Zane Safrit

Would You Listen to Duke Ellington?

Duke Ellington was the most important composer in the history of jazz as well as being a bandleader who held his large group together continuously for almost 50 years. The two aspects of his career were related; Ellington used his band as a musical laboratory for his new compositions and shaped his writing specifically to showcase the talents of his bandmembers. - Pandora profile of Duke Ellington & John Coltrane.

So, would you showcase the talents of your team members?

If you could hold your team together for...FIFTY years and in the process you and your team are recognized as legends in your industry, would you showcase their talents?

Cisco Recognizes Employees For Best-Ever Profit By Firing Them

Pop quiz: You’re the CEO of a major multinational company. You just completed a fiscal year in which you made $10 billion in profit. You managed to buy back nearly $3 billion in stock and paid out more than that in dividends as well. Profits were up 18% in the most recent quarter and you see revenue rising by a small amount in the next 3 months. It’s a bit less than you had hoped, but you’re still telling Wall Street you’ll be within one penny per share of where they expected on earnings and within 2% of the revenue target. Oh, and you still have $50 billion in cash on the balance sheet. So what do you do? If you answered, declare victory, double down on your prior-stated commitments to your people and promise to pursue new growth opportunities with your war chest, you wouldn’t be Cisco boss John Chambers. Instead, he’s laying off 5% of Cisco’s workforce or 4000 people.

via www.forbes.com

Stories like this puzzle me now whereas they once outraged me. Either I'm getting older and wiser or their frequency leaves me increasingly numb. Maybe, I won't notice them five years from now. I hope not.

While I love the tone of the above paragraph and consider it fair, I wondered what was the rest of the story. Why did a very smart man, Cisco's CEO John Chambers, choose to not declare victory, double down on your prior-stated commitments to your people and promise to pursue new growth opportunities with your war chest? You know?

We don't.

I'm willing to bet no one at Cisco knows either. Certainly none of the 4000 people being laid off know why he chose not to reinvest in their roles or new roles in new growth opportunities.

For a company built on handling data and information, making it possible to share information across a wide range of networks, etc, etc, it's an interesting anomaly in the CEO's decision to not share that information.

Maybe, he's tired. Maybe, he's earned his stock options and 4000 employees fewer sound like a good idea. Maybe, he's seen the future and he's bracing for it but can't tell his employees or the US economy what's arond the next corner, as in there are no new growth opportunities.

But nature hates a vaccuum no worse than markets and social media.  I thought through this news and wondered what if he'd had an open conversation with his employees outlining some of the coming challenges.

Describe the scenarios he sees being played out for the company's future.

Share the solutions being discussed including the 5% layoff solution (always the easiest, most self-serving.

Challenge the employees to find solutions to generate the same amount of cash-flows that would be generated with the layoffs.

Share the ideas throughout the company.

Take cash-flows that exceed this threshold and put half of it in a fund for training/retraining and share the rest with  the employees on a pro-rated basis based on their salaries

Continue the program with the bonus threshold being based on payroll costs not exceeding x percent of Gross Revenues.

While this sounds pollyannish, we did this at a company where I was CEO.  We needed to find sources of cash-flow to replace that lost as prices dropped by over 70% and marketing in a commodity hell became increasingly expensive and unproductive. I shared the need, the idea and my idea of how to handle the bonus: a party. (I know, I know, wth was I thinking.) And they said said no they'd rather have it as a bonus. So, we did. And the ideas flowed and generated the results we wanted.

Granted this company was just a wee bit smaller than Cisco. On the other hand, the source of ideas were a wee bit fewer, too.

Moral of the story: Next time you're facing a challenge, ask your employees for solutions. Recognize them with rewards that are meaningful for them. I think you'll like the result.

 

Spending Time With Your People

Spending time with your people is one of the most powerful forms of recognition you can bestow. Genuinely seeking their opinions and feedback costs nothing but your time and the dividends are priceless. You’ll see increased morale, more open communication and greater sharing of solutions to business challenges. You’ll also get to know some truly remarkable people in the process. - James. E. Burton, CEO of CalPERS 1992-2002

Better'n Sex AND Money?

