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How to Design a More People-Centered Organization

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Sponsored by Performica

In today’s world of work, it’s easy to find two very different types of people — self-promoting “squeaky wheels” whose voices are often the loudest, as well as those who quietly deliver without much recognition. Both bring something to the table. Still, leaders often judge an employee’s value based primarily on their visibility. This kind of bias is a critical reason why it’s important to build a people-centered organization.

But what can leaders do to better understand everyone’s true contributions? And how can they use these insights to develop more engaged, productive teams?

This issue matters, not only now, but for the future of work. That’s why I want to dig deeper with an HR tech innovator and entrepreneur who understands what it takes to design a more productive, people-first work culture.

Meet Our Guest: Alex Furman

Please join me in welcoming Alex Furman, CEO and Co-Founder at Performica, a people analytics platform provider. Previously, Alex co-founded Invitae, where he was responsible for growing the company’s collaborative culture of innovation at scale.

His first-hand experience as a senior business leader with technology expertise makes Alex an ideal guest for this discussion. Join us as we explore how you can leverage technology to build a more equitable and effective work environment…

Designing a More People-Centered Organization

Welcome, Alex! How do you define a people-centered approach to organizational design?

For a truly human-centric organization, we need to understand how people actually operate in the context of getting work done. Historically, we haven’t done that. We’ve thought in terms of org charts, business units, profit centers, and vertical silos.

But people are our greatest asset. And they’re social. The dynamic, cross-functional way people actually work doesn’t show up on org charts.

So to optimize people as an asset, we need to make sure everyone is seen, heard, valued, supported. That means moving away from analyzing org chart boxes and looking through the lens of humans working together.

Finding Hidden Influencers
You say teams rely heavily on “stealth influencers.” Could you tell us more?

As the head of people at a rapidly growing tech company in 2014, I wanted to see who was actually working together in real time. So I asked our engineers to connect our internal systems and create an org graph.

Soon it was clear that we had been over-celebrating those who were good at promoting themselves. Meanwhile, we were under-recognizing quieter “non-leaders” who were actually stronger influencers.

It was humbling. But that was the beginning of a solution to an important problem in the corporate world.

Tech’s Role in a People-Centered Organization

How can technology help leaders build a more people-centered organization?

We all know people are a company’s biggest asset. At most companies, 75-85% of expenses involve things like payroll, office space, travel and entertainment.

But people are also our biggest liability. We see this when cultures go sour and top performers start leaving. It becomes hard to attract talent and this can cripple a company.

But truly knowing your people and how they work is like a superpower. For example, one of our customers is going through significant change management. In this company of 1000 people, we identified only 24 people who are driving about 50% of employee sentiment and engagement.

So we’ve worked with senior management to target their interventions through that group of influential people. Now we’re seeing a massive and very measurable positive effect.

For more insights from Alex about how you can build a more people-centered organization, listen to this full podcast episode. And be sure to subscribe to the #WorkTrends Podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher.

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

Practical Actions to Foster Psychological Safety in Your Team

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Why Focus on Psychological Safety?

Successful organizations create conditions that help team members perform effectively, solve complex problems in innovative ways, and feel a sense of inclusion and belonging among their colleagues. This requires leaders to foster a high level of psychological safety.

Psychological safety is “a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes, and that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.” This definition comes from Amy C. Edmondson, Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School, who has been researching psychological safety for decades. 

While there is an abundance of research and literature on why it’s important to foster psychological safety, we want to explore the how. What exactly can leaders do to foster psychological safety among team members? 

5 Leadership Behaviors that Foster Psychological Safety

Adopting any of these 5 behaviors can have a huge impact on your team’s psychological safety:

1. Welcome Other Viewpoints: “What am I missing?”

As a leader, one of the most powerful things you can do is ask, “What am I missing?” When you ask this simple question, you signal that you are open to looking at things from different angles, and even being challenged.

A leader who regularly asks for other perspectives sets an important tone by signaling that no one has all the answers, and everyone on the team has a valuable perspective worth sharing.

2. Listen to Understand: Develop the Discipline of Not Preparing a Response

When someone speaks, make it a priority to truly understand what they’re trying to communicate. As they talk, don’t think about whether they’re wrong or how you want to respond. Instead, listen with the sole intent of fully understanding their idea or point of view.

Don’t worry — the mere act of understanding someone else’s perspective doesn’t require you to give up your own opinion. Understanding is not agreeing! It’s about letting go of your need to be right and engaging in a battle of arguments. Once you fully understand another person, you can have more productive conversations and deepen the connection.

3. Hit the Pause Button: Model Non-defensive Reactions

In professional settings, it is common to become defensive. We feel attacked, so our brains tend to react as if we’re in physical danger. The fight-flight-freeze reaction takes over, and we may behave in ways that have a negative impact on psychological safety.

During intense moments, notice what you’re feeling and pause. Taking a deep breath can give you time to consider the context and respond in a constructive way. For example, when you feel challenged, ask a curious follow-up question rather than lashing out. 

4. Normalize Failure: “This Is New to Us, So We Will Make Mistakes”

Innovation and success cannot happen without failure along the way. That’s why we need to destigmatize failure. Failure is not unacceptable and it doesn’t need to be avoided. It’s a necessary by-product of innovation.

As a leader, make it explicit that the goal is not to prevent or cast blame for failure, but to learn from it. When your team tries something new, emphasize that you expect failure. Say, “This is new, so we won’t get it right the first time.” Or, “Let’s share and learn from our failures.” Team members will feel invited to take risks, try new things, and discuss what they learn. This accelerates innovation.

5. Upgrade Your Meetings: Appoint an Inclusion Booster

Often in professional meetings, only a small percentage of participants feel comfortable contributing. But this means teams are missing out on valuable, diverse viewpoints.

A great way to increase psychological safety in meetings is to appoint someone to play the role of an “Inclusion Booster.” The Inclusion Booster’s job is to invite everyone to participate, make it safe for all to speak up, and ensure dissenting ideas are acknowledged. This person also makes sure that meeting attendees follow the team’s ground rules. These can include, for example, minimizing interruptions and ensuring equal speaking time.

Diving Deeper: What Actions Foster Psychological Safety?

Each of the 5 behaviors we’ve outlined has complexity and nuance. Let’s look deeper into how two of these behaviors can be managed in common workplace situations:

How To Welcome Other Viewpoints

  1. Declare your interest in feedback
    When giving a presentation, rolling out a strategy, proposing an action plan, or floating an idea, explain your reasoning. But make it clear that you are truly interested in feedback from others. 
  2. Set expectations
    Tell people explicitly that you do not expect everyone to agree with everything you say. Emphasize that you want to avoid false harmony and groupthink.
  3. Create space for dialogue
    Periodically ask, “What am I missing?” Then wait until others respond.
  4. Keep the door open
    If no one shares feedback, let them know you’re sure you haven’t thought of every angle and you would value their thoughts. You may even want to delay a decision until you hear other perspectives. You’ll need to balance opportunities for gathering input with timely decision-making. But keep in mind that you can do both. 
  5. Express gratitude
    When others speak up, openly thank them. For example, say, “I truly appreciate your honest opinion and your willingness to share it. I know it’s not always easy to be a dissenting voice.”

How To Upgrade Your Meetings by Appointing an Inclusion Booster

  1. Establish ground rules
    Communicate meeting guidelines in advance and remind participants about these rules at the start of each session.
  2. Monitor speaking time and interruptions
    If someone is talking too much, politely thank them for their ideas and invite others to contribute. If someone interrupts another participant, you can say something like, “Maria hasn’t finished her thought. Let’s let her finish.”
  3. Help clarify thoughts that may be unclear
    For example, ask people to define acronyms or new terminology so everyone has the same level of understanding.
  4. Be aware of people who look as if they want to contribute
    If someone seems to have trouble jumping in, invite them to speak.
  5. Ask for alternative points of view
    Especially if the group quickly focuses on one line of thinking, intentionally ask participants to suggest and discuss other ideas.
  6. Be respectful and assertive
    If you are the Inclusion Booster, you are the one person who can interrupt when someone else monopolizes the meeting or dismisses another person. Use this power judiciously.

Final Notes on Psychological Safety In Practice

Declaring your workplace “a safe space” doesn’t make it so. Creating and sustaining a psychologically safe work environment is a continuous journey that requires a leader’s time, attention and commitment. It happens over time, through consistent behavior — one conversation and one team meeting at a time. 

We encourage you to try even one of the five ideas we’ve shared here. We’re confident that you’ll agree small actions can have a big impact. And small actions repeated over time can have a beautifully positive ripple effect on your team and your organization. Take that first step in your next conversation or your next meeting, and you’ll be moving in the right direction!

 

EDITOR’S NOTE: In developing this article, Minette Norman collaborated with Dr. Karolin Helbig, a former McKinsey consultant. Together, they also co-authored the recently published book The Psychological Safety Playbook: Lead More Powerfully by Being More Human.

Hot Desking: Key to a Flexible Future of Work?

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For most of the last three years, millions of people clocked in at work from the comfort of home. Now, eager to return to a state of normalcy, many organizations are asking employees to come back to the office — for at least part of every workweek.

The problem? A smooth return to the office is easier said than done. In fact, research shows that 82% of decision makers are concerned about successfully getting employees back to the office this year. Employees want freedom — not just in terms of where they work, but in how they work, as well.

Enter hot desking. This innovative workspace solution is bringing much-needed flexibility to the modern workplace. But what exactly is hot desking? How does it work? And most importantly, how can your organization benefit from implementing it? Let’s take a closer look…

What is Hot Desking?

Hot desking is a temporary workspace strategy for people with hybrid onsite/offsite work schedules. It’s essentially a flexible seating arrangement where employees can book and use any workstation anywhere in the office on an ad-hoc basis, as long as someone else hasn’t already booked the space.

As an alternative to the traditional fixed-desk setup, this approach lets people freely work onsite wherever they feel comfortable on any given day.

The goal is simple. Employers want to optimize available office space and maximize workforce efficiency, while minimizing as many redundancies as possible. Ideally, this translates into an office environment that is more productive and harmonious.

Why is Hot Desking Becoming so Popular?

Hot desking is far from a new phenomenon. In fact, CitiBank helped pioneer the concept in 2014. After realizing that its office space was underutilized, the company introduced flexible workstations that made better use of existing real estate.

Now, this approach is gaining traction, as more organizations embrace hybrid work models. In the aftermath of the pandemic, employers have been eager to bring people back to the office. However, some employees are strongly resisting mandates to return to the workplace on a full-time basis. This push back has led some employers to shift to hybrid work policies, instead.

Benefits of Hot Desking

Despite criticism from some quarters, the hot desk concept offers undeniable benefits. More than just a seating arrangement, hot desking is a strategic way to drive workforce productivity while  supporting broader business goals. Here are some key advantages:

  • Reduced cost: As noted in Forbes, hot desking translates into decreased office expenses. This is because employees who share on-demand space, equipment, and utilities require fewer overall resources.
  • Improved collaboration: Employees who regularly change their workspace location tend to spend more time with colleagues from different departments. This helps remove communication barriers, encourage cross-functional productivity, and strengthen company culture.
  • More organized workspaces: When employees regularly use different workstations, they’re less likely to accumulate clutter and are more likely to surround themselves with work essentials. This isn’t just about maintaining a tidier environment. It also helps improve productivity by reducing unnecessary distractions and keeping people focused on work-related deliverables.
  • Increased retention: With the freedom to work wherever they prefer, hot desking employees enjoy an in-office experience that is comfortable and fits their unique workstyle. This sense of autonomy can help improve engagement, diminish burnout, and reduce turnover.
  • Measurable insights: An effective way to manage a hot desking team is through a centralized dashboard. This makes it easy for everyone to book workstations and for managers to follow key metrics. It’s also a great way to identify issues that need improvement. By connecting your hot desking setup with a dashboard, you can track all kinds of usage insights. This helps you spot trends and make informed decisions about space allocation.

Hot Desking Tips and Best Practices

When introducing a new hot desking setup, take some time to carefully consider everything you need for a seamless transition. Otherwise, employees may not embrace the change. To ease the process, consider these implementation tips:

1. Make Sure it Makes Sense for You

Before you get started, consider whether hot desking is a good fit for your organization. Circumstances vary, depending on your existing work model, your culture, and other business realities. Start by thinking about how hot desking would work in each of these scenarios:

  • Hybrid work model: Hot desks are great for people who come in to the office on specific days but work from home the rest of the week. This ensures everyone always has a workstation whenever they’re in the office.
  • Office-first model: Even if your workforce is fully in office, hot desking supports cross-functional teamwork and encourages people to move about the workplace. Also, visitors such as vendors, clients, and business partners can use hot desk space for their business needs while on-site.
  • Fully remote model: Do you have a distributed workforce? If so, hot desking can still work in your favor. Whether at a coworking location or in the office, hot desk sites offer employees a remote work alternative when needed.

2. Use Wayfinding to Your Advantage

Wayfinding is the process of literally finding your way around the workplace. It includes any physical or digital system people use to navigate through an office, from physical maps and digital floor plans to more advanced devices that connect with video conference schedules, room controls, and booking capabilities.

How does wayfinding relate to hot desking? Fundamentally, it helps people find available workstations. But as organizations adopt more advanced technology, wayfinding solutions can also encompass room booking and scheduling, environmental monitoring, room controls, and more.

When people regularly switch desks, looking for an available space can be confusing, time-consuming and frustrating. Wayfinding can cut this search time dramatically and help people go where they need to be faster and with fewer hassles.

3. Equip Desks with the Right Technologies

What good is a workstation if it doesn’t actually make work easier? According to Kantar, 64% of hybrid and on-site workers take calls and virtual meetings at their desks.

This means it’s essential to outfit hot desks with all the essentials: USB ports, softphones, video conferencing devices, cameras — basically, anything people need to collaborate efficiently in the modern workplace.

4. Complement Workstations with Bookable Meeting Rooms

Sometimes people need privacy — or at least some peace and quiet. Aside from hot desks, bookable meeting rooms offer a secluded place to get away from the hustle and bustle of the office, so employees can engage in deep work.

It’s smart to install collaboration devices in these rooms, so people can easily initiate and join virtual meetings, collaborate, and stay productive throughout the day. For example, Cisco Room Kits can transform ordinary office rooms into fully functioning video conferencing suites.

Prepare for Your Flexible Future

As your organization jumps back into the swing of things at the office, now is the perfect time to step back and consider the power of hot desking. More than a trend, hot desks are an effective way to support your hybrid workplace and provide employees with more convenience and freedom of choice.

With advanced digital tools that help employees easily share workstations and meeting rooms, hot desking can help your organization pave the way to a successful future of work.

