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(dramatic music) (dramatic music) - Welcome to "Business Forward," I'm your host, Matt George.

Joining me tonight, Lee Hoffman, who is the director of Culture Transformation at Ledgestone, and Cole Stalter, who is the employee engagement consultant at Ledgestone.

Welcome Lee, welcome Cole.

- Thanks, Matt.

- Thank you.

- Good to be here.

- Well, gonna start off with you, Lee.

We've talked many times about leadership and employee engagement, but in regards to just you and Cole, like what do you do?

What do you do on a daily basis?

- Great question, Matt.

Simply put, we do kind of some of the things you already mentioned.

We help organizations, leaders better engage their employees.

So that employee engagement, it's kind of a buzzword right now, but that's essentially what we do.

We use people analytics, we use proven leadership strategies, and we blend those two.

- [Matt] Okay, and with the goal of?

- Employees are - Happy.

- Happier.

- Engaged, obviously, that's a word.

- And that's twofold, right.

It helps the employee, not only with them at work help the organization, but it also helps them personally.

So it's twofold.

We're making people have better lives in work and out of work, and we're helping organizations be more successful with what they're trying to achieve and help this world.

- All right, go deeper, Cole, employee engagement.

I mean, really what is it when you, because right now, Lee said it, you hear it everywhere, it's almost just one of those words that you just, like it's in and out, what is it?

- Right, so employee engagement is the psychological investment an employee has with their work organization.

Now, as we mentioned, it has been a buzzword, definitely for the last 10 years for sure.

But employee engagement, or just engagement as a psychological construct came on the map in the early 1990s and it took a lot of time to develop that academically.

And then the corporate culture kind of picked that up and ran with it.

Employee engagement is the product of corporate culture and corporate society trying to come up with something in a way that they can speak to the holistic investment of an employee with their work.

Now employee engagement kind of encompasses a bunch of different psychological constructs, job satisfaction being one of them.

But the difference between engagement and satisfaction, one, engagement is completely separate from satisfaction, and two, engagement has a stronger success rate than job satisfaction when it comes to things like performance or organizational citizenship behavior, etc.

And the reason that is is because whereas satisfaction promotes low positive affectivity, engagement promotes high positive affectivity.

You can be satisfied with your job, but not motivated.

So it really sets a different tone there.

- So when people talk about, and another buzz term that you hear all the time is psychological safety, that mindset of is my job safe?

Am I safe at work?

Are my benefits safe?

There's some people that I know just have a job just for health insurance.

So that psychological safety piece, so also that's a piece of it.

- Absolutely, and like I said, when we look at the holistic concept of employee engagement, it encompasses not only engagement, but also job satisfaction.

And that psychological safety piece that you're talking about fits right in there with job satisfaction.

- I mean, because there is a difference between employee engagement and work engagement, right.

- Absolutely.

- So talk about that.

- Well, you think about employee engagement, work engagement, what I do as an employee is usually a response to how I perceive my leader, surprisingly enough.

Leadership has a huge impact on how employees feel.

So when a leader does certain things, it's going to impact the employee.

Now, often we think, oh, I'm in control of my emotions, I'm in control of my feelings.

But in reality, study after study has shown, we just simply aren't as humans, right, we're irrational in the sense that we respond emotionally often before our brain engages in what just happened.

It's that whole fight, flight, freeze thing.

We don't even know that's happening to us.

Same thing happens on a day-to-day basis.

You're at work and your boss, your leader walks by you in the hallway and doesn't say hello.

Well, you immediately have a feeling that's associated with that.

- It's very true.

- If you, going back to what Cole just said, psychologically you trust that boss, what do you do?

Oh, they must be in a hurry.

But if there's something that's caused you to be like, I'm not sure I can trust that boss, and they walk by you without saying hi, all of a sudden it's like, what did I do today?

Oh, they're upset at me.

And now all of a sudden we're feeling a certain way that's causing us to think in a way that is not productive.

Because we go to different parts of our brain and we actually become where, I mean, it shows where our cortisol kicks in instead of just our natural relaxed, like how can I think best.

I'm thinking, how do I protect my job here?

How do I make sure I'm doing what I'm supposed to, make sure I don't get fired?

All that is played in that psychological safety.

So those feelings that we have that are instantaneous impact a mindset that ends up happening over time which we call employee engagement.

So if we can change how people feel or influence it in a positive way, you can change that mindset to help them be more engaged in what they do.

- Yeah, because if you think about it, like a pet peeve of mine is when people walk, I don't mind someone actually being on the phone, but I do them on the phone texting, like texting bothers me.

It's like, okay, you're walking around not paying attention to anybody, on the phone you could be running to the copier, you're grabbing something, you could be doing something.

