Twelve Days of Respect

Ask anyone in your workplace what treatment they most want to experience at work and they will likely top their list with the desire to be valued and treated with respect.

When employees feel valued and respected in the workplace, productivity and employee engagement soars because employees have higher self-esteem around the work that they do.

Now, the interesting thing about respect is that you can’t control when or how others demonstrate respect.  You can only control whether or not you exercise it on a regular basis.  And, when you demonstrate respect you encourage it in others.

So, instead of the Twelve Days of Christmas, we are offering you the Twelve Days of Respect to cultivate respect in your workplace.

1. When you see it, say it. When you observe or experience respectful behaviors, verbalize your appreciation. Call out the specific behaviors that make a difference for you and your team.
2. Show a “can do” attitude. No matter what the situation, take the initiative and the lead, when appropriate.  Your attitude will affect others around you.
3. Be a good listener.  Everyone loves to be around a good listener. Listen to what others have to say. It shows that you care, and that you respect them and their opinions.
4. Respect other’s time. Recognize that everyone is busy, everyone has challenges, and everyone feels pressure.  When you respect other people’s time as much as our own, you earn respect.
5. Encourage fun and laughter. Laugh at yourself or about experiences that you have shared with your team. Laughter elicits good feelings, lightens the load, and bonds the team together.
6. Pay it forward. Be the first to demonstrate respect whether someone has earned it from you or not.  Respectful behaviors given often produce respectful behaviors in return.
7. Empathize. Ask questions out of curiosity to better understand someone else’s situation. Everyone benefits from stepping back and taking the time to walk in another person’s shoes.
8. Be considerate. Good manners make others feel comfortable and are a source of personal power and strength. Be polite. Say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’. When you show consideration to others, you make them feel valued.
9. Be on time for meetings. Arrive to meetings a few minutes prior to its start time to send the message that you think the gathering is important. The individual leading the meeting will appreciate your promptness.
10. Speak up when you see behaviors of disrespect. Speak up about observations and experiences of disrespect.  Share the impact that the behavior has on you and your team.  Request the behaviors that you would like to experience and/or observe.  This may take courage and practice, yet speaking up about disrespectful behaviors in a respectful way will earn you respect.
11. Walk the talk of respect. Pay particular attention to the things that you criticize and take an inward look at your own behavior. Demonstrate the behaviors that you desire and admire in others.
12. Honor diversity. Focus on the good traits in everyone. Every personality, including your own, has its positive traits and its negative traits.

Happy Holidays!  Georgine

Happiness at Work

Today my thoughts are on happiness.  Every individual wants to feel it in their life.   Every business wants their customers to experience it in some way. Every employee wants to find it in their work. 

So I decided to do a little research on happiness at work.

Numerous studies show similar findings; that 55% of American workers are unhappy in their jobs.  These same studies also show that employees who are happy have a heightened sense of engagement and are more productive.  

It seems to me that organizations would want to infuse more happiness in their workplace.  So, how do you do that? 

Interestingly, the number one thing that makes us unhappy at work is also the number one thing that makes us happy. Are you ready for it? It is the quality of our workplace relationships.

• How well we get along with our manager and co-workers
• The level to which we feel valued by them
• How well our manager and co-workers communicate with us

Here are three action items that you and/or your team can implement to build happiness at work.

1.   Choose positive thoughts.  The biggest thing that blocks us from happiness is negative emotions such as pessimism, resentment, and anger.  We can shift this by choosing positive emotions, such as empathy, honoring diversity and especially gratitude.

2.   Call out what’s right.  Recognize the strengths of your team and your accomplishments.  Recognize each other.  When a co-worker does something helpful, say it and share with them the impact it has on you.

3.   Learn together. Stay open to new ideas.  Review what you have learned from both positive and negative situations. Choose a job and/or team competency and learn about the skills associated with it.  Learning together provides the perfect forum for improved communications.

You can also call on Madd-Steiny to help you build happiness on your team through our suite of products or a customized learning session just for your team/organization. Our flagship program, respectFULL teams® has proven to be effective in building the quality of workplace relationship.

Happily, Georgine

Best Friend at Work

When it comes to work and life, I’ll get by with a little help from my friends.  That song, by the Beatles, is stuck in my head today – probably because my co-workers and friends have been so helpful and supportive to me over the last few weeks.

And, it got me thinking about Gallup’s Q12 employee survey question; “Do I have a best friend at work?”  Their research has indicated that having a best friend at work can greatly impact employee engagement.

Yet, I have met many managers who voice concerns about this question.  Some believe that work place friendships can sometimes get in the way of productivity.

Research has shown that although friends working together do socialize, their relationships contribute to better work-related communication.  They have greater collaboration and are able to challenge one another’s ideas in a constructive way.  Co-workers who know each other on a personal level are more willing to pitch in and help each other.  And, let’s face it; spending time with people you genuinely care about can make the days go faster.

Co-workers who do not have these types of relationships may compromise communications by being “too polite” or avoiding conflict.

There are numerous ways to build friendships at work.

Madd-Steiny has seen that when managers make time for dialogue with their teams about actions and results, team relationships are strong and healthy.  On the other hand, we have also observed when managers use a “dictatorial” style of leadership and tend not to share information or recognize actions and results; there is more jealousy, distrust and gossip.

