Well, good morning, everyone, and welcome to AED Foundation's webinar entitled Two Birds, One Stone, Creating Workplace Differentiation Through Employee Engagement and Inclusion. I have the pleasure this morning of taking you through this presentation and materials. My name is Brian Giroux, and as way of background, I spent 31 years in corporate America working for a Fortune 50 company, and primarily three roles in manufacturing, logistics, and HR. And during my tenure, I also spent about the last 10 years of that in the OE and OD side of the business, and our global team worked on about 200 projects worldwide, including the rollout of corporate values, employee engagement, and lean manufacturing. And while in manufacturing and logistics, I also had the privilege of doing nine startups and managing 15 facilities in North and South America. So I hope today to share with you not only research, which I continue to be heavily involved with as a senior fellow at the conference board in New York City, but also as I continue to study, research, and help people with my consulting business. So that's a little bit of background on myself. To get started, I am going to make an assumption which typically is always true, and that is that the people that are on this webinar and participating, as well as those that you are trying to influence, other leaders in your organization, are intelligent, they're very busy, and they have great intentions regarding the people side of the business, but I will remind all of us that we judge ourselves by our intentions, and everyone else is judging us by our actions. So as we go through this material today, I would encourage you to take some notes, and more importantly, to leave with one or two actionable items that you ultimately can take and apply, and we'll focus a lot on the practical and tactical side. Samuel Johnson said once that people need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed, and so my goal today is to help remind you of some things that in the busyness of life and of work sometimes may slip through the cracks, but we do know them, we just need to be reminded. So as we look at this subject, let's look at the playing field. Here's some of the current landscape that we're dealing with in the United States. Based upon the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics report, there's 5.4 million job openings currently in the United States, and in the last month reported, over 3 million employees decided to quit their job and look for something different. Now if you look at those two statistics and then you look at other research, there's a lot of different numbers out there, but one that's usually identified and agreed upon is that conservatively, when you have to replace an individual, you're looking at about 20% of their salary in the total cost of getting new people, getting them on board, et cetera. And this subject that we're going to talk about in more detail, engagement, research also shows that if you have a disengaged employee, i.e. someone who shows up and only does what they're told and nothing else, that basically you're looking at about 34% of their salary being waste and cost because of that disengagement. So that's the playing field that we're dealing with. So the plan for the day in the next few minutes is to lay some groundwork. We'll look at three operational definitions. I'll share with you some research on employee engagement and inclusion and why there's a business case for focusing and spending time and discipline in it. And I'll share with you a mental model that really focuses in on the behavioral side. I'll share with you five pesky birds, tying back to the title of this presentation. These pesky birds seem to come up routinely with people initiatives. And then seven common stones that can be leveraged and create a ripple effect and enhance both engagement and inclusion. We have included, when you went online, there's an outline of this presentation to help you with taking notes. And during the course of this, there'll be several individual exercises. One last logistics for you is that this is being recorded, but we do have a live chat feature. So during the course of it, if you would like to type in a quick message or comment, I'll be able to see those and share those with the entire group. So let's move on. Let's start with some key operational definitions. And I think this is so important, because we're going to talk about the importance of clarity. And too often we use words and people have slightly different definitions, and therefore they have slightly different beliefs and ultimately behaviors that go with those. So let's look at three specifically that I would like to address today with you. The first is employee engagement. Not a new concept, been around for over 15 years, but for purposes of today, let's think about employee engagement as having three major components. One, commitment. Two, effort, also referred to as discretionary effort. And three, loyalty. Now, loyalty is important. We're not talking about loyalty because of lifetime employment, but we're talking about loyalty to the mission of your organization, to the objectives, to maintaining the brand, satisfying the customers, and using your assets respectfully. That's the type of loyalty that we're talking about. Secondly, employee engagement has been researched tremendously in large studies. And at the end of the day, over 300 factors have been identified as potential drivers, but they can actually go into two large buckets. The first bucket is rational. The rational items would include things like competitive wages and benefits, providing a safe place to work, providing basic tools to do the job, and basic training to do the job. I would consider these to be getting a ticket just to enter the game. These are the things that we have to provide, and they have to be done first before we can move to the second set, which are the E or the