Insights to Growth

Strong Teams Spark Success

3 Tips for Improving Employee Retention

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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?

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.

5 Tips On Leading a Multigenerational Workforce

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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:

  1. Create an environment for open dialogue. This will take time and effort.
  2. Be flexible and really listen to recommendations from your team.
  3. Provide specific, regular feedback, and ask for confirmation on the feedback.
  4. Avoid stereotypes. Each person is unique.
  5. 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!

Gain Insights with Employee Assessments

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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

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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.

Encouraging Constructive Conflict in Your Teams

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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.

3 Tips for Handling Difficult Conversations with Employees

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Many people leaders struggle handling difficult conversations with their employees.

If you haven’t been in this situation, then it’s only a matter of time. Here are three tips you can use next time you discover an employee problem that needs addressing.

1| Addressing Skill-Based Problems

Is the problem skill based, like someone consistently submitting an expense report late or with errors?

If the issue is skill based, then you can approach the person and say, “I know you are so skilled at your job, and I don’t doubt that skill. However, I do see that you consistently struggle with turning in your expense report accurately and at the agreed upon time. Can you tell me a little about what is happening with your current process?”

By doing this, you decrease the chances of them reacting defensively.

2| Addressing Personal Problems

Is the problem personal, like an employee who consistently shoots down other team members’ ideas in meetings?

When the issue is personal in nature, you can approach the person by letting them know that one of your top priorities is having them be successful and that you need to share information that is sensitive.

By sharing that you want them to be successful, the person is more likely to take the information with a more constructive mindset.

3| Practice Makes Perfect

My third tip is to practice this conversation, so you appear comfortable having it. The more relaxed you are, the better the conversation will go.

Of course the worst thing to do is nothing. Issues like these will not go away when we ignore them.

Keep in mind that meetings can turn into difficult conversations as well. If a meeting goes off track and is no longer productive, you should stop the activity and bring the group back to purpose.

On the other hand, if the conversation turned unproductive to the point where the group needs a break, then there’s no shame in rescheduling the meeting.

My favorite book, and I read it at least every 18 months is, Crucial Conversations: Tools for talking when stakes are high by Patterson, Grenny and McMillian.

What do you do for difficult conversations? Comment below or get in touch.

4 Important Steps to Add to Your Onboarding Process 

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Even the most promising new hire needs an adequate amount of support during the onboarding process when they first start working for your company.

I frequently talk about finding the BEST person for each role, but that’s only half the battle. Once you’ve found the right candidate, it’s time to give them a big dose of your company culture through an effective onboarding process.

Ensure Your New Hire Starts Off On the Right Foot

Onboarding and training are two different processes that require a different approach.

For onboarding, you need to put yourself in a new hire’s shoes. They’re making a big change, so onboard them to your company by rolling out the red carpet–literally!

An article by Social Talent informs us “when employees go through a structured onboarding process, they are 58% more likely to remain with the company after three years.”

Important Steps for Effective Onboarding

1. Engage with the person a week ahead of their start date. A short email or text message letting them know that you are excited to have them on the team can put them at ease. For extra points, have the hiring manager or senior executive do a “Welcome to the Team” Video.

2. Provide a 5-day schedule 2-3 days in advance. This tells a new employee that you are thinking of them, and your organization is buttoned up. The schedule should be educational, and people based. Bonus Tip: PLEASE do not stick a new person on 8 hours of video learning.

3. If you are in an office environment, have a welcome committee that lets the new person know that the whole team is excited they are joining the team.

4. Have EVERYTHING ready for the new team member on their first day. This includes their computer, account log-ins, business cards, coffee cup, badge, workspace, etc. I mean, you HUNTED for this person. You should show them that you want them and you are serious about making them successful.

How’s Your Onboarding Process?

Many organizations overestimate the effectiveness of their onboarding process. In a survey carried out by OfficeTeam, 54% of employees said that they’ve experienced a mishap in their new job.

Putting the effort into a structured onboarding process will pay off. Ask any new hire that has joined your team.

Do you have any important steps you’ve added to your onboarding process?

Comment below or contact me. I’d love to hear it!

How effective is your communication with your direct reports?

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Even when we have 1:1 meetings, staff meetings, and real-time pinging through Slack and other instant messenger tools, I’ve never met an employee who said, “my leader over communicates to me.”

