The need for less boring work in 2016

Glassdoor has released some new research looking at the reasons people leave work - with January being a key month for doing so.

The research identified low salaries as the main factor that led people to quit  - not surprisingly given the questions asked the last straws which caused people to leave.  Other factors like relationships with the line manager, and other people, will still be more critical in getting people to start thinking about leaving - at which point levels of reward start to become more of a thing.

But it's also interesting to see factors we think about less frequently - such as the boring nature of a lot of the work people are asked to do - appearing as important tipping point factors too.

These were my comments in Glassdoor's press release:

“Understanding what causes employees to leave a company is beneficial to both the job seeker and the employer. For job seekers, this survey in particular, offers an important reminder to research a company before applying or accepting a job offer to understand what keeps current and even former employees satisfied and what would or did cause them to resign. For employers, understanding reasons for resignation both across the country, at competitors and within your own company can help in evaluating and improving recruiting and retention efforts.”

For more, see the commentary on OnRec.

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#HREvolution, Nobscot and Exit Interviews

 

  I’ve posted several times here that, even though I strongly support their use, engagement surveys should only ever be seen as part of the picture.

Firstly, engagement is only one part of the broader contribution of human and social capital that employees can tell their employer about.

Secondly, there are a variety of ways in which organisations can find out about engagement and other human capital issues from their employees.  One key opportunity for many organisations is to conduct better exit interviews, so I was very pleased to speak recently with Beth N Carvin, CEO at Nobscot which provides web based exit interviews and is sponsoring my travel to attend HREvolution in Atlanta this week.

Beth explained that Nobscot has been built around the idea of automating exit interviews – a space in which there are still few other players and that still provides the basis for Noscot’s flagship product (though the company also provides systems enabling other types of web interview, eg for new hire surveys, and other HR needs, eg supporting mentoring programmes).

The firm’s WebExit system allows departing employees to complete exit interviews over the internet, and provides powerful reporting capabilities for HR managers to look at the reasons leading to these exits at aggregate instead of just individual level.

The other key benefit is providing assurance that the exit interviews will get done, as without the technology, it’s often a bit of a lottery whether an HR manager will or will not get to the person, and the summary of the interview is then often not written down, or is written on a piece of paper which is then filed, but without any central collection of information.

Nobscot have found this functionality is particularly valued by companies focused on employee turnover, and also where employees are spread out over different lcoations.

My only concern about the system was that employees would prefer to meet someone face-to-face, but Beth suggested their experience is that organisations get better data when they use Nobscot’s technology.  Employees often have a hard time saying that their boss is a jerk, or something of that nature, but they will share this when put in front of a computer.  And of course, they’re getting ever more comfortable doing this over time leading to an ongoing increase in the quality of the data.

But some companies still do conduct both face-to-face and web based interviews (either before or after the face-to-face one), it doesn’t need to be an either/or decision.

 

Technorati Tags: Nobscot,web,exit,interview,technology,HRevolution,scholarship

 

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Passive job seeking still high in the UK

 

I’ve posted several times recently to suggest that what seem like decent engagement scores being reported by some organisations and a few vendors may hide a number of potentially very significant, and growing, employment problems.

New based research from Plateau Systems seems to confirm this thinking:-

So firstly, yes, this survey also suggests job satisfaction is fairly high. In fact, 62% of the two thousand adults in Great Britain who participated in this YouGov survey suggested that they are very, or somewhat, satisfied in their current job.

There are some interesting variations within this – so whilst at the lowest end of the spectrum, only 49% of London based workers are very / somewhat satisfied, a full 73% of those not-always-so-cheerful Scots say they are similarly satisfied.

And while 62% may be high, it’s a tad bit lower than the 69% of US employees who said they were very or somewhat satisfied in s similar survey completed recently (see Plateau’s summary of this research, or John Hollon’s write-up at TLNT.com).

 

I’m Outta Here!

Based upon these findings, and what we know more broadly about the economy, it’s no great surprise that just 15% of people said they were actively job hunting (17% in London – and the North-West, and just 10% in Scotland – and only 8% in Yorkshire and the Humber).

But the survey identifies 72% of respondents, all currently employed, as I’m Outta Here’s: passive job seekers who would consider leaving their current job if approached with a new job opportunity.

And while 46% of people are seeking or would consider a new job to increase their salary, 27% are looking for career advancement and the same percentage say they just need a change - in fact 21% of people say they want to change their careers or professions as well as their employers.

(YouGov doesn’t seem to have asked people whether they’ve just felt used and abused, particularly over the last couple of years.)

 

You Comin’ Over?

