So here’s the reality of it all… All the profit in the world, even when it’s a direct result of building a positive work environment, won’t be what motivates our team members - especially if we’re trying to hang onto every stinking penny of it - unless we can...

Creating an atmosphere where our team members don’t throw up when they think about working for us involves more than just avoiding the urge to be an insufferable jerk by demoralizing everyone we manage and yelling louder when they don’t heed our every command. There might not be cause...

What flashbacks do you have when you think about your most miserable job ever? There was an NCIS episode where Abby and McGee go back and forth with one another sharing their worst jobs before joining Team Gibbs. It started out with the boring ones and rapidly morphed into the most disgusting...

I don’t think it’s ever been much of a secret that turnover is expensive or that getting a new team member up to speed takes time, and both cost a lot more than most companies realize, but those certainly aren’t the only places we see the impact of our onboarding process - be...

We’ll soon start working through the tangible benefits an organization can expect from an effective employee orientation program but before we go too far into the HOW, we have to nail down the WHO and the WHY! Otherwise, any steps we take won’t likely make the impact we’re...

Since we now have a definition of onboarding that we can work from, and I started pounding the drum about the importance of making sure our organizational values are a heavy part of that process, let’s start looking at a few things we need to keep in mind if we’re going to be...

Christopher Columbus supposedly said “You can never cross the ocean unless you have the courage to lose sight of the shore.” I say supposedly because variations of that quote seem to be attributed to at least half a dozen folks, not the least of whom were Winston Churchill and William...

Not only do we need to provide a daily example of deliberate leadership, showing our team just how engaged we are in working toward the initiatives we’ve set, we also need to make sure our behaviors that show this engagement directly translate back to those objectives! This is where we...

In The Three Signs of a Miserable Job, Patrick Lencioni mentioned that two of the signs were important for every team member to understand if we want them to have a clear picture of how they can engage and why it matters. We’ve already hit on IRRELEVANCE and we’ll touch on something...

If you’re still on the fence as to whether or not employee engagement has a real financial impact on your business, or even your department within a business, take one more look at just the low numbers I shared recently… Now it’s time to dig into some things we can each do to...

Now that we have a foundation for what employee engagement looks like - meaning a clear picture of the types of behaviors we should be seeing from our engaged employees - let’s work through why it even matters and how engagement really does impact our bottom line. Just in case we’re...

I remember a Friday evening phone call a few years back with a friend who was serving as CEO for a locally owned company that was experiencing almost unbelievable growth. He had been very tuned into the topline and bottomline revenue the entire time I knew him. I had also seen firsthand how...