Episode 56: THE Leadership Japan Series - How to Build a Culture of Engagement in Your Organization
Today, we are going to hear a presentation on how to build a culture of engagement in your organization.
Greg: Thank you very for coming. My name is Greg Story. I am the president of Dale Carnegie Training Japan. We’re going to run through organizations and pride in organizations and the culture around that today. This is actually the fourth of a series of these engagement seminars and workshops that we’ve been doing. They’ve all had different themes and we are working through the elements of that. Today it’s around pride in the organization. That will be our main game.
Let me take us through a few things first. Some of you will probably know about Dale Carnegie, some of you may not. We are going to look at how great organizations create a culture of engagement. The book on the left there is the original cover they used in 1936 when they issued, “How to Win Friends and Influence People”, which has been a phenomenal best seller. The one on the right was issued a couple of years ago as an update, making it more relevant in the digital age in which we work. The Japanese versions have sold nine million copies of “Hito wo ugokasu”, and now they have just released “Hito wo ugokasu II”, as the equivalent of the digital age book. They’re very very well accepted and popular in Japan. We are very fortunate that 90% of the Fortune 500 companies are using Dale Carnegie for their training and I found that there are about 64 Japanese companies in the Fortune 500. I noticed that about half of them are our clients here in Japan. We work across the globe. We bring training to 91 countries around the world and we teach in 30 languages. The beauty of this is for our clients where they might develop training content or a customized training program in one country and they want to take it all around the world, they can do that. We are currently doing a 34 country roll out of a particular program of multiple trainings for a Danish company. The beauty of this is they designed it in Denmark but it rolls out in 34 countries around the world in the various languages. It’s a very great help to clients who want to take their training global. I think everyone knows Warren Buffet, one of the most famous business people in history. If you bought into his company 30 years ago, we’d all be billionaires by now. It’s phenomenal. He is a big fan, which is great. Let’s see if we can hear from Warren.
Video: (Warren Buffet) I was terrified of public speaking while I was in high school and college. I mean, I couldn’t do it. I’d throw up and everything. So I took this Dale Carnegie course and as soon as I finished, I was 20 years old, I went off to University of Omaha and I said, “I want to start teaching”, because I wanted to get up in front of people and make sure I didn’t lapse back. I actually have the diploma in the office. I don’t have my diploma from college. I don’t have my diploma from graduate school, but I’ve got my Dale Carnegie diploma there because it changed my life.
Greg: That’s the type of testimonial you like to have from a guy who’s as successful as Warren Buffet. “This course changed my life.” In his case it did because he was a very smart guy, had these brilliant investment ideas which have all proven to be wonderful, but couldn’t get people to come with him. He didn’t have the persuasion power. So he took the Dale Carnegie course and it changed his life. That’s why he has the diploma on the wall of his office but not his university degrees. He already got the degrees, but he didn’t have the wherewithal, the capacity to persuade and convince people to come with him. So this is a great testimonial for us from Warren Buffet. Not only Warren Buffet, but also in Japan three very well-known business people. In fact Uotani-san who is the ex-chairman of Coca-Cola, now the president of Shiseido, Murakami-san, ex-chairman of Google, and of course Atarashi-san from Johnson and Johnson. These three gentlemen all took Dale Carnegie training and it changed their lives too. You’ll often see them in print talking about the influence the training had on their careers. They often give talks, speeches and they refer to it. They are great fans and supporters and we’ve got nine million graduates globally and over a hundred thousand in Japan. So it’s quite well established.
About nine months ago now I noticed that we do surveys of satisfaction rates of all the training and they are always pretty good. You get the percentages back - it’s always pretty high. I thought, we’ve never aggregated, never put them all together and just take a snapshot of everything. So I said to New York to put it all in a big bag - all trainers, all seminars, everything. Tell me what the average satisfaction rate is for our training in Japan. It came back with this number, 97.7% over five years as a consistent average. So that tells us that what we are doing is working for people and it’s successful. It’s a good indicator.
Now we are going to talk a little bit about engagement. There is a very interesting video I want to bring up.
Video: (Music) (various people) Google is a very unique company for me and for a lot of people that work there. What Google does is allow you a fantastic environment to get your product developed really quickly. It is a very different structure than the average community. We always really try to avoid bureaucracy so that people can really do what makes sense for their project. One thing that’s great about Google is you have a lot of autonomy over your product and its directions. We are encouraged to work on whatever we think is important and often the best ideas come from employees. At Google if you come in on your very first week and you have a good idea on how things should be done and people agree with you, in that first week you start making those changes. The biggest resource that we have is really the people. One of the things that attracted me to Google and makes it a very comfortable place is they hire people who are very good. I think Google goes after people who are entrepreneurial, who are kind of go-getters. Everyone in the company is so accessible and is really driven to make the company succeed. No two employees will have the same background, there’s no formula. We have people straight out of college, we have people who have been in the industry for 20 years. The concentration of talent that we have at Google is really quite amazing. I come to work and I look forward to the conversation I am going to have during the day with my colleagues and with people I haven’t met yet within the company because I know that today I am going to have five new great ideas that I am going to get excited about. We have yoga, we have Pilates. I love massages. Food here by the way is great. We have a French class where we get together and speak French. We have great cafeterias. There is any type of amazing cuisine, even better than some of the restaurants in New York. That’s an extra benefit and pretty nice. You know that what you are working on will be seen by millions and millions of people and you like that kind of visibility. You’re in a position to make a difference to people you’ve never met. It’s something that makes it fun to go to work in the morning because you are thinking about the people you are going to talk to, problems that you are going to try to tackle and solve. It’s really a great place to work. (Music)
Greg: We talk about one of the things today being pride in your organization. What do you think? Do you think the team at Google seems pretty proud of their organization? Let’s make a couple of groups. How do you think we would go if we brought a film crew into your organization and we wandered around and started filming like they did at Google? Would we get that same sense of pride in the organization? If so, why, and if not, why not? Please discuss that for a couple of minutes. (Talking)
Let’s pull it up there and just see how far you got. I’m sure we are going to have a number of discussions today, this will be one of them. Dennis, how about in your company? If we took a film crew around to your team and we did a type of Google thing there, would we get that same type of feeling? I don’t mean the words. I mean you actually tell people believe that they’re real the way they are talking about it. How do you think that would go?
