GIVE YOURSELF A BREAK
How are you responding to these stressful times? Feeling frazzled? Going to bed a little later and getting up a little earlier? Eating lunch at your desk?
If your intention is to strengthen your job security as layoffs happen all around you, you just might want to reconsider that six-cylinder, 24/7 strategy. It’s counterproductive.
Overstressed employees are less engaged, less focused, and less vision-driven. This hurts customer service, which in turn hurts everything. Stressed employees are also more likely to get sick, lose sleep, and develop dysfunctional behaviors, all of which further hurts productivity.
Productivity wins and the bottom line wins and quality goes UP when employees are happy, rested, and well cared for. Run a car’s engine in high gear for hours and you’ll end up with a pile of junk. Running a human being be any different. So if you are serious about results, get serious about caring for that amazing machine that drives your results—YOU
Call It Tight!
Someone’s late for a meeting. Nobody calls the person on it. Next week, three people are late. That’s no coincidence. Eventually, there won’t be a meeting in the entire organization that starts within 15 minutes of the scheduled time.
Sales reports aren’t done accurately or aren’t timely. Well, it’s your top producer, so what can you say?
Then, the top achiever stops doing the reports all together. So do the rest of your team members. Sales take a nosedive. Your sales team blames the economy and the competition.
Yeah, right.
You have checklists required to make sure people are in compliance. Somebody pushes the limit, thinking, “Gosh, I was busy, so I didn’t do it.” Suddenly nobody is doing their checklists.
Everybody knows the rules, but no one is calling others on the breach of rules. Your organization becomes rule-free and loose. How could it not?
If you look at every successful organization, you see a group in which every team member calls every other team member on it whenever a service standard is breached, a deadline missed, or an honor code violated as defined by your values and behaviors.
Struggling organizations have folks who just want to be “nice.” They let it all go—which means, of course, that others will let THEM go when they mess up. Now the whole group is letting it all go—and in no time flat, you’re back to blaming the economy.
It is not management’s job alone to call people on their stuff—it is the role of every person within the organization. Only by doing that can you have any hope of progression. Repeating yesterday will NOT create different results. Management’s job is to make sure every person is calling every person on any violation and pushing each other to greatness.
People need to understand that it isn’t “mean” to challenge each other—it’s uncaring and unloving to NOT challenge each other for not doing what is required. It keeps others small and puts the whole ship at risk. Instead, call it tight and EVERYBODY wins.
Do you have a question about how to handle a situation or a relationship in the workplace? Ask Roxanne!
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