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.

Caring for Your Managers' Well Being

I know a PR professional who rocked her individual contributor job during the pandemic. Her boss took notice, and at the beginning of this year, she was promoted to a supervisor role.

While she was more than qualified for this transition, my friend struggled. She’d suffered anxiety and burnout during the two long years of COVID-19 and felt physically and emotionally isolated from the team she now managed.

Her organization probably would have wanted to help her – if they knew what was going on. But, the company didn’t have a mechanism to find out, and this woman didn’t feel comfortable sharing out of the blue.

A 2021 Gartner survey revealed that 68% of HR leaders agree that hybrid work responsibilities are overwhelming for managers, but only 14% are taking action to remedy this. The manager experience, and especially the new manager experience, can go a long way.

Here is a sample of my guidance related to caring for your new managers’ well-being.

Build a sense of psychological safety: Psychological safety is a shared belief held by members of a team that others on the team will not embarrass, reject, or punish you for speaking up. Psychological safety is a component of organizational culture that admittedly takes time to establish, but the essence is this: new managers should not feel like their new position or reputation is in jeopardy if they admit they’re struggling.

Develop online training materials that demonstrate empathy: There are obviously certain things you expect your new managers to learn. However, these messages should avoid judging and acknowledge that everyone is doing the best they can. They will also communicate that you understand the stressors new managers are facing and that you give your new managers permission to be human.

Facilitate open dialogue between leaders, managers, and colleagues about mental health: Provide talking points (depression and anxiety are nothing to be ashamed of, etc.) and offer confidential support resources (behavioral health, crisis hotlines, etc.).

Consider expanding your benefits package beyond the basic EAP: Be creative with new wellness services that may include things like nutrition coaching, health retreats, and massage.

Organize all-hands events that focus on mindfulness, resilience, and coping with uncertainty: These can be provided in person or virtually, and ideally, senior leaders will participate. In addition to sharing new tools and coping methods, these events will double as team building and relationship enhancing exercises for your distributed workers.

Share the signs of burnout and encourage new managers to seek help before they are drowning: Ensure new managers understand their career and flexwork options, and that you’ve provided training on how to operate most effectively in a hybrid or remote work environment. Remember that this is still a new concept for everyone and new managers don’t know what they don’t know.

To learn more about building a supportive experience for your new managers, check out the webinar replay and let us know what you think!

Pre-empt the Great Resignation with Creative Sourcing

By now, most everyone in human capital and workforce circles has heard the term “Great Resignation.” The general idea is this: as the economy improves and companies are mandating that employees head back to the office, disengaged workers who have stayed put through the pandemic are taking the leap. In fact, according to the 2021 Microsoft Work Trend Index, 41% of employees are planning to leave their current job within a year.

Over the next year or two, we can expect the current employer’s market to evolve into a job seeker’s market, especially for seasoned employees in hot industries. This means that no matter how prestigious your employer brand, or how desirable your positions are, you may find yourself at a loss for talent.

The obvious way to pre-empt the Great Resignation is by improving the experience you’re offering to current employees. However, talent acquisition is an essential piece of the puzzle, and if you recruit the way you’ve always recruited – for example, insisting on candidates who check two dozen specific boxes or who graduated from the “best” universities – your hiring process is likely to drag on far longer than it needs to. And this, in turn, negatively impacts the employee experience for current employees who are doing more with less.
Let’s look at a few creative sourcing strategies through which you are most likely to interface with passive candidates who are the best fit for your organization.

Contact people who started a new job during the pandemic.

I heard this one in a recent HR expert roundtable, and it makes a lot of sense. Combine the fact that many companies have been terrible at onboarding during COVID-19 with the notion that employees are most likely to quit a job in the first three months, and you have a whole lot of good people sitting on LinkedIn wishing they’d made a different choice. Talk to them. You never know what you might find out.

Don’t insist on FTEs or local candidates.

Are you sure you require someone full-time and/or someone who lives close to headquarters? Because when you insist on these two things, you narrow your candidate pool considerably. Contract workers especially are so common now that the U.S. government even addresses them on the W4 form. I encourage you to consider whether a given job can be done just as easily by a worker in another state, or one who earns money another way when you don’t need them.

Join an industry guild or association.

