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10 Tips to Level Up Your Professional Network

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People often hate the idea of networking, either because they’re introverts by nature, they’re afraid of rejection, or they don’t want to seem pushy, self-absorbed, and disingenuous. Still, networking remains one of the most effective strategies for managing a successful career. In fact, 70% of Americans say they found their current job through their professional network — even though only 48% say they regularly keep in touch with their connections.

However, the tide is starting to turn. Many people are interested in strengthening their professional circles now, as the economy grows more uncertain. That’s why we decided to gather helpful networking tips. Specifically, we asked business leaders and recruiters these questions:

  • How have you built and leveraged your professional network to advance your career?
  • How has your network rewarded you with opportunities
  • What advice would you share with others who want to level up their networking efforts?

In response, we found 10 excellent ideas from CEOs, recruiters, and other professionals. If you take a quick look, I’m sure you’ll find several suggestions that can help you achieve better results from your efforts:

  • Nurture a “Trusted100” Network
  • Make Room for Introversion in Networking
  • Leverage Connections for Career Advancement
  • Maintain Warm, Genuine Professional Relationships
  • Emphasize Reciprocity as a Core Principle
  • Create a Vibrant Community for Growth
  • Expand Your Network Beyond Discrete Categories
  • Be Clear and Specific in Networking
  • Engage Actively on Social Media Platforms
  • Share Knowledge Openly on LinkedIn

To learn more about how you can make the most of your professional network, read on to see how these ideas helped others level up…

10 Ways to Level Up Your Professional Network

1. Nurture a “Trusted100” Network

Throughout my career, I’ve intentionally nurtured a “Trusted100” circle of professional contacts, emphasizing genuine investment in each relationship for mutual growth.

Staying up-to-date with industry trends and actively participating in forums helped me present new opportunities to those in my network. I added value by sharing resources, making introductions, or providing important insights. In addition, by pursuing joint ventures such as co-authored articles or webinars, we enriched our shared expertise and strengthened our bond.

A notable moment was when one of my “Trusted100” contacts introduced me to a groundbreaking cloud-skilling project that unlocked access to 3,000 scholarships. This enhanced my professional journey, as well as that of others.

Networking is about quality, not quantity. Prioritize building high-trust relationships. Investing in others’ success can bring profound returns.

Chaitra Vedullapalli, CMO Meylah, President Women in Cloud

2. Make Room for Introversion in Networking

As an introvert, I took a different approach to building a professional network. This involved attending meet-ups and leveraging those forums to connect with new people. I seized the opportunity to step out of my comfort zone and participate in speaking engagements to increase visibility. For example, after I attended Mom 2.0 in May 2018, my network expanded, which ultimately led me to a cherished role at a tech company.

For fellow introverts, I recommend focusing on targeted connections. Seek out smaller gatherings or events where it’s possible to engage in meaningful one-on-one conversations, rather than having to navigate through a massive, bustling crowd.

Remember to keep networking and keep building your connections. A network is not just a safety net for job opportunities — it’s a source of support, knowledge, and growth. It opens doors to valuable insights, mentorship, and collaboration opportunities, even for introverts.

Natasha Brown, Technical Recruiter, On Platform

3. Leverage Connections for Career Advancement

I have never shied away from using my connections to help further my career. It started with an internship in college, which led my boss to introduce me to a former colleague who was in a leadership position in my hometown. That path inadvertently led me down a very roundabout career path.

In 2017, I interviewed with many potential employers. Several years later, an HR professional remembered me from our 2017 exchange and reached out to discuss a position he was trying to fill at a new company. I wasn’t looking for a new job. But it was early March 2020, and the world was changing right before our eyes. So I made the switch. Today, I’m still with that company and have advanced to a leadership position.

If you find a position that interests you and you know someone at that company, don’t hesitate to reach out and learn about the culture. Your connection can help determine if it’s a good fit, and perhaps recommend you. Even if the timing isn’t right at that moment, it could lead to an excellent opportunity in the future.

Take the chance. The reward could very well be worthwhile. You’ll never know unless you try.

Pamela Abreu, Director of Client Relations, 5K.co

4. Maintain Warm, Genuine Professional Relationships

One of the most effective ways I’ve advanced my career is by diligently maintaining my professional network. I make it a point to keep in touch with college peers and colleagues from previous jobs, often through social media updates and coffee meetings.

This approach has led to some incredible opportunities. For example, a former colleague contacted me about a job at his new company. Similarly, when a former classmate became an entrepreneur, that classmate became one of my clients.

My advice is simple for others looking to enhance their network outreach:  Keep your professional relationships warm and genuine. Opportunities tend to come from places and people you least expect, and you never know who might be thinking of you when a new opportunity arises.

Michael Sena, CEO and Lead Analytics Consultant, Senacea Ltd.

5. Emphasize Reciprocity as a Core Principle

Focus on forming genuine relationships with others in your industry. Stay connected by regularly checking in. And be ready to help whenever you can, because this builds reciprocity into your relationships.

Always show gratitude when others assist you — it goes a long way in maintaining positive relationships.

I found my current role after connecting with my current manager on LinkedIn. I reached out when I saw her post about a position she wanted to fill. And here I am, a year and a half later!

Kristina Ramos, Reverse Recruiter, Find My Profession

6. Create a Vibrant Community for Growth

Throughout my career journey, I’ve discovered a profound truth about networking: It’s not just about building a professional network, but about creating a vibrant community of individuals united by a shared vision of support and growth. I’ve experienced the immense power of this principle firsthand.

By creating intentional, value-driven relationships, I had the privilege of being nominated as the G100 Mission Million South Carolina Chair for Startup Ecosystems. This honor was a testament to the potential of developing authentic connections.

Embrace the art of forging meaningful bonds. This truly is the key to unlocking opportunities you can’t even imagine at this moment in time!

Kathryn Dawe, Women Empowerment Coach and Leadership Strategist, Kathryn Dawe

7. Expand Your Circle Beyond Discrete Categories

A surprising number of recruiters fail to keep in touch with candidates after they’re placed. We tend to be busy with responding to new contracts, so once an initial trial period has passed, we move on.

If you’re selling a product, you may do the same with customers. You may see them solely as buyers, rather than members of your professional network. But when you place someone in a narrow category, you’re likely to overlook the full potential of that relationship.

Recently, a candidate I placed 10 years ago reached out to me. She was launching a business and needed my services. Since we’d stayed in touch long after her placement, I was top-of-mind when she needed to hire resources of her own. This teaches an important lesson not to limit your network. A more expansive perspective can lead to opportunities you wouldn’t otherwise expect.

Linn Atiyeh, CEO, Bemana

8. Be Clear and Specific in Networking

I landed a job abroad through the power of networking. After a few sluggish months of online job applications in my desired country, I proactively reached out to my contacts in that location. I clearly expressed my career goals, leaving no room for ambiguity about the kind of role I was pursuing.

A few weeks later, a recruiter contacted me directly, all thanks to referrals from my contacts. The recruiter recommended a role that perfectly aligned with my career aspirations. This enabled me to move abroad while advancing my career.

This experience holds a valuable lesson for anyone looking to level up their network outreach, especially in the pursuit of new opportunities. The key is to be straightforward and specific. Rather than relying on vague prompts like, “Let me know if something comes up,” make it known exactly what you’re aiming for.

Being clear amplifies the effectiveness of your outreach tenfold. The clearer you are, the easier it is for your connections to match you with the right opportunities.

Ana Colak-Fustin, Founder, ByRecruiters

9. Engage Actively on Social Media Platforms

I’ve found many career opportunities through my network. In fact, that’s how I discovered my current role as a physician’s assistant. A person I met during residency mentioned on social media that their employer was actively searching for PAs when I was looking for a job.

My advice for others who want to use their network as a career-building tool is to stay active and engaged with your professional contacts on social media platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter.

Any time you meet other people in your industry at networking events, conferences, or in the course of your day-to-day job, always look for them on social sites and add them as contacts. Not all of them will be active on social media, but you won’t know until you search for them. And those who are active can be an excellent source of industry knowledge, as well as career advancement opportunities.

Carlos Da Silva, Physician Assistant, PA Career Hub

10. Share Knowledge Openly on LinkedIn

I built my personal brand on LinkedIn and spent the last two years sharing everything I know and have learned with my audience. The more I’ve connected with like-minded folks on the platform, the more opportunities I’ve received each week.

So, my best advice would be to not hoard knowledge but share it openly with the world. You never know if someone on the other side is looking for someone with the kind of knowledge and expertise you’re prepared to share.

Gordana Sretenovic, Co-Founder, Workello ATS

Can Gamification Help Employees Beat The “Great Gloom”?

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Whoosh! The winds of workforce change continue blowing in every direction. Are you feeling it?

First, the pandemic forced employers to go all-in with remote work. Then by 2021, forward-thinking leaders rolled out hybrid work models, hoping flexibility would keep the “Great Resignation” at bay. No such luck. By last year, turnover reached record highs as employee engagement continued to sink.

What’s next? Well, now, in the face of broader economic troubles, many employees are choosing to stay put. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re happy. Not at all. In fact, researchers say the “Great Gloom” is upon us. Oh my. Yet another buzzword. And this one doesn’t sound promising for anyone.

What exactly should we make of this current wave of workforce discontent? It seems we’ve arrived at a sort of no man’s land, where people are neither engaged nor disengaged — just discouraged and disheartened. But that won’t steer anyone in the right direction. So what’s an employer to do?

This brings me to a topic we’ve discussed before — gamification.

Why It’s Time to Get Serious About Gamification

After so much disruption, some employers may welcome this pause as a moment of relief. But no one can afford to get too comfortable. If the past few years taught us anything, we know this isn’t over. Profound shifts will continue, even if we can’t see what’s around the corner. So, how can teams move forward and perform their best, while rolling with more organizational twists and turns?

I think gamification is part of the answer. I’m not just talking about fun and games, here. I’m talking about thoughtful strategies that fit into everyday work culture and tap into innate human traits, like curiosity and the desire to perform at our best.

We know from experience that gamification works for everything from recruiting and onboarding to team building and talent development. And these capabilities are within nearly every employer’s reach. So what are you waiting for?

What’s at Stake

Gallup estimates that employers lose $1 trillion each year to voluntary turnover. A majority of those former employees say their manager or organization could have done something to keep them. But companies aren’t asking, “How could we keep these people onboard?” until they’re already gone.

And now, even though more employees are staying, many are as disengaged and unfulfilled as those who left during better economic times. That’s not a good sign for business.

Success depends on productive teams — and productive teams depend on competent, committed employees. But building a high-performance culture isn’t easy, especially when remote and hybrid work schedules make communication, trust, and teamwork harder to manage. It sounds like a job for gamification.

Tips From a Gamification Expert

This reminds me of a previous #WorkTrends podcast guest who recommends that employers tap into the power of gamification to elevate the employee experience.

Lauren Fitzpatrick Shanks is the Founder of Keep Wondering Out Loud (KeepWOL), a game-centered talent development platform she developed after 14 years in leadership at five Fortune 500 companies. An accomplished, award-winning black entrepreneur and engineer, Lauren is passionate about leveraging gamification to improve performance among individuals, teams, and organizations…


So, what is gamification, and how important is it for companies to gamify their training and engagement initiatives? Lauren explains: 

Defining Gamification

We’ve all played games before. But think of gamification as game elements and mechanics you can add to work situations that aren’t meant to be games.

Think about how games work. They have rules, they have a framework, they have a structure. And these fundamentals apply to everyone.

For example, when you play Monopoly, you can’t just make up your own rules unless other players agree. This means games give everyone an opportunity to start on equal footing, so each of us has an opportunity to win.

Why Gamification Is So Powerful

As humans, we all want to win. Even if we’re not competitive, no one wants to lose or fail. So games hack your brain. They typically require strategic thinking or quick decisions that disarm people and bring them into a competitive mindset. This taps into the brain’s reward center so you tell yourself, “I want to do well. I want to put my best foot forward.”

I think all teams can benefit from gamification. However, the results depend on the types of games or game mechanics you use, and whether it’s done well. There are many possibilities, but it’s important to be mindful about how you implement it.

How Does This Prepare Us For the Future of Work?

Gamification isn’t a new concept. But companies are on a mission to incorporate it into talent development initiatives, so they can bridge the gap between learning and doing.

Deloitte predicts that soft-skill-intensive occupations will represent 2/3 of all jobs by 2030, and demand for those jobs will grow 2.5x faster than for others.

That means companies need to improve soft skills among today’s employees. And these skills are hard to develop. They don’t come intuitively. You have to practice. But games, gamification, and simulations are fun, creative ways for people to learn, practice, and retain information. They help us grow more naturally. So they’re ideal for soft-skills training.

Why Gamification Wins

We’ve worked with teams of all types and sizes — matrix-based teams, C-suite teams, and multidisciplinary teams. People who work remotely, in-person, and a hodgepodge of both.

That’s what’s amazing about games and gamification. It’s more expansive than a ropes course or an escape room or trivia questions. These methods can bring together people from different generations and cultures to build trust, connectedness, and productivity.


My Turn: How Gamification Helps

Is it really worthwhile to integrate gamification into employee engagement initiatives? That’s a fair question. Here’s my perspective. If you look closer, you’ll find multiple reasons to invest. For example, with these techniques, you can:

1. Inspire Individuals to “Level Up”

Modern employees crave personalized feedback and recognition for their contributions. Game-oriented platforms help with real-time performance tracking. This often includes reminders and rewards that motivate people to keep moving forward. It also keeps managers in the loop with alerts and insights that enable them to intervene when coaching is needed or to celebrate achievements when the time is right.

2. Help Teams Run-Up the Score

In this case, “the score” is your organization’s overall success. Adding game-based logic to department or group projects demonstrates how employee contributions translate into measurable business impact. For example, you can drive team performance by awarding points to people who collaborate effectively and share creative ideas. Similarly, you can help people sharpen their skills by integrating game elements into employee training programs.

3. Tap Into Employees’ Competitive Nature

Gamification shapes behavior with incentives that spark friendly competition and help individuals become better versions of themselves. This is where employers must tread lightly to avoid triggering a cutthroat war among staffers. However, team-oriented strategies and meaningful rewards can build confidence, competency, and camaraderie.

4. Avoid “Game Over” Scenarios

HR and business managers can use insights from gamification platforms to understand and respond to employee development needs. Think of this as a form of workforce intelligence gathering, where employee performance metrics reveal red flags, as well as exceptional performance that deserves attention. When you actively support employee career growth, your team members are less likely to leave.

5. Appeal to All Generations

Younger employees tend to care about the purpose behind their role and they want more control over their career destiny. Gamification can provide them with a more satisfying, personalized work experience. For example, Deloitte’s Mass Career Customization program lets employees pick their work preferences. Another company, Valve, uses gamification to help employees choose projects they prefer. Methods like this offer younger employees the kind of instant gratification they crave but often miss in traditional corporate settings.

6. Boost Your Employer Brand

By improving job satisfaction, engagement, and retention, gamification can eventually transform employees into brand ambassadors. This elevates recruitment by demonstrating that your company culture is modern and healthy — and puts employees first.

7. Lighten The Mood

Let’s face it. When thoughtfully implemented, gamification is fun. And don’t we all deserve a little less friction and a little more fun in our lives these days? Positive emotion can help connect us more deeply with our colleagues and with our work. Sounds like a smart “gloom slayer” tactic to me.

Game On! Can Your Culture Outplay The “Great Gloom”?

Gamification isn’t likely to solve all of today’s workplace challenges. But it can give employees something new to be excited about. And when employees are motivated to engage, work together, and accomplish something greater, good things are much more likely to happen.

Honestly, it’s hard to think of any other talent management methods with the power to pull people out of a sense of gloom. You have everything to gain and nothing to lose. So, what are you waiting for? It can be exactly what you need to get your employees more invested in their roles and engaged with your organization. Ultimately, that means you can build a winning culture. So get ready, set, go!

 

EDITOR’S NOTE: For more in-depth information about how to develop and manage successful gamification initiatives, visit the Keep Wondering Out Loud website, where you’ll find helpful resources for employers. And for more #WorkTrends insights, check our growing collection of episodes at Apple or Spotify and subscribe!

 

Mentoring: Are You Building a Culture of Connection and Growth?

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Sponsored by Together

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. Mentoring is a key to the future of work. That’s not hyperbole. It’s a fact. I’ve been beating the mentorship drum for over a decade. Yet, I’ve never been as confident about it as I am today. And I hope employers are listening. Why?

The Business Case for Mentoring

All the signs point to mentorship as one of the most powerful ways to navigate increasingly turbulent workplace waters. Here are just a few proof points:

  • Pandemic-era job disruption has created knowledge and skill gaps across many organizations.
  • Even before the pandemic, average job tenure was shrinking among all age groups.
  • Managers and senior-level leaders are moving on and opting out at a record pace.
  • Younger people are looking for more guidance and support as they enter the workforce.
  • Demand for future-ready employees is intensifying as organizations continue to invest in new technologies.
  • The average half-life of skills continues to decline.
  • Many employers are still struggling to find qualified talent for critical open roles.

With 84% of U.S. Fortune 500 companies already offering mentoring programs, this seems like the right time to double down on that strategy. Why? Consider these research findings:

  • 90% of employees with a mentor say they’re happy at work.
  • 75% of executives give mentors credit for their success.
  • People with mentors are significantly less likely to consider quitting. This includes managers, senior managers, vice presidents, and individual contributors.
  • Among millennials, 68% who stay onboard for 5 or more years have a mentor, compared with 32% who don’t.
  • In fact, one Wharton-led study found much higher retention among mentees (72%) and mentors (69%) than among those who did not participate in these programs (49%).

But here’s the kicker: While 76% of people say mentors are important, only 37% actually have one. Is your organization facing this issue? You may be able to bridge the gap more easily than you think. For helpful ideas, read on…

Advice for Mentoring Program Success

Let’s start by clarifying a key point. Mentoring, alone, is not the answer. Organizations really need to aim higher by developing a culture of learning. However, one of the most effective ways to foster this kind of environment is through mentoring in all its forms.

