5 ways to create performance that matters
Here is an excerpt from our eBook, Creating Performance that Matters in the Workplace, which was released at the 2022 Global Peter Drucker Forum.
How do businesses improve performance while adapting to new ways of working? How can they bring better products to the market sooner and define what being agile means for them?
The answer to these questions lies within a business’s employees and workplace culture.
Rather than focusing on the right business model or latest innovative tool to inject into operations, business leaders need to focus on creating an environment that encourages employee productivity and experimentation. In doing so, businesses will be able to generate a continuous cycle of performance that matters in their workplace. At Emergn, we believe this is achievable in five ways: building trust, facilitating communication and team collaboration, encouraging forward thinking and experimentation, investing in your employees’ continued growth, and creating purpose and motivation.
Emergn’s 5 ways to create performance that matters in the workplace:
- Build trust
- Facilitate communication and team collaboration
- Encourage forward thinking and experimentation
- Invest in your employees’ growth
- Create purpose and motivation
Building trust
Research shows that allowing your employees to demonstrate a healthy level of autonomy at work increases levels of job-related wellbeing. Businesses that lead with compassion and transparency while enabling their employees to participate in decision-making foster an environment of inclusion and trust. This two-way trust, in turn, increases employee job satisfaction and self-motivation while encouraging creative and innovative thinking.
Facilitating communication and team collaboration
There is no one-size-fits-all communication plan that works for every company. Therefore implementing modern methodologies, like Scrum or Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), to drive team collaboration without analyzing if the methodology is truly the best fit for specific teams and projects, often yields few results. By first performing a complete analysis of a business and its departments, leaders can identify each team’s specific needs and how they may conflict with others, determine clear roles and responsibilities based on individual and team strengths and weaknesses and set clear organizational goals. By doing this, thought-leaders can better determine the right communication strategy for their operations that will successfully facilitate cross-team communication and collaboration and drive productivity.
Encouraging forward thinking and experimentation
Agile operations that thrive through rapid innovation and changing market and demand responsiveness are only successful alongside equally agile employees. Introducing a ‘discovery mindset’ – a philosophy that pushes teams to take a more agile approach to their thinking by encouraging experimentation, forward-thinking, and learning from failure – teaches employees to think freely, embrace change and learn through experimentation and their own mistakes. Employees working within a ‘discovery mindset’ environment do not get lost in routine. They are constantly searching for ways to improve customer and business outcomes and are willing to try new things even if they fail. Allowing employees to think and work openly and creatively will lead to more intuitive, context-sensitive, and personalized products and better overall performance.
Investing in employees’ growth
Every employee wants the opportunity to grow within their profession. By making learning part of the employee experience, employers demonstrate an equal desire to see their employees grow and succeed. Leaders must also introduce various work-based learning experiences that feed an employee’s appetite. There are five key considerations to think about when creating a successful employee learning experience:
- Close the expectation gap between current learning offerings and new skills employees want to learn.
- Make learning part of employees’ work-based objectives.
- Ensure learning is personalized to individual roles
- Allow opportunities for people to learn together.
- Provide “just-in-time” learning.
Learn more about the 5 key considerations for building a work-based learning experience.
Employee expectations and operational best practices are constantly changing. But, by fulfilling employees’ appetite to continue to learn and grow with business-specific learning programs, companies can ensure the constant use of industry best practices while creating a healthy internal leadership pipeline.
Creating purpose and motivation
In the wake of the “Great Resignation” and a job market that has stayed hot despite economic uncertainty, employees have reprioritized what is important. Now more than ever, employees are looking for a purpose in their job and to feel like they are making a difference. It is up to business leaders to create that purpose and sense of fulfillment for their employees. Research has shown that effective short- and long-term goal setting positively affects an employee’s engagement, motivation, and accountability. Further, setting achievable goals and celebrating the completion of those goals has been shown to increase employee satisfaction and job retention. Employers that set effective short- and long-term individual goals that align with larger strategic business goals will help employees feel more connected to the company, increase accountability and generate improved performance and business outcomes.
Whether teams are working in the office, hybrid, or fully remote, organizations that successfully integrate these five ways into their business operations will create continued performance and successful outcomes.
Download the full eBook, Creating Performance that Matters in the Workplace, here. Each chapter breaks down each of the five ways to create performance that matters in the workplace in today’s market.
Additional insights
Shift your product development process to deliver customer-centric solutions
Reflections on workplace learning
Improving product innovation and design with AI and ML