It strikes me to be a pretty good time to be recruiting, particularly for people in London and the South. It doesn’t look like you’d even need to offer people huge increments over their current compensation. The main need seems to be about simply being flexible enough to give people a shot at something new.

Of course you could always try doing this with your existing workforce too. You may even create a few more I’m Stayin’ Put’s as well!

 

Plateau

This is the first of a series of posts at Strategic HCM sponsored by Plateau.

Plateau provides SaaS-based Talent Management solutions for developing, managing, rewarding and optimising organisational talent to increase workforce productivity and maximise operating performance.

Plateau software has been deployed by many of the world's most successful enterprises. Organisations such as GE, Royal Bank of Canada, Singapore Airlines and Thomson Reuters use Plateau to increase the productivity of their employees and partners.

Plateau delivers:

• Scalable, flexible and secure multi-tenant architecture
• 99.5% uptime
• 24 x 7 x 654 support
• Experienced experts to manage your system from implementation to ongoing support.

 

Contact Plateau here or call at +1 866 4PLATEAU (+1 866 475 2832) or in the UK at +44 203 1788 409.

You can also read updates from Plateau at their new blog: http://www.plateau.com/blog.

 

 

Technorati Tags: Plateau,YouGov,survey,UK,passive,job,seeker,finder,employee,satisfaction,happy

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Retention Reflections from Doug’s Dad, and others

 

  I’ve had some great comments on my last couple of posts about retention.

Andrew Marritt provides just about the most comprehensive comment I’ve had on this blog in his response to my post on ‘Exit as the Keystone’ and I agree with most of his points:

1. Yes, some organisations are doing something like this.  In fact, the original idea came from an organisation I spoke to about being a case study in my book, and which then decided they did not want to be featured in it, as they saw the approach as part of their competitive advantage.  But I still don’t think any organisation does quite what I’m proposing.  Which is why I’ve suggested it as a ‘hack’.
2. Yes, there is a risk that the career partner (individual) won’t come back.  They key, I think, would be identifying the right individual whose own interests and motivations fit the organisation’s mojo and strategy.  Then there’d be a really good chance that they would come back.
3. Yes, relationships are important (see my other blog, Social Advantage!), and part of this approach would need to focus on maintaining these relationships during the ‘out of employment’ phase.  I do write about this at the MIX.  And I’m not suggesting allowing an company’s best people to go to its competitors – companies want to limit the other organisations involved in these relationships – and perhaps set up some form of syndicate to support this.
4. Yes, loaning is definitely an option.  Actually, I’m not that fussed about the form of employment contract used to support this.  The key point is that an employee would spend a considerable amount of time over a number of different periods working for one ‘owning’ organisation and other times for other organisations.  There are a number of ways in which this could be accomplished.

 

I also recommend Andrew’s blog which I’ve not come across before, although I’m not a big fan of data mining, and plan to come back again shortly and discuss why.

 

Commenting on my previous post on this, Euan Semple thinks back to his days at the BBC, and in this separate post on his own blog, Doug Shaw reflects on his experience at BT – and his dad’s in the civil service.  I love this post.

I also love the fact that we’ve now got to career partnership from three separate angles – from a visioning / intuitive perspective (what would am HCM approach to retention look like?), from a business process design one (what would a true retention process look like?), and from an introspective one (how would I have liked to have been treated?).

Put all of these together and I think you’ve got something much more solid than you’d ever get from an ROI calculation, or from mining your data!

 

Technorati Tags: Employee,retention,career,partnership,MIX,hack,Andrew Marritt,Organization View,Euan Semple,BBC,Doug Shaw,BT

 

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Exit as the Keystone to a Retention / Partnership process

 

  As I noted in my previous post, both my workshop group’s thinking on retention processes, and my previous notes on career partnership, suggest that retention / partnership consist of a series of sub-processes, particularly head hunting; delivering the deal; proactive exit and alumni management.

I find it interesting that I came to the same conclusion about retention through by a process perspective and a more intuitive one.

But what I find yet more interesting is what the process perspective suggests about the role of the proactive exit sub-process, supporting points I’d already made in response to my earlier responses to comments on my hack at the MIX.

And that is, that out of all four sub-processes, it is the proactive exit one that is key.  In fact, I’ve begun to think about this as being like the keystone in a bridge.  All of the other sub-processes stand on their own – the proactive exit one only makes sense when placed within this cyclical retention /  partnership process (this is the reason that the proactive exit sub-process seems so odd).  But it when this sub-process is combined with the others that the whole retention / partnership process starts to really work (becoming more strategic and proactive).