So where should employers start to establish or enhance mentorships? One of the smartest sources I know is Matt Reeves. Matt is CEO of Together Software, a platform that helps companies run best-in-class mentoring programs. Early in 2022, Matt joined me to discuss mentoring strategies on our #WorkTrends podcast. To hear his advice, listen to this encore version of our conversation and read the show notes below…

How Mentoring Works

1. Defining Mentorship

So tell us, Matt, what does mentoring look like to you?

In its traditional sense, mentoring is based on pairing two colleagues for career development and professional guidance. Usually, this involves a more junior employee who’s the mentee with a more senior employee who’s the mentor. And typically, they meet on a particular cadence, like once a month for a year or even more.

2. Evolving Trends

How are mentorship programs changing?

We’ve seen companies break the mold and experiment with various types of  programs. But the common thread is that they help employees learn from their colleagues through relationship-building and ongoing conversations.

3. Mentorship Variations

What are some of the different flavors you’re seeing in mentorship programs?

The classic approach is one-on-one, where a more senior person mentors a more junior person for a specific period.

However, peer-to-peer programs are increasingly popular. Also, we’re seeing more reverse programs, where a more junior-level person who is experienced in a particular topic mentors a more senior employee.

In addition, many organizations are successfully breaking the mold with the duration of these relationships and in offering participants more flexibility.

4. Benefits of Mentoring

It may seem obvious why mentees are attracted to these relationships. But it helps mentors, too. In fact, more than 90% of professionals who’ve mentored young people say it has helped them become better leaders or managers…

Yes. It’s probably easy to understand why a mentee would want to participate — to learn, develop, and progress in their career. But mentors benefit, as well.

Senior-level people are expected to develop others and carry their organization’s culture forward, and mentoring is an opportunity to visibly demonstrate this. Also, as people move up in an organization, they’ve probably experienced some mentoring (or wish they had a mentor). So this is a way to give back.

5. How Technology Enhances the Mentoring Experience 

What role can technology play in bringing people together and keeping them connected?

Technology significantly reduces the workload for program administrators, while significantly improving the mentoring experience for participants.

For example, when a program is managed manually, making a strong mentee/mentor match can take a long time. When you’re eager to move forward, it can be frustrating to wait for weeks or even months for a suitable match. You may even be matched with a mentor who has left the organization. This is easily avoidable when you use technology.

In addition, technology can help you scale a program much more efficiently, and keep people connected with reminders and feedback that helps them stay on-track and helps you tweak your program.

Tips for Modern Mentorship Programs

What else should you keep in mind if you want to achieve strong mentoring results, especially in today’s hybrid work environments? When building a game plan, keep these considerations in mind:

1. Assess Your Current State as a Baseline

With or without a formal program in place, mentoring is probably already happening all over your company. It often occurs organically, the same way culture exists, with or without intentional leadership involvement.

So start with a broad-reaching reality check. Research and evaluate the various ways people share knowledge, skills, and experience, and assist others professionally. What seems to be most effective? Can you leverage these methods? Alternatively, what isn’t working well? Does it make sense to provide additional resources that can reinforce, enhance, and expand what’s already in place?

2. Clarify and Communicate the Purpose

When people understand why mentoring is important to your company, they’re more likely to sign up and take responsibility for their role in its success. But there are many ways to frame mentoring initiatives. What goals do you want to accomplish? How closely do your objectives align with your organization’s values? What would success look like for your company and for participants? For example:

  • To improve retention among new hires, incorporating mentoring into the onboarding process can provide a stronger start.
  • If employees from underrepresented groups lack a sense of inclusion and belonging, “bridge mentorships” could help you move the DEI meter.
  • Or if you need to build bench depth, peer-to-peer cross-functional skills mentoring could be a solution.

The possibilities are endless. But no matter what your agenda is, you’ll need top-down support. How committed are your senior-level executives to mentoring? How willing are they to make mentoring participation a leadership priority? What can you do to demonstrate the power of mentoring from cases within your organization or among competitors? What kind of budget and other resources will be required to achieve these goals? Engage senior leadership early in discussions that address these questions.

3. Focus on Learning and Holistic Growth

Although cohort-based social learning is a popular trend — especially in remote and hybrid work environments — one-on-one relationships can drive deeper personal growth and enrichment. Encouraging people to form stronger direct bonds opens the door to a more holistic approach, where participants can connect as individuals and grow, even outside of their professional roles.

Also, keep in mind that the most enriching approach to mentoring isn’t about “teaching” per se. Classic mentoring models emphasize a one-way flow of information, guidance, and access. However, modern mentoring relationships are often a two-way street, where both sides actively aim to learn and grow together, even if their roles and experience levels are not comparable.

4. Provide Structure Along With Flexibility

When matching a pair of participants, you’ll want to formalize expectations in a way that respects the time and effort required to establish and sustain a productive relationship.

It helps to specify basic parameters, such as the minimum mentorship duration (for example, 1 year), and minimum activity frequency (for example 1 meeting a month). However, beyond these parameters, individuals often find it helpful to negotiate their unique goals. Both sides can use this agreement as a discovery tool and as a reference point throughout the relationship.

In addition, you’ll want to encourage consistency with a reasonable ongoing communication cadence. Flexibility is key, here. Mentoring isn’t a full-time job, relationships take time to develop, and informal interactions don’t need to be regimented. However, if participants agree upfront to a minimum pace (such as 1 digital check-in a week), this can help keep the relationship top-of-mind.

5. Measure and Adjust

This may seem obvious, but unless you quantify your mentorship program’s performance, you won’t know if your organization is moving in the right direction. Ideally, you’ll establish success metrics that tie to program objectives even before you start to match participants.

However, once you launch the program, you’ll want to monitor progress regularly by measuring key performance indicators. For example, if you want to build workforce competencies in a particular set of skills, you’ll want to track active mentors and mentees for each of the skills you’re targeting. If you don’t have enough experienced mentors to fulfill mentee demand, you’ll want to recruit more mentors who are qualified in these areas. (Or you may decide to address the demand with another type of skill development intervention.)

Also, plan to seek feedback from participants periodically. Pulse surveys can help you gauge sentiment about the program and identify weaknesses that need attention. At the same time, keep in mind that mentoring is a long-term commitment. Over time, business priorities will shift. To stay ahead of the curve, you’ll want to build periodic program review cycles into the management process, so you can adjust accordingly as goals and needs change.

 

EDITOR’S NOTE: For more in-depth information about how to structure and manage a successful mentoring program, visit the Together Platform website, where you’ll find all sorts of helpful resources for employers. And for more #WorkTrends insights, check our growing collection of episodes at Apple or Spotify and subscribe!

 

Employee Experience: 5 Paths to a More Human Work Culture

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Anyone who says being a leader is easy is simply not being honest. Leadership is hard. Yes, I said it. And that shouldn’t shock anyone. After all, modern managers are expected to be nearly super-human. They’re responsible for inspiring people, bringing out the best in their teams, and getting positive results. And naturally, they play a crucial role in shaping the employee experience.

Effective leaders create a positive work culture that fosters engagement, enhances job satisfaction, and increases productivity. Innovative work processes and technology can help. But the most influential leaders rely on more than KPIs, annual performance reviews, and cool digital tools to shape individual and organizational success.

Instead, these enlightened leaders put wellbeing and productivity at the center of their employee experience strategy. All of this sounds good, doesn’t it? But it is much easier said than done.

This article challenges leaders to focus on five factors that drive employee experience in today’s complex work environment: 

  • Empowerment
  • Purpose
  • Recognition
  • Positivity
  • Growth

To uncover areas for improvement, consider these questions…

1. Do Employees Feel Empowered as Individuals and Part of a Team?

For any organization, balancing individuality and teamwork is a delicate art. Do you provide an environment where employees feel free to express themselves openly and authentically, as members of a cohesive, supportive team?

Aim for a Sense of Belonging

The desire to feel connected with others is part of the human condition. In childhood, we begin to fulfill this need by forging relationships with family members and groups of friends who accept us for who we are.

Similarly, at work, a sense of belonging develops when we feel free to show up and contribute as ourselves. In fact, extensive research reveals a strong relationship between authenticity, psychological safety, trust, and a sense of belonging. By behaving openly and authentically, you give peers and team members unspoken permission to do the same. What’s more, by letting go of unnatural roles, everyone has more energy to focus on what really matters.

Breed Trust Through Authenticity

As a leader, you can set a powerful example for others by sharing your own personal and professional setbacks and successes. This lays the foundation for a more genuine, relatable team atmosphere. Employees who see their leaders as real people with strengths, weaknesses, and a desire to learn, they’re more likely to open up, collaborate, and take calculated risks. Ultimately, this can drive creativity, innovation, and growth.

2. Do People See Purpose in Their Work?

How well do employees understand the significance of their efforts? When people understand how their jobs support an organization’s broader mission, they become more motivated, engaged, and committed to their work.

Connect Tasks With Meaning

We’ve all had moments of reckoning at work when we suddenly wonder, “Why am I doing this? Why does this matter?” Don’t wait for this to happen to your employees.

When assigning projects or responsibilities, you have a unique opportunity to share meaningful context. Don’t hesitate to underscore the impact you believe your team members will have on your department, your organization, your customers, or the community at large.

Frame Work as a Fulfilling Endeavor

We all want our efforts to mean something. In fact, research confirms that when employees understand how their daily efforts fit into the bigger picture, they’re more motivated and fulfilled.

Speaking to the value employees bring to the table can deepen their commitment to their job, their team, and the organization as a whole. So, remember to regularly remind people about their significance and acknowledge their contributions.

3. Do You Make Recognition Integral to Work Life?

Celebrating employee contributions strengthens their connection to the organization. Ultimately, this leads to better performance, higher profits, and stronger retention rates. How well do you respond to this need?

Acknowledge Excellence and Effort

Recognition is a core pillar of employee experience. That’s why you’ll want to acknowledge team members on a regular basis.

We all crave validation, but every situation is unique. So take time to think about the most effective approach. Some public acknowledgments resonate for some people, while others prefer a personal note or private 1-on-1 conversation.

Acknowledging excellence boosts morale, builds engagement, and reinforces a sense of value. So don’t hesitate to share a simple “thank you” or reward people formally through a recognition program, 

Encourage Everyone to Participate

At WorkRamp, we’ve created a #Props Slack dedicated to employee recognition. We encourage all employees to use this space to express gratitude, brag about team members, share accomplishments, and celebrate work wins. It’s one of our most popular Slack channels, and team members of all levels regularly contribute. 

4. Is Your Environment Positive and Inclusive?

Company culture directly affects employee employee wellbeing and productivity. A supportive, collaborative workplace attracts and retains top talent, motivates people to excel, drives job satisfaction, and leads to organizational success. How can you build a better culture?

Cultivate Positivity

A positive culture helps employees feel comfortable and supported, which boosts job satisfaction and wellbeing. As a leader, you can set the tone for this kind of environment. To move the meter, you’ll want to embrace change, champion open communication, and ensure fairness whenever possible.

Promote Work-Life Balance

Work-life balance can be elusive, especially these days, when more employees are working remotely or in a hybrid mode. However, by helping team members balance personal and professional priorities, you can help employees gain a stronger sense of wellbeing. 

There are multiple ways to encourage self-care. For example, you can remind people to take breaks, use their vacation time, and unplug during off hours. By supporting healthier habits, you can help team members become more focused, motivated, engaged, and productive teams.

Prioritize Diversity and Inclusion

Promoting workplace diversity and inclusion is not just a moral imperative — it’s a strategic advantage. Embracing diverse perspectives and backgrounds enhances employee engagement. It also fosters creativity, problem-solving, and innovation, all of which can lead to better business outcomes.

By building a diverse environment where all voices are heard, you can avoid bias and foster a more inclusive workplace where employees feel valued and respected. Organizations that excel at this tend to attract and retain talent much more effectively than their counterparts.

5. Are You Committed to Employee Career Goals?

Do you emphasize employee growth? Research consistently shows that employees prefer to work with employers that invest in their future by offering professional development opportunities. This boosts employee morale and job satisfaction. At the same time, it means employers have a more skilled, motivated workforce, with people who are prepared to contribute to the organization’s future success.

Commit to Ongoing Growth

When you actively help team members work towards their professional goals by providing continuous learning and growth opportunities, you can expect to see improved morale, satisfaction, loyalty, and retention.

These opportunities can take various forms. Initiate regular conversations to understand each team member’s aspirations. Then work with them on an ongoing basis to identify relevant educational paths, stretch assignments, cross-skilling and upskilling opportunities, and mentoring relationships that will enrich their daily work lives and expand their capabilities portfolio.

Employee Experience: A Top-Down Imperative

No doubt about it. Leaders have a direct impact on employee experience — for better or worse.

If you have a leadership role, you can help improve your organization’s culture. It won’t happen overnight. But by focusing on building an environment of authenticity, purpose, recognition, inclusion, and career growth, you can help team members feel more valued, fulfilled, and engaged. And over time, with a consistent commitment to these elements, your organization can improve productivity, retention, and overall organizational success.

It’s not easy. But I assure you, it is worth the effort.

How to Overcome Top HR Challenges in Tech Startups

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Human resources can be a highly rewarding profession, especially at technology startup companies. In fact, recent research says effective human resources management actually helps drive innovation — and tech companies are all about innovation! Nevertheless, HR challenges can be tough to manage. So, what can you do to help your company deal with difficult HR issues? Let’s take a closer look…

8 HR Challenges Tech Startups Often Face (And How to Overcome Them)

1. Attracting and Retaining Top Talent

The ability to hire qualified people and keep them onboard is vital for every company, particularly in the technology world. But this is no easy task. Because tech hiring is extremely competitive and time is of the essence in a startup, employers must always be on the hunt for the best and brightest.

To build a strong talent pool, you need to be proactive. Job postings on job sites or social media are not enough. You can’t afford to wait for candidates to come to you. Go out and find people with the skills you need.

Applicants with qualifications like a graduate degree in engineering can help your company grow. To find them, focus on target-rich environments. For example:

  • Campus recruiting at a technical college is a good place to start.
  • Outreach among tech conference attendees can build brand awareness and establish valuable relationships.
  • Offering referral incentives to existing employees can leverage your team’s professional networks.

2. Managing Rapid Growth

Startups are unique because, from day one, you must rapidly scale and expand. This is necessary to make your presence known and gain traction in a fluid, highly competitive industry.

However, the pressure on employees is relentless, and HR teams feel the strain. For example, the continuous drive to grow often leads startups to rush the recruitment process. This can test the limits of even the most seasoned human resources professionals, 98% of whom say they’re feeling burned out.

To remain efficient in a fast-paced environment, outsource extra recruiters to help scale and support your workforce. This interim strategy can be highly successful, as long as your recruiting partners are competent and committed. Also, be sure their values align with your company culture, so you can rely on them to represent your brand effectively.

3. Building an Employer Brand

Establishing and defining your employer brand can be one of the biggest HR challenges for any startup. Because you’re unknown in the marketplace, the race is on to make your brand visible and engaging. Your mission is to appeal to the right talent by differentiating your company in ways that clarify your vision, values, and culture.

The Forbes Human Resources Council says your best brand ambassadors are your staff members. This is particularly true for tech startups. A personal, employee-driven strategy is a compelling way to set your brand apart from larger, more established tech giants.

Call a brand launch meeting to help employees get involved in making your company brand more widely known. Establish an internal team dedicated to employer brand advocacy. They can generate ideas and develop content for your website and social media pages. Also, incorporate staff in ongoing marketing and recruiting videos. Include their anecdotes on your website. The possibilities are limited only by your team’s time, budget, and imagination.

4. Navigating Legal and Compliance Issues

The tech industry’s legal landscape is highly complex. Data privacy and intellectual property rights are only two issues that complicate the already massive task of starting a company that complies with government laws and industry standards. To be a viable competitor in the tech industry, no startup can ignore these requirements.

But tech-related laws are not the only regulations. For example, one of the central HR challenges in any startup is to ensure ongoing compliance with labor laws. Do you have effective policies and procedures in place for this and other people-related issues that arise?

For example, are you prepared to manage discrimination and harassment charges against your organization? High-profile companies like Google and Facebook have come under fire for gender discrimination. Even as a small company, you’ll need to communicate expectations for employee conduct and put a disciplinary framework in place. This protects your team members, as well as your company.

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is a great resource for a framework that can help you handle discrimination complaints.

5. Creating an Inclusive, Diverse Workforce

Despite great strides in creating a more inclusive society, many companies still struggle to foster workforce diversity and inclusion. This remains a serious challenge for HR in the tech industry. For example, female representation in key roles continues to lag across the STEM spectrum.

The advantage of a startup is that you don’t have to overhaul existing processes that are archaic and outdated. Instead, from the beginning, develop targeted recruitment campaigns that appeal to a wider pool of talent. And adjust interview procedures so they are sensitive to gender and culture differences. Harvard Business School recommends explicitly stating your commitment to inclusion in job descriptions and removing gendered language from interview questions.

We’ve found that a gender-inclusive workforce brings many benefits to the table, including stronger so-called soft skills like communication, adaptability, problem-solving, and empathy. These skills can be invaluable to tech start-ups that rely on collaboration to innovate. As Marta Jasinska, Chief Technology Officer at Bloom & Wild says, “It’s really hard to scale something if you build it on your own.”

6. Managing Distributed Teams

In the aftermath of the pandemic, remote and hybrid work models are increasingly common. This can cause HR challenges involving communication and collaboration.

The tech industry is not immune to these issues, but we’re often better equipped to handle them. In a remote environment, teamwork and communication rely heavily on technology. And many tech teams are already familiar with software that makes distributed team collaboration possible.