Sex is a primal drive and money's about power and freedom.

Mary Kay's an expert on recognition and praise having founded and inspired a $2.9 billion, direct-sales, company. I defer to her judgment.

And there's a tremendous amount of data showing the power of praise and recognition in motivating and engaging employees.

So, if you have something in your motivational toolbox that’s more power than...praise and recognition, I’d suggest you use it.

But if not, consider how inexpensive praise and recognition can be. The minimum costs you two words: Thank you. Then consider these premium plans:

• Be generous and use their first name.
• Be extravagant and describe in explicit terms why you’re thanking them.
• Go crazy and thank them in front of their peers, using their first name and describe in explicit terms why you’re thanking them.

Hat tip to Suzie Poirier of Ace Concierge for the link.

 

Stop Buying Candy for Your Employees

Depending on the emotions that are triggered at work, employees will either be less available or more available to be fully engaged in their work.  The feelings themselves determine the path that will be taken.   Emotions are always present…and until the emotional component is addressed, employees cannot fully engage. This is the major missing link in many efforts to engage or re-engage workers.  Too many organizations and managers still go to the old employee perks goody bag to solve long-term problems with questionable short-term solutions. This is not to say that these incentives are wholly ineffective, but without substantive changes in employee relationships and cultural environment, they offer little more than temporary distraction from deeper problems. via mindful-matters.net

Kinda like eating a bowl full of ice cream or watching 4-5 hours of TV or sinking hours on Facebook. Temporary distraction from deeper problems.

These temporary distractions now comprise a $46 billion industry.

But in business, these temporary distractions create a workforce where only 30% is actively engaged in their job.

Though the state of the U.S. economy has changed substantially, the state of its workplace has not. According to Gallup's State of the American Workplace: 2010-2012 report, employee engagement levels remain stagnant among U.S. workers. By the end of 2012, as the U.S. inched toward a modest economic recovery, only 30% of American workers were engaged, or involved in, enthusiastic about, and committed to their workplace. Gallup Business Journal

That costs our economy roughly, say, $370 billion annually; that was in 2011.

The key disconnect is failing to acknowledg that recognition is the key, not money. Psychology Today's recent article, New Employee Study Shows Recognition Matters More than Money, reports:

New research on employee engagement released today examines the relationships among motivation, money, and recognition, and finds, not entirely surprisingly, that how you feel is often more important than what you earn.

A key finding was that 70% of survey respondents reported their most meaningful recognition “had no dollar value” – a substantial increase from 57% in a similar survey 2007.

- 83% of respondents said recognition for contributions was more fulfilling than any rewards or gifts;

- 76% found peer praise very or extremely motivating;

- 88% found praise from managers very or extremely motivating;

Here's three things management can do to increase employee engagement with no additional costs:

1. Recognize your employees' achievements. Daily. Start with a simple, personal, '[First name], thank you for [x].'

2. Stop buying candy for your employees. I mean, really, it's like trying to buy the love of a child with candy, except the candy's more expensive and the recipient's not a child; they're a jaded, skeptical, more-than-twice-burned working adult.

3. Invest in hiring or training the right manager.

According to Gallup's Chairman,

The single biggest decision your company makes every day is who you name manager.

This is the conclusion Gallup draws from decades of data and interviews with 25 million employees, in our recently released State of the American Workplace report. But companies keep getting this decision wrong, over and over again.

In fact, the people picked to be managers account for the majority of variance in almost all performance-related outcomes. Yet leaders will spend hundreds of billions of dollars every year on everything but hiring the right managers. They’ll buy miserable employees latte machines for their offices, give them free lunch and sodas, or even worse -- just let them all work at home, hailing an “enlightened” policy of telecommuting. Hell, some of these practices might even earn your company a business magazine’s Great Place to Work award.

But, the results are that only 30% of your employees are actively engaged at work.

The costs to the economy in 2012 are even higher. Gallup's Chairman writes:

Gallup estimates that active disengagement costs the U.S. $450 billion to $550 billion per year.

Shameless self-promotion: I have a list of 52 ways to recognize your employees. It's free.

Start recognizing. Start hiring the right managers. Start engaging.