Category Archives: Employee Engagement

5 Ways to Create a More WorkHuman Workplace!

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Okay, what the hell is WorkHuman?

I get asked that a lot as I talk about it. WorkHuman was a concept started by Globoforce, a recognition and rewards technology solution for your employees. Last year Globoforce held their first WorkHuman Conference with the focus on how do we make our workplaces better for ourselves and our employees.

They were really the first ones to drive home and start talking about the Employee Experience. Employee engagement is more than a program. We need to focus on providing a great experience for our employees, and the engagement will be there.So, what does this WorkHuman workplace look like?  I’ve got five ideas on how you can create a more WorkHuman workplace: 1.

So, what does this WorkHuman workplace look like?  I’ve got five ideas on how you can create a more WorkHuman workplace:

1. Hire glass half-full people.  You can’t teach optimism. You can’t create it. People either have it when you hire them or they don’t. High optimism also won’t guarantee you a great employee. What it will guarantee you is someone who will continue to work to get better. People are drawn to that. Hire talented people, and make sure they share your organization’s optimism!

2. Hire people who love to recognize others. Creating a culture of recognition isn’t just about giving them the tools and resources to recognize others. That will help, but you also need people who do this naturally, given no tools or resources. This is one you can also pick out fairly easy with some well-planned interview questions.

3. Get your Leaders to be human!  Normal human, not themselves! This is an easy and cheap way to create a better employee experience. Ensure your leaders get out and talk with your employees, and not the employees they usually talk with. Actually, get them out to meet and learn who your employees really are, personally. Employees love working for companies where they feel the leader actually knows them.

4. Manage outcomes, not hours.  It’s exceptional freeing to everyone when you start actually managing by results and stop believing that hours in a seat equal results.  Don’t take this as soft. Managing by results will get you to decisions much quicker than watching someone sit in a cube! But allowing people to manage their life around their work, and still produce great results, well, that’s workhuman!

5. Care about the health of your employees, not just physical. The financial wellness of your employees might have as much impact on your employees giving you their best, as their physical health. Help them manage their financial health. The stress many of your employees feel over their finances is staggering. This isn’t about retirement. This is about paying bills, childcare, student loans, buying a house, etc. Your employees are unhealthy. Like major drug problem unhealthy, and you’re ignoring it!

Want to learn more about creating a WorkHuman workplace?  The WorkHuman Conference is May 9-11th in beautiful Orlando, FL, with speakers Michael J. Fox (he’s an awesome story teller), Mr. Happy Shawn Achor, TEDx start Ann Cuddy, and so much more. $300 off your registration by clicking on this link!  Also, if you come, I promise to get up and do sunrise meditation with you! Okay, I’ll probably sleep in, but I will definitely do sunset champagne with you! See you in Orlando! 

P.S. – If you’re looking to recharge your HR batteries, there is no better HR conference to go to!

HR Leaders, It’s Your Job to Get them an Audience

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HR thought leaders and bloggers laugh at posts like this. The seat at the table post. We’ve been talking and writing about this for twenty years. So, those of us who write about it, are sick of it. But, like all good writers, everything that is old is new again! I declare 2016 to be the year of Get Your Seat at the Table!

Just kidding, no I don’t, that’s stupid. Even though, I’m sure I could have gotten a speaking session at SHRM with that exact title: 2016 The Year of Getting Your Seat at the Table. The session would have been crammed with HR folks still hoping and wishing!

Even though, I’m sure I could have gotten a speaking session at SHRM with that exact title: 2016 The Year of Getting Your Seat at the Table. The session would have been crammed with HR folks still hoping and wishing!

Let’s take it a step beyond and talk about what is the job of an HR leader to their teams.

I’ve been truly blessed to work for some great HR leaders that all understood one thing, it wasn’t about getting their seat at the table. As an HR leader, it was about ensuring their team was able to get an audience, so they could get their own seat.  It was their job to make sure the door was open to the room, once inside the room you still had to fight for your own seat.

The leaders I’ve worked for had their seat at their table, but more importantly, they made sure their team had an opportunity to get their own seat, at the table that was right for them.

