Retain Top Talent

Most companies are horrible at their on-boarding process. In most companies the imprpvement of their on-boarding process is fake dress up = what my of my midwestern friends would call putting lipstcik on a pig. A great on-boarding process goes a long way to building engagement, encouraging motivation, and ensuring a successful relationship.

I get this question a lot from my clients related to what are we measuring and how are we recognizing it in our people? Is it more about performance or behaviors?

Do you make performance discussion a two-way street? Interesting article on including an employee self-appraisal as part of your performance management-appraisal process.

I cannot stress enough the importance of a vibrant employee recognition and reward program. Here are some additional ideas to consider in recognition and rewards. Next to the lack of NOT defining success, a weak or non-existent recognition and rewards program is the secon reason you see a lack of engagement and productivity in your organization.

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 thorough article on performance management and best practices. Are you starting to adopt some of these ideas in your performance management?

Do you celebrate personal milestones of your employees. One milestone not mentioned you should be celebrating are when your employees take part in non-profit, social activities that are not political - like helping at a soup kitchen, food bank, or organizing a dinner drive for local hospital workers.  Are all of your employees tuned into what's going on in the lives of their teammates?

I've seen many companies drop this caring, empathy, and recognition during Covid as if people don't matter anymore. NOW is when we should be emphasizing these personal milestones.

Many of my clients have been lamenting to me for the past few months about underperforming team members and whether they should fire them and replace with them with someone better.

There are lot of things you can do to improve an employee's performance before you reach for the trap door lever. First, are the expectations and results desired clear, precise, quantifiable, and metric based? Are they written down and have you and your employee agreed to them together? Secondly, how often are you having one-to-ones and improving your coaching of your employees? Finally, are you actively working on employee engagement initiatives such as creating personal development plans and implementing a rigorous employee appreciation and recognition program? Simple steps to dramatically boost performance, effort, initiative, motivation, and proactivity.

One of the topics I cover in my workshop on improving employee engagement is that it starts at the on-boarding process. Many companies are weak to non-existent with best practices in on-boarding. Here are a few key ideas to try in your organization.

One of the programs I do for Vistage Groups is on Employee Retention and Engagment (productivity). A key tool and simple tactic that emerges from this workshop is re-investment in people. One of my recommendations is that every employee should have a personal development plan - 1 or 2 things that could help them to become more effective and have a greater impact. Is this part of your cultural fabric?

It's especially important for your top performers - the pareto group  where you get 80% of your results. If you're not aggressively developing this group, you risk losing them to competitors.

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?

I talk about this issue over and over in my workshops on employee engagement. 

Most of my clients consider the issue of defining their purpose to be too touchy-feely, uncomfortable, not worth the time to work on, or disconnected from doing business. As the other indicates there are a variety of well-known publications and authors articulating the need to define purpose.

Here's a quote from the article:

"In a recent McKinsey survey, 82% of U.S. workers said that it’s important for companies to have a purpose, but only 42% reported that their company’s stated purpose had real impact."

Here's my perspective on purpose - without a purpose that employees can get behind, it's hard for individual employees to determine whether they matter in the achievement of your purpose - and whether they want to be aligned with it. When there is a lack of purpose, or a misalignment then employees drop down the engagement pyramid / Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs - and they they give you rock-bottom, minimal levels of productivity they think you'll tolerate without firing them.

Shame on many companies for not having a purpose and allowing employees to feel like they matter - and accepting sub-par levels of productivity.

I rarely touch on the element of when to fire someone. I should probably cover this topic more in-depth. One of the old trite phrases that many of my clients violate is Hire Slowly, Fire Quickly. Most companies do the complete opposite. They fall victim to hiring mistakes because they pull the trigger long before vetting, validating, verifying every claim, accomplishment, achievement, skill, statement by the candidate.

They also let misbehaving, toxic, non-performers overstay their welcome instead of voting them off the island. They usually rationalize this decision with "better the devil I know than the one i don't."

As you probably know, I talk extensively about how rewards, recognition, and appreciation is the next most important element to employee engagement (productivity) after defining success for the role.

Do you have a strong peer to peer recognition as a best practice in rewards and recognition for your organization?

Most companies I come across in my executive search and consulting practice claim they have a great culture - but they lack a core element of appreciation, gratitude, recognition, and thankfulness. How do your managers execute on a daily basis around showing appreciation? Is it time for some remedial training of your management team around this critical element of an outstanding culture.

Always looking for a little managerial humor. Bosses are always getting a bad rap - maybe for good reason after you read this article. I've been preaching over the last few years about how important the boss is in driving engagement/productivity.

Some interesting insights into your workforce - particulary the disengaged who don't care whether they continue working for you  - new study pegs it at 25 percent. I believe it's much higher - particularly if you look at the Gallup research.

Good article by BambooHR on the Dos and Don'ts of employee recognition. As I indicted earlier, many companies have just zoned out on the need to increase employee recognition, rewards, sensitivity, empathy during COVID. My argument is that we should all be doubling down to show how much we appreciate our employees.

This article caught my attention. Do you work in a toxic work environment? Should you be asking yourself these questions? As a key executive, leader, or CEO - you are what you tolerate. If the complaints I hear from my clients are indicative of what's going on in most companies as tolerated behavior - then I am seriously worried about the state of employee engagement and retention.

Obviously the author of this article is biased in thinking there list falls in the top 14. However, there were a couple in this article that are pretty consistent from best practice article to article over the past decade. These become amplified in a hybrid work environment. Some of the best ones include clairty about goals, raising the amount of communication, and starting to get managers to stop focusing on employee weaknesses and start focusing on coaching. Finally, there is a need to inject a little bit of humor into the work environment during this covid crisis - my perspective is that many of us have lost our sense of being playful, having fun, joking around, and enjoying each other as teammates.

Here's the quote that breaks my heart about people:

"92% of employees would stay with a company if their managers showed a little more empathy"

When I talk about sensitivity/empathy - and the need to train managers how to show more of it in my Vistage workshops on employee engagment - most CEOS-Senior Executives look at me like I'm nuts. That seems way to touchy-feely or squishy to them.

The studies bear out that the manager is the primaryinfluencer of employee engagement and productivity, and most employees feel their manager doesn't show enough empathy and sensitivity.

I've never seen studies showing the breakdown of managers between those who have high sensitivity/empathy and those who lack it.  My ancetodal research indicates that most managers are Type A - aggressive, dominant, caring more about results than people.

How do you balance the need for showing empathy in your culture when your management team doesn't have this capability?

Interesting article on the Forbes website talking about employee engagement/satisfaction/happiness in terms of vitamins are pain-killers. Unfortunately, the concepts discussed are so far out in left field that many companies might have trouble considering these ideas.

One of my big hot buttons is helping employees understand how they matter to what the organization is attempting to achieve. One of the key elements around matterness is the idea of purpose and whether it motivates employees. Let's start at a very basic level - do you have a purpose for your organization? Have you answered the "WHY" question?

I would like to point out that this article really has nothing to do with healthcare. There is a direct correlation in every business, whether you're selling skateboards through Amazon, providing hospice care - or something in the middle - you're employee engagement, happiness, satisfaction is directly tied to your customer/client satisfaction.

Most companies don't buy into this idea since their investment in employee experiences and engagement is in the bottom of the bell-shaped curve - and they don't measure the impact through metrics on the customer/client. It's almost as if they don't care or they are in denial about the correlation.

What are you doing to boost customer/client satisfaction by investing in employee experience/engagement initiatives?