Sarah McVanel, Author at Greatness Magnified

The Flipside of Failing: How Failure Can Build Stronger Connections

July 14, 2019 By Sarah McVanel Leave a Comment

Two months ago, I had the privilege of speaking again at the Spark Women’s Leadership Conference. The attendees and organizers know that I’m a recognition expert and that my brand is FROG – Forever Recognize Others’ Greatness™. Imagine their surprise when they realized the title of my new keynote is Flip Side of Failing.

A few people on Facebook messaged me: “Hey Sarah, have you completely changed what you’re talking about? Is this not your focus anymore?” I couldn’t wait to share with them that it is through our failures that we can best leverage and harness our greatness. And that when we can recognize ourselves and others unconditionally, despite a failure, now that is truly authentic and meaningful recognition. This was a lesson I would learn through the pursuit of writing my fourth book, Flip Side of Failing: How to Leverage and Recognize Greatness in Work and Life.

While interviewing Everest climbers, 3M scholars, Olympians, Paralympians, philanthropists and people who aren’t necessarily famous but had overcome incredible things in their lives, I learned about their incredible achievements. Some had been born into challenging emotional, abusive, or even physically taxing circumstances, and they rose above it to achieve extraordinary things. All of these people I had put on a pedestal for greatness, which is why I asked them to be interviewed for this book. The irony was that they all spoke about their failures and struggles, which actually served to level the playing field, making them just like “you and me”. The irony was that one core theme that every great Canadian mentioned was how important their failures were in their lives. And that how they handled failure was how they handled everything in life. Failure was, amazingly, at the root to their greatness.

If you don’t shy away from failure, you’re not afraid to share it. These great Canadians shared it in their interviews even when it was unsolicited. And many even share their failures very publicly through books, professional speaking and in their social media presence. What is the reaction? Do people unfriend them, reject them, shy away from them? No. They’re attracted to them. They’re admired for their bravery to share their stories. Their stories are relatable to people.

In other words, failure is actually one of the greatest ways to build meaningful connections. Think about authentically connecting on the things that didn’t work well. Do you bond and connect with those people better than others who always seem like they have that picture perfect, filtered lifestyle? We don’t even understand those people. Not only that, we get into “comparitis.” We think, “What’s wrong with me? They’re so great. I can’t measure up,” and then we get down about ourselves. Not only that, it activates our shame centres.

As we’ve learned from Brene Brown and other researchers who help us understand trust, shame, vulnerability, courage, and bravery, that it is actually not necessarily through our successes that we find our greatness. It is by leaning into the things that are most challenging and that leave us feeling vulnerable. Fear of failure or the failure itself is one of the most vulnerable of experiences because of how we view failure in our society (look no further than the dictionary definition…who would want it?!)

Consider that there can be a flip side, particularly if you have been beating yourself up, if you work in an environment that shames and blames mistakes, or you look around at your life and you think, “everyone else is doing so much better than me/us?” This does not lead you to your team or your organization’s greatness. This roadblocks connection, fragments relationships and fuels isolation. Learning from the great Canadians in my book, it’s actually lean into their failures that connects them to others. Your failure is your humanity. It’s what connects us all, and needn’t tear us apart or down.

When you look at the people who’ve inspired you most in your life, your mentors, your supporters, your caregivers, it’s probably the people who have overcome a challenge, and you think, “Wow. If they can do it, so can I.” Imagine authentically sharing the challenge and failure. Imagine what it could do for other people.

Want to dive deeper into understanding the flip side of failing? Why don’t you jump over here to some resources.

5 Ways to Boost Recognition Scores: The Easiest Employee Engagement Metric to Impact Before Your Next Survey

June 23, 2019 By Sarah McVanel Leave a Comment

If your engagement and satisfaction scores aren’t where you want them to be, don’t lose hope.

By focusing on recognition as a key priority, you’ll find you can elevate other essential drivers of engagement and satisfaction in the workplace right away. You can do this one-on-one, in a team environment or as a whole organization.