This is admittedly not a new sourcing tip for me, but after joining several groups over the last few years, I’ve personally realized its power. Through my associations with the Grey Swan Guild, the Future Today Institute, and the Association of Professional Futurists, I’ve casually met enough talented futurists to fill my collaboration cup for the rest of my career.

For more where this came from, head over to the SilkRoad blog.

Don't Be a Victim of the Great Resignation

By now, you’ve likely heard the term “the great resignation.” Anthony Klotz, a professor at Texas A&M University, coined the term in a May Bloomberg article to refer to the great numbers of workers expected to exit the workforce after the pandemic.

Klotz does his own research, but a recent Microsoft study, the 2021 Work Trend Index, mirrored his findings. Microsoft surveyed more than 30,000 people in 31 countries and analyzed trillions of productivity and labor signals across LinkedIn and Microsoft 365 to forecast the pending workforce departures.

According to Microsoft, over 40 percent of the global workforce are considering leaving their employer this year, 46 percent are planning to make a major pivot or transition, and only 38 percent of employees are thriving in their careers right now. The situation is worse for women. McKinsey’s Women in the Workplace 2020 study found that one in three working mothers have considered leaving the workforce or downshifting their careers because of COVID-19.

The Microsoft and McKinsey data suggest that the pandemic led employees to question their priorities and either transition to work they found more meaningful or decrease the focus on their job generally. But while this was certainly a factor, new data from Stanford University illustrated that how companies treated their employees also played a significant role.

According to Stanford, the pandemic had a cascading effect on organizations with unsupportive cultures. Companies that had historically laid people off, decreased compensation, held back promotions, or sacrificed psychological safety to preserve the bottom line engaged in more of these behaviors during COVID-19. Stressed-out employees who might have been disgruntled before were downright disgusted. And now they’re ready to quit.

Interestingly, food service, hospitality and retail – some of the sectors hardest hit by the pandemic – are experiencing the most resignations. A “We Quit” sign left on the door of a Nebraska Burger King restaurant after the entire staff walked out really said it all.

As reported by the Washington Post in June, 649,000 retail workers put in their notice in April, the industry’s largest one-month exodus since the Labor Department began tracking this data more than 20 years ago.

The so-called “great resignation” will collide with other demographic factors impacting who is available to work and where – including baby boomer retirement, a small population of midlife employees, and a young worker population plagued by stalled education and career growth. If this doesn’t point to a coming labor shortage, I don’t know what does.

If you’re an HR professional or manager, is there anything you can do to avoid becoming a victim? The answer is yes, and it starts with self-awareness of common employer blind spots.

Want to learn more? Catch the replay of my webinar on HR blind spots with SilkRoad!

 

Americans Feel Their Employers View Them As Disposable

A new DeVry University study conducted for Labor Day found that at a time when American workers should feel recognized and celebrated, more than a third felt their employers could take or leave them.

Thirty-six percent of DeVry respondents said that based on their employers’ actions since the start of the pandemic, they believe their employers view them as disposable. This perception resonated  more with younger workers than older ones, with 47 percent of Gen Z-ers (born after 1996) and 42 percent of millennials (born 1980-95) saying they felt disposable compared with 28 percent of Gen X-ers (born 1964-79) and 32 percent of baby boomers (born 1946-63).

Respondents agreed that in today’s workforce, tenure, education, and industry experience do not matter as much as hard work,  meeting goals and deadlines, and having a positive attitude.

If you’re an employee, being disposable is clearly not the ideal status as it makes you vulnerable to layoffs, consolidations, or random turns in your marketplace. Fortunately, you can protect yourself from natural evolution and future disruptions by focusing on your career durability, or your ability to sustain gainful employment over a long period of time. The five components of career durability include:

Soft skills are interpersonal attributes that you need to collaborate successfully with others at work. As machines take over more work tasks over the next 10 years, soft skills like empathy, intuition, diplomacy, judgment, and problem solving will set human employees apart. You can hone yours through personality assessments/recommendations, classic business books such as those by Stephen Covey and Dale Carnegie, and on-the-job experience.

Hard skills are those in a specific area for which learning can be measured (i.e. you either know it or you don’t). If you’re applying for a given job, employers will expect you to perform the requisite functions. For instance, if you’re a phlebotomist, you must know how to insert an IV. You can acquire the hard skills you need via degree programs, online courses, certifications/microcredentials,  and employer training.

