Empowering Employees: Tips to Retain Top Talent
September 4, 2018 | Posted in Leading Hartfully, Living Hartfully | By Gaia Hart
Try engaging employees by aligning their passions and values with your organization and supporting their need to be a part of the community and have a heart at work. Two of my past clients, Fannie Mae and Washington Mutual offer several hours per month for each employee to provide community service and volunteer activities of their choice to help provide goodwill in the community. Having each employee choose their project provides them with more choice over their time instead of the organization selecting a neighborhood cleanup or other project where the hearts and heads of the staff may not be so concerned. Give your team choices and they will give you their best effort.
- Ensure that recognition is timely and immediately follows their accomplishment
- Praise individuals versus entire groups – it carries more meaning when each person is singled out for exactly what they did instead of telling the whole group ‘they done good’
- Be specific in your praise and highlight details of the accomplishment to show you noticed and understand what they did
- Write a note home to the team member’s family telling the family of the staff member’s accomplishments
- Give recognition that was actually earned to make it more meaningful and avoid giving acknowledgement before it was actually earned in order to motivate an employee
- Give a welcome party for a new team member instead of throwing them a party only when they leave
- Sincerity is a key ingredient to the success of any recognition gesture. Actions lose their effectiveness when done in a tone of insincerity and if you spell names incorrectly or get dates wrong.
- Employees feel most productive when they feel their contributions are valued and their feedback is welcomed by management.
- An unsupportive atmosphere can lead to reduced performance levels and higher turnover for business.
- Another poll by Maritz Research found dissatisfaction with the way employers offer recognition. The survey of 1001 adults nationwide found 34% of them do not feel they are recognized for their work performance in ways that are important to them. Only 40% felt they were adequately recognized.
- Other findings indicated 26% of employees are unhappy with the way they are managed and 32% intend to change jobs.
- Accountemps, an international staffing services firm conducted a recent worker satisfaction survey and found that 43% of executives from large firms believe that an employee’s relationship with their manager has the greatest impact on job satisfaction – far more than any other factor.
- 5 tips to combat the uninspired, unchallenged worker who is wasting away:
- Spot It – perform stress audits and appraisals regularly
- Prevent It – match the right people to the right job for a better fit with skills and challenges – screen new hires for a better fit
- Lead It – don’t allow this type of culture in your organization – be aware of prevention
- Confess It – take a look at your own behavior and role modeling and if your attitude is slipping
- Risk It – revisit your purpose at work and your definition of success and take some calculated risks to put you on the edge of vitality again
What are you doing to inspire and empower your employees? What is keeping them from walking? A Deloitte Millennial survey found that 70% of Millennials see themselves as working independently one day? What are you doing to encourage them to stay?
Tips to Attract & Retain Your Top Talent
May 4, 2018 | Posted in Leading Hartfully | By Gaia Hart
Winning and keeping the bright stars of today requires and understanding of the shift in values and changing expectations to today’s workforce. Some of the key elements in attracting and retaining your top talent are:
* Offering a flexible way to work that allows for personal and professional work/life balance. Time spent on the job in a year has increased by 163 hours in the last 20 years, which equates to about one month per year, while our leisure time has declined by about 30%. More and more entry-level professionals are willing to give up salary in exchange for less work hours to help balance their lives. Some research indicates that it is possible to cut turnover by 50% by introducing such programs as: eldercare programs, flextime, alternate work schedules, dependent care leave, counseling, childcare subsidies, commuter subsidies.
* Tie your organizational mission to a deeper meaning so workers can gain a deeper sense of cause and meaningful work. Many employees want to make a difference more than anything – it comes up near the top of many motivational surveys. Create a sense of community among workers by giving them time to be a part of something other than their job position.
* Allow for socializing, learning, volunteering, chairing teams, and setting up your environment to compel integration of all workers and allow for interaction and brainstorming. One high-tech engineering firm in Virginia hosts Technology Tuesdays with free lunch and learn sessions on the latest gadgets or techno stuff. They also offer cookies and milk on Wednesday afternoons so employees can take a break and gather around for a quick break. One financial services company allows workers a certain number of hours off per quarter to volunteer for their favorite community cause.
* Offer personal and professional development at all levels. Allow employees to choose the training they think would benefit them and the company most. Give access to training catalogs and let them choose or work it out with their budgets so they get to decide what to cut if something else is important enough to attend. When people feel valued, they stick around. That goes with customers, employees, and personal relationships. When we don’t feel valued, understood, and listened to – we walk.
