UPMC administers surveys to all 80,000 employees across 20 different hospital systems, doctors’ offices, clinics, and long-term care facilities to understand the employee voice.
On this episode of the Engaging People Podcast, we’re joined by VP of Consulting, Christian Nielson, and Senior Consultants, Charles Rogel and Spencer Taylor.
Recently, our consultants have been spending more time advising our clients on their employee listening strategy during a crisis. Many organizations haven’t surveyed during these circumstances and need extra guidance on the following:
Should we proceed with the survey?
Should we add COVID-19 related questions to our current survey design?
Should we switch to a different type of survey?
How will this survey during a crisis affect our trending progress, year after year?
How can I convince our executive team to seek employee feedback right now?
Our team goes into depth on these questions and more in an effort to help you engage employees with two-way communication.
Listen to more of this insightful conversation on best practices for surveying during a crisis.
In this video message, DecisionWise President, Matthew Wride, talks about the importance of employee feedback during a crisis and the DecisionWise pledge to help your business listen, understand, and act, even during tough times.
Hello, my name is Matt Wride, and I am the President of DecisionWise. Before I get to my main message, I want to touch briefly on the COVID-19 pandemic. If feels like we are making some progress. This is encouraging, and I hope you are well and safe.
Despite the stress and heavy disruptions to our way of life, I am struck by the good I witness each day. For example, just a few days ago I waved to a man standing in overalls to walk through the drive-through lane ahead of me. As I waited, I wondered why he was walking through the drive-through lane, but I figured that in a COVID-19 world, he probably had a good reason. So, I nodded and smiled. When it was my turn at the window, the worker told me that the man in overalls had already paid for my lunch. I smiled as I watched this Driver saunter over to a big, loaded Kenworth. Now, I understood why he couldn’t get his vehicle to fit through the drive-through lane. So, here I was – I didn’t need his help, but he gave it anyway. So, to this unknown Driver, I flash my four ways.
This simple story illustrates why we will rise from COVID-19 better and stronger, because the vast number of employees are good people, and they are doing their best in challenging times and circumstances. It’s easy to forget them amidst the stress, the draining cash balances, and slumping sales reports. We can’t. We mustn’t. We must acknowledge them, and the best way to do this is to listen to their feelings.
At DecisionWise we survey employees. You might raise an eyebrow and say, “Of course they are going to tell me to survey my employees.” You’re right. We are. We know that budgets are tight, and we know that employee surveys seem unnecessary when we are focused on keeping jobs. We get it. We promise to work with you to identify the essential services you need to stay on budget and continue working towards achieving your organizational goals.
Humans aren’t resources. They aren’t widgets to be tracked on a spreadsheet. They are people who represent an organization’s pathway to success. Now, more than ever, we need to engage with our workers, so they will engage in their jobs. We are trying to keep their hearts, hands, minds, and spirit with us. We need them so that we can meet the challenges that lay ahead.
At DecisionWise, we have adopted the phrase “The Obstacle is the Way,” as our COVID-19 metaphor. We know that if our clients are to overcome their obstacles, it will be through the hard work and engaged efforts of their employees – those good people, just like the Driver that paid for my lunch!
Please reach out to us. We have experienced consultants ready to assist, and we will do what we can to craft a employee listening program within the budget you give us.
About a year ago I received one of my favorite perks. It was peak season for us – my workload was heavy, and support was limited. This meant late nights in the office with the stress that so commonly follows.
As my supervisor and I were talking about what could be done to address my stress, I brought up exercise. I hadn’t been going to the gym regularly for the past few months. Most nights, by the time I left the office, I was too tired to complete a fulfilling workout, and I’ve never been a 5 AM workout warrior (and don’t want the massive caffeine addiction it takes to become one). So, I asked my supervisor if I could take off late afternoons, get in a workout, and return later to finish my work. That was a little culturally unusual for our team, but he agreed without hesitation.
Within days of switching to a more flexible schedule, my stress levels decreased significantly despite no change to workload and even later nights. It cost my company nothing, only awareness and an open-minded supervisor.
What Survey Data Tells Us About Stress in Your Organization
Many organizations struggle to help their employees manage stress. Our research has found that an individual’s level of stress in their job is one of the top five most frequently reported areas that needs attention from executive teams. Our firm, DecisionWise, has amassed more than 50 million employee survey responses from more than 70 countries throughout the world. Each year, we consistently find that perceptions of stress and workload generally rank within the lowest 10 employee survey items for most organizations.
Surprising? Probably not, when you consider for many, your job may actually be “killing you.” According to Jeffrey Peffer, PhD of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, some workplace conditions may contribute to premature death. The impact of these stressors may actually be “as harmful as secondhand smoke,” according to Pfeffer’s research.
