Resources: Blog Posts

From Fast Company, written by Nicole Gull McElroy. The next big office amenity? Space where you can actually get some work done. Daniel Zimmer’s job at legacy tech company SAP is to improve the experience of the developers and engineers working there. When the pandemic hit, Zimmer was in the middle of reimagining SAP’s Bay […]

Here are two things you should know about today’s candidate-first talent market

If there is one word that cuts through the complexity of employee compensation, it’s fairness. Fair pay for the actual work, and fair pay in relation to colleagues and market expectations. There are many reasons to make fairness the cornerstone of your compensation philosophy and practices, not the least of which are an increased ability to recruit and retain top talent. A reputation for fairness contributes to a stronger employer brand and helps increase employee productivity and loyalty. Being cheap, or even perceived as cheap, does the opposite.

Not long ago, the CFO of a fast-growing $150 million company with 80 sales reps was planning to move to a bigger, better location. I suggested that he not move everyone into the new space and, instead, arrange for some of the reps to work remotely. I was shocked by his answer: “No, because I don’t trust them.” (I didn’t ask how the reps felt about him, but trust usually goes two ways.) There are still far too many business leaders who believe that if they can’t physically see their employees, the employees aren’t working.

Effective leaders in today’s world are learning to live and thrive with constant change and uncertainty. Without a new mold for what a leader should be and do, we have opened the door to expressing our own humanity as well as creating more humane workplaces. Rather than a recipe for chaos, leaders in companies of every size and industry are seeing greater engagement and satisfaction, increased teamwork, and more innovation and productivity.

Now that there are more job openings than people to fill them, 2019 is the time to get really serious about being the best company you can possibly be. This year we see the rise of the individual, where top talent takes over the catbird seat—able to pick where they want to work rather than wait for you to pick them. This leaves you no choice: You have to put significant resources into winning great people in order to grow.

I believe in men and women leading together. Everything is better when we do. That said, if you’re a woman you probably have a #metoo story of one kind or another. Me too! And that fact complicates things. My fear is that if we don’t keep our heads and resolve workplace harassment issues together, it will be women who become the big losers in companies across the country. If men, who still hold most of the power, are uncomfortable, women risk being cut out of important interactions and opportunities for promotion. That’s not the outcome we want.

Entrepreneurial environments cannot function without people who are comfortable with rapid growth and change. Most of the people you hire should not see security as a priority; they should, instead, get “jazzed by chaos.” But that’s not all that’s needed. You want to create a balance of people who thrive on “different, new, and exciting” and people who provide underlying stability that supports the constant change. As a high-growth company, you need a mix of spirited innovators and support staff who can come up with the right processes and procedures as your company evolves.

Micromanaging comes naturally to entrepreneurs, but it frustrates employees and stifles growth. It’s important for leaders to empower their people to run the business and make decisions. With trust as its foundation, empowerment provides the oxygen for innovation and growth. That doesn’t mean you can’t sweat the small stuff, it means that you’ll have a team to do it. Companies grow in stages, and effective leaders let go as their company moves through its lifecycles, often evolving in ways they never imagined.

People at the bottom of the pay scale often struggle to support their families. You can help ease that stress by raising their hourly pay with a seemingly small amount. The benefits of your empathy are many, including saving the cost of turnover and rehiring, preserving institutional knowledge, increasing productivity, and lifting morale. Everyone at every level is important in your business; everything touches customers in one way or another. Not everyone wants to be a leader, and those who want to show up and do a good job deserve respect and fair pay. Penny-pinching makes no economic sense when it comes to your people.

There is no longer any question that diverse leadership teams offer tremendous business benefits. Among other things, women add stronger interpersonal skills, the ability to multitask and get things done, as well as a service mentality. Companies with more female executives and directors perform better and tend to be more profitable. Men and women should lean in and lead together. And since we need more women executives, both women and men must look for opportunities to mentor women, creating better business environments as well as results in the process.

Your employment brand, or reputation, communicates your culture, mission, and values, serving as a key decision point for whether people want to work for you or continue to work for you—or not. Regardless of company size, a strong reputation significantly impacts whether you can attract and retain top talent; and it gives you a distinct competitive edge. Assessing, improving, and promoting your employment brand should be a top priority. It begins with being both authentic and strategic in your thinking and becomes a long-term effort that permeates every aspect of talent management.

When the right person walks in your door, don’t miss the rare opportunity to add exceptional talent to your team—hire him or her immediately. On the other hand, when you discover that you’ve made a mistake by hiring someone who is disrespectful, negative, self-serving or otherwise disruptive, fire that person with equal speed before they do serious damage to morale. Leaders need to be like the hare when opportunity knocks. They need to be like the tortoise in taking care to hire only people who share company values, rather than simply filling positions because they’re empty. Avoid hiring mistakes by planning ahead for the right people you’ll need to grow your business.

Allowing vulnerability into your company culture is the first step in getting healthy from the inside out. It brings you closer to your customers and to your employees and deepens understanding all around. Vulnerability takes leaders outside of the overall organizational culture where vision and strategy reside and into the sub-cultures of departments and teams where day-to-day reality lives—and where your major focus should be. This concept is from author Curt Coffman’s “Big C” and “Little C”. Today, dynamic leadership means managing change effectively, which depends on cultures that embrace vulnerability, ensure cultural fit, and build respect.

Becoming a great company is an achievement to be proud of. Going a step beyond that to uniquely “irresistible” status is the rarest of rare in companies. Think Zappos, Red Frog, and Southwest Airlines. What they and a handful of other companies have in common is empowering employees to provide extraordinary customer service. Being irresistible requires high trust levels, well-defined core values, and courage, among other things.