But more than impacting scores, let’s not lose sight it’s about impacting people. And how those folks experience the place they spend more waking hours than anywhere else.

You Can’t Lose

No matter what you do and what level you choose to try to impact, focusing on recognition is going to make a difference. Just get started. You can’t wait around for the perfect plan. There are people in your teams, that are considering leaving right now, so it’s really important to get started.

I recently met an incredibly talented, young woman who has worked for a number of different organizations since she graduated college. Some might say she jumps ship too often. Others would remind us that this is the new reality; people will switch careers up to 15 times in their lifetime, and the bar is higher for expectations. And rightly so. After all, for this talented rising star, the number one reason she left every one of those jobs was because she did not feel recognized and valued. Such a simple but easy issue to fix.

And it gets worse. The more she performed, the more the organization piled on duties and responsibilities. No additional pay, a lot more headaches and definitely more stress. Not something you want to do with your top performers. For women of a previous generation, this leads to other problems, it deters women’s advancement and then they leave in frustration. Either way, working so hard you don’t get rewarded and you feel taken advantage of needs to stop, and recognition needs to increase.

If recognition will help keep your best people in our current talent shortage, and it’s the single easiest driver of engagement and the employee experience to impact, why wouldn’t you do it?

Here’s what you can do:

1.Just Start…Or Do it More

Recognize people in whatever way feels authentic and meaningful to you. Say thank you more (95% of people say they most prefer this form of recognition…pretty good odds it will work!) Write thank you cards. Have a kudos board encouraging peer-to-peer recognition. Anything that you can do easily and can be built into the way you do your work already. That will make it quick to get started and easy to sustain. And it’s modelling the way.

2.Plan With Your Peers

Discuss the need to boost recognition with your peers. I recently spoke to a senior team of one of Canada’s top organizations as they were taking their low scores in recognition very seriously. After my keynote, they were forming action teams with a one-year goal to transform recognition. If you’re not at the point of mobilizing, join with like-minded staff or middle managers to elevate recognition. Ask each other what they do that works, share your own examples and together come up with ideas to try (need help?….we’ve got a solution for that). Build on successes and try new things. Strength in numbers, even if it’s just a few more than you!

3.Monitor Progress

What are the other pain points you’re trying to impact? By boosting recognition, you can also elevate other drivers in your engagement survey: continuous improvement behaviour, trust in the organization, satisfaction with leaders, and intention to stay. You can impact HR variables like sick time, stress leaves and turnover. You can impact safety such as lost time, WSIB claims, bullying (psychological safety) reports. You can boost your customer satisfaction scores and use behaviour. When you identify what you want recognition to impact, you can understand exactly what you’re trying to accomplish by boosting recognition (if it’s just for a survey it’s not enough). What are some of the things that you’re hoping will elevate your engagement and satisfaction scores in a year or two from now?

4.Consider Strategic and Operational Priorities

Which of those things I noted above are essential metrics to fulfill your operational and strategic objectives? Since recognition is so easy to implement and increase, how could it provide a powerful foundation in which to build other initiatives? What will fail if you don’t have it? Make the direct connection about how engaged, satisfied people who feel valued and recognized are going to enable a key initiative or project to happen.

5.Celebrate the Small Wins

You can celebrate recognition wins. Celebrate your wins as a peer group or as an organization. While you’re at it, don’t just celebrate recognition gains, but anything that you want to see more of! Make celebration of success as well as failures (what you’ve learned from them) part of your culture. Don’t let milestones of projects or initiatives go undervalued and ignored.

When people feel a greater sense of connection to each other, they feel like they’re contributing individually and that they’re part of a collective that is successful.

I hope you found these tips on how to move your recognition agenda forward, helpful. For more tips on recognition, tune in to my daily, Forever Recognize Others’ Greatness Flash Briefing. All you need is an Alexa device, an Alexa app, a Podbean app, and you can get one tip, one to two minutes a day that will help to give you more and more ideas to keep this recognition going.