Applied technology skills represent the ability to leverage people, processes, data, and devices to do a job more efficiently. In all occupations, digital technology exists to augment human work. But do you know, for example, what software is available in your role and how to use it? You might increase your base of applied technology skills with employer training, mentorship, solo exploration, and investigation.

Institutional knowledge is industry specific expertise gained through experience and/or tenure. Organizations are facing a brain drain caused by the retiring baby boomers. Some things can only be learned by facing similar scenarios multiple times over a career lifespan. You typically acquire institutional knowledge by staying with one company or in one industry and gaining cross-functional and adjacent expertise via job shadowing, informational interviewing, and volunteering.

A growth mindset is the positive attitude that influences how an individual sees their world, and that motivates them to learn and change. Today’s learner must be continuous and self-directed, and curiosity, agility, and drive to improve will win the day. You can enhance your growth mindset through self, peer, and manager evaluations, acceptance of failure, implementation of constructive feedback, intrapreneurship, and inspirational books and podcasts.

Employee actions are only one piece of the puzzle, however. What if you’re an employer, and you’re rightfully concerned that so many of your talent employees feel disposable? Improved benefits and greater pandemic safety measures are essential, but don’t get to the heart of the disposability issue. The key  is to show appreciation early and often. The DeVry survey respondents indicated that the most effective ways are through pay increases (69 percent), awards (34 percent), and greater schedule flexibility (30 percent).

This year especially, Labor Day is an appropriate time to take the right steps so employment is beneficial and satisfying for all sides.

When You're Looking for a Job and All You Hear is Crickets

A reader from CollegeRecruiter asked the following question:

Graduation is fast approaching and I’m stressing out as I don’t have a job yet. My career service office is focused on jobs from local employers and so isn’t of much help as I attend an out-of-state school and want to move home after graduation to be close to friends and family. I’ve applied to dozens of jobs but after weeks I’ve heard back from only a few and those were automated responses confirming my applications. No interviews. No emails from recruiters. No job offers. Help! I love my parents, but I don’t want to share a room with my little sister again.

Keep in mind that most job openings aren’t advertised because a lot of businesses prefer to hire from within the company or through word of mouth. If you’re coming in from off the street, you could be out of luck.  Instead of working harder, work smarter. Use online resources and business trade publications, such as The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and Fast Company to target desirable companies in your home area. Then, prepare to infiltrate these companies by making the transition from outsider to insider. Here’s how:

• Get to know individuals already employed at your target company who are in a position to hire you. 
• Apply for an internship position that will land you inside the company and provide you with an opportunity to build your skill portfolio.
• Secure referrals from anyone you know in your chosen field—either people with years of experience behind them, such as old professors and your parents’ friends, or recent graduates who will have sympathy for your plight and might also be more familiar with a company’s lower-level job openings.

Using a combination of these approaches, you are much more likely to gain access to unadvertised job openings in the companies you desire. However, it probably won’t happen overnight. Be persistent and don’t resort to laziness, even if you’re not seeing immediate results. Keep your expectations realistic and remind yourself of the end goal every day. Above all, don’t doubt your own abilities. Ignore all of the folks who tell you that the market sucks and that you should take any available job, even if it’s not what you want or need. Learn to take rejection with a grain of salt—it’s all part of the process. If you take the right action patiently and efficiently, an opportunity will come along that’s a good fit for your skillset.

For answers from other workplace experts, check out the full article on CollegeRecruiter.

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.

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.

 

How to Spot the 5 Subtle Forms of Workplace Bias

I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to be a tall, white man.

While I am Caucasian, I’m not tall or male. And because depending on who you ask, between 70-80 percent of leaders have all three attributes, I’m wondering just how much my lack of two of them has held me back.

When I talked, off the record, to a gender bias researcher at a prestigious U.S. university, she informed me that I should not take my success for granted. Apparently, being a short woman in Corporate America means I must be twice as smart, twice as competent, and twice as hardworking.

Most clients wouldn’t tell me that outright as they don’t understand it to be true. It’s not like people readily believe that tall, white men naturally make better leaders. And 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 almost as old as humans, as our ancestors developed it to quickly categorize threats in a hostile environment.

In other words, we don’t mean to discriminate, but we can’t help it.

The good news is, we’re getting better at spotting subtle bias at work, as well as the business process improvement techniques and strategies that can root it out before it does too much damage to your culture. Let’s examine a few places bias at work will commonly show up, now or in the near future.

