If You Care About ROI, Follow This Strategy

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When you measure progress within your organization, you don’t do it by checking off each individual activity done by your team. You do it by looking at how well you’re accomplishing your overall company goals. So why do we often approach projects from the opposite direction?

A common mistake that leads to loss of ROI and efficiency stems from our human need to get swept up in the details. Now, there’s nothing wrong with getting all the details right, but details shouldn’t be first in the pecking order of priorities.

For progress to happen, you need to measure your activities. But without goals and a strategy, you can’t measure anything accurately. If you don’t have a solid plan of alignment, you won’t prioritize what actions and details need the most attention.

The flaw in quick solutions

As we’ve all learned in the last year, crises happen, and they can happen overnight. Organizational pivots can be spurred by internal and external events within your market, industry, or location. With varying levels of success, businesses responded to shifts caused by the pandemic by implementing new technology, changing processes, and rearranging priorities.

Even outside the pandemic, it’s incredibly easy for organizations to implement “solutions” to their problems, creating more friction. For instance, many organizations struggle with data duplication because they use different systems to track their prospecting and sales, marketing, and client management. The result is a chaotic mass of unusable data that provides extremely limited information to those who need it.

Here’s how to ensure your organization avoids this type of costly mistake by changing your approach to problem-solving.

Stepping back

Before you decide to implement a solution for a problem, start by following these steps.

1. Identify your core goal

Your goal should be in the context of the result you’re looking for, not the solution. For instance, “We need a system to help us manage our prospecting” is an example of a solution statement. A goal statement looks more like, “We want to make more informed decisions around how we manage our prospecting and have a smoother handoff between prospecting/sales and client management.” Starting with the goal statement stops you from identifying possible solutions before you’re ready and keeps the door open to make connections between this goal and other related goals.

2. Review department alignment

If you want to save time and resources, spend time reviewing how this goal might affect other departments; specifically, determine if it aligns with issues cropping up in those departments. In the case of data duplication, if an organization approaches marketing, sales, and client management as separate tasks, they miss what it’s all about: the entire customer experience.

Suppose they approached this issue with a broader lens. In that case, they could implement a tool to combine each of these activities under one system, resulting in no data duplication and a smoother transition between the customer journey stages.

3. Identify your KPIs

If you’re interested in measuring how well a solution is working (which you should be for several reasons, ROI aside), then identify core KPIs you can use to track a tool’s success. Keep them measurable, attainable, and specific.

To continue with the example used above, KPIs for this type of solution might involve:

  • Increased customer retention rates
  • Increased closed deals
  • Decreased time for client onboarding

Refer back to your goal statement to help you identify the results you hope to achieve.

Don’t skip ahead

If you find a new tool that seems excellent, great!

But stop before implementing it.

It’s easy to get excited about a solution without first clarifying your goal. Who doesn’t like to nerd out about new solutions? But if you don’t have processes in place to stop new solutions from being implemented before completing these steps, you’ll end up wasting time, money, and resources.

These steps should be followed for nearly every activity, process, and solution your organization implements. So even though you’re excited, stop, take a step back, and make sure you cover these bases before running ahead with your new solution. The results will be far more impactful, efficient, and sustainable.

 

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Content provided by Q4iNetwork and partners 

Four Ways to Fight Burnout

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Even before the pandemic, employee burnout was a top concern for employers. The Mayo Clinic describes burnout as “a state of physical or emotional exhaustion that also involves a sense of reduced accomplishment and loss of personal identity.” It manifests in many ways that are quite literally dangerous for employees. Symptoms of burnout include insomnia, fatigue, heart disease, vulnerability to illness, and death.

So, let’s talk about some simple and practical approaches to fighting burnout in your workplace. First things first, employers need to take responsibility for leading the fight. It’s not your employees’ job to fight burnout on their own. Burnout is often caused by systemic issues in a company’s culture, leading to overworked employees who don’t have the time or resources to manage their workload.

It’s best to approach the fight from all angles and not assume there is a one-size-fits-all solution for your company. Here’s where you can start.

1. PTO and the benefit of benefits

MetLife’s recent study found that 86% of employees considered health insurance a “must-have” and ranked comprehensive employee benefits as one of the most critical drivers of employee well-being. The same study also found that comprehensive employee benefits were a driver for increased employee productivity and loyalty.

Ensure you’re giving your employees the support they need to take care of themselves mentally and physically. Consider offering them a week’s more PTO than you did the previous year and see what it does for employee engagement, productivity, and retention.