Dennis (participant): We were chatting about how we both are working for global companies; headquarters are outside of Japan. The offices here in Japan are quite small. Five, ten thousand people global company but here in Japan it’s about 20, 30 people working. It’s tough. Often times there is a disconnect from the headquarters and the culture and to bring it here in Japan. I came in mid last year and part of it is because it’s not a high functioning culture or team. Part of my role is to help improve the morale, the team and start getting on a track that’s high performing. So it would be the opposite of Google, of what you saw in that video.
Greg: At this point in time, right?
Dennis: At this point in time.
Greg: How about Coca-Cola, another big global organization. We’re a big team here. If we take the film crew around to Coke, would we get something very similar do you think?
Participant: I’m not so sure. There are a lot of Japanese people so they are kind of shy. I’m not so sure they would speak up. But we have an employee’s survey every two years and the pride part is very high.
Greg: Very high right, because they’ve got a very big brand name, very powerful name. If you’ve got a big brand name like Google, cutting edge technology, it’s natural for people to feel a lot of pride in that. As they said, “what we work on here is visible around the world”. That’s a pretty big thing. Not many people get to do that. So what we are looking for are some things that we can do that are realistic for our size of organizations in Japan that would help people have pride. In our objectives today, on page 1 of your manual, we want to define engagement and look at the impact that getting engagement has on the organization and an employer of choice model. We are going to look at how we can become an employer of choice. What would be required to get that result? How to build that pride and relate that to high performance? Then, how to strengthen and maintain engagement once it gets going?
When we talk about engagement we define it as the emotional and intellectual commitment of employees to deliver high performance. That’s really the mind and the heart. The problem with that is often we have people who are very skillful, very knowledgeable, very talented but they’re smart, they’re selfish. They are only interested in themselves - their career, their bonus, their progression. If they become a leader, they’re people who are just assets for them to move up. They have all the brainpower and skill and ability but they’re a problem in your organization because they’re not really engaged. They’re like a free agent. They can pack up and move quite easily because there’s no loyalty, only loyalty to themselves. Or you have the other side, the attitude, the heart, they are happy but hopeless. They are a sort of pleasant person, very cheerful, bit of a mood maker maybe, but they don’t have the skills, they don’t produce the outcomes. That’s no help to us either. That’s not really going to get the type of engagement that we want. If we think about it, can we get the person who’s got those high-level skills to feel that their abilities are recognized and appreciated in this company? Do they feel the organization is proud of them? That’s something.
Think about this, your own organization, have you felt in your career that your organization was proud of you? Did you ever have that emotion? Did you ever have that thought? Your organization was proud of you. We are trying to get engagement where the people are mentally and emotionally engaged. They feel what they do is relevant and they also feel that the organization is proud. I don’t know there are too many organizations where we could go and survey them where the people would say, “My organization is proud of me”. Why do you think that is? Why would that be the case? Are the organizations just not proud, or do they just not communicate it? What do you think the breakdown is there?
Participant: I would say a lot of times that feedback is not given so the organization may think that they’re proud but they’re not actively letting their employees know that.
Greg: That’s right. We probably assume they know we’re proud of them so we don’t have to tell them. When you talk about engagement, if people are going to be engaged, the heart and the mind together, then telling them that they’re capabilities and skills and experience are appreciated and important, that’s a very powerful one, but also tell them, “We are proud of you. We are really pleased you work here.” That gets people fired up. That’s where you start to get real engagement. Except that often we forget to tell people that, we forget to tell them. They are doing what they are good at, what they love to do, what they need to do and on top of that you start getting what we call discretionary effort. Discretionary effort is that extra additional input, energy that you outlay beyond what the job specs is or what the company may ask of you. You go beyond that. It’s very hard to get innovation if you don’t get this discretionary effort because if people don’t care about the company, why would they care about being innovative? If they don’t care about the organization, why would they make any extra effort to make the system better or to make the customer service better or whatever it might be? When we start to get both the mind and the heart working together, then we get engagement. But we sometimes miss in the communication around telling people what they need to do or how we feel about them. It’s a bit of a lesson for us that we can get high levels of engagement but we have to work at it a bit harder than perhaps we think.
