Grade A Entrepreneurs

According to Gallup, as of June 2015, “the percentage of U.S. workers engaged in their jobs continued to hold steady at 31.9%,” which means that employee disengagement remains extremely high year after year. Do the math! Passive and active employee disengagement is costly business when you relate the stats to the 2015 total wages and salaries, which came out to about eight trillions of dollars.

The problem won’t be fixed overnight, and organizations may want to realize that disengagement comes in a multitude of forms, and for a multitude of reasons. In many cases, however, it is linked to the “boreout” phenomenon described by Peter Werder and Philippe Rothlin in their 2007 book Boreout!: Overcoming Workplace Demotivation: employees are disillusioned, do not see the purpose of what they do or sometimes do not even know what they have to do – hence their self-preservation strategy of looking “busy” to keep their job.

Start somewhere: Tactical Re-engagement with OKRs”

Before you try to revolutionize your processes at a global organizational level, start somewhere smaller after a careful analysis of the overall “health” of your company… Look at the new generation of products designed with the practical goal of engaging people in great achievement. One of them is Workboard, a well-funded company started in 2013 by Deidre Paknad.

Workboard enables companies to implement an OKR (Objectives and Key Results) methodology, the purpose of which is to provide real clarity and focus on aspirational goals and results. The concept is to bring teams together so they pull in the same direction and experience personal pride through collaborative accomplishments.  As Deidre puts it: “OKRs combine ambitious, qualitative goals and quantitative success measures with weekly execution and accountability cadence. They galvanize people to achieve the best possible results in the shortest time period. These are not old-school back office goals – these are live, dynamic, and real for your team. Outstanding results come from shared aspirations and accountability. Rather than assume you have either one, ensure you have both.”

Transformation made easy

Implementing such organizational transformation doesn’t take months or fortunes. The Workboard platform makes it straightforward:

1. You declare your goals.
2. You establish the metrics that will enable your team to declare victory.
3. You define the workstreams, i.e. the execution processes and all the dependencies that will support a particular goal.

At all times, all the team members can see how fast they are advancing towards the goal, how well they are delivering on particular objectives along the way, and eventually the risks or blockages that call for specific attention.

At all times, all the team members can see how fast they are advancing towards the goal, how well they are delivering on particular objectives along the way, and eventually the risks or blockages that call for specific attention.

For more: see https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/workboard-digital-transformation-your-fingertips-delbourg-delphis?trk=pulse_spock-articles