Blog - Insights to Growth

3 Tips for Improving Employee Retention

February 24, 2021 by Insights to Growth Leave a Comment

Employee retention is one of the most important responsibilities business leaders have. Let’s dive into the role employee training plays in retaining your employees.

Employee Retention from Training

In their 2018 Workforce Learning survey, LinkedIn found that the #1 challenge for talent development is getting employees to make time for learning and training.

This is very frustrating for business leaders, especially when the same employees reported that 94% of them would stay longer at a company if they perceived that the company was investing in their career.

This tells us that employee training directly affects employee retention, but it also tells us that training employees is a difficult task for both employee and leader.

How can you make this happen?

68% of employees prefer to learn at work.
- We have to make it convenient for our team members to engage in learning opportunities as part of their workday.
58% of employees prefer to learn at their own pace.
- Just like our team members have diversity in their thinking styles and communication styles, they are likely to have different speeds in learning. We risk expending a lot of effort on training if we don’t accommodate learning and absorption rates.
49% of employees prefer to learn at the point of need.
- What this means is that individuals want to learn a skill when it is needed and they can apply it. If we provide training for something that is not needed now, then we run the risk of learning decay, which means re-training in the future.
- Your investment in the training and development of your employees is essential. I love a quote that I’ve seen as a meme where a CFO asks a CEO, “What happens if we train our people and they leave,” and the CEO answers, “What happens if we don’t and they stay?’

Recommended Reads: SHRM published an article where the author argues that “training is a bridge that can lead to employee satisfaction and a higher retention rate for your company.”

Now that we have established training as an important tool for employee retention, I’d love to know about your organization.

How do you decide the training to invest in every year?

Feel free to share your experiences in the comments below.

Using Cognitive Assessments for Hiring

February 17, 2021 by Insights to Growth Leave a Comment

Did you know that the NFL uses a cognitive assessment as part of their draft process?

Let’s dive into why so many organizations, like the NFL, use cognitive assessments for hiring.

Why use a Cognitive Assessment?

Over 100 years of research shows us that cognitive ability is a strong predictor of job performance.

Throughout the last century, hundreds of studies have been conducted comparing cognitive ability with job performance. These studies have been aggregated together using a statistical method called Meta-Analysis.

Results show that cognitive ability consistently predicts job performance better than any other assessment tool available. In fact, it explains 42% of job performance (Frank Schmidt April 2002).

This can give an organization a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

My Assessment of Choice

The assessment I know best is part of The Predictive Index®, and it measures how fast a person learns and how fast they adapt.

In the assessment, a person is asked up to 50 questions in 12 minutes. The questions are divided into 3 categories: numerical, verbal, and abstract reasoning. A plus, is that this assessment is culturally neutral and statistically valid.

The Predictive Index® published the blog “6 Reasons to Use Cognitive Tests in Hiring” where they discuss the benefit of having cognitive information to identify a new hire’s ability to be successful beyond the person’s current job.

What are your experiences with using cognitive assessments for hiring?

If you would like to discuss this topic in more detail, please feel free to reach out to me or comment down below.

5 Tips On Leading a Multigenerational Workforce

February 10, 2021 by Insights to Growth Leave a Comment

Having a multigenerational team in your organization is a benefit. Leading a multigenerational workforce allows you to learn from each generation’s unique vision of what their workplace should look like.

Business leaders have between 3 to 15 direct reports, and chances are that they’re from various generations. In order to leverage this diversity, we need to understand our biases, so we can serve our direct reports and leverage the strengths that they are bringing to the group.

Karen’s Tips for Leading a Multigenerational Workforce:

Create an environment for open dialogue. This will take time and effort.
Be flexible and really listen to recommendations from your team.
Provide specific, regular feedback, and ask for confirmation on the feedback.
Avoid stereotypes. Each person is unique.
Vary your communication approaches.

Recommended Reading: One book that addresses this topic in great depth and with academic rigor is Work With Me: A New Lens on Leading the Multigenerational Workforce.

Our goal should ultimately be to achieve better productivity, engagement and retention with a multigenerational team.

It’s a tall order to address the needs and preferences of so many different groups of employees at once. But fostering a culture of productive collaboration and mutual respect starts from the top down.
Brandman University

I’d love to hear about the most difficult obstacles you’ve faced managing a multigenerational team in the comments down below.

