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Category Archives: Employee Engagement

Thoughts on the Sort of Talent Discussions That Drive Employee Engagement

25 Thursday Aug 2016

Posted by Rory C. Trotter Jr in Employee Engagement, HR Strategy, Talent Management

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

hr, human resources

…Okay, so an article published about a year ago by Ben Whitter titled “Bye, Bye, Human Resources” has been making the rounds on social media. The piece highlights the way that Airbnb has transformed its HR function – with the focus internally moving away from a conventional approach to HR (recruiting/talent management/labor/total rewards etc.) to focus on employee experience. From Whitter’s piece:

Five Circles
 

…HR theoretically has a place in all of the above employee experience circles, but there is one that I really want to talk about, namely Intellectual (Talent Development), and the role that HR (and managers) have to play in developing this circle well.

Specifically, Kris Dunn recently wrote a piece titled “Here’s To the Crazy Ones: And Why You Don’t Deserve Them” here wherein he talked about the performance review process. From the piece (bold highlights mine):

… The reason you do any type of coaching or performance management is to migrate employees.   If you’re going to do it, you want a system that allows you to support migrating new employees to good performers, and good performers to great employees.

You don’t get there by focusing on the rating scale.  That doesn’t migrate anyone.  You get there by using performance management as a means to have a different type of conversation – one that gets an employee thinking and perhaps excited about taking care of the busy work that’s a part of any job, then having time to come up with some different ideas.

…What does great performance look like?  I think it means that you encourage employees to challenge the status quo.  Of course, if you’re going to encourage that, you better be comfortable telling people that their idea sucks and they need to go back to the drawing board.

…Start having conversations with your best people about what’s possible.  It’s funny how those types of conversations and the exploration that results are actually the best retention tool for your top talent.

^This is powerful for two reasons: (1) because it highlights that a key reason HiPo employees stay with their companies is because they enjoy the type of work they do (above a certain level, pay stops being the primary driver for most), and (2) because it highlights that a collaborative process like this can really only happen if an organization has a culture that encourages both innovation and constructive feedback. Ultimately both (1) mission and (2) feedback are integral to any performance management and talent development process or else it’s doomed to fall apart.

…Concerning point #2 (feedback), Tim Sackett has a really good article on the topic here, but the most relevant component is below:

 …No one cares about what you have to say, unless it’s telling them how good they are.

People can’t handle critical feedback, unless it’s set up in a mechanism where they expect it and desire it.  That’s the crux, hardly anyone has that mechanism and while most people tell you they want critical feedback they don’t have the makeup to handle it.

Here are the types of “critical” feedback people can handle:

“You’re doing a good job, would love it if you could get that big project off the ground. That would really help us out!”

Here’s what you really want to say, critically, but can’t:

“You do good at things I tell you to do, and all basic day to day duties of the job. I need more from this position and from you, and I’m willing to help get you there. I need someone who can take a project from scratch and kill it, without me having to babysit the entire thing. You’re not doing that, and that’s what I really need you to do. Are you willing do that?”

Same message, right?  You do some stuff good, but one critical aspect of the job is not getting done. The problem is, the first level feedback is given 99.9% of the time, because managers and leaders know if you deliver the second level, that person will be destroyed!

They’ll think you think they suck, and they’ll start looking for a job.  When in reality, you were just trying to give them legitimate feedback. Real feedback. Something that would actually help them reach expectations.

^One of the best ways that we can enhance employee experience as a function is continue to develop the mechanisms in which employees are (1) encouraged to innovate / perform and (2) are given candid, actionable feedback on how they can get better in both areas.

…I will be the first person to admit I can get better at the above (as both a manager and in supporting my client group). Because while I go to great lengths to encourage new ideas, collaboration, and dialogue… I sometimes struggle with giving people the feedback they need to move their ideas along (or else take them back to the drawing board). This is partly because I recognize that I personally over-correct in response to constructive feedback (and so try to avoid giving feedback that could cause others to do the same), and partially because as a glass-half-full type I tend to focus on what is going well as opposed to what could be going better.

