Have you ever worked on a cool initiative only for it to flop? When employees are still disengaged after all your hard work, it's likely because you're working on things in the wrong order.
Allow me to introduce you to the Employee Hierarchy of Needs. Just like Maslow's Hierarchy, you need to make sure certain needs have been met before you build on others.
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Reach out to me on Linkedin so we can talk about the specific issues unfolding at your organization, I'd love to talk to you! 💁♀️
Follow me on TikTok, and Instagram, sometimes I spoof daily work life!
Have you ever worked on a cool initiative only for it to flop? When employees are still disengaged after all your hard work, it's likely because you're working on things in the wrong order.
Allow me to introduce you to the Employee Hierarchy of Needs. Just like Maslow's Hierarchy, you need to make sure certain needs have been met before you build on others.
----------
Reach out to me on Linkedin so we can talk about the specific issues unfolding at your organization, I'd love to talk to you! 💁♀️
Follow me on TikTok, and Instagram, sometimes I spoof daily work life!
Okay today, we're going to talk about why sometimes employees don't care or don't use the things you work really hard to create and put together. I'm talking about your book club, your, career mapping, your cat day, your hat day, your crazy taco day. And employees are like ma and you're like, really? What do you want? Well, I'm going to tell you what they want, because today we're going to talk about the employee hierarchy of needs. And if that sounds a little familiar, let's back up and remember Maslow's hierarchy because it's basically sort of the same thing. It's what we learned in school, where you can't worry about being your highest self living your best life. If you don't have food, water, and shelter and clothes, you know, You're not going to be in your mansion, doing your thing, living to your highest passion. If you're naked and afraid and starving out in the woods. Often, what I see happens is the CEO will tell HR, I need you to do career mapping. Which sounds all nice and great, but who cares about a path to grow at a company where they don't even know what's expected of them at work? Like in their current role day to day? It's the same as. Putting together and building an amazing roof on the ground and gathering around all your employees and saying, look, you needed a roof to be kept safe. And the employees are like, that's great, but where are the walls? In fact, the walls would be sinking into the mud. Where's the foundation. I see a thunderstorm coming off in the distance and I need shelter. So like, can you figure this out quick? Otherwise I got to go find another house. See, we work on things in the wrong order. And it doesn't mean anything to employees and it's a huge energy and financial expense and it was kind of all for nothing because people leave anyway. And that costs your company money. When you have turnover. Remember, this show's brought to you by a very formerly disengaged employee. And this perspective is so much different than the other HR advice that you're going to get, because I'm blending how employees perceive what you're doing with the executives and how they force you to do weird stuff that you kind of have a feeling in your gut is not quite right. And. You're in a tough, tricky position because you need to keep your job, but you're kind of in like the disengagement sandwich with executives at the top and employees on the bottom and everyone's like, give us what we want. And you're like, oh, So you try to listen to everyone and do a little mix of everything and work on the loudest problems. And.. Whatever you do, it just seems to flop. And here's why. The employee hierarchy of needs our basic emotional feelings that need to be met for your employees that need to build on each other for you to go to the next level. So I'm going to link out to this in the show notes, you should check it out, screenshot it, copy paste, whatever into a deck. Show your executives. But keep it because when you're deciding what to work on, This is what you should be looking at to make sure that you're, you're doing something that's going to have great impact before just jumping into a project. So I'm going to say numbered statements from one to 12, and I want you to visualize moving up the pyramid. Okay. We're starting at the very bottom. The very bottom of the pyramid is. I know what's expected of me at work. That's number one. Number two, I have the materials and equipment. I need to do my work right. Number three at work. I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day. Number four in the last seven days, I have received recognition or praise for doing good work. Number five, my supervisor or someone at work seems to care about me as a person. Isn't this stuff kind of pitiful. You're like, oh my God, I hope so. But actually sometimes the stuff doesn't, it goes unmet. Number six there's someone at work who encourages my development. Number seven at work. My opinion seems to count. Number eight. The mission or purpose of my company makes me feel my job is important. Number nine. my associates