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Team building activities will not only boost employee morale, productivity and open communication but it can dramatically increase the success. 
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5 tips for keeping employee morale high through virtual recognition.
Barry Deutsch's insight:
Couple of items I took away from this article was tying recognition back to your values, and that the pace of recognition should be one recognition per employee per month. I've never seen that recommendation before - but I really like the suggestion on pace.
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There are many ways to improve employee engagement, even during a crisis. In the article, we gathered the most effective ones. Almost all of them are free.
Barry Deutsch's insight:
A good reminder of some of the key elements to think about related to employee engagement. Which one of these could you focus on to improve your employee engagement - and raise productivity.
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When your employees build strong relationships with the people they work with, they’re more likely to put in effort, keep everyone updated about what they’re working on, and feel inspired to produce their best work.
Barry Deutsch's insight:
From the makers of a recognition app, I found this blog quote that I've been reinforcing in my workshops, but it's always good to hear it from multiple sources:
"When your employees build strong relationships with the people they work with, they’re more likely to put in effort, keep everyone updated about what they’re working on, and feel inspired to produce their best work."
How are you creating these relationship building opportunities, team bonding, and leveraging chat tools like yammer/slack to encourage sharing?
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Google has a unique approach to employee recognition.In addition to compensation and other perks, Google uses a digital tool called “The Wall of Happy,”...
Barry Deutsch's insight:
Loved the Wall of Happy described in this article. The statistic that rocked me a little was the one about 4 out 5 employees indicated they would work harder if praised/patted on the back.
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As well as engaging with your front line employees, it’s essential to maintain communication with furloughed employees and ensure that the whole team continues to feel valued and motivated during the current crisis and beyond.
Barry Deutsch's insight:
I agree with this recommendation by the author 100 percent. Are you staying in touch with your terminated or furloughed employees? How are you maintaining a strong relationship with the folks you might want to hire back?
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While physical distance may separate employees, remote workforces can maintain the same company culture found in the office with online collaboration tools.
Barry Deutsch's insight:
As you know, I've been doing a webinar on How to Manage Remotely which takes all our content over 2 decades on hiring, performance management, and employee engagement and mashes it together with the element of working remotely.
The first of 8 elements I cover in this webinar is that companies must provide the infrastructure to allow employees to work well with each other. Here's the statistic that shocked me:
The Right Technology. According to a recent Gartner poll, 54% of HR leaders reported that poor technology and/or infrastructure for remote working is the single largest barrier to its success. This “technology” category encompasses everything from email to internal messaging platforms to video conferencing tools.
This is pretty consistent with the comments shared by CEOs in my webinars. If this is a barrier to getting work done - what does that say about the productivity of your organization?
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From
hbr
A bottom-up approach helps align incentives and find creative solutions.
Barry Deutsch's insight:
Here's a novel idea - how about involving your employees in decision making around layoffs and cost reductions - counterintuitive idea from HBR.
I'm curious if any of you have tried this compared to the traditional method of top-down instead of bottom-up?
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Using the insights from the data analysis, Process Walk and Fishbone Diagram, the team quickly identified simple solutions that made a big impact.
Barry Deutsch's insight:
This is a great example of improving process. The last point I try ot make in my Vistge webinars on Managing Remotely in a Crisis is to identify a couple of significant opportunities for improvement and work on those items that are "IMPORTANT" but not "URGENT" so you can emerge from this crisis even stronger.
Many of these opportunities, you've thrown onto the back burner since the rising tide economic expansion has not presented an opportunity to work on "IMPORTANT" improvements. Now you have a little bit of that extra time available - are you using it to make positive changes to your organization OR are you paralyzed by the crisis and praying that you can just pick where you left off in March?
What 2-3 aspects of your business have decided to work on and improve over the next 3-6 months?
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From
reba
With up to 20% of staff turnover happening within the first 45 days on the job, it’s vital that leaders ensure the dream sold at interview is every part the reality, argues Kerry Drury....
Barry Deutsch's insight:
First the bad news: 20% turnover in first 45 days. Horrible!
What I liked about the article was what has been known up to this point as an on-boarding plan - takes on a new dimension as a customized employee engagement plan for each new hire.
What if you did this with every new hire?
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From
www
Capital One has announced it is extending its work-from-home policy, put in place to stop the spread of the coronavirus in the workforce, through Labor Day weekend. It is latest large company to delay a return to the office.
Barry Deutsch's insight:
Some companies are extending work from home into the fall or through the end of the year. Have you communicated your expectations to your workforce?
Second element the article raises is that over 1/3 of US jobs can be done remotely. For these roles, are you now considering some hybrid form of coming into the office occassionally, but dominately working from home? Many organizations have done this for their sales teams - why not for other roles?
Why does the supply chain analyst, or bookkeeper, or marketing manager have to work full time from the office?
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It's time to start writing your Back to Work Playbook for COVID-19. We certainly aren't past this yet, but the return to work is starting.
Barry Deutsch's insight:
Do you have a playbook for returning back to work in the office or in the new abnormal? Josh Bersin provides some ideas around rethinking your business model.
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Like panning for gold, a crisis filters out the dirt and leaves you with what’s important.
Barry Deutsch's insight:
Interesting short article on the need to work on your culture. First, I loved the quote " Like panning for gold, a crisis filters out the dirt and leaves you with what’s important."
Second, the author infers we should be measuring the success of our culture, but the author doesn't mention what metric, how do we measure it beyond employee surveys?
My thought is that most companies have a fairly dysfunctional culture tied directly to the CEOs behavior. I would recommend listing all the things you aspire to be as an organization - mission, purpose, values. Who do you want to be?
