Inside Out Culture

Our old friend Kevin Sheridan returned to present to our team last week. Kevin, the author of Building a Magnetic Culture and HR Solutions Guru, has spent the better part of his career developing Employee Engagement surveys. The man has workplace statistics to back up his work:

• 1 in 25 people quit their job on their first day
• 51% of employees plan to leave their current job when the economy improves
• Engaged Employees are 3.5 times more likely to stay with their current employer
• The engagement rate for employees of 20+ years tenure is 86%

First, there was Employee Rewards, then Employee Engagement, and now Company Culture.

Our degree of engagement is predicated by the people around us. If every day is met with unnecessary information, our progress will be distracted. So, how do you know if you are distracting your co-workers from their path to Engagement? A few key things to remember:

• Your ego has nothing to do with your success
• There is a direct correlation between brand engagement and employee engagement
• Positive thinking produces positive results 

I know you're crying on the inside
Are you more interested in producing results or having your opinion validated? Too often team meetings are spent pondering rivaling opinions instead of developing ideas.

If you spend the majority of your time in internal meetings - you are losing the engagement battle!

If your internal meetings are filled with self-promotion (instead of building strategic differences) - you are losing the engagement battle!

Concentrate on what matters: people, products, and performance!

Customer facing reveals your culture
"we may be threw with the past, but the past isn't threw with us"

Disengagement is worn like a cheap suit. Indecision is a result of past failures. Your inability to address your customers concerns directly exposes your lack of trust in your products, your people, and their ability to perform.

What we produce (and its relevance in the marketplace) creates our brand. If our customers feel mistrusted our external reputation will infiltrate our organizational culture.

The unlikely power of assumption
There is a long storied tradition in the workplace that assumptions do not produce results. But, it helps to believe in what you do. If you go into the marketplace with the assumption that you will fail, you will! If your attitude tends towards what IS possible, you will succeed.

People are kind by nature so they will lend you a shoulder to cry upon. At some point you have to quit crying and make it work.

No company has a 100% engaged culture. We all make mistakes, there is dishonesty for the sake of self-preservation in the workplace, and sometimes our products fail. In the end, employee engagement is driven by quality work.

If you create something that makes other companies better, allow your employees to utilize their strengths, and are consistently able to embrace change.....you will cultivate an engaged culture.

Sometimes we cannot over-think it: concentrate on doing great work and ignore the chatter.

Don't Forget to Remember!

Dave