Tag: communication

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How to Build an Employee Engagement Road Map

employee engagement

Road maps are a form of content that will help you navigate key areas of people management. Road maps focus on the changing terrain of employee engagement. This guide offers a step-by-step process for creating a measurable engagement strategy that will deliver results.

Most of your employees are probably not engaged and it’s hurting your bottom line.

But don’t feel bad. Almost every company is in the same boat.employee engagement

Despite years of talking about the importance of employee engagement to hiring, retention and productivity, only 34 percent of employees are engaged, according to data from Gallup. Worse, 13 percent of employees are actively disengaged. “The numbers have improved over the last decade, but not as much as we want,” said Jim Harter, chief workplace scientist for Gallup.

The good news is that employee engagement can be improved if companies focus on the right things. Harter has seen dozens of organizations across industries increase engagement levels when they implement targeted strategies and stick with them over time. “Change happens incrementally but it does happen,” he said.

When it does, the payoff is clear. Gallup research shows organizations with high levels of employee engagement achieve better earnings-per-share, and see substantially better customer engagement, higher productivity, better retention, fewer accidents and higher profitability.

The trick is understanding who has the power to influence employee engagement, and what they can do to generate change, said Jill Christensen, employee engagement consultant and author of “If Not You, Who? Cracking the Code of Employee Disengagement.”

“Poor engagement is not HR’s fault,” she said. Employee engagement is regularly blamed on HR because it is a “people problem,” but in fact, it is entirely shaped by the actions of senior leaders. They define the culture, the mission and the attitude in any organization, and their actions determine how employees respond. “Senior leaders need to drive the employee engagement journey from the start,” she said. “If they don’t it will fail.”

HR should be involved. HR still needs to plan, implement and measure employee engagement strategies — but senior leaders need to be the voices of the program to make it work. It’s a collaboration, and this road map provides a framework for how senior leaders and HR can work together to make engagement happen.

PART 1: MAKE A PLAN

Get leaders on board. Leaders will never independently take ownership of engagement, so HR has to pull them in. Harter suggests sharing data linking employee engagement to business performance to pique their interest, then showing them how their words and actions impact outcomes.

Ask employees what they think. If you want to identify your engagement issues, you have to listen to what employees are saying, said Amanda Popiela, researcher with The Conference Board. “Continuous listening strategies are key to understanding engagement.” Along with reviewing annual survey results, she suggests conducting periodic pulse surveys, hosting employee focus groups, monitoring social media posts, and talking to employee teams about what they love about working for your organization, and what needs to change.

Please Watch: Voting on the Clock Works as an Employee Engagement Tool

Identify skill gaps. Most leaders and managers are never taught good coaching skills, like how to give feedback, build trust or manage conflict, all of which is key to driving employee engagement. So management training has to be part of the plan. Look for content that is quick and easy to access and let managers know they will be expected to use it.

Set realistic goals and expectations. If you want to foster change you have to hold managers accountable, Christensen said. She suggested setting a goal to increase engagement levels by a specific amount in one year then tying those results to performance reviews. “That’s how you make culture change happen.”

PART 2: START ENGAGING

Make employee engagement part of every conversation. Define specific communication steps for managers and leaders to integrate engagement into their talking points. These might include discussing engagement issues in every team meeting, sharing engagement strategies in town hall events, and having weekly one-on-ones with team members to identify their specific concerns or needs. “You need to tell them exactly what to do or they won’t do it,” Christensen warned.

employee engagement roadmap Keep employees up to date. Employees want to feel like they have a voice and that their opinions matter, so keep them in the loop. Report employee engagement survey results, share your action plans to address specific problems, and keep them up to date on progress. “Exceptional communication is an important part of employee engagement,” Harter said.

Teach managers to coach. Managers are busy and will often skip training to focus on the next deadline. So you have to make it easy to access, immediately relevant and a clear priority, Popiela said. One way to do that is to get senior leadership involved. Popiela recently worked with a financial services company whose CEO posts a monthly webcast discussing one tip for managers on how to improve engagement. “Managers know what they should be doing, but they don’t always do it,” she said. These short, thought-provoking webcasts make them stop and think about what they could do better.

Deal with the disengaged. When teams have toxic, negative or disruptive members, no amount of coaching will make a difference. “These employees can be toxic,” Christensen said. And it’s up to managers to deal with them. They need to be ready to have these difficult conversations, set clear performance goals, and fire people who refuse to change. A lot of managers ignore toxic employees because they don’t have the skills to deal with them, but the consequences of this approach can be severe, she said. “When leaders don’t take action with these employees, it will breed disengagement in everyone around them.”

PART 3: MEASURE RESULTS

Conduct annual survey results. The annual employee survey is the best baseline measure of engagement and proof that your efforts are working. Remember, even small shifts are a good sign. “Change takes time,” Harter said. But companies that stick with it can achieve dramatic and sustainable change over a few years.

Please read: How Dog-Friendly Policies Can Improve Company Culture and Employee Engagement

Conduct pulse surveys. Short pulse surveys that sample a percentage of the employee population, or ask everyone a few questions, can give you a sense of progress and help you see what’s working (or not). But don’t overdo it, and don’t use surveys to replace real conversations.

Check your eNPS. Employers can now use NPS to measure employee engagement. The one-question survey tells you how likely your staff members are to recommend your company as a place to work on a scale from 0 to 10. “It’s a simple way to gauge engagement,” Christensen said. And it can be a quick easy way to demonstrate results.

Share the data. Any time you survey employees you have to share the results, otherwise it could actually make things worse. Report engagement levels to the entire company, celebrate big successes and share what you plan to do next, Popiela said. Then discuss the data with executives, drawing connections where possible between engagement and productivity, retention, and business performance. “It’s important to show them the ‘so what’ of improved engagement,” she said. “Especially when it effects the bottom line.”

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Unintended Costs of the Modern Workplace

A lot of conversation focuses on helping people manage the day-to-day stress that comes with modern life and the modern workplace.

