How Can You Get the Best People on Your Team, and Keep Them?

In today’s post-recession environment, businesses are operating with pared-back workforces.

Picked to the bone, the burden is placed more than ever on the best-of-the-best people who remain. A focus on results in the best cases — or simply survival in other cases — has burned out many leaders.

In places that have misidentified their leadership talent and thus have an inordinate amount of mediocre performers leading that lean workforce, the burden on the elite few is even greater. These leaders are swimming upstream against a rapid and rising current.

At the same time, compensation and rewards have become commoditized when attempting to retain or attract talent. Early into the recession, companies learned that offering competitive salaries, titles, and rewards for results in the form of bonuses and options could help retain and attract the best.

Yes, these enticements are important and necessary, but they are no longer sufficient. As a human resources executive with the good fortune of having worked in companies with great people and extraordinary leaders, I can tell you that it is imperative that the components of compensation are aligned with the strategic goals of the organization.

The 3 common denominators of recruitment & retention

Today, recruiting and retaining the best talent result is an enormous competitive advantage for those who do both well. My experience clearly indicates there are three common denominators to the companies and their cultures that excel at attracting and retaining top leadership talent. These are:

1. A leader who seeks input from the team and knows how to inspire and motivate through communication.
2. A team of extraordinary executive leaders who share similar values.
3. A high-performance culture that wins.

In their book Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, & Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-Based Management, Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton highlight the vital importance of seeking out disciples deeper in your organization.

We can’t find a shred of evidence that it is better to have just a few alpha dogs at the top and to treat everyone else as inferior. Rather, the best performance comes in organizations where as many people as possible are treated as top dogs. If you want people to keep working together and learning together, it is better to grant prestige to many rather than few, and to avoid big gaps between who gets the most and least rewards and kudos.”

They go on to conclude that “rigorous studies DO imply that great people make great organizations.”

The 4 types of employees

In his model of situational leadership, Ken Blanchard categorizes four basic types of employees:

• Enthusiastic beginners, who are low in competence but high in commitment.
• Disillusioned learners, who are still relatively low in competence and also low in commitment.
• Reluctant contributors, who are relatively high in competence but low in commitment,
• Peak performers, who are high in competence and commitment. These are your potential disciples.

Continually diagnosing where your people are in the development cycle and flexing your leadership style to meet their specific needs are steps that are paramount to your ability as a leader to develop your peak performers, those self-reliant achievers.

Ironically, though, these folks often remain below the radar precisely because they are so reliable! You can delegate to them and forget about them. These self-sufficient employees allow you to focus your scarce time on other important issues, knowing that they will take good care of the projects, tasks, and areas of your business for which they are responsible. However, these are the very people who deserve your attention most! They yearn to be recognized and challenged further. Seek them out.

Using these principles, businesses can attract and keep the best talent, even through tough times. Show your employees that you are invested in them and in their growth, and make your business a place that people are excited to work at.

BY David Casullo is president at Bates Communications

From Start-up to Small Business: 5 HR Must-Haves to Get to the Next Level

Here are five must-haves they identified to take your business to the next level:

1. A culture that supports your purpose

You need to decide what kind of culture you want your company to have. That depends, somewhat, on what you want your company to look like down the road. Start with the end in mind. For many entrepreneurs on the cusp of growth, it’s still go-go-go (and likely will be for a while). But stop working for a second and reflect on what aspirations you have for your company.

According to Roitman, “Your long-term game plan should be supported by a culture that will take you there.” For Stroll, the goal was to be a high-growth company. “We defined what values people need to embrace to make sure our employees are accelerating the business.”

Values like strategy mindedness, ownership thinking, and being the best have made the company one of the fastest growing in the U.S. – growing an average of 73 percent per year since 2002 and 135 percent last year.

2. A sustainable operation

Can your business survive a week without you? How about four weeks a year, as Roitman suggests? For Turo, “The greatest obstacle has been scaling–to go from actually doing the work myself to training and managing others to do so.”

Of course, it’s hard to loosen the reins. Before you cede control, you need a team you can trust. But if you’re self-funded, getting the best people in the door isn’t easy.

As a stop-gap, hiring a few temporary contractors can free up some of your time – which you can then spend on finding your rockstars.