But I do understand that because in my past career, you'd walk down the hallway, everybody wants to say hi to you.

They do.

And there is that feeling of, oh, Matt said hi, or the CFO said hi, or whoever it is, right.

You want that piece there.

So Cole, I'm gonna go back to you for a second and this is gonna be very simplistic, but the word holistic, there's another word you hear all the time in business now.

For people who are watching this show, in terms of leadership and engagement, what does holistic mean?

All encompassing, is that the best way of putting it?

- Absolutely, absolutely.

And so when we look at employee engagement as a holistic concept, really what you're doing is acknowledging the humanity of your employees holistically.

You're not just looking them as service or robots or things to value add or value extract from them.

You want to value add to your employees.

You want to value extract so you get that return.

But employee engagement is all about acknowledging the humanity of an individual.

And you can't just do that in one way.

You can't just say, hey, go be motivated, and get excited, and go after it.

You also have to look at the other side of that person, much like you were talking about psychological safety.

If you disregard that, it makes it very difficult for that individual to become motivated.

Because like Lee said, there's different parts of our brain that activate when these different feelings arise.

And what you have there potentially is contrasting brain energies that are fighting against one another.

Like they want to be motivated, but it's hard to be motivated when you're not satisfied and maybe not feeling safe, 'cause that energy is taking over the energy that could be used to be thinking in a motivated way.

- That's interesting because you talk about employee engagement as a mindset.

Well, what does that mean?

I mean, I know what it means, but like if you were going into a business and you say to a CEO, I'm gonna go talk to your team, your employee engagement's a mindset.

- It's a mindset.

- What's that mean?

- A mindset means it's set, right.

You have bad days and good days at work.

You can come in and be like, you know what, it was an exhausting day.

I had a little argument with this person about this idea.

And you can leave being higher or lower emotionally, that happens.

Mindsets are more set things, right.

So normally, if you are burned out, I don't trust my boss at all, that's a mindset.

Where you can't just come in and be like, oh, I'm gonna turn that on and off.

Now all of a sudden it's kind of like when you're driving on the road and you get in a rut, that's what it is, a mindset is a rut.

Now it can be a positive rut or a negative rut, but it's like, - That's a good way of putting it.

- It's hard to get out of that, that's what a mindset is and over time we develop mindsets.

I come out of education and often educators were, wrongly I think, sometimes assigned mindsets like you know what, these kids don't change.

And the older you get, that veteran teacher, which isn't always true at all, but sometimes that does happen where you get in this rut where it's like even when data contradicts that, I can't change my way of thinking.

And so that's what a mindset is.

So we wanna say, if you have employees in an engaged mindset, yeah, they're gonna have bad days, they're gonna have times when they're frustrated, but the next day they're gonna come back and they're gonna be, you know what, let's go after it.

- Go get it.

You know, it's funny, I take my kids, my favorite thing to do, I take my kids every morning to school, one of my, this just happened today, and one of 'em said, ah, it's Friday.

And I always say, and I probably say this weekly to 'em, and I think this is a mindset, but it's also habits almost, where I go, Mondays are just as good as Fridays.

Like I have just as good a day on a Monday as I do on a Friday, it doesn't change.

And I don't know if that's just because I'm old now and they're younger, but I think they're almost programmed.

- It is programmed.

Here's the way that I think of it.

When it's Friday afternoon, and if you're like, I could come back here tomorrow, that's an engaged employee.

And there's times I've had that in my career where it's like, it doesn't matter that it's Friday, I could work, I'm not going to because it's Saturday and the place isn't open.

- Got a family.

- But it's like I could come back tomorrow.

I don't need the weekend because, oh man, I got to end of the week, and man, I gotta get out of this place, right.

Those people are just what we call paycheck collectors.

It's just like, I'm here to make money so I can go live the rest of my life.

Like what a sad way to live if we spend 40 to 50 hours, but how many people, when you look at the engagement statistics, it's abysmal.

One out of three, if you're lucky, are engaged.

The other two-thirds are basically there to make money so they can live the few hours outside of the rest of the day in a way that they like to live.

Our goals say how do we help organizations, 'cause all organizations are trying to usually solve a greater purpose, how can we get employees, leaders, organizations saying we're all doing something great here, let's do this in a way that it's rewarding from eight to five.

Yes, we want your family to be a great experience as well.

A little bit, it's like, it's a vocation, right.

It's no longer a job.

It's like, this is what I get to do with the talents and gifts that I have.

And so that's what we talked to leaders about, like are you creating safety, but then also are you also motivating them in a way that's tapping into who they are, what they're good at, and how they help your organization most succeed?

- You know what, I bing up that story about my kids is because it's no different than work than it is them going to school.

You go into school with a mindset of I can't wait for the day to end, you've already skipped ahead to three o'clock.

