Promoting a culture for the employees to feel valued and recognized to maximize efficiency and company performance

In a context of permanent changes driven by the global warming, rarefaction of rare resources, population aging, pension plan funding, political changes, new generations’ expectation changes, artificial intelligence, the Covid-19 pandemic has made profound changes in the economic environment and people relations and communication.

Who would have predicted that people will test themselves before joining a familiar dinner, or to face lock-down situations where simply going outside for a walk would be subject to receive a fine in some countries ?

The Covid-19 has dramatically affected the basic rules, and created new words that 2 years ago would have made no sense, and to refer to “présentiel” or face-to-face to “distanciel” or remote, in primarily all levels and organizations.

The most impacted persons were the education systems (schools and universities) where students quickly move from a model spending times in a class, amphitheater, canteens, study rooms, and classmates parties to remote digital class with limited interactions with others.

On a company side, with the pandemic new regulations, the home office became at first an obligation hence affecting the family structure and way of working by requiring employees to work from home in structures not well adapted in terms of space, isolations from others and adapting with the family and kids organizations.

In a second phase, a partial home-office approach is now been seen as a generally accepted way of working, while enabling employees to better manage their time between the private and professional times without affecting much the company efficiency and deliveries.

On the other hand, the home-office approach is putting a stronger pressure on the company side to ensure employees remain engaged and efficient, and on the employees’ side to keep a strong relationship with their respective company as the distance and lack of face-to-face communication is making a natural distance, with potential negative side effects.

Various models have been developed, shared and explained in companies to build up teams and efficiencies walking up the development pyramid from the trust, conflict, commitment, accountability to results to set the team development foundations and frame to improve efficiencies among teams and company abilities to deliver superior results, growth, acquire new markets, technology, supplies or simply sustain existing businesses.

Once the basis is there and well promoted within the company and organization, it is more than essential to ensure employees remain engaged, motivated and efficient. This sounds to be a given point and obvious but it requires a permanent work and focus looking at the entire company.

Multiple factors have an important impact on the employees’ motivation and engagements, such as work environment, remuneration, work diversity, or career opportunities; however, a very simple and important aspect is to ensure employees at any level within the organization feel valued and recognized.

Within the company people pyramid, the organization is very diverse and important, with a mix of competencies, talents, and strengths, as well as with a employees’ performance ration been roughly split as around 5% superior performance, 25% very strong, 55% strong and 15% moderate.

The motivation leverage is crucial to ensure that each single employee as an individual contributor, manager, or director contributes internally and externally as an equal impact on the customers, suppliers, and company performance as the executive teams.

In other words, ensuring an employee feels valued, recognized and is an effective player to deliver the company strategy, visions and valued will be a key factor.

This means, that the company has to develop this vision, share and anchor it strongly within the overall organization.

Along the pyramid company organization, the expected employees’ efficiency is directly managed by the hiring process in a view to attract and retain talents that will form the performance of the organization.

At leading positions, it is essential the selection is done extremely well to focus on the strong importance of these soft skills in parallel to the technical skills as an inappropriate promotion or hiring will have a dramatic effect on the entire organization, along with the ability to walk the talk and lead by example to ramp up the team performance from trust to results through the ladder development stages.

As a CFO, my primary focus is the Finance function development in terms of process optimizations, financial systems, cash flow, financial developments, taxes, transfer pricing, cost control, cross function communications, and mostly the team development and ability to deliver superior results.

These a very ambitious goals and would never been achieved without a genuine and permanent work to ensure teams are feeling well appreciated, valued and engaged in their respective and collective work.

Basically, as a none exhaustive list, this means for example to make yourself available anytime for your team, using an active listening, celebrating success, making each employee important in the organization, sharing the relevant information to employees, initiating discussions, team work, assigning goals and follow-up, regular 1:1, valuing remarks and thoughts, suggesting ideas, assigning projects, challenging them, and most likely demonstrating empathy and respect.

This is highly rewarding when seeing results in your organization and effective and open communication.

Thank you for talking the time to read these few lines and to reflect on them.

Kind regards

Pierre

?

?