Shhh... Listen to the Secret of Onboarding Success

I followed with great interest a recent LinkedIn HR discussion thread where the question posed was: In one word, what would you like to show/teach a new employee on his/her first day of work with you? More than 1,000 people shared their opinions. Many provided much more than the requested “one word.” In essence, they didn’t listen to the request. They were so absorbed with dishing out their advice that they didn’t tune in to what was being asked of them. This provides interesting insight into why people struggle in their roles: they fail to listen. “Listen” might be the most important word of advice you offer to every new hire.

Listening is key to help new employees ramp up quickly, acclimate to the company’s culture and kick start their contribution to the team and the organization. It involves not only hearing the spoken word or comprehending the written word, but also involves the ability to understand and observe actions and behaviors. When onboarding an employee, it is essential to provide coaching and guidance, including stressing the importance of listening. Too often, new employees – anxious to prove their value – fail to listen closely and don’t clearly understand expectations. Listening helps to trigger important questions new employees need to ask to gain further insights. Careful listening can level-set and establish clarity – ensuring a new hire meets objectives most important and relevant to his or her immediate manager, the team and the organization.

Careful listening helps new employees better understand the organization’s culture and climate, management styles, business issues, team dynamics, expectations and concerns. It creates the foundation for the new working relationships. Once the new employee fully understands the work environment and goals, she or he is better positioned to take action with confidence and bring value and achieve results that are aligned with the needs of the team and the organization.

No matter how well we listen, for most of us there likely is room for improvement. Next time you are onboarding an employee, help them to understand the importance of listening as a skill to level-set all stakeholders and set priority expectations.

Why Training Matters to Everyone

When budgets get cut, often training is the first thing to go. In the last three years, training budgets have fallen by 21%. Cutting training can have a devastating impact on the customer service experience. Today, the customer experience – which can be instantaneously broadcast far and wide via social media – is a powerful differentiator.

Without training, frontline employees often find it difficult to make the connection between their roles and the success of the organization. Consider the influence on the customer’s experience when you factor in that only one in three U.S. retail employees have received formal training from their employers, according to a June report from the Sloan Center on Aging & Work at Boston College.

Training may not require significant investments of cash and resources. Training and development have taken on newer and far more cost effective forms without losing the power to change behaviors or acquire new skills. Online courses, scenario-based learning and on-the-job learning applications have all made development more “real time”, reducing “time away from the job” costs associated with more traditional training models. It might be more of an issue of coaching managers to regularly engage employees in discussions to keep them informed about the business strategy so they understand how they play a part in the company’s success. Whatever the method used, solicit employee feedback and opinions for improvements so they can make meaningful contributions. And empower them to implement their own solutions.

A classic example of great training reported in a recent BNET article comes from CitiStorage. One of the key stakeholders in the business argued that it wasn’t just customer service representatives who should be trained; everyone should. This wasn’t a trivial suggestion. Taking every employee out for three days is expensive – never mind the cost of the trainer. But, argued the stakeholder, isn’t customer service everyone’s business?

The acid test was this: CitiStorage’s customers got the impression that the company had taken on more staff. But of course they hadn’t. They were just getting more involvement, commitment and creativity from the staff they already had.

Can you afford to cut training and potentially taint the experience your customers receive from your “directors of first impressions”?

Control Your Own Destiny Because No One Else Will

Is it really possible to have any control over your own career’s direction given all the variables affecting your professional choices? Your career is, for the most part, the sum of your own choices. We make choices and decisions every day that impact the future of our careers. But often there are also events outside of our own direct control that influence the choices we make.

In our youth, we probably considered the careers or professions of those close to us by evaluating their success and wealth. Our environment played an important role in forming our first ideas about careers and sest the wheels in motion as we began our journey on own career path. But even with all of the preparation in selecting a university or a study program, we weren’t necessarily sure we would make the right choices to lead us to the promised land of career happiness.

What often happens is that one’s career path includes the selection of traditional courses such as Business Administration, Economics, Accounting or Marketing, and is then influenced by many other factors, such as friends and teachers, internships, political and social environment, and economic trends. Given so many varied circumstances – outside of our own direct control – were we really directing our career “destiny” or just going along for the ride?

When you accepted a new job with “X” company, you made a choice that impacted your life's journey. When you joined a professional association, you made a choice. When you accepted a new assignment in your role, you made a choice. When you decided to play it safe, you made a choice. The present is the sum of our choices, driving us toward the future.

We have to give up the position that we are victims with little or no control over our future. There are events and circumstances that are out of our control, but we all have the ability to make wise choices. Your professional life belongs to you. Your future depends on you. Don’t yield control to external forces.

How Fit Are Your Next Employees?

The changing nature of work and the dwindling size of the traditional talent pool are converging – leaving companies searching in new ways to meet the demand for the skills required in today’s economy.

Employers need to redefine the parameters of their search for talent and focus on new priorities. Essentially, hire employees for their potential to fit within your culture and team and invest in developing the specific skills needed to perform on the job. Manpower calls this Teachable Fit – a new approach for easing the talent mismatch.

The premise works as follows: When employers can’t find candidates with the full range of skills needed for particular positions, they can recruit candidates, perhaps from outside their industries, who possess adjacent skills with an eye toward filling the gaps in their capabilities. It’s important to understand how fillable those gaps are – both in terms of technical skills and candidate mindsets – and at what cost. We know from Right Management research that as many as one-in-three employers are looking for a good motivational fit compared to only about one-in-ten who are looking for specific technical skills or relevant experience.

