This list is from a columnist at China Daily in response to reducing high turnover and improving retention.
Six essentials employees want in their jobs
A great boss
Trust and respect
Appreciation and recognition
Career progression
Corporate culture
Communication
The list doesn’t differ much from dozens of similar lists you’ve seen under the title of “What Millennials Want’ or descriptions over the decades of what most US workers want.
And I’m willing to bet the list applies to any workforce in any country on Earth or elsewhere in this or other galaxies.
These are universal desires of both educated and uneducated people; what changes is their ability to articulate them.
It’s a list that managers and management should take to heart, because it isn’t going away.
The six are constants that every manager had better understand and provide or be prepared to staff a revolving door.
As hiring has picked up I’m getting the same questions from a variety of managers at different levels and in different industries.
Boiled down they all want to know if there is a way to avoid bad hires, i.e., the ones that happen in spite of a rigorous interviewing process.
The answer is yes and I’ve written about them at various times over the years; rather than compose yet another post discussing them I thought I would just link back to them (getting lazy in my old blogging age).
The most persistent reason for bad hires is unconscious.
On the flip side, attractiveness, which we are actually hard wired to prefer, is the biggest reason for missing good hires. But that, too, is preventable.
There are additional links and trackbacks in each post that you will find useful.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
As I said New Year’s Day, I’m looking for guests who want to share their own experiences whether as a boss or a worker. Areas of interest are culture, management, motivation, people acquisition and retention and startups in all their gory glory.
And if you always wanted to draw a comic based on your experiences in the workplace, but aren’t much of an artist, give me call at 360.335.8054 or write me; I care more about your sense of humor, irony and irreverence than your drawing skill!
Lynn Blodgett, president and C.E.O. of ACS, a Xerox company, believes that all 85,000 ACS employees should think entrepreneurs. He sees a direct correlation between accountability and great the performance—increase the former and the latter goes up. This includes pushing P&L deeply into the organization, which encourages people to spend as if it was their own money.
“So you give people control, hold them accountable, give them control of their resources, and then monitor what they do.”
He also believes the right kind of incentives fuel motivation and engagement.
“I believe that a really important management principle is that if you get the incentives aligned, people will motivate themselves far better than you’ll ever motivate them. But, again, you have to get the incentives right.
It’s not only financial. It’s being able to feel like they have a level of control over their destiny, that they are valued in what they do, that they’re being successful, that they’re contributing. Those things are actually probably more important than the money. But you’ve got to get the money right, too.”
An additional benefit of this approach is that people will “self-select,” i.e., if they can’t/don’t achieve the incentives they will realize much faster that they’re in the wrong type of work.
I especially like this because it is a better career development tool. Being terminated for non-performance allows people to rationalize, whereas missing incentives tied to viable goals offers the insight that they may need to find more fulfilling work and not keep making the same mistake over and over and that’s not a bad thing
Notice I said “viable goals,” which mean feasible, possible, doable; not goals that only one in a hundred can achieve them.
Goals that set people up for failure have a boomerang effect; they’ll return to their place of origin and smash a large hole in that manager’s reputation.
This is also not a bad thing, since “holey” managers seem to align with “holey” companies making it easier to avoid them.
Are you one of the thousands of managers who spend your days trying to increase productivity and improve your company’s bottom line and you nights worrying that you aren’t doing it fast enough—if at all?
Does your company hire experts to teach motivation and employee engagement techniques?
Do you twist in the wind trying to implement complex, sometimes costly, approaches?
Why?
Why complex when some of the smartest CEOs, advisors and academics are all saying the same thing?
Simply put, in the words of Tony Hsieh, if your employees are happy they will make your customers happy; if your customers are happy they’ll spend more; if they spend more your bottom line will grow.
Saturday I gave you multiple links showing just how simple and inexpensive engaging your people can be—but not everybody reads Saturday.
So, instead of writing yet another post on engagement, I thought provide a video from Guy Kawasaki, who talks about how to “enchant” your employees.
His advice is simple and doable, although it does require the right MAP.
The only cost may be to your ego, since in order to implement it you need to change.
Tony Hsieh Has been beating the drum that happy employees provide the best customer experience and help assure success and sharing his wisdom on how to do it.
The other question I keep getting asked is how do you do it when you
aren’t the CEO or even a senior manager;
don’t have the budget for great perks; or
aren’t the touchy-feely rah-rah type (direct quote).
The short answer is in five words, you take time to care.
Gallup estimates the cost of America’s disengagement crisis at a staggering $300 billion in lost productivity annually.
$300 billion is a number that should get anyone’s attention.
The engagement issue is relatively simple and definitely cheap to solve.
The problem is that, as usual, employees and managers aren’t on the same page.
The research shows that for employees “the single most important [event] — by far — is simply making progress in meaningful work.”
Managers are another story.
“When we asked 669 managers from companies around the world to rank five employee motivators in terms of importance, they ranked “supporting progress” dead last. Fully 95 percent of these managers failed to recognize that progress in meaningful work is the primary motivator, well ahead of traditional incentives like raises and bonuses.”
What constitutes supporting progress isn’t rocket science, either.
Autonomy, meaning no micromanagement;
sufficient resources, meaning valid scheduling and enough of whatever to get the job done without having to beg or being left to fail without them; and
learning from problems, meaning understanding the why and how, not just the what.
If you find any of the three difficult to provide you need to look in the mirror.
The problem isn’t about having time to support progress; the problem is that your MAP doesn’t support the concept.
