As a business and leadership coach I am often engaged to help organisations to improve employee engagement and overall effectiveness. The question that is often posed is, “How do we improve our business performance WITHOUT spending more money?”
The secret to achieving this outcome is to understand that business performance is simply the outcome of individual employee performance. We cannot control business performance, but we can most definitely influence employee performance.
Studies have shown that up to 30% of results achieved by employees is caused by the work environment that the leader creates.
A study by Gallup in 2015 found that in the USA less than one in three employees get to employ their strengths at work every day. In the UK, France and China, the figure is closer to one in six getting to use their strengths daily.
The employees that strongly agreed that they were able to use their strengths every day were
- 38% more likely to be highly productive,
- 50% more likely to have high employee retention, and
- 44% more likely to earn high customer satisfaction scores.
The employees that strongly disagreed with this statement
- achieved significantly less on a daily basis,
- dreaded going to work, and
- tended to have more negative than positive interactions with their colleagues.
So, what does this mean for managers and leaders?
Too often, people are fitted into roles with little thought about how to best utilise their natural talents. When you are forced to do work that you have no talent for, it becomes demotivating and results in employee disengagement.
Taking the time to understand your team members’ individual strengths is essential so you can work to assign the best person for the job and get people working to their strengths. There are many tools available to assist you as a manager including DISC profiling and other tools like Gallup StrengthsFinder.
As you become more aware of your own strengths and also the strengths of the people around you, you can find ways to work to your strengths and leverage the strengths of your team members. No matter how much you work on a weakness, it will never be a strength for you, instead it is better to spend the majority of your time in further developing your strengths and finding ways to use these to add the maximal value to your organisation.
If you would like to find out more about identifying and working to your strengths, contact us for a confidential and obligation-free discussion. Call 1800 330 027, or use our online enquiry form here.
