HR Management & Compliance

Instant Turnaround: Getting People Excited About Coming to Work and Working Hard

HR practitioner Cheryl Stone reviews Harry Paul and Ross Reck’s book Instant Turnaround!: Getting People Excited About Coming to Work and Working Hard.

Looking for a way to turn around employees overnight that is easy to implement, costs nothing, and where everybody wins?  Check out Instant Turnaround!: Getting People Excited About Coming to Work and Working Hard by Harry Paul (Ken Blanchard Companies & coauthor of Fish! Tales: Real-Life Stories to Help You Transform Your Workplace and Your Life) and Ross Reck, Ph.D. (management consultant & coauthor with Paul of Revved!: An Incredible Way to Rev Up Your Workplace and Achieve Amazing Results)
Instant Turnaround

In an easy-to-read format, the authors take you through the experiences of a fictitious company that embraces a program called “Destination: Work.”  With conversational dialogue, they tell a story and challenge us to make work a place that employees want to come to on Monday morning, replacing TGIF with TGIM — “thank goodness it’s Monday” and I get to go to work!  While they acknowledge the importance of the immediate supervisor and employee relationship, by the end of the book, they place the responsibility for this program squarely on the shoulders of senior management.

The idea starts with the concept of discretionary effort -– that people regulate the amount of effort they put into their jobs based on how they feel they are being treated by their boss.  The job of managers is to treat them in a manner that will get them to apply all of their discretionary effort to their jobs.  To that end, they outline four principles:

1. Focus on people as well as numbers. People come to work to satisfy their needs, not ours.  If we meet those needs, they’ll take care of the bottom line.  Put your employees before your customers, and the employees will take care of the customers.

2. Motivate with trust instead of fear. Use the 4 Be’s to develop trust:

a. Be real
b. Be appreciative
c. Be interested
d. Be nice.

3. Turn Work into Fun.

4. Senior Management must execute Destination: Work with frontline employees. They support this recommendation with backing from a Towers Perrins’ Global Workforce Study that found the top single driver of discretionary effort is, “senior management’s sincere interest in employee well-being” and offer these suggestions:

a. Communicate openly and honestly.
b. Be visible and accessible.
c. Show support for new ideas.

The book is worth reading but does not offer much for research-based facts.  Could it be this easy?  It certainly reinforces the importance of employees and how we treat them, but I guess we’ll have to try it for ourselves to see if Destination: Work holds the key to the instant turnaround they promise.

Cheryl Stone, SPHR, is Senior Vice President of Human Resources and Training for BankWest, Inc., a South Dakota community bank.  Cheryl is a poster on the HRHero.com Employer’s Forum and has worked in the field of human resources for over 20 years.

2 thoughts on “Instant Turnaround: Getting People Excited About Coming to Work and Working Hard”

  1. Dear Cheryl,

    I’m one of the coauthors of Instant Turnaround! and I’d like to thank you for your wonderful review of our book. Related to the book, my coauthor, Harry Paul, and I have decided to declare War on Bad Bosses. We think you might find this campaign very interesting. If you’d like to learn more about it, please send me an email. I hope you have a wonderful day and thanks again for such a great review. Ross Reck

  2. Dr. Reck:

    I would like to know more about your War on Bad Bosses, but have been unable to locate your e-mail address. I have found some information on your websites. Let me know more. Thanks!
    Cheryl

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