According to a recent study, 97% of executives expect to see increased competition for talent over the next 12 months.

That’s the view shared by thousands of business executives who responded to business consultant Mercer’s 2019 Global Talent Trends Study.

And, the study found, more than half of executives from high-growth companies – 52% – see the length of time it takes to find and hire new talent as their biggest people-related challenge.

‘Human capital risks’

That’s why more organizations are focusing on how to address what the study labels “human capital risks.”

They are working to understand where their workforces lack skills needed to compete now and in the future.

And they’re looking to HR to develop people strategies focused on identifying and filling those gaps.

According to Mercer’s analysis, that requires breaking down HR silos.

The consultancy recommends closely integrating talent acquisition, compensation and benefits, career development and learning and aligning them with organizations’ strategic priorities.

Training investments

With competition for talent so intense and market trends so unpredictable, developing the skills of existing employees becomes more urgent.

Mercer states that companies are spending about $1,000 per person on helping employees improve or add new skills by offering employee-directed learning programs or more formal, targeted training.

And companies are investing in “upskilling and reskilling” initiatives.

But there are barriers that are stopping some companies from
implementing training programs.

HR leaders told Mercer that the biggest of those barriers is
fear that competitors will reap the benefits of training investments when
employees leverage newly acquired skills to get jobs with other companies.

Redesigning jobs

They are also redesigning jobs to help keep employees
engaged and inspired. They are increasingly focused on aligning those jobs
explicitly with their organization’s culture, values and strategic goals — and
eliminating jobs that don’t.

To keep talent, reports Mercer, many organizations are focused on developing and maintaining an attractive “talent value proposition.”

That includes work/life balance, transparency and trust and a fair and respectful work environment.

And, Mercer says, HR plays a critical role in designing and supporting
a “human-centered” strategy necessary to compete for and continuously develop
the talent needed to compete in complex and rapidly changing markets.

The post Execs say hiring takes too long as competition for talent intensifies appeared first on HR Morning.

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As
the HR profession evolves, it continues finding innovative ways of tackling
traditional problems.

Unfortunately in some areas, such as Performance Management, we open our toolkit and pull out the same old solutions.

For many years HR has been trapped stuck on a hamster wheel of annual reviews supported by one-to-one check-ins and coaching sessions that rarely actually happen.

Research from Gallup uncovered that almost half of employees receive feedback only a few times a year, if that often, and less than a quarter of workers felt the feedback they receive in those sessions is actually valuable.

At Collinson we decided to take a leap and turn the traditional, ineffective appraisal model on its head. Instead of placing the process at the start of our thinking, we put the customer first.

We committed to first consider our people’s needs and experience and then define how we would link that to increased performance and engagement.

As part of that effort, we changed how we talked about the entire process. I was never a fan of the term ‘performance management.’

We have people in our business from 17 to 67 years old, most of them clever and very capable. Therefore the need for close ‘management’ has rarely been a big issue for us. So we coined the term ‘performance engagement’ to more accurately reflect what we are trying to achieve.

To help us realize our vision of performance engagement, we partnered with Betterworks to deploy a digital platform that could support a new way of interacting with our people to encourage and support them.

 We broke away from the annual performance cycle, including killing off the annual appraisal, which felt like saying goodbye to an old friend that was never really much help.

We replaced it with a continuous performance improvement structure, whereby people set and achieve objectives on an on-going basis —  as one is completed another one is introduced.

Overall performance is reviewed every quarter in the same way, using a framework of structured monthly conversations on topics such as performance, well-being, coaching or personal and professional growth.

My instinct proved correct. After moving to a continuous performance process, we saw a noticeable increase in employee engagement and connection to our organizational goals.

Lessons
learned

Of course, disrupting a process as entrenched as the annual performance review has become, we had to learn a lot along the way, from how to secure executive buy-in, to training managers and rolling out the program to our employees.

Here are three key concepts we learned through the process that will help your organization gain the huge benefits of moving to a continuous performance management process. 

1) Show
employees how performance engagement benefits them

I have never talked to ANYBODY who likes doing annual reviews Most employees and managers find them a bureaucratic  burden, something which they are forced to do that they’d rather avoid. And that’s the best case scenario.

At worst they are demotivating, expensive and ineffective at their primary purpose of improving performance.

