{"id":811,"date":"2017-03-15T10:00:34","date_gmt":"2017-03-15T10:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rocksolidbizdevelopment.com\/ourblog\/?p=811"},"modified":"2025-07-01T17:20:23","modified_gmt":"2025-07-01T17:20:23","slug":"best-ideas-improving-job-come-every-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rocksolidbizdevelopment.com\/ourblog\/best-ideas-improving-job-come-every-day\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cThe best ideas for improving a job come from those who do it every day.\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A lot has been written lately about \u201cemployee engagement\u201d . . . some of it right here. The Gallup organization, which has studied it for many years, says employee engagement can be measured by the strength of the <em><u>emotional<\/u><\/em> connection an employee feels toward his or her company.\u00a0 If the employee sings the company song, bleeds the company colors, and is fully committed to the company\u2019s mission and goals, he or she is \u201cengaged.\u201d\u00a0 If an employee is just punching a clock and collecting a paycheck, he or she is \u201cnot engaged.\u201d\u00a0 Gallup says 70% or more of employees nationwide fall into this \u201cnot engaged\u201d category.\u00a0 However, Gallup also says a company that increases its level of employee engagement will also increase its profitability and productivity, and will decrease its employee turnover.\u00a0 But is capturing the hearts of your employees enough?\u00a0 According to a friend and colleague, Nick Bizony, it\u2019s not.\u00a0 To learn what Nick believes is the real payoff, please continue reading below.<\/p>\n<p><strong>\u201cThe best ideas for improving a job come from those who do it every day.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><em>~ Jim Bleech, business consultant, speaker<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Nick spent many years working with Fortune 500 companies, helping them to forge more collaborative relationships between management and workers. He pushed for higher levels of what he terms \u201cemployee involvement.\u201d If employee <em><u>engagement<\/u><\/em> is about winning the hearts of employees, then employee <em><u>involvement<\/u><\/em> is about getting their heads in the game as well. After all, today\u2019s workforce is smarter, better educated, and better informed than any workforce in history. So why waste all that brain power? Your employees have ideas about how their work could be done better\/faster\/cheaper, but if you don\u2019t ask, and if they\u2019re not engaged, they\u2019re not going to share them.<\/p>\n<p>There are several areas where employee involvement is particularly appropriate<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Decision-making.<\/strong> When you need to decide something, do you huddle only with your managers, or do you involve everyone whose job might be impacted? Perhaps you can\u2019t include everyone in every decision, but in many decisions, you can. And understandably, people want to have a say in decisions that will influence the way they work.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Problem-solving.<\/strong> As managers, that\u2019s what we do. We solve problems. If there are no problems, there\u2019s not much for us to do. But that doesn\u2019t mean we can\u2019t tap into the experience, skill, and knowledge of our employees to help us solve problems. With more heads working on the problem, we probably get a better solution than the one we may have come up with all by ourselves. Plus, asking employees for their help sends a powerful message that you respect and value their ideas and opinions. This can be a great morale booster<\/li>\n<li><strong>Continuous improvement.<\/strong> As the quote above says, if you want to improve something, ask the people who are involved with it every day. This isn\u2019t decision-making or problem-solving. This is saying, \u201cWe\u2019re really good at what we do, but how can we do it even better?\u201d As you would expect, people get a real positive buzz when they see an idea of theirs put into practice.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Nick and I have had endless chicken-or-egg discussions about whether engagement leads to involvement or involvement opens the door to engagement. But we do agree that there\u2019s a symbiotic relationship between engagement and involvement. An engaged employee will be more open to deeper levels of involvement in the company, but it\u2019s also true that deeper levels of involvement will lead to even higher levels of an employee\u2019s engagement. Ying and Yang. Each feeds the other.<\/p>\n<p>If you\u2019re that rare employer who has carefully crafted both employee engagement and employee involvement into your company\u2019s culture, good for you! Just keep it up. But if you\u2019re not that rare employer . . . and let\u2019s be honest, you\u2019re probably not . . . then you\u2019re squandering a valuable resource. As a retiring General Motors employee once lamented, \u201cFor 25 years you\u2019ve paid only for my hands when you could have had my brain for free.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>If you\u2019re interested in learning how you might start down that path to employee engagement and employee involvement, please contact me. I will be happy to discuss it with you. And I\u2019ll even bring Nick.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A lot has been written lately about \u201cemployee engagement\u201d . . . some of it right here. The Gallup organization, which has studied it for many years, says employee engagement can be measured by the strength of the emotional connection an employee feels toward his or her company.\u00a0 If the employee sings the company song,<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/rocksolidbizdevelopment.com\/ourblog\/best-ideas-improving-job-come-every-day\/\">Read More\u2026<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[39,36,33,30,127,26,25,22,20,19],"tags":[122,121],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rocksolidbizdevelopment.com\/ourblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/811"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rocksolidbizdevelopment.com\/ourblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rocksolidbizdevelopment.com\/ourblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rocksolidbizdevelopment.com\/ourblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rocksolidbizdevelopment.com\/ourblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=811"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/rocksolidbizdevelopment.com\/ourblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/811\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":812,"href":"https:\/\/rocksolidbizdevelopment.com\/ourblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/811\/revisions\/812"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rocksolidbizdevelopment.com\/ourblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rocksolidbizdevelopment.com\/ourblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rocksolidbizdevelopment.com\/ourblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}