emotional elements. And the best way that I can share with you and describe for you the emotional elements is they're wrapped around what I refer to as the triple I. The first I is identity. Helping people understand the identity of who they work for, why they should feel proud to be part of the organization with its rich history and its bright future. That identity is extremely important. The second I on the emotional side is importance. And in this particular case, it's helping employees understand the importance of doing things, following the policies, the practices, the procedures, and the values within your organization. And then finally, the third I is helping the employees understand the impact that they have on the bigger picture. Classic story, an individual thinks that their job is only to make bricks until they're brought to a cathedral, and all of a sudden now they believe and feel that they're part of a team building beautiful structures. So identity, importance, and impact and all the things that drive that are on the emotional side of engagement. And bottom line, lots of people have started initiatives and engagement, but they've fallen short because they do not consistently get four things right, and that is employees doing the right thing at the right time, the right way, for the right reason. Let me repeat that. It's doing the right thing at the right time, the right way, for the right reason. And the right reason will help you understand, and we'll talk about that a little bit more, whether they're doing it simply to comply or they've moved down the journey and are showing more commitment. So that's employee engagement. Secondly, inclusion. For today's purposes, let's use the definition of inclusion, inclusion being actively involving everyone. Actively, not passively, and involving everyone regardless of where they are in the organization. And that requires several things. One, involvement. Can't be a spectator. Secondly, respect and respecting different perspectives, different opinions, different experiences. And then third and important, and very important, is connection and reconnection over and over again because it's really about a contact sport. And finally, diversity supports inclusion. It's important to have diversity, but having diversity and then not being inclusive without diversity is also a challenge. Finally, let's talk about differentiation, and you use that in your business every single day. And as depicted by the picture to the right, trying to provide customers and clients solutions to their business, whether they be solutions for new opportunities or solutions to solve problems. And the key is, can we differentiate ourselves from others that are trying to do the same thing? Can we distinguish ourselves in our organization? Can we do things to make us more attractive than someone else? And can we highlight some of those unique qualities that we have? We use this all the time with our products and services, but it's also critical in the people side of the business. So those are the definitions for the day. Next, we talked about macro challenges. Let's talk specifically about a few more examples of the challenges today and in the future of finding, hiring, and keeping talents, and why differentiation in the workplace may be absolutely critical. So first, the Bureau of Labor Statistics forecast that diesel mechanics and machines, the rate of growth in that industry will be 12% annually. Lots and lots of people who are retiring and or there are new skills needed, a tremendous growth in that technician side. Secondly, the American Welding Society estimates that by the year 2020, there could be a shortage of up to 300,000 individuals related to welding. Responsibilities and processes, a huge, huge gap. And then another one from the American Trucking Association, they believe based on their forecast that the shortage for qualified drivers may balloon to up to 175,000 in the near future. Two other statistics not on your screen that you might want to also think about is there was a new manpower group talent shortage survey recently completed, and they identified the 10 most difficult jobs currently to fill in the United States. And included in that were skilled trades, drivers, engineers, and technicians. Many of those important to our business success. And then finally, Deloitte Consulting also just finished a study and said over the next decade, nearly three and a half million manufacturing jobs will be needed and two million are expected to go unfilled due to skill gap. So the old adage, the war for talent is going to become even more and more important in the future. Differentiation. One size does not fit all. You know that based upon all the activity that you do with your customers. And historically, differentiation has happened in the business side with your customers through three primary areas. Pricing and all the things that can be done with pricing and discounting, bundling, new products and services being offered, and then the overall customer experience from initial inquiry all the way through ongoing product support. That differentiation also can be done and has been done in the people side of the business. Historically, many organizations have used wage and benefits as a differentiator for some type of innovative policies and procedures. Or some organizations have also looked at the overall employee experience. Now, historically, the rational elements used to differentiate like pay and benefits and long-term employment and perks like perhaps child care and fitness facilities, the trend absolutely has been towards moving towards the same versus different as competition has grown. People have found that in order to be successful and to survive that they can't offer the highest wages and the highest benefits and some of those traditional rational elements. The other area in the overall experience side where other organizations have found some success