or fellow employees are committed to doing quality work. Number 10. I have a good friend at work. Sometimes this is, I have a best friend at work and people will say like, yeah, throw that question out. Work in friend personal life should be separate. You do need a best friend at work? Because the best friend part it's not for like throwing daisies up in the air and being like let's plan a vacation. That one's one of the most critical, because that is actually your person who is psychologically safe. That's the other employee where you can say, um, was that meeting weird or is it just me? Um, I got these really messed up goals and I don't feel like I can even achieve these and they can say, oh, that just happened to me too. Or like, yeah, those goals are weird. That's that's ridiculous. Why, why would they think there's enough time for you to do all that? Whatever. That that is not a throwaway need that often in the engagement survey, people are like, throw that out. I'm like, no, that's one of the most important ones. People need someone to process their emotions with who is not their boss. Okay, two more. We're getting to the very tippy top of the pyramid. Number 11 in the last six months, someone at work has talked to me about my progress. And finally, number 12, this is career mapping. This last year, I've had opportunities at work to learn and grow. Okay. So, like I said, in the beginning, who cares about a path to grow, if the way that the work gets done is very naked and afraid alone in the woods. Survivor style free for all. And you might be thinking, how do I figure out where my people land right now? Well, the beautiful thing is Gallup who created this employee hierarchy of needs. They have studied the workforce for four decades and they know very clearly. I think they're a very respected authority. One of the best when it comes to talking about engagement. these 12 statements are basically you flip it. It's your engagement survey. So I know it's expected of me at work scale of one to five scale of one to 10. And focus on anything that didn't get glowing results, which is probably that first basic need. That's where you start. You send a followup pulse survey question, and you ask your employees. What would it look like for you to know what's expected of you at work? And they'll tell you in their own little backwards way that maybe you have to reverse engineer a little bit, or maybe there'll be very direct. They'll say we have too many meetings and we leave with no answers, but most of the time you'll get these responses that you need to think through and reverse engineer a little bit. Like it'll be any combination of there's way too much work. I'm so burned out. My deadlines are super unclear. My boss interrupts me all day for updates on things. They also asked me to log in some of our tools. So like, why aren't they just looking at the report that they're asking me to put together every week that they share in the all hands? True story. Or another thing they'll say is, you know, I got my goals maybe halfway through the quarter, companies need to stop doing that. If you don't ship them on time, make the goals more achievable. Or just don't give goals that quarter and break it down and say, We messed up, but goals are often shipped late and then they're confusing and the quarters already have eaten up and employees panic. Because either nothing's weighing on it and maybe it doesn't even matter. They're not incentivized or their bonus is resting on something that you gave them late, which tells them an underlying message that you don't care, even though that's not true. It's how it comes across. Sometimes employees will say, I wish we had goals, which I personally very proudly did once on an engagement survey and wished I wouldn't have, because then we entered into this confusing goal setting. Era, but I asked, can we please have goals, which is the equivalent of a child saying, may I please have chores because I need structure. I need to know what the days are going to be like. And this is what happens when employees have no sense of done or no sense of what to say no to this could also be a values issue. Do your values. You know, are they used as a framework to make decisions? Employees need your values to say, Hey, no, we do quality over speed, stuff like that. So there's not too much work because when everything's a fire drill and everything is just the loudest thing and everyone work on everything at once. Employees don't like that. I'm telling you as a very formerly disengaged employee who was a D one athlete. I played all the instruments. I got good grades at times. I was a very high performer. When I wasn't upset or exhausted. A lot of what's driving. Disengagement is the way the work gets done is so busted on projects. The projects and the work isn't that hard. We spend a majority of the time trying to figure out what the heck is going on. So after about six months of being the new employee, you really settled into your disengagement seat because it's a coping mechanism. You're like nothing matters. Nothing makes sense. People do whatever they want. No one does low quality work on purpose. They're just trying to survive and it's really hard sometimes to