Horizon Point Consulting

Author: Jillian Miles Massey

Benefits Benchmarks: North Central Alabama

A few weeks ago, I asked the question “Are Employees Utilizing Those New Perks?” and highlighted benchmarking as a critical activity for evaluating workplace benefits. Now, we have the published results from the 2022 North Central Alabama Wage & Benefit Survey!

First up, Average Benefit-Cost Per Employee (Annual) increased 25% over 2021. Employers reported an average of $16,608 spent annually per employee in benefits, compared to $12,459 one year ago. Some hot categories for increased benefits spending are Child Care Support, Adoption Support, Pet Insurance, and Elder Care Support. These types of benefits are increasingly attractive, and the Huntsville/Madison County Chamber Foundation is now providing the Best Place for Working Parents® program in recognition of companies that are focusing on family care.

Next up, 72% of companies are now offering a PTO (Paid Time Off) structure in place of set hours/days for Sick Leave, Vacation, etc. Last year, only 58% were using a PTO structure. This shift aligns with increases in Flex Time and Remote/Telework benefits as options to give some autonomy back to employees. If you’re thinking about shifting your Leave and/or PTO policies, look for a blog post coming soon from Mary Ila Ward on Flexibility and Unlimited PTO.

Paid Family/Parental Leave is more available, with a 17% increase in the number of employers offering any amount of leave designated specifically for family/parental leave. The median leave times in weeks jumped from 2 weeks to 4 weeks.

If you are in the North Central Alabama Region, how do your benefit offerings stack up against these benchmarks?

If you are outside of this region, where can you find local data? Check with your local Economic Development Agency and/or Chamber of Commerce to find out if local data is available.

Benchmark, benchmark, benchmark!

This wage survey covers Cullman, Lawrence, Limestone, Madison, and Morgan Counties in Alabama and represents 132 company respondents in 2022. Learn more here.

June 28, 2022
Crafting a Thoughtful Performance Management System

I recently asked a room full of managers representing dozens of organizations if they actually liked their own company’s performance management system. What do you think they said?

Some of us may think of Performance Management as a rubber stamp on an annual review. We often don’t think of it as a living, breathing, system. Others of us may think of Performance Management as monitoring what we’re doing wrong. We may not think of it as monitoring and developing what we’re doing right.

When an organization thoughtfully designs, implements, and continuously improves a performance management system, it should look like the graphic below, representing a continuous, living cycle.

OBJECTIVE

Company objectives should be driven by the organization’s vision, mission, and values, and these objectives should cascade and influence manager and individual contributor objectives. Read more from Mary Ila on 6 Ways to Design Your Performance Management System Around Company Values.

How are you writing company, department, and individual objectives?

MONITOR

Progress towards objectives should be monitored regularly, and “regularly” should be a customized cadence that works for your organization.

For the context of this post, let’s assume that formal performance reviews are held annually. We recommend formal and informal monitoring in addition to the annual review. This may look like an informal monthly one-on-one and a formal mid-year review with your direct supervisor.

How are you effectively and regularly monitoring progress towards objectives?

COACH

If there’s anything you take away from this light reading, I hope it’s that everyone needs coaching. High performers, low performers, and everyone in between.

Coaching is critical to successful performance management systems. This is where we catch potential issues and allow time for correction before a formal review period ends. This is also where we acknowledge and reinforce positive behaviors and results in real-time instead of waiting for the formal review.

How often are you coaching your direct reports? How often are you receiving coaching from a supervisor? Is the coaching meaningful?

EVALUATE

The formal evaluation is an important element of any performance management system. It often drives rewards (stay tuned), succession planning, and development opportunities. All organizations should have a structured performance evaluation process that gauges the successful completion of objectives (or lack thereof) and sets the foundation for future objectives.

One of the most critical components of evaluation is that team members be made aware of the evaluation methods and criteria at the start of the evaluation period. In other words, if my performance is evaluated from January to December and my annual review is in December, I need to know by January at the latest what my objectives and expectations are for the upcoming year. I need to know what I’m going to be evaluated on. What chance do I have of performing well if I don’t know what I’m expected to do?

When and how are you letting people know what methods and criteria will be used in their formal evaluations?

REWARD

This is where we put our money where our mouths are. In order for a performance review to be effective, the rewards or incentives need to be clear, relevant, and meaningful. Employees want to know: “Why should I work hard to achieve goals? Why does it matter whether I score low or high on a review?”

Do your policies clearly outline the rewards structure, including how rewards are determined? Are rewards actually relevant and meaningful to your employees?

When I asked a room of nearly 50 managers if they truly liked their own organization’s performance management system, only 3 people said yes. What are you doing to help your own managers answer “Yes!” to that question?

June 14, 2022
Are Employees Utilizing Those New Perks?
Organizations have been extra creative lately with new benefit offerings and retention strategies. Is it working? Are employees utilizing those new perks and sticking around? Yes and no. SHRM explored the issue nationally, and our team has some local insight from the 2021 and 2022 North Central Alabama Wage & Benefit Survey.

Aon reported in April that enrollment in voluntary benefits increased 41% from the previous year. Most of the increases were tied to medical benefits, as to be expected, but some may be surprising:

The fastest-growing voluntary benefits employees enrolled in amid the COVID-19 pandemic include supplemental health insurance policies such as critical illness, accident, and hospital indemnity…Other popular voluntary benefits in 2021 were life insurance, student loan assistance programs, identity theft protection, legal benefits, pet care, and auto/home protection.

