We are spring boarding off our last article focused on fairness in this blog series by now turning our attention to positive engagement. In this article we move beyond the numbers to examine how we share information in a meaningful and engaging way to your workforce. Like two interlocking pieces of a puzzle, fairness and positive engagement go hand in hand by developing culture and trust with your workforce, helping to achieve world-class results and aiding long-term organizational sustainability.
Leadership Must Be Trusted to Lead
The starting point for any organization seeking world-class results is first evaluating if their corporate goals align with positive engagement in their workforce. Intuitively, we know that positive feedback and encouragement can have vastly superior effects in teaching and guiding people, but in many cases, we lose track of those corporate goals. Molecular biologist, John Medina, illustrates the very intricacies of how the human brain works in his New York Times best seller Brain Rules; specifically, his novel focuses on how to achieve optimal performance. Medina describes a situation of a flight instructor, while teaching one of the top students in the class, recognizes the student making a naive mistake, and rather than engaging the student in a positive and coaching dialogue, yells at the student. This causes the student to make even further mistakes, ultimately leading the instructor to take over the controls. For a long time, the student would not return to the cockpit, hurting not only the instructor’s professional relationship with the student, but also the student’s ability to learn. Medina shares that this crushed the instructor, and that if the instructor could have predicted how the student would have responded, he never would have acted that way. This type of situation unfortunately is not one that is uncommon to organizations, resulting in a workforce that loses trust in management, and one where culture and performance degrade.
Stay The Course The question then becomes, if most organizations would agree that positive engagement is part of their corporate goals, how do we keep ourselves on track through the day to day stressors to ensure we are engaging with our entire workforce the right way? LinkeDrive’s Driver Performance Management (DPM) solution, and more specifically, our Cycle of Positive Driver Engagement addresses these exact needs and challenges. This best-in-class workforce engagement model is at the core of our overall solution, embracing in a positive way what is most important – your drivers. Our DPM solution is also one that is deeply rooted and tuned to your corporate values and goals, fully automated for each and every driver in your organization, ensuring the right and consistent messaging to your workforce.
We believe so deeply that positive engagement must be part of your corporate strategy, that it is embedded in every facet of our DPM solution. It is this same reason that we’ve also automated the entire engagement model direct to drivers, ensuring consistent and positive feedback happens every day. Look for an upcoming post from us highlighting this full automation, for real-time positive engagement in the cab, daily, weekly, and monthly.
Case Study: Dynamic Speed Display Signs
We’ll end with a study from Texas A&M and the Texas Department of Transportation on the effectiveness of Dynamic Speed Display Signs, as much of this parallels the in-cab and real-time PedalCoach portion of our DPM solution. Dynamic Speed Display Signs are the signs that measure and display the speed of oncoming vehicles, which in terms of providing positive feedback, are quite the opposite of a speed trap. These signs provide the driver with their current speed, usually right around speed limit signs, letting the driver take control and ownership of the situation. Deploying these signs is a much more scalable solution versus police officers providing speed limit enforcement. The results of this study show that immediate and positive feedback can have a dramatic impact, a) cutting speeding by more than 50%, b) decreasing the speed on these road segments by 8 mph. Naturally, this can also result in fewer accidents – a win-win!
Summing It Up Just like the scalability highlighted by the Dynamic Speed Display Signs, the overarching goal of LinkeDrive’s DPM solution is to reach every driver in an organization in a positive way, empowering them with a fair assessment of their performance, while providing a pathway to becoming an even better driver. Our solution is about shifting the entire performance bell curve through positive engagement, smart automations, and leading-edge patented solutions for the transportation industry. This is how you get to world-class results and long-term organizational sustainability!