Want a Fired-Up Workforce? Try This!

 

What if I told you that the company you are at today is the company you would retire from? Would you laugh? Look at me sideways? Raise an eyebrow? Probably. Why? Well, because many people throughout the course of their careers, are looking less for a long-term employer and more for the next best thing. If this was a dating column, we’d call this the “shiny object syndrome.” While slightly different, the same fundamental rules apply. You are offered a relationship, it’s good for a while, both parties are happy, but  after a while things start to get mundane, routine, stale, and the opportunity next door starts to look a little better. New and unexplored territory is now the currency du jour.

While many employers fight tirelessly to keep employees committed for the long-haul, others have understood that the desire to change careers is not going to be quenched by throwing extra benefits at employees, and for some companies, the best resolutions is to actually not fight this phenomenon, but to embrace it.

I am going to conclude my series on the LinkedIn Talent Connect seminar this post because it will be inclusive of my final take away, which is condensed into elements specifically contained in The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age.

Before I dig into this philosophy, I honesty have to commend Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha and Chris Yeh for their work on this book. It is not only insightful, but I think a brave, potentially controversial, and necessary phenomenon that has been underexplored until now. While I believe companies have taken bit-part concepts to make steps toward this effort, I had yet to see this information presented in a way that is easily applicable to a variety of organizations.

When I finished my Master’s of Science in Human Resources in December 2012, my final research was on Gen Y employees. As a Gen X-er and Digital Immigrant, I knew that in order to make change in my lifetime, I would have to spend a great deal of time understanding ideas that were not native to me, but made perfect sense to up and coming talent. I would not only have to engage with talent of my own generation, but I would have to be adaptable to the trends of talent who at some point will be 20, 30, or 40 years junior to me. In my extensive research, finding real solutions posed to be a bit of a challenge. Everything reported appeared to be based on emerging trends, but no one was talking so much about how to solve the problem. The question of how to retain employees spending fewer years at a company was often left unanswered, and the problem remained because it seemed like no one was offering solutions, they were only offering band-aids.

The Alliance is not a band-aid; however, I genuinely believe that this is a solution for the talent conundrum. Instead of fighting the battle against longevity, it proposes accepting it to maximize the time an employee is with your company by giving them meaningful projects for a designated period of time. At LinkedIn these periods are defined as “tours of duty” and can last for varying lengths of time depending on the role and the individual.

While it may be a novel concept to consider a “tour of duty” as a method superior to the benefits of a long-term employee, let’s unpack what this really means in terms of benefits.

1.       Relationship

A tour of duty is not just employment; it is a relationship, and more importantly, a partnership that a company can establish with someone for a lifetime. When employment in a traditional company ends, there is often resentment from one or both parties. Perhaps Jane A is disgruntled that she didn’t get the promotion offered, so she leaves your company unhappy. In a “tour of duty” Jane would have agreed to a specific timeframe for her current role, accomplished those goals, and once those goals were met, she could then decide to enlist for another tour, or with the support of her company, find a tour with another organization. Upon leaving the company Jane is not disgruntled, but rather she is a success story of your reputation as both an employer, and an ambassador (read: marketer) of your service or product. 

2.       Engagement

A tour of duty is ultimately an experience where employees will be highly engaged for a period of time because at the outset of the alliance, they sit down with their manager to discuss not only the company’s goals, plans and vision, but what the employee’s goals, plans and vision are as well. The company’s goals are achieved while the employee simultaneously develops professionally; a win-win situation for both parties.

3.       Production

As a company, employing nothing but engaged employees, excited to come to work and create the best possible product will send your production through the roof. If you work in a traditional environment, stop and look around right now. How many people are around you who are really excited about what they are doing? How many people are dead weight, doing their jobs to get to Friday? Imagine if you could replace each of those individuals with a vibrant employee, daily committed to achieving their absolute best in that role? What if every one of your employees took ownership of their role, and had the freedom to improve processes? Do you things might start to look differently? I think they would.