Organizations need to break this painful
cycle. The great news is you can replace it with a process that employees will
actually demand because they find it valuable to their career development.

Language is a powerful tool in that
transformation. At Collison, simply renaming the programs from “performance
management” to “performance engagement” immediately signaled that the new
process focused on engaging with the talents and ambitions of each employee.
This forward-looking focus not only reduces employees’ anxiety, it boosts program
participation. It can also have a positive impact on your
recruitment efforts, as the best candidates increasingly look to join
forward-thinking organizations that are committed to employee development.

Beyond a language change, it’s important to communicate that a continuous process is more efficient than conducting annual reviews.

When we first announced that we were moving from annual to quarterly reviews, our managers worried this would mean an increased workload.

Making the process more frequent made the process significantly lighter, faster, less stressful and more valuable for everyone involved.

I was able to show our executives and managers that, while our previous annual process required users to input data in 30+ fields, our new quarterly process pared this down to just a few key questions.

When designing our review questions, we kept asking ourselves “What does the employee need to know?” and “How does this add value?”

Another important change we made to benefit our employees was upgrading the performance development technology we use. This is a critical step for any organization looking to improve their engagement process.

Compared to the simple and efficient apps employees use in their everyday lives, many of HR’s goal-setting and review systems are outdated, overly complex and cumbersome.

With Betterworks as our technology partner, we were able to make it easy for our employees to continuously create and update goals, and for managers to provide regular and ongoing performance feedback.

Upgrading our HR platform had an immediate positive impact on our participation and engagement rates — where less than half of our team recorded their goals in our legacy system, that rate reached 98% of employees in our first year using the new system.

2) Start from
the top 

Research from management consultants DDI found that those companies who clearly define and then act on a sense of purpose outperformed financial markets by 42%. But that doesn’t happen without hard work and ongoing commitment.

Connecting individual effort to an organization’s mission requires continuous alignment and re-alignment of everyone’s work within the organization to encourage and sustain the levels of engagement needed for higher performance.

HR must help senior executives see the connection between employees’ alignment to goals and increased employee engagement and better performance.

And that requires speaking their language. You want to tie the effort of moving to a continuous process to the very real business outcomes senior leaders are looking to achieve. 

Then, once you have the senior staff on board, move your focus to the individuals who have the greatest impact on your workforces’ overall performance: your people managers.

At Collison, we provided on-site group training for our managers and also trained people at each location to act as local champions. We encouraged friendly competition among employees and managers to boost initial adoption, sharing leaderboards showing which regions had the highest goal completion rates.

3) Have a plan, but stay agile and open to learning

Once you get the buy-in and the budget to implement a new Continuous Performance Management process, it will be tempting to go all in and try and roll out everything at once.

But it is more critical that your workforce and the business to start seeing value as quickly as possible.

We learned from our rollout that it is better to get started quickly with just one or two elements of the program and allow time for everyone to learn and adapt to the new process and platform.

As leadership, management and employees see immediate value from the program, you’ll acheive higher, and faster,  adoption.

This agile approach to rolling out continuous performance management also encourages feedback from your managers which you can use to refine the process.

And when people know that their ideas are being acted on they are more engaged in working with and sharing their opinons about how to improve the process.

We’ve now reached the point where, if a manager isn’t coming to HR with
suggestions about how we can make our performance engagement process even
better, we wonder if he or she is paying close enough attention.

And we are getting ideas from all the way up our organization. When you get focused, direct feedback from your CEO and can act upon it, you know that you are making real progress.

With quarterly reviews successfully in place and evolving, we’ve created a roadmap for the next year.

We’ll encourage people to start setting specific quarterly goals and introduce added value to the process, such as marking International Mental Health Week by releasing wellbeing conversations and integrating 360-degree reviews into our processes.

Other factors that will impact your
organization’s ability to implement a continuous performance process
successfully, but I believe the above three are the most important because each
one influences the others.

A feedback loop for continuous performance inmprovement

Leadership buy-in helps with employee engagement and ensures leaders contribute to the evolution of the process.

Engaged managers will also provide feedback on the process and their enthusiasm will be picked up by employees, enhancing everyone’s appreciation of the benefits of a continuous approach.

Finally, an agile process helps with early adoption and engagement because people don’t expect a perfect system and it’s easier for leadership to back an idea that will deliver results quickly. It also enables you to learn quickly and apply for improvement, which has been key to our success so far.

