Tag: Business Development Fail

Employee Engagement

Knowledge Check!Recently this topic was raised in a town hall style meeting, and the comments from the leadership raised several concerns.  It appears that employee engagement is attempting to become a “buzzword” instead of an action item, and this bothers me greatly.  Worse, many people lead teams with vague ideas about what employee engagement means and then shape their own biases into the employee engagement program, making a pogrom of inanity and suffering out of a tool for benefiting and improving employee relations.

When discussing employee engagement, we must first begin with a fundamental truth; employees do not work for a company, do not work for a brand; they work for a manager.  An employee might like a company; they might enjoy having their professional brand aligned with a known branded organization. The employee might feel pride in associating with other employees under that brand.  When the road gets difficult at the end of the day, an employee works for a manager.  The relationship between a manager and an employee is one of trust operationalized and honed through shared experiences.

Employee Engagement – Defined

ProblemsAccording to several online sources, the definition of employee engagement is, “Employee engagement is a fundamental concept in the effort to understand and describe, both qualitatively and quantitatively, the nature of the relationship between an organization and its employees.”  If you believe this definition, you will miss the forest for the bark you are fixated upon!  Employee engagement is fundamental; it is not a concept, a theory, or a buzzword.  Employee engagement is a relationship between organizational leaders and the employees, but employee engagement is not about collecting qualitative or quantitative data for decision-making policy-based relationship guidance.  At the most basic level, employee engagement is the impetus an employee chooses to onboard because of the motivational actions of the manager they report to.

Employees must choose to engage; when they choose not to engage, there is no enthusiasm in the employee, and this can be heard in every action taken by the employees on the company’s behalf.  Is this clear; employee engagement is an individual action, where impetus leads to motivated and enthused action.  While organizational leaders can and do influence motivation, they cannot force the employee to engage!  Thus, revealing another aspect of why the definition found online is NOT acceptable for use in any employee engagement effort!Leadership Cartoon

Employee engagement is the actions an employee is willing to take, indicating their motivation to perform their duties and extra-duties for a manager they like.  Employee engagement is the epitome of operational trust realized in daily attitudes, behaviors, and mannerisms of employees who choose to be engaged in solving problems for their employer.  While incentive programs can improve employee engagement, if the employee does not first choose to enjoy the incentive, the incentive program is wasted leadership efforts.  The same can be said for every single “employee benefit.”  If an employee cannot afford the employer’s benefits, those benefits are wasted money the employer needs elsewhere.  Hence, the final point in defining employee engagement is the individualization of incentives and the individual relationship between managers and employees.  Stop the one-size-fits-most offerings, and let’s get back to talking to people.Anton Ego 4

Reflective Listening

Listening has four distinct levels; currently, these are:

      • Inactive listening – Hearing words, seeing written communication, zero impact mentally. Mainly because your internal voices drown out the possibility of communication.
      • Selective listening – Hearing only that which confirms your own voices, opinions, and biases. While others are speaking, you are already forming your response.
      • Active listening – Show the other person you are paying attention to, engage with meaning in a reply. You are focused on removing barriers to get your point across.
      • Reflective listening – Paying attention to intent and content, reducing emotion, two-directional as both parties are engaged in achieving mutual understanding.

Chinese CrisisInactive and selective listening can be heard through phone lines, instant messaging, text messaging, and easily observed during face-to-face communication.  Worse, active listening launches trust, and when faked, destroys credibility, ruining relationships.  Reflective listening can only achieve mutual understanding when both parties are choosing to listen intently and with the purpose of reaching mutual understanding.  The most powerful tool in an organizational leader’s toolbox for quickly rectifying employee engagement is reflectively listening.

