Today is Groundhog’s day. A day I more closely associate with the Bill Murray movie than with the furry, winter-loving, Pennsylvanian rodent. You remember, Bill Murray’s character wakes up to find he’s living the same day over and over.
It’s hard to be creative and think of better, more interesting solutions if you find yourself on auto-pilot most of the time. I find this particularly true for me. I very easily fall into the same patterns and can see my productivity plummet when things feel too familiar. I try to mix it up with varying degrees of success by working from different locations, grabbing coffee with different people or varying my ‘to do’ list so that it uses different sides of my brain within a given day.
But I’m curious what others do. How do you stimulate yourself and your team? Please comment if you have ideas. A few thoughts if you don’t:
Photo by Stefano Pizzetti
We may have six more weeks of winter this year, but I’m hoping that doesn’t mean six more weeks of the same old thing.
With so many companies now laying off employees I’ve started thinking about the exit interview. I think nearly everyone would agree it’s completely useless. But frankly, I’m a little stumped on how make it useful.
On paper, the concept is a good one. People are leaving (by choice or otherwise) and you want to know why so that you can improve your company.
But employees paint a glorious picture of rainbows and butterflies because neither are flammable enough to ignite a bridge. Similarly, employers are all too happy to hear that. They don’t want to admit that anything is wrong.
Two thoughts on how to change this.
1. Completely eliminate this useless waste of time
Instead build what you want to get out of the exit interview into your everyday processes. The key is to listen dispassionately. Nothing is personal, nothing is held against anyone.
2. Give employees some incentive to give good feedback
Admittedly, I don’t have a lot of good ideas here. But I do have one that I’d like to experiment with.
Companies pay consultants big dollars to analyze their processes, culture and operations. Shift that budget away from the suits who parachute in for a couple months and transfer it to those who endured and operated within the system.
Offer the employee a small pot of gold in exchange for an additional day or two of work. The output of that day or two is a document (or whatever form works best for the employee) that addresses what they’d do if they were in charge, why they couldn’t implement their ideas, etc. Identify the open-ended questions that are germane to your company and pepper in the additional questions that are unique to their function, manager and team.
It’s not perfect, but $1,000 plus the chance to prove how smart you are may be just enough to tip the scales and provide the incentive for employees to offer up what’s broken.
Thoughts? Does the process work for you? How would you improve it?
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