By transitioning to a Continuous Performance Management model, HR teams can position individual employees and the entire organization for success.

Just remember to keep your focus on creating a process that delivers inherent value for employees, provides more frequent opportunities for communication across all levels of your business, and leaves room for ongoing innovation and refinement. 

The post Transitioning to a continuous performance process: 3 keys to success appeared first on HR Morning.

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Having trouble hiring? Who isn’t, with the tight job market, being ghosted by candidates and just the complete overhaul in the hiring process the last several years?

And now there’s a new hiring practice: Job interviews by texting.

If you adhere to certain guidelines, interviews by texting can be a really useful, and convenient, tool to add to the mix. It can even speed the process along, particularly when managing multiple candidates for a job.

Here’s how interviews by texting might work: A recruiter would set up a time to text back and forth with a candidate. Then the interviewer sends the candidate a question, waits for a response and asks the next question, and so on.

Attracts millennials, Gen Zers

Texting might be particularly useful as a first-time discussion to weed out unqualified candidates. And it can boost recruiting efforts for attracting millennial and Gen Z candidates.

There are even a growing number of technology companies, such as Mya.com and Canvas (gocanvas.io), that offer text messaging tools. For example, you can send an automated text, asking “You applied to a job last month. We have a new opportunity. Do you have a minute to chat?”

Rather than trying to accommodate a candidate’s current work schedule, employers can cut “approximately half of that time spent by communicating through text,” says Fisher Phillips Employment Attorney Erin Price on SHRM.

Here are a few best practices from recruiters who’ve been hiring by text:

Consider the position. Use texting for more junior positions. “You probably don’t want to recruit your chief financial officer via text,” says Gwen Moran, author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Business Plans.

Ask first. “We always speak to our candidates via phone first, and then ask if it’s okay to text,” says Michael Sunderland, CEO, Full Stack Talent. It’s best to have a conversation to ensure the candidate completely understands the format of the interview or pre-interview.

Develop a text message policy. Specify how and when to initiate contact through text. Most employers suggest keeping it professional. In other words, no slang, abbreviations or acronyms.

“While texting is an informal medium, you’re still trying to impress each other,” says Moran.

Save text communications. Use recruitment marketing software to keep all communications in one place – including applications, email communication, notes and text messages.

Diligent recordkeeping will also protect the company should a candidate, for instance, not get hired and threaten a discrimination lawsuit.

The post ‘Just text me’: New way to interview appeared first on HR Morning.

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Bank of America has agreed to pay $4.2 million after
the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance
Programs reportedly found evidence of hiring discrimination practices in past
years, according to published reports.

The OFCCP alleged that African Americans, Hispanics and
women were discriminated against when applying for phone representative, client
service, mortgage underwriter, phone sales and sales specialist positions at
BofA locations in New Jersey, Florida, Georgia and Texas, according to a DOL
press release.

Despite the payout, BofA said it disagrees with the allegations
and is confident that its hiring practices were appropriate.

“These reviews occurred between six and 10 years ago in
a small number of offices. We decided it was best to put this matter behind us
by reaching this resolution,” BofA said.

BofA spokesperson Bill Halldin in some cases, the bank hired
more women than men for a position, but the DOL felt there should’ve been more
women hired.

More than half of BofA’s U.S. workforce is women, while 46%
is ethnically diverse.

DOL uncovered these alleged instances during routine
compliance checks.

As part of the agreement, BofA will monitor its hiring
practices to ensure compliance and enlist a consultant to look at its hiring
procedures over a five-year period.

“This is one of the largest settlements in OFCCP history,
and this result will further the goal of equal employment opportunity,” Craig
Leen, director of the OFCCP, said in a statement.

The $4.2 million amount includes back wages and interest. It
is considered an early resolution conciliation agreement, which as of November
2018, is a way for the DOL to reach compliance-related settlements more quickly
and efficiently to maximize resources.

The post Bank of America pays $4.2M to settle federal discrimination probe appeared first on HR Morning.

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Faced with rising costs and continuing struggles to engage employees with their benefits, U.S. employers are redesigning their benefit strategy to better meet employee needs, according to a new survey by Willis Towers Watson.

The survey found employers are looking to place greater emphasis on employee wellness, broader benefit packages and use of new technologies to support employee decision-making.

