Retain Top Talent

Good fundamental article on the foundation of employee engagement. The point that caught my interest at the beginning was "quality management is necessary for the relationship between an employee and employer to be at its best."

The core problem in most companies is that the vast majority of managers are horrible at managing, supervision, and leadership. They are wonderful individuals, but they've never been trained in best practices for measuring success, motivating team members, giving feedback, showing their team members that they care about them, and are capable of showing their gratitude.

Is it time to conduct some remedial training of your mangement team to begin to put quality management in place? Just because someone carries a manager, director, or VP title - doesn't correlate that they are a good manager.

Here is a decent article on employee morale and the importance for teams. Are your team leaders and managers well trained in how to drive high levels of morale and do you have a series of action steps, initiatives, programs to bring this generic concept down to the reality of day-to-day work in teams?

This is a reverse angle on interviewing - questions a potential candidate might ask of you. How would you respond to these questions? Everyone talks about their culture is family oriented and cares deeply about their people - is that really true? Could you offer specific examples to illustrate how your values get reflected day-to-day with employees?

One of the most important elements of employee satisfaction, engagement, and retention is continuous and regular feedback. KILL the traditional performance management process with it's once a year review cycle. Not only is it woefully inadequate, but it borders on a sadistic approach to feedback.

When of the struggles I hear from my clients is what is appreciation vs. recognition - how do know it when we see it? We don't want to reinforce just showing up to work - but going above and beyond. What would that look like at an observable level?

Everyone is talking about managing the employee experience - but what is that? How does it affect specific initiatives? Not managing it well puts you on the wrong end of the metrics around the "great resignation."

Whose responsiblity is it to foster or create  a framework for developing work related relationshps/friendships? It's not enough to just work together and hope it works.

A hallmark of high performing teams is that the team members really like working with each other. This is done through team-buildling exercises, outside events, sharing meals together, lunch and learns. Are you doing enough to allow people on your team to develop strong personal relationships?

Some good ideas around designing a non-monetary reward and recognition process. NOT having a great recognition and reward process is the number two reason (behind not defining success in clear and precise language of KPIs and Metrics) why employees disengage and start looking for a new job.

This article pretty much sums up my entire workshop on retention and engagement - "Employee satisfaction hinges on the quality of management".

In most organizations, the managers who are leading the bulk of your employees have no clue what they are doing! They're good people, they've just never been trained, coached, had their hand held, taught, sent to class, and measured around best practices of leading teams.

This is not a new revelation - almost every major business author in the last 2 decades has talked about the importance of managing and leading. Gallup came out with an excellent book on the subject titled "It's the Manager".

Let's think through this logically. If 70-75% of the reason an employee is engaged is based on their manager - meaning they give a 100 percent effort, and love being part of your organization - then should we not help managers know how to engage (defining success, open and transparent communication, developing people, giving great feedback, motivating their team, helping employees understand how they matter, and showing tremendous appreciation and gratitude for what they do).

Most managers have no clue how to execute on these critical engagement activities with their teams. Is it time for some remedial training of your core mangement team?

This is an interesting idea that has been kicked around for a few years - but doesn't seem to have gained much traction. I love it! Can you apply gamification to learning and development to drive better outcomes and results? Might be worth experimenting with some of the ideas mentioned in this article.

The article seems to make this information revolutionary based on their study, but Gallup has been publishing and researching this information for over the past decade. Not defining clear expectations, not having a great culture of appreciation and recognition, and a lack of learning and development are the fundamental reasons 50% or more of your employees are seeking greener pastures right now. Fixing it is easy. My head scratching moment is why employers are not launching initiatives and changes to fix these negative workplace factors.

I have not yet seen any decent studies of the issue related to employees quitting over a lack of support on inflation for US companies. The data from this UK study cannot be too far off where we are in the US.

What I don't understand is how could the movement toward a recession suddenly cause a well-known and sophisticated company to start considering effective performance management? How could these "non-performers" have been allowed to remain on the Island without being voted off?

Does this really reinforce the old adage that a rising tide lifts all boats - we ignore the fundamental elements of effective management in good times. We allow average and mediocre people to remain on the team because their weak effort or lack of performance is covered by the rising tide?

There are a number of good ideas here in this article. The one that resonated with me was the first - get to know your employees.