But strong communication tools are only part of the equation. What makes or breaks remote work are the processes and social bonds that help team members work productively together. The challenge for HR is to help remote workers feel heard, included, and connected with broader goals, no matter where or when they are working.

You can make this happen by encouraging regular social interactions and team-building activities. For example, establish online chat channels designed exclusively for team members to share personal news and support. This helps remote workers feel like a part of the team, rather than isolated individual contributors.

7. Supporting Work-Life Integration

In addition to recruitment and payroll, HR is also tasked with performance management. This can be tricky in tech startups, where people are often expected to go above and beyond.

However, remote work options are common in the tech sector. Fortunately, remote work tends to support a healthier work-life balance, which in turn, leads to better performance. But how can HR encourage better work-life integration?

This can be particularly challenging at a tech startup. In a company’s early stages, the pressure to succeed is tremendous. Intense entrepreneurial focus and drive are essential. But long work hours and a high-pressure environment can easily become overwhelming.

HR plays a key role in helping employees avoid burnout. Introduce more work model choices: flexible hours, a hybrid of remote and in-office work. Provide regular opportunities for people to unwind and casually interact. Offer wellness activities as ongoing programs and as performance rewards. And provide mental health support so everyone knows they can manage stress privately with the help of a coach or counselor.

8. Developing and Retaining Leadership Talent

Strong leadership is the key to any successful startup. But one person can’t do it all indefinitely. When should a founder start expanding the leadership team?

Look for missed deadlines. These go hand in hand with missed opportunities. Also, when the stress of scaling a business leads to a drop in your quality of work, it’s time to add leadership bench strength.

This is one of the most critical HR challenges in any startup. You’ll need to spot signs of managerial weakness and counsel the founder when the time is right to find additional executive expertise.

Then it’s up to you to identify, recruit, and select leaders for critical management roles like operations and finance and customer experience leaders. Some candidates may emerge internally as they prove themselves in existing roles. In a startup, it can be easier to pinpoint internal candidates with high potential. Other senior roles are likely to be more difficult to fill, so they may require creative sourcing.

A McKinsey analysis says few founders do what’s necessary to reinvent their organization as they move from development to launch, and then into high-growth mode. Once the pressure of bringing a product or service to market passes, it’s vital to invest in developing and supporting other potential leaders from within. This builds a talent pipeline that can step up when a founder is ready to hand off responsibilities. Ultimately, this makes growing a business much easier.

The best way to do this is by delegating specific assignments to new talent while maintaining structure in senior roles. However, this balance continuously shifts as a company scales. You can act as a mediator, adjusting organizational design to minimize the chaos of too little structure while avoiding the bureaucracy of too much.

A Final Note on HR Challenges in Tech Startups

The tech environment is extraordinarily competitive, and recruiting the best talent can be daunting. But hiring for open positions isn’t the only priority. Tech startups face multiple complex HR challenges.

When navigating these various demands, it’s important to balance the needs of the company with the needs of your staff. Sometimes, you may be the only advocate for staff wellbeing, inclusion, or development. Be prepared.

Also, it may be tempting to react to immediate problems each day. Startup teams do that. But while you’re fighting fires, don’t forget to keep the long game in mind.

Employee Motivation Matters. How Can Leaders Help?

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You’re a business leader. You believe in your company with all your heart. Your commitment to the organization’s mission drives you to aim high, work hard, and put in your best effort. However, that’s not the case with your workforce. You want your team to be as dedicated as you are, but employee motivation doesn’t happen by chance. And that’s where leaders too often miss the mark.

In an article about employee appreciation, Harvard Business Review briefly illustrates the problem:

An employee arrives at work on his 10th-year anniversary and finds a gift card with a sticky note on his desk. The note is from his manager, acknowledging his anniversary. Realizing the message doesn’t include a thank-you or congratulations, he rolls his eyes.

This missed opportunity speaks volumes. Just imagine the cumulative impact on morale when this kind of scenario plays out on a regular basis.

Layoffs continue to capture headlines as the economy sputters. Nevertheless, employers are still vying for qualified talent so they can stay competitive. But no one can effectively attract and retain stellar people without inspiring them. And the ability to inspire depends on your willingness to motivate people on an ongoing basis.

Connecting Motivation With Business Benefits

The power of motivation is undeniable. It directly influences multiple business metrics. For example, it can:

  • Boost Productivity and Profitability
    Because motivated employees are more engaged with their work, they tend to be more productive and deliver higher-quality results. In fact, research says highly engaged teams can increase business profitability by more than 20%.
  • Reduce Absenteeism and Turnover
    When motivation and engagement are low, people are more likely to call in sick or resign. The cost of both can be steep. On the other hand, Gallup says organizations with high engagement see significant benefits, with an average of 81% lower absenteeism and 43% lower turnover.
  • Improve Collaboration and Innovation
    Motivated people typically are more content with their jobs. As a result, they’re more open to teamwork and collaboration, which leads to better problem-solving and innovation. They also tend to be more efficient and willing to go above and beyond to achieve business objectives.

Most leaders understand the value of motivation. But motivating people is easier said than done. What can you do to fuel employee motivation? When work starts piling up and engagement is at a low ebb, try these 8 ideas to engage your team and steer them toward success:

8 Ways to Inspire Employee Motivation

1. Communicate the Big Picture

Regularly sharing information about your organization’s vision, goals, challenges, and achievements helps people feel more invested in its success. Here are some effective ways to keep people in the loop:

  • Articulate Your Expectations: This is essential. Unless people know how you define success, and understand how it relates to their roles and output, they have no way to gauge their status or progress.
  • Set Objectives Collaboratively: Work together to set clear, achievable objectives. This helps people grasp the purpose behind their work and how it fits into the company’s broader mission and strategy.
  • Provide Periodic Business Updates: Keep employees informed about how the organization is performing to plan. This is also an opportunity not only to focus on key issues but also to celebrate successes and milestones. Keep in mind that timely, specific public recognition is one of the most effective ways to motivate people.

2. Seek Employee Input

It’s easy to become so focused on top-down communication that you may overlook the value of employee input and feedback. Asking employees direct questions during a group meeting or private conversation lets them know you care about their opinions and are open to their ideas and concerns.

It’s also helpful to periodically gauge overall employee satisfaction and engagement by conducting anonymous surveys. This is an opportunity to remind people that their opinions matter. Ask for feedback about what needs improvement and suggestions for how to improve.

Of course, any input you receive deserves swift attention and action. A timely, thoughtful response tells employees you value their feedback. It’s also a way to demonstrate the kind of loyalty you hope they’ll return by doing their best.

3. Give People Autonomy

Handing employees some control over their work can be a highly effective motivator. This can be as simple as giving people a chance to work on projects they love or letting them choose a schedule they prefer from a variety of options.

When employees have a voice in defining their priorities and daily activities, they’re more likely to feel committed to their work and invested in their results.

4. Reward Success

People will sign up for your mission and stay with your business when you give them a reason to care. And recognizing their efforts is one of the most effective ways to build this kind of connection.

For example, implementing an employee incentive program is relatively straightforward strategy:

  • Focus first on how to align rewards with company values and goals.
  • For each level of achievement assign appropriate awards, such as crystal trophies and cash bonuses, as well as certificates and verbal recognition.
  • Establish clear, attainable criteria for receiving awards, and regularly share program guidelines with everyone who is eligible.
  • Build peer-to-peer recognition into the process, so employees can nominate colleagues for recognition.
  • Celebrate achievements publicly to increase visibility and inspire others.
  • Regularly review and update your incentive program to keep it fresh and relevant.

5. Foster a Positive Work Environment

Formal recognition isn’t the only way to shape employee attitudes and behavior. For instance, leaders can also make a significant impact on employee morale and motivation simply by fostering an open, supportive work environment. This includes:

  • Work structures and processes that encourage teamwork and collaboration,
  • Programs and policies that promote work-life balance, and
  • Opportunities for employees to socialize and form strong bonds.

The important thing to remember here is that, even in small companies, work cultures are complex. The status quote won’t change overnight. If your culture needs to shift, prepare to be intentional and consistent. It may take time, but you’ll be rewarded with lasting business impact.

6. Offer Opportunities for Professional Growth

What better way to motivate people than to enrich their professional knowledge and skills? Especially if your business is expanding rapidly, giving people opportunities to learn, develop, and grow within your organization can be a tremendous incentive.

There are many ways to help people expand their capabilities beyond formal training. For example, consider adding stretch assignments, cross-training, educational reimbursement, mentorships, and internal career advancement to the mix.

7. Lead With Encouragement

Every day brings new opportunities to help employees overcome inevitable mistakes and failures. By encouraging people to focus on continuous improvement, you can help them develop a positive mindset and the determination to see things through.

When projects don’t go according to plan, resist the temptations to start by investigating whose to blame. Instead, focus on working together to identify the root cause and solve the problem. During difficult times, remember to tell people you trust them or send a supportive email message. And be sure to reinforce anyone who takes accountability and steps up to the challenge.

8. Remain Available

No matter how busy your schedule is, make it a priority to be responsive when anyone needs help or advice. Can you blame an employee for becoming frustrated and demotivated if you’re never available to offer guidance, assistance, or approval?

Here’s a sign that you may need to adjust your standards: Think about your one-on-one meetings. Do you regularly postpone these sessions, or blow them off altogether? Don’t be surprised if productivity and engagement are suffering.

A Final Word on Employee Motivation

Any leader who wants to elevate organizational performance and productivity should start with employee motivation. There are multiple ways to move in the right direction, but here’s the bottom line:

If you want employees to commit to your organization, you’ll need to commit your time, attention, and effort to motivate them on a continuous basis. This is clearly a long-game process, but the journey can be one of the most rewarding investments your business will ever make.

Want to Engage Future Leaders? Empower Them

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Leaders, do workforce engagement issues keep you up at night? If not, here’s a powerful wake-up call from Gallup. Last year, the global employee engagement rate was only 23%. Although that’s the highest level since Gallup started tracking global data in 2009, it means 77% of the workforce still misses the mark. Plus, it falls far short of the 72% benchmark seen in best-practice organizations. So, how can your company move in the right direction? Empower people — especially younger team members.

Empower employees - Gallup global employee engagement trends as of 2023

 

Engage? Or Empower?

Employers recognize just how vital engagement is for workforce well-being and satisfaction, as well as overall business productivity and profitability. As a result, the desire to improve engagement has spawned an endless number of programs, initiatives, and tools to help keep employees interested and engaged in their work. Yet still, strong engagement remains elusive.

Why? Sometimes, the best solution is not about adding more layers to an already complex leadership strategy. Instead, it’s about understanding and adapting to changing workplace trends. This is precisely what’s needed now.

Today’s work dynamics require leaders to understand, appreciate, and adapt to the interests and motivations of an increasingly younger workforce. Those who master this subtle art of purposeful empowerment are more successful at inspiring their staff with a new sense of focus, connection, and commitment.

What Do Next-Generation Engaged Workers Look Like?

As the president of a leadership development consulting firm, I often speak with managers about the most difficult challenges they face. Recently, their answers involve a common complaint. “Kids today!” But what exactly do comments like this mean? When we dig deeper, a more specific profile emerges:

  • Employees from younger generations seem uncertain, yet confident.
  • They continuously demand more, even when myriad choices are available.
  • They introduce new ways to communicate, and are fluent with digital technologies that are typically beyond the grasp of senior team members.

These generational differences may cause frustration and friction. But in truth, every generation can point to differences in others that create difficulties. Instead, we need to challenge our own mindset and operate on positive assumptions rather than negative ones.

This means that no matter what younger employees bring to the workplace and how they shape the work culture, leaders play a vital role in helping them evolve into more engaged, committed individuals and teams. You can’t change the characteristics of people who are entering the workforce, but you can adapt to their reality and meet their development needs. And in the process, you can make your workplace more inclusive and resilient.

To Empower Employees, Where Should You Start?

When adapting to Gen Z and Millennial needs, it’s wise to emphasize working styles. For example, to feel comfortable and focused at work, younger people expect employers to demonstrate an ongoing commitment to their wellbeing. This may include flexible schedules, remote or hybrid work options, shorter workweeks, the ability to take extended mental health breaks, and other creative benefits and work choices.

Support for mental, emotional, and financial health is the new bread and butter of Millennial and Gen Z work experience. And if you resist these needs, you risk losing the best and brightest young talent.

Younger members of the workforce know many possible career paths are available to them. They don’t need to commit to any particular company for the long haul. Now, these individuals are more open to participating in the gig economy and going solo as professional practitioners and entrepreneurs.

Their work/life expectations are also more than a wish list or a passing phase. Here’s why: After years of pandemic disruption, intense remote work environments, and economic challenges, 46% of Gen Zers and 45% of Millennials are feeling burned out. As they see it, their demands are not whims — they’re about physical and mental survival.

How Can Leaders Empower Employees in a Meaningful Way?

Millennials and Gen Z are predicted to comprise 75% of the workforce by 2025. So, if you don’t learn how to empower and engage them now, you’ll soon be outnumbered. To start creating a work environment where younger team members can thrive, try these three strategies:

1. Consider What’s Driving Various Demands

First and foremost, seek to understand the logic behind requests from younger employees. For example, a Gen Zer may prefer remote work because they live in a smaller, cheaper town so they can make ends meet and avoid an expensive commute. Or a Millennial could seek schedule flexibility so they can pursue a side job to improve their financial stability.

There are often serious, valid reasons behind younger workers’ expectations. Recognizing these underlying drivers can help you respond effectively and build a work environment where every employee can thrive.

2. Give Younger Employees a Seat at the Table

One of the most damaging assumptions you can make as a leader is to assume you’re always the most intelligent person in the room. If you let go of this notion, evolution and innovation will immediately become easier, more people will feel included and involved, and ultimately, your business will become more successful.

Invite other voices to join the conversation. Acknowledge the importance of their input, and accept the value of their perspectives. As a result, you can expect a more loyal, committed workforce. In fact, Deloitte research indicates that when younger employees feel empowered to share their ideas and influence in decision-making, 66% stay with their employer for at least 5 years, compared to only 24% who do not feel empowered.

3. Don’t Just Delegate — Empower

Many leaders stop short of empowering employees merely by taking tasks off their own plates and delegating them along with explicit instructions. But if you move from delegating tasks to actually elevating employees and giving them power, they will take ownership and accountability for projects. And ultimately, they’ll be more engaged.

The key is trust and a willingness to let go of control.

As leaders, we’ve been conditioned to jump in with ideas, answers, and solutions — but when we do, we take that opportunity away from others. Whether your team comes to you with an idea, a problem, or a recommendation, take the time to really listen to what they say and why it’s important. And when you ask questions, ask with an intent to understand, not to solve.

It’s Time to Empower the Future

As leaders, we all must recognize and embrace the fact that the world is changing, and organizations are changing, too. This is an opportunity to grow in new, interesting, productive, and profitable ways.

Younger generations are here. They are looking to us to help them transform the way we work. So, don’t dig in your heels or bury your head in the sand. Instead, consider the possibilities and leverage this new source of talent that, with our support, can build a brighter future.

Managers Need a Toolbox for the “Post-Everything” Era

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TalentCulture Content Impact Award Winner - 2023
Sponsored by The Culture Platform

What tools actually help managers manage their people? That’s the most important question every organization needs to ask itself as the workplace enters the “post-everything” era. Post-pandemic, post-work-from-home, post-boomers, post-engagement-software’s-failure-to make-a-difference, post-wondering-if-AI-will-affect-work. You get my drift.

I believe this new era will be defined by how well organizations adapt their approach to managing people, as well as the responsibilities they put on managers’ shoulders.

Inside the “Post-Everything” Manager’s Toolkit

“Post-everything” has created a new starting line for managers. Expectations have changed. Most importantly, the number one reason why individuals leave a job today is a lack of growth opportunities. In fact, more than any generations in history, Gen Z and Millennials are ready to quit their current job for another role that promises better opportunities.

This is why managers need to focus on setting clear expectations. But here’s the catch — it requires human-to-human communication.

I’ve managed about 5,000 people in my career. My on-the-ground experience taught me that no two people are exactly alike. Career planning is a process of ongoing communication. It’s a give-and-take conversation about strengths and weaknesses, about roles and responsibilities, about goals and metrics, about performance and results.

As every manager knows, it’s remarkably easy to make mistakes when setting expectations. Being consistent is hard. But it’s even harder if your organization is also inconsistent.

Think for a moment about your career. Ask yourself this question: Have you ever seen an employer dedicated to providing a single, consistent, unified process that helps managers set expectations about career opportunities for team members? Is this happening where you work now?

The “Post-Everything” Process

Of course, a toolbox is only as good as the process it uses.

I’ve spent a decade talking to hundreds of organizations around the world about the role of the manager. Along the way, I’ve repeatedly heard that if we want to help managers set clear expectations, inconsistency is the biggest problem to solve.

Inconsistency comes in many forms. It may come from a lack of formal goals or goals that are continuously changing. You may see it in a failure to establish metrics or metrics that mean different things. It could be about reorgs or reductions in force, weak communication, managerial changes, or language differences. The list goes on and on.

At its heart, inconsistency breeds distrust in management’s ability to be accountable and follow through on an employee’s career growth. These triggers cause people to move on in search of better opportunities. And that’s why I think organizational inconsistency is failing managers today and is the real reason employees are so disengaged at work.

3 Steps For Success

I’ve come to believe that every unified process to help managers consistently set clear expectations must include three essential steps. Individually, each step is helpful. But linking all three end-to-end is the key to empowering managers, especially at scale. So this is my call to action for leaders:

1. Embrace a Common Vocabulary

Communicate with common terms. Think of company-specific languages like V2MOM from Salesforce or standardized vocabularies like OKRs. A common organizational vocabulary eliminates communication gray zones or ambiguities. What words do people use in running your business? You need to define the meaning of those words. For example, what does strategy mean to your organization? How do you distinguish a priority from a program? What is an initiative, and how does that differ from a project?