Communication occurs in two different modalities, verbal and non-verbal.  Good communicators adapt their message to the audience using reflective listening and careful observation.  Adapting the message requires first choosing, determining who the primary and secondary audience is, and then focusing the message on the primary audience.  Next, adaptation requires prior planning, which includes mental preparation, practice, and channels for feedback.  Finally, adaptation requires listening to achieve mutual understanding, careful observation, asking questions designed to lead to mutual understanding, and clarifying what is being said to achieve mutual understanding.  The pattern described can be the tool that begins employee engagement but is not an end-all solution all by itself.Anton Ego

Appreciative Inquiry

Appreciative inquiry is a growth mechanism that states that what a business organization needs, they already have enough of, provided they listen to their employees.  Appreciative inquiry and common sense tell leaders who want to know and change their organization and how and where to begin.  Appreciative inquiry-based leadership is 6-continuous steps that start small and cycle to more significant problems as momentum for excellence permeates through an organization.  But the first step, just like in defeating a disabling addiction, is admitting there is a problem.

Here are the six operational steps for appreciative inquiry:

      1. Admit there is a problem and commit to change.
      2. Define the problem.
      3. Discover the variables and stay focused on the positive.
      4. Dream BIG!
      5. Design the future and outline the steps to that future.
      6. Destiny, create the destination you desire.

Bait & SwitchFollow the instructions on a shampoo bottle, “Wash, Rinse, Repeat.”  The appreciative inquiry model can be scaled, repeated, implemented into small or large teams, and produce motivated members who become the force to create change.  Allow yourself and your team to learn, this takes time, but through building motivation for excellence, time can be captured to perform.

Of all the steps in appreciative inquiry, it must be stressed that focusing on the positive is the only way to improve people.  Even if you must make careful observations to catch people doing good, do it!  Focusing on the positive provides the proper culture for engaging as many people as possible.  Criticism, negativity, aspersions, and insults all feed a culture of “Not my problem,” and when the employee claims, “not my problem,” they will never engage until the culture changes.

Organization

Andragogy - LEARNEmployee engagement requires structural changes to the organizational design.  Employee engagement is going to bring immediate change to the organization.  If the leaders, directors, managers, supervisors, team leaders, etc., are not prepared for and willing to change, employee engagement will die as an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.  As a business consultant, I have witnessed the death of employee engagement, and the death is long, protracted, and disastrous to the entire business.  Worse, individuals refusing to change stand out like red dots on a white cloth as employee engagement dies.

Thus, the first step in employee engagement belongs not to the employee, but the employer, who must answer this question: “Are we a learning organization willing to change, or are we a knowing organization who does not need to change?”  How the leadership answers this question will speak volumes to the employees closely observing and making their decisions accordingly.  Depending upon how that question is answered will depend upon whether the business can move onto the second step or remain stuck on the first step.

Andragogy - The PuzzleThe second step in employee engagement is training the organization to accept change and failure as tools for learning, growing, and developing.  A toddler learning to walk will fall more than they stay up before they can run.  The same is true when initiating employee engagement.  Guess what; you are going to fail; can you as an organizational leader accept failing?  Are you willing to admit you failed, made a mistake, and publicly acknowledge the blame and consequences?  Are you willing to allow others to accept the praise for doing the right thing?  Will you as an organizational leader accept change?  How you answer these questions also speaks volumes to the employees you are trying to engage.  Depending upon how you individually and collectively as a team answer these leadership questions will decide if you fall back to step one or advance to step three.

The third step in organizing employee engagement is total commitment.  Are you onboard?  Are all the leaders onboard?  Being onboard means 100% commitment to the organization dreamed in the operational steps to appreciative inquiry.  If not, do not launch an employee engagement program, for it will fail spectacularly!  Never forget the cartoons where a character has one foot on a boat leaving the pier and one foot on the dock; they get wet and left behind!

Have FUN!

Semper GumbyEngaging with employees should be fun, it should be an enjoyable experience, and it should bring out the best in you!  All because you want to see others engage, grow professionally, learn, develop, and become.  Your efforts to teach engagement lead you to learn how to engage better.  Seize these learning opportunities, choose to grow, but never forget to have fun.  My best tool for engaging with employees, dad jokes!  Really, really, really, bad dad jokes!  For example, when Forrest Gump came to Amazon, what was his computer password?

