How Do You Get Employees to Help You Increase Productivity and Profitability?

By getting them to take personal responsibility for their performance - that's what the employees in the TAC (technical assistance center) for a diagnostic equipment manufacturer in Newark, Delaware did. Responsible employees are more engaged and productive. They willingly accept accountability for producing results...and continually look for ways in which they can improve their performance.

You already know that, because your best employees are the responsible ones.

The customer service representatives in the TAC, a call center, took their company from last place in customer satisfaction in their industry, to first place in less than two years. In 2006 they once again took out first place for the sixth year in a row.

Things were very different back in 1999 when they were in last place, and had been for some time. When the poor satisfaction scores came in each month, the employees didn't see the results as having anything to do with them. When a customer complaint came in, they always had excuses, or someone else to blame.

So how did the managers at the TAC turn things around and get employees to take responsibility for customer satisfaction, when they had previously seemed hell-bent on avoiding responsibility?

A Change in Leadership Approach Made a Difference
Despite the fact that the managers at the TAC were holding employees accountable for customer satisfaction, they did not accept accountability. Have you noticed that holding people accountable does not work?

The reason it doesn't work is that people cannot be held accountable by someone else... they have to choose to be accountable. That's a fact. People will only be accountable for what they choose to be accountable for. Accountability requires ownership, so for employees to be fully accountable for the results they produce, they need to have a say in how they do their jobs, and have input into their goals.

The managers at the TAC realized that in their control- based work environment where employees had no say in how success was defined, or how it was measured, they could not really expect them to feel responsible when the goals were not achieved?

Get Employees Involved in Goal-Setting
Many business leaders are afraid that if they allow employees to set their own goals, they will set them low to make life easier for themselves. That is not what happened at the TAC. When the management team got the employees involved in discussing what needed to be done to increase customer satisfaction and to set a goal they thought was achievable, they set the goal far higher than their managers thought was realistic...96 percent satisfaction.

Not only did they achieve the goal - they exceeded it. Almost every month for the past 5 years the TAC has achieved 100 percent customer satisfaction. The reason is that the employees own the results! In addition to giving the employees a sense of ownership in the goals, the managers also gave them more control over how to fix problems and improve systems that would increase customer satisfaction.

Employees who are trusted and given more choice over how they do their jobs are more engaged, more committed and more productive. People who know they are being trusted to be responsible do not want to let the organization down.

Trust is the Foundation
The foundation of an accountability-based workplace is a high level of trust! To create a culture where employees want to take ownership of their jobs, managers need to trust employees, and believe they will do the right thing by the organization.

It is also important that employees trust management, otherwise they will not choose to be accountable. Employees need to know that they will get the support they need to learn how to excel, and that mistakes will be treated as learning experiences rather than opportunities for blame and punishment.

In a previous update I wrote about the fact that being trustworthy does not mean that your employees will trust you. Most business leaders are trustworthy in a moral, ethical sense...and yet many go to work every day and diminish trust with their people, unintentionally. The reason is that building trust is a skill that must be learned. Click here to download the update Being Trustworthy Does Not Build Trust.

Once the managers at the TAC treated the customer service representatives as partners and listened to their ideas for becoming number one in customer satisfaction, things changed very quickly. Employees want to be responsible. They want to give you their best performance.

All you need to do is create a work environment where passionate, responsible people want to work. To achieve that you need exceptional leaders at all levels of your organization. Leaders who are building trust, not destroying it. Leaders who know how to get the best performance out of everyone in your company. And that requires a serious commitment from your organization to raising the standard of leadership you expect.

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To take a free trial of the Team Dimensions Profile and learn more about how it can help you to capitalize on the talents in your team, courtesy of Leadership Strategies International, email engage@leadership-strategies.com. For a free copy of a case study called "Team Innovations" offered by Laura Hauser click here.

To learn more about a ready to use half-day seminar on Capitalizing on Team Talents, complete with the Team Dimensions Profile for each team member, personalized participant workbooks, leader's guide, PowerPoint slides with built-in video, click here. And to take a look at a sample Leader's Guide, Participant Workbook and Program Overview, click here.