Building High Performance Workplace Standards
Are you the person who is leading the charge for building and maintaining high performance workplace standards in your company?
For those of you who have been around, you already know that being a great manager doesn't require a diploma or a degree or the corner office or any of the other trappings that are so often associated with the title.
But it does require a total dedication to identifying, developing, and maintaining high standards of quality and customer satisfaction that permeate the entire organization.
In order to instill these important values in your workplace everyone, from the administrative assistant to janitor to team leaders to CEO must understand what the acceptable standards are, accept and agree that they are doable, and then they must embrace them as the mantra that drives everything in the workplace. It requires awareness, dedication, and sometimes it requires discovering and understanding each team member's potential and finding new ways to tap into those resources.
In a recent Towers-Perrin Global Workforce Study they found that if managers recognized employees' untapped energy, ambition, and desire and then they channeled them to drive high performance workplace standards, they would increase employee engagement and the employee's willingness to go the extra mile.
So how do managers go about achieving high performance workplace standards as the"norm" in their organization? Well, here are some suggestions that will help you to move forward:
Trust. Managers need to create it and employees need to, well, trust. If your words and actions are just lip service, employees will know it and steer clear. Avoiding “flavor-of-the-month buzz words” can go a long way to proving your words are genuine and authentic and that your actions follow suit.
Understanding. Employee empowerment is not an event, it's a philosophy with specific strategies that allow staff to make decisions that directly affect their job. Employers need to be in it for the long term and employees need to consider how their decisions affect the company.
Clear boundaries. When the manager is away, what decisions can staff make? Remember, assigning responsibility without authority can be a motivation killer. Make sure everyone knows what’s expected, knows the standard, and knows who to go when things are outside of box.
Encouragement. Second guessing the decisions of staff that have been given the authority to make those decisions undermines the entire process. Will mistakes be made? Of course. But this is not the time to shoot down an employee. It’s a golden training opportunity to showcase the expected standard and encourage the employee to demonstrate their new knowledge.
Empowering employees is a powerful way to motivate your staff. It allows them to get passionate about challenges and inspires them to step up with new ideas. It's a win-win situation. Left uninterrupted, this cycle repeats, encouraging passionate and skilled people to step up and make decisions about how to best serve customers or clients.
Remember, instilling high performance workplace standards won’t happen overnight and you may not see the benefits of excellent quality and service or high employee morale or even higher customer satisfaction right away.
However, like a stone thrown into the water, what managers demonstrate and say has a far-reaching ripple effect that extends well beyond those immediately around them and continues well after the stone has disappeared from sight.
If you’d like to read more about building trust including for your remote workers, check out our blog What Remote Workers Want Most.