2. Emphasize Shared Goals

To be clear about which activities matter to operational execution, develop and publish shared goals. These goals are the way people can connect their job role to what will be rewarded. Shared goals serve the important role of distinguishing what’s important from what’s urgent when communicating. Do we care about growth? Or do we care about efficiency? Shared goals help managers align job roles to what the organization actually values.

3. Focus on the Standard Metrics

Are you measuring everyone’s success the same way? A single taxonomy of metrics sets up what employees really want — a consistent accountability system. If people can’t communicate with facts about their performance and results, it leads to an insidious way of getting ahead: relying on who you know. And we all know what that leads to.

Alignment Matters in the “Post-Everything” Era

A common vocabulary, shared goals, and a single system of metrics. Together, they form an end-to-end process that minimizes inconsistency when setting expectations.

Yes, this process is more difficult than buying a software tool. It requires leaders and managers to do the hard work of agreeing on specific elements of the process. But that said, it’s no different with Six Sigma or Lean/Agile methods. And the results are worth the effort.

The “post-everything era” is defined by what the best employees want — growth and advancement. This era demands end-to-end alignment. That means every employee in an organization should be able to align their job role to current and future opportunities. It is hard work for any manager, but it’s the new “post-everything” reality.

Want to Manage Well? Alignment is the Answer

End-to-end alignment requires human-to-human communication up and down the organization. It’s why I believe employers have been getting engagement wrong. It’s upside down. Instead of being engaged, employees want their leaders and managers to be engaged in conversations about their individual career success.

The core premise of The Collaboration Imperative, which I co-authored about Cisco’s best practices, centers on the idea that any great productivity leap forward or new strategic direction requires the alignment of process, culture, and technology. In other words, it may be tempting to depend on a tool for this, but technology alone cannot substitute for a complete process.

Organizations already put significant weight on managers’ shoulders. In the “post-everything” era, it’s time to lighten the load. It’s time for leaders to carry some of the weight by giving managers what they need — a process that consistently and systematically eliminates inconsistencies in expectation-setting. Let’s give managers the toolbox they really deserve. Your people are depending on it.

I want to give you a head start with this process. Send an email request to me at TheCulturePlatform@gmail.com and I’ll send you a PDF of Chapter 4 from The Collaboration Imperative: Creating Commitment to Shared Goals.

Is Remote Work Failing Generation Z?

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When the pandemic arrived in 2020, everyone’s definition of work changed in a heartbeat. Most people headed home, leaving their offices, cubicles, water coolers, and daily commutes behind. After making it through that massive disruption, employers found an even tougher challenge on the other side. They’ve had to figure out how to sustain a positive, productive work culture outside of a shared space. Even now — more than 3 years later — many HR and business leaders still haven’t filled in the blanks. But the delay isn’t helping anyone, especially Generation Z.

What exactly is happening here? And what are the implications? Let’s take an in-depth look at what employers should consider…

Why Generation Z Matters

It’s not surprising to learn that what we know about Gen Z on the youngest members of our workforce.

Imagine starting your first adult job at home. You have no peer relationships or experience in how to navigate organizational life. Think about how overwhelming it would be to move through each day without knowing how to find context, where to look for the right resources, or who can most easily steer you in the right direction. But this has become a norm for all too many younger workers.

No one recruits people to fail. And despite a shaky economy, talent is increasingly hard to recruit and retain. So employers are understandably concerned about onboarding and upskilling Generation Z staff more effectively in today’s remote work environment.

What’s the Next Step for Employers?

Some organizations already had a head start on this new world order. For example, virtual teams have long been what we know about Gen Z. This company continues to improve remote work processes and systems. And recently, Buffer has focused on preventing issues that keep recent graduates from succeeding as new hires.

Buffer is the exception rather than the rule. Most companies had not considered challenges like these before the pandemic, so they were totally unprepared to support young hires in a remote climate. Now, organizations everywhere are actively seeking insights so they can make it work.

Unfortunately, useful data about key issues and best practices is still limited. But smart employers are thinking ahead, so they can minimize negative consequences. For instance, it’s especially important to consider how remote work potentially limits access to equitable opportunities for career growth and development among younger workers.

Here’s a central question to address: “Compared with recent generations, do our Gen Z employees have what we know about Gen Z and develop in their careers?”

Defining Generation Z

When talking about how young people are affected by remote work, we want to be clear. This group includes working-age people born after 1996. This aligns with Pew Research, which selected 1997 as the starting point. Before then, Gen Z was too young to be affected by political and cultural changes that notably influenced Millennials.

Currently, Gen Z and Millennials are experiencing very different life stages. Therefore, when researching these groups, it’s important to apply different measures of security, financial stability, and so forth.

For example, many Millennials are starting a family, buying a home, and settling down. Meanwhile, Gen Zs are finishing high school or college, moving out of their parent’s home, getting their first job, and becoming more independent.

Gen Zs are the definitive internet generation. All members of this cohort were born after the internet became widely available, and they came of age surrounded by the abundance and complexities of social media. Theoretically, Gen Zs are ready to thrive in a highly connected business world. But are they ready to thrive in a remote-first world? 

Remote Work Benefits for Generation Z

Remote work has created an unprecedented opportunity for people who want more autonomy because they can more directly manage their work schedule, location, office set-up, family time, and more. So understandably, remote work is popular among older workers who want to improve their work-life balance. But what about Gen Z?

Here are some reasons younger workers value remote work:

  • Lower commuting expenses
  • Less commute time (and more time for other priorities)
  • More professional opportunities for people with accessibility needs (when commuting is difficult or impossible)
  • More time/flexibility to pursue further education while earning an income
  • Potential to work for multiple employers at once (increase income and expand skills faster)
  • Likely exposure to a more diverse spectrum of people across roles and geographies (compared with onsite jobs)
  • Reduce the risk of toxic management (because behavior is captured in communication channels such as email, slack, and Zoom calls)
  • Freedom to reduce stress by taking breaks for self-care, or spending time with family/friends
  • Potential to start a family at a younger age (if desired) by leveraging flexible scheduling
  • Ability to take time for caregiving, if older or younger family members are at home

Remote Work Risks for Generation Z

Although Gen Z can benefit from remote work, there are downsides, as well: 

  • More obstacles to informal learning. Fewer chances to overhear and join relevant conversations, discuss questions in the hall and on breaks, or be invited to meetings and activities on-the-fly
  • Fewer 1-on-1 relationship-building opportunities
  • Lack of face-to-face community connections
  • Risk of isolation
  • Missed opportunities for on-the-job learning (skills and institutional knowledge)
  • More difficulty finding support networks and career networks
  • Threats to personal time (Digital days at home may start earlier and end later than normal)
  • Potential for increased stress if micromanaged from a distance
  • Zoom and screen fatigue
  • Pressure to create a proper workspace, even if it’s not affordable for a young person
  • Higher out-of-pocket expenses (equipment/workspace, internet, phones, hardware)
  • Regular remote office distractions that affect focus and concentration (for example, neighborhood construction, power outages, housemates)
  • Greater burnout risk (from a persistent lack of boundaries, unclear scheduling, or unrealistic expectations)

Long-Term Equity Implications 

Some of the problems noted above could have a serious, lasting impact on young workers’ professional and personal lives. For example, without in-office experience, Gen Z staff are more likely to suffer from a lack of mentorship, advancement opportunities, informal learning, and professional community.

In addition, remote and hybrid work models often blur the lines between home and work. If you’re home, you could be working. And if you’re working, you could be doing something else. Distractions are all around. Is this decision fatigue or a lack of discipline? When remote workers don’t separate these roles at the start of their careers, boundary issues can potentially follow them all the way to retirement.

That’s why it’s especially important for business leaders, managers, and older team members to understand why remote Gen Z workers need extra support to establish a foundation for success.

Remote Work FAQs

Why Do Employers Oppose Remote Work?

Some employers don’t support virtual teams because they have multiple business concerns. They may expect the worst: weaker productivity, collaboration, informal learning, and a loss of tribal knowledge. Or they may be concerned about employee wellbeing: increased isolation, stress, and disengagement.

Has Remote Work Decreased Productivity?

Depending on an organization’s workload and scheduling, remote work can lead to a decrease in productivity. Employees may be more distracted when working remotely, or if their workspace is chaotic they struggle to focus.

Many other factors can reduce productivity in a remote or hybrid work setting, so this is an important consideration to discuss openly on an ongoing basis.

Why Is Remote Work So Exhausting?

Remote work can feel exhausting, especially if you haven’t established a clear separation between work space and home space. Juggling these blurred lines can add a psychological load that increases stress and eventually leads to exhaustion.

Setting People Up for Success

Given what what we know about Gen Z and remote work, how can employers create a culture that helps young workers feel comfortable working at your organization? It may seem like in-office work is the best answer for anyone at the start of their career. However, some digital solutions can make remote-first teams feel more connected, supported, and included. For example:

  • Establish consistent office hours
  • Encourage everyone to rely on collaborative communication tools
  • Practice knowledge sharing as a way of working
  • Build and promote remote-first mentorship programs
  • Regularly ask Gen Z workers and managers open-ended questions about what is working (and what is not)
  • Schedule periodic digital water cooler chats and invite everyone to suggest agenda ideas

It’s important for leaders to build on what many of us have learned about remote and hybrid work over the past few years. Challenge yourselves and others to think outside the box. Put yourselves in the shoes of each employee — not just younger people — and think of ways to help everyone feel more connected and included. Experiment. Hold on to what works, and integrate it into your culture.

Employee Satisfaction is an Inside Job: 3 Points of View

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If you lead a business of any kind, it’s essential to understand the factors that influence employee satisfaction in your organization. This kind of insight starts with awareness of needs, wants and desires of people across your workforce. Especially now, when employers are struggling to find strong talent, knowing what motivates your staff can play a central role in attracting and retaining top performers.

That’s what prompted the Agency Management Institute to take a closer look at  employee satisfaction issues in the marketing and advertising realm. Although this research focuses on professional services firms, it can be useful for leaders in other industries to consider, as well.

For example, with 72% of agency leaders saying they want to empower their staff, there’s no more powerful place to start than by learning what interests, inspires, and energizes team members. By leveraging these insights, you can improve internal communication, build individually tailored development opportunities, improve overall team performance, and more.

3 Key Profiles Behind Employee Satisfaction

When employees feel connected, engaged and satisfied with their work, their organizational culture is likely to be built on knowledge of who they are as individuals. When looking at various attitudes and characteristics associated with employee satisfaction, three types of personality profiles emerge:

  • Enthusiastic 27%
  • Self-reliant 45%
  • At-risk 29%

In other words, an employee’s primary profile is highly likely to indicate their level of commitment, work performance and overall workplace satisfaction.

Employee Satisfaction Types Up Close

Each employee segment brings unique characteristics to the table. But responding effectively to these diverse needs requires keen leadership and a strong work culture. So, what makes each group tick? These snapshot descriptions offer helpful guidance:

1. “Enthusiastic” Segment

Only 27% of survey respondents are considered “enthusiastic.” These people tend to give their employers high marks for professional development, career opportunities, work culture, and even compensation. More importantly, they feel that a long tenure with their company is the best way to build a career. They’re loyal, excited, and engaged. In short, any company would consider these individuals dream employees.

Historically, the enthusiastic group is the smallest segment. Naturally, employers want to know if and how they can attract and develop more of these valued employees. The answer lies in recognizing issues that matter to employees in the other two categories.

2. “Self-Reliant” Segment

Representing 45% of respondents, “self-reliant” employees are by far the largest group. Although these employees tend to think of themselves as responsible for achieving their own success, this isn’t necessarily a good thing.

Generally, self-reliant employees believe leaders don’t acknowledge or appreciate their struggles or contributions. In fact, many in this group feel “invisible.” And their discontent extends beyond a lack of recognition. They’re also skeptical about whether employers know how to develop their skills, provide opportunities for advancement, or improve their financial position over time.

Interestingly, 63% of these employees are millennials who tend to work for larger organizations. It’s also worth noting that women are heavily represented in this segment, and they tend to feel their opinions and ideas are heard less often than their male peers.

Although these issues are more of a concern for at-risk employees, high stress, difficult clients, and unrealistic expectations about working outside of conventional hours contribute to employee dissatisfaction in this segment. The same can be said for scope creep, job insecurity, and turnover. For all of these reasons, 22% of “self-reliant” employees have thought about leaving their job for greener pastures.

3. “At Risk” Segment

29% of employees are classified as “at risk.” They tend to work for smaller organizations and rely on their employers to engage with them and support them. They’re also much more likely to be women. In fact, 66% of at-risk workers are women.

It should seem obvious, but “at risk” employees are most likely to resign. In fact, research indicates that 50% of people in this segment have thought about seeking other employment. These individuals are looking for more, whether it’s with their current employer or elsewhere.

What’s driving this restlessness? Typically, at-risk workers are looking for a better (or different) workplace culture. Perhaps their current workplace doesn’t suit them, or company policies don’t align with their principles. These people want their employer to care about their wellbeing, align with their values, and provide more opportunities for collaboration and growth.

“At-risk” employees also crave more collaboration. They care deeply about their work. They’re often at the center of an organization’s activities, because they desire opportunities to collaborate with peers in meaningful ways. However, they’re less satisfied with their career trajectory, compensation, and path for advancement than others.

But these people aren’t operating in the shadows. In fact, they’re often spearheading key roles, including strategy, leadership, project management, and account management. Because these employees are central to an organization’s success, losing them could cause major setbacks and shouldn’t be taken lightly.

3 Steps to Strengthen Employee Satisfaction

With all the responsibilities that come with running a business, it’s easy to forget that employment is a two-way street. Here are a few considerations to help you improve engagement and satisfaction among your team members:

1. Encourage people to invest in their own development

Professional development must be a shared responsibility between company leadership and staff. Individuals can’t develop themselves entirely on their own. They need your active guidance, support, and resources to develop themselves. Giving people an active role in mapping their growth plans and decisions about where to invest their time and energy can make a measurable impact on their commitment and satisfaction.

2. Take time to craft a personalized development plan

Because you’re working with individuals, it’s important to recognize that professional development isn’t a one-size-fits-all endeavor. Every employee deserves a growth plan that’s personalized for their unique goals, interests, and aspirations. Without a plan they can “own,” no amount of time or money will improve their engagement, performance, satisfaction, or retention. What’s more, employees who don’t see any promise of growth won’t be employees for very long. Your commitment to their future success can make all the difference.

3. Find ways to push autonomous workers to new heights

Don’t forget to give “self-reliant” employees their share of attention. While they may not speak up often with complaints, “self-reliant” employees can be a tricky bunch to manage and develop. These folks often need a side hustle to feel engaged, creatively. If they’re asked to do additional work or contribute to a new project, they may engage less with their primary work. To better support these employees, consider pairing them with mentors. This way, they always have access to someone who can help them stick to their agenda while moving forward on their career path.

A Final Note

Building workplace satisfaction is as much about striking a balance as it is about understanding what makes people tick. Investing in your workforce’s professional growth and creating a supportive environment are both key. In fact, if you read between the lines of this survey, it’s clear that employees often believe these actions are worth more than money.

Developing Your Team Versus Driving Results: How Do You Strike a Balance?

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Faced with increasingly turbulent economic times, businesses are rapidly learning the importance of strong leadership. The world has had enough problems dealing with the Covid-19 crisis and its aftermath. And companies that lacked strong leaders have been struggling to move through a nonstop stream of business problems in recent years. Many organizations have responded by emphasizing short-term performance. But the truth is that you’ll ultimately achieve better results by developing your team, as well. It’s a long game. However, this strategy pays in multiple ways.

Developing Your Team Builds Strength for the Future

During difficult times, it is natural for businesses to focus on achieving essential near-term results. The burden of generating more leads, maintaining a strong sales pipeline, and sustaining profitability normally falls to leaders. But these objectives also need to be balanced with broader business interests.

When teams are successful, it’s clear that their leaders are effectively managing people, strategy and resources. But when the inverse is true, it can underscore leadership problems that shouldn’t be ignored.

Here’s a contradiction that makes things even more complicated: as companies push harder for better results from team members, staff are likely to feel underappreciated, especially if individuals aren’t encouraged to develop in ways that help them grow professionally.

So, you may get the results you need in the short-term. But it can come at the cost of long-term company success, as skilled team members decide to move on and pursue more promising opportunities.

In this article, we look at how business leaders can strike a better balance between driving great results and developing their teams.

Great Leadership is a Journey, Not a Destination

The first thing to consider is that it is important to understand your own expectations of leadership, and determine if you ought to adjust those assumptions. Being a leader means making measured decisions and balancing their consequences every single day.

You can always learn more and understand more. But this isn’t something leaders can afford to take for granted. It’s important to intentionally embrace growth and stay open to learning — for yourself and everyone on your team.

“The best leaders learn from experiences — including failures — and apply those lessons to unfamiliar situations in the future,” says Gemma Leigh Roberts, a chartered psychologist specializing in leadership. “They see challenges as opportunities, as opposed to threats, proactively seek knowledge to stay up to date in a rapidly shifting professional environment, and are curious to identify areas for development and try new ways of doing things.”

Retain Top Staff by Developing Your Team

It is important to remember that if you want to get strong results across your company, you need a strong team. Your business results are driven by the people working with you. There is always pressure to get the best out of all your people in their day-to-day activities. But it’s equally important to ensure that top performers are kept happy, challenged, and supported.

Remember that talented individuals will always be able to find positions elsewhere. So, you’ll want to nurture and retain your organization’s best performers. A key way of doing this is by providing them with opportunities for career growth and development.

“While training is often necessary when teaching people new skills, it’s only the first step toward a more distant end,” says Margaret Rogers in Harvard Business Review. “In my experience, the most impactful development happens not through formal programs, but also through smaller moments that occur within the workplace: on-the-job learning opportunities that are wholeheartedly catered to the worker’s unique needs and challenges.”