Also, invest time in codifying some standard operating procedures. Even with a small team, a little structure will go a long way. Develop some guidelines for how work should get done to empower your new hires to hit the ground running, and to keep them aligned with your culture and desired work style.

3. A refined people process

Once you can afford to take a breath, devote some time to developing people processes. The first step, as Roitman sees it, is developing a great hiring process, “so you can begin cherry-picking your team.”

Before you hire anyone, decide how you will define success–for your company, your employees, and your managers – and how you’ll measure it. Apply this to how you score candidates and gauge cultural fit. Recruiting inevitably takes longer than you expect, and you’ve got a business to run.

So whether you hire an in-house recruiter (as Roitman suggests) or contract this out, get someone to help you build your team.

People processes don’t end with hiring. Open, two-way communication is key as you build your organization. Be transparent. Share your vision, and openly discuss how things are going. Implement a process for tracking employee goals and performance, and meet with your team regularly to give – and receive – feedback. Make sure everyone is set up to succeed at what you hired them to do.

4. A network of support

It’s lonely in the driver’s seat. Establishing a network of mentors and non-competing CEOs is pivotal to your personal development and that of your organization. “Get some accountability. Develop a broad network of entrepreneurs so you can learn from them,” says Roitman. There are endless resources available for honing your leadership skills (for instance, Roitman was a member of the peer advisory group Vistage for seven years). Don’t go it alone.

5. Keep an eye open for improvement

Don’t get too comfortable just because you have things cranking a bit. Even if you’ve built a sustainable organization, your work is far from done. As Turo points out: “Be prepared to work harder (and enjoy working harder) than you ever have in your life.”

You’ll make some mistakes (everyone does), which is why process improvement is always iterative. Learn from them, adjust, and consider how you can optimize for success.

BY Kyle Lagunas is the HR Analyst at Software Advice 

The Many Ways You Can Spot a Liar in the Workplace

If you have spent any time in management or HR, you know this to be true: dealing with liars is simply part of what you do.

It’s not a pleasant part of the job, mind you, because no one likes to deal with deception, but just about everyone who supervises people in the workplace deals with a litany of lies, both large and small, every single day.

People concoct all sorts of deceptions in the office, from fibbing when they haven’t even started (much less finished) that pending report, to co-workers lying to cover up an inappropriate office romance.

Problem is, it’s not always easy to separate honesty from deception, and that’s why this Forbes story titled (appropriately enough) 12 Ways to Spot a Liar at Work jumped out at me, because who doesn’t want a handy-dandy formula for figuring out those in your office who aren’t giving it to you straight?

Here’s the key to all this, as author Carol Kinsey Gorman puts it:

In business dealings, the best way to understand someone’s baseline behavior is to observe her over an extended period of time. Note her speech tone, gestures, blinking patterns, etc. Once you’ve assessed what is “normal” for a co-worker, you will be able to detect shifts, when her body language is “out of character.” Just remember (and this is key), that the atypical signals you detect may be signs of lying — or a state of heightened anxiety caused by many other factors.”

I won’t go into the entire list of the 12 things she identifies here (you need to read the full post to get all of that), but some of them may sound familiar:

• A fake smile;
• An unusual response time;
• Foot movements;
• Face touching; and,
• Changes in gestures.

Reading these tell-tale indicators of lying that she lists, it reminds me of  that great scene from the Quentin Tarantino-scripted movie True Romance, where Christopher Walken, playing a Mafia Don, tells Dennis Hopper’s character that he can tell he’s lying because he can recognize “the 17 different things a guy can can do when they lie to give themselves away.”

"If a person really believes the lie, there is no way that can detect that falsehood. But, unless you are dealing with a pathological liar or a superb actor, I know you can become better at spotting those who try to deceive you!”

BY John Hollon is Vice President for Editorial of TLNT.com

4 Steps to Make Sure You Aren’t Making Engagement Optional

Employee engagement is big business.

In fact, the recent research done by the Society for Human Resources Management and reported on here at TLNTrevealed that employee engagement is the number one concern among HR professionals. Clearly, we have become convinced that employee engagement should be a primary outcome of our management and leadership practices at our organizations.

