Theresa Welbourne, Ph.D. of eePulse, Inc. Discusses Latest Survey Results
Whether you are working on public relations, marketing or core business responsibilities, it is key for you and your employees to have the best energy levels possible. This is how you achieve ideal productivity and results.
While you may think you and your staff members have high energy levels and great productivity, you may be completely wrong.
According to a recent study by Theresa Welbourne, PhD of eePulse, Inc., the University of Nebraska, Lincoln and the Center for Effective Organizations at the USC Marshall School of Business, 82% of business leaders are not working at their best energy levels.
With this in mind, I caught up with Dr. Welbourne to learn more. Here’s what she had to say:
How do you know if you and your employees are working at the best energy-levels possible?
The concept is really about how one is exerting energy because you can be at a high energy level and think all is fine, but if you are exerting too much energy, you simply run out of the ability to do work and be healthy.
Exerting too much energy, too quickly leads to low performance, burnout, health problems, and in many cases, turnover. With over 15 years of research on hundreds of thousands of employees, we’ve found that deliberate work to optimize and then direct energy at the right goals leads to successful individual, team and business results.
For example, if you work at a high energy level and are exerting too much energy, you are more likely to make mistakes, have to deal with bigger problems and burnout quickly. And if you work at a low energy level, you tend to avoid challenges and get bored easily.
The optimal energy level for every individual is unique, and how you direct that energy to achieve results is different by job, occupation and organization.
What can you do to improve energy levels and productivity in the workplace?
Since energy levels change regularly, the only way to find optimal, energy levels is to measure it frequently and find out what’s going on with your employees at all levels of the organization.
It’s not enough to take an annual survey and check employee-engagement levels. Instead, it involves a process of obtaining energy levels directly from employees and monitoring the data on a regular basis. Then, you can make the appropriate changes to improve energy levels for the best productivity possible.
Think about how we manage finance, quality, sales, and marketing. We would never even think about obtaining financial metrics just once a year and then making an annual action plan on a one-point-in-time piece of data. We track financial data weekly, monthly and even daily in some firms; we respond to trends.
If you really want to be a great leader and achieve your goals, you need to do that same type of measurement with your human capital, and our research shows that tracking energy is an effective way to keep tabs on people and how and if their energy is being expended, at the right level, and in the right direction, to meet business objectives.
This sounds like a major process involving a lot of expenses. How can small business owners do this?
It does not need to be difficult or cost a lot of money. You can start by checking your energy at http://www.whatsmyenergy.com/ for free.
And once you are start measuring energy levels and talking to your employees, you may find that simple solutions can make major changes in productivity. For example, if you discover simple issues when they start, you can take the appropriate actions to stop them from escalating into large, costly problems.
Also, it’s all about cost/benefit analysis. What you don’t know can severely harm the organization. Not knowing about the most important asset in our firms, the human capital asset, is costly.
Is there anything else you would like to add?
While finding and monitoring employee energy levels may just seem like an extra task to add to your “to do” list, it can be the difference between becoming a thriving business or one that just survives.
If you make it a priority, set processes in place and review the results, you can easily increase productivity and create a successful working environment for you and all of your team members.
Thanks for your insights Theresa. Hopefully, the StartupNation audience can use this information to grow their new businesses.
And if you have questions for Theresa, you can reach her at www.eepulse.com.
What are you going to do today to increase energy levels and productivity at your business?
If you need help boosting awareness for your business via BtoB content strategy, please write to me below or at www.rembrandtwrites.com.
