Employee NPS (eNPS) is based on Net Promoter Score® (NPS™) by Bain & Company, Satmetrix Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld. It’s commonly used as a quick indicator of employee engagement because engaged (and loyal) employees are more likely to recommend their workplace. NPS recap NPS measures customer loyalty by asking: ‘How likely are you to recommend this company to a friend or relative?’ The idea is that loyal customers believe so strongly in the company they’re recommending that they’re willing to put their reputation on the line for it. Friends and relatives are typically the people we feel most strongly …
[Infographic] 6 effective leadership styles
Leadership style can make or break the success of an organisation, team, or project. While different leadership styles suit different situations, effective styles share one common trait – emotional intelligence (EQ). Daniel Goleman (an EQ expert) proposed that there are 6 effective leadership styles, each stemming from 4 key EQ competencies: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and social skills. Coercive/Commanding Lead by force Climate influence: This style has a negative impact on the climate and demotivates employees as it eliminates the opportunity for new ideas, reduces accountability for performance, and destroys the rewards system. Of the 6 styles, coercive is the …
Confessions of a flex worker: leading the way to culture change
It’s 6:30 on a Sunday morning and I’ve just tiptoed downstairs, made a coffee and sat down to write. I am Donna Jones and I flex all of the time. I know the business case for flexible working – higher engagement, greater attraction and diversity of applicants, greater employee wellbeing, productivity and safety outcomes etc. From a retention perspective, workers value their personalised flexible working arrangements over salary increases; women are more loyal when they have this invaluable agreement in place. All of this sounds great! But why are we, the transport industry, still designing staff rosters around the sole …
Leading diverse teams: the importance of cultural intelligence
So you’ve probably heard about emotional intelligence (EQ), a key tool in a leader’s toolkit. But what have you heard of cultural intelligence (CQ)? It’s equally important but it’s a largely unrecognised leadership tool. For those unfamiliar with the concept, here’s what you need to know: Components of cultural intelligence CQ is a person’s capability for successful adaptation to new cultural settings. Leaders with high CQ are culturally competent and have the skills, attitude, and behaviours to function and manage effectively in culturally diverse settings. CQ consists of 4 components. Leaders with high CQ will possess all 4 components. Cognitive …
The importance of a comprehensive approach to EX
“EX is employee surveys!” “EX is employee engagement!” “EX is my org’s new ping-pong table!” Many leaders are doing their best to take advantage of the employee experience movement early on by attempting to prioritize and improve EX within their organizations. Unfortunately many are focused on the wrong things due to a general misunderstanding of the concept. As a leader, the first and most important part of improving your organization’s EX is understanding what it actually is. Understanding EX Employee experience (EX) is defined as the comprehensive set of interactions and observations an employee has within an organization. And it’s …
How effective leaders get results
Leaders need to get results: whether revenue growth, return on sales, efficiency, profitability, employee satisfaction, or employee engagement. Quite the task! So how on earth do leaders do it? One way is by influencing the organisation’s climate, which can account for a third of an organisation’s financial performance. How? Glad you asked! Six ways leaders can influence organisational climate Permit Flexibility – give employees the freedom to experiment and take calculated risks to achieve goals without unnecessary restrictions and micromanaging. Flexibility promotes creativity, innovation, and accountability over one’s work. Create Responsibility – give employees control over their own work to …
It’s called work, not awesome
In my inbox last week. “I always read your HR posts with interest. They are sometimes very entertaining. I do however struggle to relate them to my job, as all my working years, its been a cat and mouse game of avoiding being shouted at or sacked. I’ve never known an employer that gives the slightest rats arse about what employees might think.” For many, worklife is bleak. Later that week, visiting a clearly still bemused new HR Director of SoMa* start-up. “It’s like the Wizard of Oz. You’re not in Kansas any more when the biggest HR challenge is …
The plight of the alpha female: why women say they prefer working for men
Recently a colleague was relaying a conversation she’d had with another woman regarding how they both prefer working for male CEOs. She and her friend had both experienced working for male and female bosses. “We were just saying that female CEOs are always having to prove themselves… the trouble with alpha females …… they have something to prove …and they show their insecurity” she bemoaned. While I like to think I am a good listening ear, I cut her short. In fact, to be honest, I might have even talked over her and started womansplaining what was going on. Over …
The business case for measuring and managing employee mental wellbeing
This is the second part in our employee mental wellbeing series. If you haven’t read it yet, check out part one: Encouraging employees to flourish. Here’s a quick recap. Employee mental wellbeing Mental wellbeing is a continuum. At the positive end you have flourishers. At the negative end you have languishers. The goal of any organisation is to enable all of their employees to be flourishers. Why? Because flourishers drive positive business outcomes such as engagement, productivity, organisational commitment, and organisational citizenship behaviours. Flourishers also take fewer sick days, are more resilient, and are less likely to seek employment elsewhere. …
The truth about millennials: global connectivity creates EX equality
Create a global employee experience where everyone is equal, no matter which office they’re in. Remember when there was no easy way to access the internet and we couldn’t do our job effectively from anywhere other than our place of work? Me neither! Like many millennials, I was born around the same time as the world wide web, in the late 1980s. Although I still dimly remember the struggles of dial-up internet and a world where mobile phones were rare, for most of my professional life I’ve enjoyed robust internet connectivity. This huge advance in technology leads to a frequent …
Is your employee experience Theory X or Theory Y?
Sixty years ago Douglas McGregor from the MIT Sloan School of Management presented two theories of workforce motivation he named “Theory X” and “Theory Y.” Over the intervening decades these theories have been used by leadership teams, HR professionals and OD folks as they craft and create HR policies, performance management programs, rewards and recognition, and work space design. If it’s been some time since you gave much thought to McGregor’s work, here’s a refresher: Employee experience Theory X vs Theory Y Theory X assumes that: people dislike work people want to avoid work (i.e. “people are inherently lazy”) people …
The business case for employee mental wellbeing: encouraging employees to flourish
People tend to associate the term mental wellbeing with illnesses such as depression, schizophrenia, and bi-polar disorder. As a result, organisations tend to think it’s not relevant to everyone and shy away from addressing employee mental wellbeing. But what if I were to talk about stress, anxiety, and burnout? Suddenly, mental well-being becomes highly relevant because these are common work-related terms and issues that affect many employees. The languishing-flourishing continuum If employee mental wellbeing is a spectrum, at the positive end we have employees at their peak mental state – or flourishing. An employee who is flourishing is filled with …
We need to have a conversation about engagement
Numbers are easy*. Anyone can take an employee survey and make something of it: response rate is obvious, unhappy and engaged answers easily coded. We can chart results and turn them into reports and pretty infographics with a bare minimum of effort. 77% of employees hate the food in the cafeteria! 31% of millennials in Townsville stay for the beanbags! Numbers, saving us from too much thinking since forever. Unfortunately, numbers are also simple. Surveys in particular condense a whole heap of potentially mind-blowing information into a single, easily digestible figure. Say I discover that only 31% of employees think …
Superior Employee Experiences: why reinvent the wheel?
Judging by the literature being published on the information-super-highway, the new titles being bandied about on LinkedIn and the real competition for talent, it seems that Employee Experience is a ‘thing’. Maybe even ‘the thing’ if you’re of an HR bent. As the great Steve Jobs used to say, and with good reason: “Good artists copy, great artists steal”. So as someone who is passionate about using frameworks to help leaders communicate and bring about change more efficiently, I think HR practitioners should ‘steal’ the great work of the User Experience (UX) community and design thinkers around the world to …