The Clifton Review
The Clifton Review is a tri-weekly column that examines the question of the Clifton project along with the evolution of the war between two billionaires. We covered the start of this war with articles describing the battle over easement rights, the mysterious burning of a home, the blocks to rebuilding, and countless questionable court filings.
While the 2018 series salutes fashion mogul Peter Nygård’s Golden Jubilee detailing his rags to riches story, his incredible business success over these past fifty years and an inside look at how he did it, The Clifton Review will also continue to address current affairs as they relate to the good of The Bahamas.
Getting Employees To Achieve Business Goals
By P.J. Malone
One of the biggest challenges businesses face is how to get employees to become engaged and remain engaged at work. Every year there are studies done by the Gallup organization within the United States measuring employee engagement.
“Gallup defines engaged employees as those who are involved in, enthusiastic about and committed to their work and workplace” (news.Gallup.com).
Gallup’s “State of the American Workplace” report states that 70% of U.S. workers are not engaged at work. It further suggests that 51% of employees are actively looking for a new job or watching for new job openings.
If businesses want employees engaged in helping them reach their goals, these numbers are not encouraging. It suggests that business leaders must actively work to counteract this issue.
Answering the question ‘how best can we achieve our business goals’ has to also answer the question ‘how best can we support our human resources to help us reach our business goals.’
One of the things a number of organizational strategists will suggest to organizations is that they should focus attention on their best employees and support their best efforts. This is wrong for a number of reasons:
- It’s a waste of business resources to not support the efforts of every one of your employees to be successful.
- You will fail to operate at maximum capacity.
- You could be throwing away a perfectly good fruit, so to speak: one of the discoveries we made from the last article’s case study is that an incompetent employee in one department can be a star employee in another.
Our previous case study showed that there were two ‘considered-incompetent’ employees by one department who turned out to be star employees in another department.
So, what is the key to turning low employee engagement around and getting employees to work toward your business goals? There are a number of business consultants around the world who have come up with various programs and tools—and charging thousands of dollars for it of course—for increasing employee engagement.
However, it is our contention that it is not as difficult as it may appear. And in fact, our perspective on what it takes can be seen from the example of fashion mogul Peter Nygard’s business success. Nygard has managed to motivate his employees to help him achieve his business goals for 50 years. We’ll explain how through the next few articles.
There are a number of key factors for motivating employees to help business leaders reach their business goals. They include the following mandates:
- Treat employees like ‘employee-partners’
- Make employees feel valued
- Empower your employees
- Involve employees in a significant way
- Give employees the tools to succeed
- Keep in mind WIIFM (What’s in it for me?)
At first glance, this may seem self-explanatory or even obvious. Yet, these factors are a lot more involved than they may appear, which you’ll discover over the next few articles.
We will explain each of these factors and expound and present steps on how you can use these factors within your organization to achieve your business goals.