From a CEO perspective, it is important to assess where you are today and where you want to be – before you can even start to build the bridge between the talent strategy and the business strategy. Assessing talent enables you to evaluate your current workforce and forecast future needs; the resulting gap analysis provides a roadmap for sourcing, onboarding, developing and accelerating talent, and aligning performance with your business direction.

Today’s talent mismatch will continue to intensify. That means more competition for available qualified people, against a backdrop of what Talent Management reports as higher turnover and as many as one-in-four high-performers walking out the door. Employers need to think differently about how they fill the talent needs now and in the future. They must look beyond the usual places for candidates and consider those who are best positioned with their skills and personalities to benefit from training and development.

Check back tomorrow for the third in Owen's four-part series on Teachable Fit and how to expand your talent pool.

Why you should do a gap analysis before a restructuring

Employees are reporting that their workloads have increased due to restructuring at their company, according to research from Right Management. What’s less clear, however, is whether employees have the necessary skills to take over the work of laid-off colleagues.

According to the research, 79% of employees feel their workloads are heavier. The feeling is especially acute at large organizations, where 68% of employees believe their work demands have grown “a lot”. Right Management analyzed responses from more than 800 people throughout North America.

How can organizations make sure that remaining employees can handle their new responsibilities? The answer is first to conduct a gap analysis of work requirements to understand what holes need to be filled and pinpoint the best individuals on staff to fill those gaps. Once that’s determined, the logical response might mean anything from reassigning roles and developing internal competencies to bringing in contingent workers or consultants or simply eliminating the work. Managers also will need to discuss with employees what changes they can expect in their roles and responsibilities and how their work contributes to the goals of the organization, as well as helping to prioritize assignments.

The bottom line: By doing a gap analysis, companies can establish a better alignment between talent and business strategy. And by providing employees with the guidance and training they need, organizations can ensure that employees are set up to succeed.

Optional leadership

Some 90% of the world’s top firms are led by Boomers or older. Sure, it’s fine to acknowledge that the age of the working population is expanding and that older workers are staying in the workforce longer. But at some time, these leaders need to make room for the next generation of leadership: Generation X.

According to generational expert Tammy Erickson, who recently presented a Harvard Business Review webinar on “The Leaders We Need Now: Are We Ready for Gen X to Take Charge?”, Gen X will lead by exploring option after option. This new band of leaders, who are currently aged 31-49 years old, hold valuable, contemporary traits and perspectives that will alter how leaders drive organizations forward.

Erickson believes that Gen X leaders have a sense of alienation and a preference for the alternative. They are inclined to innovate and look for different ways to advance objectives. As leaders, Gen X will explore options to solutions more freely, which could be a point of contention for those of other generations who prefer sticking to an agreed upon and fixed path.

Instead, Gen X leaders hold strong survival skills and can handle change with resilience. Remember, these are the people who, as kids, saw their parents experience widespread layoffs for the first time, rising divorce rates, falling standards of adult behavior such as Watergate, and removal of political barriers such the destruction of the Berlin Wall.

As leaders, we can expect Gen X to be fiercely independent. They will meet their commitments. They will take their own employability very seriously. They will be ready with a well-nurtured portfolio of options and networks. And they will be practical, incisive and hold value-oriented sensibilities.

But the greatest difference in their leadership style will be the continued pursuit of options: optional career paths, lifestyles and business solutions. How will the rest of the workforce fare with such option-based leadership?

Do More But Don't Discount Doing Less

In a downturn, the need to manage more proactively can take a definite upturn. With the game of winning new business much tighter than it was before, a manager has to step up and use all his experience and expertise to give his team the edge. Controlling costs, driving productivity, developing team skills and keeping the team focused are all among the responsibilities that a manager must take more firmly in hand.

But a manager also has to know when to keep the reigns loose. As our experience and research shows, promoting employee learning and development can have a significant positive impact on two essential drivers of productivity, employee engagement and retention. Even during a downturn, managers should help employees learn on the job by varying work responsibilities, offering stretch assignments, implementing job rotations or providing opportunities to run with new projects or initiatives. For managers, sometimes doing more can mean doing less.

Fanning the Flames of Passion In Your Workforce

Passion for work can be elusive and difficult to quantify. However, as it pertains to the next generation of employees, passion is a huge and undeniable component of what makes them committed and engaged. It is also what inspires the creativity and innovation that is their hallmark.

The next generation of employees insists on feeling passionate about what they do. It has high expectations for work that has meaning and value, work that provides them with developmental and learning experiences. Not content to perform tasks and follow orders, they want to be fully participating and making a difference in an open and dynamic environment – signaling a significant culture shift in how and why we work.

How organizations acknowledge this shift, address the needs of this segment of the workforce, and inspire passion will be what differentiates the winners from the losers. It’s poor business sense, if not professional suicide, to neglect to tap the potential of these creative young people. An organization unwilling to adapt will not be able to succeed; put simply, stagnation equals death. Without the sort of passion — in part defined by the sheer potential for creative and innovative ideas and solutions — endemic to the next generation of employees, businesses are destined to wither and die.

This generation expects to be challenged, to have its horizons broadened at every opportunity. Leaders need to supply these opportunities, to set these personally and professionally enriching challenges. This means that leaders also need to be vigilant about recognizing a person’s unique talent and rewarding a job well done, whether via formal performance evaluations or more informal conversations acknowledging meaningful contributions. Finally, leaders need to do just that: lead by example. The next generation of employees takes its prospective company’s values to heart. It scorns insincerity and won’t tolerate hypocrisy of any kind. Therefore, leaders must be prepared to “walk the talk” if they expect the next generation of employees to loyally and proudly — and passionately — follow.