That doesn't, to me, I can't relate to, honestly, maybe I used to and I forget, but it's like, I'm ready to take on the day now and they're ready to go to baseball practice at three.

Maybe that's because they're kids but I see that with employees too.

And when you have that happening with employees, you're in trouble.

- Yeah.

- So which comes first, feelings or thoughts?

- You know, the short answer is that it's pretty complicated.

The long answer is that they have kind of this bidirectional relationship with one another.

They feed into one another and they help each other produce itself.

And it's hard to say 'cause some people, they're likely to think their way into a feeling, but other people, they're likely to feel their way into a thought.

And so it really kind of depends on the individual.

But one thing we do know for sure is that, in terms of our work, leaders have a direct influence on both of those things.

And so in our work, that's why we really try to go head on with the leaders and get them making the change within their organization because it's hard to tell which comes first, thoughts or feelings, but we are very certain that leaders have a very strong influence and effect on that.

- Yeah, I wrote something down, our thoughts can be influenced by our emotions and our emotions can be influenced by our thoughts.

- Exactly.

- Is that right?

- Perfect.

- It's almost like you wrote it.

- Just better.

- Well, I always relate things to people who have come on our show, come on my show.

And I sit here and I've talked to about every entrepreneur, every CEO around.

And if you just peel back and look at every business, no matter how healthy a business is and making money, whether you have a thousand employees or two employees, you're in the people business, right.

You've heard that term a million times.

You're in the people business.

What you two are doing is really showing leadership what the whole team is looking at from their side, too, right?

- Exactly.

- I mean, because a lot of times you'll sit there and as you're walking down the hallway as a CEO and you're texting, which I've done, you sit there and when someone calls you out on it, you don't always take it the right way or you sit there.

And then now that I've gotten to a point in my career where I've sat here and led for 30 years, I actually do look back at many things and go, why did I do that?

And I think leaders, I think it's okay to fail.

And I think sometimes leaders don't think they can fail.

- Absolutely, leadership can be isolating.

I was just having a conversation this morning with a longtime leader, how often leaders, we call it, they fail, they fall, you read about 'em in the news.

And often it's because leadership can become isolating.

That you're at the top, you're governing, your strategy and you in some ways disconnect from the people part of it.

Because, I mean, leadership's a heavy mantle.

It is a very heavy mantle.

And so what we're trying to get people to realize is leadership is actually about building connection and you can't do that alone.

You need a team and teams are always better than individuals.

- You know, Cole, I was just thinking about just one of the businesses, one of the people that were on here, and she was telling me as a CEO that she implemented processes and she told them what to do.

And sometimes employees can't be simply told what to do.

Is that correct?

- That's correct.

Yeah, a lot of ways, and there's a lot of research out there and case studies that will encourage that the best practice is not simply telling your employees what to do but co-creating that process with them, having them involved in the makings of a job.

We call that job crafting, or we use that term a lot.

It is a psychological construct where the employee has a say in the process of their work, or they may have a say in the process of the organization as a whole.

And what that does is that it looks to empower the individual, it gives 'em a sense of value that, hey, if I have a say here, that that means they value what I think and what I might be able to produce.

Not just with my work, not just what they hired me for, but, and here's that holistic word again, right, the holistic process of the nature of work that I'm doing.

Not just these outline, oh, check, check, check, no, but I actually have a say in how to live in this space here.

- Hmm, yeah, that's probably something that a lot of leaders forget.

This is my business, I was tasked to run this business as president, or CEO, or whatever it may be, or entrepreneur, I'm an owner and we're gonna do it my way.

And then you wonder why you have turnover at 35%.

What are the feelings, 'cause I think this is important, what are the feelings that impact employee engagement?

- Well we've noticed, Cole said a couple times now, satisfying and you use the word motivating.

So our framework that we have created has both those sentiments or mindsets, satisfied and motivated.

The satisfying feelings are security, connection, and alignment.

So if you think about that, for an employee to feel satisfied, like, hey, this is where I want to be, I feel good about being here, I'm getting up in the morning glad to be coming to work, not out looking for a new job for an extra a hundred bucks a week, it's probably 'cause they're satisfied there and they're secure, they're connected, they're connected to the organization, and they feel aligned.

Those three, when they work together, are powerful feelings.

Now we can't just tell people to feel things, like, hey, we want you to feel more connected, feel more secure.

- I was just gonna say that.

We just talked about it, so, yeah.

- So that's where our work comes in, where we help leaders actually say, how do you create that sense of security?

And we've talked about psychological trust, huge component, trust is one of the bedrock foundations of security, so that needs to be there.

If you're not a leader of integrity and you don't treat people with equity, then you're probably not building security in your employees.