That said, regardless of where one sits on this continuum, as we continue to spearhead HR transformation efforts that focus on scaling our capabilities and those of our clients, the opportunity to enhance the vehicles through which we continue innovation and deliver constructive feedback have got to remain top of mind.

…I think. -_-

Happy Thursday all. As always, let me know what I got wrong in the comments below.

Best,

Rory

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Infographic Thursday: The Business Case For Recognition

10 Thursday Sep 2015

Posted by Rory C. Trotter Jr in Benefits, Employee Engagement, Infographic Thursday

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

employee engagement, engagement, hr, human resources, recognition

Check out the below infographic from O.C. Tanner laying out the business case for recognition. Be it increased tenure, engagement, or productivity, the value proposition here is clear. As always, if you like this infographic then be sure to follow its author on Twitter here. And if you want to drill even further into the data highlighted in the below infographic, follow this link to download a white paper that will tell you more about it!

Infographic-Business-Case-for-Recognition1

Best,

Rory

P.S. Something Different HR was named one of the best HR Blogs of 2015 by Promotions Now. Check them out here.

A Few Thoughts on Socializing Expectations Around Feedback

08 Tuesday Sep 2015

Posted by Rory C. Trotter Jr in Employee Engagement, Talent Management

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

engagement, feedback, hr, human resources

…Okay, so this evening I read a great piece from Josh Bersin on LinkedIn entitled Employee Feedback is the Killer App: A New Market Emerges. It’s probably the best piece I have read about employee engagement and feedback in, well, ever. I highly recommend checking it out here. Starting with a visual, though, check out the below graphic – per research from Workboard – which shows the correlation between feedback and engagement:

Feedback Deloitte

^So for many people this is intuitive. People like to be told how they’re doing, and they especially like to be told they’re doing a good job. But of course this is easier said than done. The age old problem is coming up with a way to regularly deliver both positive (and constructive) feedback in a way that helps teams get the best out of one another.

Bersin recommends tacking this challenge through a combination of pulse surveys, anonymous feedback tools (for delivering constructive feedback), conducting cultural assessment diagnostics, and social recognition. He emphasizes that there isn’t really a right or wrong approach for any individual company – the tools a company uses to move the needle on feedback and the form that feedback takes in large part depends on the organization.

…The cool thing about all of these tools though is that are they are speaking to three basic truths about human beings (in both work and personal contexts):

  1. We each respond to and deliver feedback differently based on how we’ve been socialized
  2. Everyone has their own rules of conduct (what they believe is right/wrong)
  3. We all (to an extent) have a desire to feel like we’re included (and that we’re adding value)

^There are a ton of great tools out there to help us address these realities about people in the pursuit of greater engagement in the workplace… but at the end of the day all of these tools are simply helping us to (I) understand one another’s values, and (II) establish rules and conduct for collaborating/communicating to bring the best out of one another while respecting those values. Coming up with vehicles to accomplish these two goals doesn’t feel all that daunting, right?

…It’s 7:30 PM so I may be oversimplifying this (in which case I may revisit later), but I wanted to share this piece and a few thoughts here. Please let me know what I got wrong in the comments section below.

Best,

Rory

Examining the Impact of Expectations Management on Retention

08 Friday May 2015

Posted by Rory C. Trotter Jr in Employee Engagement, Talent Management

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

hr, human resources

<www.simplicant.com

…So I have been thinking a lot about retention lately – specifically about how two people with similar careers and backgrounds can be in the exact same 1. I wondered about the etymology of the phrase “Happy as a Lark” as I wrote this. For the curious, it is originally “Derived from comparison to the seemingly cheerful birdsong of a lark. I’d never considered Lark’s to have especially cheerful sounds, but also can’t place the sound right now. The more you learn…”roles… but one person can be happy as a lark 1 while the other becomes miserable enough to ultimately leave the organization. And from there I started to think about what a massive role the management of expectations plays on talent retention: From the time we recruit talent as external hires to the time they leave the organization, their engagement and intent to stay is basically driven by how closely what an employee expects a company to do lines up with what they actually do.

