Is your team fully engaged? | Issue #244
What Is Employee Engagement And Why Is It Important
As a Business Coach, I often speak at events, and it amazes me that most business leaders in the room have no handle on team member engagement. That’s crazy! Numerous studies have shown a direct link between high team member engagement and positive business outcomes. Engaged employees believe in the company’s purpose and give you up to 40% of extra effort.
In its latest State of the Global Workforce report, Gallup found that only 9% of the UK workforce is engaged. That’s phenomenal. Most people are going through their working life on autopilot. What a waste of an existence! I feel so passionately about this. The kick I get out of coaching is seeing how much faster everything happens when you have highly engaged employees. And it’s much more fun – for me and my clients!
If you’re not getting the desired business outcomes, you must foster team member engagement. Here’s why.
E249 | Redefining Market Success: Tony Ulwick’s Jobs to Be Done Theory
This week we learned from the inventor of the Outcome-Driven-Innovation (ODI) process, Tony Ulwick. Tony developed this process and, in 1999, he described it to Clayton Christensen, author of The Innovator’s Dilemma. Although Clayton loved it, he didn’t like the idea of customers having a process, so he called it Jobs-To-Be-Done. Every customer has a job to be done, so what we can do is innovate around solutions to help them get that job done.
What’s the job your customer is trying to get done? And how do you measure success? In this episode, Tony guides us through the process that innovators need to answer those questions, and he shares some interesting case studies of how he’s helped different firms understand what jobs their customers were trying to get done, and how to identify their unmet needs.
A fascinating conversation with Tony.
Download and listen to learn more.
Recommended Podcasts
Guy Raz interviews the world’s best-known entrepreneurs to learn how they built their iconic brands. In each episode, founders reveal deep, intimate moments of doubt and failure, and share insights on their eventual success. How I Built This is a master-class on innovation, creativity, leadership and how to navigate challenges of all kinds.
Recommended Articles
Help Your Team Stop Overcommitting by Empowering Them to Say No
There’s nothing wrong with wanting to please. In fact, we’re hardwired for it. But when we overcommit ourselves, we spend our time checking things off a list rather than actually creating value.
If you’ve been feeling like your leadership contributions are underappreciated, add a copy of Why Managers Matter to your reading list. In it, Nicolai Foss, a strategy professor at the Copenhagen Business School, and Peter Klein, the W.W. Caruth Chair and professor of entrepreneurship at the Hankamer School of Business, Baylor University, examine the various iterations of manager-free organizations that have been proposed—and occasionally adopted—over the past 50 years or so. Their conclusion: nonsense!
Research: The Flexibility Options Your On-Site Employees Want
Gallup surveyed more than 5,700 U.S. workers in industries such as manufacturing, transportation, health care, education, and service to understand which flexibility options their employers were offering and which flexibility options would entice them to switch jobs. The most commonly offered options (relaxed dress code, flexible start and end times, choice over which days they work per week) were not the ones that employees most valued (increased PTO, four-day workweek, remote or WFH options).
Jobs To Be Done by Tony Ulwick
Why do so many innovation projects fail? What are the root causes of failure? How can they be avoided? Since 1990, Tony Ulwick has pioneered an innovation process that answers these questions. In 1999, Tony introduced Clayton Christensen to the idea that “people have underlying needs or processes in their lives, that they are addressing in some way right now”—an insight that was to become Jobs-to-be-Done Theory. For 25 years, Ulwick and his company, Strategyn, have helped over 400 companies, applying Jobs-to-be-Done Theory in practice with a success rate of 86%—a 5-fold improvement. “Ulwick has taken the guesswork out of innovation,” says the ‘father of modern marketing,’ Philip Kotler, S. C. Johnson Distinguished Professor of International Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. “He has done this by introducing us to Jobs-to-be-Done theory, and converting it to practice using his rigorous innovation process known as Outcome-Driven Innovation.
Quote of the week
“When people are financially invested, they want a return. When people are emotionally invested, they want to contribute.”
Simon Sinek
Chapter 5: F**k Annual Employee Appraisals
Think back to your childhood. Did your parents sit you down at the end of the year and teach you a few lessons, or did they teach you valuable lessons in the moment?
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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.