1F@rr3st1

When you get that joke, laugh; but wait for others to get it as well!  Employee engagement is fun, exciting, and can be the best job you ever had as a professional.  Just believe in yourself, believe in and invest the time in appreciative inquiry, organize yourself and your business, and always reflectively listen.Never Give Up!

© 2021 M. Dave Salisbury
All Rights Reserved
The images used herein were obtained in the public domain; this author holds no copyright to the images displayed.

 

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Leadership and the Department of Veterans Affairs – Shifting the Paradigm on Killing Veterans

I-Care

Since the beginning of 2019, a running theme in the Department of Veterans Affairs Office of Inspector General (VA-OIG) reports, that I have delivered via email, has been the lack of leadership.  Today’s VA-OIG report is a perfect example of discussion and remains significant due to a veteran being killed by the Spinal Cord Unit in San Diego, CA.  I fully submit that VA Secretary Wilkie is trying to reform the Department of Veterans Affairs.  I fully offer that the nurses and providers, as well as other front-level employees at the Department of Veterans Affairs, are trying to do a difficult job in a bureaucratic nightmare.  I contend that the mid-level managers between the supervisors and Secretary Wilkie need removed and processes redesigned.

Using today’s report, we find causation for removing mid-level managers to streamline leadership effectiveness and potentially save patients.  The VA-OIG claimed, “At the time of the patient’s death, the SCI unit used an outdated nurse call system that required the use of a splitter to connect the ventilator to the call system, none of the respiratory therapy staff had training or competency assessments related to PMV use, staff failed to report the patient’s ventilator tubing disconnections through the Patient Safety reporting system, and SCI leaders failed to follow the standard operating procedure for the management of clinical alarms.”

Outdated technology is inexcusable, especially for all the money continually pumped into the Department of Veterans Affairs to update technology.  Who are the mid-level managers in charge of procurement that have failed to do their job and improve technology effectively?  VA-OIG, was the role of technology procurement included in this investigation?  If not, why?  If so, where is that report?  I have personally witnessed 10+-year-old technology used for patient care due to inadequate leadership efforts and procurement people wasting time, as well as other resources.  If a root cause in a patient dying is old technology, why are we not holding those in procurement an IT accountable?

Training at the Department of Veterans Affairs is a colossal joke; either the training is bloated, and the user cannot identify which parts are valuable to their job duties specifically, or the training is so shallow that the topics are considered a waste of time.  But, there is also a third option for training; training only applies to managers due to the labor union collective bargaining agreement.  Thus, the front-line worker could use the knowledge, but the union is preventing that knowledge from spreading as that policy has not been approved.  The leaders in charge of training cannot answer basic questions regarding applicability, usefulness, or point to policies and procedures that govern why certain topics are required to specific audiences.  The lines of communication breakdown in training have reached monumental proportions, and as witnessed, is killing patients.  Worse, the training at the VA is governed by third-party LMS software that can quickly be completed without ever influencing the actions of the individual.  Classroom training is a rehash of the LMS training and does not cover the gaps or explain why.  Front-line supervisors cannot answer basic questions about the why behind a process or procedure, nor can they point to a resource where the information can be discovered.

The VA-OIG noted a root cause in their investigation, “The OIG could not determine what the ventilator settings were at the time of the patient’s death, because facility staff who inspected the ventilator immediately thereafter changed the settings to check whether alarms were functional and then reportedly returned the settings to the previous levels.”  If the setting on a piece of equipment is required for a patient safety report, why are there not digital pictures taken?  I find the VA-OIG being unable to ascertain equipment settings to be a complete failure of current technology.  How many smartphones are possessed by patients, staff, providers, etc. that could snap a picture of a piece of equipment for an official record?  Does not the VA issue phones to mid-level managers?  One of the most egregious problems at the VA is designed incompetence to allow a malefactor the ability to hide behind bureaucracy to avoid accountability and responsibility.  Designed incompetence is the problem and I do not see any of the mid-level managers, leaders, supervisors, trainers, etc. acting to eliminate designed incompetence to the improvement of the Department of Veterans Affairs.  Consider for a moment the hundreds of millions of dollars lost in bloated construction projects.  The project leader has vague, inaccurate, old, etc. processes and procedures to blame the failures upon; this is an example of systemic designed incompetence, that protects a lazy employee and costs the taxpayers resources, and the Department of Veterans Affairs reputation.