People generally believe that there’s more information to know. In fact, the statistics are pretty scary:

  • 60% of companies don’t have a long-term strategy for their internal communications (Workforce).
  • 74% of employees feel they are missing out on company information and news (Trade Press Services).
  • 72% of employees don’t have a full understanding of the company’s strategy (IBM).
  • 86% of employees and executives cite lack of collaboration or ineffective communication for workplace failures (Salesforce).
  • 33% of employees said a lack of open, honest communication has the most negative impact on employee morale (Recruiter).

A direct reports’ need for information and communication increases during time of change and turmoil whether internally or externally driven.

Like any personal relationship, our work relationships thrive or die on our ability to communicate clearly, establish trust, and create a welcoming environment for questions.

To dig further into a manager’s role and the importance of their connection to employees, I found the book by Jim Clifton and Jim Harter, It’s the Manager: Gallup finds the quality of managers and team leaders is the single biggest factor in your organization’s long-term success, to have substantial research and insights. 

Effective communication with our direct reports is a top priority if we want highly engaged team members. I would enjoy knowing what you find to be helpful in communicating with your direct reports. Get in touch!

Do you have a hiring bias for industry knowledge?

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If so, then is your hiring bias founded on facts or can you teach industry knowledge in a short amount of time?

The Challenge

I challenge my clients to look at this, because when you limit yourself to candidates with “X” amount of experience in your industry, you really shrink the available pool of candidates.

I understand that there are truly places where you must know the industry because of regulations, compliance, certifications, or laws, but there are many cases where you might be able to find great candidates and train them. A great resource to understand this bias and many more can be found in Howard Ross’ book Everyday Bias.

The Advantages

Think of the advantages of being able to train a person “fresh” and being able to put your organization’s spin on the industry, so the person starts with a clean slate and without baggage from prior organizations.

We know from Peter Drucker that “Culture eats strategy for breakfast” so really, what you want to do is hire for talent, skills, and interest. If the industry knowledge can be taught, then you should focus on culture fit though talent. One of my favorite books is Bet on Talent: How to Create a Remarkable Culture That Wins the Hearts of Customers by Dee Ann Turner.

My Insights

In the past, I was asked to lead a sales team that was in the green industry. The company had historically hired people who had experience in horticulture, agriculture, or viniculture for sales roles. They were convinced that the person must have green industry experience, but the turn-over for the sales role was 40-50% annually.

Why? Well, people who like plants and grapes generally are not people lovers, they are plant lovers. So instead, we determined what skills and talent were for these roles. Once we made a change, we had top sales performers who came from teaching, hospitality, retail, property management and more. This shift was caused by hiring for talent and training for industry.

I believe that we need to seriously take a look at the advantage of attracting talent with transferable skills from outside our industries and rid ourselves from any hiring bias we may have. We can increase our candidate pool and the chance of finding the BEST talent for the role.

Have you had any success with going outside of your industry? Share your story in the comments below or get in touch with me for further support.

Culture DOES eat strategy for Breakfast

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Peter Drucker is attributed to saying “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Meaning, that no matter how good your strategy is, how much time you spend talking about your strategy, or in many cases, how many consultants you pay to make awesome PowerPoint presentations on strategy, your strategy is going to be useless without the right people demonstrating the cultural values and living these values.

If the company strategy is to deliver the best products and the best services to the customers but does not have the right people in the leadership roles, leaders with the actual skills and abilities to drive these values, there will be a disconnect. If a company spends the time and effort to create mission statements and large colorful posters with aspirational qualities on it – the executive team must live those qualities and be consistent in demonstrating those values.

I’m a big fan of the book Follow This Path: How the World’s Greatest Organizations Drive Growth by Unleashing Human Potential (Coffman & Gonzalez-Molina, 2002). I recommend reading the entire book, but in a two sentence summary of the findings are: “They (the companies surveyed) know that their most valuable resource is human-their employees and customers. And the best companies understand two important facts: people are emotional first and rational second, and because of that, employees and customers must be emotionally engaged in order for the organization to reach its full potential.” My take-away from the research within this book was that if I focused on just customer satisfaction I was solving less than half of my challenges. If I focused on my employees, getting the right people in each role, engaging them through specific metrics and goals, mapping out their career path, understanding what motivates, and providing a robust set of tools to make their work as efficient as possible, that THEY took care of 99.9% of customer satisfaction. Net-Net: if you take care of your employees, the employees take care of the customers.

It takes the right leadership team and the right team members, working together, to make this authentic company culture a reality.

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