Alexandra Levit's Water Cooler Wisdom

Why Onboarding is More Important Than We Thought

Chief Research Officer and Co-Founder of Aptitude Research Partners Madeline Laurano recently shared data from 1,000 organizations to qualify the link between human capital practices and business results.

Laurano and her colleagues found that onboarding is the linchpin to everything related to talent management, and both employers and candidates are asking for a new hire experience that is continuous, dialogue-driven, and meaningful. Seventy-three percent of Aptitude’s respondents said that their top talent acquisition priority was a consistent experience for both candidates and employees, while 83 percent said their top engagement priority was a consistent experience.

Consistency

Consistency, however, is exactly what is lacking.  Sixty-seven percent said they currently have a consistent experience for candidates and employees, but less than 40 percent said they have improved their employee experience, while greater than 60 percent said they have improved their candidate experience. Those numbers speak for themselves.

Simplicity

Not only are our onboarding experiences relatively inconsistent, they are also far too complex. In the last four years, companies doubled their spending on HR technology from $400 million to approximately $2 billion. Fifty percent of respondent companies are using 3+ onboarding solutions, and 1 in 5 plans to increase their onboarding technology investment in 2017. Unfortunately, though, all of these systems have made the onboarding experience quite complicated, and respondents agreed that streamlining and simplifying it is essential. Fortunately, technology providers are now offering experience systems, which differ from traditional HR systems in that they span the entire employee experience, integrate various technologies, are optimized for mobile, and are analytics-based.

For the rest of the findings, please visit the SilkRoad blog.

Engagement Isn't Everything

Most know that diminished engagement has reached a crisis point – only 30 percent of workers are engaged. Eighty nine percent of Glassdoor users are either actively looking for new jobs or would consider better opportunities. And 93 percent of workers that took a new job did so outside their current organizations.

According to analyst Ben Eubanks, our mistake as HR professionals lies in thinking that our leaders are focused on engagement as a unique outcome. But engagement is typically not the end variable. Rather, CEOs want to move the needle on productivity, customer satisfaction, retention, and revenue. The key is to understand how employee engagement impacts all of these things.

For example, per IBM, employees who score highly on the experience index, which is correlated with engagement, gave 40 percentage points more discretionary effort and were therefore far more productive. Per Aon Hewitt, teams of engaged employees saw an additional 25 percent growth in Net Promoter Scores. The Corporate Leadership Council found that engaged employees have the potential to reduce staff turnover up to 87 percent, while Hay Group discovered that engaged workforces lead to 2.5 percent annual revenue growth.

In building a business case to focus on engagement, you must make an effort to use the same language as your leaders. Eubanks suggested that you gather data on these metrics (productivity, customer satisfaction, retention, revenue, etc.) as they currently exist in your business. Plot them against your employee engagement data and note any connections or correlations. What are your strongest conclusions? For instance, is there a team that’s driving the greatest business value that you need to focus on engaging and retaining?

For the rest of this post, please visit the SilkRoad blog.

Better Office Seating Arrangements Increase Productivity

In a recent article in Harvard Business Review, Jason Corsello and Dylan Minor described the results of a new study, which suggested that who an employee sits next to affects how they perform — and that grouping the right types of coworkers together can improve productivity and work quality.

The study was built upon the concept of “spatial management,” or the pursuit of how to best physically locate workers within an organization. Cornerstone analyzed the data of more than 2,000 employees over a two-year period provided by a large technology company with locations in the U.S. and Europe. This data included worker performance on three key metrics: productivity, or the average length of time it took a worker to complete a task; effectiveness, or the average daily rate at which a worker needed to refer a task to a different worker to solve; and quality, or the client’s satisfaction with the task.

For each employee on each of these three metrics, the researchers calculated what they called “spillover,” or a measure of the performance of the employee’s surrounding peers. The HBR article used this example: assume a worker has three coworkers: one sits next to her, one sits 25 feet away, and another sits 50 feet away. The researchers looked at the performance of the three coworkers along with their distance from the worker, and through data modeling measured the average spillover of co-worker performance on the worker.

