Communications | Behavior Matters! - Part 5

Category: Communications Page 5 of 6

Do the holiday’s sap employee motivation? Or the wasted week between Christmas and New Years…

On December 27, 2010

In Communications, Employee Motivation, Leadership, Uncategorized

Here is a question that I’ve been asking myself all day long in between surfing the web to find out about the latest Timberwolve’s news, great after Christmas specials, the East Coast’s version of a Minnesota winter, and seeing what all my facebook buddies are up to – do the holiday’s sap employee motivation?  Or at a minimum, employee energy?

I know they do for me.

Which is a problem since this is our busy time of year.  Normally, I’m lucky to get Christmas day off  but this year I actually got three days off – that is a record I haven’t had in over 10 years!  With those three days came a lot of family celebration, festive eating, lots of visiting and much time playing with the kids.

Now I need a break!

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Empowered or Entitled? guest blog by Paul Schoening

On October 29, 2010

In Communications, Employee Motivation, Leadership, Motivation, Uncategorized

Increasingly we are seeing data that engaged employees drive business success.   As the economy recovers at the current snail’s pace, companies are also looking at their employee engagement scores deciding they’d better do something about it now before wholesale exodus occurs by their greatest resource.

Proactive talent managers planned for this factor 3 years ago.

Where are your engagement planning efforts at currently?

Emotional Engagement

Just this week, another study was released by The Brand Union, a brand strategy and design consultancy. This recent study surveyed 680 U.S. professionals revealing emotional engagement outweighs other forms of employee interaction, offering critical insights for executives who want to improve employee engagement health and create business efficiencies during lean times. 

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Survivor: Corporate America edition – Guest blog by Paul Schoening

On October 15, 2010

In Communications, Employee Motivation, Incentive Compensation, Uncategorized

Survivor “Damn Lucky”

Counter-intuitively, organizations tend to find difficulty prioritizing their employee engagement efforts during challenging environments. In fact, during this recession many have executed a status quo strategy, which communicates to their single greatest resource that you are “damn lucky to still be here”. Take a moment to think about this – has this been your organizations approach to engagement?

Therein lies the issue! If we tell our recession survivors they’re lucky to have a job and yet we label them our greatest remaining resource, we are sending mixed messages.

My Story

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Myths on communicating compensation plans…

On October 11, 2010

In Communications, Employee Motivation, Incentive Compensation, Uncategorized

Olivia Mitchell is one of the best experts on the web when it comes to presentations and public speaking.

She gets it.

I have been following her for over a year now and have been constantly amazed at the quality of her posts and her use of research to back up her statements.  In this post, she talks about three myths of public speaking – read it and let me know if you don’t change your mind after reading this.

After reading it, I started to think about how these myths often get in the way of effectively communicating incentive and compensation plans to people as well…

Myth #1: It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it

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Motivated by adversity: Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog

On September 10, 2010

In Communications, Four Drive Theory, Motivation, Uncategorized

First, if you have not watched Joss Whedon’s Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog starring Neil Patrick Harris, Felicia Day, and Nathan Fillion – please,  please do.  It is funny….ha, ha, ha, he, he, ha…. (ok, I need to work on my laugh – you’ll see the connection after watching).

The Spark

Joss Whedan on why he developed Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog:

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No Best Practice Quest Here!

On September 3, 2010

In Communications, Employee Motivation, Incentive Compensation, Leadership, Motivation, Uncategorized

I read “Sales Comp Demands a Deep Sales Dive, Not a Best Practices Quest” by Ann Bares on Compensation Force yesterday – the article really resonated with me.  The basic premise of the article is that companies should focus on understanding their sales force and not depend on best practices.  Ann states it best when she says, “the problem with the notion of best practices in HR is that it too often leads to a blind search-copy-cut-paste effort whereby we simply lift popular program elements (out of professional journals, books, studies, etc.) and implement them, without sufficient thought as to their fit and strategic applicability.”

It resonated because it is right-on but also because I just completed an assignment for a company where they were looking for “best practices.”

I didn’t give them any (we’ll not really – more on that later…).

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Awareness – how easy it is too not see

On August 12, 2010

In Communications, Employee Motivation, Incentive Compensation, Incentive Plans and Sales Awards, Motivation, Uncategorized

Yesterday I wrote about how we are not rational.  Today, we look at how sometimes we don’t even see things that are right in front of our eyes!  Take a look.

Did you see the bear the first time?  I know when I first did this test, I didn’t.  How long did it take you to notice the changes in the 2nd video?  I didn’t catch it until about 3/4 the way through and I was looking for it.

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5 Lessons From the Maze

On August 11, 2010

In Communications, Employee Motivation, Leadership, Uncategorized

People going through the maze

The Maze

Over the past 18 years I have conducted a team building event called the Electronic Maze® with hundreds of companies and thousands of participants.  Sometimes called the “Magic Carpet” the Electronic Maze is extraordinary, not because it is magic, but because of the team behaviors and emotional responses it elicits.

Those behaviors and emotional responses are surprising similar across a wide variety of groups: senior managers, line workers, middle management, cohesive teams, strangers, international audiences, men, women, and every group that we’ve ever done this with.

Those behaviors are also very insightful as to how we perceive the world, work with each other, and get things done.

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Economic Growth Centers – Small Business Learning Initiative

On August 4, 2010

In Communications, Employee Motivation, Uncategorized

Here is the link to the webinar I did with Economic Growth Centers (ECG), a 501C non-profit that I’m on the board of.  ECG’s mission is to strengthen the economic vitality of the Twin Cities Metro area.

One program that we are working on is to create an electronic small business education curriculum that can be freely accessed from our website by small business owners, managers and employees.  Our goal is to have an entire curriculum of educational webinars available free of charge, hosted by various experts in their fields.  This type of training or consulting would be cost prohibitive for many of the small businesses we aim to help.

If you would like to donate your time or expertise – please let me know kurt@lanterngroup.com or leave a comment.  We are looking for people to work with to create a one hour webinar that would teach small business leaders and employees a key business skill. If you are interested, let us know -we would love to hear from you!

Motivation Webinar Link

When Power Point Fails

On August 4, 2010

In Communications, Employee Motivation, Uncategorized

Oops I read this article recently, “PowerPoint Does Rocket Science–and Better Techniques for Technical Reports” by Edward Tufte.

Read this article.  Seriously, read it.

It is technical and it gets into details and isn’t constrained to just one page.  It has long paragraphs.  Read it anyway.

It highlights how we have come to depend on Power Point and its conventions – even when that medium or those conventions don’t work.  And how, in this instance, might have led to disaster.

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