the year of the person

IN THIS ISSUE: MIND THE GAP | VOICES FROM THE TRENCHES | TECH & LEARNING watercoolernewsletter.com

Volume 7 Issue 1January/February 2013

The Year of the Person

If I Were You, How Would I Engage Me?

We have for some time held the point of view that team members, managers, crews, associates, and employees are customers of an organization’s strategy. Successful leaders, who know this, know how to meet their people where they are, uncover insights on their perspectives, and are constantly curious about what they do and don’t understand. In simple terms, the goals of leaders are not to turn a complex business and sophisticated strat-egy into a foreign language. It is to break through to their people. The goal is to tap the discretion-ary effort of their people by first understanding how they feel, think, understand, and connect to their strategic agenda. It turns out that strategy creation is often the easy part. Translating it into something that makes sense to the recipients turns to be the real heavy lifting.

continued

By Jim Haudan, CEO, Root Inc.

FEEL

THINK

UNDERSTANDCONNECT

watercoolernewsletter.com2 The Year of the Person

continued from cover

Just recently I heard a frustrated manager say, “We are all clear on the words of the strategy and can repeat them verbatim. However, it is as if we are looking into a black hole when we try to see what it is that we should be doing differently.”

We are dedicating the 2013 issues of the Watercooler Newsletter to the Year of the Person! To better point out disconnects that occur with the associate/customer. To identify what can convert a cynical manager/customer to an advocate for the future strategy. And to explore how feedback loops from the team member/customer can significantly improve execution results.

Our goal is to bring you leading-edge perspectives on how to anticipate, understand, and initiate conversations with your people so that they can take their individual and your collective game to the next level. We want to uncover and illuminate the perspectives of people who want to help their organizations win in the marketplace, want to contribute to their company’s success, and want to feel that they made a difference – that their efforts mattered! As in all powerful customer rela-tionships, we hope to help you see the challenge and opportunity of strate-gy execution through people… from their view. In the Year of the Person we are setting out to bring you the “Voices from the Trenches” that ask “If I Were You, How Would I Engage Me?”

Jim HaudanCEO, Root Inc.

THE YEAR OF THE PERSON2013 WATERCOOLER NEWSLETTER ISSUES AT A GLANCE

March/April: The Common Fears in all organizations

May/June: Make everyone in your business Accountable

July/August: Important facts and trends in Virtual Learning

September/October: Managing Culture Change in your business

November/December: Discovering the “Bears” in Your Organization

watercoolernewsletter.com The Year of the Person 3

MINDTHEGAP

KNOWING WHAT EMPLOYEESWANT IS KEY

By Lena M. Bottos, VP of Compensation, Kenexa


A 69%

81%

83%

At Kenexa, we conduct an annual Compensation Outlook Survey. Our focus is on attitude questions that will give us a deeper view into HR’s perception of engagement, pride, retention, and other factors affecting human capital. After the most recent survey, we directly compared the data with a similar survey from visitors to our consumer website, Salary.com, and to World Norms from Kenexa’s Employee Engagement database. We gained incredible in-sight from these comparisons and were able to clearly see similarities and differences worth noting.

MIND THE GAP Across all HR categories covered in the survey, there was a noticeable gap between the Salary.com visitors and HR perception, while the World Norms data hovered some-where in between. We can safely assume that the visitors to Salary.com are biased toward workplace dissatisfaction, because they are visiting a career site most likely looking for a career change or a new job. It is also highly likely that the World Norms data is skewed toward more highly en-gaged employees or more self-edited answers, depending on an individual’s trust in survey anonymity. The bottom line, however, is that HR’s perception of employee atti-tudes is off the mark in every category.

ENGAGEMENT AND RETENTION As our economy continues to rebuild, engagement is a critical metric. Employees have faced pay cuts, layoffs, and stagnant salaries. With all of these challenges, it’s crucial now more than ever for employers to stay in tune with how their employees feel. This is key to holding on to tal-ent. Yet, with this urgency, there is a staggering disconnect between what HR says employees think and what those employees really think.

69% of HR professionals think employees have a high level of engagement – the same as the World Norms data – while Salary. com visitors show engagement levels of 34%.

81% of HR professionals believe employees would recommend the organization as a good place to work, while World Norms figures are at 72%, and Salary.com visitors are at 38%.

83% of HR professionals believe employees will stay with the organization in the coming year, but the figure is only 57% in the World Norms data and 41% for Salary.com visitors.


The gap in the perception of competitive benefits may also be affected by sharply increasing healthcare costs. While an organization may actually have competitive benefit plans, employee perception can be different. This all comes down to communication with employees. Without color commentary from HR, the only thing employees know is that their out-of-pocket costs have increased. They need to be shown the larger picture.