Our DecisionWise survey findings seem to support the fact that workplace stress is out of hand, particularly given the current economic and health concerns inherent in the pandemic situation we are facing today. Even prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, only 65% of Employee Experience survey respondents provided favorable ratings to the statement, “The level of stress in my job is manageable.” This closely aligns with responses to “The amount of work I am expected to do is reasonable,” which scores 67%. For context, a typical engagement survey’s overall score is 73% favorable.
Why Do Leaders Struggle to Help Their Teams Manage Stress?
The challenge for most leaders is that stress is subjective – it varies greatly across roles, cultures, and personality types. Many of the factors that contribute to an employee’s stress levels fall out outside of an organization’s influence. But there are several things a manager can do to help minimize employees’ stress levels.
My aim is to help you understand the science behind stress, and arm you with tactics for addressing it in your teams. To accomplish this, I’ve selected four stress theories from the disciplines of physiology and psychology. I have also included specific recommendations related to each theory.
Four Theories to Help You Evaluate Stress
1. Homeostatic/Medical: Stress is a physiological response to ensure safety.
The term “fight-or-flight” was originally coined by Walter B. Cannon as a way of describing the body’s natural response to environmental demands that threaten our safety and homeostasis. Stress is a natural response that helps us quickly address or avoid a threat so that our health and safety remain secure i. These threats can be physical, such as safety hazards or a dangerous work facility. They could also be psychological threats, such as harassment, fear of retribution, or discrimination. Each of these can trigger the fight-or-flight response in the workplace.
Tips for Managers
Ensure worker physical safety through adherence to safety policies.
Be mindful of potential psychological safety issues. Address harassment and discrimination issues quickly and thoroughly.
Promote diversity, equity, and inclusion by ensuring employees on your team feel respected, valued, heard, and feel they have equal opportunities for growth regardless of their age, ethnicity, or gender.
Note
Worker safety, discrimination, and diversity are topics that extend beyond the scope of this article. If you’d like to deepen your understanding of diversity, equity, and inclusion, here’s a well-researched article to get you started: Are Your Diversity and Inclusion Efforts Only Skin Deep?
2. Cognitive Appraisal: Stress is a result of our perceptions.
Introduced by Richard Lazarus and Susan Folkman in the 1980s, this theory emphasizes people’s perceptions of stressors. How we perceive stressors can alter the amount of stress we feel. This means that stress can be managed by either addressing the stressor or the emotions and perceptions of the stressorii. What’s stressful to some may not be stressful to others. A few items that impact the degree of stress we feel include:
a) Personality: Different personality types might perceive certain tasks to be more stressful than others. For example, employees with high preferences for introversion may find tasks such as client interactions to be more stressful than employees with extroverted preferences. Employees with low levels of neuroticism are less likely to experience stress compared to others. Neuroticism and extroversion are two personality traits assessed by the Revised NEO Personality Inventory (or NEO PI-R).
b) Culture Culture significantly impacts employees’ perceptions of stress. One study found that American employees are more likely to experience stress from a lack of job control and team coordination. In comparison, Chinese employees are more likely to experience stress from job evaluations and work mistakesiii. Either way, an employee’s cultural background has a clear impact on stress.
Tips for Managers
First, listen to your team. Try to understand their stressors.
Identify the major causes of stress for your employees, whether as a group or individually.
Identify when (time of the month, quarter, or year) stress will be worst. Consider such factors as “peak season.”
Write your ideas down and review them in your next team meeting. Ask for further insights.
Talk to your Learning and Development or HR department if you would like to obtain a deeper understanding of the personality profiles of your team.
Second, address the problem.
How can you adjust tasks across your team to minimize stress?
How can you share the load with other teams in the organization? Are there ways to address processes that will improve efficiency and therefore decrease workload and stress? If so, implement them, or talk to your manager about getting the appropriate approval needed for changes.
For predictable periods of increased workload, investigate staffing and outsourcing options. Can you bring on seasonal interns, work with a temp agency, or outsource entire projects?
Third, address emotion.
You may not be able to control the cyclical nature of the demands on your team, but you can lift spirits by grabbing pizza for dinner (on the company’s dime) to occasionally make the burden of staying late lighter. Not only does it provide a much-needed meal and break, the gesture also says, “hey, we get it, and want you to know we are right there with you.”
If circumstances allow, arrange for flexible schedules, or let employees work from home occasionally during periods of extreme workload. This doesn’t address the quantity of their work, but extra autonomy may help them feel more relaxed.
When things are slow, invite employees to go home early. If they feel measured by how long they’re tied to their chairs, they’ll hold you accountable for violating that social contract when they’re forced to put in extra hours.
Note
Be emotionally intelligent in your approach. Don’t prolong employees’ stay at the office through “stress-relieving activities.” Avoid creating the perception that the team is getting pizza in exchange for an extra 10 hours of work this week (unless your workers are all teenage boys, who might just consider the deal a “win.”) Instead, tie this treat to the gratitude you feel toward your team.
