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ENGAGING EMPLOYEES

In today's workplace a high performance culture requires high maintenance and people issues are at the top of most CEO's to-do lists. But what does it take to build a utopia?

A large number of my friends and peers look puzzled when I volunteer that I love my job. I don't just look forward to returning to work on Monday mornings, it's more than that. I am inspired by the people, committed to the organisation and connected to my role; I am an engaged employee. In HR speak I apply discretionary effort, and when this happens everyone's happy. Happy people equal happy profits - and in a nutshell that's what they teach you at business school now.

The same friends then go into total shock when they find out that I turned down another role paying nearly $20k a year more for the one I have now. So what did my current employer do to woo me? How did their employer brand get me?

Employee engagement, what just a few years ago was conference lingo and a phrase bandied around by hip CEOs has fast become the holy grail of organisational success. What use is are a strategy and a plan without the right group of motivated people to get you there?

Engaged employees mean high performance. In an age where perception is reality; engaged employees are around three times more likely to believe that they can have a positive impact on product quality, customer service and costs. The emotional bonds that an engaged workforce develops means 'above and beyond', the discretionary effort the HR boffins refer to, becominges part and parcel of every working day. The pay-offs are mutual; work becomes pleasurable, more productive and more profitable.

In turn our willingness to recommend our employer as a place company to do business with regardless of what it sells or does, or as a great place to work sky-rockets.

What conditions do we need to become and remain engaged?

Firstly, is a flexible and friendly environment that caters for your demographic. This might mean work from home for those that prefer peace and quiet for a couple of days a week or have childcare commitments, hours to suit (within the context of the businesses' needs of course) and an at-work environment with break-out areas and even a Wii or PSP if you're high on the GenY count.

Second is the right resources to get the job the done; not everyone wants the same desk, chair, or PC, so where budgets and health and safety will allow, letting your people create their home away from home, and provide opportunities for everyone to give feedback as to what's stopping them at work. Big problems needn't always cost big bucks. I'm reminded of the story where management consultants were drafted into a logistics firm to work out why so many deliveries were made late or going to the wrong address. They discovered that the printer printing running off the delivery notes wasn't powerful enough to penetrate the multi-layer delivery notes sheets and the driver's copy was barely legible, so i. It pays to talk to your people.

Third is inspiring leadership and individual autonomy - the two can and should go hand in hand. Empowered people inspired by the organisation's vision embodied by the CEO and leadership team create their own high performance culture.

Fourth is a fair financial package; you don't have to be the best payer on the block in the same way that your product doesn't have to be the cheapest. We'll happily pay more for a pleasurable brand experience at the shops and will happily earn less for a pleasurable work experience. In the war for talent ; anything goes to attract and retain great people. Google now lets its workforce spend 20% of their time doing anything they want - which has in turn led to the development of projects like AdSense and Google News. St George offers employees the opportunity to work for four years and take year five off with an income.

Non-monetary benefits including evermore innovative reward and recognition programs are an increasingly important part of an employer's armoury to get the right people into the right seats and keep them there. There is also a growing bank of evidence to show that non-cash incentive programs improve performance more effectively. John Anderson, CEO of Gorman's Business Interiors in Detroit, created Gormanopoly, a monopoly like game that incentivized just about everything and awarded points to teams; at the end of the first year all three teams had enough points to send every member of staff and a guest on a Caribbean cruise costing over $32,000USD. "Not only was it good for the organization, it got us good PR without a lot of promotion, customers got engaged in it and learned about our culture, and it was a great recruiting tool too," reports Anderson. A recent study by the University of Chicago reported increases in productivity of over 38% against cash based incentive programs mediocre 14.6%.

What keeps me in my seat? It's culture more than anything else.

Getting the best return on investment from your employer brand budget is not an easy task and personalizing rewards and recognition is even harder.

