Work priorities for this year

A busy week this one – two visits to Monkton Park, one to London and still a day to go. Good to see so many staff out and about though. This week we published the budget papers detailing plans to balance a difficult budget in ’17-18. This has been the toughest budget so far but of course setting it is the easier part; delivering it is always the real challenge. Even with a recommended council tax rise of 1.99% plus the social care levy of 3%, it leaves us with a gap of £13.3m to fill. We plan to do this through a combination of changes to policy, service delivery, general efficiency, procurement savings (totalling around £10m) and reducing the number of staff posts (£3m). For the latter we will target reductions in vacant posts and agency spend first as we always do.

Last week I got together with the mangers in the services I lead. We spoke about the priorities for this year, agreed the expectations from us all and then I spoke about staff engagement. I had been reading a lot about this over the Christmas period. I read that up to 70% of staff in organisations are disengaged. I am pleased that we don’t have those levels as will be evidenced in the staff survey results that will come out in a couple of weeks. I researched the impact that managers can have on staff engagement and shared what I found with those attending. Here’s what I found:

Some research & data

•  70% of employees say they are disengaged at work (Gallup, 2016)
•  Engaged, motivated employees improve bottom line performance
–  31% more productive, 3 times more creative
–  87% less likely to leave
•   Most organisations fail to hold managers to account for this
•   70% of motivation is influenced by an employees line manager
•   Employees don’t leave jobs, they leave managers. Scary!

Making things worse – the 7 negative or demotivating behaviours

•   Making a lot of stupid rules (we need to challenge ourselves here as we have some of these I think; grateful for your feedback)
•   Letting accomplishments go unrecognised
•   Hiring and promoting the wrong people
•   Treating everybody equally
•   Tolerating poor performance
•   Going back on their commitments
•   Being apathetic

Making things better – the 7 positive behaviours

•  Follow the Platinum rule (not the golden rule). The golden rule is to treat people as you would want to be treated. The problem here is that we are all different and need to be treated differently! So the platinum rule is to treat people as they wish to be treated. 
•  Be strong without being harsh
•  Remember that communication is a two way street
•  Be a role model, not a preacher
•  Be transparent
•  Be humble
•  Take a genuine interest in employees work life balance

Bringing it all together

•  If you cultivate the characteristics above and avoid the demotivators, you’ll become the kind of boss that people remember for the rest of their lives. Oh god please let us achieve this in 2017.

Speak again soon. For daily updates, discussion, personal opinion, comment or just to connect or keep in touch you can follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/#!/drcarltonbrand.

Carlton