Alexandra Levit's Water Cooler Wisdom

Are You Adequately Supporting Your Middle Managers?

Want to know what struck me the most in our middle manager panel blog post? I was impressed by how proactive they were. In many circumstances, they knew what to do and were able to execute on behalf of their organization and for their own well-being.

I realize this is not always the case, especially for new managers or managers who are new to working in a distributed work environment.

It’s up to an organization’s leaders to provide middle managers with the support and guidance to be productive, engaged, and healthy on the job. Let’s divide our support strategies into two categories: assimilation and safety.

Assimilation

Assimilation doesn’t just apply to middle managers who are new to the role or new to an organization. Even experienced managers can feel confused or stressed about how to succeed in this transformed workforce that presents new management challenges.

Leaders need to start conversations on how to manage bi-directionally within the organization’s current culture, how job expectations and success metrics have evolved, and how to handle employee issues that didn’t exist two years ago – like how to proceed if a worker refuses to come to the office.

More than ever, middle managers need leaders to facilitate mentorship, sponsorship, and peer-leader relationships that can grow and deepen in person as well as online.

In Ceridian’s 2022 Executive Survey, 94% of respondents said that the employee-manager relationship was very or extremely important for employee retention. Despite that, many people in supervisory positions don’t feel comfortable communicating with their direct reports.

In a private leadership session, I recently asked 10 executives how they felt about having substantive conversations with their employees. More than half said “awkward.” Regardless of the cause of the communication difficulties (lack of in-person rapport, etc.), this is an issue that should be nipped in the bud.

Both new and experienced middle managers should receive training in areas such as demonstrating empathy, building trust, delegating, providing constructive performance feedback, and persuading and motivating teams. This may be easier said than done, though, because as the Executive Survey indicated, only about half of organizations have management training programs at all.

The bottom line? Today’s middle managers don’t have the bandwidth or wherewithal to “figure it out.” If leaders want them working in harmony with the rest of the organization, they need to expend the time and resources to educate them and empower them to overcome management challenges.

Safety

For much of the pandemic, employee safety initiatives focused on how we could keep people from contracting and spreading COVID-19. But over the course of two trauma-filled years, employees and especially managers began feeling a different lack of safety.

In fact, the emotion that has most permeated the ranks of middle management is fear. Many are facing significant personal and professional challenges but are afraid to speak up lest they experience negative consequences.

Some organizations have done an excellent job of supporting managers’ psychological needs during the pandemic, including organizing events to target burnout, providing confidential resources like crisis hotlines and behavioral health sessions, and actively reducing the stigma of talking about mental health issues. And in the immediate aftermath of COVID-19, organizations are offering career mobility and flex work options to an unprecedented degree.

The key here is to sustain the momentum. Already, I’m seeing some companies revert to their basic EAPs (employee assistance programs) when it comes time to decide on benefits for the upcoming year.

Unfortunately, I’m also witnessing certain organizations doubling down on in-person office time or subtly punishing managers who leave work to pick up a child or go to a doctor’s appointment.

If managers don’t feel safe, no one else will either. Caring for middle managers through assimilation and safety isn’t just the right thing to do, it’s the smart business decision in a tight labor market where competent and loyal talent is hard to find.

The Plight of the Middle Manager in 2022

Welcome to our blog series on middle managers. Over the next two months, we will focus on the millions who comprise this heroic group. We’ll start with an overview of modern middle manager challenges and follow with some individual perspectives from middle managers. Our final two posts will cover general solutions and technology-specific solutions for supporting the middle managers in our organizations.

When I was 24 years old and working in a junior-level PR job in New York City, I decided to write a book about everything work-related I hadn’t been taught in college. Burnout was top of mind.

As it turns out, I had no idea.

Fast forward 20 years, and many of my generational compatriots are middle managers. They took these roles at a time when burnout had increased so much that the World Health Organization had labeled it an “occupational phenomenon.” And, in conjunction with the COVID-19 pandemic, late 2021 survey data from Gallup found that manager and middle manager burnout is only getting worse and is precipitously higher than individual contributor burnout.

It's not just the pandemic

It’s easy to attribute burnout to working two years in a pandemic, but the issue is more nuanced and multifactorial. First, let’s consider the role within the organization. A manager in the middle of several layers of hierarchy must maintain relationships with those below them and those above them. “It requires being both a proactive leader to direct reports and an engaged follower to the top management – all at the same time,” wrote Zahira Jaser last year in Harvard Business Review.

Jaser explored other challenges facing middle managers, including the need to create a dialogue with and appease people with conflicting agendas, to amplify the voices of direct reports upwards, and to critically appraise and balance dilemmas.

