Retain Top Talent

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?

Fairly sophisticated ideas from HBR on shaping employee experience. Allow me to boil this down to it's most basic elements - like the key concepts I talk about in my workshops on employee engagement.

1. There are some basic fundamental elements of employee engagement that have the most significant impact - such as defining expectations and having a systematic reward program.

2. You must solicit feedback from employees in the form of 1-to-1s (stay interviews), town halls, group meetings, and employee satisfaction surveys.

3. A better communciation plan must be put in place - ideally in partnership with your employees about company information, business vision, personal opportunities.

4. Managers have to be trained to do an effective job of managing their employee expectations, dreams, and vision - as it relates to the  capability of the organization to meet these needs.

Not investing time and effort in these four elements means your just a short stopping point for most hires when they realize the grass is greener somewhere else.

First point in the article - the traditional employee performance appraisal should be proclaimed as DEAD!

Instead we should be using a dynamic process of setting goals, effective communication and feedback (such as a regularly scheudled one-to-one at least on monthly basis), and frequent discussions around matterness - showing and demonstrating how your teammembers matter and are aligned with the purpose of the organization.

You'll be in shock over the increased productivity and impact if you just do these simple steps in performance management and coaching.

Some good tips on managing performance - particularly when performance falls below your expectations. NOTE the importance of setting clear and specific goals/outcomes.

Some basic fundamental ideas on virtual on-boarding. Most companies approach to effective on-boarding is either non-existent or completely ineffective. Hiring people in a virtual world just amplifies the need to do a better job of making people believe this is the most important decision they've made to join your organization.

I've researched the idea of mental toughness extensively and teach it as my primary tool for success in coaching High School Girls Basketball. What is mental toughess (or what's now referred to as "Grit")?

It's character traits that enable success - like a positive attitude, a winner's mentality, proactivity, intiaitive, self-motivation, resilience, ability to overcome adversity, ability to accept constructive criticism/feedback and strive to continually improve (as Covey called it - sharpening the sword).

I recommend my clients dig into these character issues in every interview at every level. Here's an article on resilience I thought was interesting, especially this quote:

"40% of global respondents reported low levels of personal resilience and were at risk of ‘occupational burnout"

How do you build mental toughness/grit among your teams, especially since it's one of the core elements of high-performing teams.

Here from Forbes some key points reinforcing those I've been making in my Vistage Managing Remotely in a Crisis workshop on Zoom: set expectations and manage them, do face to face meetings on video, over communicate, create a communications plan and stick to it,

How well is your leadership doing leading across these elements?

I keep seeing articles showing a trend for companies to be monitoring how much and where employees are spending their time - NSA type monitoring.

Something doesn't seem right about these attempts? I've always been a big proponent of not measuring screen time, but rather setting mutually agreeable outcomes, deliverables, metrics, and KPIs.

The problem is when managers don't want to invest the time to define success, then we are left with the fallback position of measuring hours and screen time.

What's going on in your organization?

Some good action steps for improving employee engagement and higher levels of impact/productivity.

Note on Facebook's shift to remote working:

"The impact of the coronavirus has caused Facebook to reassess its requirement for employees to work out of an office"

Have you gone through a similar analysis of who really needs to be in the office full-time or part-time?

Once again, reinforcement that 50-70 percent of your workforce is disengaged. The author lays a number of benefits that occur through better engagement - many of which have been well documented in a wide variety of studies over the past decade.

Here's my question: on each of these elements mentioned in the article are you setting metrics to measure your success in moving the needle on employee engagement?

Most of the goal setting done in entrepreneurial businesses is at best weak and superficial. This article serves as a good reminder around the steps of setting goals for people. We can our process SOAR which is a variation on the older model of SMART outcomes.

Very scary statistic: almost 1/3 of employees leave their job within 6 months due to weak employee engagement - number one is a lack of clear specific outcomes/goals. Are you forcing good employees to leave by not defining success for their jobs, and not implementing initatives in areas like recognition?

Good reminders of accountability and performance management. One of the key points is about having regular feedback sessions, a point I've been stressing on doing 1-to-1s in my Managing Remotely in a Crisis Workshop.

Are all your managers conducting regular 1-to-1s with their direct reports on a weekly basis. See my LinkedIn articles on the rationale of conducting 1-to-1s and an efficient model to do them in a 20-30 minute timeframe every week.

Tracy writes about the role HR can play in driving signficant change for organizations to be more successful. I agree this is the role HR should be playing. Unforunately, I see it less than 5% of time when interviewing HR executives in my executive search practice. CEOs dream of having an HR leader who can do what the author describes - why do most HR execs constrain themselves to the role of admin instead of a strategic force?

Good reminders on the basics of effective performance management. Notice number one on the list is map out expectations.

This is the central theme of our consulting, workshops, and executive search practice - define success. NOT defining success is the number one reason for hiring failure, ineffective performance management, and poor employee engagement (and subsequently employee productivity).

Most studies show that at best 50 percent of your workforce knows what their immediate boss expects of them. In entrepreneurial and small businesses, that number is more likely to be in the 80 percent range of employees, candidates, new hires not understanding what's expected of them.

Huge problem in most companies. How are you fixing it?

Great set of statistics reminding us of the value of creating a sense of belonging, community, and matterness. What specific intiatives is your organization moving forward with to stimulate this level of employee engagement around relationships?

People might come to you because of your rep, salary, location, job opportunity - but they'll leave for a lack of relationships - boss, peers, teams.

Most companies invest ZERO time in stimulating the relationships among co-workers, and creating a sense of community and shared purpose. If we don't work on these elements, how can we ever hope to build high performing teams?

The part of expressing caring, interest, sensitivity, support, and empathy goes down the tubes when we feel isolated, lonely, and separated from our boss, organization, and co-workers.

As I've been reminding everyone in our Managing Remotely in a Crisis Workshop:

"Instead of jumping right to agenda item no 1 (or as soon as Harold finally located his unmute button) we should take 5 min. to ask how people are. Or take a virtual lunch or coffee break without any other purpose, than sharing how we are feeling on, what feels like day 913 of working in the same pants"

How much of this dialogue is happening in your organization - or is it only about the numbers and the metrics in conversations?

Some really good ideas from Forbes on hiring A-players. How many of these 14 strategies are you executing on now? Which one is at the top of your list to develop action plans for execution?

Some ideas/thoughts for boosting motivation by your employees working from home and suffering burn-out, zoom fatigue, isolation, separation, and the stress of balancing childcare, home life, and work expectations. My concern is that most companies are not spending enough time thinking about these issues, their cultural implications, and the resulting low levels of productivity based on employee disengagement.

Something to think about - your working parents - whether they will continue to work from home or come into the office now that restrictions are being eliminated.

Are you setting your organization up as a great place to work because of your sensitivity, empathy, caring toward family issues, and parents struggling with at-home issues?

The great part of working for an entrepreneurial company is the flexibility and family style atmosphere  - is that really the case in your actions as we cycle through this Crisis?