3. Person-Environment Fit: Stress is a result of unclear expectations or poor job-role fit.
Psychologist Robert L. Kahn’s ideas of stress focused on the importance of roles and expectations. When people’s skills and abilities match what’s expected of them, stress is minimized. Ambiguous expectations or expectations that conflict with people’s skills and abilities in social roles lead to stressiv.
Tips for Managers
Work with HR or recruiters to make sure that job listings for your team are accurate and represent the skills needed on your team. Clearly describe which skills can be developed on the job, and which aptitudes are prerequisite to success on your team. Better yet, instead of letting HR try and find the talent you need, become an active participant and lead the charge.
Clearly define job roles and expectations. Provide stories and examples of exemplary performance when possible.
Recognize employees for successful performance in key areas.
Schedule regular time to train employees who are lacking skills in key areas.
Consider what skills your team members have that aren’t being used in their job roles. Are there other opportunities for them to use those skills, e.g. on cross-functional teams or committees?
Consider the clarity of expectations where performance issues exist. If expectations are unclear, redefine them. Avoid holding employees accountable to unclear expectations.
Before extending invitations for new roles, do your best to set employees up for success by helping them understand the inherent challenges that come along with the role.
4. Psychoanalytical: Stress is a result of a gap between who we are and who we want to be.
The psychologist Harry Levinson applied concepts of Freudian psychology to stress, and believed that stress is the result from misalignment between our ego-ideal (who we’d like to be) and our self-image (who we believe we are now)v. Our careers are instrumental in helping us progress toward our ideal self. If employees struggle to see how their job connects to their aspirations and long-term goals, they will likely feel stressed and disengaged.
Tips for Managers
Know your employees on a personal level: their values, interests, and who they aspire to be.
Help employees connect the dots between their work and what they aspire to be. If their current job role doesn’t clearly align with their future aspirations, show them how it will help them achieve success later in life. For example, their current job might fund an education that will allow them to pursue their true passion after graduation.
Help employees understand the vision, goals, and values of the organization. Show them how their work helps accomplish that vision.
Highlight the progress you’ve seen employees make. This might not be apparent to them.
Stress During a Crisis
During the time of this writing, the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted economies worldwide. Economy-altering crises such as pandemics, stock market crashes, or political unrest can create uncertainty, threaten employees’ sense of job security, and lead to high levels of stress. Work and money are the most mentioned sources of stress for Americans. According to the 2019 Stress in America report by the American Psychological Association:
When asked about their personal stressors, around six in ten adults identify work (64%) and money (60%) as significant sources of stress, making them the most commonly mentioned personal stressors. Adults citing the economy as a significant source of stress declined slightly from 2018 (48%) to 2019 (46%), though the proportions in both years represent a large decrease from the highest level reported, when nearly seven in ten adults (69%) identified the economy as a significant stressor in 2008vi.
Note that stress levels were 23 points higher following the financial crisis of 2008 than during the economic boom of 2019. Here are a few tips on how to mitigate stress as much as possible amid a crisis.
Tips for Managers
Keep your employees informed. This is one case where the adage “no news is good news” couldn’t be more wrong. In the absence of information, employees will spin their own stories. Control the story by proactively sharing pertinent details with employees regarding the steps that are being taken to ensure job security.
If your organization is helping the world through the crisis in any way, emphasize and share that message with your team. Employees will hopefully see themselves as part of the solution to the crisis rather than a victim of it.
Listen to your team. Find out what is going on behind-the-scenes, which you may not be aware of. Ask them how they’re doing. The chance to share your own concerns may help them. Help them understand that you are here to support them.
As mentioned previously, stress is a common factor inherent in most organizations, regardless of size or industry. If this is an issue for you, you’re not alone. However, you as a manager hold the power to shape the experience of your employees.
iCannon, W. B. (1932) The Wisdom of the Body. Norton.
iiLazarus, R. S., & Folkman, S. (1984) Stress, Appraisal, and Coping. Springer Pub. Co.
iiiLiu, C., Spector, P.E. and Shi, L. (2007), Cross‐national job stress: a quantitative and qualitative study. J. Organiz. Behav., 28, 209-239.
ivKahn, R. L., Wolfe, D. M., Quinn, R. P., Snoek, J. D., & Rosenthal, R. A. (1964). Organizational stress: Studies in role conflict and ambiguity. John Wiley & Sons.
vLevinson, H. (1978). A Psychoanalytic View of Occupational Stress. Occupational Mental Health, 2, 2-13.
viAmerican Psychological Association (2019). Stress in America: Stress and Current Events. Stress in America™ Survey.