Whether it is looking at financial well-being (or the lack thereof), the stress of constant change, and the greater demands placed on an always-on workforce, we know there’s a problem. Diagnosing the root cause can be difficult, and that’s why I was so struck by my friend Aaron Hurst’s summary of the six unintended consequences of the modern workplace. He presented it at Purpose 2030, his company Imperative’s annual conference that focuses on aligning people and organizations around purpose and connection. (Full disclosure: I’m on Imperative’s board.)

One of the most important insights from their recent research is that creating deeper connections among people is a vital element to the success of organizations. I left their event inspired about how to build those connections on our team and thinking a lot about the idea that a leader’s job now includes creating an environment that supports deep and meaningful connections among colleagues, whether they are sitting side by side in an office or working in various locations around the world.

But that’s hard to do if we don’t examine why work has become a place that often creates the opposite of connection — loneliness and isolation. Looking at some of the unintended consequences we’ve created gives us a path for starting to solve them.

Productivity and communication tools like Slack can increase efficiency and collaboration, promoting quicker decision-making and information sharing. But the volume of communications can be a challenge.

Also in Benefits Beat: Make Benefits and Internal Communications Inseparable

As quantity increases, stress can too, and many interactions feel transactional rather than personal. For benefits teams, these new tools can be a daunting new feedback channel to manage as well. Several of our clients use them to promote benefits in creative ways, but keeping up with employees’ dialog and questions can become a full-time job.

Questions to consider: How do we support conversations that are meaningful? And how can benefits teams with limited resources embrace new tools?

Remote work is an amazing thing. It has expanded the possibilities for the way we work and with whom. For our team, it has been a vital tool for us to bring on key talent, and I think supporting remote work is beneficial in countless ways. But, with less room for casual and face-to-face interaction, authentic connection among employees can be lost.

Questions to consider: How can we enable a sense of belonging and connection with those working remotely? How can benefits create ways for people who work remotely to feel connected and supported by their organizations?

Diversity and inclusion are key goals for most of us. The connection to benefits and the ways we build support programs for various employee groups is a hot topic.

But fully embracing a diverse and inclusive environment creates unique new challenges that require a lot of intentional new behaviors. This side of D&I is not always fully acknowledged or discussed.

As Aaron Hurst says, “The workforce is growing more diverse in every way. It is building a more inclusive society and economy as well as bringing new perspectives to work that drive innovation. When we work with people who are similar to us, the norms of communication and interaction are pretty clear, and it is easier to feel psychologically safe. When we have a diverse workforce, the old models of communication and collaboration are no longer adequate.”

Questions to consider: What does a workplace look like that can fully address the psychology of diversity? How do benefits and other programs build connections and support full inclusion?

Many modern corporations have adopted open-plan designs, hoping it will increase collaboration and productivity. In reality, workers often find that removing physical walls can decrease the quality of connection with those we work with and make focused work more challenging.

Also in Benefits Beat: A New Look at Caregiving

Questions to consider: How can we retain the benefits of open spaces while also restoring more intentional connection? Can benefits like mindfulness training or well-being challenges help individuals and teams get better connected inside and outside of the office walls?

The negative side effects of engagement as a main measurement tool and the challenges of shrinking tenure are also among the unintended consequences Aaron covered. What are the other unintended consequences of your modern workplace? And how are you going to use this year to solve them?

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Q&A With Jennifer Petriglieri: The Key to Thriving in Love and in Work

workplace couples
Jennifer Petriglieri
Jennifer Petriglieri, author of “Couples That Work.”

Jennifer Petriglieri, author of “Couples That Work,” talked to Workforce about the reality of making a dual-career relationship thrive in both the professional and personal aspect. In her book, she examines three transitions that couples commonly go through, the challenges they face and how to navigate each of these stages of their relationship. She recently spoke with Workforce Editorial Associate Yasmeen Qahwash.

Workforce: Struggling with work-life balance isn’t necessarily a new challenge for couples, so what motivated you to write this book now?

Jennifer Petriglieri: It’s true, couples have been struggling with work-life balance, but the way we’ve looked at work-life balance is really the interface between each individual’s career and their home life. We’ve never looked at how two careers interact together, and certainly, my research in many ways came from my personal experience. I’m in a working couple myself, and facing career transitions, and as every good academic does, when I face a problem, I go to the library. I was looking for research books, anything that could help me really understand how careers fit together, and all I found was the work-life balance literature, which is how do we divide the laundry and manage child care? All these stories of power couples, they seemed to have everything sorted, neither of which were really helpful. The more I looked, the more I realized there’s just nothing out there that looks at the interaction of two people’s careers over their lifetime. So, I thought, if that’s not there, I’m going to write that.

Workforce: What was the methodology for this research?

Petriglieri: Over the course of five years, I followed more than 100 couples across the globe and really tried to understand their lives as they unfolded. These couples were in different career and life stages, so, all the way from late 20s, 30s, 40s, right through to 60s, and even some in their 70s. They were from across the globe, gay, straight, intercultural, some had always lived in the same place, some had moved around — it’s a huge variety. When I started the research, the questions I had were, “What is the arrangement that makes this work? Is there a life structure that if people pursue, they get it right? Is it 50/50 or maybe one person with the lead career? Or maybe we should really stay in one place and not move around?”

Watch the video: Dual-Career Couples and the Balancing Act Between Work and Life

As I got into my research, initially, it was quite confusing. There were couples with all sorts of arrangements that could make it work, and there were couples with exactly the same arrangements who weren’t making it work. That’s when I started to realize, it’s not actually what a couple choose to do, it’s the way in which they go about making their choices, and that really unlocked the findings of the data.

Workforce: How are workplaces accommodating to these couples’ needs and lifestyles, and what are they neglecting?