This was a very disturbing set of numbers when we did our global and then regional and by country survey of engagement. We found that there’s no direct correlation between high levels of satisfaction with the boss and engagement. In my case, before I saw these numbers, if I was told, “Greg we surveyed your team and they’re very satisfied with you as the boss”, I would automatically assume I’ve got high levels of engagement in my team. I’d just make that assumption. What we found though was of those who said I am very satisfied with my boss, only half of them were engaged. And of those who said “I’m fairly satisfied, somewhat satisfied with my boss”, only roughly 20% of those said they were engaged. And those who are not happy, well you can imagine its game over for that. What it tells us is that being very satisfied and being engaged is not the same thing. Where we might think we are succeeding, we may not be getting the levels of engagement we assume we are getting. This is also very interesting, when people feel that their manager cares about them, the one third of those who were surveyed that said, “Yes, I feel that my manager cares about me”, half of those were engaged. Of those two-thirds who said, “No, I don’t really feel that my manager cares about me”, only 17% were engaged. So it says we can increase the level of engagement very simply and rapidly if we can have the managers communicating to their team that they care about their people.
We’ve gone through a few stages in leadership and management where certainly when I was younger and growing up, the concept that the manager would care about the employees was a very distant idea. There was great separation between work and private. There was no mixing of the two. Work is work. Private is private. Don’t talk about private things at work. But in today’s society that is not the case. People want to know that the manager cares about them in total. They may have relatives, parents are getting older. They might have problems with their kids, different things going on in school. They want the manager to take all that into consideration and care about them, about their work life or non-work balance. They want to know that people care about that. Just by showing that we care we can change that percentage of engagement very very quickly. It moves the needles on the gauge very quickly. Gallup did a study of highly engaged organizations and related it to performance. In Gallup’s study they found that highly engaged teams outperform by more than 200%. Things like sales, productivity, customer retention. You got nearly a 20% higher shareholder return and you had lower turnover, so your cost are a lot lower. It’s certainly translated into a very clear bottom line for companies.
We looked at different levels of engagement. For example, the disengaged, partially engaged and fully engaged. When we looked at the US numbers and then global numbers, they found about 30% of people were engaged, which means they tend to stay longer, they contribute more, they’re more passionate about what they are doing. Those who are partially engaged were coming to work, doing their work and going home. That discretionary effort that I talked about before, not much of that is coming across. They do what they need to do, but not a lot more. There’s life after work that is probably more important to them, but they do work. They turn up and they do their job but that’s all. I get paid, go home. Then the disengaged, they’re the whiners, the complainers, the ones who get together with everyone around the coffee kitchen area and whinge about you the boss or complain about the organization and what it’s not doing or should be doing. They are basically a source of negativity. There’s a reasonable percentage of those. When we look at the Japan numbers, we contrast global with APAC and Japan and we see a really big trend here that you’ve got a huge number of Japanese who feel disengaged, 77%. And then 22% partially and only 2% engaged. There was a Gallup study in Japan done in 2009, just a few months actually after the Lehman Shock. At that time the engagement score was 7% which is still pretty low. Ours was 2% in 2012, 2013. Lehman Shock, earthquake, radiation - there’s been quite a few big changes in the country. Whether that number is reflecting that, I don’t know. But whether it was 2% or 7%, it is not a great number. The engagement level is not particularly high as measured around the world comparing Japan. So we have got a bit of work to do still in Japan to try and pick up the pace here.
Our study found that there were three drivers for getting engaged. One was very obvious: your direct relationship to your supervisor. When people leave companies, the boss is what they are leaving. That’s usually why they leave, so satisfaction with the immediate manager is very important. Belief in the senior leadership, where the senior leaders are taking the company. Are we going the right direction? Is it all working? Finally, this is what we are focusing on today, pride in the organization. The degree of pride in the organization was a driver for engagement. Your immediate supervisor, usually middle management, there is an issue around getting them to be more caring about people and communicating. And senior leadership, their direction. The why of where we are going getting communicated more clearly has a big impact on engagement. What often happens though, the senior leaders communicate the why to the middle managers but the middle managers fail to pass it down. Somehow it gets sort of trapped there. They forget. They pass on the “what” and they pass on the “how” but not the why. Even though senior leadership thinks they are very clearly communicating the direction of the company, our vision for the company, why we are making these changes or why we are taking a particular direction, they are actually not getting it down to the people at the bottom because middle management is not playing their role. It says that then companies really need to look at our middle managers to make sure they are playing a very constructive role there. And then, who’s building the pride in our organization? Again this comes down to middle managers having a bigger role in that. Senior managers have a bigger role in that, but also the awareness that this is an important issue.
“I am proud to be here. I can’t wait to get to work”. That’s an engaged employee. They’re proud to work in the company and they can’t wait to get to work. And you’d like to have every single person on your team operating with that feeling, I’m sure. How do we get that? What would people say about your organization to others when you’re not there? I am sure when they’re in front of the boss, they’re going to say nice things about the organization. What about when the boss is not there? What about when they are outside the company and they are talking to their friends or their relatives about the company? What do they say? In your groups again, think about that. What do you think people would be saying about your organization when you’re not there and talking to other people? In your groups, please have a discussion and let’s hear what you think about that. (Talking)
Let’s hear what people thought about that. Yamazaki-san, your company’s case. What would your people say about your organization to others?
Yamazaki-san: I guess there are two different types of persons. One is like highly engaged.
Greg: What would they say?