The 2019 Benefits Trends Survey found the primary benefit strategy challenges U.S. employers expect to face over the next three years are rising benefit costs (82%), followed by difficulties communicating benefit choices to employees (53%) and the differing wants and needs of a multi-generational workforce (50%).

Just under half (47%) cited lack of employee engagement with their benefit programs as a primary challenge.

 “While controlling costs remains their top challenge, employers are increasingly focused on a broader benefit strategy that goes beyond their core health and retirement offerings,” said Jennifer DeMeo, senior director, Retirement, Willis Towers Watson. “In addition to the traditional emphasis on plan design and cost management, employers are looking for ways to better connect with employees to meet the benefit needs of a diverse workforce and to get the most value for their benefit spend.”

According to the survey, employers are focusing across a broad range of benefits — starting with wellness. When asked about their highest priorities, 80% of respondents cited incorporating employee wellness into their benefit programs.

That includes physical, emotional, financial and social
wellbeing programs.

• (64%) cited aligning benefit provisions with
  employee wants and needs
• followed by enhancing work policies (61%)
• and incorporating inclusion and diversity into
  benefit programs (56%).

Importantly, 70% of employers plan to focus on enhancing
corporate social responsibility (CSR) policies and aligning them with their
benefit strategy over the next three years, nearly double the percentage of
respondents who focused on CSR policies in the past three years.

The survey also noted some employers are changing their
benefit strategy to improve their current programs’ overall effectiveness.

For example, only four in 10 respondents said their programs are effective at offering significant choice and flexibility in benefit selection, while just under half (49%) are effective at tailoring their benefit packages to support their employees’ needs.

Prioritizing employee experience

Employers are putting a greater priority in their benefit
strategy on talent experience, including the continuing desire to deliver a
technology-enabled benefit deal — and with good reason.

According to the survey, less than three in 10 employers (28%)
said they are effective at using decision support and other digital tools to
drive engagement. Not surprisingly, 84% of respondents plan to focus on the
talent experience over the next three years, compared with 54% over the past
three years.

Among the broader moves expected in the next three years
include the use of technology to deliver benefit messages to employees (82%
over next three years versus 44% over past three years) and creating a shopping
experience when employees sign up for benefits (65% over next three years versus
38% over last three years).

“Most employers are giving their employees choice across their core and voluntary benefits. However, there is still much opportunity to enhance employee engagement, including widespread adoption of new decision-making technologies,” said Julie Stone, managing director, Health and Benefits, Willis Towers Watson.

“Employers are also moving forward by incorporating human-centered design thinking into their overarching benefit strategy,” Stone added, “thereby improving their ability to tailor their communication to various segments in the workforce.”

The 2019 Benefits Trends Survey was conducted during May and June 2019. Respondents totaled more than 4,300 companies from 88 countries, including 400 large and midsize U.S. companies.

To illustrate how a targeted benefit strategy can improve employee health and save on the bottom line, consider this example from the experts at What’s New in Benefits & Compensation.

Adding cancer screenings to wellness benefits
can potentially save a firm’s health plan $1 million or more on a single
patient, if the disease is caught early or prevented entirely.

That’s because, for example:

• 60% of diagnosed colorectal cancer (CRC) cases are discovered at a later stage due to under-screening.
• Employees aged 50-65 have the lowest rates for CRC screening.

The U.S. spends $7.4 billion on CRC each year
and newer immunotherapies can cost more than $400,000 per year, per patient.

For employees diagnosed with CRC at any stage,
a large percentage of costs are paid out by company-sponsored health plans
despite more high-deductible plans being used today.

Most companies offer wellness plans, but only
20% of those programs offer CRC screenings that can identify risks early.

A CRC screening starts with a blood test. If
positive, employees can be referred to a doctor for a diagnostic colonoscopy.

The procedure will determine if cancer is
present and remove precancerous polyps or lesions.

Getting screenings
started

Screenings can bridge the gap for employees
who don’t see their provider on a regular or annual basis. Here’s how to get
one started:

• Partner with a third-party administrator (TPA) that can assure HIPAA regs are followed. The TPA can also arrange for delivery of test results.
• Specifically target employees eligible (by age) in your wellness communications, citing benefits and risks.
• Offer rewards for participation, such as PTO, financial rewards, gift cards, gym memberships, etc.
• Do follow-up to make sure blood test results are delivered quickly after screenings.

