Retain Top Talent

My takeaway from this article about improving employee engagement was that it starts with good management. Unfortunately, in many of the companies I've been invited to help with retention, engagement, hiring, and performance management strategies, the sad truth is that many of your managers have no clue what it means to be a good manager.

No one has ever given them sophisticated training on being a great manager, no one has ever mentored them to improve their game, and most managers lack the proactivity and initiative to go above and beyond to learn on their own.

The result is that a signficant portion of your workforce (50 percent) is disengaged and showing you minimal levels of productivity - just enough so they don't get fired. It's a shame that most organizations don't come close to realizing their potential since their management team is so weak in the skills of managing - most likely along the lines of being unconsciously incompetent.

Is it time to pivot and relook at the process of developing your managers through a new lens of boosting engagement and productivity. How could you afford not to train, develop, and coach?

So many of my clients lack the skills and knowledge of how to have a performance based one-to-one. I talk about this extensively in my Vistage workshop titled Managing Remotely in a Crisis. It becomes very important to have frequent one-to-ones when your team is remote. Excellent article on the steps of having a coaching conversation.

None of this should be a surprise, particularly given Gallups research that shows 50-70 percent of your employees are not engaged. All the studies that have been done over the last decade or more show pretty consistent results of employee dissatisfaction, disengagement, and consequently low productivity.

As I am demonstrating to many Vistage Groups in my talk on Managing Remotely in a Criss - these issues get amplified with folks working outside of the office. Are you accepting low productivity or working on initiatives to let it SOAR?

Interesting article on productivity of a remote workforce. The question is whether metrics of more CRM activity or chat based activity in apps like Yammer and Slack are leading indicators of productivity levels?

Here's the quote that got my attention:

"Gallup found that just one in three U.S. employees felt they’d received recognition for a job well done in the past week."

That's a horrible metric. What are you doing to build a strong recognition program into the fabric of your culture?

You'll never realize high productivity from your workforce until they feel you appreciate their effort through recognition.

We've known this to be an issue for quite some time. Studies are starting to show the effect of stress and anxiety on engagement and productivity. The big question is how your organization is responding to this new trend and potential crisis given the fact that we're going to be in a Covid-related environment probably well into 2022.

Good article from HBR on raising employee engagement and productivity through autonomy. How are you providing your remote workers during the pandemic with more autonomy to encourage productivity?

What are some of the key elements in driving employee engagement, productivity, and effort - autonomy, decision making, authority, control over their work, not being micro-managed.

Good article coming at the issue of how do you empower your employees? This quote of a survey is frightening:

"those who felt disempowered were rated at the 24th percentile of engagement while those with a high level of empowerment came in at the 79th percentile."

Are you in the bottom quartertile of engagement (productivity) becuase your employees feel powerless to effect/impact their job?

Here's the quote that reinforces most of the attitudes about remote work. 

“If I can’t see them working, how do I know they’re actually working?”

This sums up the managerial attitude of the vast majority of my clients. It covers for the excuse of not investing time to define expectations, conduct on-going performance management through one-to-ones, and learning how to coach teams.

Rather than staying stuck in a 1070s command-control mode, when we start working on the things that raise employee engagement and lead to increased productivity, we actually don't have to see our subordinates doing work to trust they are being productive.

I know it's hard to let go of tribal management practices and the tactics that most managers were taught (direct line of sight). The question is when will you start experimenting with best practices to unleash the productivity in your employees that you are missing?