Do middle managers receive proper training for this complex dance? It depends, but the answer is often no. Ceridian’s 2022 Executive Survey found that while leaders recognize the value of middle managers, they aren’t always great at supporting them.

When Executive Survey respondents were asked how their organizations support middle managers, only half (51%) said their organizations offer management training programs.

A lack of comprehensive leadership development guidance and mentoring often leaves middle managers feeling less secure. Millennial managers are especially vulnerable to getting in over their heads, as they were promoted into supervisory positions much earlier than prior generations. All these factors lead to a profound experience of middle manager burnout.

For the rest of this piece, head over to the Ceridian website.

Career Durability: Ensure You Have a Job As Long As You Want One

You might remember that last fall, I helped DeVry University with a survey about workplace sentiment during the COVID-19 pandemic. At a time when employees should be feeling recognized and celebrated, nearly one in four employed Americans said they believed that American workers are not valued. And, more than a third of survey respondents claimed that based on their employer’s actions since the start of the pandemic, they feel disposable.

Were these feelings valid? Could employers actually take or leave employees, not caring if they were successful or unsuccessful, contributing or not contributing, employed with the company or leaving to go somewhere else?

The workforce is changing in major ways. The pandemic sped up a movement from strict scheduling to flexible “work on your own time” engagements. Prior to COVID-19, we were already seeing smart machines and automation as part of daily work, and the tremendous growth of the gig economy.

Taken together, these trends show that the old ways of sustaining a career no longer work. In past decades, you could go to college or a trade school, get a degree, and use the skills associated with that degree to work for one – or maybe a few – organizations over the course of your working life.

That is no longer the case. Jobs – and the skills required for those jobs – are changing rapidly.

In these times, nothing is certain except change, and this is unnerving. In fact, Ceridian’s 2021 Pulse of Talent report, which surveyed more than 5,000 people across five regions, found that 66% of individuals are taking job security into account more now than before the pandemic.

Career durability is a ticket to long-term security

To avoid feeling – and indeed being – disposable, today’s employees need to be the leaders of their own careers. They must build what we call career durability.

Career durability involves acquiring the skills, mindset, and knowledge to be an engaged and productive member of the workforce – continuously. On LinkedIn, I explained career durability as including these five areas:

• Hard skills: skills that allow you to complete tasks in a specific job.
• Soft skills: skills for collaborating effectively with others.
• Applied technology skills: skills that allow you to leverage available technology to do your job better.
• Institutional knowledge: job or industry expertise gained through experience.
• Growth mindset: being willing to improve, learn, and reconsider existing ways of doing things.

For more where this came from, read the full article at the Ceridian Dayforce Wallet blog.

Effective Writing is More Important Than Ever

Good writing is infrequently considered a business skill, but when practiced, it can make everything from brand building to email marketing more effective. It's especially important now that businesses have been relying on digital channels to stay connected to their customers during the pandemic, finding themselves competing for attention with virtually every brand that has a social media presence.

Now is an excellent opportunity to hone your writing skills and craft a style that stands out in the era of social distancing — not to mention emoji, images and acronyms. 

1. Make your communication easy to digest.

Writing may not have been your strongest subject in school, and English might not be your first language—but as a business owner, your credibility depends on steering clear of grammatical pitfalls.

While you can absolutely take advantage of the “smart” features in word processors or presentation software to catch spelling and grammar errors, don’t rely on them exclusively. When in doubt about a word, phrase or sentence, check out online resources like Grammarly, 5 Minute English, FluentU and Grammar Girl.

If you’ve ever received advice for giving a memorable presentation, you might have heard this rule: “Tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them.” This guidance applies to every form of written and oral communication. If you want your reader to absorb the message, share what you're about to say and why, explain the details and then summarize the key points.

Aim to get to your main idea quickly. Pretend you only have less than 30 seconds to sell a product to a just-browsing customer in a store, and make your document easy to scan with large headings.

2. Know your audience.

Your content and tone will vary depending on the target of your communication — for example, is your audience an investor, a customer segment or a group of frontline employees?

Think through what this audience wants to hear from you. What is this group worried about? What answers to do they need?

You may need to do some research via survey and interviews to determine where and how your audience consumes content. If your audience will be more receptive to certain messages and completely turned off by others, you want to know that before you start writing. A few questions to consider asking:

• Do people read an internal blog or e-newsletter?
• Are they on public social channels or is real-time instant message more their thing?
• Do they value expert advice?
• If they visit multiple channels, what would they most prefer to read on each one?
• Is there a particular type of content that your organization is best suited to deliver? 

