Keeping Your Office Engaged During the Dog Days of Summer

Stress impacts performance and sometimes during the summer months, when people are covering for one or more co-workers who are on vacation, it can get crazy. And, honestly, the weather during the end of July through Labor Day can be absolutely brutal throughout most of the country. Here in Kansas City, I got a weather notification on my phone Saturday night happily informing me that Sunday was going to be “10 Degrees Cooler Than Today!!!” Then it informed me that it was still going to be 94 degrees with nearly 90+ percent humidity. Gee, thanks!

Managers these days have to pull out all the stops to keep spirits high, employees focused and performing well. Today, I want to share some ways to motivate your team and keep your department or company, enthused, pumped up, and performing at their peak. While some of these may not work for your situation, there are others that will:

Helping managers embrace—and facilitate—fun and engagement

• Enable interaction between co-workers, departments and business units
• Encourage “shop talk” among employees to allow them to learn the business better  
• Create focus groups and project teams
• Remove barriers that separate departments and employees and create silo mentalities
• Acknowledge small accomplishments
• Encourage and reward action even if it doesn’t’ succeed every time
• Don’t micromanage your employees. Give them the “what” of the work (deadlines, measurements of success and failure, what needs to be done) and give them space to figure out the “how” on their own 
• Change motivations if needed   
• Make the choice to live more joyfully, responsibly, and wholeheartedly 
• Coach your staff and be coachable yourself

Empower your staff

The benefits of empowerment:

• For customers: faster responses, “playful” service, a feeling of being wanted as a customer, getting to know more about the company and involvement 
• For staff: job satisfaction, more interaction, and “play” with customers 

The three steps of empowerment:

1. Keep employees informed/educated about the organization’s vision, values, and performance 
2. Train employees with the skills they need so they can contribute to the organization’s goals
3. Give employees the power to make decisions on behalf of customers

Do you get in the way of empowerment?

• Do you support efforts that promote the fun philosophy?
• Are there any areas that prevent empowerment?

What rules and procedures need to be addressed to encourage empowerment? 

Types of empowerment managers can give:   

• Take suggestions from employees  
• Sharing information
• Give credit where credit is due

Give people a role

• Give everyone a key role. This gets them committed to action and the ability to involve their people in turn 
• Lower-level employees provide critical real-time information and ideas that directly affect operations and processes 
• Employees who are powerless behave like victims 

Bureaucracies and barriers stifle action and create indifference  

• Structural bureaucracies, such as complicated approval processes
• Policy barriers, such as inflexible or outdated personnel guidelines  
• Practices that do not recognize risk-taking or innovation 
• Lack of skills needed to participate effectively

Ways to create meaningful involvement    

• Let all employees devise their own action plan
  — Assess how their performance fits into the vision.
  — Participate in identifying specifics to meet goals.
  — Brainstorm barriers.
  — Identify ways to prevent or overcome barriers.  
• Agree to a timetable with the team and individuals
• Document the agreement

If you look at the national data, employee engagement is only running around 33 percent today which means two out of every three employees is ready to jump ship at the first chance. The good part is that you can tweak just a handful of things in your world that can completely change attitudes in your organization or department. Don’t be afraid to have a little fun at work and empower your team. It will all work out well if you do.