Don’t ever think your leader should get you a seat at the table, and leaders don’t ever think it’s your job to get them a seat! The leader creates the opportunity for an audience, it’s your job to prove you deserve that audience’s attention!

 

5 Ways to Make the Best Impression During Onboarding

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Like the saying goes, “you only get one chance to make a first impression!” Well, unless you hire back a boomerang, then you get two chances, or if you fire someone, but then hire them back, you get another chance on that one as well. Theoretically, if you hire identical twins you would get two chances, but genetically it’s almost the same person.

You get where I’m going with this! When onboarding, you need to make a great impression, and for most of us, we only get one chance.

Years ago when I first went to work for Applebee’s, I actually started the week of Thanksgiving.  The timing just worked out that way, and they wanted me for the first three days of the week. When I arrived for my first day, I was blown away at how much work they did to prepare for me to come. I had all the accesses I needed, a laptop and phone ready, libraries of documents electronically that I might need in my position, a training calendar that laid out my first month of employment by the day!

It was unlike anything I had ever experienced.  It set the ground work for an amazing employment experience, that I still talk about and share, ten years later!

Not everyone has the resources that a large company like Applebee’s has, and can do what they can, but everyone can make a great first impression regardless of their size and resources! Here are some things you can do to make a great impression during onboarding:

  1. The element of surprise! This is the one idea where I think you should spend a few bucks. I love sending a token of appreciation to someone close to your new hire. A spouse, a boyfriend, a parent, etc. I’ve sent flowers to the home of parents of a new hire thanking them for raising us a great person to work with. It costs $25-30. The result is priceless! Talk about a huge win in onboarding.
  2. Don’t waste their time! Probably 80% of current onboarding can be done before the employee even shows up to work. Use technology to get ahead of the game and have employees fill out all the necessary paperwork before they show up. That way, day one,their ready to rock and roll, and not fall asleep in endless, boring onboarding meetings.
  3. Executive presence is a present! Being able to spend a little one-on-one time with your highest functional leader in your division, location, etc. can be huge your first day/week. Instantly, you feel like what you are bringing to the company and your position matter. I mean, what company allows you to talk with a high-level executive day one!? Bonus, this is free!
  4. Everybody needs a friend!Having a work mentor day one is nice, having a work friend day one is even better. I love connecting people who work in different functions. It’s really difficult to ask stupid questions to your peers. You’re new, and you don’t want to sound dumb, but someone in another area will tell you how tuition reimbursement works, without looking at you like you’re an idiot. Bonus, this is free!
  5. Check out this free webinar for even more tips! (It’s called 8 Tips for Awesome Onboarding, and it’s being hosted by the folks who make ALEX (and friends of The Projects), a benefits decision support platform I think is pretty neat. Next Tuesday, February 16, 2-3 EST.)

Anyway, onboarding doesn’t have to be fancy (or expensive) to be exceptional. People don’t come into your company expecting a parade. They come into your company expecting to go to work. It’s our job to make sure they’re ready to do that!

Would You Fire Your Top Performer for Punching Another Employee?

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The world of the NBA brings us the real live HR Game Show – What Would You Do?

I know most of you could care less about professional basketball, and I promise, this post isn’t about basketball. In case you didn’t hear last week, Los Angles Clippers Allstar, Blake Griffin, punched an equipment manager of the team, Matias Testi, after a game, while out at dinner.  In the face, more than once, and he broke his hand doing it. So, now he can’t play for the next six weeks.

Most people just chalk this up to stupid, overpaid, professional athlete does wrong. Not even page 1 news. Almost happens on a weekly basis.

For those HR Pros in the audience, you know, the Clippers have a major problem now!  One employee just did bodily harm to another employee. Not only that, your BEST employee just did bodily harm to an employee that can be replaced by a million people in a second.  Your best employee can’t be replaced, and if your competition gets him, it hurts your company. That’s pretty close to the truth.

So, tell me Mr. and Mrs. HR Pro – What Would You Do?