For this episode, we’re joined by Joseph Dicianno, Ph.D., MBA, who is the Manager of Talent Management and Organizational Development at UPMC (University of Pittsburgh Medical Center). We discuss concepts from his upcoming book, “Caring Leadership,” about ways that leaders can show more compassion and demonstrate they sincerely care about the individuals they work with.
“Saying you can empathize with somebody isn’t enough in the leadership world. I think there’s a greater opportunity to close that gap and to help leaders understand how to turn that empathy into action.”
Listen to more of this insightful conversation on caring as a leader.
In today’s landscape, you may not be able to physically look an employee in the eye or put a supportive hand on a shoulder. But, with the willingness to adapt, there are plenty of other ways you can connect with and support your employees.
Here are 7 ways to help shape the employee experience in times of crisis.
Reinforce your Company Values
FIND OUT how your team perceives the company values. Do they (and do YOU) practice these values in today’s daily work life, even when working remotely or in times of difficulty?
Keep Your Communication Channels Open
Ask questions that show you’re thinking about the experience employees are going through right now. Look for ways to augment your FEEDBACK TOOLS, and make them more timely.
Change Your Tone and the Nature of Your Questions
SURVEY your teams, especially remote workers. Focus more on open text comments to get the full weight of FEELINGS. Shift your questions to be more employee-centric and less organization-centric.
“Onboard” Remote Workers and Check In Frequently
Many workers who work from home for the first time will need access to VPN, TECHNOLOGY, and other resources. Make sure someone oversees setting these employees up for success.
Coach Your Managers
Put BEST PRACTICES and tips into the hands of your front line. Reinforce their responsibility to cascade information up from employees to leaders and back down again.
Align Expectations With Managers and Employees
Model how managers can COMMUNICATE with their teams. Managers, help your teams understand the critical outputs. Ask for DELIVERABLES. Check in.
Connect With the Mission
Have each team meet and talk through these points: What’s our STRATEGIC contribution, what are we good at, what do we want to be good at, how can we contribute in this new era?
Hello and welcome to another Engaging People Podcast. My name is Christian Nielson. I’m the Vice President of the Consulting Services here at DecisionWise, and I’m joined by our consulting team. Today, we’re talking about how your engagement initiative can help you attract and retain top talent. Now, before we get into this, it’s an interesting time in the context of the world to have this conversation, we’re going to stop short of having this be a complete COVID-19 podcast. However, I think that will be some important context to consider as we talk this through for our own examples and stories as well as for those clients and organizations listening to this podcast. I’ll start by talking a little bit about how I’ve seen employee engagement work within the organizations. Then we’ll go around the team and hear what each of our consultants has to say on the subject.
Expanding Ownership in the Organization
As I’ve looked at engagement within an organization, one of the principles I’m looking for, especially in engagement initiatives at a manager level, is the expansion of ownership. As more and more people throughout the organization take ownership of the employee experience and cultivate employee engagement, we see great things happen. And so if we think about frontline managers and the role engagement and the employee experience plays there, we have to build where those frontline managers see their sense of ownership and understand the role they play in shaping the employee experience and employee engagement. And then we have to get managers to help expand ownership throughout their teams so that they involve others in shaping that team experience.
Client Example
I have one client that I’m working with that does a really tremendous job of expanding that ownership down to where managers understand their role in shaping the team experience. They involve others, and all of their work is not only about improving their collective experience, but also about strengthening the customer experience. They have a more outward focus. Everything they do is to create a greater sense of service and value for their customers. And this gives more meaning and purpose to their work. It galvanizes them as a team unit and connects them back to the organization.
What does this mean for attracting and retaining talent?
When our employees engage, great things happen.
Turnover goes down – engaged employees don’t leave as often when they find their work experience engaging.
You get higher NPS (employee net promoter score), which is a strong response to the survey item: “I would recommend this organization as a great place to work.”
You get better candidate referrals – some of our best candidates come from internal referrals from engaged employees.
These are things I’ve seen within the team environment as organizations work to expand ownership down to managers, cultivating the right team experience, involving others. We see some immediate benefits for the organization, as well as the employees. Charles, do you mind sharing some of your thoughts on this subject?
Don’t Overthink Your Employee Engagement Initiative – Choose and Work on Something
Charles Rogel
Senior Consultant
You know, I think about this topic, and I thought of an example that I read about in The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg a number of years ago. He included a story about a company called Alcoa Corporation. It’s one of the largest producers of aluminum in the world. Back in 1987, a new CEO was appointed, Paul O’Neill. And during his first speech, people had high expectations. The company wasn’t really performing very well. He got up and he basically said, I want to talk to you about worker safety. And it was interesting, because nobody was expecting that to be the topic. And he went on to talk about how they were going to focus on their safety record, that everything was going to be kind of geared around their performance metrics. If you want to understand how the company is doing, look at how our safety record is doing.