and where we'll spend the rest of the time today is on the emotional elements, things like engaging and creating an inclusive business culture, things like values-based behavior, things like using more non-financial reinforcement, and things like personal development and growth. Differentiation is used in your organization for your customers. It also has been and can continue to be used and leveraged in the space for your employees. Let me share with you some compelling research on the business case for working on and getting employee engagement and inclusiveness in your organization. Based on studies by the conference board, they concluded that engaged employees performance is 20 to 28% higher than those that are not engaged. T&T Employment Insights shared and found that when employees were engaged they had and provided much more successful customer experiences. The Corporate Leadership Council found that employees who are engaged try 50% harder and they're 80% less likely to leave the organization. DDI found that looking at engagement that turnover absenteeism and quality of work were all significantly better for those organizations and those groups that had engagement. Gallup also found in their research that when an employee was engaged they were much stronger advocates for your company, for your products, and your services. Taking it one step further, if we look at an IBM and Connexus study that was done specifically with equipment dealers, they looked at a number of dealers in North America and looked at individual branches and what they found was that those branches with higher levels of engagement outperformed the other branches in financial results, in better productivity and quality with technician-related reworking, higher productivity, better safety, and lower turnover. There's much, much more research out there, broad in nature and even broken down by individual business sectors, but there is some compelling research that says when you are able to provide and achieve higher levels of employee engagement, there is a bottom line business benefit. The same can be said for inclusion. Here's a few examples. Deloitte found that when they looked at a broad study and looked at teams that had inclusion and had everyone actively participating, they outperformed other teams by 80%, almost double. They also found in another study that inclusive teams were much more change-ready and that they were much more creative and innovative, all very important factors for business. In addition, other research has found that inclusion creates better problem solving and flexibility and then a desire and an ability to learn more from each other regardless of level in the organization. Finally, a great opportunity and a great advantage is that when there's more inclusion inside, you become more appealing outside to a wider range of customers and suppliers. Again, lots and lots of research out there. I've only given you a few examples, and if you'd like some more, I'll share with you at the end on how we can have some dialogue about that and share some more information. There is absolutely a business reason for trying to drive and differentiate yourself through higher levels of employee engagement and inclusion. I'd like to share with you a mental model for the rest of this presentation because it really focuses on what most of this activity is going to be about, and it's behavioral, not process. It's behavioral. Your organizations, your dealerships have values and principles. Most of those are written. Some of them aren't, but there are values and principles for every organization. Ultimately, those values and principles create a behavioral blueprint for actions and behaviors in the organization, what's tolerated, what's reinforced, where are the boundaries. Based upon that, those actions and behaviors and their consistency or inconsistency drive a number of things. They will drive organizational results and whether you have engaged or disengaged employees. They will drive your image, your reputation, and your brand not only externally to customers but also in the community and also as you recruit and find the next generation of employees. They also will either increase or decrease your business risk and will help you or hurt you in the area of compliance. So bottom line is I hope that you remember this, that employee engagement and inclusion are natural outgrowths of your business culture and values. They will either complement or they will conflict, bottom line. So that's the first part of our presentation today. Now let's talk about five pesky birds. There are many of them out there, some more annoying than others like this pigeon on the boy's head, but these are the five we'd like to talk about today. The first is commitment, the second change, the third individual accountability, the fourth, the importance of leaders modeling the behaviors they want others to do, and five, the area of how we measure our progress and our success. So let's look at each of those in a little bit more detail. So let's start with commitment or what I call the wild goose chase. There are basically three critical questions that an organization needs to answer honestly to decide whether or not something is important or not important. In the case of engagement and inclusion, they're no different than many other initiatives in the people side of the business. So the first one is, is this a need to do or a nice to do? This really gets to the heart of whether or not there is significant strategic value for the business. If it is a need to do and there is perceived strategic value in doing it, then you will allocate time, money, and talent to do it. If not, it will fall down in the priority ranks and it will quickly die as another program or initiative. The second one is how you measure success. Is it an outcome or an objective? If we're looking strictly for an objective, traditionally many organizations have failed because