Let’s break down some options:

1. Fire both parties. It takes to get your butt beat. Both were engaged in a verbal spat that one party took further.

2. Fire Blake. He’s twice the size of the guy he hit, and he’s at a much higher level within the company, thus his responsibility is much higher on how he acts.

3. Don’t fire either. Which is probably what’s going to happen – but would never happen in the ‘real’ world. The two parties involved are friends. Something happened that shouldn’t. The lower employee has the job of his life, constantly surrounded by millionaire athletes, he doesn’t want anyone fired. He probably wants to apologize that his head wasn’t softer so he didn’t break Blake’s hand.

4. Fire Matias. He’s replaceable. You could easily cut a severance agreement for a small price and all this goes away. Being in the position he was, he should have known not to push Blake’s buttons and the value Blake has to the franchise.

5. Suspensions all around. Suspend Blake and Matias for their involvement in the industry. The problem with this is the Clips are trying to make the playoffs, probably will, and they’ll need Blake, which is about the same time he would be coming off this injury. Are you really going to suspend your best employee for the playoffs? Heck no. I don’t care about Matias, you can suspend him, no one will notice.

A real HR pro in this situation only has one option. Fire Blake.  He’s demonstrated that he’s willing to physically harm an employee of the company, put the organization in harm’s way by missing games, and even self-implode by not controlling himself in a scenario a normal person would.

This is where reality kicks real life HR Pros in the teeth.

The real call here is to get rid of Matias.  This decision on all fronts leaves the most positive outcomes for all involved.  The Clips get rid of a low-level employee for very little money. If he’s truly a friend of Blakes, he won’t cause problems, he knows where the real money is in this relationship. You can’t leave the possibility, even the remotest, of this, happening again. With Matias on the team, this could always happen again.

Real HR Pros gasp at this scenario because we all know where this would lead in real life. The courtroom. That’s where you miss one really smart play here, that you also can use, the severance agreement. Get them to sign the paper, hand them a check, move forward. The Clips would be smart to move forward, not without their best player, but without an equipment manager, they could easily replace.

Do I do anything with Blake? Yeah, something has to happen. I probably give him the biggest fine I can under the collect bargaining agreement, and maybe even go higher, just to prove a point, knowing it will get knocked down.

Agree or disagree? Hit me in the comments!

Hey, Kid! Know Your Place.

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Something really funny happened this past week in the NBA. Kobe Bryant who was sitting out of a game against Portland, in street clothes, came out to the bench after the game had already started. All the seats were taken on the bench. So, what did Kobe do?

He made a rookie give up his seat and sit on the court. A rookie who was actually dressed to play in the game – take a look:

This is brilliant!

I want to work in an organization where when a legend walks into a meeting room, some kid gives up his seat when there isn’t one available!

I know. I know. We’re all supposed to be Servant Leaders. Kobe should have sat on the court himself and let the kid keep his seat on the bench. Screw that. Kobe is one of the greatest players to ever play the game. If he wants a seat, someone better get up and give him a seat.

For real, though, there’s something to be said about knowing your place in an organization and respecting those who came before you. Respect is earned. Kobe clearly has earned that in his final retirement year.

I can’t stand seeing formal power used in organizations. “Oh, that’s the President, he demands to have the first parking spot.”  There is a little bit of this in the clip. But, if the kid truly didn’t want to give up his seat, he probably wouldn’t have.  He even mentioned as much on Twitter, later, saying Kobe has earned his respect to give up his seat.

I hear too often from people, especially HR and leadership thought leaders, who take the opposite stance. I think we’ve gone a bit too far on this one. As I am told I need to value these young bucks coming into the organization for what they bring, they, also, need to value the years of value I’ve already brought and continue to bring.

Yeah, I said it. These damn kids need to know their place in the organization! Now get off my lawn!

Hero Ball: Coming to an office near you!

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If you played ‘ball’ sports, you know the concept of Hero Ball. It’s exactly what it sounds like.  One guy or gal trying to be the hero of the team and doing too much, or not playing within the team concept. They want to be the hero! The hero doesn’t pass. The hero takes the big shot. The hero tries to win the game all by themselves.