Couples That WorkPetriglieri: The bottom line is, organizations have a D-minus right now when it comes to thinking through working couples. This really stems from the logic we currently have in our organizations around talent management. When we think and talk about talent, we treat them as people with no strings attached. Now, we may say we recognize you have a personal life outside, but that is not the way almost all our talent management structures and processes are designed in organizations. This creates two main issues for working couples, one is a mobility issue and one is a flexibility issue. The mobility issue is that most career ladders are based on the logic of geographic moves. If you want to get to the top of this organization, you need experience in different geographic markets, perhaps you need experience on different sites of the business. This logic of geographic muse is really baked into the heart of our talent management processes. Now, it’s not that working couples are not mobile, that’s not what I found at all. However, they cannot be mobile in the same way that someone with a stay-at-home spouse can be or someone who is single. This is creating big issues for working couples, but also big issues in organizations. The few organizations who are really thinking this through well now are changing the logic from location to a logic of what skills they experience in the network that people need to develop.

The second issue is flexibility. The problem is that most companies are really looking at this in the wrong way. Most people, when you say flexible working, the image that comes in their mind is of a working mother with small children, and they think part-time working or two days a week at home working. The reality is for the vast majority of working couples, that is not the flexibility they want nor is it the flexibility they need, what they need is what I call marginal flexibility. They don’t actually want to work less hours, they just want the flexibility to work those hours when and where suits them best.

Workforce: Communication seems to be a key factor in navigating couples through their transition stages. Why is this so hard for couples to maintain?

Petriglieri: I think there’s one societal reason, and then one reason within couples. I think as a society, if we think about our careers, we have a logic of investment. We wouldn’t think twice to spend a weekend on a retreat thinking about career direction and career strategizing. And we think about careers in terms of investing effort to figure out where we want to go and what’s important in pursuing it. When we think about relationships, we have the Prince Charming logic — I meet the one, I kiss the frog and we live happily ever after. We may laugh at that, and we know in our heart of hearts it’s completely unrealistic. Yet time and time again, as a society, we think about having these deep conversations as something that should be done when we have an issue in our relationship. We don’t think about relationships through the logic of investing in them. If you ask someone, “What’s your vision for your relationship?” they probably look at you with a blank face, and I’ve done it many times, I can attest to that. But if you ask someone, “What’s the vision for your career?” they could likely tell you something. I think what this does is it puts couples in the mindset of the fairy tale of their relationship, that if something becomes challenging, maybe that’s a problem with our relationship, maybe we’re not meant to be together. No, it’s just about investment — it’s exactly the same view as your careers. The more you invest, the more you get out. This is true in every domain of life, but in our relationships, we tend to, as a society, have left that behind and really forgotten about that. Then for couples, if we’ve not been doing that investment, when we hit that first roadblock, we are like rabbits in the headlights. We think, “Whoa, what’s happening? Is this a problem with our relationship? Maybe we shouldn’t have gone down this path together.” Rather than thinking, “OK, this is the time we need to double down and invest in those conversations.” To be fair, many couples get to those conversations through a crisis point, and that’s OK to get there. The question is once you get there can you then use that insight to develop a habit of keeping working on that stuff together? The reason I use the term investment is because these can be difficult conversations, but they’re also incredibly rewarding conversations. Who doesn’t want to spend time thinking about what really matters to them? Who doesn’t want to spend time with the person they love most in the world? Thinking about, “Where do we want to go in life, what are the things that are important to us?” So, it’s not that these conversations are really painful to have all the time, it’s just that we’re not used to having them. One of my real ambitions for the book, is it changes the way we talk about our relationships, it changes the way we think about working couples and it changes the conversations we have with our partners, but also we have with each other, we have in our organizations, and we have as a society about what it takes to make a relationship and two careers work.

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When You Tell a Job Candidate, ‘You’re Probably Not Going to Like This Job’

When hiring is brisk, it’s easy to rush the process and end up with mismatched employees. So it’s important to know what motivates them — not just how they behave, but why they do what they do. With today’s labor market, finding the best match for performance and retention pays for itself in retention alone.

A majority of Fortune 500 companies use assessments for selection and companies of all sizes can benefit from emulating the practice. To ensure the best talent selection and long-term match, HR should go deeper than personality types and behavior.

With assessments that determine what motivates candidates, HR can be more assured in choosing — or passing on — any individual.

“Selection is very different than just hiring,” said Brett Wells, chief science and consulting officer at Talent Plus Inc. “Selection means you’re making a sound judgement based on validity and science, based on what’s the very best in a role or an industry and how they will respond versus what you think your gut reaction should be. It’s predictive.”

It’s a Good Time to Be Choosy

“People can answer interview questions very well,” said Alison Nolan. “People are fantastic at answering interview questions, but it doesn’t always tell you the truth.”

Nolan is HR partner for the public health NGO, FHI 360. Previously, she did the same job with Volvo Group Trucks. With her 18 years of talent acquisition experience, she recommends an assessment-based hiring process.

“With an assessment, if they’re trying to fake it, it shows up,” said Nolan. “It’s very clear if they’re trying to skew the answers. If you’re honest it just gives you so much more insight. It saves the employer and the employee.”

In Nolan’s experience, only about 25 percent of employees who are put on a performance improvement process end up keeping their jobs. So why not make it a goal to avoid performance improvement interventions?

Right now, two competitive factors make it more important than ever to assess and understand employee motivation in hiring so great performance is the norm:

  • Near full employment. With full employment, talent acquisition is more about who you don’t hire than who you do hire, because you want to be selective and find people who will thrive in your organization. And once they’re hired, retaining those employees also becomes a competitive necessity in a tight labor market.
  • Career trends. People have become more selective about what jobs they take. Once upon a time, job seekers considered just getting a job a societal responsibility. Today, they are more attracted by intrinsic factors — in other words, corporate culture and corporate responsibility — than the need to simply find a steady income or a job for life.

Personality assessments that identify motivation can make all the difference in matching candidates with the jobs in your organization.