they simply look at a single number, and typically that's in some type of survey form. And they forget that it ultimately is an outcome of many things and it's influencing many different results, not just one single result. And then finally, the third question is, is this considered to be an integrated process or is it a standalone program traditionally just implemented through HR? I would conclude based upon all of my experience and the research that I continue to see that if your organization feels that the initiatives in the people side of the business, the importance of differentiating yourselves in the workplace and things like employee engagement and inclusion are a need to, are an ultimate outcome, and that are part of an integrated process, you will be much, much more successful with Asbestos Bird. Next, let's talk about change. And I like this cartoon because it goes with what many people feel changes for the birds. Interesting research by Price Waterhouse Cooper in a very, very large study found that nine out of ten of the key barriers to successful change are people-related. They're not process. They're not resource. They're people-related. Typically, one of the biggest resistance is that people tend to focus on what they will lose or what they're giving up that they think is important. One of the challenges with this pesky bird is too often we look at the resistance and we only look at one side of the equation. So I'd like to show you both sides of the equation. In this equation, let's start at the bottom. There's a natural evolution that happens in any organization's culture, i.e., in the accepted or perceived way that we do things and the behaviors that we accept and tolerate and reinforce. It starts with compliance. It's mandatory I have to do it, at least while you're watching me. Then it moves to commitment, more people understanding it, seeing what's in it for them as well as what's in it for the organization. Then we hit a very critical pinch point. That pinch point hurts because at that point we have to address some behaviors that aren't necessarily aligned. The problem with this pesky bird is real simple and that is that most people want to spend all their time strictly on the rational side. The rational side is very vocal and it typically sounds like this, I can't change or I can't do that because you haven't done something. You haven't provided time, tools, training, resources, translations, documentation, software, on and on and on. Those are important to address and most of the time those get addressed. The problem is that too often the other side of the equation is not addressed and that side of the equation is the emotional side. Think of the emotional side as the belief side and it's not articulated outwardly as often as the rational elements are, but basically the individual's behaviors are saying I don't want to because it changes my roles, it changes my responsibilities, it changes the way I like to do things. Until you break through and address both those rational and emotional issues or think of the rational as barriers and the emotional as beliefs, you will not get to the third and final stage that we all want to get to when we're looking at change and that is embedding where it becomes a normal behavior that people don't even think about. It's just the way that we do things. So that pesky bird traditionally ends up with all of the eggs being in one basket and those being on the rational side and the emotional side does not get adequately addressed. Okay, the third pesky bird is what I refer to as water off a duck's back and it has to do with accountability, personal accountability. Now, when I go in and talk to clients and work with clients, one of the things that we talk about and some of the exercises that we do are ask people if they can spot unaccountability and not surprising, people can spot unaccountability very easily. They see people showing a lack of interest. They see people making omissions and continually saying, well, I forgot or I didn't think it was important or leaving out critical information. They see people being silent and trying to avoid any discussion about accountability. They see people making excuses and they see people pointing out other inadequacies that cause things not to be done like documentation and tools and processes and time, et cetera. So they can spot unaccountability. The problem is it's not addressed. It's tolerated and becomes part of the culture. So one of the things that's very important with this pesky book is to change people's perceptions of what accountability is. It's not about blame and shame. It's about the three factors listed below, about proactively influencing, not setting back and not waiting for one particular group to do it, but proactively influencing. It's about taking ownership and taking ownership of a totally different set of behaviors than just taking something from someone short-term. And then ultimately about delivering results. The other thing in this particular case that's very important is too often in accountability, accountability language is not holistically used. What I mean by that is accountability is only talked about when something goes wrong and is never associated with doing something right, when people do the right thing at the right time in the right way for the right reason. One other piece of interesting research in this area is that a recent study by AMA Enterprise indicated that more than 20% of all managers they surveyed believed that 20 to 30% of their employees actively avoided responsibility. Lots of opportunity for improvement, lots of waste in that particular area. The fourth pesky bird is what I refer to as chickening out. It's about behavior change and the fact that it's hard. But at the end of the day, people are watching leaders in the organization. And when we talk about things in the people side of the business, specifically about engagement and about inclusion, many