Unlocking Untapped Employee Potential: 5 Tips for Prioritizing Work That Needs to Get Done

Successful businesses align highly engaged front-line staff with corporate objectives or OKRs. Unfortunately, the reality of this goal is that research suggests 14% of companies do an excellent job of getting front-line staff to understand corporate strategies. Further exacerbating this, 66% of employees are disengaged.

What if there was a way to engage employees in front-line strategy, building efficiency, and employee purpose? What if the process improved corporate performance at a point and time when engagement is at its lowest?

ThinkSmith customers consistently say, “We were surprised at the level of answers we received on that challenge.” Our research suggests leaders underestimate employees’ abilities, meaning every employee is under-utilized or under-employed.

Best-selling Author Stephen Covey once said, “Employees have more insights and capabilities than their current roles require or in some cases even allow.”

Strategy

Best-selling strategy author Richard Remult’s “The Crux” suggests most strategic plans are more about vision and goals and lack the proper actions required for success. The typical strategic planning process involves executives going away for days or weeks, emerging with a plan outlining the plans for growth for the coming fiscal year. The objectives are distributed to teams so each knows their responsibilities but tend to foster little connection with employees. These objectives or OKRs are stretch goals predicated on the notion that teams will change required behaviors, impacting the gap between present and proposed business levels. When one looks at the list of objectives for a given group, the question needs to be asked: “Who is going to do the required work over and above their day jobs?” Midlevel management is a melting pot of challenges entertaining direction from sr leaders amongst the high demands of customers. 

By tapping employees’ creative, strategic side, they feel empowered as they align business unit-level actions with objectives.  

Being Realistic

If we are to be realistic, each team can’t do everything that is in front of them with current workloads, much less the additional work associated with change and improvement. Therefore, leaders must prioritize 20% of the actions that deliver 80% of the success. In addition, this process needs to include the employees who intimately understand customers and the internal workings of your company.

Collective team intelligence aligned with strategy improves outcomes and builds purpose.  

A company with 150 employees has 150 relatively disjointed data models…… by systematically engaging employees on specific outcomes, biases are removed. 

Here are suggestions to help prioritize the work that needs actioning:

1. First, for each team-level objective, start the process of getting agreement with your team as to what fundamentals need to be “true” to deliver on that objective. Staff should look at this from a skills, knowledge, alignment, product, and culture perspective.
2. Once you have a list of fundamentals, the team answers the following question about each fundamental, “What about this is difficult.” This question is crucial because it represents the “work that needs to be done or the action.” Put another way; this is where you want the team’s action to be focused. This question is 100% where the ThinkSmith solution plays, putting employees into the teacher and learner position via app-based challenges that specifically address required changes.
3. Prioritize the work. Execute high-value and highly addressable action items. Rate each action from two different perspectives:
   1. Scale of 1-10 how addressable is this item? If the product improvement takes a year to resolve, then this would be a 1; if it is a skill or required knowledge, it becomes an 8 or 9 because it is relatively changeable.
   2. Scale of 1-10 how valuable this is.
4. Build a ThinkSmith challenge (the action) for each item that meets your prioritized high-value and highly addressable list.
5. The team decides which team or teams need to be involved in the challenge for maximum alignment.

Including employees in a business unit or department strategy session is a productive way for employees to feel significant and generate buy-in.

What is your plan to tap into employees’ wisdom and sense of purpose?