Graphic source: https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/benefits/pages/employees-want-voluntary-benefits-but-dont-always-understand-them.aspx

SHRM referenced another survey from Voya that found that people are more likely to work for employers offering voluntary benefits, but people also reported that they don’t quite understand all of the benefits available to them.

Employers may be missing a critical piece of the puzzle – literacy. Information literacy, financial literacy, digital literacy… Do employees have equal access to education and training on what benefits are available, how they work, where to learn more (in various learning styles), etc.? If everything is available online, do all employees have home or work access to the internet? Is information available in different languages?

SHRM also highlighted this from Buck’s 2022 Wellbeing and Voluntary Benefits Survey report:

“We found that key drivers of employee retention include employees’ perceptions of their organization’s commitment to their overall well-being, diverse benefit options, and effective communications that raise awareness of their employer’s offerings,” said Ruth Hunt, a principal in Buck’s engagement practice and co-author of the report. “To continue to attract and retain top talent, it’s critical for employers to implement and promote programs that address whole-person well-being and substantively close the gap between management perceptions and employee realities.”

The bottom line seems to be that employers will only see strong engagement with benefit offerings when they carefully and strategically implement and evaluate the effectiveness of such offerings. SHRM shares six tips from Krystie Dascoli, executive board president at the Voluntary Benefits Association.
1. Understand workforce demographics.
2. Find the gaps.
3. Benchmark, benchmark, benchmark.
4. Communicate information.
5. Ensure integration.
6. Conduct a compliance review.
Benchmark, benchmark, benchmark is where third-party survey administrators like Horizon Point come in. We partner with the local economic development agencies in our area to administer an annual North Central Alabama Wage and Benefit Survey representing employers across all sizes and industries. We ask general and specific questions about pay practices, compensation data by position, aggregate wages by occupational group, benefits for full-time versus part-time, and more.

Results for the 2022 local survey will be published in the coming weeks. Do you think we’ll continue to see an increase in voluntary benefit offerings? Stay tuned!
May 24, 2022
Teamwork Makes the Dream Work…Unless the Team is Dysfunctional

This week, I had the great pleasure of facilitating in-person training with a group of junior managers who are working diligently to improve team and unit dynamics among their direct reports. They quickly identified the teams they lead that are functional vs. dysfunctional, and we had some deep discussion about why some teams work and some don’t.

Patrick Lencioni is a subject matter expert on organizational health and team dynamics, and his model of the “5 Dysfunctions of a Team” is embedded in most training about how and why teams work or don’t. The foundation for the model is Trust, followed by Healthy Conflict, Commitment, Accountability, and Results.

Source: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni

Trust must come first, and trust isn’t always easy to establish. Effective team leaders build trust through psychological safety, which in turn creates an environment where healthy conflict can sprout.

Our instinct when we hear Conflict is to physically cringe (unless you’re someone who is wired for it), but Healthy Conflict is simply the open sharing and ideas – allowing space for innovation and continuous improvement through challenging and questioning. Without it, a team will never achieve cohesion and commitment.

Another way to think about Commitment in teams is buy-in – are all team members bought-in to the shared purpose and goals? Without buy-in, the team will lack internal accountability.

When team members are not comfortable holding each other accountable to shared purpose and goals, any results achieved maybe by happenstance, not by clear and cohesive teamwork. Results improve exponentially when all members of the team hold themselves and each other accountable.

If teams have Trust, Conflict, Commitment, and Accountability, but struggle to value collective team success over individual achievement, they will ultimately reach some level of dysfunction. A team of people who are focused on their own independent successes are really just a group. There’s a difference!

So, take a minute to evaluate a team you’re a part of. How many of the critical pillars of functional teams do you have? Is your team stuck in one of the dysfunctions? What insights can you take from Lencioni’s model back to your organization?

April 19, 2022
Training and Developing Growth Mindset

Two weeks ago, Taylor kicked off our new series on Growth Mindset: what is it?! Today we’re exploring a growth mindset in training & development.

The Neuroleadership Institute (NLI) defines growth mindset as

…the belief that your skills and abilities can be improved, and that ongoing development is the goal of the work you do. However, creating a growth mindset culture isn’t just about having optimistic employees, but creating a space where employees strive to learn, enjoy being challenged, and feel encouraged to develop new skills.

Let’s look at a case study of NLI’s work with Microsoft.

A few years ago, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella started a revolution from a revelation: the success of the company was dependent upon a culture of continuous learning and a workforce of “learn-it-alls” instead of “know-it-alls”.

Training and development became the forefront of the Priorities, Habits, and Systems of the company.

NLI’s growth mindset work follows a structure of Priorities → Habits → Systems. In the case of Microsoft, executive leadership adopted a growth mindset as a major priority to be supported through habitual training and learning activities and embedded into organizational systems like performance management and pulse surveys.

Microsoft created “interactive online modules with rich storytelling and multimedia” for their employees to learn independently and on-demand about the why, what, and how of growth mindset. Managers were given conversation guides to help drive and facilitate meaningful discussion about growth mindset within departments and teams. When team members exhibited growth mindset habits, they were recognized and positively reinforced.

Graphic: NLI Growth Mindset Case Study Collection

Training is often thought of as sitting in a room (physical or virtual), facing forward, listening to a facilitator read words from slides. Training doesn’t have to – and shouldn’t – look and feel like that.

Our team hosted an interactive workshop this week where participants sat around one large table with the facilitators, everyone facing inward and around at each other. Learning was facilitated through large group discussion, partner discussion, independent work, and even physical movement around the building and the block (we literally walked around the block during a break!).

Is your training stale? How can you shift the paradigm to a Growth Mindset in your training and development priorities, habits, and systems?

March 1, 2022