When you ask most of the experts to define employee engagement, some part of the definition will include the application of discretionary effort by the employee. Translated to normal language, that means that employees are so into their jobs that they are willing to go above and beyond the call of duty on a regular basis.

Improvement or entitlement?

That sounds great, doesn’t it? Having a whole company of people who are willingly giving more than is expected of them is very appealing, hence our attraction to the idea of employee engagement.

The problem when it comes to engagement is in how we are approaching its measurement and management.

If you’ve worked in mid to large-sized companies, you are familiar with the practice of employee engagement surveys and you’ve seen the fire drill that often accompanies these efforts. While surveying employees is a good thing and desiring engagement is also a good thing, the problem underlying these engagement surveys is that they are assuming that it’s a company’s responsibilityto engage each employee.

The practice of surveying for employee engagement walks a fine line between improvement effort and creation of entitlement. The fundamental question that marks the difference between the two is this: when did being engaged in your job become optional?

Isn’t this what we pay people for?

When you step back for a moment and think about it, isn’t engagement what we are paying for when we bring someone onto our payroll as an employee? Shouldn’t employee engagement be a requirement of any job? Of course it should. And, at one time in our history, I think engagement may have been expected.  That appears to have changed.

Employee engagement is an individual choice that each employee makes on a daily basis (either consciously or subconsciously). They choose to give their all, to slack off or something in between. It’s their choice. Managers can’t create engagement any more than they can create happiness or turn lead into gold.

What they can do is make engagement a requirement of the job. Great managers and leaders recognize that a disengaged employee is making a choice to be that way.

In order for that same employee to become engaged, they have to make a different choice (or series of choices). The leader’s responsibility is to help each individual make that choice and hold them accountable to it. If an employee won’t make the choice to engage, then they are making the choice to move on. There can be no third choice where an employee hangs around, waiting to see if the company will give them enough stuff or make enough changes for them to decide to give over the gift of their engagement. That’s called emotional blackmail and it shouldn’t be tolerated.

Warning signs you’re making it optional

Engagement can’t be optional, at least not if you intend to have a high performing company that attracts the best talent. If you are on board, you are all in. That’s a reasonable expectation for someone to whom you are paying a salary.

Next time your organization is about to head down the path of conducting an employee engagement survey, consider whether your process is making engagement optional for your employees. Look for these warning signs:

• You talk about using the results of the survey to “drive higher engagement”rather than to drive better performance.
• You have a process where a leader can create an after-survey action plan without extensive input from their team thus implying that engagement is the manager’s sole responsibility.
• You train managers on how to action plan, but not on how to coach employeesfor their commitment to their work and their results.
• After receiving the results of your survey, you spend more time focusing on what environmental changes you can make to “improve engagement” and little or no time talking about how to work directly with your disengaged employees on how to help them decide to either be fully on board or out the door.

4 steps you can take

If you really want to have an impact on your organization through engagement, It may require that you undo some damage that you’ve inadvertently done already. If you discover that you have indeed made engagement optional at your company, you aren’t alone. And, it’s not too late to do something about it.

Here’s how where to start:

1. Decide to make engagement a mandatory requirement of working at your company.
2. To do this, you must get very clear on what engagement is for your company. This means having a clear definition and helping leaders and employees understand what it looks like.
3. Then, teach your managers how to coach employees on their decision to be fully engaged and what to do if they are not.
4. Finally, when you conduct your engagement survey, make it less about measuring engagement and more about discovering how to help your best employees to be more effective at driving the company forward.

BY Jason Lauritsen is a former human resources executive turned consultant and keynote speaker. His company with partner Cy Wakeman, Bulletproof Talent

The Four Rules of Effective Feedback

There are four simple rules for giving effective feedback.

1. Be specific versus general.
2. Describe versus evaluate.
3. Focus on the behavior versus the person.
4. Maintain the relationship versus indulge in self-serving behavior.

The first rule, that feedback should be specific and not general, ties in with what we will talk about in the imagery section. There we explain that coaches need to paint clear pictures so that people can self-adjust their performances.

