In this episode of Transform Your Workplace, we talk with the founder of Confidence Coach, Scott Ballard, about the pressing issue of employee disengagement in today’s workforce. Learn how to partner with and invest in your people while pursuing the vision, dreams, and goals of your business.
GUEST AT A GLANCE
Scott Ballard is the founder of Confidence Coach LLC and is an author, speaker, and coach for business leaders who seek to boost employee engagement. Whether it’s with small businesses or Fortune 500 companies, Scott is passionate about helping leaders tap into their greatest resource: their employees.
A QUICK GLIMPSE INTO OUR PODCAST
🔊 Podcast: Transform Your Workplace, sponsored by Xenium HR
🎙️ Host: Brandon Laws
📋 In his own words: “The Transform Your Workplace podcast is your go-to source for the latest workplace trends, big ideas, and time-tested methods straight from the mouths of industry experts and respected thought-leaders.”
CLOSING THE GAP
According to recent guest Scott Ballard, only 20% of employees are truly engaged by their leaders in the workplace. Despite the staggering lack of engagement among the other 80%, change is indeed possible. First, leaders must recognize and address what Scott calls the root cause of disengagement: “the gap between the vision or the goal or the dream for the company and the employee’s dream and goal and vision for their life.”
Employees need to see that it isn’t just about the company’s profits, but it’s actually about a vehicle for both the company and its people to build something. Scott says businesses should open the conversation and see what happens with employee engagement when we say, “Hey, we’re doing this together, and you can build your life and your dreams and your goals, and we can build the company.”
PODCAST EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS
Happiness Here and Now
“How much more effective are people when, in their own life, they’re achieving their own dreams and goals? And then they come to work and they’re naturally already an achiever. They’re already winning in some way […]. They bring that to the company, and they create so much more value. And they’re happier because happiness comes with progression of the realization of a goal. That’s where we become happy. It’s not the destination. It’s your 14 years there. That’s what you’re excited about is the progress you’re making in your life.”
The Dreams of Us All
“When a business owner starts a business, he or she has a dream, vision, goal for that business, to do something with the business and their life, and it’s all positive. […] And that takes them through all of these challenges, starting a business, growing it, like all the ups and downs, all the failures, all the mistakes. But because it’s their dream and their vision goal is so strong, they’re resilient. They’re able to keep going through that. But […] we as owners, as leaders, forget that this is in everybody. But we only think about ourselves. So our selfishness actually cuts us off from all the energy, all the drive, all the resilience that our employees have in them.”
Just Ask
“If we even just asked them, ‘What are your dreams and goals for your life? And how can we as a company, in some small way, come alongside you and partner with you?’ But when we stand in our silo, selfishly, as an owner, as a leader in a business, and we only think about our own dreams and goals, we exclude all these people — forty people working for us. That is 40 sets of energy and passion and value creation that if we would just harness a little bit and they would bring that into the business, disengagement would go away.”
Finding the Passion
“I’m in my sixties, but I work a lot with 20- and 30-year-old employees […]. They want something that they can be passionate about. Well, if you treat them like a number or a widget or whatever, that is the most disengaging activity we could do as leaders in a business. […] No matter what technology does, it’s still about people, with people working together, creating value, and it’ll always be that. It still comes down to two people, but we’ve lost sight of the other person. Then, we wonder why they won’t do more and why they’re acting out, but we’ve disengaged them. We have control of the engagement, but we’ve given it up and we’ve just said ‘This just about me and my company.’”
Prioritizing Your People
“Your employees are your first customers. They know more about your business, have more impact on the bottom line, and have bigger influence than anybody. And yet we spend more with our paying customers than we do with the people that actually have the greatest impact. So we need to look at them and go, ‘Okay, how can we engage them in a win-win? How can we engage them by making deposits in them?’”
Taking Risks
“People respond to love as a strategy. This is what this really is, and I know it freaks people out in business, but what motivates people is unconditionally loving them where they’re at and believing for where they wanna go. And if I’m a leader, and I really want to leave a legacy, I think it’s found there.”
LEARN MORE
Interested in finding out how you can boost employee engagement? Schedule a free consultation with Confidence Coach Scott Ballard here.