Horizon Point Consulting

Author: Jillian Miles Massey

  • Why Appreciation in the Workplace Matters

    Why Appreciation in the Workplace Matters

    Remember Mary Ila’s take on “How to Be Authentic with Your Appreciation at Work”? We reference Chapman & White all the time in training and coaching with our clients. To celebrate Valentine’s Day with full hearts in the workplace, we’re bringing you an early look at the new updated version of The 5 Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace. 

    We subscribe to the newsletter from Appreciation at WorkTM and got one of the first announcements of the new, post-COVID research on professional appreciation. Right away, I asked the team if we could do a blog about it. New research!? Yes! Here’s the blurb we got: 

    Appreciation at Work has done peer-reviewed research and polling through and post-COVID. The result of this research is a completely new chapter on how to effectively show appreciation to remote and hybrid employees including topics such as: 

    • the variety of remote work relationships 
    • trust in remote work relationships 
    • creating and maintaining a workplace culture 
    • the employer/supervisor perspective 
    • the employee perspective 
    • the key to keeping remote employees 
    • what neuroscience is showing 

    This edition also includes updated research (50+ citations) of data shared about the importance of appreciation and its positive impact on the functioning of businesses & organizations (including increased productivity and higher profitability when your employees feel appreciated.

    Source: Appreciation at Work

    I read it, loved it, laughed, cringed, and mostly just appreciated for the millionth time that Gary Chapman & Paul White adapted the Love Languages for professional relationships. They present their research on appreciation at work in a relatable, real life way. Here are some of my favorite quotes, classic and new:

    • “During the Great Resignation of 2022, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that employees were three times more likely to resign due to a lack of appreciation in comparison to financial compensation issues.”
    • “When leaders actively pursue teaching their team members how to communicate authentic appreciation in the ways desired by the recipients, the whole work culture improves. Interestingly, even managers and supervisors report they enjoy their work more. All of us thrive in an atmosphere of appreciation.”
    • “74% of employees never or rarely express gratitude to their boss.” (Reminder that appreciation is important up, down, and sideways!)
    • “There is a distinct difference between the Quality Time employees desire from their supervisor and what they value from co-workers. In response to this issue, we expanded the Motivating by Appreciation Inventory to allow individuals to indicate what actions they desire and from whom they want them.”
    • Acts of Service are about the other person, not about you. “Ask before you help. Don’t assume you know what help they want or need. If you are going to help, do it their way.”
    • “Our research with over 375,000 employees found that Tangible Gifts is the least chosen language of appreciation.” So if you’re going to do it, it’s important to give gifts “primarily to those individuals who appreciate them” and “give a gift the person values”. (Lorrie wrote about HPC’s take on gifts in “A Few of Our Favorite Things”.)
    • “The surest way to find out the appropriateness of Physical Touch is simply to inquire.” Many people appreciate a good high five, fist bump, or handshake to celebrate a job well done. Just check with them first, and don’t hold it against them if they prefer not to touch.

    Chapman & White also devote an entire chapter to the ROI of genuine appreciation. Take a look at these charts from the book: 

    Flow chart indicating that personally relevant authentic appreciation leads to employee engagement; which leads to reduced turnover, reduced absenteeism, and improved productivity; which leads to a better bottom line. 
    Table chart indicating the overall impact of employee engagement in organizations. One column lists results of employee engagement, and one column describes the associated research findings.

    Regarding remote and hybrid teams, Chapman & White basically say the needs are the same as fully in-person teams, but the intensity of certain needs are different. Here’s a snippet from the chapter on remote teams: 

    “In one study, prior to COVID-19, with almost 90,000 individuals who had taken our online assessment…we found that Words of Affirmation was the most desired appreciation language, followed by Quality Time and Acts of Service. But remote employees chose Quality Time as their primary language of appreciation more frequently (35% of employees) than workers on site (25%). The same pattern was found with employees both during the pandemic and afterwards.” 

    They go on to say, “…the single most important lesson we learned for effectively communicating appreciation to remote colleagues is that one must be more proactive than in face-to-face relationships. The most important factor is to understand, affirm, and relate to your colleagues as people.”

    If you saw our new team video highlighting our operating values, or if you’re a longtime HPC friend, you know that People First is our number one value. We are all just people, with the same ups and downs, and the same desire to be loved, appreciated, and valued. If we were to sum up the 5 languages book(s) in the simplest terms, we’d say Be People First. Be people first toward yourselves, and be people first towards others. 

    If we remember to be People First, we just might get better at genuine appreciation all on our own. 

    For individuals or teams interested in learning more about The 5 Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace, we highly suggest starting with the MBA InventoryTM, then reading the book (or listening to the audiobook). If you purchase the book, it comes with an access code to take the inventory. If you’d like to jump straight to the inventory, you can buy a single access code or codes for your entire team here. (I feel like it’s important for me to say that we’re not being paid to promote any of this, we just really like it.)