Why you need to be specific

Even positive feedback needs to be very specific if we are going to increase the performer’s competence. General feedback like, “You were terrific, Muhammad,” or “That was a great speech to the Rotary Club last night, Ashley,” may make the person feel good, but it does little to improve his or her competence. How can Muhammad stay terrific if he has no idea what he did, specifically, that you thought was terrific?

The third rule reminds you to focus on the behaviors you wish to improve, change, or reinforce in the other person. I recently asked a group of leaders in a seminar I was teaching if they thought their children were bad. Except for one jokester parent, all concurred that their children were not rotten-to-the-core bad. They also acknowledged, however, that they often were not thrilled with their children’s behavior.

I suggested that perhaps a more accurate form of feedback to their children might be something like this: “I love you, but I don’t like the way you are treating your younger brother” (or the mess of your room or whatever behavior you’re dealing with). The message then is that they aren’t bad, but that you sure don’t like the behavior.

In the same way, I may have an excellent employee with a bad habit I would like him to change. Let’s say, for example, that one has a tendency to interrupt people in mid-sentence in meetings. It’s the interrupting that I choose to focus on. “Adam, you interrupted Jacques three times during his presentation this morning. A rule of thumb in those situations is to let people finish talking before you comment or ask questions.” If I think he needs to be made aware of the impact he had on at least one person, I might add a comment on my feelings: “I must admit I felt a bit frustrated by the interruptions.”

In the above example I chose to take a teaching approach and did not assume competence on Adam’s part — I did not ­assume he knew not to interrupt — and so fed back to him a picture of the appropriate behavior. Had I chosen to use a more consultative style I would have asked, “Adam, are you aware that you interrupted Jacques three times during his prepared presentation in the meeting this morning?”

Using the mentoring style

You will recall that the consulting style — asking questions and actively listening — is focused on developing self-awareness and self-responsibility in the other person. If he answers casually,“Yeah, so what?” then clearly he does not have enough awareness yet, so I might move to a second question: “Well, I know how I feel when I have prepared something I want people to hear in its entirety and I get interrupted. How do you feel when that happens 
to you?”

A third possibility is to use a mentoring style. Mentoring is simply coaching that focuses on a career path or survival in the organization. In this instance my feedback would sound more like this:“Adam, as you know, one of the things that is really valued in this organization is that we treat each other with respect and dignity. Interrupting Jacques three times during his prepared statement in the meeting this morning might be interpreted by some as disrespectful. I am sure that wasn’t your intention, but I must admit I felt a little frustrated by it.”

The fourth rule reminds us to give feedback for one reason and one reason only: to help the other person get better. Feedback is not meant to be self-serving to the person giving it. This is not where you get even or show them you’re smarter. Whatever approach you take, you should be able to give feedback — all feedback — in a way that maintains the relationship.

If your feedback is to have maximum impact in bringing about increased competence on the part of the performer, then it should also be timely, varied, and frequent. It was Paul Allaire, the retired CEO of Xerox, who once said that we undercommunicate “to the power of 10.”

Just because we said it once doesn’t mean people got it. For them to get the message clearly, you need to communicate it over and over again, as often as you can, in as many ways as possible. As for timeliness, research tells us that the effectiveness of feedback starts to decline 0.4 seconds after the act. The best time to tell someone? Now!

Good feedback comes from disciplined leaders

A few important final thoughts on feedback.

Leaders who are good at the skill of feedback are highly disciplined; they think ­carefully about what they’re going to say and how they’re going to say it. Few of us can spontaneously offer up exceptionally good, competent, relevant feedback. This simply doesn’t come naturally.

All of us are capable of giving general, nonspecific, ­focus-on-the-person feedback such as “Great job on that report, Bruce.” Giving exceptional feedback is a different matter altogether. “I read the McDougal report, Bruce, and it’s extremely thorough and well targeted. It focuses on efficiencies, succession planning, and return on investment (ROI), which are the customer’s key concerns. I feel confident in forwarding it to the client. Excellent job!”

Who spontaneously speaks like this? Perhaps only your golf pro or someone who is trying to make you better. Most of us need to spend a few moments capturing the key points and getting back in touch with the guidelines for effective feedback before we’re able to give such comprehensive, meaningful feedback.

