The mantra right now in HR circles is Employee Engagement. It's engagement this, engagement that all day long. Everybody struggles with the topic of engagement. We send out surveys to measure it. We don't even know what we're measuring.
We ask questions like "How likely are you to look for a new job this year?" We ask that question like we think that people know the answer to any reliable degree, in the absence of an actual invitation to apply for an actual job.
We delude ourselves that we can measure a person's likelihood of leaving us in the abstract, when they don't have a job offer on the table.
Believe me, if I call your best employee with a great new opportunity and I really listen, and hear what he or she needs and I give them whatever you're not giving them, I'm going to hire that person. Luckily for you I'm not a headhunter. I'm an HR opera singer who gives advice, so you get off easy this time.
Seriously though, we have to step it up in the employee-listening department. Surveys are a horrible way to gauge how people feel. They're insulting.
If you were in prison and once a year they sent you a survey to ask you about the living conditions and the quality of the afternoon snacks and then they told you "Fill out the survey and slip it through the bars on your cell" you might decline to participate. You might tell them to stick the survey wherever they please.
You work among your employees. They are right there next to you working shoulder to shoulder with you. Why don't you turn to them and ask them how they're doing? You could make the topic "How are you doing?" an agenda item at every staff meeting, and you should.
In these days when organizations large and small are complaining about a lack of talent and how hard it is to find people, you'd think that truly listening would be an ultra-high priority for every employer. We certainly know how to listen to our customers!
Here are ten ways that way too many organizations send their best employees straight into the arms of their competitors. They do it against all reason and to the detriment of their shareholders and customers, but the bureaucratic mindset is strong and firmly planted. We can get smarter about managing our teams.
Maybe if you pass this column around at your next manager's meeting and talk about it, you'll fix some of these gaping holes in your Employee Engagement program, and keep your great employees for yourself.
Ten Ways Employers Send Their Best Employees To Their Competitors
They make it easier to find a job elsewhere than to transfer or be promoted internally.
This one springs from pure fear -- "I'm the manager, and I get to approve my team members' moves!" That's absolutely true in a vacuum, inside your own company. Any one of your teammates could pitch a resume into the ring for a job opening across the street at any moment.
Why would you want to make it easier for people to leave you altogether than to move from one group to another when they're burned out or the energy isn't good?
They ask the world of their best employees, but when the employee has a personal need arise they say "Refer to the policy manual."
Before I die I sincerely hope to get the HR and leadership communities to understand that fairness is not the same as uniformity. When one of your teammates has a family emergency, that's his or her priority and if you value that person, it should be your priority too.
WATCH:
You can't point someone to Page 47 in the employee handbook and expect them to give a fig for your petty little business problems, which pale in comparison to whatever they're dealing with at home.
I got business calls when my third baby was in the NICU, and I tried to explain over the phone. "I can't follow you," I said. "I can't focus on stock option valuation right now. You don't understand. My baby is right there in an oxygen tent. You have to figure it out on your own."
The business vortex is strong. It says "This item is on my To Do list today and I'm going to complete it." We forget that human beings populate our organizations. We need to remind ourselves of that.
They let great ideas go to waste.
Every good idea that doesn't bubble up to the people who could celebrate and implement it is a win for your competitors. When a smart person gets tired of making suggestions that get ignored because they threaten somebody's little bit of turf, the idea-generation machine is likely to pack up the tent and go work for somebody who wants to hear what s/he has to say.
They don't keep up with market compensation.
We know what it costs to acquire a new customer. We obsess about that number. Why are we so blind to the similar cost of acquiring a new employee and training him or her - so blind that we compresss the salaries of the people who work with us? What do we think we're saving?
When you practically put posters on the walls saying "You're getting a four percent bump from us this year, and I'll bet our competitor will give you twelve!" you only have yourself to blame.
Salary compression cuts across all industries. If your salaries are at the low end of the market, you're asking for people to hightail it over to your most bitter rival. How could you blame them if they did?
They talk down to their employees.
I wrote about that issue over here. Why so many policies, so much red tape and so much bureaucratic indifference? That's a recipe for a brain drain if there ever was one.
They focus on petty things.
Who really gives a dang whether the meeting minutes are in one format or another, and why do little things use up so much of our energy at work? We are lost in the weeds. We measure everything, stopping the action to hold a yardstick up to it, and stop the flow of creative forward motion just when we should be letting it fly!
Our client Ellie was a Risk Manager. She got an email message from the CFO, her boss's boss, specifying that the Finance employees were expected to park in the parking lot nearest to the Finance part of the building. Why? The closer to the building you park, the faster your walk to the employee entrance will be.
I'm talking about highly qualified Finance people who don't need to be told where to park or how many steps of daily walking they are allowed. The CFO said "I realize that the parking spaces are larger and there's shade on the north side of the building, but your priority is to start working at the earliest point."
God bless the pin-headed CFO and his talent-repelling message and his incredibly small view of the world. Ellie took the A train and got a new job as a Director of Treasury. The CFO was very sad to see her go, and told her he was bewildered by her decision to leave.
WATCH:
Would you have told the CFO that his insulting parking email sent you away? Ellie kept her mouth shut. She wasn't hired to be a cultural consultant and she didn't think her message would be well-received. Fear-based leadership is a drug that is hard for some people to quit.
They pit employees against one another.
We talk incessantly about teamwork. You can talk about it, but if your performance appraisal system is a zero-sum game then anyone with two functioning brain cells will see that. You can't use stack ranking and bell-curve performance review systems and expect great people to stay. You know why not?
Great people want to work with other top performers. If a manager is forced to fan out his team across a spectrum with Top Player at one end and Dogmeat at the other and only a certain number of reserved spots for the best people, then a manager is penalized for hiring more than a few good people.
That's idiotic. Great people won't stick around.
They obsess about face time.
We had a client who got an offer for a job as a Social Media Manager, and the ironic thing was that the company was in the LOHAS space. LOHAS means Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability. This company was all about health and sustainability for its customers, but their treatment of employees was a different story.
Our client got the offer for Social Media Manager. When she asked whether she could work from home, a 50-minute drive away from the office, when there was a snowstorm, the VP of Marketing told her no. She had to drive into work if the office was open, blizzard be damned.
Here the woman is being hired to work on social media, and her employer can't grasp the concept of a person putting in a day's work without braving the elements and sliding into the ditch to get to work. She never went to work there, but an employer with that mindset is at risk to lose great employees as fast as they can hire them.
They're stingy with information.
The more people know, the better job they can do. The more they know, the more they can align their decisions with a higher-level vision. It makes sense to share the company vision with the team at every opportunity. It isn't hard to do if we see Team Communication itself as a critical business activity, the same way we view forecasting and budgeting.
We give communication short shrift at work, and that's a great way to drive our best people away.
They let energy blockages gum up the works.
We've all run into energy blockages at work. The poster in this story illustrates eight of the most common blockers. We have to talk about fear and trust, about bureaucracy and vision and unresolved conflict if we want to tackle those things. We tend to weenie out and keep silent about the important stuff, which is the sticky human stuff.
We pretend it will go away on its own, even though a million years of human evolution says differently.
We can tell the truth about sticky topics at work. We can name the elephant in the room, whether it's Arnie's Mysterious Disappearance or the fact that we know we're going to miss the plan.
We can be honest at work, and if we want to keep our employees excited to come to work, we need to. The Human Workplace is here. How will your organization respond?