Ideas for Developing Your Team While Keeping Results in Mind

1. Link Personal Goals to Business Goals

Too often, when we think about “top performers,” we consider it only from the perspective of how well people are achieving their professional goals. But it’s also important to link their goals with business objectives. To illustrate this point, let’s look at an example:

Imagine the highest-performing member of your sales team completes 50 sales in a recent month. But since then, only 5 of those sales have turned into repeat business because your top performer has been overselling in order to complete the original sales. Meanwhile, another member of the team made 30 sensible sales, and has subsequently turned 15 of those sales into valuable repeat business.

Here’s another example: Say a staff member wants to upskill for a role that will benefit your business, and they want to enhance their driving capabilities. By supporting this staff member’s personal training goals, you can help them acquire a higher-level license that will also be of value to your organization. In this circumstance, a personal goal can serve two purposes — simultaneously helping a team member grow while also helping the organization address business needs.

2. Establish Achievable Goals

If you want to motivate staff and provide them with opportunities for development, you need to ensure that you set realistic goals for their growth. It is also important for leaders to understand and agree with the scope of these goals.

“You need to have the discipline to take risks,” explains Howard Shore of management training specialists, Activate Group. “If your management and executive team are not aligned in their goals, and if your company culture is underdeveloped and unsupportive of change, this can create enormous friction.”

3. Know When to Change and Adapt

Leaders and managers recognize when their business is doing well because they’re rewarded with strong revenues, profits, and momentum. They know established goals are being met. Likewise, their employees and customers also feel more accomplished and satisfied. However, if success comes down to striking a good balance between today’s results and preparation for the future, then it’s essential to recognize when things may be off-balance.

Smart leaders know how critical it is to stay alert and keep an eye out for issues that require adjustment. When, how and why can an off-kilter equilibrium slow your progress or tip the scales of success against you? Here are some obvious but important factors to keep in mind:

  • Rising salaries
  • Increasing financial costs from external causes, such as inflation, recession, exchange rate fluctuations or taxes
  • Falling profits
  • Deteriorating business growth
  • Staffing issues
  • Supply chain problems
  • Threatening economic events or political instability.

4. Give Staff Ample Agency to Grow

It is important for staff to understand that they have agency in your business. The best way to manage this is by delegating tasks to team members, rather than trying to manage everything yourself. In this context, effective leaders focus on how to let people lead themselves. Having agency gives people a chance to develop on their own terms, and provides paths to growth that can be beneficial to the business as well as the individual.

5. Link Success to Opportunity

Just as it is wise to provide staff with the chance to grow, it is important to emphasize the idea that a company’s long-term success depends on team members’ collective contributions. Company-wide success is an opportunity for staff, too. This is why goal alignment matters. In the best-case scenario, individual success aligns with company achievements. This makes it easier to find an effective balance between results and team growth.

Final Notes on Driving Results Versus Developing Your Team

Leaders are essential to team success. A great team with poor leadership can lose focus or descend into infighting. It is up to management to find ways to maximize results while also ensuring effective development of their team. By keeping a continuous eye on both and proactively managing both sides of the equation, companies look forward to long-term success.

HR Trends That Matter in 2023: An Insider’s Guide

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People often ask me which HR trends should be on their radar. It’s a fair question, because I organize two of the HR profession’s most popular conferences, UNLEASH America and UNLEASH World. During the programming process, I work closely with hundreds of human resources leaders and industry influencers, as well as HR technology and services providers. Spotting key trends is easy, because patterns appear as I reflect on the topics speakers pitch, along with themes that emerge among exhibitors, attendees, and startup competitions.

This year, 7 closely related HR issues and opportunities are trending:

  1. Asynchronous work
  2. Distributed, remote and hybrid work
  3. Upskilling and reskilling
  4. Diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging
  5. People analytics
  6. Employee experience
  7. AI and automation

These HR trends probably sound familiar, but they continue to define the future of work. That’s why they’ll take center stage at our conferences in the year ahead. For details on what I’m seeing and hearing about these hot topics, read on…

7 HR Trends That Matter Now

1. Asynchronous Work

Asynchronous work is the future of work. It’s an environment where people collaborate and complete tasks without real-time presence or communication.

Some industries have relied on asynchronous work for decades. For example, in the software sector, developers often work from wherever it’s convenient. They rely on a blend of standards, practices, and tools that support distributed project management, team problem solving, and interactions. This improves productivity in various ways — especially by reducing interruptions when people want to focus on their primary tasks.

Asynchronous work also improves the accuracy of strategic planning and decision making. Without accuracy, running a business is very difficult.

Many companies are still striving to enable asynchronous work. This includes connecting systems of record so relevant data is secure but also highly available. The goal is to ensure that information isn’t scattered, so people don’t need to call or message others whenever a question arises. Speed bumps like these can create huge volumes of reactive work.

An asynchronous work infrastructure is the foundation of another key HR trend: distributed, remote and hybrid work…

2. Distributed, Remote, and Hybrid Work Models

The pandemic was like a time machine. It instantly catapulted much of the world into a variety of work models that many of us discussed for decades, but hadn’t implemented. Now, these work models are here to stay.

For example, consider one of our biggest clients. At the start of 2020, this company was planning an 18-month global roll out of Microsoft Teams. But when the pandemic struck, they actually rolled-out Teams within only a few days!

This wasn’t an isolated incident. Organizations of all types suddenly had to embrace flexible work  arrangements. Now, although some teams are returning to the office, remote work structures remain. This is driving demand for hybrid work, where people can engage remotely at least one day a week.

Another HR trend emerging from the pandemic is the four-day work week. Previously, this was also widely discussed but not widely implemented. Then, during quarantine, flexible work arrangements became a necessity. This paved the way for ongoing adoption of the four-day work week and other innovative scheduling models.

Pandemic-era flexible work arrangements also helped many employees improve work/life balance. This is yet another HR trend that received attention in the past, but was rarely achieved.

Flexible work models aren’t perfect. But I doubt we’ll ever return to a world where people go to the office and work from 9-5 all week. We’ve seen flexible work succeed, even under the most difficult circumstances. We now know it doesn’t make sense to endure long, expensive commutes and childcare struggles. And why limit creativity and productivity to a prescribed time and place?

3. Upskilling and Reskilling

Although tech industry layoffs are rampant and a recession is looming, the war for talent continues to escalate. But this isn’t really news. It’s been building for years. So, what is the HR trend to watch here?

Many workers who perform repetitive tasks increasingly feel frustrated by a lack of career growth. For decades, we’ve discussed the gap between these jobs and knowledge work. But now, the gap is growing even wider, as technology continues to advance and employers invest more heavily in upskilling and reskilling knowledge workers.

To keep top talent onboard, employers are making learning and development a priority. Professional development is also a powerful way to attract new talent in an increasingly competitive hiring climate. But what does this mean for people with jobs that are likely to become obsolete or automated soon?

Professional growth is increasingly important to people in every line of work. So employers are investing in learning programs to help attract and retain a future-ready workforce. HR departments are finding that implementing and maintaining effective learning programs is much faster, cheaper, and easier now. That’s because learning systems are adding innovative tech like AI-driven capabilities, interactive video, and augmented reality to improve learning experiences. They also offer APIs to connect learning platforms with other HR and business systems, so employers can more easily assess employee skills, track development progress, and measure learning outcomes.

Ultimately, this means employers are becoming better-equipped to help individuals grow in their careers, while helping their organizations succeed.

4. Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging

Another key HR trend focuses on workforce diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB). This isn’t just lip service. It has been a serious priority for years, and the commitment continues. Here’s why:

Studies show that diverse companies outperform others. That’s partially because they can tap into a broader range of employee perspectives — spanning age, race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and more.

In healthy cultures, all employees are paid equally for similar roles. But that’s not the only requirement. People also need to feel welcome, respected and included in relevant meetings and decisions. These pillars of DEIB are more important than ever in today’s dynamic work world, and they’re becoming even more integral to the fabric of vibrant organizations.

5. People Analytics

For decades, data analytics has played a central role across business disciplines — finance, logistics, e-commerce, sales, marketing, and information technology. Now it is becoming common for HR applications such as learning, recruitment, performance management, and employee experience platforms.

Going forward, HR teams will increasingly rely on people-oriented analytics systems to make evidence-based decisions. For example, when relocating an office, decision makers will want to assess talent, performance, and many other data points to determine who should staff that office.

Also, look for AI to play an increasingly important role in people analytics applications, so organizations can improve decision support, performance analysis, and predictive processes.

6. Employee Experience

Now more than ever, organizations are emphasizing employee experience — including onboarding, workflow, culture, career development, and other aspects of work life. This is because a positive work experience correlates with higher engagement, productivity, satisfaction, commitment, and retention.

Also, employee experience is gaining traction because analytics systems are becoming more prevalent. This means more organizations have the capacity to evaluate the impact of employee-focused initiatives. Measurement typically focuses on onboarding, training, and other career experiences such as project assignments and promotions.

Employee experience is derived from customer experience and personalization initiatives used in marketing to assess customer preferences and develop relationships based on those interests. Similarly, the more an HR organization learns about employees and their preferences, the more effectively it can design custom work experiences with a more positive impact on engagement, performance, morale, and commitment.

7. AI and Automation

I’ve mentioned AI previously, but AI and automation deserve a separate discussion. That’s because both are transforming HR processes by dramatically streamlining tasks and enabling HR teams to focus more on strategic priorities.

AI and automation are critical to people analytics and employee experience initiatives. For instance, they can help detect when an employee is unhappy and at risk of resigning. Then, they can recommend ways to correct the issue before it’s too late.

In addition, these tools can alert HR and business managers when employees aren’t receiving appropriate onboarding or learning support. They can also assess and recommend an employee’s unique training path based on the market’s changing demands and the organization’s talent realities.

AI and automation will increasingly permeate HR, reduce the burden of administrative tasks, and offer invaluable insights regarding employee growth, performance, engagement, satisfaction, and commitment.

Final Thoughts on Current HR Trends

The pandemic unleashed work changes no employer could predict. But that’s only the beginning. Now, changes that started several years ago are leading to even more challenges and opportunities ahead.

In today’s volatile talent market, workers continue to place new demands on employers. Meanwhile, HR tech innovation continues to accelerate, giving organizations even more powerful and effective tools to improve all facets of work. As employers rapidly adopt new tools and techniques to improve organizational impact, the future looks bright across the HR landscape.

Employee Retention Strategies: 9 Ideas That Are Working

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TalentCulture Content Impact Award Winner - 2023Keeping valued employees onboard is top-of-mind for many organizations these days. But what kind of employee retention strategies are actually working?

To find out, we asked numerous HR and business leaders to tell us which methods are making a difference for their workforce. And they responded with a variety of answers worth considering. Here are 9 of the best ideas we received:

  • Actively Support Employee Mental Health
  • Invest in Employee Growth
  • Invite Family Members to Team Events
  • Support Employee Sabbaticals
  • Assign an Employee Partner for Each New Hire
  • Create a Culture of Trust and Connection
  • Offer a Generous PTO and Benefits Policy
  • Build Meaningful Onboarding Connections
  • Provide Professional Development Opportunities

To learn more about how your organization can make the most of these employee retention strategies, read the full responses below…

9 Effective Employee Retention Strategies


1. Actively Support Employee Mental Health

One of the most powerful ways we have improved our retention rate is by proactively supporting employee mental health. We make workplace wellbeing a priority by encouraging mindfulness and reminding people to take short mental health breaks every day.

To ensure our employees benefit from improved wellbeing, we’ve also brought in trainers to teach various mindfulness exercises. These simple improvements have been easy to implement. Yet, they’ve helped our employees become happier and more engaged at work. This, in turn, has led to increased retention.

Mark Pierce, CEO, Cloud Peak Law Group

2. Invest in Employee Growth

To help retain our best talent, we provide ongoing internal and external opportunities for career growth.

For each position in every department, we publish clear, open-source career ladders. And we offer programs that help each employee develop skills and competencies needed to become a subject expert at their current level or qualify for success at the next level.

These opportunities include a robust Skill Enhancement and Employee Development (SEED) program for individual contributors, and a rich Leadership Essentials and Development (LEAD) program for people leaders. These are cohort-based programs we offer twice a quarter. In conjunction with other social learning activities, these programs improved our retention rate by 28% in the second half of 2022.

On the external development front, we offer a Be Your Best Self program that lets employees spend up to $1,500 a year on certifications, conferences and other activities in line with their professional goals. This initiative elevated our retention by 13% in the second half of last year.

Elizabeth Boyd, Fractional Director of Talent Development and Learning, TalentLab.Live

3. Invite Family Members to Team Events

Rather than hosting happy hours and team events for “employees only,” we invite spouses and children, too.

In addition to helping employees get to know their colleagues better, this is an excellent way for families to become familiar with colleagues their wife, husband, partner, mother or father works with each day. This means family members can put faces to names during future at-home conversations about work.

What’s more, these informal family relationships often help employees become much closer. Sometimes, colleagues’ family members become friends, as well. All of this leads to a much happier workplace that employees hesitate to leave.

Janelle Owens, HR Director, Guide2Fluency

4. Support Employee Sabbaticals

Effective work-life balance isn’t just a distant goal to achieve. It’s a reality we are all continuously managing and renegotiating. Sometimes, for whatever reason, the life component suddenly takes precedence. That’s when an employee must radically rebalance key priorities.

By offering extended time away through sabbatical leave, you provide significant reassurance. Should the worst happen, employees know they can take time away from work without risking their employment status.

Similarly, if a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity arises, such as long-term traveling, studying, or focusing on personal growth, people know a formal mechanism is in place to support them.

Some of our organization’s most engaged and loyal employees have taken sabbatical leave multiple times. Even those who haven’t exercised their right to a sabbatical think highly of the option. They appreciate the fact that we offer flexibility, should the need arise.

Chloe Yarwood, HR Manager, Test Partnership

5. Assign an Employee Partner for Each New Hire

Whenever you’re expanding your team, think about group dynamics. Sometimes when you hire new staff for positions that are similar to others’ roles, members of your team will feel scared. They may assume you’re looking to replace them when that’s not the case.

To ease any tension or anxiety, ask existing employees to team-up with new people on relevant projects. Give them responsibility for delegating tasks to the new hires, so they feel included and empowered to make onboarding more successful.

This helps existing staff feel more control over the situation. They’ll also pick up on the fact that you need more resources to manage a growing workload. By recognizing this is an investment in everyone’s success, existing staff should feel more secure in their positions. This also means they’ll be less likely to look elsewhere out of fear.

Dennis Consorte, Digital Marketing and Leadership Consultant for Startups, Snackable Solutions

6. Create a Culture of Trust and Connection

We’ve found that one of the most effective ways to keep employees is to focus on building a culture based on trust and connection. This doesn’t happen overnight. But it can make a huge impact over time.

We started by implementing weekly team meetings where people from different departments discuss issues or challenges we’re facing. This opens lines of communication among team members. Everyone is welcome to share ideas for improvement. It’s also a forum to discuss what has worked in the past or could work in the future. This creates an active dialogue around innovation that encourages employees to grow professionally.

These regular meetings give us a chance to build stronger relationships through group problem solving. They also help us develop mutual understanding, while recognizing everyone’s strengths and weaknesses. Plus, we have an opportunity to celebrate individual and collective successes.

Travis Lindemoen, Managing Director, nexus IT group

7. Offer a Generous PTO and Benefits Policy

Because our entire team works remotely, we have to make sure the work people do is more valuable to them than the work they would otherwise be doing in a more traditional setting. That’s why we offer 38 days of PTO (personal time off) each year, as well as private healthcare stipends employees can use to maintain their mental and physical health. 

Similar companies typically don’t offer any of these benefits. That’s why we stand out among competitors. It helps us recruit strong talent, and ultimately it means employees stay with us longer, as well.

Gordana Sretenovic, Co-founder, Workello

8. Build Meaningful Onboarding Connections

Our organization invests in multiple policies and programs to improve employee retention. One stand-out initiative is our structured onboarding plan, which includes intentional workforce integration activities such as team-building exercises and networking events.

We believe strong retention really begins on Day One. So, by introducing every new hire to the company culture, we can help people more quickly feel comfortable in their roles. This has led to increased overall engagement across the organization. It has also helped improve job satisfaction and reduce turnover.

Grace He, People and Culture Director, teambuilding.com

9. Provide Professional Development Opportunities

One of the best ways to keep people engaged in their jobs is to provide opportunities for professional growth. It not only helps employees learn new skills, but also demonstrates that your organization wants to invest in their growth and development.

This could include internal or external training programs, mentorship opportunities, tuition reimbursement programs, or a combination of these options. For example you can provide funding for people to attend relevant conferences or networking events, so they can develop a broader range of professional relationships skills in your industry. This not only helps build a more knowledgeable and competent workforce, but also improves retention.

Timothy Allen, Sr. Corporate Investigator, Corporate Investigation Consulting

 

 

Which Benefits are Best for Onsite Employees?

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Numerous jobs can be performed remotely or on a hybrid schedule. Still, more than 70% of full-time roles require people to work onsite. For instance, consider those involved in transportation, manufacturing, construction, and agriculture, as well as frontline workers in healthcare, education, retail, hospitality, and other service industries. How can companies in these sectors attract and retain talent more effectively? This article looks at how specialized benefits for onsite employees can help.

Demand for Onsite Employees Remains High

Employers have been reeling from a series of one-two punches in recent years. It all started with the pandemic quarantine in 2020. Then in 2021, more than 47 million people left their jobs during the so-called “Great Resignation.” Soon after that, the notion of “quiet quitting” caught fire, when many who remained in their jobs decided it was no longer worth the effort to go above-and-beyond.

By the start of this year, work trends hit a low ebb. On average, 4 million U.S. employees were resigning each month, and at least 50% of the workforce was doing no more than the bare minimum. Yet job openings remained at historic highs. No wonder companies continue scrambling to engage and retain talent — especially frontline workers.