Remember that your communication must strike a balance between what you need to say and what your target audience wants to hear. This is admittedly tough, so even if you are writing to a large population, it may help to imagine a single person reading the communication.

For the rest of my tips, head over to the AMEX Business site.

5 Leadership Principles to Improve Customer Service

Each year, thousands of companies around the world – spanning the financial, healthcare, insurance, manufacturing, retail, hospitality, communications, not-for-profit, government, and education spaces – celebrate Customer Service Week during the first full week in October. Although the 2019 Customer Service Week theme is “The Magic of Service,” strategies to improve customer service go beyond magic. In fact, the role of the team leader in customer service is significant, and certain leadership principles, including developing and managing teams that are positive brand extensions, illustrating demonstrated commitment to quality customer service, focusing on the employee experience, designing agile processes, and being visible are critical to a company’s efforts to recruit and retain customers.

Leadership Principle #1: Teams as Brand Extensions

Strong leaders understand that building and communicating a memorable brand is an essential piece of customer loyalty. However, when it comes to brand, many organizations “set and forget.” Instead, leaders should take steps to evaluate the company’s current value proposition, analyze how it stacks up to the competition, and vet it to ensure authenticity and consistency with actual company practices. Then, they must select team members who complement one another in embodying the brand, and reward employees who display and share core brand attributes. For example, savvy leaders know that customer service representatives who dress fashionably and speak articulately will bolster a sleek, on trend, and forward thinking brand.

Leadership Principle #2: Commitment to Quality Customer Service

Customer Service Week can present a fresh opportunity to re-commit to quality service from the top-down. Ideally, leaders reinforce stellar customer service on a regular basis through company-wide messaging and activities. They have outlined what customer service looks like in their organization and strive to improve on measured results. Leaders are willing to invest in adequate staffing, equipment, and software so representatives are set up for success, and are dedicated to leveraging new technologies to facilitate omnichannel communication and strategic automation with the goal of faster and more targeted customer service.

Leadership Principle #3: Focus on the Employee Experience

Business mogul Richard Branson once said, “Clients do not come first. Employees come first. If you take care of your employees, they will take care of the clients.” The employee experience, or what a company’s people do and how they feel over the course of recruitment, onboarding, learning, performance, and transitions, is a necessary focus for customer-oriented leaders. For instance, good leaders facilitate a hiring experience that attracts employees with the right combination of skills and traits to excel in customer service. And, leaders who support an employee experience that highlights collaboration and continuous learning via applicable training will typically have more customer savvy team members.

Leadership Principle #4: Agile Processes

Just like customer service is an attitude, so is agility, and strong leaders must keep their eyes on big picture business objectives while recognizing that evolving market forces require more frequent adaptation than in the past. Not only should leaders design customer-facing processes that make it easier to respond to changing requirements in real time, but they should also empower representatives to make in-the-moment decisions and innovate on behalf of a customer. Rigidly constructed policies aren’t the hallmark of good leadership or service, so this Customer Service Week, perhaps take the opportunity to rethink them.

Leadership Principle #5: Visibility

Beyond Customer Service Week, effective leaders show up for employees and customers alike. This means putting in face time at your place of business, conversing with staff and clients, and paying attention to small details like birthdays and professional moves. Even if a leader has the most competent frontline employees imaginable, there’s no substitute for an owner who takes the time to get to know and spend time with the people who matter to the business. Hosting team building outings and customer appreciation events provides an excellent forum for owners to interface with the community and humanize their enterprises.

There are a variety of ways to improve customer service, but this Customer Service Week, consider the role that solid leadership plays in driving it. By honing agility and visibility and placing a spotlight on branding, employee experience, and commitment to quality service, you’ll be the most trusted and admired of business owners.

How to Cope with Long-Term Uncertainty

As much as experts want to predict how the coronavirus situation will pan out, the truth is that no one really knows what's going to happen. The good news is that there are several things business owners can do to reduce their uncertainty. 

1. Act on the outcomes you can realistically anticipate.

Businesses based on in-person interaction already know that customers won’t be coming in for a while. If you don’t yet have a digital means to offer your product or service, consider which products and services are most appropriate to sell online, and then add e-commerce to your website. There are a number of e-commerce solutions such as Shopify, BigCommerce and Squarespace.

While you may want to delegate this to a tech-savvy staff member, both of you should make note of the ways in which online business differs from brick and mortars. With the reduction in frequent in-person connection points, you'll need to go out of your way to engage with your customers via social media and email outreach. Try working with your marketing team to create a content calendar—either an old-school spreadsheet or a tech-based solution like Later or HubSpot—that tracks analytics around your social engagement so you can see what resonates with your customers.