The next step would be to create action plans to move your culture in that direction. Almost all the companies I work with DO NOT have cultural improvement programs in place. Their hope is that next year is better than this year. Are you willing to accept that mediocre definition of culture improvement?
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If you are trying to increase employee engagement or attract better team members consider these strategies that Trader Joe’s uses with great success.
Barry Deutsch's insight:
Some interesting ideas of how Trader Joes creates a unique culture starting at hiring and on-going to reinforce the culture. Perhaps, a few of these ideas might apply to your organization?
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Blanking on employee rewards? Here are 65 creative ideas to help you engage employees and improve organizational culture.
Barry Deutsch's insight:
Great list of employee reward/recognition ideas broken down in key categories. Are you testing any of these ideas in your company?
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From
www
Brené Brown studies human connection -- our ability to empathize, belong, love. In a poignant, funny talk, she shares a deep insight from her research, one that sent her on a personal quest to know herself as well as to understand humanity. A talk to share.
Barry Deutsch's insight:
In my workshops on how to conduct effective 1-to-1s, I've been talking about the need for CEOs, Executives, and managers to first demonstrate vulnerability to get their employees to open up and speak truthfully.
Excellent TED talk on this subject.
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Many organisations are keen to reduce the effort that managers and employees put into performance management, but research suggests this doesn't make systems more effective.
Barry Deutsch's insight:
The article suggests research indicates that decreasing the time and effort spent in performance management has negative effects. Duh! It goes on to suggest ways to improve the traditional performance management process of annual reviews.
My recommendation is blow up your traditional performance management annual appraisal process. At best, it's a sadistic process that everyone hates and most feel is useless.
Instead, we should all be moving to a monthly, dynamic, coaching conversation of on-going performance management.
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Don't constrain your company culture to top-down recognition. Peer recognition is when all employees are empowered to express appreciation for their coworkers, including their peers, managers, and direct reports.
Barry Deutsch's insight:
I just had this conversation today with a group of CEOs in my webinar on Managing Remotely in a Crisis. I was recommending that the companies should implement a peer-to-peer recognition system in addition to their other methods of showing appreciation.
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The smartest executives know that employee engagement surveys are not superficial exercises to solicit high scores to parade around town. The primary purpose of measuring employee engagement is to discover the truth about what’s helping or hurting your employees’ engagement.
Barry Deutsch's insight:
It's somewhat counter-intuitive, but the author is suggesting that even in the middle of a crisis like the Corona Virus - it might be the perfect time to do an employee survey and measure current engagement levels.
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Discover what organizational culture is and the techniques you can use to build a culture that leads to improved productivity, retention, and profitability.
Barry Deutsch's insight:
A really good article on defining culture, and details about how to build/refine your culture. Most interesting statistic was:
85 percent of organizations fail in transforming their cultures.
If 85% fail to transform/improve their culture - what's the biggest pain point?
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The truth is employee satisfaction can be considered a thing of the past.
Barry Deutsch's insight:
Usually I would not post a rant like this about culture or bosses - however, it struck me that it's a familar theme I keep hearing from many people.
Most of my direct clients are the CEOs and senior executives of $10-$100 million companies. They seem blindsided by this feedback over the quality of their subordinates who are managing the bulk of their organization.
Remember the folks at Gallup have identified that 70% of the variation in employee engagement is directly tied to the manager. If you're manager sucks, you then hate your job, your engagement is low, and your effort level is minimal because you no longer care.
My first question is why the CEOs of entrepreneurial and small businesses are blind the capability of their managers, and secondly, why do they accept such poor levels of effort from their workforce when the studies show that 50-70 percent are disengaged and a significant reason is the manager?
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From
blog
It can be hard to connect with remote team members, but these virtual activities will make culture building and employee engagement a breeze.
Barry Deutsch's insight:
Some great ideas that I've been mentioning in my Vistage Webinars for team-building, relationship development, fun, and culture enhancement.
Some of these you may be already doing - like the Birthday celebrations and morning donut/coffee breaks. There are also some other creative ideas mentioned that I've not yet considered.
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Is your team satisfied? Meaning, are they showing up and going through the motions? Or, is your team engaged? Meaning, do they want to be involved and...
Barry Deutsch's insight:
I didn't find this article to live up to the headline about how to go from good to great in employee engagement. It offered a few simple suggestions.
What caught my eye was the couple of studies they mentioned that showed employees think their employer has blown it during the Corona Virus Crisis. These studies ranged from 45-55%. I saw one the other day that said 75% felt their employer had done a terrible job.
If those stats/surveys are accurate and reflect what's going on in your organization, what's your plan to fix it?
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From
www
Companies should improve their performance management process to acknowledge employee performance and contributions.
Barry Deutsch's insight:
Interesting thoughts about performance mangement linked to rewards/recognition. Here are some of my favorite quotes from the article:
"biggest barriers to effective performance management, a top obstacle they identified was an inability to adequately reward or incentivize performance that exceeds expectations."
"a recognition or award—had the strongest link to effectiveness."
"Top-performing organizations, were significantly more likely than all other companies to reward employees with a financial bonus or a recognition or award."
How closely is your non-monetary reward/recognition system linked to your performance management process?
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Consider both immediate and long-term actions when it comes to your employee engagement strategy.
Barry Deutsch's insight:
Some good points in this article about employee engagement around teaching listening skills (not a strong trait of managers), effective managers (very little training going on teaching folks to be great managers - first thing to be cut in belt tightening), and working on purpose.
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My experience over 30 years of working with small businesses and entrepreneurial organizations is that the ones who manage to achieve creating high performing teams are those that dedicate specific time to team building activities.