The VA-OIG reported more root causes in the death of a patient to include, “… the facility did not implement risk mitigation strategies for the use of the in-line Passy-Muir® Valve (PMV) on ventilated patients. The facility did not have a backup monitoring plan when the ventilator alarms were off, patient criteria to determine when the valve should be removed, policies for facility staff and patient/family education on the use of the PMV, policies or procedures for monitoring and documenting ventilator and alarm settings while using the PMV, or a policy to use anti-disconnect devices.”  Risk mitigation is everyone’s job in a VA Medical Center.  Risk mitigation is a facet of every post and included in the third-party software training programs for providers, nursing staff, and clerical staff.  Why did this patient die from a lack of risk mitigation?  What are the tactical risk mitigation actions that support risk reduction strategies?  I have asked this exact question, as an employee and a patient, in two separate VA Medical Facilities and never received an answer beyond simple platitudes.  A root cause in a patient dying was risk mitigation strategies; VA-OIG, there is a bigger problem here that merely making a recommendation to leadership can resolve.  If a strategy is not supported with tactical action, there are no strategies; simply wishful thinking and hope statements.  Are the mid-level managers going to be held accountable for dropping the tactical ball here and letting a patient die from systemic designed incompetence?

The US Military believes in redundancy; every mechanical system has a backup, that backup has a backup, and there is a manual backup for when all else fails.  How can the Department of Veterans Affairs claim to serve America’s military veterans without redundancies?  Without training on redundancies?  Without education and real-life training scenarios, to prod thinking before an emergency occurs?  The simple answer, the VA cannot represent, serve, or support America’s veterans without these core competencies built into the processes and procedures that power a learning organization.

I am sick and tired of seeing veterans harmed, abused, and killed at the hands of bureaucratic ineptitude and systemic incompetence that protects the lazy and useless at the expense of veterans.  I am beyond disgusted that mid-level managers, supervisors, directors, etc. have the power to arbitrarily pick winners and losers based solely upon the worship that employee does to the boss when the employee cannot do the job they were hired to accomplish.  It is beyond inexcusable to see no job-specific duties, processes, and procedures that provide tactical action for strategic aims at every workstation where training is held daily to meet the strategic goals of the medical facility.  The Department of Veterans Affairs needs to begin cleaning house of the criminals, the incompetent, and the lazy that are supporting a reputation of killing veterans through designed incompetence, as they masquerade as supervisors, directors, managers, etc.; there is no excuse for killing another veteran!

© 2019 M. Dave Salisbury

All Rights Reserved

The images used herein were obtained in the public domain, this author holds no copyright to the images displayed.

A Poor Customer Service Example: How NOT To Treat Your Customers

I experienced a wretched example of a series of poor customer service incidents from an organization I trusted, honored, respected, and invested time and money that will forever leave a scar from their betrayal, their false accusations, their belittlement, and their deception. This example is the ultimate prototype of poor customer service. I am not the only person to suffer at their hands.

Almost from the beginning of more than 10-year association as a customer with this organization and having worked with this organization in several different capacities in multiple states, I have had to fight for the most elementary customer service. Poor service representatives, leaders, directors, and managers evaded their responsibilities by refusing to answer questions, by not performing critical timely actions that were detrimental to accomplishing needful procedures, by not engaging in proactive communication, and by causing additional expense because of their negligence. Sometimes resolutions would be forthcoming, but most of the time the struggle was unending and their lack of responsibility and proper engagement have cost my family needless, excessive money.

