Engage and Inspire

Your employees have a choice.  How do they spend their discretionary time?  Do they seek to help others, take on projects and improve the business?  Do they log on to their social media accounts?  Or do they disrupt other employees who are busy working as they seek some social interaction before the end of the working day?

The number one job of a leader is to engage and inspire your people. You will get a better business outcome from an engaged team. The leader then has to translate the engagement into benefit for their business.

Engaged people contribute their discretionary effort and this has a massive impact on the growth of the company with successful sales and with higher client retention. Engaged people will stay longer, will talk positively about the company and will strive to succeed.  Always important for a business but particularly important during a period of change or transformation.

SAY • STAY • STRIVE — the human measures of transformation success

Business transformation is usually measured through financial and operational KPIs:

Cost.
Revenue.
Productivity.
Quality.
Customer satisfaction.

All important.

But there is another set of measures that can tell you whether a transformation is likely to succeed.

What are your people saying?
Are they staying?
And are they striving to make the change successful?

We call these:

SAY • STAY • STRIVE

SAY — what are your people saying?

Do employees understand why the transformation is necessary?

Do they believe in the direction of travel?

Do they have confidence in the leadership team?

And are they willing to say positive things about the organisation to others?

During transformation, communication matters enormously.

If people don't understand the destination, the organisation quickly fills the information gap with speculation.

Positive employee advocacy is more than an engagement measure. It is an indicator of confidence.

STAY — are you retaining the capability you need?

Transformation creates uncertainty.

The people with the greatest knowledge of your business are often the people competitors want to recruit.

Losing key people during transformation can result in:

• Lost knowledge
• Recruitment costs
• Reduced productivity
• Delays
• Increased pressure on remaining employees
• Greater transformation risk

Retention isn't simply an HR measure.

It is a transformation risk indicator.

You need the right people to stay long enough to embed the new processes, systems and behaviours.

STRIVE — are people giving discretionary effort?

Transformation inevitably creates additional work.

People have to learn new processes, test new systems, identify problems, help colleagues and maintain customer service while the organisation is changing.

A successful transformation needs people who don't simply comply with the programme.

They actively want it to succeed.

That's STRIVE.

It is the discretionary effort that can make the difference between implementing a change and actually embedding it.

The three work together

SAY without STAY isn't sustainable.

STAY without STRIVE doesn't deliver transformation.

STRIVE without a clear direction can create energy in the wrong place.

You need all three.

And they should be measured alongside the traditional transformation KPIs.

Because ultimately:

Technology enables transformation.
Processes support transformation.
People make transformation happen.

This is why training and capability investment matters.

There's an old management joke:

"What if we train them and they leave?"
"What if we don't train them and they stay?"

The cost of training is visible.

The cost of not training often isn't.

It appears later as lower productivity, errors, rework, poor customer experience, slower adoption and ultimately failure to realise the transformation business case.

Transformation is about getting People, Process and Technology working together.

The leadership challenge is creating an environment where people understand the change, believe in the destination and have the capability and motivation to make it happen.

That is when transformation becomes sustainable.