So, how can you encourage friendships and healthy connections on your team?  Here are a couple of ideas:

• Assign projects to a team.  Assigning two or three employees to a particular project or task allows them to get to know each other better as they work toward the project goal.
• Discuss the research around friends at work with the team.  Identify ways to build strong, supportive and friendly relationships.
• Implement one or many of the various techniques that encourage co-worker to recognize each other on a day-to-day basis.
• Celebrate birthdays or other special occasions.
• Plan time with the team to just talk, laugh and connect.
• Learn together. Commit to time for the team to learn together in a workshop, webinar or read a book together over time.  Debrief personal and team learning from these events.

Your Friend, Georgine

Engage Play Laugh

This weekend marked the opening of the new movie, Eat Pray Love, based on the book by Elizabeth Gilbert.  While decidedly a “chick flick”, the movie’s message is universal: finding the meaning of life.  Well, this blog is not about the meaning of life – although it is certainly a worthy topic.  Rather, I wanted to pay homage to the title and devised Engage Play Laugh as an inspiration to leaders for creating positive energy in the workplace.

Engage.  We’ve written before on the topic of employee engagement and there is more evidence than ever that when employees are engaged at work, profits and productivity rise.  So, what can leaders do to engage employees?  Here are some ideas:

• Make sure employees have the tools they need to succeed. This includes procedures, equipment and training.
• Provide clear expectations through goals and performance standards.
• Recognize employees for their performance frequently.  Don’t wait until the annual review to let them know how things are going.
• Encourage innovation and creativity.  When you provide encouragement to “color outside the lines”, employees are more likely to create new solutions the old problems.
• Ask for their opinions and ideas.  Involve them in projects and strategic planning to give them a sense of ownership.
• Identify development and advancement opportunities and make sure they have the support needed to reach new performance heights.

Play.  Playfulness in the workplace can be a very productive activity.  In his recently published book, Delivering Happiness, the CEO of Zappos, Tony Hsieh talks at length about one of their core values:  Create Fun and a Little Weirdness.  Now, for those of you who have never heard of Zappos, it’s one of the most successful online companies in U.S. history (right up there with Amazon, which bought Zappos last year.)  Zappos grew to a billion dollar company in 10 years because they focused on building a vibrant and customer focused culture.  Fun and weirdness are an important part of their culture.  Hsieh makes the case that encouraging fun and weirdness “encourages people to think outside the box and be more innovative.”  So, ask yourself these questions:

• What can you do to be a little more playful and differentiate yourselves from the competition?
• How much fun do you have on the job and what can you do to increase the fun factor?
• What can you do to make your job (and the jobs of others) more fun?

Laugh.  Surely this is an extension of creating playfulness, and perhaps a little weirdness, in the workplace.  Laughter breaks down walls, reduces tension, and lightens up the energy in a room.  But, you don’t have to have weirdness to have laughter.  There’s a little too much seriousness in the world today.  We probably could all use a big belly laugh.  What’s your leadership style like?  Do you tend to take things seriously?  Are you able to laugh at yourself and your mistakes?  If you walk down the hall and hear people laughing, do you join in or does the laughter taper off when you appear?  Think about the energy you create at work and consider “lightening things up” a bit.

Decide to incorporate a little more playfulness and laughter into the workplace and see if you don’t get a lot more engagement from the team.

Lynae

Respect and Teamwork

Recently, I facilitated a teambuilding session with a marketing team from a leading company in the pet products industry.  The day was exhilarating and rewarding.  I’m continually inspired by teams who are committed to creating deeper connections with each other and improve their overall performance.  One of the things we did together was select a set of values for the team that will guide their actions and attitudes going forward, and help them to achieve their organizational vision.  One of the values they selected, and a theme that surfaced over and over again throughout the day, was respect.

Respect for this team is paramount to their long term success.  And, for any team, respect serves as a foundation for more effective collaboration, innovation and problem solving.  Why?  Because when there is respect on a team, there is room for different perspectives and new ideas.  Respect creates space for passionate dialog around varied philosophies and a diversity of opinion that can lead to rich and complex solutions to everyday problems. When I asked the team to define what respect would look like on their team, they answered simply:

·    Listening to each other without judgment.
·    Making sure everyone has a voice.
·    Thanking each other for a job well done.
·    Sharing resources.
·    Treating everyone as equals.

Take some time this week and talk with your teammates about respect on your team.  It’s simple, and can make a huge difference.

Respectfully,

Lynae

Building a Culture of Respect

Recently, I spoke with one of our clients, Cynthia Davies from the Minneapolis Clinic of Neurology.  She’s not only the Director of Human Resources there, she’s also a valued Madd-Steiny partner.  Cindy and her team are in the middle of implementing our respectfull teams program across the organization.  I asked Cindy why she chose this program, given that she had lots of choices in the marketplace.  Here’s what she had to say:

“This program is in line with our core values in 2004, which includes ‘building a respectful work environment’.  Since we rolled out the core values, we have always strived to link them to programs, training and decisions we make in the organization.  To me, it seemed logical that this was a program we could use to emphasize our core values and build upon our strengths.”

Since they introduced the program in late 2009, Cindy has seen lots of discussion around the concepts of respect.  “I have noticed people talking about respect much more.  People are asking themselves: What can I do to achieve the results I want?’ and What can I do to change the course of things?”

Finally, I asked Cindy about her hopes for the organization after the program is presented to everyone in the organization.  Cindy said:  “My hope is that everyone will see that it’s all about how we treat people.  If we do a good job behind the scenes, it will filter out to the patients.  You can’t help it!  You feel it as a patient and a customer when there is a respectful culture.”

Madd-Steiny clients like Cindy at the Minneapolis Clinic of Neurology are discovering the power of respect.  Are you ready to build a respectful culture?  Visit our website to see how Madd-Steiny can help.

Respectfully,

Lynae