Turning Frustrations into Focus , the 3rd layer on your journey to High Performing Cultures.

Let's talk about High Performing Cultures some more, shall we, and get our Culture Cake out and move nicely onto the next layer – layer three.

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Remember what those five layers are:

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1.???? Make it easy

2.???? Speak up

3.???? Frustrations into focus

4.???? Learning from failure

5.???? Everyday learning

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We will look at the ingredients for the third layer – ‘Frustrations into Focus’ which is all about understating what people’s frustrations are so you can turn them into a focus area, and this links with the previous layer ‘Speak up’ because people need to feel safe in order to share.

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Active Listening

This is a great place to start, so when people can speak up and share how they feel about work and what their frustrations are, you as a leader need to take the time to actively listen. Active listening is a skill that you need to possess to really take the time and attention to listen to what someone has got to say, so you can understand what their perspective is and why they have it.? Often, we are too busy or in a rush and can’t take that time to really actively listen and we can potentially just think people are moaning or complaining rather than sharing what’s getting in the way of getting work done. So take the time to really listen and it will pay off.

How are you developing your active listening skills?

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Take Action

This one always sounds so simple but once you find out what is frustrating your people then an important next step is to take action to do something about it.? If your people are frustrated by something that is happening in the business that is getting in the way of them getting work done, then please take action.? But know, that when you can’t take action, or there too many things to fix at once, then explain the context for your decision making and what you are prioritising and why. This will also go a long way to alleviating frustrations, but by taking no action and not explaining why will just frustrate people more.

What was the last frustration you took action on?

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External into Internal

Taking steps to align your external messaging to your internal messaging so they are the same kind of narrative and dialog, so they aren’t vastly different is very important. Have you have ever worked inside a business and experienced a time where you hear something that has gone public or in the media and then you think to yourself “I don’t even know that and I work here!” – that is an expression of the misalignment of the external and internal approaches, and it can cause big frustrations. The way that you communicate, the way that you treat and respect your external customers and stakeholders needs to align to the way you communicate and respect your employees.? This can go a long way to helping people feel valued, important and in the loop as well as reducing frustrations.

How can you better align your external approach ?to your internal approach?

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Learning Teams

A great way to understand what is frustrating people about work, is to undertake a ‘Learning Team’.? Now if you are not familiar with what a ‘Learning Team’ is – it is essentially a facilitated conversation about work with a bunch of people.? You get to take people away from their day jobs for a couple of hours or so and you run two sessions.? The first one is all about really understanding what the frustrations are by talking about what’s working and what’s not. The second session is all about what can you do to problem solve to turn their frustrations into focus. Learning teams is a great way to undercover those frustrations and do something proactive about them.? You can undertake Learning Teams yourself if you follow a process and have trained facilitators, or you can do Learning Teams with the support of Culture Kick, we can do them for you or with you, which ever your prefer.

What is stopping you introducing Learning Teams?

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Stress

What does stress look like in your business and what things are stressing your people out? Its important to know that stress affects different people, in different ways, at different times in their lives and careers, but it’s important to understand what things in your workplace are causing excessive stress to your people and turn that into a focus area to do something about. Equally not all stress is bad, as pressure and deadlines are a great motivator for some people, but you need to find that sweet spot and that balance where it’s not having a negative effect on people’s Health and Wellbeing. When it comes to your approach to Health and Wellbeing it needs to actively focus on what’s frustrating and stressing your people out and having negative impacts on people so you can genuinely improve people’s Health and Wellbeing at work.

?What are you doing to reduce stress in your workplace?

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ROT

Spend time actively focussing on the ‘ROT’ in your business, as this will be causing frustrations for your people. ROT stands for Redundant, Obsolete and Trivial. So, what is redundant in your business? - ?what are you doing that is maybe being duplicated elsewhere by another team or person or process, that you could get rid of.? Obsolete – what is Obsolete in your business? What are you still doing, or what equipment have you got, or processes in place that are just obsolete now and you don’t need – so can you get rid of it? And finally Trivial – what things do your people have to do that’s just trivial and not adding value? And it’s just there as it’s always been there – so can you do something about?? All things in your business that fall into the ROT category could be making you inefficient as well as causing frustrations for your people – so turn them into a focus area.

?What was the last piece of ‘ROT’ you found and got rid of?

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So, there we have a whole bunch of ideas to get you started on layer three – which is all about turning ‘Frustrations into Focus’ and helping your people get work done easier and smoother.? It will definitely take more time and deliberate effort, but the rewards are incredible if you actively pursue this journey to a High Performing Culture.

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Stay around and we will get to layer four next – Learning from Failure