How Does Your Organization Measure Up in Employee Satisfaction?
May 4, 2017 | Posted in Leading Hartfully, Living Hartfully | By Gaia Hart
Time to take a hard look at the hard questions and maybe experience some of the hard facts that workers are not all that happy. Better to know now and do something about it than to wait until they jump ship to find out in their exit interview how you screwed up. You are doing exit interviews, aren’t you?
Answer these questions provided by the Forum for People Performance Management and Measurement to see how your organization measures up.
- Are employees empowered to service customers at the highest possible level?
- Does the company recognize the role of employees in retaining customers?
- Is the performance of employees regularly measured?
- Are internal communications truly aligned with external marketing initiatives?
- Does the company’s overall corporate objective include human resource and motivation issues?
- Is the company committed to employee development and training?
- Are employees encouraged to provide feedback and given the tools to do so?
- Is employee feedback incorporated into planning and operations?
- Can the company demonstrate a link between people performance management and sales and profit?
In an annual survey conducted by the Society of Human Resource Management, here are the results concerning work-life programs in corporate America today:
- 57% of companies now offer flextime to their employees
- 56% have wellness programs
- 36% allow telecommuting
- 20% have on-site fitness centers
- 19% offer stress-reduction tips to workers
- 13% offer massage therapy
When employees feel included when they feel a sense of belonging to an organization, when their personal values and goals are in alignment with the organizational values. In order to gain a maximum sense of involvement and engagement in an organization, here are some elements that need to be present to foster dedication, retention, and productivity:
- Intrinsic personal interest and worthwhile work
- Challenge and stimulation
- Significance
- Influence
- Creativity
- Independence
- Control
- Income
- Security
- Personal involvement
- Recognition
- Positive environment
24% of 1000 workers surveyed said they were chronically angry at work. The most common reason cited was a sense that their employers “violated basic promises” and didn’t fulfill “the expected psychological contract with their workers”. The anger problem remains mostly underground and workers simply lose interest in work and become lethargic and uncooperative. What is going on in your office to undermine expectations?
Ask burned-out employees (or less than enthusiastic family members) “What do you really want from your job/school/your life/this family?”. Write down 25 quick answers to help jostle them into thinking about their interests and desires so they can look for a way to pursue them through work/school/family life.
So how does your organization measure up? Are you incorporating these types of things into your environment? If you have other ideas that are working for you, let me know at Gaia@GaiaHart.com.
Love ‘Em, Don’t Lose ‘Em
April 4, 2017 | Posted in Leading Hartfully, Living Hartfully | By Gaia Hart
I’m intrigued about the topic of corporate kindness and how being nice can actually be a competitive advantage. In The Power of Nice: How to Conquer the Business World with Kindness by Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval, they explain how friendliness and common courtesy along with how you look affects people’s moods and attitudes towards you. Cheerfulness and being polite and respectful spreads more easily than irritability and facial expressions and body language convey more relevant information than a sales pitch.
It’s all about the notion of consequences and karma – people may forget what you say, but they never forget how you made them feel. They remember acts of kindness as well as rudeness. After all, isn’t business and all of the world about relationships and how we connect with others be it inside or outside our organization?
Another book, The Kindness Revolution: The Company-Wide Culture Shift That Inspires Phenomenal Customer Service by Ed Horrell identifies how companies with stellar street reps for service excellence practice extreme kindness, respect, fairness and genuine niceties. He notes that the opposite of kindness isn’t being mean, it’s indifference. When indifference sets in, then it gives people a bad experience and in a world of choices, the customer (internal or external) chooses to walk. In fact, you can say that about any relationship – when indifference and disrespect and unkindness sets in, most people walk.
With a little more corporate kindness and consideration, I would argue that we would have many more gruntled workers than disgruntled workers. And we could actually save lives…one statistic form the Department of Labor cites that the #2 killer of workers on the job is homicide by a disgruntled colleague or customer. What are you doing to impart kindness in your daily activities? What are you doing to add light to the world? What are you doing to save a life today?
