I don’t believe peo­ple come to work hop­ing to be mediocre. Most employ­ees want to do well and to be rec­og­nized and rewarded for their contributions.

In order to excel, your employ­ees must be engaged, encour­aged, and empow­ered to make a dif­fer­ence. Employ­ees see the good and the dumb ideas passed down from man­age­ment. They know first­hand what doesn’t work, or hin­ders their effec­tive­ness. That is why you should involve employ­ees in improv­ing your business.

There may be a busi­ness whose prod­uct, process, or mar­ket hasn’t changed in twenty years. It’s pos­si­ble, but for the vast major­ity of busi­nesses these things evolve reg­u­larly. What worked ten years ago (or even five) would prob­a­bly yield dif­fer­ent results today.

If you want to improve pro­duc­tiv­ity, lis­ten care­fully to what you hear from the trenches, from the peo­ple doing the work every day.

Engage and Empower Employees

Lead­ers need to get up from behind their desks and engage employ­ees. If you lis­ten, you can learn a lot about what’s work­ing and what needs improve­ment. You will also have the chance to pro­vide the encour­age­ment they need.

Town hall meet­ings can also be used effec­tively. It may take time and effort to get employ­ees to open up, but once they see that you are will­ing to lis­ten and take action, these types of meet­ings will become more pro­duc­tive. Reg­u­lar employee meet­ings, in man­age­able group sizes, are invaluable.

When the issues are for­mi­da­ble, you may require a manager-led team of employ­ees to deter­mine the best course of action. If the issue has sub­stan­tial impact or cost asso­ci­ated with it, then senior exec­u­tives should be involved. The goal is to under­stand the issue fully, break through any bar­ri­ers (like denial and fin­ger point­ing), and agree on a plan to get it resolved.

Use Employ­ees to Dig Into the Details

Some­times it takes a change in mind­set to rec­og­nize that your cur­rent approach is out­dated, or bloated, or both. I have seen sea­soned man­agers unwill­ing to accept the pos­si­bil­ity that their strat­egy could be improved.

Of course, peo­ple man­age most processes or work­flow. Some­times change (planned and unplanned) creeps into the process, and even­tu­ally gets in the way of doing the work productively.

I have seen as much as a 40 per­cent reduc­tion in staffing lev­els result in equal or even improved qual­ity. This hap­pened when the cur­rent work­flow was reex­am­ined, higher expec­ta­tions were set, and more account­abil­ity was intro­duced. Most impor­tantly, direct man­agers actu­ally involved their team, rather than try­ing to han­dle every issue per­son­ally. Amaz­ing, but true.

New Peo­ple Bring New Perspective

As busi­nesses grow and expand, new faces are brought into the com­pany. There is a good chance that you are bring­ing in expe­ri­enced peo­ple who know about how dif­fer­ent processes worked in other places. What an opportunity!

New team mem­bers are likely very excited to be with a new com­pany. They bring good and bad expe­ri­ences with them, and this likely includes some ideas about some things that their pre­vi­ous com­pany did very well.

Once new employ­ees and man­agers have set­tled in and have a clear under­stand­ing of how things work, it’s a good time to ask them if they see areas that can be improved. This can be an infor­mal process. Their ideas may be dif­fer­ent that the estab­lished norms, so they may be too quickly viewed as irrel­e­vant by the exec­u­tive man­age­ment. The key is to make it clear that you actu­ally want to hear their unfil­tered feedback.

Be Open to New Ideas

Occa­sion­ally great ideas are writ­ten off as “not the way we do it here.” That way of think­ing may turn out to be cor­rect, but then again it may not.

I have seen employ­ees over­come oppo­si­tion and finally pre­vail with fab­u­lous ideas that made sense and made money. How much resis­tance do your employ­ees face if they see a way to change things for the bet­ter? How many have come up with great ideas but are reluc­tant to share them with such an unwill­ing audience?

It is good to rec­og­nize those valiant employ­ees who fight to bring productivity-boosting ideas to the table. Other employ­ees will be more will­ing to step for­ward if they believe their ideas will be heard, and man­agers will be more will­ing to accept and embrace change when they see the good that can come of it.

Engag­ing employ­ees to improve pro­duc­tiv­ity has another ben­e­fit. You will cre­ate a strong cul­ture and stronger orga­ni­za­tion of peo­ple even more com­mit­ted to accom­plish­ing the vision and goals of the company.

Peo­ple are an impor­tant key to suc­cess. The more that can be done by the leader to engage them and lis­ten to what they have to say, the stronger the com­pany and its results.

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Tags: Feedback, Improvement, Performance, Solutions

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