2. Brainstorm with other business owners.

Another way you can deal with uncertainty is to identify other business owners in your sphere who are facing the same challenges you are, and come together to devise solutions to keep the collective group afloat. In particular, experts recommend launching online engagements that preserve the heartbeat and character of a community. 

Midnight Market, a Jersey City, New Jersey-based indoor festival that curates 20 food vendors to recreate an open air, international market, did just that. Understanding that they can’t open for the foreseeable future, Midnight Market’s owners rallied their partners to host a "Take-Out Flash Mob," that is, encouraging followers to order takeout from eight participating restaurants.

"It gives them a burst of cash to pay employees, keep the lights on and helps them continue normal operations so they can continue making delicious food for us!" the company wrote on its website.

To create a social distancing appropriate recreation of their event, Midnight Market promoted cocktail recipes that were easy to create at home, live streamed of DJ sets, and shared drinking games. And they're planning another one with a different selection of restaurants.

For the rest of my tips, check out the full article on the AMEX Business website.

 

Time-Saving Ways to Stay Up to Date on Market Trends

Business success today depends on understanding, in real time, what your customers need and what types of competitive strategies are the most effective. After all, there’s nothing worse than spending precious resources launching a new product or service that ultimately flops in the marketplace.

Fortunately, advancing technology makes it possible to conduct competitive market research more rapidly than in the past. Let’s explore how to conduct a market analysis efficiently, as well as strategies that facilitate quick learning of key market trends.

How to Conduct a Customer Needs Analysis

The first step is getting to know your customers, which we’ll discuss in more detail in the next section. You should use the information and feedback collected to divide your customers into segments. Segments should share a common characteristic (such as age or location) and be large enough to warrant individual marketing attention.

Within each segment, it’s helpful to develop buyer profiles. Thanks to the below information on how to conduct market research, you’ll hopefully have a complete understanding of your target buyer’s needs. Picturing her as a flesh and blood human, you’ll describe her demographics and background, her motivations and challenges, what she spends her life doing, how she communicates with businesses she patronizes and the messages that are most likely to appeal to her.

Your last customer needs analysis step? Connect each target buyer’s needs to a product or service. Call out your benefits, why the target buyer would or would not choose you over a competitor. If there are holes, consider refining your offerings to better address critical customer pain points.

How to Conduct Market Research without Spending Months or Millions

You don’t need to spend a fortune with a prestigious market research firm to gain valuable customer insights. There are a number of low cost, time-efficient ways of examining market trends – many of which are online. One go-to strategy is crowdsourcing. You can use social media or online surveys emailed to your database to collect feedback about what’s working (or not) for your existing customers. Be sure to ask the tough questions, encourage honesty, and reward customers for their participation via coupons, discounts, or gift cards.

In some cases and especially if you are developing a new product to service, you might want to access the larger market. Online services like TYLM (Tap Your Larger Market) and Gutcheck allow you to use targeting criteria like gender and income to ask a series of open and closed questions to millions of pre-qualified individuals. In addition to completed surveys, these tools can capture customer emotions via one-on-one video responses and can analyze and summarize the results so you don’t have to spend time sifting through raw data.

You might also deduce market trends through the use of text analysis software. These tools help business owners gain insights from structured and unstructured text data using natural language processing (or a program’s ability to process human speech patterns). Leveraging data from a variety of sources including public reviews, emails sent to your organization, surveys, and phone transcripts, text analysis software can pull out key language patterns that get to the bottom of customer sentiment. As an example, Thematic gathers customer feedback from your existing data sources and, by distilling common themes, analyzes your best route to keeping customers. Similarly, Chattermill takes unstructured input and translates it into clear actions meant to improve customer experience. And best of all, many steps can be automated!

Of course, your market trends analysis won’t be complete without competitor monitoring. If you’re not sure how to find competitors of a company, searching them out via Google and comparing and contrasting the features and benefits listed on their websites is an excellent place to start. A number of paid tools also help with competitor monitoring, including SEMRush, which provides data about your current online performance as well as that of your competitors and helps you accurately assess the search terms leading to your company and competitors. A second option is SpyFu, which allows you to search for any competitor and download their keywords.

While conducting a customer needs analysis and market trends research doesn’t have to take over your life, it may still be worthwhile to hire an intern or freelancer to employ these strategies on your behalf. While you should probably repeat your analyses annually, you will also get more proficient at minimizing time spent!

