Horizon Point Consulting

Author: Lorrie Coffey

  • Is Your Organization Prepared for the Future?

    Is Your Organization Prepared for the Future?

    “Before companies can start to think about their succession plans, they have to understand their jobs.” – Sharlyn Lauby, President of ITM Group, Inc.

    For the past few weeks I’ve been focused on helping a client complete a People Review of their top talent and outline their succession plan. Each April they complete the People Review, evaluating their top talent on the areas of performance and potential, risk of leaving the organization, and mobility within the organization.

    In working through this process with them, I’ve discovered that for most of their key employees, they don’t have a good succession plan in place. Both in regards to what would be the next step for the employee as well as who could step into the role should the employee leave the organization. Given the tight talent market right now, this is very concerning to them, and to me.

    So how can companies evaluate their employees for succession planning and what steps do they need to take to ensure they have options?

    1. Conduct an assessment annually of your key positions. Notice I said positions and not employees. What positions within your organization are critical to the success and sustainability of your organization? What are the responsibilities of those positions? Is there a logical promotion track from one key position to another?
    2. Evaluate your current staff. Once you’ve identified those key positions, then take a look at the employees who currently fill those roles. Assess them on their current performance and their potential. As I’ve told each of the managers I’ve met with, just because someone ranks lower on performance and potential doesn’t mean they are a bad employee, it may just mean that they haven’t been in their current role long enough to gain the full scope of knowledge needed to be a high performer or have high potential.
    3. Communicate. Once you’ve assessed your key employees and determined those who could move up within your key positions if needed, have a conversation with them. There is nothing worse than creating a succession plan only to find out when the time comes that the employee doesn’t want to move up into the position you’ve designated them for. Find out where they see themselves going in the organization and make sure it aligns with the plan you created. If it doesn’t, you may need to reevaluate your plan.
    4. Provide training and support. After you assess the key employee’s current performance and potential and ensured that your vision and theirs match, you need to create an action plan to help them get to that next level. What areas of performance or potential do they need to strengthen in order to be successful in a new role if and when the time comes? The client I’m working with conducts Individual Development Reviews each September, but they do not tie those IDRs back to the information they gleaned through their People Review, so they are not creating an action plan or setting goals that are aimed at helping those key employees be prepared for the next level.

    “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.” -Benjamin Franklin

    If your organization were to lose a key employee tomorrow, do you have a plan in place to respond and minimize the impact to the organization?

  • Are Your Top Employees Also Your Most Toxic?

    Are Your Top Employees Also Your Most Toxic?

    Picture this: There is an employee at your company that you’ve had multiple complaints against. They treat other employees with a total lack of respect and maybe even the treat customers the same way. They have created a hostile work environment in which other employees dread having to work with them, go out of their way to avoid them both in their tasks and just around the office in general, and customers refuse to deal with them. But they are one of your company’s top performers or they have a knowledge base that no one else in your company has. They exceed every performance expectation, get the job done faster than anyone else, and they are a subject matter expert.

    You go to leadership and voice the concerns you have and the complaints you have received regarding this employee and their toxic behavior and the response you get is “we can’t lose them, they are one of our top performing employees and we couldn’t possibly lose their expertise.” And so nothing is done. Maybe your told to have a conversation with them regarding the feedback you’ve received, but if they fail to change their behavior, it is allowed to continue and expected to be tolerated.

    I recently came across a video from Gary Vaynerchuk, Chairman of VaynerX and CEO of VaynerMedia, in which he talked about why you might need to fire your top employees (warning: he uses very colorful language to get his point across!) I found myself nodding my head repeatedly during the three and a half-minute clip.

    According to Vaynerchuck, “If you tell your people that you care about them, but you ‘look the other way’ when certain employees are mean to everyone else, you’re sending a very clear message.”

    In today’s world, company’s are built on their culture. If your actions or the actions of your employees do not match your core values, your company culture will suffer and in turn so will your bottom line. Employees will spend more time lamenting over how unhappy they are in their jobs or the company and less time being productive.

    Retaining an employee because they are a key performer or a subject matter expert may seem like the right decision, but the consequences of doing so may cost the organization more than that one individual is worth.

    According to SHRM, the cost to replace an employee is between 90-200% of their annual salary. Imagine how much it would cost your organization if five employees resigned as a result of your decision to keep one toxic employee. In addition to the cost of replacing them there is also the cost of lost productivity caused by their departures.

    Do you have a top employee that is toxic? Are they single-handedly destroying your company’s culture?

  • Creating a Teaching Culture

    Creating a Teaching Culture

    My twelve-year-old son had his first experience with interviewing this week. He is applying to a special program for high school and as part of the application process he had to participate in a panel interview with members of the program administration. Naturally, he was nervous. Luckily the interview was scheduled on very short notice so he didn’t have too much time to overthink it.

    As I sat in the waiting area with him and his best friend before their interviews, I put on my recruiter hat and gave them some basic interviewing advice. They were both very receptive to what I said and I think they both took my advice to heart during their interviews. (We find out if they both made it in to the program in a few weeks, so fingers crossed!)

    As I went over the basics with them (eye contact, open posture, speak clearly, don’t fidget), I heard another mother say to her child “you know how to interview.”

    My first thought was “how does a twelve-year-old know how to interview when so many adults struggle with it?” Then I started to think about the deeper impact of her statement.

    How often do we as leaders assume that those we lead already know what we want or need them to know? And how many of us get frustrated when we find out they don’t know it, often only after they tried on their own and made a mistake?

