Welcome to this month's edition of The Quest for Workplace Excellence (on-line edition.)

During the past fifteen years, Peter Barron Stark & Associates has had the pleasure of partnering with with hundreds of organizations and surveying nearly 75,000 employees around the world.  While these organizations vary greatly in the nature of their business, they have one thing in common.  They all place a high value on their employees' opinions.  In reviewing our survey data, we find that these organizations are committed to building a culture where employees love to come to work and customers love to do business.  To learn more about how these cultures are built, we turned to the experts – our clients, and asked them what they felt contributed to their success and high levels of employee satisfaction. 

For the last two months we have shared the first four principles of workplace excellence. (To view previous issues, click here.) This month we bring you the final three principles and trust that learning from the "Best of the Best" will help your organization become a fantastic place to work!

Strive for excellence, not perfection,

Peter B. Stark and Jane S. Flaherty

Principle #5: Get up, get in touch, get movin’.

It’s dangerous to sit behind a desk and assume you know reality from an employee’s perspective. Unless you get up from behind your desk and keep in touch with employees and their day-to-day successes and challenges, it will be difficult to keep up levels of morale and maintain workplace excellence.
You need to regularly ask employees for their ideas, input, challenges and solutions. However, if you ask for input and neglect to take action, we guarantee you that morale will go down. Asking without taking action is futile. Our Award for Workplace Excellence™ winners are committed to taking action in areas identified by employees as being matters of concern. Senior leaders at First Future Credit Union note that their survey “improves communication within the organization and assists management with connecting with staff.” Further, the survey “has made senior and middle management aware of employee issues and how important it is to be an effective coach and leader.”

Ruth Duncan, senior vice president at North Island Credit Union, notes, “By reviewing the results [of our employee opinion survey] with our staff and managers through focus groups (at both the corporate and departmental levels), we send the message that we want to make improvements and that we are serious about ‘turning up the volume’ in areas where there are gaps.”

• Do you know the thoughts and opinions of your employees?

• What do employees feel makes your organization a great place to work?

• What would they like to change?

• What challenges do your employees face?

• What could you do to help your employees be more successful?

Principle #6: Commit to employee development —it’s a necessity,not a luxury.

In cost-conscious markets, there may be a tendency to view training as a luxury reserved for more prosperous times. Employers of choice, however, acknowledge that training employees is critical to ensuring the continuing success of the organization. Providing training opportunities for employees
strengthens skill sets, improves morale and enhances overall levels of customer satisfaction. In addition, today’s employees view training and development as a benefit because they know that to keep up with the changing times and remain valuable in the future, they must be proficient and up-to-date with the latest technology and information. To this end, WD-40 established a Leadership Academy to address areas for improvement
(sometimes known as “learning moments”), and to give employees the leadership tools they need to meet the challenging demands of the growing business.

• What are the training and development needs of your employees?

• What knowledge, skills and abilities do your employees need to carry your organization successfully into the future?

• Do you have a training plan?

• Does your budget include a line item for the development
  of your people?

Principle #7: Take good care of your people . . . or someone else will.

Leaders of our award-winning organizations know that money alone will not attract and retain star performers. While they acknowledge the importance of providing employees a competitive wage-and-benefit package, they also understand the importance of both formal and informal recognition for employee contributions to the organization’s success. Great leaders realize that they get what they reward, and the way an organization pays or recognizes people sends a strong message to employees about what is truly important to the leaders of that organization. Here are some ways three of our award-winning organizations take care of their people. To ensure that its reward system recognizes valuable employee contributions, American First
Credit Union has created an all-staff incentive plan that links every associate’s performance objectives with a line of sight to the credit union’s goals. First Future Credit Union has instituted a formal JOBS program to focus on promotions from within the organization. North Island Credit Union rewards employees in both big and small ways, utilizing a number of award programs that recognize and energize the employee superstars. Programs include Let’s Make Waves (employee ideas), Employee of the Month
and Employee of the Year.

• Do your rewards and recognition programs foster an environment where people love to come to work?

• Does your pay system reflect a value for the people who make significant contributions to your organization’s success?

• Who are your company’s heroes and heroines?

• Do you hold in esteem the people who reflect the company’s values?

• Do you reward behaviors that move you closer to your goals or further away from them?

Creating workplace excellence takes a sincere commitment on the part of every member of your leadership team. Bill Catlette and Richard Hadden, co-authors of Contented Cows,have demonstrated that successful “employer of choice” efforts are based on one thing and one thing only—the deeply held belief that one’s reputation as an employer is as important as bandwidth, and, as such, is one of the critical success factors for any business. As Larry Bossidy, president of Allied Signal, put it, “At the end of the day, you bet on people, not strategies.”
 

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