They also divided employees into three types of workers: productive, generalist, and quality. Productive workers are very productive but lack in quality, while quality workers produce superior quality but lack in productivity. Generalists are average on both dimensions.

Birds of a Feather Shouldn’t Flock Together

The results indicated that neighbors have a significant impact on an employee’s performance, and it can be either positive or negative. So naturally, the study asked the question: what types of workers should be seated together? The results confirmed that matching productive and quality workers together and matching generalists separately generates up to 15 percent of increased organizational performance.

However, seating two productive workers together did not significantly increase their productivity — nor did placing quality workers together increase their work quality. And since generalists were average in both categories, they were less affected by spillover effects from either side. So, in a nutshell, symbiotic relationships are created from pairing those with opposite strengths. It turns out that those strong on one dimension are not very affected by spillover on that dimension. But, they are very sensitive to spillover on their weak dimension.

For the rest of the piece, head over to the QuickBase Fast Track blog.

20 Years Later, Much Career Advice Still Applies

In the summer of 1996 after my sophomore year of college, I started an internship at a nonprofit technology association in downtown Washington, D.C.

Until that point, I’d only worked in retail and had no idea what to expect. I asked my father and a professor for advice. Remarkably, 20 years later much of that guidance still resonates.

Doors open based on who you know

In the late 90s, these were physical doors rather than virtual ones, but the concept is the same. When applying for a job or looking to connect with someone, name-dropping would increase your odds of getting a positive response. Today, although we have exponentially larger networks thanks to social media, deep, in-person relationships still provide the greatest networking benefit. 

As you build your network of contacts, remember to follow up

Meeting a contact once is a wasted opportunity unless you periodically remind him or her of who you are and take steps to grow the relationship over time. In the 90s, I was encouraged to send snail mail holiday cards to former bosses and colleagues, and even to pick up the phone occasionally. Twenty years later, it’s all about LinkedIn.

In a new situation, aim to assimilate

Corporate culture used to be “one-size-fits-all.” If you worked in a business office in any city in the world, you were expected to behave professionally, adhere to hierarchies, and generally do what you were told without making waves. Individual company cultures may be more unique today (conservative versus liberal, strict versus playful) but the need to examine and then fit into a new culture – whatever it may be – remains.

For the rest of the piece, head over to my new Mashable column.

 

Is Rejection a Badge of Honor?

But although unpleasant, rejection can be seen as a critical warning and/or badge of honor. This post, featuring an exclusive interview with Halley Bock, author of Life, Incorporated, will explore the types of professional rejection, how you should take it in different situations, and what it means when you’re not experiencing any.

What are the different types of professional rejection?

Rejection can come in many forms – personal and professional, subjective and objective – and there isn’t much delineation except the setting in which it occurs. In the workplace, it could show up as a project abandoned, a team member suddenly disengaged or hostile, a plan hopelessly complex, a budget undermined by economic fallout, or an idea with no buy-in to support it. And while rejection can feel demeaning and frustrating, each rejection gives us the opportunity to categorize it as either a critical warning — a beacon illuminating an alternative path — or a badge of honor — a rumble meant to test internal drive.

In which situations might rejection be a warning? How can you accurately identify it as such?

Rejection may serve as a critical warning when we either repeatedly experience it in a particular situation. This perhaps indicates a need for us to alter our behavior and/or approach. Or, when despite all of our best laid plans, roadblocks and issues persist. In my experience as a CEO, nine out of 10 times, rejections were due to extenuating forces that had nothing to do with the validity, cleverness, or implementation of the effort itself. Instead, ideas didn’t work when they were ill-timed. Strategies didn’t pan out when there was a shift coming around the corner that would change everything. Relationships stalled when we were coming together for the wrong reasons.