While what I’m sharing might cause some skepticism if your company is not particularly adaptable to new and cutting edge ideas, let me encourage you to continue to explore ways you can start networking with others in your industry that have made the change. When I started working in my present organization, I reached out to an individual who was a bit more experience using the same ATS we used. He worked for another company and had no financial gain in helping my team, but he was open, shared with us, and as a result, we created a great professional relationship. What I have found is that within the Talent Acquisition community, people want to help others. We’ve all been in a company with fewer resources, and we’ve all just been starting out, praying someone would just throw us a bone.

If anything I’ve written thus far is connecting with you, then please visit www.thealliancenetwork.com,  get the book, or at least visit youtube.com where you can see a load of videos from the LinkedIn Talent Connect 2014 San Francisco.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this information, as always please feel free to reach out and keep exploring!

#1 Reason People Keep Coming to Work

If someone asked you what the number one most important indicator is for recruiting and retaining top talent, what would you say? Good pay? Great benefits? Time off? Flexible schedules? While these are all contributors to a great overall package, the number one necessary element is actually meaningful work.

At the LinkedIn Talent Connect conference I attended in San Francisco, this was a theme that continued to appear through the course of the three-day event, and I found this concept to be really interesting to explore, so I chose if for my #5 big take away from Talent Connect. You can see my previous Top 3 take always on my blog at www.highgearcareer.blogspot.com

I wanted to write specifically about this topic because I think that meaningful work can happen in a few different ways, and sometimes I think that people can find it challenging to connect their day job (manager’s included) to something that would be meaningful or inspiring. So, below I have listed a couple different ways to be able to create meaningful work regardless of what your day job is.

1.       Create meaningful work by setting specific learning objectives with your job.

Co-founder of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman, recently authored a talent management strategy he calls The Alliance. In this method he addresses how to keep your employees engaged for periods of time or “tours of duty” by openly discussing their long-term goals, which may not be inclusive of a long-term career with the company. However, in order to keep them engaged in achieving the goals of the company, the manager and employee discuss what professional development goals can be achieved during the designated tour. This is a great tactic because the company wins the loyalty and productive efforts of an employee for a designated period of time, and the employee gets to create new opportunities for themselves by exploring new skill areas: win-win for everyone.

 

2.       Create meaningful work by leveraging your company’s resources to achieve your personal goals.

Matthew Kelly explained how a waste management company effectively used company resources to help employees achieve personal goals in his 2007 book, Dream Manager. After realizing the significant challenges and expenses accrued with the high turn-over rate in his company, the team in his company conducted some research around why people were leaving. When they discovered that the reason people left could easily be remedied with a minimal investment by the company things started changing.

 

It all started with a simple survey and a bus. By alleviating the cost associated with the drive to the plant by providing a bus to shuttle employees in, the leadership learned they could retain workers who were otherwise put out by that expense. First the company providing a bussing service, then financial counseling. Before too long, employees were achieving personal goals like homeownership. How was this possible? The management in this story noticed that through the investment in a full-time employee (the Dream Manager)to help employees achieve their personal goals that retention improved, turnover reduced, and productivity sky-rocketed.

 

While not every company may have a dream manager on their staff, this story has become widespread in talent management circles, and employers are becoming increasingly aware that offering this type of benefit provides massive returns on the investment.

 

What if your company does not offer a dream manager? Well, then it leaves more responsibility on the individual to seek out resources. If your company is not in the habit of offering these types of programs, see if there is an opportunity to mentor underneath a manager who could unofficially provide you with the right guidance to help in a similar way.

 

In my career I have been fortunate enough to connect with some incredible talented professionals, but it has never been as a result of my working for a company with a Dream Manager type of program, but rather it has been as the result of my persistence to learn more and be the best at what I do. People want to help hungry people. It doesn’t matter if you’re hungry for a sandwich or starving for information, people want to help others, and if you reach out, I promise you will find people interested in sharing.

 

3.       Create meaningful work by connecting to your company’s mission.

This is kind of a no-brainer, which is why I saved it for the last point. While, in theory, it’s ideal to only accept jobs in organizations where you share a mission or common vision, let’s be real. Sometimes in life you accept jobs for other reasons: maybe it’s for the money, maybe you are geographically tied to an area.

