Essence organisational development news

Motivation - how to invigorate your staff

Tue, 13 May 2008 00:00:00

By Nigel Risner - motivational speaker

Are your staff feeling lacklustre? Motivational speaker Nigel Risner shares his thoughts on how to get employees jumping.

What do I need to think about when it comes to motivating staff?
If employees feel valued and involved, they'll always go the extra mile and take the initiative. Ask yourself, why should somebody go out an give great service when they've had a lousy week and they're feeling demoralised? It's simpe. People who produce good results have a high self-esteem, and people with a high self-esteem produce good results.

Apart from the obvious pay rise, how else can I motivate staff?
You need to find out what people's personal goals are. In the New Year, for example, most people think about their health, or perhaps spending more time with their families. Good employers tune into that. Try offering gym memberships to reward good performance, or allow later starts a couple of times a month. Finding out what makes someone tick is a much more powerful motivator than just throwing money at them.

Make sure everyone understands what your company is trying to achieve, too. It's all very well saying the company needs increased turnover by x amount, but nobody walks around with that idea in their head all day. Try to make tangible goals and communicate them loudly and clearly to the entire organisation. If your firm wants to enjoy 20 new clients, for example, write that message on every flipchart or on the back of every door in the building, and so on.

How can I get staff more involved in the business?
Take an interest. Every Friday, for example, encourage managers to hold a short meeting to find out how the team's week went. Ask them what they have achieved.

Share the highs and lows. If the company wins a big order, make sure that everyone celebrates that success. Equally, if you lose a client, tell everyone. It's important that your employees can relate to the company's performance and that they feel part of it.

Make it fun - 90% of staff spend their time doing mundane stuff, so try to break up the routine. Organise activities and ask staff what would improve their working life.

What other simple strategies do you suggest?
Strip down unneccesary processes or regulations that slow things down and demotivate people. For example, too many meetings can make people's lives a misery. Anything over 40 minutes is too long. Make sure each meeting has a purpose, a clear objective and most of all, keep it short, sharp and focused.

Trust people. Mast staff want to make a difference. Mistakes happen when people are tired, their workloads are too heavy or line managers are not being supportive. Find out why mistakes are being made and you may well resolve a more deep-rooted issue.

If staff don't respond to motivation techniques, what can I do?
If staff are proving resistant to new ideas, you need to find out why. Is there an underlying problem like a lack of training or poor management? Sometimes coaching can help but ultimately, if you can't inspire someone to work more effectively, you might be better off letting them go.

For assistance with motivating staff, please contact us .

How to become a learning organisation

Mon, 12 May 2008 00:00:00

By André Bedlow

The benefits of continuous learning within any business environment are indisputable. Organisations spend a great deal of time and exert considerable effort on the implementation of easily accessible educational programmes for their staff. But time and again the training offers a welcome diversion, but fails to change behaviour or improve performance. In addition, people ought naturally to get better at their jobs as they gain more experience, but this collective learning can be lost if the organisation is not listening or is too inflexible to move with the times.

Generic, untailored courses are of limited value to an organisation, as they ignore the unique culture and knowledge requirements. Bespoke course content is vital to building identity and loyalty amongst staff. It is critical that learning and content truly reflects the culture that an organisation wishes to instil and creates a sense of brand identity amongst employees.

Where an investment is made in external training support, it is vital that the provider understands the organisation's business needs and skills of its staff first. This information should then be used to develop and provide training that has real impact. Such an approach to providing impact-focussed training can be achieved with the following steps:

1. Assessment
Assessment of the key business drivers and where delegates are now in terms of their skills to deliver.

2. Pre-course learning
Online or paper-based reading, exercises and case studies.

3. Short training intervention
Concentrating on one or two key issues/topics, up to one day of training, including tutor-led input, group discussion and case study or skills practice.

4. On site coaching
Approximately four weeks later, on site/job observation and/or coaching on a one to one or two basis.

5. Final assessment
Assessment of improvements in delegates' performance and/or behaviours and any further areas to work on.

In addition, it is key to find ways to enhance interaction between employees, taking the focus away from formal learning and shifting towards on the job development. Structures should allow for regular team and inter-team meetings, with a focus on communication and the sharing of best practice. Also, review and evaluation should be built into every project and the start of every business planning cycle. The focus should be on learning lessons from how tasks where delivered as well as what was delivered.

For support with training and shared learning, please contact us .

Gross misconduct on the Apprentice?

Thu, 08 May 2008 00:00:00

By Christopher Davies, Professional Support Lawyer

The very vocal Lee McQueen and the ultra confident 'best salesperson in Europe' Jennifer McGuire took the lead roles in last week's project.

Purchasing a list of specific items at the lowest cost did not sound the hardest of tasks even though the teams would have to haggle with the renowned market traders of Marrakesh.

The shopping list in hand, Jennifer rushed out to get into the market first and did not take time to do any research. Unfortunately, her eagerness backfired when she started making purchases without paying attention to the details in the shopping list. The mistakes led to her team losing by a large margin to the better prepared Lee's team.

In the boardroom it became apparent that the team had committed a catalogue of mistakes (including showing ignorance of Kosher food by asking a Muslim butcher to slaughter and bless a chicken). Notably, it was discovered that one member of the team had acted dishonestly in trying to bribe a shopkeeper to get one over on the other side.