Investing in culture is achievable by investing in relationships. Shared experiences produce relationships, they generate conversations, create memories and build emotional bonds; t, they are the currency of making dreams come true.An employer that makes dreams come true.....we might not all become millionaires but a few hundred dollars on an experience of a lifetime is definitely one more good reason to stay.

HOW TO GET RID OF BAD BUSINESS HABITS AND HOW TO OBTAIN HEALTHY HABITS

I was wondering with so much information we get today via every source of media how to become a better person or a better business owner why we were not getting the life we deserve? What is the foundation of our success? How can we describe the top ways to create wealth?

We know in our heart we must change. But do we really take action? We are a little bit hazy on finer details due to the confusing messages sent by the business marketers/ business owners. We know we must learn skills, do research, do something every day. It is like we know in order to be healthy we must eat right and do daily exercise. What is our exercise in current business activities? Do we have one? How should we develop it?

We know why we want to be successful. We want to be like that those guys who wear expensive clothing, drive BMWs and Hummers, we want to fly first class instead of feeling like "tuna in a can" in our seats. We want to feel that positive energy, inner happiness. We want to feel like kids who have no mind programming, no boundaries to what they can do. Have you heard a child saying to mommy, " I want to be a movie star" I want to be a banker" I want to be a doctor" Kids already visualize so early because they have no limits to what they believe. We want to feel good about ourselves. And we want to be attractive, happy, fun-loving, life-loving people...

The missing links is how and show me the way:

Some days we all lose focus on what we do, and we forget we must have will power. We get distracted by phone calls, chatting on instant messenger or just simple daily errands. We get started and get all excited but then.... we are fried. We lose desire, drive to do anything. Every obstacle that has been created by the mankind is there in front of us. We become self-destructive. We create those obstacles. Nobody does. Our sponsor does not create obstacles. The company does not create them. All obstacles are inner obstacles. I read somewhere and it gives a good analogy to human behavior

"A fly in a pitcher plant is, at the beginning eating the plant. At some imperceptible point, the plant is eating the fly."

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit." - Aristotle

What we repeatedly do, defines us. Imagine your dream life and then think of your life now. The difference largely amounts to "doing and taking action." In your dream life, you'd be doing something different than you're doing now.

Our habits can be constructive and destructive. One thing every habit has in common is where it comes from: from inside. Do you remember a movie about ground hog day? they have no structure, no sense of purpose and no desire to change life. Their routine is boring and that is what can happen to us. We become satisfied with our cozy thoughts and we find excuse after excuse

But how do we get from point of being self destructive to being constructive?

We have to have three important attitudes or attributes

1. We must be committed We must have the right mindset and believe in ourselves not someone else

2. Commitment will bring clarity. We must be clear all disbeliefs. We must clear the path to success by eliminated dirt, mud and weeds growing on the way.

3. We must be consistent. It will teach us to overcome fears. Fear is the biggest doubt people have.
I think in order to feel great about ourselves we must control our habits, set attainable goals, and stay focused.

One more thing...do not forget to be yourself.

We all have bad habits but we need to learn how to get up after falling and take it the way it is and move on...

FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT 201 – TROUBLE-SHOOTING TIPS

When I was a college student, I got an 'A' in my Accounting 101 and 201 classes. Then I entered the "real" world and almost SUNK the family business because I had no idea what I was doing with the "real" accounting. You see, the examples in the college text book used financials that were correct. That means, the dollar amounts in the accounts could be trusted, and were assumed current and accurate.

The "Real" World...

Well, when I took a swing at entering my accounting data I made a big "Slinky knot" mess out of my Peachtree accounting file. Ooops. I didn't learn how to FIX my accounting in college. That would have been useful! I learned what I know from falling in holes and climbing out of them.

As a business consultant, I see lots of financial reports. Most of them have a few "Slinky knots" in them...accounts that are just wrong. The data in those accounts are the result of mistakes in data entry. In my consulting work, I start by helping my clients get to KFP - a KNOWN Financial Position. Let's get the accounting correct. That's the first step. From there, we can see the impact of operational, marketing and sales behaviors. The good news is that you can always improve your financial situation once you know what it is. I am kind of like Super Nanny. I show up, we work together to clean up the accounting and we put simple systems, routines in place to help you stay at a KFP.