A-players want adequate compensation, but most people are surprised to learn that high salaries are not even in the top five things they want from their employer. In fact, it’s not necessarily “things” like beer, foosball games, or dollar bills that people want at all. It’s what those things represent—which is a great culture. Great cultures are flexible, fun, and transparent. They’re respectful, fair, trusting, and innovative. They have a purpose or mission, and it just feels good to be part of them. Your culture, whether great or not so great, is directly reflected in your bottom line.

For the first time ever, there are at least four generations working together in the workplace, and of course there are differences. If you grew up in the 1950s, today is like a different planet in every way from culture to technology; and how well would a 20-something function in a world without mobile phones? We need to overcome our biases, whether against Millennials or Boomers, and welcome and value the differences in life experience and perspective. Innovation and personal growth are the outcomes of open minds.

Productivity, morale, customer service, and retention levels rise with increasing employee engagement. Far from a trendy buzzword, engagement is a crucial business strategy that saves money and generates revenue throughout your business. Tools like surveys and assessments help you measure levels of engagement, which can then inform your training and development programs and indicate where you need to make changes in policies and procedures. High levels of engagement reflect an ownership mentality in employees that can take your business to new heights.

Three out of four employees are either actively looking for a new job or open to moving if they’re approached—yes even your employees! This means that you cannot focus all of your efforts on finding new employees. You must also put significant effort into retaining the employees you’ve already invested in so carefully. Frequent and varied employee communication, an active feedback loop, and both formal and informal recognition are critical to building trust and honesty—and increasing retention.

Candidates have choices, and the better the candidate, the more choices they have. Unless you understand and communicate why a candidate should choose you, you may lose out on the A-players. It falls heavily on leadership to tell your story and articulate what makes your organization better than the competition. Paying lip service to what you hope to be or used to be will not be convincing. Leaders need to let go of their egos, challenge their assumptions, and take a deep and honest dive into the reality of who you are as a company today. If you see roadblocks to attracting the best people, knock them down.

It’s well past time to ditch traditional performance reviews. Evaluations of your people should reflect your organization’s unique culture and the individual you are reviewing. Forget the negative reviews based on flaws and “opportunities for improvement” in favor of continuous feedback. Far beyond measuring performance, when you take a more timely and humane approach to performance reviews, you help engage and retain your most important asset—your people—improving morale and saving costs. I offer some options that allow you to dip or dive into new review processes.

Being nice is an attitude, and it should be at the top of the list of characteristics you look for in recruiting new employees. In fact, niceness should apply to all of your decisions: who you hire, who leads, and who participates on teams. When your culture aligns around niceness, you increase engagement and, along with it, productivity and performance. Being nice shows respect—and exceptional business acumen. This article explores the costs of tolerating people who don’t play nice, and the benefits of hiring those who do.

It takes equal amounts of courage and confidence to be an effective leader in today’s environment of constant change and uncertainty. There is little of the tried and true to fall back on. However, there are some basic strategies that can help you meet ever-moving targets and challenges, in order to provide a constant vision for your people and a learning culture that will help you succeed in ways you may not have expected. Effective leadership begins by surrounding yourself with the right people.

Every organization competes for the kind of people who ask “why not?” instead of “why?” because they are the curious innovators who can grow your business. Attracting them requires that you develop a talent strategy based on today’s desired workplace environment—one that offers things like flexibility, possibility, challenge, professional growth, and work-life balance. Start by digging deep into the realities of your culture and the complexities of the people who currently work within it, and those to come.

Education and experience have been replaced as the first things to consider when hiring. Today, the emphasis is on things like how people behave and adapt, what their values are, and what motivates them—things that you can’t easily understand from resumes and interviews. But you can get this critical predictive information through pre-employment assessment. People aren’t just looking for a job; and you shouldn’t be just hiring anyone with a certain skill set. This article explains how both candidate and employer can benefit before the offer is made and accepted.

Candidates, like customers and employees, need to be engaged. Advertising and hoping the right person responds, or the “post and pray” method, doesn’t work—not if you want to attract the best people. We argue that organizations need to do two things: change to a sales mentality; and develop a culture of continuously cultivating the right people. This creates a pipeline of potential candidates, similar to your sales pipeline, with the skills and cultural fit you need, saving you from hiring whoever shows up at the door.

Gallup puts the cost of mentally checked-out employees at $450 to $550 billion a year in productivity. That cost can be the difference between your company being just good, or becoming great. Engaged employees are not only more productive, they give you a key competitive advantage. In this article, we present the ultimate employee survey questions along with focus group questions for a deeper dive. And we list the three most important areas to focus on, when it comes to measuring engagement.

Effective onboarding saves U.S. companies billions of dollars a year through increased productivity and retention, yet more than one-third of companies spend nothing on welcoming their new employees. In this article, we offer best practices on what you should do from the moment your candidate accepts the offer, throughout the first day, and in regular check-ins over the first few months. The effort and resources pay off in multiple ways.

Ordinary managers are often tossed into the role of hiring manager with no special training. Charged with the weighty task of selecting the right talent to grow your business, you need to set them up for success. Two proven tools are assessments and behavioral interviewing. Together, they greatly enhance the information and insight your managers need to make the best hiring decisions.

A “people puzzle” gap analysis is the first step in discovering whether you have talent or culture issues that will sabotage your goals. It tells you where you are, where you want to be, and how to get there. What major changes or new initiatives do you envision over the next 1 to 3 years? What steps should you be taking now to ensure you have the right talent when you need it? The data enable you to develop a comprehensive, actionable roadmap linking your talent and business strategies.