For example(s): Did an employee agree to join your organization at 20% below what he/she made previously? Okay, fine, but what were their expectations around what would happen with their salary down the line (and did you meet them)? Or conversely, what about that employee that joined your firm even though it meant moving to an undesirable town? Does he/she expect to move somewhere better in two years? …Or how about that rock star individual contributor you love? Does he/she expect to be in their role for much longer before getting a new title/being put in a people manager job etc.? How about that employee that you transferred into a cross-functional role as a stretch? Does he/she view it as adding value for his/her career?

…I think that leaders in organizations the world over make a lot of talent decisions like the ones above everyday involving without knowing the expectations of their people. But I also think leaders that understand what their talent wants still often make the just as harmful mistake of identifying the aspirations without setting reachable goal posts and appropriate expectations.

Basically, an effective employee talent retention strategy needs to do three things:

1. Identify employee career desires and clearly define the KSAs and critical experiences required to reach their next move

2. Provide an overview for all employees of the potential career paths available internally and the corresponding abundance (or lack) of opportunities for each pathway

3. Make a concerted effort to open doors for move-ready talent

^Organizations that do these things well win the talent management game because they (i) don’t make hires whose career expectations they can’t meet, (ii) know through their talent review process what employees are prospective retention risks before they reach a point where they’re ready to move on and (iii) develop a deep bench of employees that are ready and willing to move into new opportunities as they open up.

…This stuff doesn’t happen over night, though. It requires top-down commitment throughout the organization to having aspirational conversations with all employees, outlining a realistic development plan to get them to their desired next step, and then (most importantly) creating opportunities for people once they’re ready. For organizations that are in the early stages of this process (i.e. they don’t even know what their employees want yet) this can seem like a daunting task, but when done well a company should have a deep enough talent pipeline that going external is mostly limited to campus/entry-level hires and the top of the house where leadership opportunities become so scarce that you lose talented people as a matter of course.

I have more to write on this… but I need to think on it some more. Just a Friday thought stream…

Please share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Rory

10 Company Culture Killers

06 Wednesday May 2015

Posted by Rory C. Trotter Jr in Employee Engagement, Talent Management

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

hr, human resources

Check out this great infographic from Office Vibe highlighting some of the biggest company culture killers seen in offices today. And as always, if you like this infographic you can follow it’s author on Twitter here:

infographic-company-culture-killers.png

Best,

Rory

What Young People Really Want Out of Work…

11 Wednesday Jun 2014

Posted by Rory C. Trotter Jr in Employee Engagement, Talent Management

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

hr, human resources, pay, work life balance

<chrisguillebeau.com

<chrisguillebeau.com>

…So this morning I read a great post from China Gorman examining what attributes millennials most value in the workplace. You can read the full piece here, but in short it draws from research looking at the “best places to work” as judged by survey respondents to identify what benefits the top employers have in common.

Topping the list of great workplace features are fair pay, say in decisions, and competent management, while features that we might expect to top the list (such as self-expression and work-life balance) fall closer to the center.

I shared this piece today because it highlights a reality that is not necessarily intuitive but is nonetheless true: We all want basically the same things at work. As a millennial myself, I can say that this list doesn’t surprise me a bit. If I could have added something to it as table stakes I might have also included “somewhat clearly defined timelines around advancement”, but that’s it. Most of my peers are the same way.

Organizations are spending a fortune trying to engage their workforce, but most recent college grads just want to pay off their student loans (while still having enough to buy the things important to them) and to have a sense of agency at work. A good manager is a definite plus.