And it was a very interesting take. Many people were worried about his approach. Investors were worried, and they thought they had hired the wrong person. But miraculously, it really helped to turn the company around. With the focus on safety, all of a sudden, people had permission to look at the unique problems, processes, and equipment within the organization. The focus on safety really transformed the culture of the organization. Everyone focused on improving processes and procedures that led to worker safety, but efficiencies and profitability also increased. The next year, the company had an all-time, record-high in profits, and after 13 years as the CEO there, O’Neill’s net income was five times higher than what he started with. Now, I like this story because when you think about managers and engagement and what they’re trying to do with their team, I always recommend just choose something, work on something.
Figure out what you're all about as a manager
Maybe safety is a big initiative in your organization. And maybe safety doesn’t sound too exciting, but frame it in a way where safety equals care about people. This topic of safety at Alcoa really resonated with the union employees because of their skepticism about a new CEO. But when they figured out that, “Hey, this is all about improving worker safety!” they got on board. That whole initiative transformed the organization.
But turning it back to a manager and what you’re doing: what are you all about? Are you about creating growth opportunities for your employees where they’re going to advance their careers and develop their skills? Are you all about providing autonomy and empowering your employees to make decisions in the organization and boosting creativity? Figure out what is important to you and your team to be successful and make that your engagement initiative and use that when you’re hiring people. When you’re talking to people about their needs and what really motivates them, make sure your engagement focus is really resonating with your employees. Dan Deka, can you share some of your thoughts with us?
Continue Growth Conversations Even During Hard Times
Dan Deka
Senior Consultant and Executive Coach
Sure. Everyone, it’s nice to be here with you and our thoughts and prayers go out to you during these uncertain times. I think at no other time is engagement as important as it is right now. We do so much work, and we gather all this feedback, and what’s the purpose of it? To help people feel engaged, to help them feel connected, to help them feel secure. And there’s just so much going on right now, that I think there’s a lot of elements of our work that definitely helps to increase engagement and adds a great deal of benefit to people.
Right now, I’d say from my standpoint, I have a couple of different types of clients. I have coaching clients, 360 clients, and engagement clients. And I can just say for my coaching clients, it’s a fantastic time to continue the conversations. These are all conversations and coaching relationships about leadership, and there’s no better time in leadership than during times of uncertainty. So that works really well.
And then for our engagement or our 360 clients, you know, there’s the decision, do we continue to do these efforts during these times or not? And in general, with most of my clients, if they’re not critical healthcare workers and they have some time on their hands, this is a great time for them to connect to people, to do those 360s, to get that feedback, to make sure that they have that coaching support around them during this time. We definitely don’t want to do work and then leave people by themselves at this time. We want to do that work, get them feedback, and then talk with them about that feedback.
Growth and communication are critical to employee engagement
So, some organizations are continuing there, and then most specifically for this conversation around engagement, what we learn from a lot of our engagement surveys is, communication and growth are critical. And communication is especially critical now, where a lot of people are working from home and may feel a little bit isolated. I think the general feedback from a lot of our engagement surveys emphasizes the importance of communication. Oftentimes it comes across as cross-functional communication across departments. And I think now with everything that’s going on, communication just becomes that much more important.
I guess from my experience, it’s purposely taking the engagement data that you have, whether it’s from a month ago, or from six months ago, or a year, looking at that feedback that you have, and then saying, how does it apply to our current scenario right now, and leverage that. I’m very confident and talking with clients about that now, how employee feedback from the past is even more applicable now. So those are some thoughts around how I think this work is especially important during these times of uncertainty and how you can leverage either your current work or past work around engagement.
Christian Nielson – Thanks, Dan. Given the current context and my interactions with clients and review of survey data, I’m consistently impressed by the importance managers play in creating the right experience and how important communication is and how detrimental vacuums of information can be. Especially right now, as some organizations are experiencing remote work for the very first time, and certainly at this scale where people are going remote. And so, that manager and the organization strengthening communication and getting the word out there is very important. All right, let’s hear from another one of our consultants. Thomas, do you mind giving us a little bit of your take on this?
New Hire Interviews Can Be Powerful Engagement Initiatives
Thomas Olsen
Consultant
Yeah. As an HR business partner, I saw a lot of interviews. I saw a lot of different managers and the way that they interviewed candidates, and I think that’s the first initial contact that a candida has with the company. That’s really our first opportunity to show them that we’re an engaged company and that we have an engaged culture. And so, I think it’s really crucial for managers to spend a little bit more time preparing for that interview. I think a lot of managers tend to take that as a very trivial opportunity and just something that they have to go through. They have to weed out these different candidates, many of which are pretty smart. I think if you’re looking for great talent, those candidates will be able to see through a process that is not very well thought out, with generic questions.
