Empowering Employees: Bringing Solutions and Embracing Change (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: The first thing that you do is that you talk to your immediate manager always, but if your culture allows experimentation and allows the flexibility to bring changes to the table, that would be the first thing that I would do. It's never about bringing a issue or a concern. It's about bringing the solution for that issue or concern, because trust me, if you're having a concern, you probably have some inkling as to how you want it resolved, because as great as managers are, as great as leaders are, they're not clairvoyant by any stretch of the imagination. From an employee perspective, don't just bring the issue, but bring a solution or a set of solutions that you might want to try out, maybe within your own department first, or maybe if it's a different way of communicating, like using digital capture tools in order to communicate to your team instead of having more meetings, then volunteer to do that and test it out in meetings. Get some feedback from the people that you're working with and see if it really is a viable solution to the problem that you're seeing or to what you're trying to resolve. It's a lot about being bold enough to step forward, but also having enough confidence to take that first step and raise your hand first to look at it, to resolve it, or just to experiment with it for a short period of time to see if it really does work. In a mindset, from a mindset perspective, don't go back to 2019 and say, well, they never allowed me to do this before. That's not our culture. Trust me, every business is trying to figure out how to effectively navigate through what we're going through, maintain their employees, and make sure that their business is successful as well as their employees. Even if there has been negativity or resistance encountered in the past, don't let that hold you back because I think everyone is looking for that opportunity to not only engage better, be better, but be profitable and to be a success as we move through this unknown. We're moving through the unknown, just like you said. The culture changes over time. Because we had this big bang situation thrust on us, we haven't had that time to absorb and adjust and for it to organically happen. We are trying to push things forward just a little bit in order to get us into a better place where employees are trained, employees want to be part of the culture, and employees also want to stay with the company that they're at. It is really important to take the risk, come up with the solution, and volunteer to see how this solution can make the company better and make the employees more productive. If you start there, you're going to have a great foundation to move forward.