4Cs Blog: Happy Employees = Happy Customers

How To Eliminate Passive Aggressive Behavior In Your Team

Employees who complain openly and freely are often referred to as ‘squeaky wheels’. They make their dissatisfaction no secret so you know who is unhappy and what the issues are. But what about the employees who don’t speak up? How do you know what, if any, struggles or issues they might be experiencing?

As employee researchers, we tell our clients that one of the key reasons for doing an employee survey is because it gives everyone a chance to express themselves so you aren’t just listening to the squeaky wheels. You actually get to hear what everyone is really thinking.
And that is important because employees who don’t speak up could be seething inside and what you may discover is that they are acting out in passive aggressive ways that have serious consequences in workplace settings. 
By definition passive-aggressive behavior is the indirect expression of hostility, such as through procrastination, stubbornness, sullen behavior, or deliberate or repeated failure to accomplish requested tasks for which one is (often explicitly) responsible.

How to Give Gifts to Your Employees That Actually Matter

If you’re an HR manager or the head of a company, you’ve likely given some thought to rewarding your employees. After all, giving gifts and offering perks to the most hardworking individuals on your team is a surefire way to improve morale, increase retention and make your team members feel appreciated. But sometimes company gifts fall short. Not all employees get excited about receiving a new computer mouse, a coffee shop gift card or even a watch. The art of making gifts meaningful is approaching them thoughtfully, and designing them based on the recipient’s personality type. So here’s a quick guide to get your wheels turning about how to properly pat your best staff members on the back.

How To Guard Against Bias During Performance Reviews

We all want performance reviews to be fair but biases exist and we know that too. All of us have biases and it is human nature to show a preference for people that share similarities and reject people with characteristics that we are unfamiliar with.

Bias is of particular interest to us as employee researchers because of the way it plays out in the workplace between employees and their supervisors. Performance reviews offer real insight into how biased opinions trickle down from supervisors towards their staff. And for this reason, it is essential that companies that do annual reviews work diligently to reduce or eliminate bias from the process so that every employee is given a fair and accurate review.

Many HR managers are aware of our human tendency to be biased so they adopt and implement programs they believe are free of bias. Even with this awareness though they still fail to address unconscious biases. These are almost impossible to overcome because they are implicit; we ourselves, are unaware of them. Even if you try to get people to explore their own hidden biases they cannot as it can be difficult for people to acknowledge that their biases even exist.

Why Connecting With Your Employees Is Good For Business

Many of our clients here at Insightlink gleaned from their engagement surveys that employees often express a strong desire to feel connected to their work. One way to meet this need, and retain employees, is to give them a voice in how they do their jobs. In other words, asking employees for their suggestions can increase connectedness. “Employee suggestions can have a significant impact on productivity, turnover and overall organizational performance says Robert Gray, President of Insightlink Communications based in Palm Springs CA.. Other experts agree that "People need to be listened to even if their ideas don’t work or don’t make sense," explains James Campbell Quick, professor of organizational behavior at the University of Texas at Arlington. "By not listening, it makes people psychologically withdraw and you may miss … the million-dollar suggestion."

How The 9-Box Grid Reduces Turnover

Confusing a high-performing employee for a high-potential employee can be a costly mistake. As Robert Gray, head of Insightlink Communications points out, “An organization that fails to distinguish between performance and potential will have difficulty identifying talent and could be contributing to unnecessary turnover.”

After decades of performing employee research Insightlink has found this is a common predicament for many organizations. This is especially true for employees in sales departments where often top-performing sales reps are promoted to managers but they struggle to shift away from their own individual sales results to helping the sales reps they manage achieve their sales goals. Meanwhile an employee in an administrative role who may have supported his or her team for years without a promotion, looks elsewhere for a new job because they feel undervalued and overlooked. Both these scenarios hurt moral and result in preventable turnover.

Employee research is an essential tool in the battle to reduce turnover and can help organizations understand where they are performing well and where they are struggling. In addition to conducting employee surveys to get employees thoughts and opinions about their jobs, a 9-box grid compliments this research giving HR and senior management even more knowledge about their employees. Used together these two tools can expose areas of weakness where engagement and job satisfaction levels are low and identiy which employees are being most negatively affected.

A Smart Way To Engage Your Employees And Reduce Turnover

Studies on turnover estimate that when an employee leaves a company it can cost the organization between 30 to 250 percent of that person’s annual salary due to factors like loss of productivity and other associated replacement costs.

Imagine a high potential employee disclosing her long term goal to her HR Manager to work in strategy. We know of one instance when an HR manager dismissed this goal saying 'everyone wants strategy...strategy is a dream job'. I suppose a young aspiring woman could respond in one of two ways. One, she might feel challenged to achieve her goal despite the odds and the negativism or two, she might start having thoughts about finding a new job where she can make her goal a reality.

If she does resign, this would be considered preventable turnover, meaning the employee is leaving for a reason specifically related to their work experience that could have been avoided! 

Perhaps not everyone who wants to work in strategy will have that opportunity; but there are still ways to encourage employees to grow and develop strategic thinking skills that would benefit any organization at all levels and could delay and prevent some employees from leaving. Strategic thinking is a skill worth cultivating in your employees and managers because it teaches them to focus on what is really important. HR analysts Jill Fowler and Jeanette Savage describe strategic thinking as, ‘recognizing trends and challenging assumptions while maintaining a global view of situations and an affinity towards embracing change’.

Business Growth Strategies Tips To Improve Your Workforce Management

As your company grows, workforce management should become top priority. It is a challenging yet crucial facet of your operation, that grows in complexity as demographics shift and technology advances over time. You must thoroughly gather and analyze data to make informed choices about recruiting, retention, productivity, performance and engaging employees. Also, keep in mind the best resources and tools that will support your management goals. Here are some tips for business growth strategies, in regards to workforce management:

Recruiting

You must make sure your workforce is composed of creative, motivated, intelligent individuals who can fit into your company and also work toward its improvement. Enhance the composition of your team through strategic recruiting. First, you must identify your People Brand — ask yourself, “why should people want to work for me?” As you begin to answer this question, you will see certain attributes and values emerge, which can then be combined to figure out your ideal, like-minded candidate. With an established People Brand, your recruitment team can make informed decisions about the candidates they seek out and pursue.

How To Diagnose Your Organizations Cultural Health

Why should workplace social networks be important to HR specialists? It matters because these networks drive your compant's culture.
Karen Stephenson is an anthropologist who teaches social network theory as part of the MBA program at Erasmus University in the Netherlands. Stephenson has successfully applied her research in cultural anthropology to corporations and discovered a way to map an organizations social capital and identify critical participants within social networks.

Ways to Retain High Potential Employees

If up to one quarter of your top talent is tempted to quit, what can you do to prevent them from leaving? High-potentials are the people companies hate to lose. HR professionals are more anxious about losing these employees than any others and with up to one quarter of their top talent thinking of leaving, finding a solution is a struggle. In some cases, there are no solutions because if an employee is hard wired not to care about who they work for, they will leave if a better opportunity comes along and there is nothing you can do to change their minds. Fortunately, this represents about 5-6% in most companies. The good news is that not all high potentials are hard wired to leave…. It’s the problems they face that are frustrating them and cause them to begin to look elsewhere.

Ways To Heal Employees Caught In The Shame Blame Game

As humans when someone accuses, blames or shames us most of us react in one of six ways. We will either withdraw, become defensive, lash out in a counter attack, beat ourselves up internally, be a people-pleaser in order to counter the inner feelings of never being good enough or, we look for a solution to the problem that results in positive change (which we all recognize is the healthiest response but not the easiest to do).

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