Learning Culture: Ideas for Nurturing Growth in a Hybrid Work Environment

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TalentCulture Content Impact Award Winner - 2023
At what point in a career does learning stop? Hopefully, never! Most business and technical professionals realize that becoming proficient in a job and becoming more capable over time requires continuous learning. But this can be difficult for employers to support, particularly in a hybrid work environment. Here’s why…

The Business Challenge

According to research, 70% of employees feel inadequately trained for their current job. What’s more, 74% feel they could benefit from additional training. Yet, the U.S. economy loses an estimated $550 billion a year from workforce disengagement, due in part to a lack of learning opportunities.

Training is critical for employee retention. And retention is critical for organizational success, especially in difficult economic times when companies need to accomplish more with less. But in the wake of the pandemic, hybrid work is becoming more widespread, which further complicates employee development. It’s no longer enough to rely on classic learning strategies based on in-person classroom training, seminars, and conferences.

Although hybrid work creates new challenges for employee training, it also opens the door to fresh thinking. Effective training in a hybrid work environment requires an organization-wide learning culture that ensures equitable opportunities for in-person, remote, and hybrid workers, alike. That’s a tall order, but these ideas can help:

What is a Learning Culture?

“Learning culture” is a simple concept. It’s an understanding that professional growth and development are integral to daily work life and success. It’s also an active commitment to continuous improvement among individuals and teams within an organization.

A strong learning culture encourages and rewards people for developing and sharing knowledge and skills. That’s why employee training is often seen as a benefit, alongside retirement savings accounts, paid family leave, or medical and dental coverage. But a true learning culture isn’t just a perk. It’s a way of thinking and doing that enhances work experiences, while paving the way for future advancement.

This commitment is clearly good for employees — but it’s also good for business. In fact, statistics show that organizations with a strong learning culture enjoy 24% higher profit margins, on average. Also successful companies are nearly 5x more likely to have a healthy learning culture. So it’s worth the effort to improve the way your organization develops employee capabilities.

Despite the simplicity of this concept, a learning culture can be difficult to manage. In fact, ATD estimates that only 31% of organizations have a culture of learning. And now, as hybrid work environments take hold, fostering this kind of culture is becoming even tougher. Why?

The Social Learning Hurdle

Hybrid work complicates learning cultures because it introduces a different mode of remote engagement. This is a problem because many organizations still rely on more traditional methods of informal learning — what psychologist Albert Bandura called “social learning.” Specifically, he notes:

“Most human behavior is learned observationally through modeling. From observing others, one forms an idea of how new behaviors are performed. This coded information serves as a guide for action.”

In other words, we learn how to do our jobs largely by watching others perform similar tasks. As we watch, we pay attention to their expectations and responses, as well as the behaviors of others in our environment.

This is relatively easy to accomplish when people are located at the same place. But when work involves a mix of in-person, remote and hybrid experiences, social learning manifests itself in different ways. This can create problems — especially when our location is determined by factors like commute distance or personal preference, rather than our work role. Ultimately, these unpredictable work patterns can lead to social learning barriers and disconnects across an organization.

To attract and retain top talent, employers need to create a cohesive culture that overcomes these barriers by making continuous learning opportunities and reinforcement available wherever people are located.

Training Resources For Hybrid Work Settings

Bandura was clearly on to something with his social learning theory. Humans are social animals. We learn best from exposure to great teachers, whether they’re formal instructors, informal mentors, or peers. Keep this in mind when developing a training strategy for any hybrid environment. You don’t want to sacrifice the power of human interaction by focusing solely on classic modes of online learning, like asynchronous self-guided training modules. Otherwise you risk disconnecting people from one another.

Where should you focus instead? Hybrid is the keyword here. Invest in next-generation training experiences that bring in-office and remote workers together, with social learning as the glue. For example, consider these resources:

1. e-Learning platforms that support instructor-led breakout sessions, advanced gamification functionality, and in-training assessment and analysis. These capabilities support richer social experiences than isolated on-demand training modules.

2. VR and metaverse technologies that make it possible to create three-dimensional virtual spaces where social learning participants can engage within a shared digital environment.

3. Tools that enhance popular web meeting tools. For example, the Adobe Connect open architecture lets industry partners extend the platform’s core capabilities. Extensions include custom pods, learning management system integration, advanced authentication, login functionality, and much more.

4. Discussion and collaboration tools that function as standalone products or as features you can integrate into a learning management system.

5. Social tools that work within a digital learning environment to supplement and reinforce traditional onsite and online training. For example, Adobe Learning Manager offers built-in social learning tools that make it easy to informally share ideas, content and meaningful insights before, during or after people complete a course.

Supporting Learning Engagement in a Hybrid Work Environment

Of course, identifying helpful hybrid learning tools is one thing, but providing a culture that drives engagement and performance improvement is another. Here are some useful ideas:

1. Proactively encourage all team members to pursue learning opportunities on a regular basis. For example, allocate a particular number of hours each week to the pursuit of development goals. By making resources accessible across devices, platforms and locations, you can enable people to participate at their convenience.

2. Acknowledge and reward team members for the time and energy they invest in learning. This can take the form of financial incentives or team dinners. Even something as simple as a Slack shout-out can boost motivation when employees achieve development milestones.

3. Knowledge sharing is essential for a healthy learning culture. And when team members are rewarded for sharing knowledge, they become more invested in the learning process. So don’t overlook the deep expertise already available within your ranks. Think about how to empower individuals as subject matter experts. Establish methods for people to create, promote and recommend content, so you can get everyone more invested in collaborative learning, even across hybrid teams.

4. Measurement matters in any learning endeavor, so you can determine baseline benchmarks and track progress over time. Digital systems can automatically track training engagement, progress and completions. But you’ll want to track other metrics as well. For example, think ahead about the kind of feedback you want to gather from team discussions, post-learning quizzes, and organization-wide surveys. All of these can help you determine learning effectiveness and map the way forward.

5. Better culture starts with better conversations — especially in a hybrid work environment. That means open feedback channels are essential. What works? What doesn’t? How can your organization improve hybrid learning experiences? Be sure to involve team members in the process of planning, evaluating and evolving their learning journey, for more successful outcomes, all around.

How Do You Defeat Distance in a Distributed Team?

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“Absence makes the heart grow fonder.”

No doubt, you’ve heard this familiar quote. You may even have said it to encourage others who are separated from those they love. But although research says this tends to be true, people in long-distance relationships may not find it comforting. In fact, many would say that physical distance creates psychological distance.

Whatever the reality, the fact remains that in professional life, a parallel scenario often arises among colleagues on a distributed team. Physical distance can easily lead to psychological distance. And when that happens, performance suffers.

The Psychology of Teams

Teams define the very essence of organizations. Modern companies are built around a pyramidal structure, which itself is the combination of smaller pyramids we usually call “teams.” Ideally, the team’s diversity, harmony, trust, and commitment directly influence the creativity, speed, and quality of its output. And collectively, the dynamics of an organization’s teams define its overall impact.

For decades, managers have been striving to build teams that “dance” well together. And many have succeeded at driving team performance that rivals a Bolshoi Ballet. What’s the magic in this recipe? The key ingredient is the personal connection members forge with one another.

These connections transcend basic operational interactions. Not surprisingly, in healthy work environments, we sometimes hear people refer to their team or culture as a “family.” The metaphor makes sense — especially in intense environments like the military or an innovative startup company.

However, experts say leaders should tread lightly when using the term “family” in the context of organizational culture. After all, no one should feel so obligated to an employer that they can’t develop a meaningful life outside of work.

Today, as we look beyond the pandemic era, we see a business landscape that is increasingly defined by hybrid work models – where co-workers on the same team are working from different locations at different times. So, as a leader, how can you ensure that the connections among your team members will grow deeper, rather than withering away? Here are several suggestions…

3 Ways to Bring Distributed Team Members Closer

1. Drive Ownership

In a distributed team environment, it is a good idea to get everyone involved in decision-making. While this may not always be practical, it is often easy to accomplish.

For example, say you’re planning to recruit a new team member. Rather than making unilateral decisions about the role and the candidates, it’s a good idea to get buy-in from some senior contributors. This will encourage these colleagues to see themselves as participants in a critical decision-making process. It also helps develop a sense of ownership in the hiring process, so they’ll be more invested in ensuring the success of the new employee.

2. Encourage Cross-Sharing and Learning

Nothing strengthens work relationships better than shared interests. Therefore, it makes sense to make learning a central focus for your team.

Create a distributed framework for formal and informal knowledge sharing, communication, and performance support. This sends everyone a clear message that operational delivery is not the team’s primary goal. Rather, the growth and success of each member should be everyone’s priority.

As team members step up and share their knowledge or expertise with others, it helps to build mutual respect and appreciation, both of which are hallmarks of great teams.

A word of caution, however. Do not make the mistake of treating learning sessions as isolated, one-off sessions. Instead, for maximum benefits, provide relevant context. Weave instructional content, performance support, and informational resources into the fabric of the team’s operating guidelines. And be sure to index and publish these assets where they can be easily searched, accessed, and updated by all.

3. Organize Periodic Physical Meet-Ups

Most of us have discovered the wonders of video conferencing in recent years. We’ve also developed new social norms, thanks to the likes of Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and others platform providers. But although we often rely on digital technology to close the distance between people, nothing can replace in-person interaction.

Therefore, to drive remote team success, try investing in periodic face-to-face meet-ups. The ideal frequency will vary depending on multiple factors. For example, you’ll want to consider the nature of work and the geographic footprint of your team members. If everyone in your group is located in the same city, meet-ups could be more frequent than for those in different cities, states, countries, or continents.

Regardless, every manager should ensure that each meet-up offers a balanced mix of work endeavors and recreation. This will help everyone feel more connected and energized throughout the session and beyond.

Do You Manage a Distributed Team? What’s Your Next Move?

No plan or approach is bulletproof, mind you. But one thing is certain. If you incorporate these measures into your daily business practices, you will significantly improve the chance that you’ll reduce the distance between distributed team members. After all, it’s likely you’ve heard another popular quote:

“Out of sight, out of mind.”

For any leader seeking success in today’s hyper-competitive business world, this is a key issue you will want to avoid, no matter where your team members are located. So, go ahead. I encourage you to try these ideas to defeat “distance” across your organization. And don’t forget to share your experience!

 

3 Priorities for Leading a Remote Business

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Running a business from home can be an exhilarating and highly rewarding experience. But remote business owners know that leading from a home office also poses unique challenges.

On one hand, the flexible nature of working from home makes it easier to integrate your professional schedule with personal commitments. On the other hand, the chaos of everyday life can sometimes bleed into your workday. And if it becomes a habit, your impact as a remote business leader will suffer.

We know about these challenges first-hand because TalentCulture has operated as a remote business for more than a decade. Over the years, our Founder, Meghan M. Biro, has learned a few things about what it takes to succeed at leading a virtual team. She recommends that remote business owners focus on three priorities…

3 Priorities for Remote Business Leadership

1. Separate Work From Home

The pandemic taught many of us how tough it can be to focus while working from home. It also taught us there’s no magic formula for remote work success.

That’s because many factors conspire against people who work remotely. For example, if you’re a parent, or you live in close quarters, or you’re easily distracted by your surroundings, finding time to concentrate on deep work can seem impossible. Have you tried these tips to improve your productivity?

  • Create a Remote-Friendly Work Setting

    Not everyone has enough room for a dedicated home office. Regardless, it’s vital to establish a workspace that helps you mentally step away from your surroundings.

    Start by designating a separate, well-lit work zone — even if it’s only enough space for a dedicated desk and chair. Make sure these furnishings are ergonomically designed, so you’ll be comfortable enough to remain focused. Next, remove clutter and unnecessary home decor from the area.

    If your home isn’t large enough to provide the kind of space you need, consider organizations that provide coworking spaces. Many options are available now, from local, dedicated “pay-by-the-hour” work nooks to memberships in global networks for professionals who need reliable access to an office while on the road.

  • Schedule Focus Time

    Blocking time on your calendar can be a highly effective way to make progress on specific tasks throughout each day. This scheduling method helps you visually track how much time you’re devoting to specific activities, projects, or teams.

    As a remote business leader, sharing your time-blocking calendar can also help you manage boundaries. Employees who want input or feedback can quickly see your open timeslots. This makes it faster and easier for them to arrange meetings. It also relieves you from the pressure of immediately responding to every request.

  • Make Room for Interruptions

    As we learned during the pandemic, sometimes family life will spill into your work-from-home environment. Whether it’s making lunch for the kids, running an errand, or taking time for a personal phone call, you’ll want to schedule work breaks into your day.

    Let your family know in advance when you’ve allocated flexible time on your work schedule. This way, they’ll know when it’s convenient to ask you for help or request your involvement in household tasks.

Keep in mind that interruptions aren’t necessarily a negative thing. Interacting with family or friends can recharge your batteries. You may simply want to set aside time to get away from your computer. It may be hard to know when to take a break. But taking time out of your work day to get fresh air or make yourself a snack can keep you feeling refreshed and ready to take on the rest of your day.

2. Build a Team Culture

It’s not unusual for remote business leaders to become consumed with work. But even if you enjoy intense work sessions, remember that others may not embrace that approach. It’s important to consider the signals you’re sending about your work culture, especially when you’re working from a distance.

Try these tips to build a stronger remote team:

  • Define the values that drive your organization, and communicate these values through a clear mission statement. Your mission, vision, and values are powerful tools that serve multiple purposes. They can:– Distinguish your business in the marketplace
    – Help staff members understand their purpose and engage more deeply with work
    – Help your team set relevant goals and take pride in the company’s success.
  • Regularly recognize individual and team achievements. Tangible incentives and rewards can make a big impact. But simply showing genuine appreciation on a regular basis can also keep employees engaged and motivated.
  • Encourage social connections among team members by setting up informal virtual activities that build trust and strengthen relationships.
  • Drive team collaboration by moving beyond email software with tools that support natural group communication across your distributed workforce.
  • Prevent remote team communication missteps by scheduling regular group meetings and empowering individuals to arrange meetings when they feel real-time interaction is the most efficient solution.

These efforts to elevate communication and collaboration will likely require more time from your team members. But in the long run, you can expect to benefit from a stronger culture and better business results.

Provide a Work-Friendly Workspace for All

Do your employees struggle to work or socialize in a home office setting? Just as you may find value in a coworking space, this may be a valuable option for your staff, as well.

First, gather feedback from your team with a survey that asks for specifics about when and where they work, any issues they’re experiencing, and their level of interest in a hybrid work model. Then investigate vendors that fit your organization’s needs.

If you’re new to coworking services, or you’re unsure about the risk of investing in this kind of service, consider a line of credit. This can provide you with some financial stability until you can determine if a long-term coworking relationship makes sense for your business.

3. Keep Your Team On-Task

As a remote business owner, you’d probably like to think employees are just as passionate about work as you are. But even with a strong work culture, that’s not necessarily the case.