 

Thoughts?

 

And also please note that, as of today (Monday 10th January), you’ve still got 9 days to comment / vote on my proposed hack on the MIX.

 

Photo credit: John S Turner

Technorati Tags: Employees,retention,proactive,exit,career,partnership,process,MIX

 

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Do you need an Employee Retention process?

 

   I don’t normally post about client work but I’ve been in a workshop this week that has been particularly interesting and relevant to some of the stuff I’ve recently posted on here.

So, the overall context has been on retaining employees, but one morning was devoted to developing a business process for retention.  Now, I do quite a lot of work facilitating the development of business processes and I think it’s a skills / technique many more HR professionals should have.  And I’ve also run a similar workshop once previously focused on retention (at Kennedy Information’s Retention Summit in Orlando in 2008).

Actually, it’s a workshop I’d like to run a lot more, because I think it works so well.  In particularly, it helps demonstrate that what organisations often say are important, eg retaining its people, aren’t supported by actions that well.  Where is your employee retention process for example?  And of course, no organisation (?) has one.  Retention is split across a number of sub-processes eg some activity in performance management, some in reward etc.  Or probably more honestly, there’s often no process at all – retention is just (hopefully) a by-product of these other processes looking at other things.

And it sounds crazy to suggest that we should or might have a retention process.  But I think this is only a consequence of the way we have build HR processes around supporting the business, not developing Human Capital.  If we were focused on human capital, and if things like employee retention really were important, then we’d have a process for it.  Wouldn’t we?  (That’s basically the definition of a business process that I use within my workshop – a mechanism for doing something that the organisation sees as important.)

But this was the first time I’ve run this workshop with a client.  And it was possibly because this was an internal client group that we got a lot further in the workshop than I did before.

So, some of the group’s conclusions were:

• That the start point of the process should be recruiting people who would be likely to stay in the organisation
• That the end point would be arranging an appropriate departure (with links to the business development, employer branding and other different business processes as well as back to the beginning of this one).

 

In fact, the group found it difficult to specify and end point for the process – and it basically started to become a loop in which employees would leave the organisation but would then, very naturally, be re-recruited later on.

And, and this is the key bit, to make this process really work well, the organisation would engage with the individual employee to ensure they left at the most appropriate point (which might mean encouraging them to leave earlier than they would have otherwise done).

 

The interesting thing for me, you as well?, is that this is what I’ve proposed as a career partnership model a couple of times here before, and which I’ve recently entered as an example of a management hack at Gary Hamel’s Management Innovation Exchange (the MIX).  But I’ve never thought of this in process terms before, which makes me feel more confident that I’m right about both ideas (that organisations should have a retention process – or at least some aspects of one – and that a useful basis for employee retention would be a career partnership approach).

 

See:

• Stop treating people like tools
• Hack: career partnership (on the MIX)
• Career Partnership and the Human Capital M-Prize

 

Technorati Tags: Business,process design,employee,retention,workshop,management,innovation Beehive,exchange,MIX,hack

 

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Career Partnership and the Human Capital M-Prize

 

  Do you want to play a role in improving the technology of human accomplishment? Would you like to help make our organizations truly fit for the future (and fit for human beings)? And do you have a real-world story or bold new idea when it comes to unleashing human capability? If so, then the Human Capital Institute are inviting you to join an exciting new online competition—the HCI Human Capital M-Prize - hosted by the Management Innovation eXchange (MIX), an open innovation project aimed at reinventing management for the 21st century.

You can submit either a STORY (a real-world case study) or a HACK (a bold new idea) through to 20 January 2011.

I’ve submitted a hack for my idea of career partnership which I’ve often thought was a good test of true human capital thinking and commitment.  Have a read if you’ve not seen my previous blog posts on this, or take a look at the supporting video (especially for Trish):

 

 

If you’re not going to submit a hack yourself, and you like mine, I’d appreciate your votes (5’s please!).

 

Also see my previous posts on Gary Hamel’s reinventing management / moon shots / management 2.0, including his last HCI Summit presentation (top of this list), plus some related topics:

• Gary Hamel - the Future of Management
• Management 2.0
• Management innovation: can dogs do the tango?
• Requirements for organisational innovation
• HCM: The future of (HR) management
• Julian Birkinshaw on Management Innovation
• HR Innovation
• Improving and innovating performance management.

 

Technorati Tags: Gary Hamel,Management Exchange,MIX,moon shots,management,hacks,human capital,HCI,m-prize

 

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“People join organisations but leave managers” and more HR twadle

 

   One thing I did agree with Jack Wiley on, and was pleased to hear him say (because sometimes I’ve felt I’m the only one who does) was that the adage, ‘people join organisations but leave managers’, is a myth.  That the data just doesn’t back it up.