If a candidate fails a task due to poor performance they are obviously at risk of being fired, but if a candidate behaves in a dishonest manner, in this case trying to financially bribe shop assistants to obstruct the other team, they have to be dismissed.

If an employee is dishonest or offers bribes to contacts to make their work look better, it should be regarded as gross misconduct. The trust between the employer and employee is a key part of the working relationship and conduct is always a potentially fair ground for dismissal if the employer follows reasonable procedure.

For further assistance with employer/employee relationships, please contact us .

Turning heads - how to improve your personal impact

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 00:00:00

By Didi Hopkins National Theatre management trainer.

You might think the ability to influence colleagues and contacts is something you either have or you don't. There are a few simple changes you can ratchet up your personal impact.

What is personal impact?

Personal impact is about what you bring into a room and what others read from that. People get a very good idea of how you’re feeling and who you are from how you look and behave.�They might automatically judge you without thinking they're judging you - certainly they're reading you. Personal impact is about being yourself with more skill and making the most of what you've got.

Can it really make a difference in business?

The ability to harness your own personality to affect a group can make a huge impact in the workplace. A tiny change can make a big difference in terms of the way people read you. Things like varying your tone of voice can really affect them.

How can I use my personal impact to help me at networking events?

Ask yourself what you are going to the event for. Is it to get your business card out, make a quick connection and run away, or is it about building relationships? If so, you need to be relaxed enough to just have conversations with people. Think about being a host, even if you're not the host, and taking care of people in that room, rather than just going in for the kill. Take your time, smile and be interested - you'll get the focus off your own nerves and turn your attention to your audience.

Charisma is not a little bit of magic dust. It's about having presence and being able to listen, answer and field questions, rather than hanging onto a script you've learnt. Think about Bill Clinton, or any leader, who people talk about as having great charisma. They are able to walk into a room and engage with the people there. Their skill lies with deflecting attention from themselves to their audience.

What's a good way to prepare for an important meeting?

Think about first impressions. Take some slow, deep breaths to calm down before you enter the meeting. Then think about how you're going to walk in. Are you going to walk in upright and look confident? Make sure you smile. You can rehearse. Practice opening a door, walking in, smiling and sitting down. It sounds daft, but it works.

How does body language alter people's perceptions?�

There are no hard and fast rules, but to be able to stand upright, to be open and to smile and look at people shows you want to be with them. Eye contact is very important. Sometimes people go into meetings and are so anxious that they just look down at the floor and wish they weren't there.

How to increase community involvement

Fri, 21 Mar 2008 00:00:00

Extracted from 'Councillors involvement in communities' workshop by Essence Consulting.

'There isn't a single service or development in Britain which hasn't been improved by actively involving local people'. [Rt Hon Hazel Blears MP, Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government]

'Community Empowerment' is about people and government, working together to make life better. It involves more people being able to influence decisions about their communities and more people taking responsibility for tackling local problems, rather than expecting others to. To achieve this lofty ambition, it is important to review and develop engagement processes to ensure that they are effective and enable an organisation to gain feedback from the whole community (including communities of place, interest and origin).

Setting the scope

Defining the scope of a participatory activity clarifies what the boundaries are. You should consider how much can really change as a result of the exercise. This will help you to decide whether participation is the right thing to do and what level of participation is appropriate.

You should only go ahead with your participation project if:

it is clear how it can make a difference;
�there a demand or interest from potential participants to get involved; and
there are sufficient resources to make the process work properly.

Purpose

Agreeing a clear purpose is the most important stage of any engagement process and no process should proceed without it. A bad purpose is poorly defined and open to many different interpretations.

A good purpose:

has clear outcomes and outputs;
does not need to be limited or prescriptive; and
must be easy to understand and an accurate reflection of what is going to happen.

It is important that that all key players are aware of and supportive of the purpose of a process. The agreed purpose provides a reference point throughout the process and also gives participants the opportunity to make an informed choice about getting involved.

Participants

Success depends upon being clear about who the participants are and what role they are playing. Participants themselves need to know what role they are expected to play within any given participatory process. In general terms, there are two ways of thinking about selecting participants:

Open-anyone that wants to should be able to participate.
Selective-the numbers or types of participants who may be chosen as part of the process.

There are three main selection approaches:

Representative: cross-section of the target audience.
Instrumental: those with appropriate power, knowledge.
Required: those required by any guiding regulation, funding regime and so on.

Context

Take into consideration the local context as you must be as clear as to whether this creates any obstacles or opportunities. Understanding the wider context is important to ensure that the participation process:

is responsive to participant needs;
builds on previous experience and learns lessons from the past;
does not duplicate other activities; and
progresses quickly and is relevant.

The factors that are likely to affect the success of any participatory process include the decision-making environment; history & patterns of involvement and characteristics and capabilities of participants. It is often worth spending time developing a shared understanding of the context as part of the participatory process.

Follow-up

Too often not enough time is spent on follow up activities. Evaluation and review of practice is very important and planning an evaluation in advance ensures that you learn as you go along as much is possible. This enables those involved to judge whether or not the process has been successful. However, an evaluation only works if it includes the perspectives of all those involved in the process. The views of the participants can be the most useful, but also the hardest to get if not gathered at the time.