Among the goals of any manager is to create and maintain a high-performance organization. That means you have created a machine that operates at top efficiency, and your employees are engaged.
Some organizations don’t believe this really applies to them. Research has suggested that only 25 percent of the typical workforce is engaged. This means that only a fraction of your employees are in tune with your mission, vision, and values.
As a high-performance organization, with a larger core group who can be counted on to care about the organization’s success, your results would be much higher.
But nothing stays the same. Employees leave for reasons that have nothing to do with job satisfaction, and it can be a challenge to replace former employees. It can be a challenge to fill the needs of your office no matter how carefully you choose and train new employees. So, once you’ve achieved high performance organization status, how do you maintain it?
Enlist the support of your top performers
The single most important step is to stay focused on your employees and continually try to expand your group of high achievers. Then, use these top performers to be aware of, train, and convert any middle level or disengaged employees in your organization.
The key is to train and empower this core group to think and engage in problem-solving. This ultimately involves all employees, but you should especially encourage your high-performance staff to work with the employees who are good at what they do but not truly engaged.
Your core group can help other, less involved, staff to discover ways to heighten commitment and develop more than a superficial “buy-in” to the organization and its goals. In this way, you take your high-performance group, appreciate them, and give them what they need to keep all of the parts running at maximum efficiency.
The goal is to maintain zero percent disengaged and no more than 15 percent in the middle group. And remember, this is a process, not a single event. You can’t assume your high-performing employee will stay that way or that a new employee will reach that level of engagement.
Handling the disengaged employees
Should you find that you still have a few disengaged employees, use counseling and conversion attempts first as there has been both time and financial investment made in them. It’s not good to have a reputation of throwing away people as a first resort when encountering a problem.
If disengaged employees are resistant to your efforts, and the efforts of your high performance group to counsel and move them to engagement, then you need to let them go. Keep the high performance organization you’ve worked to create by keeping staff that works for, and not against, you.