The bigger question should be, how can you help people produce on a more consistent level? Getting team members on the same page to complete tasks as a unit is complicated — especially when they work remotely. As a leader, it’s your job to ensure your team’s time and talent are allocated more efficiently and effectively. These steps can help:

  • Be Alert and Mindful

    Do you know when to step in and guide your team’s efforts? This can be particularly tricky if you’re new to remote leadership. No one wants to be micromanaged. But if a core issue is overlooked, it can affect the rest of the team. And in extreme situations, your business’s reputation can be significantly affected. You’ll want to listen carefully to staff feedback, and proactively fill in gaps when your view isn’t complete.

  • Intervene When Needed

    Initiating a difficult conversation with an employee isn’t fun or easy. But you can rely on proven techniques that can help both you and your employees grow professionally. Ultimately, this can sustain a strong culture.

  • Stay Ahead of the Curve

    Proactive conversations about key projects, roles, and tasks help your team members stay on track. Set expectations upfront to ensure that people fully understand their roles and responsibilities before jumping into an assignment. Ask your staff how you can help them complete their deliverables. Then, schedule regular check-ins to make sure no one feels overwhelmed along the way.

Final Note

A remote business model can be a terrific way to structure a company. But leading a virtual team poses unique issues. Be sure to manage your own time and resources proactively, while also keeping your team’s interests in mind. By prioritizing your attention, your culture, and your team’s changing needs, you’ll be better prepared to serve your customers successfully and grow your business.

What Hybrid Worker Preferences Reveal About the Future of Work

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We don’t need research to tell us the future of work will be much different from pre-pandemic norms. But Covid isn’t the cause. Disruption was happening before 2020. The pandemic merely focused our attention and accelerated the rate of change. So, where is work headed next? It’s impossible to chart this course without considering hybrid worker preferences.

This is why my firm, NextMapping, recently conducted extensive research to explore factors that are redefining the workplace. The result is our 23 Trends For Future of Leadership 2023 Report, based on data from client surveys and online polls, combined with insights from McKinsey, Gartner, and the World Economic Forum.

Wellbeing Remains a Central Concern

Our analysis uncovered a single overarching theme — worker wellbeing. People want work that is flexible enough to fit into their lifestyle. In fact, they’re willing to make professional adjustments to address this priority. And because the market for talent remains competitive, employers need to make workforce wellbeing a priority, as well.

How does this translate into hybrid worker preferences? We see clear trends in how people want to work, where they want to work, and who they want to work for. There’s no doubt that hybrid work is here to stay! These data points make a compelling case:

  • 66% of workers worldwide prefer to participate in a hybrid workplace.
  • 26% of U.S. workers currently operate in some kind of hybrid mode.
  • 40% of workers say they’re more productive working remotely. However, 52% prefer hybrid work over a fully remote model.
  • People consider in-office work important for networking, team camaraderie, and enhanced relationships. They also think onsite work can improve training, learning, and knowledge sharing.
  • Remote work is perceived as helpful for including workers from various locations and completing projects or tasks with minimal interruption.

Hybrid Work is Not One-Size-Fits-All

There are multiple ways to define hybrid work, as these statistics suggest:

  • People want to structure their own hybrid schedules. Most would rather choose their in-office days, with 76% preferring to work in-office on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, or Thursdays.
  • Workers want fewer meetings, and they want each meeting to be more effective. In fact, 66% say ineffective meetings reduce their overall productivity.
  • People prefer accessible leaders who are strong coaches. This is so important that 81% of workers say they quit a job to leave a “toxic” boss at some point in the past three years.
  • Workers want an employer that invests in their future. 55% note that their company provides learning roadmaps, growth opportunities, and succession plans.

Overall, our findings indicate that hybrid workplace success depends on leaders who are comfortable managing the unique and variable needs of people who are operating in multiple work modes. It requires flexible, agile leaders who can adapt to diverse personalities and work styles. These leaders need higher-order soft skills. I call them super crucial human skills.

How Leaders Can Support Hybrid Worker Preferences

To better understand how to lead more effectively in this new environment, let’s look closer at hybrid worker preferences:

1. More Scheduling Choice

Knowing workers want to choose the days they work on-site and offsite, leaders will benefit from conducting ongoing conversations with individual team members about scheduling that works best for them.

Some leaders have proximity bias. In other words, they want everyone to be in the office because it’s their preference. Proximity bias creates a barrier that keeps leaders from listening to employees and developing trusted relationships.

Some leaders have told me they don’t think people are working as hard when they work remotely. This, too, is a bias. Leaders can’t be effective if they base decisions on inaccurate performance data and make assumptions based on personal biases. 

2. Fewer and Better Meetings

I know several hybrid work leaders who have fallen into the trap of booking more meetings because they think this improves inclusion. But it’s time for everyone to re-evaluate meeting practices with a more discerning eye.

The rise of virtual meeting tools makes it easier to schedule more meetings. But less may be more. When does a topic or project truly deserve a meeting? Who really needs to attend? Could a modified approach lead to better results?

Ideally, every meeting has a “why” and a facilitator who is ready to make good use of participants’ time. Some creative thinking can help you build a more effective agenda and achieve useful outcomes.

For example, polling and survey tools (such as PollEverywhere and SurveyMonkey) can help you gather worker insights about subjects that require team input. This means you can sidestep some meetings intended to gather verbal input. In other cases, these tools can help you prepare an agenda that will make meetings more productive.

3. More Access to Leaders

Hybrid workers prefer accessible leaders who are great coaches with high emotional intelligence. This is an excellent opportunity for leaders who want to coach and inspire their teams more effectively. But leading with high emotional intelligence requires great skill.

The hybrid workplace has increased the need for leaders to adapt to a combination of in-office communication and virtual communication. In the past, we called these capabilities soft skills. But for success now and in the future, I think we should reframe these skills as “super crucial human” skills.

The ability to pivot and navigate uncertain waters, while also remaining open and caring is the most critical skill development challenge for leaders in 2023. 

4. Deeper Involvement in Future Plans

Lastly, workers prefer to know “what’s next” when it comes to their future. Organizations that offer a roadmap of growth opportunities, succession plans, and talent mobility enjoy higher workforce retention. These practices will become even more important, going forward.

Leaders can collaborate with their team members to help co-create a professional path that is flexible and fulfilling. When workers feel that their leaders care about their future and are invested in helping them succeed, it strengthens their commitment to their leaders, their work, and their organization.

This is Only One Leadership Priority

No doubt, hybrid workplaces will continue to shift and require everyone to adapt. But we see other important trends emerging this year, as well. For instance, automation will have an increasingly important role in helping people produce better-quality work. Also, leaders will benefit from shifting their perspective from “me” to “we.”

To learn more about all 23 trends we’re tracking for 2023 and beyond, watch our research summary video:

WorkTech Tools: Your Quick Guide to Productivity in the New Year

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When the pandemic suddenly forced millions of people to work remotely, employers weren’t sure what to do next. Because the transition was nearly instantaneous, this shift wasn’t easy. But eventually, many people adapted to remote work and learned how to operate effectively in virtual team settings.

Indeed, only 9 months after the Covid lockdown began, Upwork estimated that 42% of U.S. employees were still working from home, and nearly 70% of managers said work was progressing much more smoothly.

What helped individuals and organizations move forward efficiently through tough times? In part, successful teams turned to best-of-breed productivity tools.

Great WorkTech Tools Make a Difference

Now, nearly 3 years later, great worktech tools matter more than ever, as employers strive to offer people continued flexibility in how they get work done.

Effective managers have learned that some applications are especially useful at helping individuals and teams prioritize tasks, manage their time, collaborate, and explain important work concepts with job aids.

That’s why we’ve compiled a list of 5 worktech tools to help optimize individual and team performance and productivity, going forward.

5 Applications Worth Considering:

 

1. Slack: Communication and Collaboration

What worktech tools can help your teams improve productivity in 2023? Learn about Slack and more in this article

Source: Slack

Slack facilitates communication and collaboration among teams by consolidating messages, file sharing and chat activity in a central digital workspace. This lets people organize conversations by topic so they can avoid repetition and confusion while simultaneously conveying information to other group members. It also supports direct conversations with individuals and subsets within a group.

Because these conversations happen asynchronously, everyone can check updates and move discussions forward when it’s convenient for them. And with all related communication available in one place, individuals can easily revisit and refresh their understanding of tasks and stay up-to-date with the latest status. This leads to better team results.

Some of Slack’s IRC-style features include:

  • Personalized chat rooms (channels), for topics, private groups and direct messaging
  • Searchable content, including conversations, people, files and more
  • Emoji buttons to add flair and personality

Also, this tool is compatible with most applications that enable file and document sharing, which makes project workflow management and version control highly efficient.

Slack’s free plan lets users view and search their most recent 10,000 messages. Graduated paid plans give users the opportunity to add more functionality as their reach and requirements grow. 

2. Hubstaff: Time Tracking

What worktech tools should you consider for workforce productivity in 2023? Learn about Hubstaff

Source: Hubstaff

Hubstaff has operated as a virtual team for nearly 20 years. The company uses its own experience to design and deliver a workforce management software suite that helps businesses spend less time tracking workgroup activity and more time focusing on company growth and success.

This platform bundles time-tracking and proof-of-work functionality with project management, automated payroll management and more – all designed to streamline remote work management.

With its time-tracking software, Hubstaff can help dozens of team members work remotely. Despite being in different locations, employees can collaborate and coordinate effectively by leveraging these features:

  • Online timesheets
  • Time reporting
  • Randomized screenshots 
  • Mouse movement tracking to supervise team activity and engagement

Hubstaff is highly effective at helping remote leaders analyze team efficiency and encourage accountability. If you want to try before you buy, a 14-day free trial is available with limited features.

3. Trello: Project Management

What worktech tools can improve your productivity in 2023? Learn about Trello and other applications

Source: Trello

Next on our list of top productivity tools is Trello. This online list-making application is built on the Japanese-inspired Kanban (visual signal) model. Developed by a subsidiary of Atlassian, Trello is a highly adaptable project management tool.

Trello helps track project progress across multiple stages. It is useful in multiple contexts, from lesson planning, school bulletin boards and gaming to web design, real estate management and law office case administration.

With Tello, users can:

  • Create customized task boards featuring columns with various task status options (such as To Do, In Progress, Pending Approval, Done)
  • Set deadlines for each task
  • Move tasks between columns as they progress
  • Add multiple people to cards and use the message feature to communicate with the group simultaneously

Trello offers three business plans – standard, premium, and enterprise – as well as a free plan for individuals and small teams.

4. Evernote: Note-Taking

What worktech tools can improve your productivity in 2023? Learn about Evernote and other applications

Source: Evernote

Evernote is a popular note-taking application that helps team members easily organize and share notes. It lets users create, save and archive ideas and resources in a variety of formats, including audio, video and saved web content and reference links. Notes are archived as virtual notebooks that users can label, annotate, search, edit and export.

With Evernote, people can also:

  • Sync notes across various devices so they’re available to multiple team members, simultaneously
  • Read digital media in a way that looks and feels just like physical documents
  • Integrate group note management with workflows in email and team productivity apps such as Slack, Salesforce and Microsoft Teams

Evernote offers free usage with limited monthly features, and paid plans with expanded storage capacity and enhanced features.

5. RescueTime: Reduce Work Distractions

What worktech tools can improve your productivity in 2023? Learn about RescueTime and other applications

Source: RescueTime

Last but not least is RescueTime, an application built by remote workers for remote workers. RescueTime is designed to help minimize distractions so people can focus on work and improve individual and team productivity. It does this by recording your digital device usage and time spent engaging with various applications and websites.

The company’s mission is to support better work-life balance by helping people:

  • Continuously track their time on websites and apps, so they’re more aware of how they use their time and can adjust their habits for greater efficiency
  • Minimize wasted time by encouraging successful productivity strategies

This app lets users manually modify its default settings to fit individual goals and preferences. A free 30-day trial is available, while the paid version helps users:

  • Set goals 
  • Activate “Focus Time” (block distracting alerts, applications and websites)
  • Record offline events

Which WorkTech Tools are Right for Your Team?

The number of productivity tools has exploded in recent years. Certainly, they can help team members work more effectively together. But too many tools – or the wrong ones – can be counterproductive. Pointless or unpopular tools can actually discourage people, disrupt workflows and decrease output.

So, before adding to your worktech stack, always research and test your selections. Start by asking your team for recommendations. They’re close to the action, so they’re likely to have good ideas. Plus, if you implement solutions recommended by team members, they’re more likely to adopt them and encourage others to do so.

Also, be sure to think about the best way to roll out new tools. Avoid overwhelming people with too many options all at once. Instead, prioritize and introduce tools over time, so everyone can learn about them and integrate them into their workflow. This also gives you time to determine the impact of each incremental step forward.

No matter what, keep driving toward improvement. Eventually, you’ll see more people working more collaboratively and effectively while meeting more deadlines. And ideally, wherever your people are located, they will feel more engaged, efficient and comfortable contributing to your organization’s success.

Using OKR Methods To Lift Business Performance

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As 2022 draws to a close, most organizations are deeply involved in planning, budgeting and forecasting for the coming year. To complete this rigorous process, leaders often invest significant time, attention and energy for weeks or even months. Yet research says more than 90% of those strategies will never be executed. How can you develop an operational plan you’ll actually use?

Today’s uncertain economic environment is prompting leaders to seek out more flexible, reliable planning tools. But there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. For decades, some organizations have relied on highly effective, affordable practices and tools based on Objectives and Key Results (OKRs).

Understanding OKRs

The OKR framework is favored by fast-growing tech giants like Google, LinkedIn, and Spotify, as well as start-ups that hope to follow in their footsteps.

OKRs are a way of setting strategic goals, first at the company level. Then departments, teams and individuals align their goals with the organization in a systematic way. But this framework is much more than a simple goal format. It comes with multiple step-by-step execution best practices.

For example, consider the “check-in” step, which is usually conducted on a weekly basis. This lightweight update process keeps everyone on your team focused, informed and on-track throughout an OKR cycle. Regular check-ins also help leaders avoid becoming consumed in reactive firefighting, which is often why strategies never see daylight.

Specialized software can help make steps like check-ins faster and easier to manage. For example, with OKR tools like ZOKRI, the check-in process takes only minutes to complete.

Unlocking The Full Benefits of OKR

OKR Snakes and Ladders - Best Practices and Mistakes to AvoidThe OKR process seems simple enough. However, making the most of OKRs requires nuance. Understanding how to navigate these nuances can help you quickly move from an OKR novice to a highly skilled OKR-driven organization.