Agility Strategies to Keep You Sane

In today’s rapidly changing business world, an agile business is a successful business. But how do you know when the best thing for the project  is to change the plan, and how can you execute and communicate changes without destroying team motivation and momentum? The following strategies may prove helpful.

Any major strategic initiative should involve the upfront establishment of goals, milestones, and success metrics. But, as Tim Berry pointed out in his article for the Small Business Administration website, assumptions should also be considered in your initial planning. “Tracking your results, you want to be able to compare them to what you had planned or expected to see,” he said.

“Get your team members together once a month to review your plan and its results. “Take a hard look at your underlying assumptions and assess whether or not they’ve changed. If they have, there’s no virtue whatsoever in sticking to the plan you built on top of them.”

Berry suggested you look at the difference between what you planned and what actually happened. Some results will be better than planned, and some will be worse. “For each key difference you discover, and all of them combined, use your best judgment to determine whether the differences were caused by false expectations or unexpected good or bad execution.”

“Also, consider external and internal factors that may have influenced the results. Maybe your expectations were too conservative, or too optimistic. In that case, you revise your plan,” he said.

Common sense, remarked Berry, is critical.  Although the project may be close to your heart, you want to remain pragmatic: for example, asking yourself if you were you wrong about the whole thing, or just about the timing? You also want to consider if something else has occurred in the market to change your assumptions.

For more where this came from, check out the full piece on HR.com.

 

 

 

The New and Improved Performance Review

What good is performance feedback if it occurs in isolation? It's just like the saying: "If a tree falls in the woods..."

“This is where it’s important to have a system that enables a company to join up performance feedback simply and in one place, where they can get a quick view of everything,” says Cheryl Johnson, chief human resources offer at payroll company Paylocity.

Paylocity uses a proprietary tool that stores multiple data points related to the performance review cycle. Employees and managers journal regularly to keep quick notes and recap conversations or meetings, and feedback is consolidated in periodic reviews so employees always know where they stand. “We also maintain performance goals and recognition awards within this same system, so when we sit down to look at the holistic perspective of someone’s performance, we have all data points in the employee’s profile,” explains Johnson.

Johnson is quick to point out that certain data points carry more weight than others, so both leaders and employees need to understand how points are weighted in the overall context of performance.

Paylocity’s Johnson has mastered the notion that different departments have different feedback needs. “Many of our departments leverage the journaling function, which makes giving and receiving continuous feedback informal, yet documented in a place where it’s easy to access when the time comes for formal conversations. Some departments have these formal conversations monthly or quarterly; others have them annually. The cadence aligns with when individual departments can collect insights that improve performance,” she says. And over time, Paylocity has adjusted its continuous feedback approach so it doesn’t require overthinking, is less cumbersome, and is more focused on input that matters – as opposed to providing feedback for its own sake.

Have you improved your performance management system recently? What did your changes entail?

Announcing Workforce 2030: A New Podcast About Our Most Critical Workplace Disruptions

Today marks a very special occasion. Alongside my partner of 10 years, SilkRoad Technology, a global leader in strategic onboarding for workforce transformation, I am releasing a new podcast: Workforce 2030. The show features discussions with leading talent management experts, business leaders and industry disrupters on topics about the future of work and how the workforce will transform to meet the needs of 2030 and beyond.

In my tenure as a workforce futurist, I’ve spent a great deal of time on the microphone with fabulous hosts, and now the tables have been turned! The inaugural episode of Workforce 2030 features Robert Dvorak, CEO and President of SilkRoad. Bob was incredibly fun to talk to because he’s been working in the technology field for 30 years and as you can imagine, has witnessed an incredible amount of growth and change.

In our lively, 30-minute conversation, Bob and I addressed what makes a successful brand a successful employer, why establishing strong employee relationships must be a combination of high tech and high touch approaches, why there’s one human managerial skill that’s essential for effective onboarding, and how tech-based systems facilitate assimilation and prevent quit quits. You’ll also hear why Bob and I are against the word “retention” and why it’s now everyone’s job to be in continuous learning mode.

Whether you’re leading an organization or a team, whether you seek the secret sauce for your own successful career in the mid-21^st century workforce, or whether you read Humanity Works and are looking for a bit more guidance, this is the show for you. Our next several guests include Jennifer Fondrevay, Chief Humanity Officer, Day1 Ready™ M&A consultancy, Grant Zallis, CEO, Founder IAR Consulting, and Ravin Jesuthasan, Managing Director, Willis Towers Watson. If you have a question you’d like me to ask these knowledgeable experts, please send it along!

Tune in to the first episode or access the whole series.