Of course, there’s a lot more of these fallacies as well.  One of my other favourites is ‘you can’t manage what you can’t measure’.  It’s.  Not.  True.

There are more of these in Jeffrey Pfeffer’s books, ‘Hard facts, dangerous half-truths and total nonsense’ (with Bob Sutton) and ‘What were they thinking?’.  And in Bob Sutton’s blog.  (Yes, OK, I know these two are fans of evidence based management and would therefore probably want you to measure so that you can manage.  So?).

 

Anyway, regarding ‘people join organisations but leave managers’, Jack Wiley suggests the issue is just a lot more complicated than that.

Kenexa’s WorkTrends survey shows that the key factors influencing stay / leave decisions in Europe at least are:

1. Promising future for one’s self
2. Excited about one’s work
3. Confidence in organisation’s future
4. Can balance career goals and family/personal life
5. Contribution is valued
6. Opportunity for growth/development
7. Manager treats me with respect and dignity
8. Safety is a priority
9. CR efforts increase satisfaction
10. Feel part of a team.

 

The manager is there, at #7, and they’re also going to influence the rest of the factors.  But it’s certainly not all about them.

 

Like Jack, I’ve seen data which discredits Marcus Buckingham’s suggestion (OK, I don’t think he was the first person to suggest it, but I think it’s down to him the phrase draws 1,480,000 results in Google).

For example, when I was at Penna, we produced evidence, which I found compelling, that while this might be true for production workers, knowledge workers were much more influenced by organisational values and senior leadership.

And didn’t Theresa Welbourne produce some similar findings suggesting that low performers might be engaged most by their managers but high performers again were influenced by broader issues (I might be making this up but I don’t think so).

It doesn’t even stand up to a decent bit of introspection – which to me at least is much more powerful than all of Jack’s stats.  Think back over the last 10 years of your career and reflect on when and how you’ve been engaged, and why you’ve left or joined organisations.  I bet it’s not ‘I joined because of the organisation and left cos of my manager’.

It’s complete rubbish.  So why do so many HR people trot it out?  Is it simply because they’re so busy, they just don’t stop to think?

I hope so.  Because the alternatives are far more worrying!

 

Photo: Gordon Bown (the exception that proves the rule?)

Technorati Tags: Jack Wiley,Kenexa,EuroSummit,summit,engagement,Marcus Buckingham,Gallup,people leave managers,nonsense,half-truths,conventional wisdom,Jeffrey Pfeffer,Robert Sutton

 

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Kenexa Euro Summit, May 2010

   I’ll be presenting on HR and Social Media at the Kenexa Euro Summit in London on 26 May.

“In today's current economic environment the importance of attracting, motivating, engaging and retaining the industry's highest performing employees has never been more vital to your organisation's success. This year's conference will feature a full day of thought-provoking sessions that will help you discover how to identify and nurture high performers and create the right environments within your organisation for them to thrive.

 

Why You Should Attend

Guarantee yourself the ultimate learning experience as you explore, learn, share and network at Kenexa's complimentary flagship European event with senior HR members from Europe's most elite organisations.

• Learn Best-in-class thought leadership from Europe's top HR influencers around the themes of recruitment and retention
• Find out exclusive business research and data around key business metrics and performance
• Listen to case study presentations from leading European and global organisations
• Gain insight and adopt best practices around the latest HR challenges and innovation
• Discover the industry's latest cutting edge HR technology, featuring product roadmaps and demonstrations
• Network with senior HR members and influencers and create the invaluable personal connections you need to help you overcome your challenges in the forthcoming year.

You can register for a free place at the event by clicking here.

Let me know if you read this blog and you will be attending.  It would be great to say hello.

 

You can also read an article from me in the latest edition of Kenexa’s Evolve HR.

 

 

Technorati Tags: Kenexa,Euro,Summit,May,2010,HR,social media,engagement,collaboration

 

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Talent Retention (Doha, February 2010)

 

   The retention of talent seems to be becoming more and more urgent as the economy (outside the UK at least) starts to slowly motor forward again.

There’s a good summary of the requirement and some of the things employers can do to increase retention on Harvard’s Management Essentials, ‘Retaining Star Performers in Trying Times’. 

This article suggests that  organisations need to ‘find the levers where the value to the individual is greater than the cost to the company’.

This includes:

• Praise for good work
• Challenging projects and assignments
• Development opportunities
• Non-monetary perks.