Some important nuances are outlined below and are illustrated in this OKR “Snakes and Ladders” infographic:

7 OKR Ladders (Top Tips)

To help you succeed at OKRs, here are 7 top tips from organizations that have relied on them for years to drive performance and growth:

  • Use OKR as a focal point for debating issues and opportunities that, if solved, can move the needle. You could also consider them a blueprint for team “therapy” that creates engagement and excitement.
  • Identify meaningful, measurable outcomes (“key results”) to be sure you define success effectively. Discourage vanity metrics and “to-do list” outcomes.
  • Use KPIs to measure business-as-usual performance. Reserve OKRs for more valuable performance metrics, focused on strategic initiatives.
  • Establish aspirational goals selectively to improve focus and unlock innovative ways of thinking. OKRs let you set stretch goals without creating unnecessary stress among stakeholders.
  • Keep in mind that OKRs do not have to follow your organization chart. For example, they can be used effectively with cross-functional team initiatives.
  • Use operational processes built into OKRs to ensure that information is flowing as needed and your organization develops an executional rhythm.
  • Leverage retrospectives at the end of OKR cycles by creating positive shared learning experiences that inform future plans.

7 OKR Snakes (Pitfalls)

Perhaps the greatest strength of the OKR framework is its popularity. The biggest obstacles and mistakes have already been solved many times before, so common issues like these are easy to spot and avoid:

  • Sometimes, executive teams are not prepared to lead by example. Instead, they expect others to set and update goals, but they don’t manage their own. You don’t want to be one of these leaders.
  • Goals assigned to you aren’t as effective as goals you help create. To unlock stronger performance gains, get more people involved in the process. Discover together what needs improvement and support others in achieving their goals.
  • Similarly, avoid developing team OKRs in a silo. Team OKRs are much more powerful when they’re the product of cross-team discussions.
  • Too many team or individual OKRs dilute your focus. Instead, set fewer goals, each with high potential business impact.
  • Don’t treat OKR steps as optional actions. Without mandatory check-ins, you lose a single point-of-truth and people stop taking reports and updates seriously.
  • When the risks and consequences of not achieving OKRs are perceived as high you might be tempted to low-ball, but that can undermine the process. Grading OKRs and retrospectives helps you avoid this issue.
  • Setting and forgetting OKRs opens the door for business-as-usual firefighting to take over your agenda. Clearly, this jeopardizes overall performance outcomes. It’s important to commit to the OKR cycle and not skip updates or OKR meetings.

Summary

OKR is a proven goal setting framework. It can help you structure, share and execute organizational strategy, while making it easy for individuals and teams to support those goals.

Businesses that rely on OKRs typically are high-performers with traditional organization charts and cross-functional teams. But as everyone works toward aligned goals, people are more likely to identify and solve problems. And they learn from each other faster than those without OKRs.

Adopting OKRs is more than adopting a new goal format. It means you’re embracing a new way of talking about challenges and opportunities, and tracking progress towards goals and learning from experience. The know-how and tools to implement OKRs are within reach – even for organizations with a limited budget and management resources.

Workforce Engagement is Sinking. How Can You Turn the Tide?

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Have you noticed that workforce engagement and motivation are slipping? You’re not the only one. In April, Gallup confirmed that U.S. workforce engagement declined from a high of 36% in 2020 to 34% in 2021.

2022 hasn’t been any better. This year, only 32% of full-time and part-time employees told Gallup they’re engaged, while 17% say they are actively disengaged.

What’s happening here? Why is work engagement declining? And what can you do to prevent burnout and unnecessary resignations on your team?

Why Is Engagement In a Slump?

Every business is different. However, there are some common trends we can point to as we search for underlying reasons for decreased engagement.

Burnout, high turnover, and poor communication are among the most prevalent causes. And these problems only get worse when good employees stop caring. That’s because new team members tend to look to high-achieving colleagues for advice, motivation, and guidance.

Let’s look closer at each of these factors:

1. Burnout

While burnout can be linked to chronic hustle culture, return-to-office concerns also are playing a role. After many people were forced to work from home in 2020, they’ve grown accustomed to choosing where and when they work. Now, when called back to the office, many want to hold on to remote or hybrid work models and flexible schedules. Who can blame them?

When employees feel they’re losing a sense of choice over their work, or they recognize an imbalance in work/life responsibilities, they’re more likely to disengage or “quiet quit.” No wonder this phenomenon has been gaining traction during the past year.

2. Turnover

All this dissatisfaction naturally leads to higher employee turnover, which (no surprise) also influences engagement.

On one hand, welcoming a new coworker or manager can be exciting. However, the learning curve that comes with getting a new team member up to speed can create a work imbalance for veteran employees, even if it’s just for a short time.

This imbalance can create feelings of resentment, especially when engagement is already suffering for other reasons. As a result, more people could decide to leave. And if you don’t pay close attention, this can spiral into a very costly vicious cycle.

3. Poor Communication

When organizations try to accommodate hybrid, remote, or flexible work, it can be hard to communicate effectively. Virtual meetings provide more flexibility and enable a sense of work-life balance that many employees now prefer.

But if instant messaging or online video calls are your team’s only form of communication, this isn’t a sustainable way to work. If you don’t use these tools wisely, it puts effective collaboration and productivity at risk. For strong results, you need a plan.

How to Lift Workforce Engagement

Current engagement numbers don’t look good, but that doesn’t mean HR and business managers are powerless. Some U.S. companies have been able to increase workforce engagement despite difficult circumstances. Here are four solutions that can help you improve:

1. Create a Game Plan for Remote or Hybrid Work

Not all companies are able to offer remote, hybrid, or flexible scheduling opportunities. If yours does, then make sure you develop and execute a supportive strategy, so everyone in these roles can succeed.

As previously mentioned, flexible work opportunities are likely to create confusion among employees if work processes and expectations aren’t communicated clearly or executed thoughtfully. Core workplace principles like accessibility, transparency, and inclusion are especially important.

Talk with your managers and colleagues to get their input about remote work practices they recommend for your organization. For example, you may find that using apps like Slack, Teams, or Monday to conduct brief daily online meetings will add a layer of accountability.

2. Encourage Employees to Take Time Off

42% of U.S. employees say they haven’t taken a vacation in the past year. That’s a huge percentage. Working too long without a break will only make stress and burnout worse.

Encourage your staff to take their allotted PTO by creating a culture that supports taking time to rest and recharge. If you are on the leadership team, set an example. Take your time off and try not to respond to work messages outside of working hours.

3. Invest in the Right Tools

Another important way to prevent burnout is by investing in the right tools for your staff. Note that this isn’t just about technology. It may mean you’ll need to purchase new software or update existing technology. But it can also mean outsourcing specific activities to a specialized services provider.

Start by identifying the bottlenecks in your team’s workflows. Then consider any solutions that can reduce or remove redundant or unnecessary tasks. Think in terms of cost-effective ways to automate and streamline work activities.

4. Strive to be Approachable and Transparent

In a healthy workplace culture, communication moves freely to and from all corners of the organization. It’s not just about a top-down flow, but bottom-up, and side-to-side as well.

If employees aren’t comfortable voicing their opinions, feelings, and suggestions, they’re more likely to burn out. To lift engagement, commit to creating an open work environment that welcomes feedback and ideas at all levels.

This is less about formal initiatives and more about consistent behavior among leaders and managers. It’s about showing up every day, listening, and being responsive.

Final Thoughts

Many factors are contributing to the recent decline in workforce engagement. Although the solution may seem complex and out of reach, try some of these recommendations. I think you’ll be surprised at the difference it makes in the way employees view your company and their work.

More often than not, people want to do their jobs. But when little things like lack of information, inefficient technology, mundane tasks, lack of support, and strict schedules pile up, it’s only a matter of time before people start to disengage.

Be the boss that steps in and reignites the passion that got your employees to apply in the first place. If you keep at it, engagement is sure to follow.

10 Ways to Drive Employee Engagement With Team Problem-Solving

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Are you looking for proven ways to drive employee engagement? Many organizations find that collaboration is a highly effective strategy. For instance, consider these 10 team-centered methods recommended by business leaders:

  1. Use the SCRUM Framework for Project Management
  2. Involve Action Focus Groups to Improve Employee Engagement
  3. Empower Employees to Take Ownership of Work Issues
  4. Give Employees a Voice in Problem Solving
  5. Create a Strength-Based Team Culture Using Assessment Tools
  6. Leverage Diversity and Mastermind for Problem-Solving
  7. Take a Bottom-up Approach
  8. Use OKRs to Drive Teamwork and Engagement
  9. Engage Employees in Weekly Virtual Team-Building Activities
  10. Personalize Engagement Drivers to Employee Groups

Why are these engagement ideas so powerful? Learn more from the descriptions below…

1) Use the SCRUM Framework for Project Management

The SCRUM framework encourages team members to work together to solve problems and complete tasks. This helps foster a sense of teamwork and engagement. It also gives team members a say in a project’s direction and execution, so they feel a sense of ownership and responsibility. Plus, each phase of the project is transparent to everyone on the team, so everyone on the team remains aware, focused and motivated.

Omer Usanmaz, CEO of Qooper Mentoring & Learning Software

2) Involve “Action Focus Groups” to Improve Employee Engagement

We conducted an engagement survey with results that identified six individual areas for improvement. Instead of using managers to do this, we asked for employee volunteers to create a response to the challenges identified in the survey. Each Action Focus Group (AFG) included 10 members who met 3-5 times to identify and recommend a solution for the company to implement. Then, each AFG presented its improvement plan to the senior leadership team, which in turn, provided feedback. After each group adjusted its plan, we implemented the final recommendations.

With this AFG approach, employees became actively involved in solving key problems. In addition, this process gave participants an opportunity to build connections outside their primary business areas.

Deborah Norris, Senior HR Manager at Amentum

3) Empower Employees to Take Ownership of Work Issues

We drive employee engagement with team problem-solving by encouraging employees to identify and solve problems affecting their work. We have found that employees are happier, more engaged and more productive when they can take ownership of issues that impact their work. 

We achieve this by providing space for employees to voice their concerns about issues and encouraging teams to come together and solve problems (sometimes with incentives), instead of relying only on managers or supervisors. 

Debee Gold, Owner & Clinical Director of Gold Counseling & Wellness

4) Give Employees a Voice in Problem Solving

Too many organizations identify problems, and then leadership dictates solutions in a vacuum. But at 104 West, we recently held an all-company meeting, where administration and staff broke out into groups, identified roadblocks to growth, proposed solutions, and then came together to share thoughts. Now, we’re implementing plans based on those ideas, and every person in the organization has a role in this—a role they helped determine.

This process helped us drive employee engagement at all levels, empowering people to be solution-seekers and showcase their problem-solving and leadership abilities.

Joan Wyly, Vice President of 104 Degrees West Partners

5) Create a Strength-Based Team Culture Using Assessment Tools

Using assessment tools like Gallup StrengthsFinder, team members can understand how to create a more strength-based approach to teamwork and problem-solving. Additionally, regular “skip level” sessions allow for bottom-up feedback that helps build a more robust work culture. Also, personalized recognition leads to a more positive employee experience.

Together, these practices can produce a psychologically safe environment where teams thrive.

Rapti Khurana, VP of Talent Engagement & Development at the National Football League

6) Leverage Diversity and Mastermind for Problem Solving

When problems need to be solved, team members tend to find a solution by relying on their individual experience and determination. That can lead to excessive time scratching heads and spinning wheels, without making much progress. However, when people come together to leverage the power of cognitive diversity, an equally diverse array of potential solutions becomes more readily available.

A mastermind-style problem-solving conversation brings together members of disparate teams that are traditionally siloed. Coming together in this way to work toward a common goal can positively impact everything from engagement and retention to trust and productivity!

Erich Kurschat, Owner of Harmony Insights LLC

7) Take a Bottom-up Approach

I’m a big proponent of the bottom-up approach to team problem-solving, based on the teachings of Dr. Kaoru Ishikawa. We involve our front-line employees in group problem-solving, as well as our managers. Front-line employees are given the authority to act autonomously within specific guidelines.

This approach is practical because those closest to a problem often know the most about it and are in the best position to devise solution strategies. Empowering workers at all levels of our organization to participate in problem-solving drives employee engagement.

Dean Kaplan, President of The Kaplan Group

8) Use OKRs to Drive Teamwork and Engagement

For our team at Compt, goal setting and management have been driving forces in employee engagement and group problem-solving. We set objectives and key results (OKRs) as a company, and each department has its own OKRs that support overall company goals. In addition, each employee’s personal goals are tied to that employee’s department goals.

We host monthly company-wide “retro” meetings to share how each team is performing in a measured and data-driven way. Everything we do is quantified, which promotes accountability and cross-department teamwork to achieve overarching goals. This ensures that we are all constantly moving in the same direction toward the same outcomes. And because each individual’s actions impact the company’s success, we feel compelled to be more engaged and create a workplace that benefits us all.

Amy Spurling, CEO, and Founder of Compt

9) Engage Employees in Weekly Virtual Team-Building Activities

One way we combat engagement issues is through weekly virtual team-building activities. Each session is planned and hosted via Zoom by a different group of employees. This way, our workforce enjoys programming variety, while each group has a vested interest in the success of the activity they host. For example, activities have ranged from virtual quiz nights to elaborate online escape room challenges.

These team-building activities have been a resounding success. They’ve provided employees with memorable shared experiences and have helped build bonds between colleagues, ultimately leading to increased workplace collaboration.

Clare Jones, Marketing Manager at OfficeSpaceAU

10) Personalize Engagement Drivers to Employee Groups

The best employee engagement strategy is to ride the drivers. Each organization, of course, will have different drivers. For example, meaningful work, career growth, empowerment, belonging, recognition, leadership, and fulfilling work relationships. 

Choose a segment of your employee population. Then implement a strategic theme strategy across your drivers that is personalized to the group but high-profile enough that successes will be seen and heard throughout the organization. Ride the drivers, measure, rinse and repeat.

Marcus Holmes, HR Operations General Manager at City of Detroit

 

EDITOR’S NOTE: These ideas on how to drive employee engagement were submitted via Terkel. Terkel is a knowledge platform that shares community-driven content based on expert insights. To see questions and get published, sign up at terkel.io.

We Surveyed 100+ HR Leaders on Driving Business Value in 2022

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Sponsored by: ThoughtExchange

For several months, we’ve been sharing insights from our partner ThoughtExchange. They’ve done some fascinating research on Gen Z employees, employee experience, boosting retention, and driving business value. They’re an essential tool for leaders across departments and industries looking to align and engage their workforces.

We finally got the opportunity to use ThoughtExchange to consult our network of HR and Talent professionals, and you shared some great insights with us and each other. 

We asked:

As HR and Talent professionals, what areas are you focusing on at your organization to increase retention and drive business value?

With anonymity, anti-bias technology, and automatic translation capabilities, ThoughtExchange makes it easy to gather diverse perspectives and have equitable discussions.

What We Heard

Using ThoughtExchange’s tools, we analyzed the thoughts you shared to identify important themes and actionable insights. It’s an efficient way to hear from large groups of diverse people, particularly in a remote setting.

