People investment = Organizational return

Many companies wrestle with a core question when faced with economic constraints: Is the cost of developing your employees a necessary expense, or just a nice thing to do? After all, you pay an employee to do a job; do you really need to pay to make them better at their job too?

Recently I wrote about attracting, retaining, engaging, and activating highly skilled emplyees. A core concept within that framework was the need for coaching, mentoring, and supporting top talent in specific ways. Many leaders, however, don’t truly get what such talent management practices achieve.

There can be several reasons for this. The primary one is that usually folks who emerge in high level leadership roles are intrinsically highly motivated and driven people. They are also people who likely sought out and established mentoring relationships naturally. These leaders may understand the value of such developmental interactions for themselves or other skilled individuals, but don’t know the organizational value of human resource development.

Organizational programs that support mentoring or coaching seem like good ideas, but are they worth it to the bottom line? After all, in this fragile economy don’t all expenses need to be carefully considered?

The answer to both of these questions is yes. Your company needs to prioritize expenses that will tie as closely as possible to revenue generation or increased productivity. Yet in a pinch, two areas ripe for cost cutting usually relate to marketing expense and human resource development. Both types of cuts can hurt, but the latter will hurt you longer and potentially more deeply.

One of the themes of this blog has been the transitional employment environment we face this year. Yes, unemployment is still high and yes, our economy is still fragile. Yet we continue to see record numbers of folks looking to switch jobs.

We know employee turnover is expensive; it is much more expensive to hire and train a new employee that to develop an existing one. The lack of development that has happened in the last few years because of restricted budgets has exacerbated the problem: people feel under appreciated, stagnant, and in search of a place where they will find meaning as well as a paycheck.

The bad news is that this is old news. This type of cost benefit analysis has been known for decades. It’s not motivating organizations to change their ways. It’s tempting for leaders to say to themselves “In this economy, there is lots of talent on the sidelines; we can just replace this role if we need to.” True: expensive, but true.

Recent research in human resource development is increasingly telling us a different story. At a meeting of the New England Society for Applied Psychology, Dr. Caroline D’Abate presented some compelling research that showed developmental interactions aren’t just correlated with individual performance, they correlate with improved organizational performance as well.

Leaders take note: investing in development lowers the cost (and liklihood) of employee turnover, is linked to increased productivity, increased sales, and increased return on assets.

So, aside from getting more people to do more and better work, these types of programs are linked directly to financial bottom line metrics most leaders consider essential.

The good news is that senior leaders are beginning to get it. Connecting the “soft side” of human resource development with the “hard side” of organizational performance management is beginning to emerge in companies interested in creating sustainable success.

A focused effort at creating an organizational culture that supports programs such as mentoring and coaching is good for your employees, good for your senior level leaders, and good for your organizational performance.

Organizational culture emerges from the top, which means those very same leaders who are challenged to understand the impact of investing in people need to not only understand it, but become champions and supporters. As the research continues to strengthen the case for such investments, are you prepared to take the steps to make such investments happen? And the bigger question: in the current economic envrionment, can your organization afford not to?

Cultivate employee engagement

This post is from my news column in the Metrowest Daily News this week.  What do you think?  Are you engaged?  Are your team members?

Do you know whether your team is engaged in their work? Is your organization working at peak capacity? Might you lose some key employees to competitors in the coming year?

According to a research report by Blessing White Inc. released this month, these are questions that should be at the front of each manager’s and leader’s mind. This comparative research indicates that fewer than 1 in 3 employees are engaged in their work and nearly 1 in 5 employees are actively disengaged.

In addition, more employees will be looking for new opportunities at a different organization in 2011 than in 2008, before the economic malaise really took hold.
These findings represent either a significant challenge, or a great opportunity, depending on how you approach the issue of engagement.

Employee engagement is a rising topic in the performance literature of the past few years. There have been several different definitions of employee engagement, but to be consistent, let’s use the definition Blessing White Inc. uses in their report: Employee engagement represents the alignment of maximum job satisfaction with maximum job contribution.