Prepare your managers more for hiring interviews to win over top candidates
And so, I think a manager that comes in a little bit more prepared to that initial interview can really win that candidate over. And they can really show their engagement in the way that they approach the candidate. Just with questions that are not as generic. And I also say some of the most successful managers that I’ve worked with, while they’re obviously interested in somebody’s skill set, they’re really trying to hire for cultural fit which also means they’re trying to figure out if the person is a fully engaged candidate.
So we talk about the engagement spectrum where we have somebody that’s fully engaged, some people are key contributors, some people are in this opportunity group, and some people are fully disengaged. We obviously want more fully engaged candidates, so can we ask questions that weed those candidates out? I think we just have to spend a little more time prepping that initial interview process. And as far as retaining top talent, my thoughts there are not earth-shattering. One-on-ones, having frequent check-ins, and just being transparent and having an open-door policy for a manager can keep that engagement up for existing employees.
Christian Nielson – I think it’s a great point that managers, including myself, don’t always remember the gravity of our role in shaping someone’s first impressions of an organization and starting that employee experience right. I think we’ve heard some sound advice on bringing people in that are going to engage with what we’re offering as an organization or looking for signs that this person’s going to come in and disengage very quickly or is already kind of prone to that. But also, just in terms of the experience a manager can create, can they prime them in those first few moments for greater engagement long term? I think these are some wonderful considerations. Next, let’s hear from Chris Story, another member of our consulting team.
Retain Talent by Helping Employees See Their Impact
Chris Storey
Consultant
You know, it may be a fairly obvious point, but when we’re talking about top talent, we’re talking about those who have something to contribute rather than just those who will take direction or follow orders. So there’s an important balance that we want to strike between orienting talent and giving direction, which is important, and drawing upon the ideas and experiences of that top talent. So, I think that’s relevant because those who feel that they are contributing and making a difference will be retained. They’ll remain in the company and they’ll be more engaged.
Managers lead strong teams with psychological safety
So back in 2012, Google’s project, Aristotle, studied high performing teams and at first tried and failed to find any patterns that explain such stellar results. And it’s interesting, because Google is pretty good at finding patterns. After further study, they did find that the best teams were those where psychological safety existed.
So what we mean by psychological safety is a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes. When we are in teams with a high degree of autonomy in place, we’re trying to innovate, push the limits, maybe even respond to something like COVID-19 situation, there’s an inherent risk for employees. So, it’s helpful to remember that along with that autonomy, they want to feel safe. I wrote down that employees want to avoid looking incompetent, ignorant and intrusive, which I guess are the three I’s of employee embarrassment or something. I just made that up, but those are the three things that employees are certainly going to want to avoid. So what can they do?
Help employees avoid the three I's of employee embarrassment
Offer explicit invitations for others to speak up – set ground rules at the beginning of a collaboration session so that people can speak up with ideas.
Shape incentives to foster learning – it’s not just about perfect outcomes all the time, incentives are built around learning and collaboration.
So to be clear, the message is not that companies should be really nice to their employees. In fact, the galvanizing companion to psychological safety is accountability. You can think of those as two dimensions. For example, high psychological safety and low accountability is just kind of the comfort zone, it’s a warm and fuzzy place where we’re not really expected to contribute or we don’t feel that sense of ownership that you spoke to, Christian. On the other hand, high accountability for demanding goals, and low psychological safety can result in limited collaboration. So the sweet spot is where there is a high amount of accountability as well as psychological safety. That’s where high performance lives, that’s what Google found. And so I think that’s one point to bring up here in terms of how to help employees, your top talent remain and then engage in the company.
Christian Nielson – Thanks, Chris. There are some competing forces there and balance that a manager can seek to find. Stephen Mickelson from our consulting team. Any thoughts?
Employee Engagement Initiatives Help Both Managers and Direct Reports Grow
Stephen Mickelson
Consultant
Yeah, definitely. About a year ago, Christian and I were in an onsite debrief with one of our large clients, and we were debriefing HR VPs on the engagement survey results for the various leaders that they supported. And as I reviewed some of the most engaged teams for a particular HR VP, she replied with, “Of course this leader’s employees are engaged. If she left to work in fast food, they would follow her.”
And I’ve remembered that because it was perhaps a little bit of aspiration and perhaps a little bit of jealousy. I’m not currently a manager, but I really hope that at some point in the future, somebody can say the same thing about me. It’s a very succinct reminder of the impact that a good leader has on his or her employees. Good leaders have so much influence over the experience that the employees have within their teams. So much, that some employees might leave to take lower pay and harsher working conditions at another organization. The flip side of that is that when employees have great managers, they are much less likely to leave their organization.