Four Ways to Boost Employee Satisfaction: Helping you Ride the Wave of our Current Talent Shortage

June 9, 2019 By Sarah McVanel Leave a Comment

Picture this: You’ve just reviewed your engagement or employee satisfaction survey results and they’re disappointing. You work very hard to create an environment where people want to come to work and it just feels like you have failed.

You may wonder if you’re wasting precious time and energy in asking people their opinion and that your efforts have seen the opposite of results you’re trying to achieve. Then, you notice in a LinkedIn group, people weighing in on a discussion “Employee satisfaction scores mean nothing.” Plus your boss needs you on another project ASAP.

I guess you’re off the hook, right?

Nope.

Let’s clear up a misconception. Yes, there is a strong argument that measuring employee satisfaction is not sufficient. It’s too narrow a window into the employee experience to say, from annual surveys alone, definitely how people feel (but then again, would you ask your spouse only on your anniversary “honey, are you satisfied?” and believe one great dinner out will be enough to turn around any dissatisfaction?)

Along with studying staff turnover and reasons for attrition, customer satisfaction, safety trends, sick time, and other data, you can get a sense of the health of your employee experience. Your satisfaction or employee engagement survey data can help you to figure out what to tackle.

As I’m sure you’re well aware, I have built the case that focusing on recognition is almost always a way to boost all of the indicators I noted above. I want to point out the drivers of engagement need to go directly in your survey results, and if they’re low, targeted efforts to bolster recognition could help turn it around in record time (in fact, here is a link to an infographic, 10 Important Facts About Recognition and Engagement).

When it comes to improving employee satisfaction, what can you can expect will be improved when you focus on recognition?

Improved continuous improvement

If employees feel that their voice is valued and they can contribute meaningfully, they are more likely to offer opinions, solutions and suggestions for improvement. They are also less likely to worry they will be blamed, shamed or targeted for pointing out opportunities for improvement (I actually talk about this more in my new book just out). When individuals’ strengths are honoured, they’re more likely to contribute more and at a higher level. Plus, given staff are the people adding the value (to the customer, creating the product, creating the intellectual property, etc), they are the most qualified to give that feedback.

2. Leader popularity

We’ve all heard the research that says people leave bosses not jobs. However, when employees feel valued, understood and appreciated by their boss, they are more loyal and satisfied. Makes sense. And loyal, satisfied people are less likely to leave. Think about the last time you had a cool new opportunity, but you like your work environment – boss, coworkers, the type of culture the leader helped to create – that you decided to stay where you were. Similarly, think about a time when you jumped ship even though it was less convenient, the unknown and perhaps paid less. I coach individuals who have started their own business, without one client yet, just to get away from a toxic boss. Recognize your people, and they will think twice before leaving.

3. Retention

As we have discussed, intention to stay is significantly higher in people who also rate high satisfaction with recognition. And in our current talent shortage that shows no signs of easing until 2030 (and at desperate levels in tech and healthcare), you cannot afford to lose your best people. In fact, what you’ll find is that your staff and leaders become an arm of recruiters; they want their friends to be happier so they’ll sing your praises, being the first one to tell them when a position becomes available. I work with some clients in very high turnover industries with no turnover problem because their employee experience is so positive that they have a waiting list of people ready to join their organization as soon as a position opens up!

4. Increased trust

What I find, when I visit great places to work where people feel recognized and appreciated, is there’s not only formal systems of recognition, but also informal recognition happening peer-to-peer. I hear leaders, owners, and staff describe their workplace like a “family” as opposed to an institution. They believe that the people they work with to be good people, have integrity and make decisions for the common good. The reverse to that, in teams and organizations I’ve worked with that have very low scores on trust, further reinforce this untrustworthiness by hoarding information, shunning some and favouring others, and not volunteering information. By the way, want more on this? Check out trust expert, Andrea Reibmayr’s book.

Not surprisingly, overall engagement increases too with higher recognition satisfaction. It’s a self-reinforcing cycle.

