You Can “Say” Team, But Do You Feel It?

Posted on by Stuart Murray
Soccer Practice. Courtesy of woodleywonderworks.
Soccer Practice. Photo courtesy of woodleywonderworks.

Does life get in the way of your workplace productivity?  Typically, it’s the opposite.  Your personal life determines how you show up.  When colleagues talk about life, and make their work meaningful to their lives, that’s when they become a team.

This is a great story from a colleague of mine from graduate school.  Alyssa Burkus describes the time she was working on a project for an organization (Actionable.co), and started seriously to consider an offer to work for them full-time.  During a team check-in about people’s weekend she announced to team members that she had achieved a milestone anniversary in surviving cancer.  There was an outpouring of sympathy and support.  She felt it.  She had found her tribe.

If you listen closely in your own workplace, you might hear other moments like these.  Some moments are better than others.  When people “have a specialist appointment” how much time do we give them?  When people have a death in the family, do they tell us, and do we have their back?  When two people talk about their kids having learning disabilities, how long are they allowed to talk?  At my current employer I had to delay my start date because there was a minor complication with a scheduled surgery.

The reason these scenarios are powerful is that many personal topics are simply more important than work.  As an employer you don’t so much own people, you just borrow some of their time.  When employees develop a sense of self-respect and a pride in their contributions, they willingly rise above what is expected from them in the job description.  I love going above and beyond for people whom I respect, and who have respect for me.  This feeling is stronger when employees forget about their salary, which is the dream of every well-informed compensation team.

The ability to have these conversations is part of a healthy workplace culture.  It turns up in employee surveys as a determinant of workplace engagement.  It drives turnover statistics and the amount of steam people put into discretionary effort.  Missteps in these areas are often at the root of conflict, harassment, and grievances.  When an employee expresses physical or emotional discomfort, the degree to which others care and take action is a major factor in accident claims, absenteeism, and long-term disability costs.  With equity and inclusion the emerging practice is to bypass categories and go deeper into individual perspectives.  With employee communications, people mostly read the personal stories.  And the best source of information for leadership development in the eyes of the employees who are following your lead.

I do a lot of math about workforce analytics and I can confirm for you that according to my calculator, emotions are the boss.

I think the reason vulnerability and compassion are so powerful is that it’s really hard to fake it.  You can tell when people mean it, and you can tell when people don’t.  As Alyssa puts it, “…this isn’t a call-to-action to start creating ‘meaningful moments’ initiatives, where the word from the top is leaders need to be more personal, or where HR tracks ‘connection point KPIs.’” It’s about authenticity.  Perhaps we need to develop metrics to guage that.

Oh Boy, Here Comes the Future

Posted on by Stuart Murray
Dungeness Beach, by Gareth Williams
Dungeness Beach.  Courtesy of Gareth Williams.

This emerging trends review by Josh Bersin from December 2016 provides some forecasts about work in the future. You’ll have to click past a pop-up screen from Forbes.com to get into it (be nice, that’s how they pay for it).

Bersin notes that business models are changing to adapt to new threats like Airbnb and Uber.  Meanwhile software companies are shifting to fee-for-service models, where you don’t buy Microsoft Office, you rent it.  A lot more things are touch-and-go.  Seventy percent of CEOs think that their core business model is under attack.  They are concerned they don’t have the right leaders or technology to adapt.

Bersin goes on to say that the company of the future, the “digital organization,” will need to reverse the pecking order of investor, customer, and employee.  The engaged and fully performing employee creates satisfied and returning customers.  Customers drive cash-flow and set up investors with success.  It is not really the investors who drive the business.  It’s the front-line staff causing business success or not.

To make this work, employees may need to develop hybrid skills.  They will need their current core skill fused to one other skill.  An example could be sales skill plus the ability to interpret the client’s business model, two abilities not always found together.  I have always thought that all of the cool stuff happens at the boundary between categories.  If you’re great at five random and un-related skills, that moment when you bring two strengths together can truly make you special.  If one such skill is your ability to take advantage of a new gadget or app, that’s in the mix also.

There is also a shift from “jobs” to “work.”  With jobs, there would usually be a job slot into which you place a person with a skill-set to conduct duties that are clearly defined.  Those of us who have worked with a lot of formal job descriptions know that they are just frameworks.  Job descriptions have a wooden walk, like intoxicated teenagers trying to sneak past their parents.  Yet real work involves a flurry of micro-skills, attitudes, connections, and organizational knowledge.  “Work,” by which we mean the actual work performed, is shifting more quickly as products and services change.  It is far more important to staff the business with general skills, capabilities, cultural fit, and the potential to get new work done in an environment of change.  And don’t forget those hybrid skills.

These shifts are dawning on CEOs as having a massive impact on how they will conduct business in the future.  And all eyes are on the human resources team.  In order to ensure individuals adapt to changes in skills, technology, and work definition, Human Resources teams have to be able to make it all work on the larger scale.  The way we design jobs, pay for them, ensure performance, develop skills, and adapt to new tools and models, will become critical for organizations that want to get ahead of the pack.

At least that’s what I thought he said.

New-Hire Enthusiasm Makes Liars of Us All

Posted on by Stuart Murray
game-time-by-michael-neel-v3
Game Time, courtesy of Michael Neel.

This interesting blog post by Mike West from One Model describes a data anomaly in “Best Employer” awards.  Many of these awards are based on employee engagement surveys, which are consistent and scientific, but susceptible to a subtle sampling bias.

The issue is that engagement is highest for new employees.  I have seen this phenomenon in other surveys, and I have pondered why this would be true.  It will make sense when you consider your personal experience.  When you are first employed, you have recently chosen to work for that employer, you have just been chosen by the manager, and you get the greatest concentration of training and personal attention.

By contrast, years later you might wish you could work elsewhere, even if you have not made an effort to move.  You may have changed managers, breaking the personal sense of loyalty and trust.  Even under a favorable scenario you will be deemed “fully-performing” …and be neglected as a result.  Negative career events occur over the years, and with greater length of service you will have more opportunity for annoyances, defeats, and betrayals.  You might leave, and lo and behold the cycle starts all over again!

Mike West notes that growing companies hire more staff into brand new positions.  This means a larger fraction of their workforce have less than one year of job tenure, which means a larger fraction of the survey sample will have high engagement.  Yes, it is nice to work for a growing company, but growth itself is not what makes people happy.

If you were the only new hire in a company that is stable in size and has low turnover, you might be just as excited as a peer who joined a growing company.  But the growing company would get a better score.  The article references the constantly-growing Google, often rated the very best employer.  Google tends to lose the top spot when they hire fewer people.

So, how do you game the awards?  Make email addresses for new staff more readily available.  How to correct this anomaly?  Companies conducting surveys should report the data on a stratified basis, adjusting for length of service.  Or, run a multivariate model which isolates employee culture and adjusts for the length-of-service effect.

But hey, it’s math.  It’s all fun and games until someone loses an award.

Mercer’s 2015 Survey, “Inside Employees Minds”

Posted on by Stuart Murray
brains-by-annabellaphoto
“Brains.”  Attributed to Annabellaphoto.

In September 2015, Graham Dodd from the Canadian offices of Mercer released the results of a large survey of employees across Canada.  Amongst their findings, was that plenty of employees with high job satisfaction are still considering leaving their current employer.  It makes sense; those who are driven and talented will be both engaged and also looking for their next adventure.  Why would we presume that employees who strive are those that are easily satisfied?