Here’s what University of Illinois track coach Gary Winckler had to say about the role of asking questions and listening in coaching:

Ask them, almost on a daily basis, how they’re doing, and I’m always telling them, ‘Don’t just tell me you’re doing okay. How are you really doing, how’s school, how’s your family, how are you adjusting to homesickness?’ It’s not so easy, especially in the school environment, where you only see your athletes an hour or two a day and we jump on the field and do our routine and then go our separate ways again.”

Gary is right. We do have limited time. But these constraints signal that it’s even more important to make asking and listening priorities.

If you want to make the most of the time you have with your people, take advantage of the opportunities you do have by using the most effective communication skills available to you.

By Peter Jensen, Ph.D, is founder of Performance Coaching Inc

4 Elements That Better Be Part of a HR Strategy

In HR we have to have a strategy for everything.

What’s your employment brand strategy? What’s your orientation strategy? What’s your open enrollment strategy? It’s not really strategies for most of these – they’re processes – but we get hit over the head so many times in HR we stopped calling our processes “processes” — and started calling our “processes” “strategies.”

It makes us feel strategic when we have strategies!

A plan of action isn’t a strategy

Unfortunately, it’s rare that I see a real strategy for an organization’s talent – their people. We strategically have many strategies in HR: our strategic benefits strategy, our compensation strategy, our recruitment strategy, etc. These really aren’t strategies, either. These are more what I call HR operational initiatives, or the crap we do on a daily basis.

It’s our job. It’s not strategy.

What is strategy? It’s a plan of action designed to achieve a vision.

We do really well on the plan of action! We usually fail on the last part – achieving a vision – because usually we really don’t have a vision, unless you consider doing the job a vision!

It’s not. The vision part of your strategy is by far the most important part. It needs to connect to the hearts and minds of your HR group. They need to truly believe in it, because it will shape decision making at all levels in your department – or at least it should!

Elements that should be in your strategy

Your HR strategy needs to speak to what you truly believe on the people side of your business. It’s all right if your strategy and your current reality are not yet at the same point, because you need to have a vision to be able to reach it.

Very few organizations design their strategy based on their current state – unless they’ve already reached that pinnacle of excellence they desire. Too often, I see HR departments go to design an HR strategy, and it breaks down because people try and throw reality into the mix. “Wait, this isn’t who “we” are – we aren’t what you are saying…”

I love realists, but they usually aren’t the best ones to draft your HR strategy! You obviously need reality in your strategy,  but not so much that you just regurgitate your current state.

I can’t tell you what your HR strategy should be, but I can tell you some elements that better be a part of it:

• The level of talent you need to achieve your organizational strategy;
• The type of talent you need to achieve your organizational strategy;
• The personality traits your talent will need to be successful in your organization.

Fact: we all need great talent

Not every organization needs high energy, go-getter, experienced individuals to be successful, but some do. Others need calm, mild-mannered, entry level people to be successful. Many organizations need a large mix of talent, traits and experiences (heck, most of us do!). In the end, we all need great talent that cares about their personal outcomes, cares about organizational outcomes, and believes that both of those things can be accomplished under our roof.

Lastly, make your HR strategy simple – so simple everyone in the building can spout it off in under five (5) seconds. That will be hard to do, but that will make your strategy lasting and effective.

By Tim Sackett, MS, SPHR is Executive Vice President of HRU Technical Resources

3 Ways to Help Your Organization Accept (and Cope) With Change

Communication missteps and a failure to motivate employees to adapt is causing most corporate change initiatives to fall short and, in addition to hurting the bottom line, is ultimately harming employee engagement.

With the rapid pace of change required to succeed in today’s uber-competitive global business environment, the organizations that thrive are the ones that can successfully trigger swift strategic and operational transformations that employees understand and embrace.

Many organizations, however, are failing at this critical business element not because the objectives and tactics haven’t been thought out.

Rather, change management initiatives typically fail because the business managers responsible for enacting the change are not providing the affected employees enough personal motivation.

3 activities to foster change

HR leaders have an opportunity to change this trend and leverage their workforce recognition solutions to help shorten the acceptance curve. A change initiative’s success or failure is defined by how quickly the change becomes part of the organization’s accepted methodology and is adopted by employees.

