Work as a character gym for them - the best way to engage your staff.

7 July 2010
All too often, when people are trying to work out why one person or why one organisation is successful lots of clever people pull out their analytical tools and they go in search of the magic formula. This is totally understandable and has led to hugely important principles and procedures being discovered, but it is not without risks. It is by its very nature formulaic and that can lead to a form of tick box excellence that barely skims the surface of what true greatness is really about. One of the best examples of this is in the area of staff engagement, company vision and mission statements.

Management consultants have been telling companies for years that they need an inspiring vision, a strong clear and positive mission statement and a beautiful set of fair, working values. Whilst this is of course true, what this has turned into is nothing more than a paper exercise for many organisations. More often than not, those documents are more likely to have been written by the HR department or the PR team and they have been seen to be necessary parts of the overall brand landscape for the company. Vision, values and the all-encompassing mission statement should be a living representation of a thriving working culture that lives those principles in everything that it does. Too many companies make the mistake of thinking that creating those values and writing them down, or putting them on posters in the toilets will inspire their workforce. Such activities will inspire your workforce if they are already engaged but if they are not engaged such activities will seem pathetic, patronising and naff. Inspiration comes second, what comes first must be engagement and that can be done in a wholly different way. People come to work to get their needs met. They are not coming to work to get the companies needs met. They broker their time and sell their life to the company in order to be rewarded well enough so that they can get what they need from life. No doubt, most people would be really happy to do great things for their company but first things first. Their personal needs come first and a company that understands this can begin to present the workplace in a way that can create a very different kind of attitude to work.

Ideally you want an employee who comes to work thinking “Ask not what my company does for me, but instead what can I do for my company”. That is the absolute ideal but that is a very rare attitude indeed. However, in our research we have discovered that the best way to create engagement and then inspiration is to redefine what the company wants and what the employee wants and find some way of aligning those two things. Traditional value alignment is about getting the employee to get excited about the company values. At FreeMind we are passionate about getting companies to get excited about their employees own personal values, their own personal needs. We have discovered that if you get an employee to get excited about their own values you can then get them to see the workplace as the best place to develop them.

We call this the character gym and with the right positioning and presentation it is possible to get people to think of work as an opportunity for them to develop themselves in such a way that there life will get better because of the greatness they are bringing into the workplace. For example, many organisations talk about greatness or excellence in an attempt to get their people to go the extra mile. Some companies even have “The extra mile” as a value but in our experience everyone knows that the company is really just talking about profit. They may as well just say “work harder” or “earn us more”. This doesn’t really inspire people. It just feels like more pressure to perform. That pressure to perform feels to the employee like they are being asked to do more for the company. Even if it is about giving good customer service and really looking after people, it still feels like the company is pushing them harder for the company. The best way to create real engagement is to reverse that- is to get the employee to think about why it is better for them. Not just in terms of possibly better commission or more job satisfaction or getting promoted more quickly. These are still just work benefits. What we have found inspires people more quickly are values that have real and significant meaning in their home lives. Forget trying to get your people to be better work people. Where are the inspiration, excitement and energy in that? Instead think in terms of getting them to be excited about being better humans and put that into the context of their hopes, their values, their dreams. Our training program called Professional best is all about training someone to be their absolute best at work but it presents that as an opportunity for them. The whole training program focuses on generosity - one of the most important human character traits. It gets the workforce to think about how their life would be better if they were more generous, more giving, more committed and more driven to do more for themselves and others. It gets them excited about why that would be great for them. It gets them realising that the more generous they are, the better things get for them and finally it makes them see work as a generosity gymnasium, where they can practice bringing out the best from themselves where it may be the hardest to. We don’t go to the gym to develop strength and only lift the bar. We have to put weights on the bar, it has to be difficult and as we struggle and strain to lift the bar, to raise our game we know we are developing real strength of mind and character.

Work is the place to practice bringing out the best from you. It is the place to carve yourself into the most perfect form so every other area of your life becomes amazing. Work is an opportunity for all of us, to grit our teeth and to raise our game. Will our workplace feel the benefit of that? Absolutely! Will that pay huge dividends both in profitability and for the overall working environment? Of course it will, but more importantly it gives people a chance to find real meaning and purpose in even the toughest of working environments. When work becomes a character gymnasium and people are given the opportunity to discover their best selves whilst striving to do their absolute best for the company everything builds from that. What the employee wants and what the employer wants finally becomes the same thing. Then your vision becomes very exciting, your mission statement becomes the weights that they will choose to lift and support. This is true value alignment and on the back of that, engagement is authentic and inspiration becomes a very real possibility. Then you can put up posters in the toilet and they will actually make a difference.
 
“95% is only half way there” Nick Jankel