even get out of bed. I said it it's true. Sometimes it's hard to get out of bed. It's happened to me. It's happened to my friends and we've all supported each other through various bad bosses or too much work. This has happened to me at all levels of organizations. And it usually boils down to a few very fixable issues. Okay. So. Side note, because in editing the show, I'm realizing I need to add this part in. The examples that I give in this episode are not frontline worker specific, but this definitely applies. If you have frontline workers. I personally have been a frontline worker at a hotel, and I've also worked in healthcare where I may have been a knowledge worker, but I was around a lot of housekeepers who cleaned hospital rooms. And so this hierarchy of needs definitely applies to you too. So change the examples to what I'm about to say to how your frontline workers feel with a lot of the manual outdated processes and writing things down on paper, and maybe a manager who's instilled some fear on the team, or they're not running the team very efficiently, but you're throwing them a cake day. Or we appreciate you day. And they're like, can you appreciate me by taking a little better care of me for what it's like to work here every day? So if you have frontline workers, I just wanted to add into this absolutely applies to you too. You have another layer. So your frontline workers, your knowledge workers, whoever's at corporate, whatever service or industry you're in this. This is definitely. A hundred percent still applicable to you too. Okay. All right. Back to what I was saying, I was about to give you the cheat codes. Ready? Poop. I'll just give you the cheat codes as a former employee. It's either a mix or a mish-mash of the following, your company values. Aren't good. Or they're not being used and, or they're not being used as a framework to make decisions on. What to do with how much work there is, or the quality or how to handle the brilliant jerk and how they're behaving. You need to have goals in place. They need to be written in a way that makes sense for employees. We'll do that in a future episode. But they also need to be given on time. There's a lack or misuse of project management software and it's the wild west. There's no structure and there's no accountability. So people kind of just do whatever they want and that's not cool. And if you use a messaging app, Whether it's Microsoft teams or slack, it's definitely being misused and causing anxiety because everyone's using it to accidentally interrupt each other and bump into each other's psyches online. To ask for clarity on improperly scoped projects. So everything's happening too fast, too much. And there's a deep sense of fear of being seen as not capable or not responsive or not on top of it. So we're just in these messaging apps all day. Like. Either talking about how confused we are or trying to give clarification to someone who's confused about something that we've barely had time to think through either. And it's just constant interruptions. Nobody's on top of it, but also no one's been given permission to fall apart and help you figure out a better way. This is why driving engagement is so hard, full circle to some other episodes. You have your magical gift of empathy, you know, something's not right. But how would you have any idea that any of this is unfolding on teams? Because Gallup also says 70% of the employee experience, which is the little mini moments that interact for every employee on every team. Those mini moments that are busted or what causes disengagement. That's 70% is the relationship between the employee and their manager. It's their day to day. You can't be there for every employees every day where you're sitting behind them. Like, how was that? Did you like that? How was that meeting? Was that dumb? How's that project feeling? You feel like you have any hope, prayer or dream or any of the resources you need to make that happen. Also. Do you even know what to do? You can't be there. That's why you can't figure out what to work on. That's why you need to get great at surveys. When you're not letting survey data guide what you're working on against the employee hierarchy of needs to make sure you're working on the right thing in the right order, so that you have the most impact. That's when your CEO slots in and is like, Work on career mapping and you're like, ah, Well, I kind of really don't know. What else will work. So sure. Let's do career mapping and you put in all this work and effort and then it flops, or you put in all this work and effort and everyone's still disengaged And you're like, what is it going to take? What am I doing wrong? That was so hard. You're playing HR. Whack-a-mole all day. You need to use surveys to figure out what's up. I can't tell you. What's going to drive engagement at your company. I can teach you how to think about it in a way that will work for your company. The answers lie with your people. Your employees will tell you everything you need to know. Their survey responses are the answers to the disengagement test. It's not a wave of negative feedback. That's going to blow your hair back and make you feel terrible about yourself. You, my friend