Jamie Notter Blog
Benchmark Data Are A Complete Waste of Time
Okay, not ALL benchmark data are useless, but they are when it comes to culture and employee engagement. In our recent book on engagement, we have a whole chapter dedicated to gathering the right data, and we make the case for basically ignoring culture and engagement...
Is Culture The Weak Link in Your Chain?
Take a minute and look at your organization from the 30,000-foot level. You’ll see that you have a number of key functions that need to be managed well if you’re going to thrive. Some of them are infrastructure functions, like financial management. Some of them will...
The Importance of Access (Culture 401 Series)
This post is part of a new series investigating workplace culture at a more advanced level (hence the “401” moniker, like you only get access to this course your senior year…), digging into what we see emerging as the “essentials” of culture in the 21st century....
Here’s Why Core Values Don’t Work
In my keynotes, I frequently poke fun at Core Values. I ask everyone in the audience who has “integrity” or “honesty” in their company core values to raise their hand, and then I congratulate them on effectively distinguishing themselves from all those companies out...
Does Your Employee Survey Measure Symptoms or Causes?
By now you should be aware that I’m kind of outraged that collectively we’ve spent billions of dollars on engagement surveys over the last several years, yet we haven’t improved our engagement scores. I think the metrics are a big piece of the problem. This whole...
You Don’t Need Happy Employees
The biggest reason our efforts to improve employee engagement over the last 20 years have been a horrible failure might surprise you: it’s because we’ve been trying to make people happy. Our collective image of an engaged employee is someone who likes coming to work,...
Seeing Systems (Culture 401 Series)
This post is part of a new series investigating workplace culture at a more advanced level (hence the “401” moniker, like you only get access to this course your senior year…), digging into what we see emerging as the “essentials” of culture in the 21st century....
Conflict Touches Everything
I started my career in the conflict resolution field, so conflict has always been on my radar, even as my work switched to workplace culture over the years. And while I may be that guy with the conflict hammer that thinks everything looks like a conflict nail, I have...
Do Millennials Define Engagement Differently?
One of the participants in my Managing Generational Diversity training course once told me an interesting story. Her Millennial daughter came home from work and told the mother that she had quit her job. When the mom asked why, the Millennial daughter replied,...