Resume Filters

We often don’t realize it, but we don’t review resumes and profiles on merit alone. When unconscious bias creeps in, we can negatively assess a candidate based on their name, photo, or educational institution. Therefore, using software to blind your applicants’ resumes, profiles, and sample interview tasks is the first element of your first business improvement plan. Full candidate details should not be revealed until your recruiters or hiring managers have had an opportunity to get to know them as an individual.

Unstructured Interviews

Unstructured interviews are not a solid predictor of employee performance for many reasons, but one is surely the subtle bias that results. When we chat informally with candidates, the conversation may proceed in a direction that takes away from the candidate’s relevant attributes. Your business process improvement plan should combat selection bias by including a new interview approach that asks every candidate the same questions, in the same order, according to the same evaluation criteria. You might also consider using a video-based chatbot assessment of interviewer speech and body language to check for potential bias there.

Female Notetakers

Do you have a meeting methodology in place? If so, use business process improvement methodology to mitigate the effects of unconscious bias. Recognize that in meetings, women tend to be asked to take notes more often than men and are more frequently the victims of crosstalk and credit stealing (men may speak over them or coop their ideas). Leaders must make a concerted effort to ensure that female participant contributions are respected and acknowledged equally, and this may be involve changing the way your meetings are structured.

Questionable Writing

Business communication is becoming more informal, and from a subtle bias perspective, that makes it increasingly dangerous because we are more prone to be lazy about what we say and how we say it. Thankfully, artificial intelligence can help you make business process improvements here. Certain document creation software, for instance, provides guidance 

on potentially sensitive or offensive language (i.e. “May the best man win”) contained in a presentation, and others scans text for inappropriately gendered pronouns as part of a general grammar check.

Homogeneous Teams

When we only have contact with our ingroup – or other people who share our demographic and/or psychographic characteristics – we perpetuate unconscious bias. Strategize business process improvements that will diversify your team both traditionally (gender, ethnicity, race, etc.) and cognitively (point of view, background, etc.). This might mean recruiting teammates from new sources and devising ways to bring forward talented individuals who might not be the perfect candidates on paper.

Even a few business process improvements in this area will help you head off subtle biases at the pass. And, if you question your need to make them, spend a few minutes at the Project Implicit website. Designed by Harvard, University of Virginia, and University of Washington psychologists, the site administers Implicit Association Tests to measure personal bias. While you may be unpleasantly surprised at what you uncover, it may well serve as the motivation you need to address this critical issue.

 

Keep Your Business Safe During a Natural Disaster

If it seems like natural disasters are increasing, it's not your imagination. And those disasters have a very real effect on company's bottom lines.

According to a 2018 report by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, direct economic losses due to climate-related disasters have increased 150 percent over the last 20 years. During the period of 1998-2017, disaster-hit countries reported direct economic losses of $2,908 billion. The United States was hit hardest at $945 billion. As you might expect, floods and storms are the two most frequently occurring disasters.

Given these numbers, every business owner today may want to consider proactively developing disaster strategies to protect human and material assets and maintain a healthy amount of working capital should trouble strike. 

Let's examine four solutions for natural disasters you might employ to keep your business safe and increase your peace of mind.

1. Practice strong working capital management.

Working capital is the difference between a company's current assets like cash, unpaid bills and inventories of raw materials and finished goods, and its current liabilities such as payroll and taxes. Business owners use working capital to measure operational efficiency and overall financial health. 

 

Just as smart business owners build working capital reserves during anticipated slow periods, you should develop a similar strategy to cope with natural disaster-related disruption. 

Ensuring that you have enough cash and liquid assets on hand to cover sudden expenses and/or loss of income can mean the difference between your business' survival and its demise.

2. Take a second look at your insurance.

Now is the time to review your insurance policies and assess how well (or not) you'd be covered in a natural disaster. 

Sometimes it isn't intuitive. Using the hurricane scenario as an example, your run-of-the-mill business policy might cover losses from broken glass that's the result of high winds and flooding that's the result of rain. But if you want to protect your location from flooding that comes from groundwater, you may require supplementary flood insurance. 

If you live in an area prone to hurricanes, you can expect to pay higher premiums, and some carriers may not insure you at all. For more detailed information on what's generally covered and where, review the Insurance Information Institute's website.

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