The post Firms expanding employee wellness programs: How do you stack up? appeared first on HR Morning.

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Employer-provided health insurance coverage for the average American family now costs as much as a small car – $20,000 – every year.

That’s the finding of a just released study by the Kaiser Family Foundation nonprofit health research group.

The foundation’s annual survey of employer-provided health insurance plans found that employees, on average, pay about a third of that annual cost for premiums deducted from their salaries.

But that $6,000 doesn’t include what they are paying out of pocket for health insurance deductibles, co-pays and other medical expenses that aren’t covered by their insurance plan.

Paying for health insurance but avoiding the doctor

The news is even worse for low-paid workers. According to Kaiser, at organizations where more than 35% of workers make less than $25,000 a year, the few that sign up for employer-provided health insurance plans face premiums closer to $7,000 a year.

The majority of those low-paid employees never enroll.

And even for those that do enroll, finding the money to pay out of pocket expenses, like co-pays, for even routine healthcare services often proves impossible.

Dan Macklin, CEO of Salary Finance, which offers salary-secured loans to workers as an alternative to payday loans or raiding retirement accounts for emergency bills, told HR Morning that company research found 48% of U.S. employees are under financial stress.

And Federal Reserve data indicates nearly 40% of American workers would have to borrow money or sell an asset to cover a $400 expense they aren’t expecting.

As a result, many employees with high-deductible health insurance plans are avoiding doctor visits and going without medications.

Those people are effectively paying all that money for nothing unless they have a catastrophic event that leaves them with no choice and pushes them past the deductible limit.

Employers’ health insurance balancing act

There is some (partially) good news.

In the current tight labor market, employers are trying to control employee health insurance costs while still offering benefits that will attract good workers.

Some are trying to keep employee contribution increases to a minimum by restricting the selection of providers available under their health insurance plans or specifying which pharmacies employees can use.

But, while lower-skilled, lower-paid workers may have to be OK with that tradeoff, many of the workers employers hope to attract and keep can be more selective about who they are willing to work for.

And, if they are going to shoulder more of the steadily increasing cost of health insurance, they are going to demand higher salaries and other benefits that employers will find hard to pull back if the economy slows.

Perhaps employers would be better off buying those employees a new car every year and asking them to use an Affordable Care Act (ACA) policy or pay the whole cost of health insurance themselves.

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The Department of Labor has released the final rule that will require businesses to pay overtime wages to employees who work more than 40 hours a week.

It’s a win for the estimated 1.3 million workers who will
now be compensated for putting in long hours — but it’s a bitter defeat for the
2.8 million others who would’ve also gotten overtime under the original rule
proposed by the Obama administration.”

For the first time in over 15 years, America’s workers will
have an update to overtime regulations that will put overtime pay into the
pockets of more than a million working Americans,” Acting U.S. Secretary
of Labor Patrick Pizzella said. “This rule brings a commonsense approach
that offers consistency and certainty for employers as well as clarity and
prosperity for American workers.”

The rule updates the earnings thresholds necessary to exempt executive, administrative, or professional employees from the FLSA’s minimum wage and overtime pay requirements, and allows employers to count a portion of certain bonuses (and commissions) towards meeting the salary level.

The new thresholds account for growth in employee earnings since the currently enforced thresholds were set in 2004. In the final rule, the Department is:

• raising the “standard salary level”
  from the currently enforced level of $455 to $684 per week (equivalent to
  $35,568 per year for a full-year worker);
• raising the total annual compensation level for
  “highly compensated employees (HCE)” from the currently enforced
  level of $100,000 to $107,432 per year;
• allowing employers to use nondiscretionary
  bonuses and incentive payments (including commissions) that are paid at least
  annually to satisfy up to 10 percent of the standard salary level, in
  recognition of evolving pay practices; and
• revising the special salary levels for workers
  in U.S. territories and in the motion picture industry.

The increases to the salary thresholds are long overdue in
light of wage and salary growth since 2004. Nearly every person who commented
on the Department’s 2017 Request for Information, participated at listening
sessions in 2018 regarding the regulations, or commented on the Notice of
Proposed Rulemaking agreed that the thresholds needed to be updated for this
reason.

