When doing the same job for a long time, an employee can become less motivated and may lose enthusiasm.

Sometimes a vacation or job change takes care of the problem, but not always. Instead, we have to find ways to reinvigorate ourselves and our employees when we get stuck in a rut.

It's not shameful to be in a rut, as long as you keep performing as expected and dig your way out of it before too long. Good managers help employees get through this phase of their careers.

The Gallup Management Journal's Employee Engagement Index results for first quarter 2004 indicate that 29% of employees are truly engaged, 54% of them are not engaged, and 17% are actively disengaged.

“Not engaged” means “putting time, but not energy or passion into a job. Essentially, the employee is sleepwalking.”

“Actively disengaged” employees are not only unhappy, but they show it, and it affects their coworkers.

Only one in three of you are passionate about your jobs and companies. What advice do you have for helping the other two-thirds of employees wake up and get their groove back?

Those of you sleepwalking through other problems, stop what you're doing and let us revive your energy by sharing your story with 100,000 MarketingProfs readers who might offer a fresh perspective. You will receive a complimentary copy of our book, A Marketer's Guide to e-Newsletter Publishing.

This Week's Dilemma

Getting our sales groove back

Our sales force is old and not motivated. They're responsible for visiting our distribution places and agents. We've tried high commissions, better prices, etc., and nothing has worked out! How do I improve my sales distribution channel? How do I engage and motive my salespeople so they actually enjoy their jobs?

—Product Manager

Previous Dilemma

‘Can't please everyone' syndrome affects our presentations

How do I manage the creation of a master corporate capabilities slide presentation when there are multiple executive VPs playing the role of reviewer/approver? These kinds of presentations are subjective in so many ways—graphic elements, story structure, level of detail, content flow, font style, EVERYTHING! I want to avoid the political land mines that I've encountered in the past. How do we create a slide deck for everyone to approve? How can we assure the project is done on time with fewer approval rounds?

—Senior Product Marketing Manager

Summary of Advice Received

This “can't please everyone” situation, at first, sounds trivial. In reality, it happens to many people, especially when there is no process or template to help control the changes to presentations or other marketing materials.

Adrian Woodliffe, a managing director at GENESIS, brings the issue to the forefront:

I have a sneaking feeling that this may well be symptomatic of deeper issues. I could be wrong. If these sorts of issues surround something as basic as a PowerPoint presentation, then I can only shake my head in disbelief. I know it happens, but this smacks of something a lot more deep-seated within the culture, dynamics, and discipline of the company.

Experience indicates that the problem may not lie in the creative process and could be deeper in the organization. In any case, it is not an easily solvable problem.

Readers provided solutions for putting controls around a presentation to avoid the dizzying around-and-around annoyance:

1. Create a standard template.

2. Build a repeatable process.

3. Define the buy-in team and improve communication with it.

4. Remember to focus on your target audience.

1. Create a standard template

Most of the feedback suggests creating a template or two to use. This overcomes the formatting issues.

Jonty Monopoli, marketing and distribution manager at GE Healthcare, proposes setting a department- or company-wide template with a standard title, header, body text and footer font, a standard background, a standard color for graphs and a standard location for pictures. Jonty says:

If everybody agrees on it, or it comes as an edict from above, there can't be any whining. Not only that, but it improves your branding and recognition to your internal and external customers. Everybody easily identifies with how your company pitches look and feel.

Though Mike Mohan, a group executive with Gravity-Marketing, can't take credit for the advice, we give him credit for telling us about it:

Those who went before taught it to me. My work as a marketing communications consultant included the development/production of many presentations for the leading office furniture manufacturer and its dealer network. The most effective way to focus on the goal and not an executive's color of the month was to offer presentations in two graphic styles—a contemporary look and a more traditional feel. Doing this gave any presenter a choice, while not turning over the art direction to someone other than the art director. This, along with a strong corporate standards (style) guide, has saved me from the abyss of presentation edits and re-reviews over and over again.

Jason Dojc's team has a common PowerPoint template for all presentations because of past inconsistent looking presentations. Jason says:

The template was designed so it was flexible enough to adapt to changing messages, but the overall color scheme and fonts were consistent. Once you get upper management to approve the template, your subsequent PowerPoints should get rubber-stamped quickly.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Hank Stroll (Hank@InternetVIZ.com) is publisher at InternetVIZ, a custom publisher of 24 B2B e-newsletters reaching 490,000 business executives.