Alexandra Levit's Water Cooler Wisdom

Designing the Right Physical Workspaces

In my work as a human resources and leadership consultant, I’ve observed that many organizations have dedicated spaces where employees come together to receive training. Most of the time, these locations are basic conference rooms, which led me to wonder: what if companies could build facilities uniquely equipped to meet the needs of the human learner?

Seeking to find out what such spaces might look like and what best practices organizations would be smart to integrate, I spoke with Jonathan Webb, VP of workplace strategy for KI, a designer of 21^st century interior furnishings.

Alexandra: Jonathan, how should companies go about designing the right physical space for corporate training?

Jonathan: In some ways, the key to creating corporate training spaces is the same as designing offices: flexibility. Just as employees have different work styles throughout their 9-to-5 day, new hires in corporate training have different learning styles. So recruiters have to design training spaces not only to enable the variety of tasks or lessons at hand, but to support the variety of learners they're training in a given session.

What physical design concepts best facilitate human learning and why?

Jonathan: I think it entirely depends on what the goals are within each learning session. That's why it's important to align a company's training goals with the physical learning environment. Designing a flexible training space is vital to facilitating human learning. For example, if one training task requires an individual assessment, new hires may need walled-in spaces or privacy screens to focus. But if another goal of the training program is to build relationships among teams that will soon work together, trainees may move to larger, shared work surfaces.

If an organization doesn't have a big budget for renovation, what tweaks can it make help improve its training spaces?

Jonathan: Training facilities are often overlooked within organizations, but an organization can make some effective changes without knocking down any walls. When space is at a premium, designing workspaces that can be reconfigured to accommodate various learning styles and types is paramount. Flexible furniture on casters can be reconfigured quickly. Mobile whiteboards can double as space dividers and learning surfaces to provide excellent teaming environments. A mix of high and low tables, along with several pieces of lounge furniture, can often be assembled to allow various types of group work.

For the rest of the interview, head over to the DeVry WORKS website.

Leading a Team in the Future Workplace

 

 

When writing my brand new book Humanity Works: Merging People and Technology for the Workforce of the Future, I found a business world in the process of rapid transformation. I learned that one way to have a sustainable competitive advantage in a constantly evolving, virtual, global and automated environment is to master how to lead a team. Leaders who do this may well find that running their organizations at this time in history will be rewarding and full of opportunity.

But what exactly will the future look like? In order to be in a good position to take advantage of pending developments, owners may want to understand what's coming and master how to lead a team.

I asked Jeff Epstein, owner of referral software company Ambassador Software and Nathan Klarer, founder and chief operating officer at IT talent provider Datyra to weigh in on a few of the more pervasive trends and how leaders can go beyond them to cope successfully with the coming changes.

Flexible and Distributed Workplaces

The average employee in the 2030s probably won't be work in a single physical environment, but where and when it's most convenient and impactful.

 

“The idea of offices is already changing, with a switch to more 'WeWork-style' workplaces," says Epstein. “Shorter-term teams will be assembled to solve specific business problems, and will operate virtually."

Epstein is referring to what is known as a distributed workforce, which reaches beyond the restrictions of a traditional office environment and is often dispersed geographically over a wide area.“Teams are becoming more multi-disciplinary as distributed workplaces allow for talent to specialize," says Klarer.

In considering how to lead a team in the future, owners may have to account for changes in workplace dynamics.

“The most fundamental change is that real-time communication is commonplace," says Epstein. "Today, with a litany of communication tools, teams have access to information—and people—immediately, and people expect to chat with team members at any time."

This means that leaders will need to open their literal and metaphorical doors and devise ways to be more accessible to team members, providing guidance and direction outside the confines of traditional business hours without losing their own sense of balance and privacy.

For the rest of the piece, check out the AMEX OpenForum.

Secrets for Driving Culture in Business Today

Driving culture involves reinforcing beliefs and behaviors that determine how that organization's leaders and employees interact internally and externally.

Is there a formula for it?

Not exactly.

There are, however, certain best practices that I've learned along the way as an entrepreneur, and also by consulting two fellow business owners: Jacqueline Marrano, owner of accounting firm Marrano Solutions and Reuben Yonatan, founder and CEO of customer relationship software company GetCRM.

 1. Focus on recruitment and onboarding.

Driving culture starts with your people. And if you are clear about your mission, vision and values, you can attract potential employees with similar sensibilities.“We position our culture at the forefront within all our hiring materials and spend lots of time searching for the most motivated and driven individuals to join our company, because the quality of our employees has a direct impact on customer satisfaction, product output and brand reputation," says Yonatan.“And, when new hires come aboard," he continues, "we make very clear what's expected of them and how their role is meaningful not just in the office, but meaningful in the real world, so they can be proud of where they work and what they do."