For Wells, who researches and builds assessments, carefully matched talent has never been more important for retention.

“With a tight labor market for candidates, the world is their oyster right now and ‘fit’ is key for retention,” said Wells. “If they don’t have that fit for the role or the organizational culture, they will leave. If they’re in a role where they’re not getting that intrinsic satisfaction they’re at risk for being disengaged and, again, at greater risk for leaving.”

Finding a Motivational Match

When you’ve done the work to accurately assess candidates, you can honestly say to those who aren’t a match, “You’re probably not going to like this job.”

How come?

You can answer, “Well, you’ve got the work ethic and the skills to do the job, but after a year, you’ll be exhausted because this job is all about engaging with clients daily in a strictly established corporate structure and you’re more motivated by thinking outside the box and coming up with new ways to accomplish tasks.”

On the other hand, for the candidate who assesses as a good fit, you can offer the job with assurance and negotiate as necessary to get them on board: “I really think you would love working here.”

Nolan has seen how this can be a positive experience for people who are not hired as well as the company.

“They get to hear why they didn’t get selected and they get that review,” said Nolan. “They have something tangible to walk away with. And sometimes, we say, ‘Hey we have this other position where you’d be a great fit.’ ”

You’ll know this because you’ve used a scientifically valid instrument that goes deeper than simple behavioral traits to find out things like:

  • Do they like to develop their own way of working or do they prefer to have it laid out for them in a prescribed manner?
  • Would they rather help others succeed or do they prefer monetary incentives?
  • Can they focus on their job with no environmental distractions or do workspace aesthetics energize them?

There are no right or wrong motivations. It’s all about congruency between what your organization needs and what it can offer the candidate.

When you assess a person’s motivation, you gain a deeper understanding of them so you can either lead them into a fulfilling and satisfying position or honestly wave them off, so they don’t take a job that will ultimately frustrate them and send them looking elsewhere.

“This is where that motivational piece comes in,” said Wells. “We often see potential wasted because they’re in roles spending time just doing things that they’re excellent at, but they don’t necessarily enjoy it.”

For Wells, it’s about talents versus strengths.

“A strength is something I’m good at, but I might not enjoy doing it, e.g., balancing a checkbook,” said Wells. “A talent is something I have the potential to do with excellence and is something I’m going to enjoy doing.”

The Perils of Using Gut Instinct

Outside of HR, not all managers are believers. Or maybe they’re just not aware.

“With some hiring managers, it can be them saying, ‘Okay, I want this person’ even when it didn’t make sense from the assessment to take that person,” said Nolan. “And nine times out of 10 they would end up on a performance improvement plan since they could not do the job, because they were not motivated by what it took to do the job.”

The best way to bring hip-shooting hiring managers into the fold of scientific talent selection is to give them the assessment that’s being used, including the feedback session. They’ll see how in-depth and revealing it is, firsthand, and they’ll be inspired by what can be achieved with a more careful hiring discipline.

Nolan has worked with managers who have a certain feeling and until they’re proven wrong — and it could be a hiring mistake that ends badly and could be costly — the task becomes how do you convince a hiring manager.

“I gave my hiring mangers the assessment and told them to take it,” said Nolan. “With them taking it, it was an eye-opener. Like someone peeking inside of you. They do it themselves and see how accurate it is.”

 Why Touchy-Feely Matters

Assessments differ, but terms like “harmonious” and “altruistic” are common. This may strike old school hiring managers as a little too soft-skill or “touchy-feely” to be practical.

What does it matter if a worker cares about the number of windows and art installations in the office? Or if they’re indifferent to status and recognition?

Plenty, according to most science on the subject, but it’s also basic psychology. People function at their best when they’re at ease. If an organizational structure or a particular job aligns with motivational preferences, the employee will be more comfortable and more able to do work in a way that gives them fulfillment.

People need to be able to be themselves at work. You can fake it for a few months in a mismatched position, but not for long.

And outside-the-box thinker isn’t going to be happy if they have to support the status quo. A person who puts himself first, will burn out in a customer service job where altruistic motivation is more valued. An employee who is highly receptive to new ideas won’t fare well in a position that demands adherence to a standard process.

A motivational assessment gives you a reliable picture of what situations are best for any job candidate.

Behavior is easy to assess. If you’ve been in talent management or training for a while, you’re probably pretty good at determining a person’s way of doing things without an assessment and through good interview questions.

Motivation, however, is deeper and you’ll need a sophisticated assessment instrument to divine it.

Motivation as a metric goes back to the work of Eduard Spranger who identified six types of motivation: theoretical, utilitarian, aesthetic, social, individualistic and traditional. Today’s motivational assessments adapt this taxonomy with more workplace-specific terms.

First Step: Assess the Job

Knowing a person’s motivational make-up won’t help if you don’t know the motivational realities of your organization and the specific jobs. So, it’s important to document the chemistry of your company first.

What is the work environment like? What are the workday demands — strict office hours, telecommute, work from the field? What are the job categories? People focused? Process focused? Creative driven or analytical?

Doing this homework will allow assessments to work as talent matchmakers.

“At Volvo, we interviewed a lot of senior buyers in our purchasing group and we benchmarked what our needs are for this job,” said Nolan.

This included requirements such as working independently, working with vendors all day long, negotiating pricing, giving presentations, and being driven by metrics in working with other people.

“Once we did the interviews, we would give the assessment and it would show us how good of a match are they for the position,” said Nolan.

Wells says it’s absolutely vital to baseline the culture before assessing talent.

“In any organization there are likely pockets of success or teams that are very successful and also pockets or teams that are struggling. With a validated assessment and research process you can discern those reliable patterns, thoughts, feelings, behaviors that drive success vs. failure in those roles,” said Wells. “So, bringing those to the forefront and making them part of your selection process will help replicate that success, selection after selection, and mitigate future failures.”

Wells recommends starting with the company’s mission statement, vision statement or a competency model, then mapping out what behaviors the company rewards, ignores and punishes. And ultimately, who gets promoted.