Yamazaki-san: All the good things about the company and then I actually recommended one of my ex-colleagues to join us. She was looking for a new organization.
Greg: Come and work here. It’s a great place to work. That’s a strong recommendation.
Yamazaki-san: I recommend, not to my family, but to ex-colleagues to join us if they are interested in looking for new opportunities. On the other hand, the other type is people in the company who say negative things about the company. There are managers who are doing this kind of thing. Not just in our channels, but sometimes to the outside, I guess to friends, not really to the client. That is obviously not engaged.
Greg: Not engaged group, yes. Disengaged or partially engaged.
Greg: How about Katherine, for you?
Katherine: I was talking to my team here about how it depends very much on what you are looking for. We have our stakeholders, say our parents at our school. They would look at certain aspects of the school and be very positive, very engaged. Like a kindergarten teacher, what they are looking at and proud of and talking to other people about maybe quite different from your high school chemistry teacher. So what stakeholders we have, they look at the organization in a different way and sometimes we are so caught up in that little glitch that happen in your life today, and we hope that people don’t go out and say that’s really bad or our organization is bad because this happened, but in general I see what the people have left that when they are able to take a step back and look at the organization as a whole and their whole experience tend to be positive.
Greg: How about you Konishi-san?
Konishi-san: Some people very engaged, some people not engaged. My company is a semi-conductor company so industry is changing very very fast. Some engineers are chasing technology and we can invest lots of money in engineering. So some people are very happy. On the other hand, my company is just 70 years old, quite new company. The organization is changing all the time - policies are changing all the time. So some people can’t really keep up with the speed. Some people complained about it, and some people just left.
Greg: So trying to build that pride to get that engagement is a tricky area because as I said many stakeholders, many groups are in some are out. What can we do to try and make that happen? We found that there was an emotional trigger in people that would lead to engagement. That emotional trigger was the feeling of being valued. Now again as we talked before, there is often an assumption that of course you’re valued. Of course we value you. We don’t ever tell you that. We don’t ever show you that particularly. We don’t communicate it to you. But trust me, you’re valued. Well, it doesn’t work because people don’t get the message. So again the leadership forgets to tell people that they are valued. We found that when people understood their role in the company was important, that they were appreciated for what they were doing, the company was proud of them, they were valued, it started to trigger inspiration, enthusiasm, and empowerment, and importantly confidence. Particularly confidence is a critical one because if we ask people to innovate, if we ask people to change, we are asking them to go out of their comfort zone and take on the risk of something that they are not good at immediately. So how you treat people when you ask them to step out has a big impact on their confidence.
Japan is a bit of a tough business culture in a way because there’s so much pressure not to make a mistake. So you’ve got this contradiction of please be able to step up and take a risk but if you make a mistake-whack! People go, “That was a bad experience. I know how to avoid that - never innovate again. Never step out of my comfort zone again. Never take a risk again.” So over time people have learnt that to have that behavior is safe. But at companies we don’t want that safe behavior, we want an innovative behavior. We need the confidence. So when you feel valued and you feel, “I can take a risk and I can step up and I can innovate-I’m not going to get whacked by my boss”, then it gives you that confidence to try. And all those things lead us up the scale to feeling engaged.
If you have your mobile phones with you, please get them out. We are going to have a little poll on these sessions. Take a photograph of the QR code on the paper in front of you. Organizations that employ proud, engaged people hold the following characteristics - which statement does your organization struggle with the most? Here’s the series of statements:
• Employees feel that corporate philosophy reflects their own values.
• Employees believe that their organization holds strong ethics.
• Employees feel that their organization respects and values them?
• Employees believe that there is opportunity for development and career growth.
• They are proud of the contribution that the company makes to the community.
• Employees are enabled and empowered to make decisions.
• Employees look forward to and are energized by coming to work.
Think about all those statements. Which one do you think is the most difficult for your organization to deliver? Take out your phone, use the QR code or go to this address. It will bring up the polling questions and you can select your answer on your phone and take part in the poll. There we go, ten responses. We see that both number six and number seven came up as issues. “Making employees feel enabled and empowered to make decisions” was an issue and finally, “looking forward to and energized to go to work” was another big issue. And then number four, “there is an opportunity for career growth”. Now it’s a small number to compare with today, and a mixed group. Let me unplug that for a minute and show you what the Japanese group yesterday voted on. Yesterday was about 40 people, all Japanese. This is how they ranked it. You can see that for them, number six came up, but not necessarily number seven. And number four didn’t come up much, but number one came up. For your group it didn’t come up that highly. So it’s interesting that they took a bit of a different view on the subject.
Participant: What kind of companies were these?
Greg: It’s varied, a bit like today. All different industries and sectors in industries. Not one consistent group. It was a very mixed bag - younger, middle, older individuals as well. Quite a good scattered group too to look at. What do you think this tells us about what people are struggling with in terms of getting their engagement going? We are talking in your case about number seven, looking forward to and energized to go to work. What do we need to do to get them to feel like that? Or you also had 30%, “enabled and empowered to make decisions”. What do we need to make people feel empowered to make decisions? What are we not doing that we could be doing? The other big one for this group was number four which was around opportunities for growth development and career growth, which can often be a communication aspect. What do you think we could do to help people to feel, “I want to come to work? I feel empowered. I feel my career is going somewhere.” What can we do? Again in your groups, have a brief discussion. What are some things we can do to get that mindset working so that we can overcome some of the key problems that you have identified? (Talking)
Let’s hear what you found. Rick?