Hero Ball is permeating almost every part of our worlds.  You just can’t be friends with a group anymore, because one friend is trying to be ‘hero friend’. You can’t be a normal member of your church because someone is trying to be ‘hero practitioner’. And, yes, we are all seeing this at our workplaces!

Don’t blame the millennials. Heroes come in all ages, shapes, sizes and creeds!

I’m going to blame our celebrity culture in America.

You can no longer just be a good standing member of society.  You know have to be a rock star! It’s not good enough to have your kids participate in sports, they have to participate on the best team.  You can’t just run for your health, you to run marathons! You can’t just show up every day and give a solid 9 to 5 to your company, you have to be willing to give up your life for your company. Or, you just don’t really care, do you?

How do you know you’re in a Hero Ball death spiral?

First, take a look at how you define success. If you define success as everyone needs to meet the same as your top performers, you’re going down a hero ball path. The definition of success isn’t defined by who does it best. Those are your top performers. You need to define what is successful, by what is expected of someone to be above average. You’re facing an uphill battle, and a ton of turnover, if you’re defining success by how your top performers do!

Second, are you rewarding individual outcomes more than you’re rewarding organizational outcomes, in the long run? I’m all for rewarding individual effort, in fact, it’s one of my favorites. Ultimately, though, you have to know that those individual efforts combined, are leading you to a greater organizational outcome. Otherwise, you risk the individual effort, working counterintuitive to the greater good.

Lastly,  to your employees seemed overly concerned about their personal outcomes and position, even in the face of organizational success?  We hear so much about how great top performers are for your organization. Which is mostly true. Top performers do a lot. But, they don’t do everything. As the saying goes, the world needs ditch digger too! In organizations, we need employees who aren’t all top players, that are willing to fill a much-needed role, which is usually not a Hero!

Hero ball is really fun…for one person.  Unfortunately, we are living in a society that seems to love the idea of hero ball.  No one wants to be part of the team, they want to be ‘the’ team.  No one wants to set up another employee for success, they want the success themselves. The organizations that will prosper in the next decade will not be those with the top performers. It will be the organizations that figure out how to have top performing teams.

T3 – Modern Survey

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This week on T3 I review employee engagement and talent analytics technology Modern Survey. I’ve been aware of Modern Survey for the past five years or so, as a great employee engagement survey technology. I’m glad I took a recent look because they’ve grown up over the past few years into a really advanced human capital measurement technology.

They still do employee engagement really well, but they also do performance, onboarding, exit interviewing, 360s and a really powerful analytics dashboard that will fully integrate with your enterprise level ATS, HRIS and CRM HR systems. It’s a content agnostic system as well, which basically means if you have a survey tool you currently use, they can integrate that into their platform.

Modern Survey’s platform has seven different modules that you can mix and match with: their business intelligence tool “Heat”, mThrive for employee engagement, m360, mPerformance, mExit, mSpark for onboarding and mReasearch which manages all of the content on the platform.

5 Things I really like about Modern Survey: 

1. Modern Survey has taken continuous measurement of your employees to the next level with employee engagement pulse surveys, onboarding and exit surveys all integrated into your existing HRM systems.

2. mSpark their onboarding tool is a game changer. Not only does HR find out about potential trouble early on, the predictive analytics basically tell you who is going to turn before they even know themselves!

3. Modern Survey is a true business intelligence tool for HR.  Some vendors are beginning to sell this out in the industry, but none have it figured out on the HR side of the business like Modern has currently. Their HIPO and High Performance 9 box analytics is something you need to see. Perfect to use for workforce and succession planning.

4. Modern Survey goes beyond just giving you your own data and has integrated great benchmark analytics into their platform to give your HR team the decision-making tools it needs.

5. Modern Survey goes one step past most technology vendors and gives you the knowledge you need to go with the tools. They just don’t provide software, but they also provide the consulting you need to kick off a major project like implementing new employee engagement surveying!

Modern Survey’s President is Don MacPherson.  He’s one of the good guys, Minnesota born and bred.  Rides a white horse type of guy. Sure he needs to make money, but I truly think he would rather put out a great product then make money! Because of this, you won’t find a better vendor to work for.