First, we looked at the Summary—an AI-generated snapshot of the top-rated ideas:

Onboarding and orientation – new hires should be set up for success from the start. Effective employee retention improves the productivity and performance of a company. Personal and professional mental health – a toxic work culture can really hurt productivity and business value. Pay equity. Personal wellbeing – avoid burnout.

Overall, you’re recognizing that business value is heavily impacted by employee experience, and you’re focusing on providing a healthy, productive workplace. 

Ideas That Rise To The Top

Next, we looked at the highest-rated answers. ThoughtExchange’s Thoughts tool shows each thought’s rating, and also how ratings change by role. These were the top-rated thoughts for each of the different roles:

Talent Acquisition: “Leadership Development. Leaders need to role model behaviors to scale change.”

Recruitment: “Employees’ aspirations for career development. These days I noticed fresh graduates and junior employees are switching their careers for any salary variation. Career development enables employees to be competent and get expertise for their future career.” 

Training & Development: “Performance appreciation and reward. By acknowledging good work done, it drives up their productivity.”

Diversity, Equity & Inclusion: “Personal and Professional Mental Health. A toxic work culture can really hurt productivity and business value.”

HR Leadership: “Employee wellbeing. This helps the employees stay fit mentally, emotionally, and socially.”

What was particularly interesting is that, of the top thoughts for the entire group, none of the top thoughts by role were included. 

  • (4.2*) “Focus employer branding efforts on values and vision. Ensure you can articulate clearly how your company is making the world a better place. People in a group desire belonging. These factors serve as unifying tools and help employees feel that the work they do is not ‘just work.’”
  • (4.0*) “Onboarding and orientation. New hires should be set up for success from the start. Your onboarding process should focus on employee guide to thrive and culture.”
  • (4.0*) “Skills, skills, skills! We want to attract skilled talent, but we need to keep investing in their skills, so people want to stay and grow with us! Caring about the future viability of your workforce means business sustainability. Plus, it’s good for employees, too. Everybody wins.”

The variation in how thoughts are ranked demonstrates how ThoughtExchange can identify team or departmental priorities, but also surface common ground.

Where You Disagreed

It wasn’t all common ground. ThoughtExchange’s Differences tool shows the rating patterns for different groups and finds the polarizing ideas.

In our Exchange, compensation and pay equity was an area of contention. Group A (in blue), mainly HR Leadership, assigned high ratings (in the 4* range) to these thoughts:

Group B (in green), consisting mainly of Recruitment, Training & Development, and Talent Acquisition folks, gave ratings averaging 2*. This may indicate a difference in priorities between HR Leadership and those responsible for hiring and upskilling employees.

The Differences tool doesn’t stop there. It also finds thoughts that Group A and Group B both rated highly. Both groups agreed that employee wellbeing and engagement are top priorities. Holding space for both sides of an issue is vital, but identifying where those two sides agree helps build a strategy everyone supports.

Areas Of Focus

To understand the discussion’s general themes, we used the Theme tool to categorize thoughts into Culture, Performance, and Strategy. 

Thought Exchange Themes

Deeper analysis shows which issues are the most pressing for our community, and identifies actions to improve retention and drive business value.

Areas to Action:

  • Company Culture: clarify organizational values, define employer brand, and consult employees on improving their work experience. 
  • Skills Development: provide employees with skills, career, and leadership development opportunities.
  • Performance Appreciation: improve morale and productivity by rewarding high-performing employees.

What You Told Us

You’re invested in improving and streamlining every stage of the employee lifecycle. You value organizational culture and recognize the importance of robust onboarding and career development. You care deeply for the wellbeing of your employees and want to foster a more supportive workplace.

For us, this Exchange showed how valuable an inclusive, unbiased discussion platform is for identifying team and organizational priorities. 

We can see how ThoughtExchange brings immense value to different kinds of leaders looking to innovate tactics, align on strategy, improve business efficiency, and engage employees.

Want to see how ThoughtExchange can give you mission-critical insights to make better decisions and transform your discussions? Talk to one of ThoughtExchange’s Talent & HR experts today.

5 Ways Leaders Can Create a Successful Work Environment

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impact awardWhat is a great “place” to work today? With many abandoning the office tower or business park cubicle office, we’re increasingly emerging from an era of great workplaces to the new territory of worker-centricity. While some thought the great place to work was about amenities (commuter buses, reduced or free food, and onsite everything), we’ve known something else all along–supportive leadership in the work environment is key. 

Executives in great organizations believe that every employee benefits from outstanding leadership. Engagement is dependent on leadership, as Gallup’s research consistently reports that nearly 70% of employee engagement is within a manager’s control. Managers who prosper in today’s hybrid work environment will boost engagement with the five core leadership practices.

1. Building and sustaining trust.

The core of the coming modern enterprise is an authentic leader’s ability to gain and establish trust. The 2021 Edelman Trust Barometer revealed declining confidence in social institutions and organizational leaders worldwide. The world’s two largest economies, China and the U.S., showed significant decreases in the trust of both politicians and corporate executives. Employees who trust their leaders demonstrate greater satisfaction, loyalty, and involvement, all antidotes to undesirable talent drain and loss.

Trust fuels the teamwork and progress that leads to innovation, a key determinant of long-term growth and survival. Managers erode trust when they are not honest and truthful, and trust is difficult to regain. Trust erosions lead to decreases in integrity, and we don’t fully engage with those we don’t trust. Successful leaders engage and enroll people in goal-driven missions that spark collaboration leading to improved teamwork and productivity. 

2. Leading from values.

When was the last time you considered what your team or company holds in high regard? Typically, we keep our values in the highest regard and build reward and consequence systems that reflect leaders’ values. Engineers and scientists, for example, are recognized for their accomplishments with honorific titles or other expressions of acknowledgment. At the same time, sales and marketing professionals might reap great expense-paid prizes. The more selective the set of values, the more they shape performance.

Values help people connect to organizations and the world in ways more significant than individual accomplishment and effort. For example, if a startup values frugality, people will likely be encouraged to monitor capital and resource consumption. When a manager recognizes effort routinely, the manager demonstrates care and will actively bolster employee satisfaction and engagement. Values guide the decisions we make and the actions we take. Leaders gain faster results and build better relationships by consistently articulating and aligning colleagues to shared values.

3. Creating communities.

While there is truth in the observation that culture eats strategy, growth businesses are now shifting to community thinking within the work environment. A community invites deeper levels of belonging and commitment, while culture implies one-way approaches. While leaders will never underestimate the influence of culture on work processes — or how things get done — they will invest in creating communities where the practices of improvement and resilience thrive. 

Communities, not cultures, pay attention to wellbeing, commitment, innovation, and revenue. As they do, expenses and problems decrease along with skepticism and stress.

Managers and leaders who succeed facilitate employee involvement in decision-making and product and service delivery. Managers expand their capacities for including and involving others and encourage broad knowledge and skill sharing. When managers lead the way in strengthening the bonds, performance vitality and output increase. Employees improve their connections among their colleagues and partnerships between leaders and their teams thrive. 

4. Growing transition readiness.

Most people can let go of the past and successfully embrace a new order or a different future. However, the time between a specific history and an unpredictable future creates and powers uncertainty. In the face of not knowing, we fill in the gaps to reduce the psychological tension that arises with an unknown future. The remedy to not-knowing is to equip a generation of leaders with the knowledge and skill to navigate uncertainty successfully.

A manager successful at helping others through transitions possesses self-awareness and openness to change and growth through learning and development. These managers refuse to see opportunities and people as problems but rather as contributors. When work is perceived more like an invitation than a requirement, an organization’s esprit de corps positively changes.  Improvements measured by meaningful metrics rise.

5. Maintaining a Customer-First Work Environment

When employees can connect their experience and employment to a paying customer or stakeholder, the commitment to excellence thrives. People want to do their best to deliver a quality product or service to those they feel connected to. Customers and new markets are eternal sources of inspiration when we successfully recruit and involve employees in a customer-first mission. A team’s connection to a customer contributes to the motivation for peak performance. When we care, we act in a customer-first way.

Managers and leaders improve organizational energy by harnessing a customer-first spirit across the enterprise with both customers and employees. When colleagues treat each other as customers, it translates to appealing work environments. A standard of care and excellence replaces indifference created by the isolation many experience in today’s hybrid workplace.

To reawaken work and succeed in the new world of work, we must put these five practices into place to boost engagement. Leadership growth in these action areas contains the kernel of power to transform careers, lives, organizations, and the communities we serve. Begin the journey to building teams and communities on the path to personal and organizational prosperity.

 

How to Make Virtual Meetings Immersive Without Video

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For many of us, virtual meetings have become the lifeblood of remote working communication. COVID-19 has made face-to-face meetings the exception rather than the rule. But the recent surge of digital collaboration tools has made remote teamwork much easier to manage. 

However, the global switch from physical to digital has pushed us into new networking territory– complete with its own footprint of pros and cons. 

Virtual meetings make us more productive and efficient employees. But too much time on a shared screen can also contribute to anxiety, emotional exhaustion, and fatigue. 

In fact, 49% of employees report feeling a high degree of exhaustion after video calls. This state of exhaustion is dubbed “Zoom Fatigue,” and it’s affecting a large percentage of the working population. 

So, how can remote teams continue to collaborate productively without causing a backlog of exhaustion? 

Well, we can start by conducting virtual meetings without video. It might not work for every team, but trying new methods of virtual collaboration is key to finding one that works for yours. 

Video Versus Audio-Based Virtual Meetings

For most people, virtual meetings are somewhat synonymous with a video presence. And there’s a good reason why—video calls are the closest we can get to person-to-person communication. Seeing the faces and expressions of colleagues helps us to understand them better. And this contributes to more effective communication. 

However, at a time where stress and anxiety levels are reaching an all-time peak, shifting how we communicate is essential to resisting burnout. If switching the camera off allows us to feel more at ease, it may be in our best interest to do so.

That being said, both video and audio-based virtual meetings arrive with their own list of pros and cons. 

So, what are they? Let’s look at video first. 

Pros And Cons of Video-Based Virtual Meetings 

Video-based meetings are the standard expectation for digital collaboration in 2022. They enable us to view the expressions and mannerisms of colleagues, promoting trust and empathy. 90% of employees feel they can get their point across more clearly via video, and 35% say it makes them feel more included. 

The caveat with video-based virtual meetings is the toll it takes on mental and emotional health. Being on call throughout the day is exhausting, and it has a negative impact on productivity. 63% of employees say that they now attend more meetings over webcam than they did pre-pandemic. 

Self-identified introverts in particular struggle with this. 2-3 hours of their day is now funneled into forced social interaction. Even for extroverts, the pressure to perform socially can become immensely taxing over time. This, in turn, can contribute to burnout, which is not healthy for personal or professional growth. 

Pros And Cons of Audio-Based Virtual Meetings

In 2021, only a handful of virtual meetings were being conducted on an audio-only basis. This is partially due to the wide availability of high-functioning video collaboration tools. Notably, it’s buffered by the impressive productivity statistics that video boasts. 

However, audio-based virtual meetings could be the (not so) silent hero of remote working communication. Not only are the apps cheaper and more accessible for those without high-quality webcams, but they also liberate workers from the anxiety of social interaction. 

Reduced eye contact, decreased cognitive load, and lack of viewing one’s own face makes audio-based collaboration much easier to process. Cutting down on the visual sensory element can allow us to focus better and preserve more energy for productivity. 

Bearing all that in mind, the reality is that audio-based virtual meetings are less familiar to us than their video alternative. For that reason, knowing how to conduct one in a way that is still immersive and productive can be a challenge. 

How To Conduct Productive and Effective Audio Meetings

Despite the benefits that come with audio meetings, conducting them in an efficient way requires a different set of tactics than their video counterpart. Because there are no visual aids, whoever is conducting the audio meeting needs to put emphasis on vocal communication. 

Being clear, concise, and continuously open about meeting progression is paramount to running a successful audio-based virtual meeting. Here are some more helpful tips:

1. Eliminate distractions. 

Because there will be no visual element for team members to focus on, all other distractions must be eliminated. If you’re trying to conduct an audio meeting in a loud or chaotic environment, extracting information from it will be very difficult for listeners. 

Aim to conduct your meeting from a quiet and undisturbed room, and encourage your team members to do the same. 

2. Have an agenda. 

It can be easy to lose track of where you’re going in a meeting without a proper agenda. Creating a list of key points to focus on will help both you and your listeners concentrate better. Make sure to have a clear objective for the meeting so that others can follow you towards it. 

Adding this type of structure to your audio-based virtual meeting will encourage focus and motivation from beginning to end. 

3. Track and summarize progress. 

If you’re tackling a particularly complex topic, regularly reflecting on what’s said is crucial. It will help attendees to better grasp what you are saying. Breaking down the meeting into distinct sections will encourage comprehension and provide others with an easy way to track the flow of conversation.

You want those partaking in the meeting to maintain a constant grasp of what you are saying, and tracking progress is one way to do that. 

4. Set a time limit (and stick to it). 

Nobody likes a never-ending virtual meeting. In fact, sessions that last longer than the stipulated time frame are considered by many to be the worst quality a meeting can have. Let’s avoid that. 

Holding attendees captive for longer than they bargained for will only cause them to lose interest. Setting a time limit beforehand and sticking to it displays respect for the attendee’s time. Additionally, it makes the whole process less stressful for everyone. 

5. Don’t stray off topic.

While we’re discussing respect for attendee’s time, remember not to waste theirs by talking about unrelated topics. The energetic bandwidth for virtual meetings is strained enough. But rambling on about irrelevant matters will only make it worse. 

When conducting a meeting without video, staying on topic will allow attendees to remain immersed in what you are saying. 

6. Invest in a quality microphone. 

Because your voice will be the sole form of communication, it needs to be heard loud and clear. Think of it like a branded logo. It needs to make an impact and people need to immediately take note of your message. Investing in a good quality microphone will allow others to understand what you are saying without question. Plus, it will help to avoid miscommunications. 

There are plenty of affordable microphones designed for this exact purpose. Owning one will only add value to your future meetings—both audio-based or otherwise. 

7. Allow time for questions.   

It’s always a good idea to leave space towards the end of a virtual meeting for questions. It prevents misunderstandings and provides attendees with the space to voice their queries one at a time. Without a designated time for questions, a meeting can quickly turn chaotic. 

Chaos is the last thing you want for an audio-based virtual meeting. Structure and orderliness are where purely vocal meetings thrive. 

8. Stay professional. 

Casual meetings have their time and place, but professionalism is important when it comes to mandatory group meetings. Chances are the people attending your meeting are already battling fatigue. So, keeping things straightforward is in everyone’s best interest. 

Staying professional, calm, and to the point is the best way to conduct an immersive and engaging audio-based virtual meeting. 

