Retain Top Talent

Interesting elements of employee engagement to think about for the coming year. Where do you stand around significant initiatives on each of these key points? The job market is starting to heat up again in anticipatin of Covid ending. Are you prepared to retain your best performers or if you do nothing is there a risk of some of these folks being poached?

One of the elements I find most companies fail at in the hiring and engagement process is the bridge experience between them of on-boarding. How do you help your new employee feel like they've made the best decision of their life to join your organization. Here are some simple ideas/reminders of things to be done during that first 90 days so your new employee doesn't have "buyers remorse".

Although I've been beating the drums in my workshops on employee retention, engagement, and productivity around these concepts in the article based on Gallup's research in First Break All The Rules, the authors at BambooHR phrase it a little differently. This article serves as a great reminder of the key elements that drive employee engagement and productivity (I would rank understanding performance expectations NUMBER ONE).

Good article from Forbes pointing out key issues to sustain your culture in a hybrid model of part-time and full-time tele-commuters. How do you connect people to purpose, accountability, and shared experiences when they are seperated from their bosses, peers, and subordinates?

Many Vistage size companies treat recognition and non-monetary rewards like it's an afterthought. Many abandoned whatever they were doing when Covid hit. My belief is that you should double down on recognition when some or all of your workforce is virtual. The thing I liked most about this article was the linkage between recognized employees/engaged employees and customer satisfaction.

Interesting article about failure leading to success. I've been a deep reader of ideas around "failing forward" over the years. One of my core interview subject areas I recommend that clients probe is failure and the learning that comes from it. How people demonstrate resilience around failure. My own experience is that I got fired from my first job out of  college.

How has failure lit a fire under you and contributed to your success?

Here's an interesting article published by HBR that caused me to reflect and perhaps put myself in my "employee's shoes". I started thinking about their perspective of working from home and feeling isolated, separated from the company culture, loss of interaction and communication, a sudden drop off in feedback from my boss, a complete stop of any engagement/motivational strategies, and a level of fear of losing my job since no one is communicating what's happening with the company. It almost might feel like the management team has put their head in their hands with a "woe is me" attitude, praying that things might get better.

Layer that onto the stress of paycuts, furloughs, lack of direction, home schooling, and 2 spouses working from home.

Might our employees not become angry, upset, frustrated, feeling disconnected? What can we do about it?

Here's different lens through which to view your employees - new term: the employee engagement lifecycle - also referred as the employee experience. Are we considering our employee's journey from the hiring process through to when they leave? What are the touchpoints, how to build their loyalty and committment, and show them they've made the best decision of their career to be part of our organization? That's a radically different approach than you show up for work and we pay you for being here. Are we ready to make that transition?

Good reminders about managing with a hybrid or remote workforce = key points of being intentional about cultural issues/change, feedback, and ensuring employees are connected to your purpose - that they matter.

I've been talking about these issues in my Vistage Workshop on Managing Remotely in a Crisis for 9 months - yet companies seem to be very slow to adopt some of these basic elements. Why? Are they too fuzzy, no one available to lead the charge, or the CEO doesn't buy into creating a great remote workforce culture?

Good article on ideas of working and managing remotely. We're not all McKinsey-type companies, but there may be a few nuggets we can take away from this article - as work evolves toward permanent remote or a hybrid environment.

I am huge proponent of metrics and KPIs to determine are your initiatives having an impact. Here are some ideas for measuring retention and related scores.

At first I had to laugh at this article - but then it hit me: Shouldn't your HR person be the individual tasked with ensuring employee happiness - along with employee engagement, employee satisfaction, employee learning and development, employee experience?

Why do we need to hire or contract with someone when that should be our chief people person? The issue is if you're not a big enough organization yet to support a full time senior professional HR person who drive these initiatives, what's your options? You could hire a "fractional" or part-time HR exec that supports you one day a month or one a week to drive these initiatives and set the programs up. Don't let your size or lack of a full time permanent person stop you from moving foward on the critical initiatives that dictate high or low productivity.

I've have been recommending using a messaging app like Teams or Slack in my workshops on Managing Remotely in a Crisis to replace the informal collaboration that naturally occurs when we are all in the office together. Here's an interesting take on Slack given Saleforce's acquisition of the company.

Here's an interesting I had not considered before regarding employee recognition - employee spotlights. There seems to be many ways to use these from on-boarding, to team recognition, to recognizing specifc employees who knocked it out of the park. A lot of faith-based communities use this technique to enable relationships to be built among their members. Have you thought of strengthening your employee at-work relationships through the idea of employee spotlights - particularly since strong work relationships is a key component of high-performing teams.

Almost all of my clients are struggling with giving effective feedback and conducting on-going performance management. This article emphasizes some of the key points to having a discussion around performance with your team members. I like the idea of showing empathy as a starting point.

Is there an increasing trend of employees being disappointed in their employer's response/support of working from home? How does this effect productivity and engagement in the coming hybrid work environment?

Have you given thought to improving your on-boarding process? How do you create a scenario in which the new employee thinks they've made the best decision of their life to join your organization - from the moment of the offer to their first 90 days on the job.

I've done about 75 workshops since mid-March on Managing Remotely in a Crisis covering similar points for Vistage groups and members.

Some really good ideas here that most companies are violating during Covid and remote work. First, building trusting relationships through effective one-to-ones, and showing a little bit of caring, sensitivity, and empathy by not making every conversation about goals and KPIs - building this conversation through effective use of video and chat technology. Are you failing to engage your workforce for the highest productivity levels because you're failing on some of these most basic elements of managing remotely?

Here's counter argument to employee engagement. I do not agree with the author's statement that the most we can expect from an organization is 35% engagement.

Problems: First, I do agree that the engagement number has hovered around 25-33 percent for 20 years. Why? Is there a limitation or is it due to some other factor? I'll contend that you will always have a group of engaged employees no matter what you do. Second, the group that offers the greatest opportunity to raise the engagement number is the disengaged group - we're failing to engage this category of employee. In fact, I'll suggest that 80 percent of all engagement initiatives fail for lack of effective execution. Finally, we're leaving the actively disengaged in our companies dragging down the numbers. Get rid of these folks - they are negative influence on everyone else.

The solution might be better execution from the HR team in driving initiatives and programs around engagement.

Are you using this Covid crisis to raise your employee engagement - even though many employees might not be in the office. Notice the first item on the list is employee well-being - which I've discovered is the last thing most organizations are thinking about rather than the first.

I get a lot of questions in my workshops about on-boarding - particularly about remote on-boarding. Here's a good resource with some ideas to consider for your next hire.

Although the article ends with a ptich for their services, I like the list of suggestions that might improve employee engagement. Not sure this is an all encompassing list - and it's mostly centered around performance/feedback/goal setting type issues. However, most companies are not coming close to fulfilling these most basic of employee engagement criteria.

Lots of buzz around this idea of the "employee experience". I liked this article for the recommendation they make about integrating learning and development with performance management - instead of looking at these two elements as completely separate. 

Interesting article in Forbes regarding the annual performance appraisal process. I've been recommending in my workshops on Feedback and Performance Management that companies should kill this sadistic exercise and move toward regular coaching conversations. The problem is that most managers don't know how to coach - so their focus is on highlighting the negatives in the annual performance review. Why don't we teach our managers to coach?