Fire Up Your Employees and Smoke Your Competition!
How to invite, incite and ignite performance
A little background – to show that we have done our research…Our business world has changed; we have moved from manufacturing to service, from industrial to intellectual, from brawn to brain. As author Seth Godin states, “we used to make food (agrarian society), then we made things (industrial age), now we make ideas” (service economy). Our days are no longer involved doing the same repetitive process that was a significant part of manufacturing or the industrial age. Much of manufacturing moved offshore and left us with a service economy. Service is an intellectual and thinking environment – brains need to be sparking! Inventing! Responding! Each employee must be fired up and thinking her way through each customer service event so that the event is consistently extraordinary. This creates strong emotional and passionate connections between employees and customers which ignites employee performance and customer loyalty. Disappointed, unhappy, disengaged or non-thinking employees negatively affect customer loyalty and company results – they extinguish the flame of innovation, performance and success. This leads to high employee and customer turnover and poor results.
Today, ideas matter most; thinking matters most. This spark of performance is resident in each employee – our job as managers is to fan these sparks to ignite extraordinary performance.
To date, we are not doing it well as seen by the following alarming statistics:
- Employees change jobs every 18 – 36 months.
- Today, as you read this, 48% of employees are job searching.
- 59% of employees do just enough so that they do not get fired; 20% don’t care if they get fired – they will just get another job. That leaves 21% of employees engaged and committed to performing at extraordinary levels; that is too few to make a difference in results.
- By 2012 it is expected that there will be 154 million employees and 161 million jobs creating a worker shortage of 7 million. Talented employees will be in great demand.
- In the next 5 years, 20% of the country’s largest companies will lose 40% of their top level talent to retirement. Many of these companies have no succession plan to stop the outflow of significant company information (brain drain).
- There are 4 generations in the workplace, Veterans, Boomers, Gen X’ers and Millennials – each believe different things and work in different ways
And here is what we have for you…
Not to worry…we know what to do. Management must now learn what it takes to ignite an employee’s “sparks” or thinking and then direct into performance. Today’s employees are paid to solve issues, invent opportunities, respond to customers in the most dynamic way possible; they have to think. Thinking belongs to each employee…they control how hard they work and how long they stay. Successful managers know that performance can no longer be mandated. Instead today we must invite, incite and ignite performance. It is time to learn how to activate the sparking of each employee and fire them up in their jobs. When we do it well, extraordinary performance results.
We are educators first so here are our learning concepts:
The solution is in learning a new way to manage (SPARK) employees. This first starts when we treat employees as assets, not expenses and look to connect them to their internal performance fire. We do this by our invite, incite and ignite model:
- Invite: Create a powerful employee-focused culture that attracts the best so that we can choose to hire the right employees based on their talents and properly align them to jobs that match their thinking.
- Incite: Activate the power in employees by creating performance expectations that define “what” is to be done but leave the “how” up to the employee. This forces employees to step up and own their participation and performance.
- Ignite: Provide consistent daily performance feedback in the way of coaching, education and mentoring, and a recurring career conversation to insure employees feel connected and empowered.
But that is where the structure ends. We are dynamic, non-conventional presenters who love having fun and know that you do too…so be prepared to get involved, lead discussions, write plans and share what you think. Success in this millennial age is in understanding how ignite the performance fire in each employee – and allow them to be great with customer. Remember, invite, incite and ignite…this is the way to fire up your employees and smoke your competition.
Program information:
This program can be hosted in an overview keynote, afternoon, one or three day program. Each program is highly interactive, practical and entertaining. See the testimonials for the program’s effectiveness.
Contact Humanetrics for more information on this program or to schedule a date…contact information below, ask for Jay Forte.
The Humanetrics Mission:
We offer practical, dynamic, innovative and customized education and consulting to significantly advance our clients’ personal and professional performance.