So, if you want to be the type of manager that employees really would follow to a minimum wage job, you need to know how to cultivate engagement on your team. Regardless of your personality type or your current experience, engagement is a competency that can be learned, it’s iterative and there’s always something new to learn. So odds are you’ve had tons of training in whatever your background or your field is. But unless you’ve studied organizational behavior or have experience in this area, the engagement survey or the engagement initiatives that your organization is doing is a great new learning opportunity on how to cultivate engagement.
Here are four ways that engagement initiatives can help you develop as a manager
You will hear your employees’ points of view on new things – those can at times be pretty difficult or uncomfortable or challenging to handle. But the more you do it, the more you get used to it, and the more you can handle the different perspectives and the truths that your employees face on a daily basis.
Have open conversations with your team about their employee experience – those sorts of conversations may have never existed in the past.
Learn how to rally your team around a common, mixed shared goal.
Learn how to address perceptions – they might not fall within your direct and immediate control.
Christian Nielson: Thank you Stephen, appreciate that. Spencer Taylor from our consulting team. Spencer, any thoughts on this?
How Managers Help Retain Employees in Hard Times
Spencer Taylor
Senior Consultant
A lot of my thoughts have been in the context of what we’re facing today with this whole pandemic. We used to live in a world where our topic of attracting and retaining top talent typically means we’re thinking of holding on to people so they don’t go elsewhere. And that’s more common in a healthy economy; however, a lot of the headlines are saying the economy may head a different direction. And so, then we’re talking about retaining people in a world where furloughs and fear are kind of the words of the day. Plus, Dan talked about the issue of proximity.
How do you deal with the issue of proximity?
If you have a bunch of employees who are not used to working remotely, now all of a sudden they’re remote. I have found, in both being a remote employee and managing remote employees, that the “out of sight, out of mind” principle applies, where it’s easy to forget that your employees need you and you can go and have the water cooler talk and have some of that ongoing connecting. And again, you add to that, the idea that the person who used to sit to their left or right either physically or virtually, may not be there anymore. They may be on furlough or unfortunately had to be laid off, or whatever the case might be. Retention’s a whole different animal in that context.
Let the ENGAGEMENT MAGIC framework be your guide
And that’s where the whole underlying wisdom of the ENGAGEMENT MAGIC framework that we talk so much about internally here at DecisionWise comes into relevance, because helping people needs to be addressed individually. Helping people find meaning. Again, given those changing tides and obstacles that are out there that none of us could have anticipated. We’re in this world where we need to feel like we’re in this together, but we’re literally being asked to not be together. It’s a unique challenge. I think we have to be really mindful as managers and leaders, with how we’re creating that sense of togetherness, how we’re helping our people feel connected as the “C” in our magic model indicates, having that impact and autonomy.
Build an environment where employees can choose to engage
I also think we can learn sometimes from what doesn’t work. I had an experience come to mind where a few years back, before I worked with DecisionWise, I worked with this company as a consultant. The president had hired us to come in and do some work. Sometimes, companies think that if they just pay their people above-market wage, provide a comfortable environment, the right tools, and the best technologies, people will engage and contribute at a deep level. And that’s kind of the prevailing environment we walked into with this project. We found out pretty quickly that it was ultimately the CEO who was the epicenter of the toxic environment. In fact, we were told if you ever see the CEO, turn and run, he doesn’t believe in consultants. He doesn’t like anyone from the outside coming in and influencing the organization.
So, it was crazy trying to operate in this world, and I wasn’t even an employee! We heard rumors that he’d terminate half a department just because he had a bad day. I’m confident that there was way more to the story, and he may have had a good reason to make some adjustments. But the point is, people perceived that. To them, that was their reality. We talk a lot when we do 360 coaching, that perception really is reality for people. The same thing applies when we’re thinking about engaging through hardship and through the process of attracting and recruiting as well.
Help promote cross-department collaboration
I think it’s a balancing act. I think we just have to be of the mind that we’re in this together, in the sense that we can support each other across organizations and across team boundaries. It’s a great opportunity for us to break down some of the silos that we see a lot. In our engagement survey, one of the most common challenges is for companies to collaborate effectively across departments. This is a great time to work on that issue, because a lot of people are kind of on a more level playing field in terms of having to work virtually. In a way, it’s easier to connect across departments because it’s just clicking that next name down the chat line. So I think we can seize it as an opportunity.
Christian Nielson – This is an interesting time to be thinking about the employee experience as Spencer and many others have mentioned, especially during this current economic climate and rare global experience. So here is a summary of a few of the things I’m taking away from the conversation:
Managers create a lot of the employee experience
Managers can improve that experience dramatically through communication (how they listen, share information, etc.)