Next week, we’ll learn how do you take this information and begin to focus on recognition in a systematic way? But in the meantime, remember, to grab that tool from the Cool Stuff!

What to Do When Your Recognition Program Loses Momentum: Four Easy Tips to Get it Back on Track

June 2, 2019 By Sarah McVanel Leave a Comment

“My recognition program isn’t working anymore.” Oh the number of times I’ve heard that!

Keeping your recognition efforts going does take time and energy. I won’t lie. However, it is easier to resuscitate and reinvigorate it than getting it started fresh. Good news is you can keep it from going stale (or getting staler). And, if this isn’t enough, I’m invested in your success. I welcome you to jump into my calendar for a quick 15-minute conversation about how to freshen up your recognition program. I have lots more ideas where this came from!

In the meantime, here are four key strategies that are essential:

1.Know your Data

How are you measuring your recognition program? How do you know it’s losing momentum? Is it just a hunch, or are you measuring it? And by the way, if it’s just a count measure of how many kudos cards were posted, that may be an artificial number. Is it impacting important business drivers such as lowering turnover, increasing length of time with the organization, boosting continuous improvement behaviours like new ideas. Sometimes folks don’t know that recognition isn’t working in staffs’ eyes until they do their engagement survey, and by this time you’re behind the eight-ball. Instead, find ways of measuring along the way and do a “Health Check” on a monthly basis of key organizational drivers. (Want more on this? Check out my past VLOGs to discover how this can help retain your best people.)

2.Measure What Matters

How is this organization tied to a strategic business focus? It is built into your people plan? Does it reflect your company values? Does it link to boosting the customer experience? When you add recognition to a priority project, it maintains the focus, resources and monitoring to maintain success.

Another way of looking at it is, what problem do you personally need to solve? For instance, I had a client decide that they were going to begin to leverage recognition to boost collaboration and healthy team communication (as opposed to the gossip and competitiveness). He started every team meeting and morning huddle with a minute of reflection on who deserves recognition (within the team or outside the team). It may seem on the surface to not be a big commitment, but the team was dealing with a lot of issues and already had packed agendas. The irony was, by spending one minute at the beginning, helped reduce time complaining and increased time solution-finding which propelled action. They were able to reduce the length of meetings and in a meeting evaluation form he implemented, ratings of satisfaction, effectiveness and accountability increased.

3.Make it a Team Effort

Is recognition, “the leader’s job”. That’s simply not sustainable. First of all, who are your champions and how can they freshen things up, increase daily acts of recognition and encourage others to recognize more often? (we often think, “wow, she’s really dedicated” but keep it to ourselves!) Then, find ways to make recognition simple for anyone to do it. Have kudos cards handy. If you’re a virtual team using a dashboard, dedicate a spot for shout-outs. Make it an agenda item and ask everyone to participate versus just you coming prepared with shout-outs. You can even formalize it with established groups coming up with creative new ideas to keep recognition fresh (such as the wellness team, social committee, engagement task force); built it into established organizational or team structures that fit well with your culture.

4.Keep it Simple

Make it easy for anybody to get involved. I see a lot of organizations who are caught up in lots of steps. You have to fill out a form, then send a message to this person, and cc that person…it’s just not sustainable, efficient or effective. Consider how people can recognize organically and naturally. Here’s an example of simple. Anytime you go into a Best Buy store, you will see a Kudos board. There are cards right beside it. They’re nothing fancy (printouts from any regular printer). To fill it out it would take under a minute. Any anyone can fill it out because it’s in a public area – customer, staff member, supervisor. How to give the recognition? Just pin it to the board, and done! If you want to brand it, some of our clients use FROG Kudos cards that they buy in bulk so they always have a bunch at the ready! Simple is sometimes best. But simple doesn’t mean it’s not strategic. Someone or a group had to come up with an idea of the simplest way to encourage recognition.

If you’re still not quite sure where to start or you’re struggling to get results, why don’t we grab 15-minutes for a virtual chat? Let me help you bring back excitement, a clear plan, to help you see exactly what you’re going to measure to ensure a big impact.