leaders push back and say, well, that's just more stuff to do versus, no, it's about how you do the things you're supposed to be doing anyway. And what's the business case for not chickening out and not letting leaders back up or out? Well, it's real simple. A 10-year study was done and looked at the criticalness of leaders' behavior and found that leadership behavior and style had a 35% impact on the discretionary effort of the direct reports. Huge, huge impact on productivity and engagement. Finally, the last area, the pesky bird is measurement. In this particular case, we could talk a lot about it, but at the end of the day, it's about putting all your eggs into one basket or what I call the SI syndrome, which is single indicator syndrome. Reports, real-time data, surveys are absolutely important. But don't forget the power of other things, like paying attention to patterns of behavior, looking to see if processes are simply a checked transaction being done or it also includes quality interaction, and then measuring and asking for and understanding individual beliefs. Too often in these initiatives and other people initiatives, we see a single indicator being used and traditionally it's a survey number and that is not enough. That will cause it very quickly to move from a need to a nice to do. So we've covered the five pesky birds, so I'd like to now take two minutes and I would like for you to reflect on the information that we've covered and to think about the following three questions. First, do you believe your organization agrees there's a strategic value in workplace differentiation? Or is it okay to be like everybody else? And if workplace differentiation is important, where have you put most of your time and energy? On the rational side or the emotional side? Secondly, we shared a bunch of research on engagement, inclusion, and workforce forecast trends. What one or two items stood out the most to you there? And then finally, we talked about five pesky birds, we talked about commitment, about change, about accountability, about the importance of leaders modeling and not chickening out, and the importance of having a broad measurement base and not a single indicator. Which one of those pesky birds is hindering your organization the most right now? So I'm going to stop for about 90 seconds and let you reflect on those three questions and hopefully you'll jot a couple of answers down and then we'll be back to talk about some common solutions. So we'll be back in about 90 seconds. Thank you. Okay, well, I hope Don and Kathy and Kevin and Scott and many others, I hope you took a second and jotted down your answers to these questions. And I hope that we have generated some questions and some ideas for you. Let's look at the last section then. Let's look at seven stones. These stones, again, sticking with our title of Two Birds, One Stone, can be leveraged. And if these activities and these behaviors are done, you get a double bang for your buck. You'll see potential improvements in engagement and inclusion, which could differentiate your workplace. So here are the seven that we're going to talk about. And again, we'll talk about these in more detail. But you're going to see in this list that many, many of them are behavioral-based, going back to what is your culture and your values saying that should be a priority and should be done on a regular basis. So let's start with clarity. Clarity involves three things. It helps build focus on what to do. It helps build understanding on when and how to do it. And it helps build trust. Who do we do it with and who do we do it for? It helps build focus, understanding, and trust. Too often what I see and what I continually find clients struggling with is that we treat communications as a single step using lots of technology versus what it is, which is a three-step process. So the first step to provide clarity in communications is to share information. The second step is to generate understanding. And the third step is to reinforce key messages. So sharing information, step one, is done faster and faster today with all sorts of new technology. But then the second step needs to absolutely happen, which is to generate understanding. What am I to do with this information? Am I supposed to do something the same or different? And the third then is to reinforce key messages because we're being inundated with thousands and thousands and thousands of messages every single day. The second thing to think about with clarity is some research and some numbers that I'm going to share with you now. Think about the fact that research shows that 20% to 30% of what we intend to communicate is misunderstood or not heard at all. Twenty to 30% of what we intend is not heard or understood at all. Secondly, think about the fact that the average person has to hear critical messages at least seven times before it registers and stays with them. Again, it has nothing to do with how intelligent the individual is. It has to do with the fact that we're being inundated with messages every single day. So if we hear something over and over again, in a variety of ways, we start to think, oh, that must be important because we're continuing to hear about that. And third, 90% will be forgotten in one week without reinforcement. So if we want to drive engagement, if we want to drive inclusion, if we want to differentiate ourselves from many other organizations, one thing that can be done is to focus on providing clarity in communications, remembering the three steps and remembering lots and lots of very interesting and very holistic data on communication. If that doesn't help, then let me give you one other research fact here. Research has found that a business with 100 employees spends an average downtime of 17 hours a week clarifying communication. Let me repeat that. Businesses with 100 employees spend an average downtime of 17 hours a week clarifying communications. If you