Retain Top Talent

Some really good ideas to "sharpen the saw" as Covey called it around sustaining and amplifying employee engagement during a time when people feel isolated, lonely, out of sight/out of mind, and disconnected from the culture.

Which one of these ideas are you currently working on  OR which one appeals to you to start working on?
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In my Vistage webinars for Groups and members on Managing Remotely in a Crisis - one of the biggest concerns CEOs express is how to maintain their culture wth a remote workforce.

This article specifically addresses that issue and starts with the recommendation to nail down your values.

Here's my favorite quote from the article:

“Company culture comes from the people, not the physical space they inhabit.”

Some really good suggestions and ideas - simple to implement to bolster engagement and strengthen your culture with remote workers. How many of the items on this list are you currently working on?

Great quote focused on remote workers:

"These interactions are really important in a distributed company because one thing that you have to recognize is that you aren't around people all day, so it's easy for loneliness to set in."

What are you doing to prevent loneliness and isolation? How do you keep everyone focused on the future, working on projects that are important but not urgent, and continuous improvement when the natural tendency is to become paralyzed by fear and uncertainty?

What steps are you taking - specific tactics to get your employees into that engaged mode of leaning in, taking responsibility, being proactive, taking initiative, and doing more than is asked of them?

This article did a good job separating the ideas of recognition and appreciation. Sometimes, CEOs get confused over which one requires what tactics - or one gets ignored.

Here are some good tips for employees about how to work at home - especially for those for which this is a new experience. I'm finding most of my clients are NOT providing coaching and resources to help their employees be more effective as a remote worker. The assumption is just work the same as you did in the office - nothing could be further from the truth. Your employees desperately crave your guidance, coaching , and support in how to be productive and successful while working from home.

Here's a contrarian view of why self-run internal employee recognition programs fail. Granted, the authors are biased since they are recommending their software SaaS model. However, I've see an extraordinary explosion in some very good SaaS apps for companies to more effectively manage employee engagement - apps for tracking success factors, projects, recognition programs, employee satisfaction, and many others.

Is now a good time to look at some of these app-based tools as many of your team members are remote?

In this interesting article on the new normal of working from home, the author talks about a few elements of improving that process.

I particularly liked "if individuals and teams are clear on the results, then they can choose the most effective and efficient means to achieve measurable outcomes. Let your employees know what is needed and when so they can work efficiently and effectively."

As you know, this idea of defining success through the organization - whether it's the business objectives for key executives of a key executive or the KPIs for a field tech - this is something that gets amplified in a work at home environment.

I'm recommending as the NUMBER ONE best practice in having people work from home in my Managing Remotely in a Crisis Webinar that companies focus on defining and communicating expectations clearly and precisely (in written form), and then structure their entire management process around it for feedback, recognition, learning, and coaching.

If you can move the needle on defining success in the next 3 months, you'll go a long way toward improving productivity, efficiency, effectiveness, and flawless execution.

Employees Unhappy with their employers. Big surprise here!

I'm surprised the number is not higher with most employers not doing anything of substance different than before the Corona Virus.

This level of dissatisfaction, disengagement, and unhappiness is only going to increase substantially over the next two months.

Are you managing as if nothing has changed?

The article on Forbes attempts to dispel the traditional command and control management approach of time studies and tracking how much people are in front of their computers.

"If your company’s culture is based on micromanagement, think about how to manage the transition away from it."

Let's transition to using OKRs, outcomes, deliverables, expectations, KPIs, and metrics to determine if people are being successful instead of control mechanisms to see when they are working.

Good ideas and reinforcement about employee recognition and appreciation. I liked giving shout-outs on social media to teams and individual employees and having managers write hand-written notes to their subordinates who then post those notes on the refrigerator so the whole family can see how much they are appreciated.

This article made me sad to read given the high percentage of people working from home right now. Here's the quote that got to me:

remote workers felt shunned and left out. Results showed that the remote cohort was more likely to feel unrepresented, and ganged up against by colleagues.

What are you doing to prevent your employees from feeling shunned and left out, isolated, ignored, cast off, not cared for?

In working through the webinar I've been conducting for Vistage Groups and members over the last few weeks, many CEOs have admitted to not communicating enough, not providing enough specific direction on expectations, and not embedding a sense of caring, compassion, and empathy into their culture.

Let's fix this right now! The steps are simple, and the technology exists to facilitate a more effective remote work culture.

Good reminder about the stress and anxiety your employees are suffering and how to listen, show you care, and demonstrate  empathy. I like to the family channel idea on Slack and the idea of laying out an employment plan to your workforce to reduce the stress of whether they will have a job in 2 weeks.

Although this article is written from the perspective of a Software/app company and how to limit churn - customers quitting, not paying, going to competitors. 

Let's move the discussion away from just software companies to all companies - product and service (especially is you have a recurring revenue model).

What are some creative approaches you could take over the next 3-6 months to ensure you retain a significant number of your clients as the economy restarts and everyone scrambles after those same clients/customers?

This is the forward planning part of my workshop/webinar on Managing Remotely in a Crisis - how do we emerge stronger and more capable rather than simply picking up where we left off? How do we take the next 3-6 months to work on those back-burner projects that might allow us to gain a competitive advantage?

Self-Evaluations by employees of their performance should be one of the pillars of your performance management process. Here are some ideas from a recent article on how to build self-evaluations into the process. Even if this is already part of your process, it might serve as a great review/assessment.

Some good ideas about working remotely and understanding the different personality type styles so that managers can be more effective in managing vs. applying a "one approach" fits everyone mentality.

Is now the time to improve the sensitivity and awareness of your management team to how people want to manage and what they need in terms of feedback and communication?