Three Types of People to Fire Immediately

Want a more innovative company? Get rid of these folks. Today.

Show of hands: How many of you out there in Innovation land have gotten the “what took you so long?” question from your staff when you finally said goodbye to a teammate who was seemingly always part of problems instead of solutions?

We imagine a whole bunch of hands. (Yep, ours went up, too.)

These people—and we’re going to talk about three specific types in a minute—passive-aggressively block innovation from happening and will suck the energy out of any organization.

When confronted with any of the following three people—and you have found it impossible to change their ways, say goodbye.

Find out who the three types are in this great piece by G. Michael Maddock and Raphael Louis Vitón on Bloomberg Businessweek

Does Greater Employee Engagement = More BFFs?

by Mark Harbeke

Is the number of BFFs (Best Friends Forever) a company creates among its workforce from effective employee engagement activities directly tied to the number of highly engaged employees it has (which affects everything from retention to productivity)?

That's my takeaway from reading Catherine Mattice's synthesis of employee engagement research on "High-Quality Connections" by Jane Dutton and Emily Heaphy on the No Workplace Bullies blog. Mattice writes that "People who have a best friend at work are more highly engaged and significantly more likely to engage their customers."

Maybe Winning Workplaces' Top Small Workplaces are hip to the same academic findings. A trend of our winning organizations is that they use their small size to their advantage by creating a work environment and team building activities that they actively bill as "family friendly."

Now, I'm not saying that just creating the conditions for a "work family" means that teams are hanging out at the local watering hole three times a week. But we've seen that doing so increases the likelihood for a scenario like this to play out – and that, in turn, increases innovation because casual conversations drift into "shop talk."