How to Engage, Involve, and Motivate Employees

Building a Culture of Lean Leadership and Two-Way Communication

Janis Allen, Michael McCarthy

• Publisher: Productivity Press
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351650991
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This book, which takes the employees' perspective, illustrates what works and what doesn't work to engage, involve, and motivate a workforce. Through examples, it shows how the "engage" methodology links to the Lean Process. While focusing on the softer/"people" part of Lean, it maximizes the value returned on the organization's investment in Lean. It links "engagement" to measurable performance improvements. The how-to book includes a methodology overview and details on how to implement including communication do's and don'ts as well as a checklist for leader standard work (a tool for individual leaders to track and be recognized for their "engage, involve, and motivate" behaviors).

Chapter 1

What Is Engagement?

Engagement is action, not survey scores.

Key Points

A.What engagement IS NOT

B.What engagement IS

Definitions

Engage : To gain and hold attention and interest; to ask to participate

Involve : To help people take actions

Motivate : To inspire a person to want to do something

At a manufacturing plant for cathode-ray tubes, moisture was found inside some of the tubes, causing quality problems. Supervisors tried unsuccessfully to find the cause of the moisture. Engineers couldn’ t figure it out.

When a supervisor mentioned it to one of his machine operators, the operator said, “ I know what’ s causing it. Every once in a while, I notice an excess of moisture in the CO2 line, and I purge it to get rid of the moisture.”

The supervisor asked, “ Why didn’ t you say something?”

The operator replied, “ No one ever asked me.” (This story is from Dr. Aubrey Daniels, author of Bringing Out the Best in People .)

Contrast that story with this one. On a snowy day at Preston Trucking (one of Mike’ s clients), a driver was unable to make his scheduled deliveries in his truck. He went home, put chains on the tires of his personal pickup truck, came to the terminal, loaded the freight into his pickup, and delivered it on schedule.

Which of these stories would describe your current work culture? Of course, we all want the initiative, engagement, involvement, and motivation of the truck driver. This book will show you how to get it.

You’ ve heard the old saying “ two heads are better than one.” Multiply “ one” by the number of employees in your organization. That indicates the extra experience, energy, and ideas you have the potential to tap. That’ s engagement and involvement.Would you like employees to mechanically follow your instructions and processes, doing just enough to get by? Or would you prefer that they engage (apply their attention, experience, energy, and brainpower) and become involved (take actions) to make the improvements that will help your organization grow and add jobs?

Unless your employees are very different from those we’ ve met in more than three decades of working in health care, manufacturing, and service businesses, we can promise you four things:

1.Most employees have more and better ideas than you might imagine.

2.Most are more willing to become involved than you might expect.

3.Most will enjoy learning new skills and finding ways to improve the work.

4.Most will voluntarily offer extra effort if they receive acknowledgment (recognition) for their ideas.

You can test for yourself whether these four things are true. If you use the easy tools in this book, we’ re confident you will build an engaged and motivated workforce. If you already have engagement and involvement, you can take it to the next level with these ideas.

What Engagement IS NOT

Engagement survey scores

Number of kaizen events

Number of teams

Number of team meetings

Merely satisfying the “ check-the-box” requirements of corporate, a union, or a customer/supplier agreement

Janis’ s example

A refurbishing company had decided to implement quality teams after its union asked for more employee involvement. At the end of a year, one facility had 12 teams operating. When asked what the results were, the answer was, “ We have 12 involvement teams. That satisfies our agreement with the union.”

On attending some of the team meetings, I found these projects being discussed:

1.Where to move the watercooler

2.Who should clean the microwave in the break room

Many of the members of these teams weren’ t happy to attend the team meetings. Some said they considered them a waste of time and would rather be on the job working. On top of that, their coworkers criticized them for “ sitting in the training room doing nothing,” because no one (inside or outside the teams) could see any tangible results of their meetings.

What went wrong? Unfortunately, this organization had chosen the wrong goal: teams for the sake of teams, involvement for the sake of involvement. The monthly reports they sent to their di vision management stated simply the number of active teams. There was no reporting of how productivity problems were solved or how work processes were improved.

Before you read the rest of the story, list your ideas for actions that you think could have prevented the unfortunate experience described in the story:

Now, to continue the story

To rescue these teams, I included their team leaders in the groups, and gave them measurable performance goals, such as efficiency, delivery, quality, waste reduction, and customer service. I trained them to use data, feedback, goals, and recognition. When they began wo...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Engage, Involve, and Motivate Employees: 5-Step Method
• Authors
• 1 What Is Engagement?
• 2 Why Engage, Involve, and Motivate Employees?
• 3 5-Step Method to Engage, Involve, and Motivate Employees
• 4 Find  Projects to PULL People 
• 5 Ask for Ideas on Specific Improvements
• 6 Set Time Targets to Test Ideas and Complete Action Steps
• 7 Motivate Actions with Positive Recognition
• 8 Coach with Feedback: Verbal, Data, and Graphs
• 9 Complete, Then Repeat
• 10 How Many People to Engage? Let the Project PULL the Number of People
• 11 How Project Teams Create Motivation
• 12 Build a Culture of Trust with Your Actions
• 13 How to Measure Your Success
• 14 When Correcting Is Needed: Deal with Negatives and Move On
• 15 FMMs (Frequently Made Mistakes): Troubleshooting and Preventing Them
• 16 Grow More Leaders
• Appendix I
• Appendix II
• Appendix III
• Appendix IV
• Appendix V
• Appendix VI
• Appendix VII
• Glossary
• Resources
• Index