2. Foster a meaningful employee experience.

Employees now expect an experience at work that is comparable to the experience they have at home via services like Netflix and Amazon. You choose what you want to do when you want to do it, and interactions are easy and convenient.

Your unique employee experience should cover all facets of the employment lifecycle, including recruitment, onboarding, learning, performance and transition. This involves understanding and promoting the activities employees undertake at each stage that can help immerse them in the culture while also reaching maximum productivity and potential.

Yonatan believes he has created a culture for his employees to thrive, be themselves, have fun and do their best on every project.

“Our team members stay with us because we offer a flexible experience that develops and captivates them," he says. "We provide an exciting in-house culture with a lot of perks, but we also share how employees' roles are meaningful in the real world, and how they can do them from home, for example."

It's important to realize, however, that customized experiences are key: a one-size-fits-all approach may not be effective in driving culture, even for employees in the same location and role.

For the rest of the piece, head over to the AMEX OpenForum.

Should You Pursue Foreign Markets?

Operating a business outside your home country sounds appealing, and can in fact be an excellent way to take your organization to the next level. But, in addition to ensuring that you've perfected current processes first, expanding to foreign markets requires substantial time and resources and careful consideration of several factors. 

Haithem Elembaby is a startup founder with multiple exits, and is now an SVP at Harbinger, a firm that helps foreign startups gain sales traction in the U.S. market.

“An initial step is understanding where your value proposition will be most compelling. Sometimes, carving a niche that your competition has avoided is a much easier strategy than going head to head," he says.

But before you embark on that strategy, consider the following advice to help lay the groundwork for success abroad.

1. Join forces with the locals.

Certain markets may require collaboration with a local partner.

“Make sure you assess local regulations and expectations from new market entrants when determining which foreign markets to pursue," suggests Elembaby.

Tim McHugh, CEO of global book publisher Saddleback Educational Publishing agrees, citing the example of Starbucks. “For years, Starbucks didn't know how to enter India as coffee is not as big as tea in India," McHugh says, "but recently [they] partnered with a local company, Tata Beverages to have a better chance of success."

When considering foreign markets, it helps to learn the nuances of how your new audience makes purchases. 

“Map the key stakeholders and understand how to interact with them," says Elembaby. “For example, does the culture value directness or is relationship building more important? What works in New York will not necessarily work in London, let alone Beijing."

You should also think through the economic and political stability of the region you're targeting.

For the rest of the piece, head on over to the AMEX OPENForum.

Why Employee Experience is the Future of HR

Starting in the last few years, culture has played a central role in a new focus on employee experience. Employee experience encapsulates what people encounter, observe or feel throughout their tenure at a given organization. The desire to create the most authentic, user-friendly experience has given rise to what is known as the consumerization of human resources. This is the process of creating a social and mobile interface for employees inside an organization, which serves as the entry-point for an immersive dive into the company’s culture and what employees experience every day. 

Driven by a more dynamic HR and c-suite involvement than most of us are used to seeing, this setup portrays the organization as quickly evolving with the needs of its workforce, and able to communicate in real-time where the company is, where it’s going, and how the individual employee fits in. Each employee accesses the experience via their own devices, all content is digital and available on demand, recommendations are customized due to input from analytics, and social interaction is prized and promoted.

Today and in the future, the notion of employee experience is complex and requires forethought, planning, and coordination between HR and the c-suite. Journey Mapping is a tool that got its start in the customer world. It imagines the employee experience across the entire talent lifecycle, and as an employee progresses through the Journey Map, they might go through stages like the following. Alongside each stage, let’s propose some activities a collaborative HR/executive team can undertake to influence and shape the experience.

Apply and Evaluate Stage:  How the candidate learned about the company; how they engaged with recruiters or hiring managers and learned sufficient information about the organization to make an educated decision.

Your experience must answer the candidate questions: What is this organization about and why would I want to work there? Is this the right organization and role for me? How can I be a part of what this company delivers its customers?

HR and Leader-Driven Activities:

• Target job boards, employee referrals, and internal career sites/social media platforms to attract top talent
• Convert top talent by telling a compelling story online and tuning candidates into company messages early
• Leverage mobile and one-click apply apps to simplify your process
• Create and deliver personalized messages for consistent touchpoints
• During conversations, provide insight into brand and talent goals
• Engage candidate in behavioral interviewing and assessments
• Provide access to a variety of sources, including current employees and supervisors
• Solicit and address feedback on the recruitment experience
• Provide a customized e-offer letter
• Upon acceptance, launch new hire onboarding experience

 

Join Stage: How the new hire was on boarded and assimilated into the organization.