Sometimes, we clean stuff up and then it gets messy again. Just like Super Nanny, I go away after my consulting visit. It is up to my clients to maintain the systems we put in place. I can always come back and I often help over the phone. However, the key to staying at KFP is your willingness to learn enough about the accounting systems to enter data properly and to fix things when they get balled up.

If you are the owner of a very small shop, you might be the Financial Manager of your company (as well as the Service Manager and Marketing Manager and Salesperson, etc.) That's the way it goes. If you dream of being a bigger shop, take heart that every big company was once just your size. The way out...is through. Take responsibility and do a good job as the Financial Manager. Quit looking for a magical solution (accounting fairy?) who will handle the accounting for you. Learn how to do it yourself and document your basic procedures. This will help you hand off the accounting duties successfully.

In larger shops, sometimes the accounting duties get handed to...

• The Financial Manager

• The Office Manager

• The owner's wife, mom, daughter (other relative)

• The Bookkeeper• The Secretary

• The "Girl in the Office"

Whatever YOUR title, if you are the one who is responsible for the financial information at your company, I am here to help you. The following are a few tips and tricks for finding and fixing the "Slinky knot" messes in your accounting program.

Financial Fix Tips and Tricks...

• It's probably YOU. I often hear something along these lines, "That number wasn't there yesterday. It must be a QuickBooks problem." That weird dollar amount in your financial reports probably has a very simple explanation. Somebody, maybe you, entered that information. In every accounting software program, there are debits and credits. Sometimes the debits and credits are not visible from the data entry screen. You will have to do some digging. Follow the flow of information from the entry point to the Income Statement (aka Profit & Loss or P&L) and/or Balance Sheet. (In my lengthy career, there have been only 2 cases where the accounting program was corrupt. Chances are...YOU are the problem. J Start trouble-shooting from that assumption.)

• Stay current with your financial reporting. I recommend a WEEKLY review of the Balance Sheet and Income Statement. Some contractors I know get daily reports. That's great! Once a year at tax time is just not going to cut it. Get to KFP and run the financial reports at least once a week. It is so much easier to find and fix a mistake that happened in the last few days than trying to track down something goofy from six months ago. Also, you can fix the mistake in the current month. That is better than having to re-open a previous month and adjust it. Once I "close" a month, I don't like to open it again.

• Go line by line down the Balance Sheet and Income Statement and look for "weird" things. If you are just getting started with this process, I can help. Or, your accountant may help you learn what's "weird" and what's right. What a great opportunity for him or her to add value to your relationship. KFP means that every account is RIGHT. It reflects what you have in Assets, what you owe in Liabilities and what you own in Equity. The Sales account should equal what you have sold for that period of time. The Expenses should reflect what you have expensed for that period of time. The financial reports should be current and true. Here's a list of "weird" things that may need some fixing...

o A dollar amount that is positive when it was negative last time (or vice versa.)

o A negative Asset. (Unless it is Accumulated Depreciation or Amortization. Those numbers are "contra" accounts and serve to reduce the value of the associated assets.)

o A negative Liability.

§ Pay particular attention to your Payroll liabilities. I recommend using a Payroll service like ADP or Paychex. The number one reason: The service handles the liability so you don't have to. The service will tell you what the cash requirements are to pay your team and Uncle Sam. They will do the tax payments for you. The Journal Entry to enter Payroll is much easier if you don't have to keep track of the appropriate liabilities and payments. I attached a sample JE for entering Payroll. Follow the flow of debits and credits. You could create a sample transaction for your Payroll procedure and reference it every time you enter Payroll.

o A negative Sales account (unless it is the Customer Refunds or Discounts...contra accounts.)