Chicken or the Egg: Start with the Customer Experience or the Employee Experience

May 27, 2019 By Sarah McVanel Leave a Comment

As a follow-up to last week’s post, focusing on the customer and guest experience and the direct link to the employee experience is of utmost importance.

Customer service isn’t new to organizations, however, in some cases, we don’t give it the attention it deserves. Or we tackle it as a “project”, expecting to throw some short-term resources at to make a lasting difference. But what happens when new people start? What happens if people don’t believe you’re serious about the improvements. What happens when they feel dissatisfied, under-resourced or undervalued.

Here are a few ways to boost the customer experience, and how they can also be applied to boosting the employee experience.

1.Hidden shoppers

You have probably heard of “Mystery Shoppers.” People who pose as customers to get a “real” sense of how they are treated when no one is looking. But how do you think it makes your employees feel when they are being “spied on”? And by someone outside of the organization? Instead, could you have employees self-audit their performance, barriers to customer service, set goals for service, and identify top priorities for the day then evaluate how well they did end of shift? Can you shadow folks and talk with them about their service and learn firsthand barriers to delivering great service as well as compliment them on what’s working well as you go? If you need to do “Hidden Shoppers,” can you ensure immediate feedback loops such as same-day feedback, self-evaluations and peer-to-peer feedback is also included? In other words, use it as an opportunity to deepen awareness, surface barriers to service, and be a uniting versus “us and them” experience.

2.Customer input.

Do your staff know what customers are saying about their service? Do you share positive testimonials regularly, can staff see it in real-time, are their incentives tied to the customer experience (not just quantity-based performance metrics?) And leaders, it’s essential to communicate to staff that they matter. Get out of your office and spend time where the value is created – at the point of contact between staff and customers (internal or external customers). Understand life from the customer perspective and from the employee’s perspective serving that customer. Walk a mile in the employees shoes by serving customers and providing the service directly from time-to-time.

3.Employee input.

When issues arise – for the customer or for your staff – I can’t stress enough how important visible leadership is. Not only will you better understand the problem, you’ll be better able to help fix it in a way that benefits everyone. When I was in a senior leadership role in a very busy community hospital, every Friday, I would shadow staff or physicians (wearing a uniform if they did) to try to understand an issue from multiple perspectives. How did I decide where to spend my time? Whatever issue we were stuck on at senior team’s Tuesday morning meeting, that’s where I’d go. And 9 times out of 10, staff and those we served had the answer (or at least a good step in the right direction). At first people were shocked to see me there but after a while, people would ask, “When are you coming to my area?” Before long, people saw the value and respected the effort.

I was never a better senior leader until I started spending my Fridays with the people who add the value. We need to get out of our office. We need to follow people and walk a mile in their shoes to better understand what needs to be improved and what is working.

These things take time, effort, energy and resources, but let’s face it, you’re deploying it anyway. You might as well direct it to what will make a lasting difference.

Why not share this with similarly like-minded folks who value the customer experience as much as the employee experience. And why not subscribe to my YouTube channel so you don’t miss a week of valuable insights about retaining top talent and loyal clients.

How do you Create an Incredible Guest Experience? It Starts with Your Employees’ Experience

May 19, 2019 By Sarah McVanel Leave a Comment

We know how important it is to create incredible guest or customer experience. But have you been looking at it first through the lens of your employees’ experience?

All too often, we put together training programs or launch initiatives or assign e-Learning modules to employees about what we expect from them, but never stopped to ask if in fact they are satisfied. If they are having a positive employee experience. If it is justified asking them to deliver a certain experience because it is in alignment with their values.

Sadly, all too often, we ask for a higher standard for our employees than we are delivering to them.

Please hear this: There is a connection between employee and guest or customer experience. You do not have one without the other. To try is an exercise in futility.

Recently, I hosted a live event at a five-star, beautiful resort. I wanted my family to benefit from my business so I decided to host it somewhere where they could come with me and most importantly, I wanted to serve my coaching clients by giving them an incredible place to learn and reflect that would bring ease, joy and abundance into their businesses.