If you’re not sure this is the right move for your business, make an experiment out of it. Record your numbers for retention, engagement, productivity, and wellness for the previous year, and compare them after one year of offering your new plan.

2. Workload monitoring

Providing a reasonable workload is a leading factor in decreasing employee stress and burnout. While this may seem obvious, it can be a tricky task to work out exactly how much work is too much (or not enough) for your employees. Do your research and develop a strategy for identifying when workloads are too high and when they need to be decreased and spread out.

Involve your employees in this process. They can help you gain insight into the ebb and flow of their workload and inform you how to best respond to the challenges they face. Make sure to keep an open dialog between employees and managers and encourage honesty.

3. Human management

This leads us to understanding the different causes of burnout and how to address them. While burnout is often a direct result of a failure on the company’s behalf to manage employees strategically, sometimes it results from external issues.

The year 2020 is an excellent example of how employees may deal with the same workload they always have but struggle to keep up due to added stress from their environment, like:

The minute you ask an employee to put aside their needs, you set your company and your employee up for failure.

Design a culture that recognizes productivity naturally ebbs and flows along with our ability to manage stress, workload, and well-being. Allow your employees to be human and open about their challenges. If an employee feels like they can take a day off or ask for extra help on a project without retaliation, their stress level won’t rise, and they’ll be better equipped to get back on track and manage their workload like the dedicated employee they are.

4. Recognition

MetLife found that employee recognition was the ultimate driver in increasing productivity, engagement, and loyalty, and decreasing stress, burnout, and depression. A simple “thank you” or “great job” can be the difference between an employee feeling burned out and feeling accomplished. There are many creative ways to celebrate and acknowledge your employees, so there isn’t a good excuse for not doing it.

Looking forward

This may be an old topic, but it’s never been more relevant. As you move into 2021 and the decade beyond, you must maintain a sincere effort to help your employees lead healthy lives at work and at home. Fighting burnout will save you money, protect employee health and well-being, and give you both stronger legs to stand on.

Photo by ANDRANIK HAKOBYAN

Content provided by Q4iNetwork and partners

Kicking Ageism Out of Your Workplace

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Ageism is an established problem HR departments battle. Laws and organizations have been founded upon the need to protect workers from ageist practices. A report by Glassdoor in 2019 found nearly half of respondents in the US had witnessed or experienced ageism in the workplace. It also found that younger employees, aged 18-34, were more likely to witness or experience some form of discrimination in the workplace. In the UK, for example, 48% of adults (aged 18-34) experienced ageism in the workplace, in contrast with 25% of employees aged 55+.

You might be thinking, “Wait, I thought ageism was about older employees?”

Here’s the deal.

Ageism is about senior employees, but it also encompasses young employees. It’s as easy to assume an older employee won’t know how to use new technology as it is to assume a younger employee can’t handle the responsibility of important work.

To protect your workplace from ageist policies, attitudes, and culture, take these steps.

Use your words carefully

A lot can be conveyed by how we talk to one another. What feels like harmless turns of phrase can make a considerable impression and convey held biases we may not be aware of. For instance, referring to a younger employee as a “kid” can mean you view them as a child. Think about what you’re saying and why you’re saying it. Words conveying a dismissive, slighting, or negative connotation can pop into our vocabulary without much thought but can do serious harm to an employee’s experience.

Think before you ask 

One incredibly unprofessional, but common experience young employees have is to be given irrelevant tasks. For instance, an employee in their twenties just out of grad school gets called into their boss’s office. Instead of getting a real assignment, they’re asked to pick up the boss’s cat and take it to the vet. Oh, and while they’re at it, pick up some cat food from a store across town.

Passing off personal tasks to young employees, often with the title of Assistant, is unfortunately all too common. These behaviors show a lack of respect for the employee’s experience, skillset, time, and contribution.

Review your demographics 

One way to spot ageism in your workplace is to evaluate the demographics of the people on your team. For instance:

  • Do you have a predominantly young or old team?
  • Do people in your field tend to be older?
  • Do you discount younger professionals because you don’t think they can handle the role’s responsibility?
  • Do you assume older people within the field won’t be as agile or technically capable?

Your workplace demographics are a great place to start when looking for patterns in your hiring practices that might be weeding specific demographics out of your talent pool.