Is Audio Conferencing the Way Forward? 

The answer to this question greatly depends on the nature of your team. Clearly, there are pros and cons to both video and audio-based virtual meetings. The best one for your team is largely dependent on their personal and professional needs. 

For example, the success rates of joint video conferences are much higher for large teams of people. Audio, on the other hand, has proven very effective for small groups. This is due to the fact that audio-only meetings can become chaotic when too many people (and voices) are present. 

Furthermore, audio-based virtual meetings have proven to be less exhaustive for remote employees. And they can contribute to better mental health. Having the option to unplug from video communication helps us feel less anxious and more in control of our workdays. 

Ultimately, it is important to remember that each remote team comprises unique individuals that require different things for productivity. 

Summary

Since 2020, virtual meeting platforms and workplace collaboration tools have received a huge increase in attention. They’ve changed the way we work and the way we communicate in so many ways. Right now, many research projects are being conducted on the nature of their effects on our mental, emotional, social, and motivational health. 

Remote working culture is here to stay. The platforms that sustain it must adapt to meet our personal and professional needs. 

Nobody should have to commit to a culture that depletes their energetic resources—even for the sake of productivity. Burnout is a real threat to the working population of today, and any methods for lightening the load should not be taken lightly.

Adrien Olichon

[#WorkTrends] The Inspiring Power of AI-Driven Collaboration

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How can AI-driven collaboration help extend our company culture to the remote workplace?

You don’t want to miss a single episode of #WorkTrends…  subscribe to the podcast now!

At TalentCulture, we have always been a remote workplace. So lately, I’ve found it really interesting to work with companies that are experiencing this for the first time. It’s been fun, and inspiring, watching them pivot so quickly — and to see them function so well within the digital workspace we already knew so well.

For these and so many others, the many actions and interactions that happen within organizations have shifted to remote. Communication, meetings, feedback, managing, planning — all now happen virtually. It’s been really exciting to see work teams make the transition and thrive, especially in the HR space. In the last few months, I’ve often felt the urge to virtually pat HR teams on the back as they realize they can, in fact, run HR remotely. As they do, they’re not just learning a new way to operate.

They are learning that Artificial Intelligence, or AI, plays a huge role in how they manage, monitor, measure, and lead their efforts.

Our Guest: Guibert Englebienne of Globant

That is why I invited Guibert Englebienne, the Chief Technology Officer & Co-founder of Globant, on this week’s edition of #WorkTrends. I wanted to talk about how AI-driven collaboration enables us to manage our work and engage our people in entirely different ways. And how the best forms of AI enable us to work together efficiently and creatively from anywhere in the world. 

I first asked him what makes today’s workplace so different from past versions. His response quickly left me impressed with Guibert’s passion for his work, and for helping HR teams: “Technology has accelerated the world we live in today. That fast-paced competition has made companies focus on delighting consumers. Now it’s time to delight employees as well.”

“The pandemic forced us to digitally transform the world overnight. Organizations suddenly found themselves in a broadly remote working environment. That creates a lot of challenges,” Guibert added. “It was natural, at some point, to start asking, ‘Is our team okay?’ and maybe even ‘Is it there?’ When we were at the office, we could see each other’s eyes. We could see if someone was okay. And very suddenly, that all went away.”

The Power of AI-Driven Collaboration

As we’ve talked about many times within the TalentCulture community, the human connection isn’t all that went away. We also lost our connection to our company cultures. Guibert agreed, “We knew we needed to continue hiring and growing — without the ability to live and breathe our culture. So, we at Globant set out to digitalize our culture.”

As Guibert admitted, this was a real challenge. “Soon, though, using AI-driven collaboration, we realized we had created a social operating system that allowed for a more human organization. One in which we each connect to more people. We get to know them better. And at the same time we create a lot of collective intelligence for the organization, which allows us to be more adaptable.”

A Human-Centered Operating System

Guibert went on to tell us exactly how Globant created this human-centered operating system. He also shared how AI plays a major role in creating a culture that inspires while also helping decide exactly what kind of organizational culture we want to build. The conversation, while it left my head spinning a bit, made me realize just how far we’ve come since the pandemic started — and just how far we can still go. You don’t want to miss a minute of this episode of #WorkTrends!

We’re not done talking about AI-Driven collaboration yet, though. Please join us next Wednesday, October 7th at 1:30pm for a special #WorkTrends Twitter chat. During what is sure to be an inspiring conversation, Guibert and the Globant team will help us answer these questions:

Q1: Why do organizations struggle with team collaboration?

Q2: How can AI-driven tools help boost creativity?

Q3: How can leaders use AI-driven tools to boost company culture?

I’ll see you there!

 

Find Guibert Englebienne on Linkedin and Twitter.

 

This podcast was sponsored by Globant.

 

Editor’s note: #WorkTrends podcasts and also our Twitter chats have evolved to better meet your needs! For details, check the new FAQ page. And to see upcoming event topics and guests, check the calendar listing on the #WorkTrends Podcast page.

 

Photo: Christina @ wocintechchat.com

WFH Employees: How to Keep Them Safe

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In some countries, as lockdown measures continue to ease, businesses are opening and employees are heading back to work. But some of us are still working from home — a policy that has become the ‘new normal‘ and may continue for millions of people, even in the wake of the pandemic.

Companies need to make sure their employees still feel safe and connected at home to avoid WFH burnout. Here are some effective ways to make physical and mental safety and employee well-being a top priority:

Let’s dive in!

1. Keep the Lines of Communication Open

When it comes to working remotely or working from home, communication is key. According to a Buffer survey, 20% of remote workers struggle with communication.

Providing several communication channels can enable the company and employees to stay in touch. An HR manager can run conference calls (both video or audio) to help bring teams together and keep them aligned on projects. One-on-one calls are more personal and can give employees a way to reveal any struggles or concerns.

Not only does communicating make employees feel safe and connected, but it also helps them feel valued — even when they can’t draw on the support of an office or workplace environment.

2. Adjust Company Policies

With the pandemic still raging, we’re not quite at “business as usual” yet. So, it’s crucial to adjust or revise company policies and continuity plans to better protect your employees and meet their needs. Flexibility is key: more than two-thirds of employees say at a loss of flexibility would convince them to find another job. WFH security guidelines can ensure that employees can use their own devices without worrying about their data getting leaked or hacked.

As you anticipate your business demands, use workforce management software to unlock your workforce’s potential and keep employees from feeling overwhelmed. Adjust your policies regarding benefits, pay, sick leave, and paid time off to fit the circumstances.

3. Provide Team Building Activities

Since working from home isn’t the easiest task for some employees, it’s important to help them manage stress levels and feel connected to each other. One effective approach is to strengthen teamwork at the same time with team building activities, such as icebreaker or informal video conference calls. Consider movie nights, or get-togethers to just talk about life.

 Such activities can help employees not only decompress, but build their sense of personal connection and trust. 75% of employers rate teamwork and collaboration as “very crucial” to strengthen employees’ work relationships and overall efficiency.

4. Promote Fair Workplace Practices

Make sure your WFH policy aligns with the company’s principles and maintains fair treatment for all employees. 54% of employees rank fair treatment as the second most valuable employer attribute, a strong factor in a decision to stay or leave.

Double-check that all employees have equal access to the company’s services, such as the devices they need to work remotely, such as laptops, internet connection, and cybersecurity. And extend sick or paid leave policies to employees even when they’re working from home. 

5. Reward and Recognize Employees

When remote employees feel valued and safe, they are free to be productive, and get their projects done effectively and efficiently. They may be working remotely, but they feel appreciated and acknowledged. Over 79% of employees who feel under-appreciated consider quitting their job — and this is going to extend to employees working from home as well. 

Build employee engagement with rewards and recognition — even just a note recognizing their efforts can go a long way.  

Whether your employees work from home occasionally or exclusively, it’s always important to make them feel safe. Support them, engage them, and you’ll see the results.

Photo: Waldemar Brandt

#WorkTrends: Mapping the Future of Workforce Skills

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We’re learning that the term social distancing may not be precisely right — physical distancing is more like it. Socially, we’re finding all sorts of ways of staying close. The same is true with the term “soft skills.”

As this week’s #WorkTrends guest and workforce expert Angela Maiers noted, “You could call them power skills more than anything. These are the power competencies that allow you to succeed, your team to succeed, your company to succeed — in a crisis or not.”

An edupreneur, author, and founder of the global nonprofit Choose2Matter, Angela Maiers had a frank discussion with Meghan M. Biro on why these skills are so important. Angela talked about how these skills have to be developed habitually, but can and should be identified, supported, and refined. Key among them, she noted, is being self-aware — in the context of everyone you work with. “You have to understand how you not only fit in, but how you advance as a team,” and recognize “other people’s diverse competencies.” 

People need the tools, development, and time to fully cultivate their life kit of essential “people” and human skills, she noted. But given the current time we’re all working in — where we’ve had to jump into remote competencies faster than you can type in a meeting ID, what if we don’t have the luxury of time? We may have to problem-solve to tackle very different challenges in the near future, Meghan pointed out — if the nature of the evolving crisis happening today is any indication. 

We all need to be able to handle VUCA, Angela said — “volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity.” That goes double for today and tomorrow’s leaders. “When you look at a leader that provides a place of not just security… but there’s a calmness around them, there’s hopefulness, there’s resourcefulness around them — those are the leaders that stand out.” Meghan noted that this particular mindset was likely going to be in high demand.  

So can we learn this? Meghan asked. And do we all learn it the same way? “One of the points causing confusion is that we think of skills as masterable segments, but they’re far more than that,” Angela said. “Building a habit is different than mastering a skill. You don’t get a percentile grade.” And since everyone has different competencies, their learning curves are also different — likely more easily addressed by modern learning platforms that can meet the needs of each learner.

We all need to be channeling VUCA now, Meghan noted. And we need to remember that at the core, these “power skills” are really human skills. We’re going to need them all to adapt to the workplace of the future, she said. Life skills are the new power tools.

Listen to the full conversation and see our questions for the upcoming #WorkTrends Twitter Chat. And don’t forget to subscribe, so you don’t miss an episode. 

Twitter Chat Questions

Q1: Why are soft skills necessary skills in the workplace? #WorkTrends
Q2: What strategies can help organizations better develop soft skills in their workforce? #WorkTrends
Q3: How can leaders help their organizations focus on essential soft skills for the future? #WorkTrends

Find Angela Maiers on Linkedin and Twitter

The Results of a Remote Work Experiment

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Remote work has always been a heavily debated topic, especially among HR professionals, who frequently face challenges that relate to employee productivity and development. There’s pressure to figure out how employees can achieve peak performance, and how managers can enable productivity.

At Bynder, we’re always looking for ways to spark creativity and enhance productivity, and this past summer was no different. For the second year in a row we held a global Remote Week, where we closed all of our offices and encouraged employees to work from anywhere. Bynder launched its first Remote Week for two reasons:

  • To encourage employees to actually use their benefits, and not be afraid that management will look down on them for doing so. Benefits like unlimited vacation time and the ability to work from home look great on paper, but there’s a hesitancy (especially in the U.S.) around actually using them.
  • To test the power of our tech stack, and learn more about how collaboration within Bynder works and what we can do to make working remotely an even better experience.

Bynder is a global company, with more than 350 employees spread across seven global offices. From Amsterdam to Boston to San Mateo, our company is connected around the clock. Working remotely has always been a part of our culture, but for the most part, our employees tend to work out of our offices. Nearly 60 percent of our employees reported that working remotely was not a part of their regular schedule.

After a successful first edition of Remote Week, we knew it was something we should try again, while taking into consideration the lessons we learned. For example, our employees missed having spaces to meet, so this year we partnered with WeWork to offer a place they could go to meet with co-workers.

This year our employees worked from all over the place. One employee said Remote Week allowed him to rediscover Amsterdam, as he was always in search of new spots to work from. Another felt it was the perfect opportunity to schedule visits and meetings at clients’ offices.

After running a company-wide experiment and survey, a few key takeaways emerged. The reality is there’s never a great time to be out of the office, especially at a fast-growing company. But that doesn’t mean employees should feel chained to their desks. Some people work best when surrounded by lively co-workers, while others prefer a quieter space. Embracing remote work is more than just telling your employees to work from home. There needs to be a structure in place for them to do so, and employees should feel encouraged to utilize the benefits that are offered to them.

Employees Felt Happier and More Productive

Seventy percent of our employees said they felt happy and relaxed when working from home during Remote Week, and nearly 40 percent said they felt more productive and focused. Those who felt more productive cited the quiet of their home and the flexibility to get things done as major benefits. For some, the office is great for collaborative tasks but too noisy or distracting for work that requires more focus.

This is one reason why workplace flexibility is so important — it’s about acknowledging that not everyone works the same way, and about finding solutions to help maximize everyone’s productivity. Sometimes you need to take a walk to ignite that creative spark and get your best work done.

Commuting Causes Stress and Wasted Time

An overwhelming number of our employees felt one of the best benefits of working remotely was that they were able to save time and money by not commuting. To many, the daily commute is an anchor on their work day, causing stress that hinders productivity — when really it should be a time to mentally prepare or debrief from the day. Our employees felt that when they didn’t have to commute, they saved hours that could be spent catching up on work, enjoying a personal hobby or being with family and friends.

Communication Is Key

As one of our employees put it, “Communicate. Overcommunicate. People can choose what they take away, and it’s better they have too much information than not enough.”

A sizeable number of our employees felt the key to building trust with team members was to communicate and be readily available. This is where the tech tools we’ve implemented at Bynder come in handy. When we asked our employees what tools they found useful to communicate, 88.5 percent cited Zoom, Google Hangouts and Slack. These are all tools that Bynder provides employees for daily use, which demonstrates how important it is to invest in tools that enable effective communication. Our employees also felt daily virtual meetups and regular check-ins were essential, and served as an alternative for the invaluable face time that usually occurs in the office every day.

A Number of Employees Missed Their Co-Workers

A good number of employees stressed the value of face-to-face communication, and felt that no tools can fully replace actually being in a room with someone. A number of employees said they missed seeing their co-workers, and felt that it was useful to be in the same room as someone when working through technical issues or brainstorming ideas. In fact, during Remote Week, 54 percent of Bynder employees actually met with colleagues in person, and 11.5 percent met with clients.

Anticipating Employee Needs Is Important

A full week of working remotely isn’t for everyone. In fact, some of our employees didn’t like working remotely. But that’s the point of offering flexible benefits — it’s all about anticipating the needs of employees and recognizing that what works for one person won’t always work for another.

Our developers are an example: One of the things they missed the most was dual monitors that were available to them in the office, but not at home. On the other hand, our sales and marketing teams had a much easier time adapting to remote work.