- [Matt] And you probably shouldn't be in that position.

- Correct.

- Let's just be honest.

- Yeah.

- Because you know this, you two have seen it with multiple companies, I've seen it over the years, there's some people that just aren't leaders.

- Right.

- And that's fine.

It doesn't mean they're bad people, it just means someone else should be doing the job to make sure that the business gets done and the people feel safe.

- Absolutely, so that's what security does, right, but then connection, connection is huge, I mean, we've seen this time and time again and studies are coming out now that everybody's a remote worker, right, and everyone wants to work from home in these hybrid situations, can you build connection virtually?

And most would say you can't really.

Now you can continue connection virtually, but it's hard to build connection virtually because connection is so emotional.

So we try to help leaders realize that, hey, employees need to feel connected to the organization, the coworkers, around the water cooler, the coffee pot.

I feel good about the people I work with, but then I feel like I'm connected to a team, I feel like I'm connected to my supervisor.

I mean, it's a huge impact.

A story that we tell often, you probably heard of the Christmas truce in World War I, where the Germans and the allies quit shooting on Christmas Day at each other and they played soccer and sang songs together, a great story.

Everybody usually says, oh, that was Christmas did that.

Well, as researchers have gone back and looked at it, they said, well, you needed Christmas actually, I mean, Christmas was a thing, but what they found out was those same people had been lined up in the trenches, crossed dead man's land there for months, building connection, smelling each other's food, hearing each other's conversation.

And they actually equate that that connection is what caused them to say, hey, it's Christmas Day, we're gonna quit shooting at each other.

And the reason why they say they know that's possible, or that's the reason, is the generals realized they had a problem, like our soldiers are now friends with the enemy and they just moved 'em up and down the line and they kept doing that.

Now we can't let people stay too close together or they will actually build that connection, like that's the power of connection that can bring enemies together.

And we try to help leaders and organizations realize you need to create that.

- Not enemies, so to speak, with employees, but different personalities.

So let me ask you something.

So I was gonna say, why is employee engagement so important?

Well, we've talked about it, that's obvious, but now I've got my fiscal hat on.

There's a cost to this, right.

And I've heard an upwards of a trillion, 800 billion, what is the number, what do you think?

- It's definitely, holistically, you look at the United States, corporations lose a lot of money on disengaged employees upwards to the billions of dollars.

- That's crazy.

- So that's why, that's one of the reasons why employee engagement has become such a buzzword, become such a fascination for people in corporate society because they're starting to realize that one of the greatest assets they have is their employees.

And where in the past the standard mindset was how much value can I extract from them, we're starting to see the gears shifting and thinking how much value can I add to them?

Lee and I, we talk a lot about this servant leadership concept and how really it seems silly that it even exists because what is an organization other than the company providing for the employee and then the employee reciprocating that and providing for the company?

That's really the dynamic that should be involved there.

And when that's happening, that's where you're gonna see, speaking fiscally, you're gonna see a lot of corporations save a lot of money on things like turnover or quiet quitters, also disengagement, absenteeism.

You'll have less employees taking that Friday off because they're extra excited to get to the weekend.

- Well, there's an easy formula to figure out for every uptick of 1% of turnover or whatever it may be, you can figure out whether it's gonna affect the bottom line pretty easily.

And it's staggering when you start getting up into the 30s, 40s, 50%.

I heard, and tell me me if this is right, 50-some percent of employees are, quote, checked out.

- Yeah, no, that's pretty accurate.

Gallup did a very massive study and they found that about on average, and they've done this year after year after year, so when you look at it all together, on average, you're looking at about 30 to 35% of employees who are engaged, right, who are engaged.

So that leaves that massive backend weight of the disengaged employees really hampering down what's going on in the organization.

And if you have disengaged employees and they're not performing the way they should be or could be, then the organization itself is also not serving its greatest purpose.

- Yeah, and I go to, if you are that servant leader, I know we can debate that piece, but you do have that sympathy and empathy for your employees.

And what I always thought of is, and I got this saying from my dad, and my dad was a longtime CEO and he had hundreds, thousands of employees, and he always says it's not just my job to take care of the team or the individual employees, it's also my job to take care of their families.

Because when you have a disengaged employee, they still go home.

So I'm gonna leave you with that because I think that's an important piece.

They still go home and have to live and have that stress.

So, guys, listen to this, I'm telling you, so Lee Hoffman, Cole Stalter, thank you for coming on.

I'm gonna ask you, I've never, I don't think I've done this before.

I'm gonna have you stay on 'cause I'm gonna do another show, 'cause I'm not done talking.

And I only got through about 10% of my questions.

- Love to.

- Will you hang with me?

- Oh, absolutely.

- All right.

Well, I'm Matt George and this is another episode of "Business Forward."

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