It’s a process of defining the culture and identifying what it takes to thrive within it. Once this is known, any number of scientifically valid assessments can be used by talent professionals to dial in the optimum profile of the candidates to hire.

Finding the Right Assessment

Once an organization knows “who it is” the process of choosing an assessment can begin.

Fortunately, the assessment industry has evolved to a point where there are many accurate, reliable and powerful instruments from which to choose.

Across the board, Wells advises that there are three basic factors to always evaluate:

1) Reliability: How consistent are scores over time and across situations. If I test you today, if I test you five years from now, am I going to get roughly equivalent results?

2) Validity: How strong is this assessment result in predicting something I care about that’s going to impact my business?

3) Fairness: To what extent do individuals from protected classes perform on the assessment compared to their majority group counterparts?

Nolan has a couple of preferred assessments and both have multiscience features that include what metrics of what drives the candidate, along with a DiSC component, and have been proven over time.

It’s always been important to match employees with positions that suit their personalities. However, now it’s more of a competitive advantage than just an employee satisfaction exercise.

In the current talent market you can afford to be more selective, which will pay off in worker retention.

As younger generations redefine why we work, there’s a little more care and feeding of talent we have to accept as employers.

Matching talent with positions by motivation helps assure success on both fronts. 

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As Sure as Today Is Cyber Monday, Your Employees Are Shopping From Work

Jon Hyman The Practical Employer

Today is Cyber Monday, the biggest online shopping day of the holiday season. In fact, it is estimated that today will be the biggest online shopping day ever, with over $9.4 billion in sales.

And, guess what? Given that most of those doing the shopping will be spending the majority of their prime shopping hours at work, from where do you think they will be making most of their Cyber Monday purchases.

Consider these statistics:

  • 68% of employees use time at work to shop online.
  • 81% of millennials shop online at work.
Should you turn a blind eye toward your employees’ online shopping habits, not just today, but across the board? Or, should you permit more open access?

I am big believer in open internet access for employees (within reason). I advocate for fewer restrictions for personal internet use at work (including Cyber Monday shopping) for two reasons: it provides a nice benefit to employees, whom we ask to sacrifice more and more personal time; and it’s almost impossible to police anyway.

We no longer live in a 40 hour a week, 9-to-5 world. Employees sacrifice more and more of their personal time for the sake of their employers. Thus, why not offer some internet flexibility both to recognize this sacrifice and to engage employees as a retention tool?

Moreover, it is becoming increasingly difficult for employers to control what their employees are doing online during the work day. Even if an employer monitors or blocks internet traffic on its network, all an employee has to do to circumnavigate these controls is take out his or her smartphone (which employees are doing anyway). By trying to control employees’ internet habits, employers are fighting a battle they cannot win. The iPhone has irreparably tilted the field in favor of employees. It not worth the time or effort to fight a battle you cannot win.

Instead of fighting a losing battle by policing restrictive policies, I suggest that employers treat this issue not as a technology problem to control, but a performance problem to correct. If an employees is otherwise performing at an acceptable level, there is no harm is letting him or her shop online from work, on Cyber Monday or on regular Wednesday.

But, if an employee is not performing, and you can trace that lack of performance to internet distractions or overuse, then treat the performance problem with counseling, discipline, and, as a last resort, termination. Just like you wouldn’t bring a knife to a gun fight, don’t bring a technology solution to a performance problem.
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Avoid Political Discussions in the Workplace? Riiiiiiiight …

Jon Hyman The Practical Employer

According to a recent survey conducted by SHRM [pdf], American workers cannot hide from politics at work.

  • 42% of U.S. employees say they have personally experienced political disagreements at work
  • 44% say they have witnessed political disagreements at work
  • 34% believe that their workplace is not inclusive of differing political perspectives
  • 12% report they have personally experienced political affiliation bias or discrimination based on their political views
  • 56% state that political discussions at work have become more common over the past four years
Some will tell you that employees should avoid political discussions at work at all costs. I am not one of those people.
It’s simply not realistic to eliminate all political discourse from the workplace. Thanks to CNN, the internet and round-the-clock news cycles, politics has invaded every crevice of our existence (and it’s only going to get worse between now and 11/3/20). How can we expect employees simply to ignore conversing about these issues for the eight-plus hours a day they are at work?

Instead of banning these discussions, remind employees of your expectations regarding all workplace conversations — that they be civil, professional and respectful. And, if a co-worker violates these precepts you have the right to disengage and to go to a supervisor, management or HR to address the problem.

Political discussions need not be nasty, uncivil, or contemptuous, as long as we respect the rights of others to think differently, and hold them accountable when they fall short of this standard.

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Workplace Dress Codes Push Fashion Forward — and Sometimes Backward

Flip-flops, board shorts and a tattered Rip Curl T-shirt. Perfect beach attire to be sure, but it’s not uncommon to see employees at companies with progressive — some may call them nonexistent — dress codes roll into the office as if it’s a day at the beach and not a 10-hour shift behind a keyboard.

Organizations still contemplate defining business casual dress codes.

While dress codes have substantially loosened over the past three decades, the area between appropriate and inappropriate apparel becomes a bit hazy. Fashion and personal style strategist Joseph Rosenfeld said that lax dress policies can result in employees consistently dressing down and misrepresenting themselves in a professional setting.

“What’s happened with business casual as a concept culturally is we chase to the lowest common denominator,” he said.

Business casual can be a safe bet in allowing employees to dress to their comfort levels and identities. By definition, business casual is just a step down from business professional. It is more casual, but doesn’t include jeans, and certainly bars shorts and an old high school gym T-shirt. Still, business casual can be a bit blurry too, depending on how well, or how poorly, a workplace communicates its do’s and don’ts when it comes to what to wear to work.

“More than 20 years later, I’m still trying to teach people that casual means leaving things to chance, and you don’t really want to leave things to chance when it comes to how you present yourself professionally,” Rosenfeld said.