Your experience must answer the employee questions: What can I expect here, and what’s expected of me? Where, how, and with whom should I work?

HR and Leader-Driven Activities:

• Deliver personalized content and solicit feedback on job location(s), schedule, and role
• Enable new hire to easily complete new hire paperwork
• Introduce new hire to team, mentors, and leaders
• Set job scope and performance expectations
• Connect individual goals to overarching strategic goals
• Survey new hire about experience and monitor performance

 

Learn Stage: Projects and training opportunities that facilitated integration into the organization.

Your experience must answer the employee question: What do I need to do right away to be productive and efficient at my job?

 

HR and Leader-Driven Activities:

 

• Serve up relevant content via a mobile-responsive interface at the right time in the right dose
• Recommend supplementary content to ensure continuous development
• Set mutually-agreed upon, short-term performance goals and provide interactive touchpoints to reinforce them
• Create an automated process to monitor completion and ensure compliance

Contribute and Grow Stage: How the organization fostered an environment of innovation and collaboration and provided opportunities for promotion and new responsibilities.

Your experience must answer the employee questions:  How can I make a difference here? How should I give and receive feedback? How can I further develop the skills necessary to drive my career forward?

HR and Leader-Driven Activities:

• Check in regularly to monitor progress, improve relationships, and recognize accomplishments
• Leverage ongoing reviews to identify skills gaps and create learning plans
• Adjust short-term goals to achieve long-term objectives
• Foster a culture of giving, requesting, and receiving feedback continuously
• Illuminate development paths, mentorship, and additional training opportunities
• Empower employees to take charge of their development and skill acquisition

What else can you do to foster a positive experience at these different stages of the employee lifecycle?

Healthcare: Can You Prevent Quick Quits?

Hiring and retaining new employees are daunting tasks for most healthcare organizations for a variety of reasons. To start, many are struggling with major skills shortages and even sourcing the proper talent to fill open positions can be an uphill battle. And then, the hiring process in healthcare organizations often takes so long that new employees either take another job instead or leave within the first few months.

Resignations that take place within the first three to six months of employment are known as “quick quits,” and given their challenges, it’s critical that healthcare organizations do everything in their power to prevent these rapid-fire resignations. The key is, of course, strategic onboarding in the form of KSR – knowledge, support, and relationships. Let’s look at each of these three components.

Knowledge

Most healthcare workers join an organization enthusiastic to contribute to the best of their ability. However, if they don’t receive proper training and direction, as well as clarity around their roles and responsibilities, they may find themselves at loose ends and wishing they’d taken a different position. In addition to general information about the organization and its policies, your onboarding initiative should include a review of expectations for what new hires are expected to accomplish in a given job. Managers should ensure that these expectations and goals align with what was discussed during the interview process. And because uninformed employees are more likely to be disengaged, there should be an ongoing and seamless flow of role-related information from organization to manager to employee.

Support

Through its work with healthcare organizations, Gallup observed that the rapid changes in the healthcare industry have adversely affected two critical items of employee engagement: knowing work expectations and connecting with the company’s mission.

Providing this type of information is an important way to offer appropriate support, but managers should also ask each new hire, regularly, what they can do to make his or her job easier. Proactively, new employees should be pointed in the direction of key resources that will help them get around common problems or roadblocks, and managers should be on the lookout for the stress reactions that often occur during times of transition – especially in high-pressure healthcare environments.

For the rest of this post, check out the SilkRoad blog.

Introducing Tours of Duty for the Business World

According to Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn and author of the book The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age, a tour of duty is an employee situation that involves working full-time in consecutive roles within an organization, working full-time in consecutive organizations for the purpose of upskilling, or taking breaks or dialing down from a full-time role in an organization.

Within a single organization, a tour of duty typically lasts for a finite period of two to five years. Both manager and employee openly acknowledge that at the end of the tour, the employee may well leave the organization. “The new compact acknowledges the probable impermanence of the relationship yet seeks to build trust and investment anyway. Instead of entering into strict bonds of loyalty, both sides seek the mutual benefits of alliance,” commented Hoffman in Harvard Business Review. “As allies, employer and employee try to add value to each other. The employer says, ‘If you make us more valuable, we’ll make you more valuable.’ The employee says, ‘If you help me grow and flourish, I’ll help the company grow and flourish.’”

The best tours of duty involve the mastery of new skills, or entrepreneurial opportunities like building and launching a new product, reengineering an existing business process, or introducing an organizational innovation. Regardless, the notion of a compact is critical. The tour of duty agreement must be made between individual manager and employee and therefore cannot be legislated by HR.