Rick: Here’s what I am thinking, especially looking at the data from Japan. I think issue number one and six relates to lack of communication with management or a lack of participation involved. If they feel that corporate philosophy does not reflect their own values, we are missing communication there. If they feel that they are not empowered and their voice is not there then that is also a lack of communication with management. So I think that both those issues are related to that.
Greg: Joyce how about in your case? What do you think?
Joyce: We all agreed on number six and were discussing how it’s much to do with the mentality of Japanese people because they are always satisfied and content. Even if they have a new idea they would just go on working very hard and seriously on what they have been asked to do rather than to propose their new idea which maybe this would work better and get a better result.
Greg: Maybe that partially engaged group, “I do my work but I am not going to make that discretionary effort or put myself at risk by suggesting an idea that might get criticized”. Yes. How about over here? What did you think about how the Japanese group they put the biggest problem areas here in number six and number one? Do you think that that reflects reality in your company as well, or would you pick something else? Which one did you select yourself?
Participant: Maybe number five.
Greg: Number five? Ok. The employees are proud of the contributions that the company makes to the community. That’s interesting. So there’s a bit of a disconnect with the local community and the organization in the country that you are in.
Participant: We just bought the company, so we don’t feel like we have connect with the society or community…
Greg: Right, so there’s a bit of a gap there? Very interesting. We have this quote. Bob Keller is a bit of a expert around engagement. He has a whole company that looks at this issue, he writes books about it. In this quote he says, “a company where employees feel comfortable with spending dialogue with anyone at any time, no matter how senior, is a company well on its way to being an engaged culture.” Now I think in many Japanese companies, because of the seniority system, people at the bottom would very much hesitate to speak to a very senior person in the company. They would very much not feel comfortable having a dialogue with anyone at any time. What does that tell us about getting an engaged culture? If you’ve got this top down, rather rigid hierarchy, it’s hard to have an engaged team. You’re going to have people who are compliant, who are partially engaged, lots of them, but hard to have innovation. It’s hard to have everyone really pulling together. So in your own companies, do you think that’s the case? Is it such that the environment is you could talk to someone, very senior person, anytime anywhere basically and feel comfortable about that? What do you think about that? Is that the case? Josh Jordan, do you feel very empowered now to show up and talk to the very senior people?
Josh: Personally yes. I am comfortable with that.
Greg: How about your colleagues? Would you colleagues also be similarly comfortable?
Josh: I don’t know if all my colleagues would be so. I don’t know if all of them would be able to walk into a room and say,“What do you guys think”. I don’t know if everyone would be raising their hand.
Greg: No. How about over at Coke? What do you think?
Participant: It depends if they are middle position, they are already talking to seniors a lot. But if they are very junior, just from college, they would need to be encouraged to talk.
Greg: Do you remember in the Google video, the person made the comment that anyone who started even yesterday, if they’ve got a good idea we’re ready to hear it. We value their contribution no matter how new or how junior they are. Everyone’s got something to contribute. We’re interested in hearing about it. That’s a culture they’ve created to allow people to feel very comfortable and allow them to be engaged and to put their ideas out there. There’s something about an organizational construct and culture to help us to deliver to get to that type of thinking.
How do we become the employer of choice? In your manuals on page six you’ll see it talks about the organization itself. It has an outstanding product or service. It’s reliable, it’s trustworthy, and dependable. The employees, the customers, the suppliers recommend the company. Word of mouth is very positive about the company. This leads to more revenue and bigger market shares. From the employee point of view, they see it as a great place to work. They feel that someone cares. “I am valued.” We talked about that before. Creative and inclusive. “I can make my suggestions and people listen to me. There are plenty of opportunities to grow and develop my skills in this organization.” And they recommend it to others, “Come and work here. This is a great place to work” as you said to your friend. A high potential A player champion workplace. This means that the people are going to move right to the top have a feeling this is a place I should stay working at because I have a place to go. And then from the customer point of view, “This is a really great company to deal with. They are consistent, exceptional service. It’s really excellent. We recommend it. Yes, you should use that company. They are a great supplier to us, going to be very good for you. They’re not just a transactional partner, they’re a relationship partner giving us extra value.” There is a lot of brand loyalty around that.
What would be some companies globally that would fit that criteria, that would be hitting all three? As an employer of choice? What local companies do you think would be hitting that criteria? How about your own company? Would your own company measure up and be an employer of choice? Again, in your groups, let’s have a think about globally, locally and your own company. What would be companies that would qualify as employers of choice? Employer of choice means that so many people want to work there they got the pick of the best people. It’s very much high demand to join that organization. Think about some examples globally, locally in Japan, and then think about your own organizations. Please have a discussion and then we’ll hear your thoughts on that. (Talking)
Let’s hear what you thought about that question. So what was an example globally or internationally of a company you would think is an employer of choice? Did anyone come up with any companies? Came to mind?
Participant: Proctor and Gamble.
Greg: Proctor and Gamble, yes. Very famous, yes. Employer of choice.
Participant: Google?
Greg: Yes, Google, and the video before. Who’d else do you think would be good?
Participant: Apple. Zappos.
Greg: Yes.