- Some tips from Love ‘Em, Don’t Lose ‘Em on keeping good people:
- Support personal and professional growth – are you building their future or are you a barrier
- Enrich the job function – do they have to leave to find growth, excitement, and challenge
- Is your worksite family friendly – do they have to choose between family life and work life or can they balance both
- Expand options for advancement – there are five career paths other than up
- Create opportunities for challenge, learning, growth, fun, enthusiasm, ownership, and a chance to feel valued – if they don’t find it inside, they will seek it outside
- Become a better listener – they want to tell their story and they want to know they matter and that somebody cares – when you tune out, you lose out and they move out
- Share the power, share the wealth, share the knowledge, share the praise, share the celebrations, and tell the truth
- Keep in mind the worth ethic when creating a work ethic in your organization. From the book Work to Live: The Guide to Getting a Life, Joe Robinson discusses how the operative ethic in our lives should be our worth ethic. “Measure the madness around you by whether it has worth for you, instead of whether you are worthy enough to take the ceaseless beating. Does it bring you significance, satisfaction, a sense of accomplishment, contribution, challenge? Or does it cut you off from sources of internal worth, isolate you, and sabotage your health? That’s not worth it, no matter the dough.”
Clients Comment on Morale-Boosting Ideas
October 4, 2016 | Posted in Leading Hartfully | By Gaia Hart
I often get ideas from clients on how they boost morale in their organizations. Here are some of their ideas along with some tidbits I’ve picked up on how to enhance your work experience to live and lead Hartfully:
- Have a mascot for the office who can wear the official badge, pin, or t-shirt of the department. This can be a stuffed animal or beanbag character. Other departments have been known to kidnap the mascot and hold them ransom for pizza or candy. Sometimes the mascot sits at the reception desk to oversee visitors – it adds some playful professionalism.
- One payroll professional wore a crown and a sash that say Payroll Queen when she personally distributed paycheck stubs to the team.
- One accounting firm offered free 15-minute seated massages during the month of April when their team was particularly overworked.
- A city recreation department’s executives hosted a breakfast cooked by them for their organization to kick off the summer staff meeting.
- Another recreation department used some of their own staff in a training film with the theme of COPS – catching frontline personnel staging bad customer service for the film. They also interviewed colleagues about what they thought was good service and the best part about the film was the bloopers and outtakes that they added to the end of the film. The audience went wild as they saw their co-workers goof up and be themselves in front of the cameras.
- The admin staff at a physics lab gets together for weekly lunches during the summer to create fresh salads made from the gardens of the workers with a recipe from an Italian grandmother.
- In similar fashion – another office hosts a cookie exchange over the holidays to expand on the variety of cookies each household offers without all the work of baking different cookies. They take it one step further and deliver extra plates of cookies to the local fire department, police station, and nursing home.
- Special Events Magazine reports that two-thirds of respondents to an online poll believe that in-person interaction tops technology as a communications tool. Some 66 percent of respondents said that technology-video conferencing, Webcasting and the like-is not as effective for communication in meetings as is in-person communication.
- Eliminating just fifteen wasted minutes each day adds up to ninety-one extra hours a year, more than two full workweeks. Organize and energize your space, your stuff, and your life to gain valuable time you can use for more fun in your life.
- Ask yourself what is the best use of your time right now and then act on it.
- Create systems that work with your preferences for sorting papers and stuff – try horizontal surfaces and vertical surfaces for storage bins.
- Look at your time you have allotted for a project and then add to it – things usually take longer than you plan.
- Put your personal and professional appointments on one calendar to avoid double-booking yourself.
- Finally, decide right now to think FAT: file, allocate (give to someone else), or toss.
- Findings in a recent USA Today article: HR experts say employees exposed to stresses such as layoffs are more likely to engage in violent behavior. Nearly 35% of workers say they’ve seen an increase in anxiety and stress-related physical ailments in their workplace in the last year. 27% report a rise in emotional problems such as insomnia and depression.
Top Reasons for Turnover
September 4, 2016 | Posted in Leading Hartfully | By Gaia Hart
After spending a few decades studying employee recognition, resilience, workplace culture, personal energy and organizational moral. I’ve compiled some fun facts on the issues and top reasons for turnover:
- give meaningless raises
- give insincere thank you’s
- throw them into jobs without training or qualifications
- allow a disorganized, dirty workplace
- freak out by visits from authority
- my way or the highway – because I’m the boss
- overlook unacceptable behavior – inconsistent discipline
- ignore opinions and ideas from staff
- lack of feedback
- micromanage
- and…… drum roll please……. ugly uniforms (who knew?!)
- A Fast Company magazine reader poll asked for the wish list of their subscribers and questioned whether they would prefer dollars or downtime as a reward for a job well done. 61% said they would give up some of their pay for more time with their family. 39% said they would give up some pay for less stress. 59% of men said that given an extra hour, they would spend it with their family. 6% said they would spend the extra hour on work.