For more on tours of duty, check out the full post at the SilkRoad blog.

Employee Experience is Not Just for Full-Timers

In the last few years, much emphasis has been placed on designing a strong employee experience that encourages talent activation, engagement, performance, and retention. However, all more organizations move toward experience design, most focus almost exclusively on a full-time, uninterrupted employee experience.

Most HR professionals recognize and support employee transitions such as maternity/paternity leave and FLMA or temporary leaves of absence. Some even encourage sabbaticals and phased retirement.  However, the word transition must be used loosely here, because in most cases, the employee in question just reassigns her work, leaves, and then just shows up again several months later (or, in the case of phased retirement, changes her role without fanfare or much acknowledgement).

If you really want your organization to derive value from these benefits, you must be strategic about designing an experience exclusively for every kind of transition situation or “career intermission.” Here are some questions to ask as you consider how to use each transition to strengthen your relationship with participating employees.

• Maternity/paternity leave: What projects is the employee looking to complete before this very personal event? At what place would she like to see her career when she departs? How can we keep her involved in a stress-free way while she’s off? What specific steps will we take to ensure she’s properly re-onboarded when she returns?
• FLMA/leaves of absence: How can we support him during this difficult time? What resources can we provide to help? How can we strengthen his commitment to the company when the crisis has passed? What specific steps will we take to ensure he’s properly re-onboarded when he returns?

For more where this came from, check out the SilkRoad blog.

Performance is a Cultural Variable

co-founder and CEO Mollie Lombardi described a culture of performance as a set of behaviors that are rewarded or discouraged by the people, processes, and systems within an organization. To create and foster a performance culture, Lombardi suggested focusing on the following conditions for success.

Alignment

According to new Aptitude research, alignment on culture is a major challenge: only 38 percent of organizations said that leaders and employees would describe their culture in the same way. On a related point, 53 percent of senior leaders said performance expectations are clearly communicated, but only 34 percent of employees said the same.  Leaders are in denial, and it doesn’t help that while 60 percent of companies have executive level oversight of client experience, only 37 percent have an executive level role focused on workplace culture and employee engagement.

Employee Experience

Eighty-one percent of top performing companies said they measure the experience of candidates, employees, managers, and leaders. When an experience doesn’t resonate, it’s often because we are using a one-size-fits-all model. Lombardi advised that we must do a much better job tailoring messages, recognizing that employees have a singular experience throughout their day. And the only experience that matters is theirs.

In addition to catering to the needs of the individual rather than the collective group, we can create a better experience by bridging the gap between employer and employee through more frequent and bidirectional communications, and creating an easier process for individuals to do their work, engage with others, and drive performance. The best employee communications are consistent in message but vary in format (depending on information consumption habits) and are supported by a strategic technology implementation.

For more of Lombardi's insights, check out the full post on the SilkRoad blog.

When Considering Employee Experience, Don't Forget About Culture

I recently presented a webinar, Employee as Consumer: Building a Differentiated Experience Through the Lifecycle, with HR Daily Advisor and SilkRoad.  We talked about the consumerization of HR, the creation of a meaningful employee experience throughout the lifecycle, and how design thinking, talent activation, and employer branding play into it.

At the end of the session, Jennifer asked: How do you create an experience that’s meaningful and impactful for different cultures? This is an excellent question, and both global and non-global organizations are becoming more interconnected with every passing year. But according to recent McKinsey research, only half of executives in global companies think they are effective at tailoring candidate and employee communications for different geographies.

The first step, of course, is to recognize that you can’t offer a one-size-fits-all experience to candidates and employees across the globe, even ones who are in the same demographic or perform the same role. You should seek to understand even the most subtle factors that drive engagement and motivation in other cultures. For instance, consulting firm Seven Step used Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions Theory to tease out country-specific essentials. These include:

• China: This culture views titles within the workplace as extremely important. Given this focus on status, companies should integrate distinctions such as awards and competitive rankings in their experiences. In China, individualism is low and language is viewed as a unifying agent. Flexibility with language translation enhances the experience while positioning the organization as a true member of the community.

• Central Europe: This culture is more risk-averse and ambiguity is viewed negatively. Job seekers and employees prefer to weigh the facts of an opportunity rather than taking a chance. Experiences in Central Europe should be content heavy, focusing on the explicit details of roles and responsibilities.

• Latin America: This collectivist culture encourages one to think of the group before himself. Organizations should ensure that experiences incorporate the use of “we” instead of a company name. Also, Latin Americans think of their careers within the context of their industry, not their company. Therefore, experiences should portray how every role is aligns with larger industry goals and achievements.

For more on Jennifer's question, check out the SilkRoad blog.