o A negative Expense account. Now, an account may look weird but be right. For instance, if you enter a rebate for your Insurance it will show up as a negative expense for that month. Drill down and make sure.

o An account that is very different from last week or last month. If all of a sudden your Advertising expense went from about $2,500 per month to $300,000 this month, drill down. Something may have been miscoded.

o Have your accountant help you make the weird things right with an appropriate Journal Entry or reversing entry.

o Find out how it got weird, if you can, and update the data entry procedure. Written procedures are KEY to staying at KFP.

o If you don't know how it got weird, at least get it to right. If it is a small dollar amount, create an adjusting entry and watch to make sure it doesn't get weird again. If it does...look through the previous week's transactions for that account to find the entry. This is forensic accounting!

o If you do this once a week, YOU will get intimately familiar with the accounts and the dollar amounts. You will become an expert in what looks right and what looks "weird" and how to fix the weird stuff.

• Run a transaction register report and look for the debits and credits. Different accounting programs call this report by different names. Look for the detail trial balance or the General Ledger journal to find the "guts" of every transaction. Double entry accounting is based on the universal law of "what goes around comes around." If something goes up, something else goes up or goes down by that amount. Debits and credits are the mechanics in the accounting system that cause the dollar amounts to go up and down...and the Balance Sheet to stay in balance. There are debits and credits behind every data entry screen. You can also affect accounts directly by creating a Journal Entry. I attached a "cheat sheet" of Debit and Credit rules. I reference this several times a week.

• Look for before-and-after differences. If you are not sure of what is happening at a particular data entry point, try this:

o Run the Balance Sheet and Income Statement.

o Enter ONE transaction. Run the Balance Sheet and Income Statement again and see if you can see where the dollar amounts ended up. (Make sure no one else is in the accounting system while you do this.)

o This is a street smart way to discover the "set up" behind the data entry screen.

• To recode, delete or reverse a transaction? It depends on your accounting program. With a basic off-the-shelf program like QuickBooks, MYOB or Peachtree, you can drill down to the transaction that needs to be fixed and recode it. Or, you can delete the transaction entirely and try again. With a more sophisticated industry-specific program like Successware, Ergos, etc. you may have to enter a transaction that reverses your original transaction and then re-enter the transaction properly.

• Be careful with your initial company set up. That's where a lot of the behind the scenes accounting is created. If you are entering Service Sales and the dollar amount is showing up as Service Agreement Sales there may be an "item" or other set up instruction that is sending the information to the wrong sales account. Go to Company Set Up or the Items list and do some investigating. Figure out the default debits and credits and which accounts are affected. Update the "set up" and see if that fixes the problem.

• Get bossy with your software support team. Call for help as you need it. If you don't understand what they are telling you to do, ask again for a clearer explanation. If they want to fix something for you, sit in as they do the correction so you can "follow the flow" of the debits and credits and learn from the experience. The more you know about your particular accounting software the less intimidated you will be by the accounting processes.

• Be assertive with your CPA or tax preparer. At the end of each quarter, take the time to make sure that your financials agree with the financial information your CPA is sending to Uncle Sam. Work together to enter the year-end Journal Entries needed to bring your accounting system up to accurate.

• Learn to trust your intuition. As your understanding of double entry accounting increases, trust your gut feeling that a dollar amount is wrong or "weird." So often, I help someone fix a "Slinky knot" and they respond, "I thought that might be the problem!" If you have that thought, follow it and see what you uncover.
If it is your responsibility to get the financial "Slinky knot" untangled, take a deep breath and know this: You can do it. You may need some help. Contact me if you feel overwhelmed and we'll set up a time to visit on the phone. This accounting stuff is just not that hard once you learn the lingo and accounting basics. One of the smartest Financial Managers I know is working with an 8th grade education.

Once you get a handle on them, you can delegate the accounting tasks. It is a blessing to have done the accounting yourself because you will never be held hostage by your bookkeeper (or "girl in the office.") You can coach someone to be even better than you were at the basic accounting tasks. And you will understand the Balance Sheet and Income Statement so much better for the experience.

