Are your employees punk?

Do you want employees with green mohawks and safety pins in their cheek? How about employees who understand their work, say what’s really going on, strive to strip away what’s not working, willingly suffer to point out problems and pursue joy in their work? This fascinating article details “principles of punk rock at work” that may resonate with you. If …

Opportunities in American dissatisfaction

Is there an opportunity for employers in this interesting study from Gallup? Americans are more dissatisfied this year than since the annual survey began in January 2001. Conservatives are more dissatisfied with the government–and with corporations. Liberals are more dissatisfied with organized religion. But satisfaction has dropped, period. Is there an opportunity here? Research shows that workers who are more …

Chick-fil-A manager fixes vaccination traffic jam

The PR team at Chick-fil-A must just walk around giving each other high-fives. A South Carolina mayor asked a Chick-fil-A manager to help out at a Covid vaccination site where a software glitch had contributed to a 1-hour backup. The manager got it down to 15 minutes. If you think this is just about process improvement, you aren’t paying attention.

Does your team need a scoreboard or a book club?

Here are two radically different approaches to employee engagement: If your culture revolves around “clocking hours, tight schedules and achieving deadlines,” maybe you need to “gamify your workplace.”  Gamification turns work tasks into games where the employee gets real-time feedback (“scores”) that give them something to accomplish or improve against. If you play video games, think “achievement unlocked!” You’ve probably …

Stop delegating and start developing

As a manager, one of the few things you cannot delegate is developing your people. In fact, even when you do delegate, it must involve developing. Don’t take my word for it: Here’s the Harvard Business Review’s approach. Think of it as a bullseye (free download here). What training, coaching and feedback do you need to give in order to …

The Greek’s intentional culture: no financial and moral negligence

Costly culture failures That’s not meant to be an over-the-top headline. But I hope it sobers your thinking on your “intentional culture.” I shared this article with clients in 2018. It reviews several of the scandals that took down business leaders and organizations at the time. (Those scandals have since been replaced with yet more scandals and takedowns.) A money …

Trust: Old Lessons for a New World

Are you trying to set sales appointments with online leads? Talk to vendors or partners over the phone? Videoconference with employees? This article is packed with practical insights for any of us who are trying to build trust remotely. The author–a trust specialist–makes a point that we’ve been doing this already in a number of ways.

Pay plans and happiness

In 2018, Fast Company had an article about how much money you need to be happy. (There does seem to be a dollar amount, but after that, it doesn’t really make you feel that fulfilled—it takes other stuff in your work to do that.) The article was featured on LinkedIn. It was fascinating see how people reacted to the article’s research. A number …

Engineered customer experience: Walk matching talk

Engineered customer experience I work with Soft Shoe, a phenomenal store in Richmond, Ky. that takes customer experience seriously. (That’s why its Facebook page has almost 34,000 likes!) We ended up partnering after the owner and I were geeking out about the following engineered customer experience I had: In 2015, a client recommended I visit Unger’s Shoe Store in Ironton, …