Managers get to choose the level in which they involve their employees in shaping the team experience
Employee gets to choose if they will engage
Don’t feel like you have to do it alone. Invite people to be part of the solution, improve that collective experience. With that, we’d like to thank everyone for being part of this conversation and we look forward to you joining us for a future episode very soon. Thank you
Webinar: Helping Employees Engage During Times of Crisis
In this webinar, the team from DecisionWise discusses ways to help individual employees engage during times of crisis. We also introduce our free 1-on-1 Manager Weekly Check-in Tool as a way to assist you in your efforts with employee engagement.
How moments of truth impact trust and the employee experience is what both employers and employees deserve to understand. Every relationship comes with a Contract and every Contract gets blitzed by Moments of Truth (MOT).
Pay Attention to Your Contracts
The Contract is a perceived set of promises that establishes the terms of that relationship. Some Contracts are explicit, such as a written statement of work–you do this, I give you that; or the Contract you sign when your daughter breaks her third mobile phone. Others aren’t openly expressed or agreed on but can have have the greatest potential influence on the Employee Experience. These Contracts are implicit and come from expectations that both parties bring to the relationship. If one’s expectations aren’t met, the implicit Contract is broken and conflict begins to fester.
In a moment of truth, the Contract that both employer and employee have established is put to the test. Think of MOTs as the bumpers in a pinball machine. Depending on the position of MOTs, expectations can ricochet off them in virtually any direction. When MOTs contradict the express promises made in the Contract there’s turbulence. When something happens that tests the validity of the promises that make up the Contract, that’s a moment of truth. Until a MOT occurs, any Contract between employee and employer is theoretical and untested. But once a MOT arrives, the Contract gets very real. Employees quickly learn whether their employers or supervisors will keep their promises. They also find out in stark terms how the organization’s leaders view them, which can be a pleasant surprise or a rude awakening.
From the employee’s perspective, it doesn’t really matter as much whether the outcome of the MOT is positive or negative, as long as the outcome is consistent with expectations.
That means every moment of truth is also a potential turbulence point in the Expectation Gap, that space between what employees expect and what they experience. Mismanagement of these moments of truth creates a situation where no one trusts anyone else.
The result of a collision between expectations and MOTs is like what happens when physicists at the Large Hadron Collider bring elementary particles together at near-light velocities: unpredictable energies and particles hurtling off on random vectors. Those energies and particles can be harnessed for greater productivity, or they can rampage out of control and destroy the entire system.
How Moments of Truth Impact the Employee Experience
What’s essential for leaders at all levels to understand is that MOTs are never neutral. They always have an impact. In fact, a MOT always has one of three effects:
Reinforcement of the Contract leads to feelings of safety and validation. Employees feel more secure and believe more strongly that they can trust in and invest themselves in the organization. They also feel good about themselves for having believed in the organization. A relationship of trust is the result.
Violation of the Contract produces anger and cynicism. Employees feel varying degrees of anger at the organization, ranging from annoyance to rage, for not keeping its promises. Because they also feel manipulated and even betrayed, they can develop the cynical belief that the organization’s leaders can’t be relied on to do anything they say they will. It’s not hard to see how this attitude can lead to total disengagement. A relationship of distrust is the result. Incidentally, revising the Contract, even when changes are minor, is often seen as a violation. The thinking goes, if the organization can change its mind at the drop of a hat, what will change next? Even if the change in the Contract is positive, the fact that it can change suddenly, and without the employee’s consent, can create a net negative outcome. Revision can lead to uncertainty and worry.
Creation of a new Contract may lead not only to confusion but also curiosity. These aren’t necessarily negative emotions, but confusion can lead to more problematic feelings if employees remain unsure about the new rules, their new roles, or what’s expected of them. That’s one of the reasons why change is hard. But communication is key. Curiosity can be a force for good and presents an opportunity to engage employees at a deeper level. Depending on the way the new Contract is handled, a relationship of trust or distrust could be the result.
Moments of Truth and Employee Engagement
These emotions are where the rubber meets the road with the Contract. They’re what you have to acknowledge and manage. Your subordinates aren’t going to say “You violated our Contract last week when you announced that pay freeze.” But they will reveal their anger, cynicism, and feelings of betrayal in subtle ways…and some that aren’t subtle.
Being mindful of those emotions isn’t a touchy-feely New Age management trope; it’s a leadership survival skill. A change to the Contract, whether company-wide or between a team lead and a line employee, often evokes powerful emotions that can dramatically affect your Employee Experience and engagement.
Stepping up in moments of truth makes trust lasting and resilient, and helps your organization be sustainable. Trust is the oxygen of the EX. With it, you have life. Without it, trust dies. Trust isn’t static. It can’t be expected to run on autopilot. The level of trust your employees have in you today won’t be the same tomorrow. Trust is a continuum, not a state. It is always being increased or decreased.
Learn more about how to manage your organization’s trust with its employees by picking up The Employee Experience: How to Attract Talent, Retain Top Performers, and Drive Results.
