Retain Top Talent

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

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.

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.

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.

Have you considered this idea of employee relationship management? This ties in closely with an employee's experience and employee engagement. It goes one level beyond that in providing a framework/person for active management of the employee experience. 

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?

One of the most powerful tools in your toolkit to drive high employee engagement and productivity - is training and development. In a perfect world - everyone of your employees would have a personal development plan. Learning, growth, development, becoming more effective, having a bigger impact, doing my job better are all important elements of retention, culture, and employee engagement.

One of the elements I discuss in my workshops with Vistage Groups on Employee engagement is the idea of helping people understand how they matter ot the boss, team, department, and organization. One of the most powerful tools to execute on this idea is to cascade expectations, results, outcomes, deliverables, KPIs or OKRs down through the entire organization. Less than 20 percent of all companies I come across build this level of clarity, purpose, matterness, and expectations into the fabric of their organization.

Not doing this is the number ONE reason hiring fails, performance management disintegrates, and employee engagement (productivity) remains at low embarrassing levels.

Great article on the subject of employee engagement, productivity, and happiness through empowerment, especially in the government space. Unfortunately, most organizations - be it profit, non-profit, government - do a terrible job of empowering employees.

The number one reason as the article points out is the lack of agreed upon outcomes, deliverables, expectations, and accountability - when employees doesn't know what the target looks like they are relegated into a micro-management submissive role of their boss being the bottleneck. When employees know the target, they are liberated to take action to reach the target instead of circling their boss as the center of the universe.

Until organizations start to do a better job of cascading down through the organization top level objectives so that everyone knows what the target looks like, what success looks like, and what the measurement stick looks like - then we're stuck with micro-management oriented supervision which results in low engagement (productivity).

I'm a huge fan of data to understand what's happening and how to focus resources. But how about the other metrics of success that might determine employee engagement - absenteeism, number of managers achieving results, sick days, eNPS, number of referrals hired, mistakes/error reduction, productivity metrics?

What else do you measure to determine if your employees are being more successful and productive as the outcome of employee engagement initiatives?

Notice the information linking to Gallup's work on employee engagement. For those of you that have seen me do my Vistage One Hour Complimentary Webinar on Managing Remotely in a Crisis - communication, setting clear expectations, and providing appropriate rewards and recognition. No brainer initiatives - what's holding you back from moving down the path of starting to do these basic fundamental initiatives that lead to high productivity.

Many of my clients continue to downplay the investment in initiatives around employee engagement and the employee experience. The benefits of small investments in this area pay off huge dividends in a variety of direct profit areas as this article points out.

So, in the face of overwhelming benefits from investments in initiatives around employee engagement - why do we still continue to ignore or hestitate to move in that direction? Is it so far outside the traiditional HR comfort zone, that we're afraid to experiment?

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.

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.

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?

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. 

Good whitepaper by Dale Carnegie on issues of driving employee engagement. The research shows that 85% of leaders say employee engagement is a strategic priority.

Why then do 4 out of 5 employee engagement initiatives fail to drive business gains, such as reduced turnover, higher productivity, greater profitability?

One of the key elements I talk about in the workshop I do for Vistage Groups on how to improve employee engagement (productivity) is the idea of matterness - does anyone care that I am here - am I adding value to what we are doing?

This affects communication around purpose, mission, and values. It's about the execution on driving clarity about job expectations, or having a structured approach to employee recognition. This article does a good job laying out these ideas and reinforcing the "why" I am here and "why" I do what I do.

One of the topics I touch on in my workshops titled Managing Remotely in a Crisis for Vistage Groups is the element of running effective online meetings. Most managers and senior staff members are horrible at running online meetings - probably 90 percent of the participants tune out.

Is it time to give your staff and managers a remedial course on running effective meetings? Just because someone carries a managerial title doesn not translate that they are good at engaging meeting participants and running effective online meetings. Seems a no brainer - what if we could improve the effectiveness of online meetings by 20 or 30 percent?

It's interesting to see the same issues crop up again and again related to tactics of employee engagement. Here's the quote:

"We did identify a major communication gap: only 20% of employees reported that they receive weekly feedback. So it appears that managers and employees are talking regularly about ongoing work and projects, but employees still aren’t receiving the coaching that they desire."

Why are employees not getting the coaching they want - because most managers don't know how to coach. Is it time for some remedial training for managers on coaching?

Everyone is struggling with how to drive higher levels of productivity through employee engagement initiatives. Yet, many of these initiatives fail miserably. Perhaps, 1 in 5 succeed. 20 percent success is horrible.

There is a groundswell of support in HR to apply IT approaches of Agile Development to HR initiatives. I am going to suggest this is an ineffective approach to implementing HR initiatives. The problem occurs because most HR initiatives are not tied to business outcomes with metrics. Once we start linking the investment and effort in HR to specific business outcomes, the results and focus starts to change.

Is HR seen as a business parter in driving results - or an admin function putting SOPs in place?

There are a few basic elements of creating a great employee experience - listening to staff, having deep and difficult conversations, being flexible, granting autonomy and not micro-managing. How well would you rate your company on these dimensions of employee experience?