How Targeted Benefits Help

With inflation already cutting into profits at many companies, higher wages aren’t in this year’s budget. So instead, they’re developing special benefits packages for onsite employees.

Of course, benefits have always been a factor in every candidates’ decision to accept a job offer. But now, attractive benefits are even more important —  especially when remote or hybrid work arrangements aren’t an option.

Thoughtful benefits that address the interests of onsite employees can make a big difference in an environment where employers offer remote and hybrid workers  35-hour workweeks, unlimited PTO, gym memberships, and a host of other creative options.

Here’s how a solid benefits package can help tip the scale in your favor in today’s talent market…

Which Benefits Do Onsite Employees Value Most?

1. Flexible Schedules

When remote work isn’t an option, flexibility is a must. In fact, 95% of workers think flexible hours are more attractive than remote work, according to a recent Future Forum survey. An Adobe survey echoes this finding, with 84% of respondents saying they desire a more flexible work schedule.

2. Flexible Personal Time Off

Flexibility in PTO has also been gaining traction. In the wake of the pandemic, traditional ways of allocating time off no longer appeal to onsite employees. For example, imagine a parent sometimes volunteers at their child’s school for several hours during the work day. That employee should feel empowered to adjust their schedule accordingly.

The same concept should apply for people who need PTO when they need time off to focus on their mental wellbeing. In fact, a recent Harris Poll found that 23% of workers are receiving new mental health services from their employers.

3. Childcare Assistance

Childcare benefits have also become more popular. Whether it’s a stipend to help cover ongoing costs, discounts on daycare center services, or onsite childcare options, these benefits can make a significant difference. In fact, childcare costs increased more than 40% during the pandemic, and they continue to rise. This is why onsite employees consider childcare assistance a highly valuable benefit.

4. Career Development

For many workers, professional growth is a primary concern. That’s why learning and development opportunities can elevate your benefits package for onsite employees.

If your budget doesn’t support a full-blown educational initiative, even a simple lunch-and-learn event series can help. Topics can reach beyond work-related skills and knowledge. For example, workers might find it helpful to learn about personal financial planning, healthy eating, time management or other life skills. By gathering input about employee interests, you can co-create a curriculum.

Building a Better Benefits Packages

How to attract and retain employees with benefits is a question for the ages. Many types of incentives can enhance recruitment and improve engagement, productivity and performance. But whatever you choose to offer, the overall package must make sense for your company and your culture, as well as individual employees. These guidelines can help you make better decisions:

1. Conduct Focus Groups

Involving employees in planning discussions is always a good idea. It’s the most logical way to arrive at reliable answers about the benefits people value most.

You’ll want to schedule at least several different sessions, each with a representative sample of onsite employees. You’ll also need to prepare a series of carefully designed questions, along with discussion prompts to keep the conversation going. Additionally, be sure to choose moderators who are skilled at leading discussions, probing for details, and gathering feedback from all participants.

2. Send out Surveys

If you don’t have time or energy to conduct focus groups, you can rely on the tried-and-true method of distributing an anonymous survey to gather honest input. This process may uncover certain employee benefits and incentives you wouldn’t learn about in group discussions. That’s because some people aren’t comfortable sharing their ideas in a small group  setting, so an anonymous survey can be an effective way to give more employees a voice.

3. Establish an Employee Resource Group

Employee resource groups (ERGs) are voluntary, employee-led groups that share a common interest and/or characteristic. They generally focus on accomplishing specific goals that tie-in with organizational culture and work life. Most groups exist to help cultivate inclusion and a healthy work environment, so this can be an ideal way to bring together voices that can speak and act on behalf of onsite employees.

4. Monitor the Competition

Even if you have strong internal input, you’ll find that studying industry competitors offers a wealth of information about how to build an attractive benefit plan for onsite employees. Look at standard practices and benchmarks — both inside and outside of your industry. With this kind of contextual insight, you may even find that you can expand and improve upon what others offer.

The Bottom Line on Benefits for Onsite Employees

Money may be one of the fastest ways to motivate employees, but even  employers with deep pockets can’t compete on price alone. Another company will inevitably find a way to offer people more. This is why a thoughtfully designed benefits package can be your strength. People are motivated by more than compensation. It all comes down to finding the right mix of benefits to attract and retain onsite employees.

For the best solution, start with your organization’s culture, values, and business realities. Then craft a benefits package that fits that framework.

Rethinking The Manager’s Role: Here’s How to Get Better Results

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Sponsored by The Culture Platform

At some point in the last 20 years, companies started to believe employee engagement should define a manager’s role. And looking back, this conclusion made some sense. After all, managers are the organizational layer between leaders and people on teams. So why not embrace this as a framework for managerial effectiveness?

How The Engagement Expectation Began

The shift to engagement as the center of a manager’s role coincided with the arrival of tech-savvy millennials and the promise of HR software to power the so-called engagement revolution. It sounded good in theory. But it has largely been a failure.

Frankly, there is no evidence that investing in “managing” employee engagement actually works. Instead, research consistently points in the opposite direction. So let’s dig deeper for answers.

Throughout most of the industrial economy, managers weren’t very good at managing people. In fact, job turnover surveys typically found the #1 reason employees quit was “my manager.”

No wonder organizations decided to invest in technology to help. But what has that accomplished?

If you add up the revenue of engagement software and HR tech firms over the past 20 years, you’ll see customers spent perhaps $25 billion on these tools. Even so, the level of U.S. employee engagement remained mostly unchanged throughout this timeframe. It has consistently hovered around 32%, according to Gallup. Abysmal.

Why do we need to change what's wrong with a manager's role? 20-year U.S. employee engagement trends from Gallup

Rethinking the Manager’s Role

I believe this idea of managing engagement was flawed from the beginning. Flawed because managers actually manage people and their expectations about success. If every employee could perform at a top 10% level, get promoted, and work from home, engaging them in their work would be a breeze. But that’s not reality.

Today, when people leave a job, they usually don’t say their boss is the primary driver. Instead, they point to a desire for professional growth or career advancement. With this in mind, I would say managers have the most important role in any organization. So this is why I believe it’s time to rethink the manager’s role.

What if organizations actually embraced what employees want? And what if they empowered managers to help their people plan for professional growth and advancement?

Currently, most organizations don’t think this way. They culturally believe career planning is an individual employee’s responsibility.

I vehemently disagree with this conventional thinking. It’s really just an artifact from an era when employees could comfortably expect to spend their entire career at one or two companies.

For most managers, empowering employee career-building will require new attitudes and actions. Changing cultural norms and setting clear expectations isn’t an easy or intuitive process. This means managers will need a new framework or model for managing people that is different from today’s engagement-centric approach.

A New View of the Manager’s Role

I propose a new concept built for the modern manager-employee relationship. 

I call it goals with purpose.

Goals with purpose align an employee’s current job role with future career aspirations. This alignment is the key to creating an emotional connection between an individual and the work they’re performing as part of the team.

For managers, this is no doubt much more challenging than seeking engagement through a simple pulse survey or weekly poll. Those engagement tools are easy to use and they appeal to the mass market by design. However, they don’t address what matters most to employees.

The Power of Goals With Purpose

What does it mean to set goals with purpose? Through the research I’ve conducted at The Culture Platform and the listening I did at Cisco with hundreds of companies, I’ve processed this input and determined what constitutes a goal with purpose.

At its highest level, this kind of goal is the way an individual contributor on a team clearly sees how today’s job role aligns with future-minded growth opportunities.

Specifically, a goal with purpose has five attributes:

1. It is tangible
It aligns a job role in a measurable way with goals that matter to the organization’s success. An individual contributor should be able to “hold” this goal in their “hands.”

2. It shapes personal growth
It reflects the strengths of the person in that role. Experienced leaders know a job role should never play to someone’s weaknesses.

3. It demonstrates a pathway
It aligns a current role with a future role. The future role may even be outside the organization or team.

4. It helps people navigate the organization
It clarifies the position an individual plays on the team. This helps dispel politics and endless positioning.

5. It empowers a reputation
It enables people to communicate with facts about their accomplishments. Ideally, it provides a “signature” project to build an individual contributor’s credibility.

Managerial Success: A Call to Action for Leaders

A manager’s role has never been more important to organizational success. It has also never been harder to be a manager, given the pandemic, work-from-home disruption, the current era of business “efficiency,” and the unrelenting pace of change.

If managers have an organization’s most important job, leaders need to realize an employee’s emotional connection to the company is earned. They also need to recognize it is worth the effort.

Tapping into an individual’s intrinsic motivations is the key to inspiring discretionary effort — that magical relationship between an employee, their manager, and their company. It’s the sweet spot where going above-and-beyond is the way things work.

During Cisco’s heyday, we called these magical moments the “Cisco Save.” In other words, when we needed to accomplish something important, a group of people would step up and do whatever it took to get the job done.

As leaders and managers, we can make work more magical for our people. But engagement doesn’t make someone want to do “whatever it takes.” We finally know that now, after 20 years of trying. It’s time to try a better way. We need to make goals with purpose every manager’s priority and make career empowerment the new managerial normal.

What do goals with purpose mean to you? How could this approach help your organization move in the right direction? I look forward to seeing your comments and ideas.

Should You Create an AI-Powered Talent Marketplace?

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After years of upheaval that have redefined society, business and work, we’ve entered a period some call the “Great Reflection.” During this era of mindfulness, employees everywhere are reevaluating what they truly want from their career and their employer. In response, companies are investing more heavily in workforce retention strategies. For instance, the internal talent marketplace concept is rapidly gaining momentum.

Why marketplaces? CIPD research says 30% of employers intend to increase wages in 2023. This is certainly one way to show people you value them. Who wouldn’t appreciate competitive compensation? But many people are looking for deeper reasons to stay onboard. As a result, more companies are focusing on employees’ career development concerns.

According to Gallup, 76% of people are seeking opportunities for professional growth. At the same time, modern businesses know they can’t advance their agenda without a future-ready workforce.

That’s why now is a good time to invest in an internal talent marketplace. This kind of solution offers multiple pathways to develop more skilled, innovative individuals and teams. But how can you accomplish this in a way that is cost-efficient, personalized, and accessible? This is our story…

Inside a Talent Marketplace: One Example

To accelerate internal mobility, Schneider Electric, a global leader in integrated energy solutions, has developed and deployed an Open Talent Market (OTM). This marketplace leverages leading-edge technology to help retain talent and stimulate employee growth.

OTM is an AI-driven career development and internal mobility platform that matches workforce skills and ambitions to opportunities across the organization. First, employees describe their current skills and past experiences, as well as their future aspirations. Then OTM provides information about relevant open positions, part-time projects, and possible mentors.

The platform also offers career planning capabilities. For example, people can explore potential career paths and establish short-term development tracks to address immediate upskilling needs or develop new skills for the future.

How the OTM Process Works

This talent marketplace is open to all connected employees at Schneider Electric, and through pilot programs for shop floor employees who don’t have daily access to a work computer. With artificial intelligence as its backbone, OTM manages the entire experience at speed and at scale.

To get started, employees create a profile in the platform, which can be based on a LinkedIn profile or resume upload. Next, they can edit and expand their profile information, adding appropriate skills, experiences, interests and development areas. The more data an employee includes, the better the AI results will be.

Schneider Electric embraces the “3E” development framework – Experience (70%), Exposure (20%), and Education (10%). And because OTM is so easy to use, employees can independently explore upskilling and development opportunities that align with each of these learning methods.

Talent Marketplace Benefits

In addition to improving talent development and mobility, this solution has formalized the way our organization manages its internal gig economy. Now, by offering part-time projects through OTM, the company can unlock hours from employees who are eager to work on stretch assignments.

But the real beauty of this talent marketplace comes from its underlying AI, which makes it possible for anyone to discover opportunities that might not otherwise have been considered.

Too often in the past, finding a new position or mentor was all about who you knew. Now, it’s about transparency. That means everyone has access to a broader spectrum of opportunities that might not have been visible previously.

At the same time, the AI personalizes the matching process. In other words, it helps employees focus on opportunities that fit their unique skills and interests, instead of requiring them to filter through a sea of options. This levels the playing field and accelerates the talent matching process by identifying the strongest possibilities, regardless of current role or business unit.

Preparing to Support Internal Mobility

An effective talent marketplace depends on a culture that is open to internal mobility. For many organizations, this requires a significant mindset shift before and during the rollout.

At Schneider, the end goal is to retain our employees by placing them in opportunities that are best suited to their skills and help them continue to grow. This is why we strive to foster open dialogue among employees, current managers, and hiring managers about internal mobility and talent development.

To set the stage for OTM, we adjusted several key policies and procedures, and built OTM logic to support our business objectives:

Policy Changes

  • To help employees pursue new opportunities more on their terms, we’ve removed minimum “time in current role” requirements, as well as the need for a manager’s approval when applying for a new position.
  • To encourage actionable communication about opportunities, we ask internal candidates to receive feedback about any application, regardless of its outcome. In the past, this was not occurring consistently.
  • To support continuous learning and development, we request that employees dedicate 10-15% of their time to projects outside of their current role.

System Functionality

  • When using OTM for career planning, employees can see possible career paths based on several criteria, including their desired roles, typical paths that others in their current role have pursued, or whether they’re interested in moving into management. Within those paths, they can see existing open positions, as well as skill development opportunities to help prepare for future roles.
  • In addition, employees can use OTM to build shorter-term career tracks based on skills or experiences they want to gain or a specific position they want to pursue:
    • A track based on skills and experiences lets employees browse available opportunities, as well as courses offered in our learning management system.
    • A track based on positions lets employees select a specific position they’d like to pursue. Then the AI compares market data to find the skills most often applied in that role and identifies which of those skills the employee already has and indicates any gaps. The platform then suggests available projects, mentors and courses in our LMS that could help an employee fill those gaps.
  • Lastly, OTM is not a one-way street. The AI helps employees uncover matched opportunities. But it also lets recruiters and project owners discover candidates with a skill or experience needed for a position or project role. This feature required change management to ensure that our managers perceive it as a tool that enhances internal mobility, rather than “poaching.”

Talent Marketplace Results

To-date, 80,000 Schneider Electric employees are registered OTM users. And since its launch in May 2020, this solution has helped more than 26,000 employees connect with projects, positions or mentorship assignments.

OTM has been a highly effective way to actively involve employees in managing their careers. It supports people as they develop, grow, and shape their future. And it helps the organization more fully utilize talent, while strengthening engagement and retention. At Schneider, our commitment to a world-class talent marketplace is leading to a brighter future, all around.

 

EDITOR’S NOTE:  In developing this article, Jessica Staggs collaborated with Michele Egan, Open Talent Market Digital Transformation Lead at Schneider Electric

When You Train Employees, Do You Also Boost Retention?

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Sponsored by FranklinCovey

If you’re involved in hiring or managing people, no one needs to tell you that competition for top talent is incredibly fierce. And keeping teams engaged and motivated is getting more difficult all the time. That’s why it pays to be especially thoughtful and strategic about how you train employees.

This isn’t just my opinion. It’s the conclusion of organizations like SHRM, which found that employees are 76% more likely to stay onboard when their organization has a dedicated process to support workforce learning and growth. Similarly, Deloitte estimates that retention is 30-50% higher among companies with a strong learning culture.

But this begs the question — exactly how can you build and sustain a learning environment that engages people so they want to stay onboard and advance your agenda? That’s the topic we’re exploring today with a brilliant business leader who is also a recognized expert in learning and development…

Meet Our Guest:  Paul Walker

I’m honored to welcome Paul Walker, President and CEO at FranklinCovey! As the company’s chief strategist and operational leader, Paul is committed to transforming organizations and enabling greatness. He actually started his career at FranklinCovey 22 years ago, and has grown and adapted along with the company. So clearly, he knows first-hand how learning and development can help retain top talent. Please join us as we explore this topic:

Connecting Learning With Retention
Welcome, Paul! Let’s dive right in. How is training tied to workforce retention?

Our work with clients and research from others tell us that training is integral to retention for several reasons:

  1. When you train employees, they feel valued because you’re investing in them. And the more valued people feel, the more likely they are to stay.
  2. It helps people perform better. We all want to do our best work everyday. If we need skills to do that, and our employer is helping us acquire those capabilities, it not only helps us do better today, but may also prepare us for something exciting in the future. Again, we feel valued.

How to Train Employees Effectively
What do people really want from work-related training?

There are probably more factors, but over and over again we see employees focusing on these things:

  1. Is it easy for me to access, so I can get the most out of it?
  2. How well does it fit into the flow of my daily work life?
  3. How relevant is it now, and will it prepare me for where I want to be in the future?
  4. Is it useful? Does it actually help me perform better?
How Can You Train Employees for Retention? Join us for a live #WorkTrends Twitter Chat - Wednesday, March 29th - 1:30-2:00pm ET. Follow @TalentCulture on Twitter for questions - and add the #WorkTrends hashtag to your tweets so others can see your comments and interact with you!

JOIN US ON TWITTER!

Choose Learning Metrics That Matter

Retention is important, but what other KPIs should we consider?

When we want to train employees, we need to be sure we’re not just advocating for retention or other objectives that may feel a bit soft to people who make budgetary and strategic decisions. These leaders don’t necessarily see how learning supports what they want to accomplish.

Instead, we need to focus on how learning improves the quality of the team’s results. That’s crucial to the organization’s performance.

We need to talk in the language Deloitte used in its research that says:

  • 92% of companies with more intentional, sophisticated learning develop more novel products and processes,
  • 56% are often first-to-market with products and services,
  • 52% are measurably more productive, and
  • 17% are more profitable.

