High five
The power of peer recognition
To build a great organization begin with the right people, says Steven Stein, author of Make Your Workplace Great: The 7 Keys to an Emotionally Intelligent Organization.
“We often pick people for the wrong reasons. The first component of a great organization is picking the right people and then – just as Jim Collins says in Good to Great – putting them in the right place.”
The next step is to build a positive social environment, he says. “If you have a good social environment where you allow people to socialize and where people like each other, you’re going to get much more productivity. We used to think the opposite: don’t let them spend too much time at coffee or talking to each other. But in our organization, we encourage it. We provide bagel breakfasts every Friday morning to give everybody an opportunity to get together, for ‘Joe in Accounting to meet Jill in Sales.’
“You want to make those relationships happen, especially in large organizations, so employees have a friend somewhere else to call on when they need something. You want that synergy.”
Dr. Stein adds Gallup studies found that individuals who have a best friend at work are seven times more productive than somebody who has no friends at work. “It’s really important that we pay attention to the social side of work.”
The third element of the successful organization equation, he says, is the work itself. “We don’t overload people with work. We try to give people interesting work, and if we have to give them some boring work, we try to balance it with some interesting work. We find creative ways to make the work motivating in and of itself.”
Finally, he says, it is essential to define your organization – whether you’re in oil, banking or building homes – according to a sense of purpose. “There’s something that you are doing as a result of your business that benefits society at large. A lot of CEOs don’t realize or focus on that. They’re so busy, but they’ve got to step outside of (daily operations) and look at the big picture. ‘Who uses what you make? How does that help them and how does that help the world?’ You have to communicate that to your employees.”
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