Participant: Facebook.
Greg: Facebook, yes. Another one isn’t it? How about here in Japan? Who would be an employer of choice in these categories in Japan?
Participant: Dentsu?
Greg: Dentsu, yes. Who else?
Participant: Sony?
Greg: Sony, yes. Any other examples?
Participant: Toyota?
Greg: Toyota, yes of course. How about your own companies? How did you go when you started to think about that? Are we an employer of choice? Are we hitting these points in a way that how we are as an organization, how our people feel about working there and how the customers feel about us? How did you go? Did anyone feel that their company qualified as an employer of choice?
Participant: Yes we did.
Greg: Very good, excellent. That’s the shot.
Participant: One reason is because we have had employees who have worked there and then gone abroad and worked other places for other companies but have wanted to return.
Greg: The grass was not greener on the other side of the fence after all. Is that what they found? They appreciate what they had before? Ironic, isn’t it. We leave actually to discover that what we had was pretty good. Again, your point before about communication, if we are really communicating and telling people, “We are proud of you. We value you. We appreciate you”, they are less likely to leave. They are highly engaged while they are there and they add a lot more value to the whole organization.
There’s another, also in your manuals on page 7. This is an acronym. These are some things we came up with that seem to help us become an employer of choice. As you see there, a clear sense of where we are going. Remember that idea before about engagement, that the senior management knows what they’re doing? There’s a clear purpose in what we’re doing. Very obvious to everybody because it communicated where we are going with this. Responsible, you are accountable as a company, you are accountable in your industry. Inclusive, you are getting people involved and valuing their opinions. It’s getting that discretionary effort from people because they feel comfortable and trusted to make that effort. Distinct, something unique. Something differentiated about the organization, be that value proposition, whatever. Also ethical, compliant, transparent. Following the rules. Very clear. We say one thing and we do the same thing. We don’t say one thing and do something else.
Let’s make one group here and one group here and go through these. Think about the relevancy of these for building an employer of choice culture in your organization. What could you do with these that you are not doing now to start to create that employer of choice culture in your own organization? Discuss that. How can we use these? What can we do with these items here to build that employer of choice mentality? (Talking)
Let’s hear what we thought about that. Do you have some things here to create that employer of choice culture? Did you think these were applicable? Did you think these were good elements to create that? How did you think in this group? What did you think Katherine? What was working here?
Katherine: For our organization, the one that we felt we need to put more effort into is the inclusive, involve and recognize employees, promote diversity and encourage. Particularly encourage idea exchange more to provide some platform where there will be more exchange of ideas. We do recognize people but naturally there may not be the time for all of the employees to be exchanging ideas. So there are clusters of different meetings.
Greg: That happens doesn’t it? We get into our work groups and we are all very busy and we’ve got companies full of very busy people in small groups. Sometimes we forget that in that whole of group activity, there’s capacity for thinking and sharing that’s going to add a lot of value to the company. We don’t tap into it because we are just very busy. When we talk about getting into high levels of engagement, becoming the employer of choice, taking some time to tap into that, it’s going to have a big impact on the employees who feel, “My opinion is sought after. I had a chance to express my ideas and they were taken up by the company.” We’re changing the world, as Google said in that video. What you are working on here goes around the world and is visible. But a lot of our jobs are not that visible. We work very hard but no one is going to see it. But within the company, if it’s seen, that will encourage people. How about Coke? You’ve got a big organization there. Were you able to tick all the boxes there working for you?
Participant: Yes, I think our company is covering everything but I think we need to do more.
Greg: Which ones do you think you need to do more on?
Participant: The more purposeful part. We have the vision and mission and everything. The only thing is they don’t communicate everyday so we have to communicate more. Maybe that will encourage people to walk and talk to people outside of the company. Now we have mission, but they don’t know it.
Greg: I do a lot of training in companies who have a beautifully framed vision, mission and value statements on the wall. One of my favorite activities is to go in and take it off the wall, turn it around and stick it against the wall and then ask the people in the audience, “What’s your company’s vision? What’s your company’s mission?” Invariably no one remembers the vision, because it’s usually way too long. Too many words. The president’s got this really elaborate vision statement which no one can remember. What does that tell you straight away right? There’s a problem here. Mission, they’re a bit rusty on that. They usually have about five values, but they only get around two or three between the whole group. It tells you even though the senior leadership may think what they’re doing is purposeful and they’re communicating because they have promulgated this, but it’s not working. I can tell you right now, if you can’t remember it, how you can live it. If you don’t know what the values are, I don’t know how you can exude those values as a representative of the company or within the company.
How about on this side? How did you go? How do you think your company goes here, Joyce?
Joyce: I think actually my company is doing quite well in going to the pride of being an employee of choice because it is a local company expanding into Asia and globally. It’s still very young and small scale so I think the message is very easily conducted by the president within the team and then to other consultants. So actually, I think we reached quite a good level and we’re expanding further. I don’t have much criticism for them.
Greg: How about you Konishi-san?
Konishi-san: My company is doing well but we have to work on being more inclusive.
Greg: Similar to this comment over here before?
Konishi-san: Yes, that’s right. Quite similar.