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Joseph Rosenfeld, co-founder of ModeDNA.

An OfficeTeam survey found that nearly 31 percent of office workers stated that they would prefer to be at a company with a business casual dress code; 27 percent favor a casual dress code or no dress code at all.

But there are limits to what passes as acceptable office attire. The survey also found that the most common dress code violations at work include wearing overly casual clothing and showing too much skin.

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Megan Moran, founder, The Style Foundry.

“I find that companies with a strict business professional policy often deal with less dress code violations and a more consistent workforce. However, their employees end up feeling bored with their wardrobes and unable to express themselves and their personalities,” said Megan Moran, founder and wardrobe stylist at The Style Foundry. Although Moran also said that companies that implement a casual dress code policy may struggle with displaying a consistent company message and their employees may lose that empowered feeling that comes with business professional attire.

Workplaces should also avoid enforcing a dress code policy that is sexist or neglects traditional clothing among different cultures and religions. Failing to accommodate these aspects can put a company in legal trouble. According to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits employers from discriminating against individuals on account of their religion, birthplace, ancestry, culture or linguistic characteristics common to a specific ethnic group.

Amy Quarton, associate professor at Maryville University in St. Louis, said managers should ask employees for their input to help draft an appropriate dress code as this could illuminate potential concerns and legal risks as well as earn support. Quarton also said that the policy should include clear guidelines and examples of what is and is not acceptable as well as established consequences. The goal is to create a dress code policy that allows all employees to express themselves through their work attire while simultaneously represent their employer’s brand in a positive way, she said.

“New and existing employees may benefit from training programs aimed at improving their cultural competencies and understanding of stereotypes, prejudice and discrimination,” Quarton said. “Employers can also establish a process that allows employees to share their concerns about the dress code. They can then work with people on an individual basis to negotiate accommodations that work for both the employer and the employee.”

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Reports of the Death of the Job Board Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

The old-school job board model, where employers pay a website to post open positions and hope that qualified candidates will find and apply for them, may not be as flashy or talked about as some of today’s bright, shiny Generation Z gig-worker marketplace products. But since the dawning of the job board as we know it some 30 years ago they appear to remain a viable business model with plenty of life.

In 2018, online job advertising companies earned a total of $22 billion, according to Staffing Industry Analysts, an increase of 15 percent. And while many companies offer advanced services such as programmatic job advertising or social media tools, the leader in many markets “is a traditional job board that makes 70 to 80 percent of its revenue from job postings,” said Jeff Dickey-Chasins, principal of the industry consulting firm JobBoardDoctor LLC.

That doesn’t mean the industry has been complacent. Especially in markets like the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union, job boards have been exploring new revenue models, new technology and new features. They have little choice, observers say. Recruiting practices are changing, the use of data has become more sophisticated and the demands of job seekers are continually evolving. 

Also, the very culture of “being online” has changed. It’s now anytime, anywhere and includes multiple channels such as websites, email, social media and chat. That dynamic can work either for or against the job boards, said NelsonHall Principal Research Analyst Nikki Edwards. Those job boards that have mobilized their platform, integrated with social media, and incorporated other channels “will have greater audience reach, and are more likely to survive, than those who do nothing to adapt or who rest on their laurels.” 

It seems like a far cry from the industry’s early days, when job boards were essentially “the old newspaper classifieds,” said Gerry Crispin, founder of CareerXroads, a recruiting-technology consulting practice. “Certainly, a lot of changes have gone on, but the fact of the matter is job boards are essentially the 21st century extension of classified advertising.”

Technology Draws a Circle

Initially, online job searching was relatively simple: Candidates searched, clicked on a job and applied to it — all without ever leaving the job board. Because applicant tracking systems were just gaining traction, companies around the turn of the 21st century relied on job boards to attract candidates while job seekers used them to deliver their applications to employers. Then, as ATS technology gained traction and more organizations built their own candidate databases, job boards began serving as gateways to corporate career sites.

However, “we’ve come full circle,” said Chad Sowash, a talent acquisition consultant and host of the recruiting-focused “Chad & Cheese Podcast.” Today’s corporate career sites, he said, are often clunky and not particularly attractive.

That encourages job boards to work harder to retain traffic. Rather than charge for how long a post remains online, pay-per-click plays a larger role in their business models. That, too, incites job boards to create simple, effective user experiences.

On another level, the evolution of the ATS changed many job boards from hunter-gatherers to sourcers. “There’s always been that component where if a company wants to source candidates instead of advertise jobs, they could go and look through a résumé database,” said Dickey-Chasins. “There are now job boards whose primary focus is sourcing candidates.”

As an example, he cites Hired. Founded in 2012, Hired offers seekers free profiles designed to match them with employers looking for a particular set of skills and experiences. It then screens those profiles to match a company in, say, Chicago with developers who’ve known the programming language Ruby for 10 years and previously worked at a video game studio. “They’re essentially doing what recruiters used to do, but they do it at a lower price point and in a more automated fashion,” Dickey-Chasins said. 

Hired also illustrates how creating the right experience for recruiters is as important as attracting the right candidates. “We have to make sure that we have a seamless experience for the recruiter because they can’t be going to 12 different websites to look at stuff,” Sowash said. “What we need to do is integrate those platforms into whatever your core system is — if it’s an applicant tracking system like iCIMS or a CRM like SmashFly.”

Given the sophistication of today’s data-management systems and application programming interfaces, or APIs, “there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to funnel all of these vendors into one core piece of technology,” Sowash said.

The term “job board” has become a bit of a misnomer. For instance, Indeed describes itself as an aggregator that compiles jobs from a number of sources. BioSpace, which focuses on the life sciences industry, says it’s  “a digital hub for news and careers.” LinkedIn is “an online professional network.”