Make It a Leadership Priority to Train Employees

Absolutely. There’s value here, and our KPIs should reflect that…

I would also say the best organizations have figured out how to ignite a passion for employee learning in their leaders. In other words, people development is a key leadership expectation, and leaders want to be involved in helping their people grow and develop. It’s not just the responsibility of HR or L&D…

For more insights from Paul about how to train employees for retention, listen to this full podcast episode. And be sure to subscribe to the #WorkTrends Podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher.

In addition, we invite you to join our live Twitter chat about this topic on Wednesday, March 29th from 1:30-2:00pm ET. Follow us at @TalentCulture for questions and be sure to add the #WorkTrends hashtag to your tweets, so others in the community can easily find your comments and interact with you!

Also, to continue this conversation on social media anytime, follow our #WorkTrends hashtag on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

Developing Entry-Level Talent: How to Invest for Success

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Imagine you’re a hard-working entry-level employee who’s been in your current position for less than a year. Your skills are solid, but they don’t help you stand out from other entry-level talent. You know which skills could help you advance, but you’re not sure what resources are available to you or how to get support for a growth plan. You don’t see a pathway to expand your skill set. You just feel stuck.

Sadly, this isn’t unusual. But scenarios like this can have serious consequences for employee morale, mobility, and retention across an organization. For example research says:

It’s no surprise that people look elsewhere when they believe their skills aren’t seen, valued, and nurtured. But this doesn’t need to happen. As an employer, you can avoid losing entry-level employees by investing more effectively in their future with your organization.

Where Employee Development Fits In

A comprehensive professional development program is one way to demonstrate your commitment. Upskilling, reskilling, cross-training and continuous learning practices help employees keep existing skills fresh, develop new capabilities, and expand their career potential over time.

Future-minded employers know that developing entry-level talent is not just good for employee engagement and morale. It’s also a smart business strategy because it builds “bench depth.” By encouraging employees to embrace new responsibilities and growth opportunities, you can create a more diverse internal talent pipeline that will adapt with you as your business needs change.

A commitment to developing entry-level talent also sends a powerful message from the highest levels of your organization. It tells people that every member of your workforce is important, and you’re invested in their future success.

What’s at Stake for Employers

Organizations that invest in entry-level talent realize significant benefits:

1. Higher ROI

When you’re facing workforce skill gaps, recruiting qualified talent may seem like a faster, cheaper, easier solution than employee development. But this is a short-sighted approach that doesn’t necessarily lead to a stronger team. Bringing in new talent requires multiple costly, time-consuming steps, from recruiting to interviewing to hiring. And there’s no guarantee new hires will onboard successfully and become committed contributors.

Why bet on an uncertain outcome, when you already have a team in place that you’ve worked so hard to recruit and onboard? If you spend the same amount of time and money helping existing employees grow, you’re more likely to achieve a higher return on investment.

2. Less Brain Drain

The value of institutional knowledge is also important to consider. The lower your commitment to development, the higher your turnover rate is likely to be. And as employees leave, they’ll take away “insider” intelligence about how your organization gets things done. For example, you’ll lose insight into strategies, tactics and processes that worked, as well as those that didn’t. This kind of information can make or break operational efficiency, effectiveness, cohesion, and more.

By developing entry-level talent, you can equip employees with the skills and knowledge they need to succeed in your environment. Along the way, you’ll build and reinforce institutional knowledge, rather than eroding it as disenchanted employees leave.

3. Stronger Employee Value Proposition

We know people are drawn to employers that emphasize continuous professional development and growth. If your loyal workforce sees you turning to new hires instead of investing in existing employees, what should you expect to happen? Morale will sink, the desire for professional growth will vanish, and skills will stagnate. Eventually, employees will look for growth opportunities outside your organization.

Instead, why not reinvigorate your team through learning? Focus on reskilling, upskilling, and cross-skilling. It’s a more sustainable way to strengthen employee satisfaction, commitment, retention, and performance. To get started with a successful entry-level employee development program, consider these five steps:

5 Ways to Develop Entry-Level Talent

1. Establish a Reasonable Budget

Start by defining the key elements of your employee growth plan. Identify the professional development topics and skills your program should address. Any development model will involve both direct and indirect costs, and these should align with market value.

However, expenses aren’t the only consideration. You’ll also want to estimate the value of potential benefits. For example, you may choose to establish a mentorship program that pairs new hires with veteran employees. This is a relatively low-cost way to support a culture of learning, but it can lead to significant tangible results.

2. Provide Time and Resources for Employee Participation

Simply put, employees need dedicated time and support to engage in professional development. Allocate a specific number of days for this purpose — perhaps even paid time away from the office, if possible.

A little workplace flexibility goes a long way in helping talent feel valued, and giving employees choice in managing their schedules encourages accountability and self-regulation.

3. Tap Into the Power of Work Relationships

Ask entry-level employees what kind of development support they feel would be helpful. Then ask managers to co-create a roadmap with their direct reports, based on the knowledge and skills they want to develop.

Managers are likely to know how to leverage connections among team members so they can learn from one another. Research shows that these relationships matter. For example, McKinsey found that 91% of people supported by mentors are satisfied with their jobs. In addition, cohort-based learning enhances workplace communication, overall.

4. Include Team-Building Opportunities

Besides mentorship programs, consider other ways for entry-level employees to learn from teammates. Cross-departmental collaboration, for example, is an underused resource. When employees work with others and learn from one another, they can sharpen both interpersonal and job-related skills. They’re also more likely to understand the company’s inner workings and see the value in individual workplace roles.

5. Showcase Progress

For any program that demands time and energy, employees and employers alike want to see results. To reinforce the benefits of participation, plan to demonstrate how development efforts lead to professional growth, improved performance, and team success. For instance, one study of U.K. reskilling programs resulted in positive economic returns and improved morale. These are the kind of concrete results everyone appreciates.

Summary

These suggestions are intended as launching points to help you make the most of your investment in entry-level talent. With these development factors as a framework, your learning programs can make a measurable and lasting difference in workplace communication, productivity and innovation. Most importantly, this kind of investment can help you build a stronger team that will be invigorated and inspired to move forward together. Everybody wins.

How to Build a Learning Culture From the Ground Up

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The great resignation, the rise of hybrid work, and the fear of recession are making one thing certain — today’s talent must be agile and adapt quickly. A culture of learning is vital now because it helps organizations thrive when moving through change. But this kind of culture doesn’t happen spontaneously. It requires intentional effort. This article offers guidance for leaders who need to build a culture of learning that will stand the test of time.

What is a Learning Culture?

Culture is the combination of beliefs and values that drive organizational behavior. In other words, “how stuff gets done around here.” When you center beliefs and values on behaviors that encourage continuous growth and development, you can create a foundation for ongoing innovation and improvement.

A strong learning culture encourages and rewards both individual and organizational growth. It takes time and dedication to build a learning culture, but the outcomes can be transformational. What else does this process require? Focus on these factors:

8 Steps to Build a Learning Culture

1. Plan Effectively

Start by assessing your organization’s recruiting and hiring practices to be sure you’re attracting talent with a growth mindset. This should include a careful analysis of your onboarding process. Do you emphasize the importance of learning? Onboarding often focuses on what employees need to learn. But new employees also need to know who they should learn from and with.

Also, examine your approach to upskilling, reskilling, and cross-skilling current employees. This will give you better insight into how prepared your organization is to support future needs. 

Use these findings to plan for retention. Keeping employees onboard is critical now. According to The New York Times, “The rise in turnover since the pandemic started has a cost in productivity: It’s taking longer to get stuff out the door.”

Meanwhile, the talent pool remains limited. Currently, for every person seeking a job, 1.7  positions are available. In today’s competitive environment, employers can’t afford to lose top talent. And one of the most powerful ways to keep people committed is through a culture that supports learning and growth.

In a recent report about what we call Work 3.0, we explain how some talent models are more effective than others at achieving these outcomes. For example, organizations with remote and hybrid work models must be careful to ensure that learning opportunities are inclusive and equitable.

Smart leaders rely on the planning process to guide their decisions about learning priorities. This includes careful data gathering and analysis to verify the organization’s current state, define its future goals, and establish a strategic roadmap to bridge this gap. 

2. Ensure a Receptive Environment

Successful learning cultures begin with psychological safety. In a workplace where this is high, people feel comfortable asking questions, voicing their opinions, and taking responsibility for their mistakes.

In fact, after studying nearly 300 leaders over 2.5 years, we found that teams with high degrees of psychological safety had higher performance outcomes and lower interpersonal conflict. This kind of environment encourages employees to learn more fully from their mistakes and from one another.

3. Align Learning With Business Imperatives

What matters most to your organization? This should inform your culture. The most effective learning strategies align with business priorities. Alignment helps scale learning while keeping it relevant, meaningful, and applicable.

Environments that welcome open, honest discussions (including respectful disagreements) are more likely to align learning with the organization’s vision, mission, and goals.

You’ll want to emphasize opportunities to develop mindsets and behaviors that move your agenda forward. This should include incentives and rewards for employees who embrace desired growth.

4. Model the Change You Want to See

It’s essential to recognize continuous learning as a key to better business results. Because culture is shaped by leadership behavior, it’s critical to exhibit the actions you want to see in others. Leaders who exhibit an interest in learning and in rewarding others for their growth will inspire employees to focus on these activities.

Leaders play a significant role here by communicating expectations and modeling behaviors they want to see. For example, it’s important to regularly express curiosity, offer feedback, admit mistakes, and share knowledge.

Effective communication and storytelling by leaders can also help your workforce understand what’s expected and why it’s important for everyone in your culture. This includes engaging in authentic conversations, sharing personal learning experiences, and proactively seeking feedback.

5. Integrate Accessibility Into the Process

It’s vital to scale development opportunities so learning is accessible to everyone, not just high-potential individuals. This is particularly important in today’s environment, where employees don’t necessarily work onsite in a central location.

To improve accessibility, offer development through a variety of modalities. This can include a mix of formal in-person training, virtual courses, asynchronous informal learning, micro-learning, experiential learning, self-paced e-learning content, as well as social and collaborative learning options.

Offering a library of resources can also help keep workforce knowledge and skills up-to-date. For example, you can provide resources such as books, articles, podcasts, and videos through a central digital repository.

A learning management system (LMS) or learning experience platform (LXP) with enterprise licensing can help you scale this kind of learning content. This also makes it possible to track consumption and tie learning to individual and team performance.

6. Invest in the Right Tools and Support

A strong learning culture naturally emerges when development becomes integrated into daily work habits. Leaders can play an important role here, by regularly encouraging staff to devote sufficient time to absorb, practice, share, and apply whatever they learn.

One standard is based on the 70-20-10 rule: This approach suggests that 70% of learning comes from working through challenging assignments and experiences, while 20% comes from developmental relationships, and 10% from formal training and coursework. The process is reinforced when employees take time to reflect on their learning endeavors. You can support this reinforcement phase through mentoring as well as “reverse mentoring.”

7. Customize Appropriately

Today’s employees — especially those in remote and hybrid work settings — prefer development opportunities tailored to their needs. When considering how to elevate your learning culture, be sure to ask employees what they want to learn and how they prefer to engage in learning. Then consider how to provide “core” learning opportunities for all, combined with various options that any individual can pursue. 

Ideally, a customized approach delivers learning experiences that address each employee’s unique needs and interests over time. Research shows that offering various delivery methods tends to boost learner engagement and knowledge retention. Ultimately, that can improve job performance, satisfaction, and commitment.

8. Measure Effectively

Finally, plan to measure your progress and use that intelligence to improve on a continuous basis. 

Formal evaluations can help you track trends, learn from the data, and adjust accordingly. Less formal options, such as the agile review methodology of, “Liked, Lacked, Learned, Longed For” can give you immediate feedback while also changing mindsets.

Strive to make after-action reviews a natural part of work routines. Regularly ask for feedback and use pulse surveys. Also, don’t forget to establish metrics that help you determine how well leaders are advancing the overall learning agenda.

Conclusion

When you build a learning culture, you’ll see how all of these elements are interconnected. If the atmosphere is hostile or complacent, or if content isn’t accessible to all, your mission is likely to fail. If you don’t understand your objectives, measuring progress will be impossible.

Recognize that changing any aspect of an organization’s culture is easier said than done. Progress takes time, patience, support, and persistence — especially from leaders and managers. To secure buy-in, tie improvement metrics to each leader’s performance objectives. Also, to keep learning top-of-mind, publicly celebrate early wins, and keep the cadence rolling.

Eventually, any organization can lead with learning. But it won’t happen until you invest in thoughtful planning and consistent implementation. Remember, it’s a process.

Should You Cut Your Learning Budget in a Downturn?

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At some point, every organization will face an economic downturn. It could be a global recession or a serious slump in one of the industries you serve. Regardless, too many organizations jump to the wrong conclusions too quickly. They slash investment in employee development to save on variable expenses. But cutting a learning budget in haste can lead to much more severe business damage over time.

That’s why smart leaders embrace a long-term growth mindset before, during, and after a downturn. It’s why they double down on developing their people, even when times are tough. And as a result, these organizations don’t just survive. They thrive.

Learning: Strength in a Downturn

Wondering how some businesses actually flourish during difficult economic times? Take a look at the research. During the recessions of 1980, 1990, and 2000, a small minority of companies (9%) showed strong performance. In fact, they outperformed competitors by at least 10% in sales and profit growth.

What was their secret? In part, they invested in helping employees make better-informed decisions, improve their responsiveness, and adapt more quickly. What was the common denominator beneath these improvements? Learning. People needed the right knowledge and skills to pursue new roles, embrace new tasks, work more resourcefully, and make more effective decisions.

That’s why organizational learning is critical during a downturn. Yet ironically, L&D is often among the first departments that suffer when budgets are cut. It’s time for learning leaders to challenge this practice. Because employee development is not just a nice-to-have option when times are good. It is actually a powerful way to increase productivity, retention, and competitiveness — especially during uncertain economic times.

Flip Your Perspective

A downturn often brings uncertainty and fear. But seeing it instead as an opportunity for growth and differentiation can help your organization position itself as a market leader when recovery eventually comes. Preserving your learning investment can help your people do exactly that. If you cut back your learning budget now, you will hinder your future success.

I might be preaching to the L&D choir. But this is a vital message to spread far and wide across your senior stakeholders. Why? Chances are, the learning budget has already been slashed in each of your competitors’ organizations. If so, you can plant seeds now that can eventually grow into a competitive advantage.

Build the Case for a Sustained Learning Budget

To communicate effectively with executive stakeholders and colleagues, focus on understanding their unique priorities, fears, and challenges. For example, issues that matter to your CFO won’t necessarily be what keeps your CHRO up at night.

Department heads can be a goldmine of insight into high-priority projects, as well as the skills needed for successful outcomes. Partnering with these leaders increases buy-in. And with more voices supporting you, the less likely your learning budget will be cut.

Internal partners can also help you define learning programs that will have a deeper impact on your business. For example, when Capital One implemented a new cloud-based digital transformation, senior learning leadership worked closely with the CIO to define and develop required skills, assignments, and content.

Align Learning With Business Success Metrics

During a downturn, leaders are laser-focused on return on investment (ROI). To avoid seeing your budget hit the cutting room floor, L&D should focus on business metrics that show how learning contributes to the top and bottom line. When you show evidence that learning boosts performance, productivity, and operational efficiency, your C-Suite will think twice about trimming your funding.

Again, partnering with other departments can help uncover relevant data that may not be available in your learning system. For instance, you could link learning behavior with business data such as sales leads, onboarding time, or customer satisfaction scores.

The more directly you tie learning content and consumption patterns with business readiness and productivity metrics, the better. It’s even better if you can prove your learning strategy delivers a tangible business impact at a lower cost than a legacy learning system or process.

Make Every Dollar Count

Ericsson is a good example of this strategy in action. When investing in a new online learning system, the L&D team found that course completions rose by 62%, while the cost of operating the learning technology ecosystem fell by half.

At the same time, business units saw a 41% increase in ethical practices, with 97% of employees completing new anti-corruption training within two months of launch. This was a month faster than previous campaigns with higher completion rates.

In addition, the L&D team discovered that the number of workers who learned Ericsson’s five company-critical skills (5G, artificial intelligence and machine learning, collaboration, sales, and automation) increased by 14%.

Address Employee Uncertainty

A final point you can make to your C-Suite involves the human aspect of thriving in a recession. Make no mistake, your people are feeling very vulnerable right now. If they think their jobs and livelihoods are at risk, they cannot do their best work.

People may need to expand their workload in the wake of hiring freezes or layoffs. They may need to switch to another role, team, or project to keep your business operating smoothly. Or, they may have extra capacity when a project is canceled or delayed.

All of these situations affect employee wellbeing and performance, especially if people don’t feel equipped to perform well. In fact, nearly 60% of workers say a lack of confidence in their skills makes their job more stressful, and nearly 40% believe their mental health suffers as a result.

Offering a tailored learning plan with clear career growth opportunities that extend beyond the immediate downturn can have a huge influence on an employee’s perception of job security.

The Marketplace Values Skilled People

Companies that treat their people well during a downturn are building lasting loyalty and a strong employer brand that can pay off over time. For L&D, actions you take now to preserve your learning budget can directly influence your organization’s ability to attract and retain talent in the future.

This is also a strong confidence signal to those outside of your company. It shows prospective customers, analysts, influencers, and investors that you understand this is just a moment in your business lifecycle, and that you’re preparing your workforce for the inevitable upturn.

After all, if your people aren’t prepared with the right skills when the opportunity arises, your business won’t be able to seize the day. In fact, if you wait to upskill your people when a recovery begins, you’ll be too late. Others who invested in learning during the downturn will lead.

Grow Now, Lead Later

Historically, some of the most innovative and inspiring businesses continued to grow during downturns because their leaders understood that opportunities don’t necessarily come during good times. Tough times present challenges that can force you to rethink processes, reskill your people, and develop a competitive edge while other companies may pause.

Learning is crucial in all economic climates, but especially in uncertainty. Skills are the building blocks for your future. You don’t want to cut back on them and find yourself without a springboard to success when the going gets better. For the kind of business impact that will stand the test of time, resist the temptation to cut your learning budget. Instead, double down — the sooner the better.