Good in theory. Only one problem. The people at the resort were miserable.

From the minute anyone attempted to make a reservation, they were faced with broken links, coupons not activated, long waits on hold and short-tempered agents. Was it their fault? Nope. They didn’t break the systems or show up to do a bad job.

When everyone arrived, the wait in line at the front desk was long. The reservations were wrong. People had to be moved to different rooms. Requests to bring luggage up to rooms or sign up for shuttles weren’t booked. Was it their fault? Nope. We learned most were new, they were short staffed, and the hotel was booked above capacity.

It was not unusual to see a staff member there at 8:00 in the morning, and they’d still be there at 8:00 at night. We were there for one week, and some staff and managers we saw there every single day. Not only is that not possible or reasonable but it makes me wonder, what kind of retention problem exists that you need people working there that many days?

I won’t go on, but one thing became very clear. The individuals who were the face of the customer experience were overworked, unsupported, and undervalued. How can you profess to be a five-star hotel when you don’t deliver a five-star experience to guests? And how can you be a five-star hotel when you deliver a one-star employee experience to your front-line staff and middle managers?

I may have been frustrated, but at least I got to go home. Their only options were to put up with it or leave. Are you reflecting right now on if your employees experience the same two inferior choices? It doesn’t have to be that way.

How do you create an incredible guest or customer experience that represents your brand well aligns to the employee experience? Here are four secrets:

1.What You Expect for Customers You Must Deliver to Employees

Take a look at your customer service and guest experience training. Now take out the word “customer” and replace it with “employee”. Do you live that? If the answer is no, start there. Don’t ask something of someone that you can’t deliver yourself.

Last fall I had the pleasure of speaking for the senior management team for a hospitality organization on the list of Great Places to Work. In preparation for the talk, I took their Guest Experience e-Learning training and presented my recognition talk in alignment with those seven pillars of their guest experience. They connected the dots instantly, what aligned well between the guest and employee experience, and what they needed to work on for employees. And that’s why they’re a Great Place to Work. Because they’re committed to moving the needle on the experience for all.

2. Analyze Your Data

Consider your employee feedback and customer feedback side-by-side. All too often we look at each set of data in isolation, and at different points in time. Some of the call centre owners I spoke for in March sent out an employee experience survey every day because that’s what they do for customers. Keep the pulse on both, and you will begin to see connections; when one goes up, the other is up there too. Effect one, the other follows. It’s like a two for one deal!

3. Identify Your Priorities (A Wish Doesn’t Create Change)

If you have a target and an operational priority for your customer or guest experience, also have one for the employee experience. What project or initiative will help with both? What barriers will roadblock both? What is the most important thing you need to address immediately? What is going to require longer-term effort? For example, as a recognition expert, my advice is to start with recognizing your staff in small ways, and monitor customer satisfaction scores; I suspect you will see, the more recognition you give out to employees, the more your guests will say their experience was exceptional and ratings will be higher. How do I know? Because my clients do this and cannot believe how small gestures make such a huge impact so quickly.

And by the way, rather than try to fix all of those data points in your surveys, keep it simple with just a few allowing you to make sure they’re aligned.

4. Measure What Matters

With those priorities, you will need to measure success on both the customer and the employee side. Likely the measures are out of alignment, but you can make small tweaks to bring them into alignment for frequency and initiative. There is no point in measuring something that you aren’t sure what impact it will have, or so many things that you have no time left to make small tests of change. Measure a few things well – strategically and often – and once those numbers stabilize, move onto the next priority.

The bottom line is this: your front-facing customer is going to remember how they feel with your employees, and you may never get a chance to serve them again or the cost of losing them might be so high it’s worth the work I’ve outlined here. It’s hard enough to retain top talent without depriving them of an environment where they can thrive.

If you’ve been focusing on the guest experience, why don’t you share this information with other people on your team? What other ideas do you have? Share them in the comments below!