Modern Survey is blowing up right now and has taken on a number of large enterprise clients, but they started in the mid-market space.  Their sweet spot is going to be 1,000 employees and above.  They work across all industries: retail, healthcare, manufacturing, entertainment, etc.  Well worth your time to check them and demo!

T3 – Talent Tech Tuesday – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on T3 – send me a note.

T3 – StandOut by The Marcus Buckingham Company @StandOutTMBC

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This week on T3 I review the engagement and performance management platform StandOut.  StandOut was the product created by The Marcus Buckingham Company (TMBC), to further his work and research on helping organizations become world-class. For anyone who has read Marcus’s books or heard him speak, you can imagine this technology is very important to him.

If you’re like me, and like what Marcus has to say in regards to engagement and performance, the philosophy about why and how StandOut was created becomes an easy sell. StandOut was built around the concept of leadership and coaching, specifically around what is it that the best leaders, across industry do, and how do you get your own leaders to emulate this behavior.

The StandOut platform is a comprehensive engagement and performance management suite designed around the interaction between your team leaders and team members, not around HR.  I see more and more HR technology going down this path. If you want high user adoption, design the software for the end-user. Makes sense. With performance management, HR is not the end-user, your team leaders are the end user.

StandOut’s feedback philosophy is designed around a quick ‘pulse’ concept. The process should only take a few minutes each week to complete. It’s not task management, but more of a sharing of priorities, getting everyone on the same page quickly and going about the work at hand. Social recognition is built within the platform as well with ShoutOuts amongst the team members.

5 Things I really like about StandOut: 

1. Engagement Pulse is built around quick and easy questions that are nationally benchmarked, and also give your Team Leaders real in the moment coaching suggestions to drive great conversations with their team members, specifically around their needs.

2. Performance Pulse gives you a great view of the organizational as a whole and allows you to drill down via each team. Ultimately, organizations still need a way to compare the performance of their employees, and this does an excellent job. All the data is also weighted across the organization so it gets calibrated accordingly, so you don’t have one team always ranked higher because that team lead is an easier rater, etc.

3. ShoutOuts. Social recognition is huge, and having a system that encourages this, and tracks this is great.  This can also help those team leaders who want to do more recognition, but get caught up in the daily grind and they just forget to do it. ShoutOuts helps establish great habits by your team leads that drives positive engagement.

4. Engagement dashboard is a great tool that allows you to see who is leading your most engaged teams, but also who and how you need to help with those teams that aren’t as engaged as the rest.

5. The entire platform philosophy is built around how do we leverage our employees strengths, which you could assume being its a product of TMBC. Still, this sets it apart from many performance management platforms on the market.

StandOut is well worth taking a look at and a demo if you’re in the market for engagement and/or performance management software. It’s quite new and they have a ton more on the roadmap they are looking to add.  The team they have in place to is top notch, so I expect to see more great stuff from StandOut in the future.

T3 – Talent Tech Tuesday – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on T3 – send me a note.

How To Fall In Love With Your Job. Just. Do. This.

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A psychologist, Arthur Aron, came up with a way to get to strangers to fall in love with each other.  His research is fascinatingly simple!  It basically comes down to having the two people sit down facing each other, then methodically going through and asking and answering a set of 36 increasingly more intense personal questions.  This experience gets the individuals to understand each other a highly personal level.

Here are some of the questions:

They start somewhat easy:

4. What would constitute a “perfect” day for you?

5. When did you last sing to yourself? To someone else?

9. For what in your life do you feel most grateful?

begin to increase in intensity:

17. What is your most treasured memory?

18. What is your most terrible memory?

19. If you knew that in one year you would die suddenly, would you change anything about the way you are now living? Why?

and continue down an emotional path:

30. When did you last cry in front of another person? By yourself?

33. If you were to die this evening with no opportunity to communicate with anyone, what would you most regret not having told someone? Why haven’t you told them yet?

36. Share a personal problem and ask your partner’s advice on how he or she might handle it. Also, ask your partner to reflect back to you how you seem to be feeling about the problem you have chosen.

