Employees with Paycheck Mentalities?
“If your employees do not connect to a purpose, they will connect to a paycheck.” – James Bird Guess Are you a leader attempting to communicate purpose to your people? Think of a puzzle inside a box. A puzzle is made up of many pieces. The picture of what the puzzle is supposed to look like once it’s completed is shown on the outside of the box. This “big picture” is like the vision for your organization, and the puzzle pieces represent the many tasks, goals, and responsibilities required to achieve the vision or big picture. Just imagine if you gave a team of people different amounts of puzzle pieces and told them to put the puzzle together by a deadline, and yet you never showed them the big picture on the box. They would still probably be able to complete the puzzle, but they would be able to do it much faster and with less frustration if they knew the purpose, the vision, the big picture of what it’s supposed to look like after all the hard work. Your job as an authentic leader is to keep showing them, keep reminding them in your own unique way, what the vision and big picture will look like once completed. From our experience, after having conducted on-site training for managers and supervisors in companies across the U.S. about 50 percent of an organization’s employees have “paycheck mentalities.” These employees are actually withholding anywhere from 15 to 25 percent of effort and energy, which means if their salary is roughly $50,000 annually, they are only contributing $37,500 worth of effort. Listed below are signs to look for: Neither fully committed nor uncommitted to daily work, direct manager, team and the organization. Perform just enough to get by and often go through the motions with tasks and duties. Does not see any connection between personal and professional goals with job duties and typically meets basic expectations. While that statistic may sound alarming, it is really an opportunity to for an organization’s leaders to reconnect with these employees before they become fully disengaged and problem employees. The most critical element on whether or not they become engaged or disengaged is the environment their direct manager or supervisor creates. Learn how on-site training equips managers to avoid creating “paycheck mentalities.” Click here to request article reprint...
Read MoreWhy Your Employees Don’t Change after Training
Her name was “Negative Nancy.” She complained about everything and always looked at the downside of her job. In meetings, her responses to her co-workers were “that won’t work, we’ve always done things this way,” or “that’s not my job.” Nancy’s manager, Tom, decided to send her to a training seminar called “Communicating with Difficult People.” After attending the training and returning to work, Nancy made a negative remark about one of her colleagues in a regular scheduled team meeting. What happened? Was the training a total waste of time and money? After training thousands of supervisors, managers, directors, and senior-level leaders across the world, one of the most frequently asked questions we receive about employee training and leadership development is “how do you make the training stick when employees return to work?” Frustrated by the lack of behavior change after investing in employee training, many senior-level leaders are telling human resource managers to pull the plug on professional development training budgets. However, just as the great speaker and trainer Zig Ziglar stated, “the only thing worse than training your employees and losing them, is not training them and keeping them.” Perhaps what’s needed is training on why employees don’t change after training, so that senior-level leaders and human resource managers understand that training is an investment in their people and results are typically seen over time depending on the type of behavior change desired. Based on our research from managers and leaders of organizations that have obtained positive returns on their investment in employee training, there are three strategic best practices that can maximize employee behavior change and application back in the workplace: 1. Pre-Training (it must be positive and important) One of the first steps to making employee training successful is in the pre-training phase. Managers and leaders should set the tone that training is positive and an important process of individual and team growth, not negative or punitive. Although it’s not completely necessary, if an employee has a positive mentality about training, application of lessons learned will occur faster. Many employees confess that they have attended a training with low expectations and a defensive mentality, only to leave the training with a positive mentality armed with, and ready to use, new tools. Managers and leaders can help employees think positive about training by not making them feel like they need to be “fixed.” For example, it will be very counterproductive to tell an employee that you have signed them up for training because they need to “fix” or work on their attitude. It would be more effective to tell the employee that this is a professional development opportunity and a chance to develop specific skills that would not only help the team, but possibly prepare him or her for future opportunities. Using the “coach leadership style,” managers and leaders can help the employee see what specific skills they could improve, and then ask the employee to write down two to three goals he or she would like to attain from the training so they are focused before they attend.Watch movie online The Transporter Refueled (2015) 2. During Training (it must be engaging!) Whether you hire an outside training consultant, send employees to public training seminars, or create an in-house training program, the training must be engaging! Learn all you can about how the training is delivered, because it doesn’t matter how great the content is if the training means sitting through fifty powerpoint slides and listening to a monotone speaker all day. Employees will simply tune out, become disengaged, and/or completely fall asleep. An effective training program...
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