What do you guys think? Gorman points out that some of the items more conventionally associated with things millennials value may be lower down the list partly because organizations have done a better job across the board of implementing them. Food for thought…

As always, please share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Best,

Rory

Leveraging the Power of Influencers to Implement Change

07 Wednesday May 2014

Posted by Rory C. Trotter Jr in Change Management, Employee Engagement

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

change, change management, hr, human resources, influencers

<thegoodcoach.squarespace.com

<thegoodcoach.squarespace.com>

We all know one (or more) of them: They seem to have a pulse on everything of significance going on in their department and/or the organization. They may or may not have formal authority (usually not), but they can nevertheless make things happen with relative ease. They serve as bellwethers for how the wind is blowing, and in some cases even serve as catalysts to guiding it in one direction or another.

…I am talking about influencers, and according to an article in McKinsey Quarterly organizations should be doing a lot more to leverage their clout and insights when implementing changes across the enterprise than they currently are. Unfortunately, right now most organizations don’t even know who their key influencers are.

In their piece, Mckinsey advocates using snowball sampling – a non-probability statistical sampling technique wherein future survey subjects are selected by referral from existing subjects – to identify key influencers in the organization and bring them into the fold as organizational change agents. The idea is that a company asks survey participants questions like “Whose advice do you trust and respect?” and then identifies key influencers by seeing which names come up over and over again. These people are then asked to join key committees and teams tasked with architecting and/or communicating large-scale programs and initiatives throughout the design process and implementation phase.

…Does this sound Machiavellian? Perhaps it is… a little. But I would also argue that change efforts are often excruciating when rolled out poorly; ergo, if they are inevitable in healthy organizations then it serves the best interests of everyone in the company to ensure such efforts are rolled out only with the feedback and collective buy-in of the entire workforce.

What do you think of this concept? Would your organization consider putting together such committees? Does it already? How have they been received?

As always, please share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Best,

Rory

Building Employee Engagement on Internal Social Platforms

09 Wednesday Apr 2014

Posted by Rory C. Trotter Jr in Employee Engagement, Social Media

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

hr, human resources, social media channels

<www.socialmediaexplorer.com

<www.socialmediaexplorer.com>

Eric Openshaw, John Hagel, and John Seely Brown have an interesting article up on Dupress; it espouses the value of social media as a tool to utilize communication channels throughout an enterprise to both enhance the value of internal analytics and drive business outcomes. This is a fairly involved read, but if you have a few minutes I highly recommend checking it out here.

…So the paper itself does a fairly good job of laying out the business case for investing into social. It shows that when a large percentage of an organization’s employee population actively participates in local social network(s), the data they create often allows the firm to conduct promising analyses which may ultimately be leveraged to drive organizational performance. Social communities can also serve as repositories for data that colleagues can reference to troubleshoot recurring problems which may have come up in the past. As an example:

…Sales associates at Avaya, the provider of business collaboration and communications software and services, use Socialcast microblogs to tap into what their peers are saying. A sales associate who encounters an exception can search conversations on Socialcast to see if anyone else has dealt with a similar situation. This easy access to institutional memory saves time. If the associate does not find a discussion about a similar exception, he or she can post a question to the group, eliminating the time-consuming process of identifying the right person or e-mailing a massive list-serve and receiving redundant responses.

In theory, I love the idea of leveraging enterprise social data to both identify casual relationships that drive performance and increase the net efficiency of teams by providing a community resource that individual contributors can use when facing down difficult problems. Conversely, another part of me says that in some cases practical application here isn’t always plausible. 

The article cites implementation success stories like cloud infrastructure provider VMWare; the company successfully scaled participation on their social channel via targeted engagement initiatives, increasing engagement from 73% to 95% over 9 months. This is really impressive, but I wonder how much the demographic of the workforce played into the firm’s ability to successfully grow engagement here. To this point, when it comes to adopting social technology internally, don’t workforce demographics have to impact the implementation strategy? I’m not sure. But having been part of engagement efforts for such communities before, I’ve found the process of increasing participation to be more art than science.