So, the key to ensuring change initiative success is quickly motivating affected employees to accept and utilize the new method/s. HR leaders can leverage their employee recognition and reward systems to help enact these changes through three primary activities:

1. Communicating the change to inspire buy-in;
2. Connecting individual and management goals; and,
3. Adding actionable measurement.

Communicating the personal context of change

While the volume of communications deployed during change initiatives is high, the focus is typically on explaining the enterprise rational for making the change – be it improved operational efficiency or increasing financial returns. Often, the communication plan does not put the change into personal context or give employees a reason to care.

Individual or team-based goals and objectives that illustrate success from the employee’s point of view helps employees make the personal connection and can be accomplished with customized communication plans. This is an opportunity for HR to develop targeted plans that tailor the personal change objectives to the select role, length of service or location, etc. HR can utilize the recognition system to deliver these messages efficiently to the specific employee groups.

Clearly connect individual and manager goals

Even though executives often have a high-profile role in describing the business changes, most are not addressing employee concerns. How will this affect me? How will my participation be measured? What’s in it for me?

Answering these questions and translating corporate objectives into desired employee actions are critical. This is another area perfect for HR involvement. HR should work with the front-line manager teams to convert high-level change related objectives into specific behaviors that employees must understand and act upon.

Using the employee recognition solution, managers can set goals and reward outcomes connected to the change and even use their reward budgets to promote quicker uptake and acknowledge early adopters. Socializing the change at the grassroots level helps organizations limit early resistance and reinforce the positive opportunities the change represents.

Adding actionable measurement goals

All change initiatives have important high-level measures to gauge success, however, tracking aggregate financial gains, operational efficiencies and customer satisfaction improvements are lagging indicators. They do little to chart the path toward sustained change and provide no diagnostic insight on how to expedite acceptance and counter resistance.

By incorporating the workforce recognition solution to help in the change management communications and motivations, HR can pinpoint where and when change is embraced or rejected at an individual level. This detailed analysis allows HR to then target potential problem areas with new communications campaigns or goals/rewards programs and further limit implementation resistance.

A company’s ability to change — and to do so efficiently — can be a significant source of competitive advantage. HR has an opportunity to help organizations speed the time to employee acceptance and use the company’s recognition program to help employees adjust and adapt.

HR can help change leaders create communications that inform and inspire, introduce recognition tools that help establish and maintain a clear connection between the organization’s goals and an individual’s actions and better identify employees who need additional training or motivation to transition completely. Yes, organizations do indeed have a lot riding on their ability to change the way they do things. But, with the help of employee recognition platforms, HR leaders have an opportunity to contribute to the change management process in new ways.

By Mike Ryan is senior vice president of marketing and strategy for Madison Performance Group

The Value of New Moms Returning to Your Workforce

I overheard on the radio about this Australian company who is rewarding returning mothers to their workforce by paying them double their salary when they return to work, for the first six weeks.

My first impression was – “Oh hell no; don’t let any of my female employees find out about this!”

For those who don’t know,  I run a very young company – not young on experience, but young on the average age of employee. It comes with the territory; most third party recruiting companies have a fairly young workforce — get new recruiters right out of college, train and grow them into your culture, make them part of the “family.”

The great value in returning Moms

There’s something else that comes with all the fun and energy of a young workforce – a ton of weddings and a ton of babies! We have the standard punchlines, “Don’t drink the water here!” etc. But the reality is, in the last 10 years there hasn’t been a time when someone in the office hasn’t been pregnant. It’s now part of the culture.

Reading about the Australian company got me thinking, but no, not about paying my returning Moms double. That’s crazy talk! It got me thinking about how valuable my returning Moms are to my company.

It’s a huge worry I have every time one of my employees comes in to share their awesome news. “Hey, Tim I’ve got something to tell! I’m pregnant!” My response: “Awesome! I’m so happy for you! Who’s the father?”

The “who’s the father?” line is a joke – I usually the know the father; remember, we’re a family and not much happens that I don’t know about. I honestly feel so excited for them. Internally, though, I’m going “Oh, shit!” because I know I’ve got a realistic 50/50 shot at getting that person back after they deliver. That’s human nature – I love my job, but once I hold that baby in my arms, I love it more and I’m finding out a way where I don’t have to leave them all day.