Turns out, rejection was the universe’s way of saying: “Not now. Something else needs to happen first.” When I learned to listen to the resistance and let go of a preconceived outcome, the organization hardly missed a beat and simply kept growing. I stopped thinking of rejections in terms of failed strategies. Instead, they were simply ideas ahead of their time.

On the other hand, if I received the same negative feedback or rejection after repeated attempts at a particular idea, project, or relationship, then it was time to take inventory of the situation. I could either decide that, despite the rejection by others, my passion for a particular idea still resonated deeply. In this case, I continued to pursue it provided that no one would pay an emotional or financial price for my efforts. Or, I would step back, evaluate my approach, and make adjustments in order to get better results.

How should you address rejection in different situations?

Should you perceive a rejection as a critical warning where adjustments in behavior, direction, and strategy are required, an attitude and mindset of curiosity is the most essential tool.

If you are in a situation in which your idea is meeting heavy resistance, lean into the resistance and genuinely ask for feedback. Maybe the way in which you are pitching your idea is unclear or contains too much bravado. Or, your quiet nature has wrongly been perceived as aloof and arrogant. The only way to find out is to ask.

Use questions like: “Dan, I admire your opinion and have noticed your success in getting teams behind your ideas. Would you be willing to give me feedback on my idea and the way in which I am putting it forward?” Or: “Sarah, in our conversation last week, you seemed frustrated and impatient with me. It’s important to me that our working relationship is solid. Would you mind telling me if my perception was accurate and, if so, what you might suggest for a more positive interaction next time?” Regardless of the answers you receive, you can decide how much feedback to take or leave.

For the rest of the interview, head over to the QuickBase Fast Track blog.

Should You Jump Through Hoops for Your Customers?

Customers are always right—or are they? As business owners, we try to go above and beyond to provide the best possible experience and customer service to our clients. However, there are times that, despite our best efforts, we simply can’t resolve the situation in a manner that’s satisfactory to both parties.

Three business owners—Patrick Barnhill, founder of SpecialistID in Miami, Florida; Tim Maliyil, CEO of AlertBoot in Las Vegas, Nevada; and Mona Patel, CEO of Motivate Design in New York City—sound off on how they’ve handled unreasonable or impossible customer service situations.

Tell us about a time when a customer made an unreasonable demand. How did you handle it?

Patrick Barnhill: It seems that unreasonable demands have become the norm these days.  Amazon’s two-day Prime shipping and lots of other factors have totally distorted most shoppers’ perception of real costs for small businesses fulfilling orders. 

Luckily, a small percentage of demands are unreasonable and we are able to write them off as a cost of doing business and staying competitive. If it will cost us less than $100, my staff is trained to “Do the right thing” by the customer. The right thing is making them happy even if it’s a loss for us. If it is over that amount, it will get special attention and may require asking the customer if they can meet us somewhere in the middle.

Tim Maliyil: Being in the software business, we often have to balance requests that would genuinely improve the software and requests that are overly specific to a particular customer’s needs. We try to educate the customer about the necessary engineering process involved in fulfilling a request, and we help them understand the cost to the company. Reasonable customers tend to understand why something gets rejected, but the unreasonable ones will still put up a fight.

Mona Patel: Last year, we worked with a client on a design SWAT project in which we were tasked with branding a new kind of conference. The project was scoped, staffed and started within a few days, and our designers were excited to get to work. These SWAT projects are designed for quick turnaround: two weeks, two rounds of iteration and final delivery of branding materials—icons, fonts, color palettes, etc. In this case, the client asked for more rounds of iteration, which required more hours. Our designers wanted to please the client while delivering their best work, but we had a dedicated timeline.

When the partnership began to feel abusive, I stepped in. I called the client with scope in hand to clearly and directly communicate what we promised, how we over-delivered and how he overstepped. I presented him with three solutions: take the deliverables as is: no added iterations, no added time, no added budget; two more rounds of iterations for added time and budget; [or] a working session with the designers to address all issues and hand off the deliverables at the end of the session, billed at their hourly rate for three hours. He went with option #3 and launched a successful conference. We have worked together ever since.

