A culture of clarity: The 3 kinds of clarity employees need, how it affects performance, why they’re not asking for it, and how to create more work clarity right now
Missed deadlines. Duplicated work. And a lack of drive. When things go wrong with operations in your business, have you ever stopped to ask why employees didn’t ask for more clarity around what actually needed to get done? It affects performance after all – not just theirs, but everyone’s.
In fact, work clarity – that’s clarity around roles, tasks and goals – is such an extremely important part of business, you’d think seeking it out would come naturally to every employee, right? So, why do we so often come back to the same performance issues?
Here’s what you need to know about work clarity – hint: It’s cultural.
WHY DON’T EMPLOYEES ASK FOR MORE CLARITY AT WORK?
Well, our traditional company systems simply don’t ask them to innovate, just fill roles. In one November 2019 study, researchers found that clarity around roles had a big impact on employees’ job involvement, intrinsic motivation and also innovation.
And an earlier 2007 study found that a company’s ability to innovate plays a huge role in viability and longevity of the entire organisation, yet employees are not bound to innovate because it rarely shows up under their job requirements, says yet another study, so showing innovative behaviour is left entirely up to the employee’s willingness to be creative and innovate. Is that enough?
“How geared is your company culture for people asking questions about what they should do and how they should do it?”
In short, you’ve probably never asked your employees to seek clarity or innovate. Or create a culture where they feel they’re allowed to.
Moreover, our endeavour to standardise education, training and hiring comes with the BIG caveat that it creates the impression that a bookkeeper is a bookkeeper, an engineer an engineer – no matter what company they work in.
And when we look at employees’ willingness to ask for clarity, it becomes entirely cultural. How geared is your company culture for people asking questions about what they should do and how they should do it? If you hired a receptionist, for example, how open are you to them really asking and engaging around what exactly their role is and how they should do it?
WHAT’RE THE RESULTS OF LOW WORK CLARITY?
We’ve already seen that lack of clarity stifles your entire organisation’s ability to innovate. But when you don’t have an organizational culture that openly invites people to challenge the meaning and true purpose of their roles in relation to the company’s overarching objectives, you run the risk of them performing just the tasks described in their job description – a list of things, normally copied and pasted from somewhere else.
“No wonder then that a lack of clarity manifests visibly as low performance (they’re not efficiently selecting the tasks that drive your overarching objectives, just repeating the rote theory school books said they must do).”
(In fact, when we work with people on improving their individual performance, the first thing we do is have them completely rewrite their own job description – see our self-management tips.)
No wonder then that a lack of clarity manifests visibly as low performance (they’re not efficiently selecting the tasks that drive your overarching objectives, just what the school books said they must do), lots of confusion and mistakes, causing inefficiencies that could show up as excessive customer complaints and having to redo work (see duplicate work, often resulting in having to institute too much overtime), not to mention blaming, conflict and ultimately high turnover rates.
OK, SO WHAT KIND OF WORK CLARITY DO YOUR EMPLOYEES NEED?
It’s important to realise that it’s management’s responsibility to drive the idea of seeking clarity in an organisation. It’s your job to create a culture of clarity. Here’s what your employees might need:
1. ROLE CLARITY
Role clarity is just how well an employee understands what constitutes success for them. And role clarity is important because if people know what their role is and how it fits into the big picture, they can manage themselves, really innovate and be creative to make exactly that happen which brings you closer to your objectives.
2. TASK CLARITY
Task clarity just talks to how well an employee understands who must do something and why (how it ties into your overarching objectives. And it’s really important for leadership to institute task clarity, because it can take a huge load off management – “clean the floor because I said so” is not the same as understanding how exactly a clean floor contributes to our success as a team.
3. GOAL CLARITY
You might notice a trend with clarity – it ALWAYS requires your employees to know your organization’s overarching objectives. The advantages of giving goal clarity are that it helps give people direction and motivates them, while simultaneously helping them see the big WHYs behind their roles and tasks.
“Our societal endeavour to standardise education, training and hiring comes with the BIG caveat that it creates the impression that a bookkeeper is a bookkeeper, an engineer is an engineer – no matter what company they work in. And that’s not true.”
OK, SO HOW DO YOU CREATE CLARITY AT WORK?
Culture is a good place to start. Have you created a culture of clarity? A culture where people are not only free to but actively encouraged to challenge what they think they could and should be doing within the company. So it’s definitely a company culture thing.
And then, of course, you need it to be part of your systems and processes. Seeking clarity needs to be ingrained in your company’s DNA; it reflects in how you give feedback and appraisal, but also how you develop your employees – recently highlighted as some of the most important factors for job satisfaction in low-income earners.
And for that, you need really good organisational development.
NEED HELP?
Good news! We are a change management company, and we specialise in helping companies change their Company Culture. We help companies figure out what’s hindering their growth & performance and then supercharge it with science-based organisational development that actually works.
And we WILL SEND a team to your company RIGHT NOW to help you figure out why your employees feel unclear & help them seek clarity – with no obligation from you!
Let’s figure out what’s going on, so we can help energise your people for your exponential growth.
ABOUT OUR #COMPANYCULTURE PROJECT
The more you look at it, the more of the common, everyday struggles we face inside our companies are related to our organizational cultures. Even the most apparent efficiency and performance obstacles we face come as a result of cultures.
That’s why we’ve tasked our #TeamCompanyCulture to talk directly to the issues we see in our businesses every day. Connect with the team via solutions@lifexchangesolutions.com or phone 071 918 3217.
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