COMPENSATION AND BENEFITS

The ability to offer competitive compensation is largely driven by budget and senior management’s understanding of how critical competitive compensation is. During the last few years of a volatile economy, many organizations had to make tough decisions – cutting costs across the board. Our data shows that HR professionals do under-stand that these decisions affect their competitiveness, which in turn affects the organization’s ability to attract, retain, and motivate employees. One of the most telling pieces of data we uncovered was that almost half (47%) of organizations acknowledged that they do not pay competitively. With employers aware that competitive compensation is a priority for current and prospective em-ployees, why is this number so high? It’s especially surprisingly when employers acknowledge the need to pay in order to get and keep the right people.

53%71%

More than half (53%) of HR professionals think employees are fairly compensated, compared to 49% for World Norms and 30% for Salary.com visitors.

71% of HR professionals believe employees receive a competitive benefits package, compared to 63% for World Norms and 48% for Salary.com visitors.


PERCEPTION IS REALITY Fundamentally, we know that employees are motivated by fair and equitable pay. It is the reason “pay-for-performance” is a concept that every organization strives to incorporate into its culture. Yet, while only 53% of HR professionals think pay is compet-itive, 69% think they have high engagement and 83% think they will retain employees in the coming year. This disconnect is alarming. Are we as HR professionals saying that pay isn’t critical? Are we fooling ourselves into thinking that without proper compensation employees will still be engaged and want to stay with our organizations?

The wake-up call will come in the form of a retention crisis. If we average the World Norms and Salary.com data to cancel out some of the bias, then 49% of employees aren’t planning to stay with their organization in the coming year. That number is too high to brush aside. When this is coupled with the lack of employees willing to recommend their organization as a good place to work, some HR departments might find themselves in a recruiting crunch they are not prepared to handle.

When it comes to employees and their engagement in y our organization, it doesn’t matter what your programs do – it’s about what employees think they do. Under-standing the gap between employee and HR perception is the key to changing the message you send to increase employee engagement and, in turn, the company’s bottom line.

HR professionals need to consider the source of employee communication. Even the most well intentioned HR programs sometimes fail with groups of employees.

Why are some programs viewed positively and others negatively? While fault may rest with HR, the overarching problem is inadequate managers. Unfortunately, while most managers have earned their positions by being promoted from roles as excellent individual contributors, they often lack solid communication skills and the proper training to deal with and manage people. This failure to arm managers to effectively communicate with their people can ultimately undermine the success of any program.

THE BOTTOM LINE Our research shows that HR has become too distanced from the employee population, leading to a misunder-standing of where the employee mindset truly is. Since ultimate success lies in proper manager training, manag-ers need to be prepared to discuss and promote programs, as well as collect feedback for HR on how those programs are perceived. Business is business, yes. But it’s also personal — and it’s about making the workforce smarter. The goal is to attract and keep the best people, develop their skills, cultivate new leaders, and capitalize on their collective intelligence by applying human insights, social tools, and workforce analytics to transform the way they work.

Understanding the gap between employee and HR perception is the key to changing the message you send to increase employee engage-ment and, in turn, the company’s bottom line.


VOICESFROM THETRENCHES


Dealing with doctors and health care can intimidate anyone. A doctor’s staff acts as the front lines to your patient base and has the ability to transform the entire patient experience.

We have an environment where every member of our staff holds the same amount of passion and commitment to our practice and our patients. Everyone is expected to be engaged and interactive.

Our team works tirelessly to encourage preventative health care measures and also to help our patients take accountability for their own health. Our staff receives an abundance of training and we try to empower our patients with information and tools on a daily basis. The two combined make for an effective and thriving practice.

WHAT YOU CAN LEARN FROM A SMALL-TOWN FAMILY PHYSICIAN

What could a CEO learn from this physician? It’s important to establish a truly collabo-rative environment based on trust and a clear understanding of responsibilities at every level. Even though we are a small-town medical practice, we face challenges and need to learn how to address them and evolve with the needs of our patients.

What is your biggest challenge? Motivating patients to take control of their own health and become advocates for their care is a daily challenge. So many of them have the mindset that it’s just too difficult and that anything they do is not really going to have an impact.

Dr. Christine Jones, M.D.Community Care ClinicIvydale, West Virginia

How should you approach this challenge?

Click to watch a video


No matter what kind of business you run, feedback is crucial to your success. Feedback from customers, employees, and others will help to shape future decisions that impact your business.

My employees are constantly evaluated and given honest and candid feedback, but it’s a two-way street. I ask the same of them to ensure we are all on the same page.

We work in many high-pressure situations and it’s important that we work as a team. While everyone has their specific roles and responsibilities, if something goes wrong, we are all in it together.

