The modern mind group believe there are five key factors that play a part in business performance. The PEACE formula stands for People, Engagement, Activities, Culture, and Execution. These are all factors you as a leader should be monitoring closely when looking to improve performance levels in your organisation, specifically looking more at employee performance which greatly affects business performance. People CEO Melissa Curran of the Modern Mind Group believes “in a world where no one leaves a company due to poor leadership" and states across all platforms that “people” should be the core value of every organisation and should come first before process. Hiring people with similar values and goals that align with the business as well as compatible behaviours and competencies is usually more important than current experience levels. This is because any employee can be trained to a high standard, unlike more personal factors that are far more challenging to change and sometimes impossible. What you’ll need to review in order to ensure you hire the correct people for your organisation is the onboarding process, from the interview all the way to the first 6 months of working at your organisation. Everything begins during the application phase, assess your candidates carefully as you wouldn't want to say no to the perfect employee before they’d even had a chance. So, firstly you should begin to review your interview strategy, are the questions you’re asking relevant enough? Do you provide enough information about the business? You should make sure that you introduce them to company policies, terms and conditions of their employment, regular duties, responsibilities and workplace location. When looking past the hiring phase, you should then review all strategies you have in place to make your new employee(s) feel welcomed and satisfied with the amount of help provided. You may want to create a digital handbook explaining expectations, role duties, policies etc as the first few weeks can consist of a slight knowledge overload for an employee. Ensure a leader, manager or co-worker has freed up time in order to work closely with the new employee not only for help but to kick-start good work relationships. With a strong onboarding process, you should be creating early psychological safety and avoiding short term employees. Engagement a Gallup study shows that highly engaged workplaces saw 41% lower absenteeism and companies with a highly engaged workforce are 21% more profitable than the average business. Employee engagement often gets confused with employee motivation, although they have their similarities, they are attained in different ways and produce different results. Employee engagement VS motivation is a common topic discussed when looking to improve business results through the employees, although motivation is a much more personal factor so although it is important to help motivate your employees, engagement is what you will want to review to increase performance levels. You may be wondering, how do I review employee engagement? Commonly, employee engagement surveys are conducted quarterly and yearly to measure engagement levels, this then gives helpful insights into where employees are best engaged and where they may be disengaged. You should then use this information as a guideline on what to work on next within your organisation with well thought out strategies. For example, you may find that employees aren't as engaged with their leaders as they should be, this is a sign you need to hold more team meetings where leaders and managers all receive time to talk about recent developments, achievements and new goals. If employees aren’t feeling engaged with their work, you may be micro-managing too much, allow employees the opportunity to take ownership of projects or activities, you could allow employee hosted meetings where the leaders do more of the listening and employees are free to express new ideas, concerns and their own goals. Activities It is crucial that leaders connect with their employees on all levels, this means good communication, motivating each other, giving and receiving feedback, and making sure employees' voices are heard. Good relationships between leader and employee bring psychological safety which is essential to have in every organisation and we have already listed 6 questions to create psychological safety. The definition of psychological safety is "the belief that you won't be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes" and it is known as the most impactful factor within teams since it allows the freedom to think and express ideas freely without embarrassment or uncalled for consequences. You should begin to review how much time is spent with your employees, both within formal meetings and informal meetings or activities, as employees will need a balance between strict formal talk and more free laid back self-expression to form a good bond and there could be a few negatives if you lean too far to one side. For example, if you are always addressing your employees in strict and formal tenses only, there will be a lack of personal connection which affects the relationship and how well you will communicate together. Availability also plays a large part in connection. How often are you too busy to let employees into your office? How often do you reply to texts or emails? How quickly do you get back to your employees throughout the day? If you are unavailable or even inaccessible to your employees you aren’t doing your job as a leader, time management is important for both employees and leaders, there should be a time in your day for employee's questions or concerns and if there is not, it is highly recommended you review your current schedule and prioritise your employees. Communication is the key to any team, if you are missing calls or getting back to emails too late, you are already showing signs of bad communication which is often offputting to employees.
Culture
Workplace culture will stem from the organisation's leadership and management team and ideally, will then have a knock-on effect through all employees, due to this, workplace culture will naturally form within every organisation but with some smart thinking, it is possible to create the ideal culture you want for your business. There are no set “types of workplace culture” as they can all have small qualities of each other, be similar or dissimilar and overall no two workplace cultures will look exactly the same. Although from every existing company culture you should be able to notice the top priority of the organisation. For example, a workplace culture that is leadership focused will show great efforts towards their leaders but also give opportunities to rising employees. The stress on growth in these types of cultures creates fast learning environments and strong thinkers.
When reviewing your organisations’ culture, make note of what the core value of your business is, and then see if it corresponds to the culture priority. There will be some cases where it does not, and sometimes that isn’t a bad thing! An example of this could be an organisation that depends on a lot of solo work such as writing, or maybe the team is largely remote-based, even with more individual-based tasks, you could want an empowering workplace culture that focuses on making sure no employee feels undervalued and that they are all connected. To choose the best culture to fit your organisation, make sure to see if it aligns with the business or if you could benefit from them being opposites. Performance levels will slightly depend on the company culture since it can be impactful on relationships, motivation and psychological safety for your team, a bad workplace culture will have long-lasting negative effects on performance if left swept under the carpet.
Execution
The last part of the formula is putting all the new strategies and solutions into action. If you have reviewed these points thoroughly you should have a decent idea of what sectors of your organisation need to be worked on in order to increase business performance. The first step you should take after gaining this information is a team meeting with as many of your organisation's members as possible, if things are going to change, your employees need to know the “why” and “how” in order to execute it effectively. This is where some leaders may reach out for external help or require second opinions from their management team
The Modern Mind Group are emotioneering human performance not engineering it.
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