If you need help overcoming those obstacles, feel free to get in touch!

5 Steps for Effective Succession Planning

February 2, 2021 by Insights to Growth Leave a Comment

I believe that succession planning for key roles is one of the most overlooked competencies in organizations.

What is succession planning?

The Economic Times defines succession planning as a process by which individuals are scanned to pass on the leadership role within a company. The process ensures that business continues to operate efficiently without the presence of people who were holding key positions as they must have retired, resigned, etc.

Succession planning is the process where an organization ensures that employees are recruited and developed to fill each key role within the company. In this process, you ensure that you will never have a key role open where another employee is not prepared.

Why is it important?

The comprehensive article “Succession Planning: What the Research Says, Most Organizations Aren’t Prepared” by Harvard Business Review tells us that there is a high price for this lack of planning and that:

Though turnover among CEOs is rising, only 54% of boards are grooming a specific successor, and 39% have no viable internal candidate. The consequences of poor planning are serious: Companies that scramble to find replacements forgo an average of $1.8 billion in shareholder value.

How can I create one?

Succession planning does not need to be complicated. Here are my five steps for creating your own:

Identify key positions where having a vacancy in the role would be detrimental to the business strategy
Identify your organization’s needs
Define a succession plan that covers the identified needs
Appoint a successor and mentor for each role that has been identified
When the time is right or a vacancy happens, make the transition

Recommended Reading: One of my favorite books is “Hope is Not a Strategy” by Rick Page. When it comes to succession planning for our key roles, this is absolutely true. Vacancies in key roles happen with and without notice, and this is something we need to prepare and plan for.

Also, the Society for Human Resources Management has a comprehensive article “Engaging in Succession Planning” that can help you with further research.

Does your company have a people strategy that includes a detailed succession plan for key roles?

I would enjoy hearing about your strategy in the comments below or contact us if you need help with yours.

Gain Insights with Employee Assessments

January 27, 2021 by Insights to Growth Leave a Comment

I call myself the people whisperer for business because I spend time working with organizations on how they can understand their employees. We need to do this in order to put the right employee in the role best suited for them.

How do I know what an employee is good at?

I use psychometric and cognitive assessments. These employee assessments measure the four primary drivers of a person, which I refer to as brain wiring, and it provides about 22 data points.

The assessment I use is from The Predictive Index®. The science behind The Predictive Index® has been around for over 65 years and is specifically designed to predict a person’s behavior at work.

The Society for Human Resource Management wrote a great article on this: “Predictive Assessments Give Companies Insight into Candidates’ Potential.”

In the article, they state, “The data supports the growing appeal of assessments. According to the Talent Board’s 2016 Candidate Experience Research report, 82 percent of companies are using some form of pre-employment assessment test, and how they use assessments is evolving. Two types of popular screens are job simulations (54 percent of respondents are using these, according to the Talent Board study) and culture fit (51 percent using, a 22 percent increase from the Board’s 2014 study.) While assessments once primarily were used for executive and mid-level leadership positions, today they’re commonly used for hourly and entry-level jobs.”

These employee assessments can tell you if an employee does the following:

Acts with a sense of urgency
Likes to follow the rules
Connects fast with people and wants to influence others
Their level of autonomy

This allows me to put round pegs into round peg roles and square pegs into square peg roles.

For existing employees, it allows me to resolve conflict between team members and allow teams to understand each other better.

How do I leverage assessment data?

Ultimately, the goal is to increase the effectiveness of workplace interactions.

Let’s dig a little bit deeper into the science behind this. When we measure an employee’s drives, then we understand their needs.

When their needs are met, then we have happy engaged employees. However, when needs are not met, then we have disengaged employees.

Having this employee assessment information is a huge advantage, but it is not all that you need to understand a person. We need to know their skills, their interests, and their values.

If you’d like to know more about behavioral and cognitive assessments, I would be delighted to have you try a PI Assessment complimentary, just click here.

You too can be a People Whisperer!

If you are already using an assessment, what kind of key insights helped from the assessment helped you with your employees?

I’d love to hear your stories in the comments down below.

Drive Employee Engagement with Mentoring Programs

January 20, 2021 by Insights to Growth Leave a Comment

One of the most effective employee engagement tools is mentoring. All organizations can benefit from a mentoring program because they help develop a better-trained and engaged team.