WHAT YOU CAN LEARN FROM A CATERER

What could a CEO learn from this caterer? Everyone needs an ally at work. It is amazing how good and ambitious people can influence others and bring out the best in them. Give every team a great team leader and you’ll be amazed how much the leader influences the team’s productivity and satisfaction in the workplace.

What is your biggest challenge? Negative attitudes on the part of even one person can have a debilitating effect on others. There are just some people who focus on a problem instead of focusing on the solutions to address it.

Katherine Hilboldt FarrellFounder and PresidentKatherine’s CateringAnn Arbor, Michigan




As in any business, everything Purdue’s soccer team does is based on competition. The ultimate goal for players and staff is to win and they are constantly evaluated and trained on their ability to do so.

We build personal relationships with both athletes and staff. It’s crucial for them to know they are valued and not just a cog in the machine. Having these relationships makes celebrating wins that much sweeter and eases resentment and defensive-ness when we need to deliver constructive criticism.

We educate players on their roles and what each one of them means to the team as a whole. We teach them there are no guarantees – what you put in is not always going to be what you get out. But if you can go to sleep at night knowing you did your best to achieve success, then you can be proud of your performance.

WHAT YOU CAN LEARN FROM A soccer coach

What could a CEO learn from this soccer coach? Opportunity and responsibility are really good motivators. Most people want to contribute and want to be part of something bigger. Don’t assume everyone is as invested as you are. You need to constantly cultivate personal relationships and facilitate an environment that supports risk takers and resiliency.

What is your biggest challenge? Generationally speaking, seeing long-term development is not something our players are accustomed to. They want more immediate results. Their world is based on smart phones, tablets, and a million other forms of technology. It takes more to engage them and hold their attention. They crave to be entertained when they are learning.

Rob KlatteHead CoachWomen’s Soccer TeamPurdue University




Think Mobile First and Fast By now, the idea of mobile as a “trend” in learning should be nothing new. The story for 2013 and beyond is really “bigger, better, faster, simpler.” Consider some numbers: Smart phones are now in 55% of U.S. households, while tablets are already in 44% of U.S. homes. By 2016, we will bring 350 million smartphones to work globally. And while 80% of companies are reporting at least a moderate interest in mobile learning, fewer than 30% of them have an enterprise strategy to embrace and deploy it. Time to get serious.

“Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD)“Work” and “leisure” time are colliding and intermingling more than ever, and workers are tired of managing separate devices for both sides of their lives. While the data show that flexible work schedules, the mobile office, and the “always connected” mindset are actually lengthening the average workers’ week and increasing productivity, in many cases we’re not making technology easy and elegant to use in support of our workers’ needs and preferences. This problem is largely driven by security concerns and protocols, but we have to think differently here – ultimately in support of an ecosystem that is device-agnostic and meets people where they are.

Embrace “Knowledge Nuggets” In other words, give workers the information they need when they need it, in “bite-sized” and relevant chunks. With less time available for formalized, traditional, long-form corporate training, mobile technology provides the platform for feeding critical information to our teams precisely when they need it to maximize job performance. For example, think quick tutorials and/or job aids that can be consumed in a minute or less, and must be readable on a small screen.

TECHNOLOGY &LEARNING 2013: THREE RULES TO LIVE BY

By Paul Ignasinski, Managing Director, Root Inc.


The Missing LinkEmployee passion could improve in many areas, perhaps by strengthening relationships with managers.

America’s Workforce: A Revealing Account of What Employees Really Think About Today’s Workplace, News Bureau Survey conducted by Kelton for Root, 2013

54%

46%

43%

36%

31%

28%

26%

25%

25%

13%

9%

2%

WhiChhAVe YOUFeLT ABOUTWORk inThe LAsTMOnTh?

Frustrated

COMMItted

HaPPY

OVerWHeLMed

CaLM

FuLFILLed

eXCIted

BOred

aNGrY

CONFused

LONeLY

OtHer

Waning Interest. Less than half of employees today can assert that they have felt committed (46%), fulfilled (28%), or excited (26%) about work in the last month. And one in four (25%) have been angry.

– Fewer 18-24 year olds than those who are 45+ could describe themselves as committed (40% vs. 50%) or fulfilled (23% vs. 31%) in relation to their jobs in the past four weeks.

Internal Inspiration. Additionally, more than half (52%) report that they get more excited about their jobs from themselves, not others in the company – perhaps suggesting that leaders need to be a stronger source of inspiration for the company’s employees.

– More men than women (56% vs. 48%) get most of their enthusiasm about work from themselves.

the year of the person

Documents

perspectives of people

organizations strategy

point of view

future strategy

strategy creation

deeper view

leadingedge perspectives

vp of compensation