These and other companies offer services designed to streamline their customers’ talent acquisition process, or at least portions of it. Such features include diversity products, job-advertising packages, employer-branding packages and other features that get folded into annual subscriptions, Dickey-Chasins said. LinkedIn Group Product Manager Kevin Chuang said his company is testing a short-form skills assessment to help it uncover more accurate matches.

Rise of the Lifestyle Platforms

Among the most fundamental drivers impacting the job boards’ landscape is the ever-changing dynamics of technology products, experts say. When sites like Monster.com first appeared in the mid-1990s, not only did the ATS not exist but the mobile phone was still a large plastic brick and the internet had yet to squash America Online.

Today’s world looks a lot different: Smartphones are ubiquitous, Amazon’s Alexa looks up recipes on command and Google’s Nest manages temperatures and monitors for smoke in homes around the world. Because of this, features like convenience, ease of use, speed and mobility count toward a job board’s success more than they ever have before. In particular, improved usability has become critical as candidates — who are essentially consumers — have come to expect simpler, slicker user experiences, Sowash said.

Advancing technology also spurred the rise of what Sowash calls “lifestyle platforms” — sites like Google and Facebook that fundamentally changed the way consumers regard online communications. “As soon as we roll over in the morning, we jump into them,” he said. Job boards can’t make the same claim because consumers “aren’t looking for a job every single day of their life.”

Job boards, then, must look for ways to leverage both consumer technology and lifestyle platforms.

“If you’re a job board today, you have to realize that people aren’t waking up in the morning thinking, ‘I’ve got to go to Indeed or I have to go to whatever your brand name is,’ ” Sowash said.  “They’re thinking, ‘I have to go to Google, I have to go to LinkedIn.’ ” As a result, job boards “really have to think much smarter than they ever, ever had to before.”

For the industry’s big names — like Indeed, LinkedIn and IT-focused Dice — that’s meant building suites of talent acquisition tools, facilitating messaging between candidates and recruiters and aggressively developing AI-based search mechanisms and data-visualization features. At the same time, a number of startups are at work trying to solve different talent-acquisition pain points of specific industries.

Not only that, said Chuang, but the process of job searching has become more social and thus more personal. Social networks, for example, allow candidates to connect with workers at prospective employers or ask for referrals. “The job post itself has become one step in the overarching process of the job search,” he said. 

“Job boards that are still exclusively focused on job postings and a singular product versus a [fuller] solution are the ones that are really struggling right now,” said BioSpace CEO Joshua Goodwin. “They’re not experiencing the uplift that we’re seeing from this labor market because of a very simple business principle: It’s about really understanding your customer’s pain point and their end goals. Our customers are about trying to hire the right candidates and not about trying to post an individual job posting.”

The Beauty of the Niche

With that thought in mind, niche job boards like BioSpace often focus their product development efforts to align with the behaviors and habits of their audience. Sites that serve truck drivers or skilled tradespeople tend to lean heavily on mobile-first approaches along with texting and universal application models, Dickey-Chasins said. “They try to do things like text-based assessments, to fit the way these people work,” he explained. “In certain sectors it’s super hard to find people, so you basically do whatever it takes to pull those people out.”

Goodwin agrees. “We tell clients that job postings are foundational,” he said. Besides posting open positions and publicizing them, he believes effective job boards provide solutions suites that help companies proactively identify and contact candidates on platforms they might frequent.

That’s particularly important in a job market like today’s, where the candidate pool is small and the most desirable workers are often “passive,” open to opportunities but only the right opportunities. Because those candidates don’t, to paraphrase Sowash, wake up and surf to a job board, sites must think of themselves more as what Goodwin calls “recruitment web sites” that offer “a lot more than job postings.”

On his site, that “a lot more” is content. BioSpace was founded in the late 1980s as a life-sciences media firm. Today, around 700,000 unique visitors access the site each month, mostly to read domain-related content. “They want to know about what’s happening in the industry. They may not necessarily be looking at jobs,” Goodwin said. However, BioSpace’s specialized information provides employers with a launching pad from which to reach candidates.

Successful niche boards, adds John Sumser, principal analyst for HRExaminer, succeed not because of better technology but “because they understand the niche that they’re operating in and they don’t go outside of it.” The moment they attempt to expand beyond their core market, “things fall apart because their expertise is narrow.”

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Human Capital Disclosure May Soon Be Mandated By the SEC

Earlier this year I wrote about the first-ever ISO standards for human capital reporting, which were published in December.

These called for the voluntary public disclosure of measures for both large organizations and small/medium-sized organizations. While some European and Asian governments are likely to adopt the ISO recommendations as law, the United States Congress was never likely to follow suit, so it appeared that adoption in the U.S. would be voluntary and slow.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission just published proposed rulemaking, which, if implemented, will bring human capital disclosure to U.S publicly traded companies much sooner than anyone imagined. This is a game changer for our profession and a VERY BIG DEAL!

On August 8 the SEC proposed to fundamentally change the way publicly traded companies report. Under the current rules, the SEC specifies 12 items that must be included in the narrative description that accompanies financial statements. Companies have to address all that apply to them. For example, these items include a discussion of the principle products and services offered, new products and segments, sources and availability of raw materials, whether the business is seasonal, competitive conditions and the current backlog of firm orders. The last required item is the number of employees, which is the only human capital measure currently required for disclosure.

The SEC proposes to move away from an explicit list of required items and instead adopt a principles-based approach where each company must discuss whatever is material with the understanding that the list of topics will differ by industry and company. (In financial reporting, material means any information that would be important to an investor in deciding whether to buy or sell a security.) The SEC does, however, share a nonexclusive list of items that it believes will apply to most companies. This list includes five items from the current list of 12 and two new items: human capital and compliance with government regulations. (The other five items are revenue-generating activities, development efforts for new products, resources material to the business, any business subject to renegotiation or cancellation, and seasonality.)

Also read: Human Resources Gets Its ISO Approval 

Furthermore, simply disclosing the number of employees will not satisfy the need for human capital disclosure.