What is a mentor?

Mentors help mentees learn the ropes at a company, develop relationships across the organization, and identify skills that should be developed or improved upon.

This Forbes article informs us of how mentoring improves workplace culture in more detail.

What is a mentoring program?

A successful mentoring program consists of four phases: preparation, negotiating, enabling growth, and closure. These sequential phases build on each other and vary in length.

I recommend your first mentoring program be for your New Hires. In this case, the mentor should not be the new hire’s direct manager. This way the new hire can ask questions of their mentor without fear of being judged.

In this program, the person being mentored really drives the engagement, but it is nice to prepare some specific content that the mentor delivers to the new employee. This program is ideally for 6 to 12 weeks depending on the complexity of your organization or resources that you have.

Your second mentoring program should be for High Potential Employees. This type of program takes more proactive work and content for the person who is the mentor. The mentor should be shaping and developing the mentee for the next level of responsibility. This type of program is usually for 12-24 months, depending on opportunity and organization.

Here is an insightful article to read from SHRM on mentoring High Potential Employees.

Coaching vs Mentoring

You may be asking yourself this question: What is the difference between coaching and mentoring?

Coaching is more performance driven; it’s designed to improve the professional’s on-the-job performance. While mentoring is more development driven, looking not just at the professional’s current job function but beyond, taking a more holistic approach to career development.

If you need support starting a mentoring program in your organization, feel free to reach out.

If you already have one, then what do your mentoring programs look like? I would love to hear other examples in the comments below.

3 Tips for Performance Improvement Plans

January 13, 2021 by Insights to Growth Leave a Comment

A performance improvement plan is a tool to give an employee with performance deficiencies the opportunity to succeed. It can be used to address failures in meeting specific job goals or to eliminate behavior-related concerns.

Performance improvement plans are a necessary component of our businesses because finding the right employees is hard. Once we hire on a team member, it’s best for our business to keep them versus having attrition.

Be Specific.

Performance improvement plans should clearly define one to three areas of improvement.

If there are more than three areas to improve, I’d recommend thinking deeper about whether the employee is fit for the role.

Are you trying to have a fish climb a tree? If so, then it is not fair to your employee.

Be Direct.

In conversation, directly ask your employee if they understand the areas of improvement.

I recommend you ask them the following questions:

How would you rate your performance?
Are the challenges you’re having due to a lack of will or skill?
How would you make changes for improvement?
Are you getting the support you need?

Be Consistent.

Performance improvement plans need to be time bound and consistent.

Check-in dates for improvement need to be set in stone, and reviews for improvement need to be agreed upon.

It is the manager’s responsibility to maintain this plan. Whether you set bi-weekly or monthly check-ins, the tone will need to be consistent. Your employees should understand that achievement of their goals is necessary to avoid further consequences.

You can view many online resources and a sample template here.

If you find that the majority of your organization is on a performance improvement plan, then you need to look at your target setting or hiring benchmarks. If you’re an individual contributor and want to maintain a high level of performance, I recommend reading books on peak performance. I really like Steven Kotler’s book “The Art of Impossible.”

What have you found to be useful in performance improvement plans?

I’d enjoy hearing your strategies in the comments below or on a call.

Encouraging Constructive Conflict in Your Teams

January 5, 2021 by Insights to Growth Leave a Comment

When individuals come together as a team, their differences in values and attitudes can often contribute to the creation of conflict. However, conflict isn’t necessarily destructive; it can be constructive as well.

In fact, constructive conflict can be the item that elevates your team to the next level of productivity and success. Here’s a great article by Amy Gallo on this idea.

Given the many advantages constructive conflict can generate, it pays to jump in and work with your team on how to do this. Try these 4 tips for encouraging constructive conflict on your team.

1. Create a Culture of Acceptance

Before constructive conflict can be used for the greater good, it’s necessary to develop a team culture where trying, not just succeeding are rewarded. Fail fast and learn from it.

2. Seek Conflict

Leaders won’t hear conflict unless they seek it and specifically name it. Constructive conflict is the opposite of YES people. If you are a leader and everyone in the meeting is just nodding their head YES, this means we are not utilizing the team’s strengths. It can be helpful if a 3rd party is named as a dissenter, to get the team going.