extrapolate that out, that comes out to about a half a million dollars a year. Huge opportunity. All right, next. Showing genuine interest and concern. It's all about small acts. And it's also about how leaders use their time. So leaders initiating contact or responding when contacted is very important. When we initiate contact with individuals, finding out how are you, seeking their input and asking them and listening to how they feel about something, that is engaging, that is inclusive, that differentiates yourself. Versus those organizations where the leaders simply respond to emails, texts, phone calls, and meeting requests. Showing genuine interest and concern. The second area in how time is used by leaders is about the classic question of quantity versus quality. When we provide both quality and quantity time for conversations with our employees, we create a feeling that they are valued and that they are important. That makes a difference in your workplace. And then third is can you balance providing output and requesting input? Many leaders in many organizations tend to have leaders who provide output. They download information, they share their opinions, and they try to convince others of why something is important and why something should be done. Balancing that with seeking input, asking questions, listening, and reflecting on other spots and ideas is absolutely critical for engagement, it's critical for inclusion, and it will differentiate you from many, many employers. The third area has to do with, is my opinion important, does it count? Huge impact on engagement, huge impact on inclusion. So here's a couple of things. Organizations having some type of agreement on when leaders will respond to employees in a timely manner. Not getting a question and referring it to someone else or telling them to go to HR, telling them to go to a website, but following through. And then thirdly is asking, using, and recognizing employees' feedback. Absolutely critical. When you ask me my opinion, when you value my input, during and at the beginning of change and not the end of change, then I feel engaged, then I feel more inclusive versus exclusive. And then inclusive is much more differentiated today than exclusive. All right, so there's three of our stones to create a ripple effect. Let's look at the fourth one. And this one has to do with a very simple formula. That formula's to the right, and it talks about rules without relationships equals resistance. Very, very powerful in life, very, very powerful in the workplace. So how do we create these relationships? Well, we create these relationships in a variety of ways in our organization. One is by our span of control. The second area is by our organizational structure and having things like solid reporting lines and dotted reporting lines. And we also create these relationships by if we are asked to manage employees who are off-site, people who work from their homes or have their trucks with them and then just go out to the field from there. Relationships are very important because when we develop relationships, typically we will also develop a level of trust. And so when human nature happens and an error occurs and or a mistake is made, we will tend to give the individual the benefit of the doubt. We will trust them, and we won't start thinking about all sorts of negative motives and reasons. One of the critical areas in this particular subject of relationships, however, is how well we establish boundaries in our organization. And many of my clients are struggling with this today. So, for example, are there boundaries about dating coworkers? Are there boundaries about if we should friend or not friend individuals in social media? Are there boundaries established on what is accepted and unaccepted if we participate, for example, in sports teams? Okay, to participate in sports teams with coworkers, but then what about afterwards when we're celebrating? Where are the lines there? Good relationships, professional relationships have to have some boundaries, and many organizations have not addressed that area yet. Next has to do with a very classic and very, very important area called showing appreciation. Historically, organizations have fallen into a trap where they've created a compound word called reward and recognition. Reward is something that has financial value, whether it's a gift certificate, a trip, a monetary gift. We're talking about here recognition, which is a very positive influence. It's a reinforcer, and it's emotional in nature. Some recent research that came out from the Harvard Business Review looked at the importance of showing appreciation and recognition in organizations and found that those high-performing organizations tended to have a ratio of praise to criticism of six to one. So six times as many thank yous, showing appreciation versus critiquing, criticizing, and those organizations that had a lower ratio tended to be less effective in performance. Also important to remember that we have to match the strokes to the folks. Some people love public recognition, some hate it. Some people love to be recognized as an individual. Others prefer to be recognized as a team. Some prefer it written, some prefer it face-to-face. Very important that we don't create one-size-fits-all in this area of reinforcement and recognition. And one of the most important recognitions that we can provide to individuals today is to give them presence. So when we do get time with them, they get all of our attention and we're not easily distracted by outside influences or electronics that we're carrying on our hip. The sixth area has to do with personal development. Very, very important. People want to improve. They want to improve so they can do their job better. They want to improve so that they can perhaps get rewarded for next-level opportunities. Very, very important. And two things critical here to keep in mind. The first is that the