The Department estimates that 1.2 million additional workers will be entitled to minimum wage and overtime pay as a result of the increase to the standard salary level.

The Department also estimates that an additional 101,800 workers will be entitled to overtime pay as a result of the increase to the HCE compensation level.

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Businesses have historically been more concerned with customer experience than their own employees’ experience, but this is beginning to change. And it’s about time!

According to a 2018 Gallup survey, only 15% of employees are engaged at work worldwide. This is astounding — and costly too.

An earlier Gallup poll predicted that actively disengaged employees cost the U.S. $450 billion to $550 billion per year in lost productivity. So, what can be done?

First, let’s define “employee experience.”

How do you stack up?

This term is intended to describe everything that an
employee experiences at work. Obviously, this includes the physical environment
(warm and welcoming or cold and windowless) and company culture (business or
casual, siloed or collaborative), but it also encompasses the technology that
the employees use every day.

In order to provide a positive employee experience, HR departments
must help design a workplace that inspires people to do great work. It’s not
enough to buy an air hockey table and fill the fridge with free snacks.

Today’s workforce expects more. They’re used to smartphones, iPads
and laptops that provide instant access to any piece of information at the
touch of a finger. Can your company’s workplace suite stack up?

The employee experience is heavily affected by the devices and applications people use to perform their jobs successfully. If they are given old, clunky software that forces them to endure constant lags and errors, they are going to become very frustrated, very quickly. This will lead to low productivity, poor morale, and eventually a revolving door of employees.

UEM: Why are they leaving?

How will HR ever learn the true reason they are leaving? New employees are especially hesitant to complain, so they are likely to suffer in silence while you scratch your head and wonder why turnover is so high.

If you have no insight into your employees’ interactions with
their software, you have no way of knowing whether they are engaged. This is
why so many companies employ user experience management (UEM) software to gain
visibility into the everyday employee experience.

UEM tools enable you to see exactly how each employee is
interacting with their enterprise software applications, so that you can view
first-hand any challenges they experience. By measuring such values as
application response times, error message frequency and workflow efficiency,
you can make informed decisions to increase staff productivity and engagement.

Once you understand the specific tech struggles that your workers experience every day, you can decide the most appropriate way to address them.

What should be fixed?

This might involve personalized training with curriculum focused
on employees’ specific trouble areas, upgrading or replacing outdated
applications to eliminate process bottlenecks, or even designing an entirely
new user-friendly interface to make workflows more intuitive and efficient. When
these changes have been made, you can then measure the effects.

• Which modifications
  have been the most successful?
• Which have had
  the most rapid effects?
• Have they worked
  across the entire company?

KPIs like these will help you understand the technological updates that are the most important to implement – and the order in which you should execute them. The most important issues to correct are those that impede your employees’ ability to perform their jobs effectively. These generally include convoluted business processes and technical difficulties causing significant business impact.

There is no instant solution when it comes to upgrading the
employee experience.

But if you want to create a work environment that positively
affects your bottom line, it pays to implement a holistic approach that delivers
continuous visibility into your employees’ productivity, job satisfaction and
engagement.

In short, treat your employees the same way you treat your
customers, and you can’t go wrong.

The post Measuring Employee Experience via workflow efficiency appeared first on HR Morning.

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Employee engagement is one of the biggest challenges in talent management.

But meeting that challenge is worth it.

Keep your best workers engaged and you’ll keep them working for you.

In this period of low unemployment, top workers are leaving
every day for new opportunities.

And your competitors are doing their best to get more to
jump ship.

Top performers are the backbone of every successful organization.

When those employees leave, you lose essential knowledge about your operations, the investment you’ve made to train them and the relationships they’ve built inside and outside your organization.

The costs of turnover

Why is employee engagement so important? One reason is that the costs of replacing a star employee are very real. In addition to the institutional losses, there’s the hard-dollar cost.

The average cost of replacing an entry-level employee in private industry is about 50% of the departing worker’s annual salary.

And it can be much higher for others – 150% for mid-level
employees and a whopping 400% for specialized workers.

Those departures wreak havoc not only on the bottom line, but on the rest of your team’s productivity and efficiency as well.

That’s why every organization should place the highest priority on engagement – motivating, nurturing and rewarding top employees.

You need your stars to feel valued if they are going to stay with you for the long run.

Why do they leave?