Ultimately, some employees thrive in an office environment, while others prefer the peace and quiet of their home to get certain tasks done. With 53 percent of Bynder employees never working remotely on a regular schedule, Remote Week either upended their workflow and pushed them out of their comfort zone, or allowed them to evaluate the way they work.

The reason we asked our employees how they felt about Remote Week is to make sure that we always strive to be better. Implementing change starts from the top, so it’s important that our leadership is as prepared as possible. While we offer all of our employees the ability to work from home, we know there needs to be a structure in place, and that’s something we’re prioritizing here at Bynder.

As we build out our remote-work policies, we’re making sure that they go beyond every individual feeling prepared. We’re going to make sure that our teams, as a whole, have what they need at their disposal. From our developers to our marketing department to our sales team, we will take different needs into consideration as we work to build out a more robust remote-work policy.

How to Move People Past an ‘Us Versus Them’ Mindset at Work

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The “us versus them” mindset is alive and well in organizations of all sizes, both domestic and global. Often, this type of mindset and bias results from command-and-control leadership and legacy business models, according to the recently-published 2017 Gallup Global Workforce Study (opt-in required). Among other findings, the study reinforces that only one in three U.S. workers are engaged, interactive and collaborative in the workplace.

Why is that?

One of the root causes of employee disengagement is an “us versus them” mindset. This mindset is a subtly pervasive form of workplace bias, preventing diversity and inclusion. Not only that — this mindset holds us back from achieving peak productivity and profitability.

Over time, an “us versus them” mindset becomes ingrained as a cultural norm. Dualism is fostered instead of dialogue. But It doesn’t have to continue to be that way. By breaking down big, hairy issues into bite-sized, feasible projects, collaborative and profitable dialogues are started across the workplace. As more and more small teams create remarkable client outcomes, the rest of the workforce will want to follow suit.

If you want to move past the “us versus them” mindset, start a dialogue about the profitability of collaboration.

Yes, profitability. When you talk profitability, you have a business discussion, not just a human resources conversation. You position HR as a profit center instead of a cost center. Have the profitable collaboration conversation across the organization, not just in departmental silos.

We need enlightened HR professionals who want to lead by acting locally. But where to start? Let’s explore where to find cases of the “us versus them” mindset in your organization.

Two Classic Cases of ‘Us Versus Them’

Dueling Departments

The first scenario turns people from different departments and professional disciplines into adversaries.

All you have to do is attend your next meeting, look and listen. Sales and marketing may be at odds with engineering and operations folks, and that is the way things always seem to go. For starters, employees speak two different professional languages. Also, historically, they are not motivated to learn how to speak — and think — like their colleagues across the table.

Alternatively, the legal or finance departments show up late in the project because, historically, they are excluded from conversations “until they need to be brought in.” You know what happens next. Projects are stalled or derailed, based on a behavioral precedent that has morphed into accepted business process.

These “but we’ve always done things this way” scenarios play out in countless meetings during the course of every week. As a result, non-collaborative, unprofitable “us versus them” biases are perpetuated. Why not address the bias, collaborate and move beyond that mindset?

Knowledge Workers Versus the Rest of the Workforce

Often, an “us versus them” mindset leads to resentment of the educational “haves” by the “have nots / couldn’t affords.” And often, less-educated colleagues and workers performing rote tasks don’t have opportunities to learn and develop in order to become part of the teams working on more complex tasks. However, manual workers may be just as capable of complex problem-solving as their more-educated counterparts, given the right tools. Typically, these workforce “Cinderellas” get stuck right where they are, eventually becoming entrenched in a biased, rote workforce mindset.

On the other hand, knowledge workers often have zero interaction with workers on the assembly line or loading dock, for example. Yet, rote workers often become beta test end-users of new systems, processes and apps created by their erudite colleagues. As a result, there is very little comprehensive appreciation and knowledge of what workflow theory actually looks like in practice. Often, these processes fall short of what was anticipated.

Think about how much you could improve the outcomes if knowledge workers collaborated with those end-user line workers, sharing feedback about product and process improvement. How often does that cross-training scenario happen in your organization? It’s not that hard to accomplish.

Bring People Together

Consider what would happen if you brought together a new cast of collaborators on behalf of creating enduring client outcomes. Either they’d quickly jettison old habits and mindsets, or the project would be derailed. As a result, project goals and outcomes would take precedence over ingrained habits. Colleagues would have no choice but to start connecting the dots differently, collaboratively and more creatively.

Eventually, everyone would work outside of their “normal” behavioral comfort zones. Consequently, team members would more readily leave their bias and baggage outside the door and view the project as a professional development opportunity. Once one project is a success, the team would have new expectations about how much they should collaborate.

Want to know how to overcome “us versus them” bias? Allow teams to experience what productive and profitable collaboration feels like. Let your own organization’s engagement scorecard showcase how two-thirds of employees are engaged, for starters. Why continue to settle for anything less?

Don’t be a Joyless Leader

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I remember a time in college when I returned home to visit my mom, and she told me about a troubling sight she had just seen. A school bus had stopped at a light beside her, and the faces of sullen and despondent teenagers filled every visible window.

Her voice was soaked in sadness as she explained, “They’re kids, on a Friday afternoon, going home for a long weekend. This is supposed to be an exciting and optimistic time in their lives. They shouldn’t look like they have the weight of the world on their shoulders.”

We lived in an affluent town, and although teen angst can run deep and shouldn’t be trivialized, I doubt few on that bus had many unmet wants.

My mom recalled the joy she had felt as a young woman, enthusiastic to learn what each tomorrow held in store for her. She hinted that bringing a surplus of exuberance into adulthood is helpful because it gets harder and harder to retain or recapture that joy after prolonged exposure to the random blows life inevitably sends your way.

When you see the sad, slack, bovine expressions of listless figures through a window, or perhaps in your bathroom mirror, you’re not looking at purposeful people motivated by an exciting and worthwhile goal. You see disillusionment, worry, and fear which are horrible expressions to have painted across anyone’s face. Discouragement and demoralization do not suddenly appear. They are signs of erosion, put there by constant exposure to negative elements which rob people of their faith and ingenuity, and insidiously stifles early talent with ridicule, disdain, or worse, indifference.

Some of the teens who carried those gloomy expressions my mom saw, may have recaptured the joy and enthusiasm she spoke of, but many, dare I guess most, have not. Today, they are your doctors, bankers, teachers, professors, police officers, city planners, elected officials, cubicle dwellers and leaders influencing others, for better or worse.

People who are disillusioned, discouraged and chronically disappointed with where they are in life make lousy leaders. They can systematically erode the optimistic possibilities held by others. Sadly, with their influence they are, through ignorance more than intent, creating a new generation of lousy leaders. That cycle must stop.

I believe happiness and purposefulness come about by the active pursuit of a worthy goal, therefore if you want to be happy you should never be without a great goal.

I believe most people know what they want to contribute to society, but lack the confidence and support to pursue their dreams.

I believe great listeners create great leaders, artists, and entrepreneurs; and when you learn to listen, particularly to yourself, epiphanies become common.

I believe accountability raises both your game and your aim. You achieve more when you are held accountable for your decisions and your actions.

I believe good leadership can eradicate despondency from the faces and hearts of the disillusioned and dissipate its corrosive effect on the world at large.

Imagine if every woman, man, and child you know had at least one great goal that they were actively working toward every day? The buzz of energy produced from such productivity, collaboration, and purposefulness would do more than illuminate cities; it would illuminate minds long shrouded in a fog of doubt. It would raise hope, lift spirits, and propel those with a success mindset ever forward. To solve what others thought unsolvable. To achieve what all but a few thought unattainable. To refuse the deferment of dreams long-held, or thoughts long held silent. To try, to fail, to try again, without stigma or scorn.

It is possible.

We may not ever live in a world without conflict, but we cannot call it living if it’s in a world without goals. The best we could do then is exist, and merely existing is not good enough for me, and I doubt it is for you.

What’s your next great goal? Will you pursue it with joy?

This article was first published on Karl Bimshas Consulting.

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Employee Advocacy = Engaged Employees

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A great work environment with happy employees is the start for creating sincere and enduring employee advocates. When people experience a wonderful culture in action and believe in the reputation of their company, they become your most effective spokespeople.

Why Does it Matter?

There is a lot of research out there that supports the direct correlation between employee satisfaction and its impact on customer satisfaction.  When employees are engaged advocates, they will go the extra mile for the customer, seeking out alternate and better ways to deliver service that amazes and delights. These employees don’t mind spending extra time with a customer to ensure their complete satisfaction, has been met, and are more likely to set achievable expectations for customer service delivery and timing.

Additionally, employee advocacy humanizes your brand. It puts a face to the brick and mortar of your business and allows people outside the company to better identify with your people-driven mission. It’s like word-of-mouth advertising… a very powerful weapon in the war for customer satisfaction and their dollars.

What’s in it for Employees?

Empowerment allows employees to become stakeholders by having them take part in decision-making processes. This empowerment enables them to take responsibility for their role and manage their behaviors and outcomes.  A culture of trust allows people to do their job, autonomously. Employees want to create their own successes, and with that find greater satisfaction in themselves and with the culture around them.

Feedback is a powerful tool in the workplace. It enables people to see how they contribute to the bigger picture of the organization. It’s important for each employee to see how her specific role impacts the organization. Show employees, directly, how their work is improving customer retention, profitability, or the metric that is most closely related to their position. This will motivate them in their jobs, in attainable goals, and increase their engagement.

Skills and knowledge training provides the growth and expansion employees need to keep improving and advancing in their careers. Challenge them to find learning opportunities that can be applied to their jobs and allow them to put this new-found knowledge to work. The empowerment and satisfaction they can reap from this experience will encourage them to look forward to future learnings to continue growing their skills and knowledge.

Collaboration across an organization opens the door to team spirit and engages people at a more root level because they believe every employee is approachable for conversation. Being able to collaborate on projects with colleagues will increase employee engagement, and make the projects more satisfying and effective allowing employees to ideate, give peers feedback and bring solutions to the forefront. In other words, to take ownership.

Why You Need Advocates

Employees who are advocates for their organization cast a wider net not only inside the organization but externally, as well. They reach a larger audience and position themselves as the voice of the organization. They will increase your brand engagement with potential new customers and employees, which from a monetary value, can save companies dollars in advertising and marketing promotions. As engaged employees, advocates are tremendous agents and defenders of your company’s reputation, again positioning themselves as a voice for their employer. Further, research has shown that employee advocates can increase the stock value of organizations by over two and a half times versus organizations that do not support employee advocacy and engagement.

Creating Advocacy

Focus on your culture to understand how employees view the company. To truly understand how successful an advocacy program will work, you first need to understand what people are thinking. If you guess you may guess wrong and that could produce a myriad of consequences. Leadership needs to have the courage to ask, “What do you like and dislike about working here?” This information is gold to the wise employer. With this in hand, set out to better understand what your employees are seeing and that may even include how they view the leadership within the organization. Be prepared to leave your ego at the door, as the feedback may be a wake-up call for management, but if the goal is to create a better workplace, recognition of what works and what is failing miserably must be addressed.

Communication is key here. Employees are inspired by leadership that is open and authentic with communications. Strong leadership that has a clear idea of the company’s direction will be viewed much more favorably than a waffling leader that is out of touch with the company’s mission. When communications flow back and forth between leadership and the employee population, the likelihood of misunderstandings and mistakes lessens.

Measure the results. Whenever possible, track the metrics that will gauge the outcomes of employee advocacy. For example, if increased customer retention is the goal, design a program to determine what a successful outcome will be. Communicate this goal to your employees, then provide them with the resources and opportunities to explore and expand on their knowledge and skills in support of the goal. By tracking the data, you can adjust how you communicate and incentivize your employee advocacy initiatives for future goals.

Trust and Opportunity

Organizations need to believe in their employees and want to help them to promote the organization, but first they need to give them good reasons. Pressuring them rather than encouraging them will not work. Advocacy needs to flow naturally for it to be believable. Leadership can, however, empower employees with knowledge and tools to promote the benefits. With a minimal amount of direction, companies can offer opportunities for employees to exercise their bragging rights in a public, social way. I know of companies that had business cards printed for each employee so if that person was interacting in a social setting and felt the opportunity was right, they could hand their business card to potential new customers and even use it as a referral card for job seekers.

Of course, having a set of “Do’s and Don’ts” is helpful so employees understand what would fall outside the parameters of advocacy. No organization can tolerate proprietary information being shared with people outside the company, so establishing parameters that address items such as this, is important.

The Dividends

Essentially, the value of having employees who act as brand advocates offers a value next to priceless. What better way to market your organization, espouse the features of your products and spread the word in a social manner that is much less expensive than traditional marketing and advertising.

To me, employee advocacy is when employees look forward to pitching the benefits of their organization and do it because they’re excited and energized, not because they’re specifically prompted by management. What sets these advocates apart from other employees is they’re engaged with their employer and find their workplace environment a satisfying atmosphere where communication and opportunity to grow and collaborate occur with consistency.

And most importantly, organizations need to give employees a reason to advocate for the company. An engaged employee advocate is the best bet you have for increasing customer satisfaction, and to experience business prosperity in an organic manner that is natural and unprompted. And the best aspect is, it’s one of the best methods for retaining valuable talent and attracting more of the same.

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HR Needs Collaboration More Than Ever

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This post has been brought to you in partnership with Microsoft Teams.

At the core of every great organization is one important asset—people. More than any other resource a company holds, it is the talent, passion, and diversity of a company that dictates whether the organization achieves greatness or finds itself stuck in mediocrity.

To find the best talent, companies need to be savvier, faster, and more connected than ever before. Even though there may still be a pool of people seeking work, the best candidates rarely job hunt anymore. When you are great at what you do, the best opportunities usually find you.

To compete in a global economy, it’s more important than ever for HR departments to find—and win—he best talent. Meanwhile, there are a great many forces putting pressure on HR departments to be more tech savvy in order to recruit and retain that talent. Two of the biggest forces at play are remote work and social networks. Note, I say “social networks” and not “social media”—I’ll explain that more in a minute. Both of these factors can help—or hinder—HR directors, depending on how well they understand them.

Remember, great talent is often sought after and recruited away from the competition, so HR directors should focus heavily on retention. It costs less to keep a good employee than to find and onboard a new one. Various studies put the cost of replacing an employee at anywhere from 20 percent up to two times that employee’s annual salary.

For companies looking to keep the awesome talent they spent their valuable resources recruiting, they must create a strong collaborative culture and a role that is worth staying for. For instance, 42 percent of millennials—now the largest demographic in the workforce—say they want weekly feedback. Providing such one-on-one insight, along with mentoring opportunities and focusing on a team mentality are ideal ways to create a collaborative culture in which they will thrive.