Internal Mobility Programs: The Key to Retention?

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In response to the Great Resignation, employers everywhere are reevaluating their talent strategies. As part of this process, they’re seeking cost-effective ways to retain employees who are craving growth opportunities in today’s uncertain economy. That is why internal mobility programs are gaining momentum.

This article looks at why internal mobility is a smart talent strategy. Through the experience of several HR professionals who have launched and led internal mobility programs, we focus on how to develop a successful initiative while avoiding mistakes along the way.

The Benefits of Internal Talent Mobility

Why prioritize mobility—especially during a recession, when budget and resources are often more limited? There are multiple reasons. For example, these programs can help you:

1) Demonstrate Commitment to Your Workforce

Ginny Clarke is the Founder and CEO of Ginny Clarke, LLC. She previously worked at Google as Director of Leadership Internal Mobility. Clarke says internal mobility programs are a highly effective way to show you care and are invested in developing your organization’s top talent.

“This directly correlates with the level of employee engagement and willingness to stay and perform well,” Clarke notes. “It is also a way to give people valuable tools they can take wherever they go.” As a result, this kind of effort can build your brand, even after employees leave the company.

2) Upskill With the Future in Mind

LaRae James, Director of Human Resources for the City of Pearland, Texas, says that as roles evolve, organizations must upskill employees so they’re prepared for future opportunities. This is particularly important in a strong labor market. As LaRae notes, “Finding good talent is a challenge, so retention is vital for a sustainable workforce.”

She adds, “Developing employees results in a higher-performing organization and builds bench strength for internal mobility and succession planning.” In other words, your organization can never be too prepared for economic uncertainty.

3) Support Your Retention Goals

Angela-Cheng-Cimini, Senior Vice President of Talent and Chief Human Resources Officer at Harvard Business Publishing (HBP), emphasizes that “Career mobility is no longer in a black box. It is based on known expectations.” This kind of clarity means employees and managers can more confidently identify growth opportunities and work together toward the future.

City of Pearland’s James agrees. She says many organizations are creative about how they attract candidates, yet they don’t put the same kind of effort into retaining existing employees. This is why she recommends considering what the employee experience would look like if your organization approached its overall people strategy more creatively.

Building an Internal Mobility Program

To develop a recession-proof talent strategy, James says it is important to understand what motivates people to stay on board. Direct feedback tools help.

For example, her organization recently learned that when employees want to advance their careers, they tend to think of leaving, rather than exploring internal mobility options. The team used this insight to implement a series of events that help employees learn about various roles across the organization. They also provided career development and interview preparation courses.

Other organizations also use employee feedback to inform mobility program development. For example, HBP recently launched a robust career pathing framework. This is a response to exit interviews that revealed a lack of career advancement was the most common reason employees sought outside opportunities. HPB’s frameworks are designed to establish universal criteria for movement across the organization. “The system is grounded in core, leadership, and technical competencies,” Cheng-Cimini says.

Today, HPB offers more than 20 ladders. This provides full visibility into the skills employees need for success. It also lets them design their own paths based on their interests and strengths. As a result, “employees can now see beyond the role they currently occupy. Also, with their manager, they can plan for the experiences and skills they want to build.”

But what if your organization is just starting to build a program? Clarke thinks it’s wise to start small, even with only one business unit or with your most senior employees. She recommends focusing first on helping participants assess their capabilities and competencies. Then help them build a narrative that transcends past roles and responsibilities. She suggests that some of these steps can be scaled through online instruction, rather than relying solely on one-on-one coaching.

Internal Mobility Mistakes to Avoid

What missteps should you avoid when building and managing an internal mobility program?

1) Don’t give employees false hope

When sharing open roles, it is important not to misrepresent these opportunities. Clarke cautions, “There are no guarantees participants will get roles they are considered for.” Be intentional and transparent in how you market the program. For example, be sure to make employees aware that external candidates are also likely to be considered for opportunities. This context can help soften the disappointment employees feel if they are bypassed for desired assignments.

2) Avoid playing favorites

Internal mobility shouldn’t be a popularity contest. Clarke says it’s particularly important not to favor any particular type of person. Instead, she recommends a three-point strategy:

  • Take time to review those identified as ‘top talent’ to ensure broad representation.
  • Triangulate these recommendations with performance reviews, 360-degree feedback, and other endorsements.
  • Incentivize leaders to perform thoughtful talent reviews so you can identify top talent continuously and confidently.

3) Let go of seriously weak links

Don’t keep talent for the sake of ease. Clarke advises employers to proactively question the rationale for retaining some people. “If they are toxic or otherwise don’t represent company values, don’t fall into the trap of wanting to retain their intellectual capital, domain expertise, or a brand name at the expense of poor morale with the rest of their team.”

4) Don’t bite off more than you can chew

On a final note, you may be tempted to overthink this challenge. Although it makes sense to tailor mobility to your organization’s talent strategy, infrastructure, and employee needs, getting started is key. If necessary, focus first on small, achievable steps. Then build on those early wins.

Are You a One-Pitch Leader?

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In baseball, the term “one pitch pitcher” refers to a pitcher who is overly reliant on one type of pitch (fastball, curveball, etc.) to be effective. History tells us this approach has limitations and ultimately limited success. They lack the versatility in their repertoire of pitches to solve the many different kinds of situations they face in the course of a game. Experts will tell you that the best pitchers have 3-4 different pitches they can throw at any given time and at any velocity they choose to solve the predicament in front of them.

Now, imagine that you are the leader of an organization and have many competitors who are looking to beat you to market and/or dominate market share.

Let’s take this scenario one step further and give you “one pitch capability” and we’ll give your competitors “three pitch capability” to solve all the problems that come your collective way. Now, the bad news, you are not going to win this competition. We’re sorry, we know that one pitch has carried you a long way and you have been successful wherever you have “played”. However the game has changed. The market place is changing daily, the complexity of data coming at you is mind boggling, innovation cycles are becoming shorter and shorter and what once made you successful now has you out of breath.

We can guess with some degree of accuracy what happened to you. Here is a short list of possibilities.

  1. You just don’t like coming out of your comfort zone.
  2. You have over-relied on a set of leadership behaviors that are not too different from each other and were greatly rewarded for this approach. It could be any set of behaviors. For our purpose we’ll choose decisiveness, hard driving and being directive. All great qualities but in the realm of leadership it translates to one pitch… FASTBALL! This is limiting. It leaves you with very little leadership versatility. You’re predictable.
  3. You greatly over value one aspect of leadership and strongly under value the opposite behavior. For example you might greatly over value decisiveness and almost completely dismiss consensus building. This could leave you very “lopsided” in this area of leadership and cause you to make a misinformed decision, leave people out of the process and ultimately not gain followership from key stakeholders. You won’t miss or fail a high percentage of the time, but enough to impact your career and your organization.

Here is the bottom line, the leadership development field has really never measured/assessed for leaders overusing their strengths. More of a good thing is always better… right? In fact what’s wrong with being decisive, hard driving and directive? Nothing actually, unless you are doing it most of the time with most of the problems you are trying to solve. If you mixed up your “pitches” and at the right time threw in some listening, asked for other opinions, facilitated dialogue between two opposing views from other leaders and called for additional data……well then you would be that more versatile and an effective leader who has 3-4 “pitches” they can rely on to get the best outcome.

So how do you uncover whether or not you have become a one pitch leader?

Here are you first steps in the change process:

  1. Pull out your most recent 360 review and capture the themes where people have indicated you’re doing too much of a particular behavior.
  2. Now, to the best of your ability make note of what meetings and with what people you are over-doing these behaviors.
  3. In order to balance out your behaviors and “show up” differently, look to demonstrate behaviors that are at the other end of the behavioral continuum. For example if people have indicated that your point of view tends to dominate meetings you could counter that with several possibilities; that might include a) asking questions to gather more data, b) asking someone else for their perspective or c) even “softening” your point of view with a caveat that sounds like: “I could be off the mark here, but I do think that we need to pursue this path of action…”
  4. Ask for feedback. Let someone you know and trust what you are working on and ask them to give you feedback on what they’ve observed.

Your objective is to become a versatile leader who can bring the right amount of the right behavior and the right time and be the most effective leader you can be. This is not easily done and perfection is not the goal here. Becoming more versatile in your leadership approach to solving big problems is our objective.

 

Author: Jeff Lugerner, Executive and Leadership Coach, Leadership Development Institute

 

Image: bigstock

Getting Things Done Vs. Making An Impact

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There is a lot of discussion about productivity, but I’ve always preferred the term velocity. I’ve found that my velocity to goal determines my career velocity. By that I mean the speed and efficiency with which I achieve my goals determines the speed and degree of career growth I experience. If I use half the time and half the people, capital and other resources to achieve the goal as planned or as a peer, there will be career reward and recognition. As importantly, the organization can then apply the unused time, capital, people and other resources to achieving more than it planned or its peers — a double dividend of high-velocity goal achievement. And of course, the reverse is also true … taking twice the time and resources is bad for you and the company!

I love the sensation of forward movement, low-friction and trajectory that velocity evokes. The term productivity doesn’t quite get there – primarily because it’s easy to confuse the satisfaction of crossing things off your to-do list with having a material impact on the organization or your career.

Motion or Achievement?

To have a meaningful impact on the organization and gain career growth and professional rewards, what you work on and how you work need to align to achievement of the goals of the organization.

These 5 strategies have helped me and can increase your career velocity:

  1. Do work that matters. It is often not the easiest work … it’s work that clearly aligns with and advances the economic and strategic goals of the organization. Don’t know the strategic goals and economics? Work on that next!
  2. Deliver excellent work. It is often not the first and fastest thing you do or deliver. It is the best you can do or deliver. Set a high bar for yourself.
  3. Value time as money. Because that’s what it is. Act like it’s your money being burned when you burn time. Get to end of job on time and then reach for more.
  4. Learn everything you can. By doing and engaging, not by observing and judging. Then use what you learn to improve your work product and grow your impact capacity.
  5. Choose a full experience. Choose to engage and experience the work and what the environment has to offer — especially when it’s not a walk in the park. You’ll build skills and durability much faster. When you choose less than full engagement, you lose.

For a chuckle and to underscore the point, here is the opposite of these 5 strategies: functioning at a snail’s pace doing irrelevant, mediocre work that you’re not proud of and which is completely disconnected from leadership’s goals while learning nothing, gossiping plenty and staying disengaged on the sidelines.

Chances are you’ve worked with someone just like this, but never wanted to be that person!

What do you think? What are your velocity strategies and tactics?

photo credit: eflon via photopin cc

How To Skip The Negative Feedback "Sandwich"

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I’ve never fully understood the logic behind the “sandwich” method of delivering performance feedback. (I’m sure you’re familiar with this concept: Open a discussion on a positive note, then insert a negative piece of news, followed by another positive.) We like to think that we’re softening the blow by offering several of bits of positive feedback around a central negative message. However, we’re doing no such thing.

Actually, this approach may be a disservice to both categories of information — each of which plays a unique and highly valuable role in shaping performance. Overall, we need to pay close attention to the “cascade” of emotions and behavior that we initiate when delivering feedback, but also be careful to retain the value of the message.

Performance Feedback: Open Dialogue

Processing negative performance feedback is quite challenging for most of us — even though on a very basic level, we realize that accepting “where to improve” is critical to our careers. While positive feedback serves to motivate and energize our work lives (we all need this on a regular basis), the “negatives” can also provide useful information about where we should direct our attention. To remain competitive, we certainly require both categories of information — and I am not debating the value of either. Rather, I’d like to open a discussion about how negative information can be presented and approached, to afford the most progress possible.

When considering negative feedback, we must acknowledge core human characteristics; including self-efficacy (the belief that individuals can actually impact their situation) and goal orientation (some individuals focus on learning, others focus on demonstrating competence, and others focus upon avoiding negative judgement). To properly deliver negative feedback, we should carefully consider and frame the delivery, so potential damage to an individual’s psyche is minimized and progress is emphasized.

Developing A Constructive Approach

There’s truly an art to presenting information about performance deficits of any kind. When managers practice the sandwich method, I fear that once the “meat” of the sandwich is delivered — the “downside” of performance — we really don’t remember much of anything that follows. (Attempting to “hide” the information doesn’t address the issues.) We can certainly do a better job of moving the conversation to more neutral ground, where performance improvement can follow. But how? Here are some ideas:

3 Behavioral Considerations

1) How humans are “wired” to perceive bad news. We are likely predisposed to pay more attention to negative information, possibly a leftover evolutionary survival mechanism. As a result, we’re likely to become hyper-focused on the negatives. This clouds our “lens.”
2) We sorely need the positives. We should all be allowed to absorb what we are doing well at work. That’s not possible when information about our successes is delivered in conjunction with information about shortcomings.
3) We “digest” slowly. It takes time to process negative information properly. Initially, when you hear information you might not not want to hear, negative thoughts can spiral, leading to responses such as panic and denial. There are stages in this process that cannot be skipped.

5 Ways To Avoid “The Sandwich”

1) Build resiliency. Performance management should never be a once a year, “live or die” event. Ultimately, it’s a continuous process. Provide positive feedback concerning small successes along the way to provide balance. This helps difficult information become easier to absorb.
2) Address self-efficacy. Some individuals have the tendency to believe they cannot impact their performance or build a needed skill set. Explore this predisposition, to encourage a more hopeful perspective.
3) Focus on learning. Research has shown that in contrast to performance goals, learning goals can increase problem solving in relation to performance problems, possibly limiting the “sting” of negative feedback. Setting the tone to “learn from failure” can prove more effective in motivating and directing behavior.
4) Never “drop a bomb.” It’s wise to address negative feedback when it is delivered. Allow enough time to help control anxiety, and at least begin to discuss a plan for improvement.
5) Support the digestion process. After sharing negative feedback, be sure to provide plenty of support. Be highly accessible as an employee works through the information and begins to take logical steps forward.

How do you present negative performance feedback? What are your “best practice” strategies? How have these strategies helped you develop others in the workplace? Share your thoughts in the comments area below.

(Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared as a LinkedIn Influencer post. It is republished with permission.)

Image Credit: Kitsa Sakurako/Flickr

How To Skip The Negative Feedback “Sandwich”

/9 Comments/ /by

I’ve never fully understood the logic behind the “sandwich” method of delivering performance feedback. (I’m sure you’re familiar with this concept: Open a discussion on a positive note, then insert a negative piece of news, followed by another positive.) We like to think that we’re softening the blow by offering several of bits of positive feedback around a central negative message. However, we’re doing no such thing.

Actually, this approach may be a disservice to both categories of information — each of which plays a unique and highly valuable role in shaping performance. Overall, we need to pay close attention to the “cascade” of emotions and behavior that we initiate when delivering feedback, but also be careful to retain the value of the message.

Performance Feedback: Open Dialogue

Processing negative performance feedback is quite challenging for most of us — even though on a very basic level, we realize that accepting “where to improve” is critical to our careers. While positive feedback serves to motivate and energize our work lives (we all need this on a regular basis), the “negatives” can also provide useful information about where we should direct our attention. To remain competitive, we certainly require both categories of information — and I am not debating the value of either. Rather, I’d like to open a discussion about how negative information can be presented and approached, to afford the most progress possible.

When considering negative feedback, we must acknowledge core human characteristics; including self-efficacy (the belief that individuals can actually impact their situation) and goal orientation (some individuals focus on learning, others focus on demonstrating competence, and others focus upon avoiding negative judgement). To properly deliver negative feedback, we should carefully consider and frame the delivery, so potential damage to an individual’s psyche is minimized and progress is emphasized.

Developing A Constructive Approach

There’s truly an art to presenting information about performance deficits of any kind. When managers practice the sandwich method, I fear that once the “meat” of the sandwich is delivered — the “downside” of performance — we really don’t remember much of anything that follows. (Attempting to “hide” the information doesn’t address the issues.) We can certainly do a better job of moving the conversation to more neutral ground, where performance improvement can follow. But how? Here are some ideas:

3 Behavioral Considerations

1) How humans are “wired” to perceive bad news. We are likely predisposed to pay more attention to negative information, possibly a leftover evolutionary survival mechanism. As a result, we’re likely to become hyper-focused on the negatives. This clouds our “lens.”
2) We sorely need the positives. We should all be allowed to absorb what we are doing well at work. That’s not possible when information about our successes is delivered in conjunction with information about shortcomings.
3) We “digest” slowly. It takes time to process negative information properly. Initially, when you hear information you might not not want to hear, negative thoughts can spiral, leading to responses such as panic and denial. There are stages in this process that cannot be skipped.

5 Ways To Avoid “The Sandwich”

1) Build resiliency. Performance management should never be a once a year, “live or die” event. Ultimately, it’s a continuous process. Provide positive feedback concerning small successes along the way to provide balance. This helps difficult information become easier to absorb.
2) Address self-efficacy. Some individuals have the tendency to believe they cannot impact their performance or build a needed skill set. Explore this predisposition, to encourage a more hopeful perspective.
3) Focus on learning. Research has shown that in contrast to performance goals, learning goals can increase problem solving in relation to performance problems, possibly limiting the “sting” of negative feedback. Setting the tone to “learn from failure” can prove more effective in motivating and directing behavior.
4) Never “drop a bomb.” It’s wise to address negative feedback when it is delivered. Allow enough time to help control anxiety, and at least begin to discuss a plan for improvement.
5) Support the digestion process. After sharing negative feedback, be sure to provide plenty of support. Be highly accessible as an employee works through the information and begins to take logical steps forward.

How do you present negative performance feedback? What are your “best practice” strategies? How have these strategies helped you develop others in the workplace? Share your thoughts in the comments area below.

(Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared as a LinkedIn Influencer post. It is republished with permission.)

Image Credit: Kitsa Sakurako/Flickr