Alexandra Levit's Water Cooler Wisdom

Building Culture with a Distributed Work Model

These days the post-pandemic return-to-office question seems to have resolved. Most organizations have embraced a hybrid model, mandating that non-frontline employees work onsite between one and three days per week. However, this structure doesn’t necessarily equate to a positive work culture that employees are reluctant to leave. 

According to our Dayforce  Annual Pulse of Talent research, nearly 70% of employees are either looking for a new job or would leave their current organizations if the right opportunity came along. Thirty-eight percent said they had issues achieving their performance goals in the last year, with the main reason being too large of a workload. Only eight percent said their employer is giving them everything they need to be productive. 

It's clear that despite having more flexibility than ever before, employees are not as satisfied as they could be. And this does not bode well for a business climate that will continue to be plagued by labor and skills shortages.  

Understanding how to build a strong culture in a distributed work environment, a task that few attempted before the pandemic, has now become an organizational imperative. The following five strategies infused with the right employee experience technology may prove useful as you navigate this new terrain.  

Conduct ongoing employee needs assessments. 

The move to permanent distributed work requires a culture shift in all organizations, but instead of viewing this as an insurmountable task, leaders should look at it as a valuable opportunity to understand the unique requirements of all your employees and address concerns impacting specific groups.  

For example, caregivers may report that office commutes are a hardship, while employees who are underrepresented minorities may experience greater bias and more microaggressions in an in-person office environment. Leaders should know about these issues before they result in quiet or actual quitting.  

Employee pulse taking doesn’t have to be a ton of work. You can use an employee experience platform to automate the work of surveying your employees on a regular cadence and determine what they need and want as well as general workplace sentiment.  

You can also leverage an employee experience platform to create a real-time, two-way path to more in-depth dialogue and feedback with senior leaders and HR representatives. Once upon a time, the flow of information from the top to the bottom of the organization might have been more of a trickle, and c-suite communication may have lacked transparency, vision, and purpose. When an organization is empowered by employee experience technology, this no longer has to be the case. 

For the rest of this piece, check out the Dayforce blog.

Subtle Signs of Unconscious Bias

When I talked to a gender-bias researcher at a prestigious U.S. university off the record, she informed me that I should not take my success for granted. Based on the researcher’s experience, being a short woman in Corporate America requires that I'm twice as smart, twice as competent and twice as hardworking as a tall white man.

It's not like people readily believe that tall white men naturally make better leaders. But that's the thing about unconscious bias—it's an automatic attitude or perception about a person based on a single attribute like gender, ethnicity, race or sexual orientation that we are unaware we have and act upon. 

Unconscious bias is as old as human beings, as our ancestors developed it to quickly categorize threats in a hostile environment. In other words, we usually don’t have ill intentions when we discriminate.

The good news is that people are getting better at spotting subtle bias at work, as well as mastering business process improvement techniques and strategies that root it out before it does too much damage to a company's culture. 

Let's examine a few places bias at work commonly show up.

Resume Filters

You may not realize it, but people don't review resumes and profiles on merit alone. When unconscious bias creeps in, we can negatively assess a candidate based on their name, address, photo or educational institution.

For the rest of the piece, check out the AMEX Business website.

Are You Wondering What Employees Are Really Thinking?

Gallup asked nearly 200,000 US employees their opinions on a variety of topics current transforming our workforces, including flextime, agile performance management, and matrixed teaming. Exactly how critical are these developments to weave into our cultures and establish concrete policies around today? The statistics speak for themselves.

Flextime

Gallup defined differentiating benefits and perks as those that a segment of organizations offer, those that most employees say they would change jobs to get, and those that correlate most highly with employee engagement and well-being. The survey respondents cited flextime, which allows employees to have some choice in the time of day they work, as the sole differentiating benefit. Fifty-one percent of employees say they would change jobs for this benefit, while 44 percent say their company offers it.