It’s also significant to note that 45 percent of millennials surveyed who are willing to leave a job said they would think about other opportunities if their current position didn’t provide a desirable career path. Couple this thought process with the generation’s ability to blend work and life in a functional way, and you have a workforce on the go that seeks stimulation and positive reinforcement. It’s one comprised of highly creative individuals who want to work with their peers, but not necessarily in the same room. The best way to provide that kind of environment? Good collaboration tools.

Collaboration Versus Good Collaboration

While collaboration technologies allow companies to communicate inside their four walls, by and large, most organizations haven’t really tapped into true collaboration. Sending messages to people across your building isn’t really collaboration. It’s just one channel of communication. When I think of collaboration, I think about a set of tools that allows people to connect seamlessly with anyone on the planet, from anywhere they are—with an internet connection, of course. It’s about the ability to share data and files, to be live on video, and to join a call via mobile device and then switch to desktop when you get back to the office. Furthermore, it is about persistent connection and asynchronous communication—meaning we connect with who we want, when we want, where we want, on any device we want. This is evident in leading UC platforms like Microsoft Teams where companies are connected ubiquitously by a vast landscape of communication tools, all connected to and compatible with the Microsoft Office 365 productivity suite. This means no switching between apps, and no compatibility issues with the software you likely use most often in a business environment. Microsoft Teams offers an enterprise-wide, functional, and practical way for employees to work all on one platform, no matter where they are or what device they’re using to access the tools.

Good collaboration sounds selfish, because it enables people the mobility and freedom to meet their own needs and connect in ways most comfortable for them. But really, it’s the most selfless method of engagement, as it offers flexibility, productivity, and innovation at rates old communication methods could never possibly achieve. And this is precisely why the HR department needs collaboration tools more than ever before. HR needs to move fast, deal with diverse work environments, and utilize the tools at their disposal not just for recruitment, but retention as well. Let’s talk a bit more about why HR Tech needs seamless collaboration and how today’s technology tools like Microsoft Teams can help.

Three Reasons HR Tech Needs Collaboration

  1. Remote and Flex Work: Companies are now hiring the best talent from all over the world. Just because someone can’t come into the office doesn’t mean they can’t work as productively as those who do. It is critical that the HR department offers a collaborative environment for all employees and candidates. From day one it should be easy to speak to recruiters, hiring managers, and those influencing the hiring decision.Millennials who have been using smartphones throughout their adult lives expect technology and collaboration in the workplace. In fact, in one survey, 41 percent of millennial workers said they would rather communicate electronically than face to face or via voice calls. Microsoft Teams makes it easy to share resumes and other documents on the popular Office 365 Word platform, make notations on those documents, and share them with a group. By providing this early proof of a collaborative workplace, HR can give candidates confidence in the company’s use of technology. And it will enable those in charge of hiring to engage the candidate strategically. It’s a win-win.
  2. Social Networking: I spoke earlier about the need for companies to move fast. Today we often find the talent we are looking for right within our social networks. However, the shift from interest to conversation can be slow. “Let’s set up a call,” sounds like the typical process. But what about instantaneous action? Or even back channeling contact info to other decision makers in the chain? By collaborating through Microsoft Teams, you can invite someone into Microsoft Teams, begin chatting individually or within a group that includes the candidate and decision makers in your organization, and even jump on a voice or video call using Skype for Business through in seconds.

This process is not about social media—the channel by which information is often spread—but really about expedience within the social network. It’s the ability to grab an interested candidate, and to quickly chat with other decision makers, in order to move things forward faster than the competition can.

  1. Employee Retention: I can’t stress enough the importance of retention. The best talent will always have options, and they will be pursued by companies who seek to work with the best. Keeping your best talent must be a priority. Collaboration tools aid retention, because they help create happy workers by offering flexibility and fostering innovation in the workplace. In fact, 93 percent of millennials said that up-to-date technology is one of the most important aspects of a workplace; 77 percent said “sub-optimal application performance” affected their productivity. Having an enterprise-wide tool that operates on any device with internet access and encourages communication, teamwork, and innovation can help create a collaborative culture within your organization. And that can make the difference between retaining a great employee or watching them get poached by the competition.HR should lead the discussion when it comes to deciding on the tools used within a company to keep employees, management, and customers closely connected no matter what their geographical limitations may be. Tools like Microsoft Teams, which makes it easy to chat, have face-to-face calls, and share documents and ideas, enable and encourage better, faster, more seamless collaboration.

As we head into the future, no matter how advanced technology becomes, a company’s ability to survive and thrive will come down to the talent that they recruit, hire, and retain. With trends like remote work, flex work, and social networking impacting the future of work and the HR Tech space, the companies embracing end-to-end collaboration solutions will be in the strongest position to find and keep the talent that sets them apart from the competition.

Ready to Get Started?
If you are an Office 365 User and you are interested in learning more about how to get started with Microsoft Teams, Microsoft offered this nice simple tutorial.

This article has been brought to you in part by Microsoft Teams. The opinions belong to the author. For more info check out the launch insights from Microsoft

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8 Ways HR Teams Can Use Tech to Encourage Productivity

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Human resource professionals play a crucial role in a business’s success. From designing effective training programs and ensuring a fair hiring process to strategic roles, quality HR is a key aspect of a smooth-running business.

One of the most important roles of an HR professional in 2017 is implementation of new technology within an existing organization and structure. Specifically, in addition to using technology to improve the role of HR itself, HR can incorporate technology to encourage companywide productivity.

Here are eight ways HR teams can use tech to encourage productivity in business.

  1. Streamlined Recruiting Process

Recruiting software can help streamline the hiring process for a business.

From one portal, HR can sort and accept applications, post job ads, manage prospective hires and communicate with upper management on prospective hires. This can save enormous time, compared to tracking hundreds of job applications manually. There are a wide variety of recruiting software options, catered to both small and big businesses alike.

  1. Easier Payroll Processing

Without technology, payroll processing can seem like a nightmare. A single mistake could cost the company significantly. Perhaps more than any HR aspect, technology and software is essential for more efficient and accurate payroll processing.

In addition to making human mathematical errors obsolete, an online payroll service can keep track of deductions, paid time off, paychecks and various aspects of payroll. It also makes filing taxes at the end of each year much easier, since all information is available digitally and is easily sortable.

  1. More Honest Feedback

Company culture is a big part of its success, with research showing that a positive culture boosts performance. A big part of striving toward a great company culture, as well as maintaining it, is transparency and honesty regarding any issues. Employees who are concerned about sharing feedback in fear of repercussions may be holding back vital information that can improve the company.

As a result, HR can use technology to allow for anonymous feedback from employees. Software like TINYpulse enables HR to gather anonymous feedback to gauge employee happiness, while using actionable data to help build a healthy culture. It’s a great tool for fostering a positive company culture, which is a huge part of a successful HR team.

  1. Easier Collaboration

HR departments that incorporate content management software and informatively acquaint employees with it can attain more streamlined collaborative practices.

Content management software allows most employees, or certain selected employees, to gauge the status of a project or task. They can see precisely where they are in regard to the project and what tasks they have left to complete. This can save on time and back-and-forth emails of clarification.

  1. Increased Access to Meaningful Data

With certain tech, HR professionals can give other employees access to meaningful or informative data that can make them better at their jobs. In fact, 80 percent of all data in any organization is unstructured, which is a wasted opportunity for informational efficiency.

Technology like Sapho enables HR to provide access to a variety of data, while still keeping access secure so only those permitted can see it.

  1. Less-Cluttered Employee Onboarding

New employees are obligated to fill out a variety of papers, such as W-4 and I-9 forms. This can create clutter, especially if there’s a wave of new employees.

To increase productivity of HR and new employees alike, using employee onboarding software can help the workers complete paperwork before their first day in the office. This way, they can focus on being welcomed and training on the first day instead of doing annoying paperwork.

  1. Automated Time and Labor Management

There’s no need for traditional clocking in with today’s software. HR can implement automated time and labor management software to make attendance more efficient, while also making it essentially impossible for someone else to check in for an absent co-worker.

The same software can be used to adjust schedules on the fly, preventing scheduling and time mishaps, which improves productivity in the process.

  1. Benefits Management

Full-time employees have a number of benefits that both they and HR must keep track of. Technology can aid in educating employees on their benefits, especially in regard to cumbersome processes like enrollment periods and carrier systems.

Benefits administration software helps both the employee and HR ensure all paperwork for certain benefits are filed, while also informing and educating on what these benefits provide.

These are eight areas that can be streamlined and made more productive by a savvy HR team that recognizes the vast potential and benefits of tech.

Which would you implement first?

 

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Give Employees The Gift Of Well-being

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Undoubtedly, a sense of well-being is one of the precious joys of living. It’s foundational to who we are and what we do. This important underpinning sets us up for success… or failure.

As a business owner, I appreciate the well-being of my employees and understand the value of helping them stay mentally focused, for many reasons, including how well-being affects attitude which in turn affects productivity. There are a variety of ways which companies can contribute to employee well-being.

Pet-friendly Environment

I am a proponent of animal rights so with that, acknowledge the value of my pets and having them with me at work. The benefit of a pet-friendly workplace is becoming recognized by many companies, because the advantages outweigh the cons. According to researchers at the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Business, it was discovered that pets in the workplace actually create a buffer between stressful situations, boost employee morale and increase productivity. Further, in a separate study conducted by Central Michigan University, researchers found that when dogs were present at team meetings, people expressed a greater desire to collaborate and were motivated to find reasons to trust in their fellow collaborators. These are just two studies, there are many more that corroborate these findings.

Note, it’s also important to be sensitive to employees who have health issues or sensitivities to animals, so be cognizant of their needs before implementing a program of this nature.

Flex Hours and Remote Work

Acknowledging that your employees have a full life that includes activities outside of work is a reality smart companies recognize. For example, many people have personal obligations that may conflict with a work schedule of 8am to 5pm, but with some adjustments can still work a full day with different start and stop times.

Flex hours also accommodate individuals who may have special needs. It opens the door to people who may not otherwise have opportunity to be productive, contributing employees. As stated by Denise Tsukayama, Equal Opportunity Officer/ADA Coordinator for the City and County of Honolulu, “While flexwork / telework may be an effective reasonable accommodation for some employees with disabilities, more importantly these accommodations can broaden our efforts in fostering a diverse and inclusive workforce.”

Additionally, not everyone is a “morning person” and with that may have different high productivity times of day. Undoubtedly, all companies want maximum output from their employees, so understanding that all people have a different productivity cadence can save companies millions of dollars a year by simply adjusting employee work hours to coordinate with their high-producing hours.

Some jobs and projects are very focus intensive and with that may be more costly or timely for an organization. Having your employees full attention and focus riveted at these times, can be critical to the success and ultimately to the bottom line of the company.

Work-day Breaks

Workday breaks can offer your employees a short respite to regroup and refocus their energy. Workplace specialists (i.e., ergonomic specialists and organizational psychologists) believe there is a benefit to taking a short break prior to starting a long and complex project. The break gives people a chance to mentally close the work just finished and begin a new project with a clean slate. In terms of productivity, this is a way to jump start a new effort without having a prior work project still looming in the back of the employee’s mind.

Going out to lunch is an extended work-day break with its own set of benefits. In addition to offering a change of venue, this is a great time for a vigorous workout, a leisurely walk, or even a chance to run personal errands. Lunch breaks outside of work, allow people to decompress, listen to music, chat with a fellow walker, or interact with people outside of their place of employment. Companies can help make lunch breaks extra fun by incentivising employees with rewards for their dedication to maintaining a religious schedule of exercise and other activities.

Volunteer Days 

Allowing employees the opportunity to be contributors outside their organization is a wonderful way to encourage charitable service and giving back to a community that supports their employment. Volunteering empowers people to refocus on those less fortunate than themselves, perhaps, and allows them to take great pride in their efforts. It’s immensely gratifying to give back and knowing one’s company supports this outreach speaks fathoms about the organization. It can, also, help people to forge stronger bonds with their employer by representing their organization within the community and to work alongside leadership that may not have happened within the confines of the business walls.

These are a few examples; there are many ways companies can show their human side and understanding. It’s just a matter of making the commitment to support your employees and recognize they are your greatest asset and biggest business relationship. And as with any relationship that is for the long-haul, you will reap what you sow.

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Social Software: Will Leaders Decide To Adapt?

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The key to collaboration is communication: we need to be able to talk to each other to get stuff done. And it’s a compelling facet of the global, hyper-networked, social and mobile new world of work that we are nevertheless in dire need of better ways of communicating with each other.

That’s what makes the emergence of social software such a remarkable and powerful gift — with profound implications for fostering innovation, driving collaboration and deepening engagement. It’s fast and scopey, enabling everything from messaging to team-mailing to live chats to file sharing to all of the usual. Yet as far as user adoption does, the workplace is proving slow on the draw. That’s particularly apparent in HR.

We are not so much at a crossroads as we are at crossed wires. A range of vendors are launching new, powerful products, and the market is growing. According to the McKinsey Global Institute, productivity improves by an estimated 20-25% in organizations that have connected employees. So how do we overcome the “you can lead a horse to water” challenge facing social software?

To facilitate user adoption, social software has to truly enhance and deepen collaboration and engagement. It has to look, feel, and act useful: 

Integrated

Social software has to be more than an addition. It has to be a total solution. It’s an understandable workforce complaint that shiny new platforms may just decentralize communication, requiring the management of increasing layers of inter-office email / outside email, internet / company server, and so on. We want to get things done, not stymied by choices or fractured functionality. To be an asset, social software needs to truly integrate (and not complete) with all of the above.

Really Social

Social software needs to be better: quicker, faster, smarter, more usable than the existing norms. Your social network should have lots of tools for engagement and collaboration, including social profiles, individual and group and community chat and focum capabilities, blogs, wikis, and all the bells and whistles of a bona fide social network. Otherwise, it will be eschewed for those social networks that are already well established (such as the one that has nearly 1.4 billion active users and counting).

One common obstacle to user adoption is feeling like the tech is unable to accomplish any more of the heavy lifting than what we already have. But if social software is not only truly integrated but can also leverage its unique position to generate meaningful intelligence, there’s the added value. That additional layer of perceptive analytics makes adoption a no-brainer, and offers a competitive advantage as well.

Embraced By Leadership

What will enable social software to make the smoothest entry into the atmosphere is its source. This shift must be initiated and mandated by leadership: it should be presented as a clear driver of organizational change, not a byproduct of it. Communication is part and parcel of workplace culture: social software should feel like anything but a trial run. Given the option, we all revert to the norm when we’re under pressure. If leadership makes social software the new normal, the workplace will follow.

The sweet spot lies in not doing away with what we’re used to, just improving upon it. In this age of relentless innovation, the status quo lasts about a minute, and depending on the demographics, that can be trigger a certain level of discomfort. Yet one thing that truly drives employee engagement is a shared sense of discovery — and growth. Given that, social software may truly be our game changer.

A version of this was first posted on Forbes.

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