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I avoid sports quotes. Too cliché for me. But Joe Maddon’s rallying cry for the 2016 Chicago Cubs (World Series champs btw) is perfect.
👉A no-nonsense framework for personal and organizational self-improvement: Try not to suck.
No one enjoys job searching. It’s a cumbersome pain in the ass. Inertia kicks in. Even during the Great Resignation (can’t believe I used that again), people would rather stay put. Just to avoid the hassle.
All it takes is one thing. The rest of the job can be totally fine. But one aspect of your company sucks puts someone over the top to click the “open to work” banner.
The problem behind the scenes: we all have blinders. The leaders of your org are people, like anyone else. They have their own perceptions and unconscious biases. They’re limited in how they can assess their org, because they only know the world through their own eyes.
Even if your leaders are great listeners, people aren’t going to tell them everything.
👉If you aren’t doing anonymous data collection (e.g. employee surveys), you’ll miss areas of suckage. And if you don’t know that, you can’t fix anything.
I’m not an employee engagement expert. I can’t tell you the best practices on setting these up, what to ask or how to structure it. We use Holistic for that. (Hit me up and I’ll be happy to make an intro.)
Long story short, we measure the team’s satisfaction in 13 key areas (and growing). And gather open ended feedback (not just 1-10 boxes) to get a sense of everyone else's experience.
This graph is our 5 most improved areas in 2021 over 2020.
It’s not a shock that 2020 was a rough year for mental health. Straight up: I would have had no idea how low our scores there were had we not asked.
You’ll also notice several of these columns have no data for 2019. We didn’t think to ask about some things at that time. It's also why open ended questions are important: there’s always something you miss that you should track in the future.
Are we perfect? No. But we’re working on it. You should too.
You can follow me on LinkedIn here and Twitter here. Join the discussion on this LinkedIn post (or give it a 👍) here.