In conjunction with flextime, remote working is on the rise. In 2012, Gallup data showed that 39 percent of employees worked remotely in some capacity. In 2016, that number grew four percentage points to 43 percent.

Employees whose organization allows them to change their hours, schedules, and location of work as needed have higher levels of engagement and well-being than other employees. They are more likely to strongly agree that a manager who lets them set their own schedule cares about them as a person.

Agile Performance Management

According to the survey, the majority of US employees show up at their job every day without the guidance, incentives and support needed to perform at their best. Only a mere 21 percent strongly agrees that their performance is managed in a way that motivates them to do outstanding work.

Much of the criticism aimed at performance management focuses on the frequency and quality of performance feedback. Gallup found that only 20 percent of employees strongly agree they have had a conversation with their manager in the last six months about the steps they can take to reach their goals. Only 23 percent of employees strongly agree their manager provides meaningful feedback to them, and 26 percent of employees strongly agree the feedback they receive helps them do better work. Furthermore, only 21 percent of employees strongly agree they have performance metrics that are within their control.

Obviously, upping feedback frequency is an important component of making performance management more effective. But as these results indicate, employees also want to be fairly measured and evaluated and to have a say in their future.

For more from the Gallup survey, 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.

 

Open Offices: The Jury Has Returned

I’ve never liked open offices. Never. I remember the first time my CEO announced that we’d all be giving up our private offices. A part of me felt like I was about to lose my home. The next step? Goodbye cubicles. Now, we all sat together like one big, happy family, and any illusion that you could have a confidential conversation or crash on a deadline without interruption was shattered. I wonder sometimes if the open office trend was partially responsible for my decision to strike out on my own. Growing up, I’d never shared a bedroom with a sibling, and I couldn’t get used to sharing now.

My last open office experience was several years ago, and the trend hasn’t slowed down any. According to the International Facility Management Association in a piece in the Washington Post, about 70 percent of U.S. offices have no or low partitions. As with many trends, Silicon Valley has led this charge. Google, Yahoo, and eBay have had open offices for years, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg even hired famed architect Frank Gehry to design the largest open floor plan in the world for 3,000 of his engineers.

Open Offices Have Been Studied in Earnest

It’s not unusual for companies in more traditional companies to follow what the tech giants are doing, even if it doesn’t appear to make sense. But at some point, you hope reason will win out. The academic community and the media have certainly done their best. Lindsey Kaufman, the author of the Post piece, cited a  2013 study, which found that many workers in open offices are frustrated by distractions that lead to poorer work performance. About 50 percent of the survey respondents housed in open offices were perturbed by the lack of sound privacy, and more than 30 percent by the lack of visual privacy.

Do open offices have any benefits? Proponents often talk up how easy it is to interact with colleagues in any open office. This study showed the opposite to be true. Professionals with private offices were actually the least likely to identify their ability to communicate with colleagues as an issue.

Fine, that’s just one study. But then, Maria Konnikova, author of the book Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes, published a sort of expose on the open office in the New Yorker. She cited the following results:

Open Office Literature Review by Matthew Davis

More than 100 independent studies showed that open offices have their advantages. Employees apparently feel more in tune with the organization, with a better grip on the company’s vision and values, when they work in an open office. Open offices were also believed to be more innovative. However, Davis’ review also illustrated that open offices caused productivity, attention, and job satisfaction declines. Employees experienced poorer concentration and motivation and greater stress than their counterparts in standard office environments.

Large Scale Open Office Research by David Craig 

At global consultancy DEGW in Montreal, professor David Craig surveyed 38,000 professionals and found that more frequent interruptions had a negative impact on productivity. If the employee was more senior, this effect was worse. Craig also found that a sense of privacy and control increase individual performance, whereas open offices remove that control and lead to feelings of helplessness.