Your employees want to know you care about them as people - not just items on the payroll register. In my workshops to CEOs/Presidents, I ask how many know the names and ages of the children of their direct reports. Less than 50% can answer that question. It makes me sad that executives don't care about the people who work for them by not asking questions of what goes on outside of work. Do you really care? When your team doesn't thinkyou care, they are already seeking greener pastures elsewhere.

Another element of the employee experience or engagement to consider: do your employees feel like the belong? How would this get manifested in day-to-day interactions?

1. How teams work together and whether everyone on the team feels valued.

2. Do your employees feel like they matter - do you reinforce this by teaching your managers how to show people they matter to each other, to the boss, the organization, and your customers?

3. Do you force opportunities for relationship development and collaboration so that it's not left up to chance or random events?

Barry

Are you rethinking the traditional approach to requiring people to work standard hours because "if I can't see them, I don't trust them." Get out of this 1970s approach to managing people. Employees have different expectations today about work, especially the younger generations. If you want to hire and retain a great team, maybe it's time to rethink your traditional attendence policies.

I'm getting more and more questions from my clients regarding effective on-boarding programs. Most companies are still stuck in a 1970s framework of on-boarding. Here are some good ideas to think about as you design your on-boarding strategy. Remember - the key is to help people realize they've had made the best decision of their career by joining your organization.

I am a huge proponent of tracking metrics and KPIs to measure success around initiatives aimed at employee engagement, the employee experience, and retention. Here are some ideas on beginning the path of determining whether HR is effective in engagement, retention, and employee productivity.

Interesting article in Fortune about the capability of hybrid work flexibility to reduce turnover rates. A lot of my clients are struggling right now in trying to determine whether to bring everyone back or continue in a hybrid model.

Encouraging workplace friendships might seem to contradict what we've been taught historically  that we should keep work and outside work separate - sterile - a sharp dividing line.

The reality is that a hallmark of a high performing team is that all the team members know each other very well, they consider some of their teammates to be personal friends, they appreciate the differences and different motivations.

The big question is what's the employer's role in helping to build these relationships beyond "leaving it up to the employees?" Do you hold team building exercises, lunch and learns together, conversations around activities that are not work related, celebrating each other. Just working together is not enough to develop these relationships that are a critical component of employee engagement.

Good understanding of what drives employee motivation is at the heart of leadership and management. I like the description of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and the connection to employee recognition. Most of my clients have minimal or almost non-existent employee non-monetary reward and recognition systems.

Beyond mission and value statements, many of my clients struggle to describe accurately their culture - what it is like to work in their unique environment. Here is one of the few articles I've come across that begins to offer a framework and words to describe your culture. The goal should be to have a one page document that accurately describes how employee work and interact with each other and customers.

This idea of why transformation/change fails so often is my current topic of interest. I'm not sure I would agree with the article that it's 75% due to the wrong culture. My perspective after heavy research is that 80% of initiatives, digital change, system implementation, acquisitions, and new market/product strategies fail miserably due to poor execution - by not considering the various elements of what leads to flawless execution. 

Some of these include having the wrong people leading the change, a lack of understanding about change management/adoption from the people doing it in the trenches, poor use of technology in managing the change, weak systems for tracking-feedback-corrections, poorly funded, and a lack of clear expectations in a KPI/metric-based approach.

Here's the piece that caught my attention regarding employee engagement and development strategies:

"Start with the development of your managers, which I liken to throwing a rock into a pond. There is a ripple effect that extends through their department and, ultimately, the company. Stronger managers lead to more effective communication, more productive team outputs and increased employee engagement."

In my retention workship titled "You're the Person We Want to KEEP!", this is one of my top recommendations. Most managers have no clue what they are doing with their teams because they have never been trained in best practices for hiring, coaching, development, engagement, and motivation. Gallup shows that 70 percent of an employee's engagement (their willingness to show effort and work hard) is based on the manager. When the manager doesn't know what to do - employees turnoff, start looking for a new job, and being giving you the rock bottom level of effort and productivity they think you'll tolerate to leave them on the payroll system.

It's a no-brainer to start developing your managers and executives in basic/fundamental best practices of leading teams.

This is a good fundamental definition of effective performance management. Most companies - particularly those in the emerging growth-small business-entrepreneurial size have weak to completely ineffective performance management systems and processes.

The result is a below average level of productivity. It's a crying shame that these companies don't achieve the full capability of their workforce as compared to companies that have more effective performance management.