- In another Fast Company reader poll: 10% of Americans say stress-induced physical violence has occurred in their workplace. 42% have experienced yelling and verbal abuse in their workplace. 52% sometimes have to work more than 12 hours a day to get their job done. 26% say it’s time for their employer to redecorate. So if you’re spending so much time at work and getting yelled at to do it – you may as well be in a nice environment for most of those hours. The civility of colleagues sometimes goes out the door when placed under stress. When things get heated, be aware of the humanity in the workplace and consciously try to keep it in the workplace for everybody’s sake.
- Stress costs US industry over $150 billion yearly. Stress-related products and services are a $9.4 billion industry. (The GDP of El Salvador is only $11.4 billion.)
- Gallup interviewed two million workers at 700 companies and their conclusion was “The length of an employee’s stay in an organization is largely determined by his relationship with his immediate supervisor.” This translates to people leaving managers, and not leaving companies. What are you doing to pump up your managerial and people skills in order to retain your top talent?
- Some questions to ask your team in order to gain some insight into their most important issues and engage them in meaningful conversations:
- What is the one thing I could do better for you?
- If you were CEO for the day – what would you change to improve the quality of life here?
- What motivates you?
- How would you like to be recognized when you do good work?
- What would a good job look like?
Retaining Internal and External Customers
August 4, 2016 | Posted in Leading Hartfully | By Gaia Hart
When employees do not feel empowered, nor energized by an organization (or their boss), they fly the coop. These are some signs that may point to the exit door for you or your colleagues. If you notice anything familiar, you may want to take a look at your morale-boosting programs:
- You are no longer learning – when there is little personal or professional growth left, it’s time for a new challenge.
- You feel sick and tired or a sense of dread and fatigue along with possible headaches, colds can be a physical sign of unhappiness at work.
- You just don’t care – when we get to “I don’t care”, our soul dies and we need to find soul food elsewhere.
- You’ve strayed from your path and find yourself in a place that was meant to be temporary, but just got convenient. Just because you have the skills and aptitude for a job doesn’t mean you should necessarily be doing it.
- Your quality of life is suffering or your work is infringing on too much of your personal life.
- Take a look at your options – would a flex-schedule solve some of your problems, a new job in a different department, or a new industry?
- Take the tingle test – if you talk about your current job out loud – do you get the chills of excitement talking about it? What gives you the tingles when you think about making a living at it?
4 tips to retain your external customers:
- Ensure your customers can get what they want without leaving your facility or website – build an unbeatable bundle of products and services for one-stop shopping and be willing to customize to their needs.
- Don’t forget incentives for customers as well as employees. Baby boomers especially like the loyalty cards where they earn special treatment. Frequent flier miles are like Pokeman for adults. Offer a gift, discounts, insider info, or special offers.
- Create a community of customers and give them additional ways to connect to you and to each other through your website or other events or programs to offer service after the sale.
- Be available when your customers need you, give a 100% satisfaction guarantee (Fun*cilitators does this and has not had any requests for refunds.), stand behind your product and services and generate sincere trust amongst your community.
Incentive Insights
June 4, 2016 | Posted in Leading Hartfully, Living Hartfully | By Gaia Hart
The magazine Business 2.0 conducted a reader survey of 6439 people on the single factor that most heavily influences job satisfaction which, by the way, influences life balance:
- 60.3% the work I do is interesting/engaging
- 26% size of my salary
- 7.5% getting along well with colleagues
- 6.2% getting along with my boss
- From a survey of work/life balance by careerbuilder.com; 4 out of 5 respondents expect at least some flexibility from their employer when arranging daily work schedules. Over 29% would like to be able to set their own hours, while 52% would like the ability to negotiate their own hours.
- Many organizations are offering online incentives to make it easier to administer a reward and recognition system that is fresh and timely. Here are some sites that offer the gamut of corporate gifting and incentives:
- www.wishlist.com
- Some of these sites offer just gifts while other offer value-added services such as incentive program setups and program consultants to help you launch your program or pump up your morale with their services. With some of these sites, you can let the recipients choose their incentive or gift that enhances the motivating factor.
- Don’t think incentives and rewards are important? Did you know that?
- 46% of employees leaving a company do so because they feel unappreciated
- 61% said their bosses don’t place much importance on them as people
- 88% said they do not receive enough acknowledgment for their work
- Think again about your organization – what gets rewarded, gets repeated