In their own words, “Item 101(c) (1) (xii) [the current rules] dates back to a time when companies relied significantly on plant, property, and equipment to drive value. At that time, a prescriptive requirement to disclose the number of employees may have been an effective means to elicit information material to an investment decision. Today, intangible assets represent an essential resource for many companies. Because human capital may represent an important resource and driver of performance for certain companies, and as part of our efforts to modernize disclosure, we propose to amend Item 101 (c) to refocus registrant’s human capital resources disclosures. Specifically, we propose replacing the current requirement to disclose the number of employees with a requirement to disclose a description of the registrant’s human capital resources, including in such description any human capital measures or objectives that management focuses on in managing the business.” (Page 48 of the proposed rule Modernization of Regulation S-K Items 101, 103 and 105.)

Did you just feel the earth shifting below your feet? You should have. The importance of this proposed rule for our profession simply cannot be overstated. Many in the profession have worked years to increase the visibility and use of human capital measures. The time finally may have come for it in the U.S.

While it is true that the SEC will not prescribe specific human capital measures, it does provide some examples, including measures for attraction, development and retention of personnel. The test for disclosure, however, is clear: materiality. Can you imagine any CEO or CFO telling analysts, the public and their own employees that people are not a material contributor to the company’s success, especially after saying for years that people are the company’s greatest asset? I don’t think so. So, if this rulemaking is finalized, human capital disclosure is coming and coming soon.

Most companies will rely on their heads of HR as well as accounting for guidance on what to include in their narrative on human capital. If for no other reason than risk mitigation, these leaders in turn will look to the human capital profession for guidance. And they will find ISO 30414:2018, the human capital reporting standards published in December 2018. These standards recommend the external reporting of 23 measures for large companies and 10 for small/medium. These measures will be a natural starting point as companies decide what to discuss, so if you don’t yet have a copy, get one, and be prepared to proactively help your organization be a leader in human capital reporting.

The proposed SEC rule is available here. The rule is 116 pages, but the section on human capital is under section IIB7, pages 44-54.

This story originally appeared in Workforce‘s sister publication, Chief Learning Officer.

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New Study Points to Diversity and Inclusion as Key Driver to Company Success

A recent study focusing on diversity in the workplace found a strong correlation between diversity and inclusion functions and corporate business strategies that if well-aligned will reap a distinct positive impact on the organization’s reputation, employee retention and financial success.diversity

Global communications firm Weber Shandwick and management consultancy United Minds joined forces with KRC Research to conduct a new diversity study that focuses on the best practices of D&I functions that are well-aligned with the overall business strategy of the company, as well as the roles and responsibilities of chief diversity officers and the challenges facing them today.

“Diversity Officers Today: Paving the Way for Diversity & Inclusion Success,” which was released in September, surveyed 500 senior-level corporate D&I professionals employed at high-revenue companies in the United States. Elizabeth Rizzo, Weber Shandwick’s senior vice president of reputation research, said that the survey was about “their role, their attitude about the D&I function that they work for, and how it is integrated with the rest of the company.” The research categorized D&I professionals into three sections — Well-Aligned, Aligned and Misaligned — along a “D&I alignment continuum.”

Tai Wingfield, senior VP of diversity, equity and inclusion, Weber Shandwick.

After reading extensively about increased visibility on the work and investment that companies were making in D&I, researchers noticed a significant gap in the field. “We were surprised to find that there was very little research available that looked at the role of chief diversity officer as a whole,” said Tai Wingfield, Weber Shandwick’s senior vice president of diversity, equity and inclusion practice. “We thought there was a need to have some sort of research in place to arm chief diversity officers with best practices on what they could do more effectively, and to raise visibility around what this role entails and where it’s headed in the next couple of years.”

Full alignment is achieved when the actions of the D&I function and D&I staff members are integrated with the organization’s planned objectives in order to meet its overall business goals. This alignment has a substantial effect on new hires and resignations. The study shows that D&I activities impact 30 percent of new hires and 13 percent of resignations. Well-aligned companies have a 33 percent rate of position acceptances due to employee satisfaction of D&I at the company, as compared to aligned functions with 28 percent and misaligned functions with 24 percent.

D&I alignment was found to be a key driver of company reputation, as 79 percent of executives in well-aligned functions strongly agreed. This is substantially higher than in aligned D&I functions with 44 percent and misaligned D&I functions with 30 percent.

Financial performance was also positively transformed through D&I. An estimated 66 percent of executives in well-aligned D&I functions strongly agreed with this statement, which was also substantially higher than the 27 percent of executives in aligned D&I functions and the 30 percent in misaligned D&I functions.

“Having an aligned function means that you have a line of sight into the C-suite, that you’re getting the right investment in the space and that you have some sort of partnership with communications and marketing, which is critical in terms of achieving D&I goals and objectives,” Wingfield said. “All of that ladders up to increased reputation benefits, financial performance and better retention and recruitment of diverse talent.”

The biggest challenge that diversity executives face is making the business case for diversity and inclusion, followed by making diversity and inclusion values or outcomes externally visible. “I think that’s why we see the CDOs who are in well-aligned functions with the business note that partnerships between communications and marketing as a best practice, because it’s so important in terms of that external visibility piece,” Wingfield said.

Elizabeth Rizzo

Rizzo said that the most surprising finding within this study was that there are three things standing in the way of achieving full integration and alignment with the business strategy: Not all D&I functions had a dedicated leader (34 percent), many of these positions are only part-time (40 percent), and alignment was not always a top priority for some companies (18 percent).

“That seems to suggest that not every company really realizes the importance of having their D&I function being aligned, or having a seat at the table with the other business strategy goals,” Rizzo said.

As for the future of D&I, the study also found that CDOs are optimistic in their visions for D&I and the expansion of the position in corporate America. Approximately 81 percent have a positive outlook on the future of D&I, and 50 percent predict that most U.S. companies will have chief diversity officer positions in the next five years.