The science behind this study, is if you can honestly answer all 36 questions with this other person, you will probably share more with this one person, and them with you, then you have ever shared with any one person in your life!

So, how do you get someone to fall in love with their job?

Modify the technique and questions between an employee and their direct supervisor. The questions don’t have to all be asked at one time. Strategically, using these questions to drive frank discussions between employee and supervisor over time will get both to truly value and understand each other.

You can imagine how some of these questions would look:

1. Tell me about the job you loved the most and why?

2. What part of this job do you love doing? Hate doing?

3. Who has had the most influence in your life, to this point, and what do they do for you on a daily, weekly, monthly basis?

Here’s the deal, though. It takes two to fall in love! Your managers/leaders have to become as vulnerable as the employee. Turns out HR has very little to do with getting employees to fall in love with their job.  Having strong, understanding relationships at work, have more impact than some silly HR program. But, HR could help develop this employee/leader process!

Crazy. Real conversations with employees. Truly getting to know them. Makes a difference. This isn’t your parents leadership model!

Check out all 36 questions. They could make for some really dynamic ‘date night’ conversations!

A Farewell Tour for an HR Pro

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If you didn’t see it, one of the all-time greats of the NBA, Kobe Bryant, recently announced he was going to retire. Kobe is a personal favorite of mine, because, besides Jordan, he might be the most competitive player I’ve ever seen play.  If you played against Kobe, he hated you. If you played with Kobe, he put up with you! I love me some Black Mamba!

So, Kobe is now on his city by city farewell tour.  This happens in sports all the time for the great ones.  We got to see it last year with Yankee great Derek Jeter.  It’s always the same thing. Each city/team tries to outdo each other with giving gifts and paying tribute to the all-time great player.  Everyone plays nice. Hugs (I like that part). Gifts. Don’t guard me too close so I can make a few plays for the fans to remember me by! You know the drill!

When a HR Manager decides to retire, we never get a farewell tour.  I think we should!  Here’s what an average HR Manager Farewell Tour would look like:

Week #1 – Your benefits vendor invites you out to Applebee’s for a free lunch. Go ahead get the appetizer, the sirloin, and the strawberry lemonade! Heck, throw in a brownie bite. Yeah, in might go over your $25 limit, but this is your tour, no one is going to care you took $28, not $25!

Week #2 – Your HRMS vendor wants to drop off a little something to congratulate you. Looks like a bottle of wine!  (Pro tip: I would ask if it’s alcohol on the front side, then meet them in the parking lot!)

Week #3 – Your EAP vendor dropped off bagels from Panera, with three kinds of cream cheese! Way over $25, but you’re really sharing with the group, so you can divide that out. Pretty safe! (Pro Tip: On your farewell tour, make sure to bring in a toaster into the office, if you don’t already have one – some will always drop off bagels!)

Week #4 – CareerBuilder just wants to send you a little something to say thanks! Also, who’s taking over for you?  CB swag is always great. Pick through the box for the good stuff first, then throw the rest in the break room. It will be gone in no time! (Pro tip: if you spend a bunch with your job board vendor – like $25K+ – you can turn this into a lunch!)

Week #5 – Your ATS vendor called to wish you luck. You just happen to drop the ‘hint’ you can’t wait to go to more movies! It’s a passion of yours! You love going to the theater, but it’s so darn expensive! Theater gift card will be coming soon in the mail!

Week #6 – It’s the employee cake and ice cream social event.  You have to throw this one in, even though, you’ll be the one ordering your own cake and ice cream! It’s your party, make sure you get the cake you want, and not that cheap crap you order for all the other employees who retire!

Week #7 – Save this one for last! It’s time to call on your staffing vendor! Staffing vendors are an easy steak dinner and drinks kind of night. You do this last because you don’t want to come back to the office and look anyone in the eye after this night. Staffing folks can party, and still believe that if they get you drunk you’ll tell them all your secrets. The secret is, we don’t have any!

The bigger the organization the longer you can stretch out this tour since you probably have more vendors. It’s your tour, do with it what you will. Just remember, you earned it!