THE APPRENTICE LEADER – MAKING THE MOST OF LEARNING ON THE JOB

Leadership is an apprentice trade. You learn some of it in the classroom and from books. You learn most if it on the job. You learn it from others and you learn from experience. Here's how to get the most out of what you learn on the job.

Improve your Odds of Getting it Right the First Time

Get some training in supervisory skills. Classroom training and reading can give you ideas of how to analyze situations and what practices to try. They can be the basis for your on-the-job experiments in leadership.
Identify role models you can use to help you figure out what to do in a leadership situation. Find a mentor who can help you.

Discuss leadership situations with other, more experienced leaders. They can give you perspective on what may work best and on pitfalls you may not see.

Experiment

Forget "trial and error." That sets up you to think of something that doesn't work out the way you expected as a "failure." And it assumes you only learn from failure, which is silly. So, instead of "trial and error," think "experiment."

When scientists experiment, there are three steps. First you set up a hypothesis or what you think will happen if you act in a certain way. Next you act in that way and observe what actually happens. Then you compare your hypothesis with reality and decide how you'll do things next time.

That's how Thomas Edison worked. When he was asked if he was discouraged because he'd tried filament after filament for his electric light bulb and failed to identify a good one, Edison had a classic reply. "I haven't failed. I've found lots of things that won't work."

If you consider your tries as experiments, you should learn from things that work and from things that don't and you'll avoid that emotionally charged word: "failure." The only experiment that fails is one you don't learn from.

Experiments give you feedback. And feedback is important if you want to get better.

Feedback is the Breakfast of Champions

In 1988, researchers took workgroups and applied different tactics to see how those tactics affected baseline performance. Feedback was the most powerful of all.

Feedback alone increased performance over the baseline by 50 percent. The more feedback you get the faster you learn.

Develop the feedback habit. Analyze your experiments. Ask your boss, your peers and the people who work for you for feedback on your behavior and performance. Critique your own supervisory performance. All that feedback will help you decide what to work on to get better.

Deliberate Practice is How Champions Train

My friend Jack and Tiger Woods both play golf. Tiger plays much better. Talent is part of the reason. But Tiger and Jack practice golf very differently.

When Jack practices, he heads down to the driving range and hits a couple of buckets of balls. When Tiger practices it's likely to be something much less fun and much more specific.

Tiger, and most top athletes use a technique called "deliberate practice." It helps them accelerate their learning. It can do the same for you.

Deliberate practice was developed by Professor Anders Ericsson of Florida State University. It involves three things.

Work on a specific skill or skill cluster and get a clear target for achievement. Instead of just banging away on the driving range, a top golfer might work on using an eight iron to get the ball within 20 feet of the pin.

Observe how you do. That's feedback. And adjust what you do on the next try. Do it over and over until you get the results you're after.

You're going to learn most of your leadership trade on the job. You'll learn faster and better if you do four things. Improve the odds of making the right choice the first time. Think of your actions as leadership experiments. Get lots of feedback. And use deliberate practice to develop specific skills.

MULTIPLE VENDOR STRATEGIES – ENSURING THE BEST PRICING AND SERVICE

Inviting competition for your business is in your organization's best interest. Vendors will go to great lengths to convince you that they alone possess your sole source solution or that you'll always get the "best buddies" platinum service plan because of a personal relationship. The reality however, is that the sole supplier is isolating you from the competition and preventing your organization from achieving a more efficient cost structure.

Having conducted thousands of audits nationwide, it has become clear that cost abuses in single vendor scenarios are quite significant in nature. Common abuses include failing to conform to established pricing, double billing and overcharges. And while you may be convinced that the dependable service you are receiving from a particular vendor justifies a little latitude, you are really overpaying for what you should be receiving anyway. Any major corporation spends more than enough money annually on the majority, if not all, of their operational and administrative products and services to entice multiple vendors to offer their best or near best pricing, terms and conditions. When you demand competition from amongst your vendors, the honeymoon never ends. Once contracts and pricing have been implemented, the selected competing vendors will bend over backwards to outperform the other guy in an attempt to secure more of your business.