For the rest of the interview, head over to the AMEX Open Forum.

Millennials View Diversity and Inclusion Differently

Today’s workplaces are politically correct. We are careful not to say anything that might be perceived to marginalize or offend a particular group, and when it comes to age, ethnicity, race, religion, gender, and sexual orientation, companies want to make sure every employee is respected and equally represented. We do this not because of profit, but because it’s the moral thing to do. This goal is at the heart of what most of us think of when it comes to diversity and inclusion.

But as of this year, the millennial generation (comprised of those born 1980-95) constitutes a majority of the U.S. workforce – and this group of younger professionals has a unique idea of what true diversity and inclusion should look like.

According to a 2015 study by The Billie Jean King Leadership Initiative (BJKLI) and The Deloitte University Leadership Center for Inclusion (which surveyed 3,726 global professionals of all levels, ages, genders, races, ethnicities, and sexual orientations), while millennials value the ideals of diversity and inclusion just like professionals in other generations, they define the constructs differently.

Most baby boomers and even Generation X-ers view diversity and inclusion in terms of representation and assimilation.  But for millennials, walking into an office lobby and seeing all types of people should be a given. True workplace diversity and inclusion means that people can come to work and be their genuine selves without fear of negative consequences. This is known as cognitive diversity.

The study’s millennials shared that cognitive diversity is the secret sauce for better engagement and empowerment along today’s fickle employees; inclusion is important not as an abstract ideal that checks a box and makes everyone feel good, but as a critical tool that enables business competitiveness and growth.

For more, head on over to the SilkRoad blog.

Is Your Personality Derailing Your Leadership?

Are you equipped to be a leader today? These insights could help you up your game.

According to DDI’s new global study of 15,000 executives in 18 countries, there are certain personality traits and attributes that make it more and less likely that a person will succeed in a 21^st century business world leadership role.

The warp speed of business has hastened the pace of leaders being thrust into roles of increasing scope and responsibility whether they are ready or not. As the cost of failure increases, predicting who can navigate these transitions demands an evalua­tion of personality factors that influence how leaders will respond to vastly greater challenge, pressure, and visibility.

One interesting section of the DDI report looks at hard-to-develop, positive traits (enablers) that grease leader success, and dysfunctional traits (derailers) that tend to trip them up. DDI examined these across three leader levels – strategic executive, operational, and mid-level. At each successive level, enablers were: exhibit stronger ambition and resilience and interpersonal sensitivity. Although the highest ranking executives are generally less vulnerable to them, the list of derailers was a bit longer:

• Volatility: displayed as inconsistency, distractibility and moodi­ness. This trait threatens credibility for building trust through predictable actions and consistent follow-through.

• Avoidant: often seen as passive-aggressive conflict resolution, which poisons opportunities to influence and interact.

• Perfectionism: the need to micromanage work or delay decisions in pursuit of a 100 percent outcome.

• Approval Dependent: senior leaders are sometimes ruled by the need for personal reinforcement and pleasing others.

• Arrogance: expressed as self-importance or insensitivity, or the need to oversell their own importance, or influence others through intimidation.

• Risk Aversion: an unwillingness to make bold moves to drive the business forward.

• Attention Seeking: the desire to take center stage risks overshadowing those whose hearts they need the most. This lack of humility compromises trust.

Leaders who are successful enough to be considered for a CEO position are unlike other high-performers. In order to learn how CEO candidates are unique in their response to leadership challenges and if their per­sonal attributes set them apart, DDI also profiled 243 CEO finalists, in 48 organizations, and benchmarked them against its larger database.

What CEO Candidates Do to Excel

• Obsess over execution and results: They stay laser focused on outcomes and demand specifics on how results will be achieved.

• Instantly and accurately size up complex business situations: Relying on seasoned business instincts, they quickly sort the good business ideas from the bad so they can steer toward best bets.

