HR Pros – Don’t Miss These 10 Opportunities to Build Positive Culture

10 Key Points in the Employee Life Cycle

There are numerous points in the course of an employee’s employment, that allow you to strengthen the connection between the company and employees. Reasons to attend to engagement: employee engagement correlates with financial success; positive culture; and retention of your best people.

Retention in today’s employment world

As the job market tightens, employees have increasing options outside your group. When a recruiter or competitor calls, how do you envision your employees’ response?  Be realistic. Here are some possible responses to a:

“I’ve been waiting for your call.”

“What kind of salary are we talking about?”

“Geez, I haven’t seen my boss in a month.”

“I’m pretty happy here.”

“Nice base pay, but I have a lot of other benefits here, including a good bonus.”

“I don’t really care what the opportunity is, this is the best place I’ve ever worked.”

 

Think about it. Do you leverage every opportunity to strength your relationship with employees? How much attention do you focus on your employees’ needs or even listening to their ideas? Every time a supervisor engages with their team is an opportunity to deepen the quality of the company’s relationship with them. Employees won’t always move for money but they will generally listen to an offer if you haven’t paid them enough attention. They will definitely listen to an offer if you haven’t treated them with respect. Further, they will actively look for a new job if they feel devalued by you. Ignore them at your peril?

Here are 10 Key Points in the Employee Life Cycle – opportunities during the employee’s career to build your relationship and to involve them in contributing to your positive culture:

1. When you hire: If you recruit for technical skill, relevant experience, work approach and values in sync with your positive culture your chances of advancing a positive culture increase.
2. When you onboard: Do you pay attention to their particular need for information? Do you orient to the company, its culture and their position? Do you encourage co-workers to be welcoming? Do you check in with them often during the first 90 days?
3. When you train & develop: Most high performers want to do well and they want to learn. Smart employees get the connection between personal development and advancement. How do you know what opportunities they value? Simple strengths and weaknesses assessment/discussions will reveal the information you need.
4. When you evaluate: Do you evaluate their quantitative (objectively measured) results and qualitative (relationship, social, subjective) experiences?
5. When you listen: Your employees are a valuable source of real inside information. It pays to gather their opinions or input on company-wide initiatives and plans, in a truly inclusive way. Also top on the list is listening to their hopes for advancement. Use this as an opportunity to plan their development to make them happen.
6. When they’re suffering: Employees may not always share information about stress or their struggles with anxiety. Frequent one-on-ones where you check in to “how they are really doing” increase the chance that you can discover and respond to employee mental health needs early, preventing longer term worsening of suffering and hard-to-reverse challenges.
7. When you respond to needs: Employee needs and situations relate directly to the benefits they value. Younger employees need access to housing, money for education costs or student loans and real-time access to payroll information. They need less full medical benefits and they can tolerate higher deductibles. Older, more established adults need other things. Think about choices. Think about everyone.
8. When you encourage rest: All employees benefit from resting their bodies and minds. If your employees carry out manual tasks or work long hours, this increases in importance. Strive to structure coverage so that employees can take their time off. Don’t pay them cash for unused time off unless its an unusual situation. Leaders, set a genuine example here!
9. When you offer opportunities: Some employees want to do the same job for years. Some want genuine advancement. If your employees want varying experiences, let them tryout different jobs. This builds candidates for future leadership and helps them develop awareness of their own needs and strengths as well as the challenges other departments face. Broad-thinking, self aware employees are your friend.
10. When you allow flexibility: If you have long service employees or your workforce includes employees over 50, allowing them to work part-time instead of retiring or quitting preserves their institutional knowledge, cultural alignment and strong performance. Occaisonal or partial WFH options are major satisfaction enhancers. Encourage employee parents to attend school meetings, medical appointments and other functions that allow them to attend to personal needs and family obligations.

(c) Copyright Benoit Consulting, LLC 2022, all rights reserved