An exceptionally valuable bonus provided by implementing a multiple-vendor strategy is that it acts as a contingency tactic in situations where not having a backup plan in place can create costly operating disruptions. When initially evaluating potential vendors, specific criteria must be met. This may include among other things geographical coverage, product line coverage and service response guarantees. In choosing vendors that meet the specified criteria, you will have identified overlapping providers such that if one vendor begins to slip, experience financial difficulties or (knock on wood!) goes out of business, a second vendor can pick up the slack while you qualify a new one. With this arrangement, the competitively priced delivery of supplies and services are never interrupted, and you can leave all the hair you currently have right there on your head.

REINVENTING THE WHEEL

I'm a big believer or reusing things, particularly if I know something has already proven itself to be a viable solution. As a small example, I maintain a library of templates for such things as word processing and desktop publishing documents, web pages, and simple data base designs. I select a template, and then fine tune it until I get what I want. I find this saves me a lot of time as opposed to developing something from scratch. If I find something else useful along the way, I add it to my library. In the systems world, I have always advocated the sharing and reusing of information resources, such as data and processing components, which I often refer to as "building blocks" for developing systems. It's just a smarter way of operating and, frankly, I don't like to reinvent the wheel with every project I'm working on. Instead, I want to get the job done. If that means reusing something, so be it, regardless of its age; if it works, it works.

I'm not much of a proponent of "throwing the baby out with the bath water," but I know a lot of people who are just the antithesis of this and are constantly reinventing the wheel. I don't know why this is, but I suspect it probably has something to do with human ego. It's kind of like someone saying, "Well, if I didn't think of it, it can't be any good and I'll go and invent one myself." We saw this for years when we sold our "PRIDE" methodologies for systems design. We met several people who thought our methodologies were nice, but thought they could do it better themselves and invested thousands of dollars trying to reinvent our wheel. Inevitably, such undertakings ended up as disasters and we sold them our product in the end. I always marveled at the amount of time and money these companies wasted in the process though; all because of ego.

Years ago General Motors took some heat for slipping a Pontiac engine into an Oldsmobile chassis. People thought they were getting gypped by getting a "cheap" engine. To me, I thought GM was brilliant. Here we had a company who designed products with interchangeable parts in mind. This allowed them to reduce inventory overhead, integrate their product lines, and still produce quality products less expensively. And I can tell you, there is nothing "cheap" about a Pontiac engine. Nonetheless, the public didn't see it this way.

In the systems world, I think you would be surprised to see how much computer software is thrown out with each release of a product. Instead of reusing program code, a lot of companies simply reinvent the wheel with each release. I find this rather strange and a huge waste of money. Maybe it's because people don't know how to share and reuse component parts; either that or they simply don't want to. Either way, the human tendency to avoid sharing and reusing anything, and reinventing the wheel each go around, leads to increased development costs, which, of course, is inflationary.

Another reason for not sharing is I believe we no longer have a sense of history anymore. We do not study what worked or what didn't years ago, we are only interested in the present. Consequently, this leads people into reinventing a wheel that was invented some time ago.

There have been plenty of tools introduced over the years for standardizing and sharing components; everything from Bill of Materials Processors (BOMP) in the manufacturing sector, to Repositories in the I.T. field. You can find such tools in just about every field of endeavor. The technology is certainly available to share and reuse components, but the desire and discipline to do so is not. I can tell you this, sharing and reusing things doesn't happen by itself. It requires a concerted management effort to make it happen. But if management is oblivious to the problem and doesn't care about the amount of money they waste year after year, then I guess we will be "reinventing the wheel" for a long time to come.