Currently, there have been many deliberations in the business world on topics such as which model of work will prevail, how best to boost productivity and foster collaboration and sustainability, how to develop a continuously learning organization and be more agile and effective.
While these are timely and relevant topics but looking back from the last 9-10 years of leading teams and experimenting various ways, I have come to realize that we need to first address three fundamental and crucial questions that are most likely the main concern in every employee’s mind. Once we are convinced it is addressed, it might become easy to sort the rest.
The context: Anonymous employee surveys are a standard practice in many organizations (often consist of 40-50 questions to be rated by every employee) and so is reflecting on the survey results thereafter, during annual goal setting on how to improve them the following year. Few years back, while reflecting on the employee survey results, we did a social experiment as a team and decided to come-up with 10 questions that is of most concern to us and work on two of them every month. The idea is to do everything that is within our sphere of influence to better our rating on them. We believed positive change will happen when we collectively take responsibility of our team.
The Learning: While working on two (out of ten) of the most troubling questions every month, we started merging the ten initially agreed questions into fewer questions every month, as we realized a lot of them are somehow related and can be combined. By second quarter of the same year, we were able to amalgamate and merge them from 10 to 3 basic questions that we all wanted to address. These are:
- What I do in my workplace adds value to the higher purpose of the company
- I grow professionally in the company and I can visualize my career path
- I am being treated fairly
(DnI, appraisal, progression, work life balance, insecurity and many more comes under this)
The reflection: Here’s my reflection and corollary to this (from experience). Given a lot of factors like setting strategy, training budget, progression, pay rise, opportunity of doing new job every time and many other things that make us happy and engaged are not within the direct control of a team that operates lower down the organization (mainly for large organizations), but these three factors can be significantly addressed by taking the following measures:
- To some extent moving away from SMART (specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, timebound) goal setting. Indeed, there is a risk of getting messy and deviate from the purpose, and hence there is a need to strike the right sweet spot between SMART and messy imaginative goals. The reasons are:
- Lack of imagination and holding on to old ways of doing things even if the goals are SMART can stall both professional growths, as well as limit contribution to the higher purpose in an ever-changing world. While SMART goals are important and will work for 50-70% (well! roughly) of the routine tasks, but in our experience, it has helped to keep some white space to give experimentation and imagination a chance, and thereby also allow room for letdowns and failures (and appreciate the team for trying) as well as great successes.
- By doing this eventually a lot of worthwhile improvement and new ways of deliverables were achieved merely by engaging in non-committal chats, experimenting, challenging with thoughtful criticism, encouraging, complimenting, and learning from each other instead of getting stifled with SMART goals (even though there must be a balance with SMART goals) and thereby needlessly competing (within team members).
- This approach may equally help, when plan will not go according to plan, as uncertainty, unknowns and randomness are ever increasing phenomenon in our lives. This ultimately adds value to higher objective and take care of personal development and growth for team members by adding new skills and cultivating learning culture.
- In this journey the goal (most likely) is to achieve harmony across all areas of life and not that much of work life balance (it is important, but harmony is more important is what we felt), and the fulfillment that comes from our professional engagement plays a significant role in bringing that harmony (Typically no one will mind putting some extra hours if that synchronization and trust is achieved). We felt if this is not achieved, there can be perfect work life balance, but still dissatisfied teams/workforces. There will be occasions when we will get things off beam, but only trust help us understand each other.
Nonetheless, we still think being treated fairly is still the hardest to address as each one of us construe the world in our own way. Will discuss this in a bit more detail in a next post (to limit the word here). Any comments/suggestions/criticism are welcome.