Danish Study on Open Offices and Health by Jan Pejtersen

In their study of 2,400 professionals, Pejtersen and his colleagues found that as the number of people working in a single room increased, the number of employees who took sick leave increased as well. Workers in two-person offices took an average of 50 percent more sick leave than those in single offices, while those who worked in totally open offices took an average of 62 percent more.

Cornell Noise Study by Evans and Johnson

According to Evans and Johnson’s research, clerical workers who were exposed to open-office noise for three hours had increased levels of epinephrine – otherwise known as adrenaline. They also found that people in noisy office environments made fewer ergonomic adjustments than they would in private, causing greater physical discomfort. Finally, open office subjects also solved fewer create puzzles than those working in a quiet, closed environment.

What about standing desks? To find out more about the legitimacy of this trend, visit the QuickBase Fast Track blog.

Disruption 101: How to Ignite Change in Your Company

As a general rule, human beings fear change and will often fight to maintain the status quo. If there are individuals within your organization who are either not interested or downright hostile toward a focus on disruptive scenarios, there are several steps you can take to bring them into the fold.

Open a dialogue

Before you attempt to persuade colleagues to jump right into a specific initiative, provide a safe space to discuss disruption in general. Organizational change consultant David Hofstetter suggested posing questions such as: Where and how could disruption impact your business? How will your skills and those of your employees be impacted? Are you embracing change, shying away from it, or ignoring it? What are your competitors doing that you are not? What the newest trends in your industry?

Attend forward-thinking industry events

The sessions and conversations you and your colleagues will have at conferences centered on innovation will take your thinking to another level. Encourage your colleagues and employees to see for themselves what disruption means and what it can do for growth and profit. Appropriate events may vary by industry, but some good ones are Tech Crunch Disrupt, World Business Forum, and Fortune Growth Summit.

Hire an outsider

Sometimes, an internal person can repeat the same message dozens of times, but no one really hears it until it comes from the mouth of an external consultant who is perceived as an expert. When it comes to embracing disruption, you might make greater headway by bringing on a single or team of advisers who can offer an objective picture of your organization’s status compared to the larger market, and can provide direction and next steps.

Conduct periodic market disruptor analyses

Often, disruptive innovations (<<interview with Guy Kawasaki) are considered far away, irrelevant, and optional. There is no better way to make a case to in-denial executives than to regularly monitor and explain how disruptive competitors are threatening your business TODAY. “As the barriers to entry in businesses get lower and easier, competitors and new ways of doing things will appear fast and more often,” said Hofstetter.

Change your tone to one of urgency

As I mentioned before, human beings prefer to support existing ways of doing things. For this reason, companies tend to be conservative, reactive, and focused on immediate business fires rather than the ones that threaten to burn from miles away. Use the data from your market disruptor analyses to connect the dots for your leaders – why is disruptive change something that requires attention this instant? Speaking in terms of lost profit or customers is more likely to resonate with some leaders than “we should really try this new thing.”

Fight the temptation to be insular

While being laser focused on your own daily operations is more comfortable, putting on blinders is dangerous in a business world that changes rapidly. Therefore, you should make sure that your company has a pipeline to receive guidance from a variety of sources. For instance, an advisory council that taps people in different roles in different fields will provide a fresh perspective that is impossible to get otherwise. When it comes to understanding where your market is going, often you can take cues from other industries that are a year or two ahead of yours.

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

Want to Improve Your Organization? Beware These Pitfalls

Joseph Drasin is the director of University Process Innovation, Division of Information Technology, at the University of Maryland. In a recent article for Educause, Drasin described his dealings with the university department known for being inefficient and difficult to work with. “Their processes were perceived as cumbersome, costly, frustrating, and antithetical to their stated objectives,” said Drasin. “Several IT systems had been purchased and implemented to address these issues, which actually exacerbated the problems.”

Drasin and his team worked with the department in question to develop an overarching process that improved service and reduced administrative costs. After ensuring that all practices were consistent, aligned, and adding value, the group was able to implement a complementary technology solution.

