In part one, we shared a few pitfalls of employee engagement surveys when you focus on scores and feedback that disappears into the metaverse! Today we are building on this to give you a few more pitfalls to consider the next time you're having a team huddle.
Spreading your focus too thin
When you first embark on culture transformation there may be a number of items brought to your attention as responses come through. And it’s tempting as a leader to want to address all the challenges at once; this approach has the potential to overwhelm team members and can feel quite surface level.
Missed opportunity: Addressing too many challenges at once in most instances has the ability to lose impact and can be more of a distraction as opposed to focusing. Hone in on one priority at a time and give it the effort and focus it needs to get the lift it deserves.
Practice: Discussing together as a team, which is the priority to focus on and explore right now, and what actions will be most impactful?
Obsessing over who, what, when
Leaders, we’ve all been here, we receive feedback we don’t agree with and our focus shifts to understanding the source of the feedback to make sense of it, or validate how we feel about it. In an anonymous survey, it might be tempting to go to lengths to find out who might have left a not so glowing perspective. Just don't!
Missed opportunity: Feedback, whether anonymous or not, it's still feedback and that’s a gift! People don't invest time in giving feedback unless they trust you will do something productive with it. If you’re putting your effort into finding out whodunnit, you’re distracted from the main goal - cultivating a feedback culture where everyone’s voice and perspective matters. All feedback is useful, it provides insight into the diverse perspectives of our teams, so use it wisely!
Practice: Applying a growth mindset. We are all here to learn and grow. Notice what you’re feeling and examine why you might be feeling this way about the feedback. Sit with that feedback and accept that this is someone’s perspective. Approach with curiosity; Is there something in this feedback that you can apply and take on board? To all the perfectionists out there, accept that it’s never going to be perfect, all at once or all of the time, we are working with humans, who are coming into the workplace with a diverse range of external factors. Our role is to perfect our ability to adapt to this changing sequence of events, or as we like to call it, humanising the workplace!.
Seeing workplace culture as a 12 month project
This is one of the most common pitfalls we see, leaders believe a solution will transform their organisation/teams in 12 months and so they take a project perspective when it comes to transforming workplace culture! If it took you years to get here, what makes you believe you'll transform in 12 or even 18 months? Like strategy, productivity, talent acquisition and marketing, your approach to workplace culture is not a project, it's not a once off and it certainly isn't short term.
Missed Opportunity: A focus on workplace culture is a continuous effort by leaders to create forward positive momentum, and in the same way strategy incorporates productivity, financials and customers, so too should it include people and workplace culture, for they are the driving force of any business! And like a river ebbs and flows, so does workplace culture as people move within organisations.
Practice: Incorporating workplace culture into your day to day accountabilities, engage everyone and ensure leaders understand they are key drivers of workplace culture. Take a top down approach to workplace culture, and at a strategy and board reporting level, include a culture measure along with your financials, productivity and customer measures.
Hopefully you now have a few more ideas to implement, join us for part 3 coming your way soon!
For more information on PQfactor, let's have a coffee meeting, you can contact us on suria@peopleq.com.au or melina@peopleq.com.au.