have a workforce. That's talking to you. If you have negative feedback, let's go. You will build trust with your employees, even when they're disengaged. By asking them what it's like to work for your company. And when they tell you, you own the results and say, Hey, thank you for your feedback. We're going to need more, but you're helping me do my job. My job is to make your experience working here better so thank you. And continue to tell me through the surveys, what it would look like to dah, dah. When you get negative feedback from your employees, you're going to want to shut down, call it quits. You're going to think you failed and think that HR is not the path for you. You're going to want to hang it up. But remember Kristy told you negative feedback as a gift. It's your employees begging you. To help make some positive changes because they do want to stay. I promise if they're talking to you, they still have hope. So when you get that negative feedback, you think excellent, great. We've still got their attention in a way that we can still turn around this culture. You will demonstrate that you mean business this time. When you get your CEO on board to how this drives more revenue. I mean, sometimes it's like, duh, they're like, tell me exactly. And you're like, well, let me remind you the golden rule friend. Cause you forgot. And you're so focused on money, but I get it childhood trauma, yada yada. But when you get your CEO on board and you start demonstrating this transparency and this communication around this power of vulnerability, like Renee brown says like, just talk about the elephant in the room. Your employees just want to know that they're not crazy. Because if you're not owning the conversation and at least talking about it, I guarantee you, they're all talking about it on slack and teams and they're bonding over it. And you don't want employees bonding over disengagement. But if they're seeing a change in behavior, they'll give you a. Third fourth, fifth, and 274th chance because they're seeing. Some kind of momentum in the direction of where they want to see things head. And they're not used to that. Most companies it's either great or it's awful. If they don't see any kind of hope. They will leave. But if they have hope they'll hang on and there'll be like, I'm paying attention. Okay. So those solutions I suggested were just for that bottom rung. I can do another episode on what my suggestions would be for every part of the pyramid. I've done a webinar on that in the past. if you want me to do that episode, send me a message, but. This is also an example of where you can use chat GPT. I've talked about this on webinars. If you get data. In a very qualitative way from your surveys and employees are just telling you in their own words, everything that's wrong and you have a bunch of employees. The quantitative stuff is easy to measure its numbers. The qualitative stuff is nuanced, messy, tricky business rooted in keywords in psychology. It's hard to always decode and have the time to go deep because you're constantly being interrupted. Okay. So copy paste. Everyone's responses, go into chat GPT and say, I just sent out this employee survey. Here's what everyone said. What are the patterns? You're not just going to blindly take that for Bible, but you're going to at least have an idea of what was said so that as you're reading the responses, you're like, oh yeah, there it is. Again. We seem to have a management issue. Oh yeah, there it is. Again, we have a meetings issue. If you have a problem with any of these, first of all, contact me immediately because I can work with your company to help fix this. You're not crazy. Okay. A lot of this again is out of your hands. Of course, it's hard for you to drive engagement because you're not there. If you want to drive engagement, you need to refer to the employee hierarchy of needs. And you do that with your engagement survey, you figure out where the glaring issues are. Start at the bottom of the pyramid and use poll surveys to go a little bit deeper and figure out specifically. What needs to be fixed so that you're working on things in the right order career mapping. Sounds awesome. I love that for you. Your employees do need that eventually, but they're likely not ready for it. And they don't want it. If it's chaos and anarchy in the day-to-day. So make your employees feel your emotional statements in the right order so that they will be ready for career mapping and they're more willing to receive it and say, yes, thank you. I'm excited for this because I actually see myself using this. Because I'm going to stay because I like the way you treat me. Okay. Nobody wants a roof when the rainstorm is coming and there's no foundation or walls, it doesn't make sense. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to reach out to me on LinkedIn. I will not say, oh my gosh, what is wrong with you? That is so stupid. How could you not know this? I would love to talk to you. No question is too big, too small or too stupid, honestly. No, one's explained this at all. and I volunteer as tribute. So. Let's have a conversation. Thank you for listening. Continue listening. Give me your feedback and I'll talk to you next week.