Why I love returning Moms

So, now I understand why this Australian company is rewarding returning mothers. Give them a little extra incentive to return knowing how hard it is to pull them away from their baby, and, start this new life as a Mom and an employee.

Life just got doubly hard – we’ll give you double the pay! You deserve it. As HR Pros and organizations, we tend to struggle to really understand how difficult this transition is. We welcome the people back, we understand the sleep deprivation and the separation anxiety, but we honestly have no idea how hard it is – unless you’ve gone through it yourself.

I love returning Moms for these reasons:

• They get hard work and sacrifice!
• They can juggle a hundred things at once!
• They have perspective on what is important!
• They work doubly hard to maintain a balance in their life!

Think about what new Moms need

So, what is your organization doing to ensure your returning Moms are going to return? I know if I could afford it, I would pay them double, but beyond that what else?

Think of what new Moms need: a transition plan to ease back into their “new” life, flexibility, encouragement, understanding and maybe a big bottle of wine and a sitter every so often.

When we talk about the cost of retention and engagement, this is what we are talking about. Find ways to keep your best, because in my world, my Mommies are my best!

By Tim Sackett, MS, SPHR is Executive Vice President of HRU Technical Resources 

5 Ways HR Can Turn Strategy Into Action

There is a long and tired debate about how HR and people leaders need a “seat at the table.”

Yet the real seat comes not from a title, level or the “repositioning of HR,” but from knowing the business and how to create a workforce with the talent and motivation to deliver it. The good news is that opportunities abound by asking the right questions at the right time.

Facebook, a company that just had one of the most celebrated public offerings ever, will ask these questions as they continue to improve the user experience on mobile devices — and with the added twist of driving up advertising revenue.

This week, in a totally different business and industry, The Wall Street Journal featured an Indiana steel mill saved because the owner, ArcelorMittal, found the answers in adopting Belgium workforce principles with some help from technology.

It’s about confidence, influence, and insight

There is an undeniable need for someone at the table who knows how to line up the business strategy with a talented workforce. Success in an ever-changing, complex business environment depends upon it. HR can’t do this alone, of course, but we can be the ones who know the questions to be answered and the steps to progress.

Those who have a seat with their name on it usually have confidence (they expect to be there), influence (they’re trusted by the others), and valuable insights (a point of view on the business). But to keep the seat, it all comes back to the work – the contribution and topics you choose to bring to the table.

Regardless of your business, industry or location, if you’re asking your leaders and yourself these questions, and acting upon the conclusions, your impact will be noticeable:

• What’s our business strategy? Where is the business going? How long do we have to get there? What parts of the business will grow or go? Where do we need more profit?
• What does our organization need to be like tomorrow to realize the strategy?What workforce trends will affect us? How must the organization function? What capability and roles will be needed?
• What are the gaps between today and tomorrow? What capability do we need tomorrow that we don’t have today? What are the biggest gaps? How much time do we have to close it? What skills won’t be needed or phased out?
• How will we close the gap? What can we build ourselves, phase out, buy or engage for a period of time?
• How will we manage and measure it? What processes do we need to realize it? What’s success and how will we measure it – next quarter? This year? Next year?

It’s about translating strategy into action

Repeat, because we know this will evolve and change – and you’ll learn as you go.

I have never seen an HR leader receive a comprehensive workforce strategy with a bow tied around it. That isn’t realistic, but it’s not a reason to slow down.

It takes putting your researcher hat on and asking the right questions – then searching some more. When you don’t get everything you need – and you won’t – make some sound assumptions.

Finally, turn it into a concrete plan that won’t be perfect, but will move you in the right direction. Time to embrace the 80/20 rule.

In your quest to get a primo seat at the table, or to simply stay there, your ticket will be less about making a brilliant comment in the meeting or “repositioning” HR, and more about translating the strategy into action.

If opportunities exist everywhere from Facebook to that Indiana steel mill, there must be a ticket to the open seat in your organization.

By Patti Johnson is the CEO of PeopleResults,a consultancy that guides organizations and individuals to “start the wave” of change.