Letters From Lisa – June/July 2022

It has been said, your business is only as great as your people. Having the right people, in the right seats, doing the right things plays a huge role in the overall success of any business operation.

The right people are employees who share your company’s core values and help to support a culture based on those values. The right seat means that an employee is operating within their area of greatest skill and passion within an organization, says Jim Collins in his book, “Good to Great.”

To take that a step further, we don’t just want to be great. We want to WOW!

At BioZyme, we have invested heavily in our team over the last few years to be committed to excellence or more simply put, to be WOWing. We take a simplified approach that is built on the below hierarchy:

Know You

One cannot be WOWing until one looks in the mirror. At BioZyme, we use a cool tool called the Culture Index to help our team know who they and those around them are. The Culture Index is a scientific approach to the “right people, right seats” concept. Culture Index allows leaders to understand the unique needs of each employee in the organization, communicate effectively and inspire peak performance. It allows people to flourish by leveraging their strengths rather than mitigating their weaknesses.

Know Us

Much has been written about shared understanding, a state of organizational nirvana where every person has clarity on the big picture, knows how his or her own puzzle piece fits in and acts accordingly. At BioZyme, we work hard at this using B4 (an internal website focused on the big picture), Yammer (a business version of Facebook for puzzle piece sharing), monthly “big picture” snack & learns, the B4 quarterly newsletter (yes, it is in print), quarterly President “big picture” updates and regular documented team huddles for constant puzzle working. These communication tools help share information from all corners of the company. While the center of the puzzle is often the focus, corners and borders are essential.

Know the Job

Knowing one’s job is an important part of the BioZyme hierarchy. In short, a job description is a written statement that describes the duties, responsibilities and reporting relationships of a particular job. Job descriptions are useful communication tools to tell employees exactly what tasks you expect them to perform. Without such clear communication, employees may not perform to expectation, and then everyone is disappointed. At BioZyme, we review job descriptions regularly. It is a huge task, but it has been well worth it. We have found that most of the challenges we run into on a personnel level come back to the job description being unclear or the person being unsure of what the bullets in their job description mean.

Know Your Work

Performance reviews are awkward. They’re biased. Performance reviews are old fashioned, but they are still one of the most important tasks for an organization to be WOWing. To be effective, performance reviews must be done regularly to recognize and reward. At BioZyme, our Know Your Work initiative translates back to our performance review process. Our reviews are a direct tie back to the job description in an approach we have titled CONNECT. To connect means to join together to provide communication. These communications are held as a conversation that each employee has at least quarterly with their manager. In the process, each role grades themselves on their job description bullets. Their manager does the same and then the two sit down together, review and discuss any scoring differences. In the end, either the job description is updated to be more accurate or there is a discussion to outline what improvements need to be made.

Bottom line – to be WOWing one must know. To know means having the right people, in the right seats, doing the right things so they can play a huge role in the overall success of the business.

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