The events occurring in June of this year (2015) began a personal exodus from this organization. My support team changed from one group of disinterested people to a new group of disinterested people. I use the word “disinterested” because I initiated all the contacts to these support personnel since I was not hearing from them and was not able to ascertain critical timely information they were to provide to me or perform necessary procedures only they could perform. Proactive customer communication is their only job. Their only job is building customer relations, supporting customers in long-term relationships, and building the brand with loyal customers. Their only mission is customer contact, proactive, engaged, value added, customer contact, and not performing their jobs is customer service suicide. Good customer service representatives find reasons to contact the customer and check-in, check up, and set expectations for the next contact. In our current day, email and Instant Messaging have added less time intrusive communication tools than the phone. Successful customer service employs the customer’s desired mode of communication so the customer may communicate on their preferred time and using their preferred method. When I did hear from my previous or current support teams, they disregarded my preferences and held me responsible for their errors. This is customer service suicide.

In July, the organization initiated a minor change to my account that forced massive revisions to my account. No proactive communication occurred; all reactive responses, similar to a “knee-jerk,” happened after I initiated communication asking for an explanation and assistance. From the middle to the end of July, these “knee-jerk” auto-responses of simple platitudes and organizationally mandated verbiage continued. I hoped a manager would see the mounting customer frustration, proactively audit the account, and passionately take-charge and communicate with the customer. This could have been an opportunity to stop the customer service suicide, rectify a situation, and begin building trust in the organization again. This did not happen and an opportunity was lost due to personal managerially driven choices.

In August, managers, finally, became involved beginning with praising team members for handling difficult clients like me. All my communications, professionally written, occurred in email fashion and are available for perusal. In addition, this month (September 2015), I initiated contacting directors, leaders who are vested in the health of the organization. Not once did they respond. The organization does have a group specializing in dispute management. When I contacted Dispute Management the first time, I deliberately discussed the possibility of finding solutions without pursuing an official charge. I simply wanted to resolve these core customer service issues. However, nothing resulted, no responses, no opening in the organizational communication chains, only silence; more customer service suicide.

In September, outside agencies contacted me soliciting for money still in dispute with the organization because of the events that occurred on my account in June and July. I called the office handling dispute management and was sent the proper email form to fill out. I listed in an email my concerns, which were ten individual points and problems that created the current issue. After eight successive email messages restating, re-explaining, and re-detailing my position, the end communication from the organization comes: “Thank you for contacting our department. We find you as the customer was not diligent enough in proactively communicating, and we will hold training for the issues discussed. Your situation is now concluded.” When did I receive the information and service requested? Where is the remuneration for the organization driven costs to third parties I now have to pay? Where is a sincere apology, followed with an action plan, to prevent this situation from happening again? Yet, the dispute team has concluded their investigation, found the customer was to blame, and have closed the case. Customer service suicide is not descriptive enough when an organization blames the customer for the problem, in writing, and acts with such impunity.

This entire story illustrates customer service suicide. Leadership driven suicide occurred from managerial loyalty to those who can secure their positions, rather than loyalty to securing a successful customer service resolution. Discontinuity suicide comes from having one customer facing department following one set of guidelines, processes, and procedures, whilst another customer facing department follows a different set of rules, guidelines, processes, and procedures, and a third customer facing department follows a completely different set of rules, processes, procedures, and guidelines.

From a plethora of organizational evidence, the organization knows they have these problems, is aware of potential solutions to these problems, provides lip service to fixing the problems, but has no plan, no leader, and no organizational will to change. Although the organization makes every other change imaginable, based on the current “flavor of the month” quick-fix antidote, the business is committing inertia suicide. From all evidence, without appropriate intervention, this organization will eventually implode. The time has come to end this relationship worth more than a $100,000 USD, a lost goal, a failed relationship, and an unfathomable amount of work hours that will never come to fruition. Our time together has come to an abrupt and pitiable end. I will not laugh as this organization slides into the wastes of infamy. I will weep for you because you pioneered something special and then betrayed your legacy, thwarted all attempts to change, and sacrificed yourself in such a contemptible manner. I would like to wish you well; in fact, I wish you nothing.

© 2015 M. Dave Salisbury

All Rights Reserved