We all know the saying, “Employees don’t leave jobs, they leave bosses.” And everyone will recognize some of these management styles that tend to drive top employees away.

Micromanagers

These folks are easy to spot. They’re constantly asking
whether employees will hit their deadlines or quotas. They want to see work
before it’s finished and ask for repetitive progress reports.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with wanting projects done
correctly and on time, but for great staff who consistently get things done and
done well, constant oversight feels (correctly) like a lack of trust.

Feeling they are not trusted, despite proving themselves
over and over, is going to drive top performers to look for a new job.

They know they are trustworthy and don’t want to waste time
soothing a manager’s unfounded anxiety.

Sure, every organization includes workers that do need
constant checkups.

But the really good performers just need you to set
expectations, outline the assignment and get out of the way. If they need help
or aren’t going to hit a deadline, they’ll let you know.

The invisible manager

So, does that mean top performers should be left alone
entirely unless there’s a problem?

No. There’s a line between trusting proven performers to get
the job done and keep your organization successful and adopting a “hands-off”
approach that makes them feel ignored.

First of all, if “hands off” really means a manager is
trying to avoid doing their own job, top staffers are going to spot it right
away.

But even if that’s not the case, when a manager tells hard
working employees, “If you don’t hear from me, you’re doing fine,” that might translate
to, “You’re doing OK, so I’m going to ignore you and spend all my time managing
the lousy workers.”

That’s not an engaging message of value or worth for top
employees who want more than just “you’re doing fine.”

Good employees will always want to know where they stand and
how their efforts are advancing the organization’s strategic goals.

Don’t lose your top workers by leaving them guessing.
Constant communication and regular feedback are key for even your most self-directed
staffers.

Bullies

Pushing employees to produce by yelling and screaming at
them, sometimes called baseball bat management, just doesn’t fly when top
employees have so many other opportunities.

Some of these managers will insist they are motivating
workers by acting like a tough coach. You know the difference and so do your
employees.

The “Do it or else!” management style always does more harm
than good. Managers who try to rule by threat are always going to push your
turnover higher.

The great equalizers

Consistency can help morale at times, and it can buy some
degree of legal protection as well. But when managers treat good and bad
employees the same, they send the wrong message.

When an employee goes the extra mile – like coming in on a
Saturday to close a profitable account – managers are asking for trouble if
they treat that person the same as everyone else.

When bad employees are treated the same as good ones, top
staffers will start to wonder why they should try so hard if they can still get
paid for slacking.

In fact, workplace studies have repeatedly shown that too
many managers spend too much time trying to raise up poor performers.

They should be putting extra effort into recognizing people
whose performance makes a difference.

High morale and productivity follow when managers spend most
of their time supporting the top 50% of their performers.

So, find a way to recognize and reward top employees or be prepared to replace them.

What are top performers looking for?

Great employees want to work hard, and they want to be
recognized for that hard work.

And to do their best work, they need to know exactly what
they’re responsible for and how they’ll be judged.

When good workers don’t know those things, they’ll leave for
an employer that can tell them.

So, what do they want?

To start, they’ll want a detailed description of the position
you’re considering hiring them for.

Even during the initial interview, candidates should get an
accurate idea about what to expect from the job.

That includes work schedule, overall responsibilities, job
priorities and accountability.

Expect big changes down the road? Make sure they also know
how their responsibilities might shift to support those changes.

Once they are on board, share company information regularly
so employees understand how they contribute to the big picture — and so they
can be thinking about how to improve their teams’ workflows and procedures.

Communication

One of the most useful strategies for retaining top
performers is asking for their input.

Your best employees are on the front line every day, and
they see things that might slip under your radar.

To keep top workers engaged, create an environment where
questions and opinions are not just welcomed, but encouraged.

That’s because when employees ask questions, it means they’re concerned about results.

Even top performers are going to have questions, so it’s important for them to know they can always ask you for clarification.

And, perhaps most importantly, they need to see how they
will be able to grow and advance within the organization.

Rewards and Recognition

Employees who do a good job each day view recognition as verification that their performance matters.

Of course, each top employee will be motivated differently,
so it’s important to tailor your recognition efforts to the individual.