 

Companies also need to:

• Manage anxieties and frustration
• Over-communicate.
  

And culture matters more than ever. 

In summary, the article encourages managers to -

Do:

• Find out what benefits matter most to your employees
• Communicate more than you think you need to
• Be realistic about people's anxieties and frustrations.

 

Don't:

• Forget that satisfaction with an immediate boss factors heavily into people's decisions to stay with a company
• Assume that a bad economy guarantees that your star employees won't leave
• Think that money is your only tool to motivate your employees.

 

The article includes a nice couple of vignettes supporting these suggestions too.

 

Anyway, the point of this post is that early next year I’ll be looking at these and other aspects of retention in a series of three-day workshops for senior HR practitioners and other business leaders responsible for talent management in financial services firms operating in the Middle East.

We kick off on 2-4 February in Doha and I’m really excited about this as I’ve not managed to visit Qatar on any of my assignments in the region to date.  If you’d like to attend the workshop, contact Daniel Jackson at Fleming Gulf (email: daniel [dot] jackson [at] fleminggulf [dot] com, tel: + 91 99 00388 366).  You can also get a 10% discount through to 22 December.

 

I’m also planning to be in Qatar for some meetings on Sunday 31 January and Monday 1 February – so let me know if you’re there and you’d like to meet up (you don’t need to be in financial services for this!).

 

Technorati Tags: Doha,Qatar,talent management,talent,employee,retention,HR,human capital,workshop,training,February,2010,Fleming Gulf

 

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Kennedy's Retention Summit, Orlando

I enjoyed Kennedy's retention summit even more than the main recruiting conference - shame so many people had left!

I thought my fellow presenters (shown from L to R: Derrick Barton, Center for Talent Retention; Greg Smith, Chart Your Course International, Carla Major, Vice President, Human Resources & Community Relations, Harrah's Hotel & Casino and Dick Finnegan., Finnegan Mackenzie, The Retention Firm) presented some great ideas on retention best practices, and I tried to help people think about some best fit, creating value opportunities as well.  I'll come back to these sometime over the next couple of weeks.

 

Technorati Tags: Derrick Barton,Greg Smith,Carla Major,Dick Finnegan,Kennedy Information,Retention Summit

 

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Arranging a proactive exit

 

   The final, linking, process in the career partnership cycle...

Organisations (line managers, supported by HR) typically use rather reactive approaches to retain their staff. In HRM, companies are generally at least proactive in discussing opportunities within their organisations, but there is still a tendency to pretend the outside world does not exist.

So the unwritten rules in many organisations state that if an employee identified as talent and their line manager see a marvelous job for the employee advertised elsewhere neither person can mention the fact that they have seen this.

Only once the employee has resigned does the organisation take action. At this point, they will use exit interviews as an attempt to re-recruit the employee. If this fails, they will maintain ongoing contact with the ex-employee for six months or more following their departure, in case the career move proves to be unsuccessful. If this does not work, they will invite the ex-employee to join their alumni network hopefully to encourage them to rejoin the organisation again at a later date.

A more proactive, HCM-level approach to retention recognises that the best development opportunities can sometimes be found elsewhere. In this approach, organisations encourage their career partners to review their long-term career development needs and how these needs can best be met – internally or externally. At the appropriate point, organisations may even want to proactively encourage their partners to leave, in order to rejoin as even more valuable talent at a later date.

As the graphic shows, the organisation gains less value from the career partner initially, but gets substantially more value (the coloured areas of the graphics) from them over time.

Implementing this approach would fundamentally alter the talent career dynamic and make it absolutely clear which organizations were operating as true employers of choice. It would also enable organisations to make the most of their career partners and these partners to make the most of their careers.

I'm not suggesting that this approach would be appropriate for many organisations, particularly at the moment, as planning horizons are understandably short-term, but I think these and the other examples from the career partnership cycle, show the opportunity for innovation in management processes.

 

Technorati Tags: Career partnership,talent management,proactive exit

Management innovation at the Retention Summit

 

   Despite the CIPD's findings, I do think it is quite possible to innovate people management practices.

I've provided a number of examples in my blog: ranging from head farming to career partnership; from the inclusion of dreams in performance management to the review of individual engagement drivers...

On 19 November 2008, I'll be trying to develop some more opportunities with a conference audience at Kennedy Information's Retention Summit.  I'll let you know how it goes.

And I'll be attending the two days of the Recruiting Conference (17-18 November) too.  Let me know if you'll be there, particularly if you're a regular reader of this blog, or you attended my recent Kennedy Information webinar on Social Capital etc.