Retain Top Talent

Loved the Wall of Happy described in this article. The statistic that rocked me a little was the one about 4 out 5 employees indicated they would work harder if praised/patted on the back.

I agree with this recommendation by the author 100 percent.  Are you staying in touch with your terminated or furloughed employees? How are you maintaining a strong relationship with the folks you might want to hire back?

As you know, I've been doing a webinar on How to Manage Remotely which takes all our content over 2 decades on hiring, performance management, and employee engagement and mashes it together with the element of working remotely.

The first of 8 elements I cover in this webinar is that companies must provide the infrastructure to allow employees to work well with each other. Here's the statistic that shocked me:

The Right Technology. According to a recent Gartner poll, 54% of HR leaders reported that poor technology and/or infrastructure for remote working is the single largest barrier to its success. This “technology” category encompasses everything from email to internal messaging platforms to video conferencing tools.

This is pretty consistent with the comments shared by CEOs in my webinars.  If this is a barrier to getting work done - what does that say about the productivity of your organization?

Here's a novel idea - how about involving your employees in decision making around layoffs and cost reductions - counterintuitive idea from HBR.

I'm curious if any of you have tried this compared to the traditional method of top-down instead of bottom-up?

First the bad news: 20% turnover in first 45 days. Horrible!

What I liked about the article was what has been known up to this point as an on-boarding plan - takes on a new dimension as a customized employee engagement plan for each new hire.

What if you did this with every new hire?

Do you have a playbook for returning back to work in the office or in the new abnormal? Josh Bersin provides some ideas around rethinking your business model.

As you start to contemplate the idea of some of your employees wanting to return to the office, what about those who still want some flexibility to work from home?

Do you still have a bias against your team working part-time or full time from home? Flexibility to work from home and flexibility around work schedule is a powerful employee engagement tactic.

On-boarding is the first step in ensuring a great employee experience starting on Day 1. Unfortunately, many companies are stuck in a 1970s model of onboarding. Are you prepared to start outstanding employee engagement with the first day of work?

You can now take your job ad on LinkedIn and from your company page send a notification to all your employees - what a great way for them to then take that notification/job ad - and share it with their network to boost your referrals.

Although this article is pointed at the PR sector, it could be extended to any business. Productivity is down. How do we still get stuff done? What are the right tools, tactics, and methodologies to ensure you can still hit your business goals, outcomes, deliverables, expectations, and KPIs?

I just had this conversation today with a group of CEOs in my webinar on Managing Remotely in a Crisis. I was recommending that the companies should implement a peer-to-peer recognition system in addition to their other methods of showing appreciation.

It's somewhat counter-intuitive, but the author is suggesting that even in the middle of a crisis like the Corona Virus - it might be the perfect time to do an employee survey and measure current engagement levels.

A really good article on defining culture, and details about how to build/refine your culture. Most interesting statistic was:

85 percent of organizations fail in transforming their cultures.

If 85% fail to transform/improve their culture - what's the biggest pain point?

I didn't find this article to live up to the headline about how to go from good to great in employee engagement. It offered a few simple suggestions.

What caught my eye was the couple of studies they mentioned that showed employees think their employer has blown it during the Corona Virus Crisis. These studies ranged from 45-55%. I saw one the other day that said 75% felt their employer had done a terrible job.

If those stats/surveys are accurate and reflect what's going on in your organization, what's your plan to fix it?

Some good points in this article about employee engagement around teaching listening skills (not a strong trait of managers), effective managers (very little training going on teaching folks to be great managers - first thing to be cut in belt tightening), and working on purpose.

Some key points to think about regarding employee engagement with referencing some major studies and statistics.

Is there any reason why we would not want to work on raising employee engagement? How about increased profits, higher  customer retention, greater productivity?

Is there any reason why we would not want to invest time and effort in growing employee engagement?

How do you have difficult conversations and messaging with your employees when the future is uncertain? How do you give them hope, reassurance, comfort - without false or misleading information? This article provides some good ideas around overcoming the fear that is gripping many of your employees about their future job status.

As you may be aware from some of my previous posts, I've been urging my clients to move to a chat-based tool for communication like the yammer tool on teams or slack. Interesting article about taking the pulse of your employees through such a tool on a continuous basis throughout the year.