Greg: And that thing about telling your people, “We are proud of you”. It’s one of those things, of course we are proud of you. We just never tell you about it. It’s one of those things when you go through this type of process, you start to realize there is a lot of assumptions that we are making here that are passing for communication, which are not actually communication, they’re just assumptions. Let’s take the assumptions, leave those aside, and make the actual communications which are direct to people and tell them that directly. It has a big impact because there’s not much of it going around. Put up your hand if in any company you’ve ever worked in that your boss has said to you, “we are proud of you”. One. Ok. It’s a rare, it’s a rather rare comment. “That was a good job, you knew the project well”, kind of phrase. It’s usually really weak praise, not very specific praise. But, “we are proud”, we don’t really express it. But this tells us that we should think about expressing it more.
On the next page we have a little cycle for some success steps. This is fairly obvious planning - start with what we are doing now. Create that culture that encourages engagement. Think about the things that we have talked about. What do you need to do in your culture that you have now that’s going to really generate more engagement? Communication is bound to be a big factor in that. Then occasionally measure it. We know that what gets measured gets done so we need to have some way of testing whether we are actually getting somewhere with our engagement or not. And then of course if we are not getting the engagement levels we want, what’s an actual plan to get that. Again, very obvious. Then hold managers accountable for improving. In some companies they have KPI’s, Key Performance Indicators, around new revenue numbers, quality numbers and also around engagement numbers. As companies do surveys and they see there is a certain level, usually Japan is lower than everywhere else, in all the companies I’ve worked in it’s always lower than everywhere else, there is an effort to get the managers accountable to start thinking about how they can get those engagement numbers to come up. Then finally recognize and reward progress. It’s all very very straight forward.
On page 9, the next page, it’s asking for us to think about yourself and what can I do personally to have some impact. I’m looking for a commitment that we can write down now, and what will I do that will help to increase the feeling that our company or our organization is an employer of choice? What can I do? It’s no good saying that they should do this or senior management should do this or do that. This is asking you, whatever level or whatever role you have in the company, what can you do to make a difference? Just take some time and go through this so you nominate your organization. It might be working with an employee where you can have an impact. It might be working with a customer you can have some impact. You might think about something you can do within your department around that PRIDE acronym that we went through before. And then, how will you know that your actions are having an impact? Let’s take a few moments and make that commitment to take some action and make a difference in our organizations. What can you do in the organization to have an impact? What can you do with the other employees that you work with? What can you do with the customer to have some impact? Taking those choices, the PRIDE, the purposeful, the responsible, inclusive, distinct, ethical, taking that idea, what can I do? Taking one of these onboard and do something with it to actually have impact? How will I know that I am succeeding? How will I know? How can I measure my activity? How will I know that this is having some positive impact on the organization? Let’s hear what some of the words were amongst that PRIDE acronym that you chose for yourself to have an impact on your organization.
Yanazaki-san, what word did you choose?
Yanazaki-san: I think ethical is the most important for myself.
Greg: How will you measure if your ethical fits in the area of being successful?
Yanazaki-san: That is a very hard question but I guess one behavior I judge is how you spend money. If you spend like if it’s your money, not the company’s money, on any kind of expenses then that’s one way the ethical standards.
Greg: Josh how about you? Which word did you choose?
Josh: Inclusive.
Greg: What are you going to do to make it more inclusive there?
Josh: One of our goals for our company is to increase the interaction with our global counterparts.
Greg: Within the same organization?
Josh: Within the same organization so if I can help facilitate that I will.
Greg: How about you? What do you think? What’s going to be a key word for you do you think?
Participant: Responsible. I picked that one because I certainly feel that the team is in that disengaged category and responsible will play a couple of key roles because one it’s giving back CSR and that becomes more and more important as we respond to RFP’s. Companies want to know that you are a responsible company and how specifically are you giving back to the community. There are lots of studies out there that organizations that participate in CSR type activities, their workforce tends to be much more engaged. So I’m thinking that if I can create that, because in the past there has been very little to no effort getting into that locally. So I will give each employee two days to focus on initiatives around CSR activities, whatever they want to get involved in, up to two days in the year. What I would like to see is more people getting involved so just tracking the number of our people making use of that.
Greg: Yes, you can actually measure that easily.
Participant: Then hopefully we’ll see some real signs of the team coming together, more engaged, they’re happier about getting involved. I had a meeting last week with Make-A-Wish Foundation. They’ve been here in Japan for 20 years but they are not really as well known here as they are in other parts. The reason I said I chose them is I saw the YouTube video, the Batman Make-A-Wish Foundation one in San Francisco where they created Gotham City and had 2000 volunteers in the city. I just want to get the staff excited and engaged and that’s that’s one thing that I plan to do this year.
Greg: All right. And you can measure it too. Annette how about you?
Annette: The inclusive one about encouraging. With the encouragement of idea exchange, I was thinking I have actually wanted us to not just give ideas but to actually go back and give feedback on what happened with the ideas and…
Greg: What you did with them.
Annette: Yes. What action could be taken together or what the ongoing issues might be that action couldn’t be moved on straight away and what the challenges might be so that then they can have more appreciation of the big picture. But that communication point is really important in that whole process. So not just getting information but feeding it back as well. But how to measure that…
Greg: Yes, how would you measure that? Do you have engagement surveys of the team now? Do you do that type of thing?
Annette: No, not really.
Greg: That might be something to think about. You can bring them in. Nagai-san how about you? Which word did you choose?