Has your company ever rolled out an internal social platform? If so, how did its leaders generate buy-in (and if they didn’t what are some of the reasons they weren’t successful)?

As always, please share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Best,

Rory

When is it Too Late to Reengage Talent?

19 Wednesday Feb 2014

Posted by Rory C. Trotter Jr in Employee Engagement

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

hr, human resources

Image Credit: <www.i4cp.com

Image Credit: <www.i4cp.com>

…So I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately:

People leave their companies for lots of reasons. Money, lack of clearly defined opportunities, uncertainty about the future…

…But it’s a gradual process in most cases, right? Apathy, resentment, and disillusionment are cultivated over time. Which means there is a tipping point between that initial frustration and the moment an employee mentally leaves their organization.

As HR professionals, when we see the signs that an employee is not engaged how do we know if it’s too late to bring them back into the fold or not?

Does it even matter? Isn’t it always our job to try?

Or maybe… it’s sometimes in the best interests of all parties involved to move on.

As always, please share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Best,

Rory

Using Gameification to Improve Workforce Performance and Engagement

23 Monday Sep 2013

Posted by Rory C. Trotter Jr in Employee Engagement, General HR, Learning and Development, Talent Management

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

hr, human resources

Image Credit: <www.greenbookblog.org

Image Credit: <www.greenbookblog.org>

That post title is a mouthful, so first things first: What is gamification? Distilled into one sentence, it’s the use of game mechanics to improve task performance and facilitate learning by leveraging the human desire for competition/achievement/self-expression etc. To really get a richer understanding of the topic I would encourage you to read the wiki here.

Associating rewards with difficult tasks is critical to creating optimal learning and development outcomes. Image Credit: <technorati.com

Associating rewards with difficult tasks is critical to creating optimal learning and development outcomes. Image Credit: <technorati.com>

With that said, as a compensation professional, huge education proponent, and advocate of following one’s passion(s) I am fascinated by gamification as a concept. 

From a workplace compensation standpoint, gamification is at core a form of intrinsic reward. Properly implemented into a company’s compensation strategy, gamification provides recognition and remuneration for reaching milestones, performance measurement, constant feedback etc. Maybe more importantly, gamification can make otherwise mundane tasks engaging, in the process contributing to the creation of a happier workforce. This can in turn lead to all sorts of benefits across an organization (for example higher workforce productivity and improved retention). Additionally, from a learning and development vantage point gamification can potentially improve workforce training outcomes by associating rewards with otherwise banal tasks.

…To this point I suppose one problem I have with gamification is that (I believe) in principle people should follow their passions: If you need to have core material relevant to your profession gameified in order to engage with it then you should probably be in another profession

…Conversely, not every job or task is innately enjoyable; furthermore not everyone is willing to put in the time and effort often required to harness their 1. The true price of not working hard to cultivate one’s passion(s) into skill(s) with compensable value is a lifetime of boredom.passions into something with compensable value. 1 In these instances organizations must make the choice to find a way to make uninteresting work more engaging, or else deal with middling productivity and high turnover. Faced with these options engagement (and perhaps in the same vein gamification) is the obvious answer; but the challenge of identifying undesirable jobs and then implementing an effective gamification strategy across an affected workforce or enterprise can potentially become so time consuming and costly as to be prohibitive.

As such, an organization looking to implement a gamification strategy across any segment of its employee population needs to have a clearly defined understanding of what it is trying to accomplish – and how it will measure success (effective data tracking and useful metrics are key here).

I want to think on this some more, but wanted to share my thoughts on the subject this morning.

As always, please share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Best,

Rory

If you have questions about something you’ve read here (or simply want to connect) you can reach me at any of the following addresses: 

SomethingDifferentHR@gmail.com OR rorytrotter86@gmail.com

@RoryCTrotterJr

http://www.linkedin.com/in/roryctrotterjr

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