How an Organizational Constitution Affects Engagement
Having an organizational constitution ensures better engagement, higher productivity, better retention, fewer mistakes, less resource waste, better relationships among organizational members, and even better personal health for employees.
I’m bold with leaders, telling them they’re leaving money on the table if their organizational culture isn’t based on respect and dignity.
My ideas are not always embraced with open arms. There is a natural cynicism about culture. Leaders are used to dealing with performance facts and hard data. So, I share the facts and hard data about the benefits my culture clients have enjoyed.
For example, 2017 research by Gallup showed that inadequate engagement accounts for 51 percent of workers being not engaged, and 16 percent actively being disengaged in their work.
An earlier Gallup study dared to hypothesize that such actively disengaged employees “cost the U.S. between $450 billion to $550 billion each year in lost productivity.”
One client came to me because of low employee engagement survey scores. They scored 32 out of 100 possible points, the worst score of their immediate peers. This plant’s senior leadership team embraced our culture process from the get-go.
Want a purposeful, positive, productive work culture? Use an organizational constitution to make values as important as results.
They defined values with observable behaviors so everyone – leaders and employees – understood what the rules were for effective daily interactions. They increased performance accountability. They measured how well leaders lived the organization’s new valued behaviors. They praised leaders who modeled their valued behaviors, coached leaders who struggled, and redirected leaders who didn’t model or manage these valued behaviors.
Within six months, conflicts, absenteeism, re-work, and grievances dropped by 60 percent. Within twelve months, efficiency had improved by over 40 percent. Customers reported amazement at the “new service attitude” that company staff displayed.
When the next corporate employee engagement survey came around twelve months later, their organization scored 62 out of 100 points! Theirs was the biggest gain in engagement scores of any other business unit in their company system.
At the eighteen-month mark, employee engagement had grown 45 percent, customer service rankings had grown 45 percent, and hard dollar profits gains surpassed 35 percent.
All the credit went to every player’s alignment to their organizational constitution.
Want a purposeful, positive, productive work culture? Use an organizational constitution to make values as important as results.
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