Where you offer opportunities

Beware of assuming the only people who want growth opportunities and new training are younger employees. Development programs, unique and challenging opportunities, new tech, and strategy shouldn’t belong to only one demographic. Ensure you offer these opportunities to your team equally, providing room for growth and development to everyone.

Don’t get complacent 

Ensuring your workplace is both in compliance and a positive environment for people of all demographics takes commitment, effort, and diligence.

This isn’t a conversation you should have once and move on. Diversity, inclusion, and anti-discrimination should be an ongoing conversation and priority for business leaders across industries. Train your managers to catch their own biases, recognize ageist practices and mentalities, and address it when they see it. Teach your employees to do the same and build a system that acknowledges and responds appropriately to employees who speak up.

Creating a safer, more inclusive environment won’t just protect you from lawsuits but protect employees so they can flourish and grow within your organization.

 

Photo by Viacheslav Iakobchuk

Content provided by Q4iNetwork and partners 

Are Exit Interviews Really Worth It?

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The value of exit interviews is a long-standing debate in the HR world, with people landing on both sides of the aisle. Some argue if an organization is broken, exit interviews are useless and hurt the interviewee’s reputation. Others say they are an excellent opportunity for an organization to learn from its mistakes.

The reality? The answer lies somewhere in the middle.

Every time a valuable employee leaves an organization, it suffers. Not only because of the cost it takes to hire and train a replacement, but also:

  • For the loss of institutional knowledge
  • For the time it takes for teammates to adjust
  • For the potential dip in productivity and team morale
  • For the loss of value to customers

So, it makes sense that the smartest move for an organization is to try everything to mitigate loss.

The catch

Exit interviews, team check-ins, increased training, and team development are tangible ways to counteract the loss of a valued employee. However, if your organization suffers from a toxic company culture and mindset, or functions under a fear-based leadership style that discourages open and honest conversations about what’s not working, you’ve got a much bigger problem on your hands.

In this kind of culture, exit interviews will likely be ignored and forgotten. Organizations failing to manage these issues will likely experience (at least) one mass exodus of employees. For that reason, it’s worth doing what you can to conduct honest exit interviews.

For example, suppose employee retention is low. In that case, it’s likely at some point, leadership will take a keen interest in figuring out the cause, at which time those exit interviews will come in handy. No matter the case, exit interviews can be instrumental if handled correctly. If you’re interested in doing what you can to improve your organization, inform your leadership, and mitigate loss, then exit interviews are a great place to start.

Follow these steps to make the most out of them.

Don’t wait 

It’s essential to get your interview in before too much time has passed. Everything will still be fresh in the interviewee’s mind, making it easier for them to recall information and offer suggestions. However, be sure to account for heightened emotions as this can be a rather tumultuous time for a departing employee. It may be worth it to schedule another interview a few months down the road when the dust has settled to allow for hindsight and clear thinking. 

Clarify goals

Before you start your interview, work out what it is you’re trying to gain.

Do you want:

  • To uncover processes that need a review?
  • An honest assessment of managers, leadership, or team dynamics?
  • To get a picture of the job they’re leaving for?
  • To find out why their new job is more attractive than their current role?

Knowing the goals and what you want to gain will help you frame intentional questions and prepare for the answers.

Review  

A common misstep is to forget the interviews as soon as they’re done. But there isn’t any point in conducting them unless you’re ready to follow up, analyze the data, and use what you learned.

Respond 

Once you’ve gotten what you can out of an interview, set up action steps for integrating what you’ve learned. If your goal was to see how your company compared to its competitors in talent attraction, your response would look different than if you wanted to uncover issues with leadership styles. Make sure you lay out your goals and how you’ll reach them both before and after an interview; otherwise, all it will do is gather dust and become irrelevant.

Start before it ends

Internal reviews are a critical part of growth and development. While exit interviews are an excellent way to mitigate loss, they aren’t a one-size-fits-all solution to uncovering issues within an organization. If you’re really interested in improving the employee experience, work out leadership problems, evaluate company culture, and generally drive your organization in a good direction, don’t wait until an employee leaves to get their opinion.

Start early and start strong. Set internal reviews throughout the year, with individuals as well as entire teams. Normalize feedback and open, honest communication. Train leaders and managers to respond to and positively integrate constructive feedback. And above all, work to foster a trusting environment where employees feel free to share their experience without fear of retribution.

All of this may be uncomfortable, but the positive impact on your organization makes it well worth the effort.

 

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Content provided by Q4iNetwork and partners