    By making that statement to her child, that mother was assuming he had the knowledge and didn’t help to ensure her child was set up for success. Same with leaders and their employees. If you set an expectation for your employee with the assumption that they know how to meet that expectation, you may be setting them up for failure or at a minimum, added stress when they struggle on their own to get it right.

    According to a study published in 2015 by Willis Towers-Watson, over 70% of high-retention-risk employee said they would leave their companies to advance their careers.

    I recently held a workshop for one of my clients in which I asked employees to tell me where they thought the company needed to make improvements. One of the top themes that I saw in their feedback was training and providing employees with the knowledge they need to be as successful as they can be.

    It’s human nature to want to succeed.  

    Providing employees with the opportunity to grow in their roles is a great way to ensure that they will want to stay with the organization. And it’s a great opportunity to strengthen your organization’s succession plan.

    Studies show that most on the job training happens in the form of informal learning. I have challenged the leaders at the client mentioned above to ask themselves each week to pinpoint one thing that they taught someone. I’ve also challenged them to think before they perform a task “is there someone who would benefit from knowing how to do this?” If the answer is yes, I encourage them to pull that person aside and show them when the opportunity presents itself (just like I did with my son and his friend).

    The interview skills I presented to the boys were very basic, but also very important skills to know for the future. My hope is that when they are old enough in a few years to start interviewing for their first job, those tips will pop into their heads and help them to have a successful interview.

    The growth and development of people is the highest calling of leadership. -Harvey S. Firestone

    Are you living up to your calling as a leader?

  • What Does Your Candidate Experience Say About Company Culture?

    What Does Your Candidate Experience Say About Company Culture?

    I follow a number of HR groups online. It’s a great way to expand my HR knowledge, see how different companies manage their HR functions, as well as to share my own knowledge and experiences with others.

    Recently, while scanning through one Facebook group, I came upon a question that stood out. “Do you think it’s ok that managers are consistently late for interviews and leave candidates waiting for 15-20 minutes?”

    Reading through the comments, many respondents addressed the base issue- No, you shouldn’t make a habit of being late for interviews. But none addressed the impact that doing so could have on the organization and its reputation, or in other words, how candidates viewed the company’s culture.

    The candidate experience is critical to any organization in order to hire and retain top talent. And it starts as soon as a candidate clicks on a job posting. Here are some questions to ask yourself about your candidate experience and how it reflects your company culture.

    1. What does your job posting say about your company culture?
    2. Is your application process quick and simple, or do you require candidates to fill out screen after screen of information that you can probably pull from their resume?
    3. Once an application is submitted, do you send a “Thank you for your application” response? How quickly do you review and respond to applications? Do you notify candidates in a timely manner if they are not selected?
    4. When the candidate arrives for an interview, how are they greeted and are the interviewers prepared for the meeting? Are candidates left waiting on a regular basis?
    5. If, after the interview, you decide you like the candidate and want to continue to move forward, do you give them a tour and introduce them to other employees?
    6. You’ve made an offer and they’ve accepted. Now what? Is there contact between the time they accept the offer and their start date? That may include sending them pre-hire paperwork, providing them with their orientation schedule, or simply having a few members of the team they will join reach out to introduce themselves.

    The candidate experience is a great reflection of an organization’s culture. If the experience is a great one, candidates will think highly of the organization and want to join that culture. If the experience is a bad one, you will not only lose that candidate to another organization (maybe even a competitor) but you’ll earn the reputation of a company that doesn’t value candidates, and in turn, employees.

    Does your candidate experience reflect your company culture?

  • Employee Health Clinics: A Creative Solution to Climbing Costs

    Employee Health Clinics: A Creative Solution to Climbing Costs

    Healthcare costs have risen an average of five to seven percent each year for the last five years. With costs steadily increasing, employers are starting to look for creative solutions to combat this steady climb in costs. One solution many employers have adopted is Employee Health Clinics.

    What is an employee health clinic?

    It is when an employer or group of employers work with local health care providers to create a health clinic specifically for use by their employees and dependents. The employer usually pays a monthly fee per employee, often between about $50 to $100. Some employers opt to charge employees a small copay for visits between about $5 and $15; much less than they would pay through their health insurance provider to see a doctor. In addition, the employer usually pays or splits the cost of lab work and prescription fees with the employee and those services are obtained by the health clinic at wholesale rates.

    How can an employee benefit from an employer health clinic?

    As noted above, visits to the employee health clinic are often at no cost or low cost to the employee and their dependents, including lab work and prescriptions. Clinics are usually set up onsite at the employer or in a nearby location. This helps to minimize the time away from work needed to seek medical care, thus encouraging employees to seek care when needed. Many employer health clinics also provide wellness care and have staff on-call after hours.

    How can an employer benefit from establishing a health clinic?

    By creating the convenience of an onsite or nearby health clinic, employees are more likely to seek medical treatment because they don’t need to take time off to do so. Clinics are often open before and after work hours and/or have staff on-call after hours. For an employer, this helps reduce absenteeism and increase productivity. Preventative care offered by the clinics can help to further reduce these problems for an employer, as well as also help to reduce the number of major health care claims to their primary insurance provider. This allows employers to cut their overall healthcare costs by reducing the annual premiums paid to the insurance company.

    Employer health clinics can also help to manage minor worker’s compensation injuries and illnesses, working closely with the employer to get employees back to work faster and determine light duty assignments available when needed. This helps to reduce an employer’s overall worker’s compensation claims.

    Many health clinics also provide wellness education including biometric testing, flu shots, and wellness seminars.

    Employer health clinics are usually staffed with nurse practitioners or physician assistants, which helps to control the costs incurred to run the clinic. Some clinics have a full-time or part-time physician on staff or on-call as needed.