• Fixate on customer needs: They embody the customer persona so that they can diagnose how business plans will meet customer needs now and in the future.

How CEO Candidates Are Wired

• Intensely competitive, confident, and emotionally resilient: While most executives share these traits, they are even more pronounced among those preparing for a CEO position.

• Craving of attention: Most personality derailers, such as arrogance or volatility, decline in prevalence for CEO candidates. Not so for attention-seeking. The top job attracts those who enjoy being noticed for their talents and charm.

• Creative OR pragmatic: Twenty-one percent of CEO candidates are creative, conceptual strategists, and 29 percent are practical, no-nonsense operators. Only 8 percent effectively balance both.

For more where this came from, visit the QuickBase Fast Track blog.

Are You Taking Advantage of Microfeedback?

A few months ago, I attended an employee engagement workshop. The facilitator suggested that millennials require performance feedback more than once a year. “Maybe once a quarter,” she said.

More like once a day!” I couldn’t resist calling out.

I wasn’t kidding. For the 80 million millennials who now make up a majority of the workforce, no news is bad news. If they don’t hear from their managers frequently, they think they’re doing something wrong and quickly grow disillusioned.

Nevertheless, an open door policy in which employees are invited to stop by a manager’s office for extended feedback sessions multiple times a day simply isn’t practical. So what’s the solution?

The innovative concept of microfeedback originated in the consumer space and consisted of collecting a small amount of information from customers at key moments in their shopping experience. The goal was to gather relevant customer feedback for a more accurate assessment of their satisfaction.

Think about this, though. Why can’t the idea of microfeedback be extended to performance management? We certainly have the technology. Intra-company messaging systems like Yammer, Skype for business, and Slack are growing exponentially and with some groups (like millennials), are even  more popular than email.

Imagine that your direct report gives a status update in the departmental meeting for the first time. You think she did an exceptional job, but instead of noting it in her file to be reviewed in six months (or worse, forgetting about it completely), you send her a “thumbs up” emoticon via Slack. The action takes you less than 30 seconds, and yet your employee has a piece of encouraging feedback that will make her day.

Check out the full article at the SilkRoad blog.

Is The Performance Deck Stacked Against Women?

I recently conducted some research on gender differences in the workplace and learned that the same behaviors that were praised in men were often criticized in women. In particular, women who were more assertive, or confident in expressing their views, were often perceived negatively. Assertive men, on the other hand, were viewed as strong and competent.

A colleague pointed me in the direction of this Fortune piece by Kieran Snyder, who had a linguist do some number-crunching to determine if gender plays a role in the type of feedback an employee receives at review time.

Snyder asked men and women in the technology field if they would be willing to share their performance reviews for a study. Assuming that only strong performers would be willing to share, Snyder was most interested in looking at the critical feedback that these strong performers had received and whether the review tone or content differed based on employee gender.

Snyder collected 248 reviews from 180 people, 105 men and 75 women at 28 large, mid-size, and small companies.  About 71 percent of the reviews contained critical feedback. However, critical feedback was not distributed evenly by gender.

When breaking the reviews down by gender of the person evaluated, 59 percent of the reviews received by men contained critical feedback, but 88 percent of the reviews received by women did. The men were given constructive suggestions. The women were also given constructive suggestions – and told to pipe down.

The critical feedback men received was heavily geared towards suggestions for additional skills to develop. A few examples:

“Constructive feedback on your performance as a feature crew tester can be summed up by saying that you still have some skills to continue to develop.”

“Hone your strategies for guiding your team and developing their skills. It is important to set proper guidance around priorities and to help as needed in designs and product decisions.”

Women receive this kind of constructive feedback too. But, according to Snyder, the women’s reviews included a sharper element that was absent from the men’s:

“You can come across as abrasive sometimes. I know you don’t mean to, but you need to pay attention to your tone.”

“Your peers feel that you don’t leave them enough room. Sometimes you need to step back to let others shine.”

For the rest of the piece, check out the SilkRoad blog.