KISS culture attracts the best people and is a powerful force for retaining them.
A few years ago I wrote about KISS culture and this seems like a god time to revisit it.
KISS Corporate Culture Instead Of Branding
A blog post from India caught my eye earlier this week. Its premise was that retention starts with hiring (absolutely true) and went on to explain how to create and use “employment branding” for recruiting.
Essentially, pretty much everything that falls under the banner of employment branding also falls within the company’s culture—call it corporate MAP—along with the necessary processes.
But corporate culture isn’t static, it’s a living organism that shifts and changes as you grow and hire.
So it’s about hiring to match your corporate culture and using your corporate culture to screen candidates,limiting your hiring to people who are at the very least synergistic with your it—something I first wrote about in 1999.
Understand, I’m not disagreeing with what Sourabh said, just with the way he said it.
Using jargon to cast it as ‘branding’ makes it far more complex than it needs to be—especially if you want the knowledge to permeate your organization from top to bottom.
If that’s your goal, then take the time to understand your culture, KISS* it and communicate it to your people through a Cultural Mission Statement; once they understand it they’ll talk about it using language and terms with which they’re comfortable.
The result will be a culture that sounds and is real—not one invented by the marketing department.
The following email came in over the weekend (edited and shortened for clarity).
Hi Miki, About seven months ago my company (name deleted) started providing most of the perks you see written about, including teaching how to be an entrepreneur. We thought that our efforts paid off when we were about to hire some amazing people. Fast forward to the beginning of July when two of my top developers quit because the entrepreneur class was canceled due to the launch schedule of a new product. To top that off, Friday my architect gave notice, explaining that he had found an angel investor and it was a guy he had met at one of our classes! What the hell is going on?
I’ve received seven similar emails and four phone calls over the last few months; they’ve come from executives and managers in development, sales and marketing at all levels in new startups, growth companies and larger, public corporations.
They all say they have gone to extraordinary lengths to attract people, but many of those hired left in 15 months or less.
They all complain that talent is scarce and that many of the people they do manage to attract have no loyalty or interest in anything except their own career.
The managers say they hear variations of the same stories over and over at events they attend, over lunch or when grabbing a beer after work.
My response to each is tailored to their personal situation and much gentler than what I’m going to write now.
You know the old saying that you get what you pay for? That is just as true when it comes to hiring as it is when shopping.
People who join for money or stock or perks will leave for more money or stock or perks.
They have no loyalty because they are not invested emotionally—there is no reason to be. Many candidates get the feeling they are doing the company a favor by joining, based on the lengths to which companies are going to recruit and hire them, and if they leave, they leave. No big deal.
The next part of our discussions focused on where to find and how to hire people who would be invested in the company. Obviously, no silver bullets, but the basics of solutions that each could tailor to their own needs.
Please join me tomorrow when I share that information with you.
Whenever culture is discussed it often is in terms of perks.
Google’s free meals, concierge services, etc.; when Apple was new and hot interviewees were told about the in-complex swimming pool and Friday beer blasts.
SAS, which is number one on Fortune’s Best Places to Work list for the second straight year, offers on-site healthcare, $400/month childcare, a beauty salon, 66,000-square-foot gym and more.
All are lauded for their cultures, but is it the perks or is something else going on?
“People stay at SAS in large part because they are happy, but to dig a little deeper, I would argue that people don’t leave SAS because they feel regarded — seen, attended to and cared for. I have stayed for that reason, and love what I do for that reason.”SAS manager
Sure, the perks are important, but they aren’t the basis of great culture.
Employees don’t leave companies, they leave managers… More than anything else, you want to create an environment where people are respected—and treated like they’ll make a difference…Jim Goodnight, founder and CEO.
Make a difference; that’s the key phrase and the key action.
That’s how talented managers in companies with mediocre perks or none at all build and motivate great teams. It’s also the reason why people who are stars at one company may not perform as well at another.
Popular wisdom agrees that people leave managers, not companies, and they leave them in spite of perks, benefits, stock and seniority.
Fabulous perks get lots of press and may attract candidates, but they can’t motivate or retain people if they feel used and unvalued.
It is elegant proof of what Gladwell says, as well as a warning call to the stupidity of wasting our world’s human resources.
On a much smaller scale managers waste their human resources every day through “positional deafness,” i.e., only soliciting and/or hearing thoughts, ideas and suggestions from those at X level or higher.
I’ve never understood why managers expect workers who were consistently ignored and shut down to suddenly start contributing because they receive a promotion.
Nobody suddenly develops a brain as a result of being promoted.
If they were good enough to promote then they should have been good enough to listen to in their previous positions.
If they can’t contribute in the position for which they were hired, why hire them at all?
Even new grads hired for their potential need to be heard; they are like eggs and like eggs they must be cared for if they are to hatch.
Managers afflicted by positional deafness often experience high turnover and lament the lack of loyalty, especially in “more junior workers.”
But the term ‘junior’ is very subjective; for some managers it refers to those with just a couple of years of experience, for others it’s a level within the company and for still others it’s relative, with the baseline how long it took them to finally be heard.
It’s easy to know if you suffer from positional deafness, just consider the sources of your input over the last quarter and what you did with it.
Better yet, ask the people you trust to tell you the truth, not just what you want to hear.
As hiring has picked up I’m getting the same questions from a variety of managers at different levels and in different industries.
The following email came in over the weekend (edited and shortened for clarity).
I’ve 
Subscribe to MAPping Company Success 