Reflecting on the redesign process, Drasin shared words of wisdom that likely apply to most readers here. “When an organization buys a shiny new piece of technology and then tries to implement it without first having looked hard at its own processes and people, the vast majority of the time, the project doesn’t live up to expectations,” he said. “Even when successful, too many times the new technology looks a lot like the prior technology in terms of how it works.”

Drasin went on to share process excellence lessons from his journey, some of which were inspired by Alec Sharp, the author of Workflow Modeling: Tools for Process Improvement and Application Development. I’ve cited several of them here and also included some additional gems from Velaction blog author Jeff Hajek.

Issue 1: Getting ahead of yourself

“It is easy to let the conversation go straight to the details before describing the environmental context and determining what the individual processes are and how they relate to one another,” said Drasin. “Everyone needs to be on the same page contextually, and you’ll need to emphasize the importance of discussion — or the project can derail quickly.”

Issue 2: Decisions by consensus

“You should never vote on a process or other business decision,” said Hajek. “Those should be grounded in facts, not popular opinion. If there are two competing choices, decide on the criteria you will measure them by, but let the options go head-to-head against each other on their own merit.”

Issue 3: Placing stock in the law of averages

“It is very uncommon for averages to help you improve processes,” explained Hajek. “For instance, the average ship time compared to your target time tells you very little about on-time delivery. The average size of the component may make it look like a part is in tolerance when in reality it has a high defect rate. Make sure you have some way of looking at the spread of your results rather than just the average.”

Issue 4: All hail the artifacts

Drasin described physical deliverables like diagrams and flowcharts as artifacts. Problems occur when teams focus on artifacts to the exclusion of the processes and conversations that build them. “If the tools themselves held the value, you could simply borrow flowcharts from a similar organization and implement them. But developing artifacts alone, without the necessary context and commitment, rarely results in effective recommendations,” Drasin said.

For more where this came from, have a look at 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.

Filling the Gaps Between Recruitment and Hiring Folks

At this year's SilkRoad Connections conference, IDC VP of HR and Talent Research Lisa Rowan discussed the differing expectations that recruiting and hiring managers have regarding HR-related issues. These disconnects matter because the all-important employee experience begins with the first candidate contact, and employees are at the heart of the customer experience.

In a 2015 study of 500 executives, IDC examined gaps in the following 10 areas:

• Gap #1: Corporate Culture: Culture is viewed as a shared responsibility with an emphasis on HR. Line of business managers want more HR involvement. The main issue for HR? How do you translate culture?

• Gap #2: Employer Branding: Managers want HR to do more here as well. If the brand is good, respondents feel that it sells itself. But if it’s unclear, how can we figure out the right message for candidates, and whose job is that?

• Gap #3: Leadership Development: HR professionals think the responsibility resides with them, while line of business managers think it’s a joint effort and would actually like more direct involvement.

• Gap #4: Translating Corporate Goals: HR professionals feel they should lead the charge here and line of business managers think it’s a joint effort. Both groups would like more involvement and collaboration.

• Gap #5: Recruiting Strategy: Both groups are split on whether this was mostly an HR or shared responsibility, but both also feel that HR should do more. HR would like a bigger role in the overall workforce strategy, which directly impacts the recruiting plan.

• Gap #6: Candidate Pipeline: HR professionals see themselves as mostly responsible, while line of business managers feel this is a shared activity. Both groups want more control over the candidate pipeline.

• Gap #7: Writing Job Descriptions: Sixty percent of HR professionals say this is a joint activity and 60 percent of line of business managers admit that they should step up and do more.

• Gap #8: Job Posting and Social Outreach: Line of business managers are vocal in wanting a bigger role. The survey was clear that they aren’t being asked by HR to tap their networks for promising candidates.

• Gap #9: Screening of Candidates: HR is frustrated by line of business turnaround times. These professionals acknowledge ownership but nearly all (98 percent) want managers to step up!

For Lisa's key takeaways, visit the SilkRoad blog.