  • How to Be Perfect (Or Not) 

    How to Be Perfect (Or Not) 

    Last week, Lorrie talked about braving trust, and a willingness to be vulnerable. She mentioned the theme from Brené Brown of taking off our armor and daring to lead. 

    Recently, Horizon Point has seen more and more client leaders struggling to take off their armor. We think it’s tied to the desire to be perfect, or at least to be seen as not a failure. Mary Ila’s research in grad school was actually on leader emergence versus leader effectiveness, and she found that emerging as a leader within a group is distinct and separate from being effective once you’re there. Let’s consider a female leader who makes it to the C-suite because of her natural traits (leader emergence) and is now finding herself ineffective. Or consider the student who was elected as SGA president, but once they got the job, they floundered. When people find themselves in leadership roles where they feel ineffective, it’s almost like…because they aren’t perfect, they just freeze up. But what does it even mean to be perfect?

    If you’ve seen the show The Good Place, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, or The Office, you may be familiar with Michael Schur. Schur created The Good Place, a show about how to be good (in order to get to heaven) and when he was doing research he dove deep into ethics and morality. The result was a book called How to Be Perfect. It is poignant and hysterical. The short summary: Perfect is made up. Everyone decides for themselves what is good versus bad or ideal versus not ideal – think back to Mary Ila’s blog two weeks ago about values. We all adopt and refine our personal values overtime which shape what we believe about being good or being perfect, and when we feel like we’re not achieving that, we start to become an unhealthy version of ourselves. 

    It’s as if in order to fit in, to climb the ladder, to “have a seat at the table“, we learn these behaviors of protecting ourselves, always on the defensive, expecting to be attacked around every corner. A few months ago, I had the pleasure of speaking to the Women in Business students at Mississippi State University, and I focused on this topic. We had a great discussion about the balance of vulnerability and self protection. Specifically, we walked through Brené Brown’s model of Armored versus Daring leadership.

    Armored leadership looks like…being a knower and being right. 

    Daring leadership looks like…being a learner and getting it right. 

    Source: Urban Wild Studios 

    We are helping clients recognize when they are demonstrating Armored leadership, and we are helping them develop the skill (because it is truly a skill that takes practice) of taking off their armor, and stepping into Daring leadership.

    I’ve also been the emergent leader who then found herself ineffective, but I’ve had incredible mentors who have helped me practice taking off the armor and living in my values. As Mike Schur says, “If we really work at finding the means of our virtues – learning their ins and outs, their vicissitudes and pitfalls, their pros and cons – we become flexible, inquisitive, adaptable, and better people.” In layman’s terms, know your values and practice them. 

    What armor are you wearing that you could take off? What if you start with one piece? It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. If you need help getting started, we have a couple of worksheets that are modified from Brené Brown’s Dare to Lead. In the end, we just need to make a choice to live in our values, rumble with vulnerability, and step into Daring Leadership. 

  • Trick, Treat, or Train: 6 Resources for Scary Good Employee Engagement

    Trick, Treat, or Train: 6 Resources for Scary Good Employee Engagement

    Ding, dong, the witch is…hovering over your shoulder micromanaging your work!? This Halloween, instead of Trick or Treat, let’s Train. We’re highlighting two applications of training as an employee engagement solution, plus 6 links to related resources on The Point Blog. 

    Last week, Lorrie and I spoke about our Illuminate program at the University of Alabama’s HR Management Conference. Before the session, an attendee came up to chat with us about the HR horrors she’d been dealing with at her new company. Her scariest issue: employees’ fear of big, bad HR. She said she felt like the HR monster, scaring everybody on the manufacturing floor with her big, bad, scary HR presence…until she just started talking to people. Every day, she walks the floor and speaks to each individual person with a smile and a “good morning”. She talks to people without needing anything from them. Now, the employees respect her and see her as a valued resource, not a spooky monster. This is “relationshipping”, and it’s critical for workplace wellness and employee engagement. Just like Ivey trained herself to be a relationshipper (and indirectly trained others), you can train yourself by practicing these strategies:  

    Today, I talked with 50 program managers about “Creating a Culture of Radical Candor”, i.e. Kim Scott’s framework of caring personally about people and being willing to challenge them directly. The spooky version: instead of tricking people into believing you care about them (manipulative insincerity) or treating people like besties (ruinous empathy), let’s train ourselves and those around us to practice radical candor, or graceful accountability as we call it at HPC. 

    Have stories about effective employee engagement? We’d love to hear them! Send us a note at info@horizonpointconsulting.com.

  • Could You Pass a Labor Relations Class?

    Could You Pass a Labor Relations Class?

    School is starting back, and that means I’m collecting the latest news on union activity – good, bad, and ugly – for a college-level labor relations course I’m teaching. Each of us at Horizon Point has a unique perspective on the union landscape through our work with various clients and projects, which we’ll be sharing in a series over the next few weeks. 

