Are your staff happy? | Issue #153
Why Friday Pulse Is The Best Tool For Measuring Staff Engagement
Let me ask you something. Are your staff happy? Do you think it matters if they are? Do you know for definite? Maybe you’re sceptical about this kind of stuff, thinking it’s all a bit soft.
What if I was to tell you that I’ve seen data showing that happier teams are 20% more productive? And that top companies that consistently out-perform their competitors are the ones that genuinely care about the well-being of their staff. What’s more, they obsess about measuring happiness levels. They’re not doing this because it’s soft. They’re doing it because it drives economic advantage.
In fact, we believe these so-called ‘soft’ aspects of business culture are actually the hardest areas to get right. And they’re the most important. The happiness of your staff should be your number 1 priority – no question. Happiness leads to engagement which leads to profitability. These things can’t be separated. So it’s fundamental to the future growth of your business.
At the beginning of our relationship with clients, we recommend they use Friday Pulse to measure staff happiness. Why? Because it’s simply the best tool in its market. It will glue your finger to the heartbeat of your business, giving you real-time data that will inform every aspect of your strategy.
How to Improve your Sales Organisation with Justin Roff-Marsh, David Davies & Jamal Reimer
Dom has spent most of his life in sales. He was a good sales guy, a terrible sales manager, a better sales director. When he got to the point where he knew he was playing to his strengths, it was because he’d spent years dialling 300+ times per day, he’d accrued 10,000 hours in sales.
Today, he often helps clients think about or fix their sales organisation, particularly technology-led businesses where the founder doesn’t come from sales and needs help understanding what their sales function might look like. From helping clients hire their first salesperson through to thinking about what the structure of sales looks like, to what their sales and marketing organisation might look like.
And so in this special podcast episode, we’ve pulled together a podcast of three sales experts (all the links to their individual episodes are in the show notes). We’ve got Jamal Reimer, who only ever wanted to be the sales guy who does multi-million dollar deals, never a sales manager; David Davies, a Sandler trainer; and Justin Roff Marsh, who believes that salespeople should just sell, nothing else.
We’ve taken the best sales advice from all three episodes and strung it together to highlight the nuggets that were really, really interesting, to challenge you when thinking about your sales organisation. These are three great conversations, turned into one.
Recommended Podcasts
In The Trusted Leader Show, Global Trust Expert, Trust Expert in Residence at High Point University, Wall Street Journal bestselling author, and CEO David Horsager sits down with influential leaders from around the world to discuss their leadership style and the strategies and lessons they have learned throughout their careers. Join us as we assemble the top tactics leaders and organizations need to perform at their best and get faster results. After listening to these engaging conversations, you’ll leave with actionable takeaways that you can immediately apply to your life so that you can become a more Trusted Leader.
Recommended Articles
Leadership Training Can Pay Huge Dividends for Midsize Companies
Developing managers and leaders in middle-market companies is a far different challenge than in large companies, for a variety of reasons. In my work, I hear these three most often:
Encourage Your Employees to Give You Critical Feedback
It’s been 10 years since I co-authored the HBR article “Making Yourself Indispensable,” with John H. Zenger and Joseph Folkman. In the article we provided a model to get useful and actionable feedback on one’s leadership effectiveness, and how to uniquely develop your strengths in those areas.
Rethinking total reward strategies
Recently, a major US insurance broker with 20,000 agents started to question why so many were leaving the company—and taking their business books with them. The answer lay in the data about reward. It turned out the company was significantly out of touch with what people wanted.
Recommended Reads
The greatest barrier to living a happier life isn’t knowing what to do, but knowing how to turn those good intentions into action. This is an audio series for anyone who is sick of their own excuses. Dr Tim Sharp, ‘Dr Happy’, busts 15 common excuses for not taking action when it comes to happiness. With his help you’ll take control of your life and stop getting in your own way. Dr Tim Sharp is a clinical and consulting psychologist with three degrees in psychology and a distinguished career over several decades. He’s Australia’s very own ‘Dr Happy’ and the founder of The Happiness Institute.
If you have ever flown in an airplane, used electricity from a nuclear power plant, or taken an antibiotic, you have benefited from a brilliant mistake. Each of these life-changing innovations was the result of many missteps and an occasional brilliant insight that turned a mistake into a surprising portal of discovery. In Brilliant Mistakes, Paul Schoemaker, founder and chairman of Decision Strategies International, shares critical insights on the surprising benefits of making well-chosen mistakes. Brilliant Mistakes explores why minimizing mistakes may be the greatest mistake of all, situations when mistakes are most beneficial and when they should be avoided, the counter-intuitive idea that we should deliberately permit errors at times, and how to make the most of brilliant mistakes to improve business results.
Get Your ‘Prescription For Growth’
15th September, New Forest 8.30am – 5.00pm
Do you ever ask yourself, “if I double the number of sellers, will I double my revenue?”. If you paused, hesitated, or said no, then you should join the next Prescription For Growth workshop with Justin Roff-Marsh.
Justin is back at Foundry Farm to walk you through the revolutionary ideas from his book The Machine and help you build a simple plan for 11X selling conversations for your team and significantly grow sales.
What you will learn:
- A growth formula that you can follow to generate up to 11 times more selling conversations for your salespeople.
- A plan for restructuring sales to cover more territory and increase sales without a proportionate increase in payroll costs.
- Steps to follow to improve operational performance and deliver >90 ontime case completion performance.
- How to generate sales opportunities on a just-in-time basis (and why marketing must subordinate to sales).
- How to use one set of KPIs to drive growth and the role of management.
MEANINGFUL ACTION FOR MONDAY
Measure staff engagement
Put in place some kind of measurement to get a handle on staff engagement. I’ve talked about Friday Pulse in my blog this week but there are plenty of other ways to do this. Before Friday Pulse came along, I used Gallup Q12 every quarter in the businesses I ran. Other clients have used Office Vibe or Culture Amp. Whatever you choose, make sure it becomes a regular part of your business rhythm. A weekly pulse is so helpful. As with OKRs, the value is in the regularity of the surveys and discussions in management and team meetings. What you realise is the culture of your business is the culture of your teams. And when you make business changes, some teams will be affected more than others. This is an invaluable insight into the identity of your great managers – and the location of your black holes.
Upcoming Events
Scaling Up Made Simple Workshop, New Forest – 18th November
Conducted in The New Forest, away from the uproar of the everyday commercial world, the Scaling Up Made Simple Workshop is presented by Scaling Up Coach, Dominic Monkhouse to allow you the mental space to look at your business afresh – to recognise your strengths, your weaknesses and your opportunities. The workshop is your first step in the process of identifying and addressing the real challenges confronting your business. You will receive practical guidance in the essential skills that underpin manageable growth.
Quote of the week
“There is little success where there is little laughter”
Andrew Carnegie
Dominic Monkhouse
Dominic offers business coaching and management development, strategy planning and organisational change, using tried and tested methods to launch your organisation onto an unparalleled growth trajectory. His programme is a function of his broad experience, his deep expertise and a proven process used by over 2,700 firms worldwide.