That might seem like a high bar to jump, but consider: in an economic environment where effective and efficient work is a key to sustained success, cultivating engagement makes sense.

I am frequently consulted by leaders these days who recognize they need to figure out how to turn a good team into a great team. They can’t simply throw money at hiring new people to expand capacity; they need to be sure they get full capacity from their existing organizational members.

The recent research on employee engagement finds that the roles immediate managers and executive leaders play in cultivating engagement are different. Direct managers are well positioned to help with engagement.

The Blessing White Inc. research tells us there are four activities managers can conduct that seem to build engagement among directly supervised teams and individuals.
1. Assess and develop your own engagement. This activity makes intuitive sense, and has a significant impact on team members. Disengaged managers are not in a position to build engagement in others.

If you are a manager, one hopes you have been recognized as someone who has high levels of job satisfaction and job contribution. You need to monitor and develop these for yourself before you are likely going to make an impact with others.

2. Develop relationships. In our culture, relationships matter. When cultivating engagement in direct reports or supervisees, you will need to share some of your personal interests and motivations to build relationships.

What do you find compelling about the work you do? Personal knowledge and trust of one’s manager is correlated with engagement; you don’t need to be everyone’s best friend, but you do need to know them.

3. Coach your people. Two of the most important factors that contribute to engagement are being able to regularly use one’s talents and skills in one’s work, and career development.

Today more than ever, employees want to do work that has meaning to them and to their organization, and they want to develop their professional skills, talents and responsibilities.

Mentoring and guiding your team members to develop the specific skills and talents they possess raises engagement.

4. Pay attention to team dynamics. Individual levels of engagement can be somewhat contagious – for good or ill. It is nice when a team “comes together” to make a project happen. However, when a team member or two turn disengaged, the poison can spread.

Don’t ignore folks who seem to be disengaging, or you risk others falling off the mark as well. Use the engagement of others, your relationship skills and your coaching skills to see if you can mediate the problem.

What about organizational leaders? Do CEOs or organizational leaders need to spend any of their valuable time working on engagement? Aren’t they supposed to focus on vision, mission and direction? The truth is there is some compelling data that connects organizational effectiveness and financial success with employee engagement.

Next month, we will explore the cultivating roles organizational leaders need to play – and why these folks need to care about employee engagement.

Don’t give up on year-end productivity

December is here and a variation of this common statement crops up in business circles: “let’s get to that work after the holidays.”

Want to earn business away from your competition? Banish this statement from your conversations.

The last month of the year brings many different types of joyful celebrations, family time, school vacations, and yes, additional shopping time. It is an exciting, energetic time. It also produces stress for a lot of folks.

None of this, however, means you can’t be productive this month, or that it is wiser to leave the start of projects until after the year-end. In fact, using this month to tee-up projects for January will mean that the new year will be more productive as well.

Here are some steps you can take to be sure you manage your energy well during the month, and both produce well at work and enjoy the year-end celebrations.

Set your priorities for the month now. You may be taking vacation toward the last week of the year, or you may have family coming to visit that may disrupt your normal routine. Think this through ahead of time. Determine how much work time you have for the month, and the key priorities to complete.

Be intentional with your tasks and time. Once you have your task list and the anticipated time available for work, be diligent about focusing your energy and attention to the work to be completed.

Encourage your team and customers to get ahead this month. The more the merrier, so to speak. Be the voice in the room that generates excitement for getting things done. Help others imagine how much better their holidays and new-year might be if they don’t have to look forward to a huge pile of work after January first.

Inject some fun. Don’t be the person who “survives” the holiday season. Tap into the joy, wonder, and anticipation that underlie this time of year. You will be surprised at how fast genuine positivity spreads.

When you are done, be done. There comes a point where you can’t get anything further done, though what you are working on might not be finished. That is the reality of the season, and if you were intentional during this month you are probably ahead of the game anyway!

If you can keep your productivity up this month, you may just enjoy your year-end a bit more, and your January workload will be looking good!