    I’m kicking us off with a look at union activity right here in our North Alabama region, featuring a snippet from the 2023 Wage & Benefit Survey. When asked if any employees are represented by a union, only 3% of participating companies said yes:

    All of these companies are in the manufacturing industry. Is that surprising? Why or why not? (I won’t grade you on it!)

    In the same wage survey, we ask questions about pay practices, compensation, and benefits – these factors contribute to employee satisfaction and whether or not they’ll seek unionization. You may have noticed that big names like Amazon, Starbucks, and UPS have been making news for employee union activity and the sometimes less-than-stellar response from corporate leadership. Workplaces are more advanced than ever before, but sometimes labor practices don’t keep up.

    SHRM recently published “The Evolution of HR and Labor Relations” for the Summer 2023 edition of HR Magazine. The biggest takeaway for me? The last sentence: 

    “The worker of today isn’t so different from the worker of yesterday in terms of their core human needs,” [Steve] Bernstein says. “What people really want in the workplace is to be listened to, to have access to decision-making and to be in a position to at least influence their workplace.”  

    Stick with us over the next few weeks as we explore further the changing (and stagnant) trends around labor relations and why it matters for YOU.

  • What’s Relationshipping, and How Do I Do It?

    What’s Relationshipping, and How Do I Do It?

    Networking establishes connection. Relationshipping builds bridges and two-way streets with sidewalks and wildflowers! When we relationship (yes, we’re using it as a verb), we have a sense of belonging. Belonging feeds engagement, creativity, and passion, which generate business success and real community impact. Come relationship with us!

    I recently had the great pleasure to speak at the NAVIGATE Nonprofit Network Conference as part of the Building Effective Teams track with Leadership Greater Huntsville. NAVIGATE is focused on equipping nonprofit leaders with the unique KSAs needed to operate on a lean budget, raise funds for continued operations, and provide services with a real impact. At the center of everything they do: RELATIONSHIPS. 

    As usual, I researched what others in the world are saying about Relationshipping. Here’s what Cornerstone Coworking had to say: 

    “When you can speak highly of a person or a business because you have a relationship with them, I feel like that is valued so much more than just passing along a business card because you stuck it in your purse. 

    Next time you find yourself stuck in a networking event, find the one person that is just standing out to you and start a conversation; not strictly focused on work, but about their life, their journey and what the future holds for them, personally and professionally. I guarantee, you’ll begin to build a relationship with someone and might be excited about what it turns into; might even be your next business partner!”

    With further supporting evidence, Meridian Resources says:

    “The term networking is overused, old, and tired. It is so 1990s. 

    We have the illusion of connection, but perhaps we have lost something very important in the activity – the art of building and nurturing true and lasting relationships, which has a significant impact on our personal and professional well-being.

    Do we find that it is more efficient to send a text than to make a call? Do we find it easier to send a quick email rather than to write a letter? Do we prefer communicating through technology within the safe cocoon of our office rather than personal conversations in the hallway? When we venture out, do we actively take the time to meet others and, more importantly, get to know them?”

    When I was a grad student, our career services director put us through a series of professional development courses at which we rolled our eyes…until we realized how relevant and meaningful his wisdom was. He introduced to us the term “relationshipping” as an alternative to traditional networking. In other words, shifting the mindset from swapping business cards to building and nurturing connections with a purposeful intent of understanding and serving others and the greater good. So…how do we do it? Meridian Resources outlines 6 steps: 

    1. Change Your Intent

      Build new relationships when you don’t “need” them. Instead of thinking WHAT can this person do for me, think WHO is this person and how can we support each other.

    2. Be People First

      People First is Horizon Point’s single most important operating value. Others use it, too. Angie Tinnell says, “People are fascinating with incredibly interesting stories to share. Stop parachuting into conversations and holding every minute hostage with all the things you’re passionate about. Instead, start getting excited about all the things the person across from you is passionate about.”

    3. Communicate Differently

      Pick up the phone and have a conversation. Write someone a handwritten thank you note. Take every opportunity to be around other people, whether it is enjoying coffee, lunch, or attending a business conference.Then, check in on people. In our hyper-active social world, the intentional “wanted to see how you are doing” message with no favor to ask at the end, can go a long way to building a strong relationship.
      For a refresher on Communication Skills, read our blog about the GREET Model!
    4. Serve Others

      Get out of yourself by putting others first.
      Instead of seeking people that can help you, look for people you can help. Not only another person, but extend yourself within the community.

      Be a connector.
      Think of two people in your life right now who don’t know each other, but would benefit from connecting with the other.
    5. Be Humble

      Humility is defined as doing for others without seeking attention by taking credit for your actions. This is the most essential element of relationshipping. A good dose of humility makes us approachable and receptive to others’ opinions, views, and support.

    6. Express Gratitude

      Acknowledge and sincerely thank those that help you along your journey. Sometimes the smallest action can make a tremendous difference in the future.

    At the end of the day, our entire lives are about relationships. Family, friends, partners, colleagues, suppliers, providers, we could not make it without them. How can you get better at Relationshipping?