Jim Rembach

Beyond Morale Leadership and Employee Engagement

Chief Spokesman for the world's first online leadership and employee engagement system. In field use for more than 10 years, the system includes employee engagement surveys and reporting with online tools to improve deficiencies; improve leadership at all levels. Learn more: www.beyondmorale.com.

Training will not Fix a Toxic Workplace

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Posted on 2012-02-24

There have been times when I have entered a workplace and just felt the weight of the emotional tension. The air was so thick that it was hard to breathe despite it being a smoke free environment. When you looked around you could see the employees walking around on tip toes with their shoulders slumped over.

The first time I walked into a place and felt this, my first assumption was the leader must be a tyrant. While that is a very understandable assumption to make, after investigation I found this was not the case. Actually the manager was a nice person and very easy to get along with. While she was very nice and personable she unfortunately went out of her way to avoid conflict.

There are a few things I have learned about avoiding conflict, one is that avoiding conflict does not mean it will go away and another is that when avoided it will most likely escalate to more destructive levels.

Over time the negative behaviors that result from unresolved conflict...

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What is Social Media Customer Service?

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Posted on 2012-02-16

Social Media Customer Service (or Social Media Customer Care) is not customer service that supports how to use Social Media or answers what is Social Media. Social Media Customer Service is about customers being served and supported on social media platforms. To help clear up some of the confusion many will just shorten it to Social Customer Service (or Social Customer Care) when they are addressing this specific area of Social Media.

The recent Social Media Customer Service Report conducted by TNS, surveyed more than 1,000 UK consumers and found that 57% of consumers preferred to search online to solve their customer issues, and then interact with customer service on social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, You Tube, blogs and forums over any other method.

Yet,...

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Moneyball inspiration for contact center leaders.

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Posted on 2011-10-26

In baseball as in business, some of the greatest success stories lie with the individuals that thought outside the box. In the movie Moneyball, we find Billy Beane, the General Manager that famously made the Oakland A’s one of the most cost-efficient and winning teams out there. Beane did not have the large media market dollars to pay for big name players. In order to win, Beane had to learn how to do more with less. For Beane to be successful, it took a different perspective, skill and art than what was being used by all of Major League Baseball at the time. Beane looked at the game from a data-driven perspective and the acquisition of players in a new way. Beane famously said, “Almost like a car salesman, if a guy walks onto the lot and a salesman qualifies him on how he is dressed he may miss out on a hell of a sale. We try to open our mind and say it’s not about perception or what you think you see.”

In baseball, he had old perceptions...

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Why Would You Wait to Improve Employee Engagement?

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Posted on 2011-08-25

We all know what is feels like to be a member of a great team. Even if you only experienced it for a short time, you know how fantastic it feels to have strong relationships at work, be stress free, confident, fulfilled, optimistic, and full of gratitude to be a member of a winner. When you feel like you are part of a great team your employee engagement is high.

So when you do not feel you are part of a great team, and employee engagement is low, why would not want to take actions to improve employee engagement? So many say, “we are already doing something” while experiencing high unplanned absences, low customer satisfaction, high resistance to change and high levels of conflict and mistrust. Okay,...

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Author Interview of the Worst Call Center Common Practice

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Posted on 2011-07-14

Click Image to Download

An ebook titled Eliminating the Worst Call Center Practice: Quality Monitoring Calibration, is an extraordinary and unprecedented look into one of the most utilized processes in a call center. This ebook exposes a level of ignorance in the call center industry that is so wide-spread it will amaze you.

When you read this ebook, you will see why the light bulbs go off in the heads of so many as they connect their struggles with...

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Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness at Work

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Posted on 2011-07-12

By far the most remembered sentence in the Declaration of Independence is the one that starts the second paragraph.

“We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

Immediately after the construction of the Declaration and since, the segment which states “all Men are created equal,” has been part of hundreds of speeches, protests, boycotts and even wars.

But let’s look at the closing of the sentence. “the Pursuit of Happiness.” Much like the varied interpretations of the segment “all Men are created equal,” the Pursuit of Happiness lends itself to numerous interpretations. Does the government need to...

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Developing Leaders that Operate from their Souls, not Ego

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Posted on 2011-06-22
Is anything right with leadership today? I am totally overwhelmed by the number of people talking about the leadership crisis that we are currently experiencing. This is a global conversation that’s going on in both the public and private sector. The long-term forecast is it’s going to get much worse before it gets better, because of the actions that have brought us to the economic and socially responsible upheavals that cover our daily headlines.

When you see these words about leadership, what do you conclude:
- Blame
- Manipulation
- Bureaucracy
- Control
- Siloed
- Demanding
- Arrogant
- Ruthless
- Power
- Empire
- Exploit
When I think through this list I can’t help but create a mental image of a person (gender doesn’t matter) that has an enormous ego. And not the good kind of ego that’ associated with charisma or charm, but the bad type of ego that’...
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Top 4 Reasons Why MBAs are the Worst Leaders

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Posted on 2011-05-19

Have you ever been surprised when people react to something you said or did? Have you ever said something funny (at least you thought so) only to have nobody laugh? Sure, we all have. Well, I sure was surprised by the many comments and tweets to my post Why MBAs are the Worst Leaders. It was way more than what I expected. I suspect this post will garner even greater attention and tweets.

The response was so diverse and opinionated that I began to ask myself, is there a common thread to make sense of all of this emotional energy? Not sure if it means anything but most of the reaction was from people agreeing that employee engagement and leadership skills were poor in MBAs. Many people took the time to write first-hand stories of their experiences.

In reviewing these comments, and researching more on Dr. Mintzberg, it’s...

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Why MBAs are the Worst Leaders

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Posted on 2011-05-10

The following is from an interview Steve Coomer had with Professor Henry Mintzberg. The excerpt below was taken from the discussion regarding what it takes to be an effective manager and why an MBA is not necessarily part of that equation.

You suggest that the dominance of the MBA as an educational standard has corrupted managerial practice. Why is that?

Well, because you have people coming out thinking they are prepared to manage, and they are not. And what is even worse you get people coming out who don’t even go into management, they go into consulting or finance. They do an end run around management and end up leaping from consulting jobs, or financial jobs, into chief executive chairs. And I think the performance of many of them is just plain dreadful. There are exceptions, but a lot of them fail terribly....

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3-Year Low for Employee Engagement yet Employers Clueless

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Posted on 2011-04-01

A recent article in USA Today titled Workers eager to job hunt as morale plunges highlights the reporting of a recent study that reveals findings that employee engagement and loyalty is at a three-year low, but many employers have no clue as to the dismal state of affairs.

Employers think that employees are just as engaged and loyal as they were three years ago. The findings from the 9th Annual Study of Employee Benefits Trends conducted by...

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