Do You Have a Best Friend at Work?

Do you have a best friend at work?

If you have a problem answering this question, do the following.

Clean your desk and put a white cloth on it or white paper. You may use any report that you have just removed from your desk because nobody reads them anyway, and you will feel good finding the new life for them.

Put some office snacks on them: peanuts, chips, sweets from last Halloween, and an apple. People will pass by and munch on the goodies; replenish if necessary.

Soon you will see people from other departments pulling up. Some will say thank-you although most of the office folks will just graze and continue being busy.

Only your best friend – if you have one – will stop by and whisper, “Are you OK?”

By now, you must realize that this is all bull**it. But if you are reading this, you are on the right track: Having the best friend at work is important for your productivity and performance. I would suggest that this has become even more important with the Millennials making up the majority of the workforce.

Having the best friend at work is important for your productivity and performance.

A good starting point is to run an anonymous Q12 employee engagement survey. You may order it from Gallup, for a fee. But it makes more sense for a lean company to use a similar questionnaire – for free.

If you are on the path to Excellence, your key objective is to improve continually, becoming better tomorrow. Hence, all you need is a benchmark. If you ask a dozen of questions, calculate the Yes/No’s or shades of gray if you use a scale, and then repeat the exercise 6 months later – you will have a good indication of whether your team’s engagement moves in the right direction.

Gallup, for a hefty price, will give you tons of data and graphs based on their proprietary formulas and extensive database. I do not find this presentation worth the money because of the obvious huge error margin. And I do not care if I am doing better than “56% of businesses of your size.” I want to be better tomorrow than I am today.

I want to be better tomorrow than I am today.

I would add 1 or 2 business-specific questions to the Gallup’s list and be satisfied with a Y/N answer. Just make the necessary number of copies and let the teams put Xs as appropriate and drop the form in the “ballot box.”

DM me for further advice on this questionnaire and on my other tools – Teamgager and Q7.