Corporate Leadership Council has done some extensive research and found that adults learn best using the 70, 20, 10 rule. They learn best 70% of the time by hands-on through experiencing it. They learn 20% of the time through coaching and feedback and they learn 10% of the time effectively through formal training. So sending somebody to a class or having them attend a webinar falls into that 10% category. It's that interaction, that connection, that coaching, and that feedback while they're practicing and doing it that will cause them to develop that skill even faster. The other thing that's critical in personal development has to do with what I call GAAF, which is organizations have to get good at giving and accepting feedback. And I would tell you that many of my clients struggle in that area. They tend to be much better at giving feedback than receiving feedback. And it's critical that if we're going to improve in our personal development or improve as an organization that we get much, much better at both giving and accepting feedback. Finally, another critical stone that can be used in this area of empowerment, and empowerment is like the old-fashioned milking stool, has three legs. You have the leg for responsibility, you have the leg for accountability, and you have the leg for authority. Too often what happens in organizations is that they talk about empowerment and they talk about giving people responsibility and accountability. Unfortunately, they saw off, they cut off, they eliminate, they don't screw in the leg of authority. True empowerment does a couple of things. It creates a sense of autonomy, creates the ability to give certain choices, it makes people feel that you believe that they're competent and can be trusted, and it creates and helps people feel that they can influence decisions before they're made. Very, very important, a very distinguishing factor in the workplace. It's also helping employees understand not only how to do something, but why they need to do it and why it's important. And it's also very important in this area of empowerment to set clear boundaries. Clear boundaries being that there really is no absolute authority for most individuals in your organization. You need to know where they can and can't do certain things. Very, very important, and again, these seven stones, if done effectively with behaviors more than processes, are going to create differentiation in the workplace, are going to create higher levels of engagement and a feeling of being inclusive. So, second exercise for you. Again, I'll give you just a couple of minutes to reflect on these questions. First question is, if you think about the stones that we talked about, we talked about clarity, we talked about showing genuine interest and concern, we talked about asking and using people's opinions and building positive professional relationships, about showing appreciation, about the importance of personal growth and development, and finally, the importance of providing empowerment. Which of those stones does your organization do fairly well now that you can build upon? Second question, which of those stones that we talked about could be leveraged through your organizational values that you already have and use? And third, what current behaviors or activities could be leveraged in these areas to create that ripple effect and allow two birds to be attacked with one stone? So, I'll give you, again, a couple of minutes to reflect on these. Remember that actions and behaviors done consistently and sincerely will distinguish your workplace, and it's important to look at those opportunities where we can leverage common solutions. So, I'll give you just a couple of seconds. So, let's summarize what we've talked about in the last hour. We've talked about the basic supply and demand issue that the war for talent has and will continue to be very strong. And the bottom line is, how will you differentiate your workplace? How will you create a different work environment? And will you use rational, emotional, or a combination of both to create that distinction? At the end of the day, if you create that distinction and you get that workforce, what you're really looking for is four things. You're looking to ultimately get their heads, which are their ideas, their creative problem solving. You're trying to get their hearts so that they're not doing it just to comply with their show true commitment. You obviously need their hands to do the physical work, and you need their habits so that it's consistently done all the time, not just some of the time. So, if you are successful and if you can create differentiation in your workplace, if you can create higher levels of engagement and inclusion, you will ultimately create and get more of their heads, their hearts, their hands, and their habits. So, the question that I would leave you with and one that I hope you will follow and think of some of the practical things we've talked about today is this. How will your organization differentiate itself to find, to hire, to engage, and to keep talent? It's not just a question of finding them and keeping them, because if you keep talent that is not engaged, you will not reach your full potential. So, we have time for a couple of questions if you'd like to type anything in. Otherwise, we really appreciate your time and your attention. Thank you so much for your time today. If you have any questions and would like to discuss this more, please feel free to check my website out and or you can correspond directly with me at the email address below. So, if we don't have any questions, I wish you a great day and hope you continue to work on ways to differentiate yourself in the workplace so that you can have your high-performing teams. Thank you.

employee engagement

inclusion

differentiation

communication clarity

building relationships

balanced leadership

recognizing contributions

empowering employees

attracting top talent