Here’s one way to determine the best recognition techniques:

• Write down what you think motivates your best workers, leaving
  room for write-in answers.
• Check off the items that motivate you, then distribute the list to
  those employees.
• Analyze the overall results for insight into what will motivate
  most employees – such as time off – but also look for ideas that might appeal
  to specific workers.

And this exercise can help you gain perspective as well, by revealing how different your own motivators might be from the ones that energize your top employees.

Flexibility

If appropriate, meet with top employees and devise a plan
tailored to meet their motivational factors.

You can’t make every employee’s job perfect.

But you might be able to improve employee engagement in some ways – like providing more flexible schedules for those with family responsibilities.

Here’s a checklist to use when considering ways to tailor
your workforce to accommodate changing lifestyles:

• Determine the core business
  requirements for your department or area first: What is it you need to achieve?
• Talk with staff about what they
  want.
• Develop possible flextime
  strategies and seek feedback from your workers.
• Decide who will be covered by the
  policies and check to ensure the policies don’t unfairly or illegally
  discriminate.
• Draw up written procedures for
  implementation and evaluation, including regular reassessment.
• Get support from upper management.
• Present the changes in a manner
  that shows you’ve taken the lead in responding to the need for work/life
  balance.

A great way to recognize employees is with “spot rewards”
like movie tickets or inexpensive gift certificates that managers can hand out
at random times during the workday when an employee’s exhibiting exemplary
performance.

Little things do mean a lot. Employees love perks not
because of the perk itself but because of the recognition that goes along with
it.

Low-cost rewards that improve employee engagement can be almost anything. A short list includes:

• tickets to sporting events and shows
• free beverages and snacks
• gift certificates for meals
• a free lunch
• free car washes, and
• holiday family parties or picnics.

But there’s one more perk that pleases everybody: time off.  An extra day off to reward an outstanding job goes a long way toward lifting an employee’s opinion of his or her company.

Nurturing growth

Finally, managers who excel at engaging and retaining high-performing staff are the ones who develop detailed short- and long-term growth plans for each employee.

So, how to design a development plan that will best nurture each top employee?

Identify each top performer’s strengths and talents and establish
goals that take advantage of those strength or address any skill gaps.

Develop work plans that allow employees to learn from
co-workers, other departments and managers, including cross-training
assignments.

And schedule regular meetings to talk with them about their goals and ask what they enjoy and don’t enjoy about their work.

Then offer help, whether that be involving them in a new project or setting up a meeting with HR to discuss how they can prepare for a promotion opportunity in the future.

Ask for feedback

Here are three questions to ask your top performers:

• “Can you tell me our organization’s top three goals for the year?”
  To analyze the level of engagement of top staffers, you need to
  make sure you’re all on the same page.
• “If you were competing against our company, what would you do?” You may be surprised to find that top performers know exactly what
  a company’s weaknesses are.
• “What could we change to get things running smoother?” Giving top staffers the opportunity to speak freely might yield
  some great results. Top employees will be grateful that you asked and are bound
  to have good ideas.

And provide performance feedback frequently.

Top performers aren’t waiting a year to judge themselves and
the old once-a-year review just doesn’t cut it anymore.

Want to lose a star? Surprise them with complaints about
their performance when it’s time for their compensation review.

The post Employee engagement: How to keep your top performers appeared first on HR Morning.

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Most employers know that it’s illegal to discriminate against pregnant employees — which makes it all the more shocking that it was one company’s policy to do so.

The EEOC recently filed a lawsuit against A Plus Care Solutions, a supplier of professional caregivers in Jackson, TN, for violating the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA).

The shocking charges claim A Plus Care required every female employee to sign a pregnancy policy at their orientation. This policy allegedly stated if they were to get pregnant, their employment would be terminated when they reached their fifth month of pregnancy.

Pregnant staff automatically fired

The policy alone would’ve been enough to warrant a lawsuit, but according to the EEOC, A Plus Care followed through with it and fired several pregnant employees. All of these women were still able to perform their job duties at the time of their terminations.

The company settled the lawsuit and agreed to pay $200,000 in monetary relief. A Plus Care also agreed to enter into a two-year consent decree, which forbids it from removing pregnant employees unjustly from their positions or requiring them to disclose their pregnancies.

A Plus Care will also now have an equal employment opportunity consultant monitor its practices and policies.

The post Their policy said WHAT? Firm owes $200K after forbidding employee pregnancies appeared first on HR Morning.

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