Nagai-san: Purposeful. People don’t talk about vision…
Greg: You don’t even have the thing framed on the wall, right? (Laughter)
Nagai-san: I don’t know deeply about the vision of the company, my company. So this year I plan to go to the United States headquarter to take training and maybe I should learn, maybe to tell to colleagues. Maybe I can measure by the number of people who talk about the value or vision.
Greg: Good point. Joyce, how about with you?
Joyce: I chose inclusive as well and just simply about idea exchanges are important to form good team work which I’m learning very much now at the moment. Also to bring the best of each person’s ability and talent, skills and their own experiences.
Greg: How you going to measure that?
Joyce: That maybe relates to the last question of how I would know that our actions have been making an impact and I just simply wrote, “through results”.
Greg: Through results. Ok. Easy. Shimura-san? How about you?
Shimura-san: I chose responsible. We are planning for training this year. I want to make a really good training program. We will measure after training with a questionnaire.
Greg: Get some feedback as well. That sounds good. Kojima-san how about you?
Kojima-san: Mine is kind of inclusive part. We had an employee survey recently and I am working to see what we can do to make it better. What can we do to be more inclusive, so not just for the leader to decide what to do, but what can we do to involve these people more and then what are we going to do to facilitate each function to make it better? Then I am thinking of involving different teams as one team and try to build more of a company total and plan to exchange more ideas from different teams, which I will facilitate.
Greg: How will you know if you are successful?
Kojima-san: The benchmark is the engagement score. I’m going to do the first survey this year and that will help.
Greg: Yes, that will tell you. Rick, how about you?
Rick: I chose responsible. In essence in my company I am responsible for engagement. As a startup company we are hiring new people right now. I think that the level of engagement that we have right now is the highest that we can expect at the time. My main goal is to maintain or increase that engagement going forward, especially as we grow. It’s good to have that vision and that mindset from the beginning. Many people are coming from larger organizations and might have found themselves behind the curve and trying to catch up to make those changes. My situation is fortunate in that I can hopefully go in that direction from the beginning. I can measure it after time with some surveys with staff members and also meeting one on one, with the focus being on engagement and making sure that my expectations for how engaged they are are equal to what their realities are.
Greg: Konishi-san? Which word did you choose?
Konishi-san: Inclusive?
Greg: Inclusive comes up a lot today, doesn’t it? What are you going to do about it and how will you measure it?
Konishi-san: I’m the HR person and am working on it now. Maybe I can create clear HR guidelines, especially the compensation part. Lots of employees complained about compensation because merit increase or performance bonus is measured by only one evaluation system so we have to define it in a different way.
Greg: You’ve got a lot of work coming up there. That’s a big task.
Konishi-san: Hopefully the turnover will be lower because we give them clearer guidelines on compensation.
Greg: You can measure from the turnover, that’s good. Katherine how about you? Which word did you choose?
Katherine: I chose inclusive.
Greg: Inclusive as well.
Katherine: I think as far as action plan goes, looking at some of the problem areas there is some dichotomy of we-they. Maybe it will help if we can focus on goals that are school-wide and work together on how we can achieve that instead of just in small groups looking at only your one little area. And actually we were talking about some kind of engagement survey. That is something we don’t have and I think it will be really good.
Greg: It could be easy to bring that in.
Thinking about on the last page of your manuals here, it’s asking for a couple of ideas that came up today for you that you may be able to take away from this session that helps you. Have a think about some ideas that you can use and just make a note of those because we are very focused on outcomes from the time you’ve spent here and sacrificed your busy schedules. That you’ve come out of this with something that is practical, ideas that you can use that makes the time investment worthwhile. Just take a couple of minutes and isolate ideas that you may have heard in your group discussions today or that came through in the presentation and you thought, there’s an idea. I am going to do something or other from now on. Think about what they might be. Also from the documents you received today there’s a survey, very short survey. Please have a look in your paperwork for a copy of that and please give us some feedback on the things you found valuable today. We’ll take that onboard as we design our workshops for you to make sure that we’re delivering what you are looking for.
We’ll start to wrap it up here. This is a great quote from Bob Keller about engagement, “Never underestimate how much our team members want to work for a great company. We shouldn’t presume that’s not the case. It is the case. If we start to make it a great company they will respond.” As I said before there’s some things we can do. We can run this workshop inside your company. If you want to bring the engagement survey to your team, that survey that went globally, we can bring that in Japanese into the team and do it for you if you want to get an idea of how engagement’s going. Or there might be a need for a customized program. There might be something that you want to work on with your middle management, or communication or an area that’s an issue for you. Or some of the courses that are listed in the documentation you have in front of you. We have got a lot of courses running all the time that you can send people to and join in those, if you don’t want something customized to bring in-house, you want to just send a couple of people to the course, that’s available. And we will have further workshops. The engagement surveys we did were mainly for larger companies. They’ve just completed one for SME’s and we are just waiting now for the analysis of that SME survey (Small Medium Enterprise survey), to come out and the findings of what that’s going to show us about getting engagement in smaller sized companies. So look for other workshops coming up that will also deal with that.
Let me end by thanking you very much for your time today and the discussions you had. I felt they were very rich discussions and hitting on some critical areas. Thank you and I look forward to seeing you at another Dale Carnegie event in the future. Thank you very much, dōmo arigatōgozaimashita. (Applause)