3. Organize Practice Brainstorming Sessions

Encourage people to work out of their comfort zone. Be creative and give prizes for the wackiest ideas. Most companies I work with are interested in innovation and growth. You want strong new ideas from your teams.

4. Trust Your Employees

You hired them and they work for you. You do need to monitor this activity but like most skills, when constructive conflict is used and understood, this is a very powerful tool for your team.

My two favorite books on this topic are by Liane Davey, You First: Inspire Your Team to Grow Up, Get Along, and Get Stuff Done and Building Conflict Competent Teams by Craig Runde and Tim Flanagan.

What strategy do you have for constructive conflict?

I’d enjoy hearing your story. Get in touch or comment down below.

How to Handle New Job Offers and Counteroffers

December 15, 2020 by Insights to Growth Leave a Comment

We all work hard to keep our teams engaged. However, even when we do a great job at this, any employee can surprise you with a resignation letter when they receive a new job offer from another company.

Who got a new job offer?

If they are a lower or average contributor, then the decision is not so hard–let them go.

If they are a top performer or someone you had high hopes for, then this decision becomes more difficult.

Should you extend a counteroffer?

Most employees who accept a counteroffer only stay for another 6-12 months. If an employee is motivated at one time to look externally, they will look again. A HBR study cites that 71% of senior executives and 67% of HR leaders in the current company would question the employee’s loyalty going forward. This makes sense as loyalty is a component of trust and that is a tough emotion to battle.

If an employee comes to me with a new job offer to counter, then I wish them well and organize their departure as soon as possible. I never extend a counteroffer, but you have to decide what is right for you and your organization, so that there is consistency.

My Strategy

Very few employees will leave over salary increases alone; here is a great article from SHRM on this. I’ve found that when organizations have top performers bringing in new job offers, they have missed out on having career development conversations with their employees. The employee feels that the only way to further their career is to show their manager that someone else wants them.

The process that I promote in my organization is for employees to schedule a meeting with their manager to discuss their career especially before job shopping.

If I cannot provide the career path that’s best for the person, then I commit to helping them find their next job. This keeps them engaged as an employee and leaves a positive impression of the organization.

I know it sounds counterintuitive, but through this process, employees have gained a new appreciation for the company and stayed.

Have you found a successful approach to new job offers and counteroffers?

I’d enjoy hearing your approach in the comments below or on a call.

3 Steps to Improve Your Glassdoor Profile

December 9, 2020 by Insights to Growth Leave a Comment

Whether you love it or hate it, Glassdoor is the standard for online company reviews and salary information. This makes having a detailed Glassdoor profile imperative to your hiring.

Why Are Reviews Important?

An article in Fast Company states that “a single comment about a particular issue may just represent a single person with an axe to grind, or it may represent someone with a legitimate but aberrant complaint.”

Because Glassdoor carries a substantial amount of weight, your company reviews can either benefit or hinder your hiring. Here are ways to impress possible candidates even if you have a bad review in the mix.

Improving Your Glassdoor Profile

First Step: Claim your profile and fill in all of your amazing information. An unclaimed Glassdoor profile communicates that you are not serious about your brand in the recruiting space.

Second Step: Gather an appropriate amount of reviews for your company. If you are a company of 1000 people with only 5 reviews on Glassdoor, then that will raise a red flag to candidates. How do you fix this?

You might be inclined to send a company wide email asking for people who are willing to add a review, but you don’t want 30 company reviews to come in during one week. It will look suspicious to candidates.

A better approach is to ask one functional group per month to do reviews. You also do not want to break trust with your employees, so the request to complete a review needs to be done as a totally open request with no financial incentive or spiffs.

Third Step: If you have a volume of reviews with some expressing concerns or negative activities in the company, then put together a plan to correct that issue. Over time, you can ask for company reviews that balance the issue.

Even if you don’t get reviews that off-set the negative information, you are able to explain to the candidate the actions the company took in your Glassdoor profile. More info can be found in this Forbes article.

Bonus Step: Some candidates may make a note of bad company reviews, and save them for the interview. I always ask candidates what information they looked at before submitting their application, which allows me to know if there are some “gotchas” I need to explain later in the interview without defensively jumping into an explanation.

With a little time and attention your company’s Glassdoor profile can go from zero to hero. Do you have a great Glassdoor story? Share in the comments below or get in touch.