When I lived in San Diego, I spent some time working for a health clinic, and there were a number of people who worked there who conveyed the importance of the work we did as an attractor for employment. Many long-term employees had been recipients of care at the clinics as children, and several times when people left, they would immediately want to return.

Sharing a mission has the direct benefit of essentially finding joy in your work because you understand that while your role may not be directly deploying the mission of the company, it contributes to that greater work being accomplished.

I hope you’ve been able to find a way to create meaningful work for yourself or your employees. If you found any recommendations useful, please feel free to let me know.

Check back tomorrow for Take Away #6

Stop Coming to Work Drunk

I love the title of this blog-post because I find it a great piece to publish the day after Halloween. Before I frighten anyone, or mislead you to believe that it’s a common (or acceptable) practice to come to work drunk, I should provide the disclaimer that I do not mean physically coming to work drunk, but rather, the cognitive function that happens in your brain when you are sleep deprived.

The keynote speaker for the LinkedIn Talent Connect 2014 event in San Francisco was Arianna Huffington. For those who may be unfamiliar, Huffington is founder of The Huffington Post, and not only is she an incredibly talented writer and journalist, but she has started an important conversation about avoiding burnout in the workplace.

After the 2013 Lean In empowerment movement, women are becoming increasingly more passionate about pursuing engaging work that both accommodates their personal lives and enables them to advance. While we are instructed to “lean in” by Sheryl Sandberg, Huffington counter-instructs “leaning back” to avoid burning-out.  This does not mean that she is proposing that men or women should be less engaged in their work. However, she is saying that people need to do a better job taking care of their health and not sacrificing important things, like sleep, for working at a reckless pace, working late into the night, and not taking time to rest.

Now, back to coming to work drunk. Huffington shared that scientific evidence now shows that in terms of cognitive performance sleep deprivation has the same impact as coming to work drunk. She shared in her speech, “I had dinner recently with a man who bragged ‘I had 4 hours of sleep the night before.’ I wanted to say, if you had slept 5 this dinner would have been a lot more interesting.” Huffington continued to draw parallels between the importance of sleep and clear decision making. I have included a graphic from Harvard Business Review, above, that shows the relationship between performance and alcohol consumption, and performance and sleep deprivation (additional links below).

She continued with examples when leaders, like Bill Clinton, admitted to making terrible mistakes while operating on sub-optimal amounts of sleep. She provided examples of hard working Talent Acquisition professionals with aging requisitions, desperate to find their perfect candidate (very relatable).  She confessed that her own worst hiring decisions were made when she did not have enough rest. When we are not well-rested, we “shut up the intuition, that voice that is telling us things about the red flags that may not be in the resume, that may not be in what the candidate is saying, but that you know, in that sense that we call intuition, that goes beyond our rational brain that something is not quite right, that is not the right fit. Every time I have overruled that part of my mind I have made a mistake.”

As a Talent Acquisition professional I can absolutely relate to these examples. But, I don’t think that you have to be in my field to take away a good lesson from this talk. Many of us have been overworked, burdened with more to do than time in our day. Instead of working longer, what if we made the best of our productive time, instead? What would happen if we prioritized self-care and sleep?

I imagine you are saying you don’t have time to sleep a full seven or eight hours per night. I get it, I have felt that way, too. Several months ago I decided to give it a shot, though. I read Huffington’s book, Thrive, this past summer, and when I decided to give myself the gift of a full night’s rest, I realized that I woke up refreshed and productive. When I sat down in the morning, I accomplished more work in less time than when I was dragging myself in after a sleep-deprived night. I would encourage others to also try this practice. I know that we all have a lot of work to do, and creating a consistent sleeping pattern does take time, but it also provides a bounty of rewards for increased productivity, creativity and clear cognitive function.

Check back tomorrow for Take Away #5 from LinkedIn Talent Connect San Francisco 2014.

To view Arianna Huffinton's keynote speech Click Here

For additional information on performance related to sleep deprivation and drinking, Click Here and Here