Horizon Point Consulting

Author: Lorrie Coffey

  • 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.

  • Is Your Training Program Legendary or Lackluster?

    Is Your Training Program Legendary or Lackluster?

    “An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.” – Benjamin Franklin

    As I discussed in my recent post Five Elements of a Great Onboarding Experience, having a great new hire orientation can be critical to making a great first impression and getting a new hire successfully onboard with your organization. While many companies have worked hard to create that great first impression, they fall short on the long-term impression they give employees by failing to create a continuous training program.

    I’m currently working with a client to help them set goals for the coming year. In meeting with their leadership and other employees, one theme stands out to me- they lack training opportunities. They conduct annual reviews and set goals with employees, but fall short when it comes to providing training to help those employees meet their goals.

    So how can an organization successfully design a training program?

    First, conduct an analysis of each job to determine what skills are needed for that role. Create a competency matrix that details each role and the skills needed for entry-level, intermediate level, and expert level mastery of that role. Then compare roles and see where skillsets overlap. This will help you to determine what training will have the greatest impact on your staff and yield the greatest return on your investment. It may also help you define career paths within your organization.

    Second, create a formal training program based on the competency matrix. Once you determine what training will give you the biggest ROI, you need to start designing that training. You may need to use internal and external resources. When designing the training, determine what method of training will be most successful. For example, the client I’m working with commented on training that had been provided previously where employees were required to sit through hours of classroom training but were never given hands-on experience with what they learned, so the training was not effective. Also, consider how you can measure the effectiveness of the training once complete.

    Third, use the competency matrix to define career paths and create a succession plan. Look at the roles in your organization, the skills needed for each role, and determine what makes sense for a path of promotion. Then assess the employees currently in those roles for possible promotions when they come available. If you have an employee you think would be great to move up, have a conversation with them to gauge their interest. Some employees do not want to move up into management roles, and that’s ok. But it’s best to know that at the beginning instead of spending time training and prepping someone to move up only to have them turn it down when an offer is made, or worse, have them feel obligated to take the position and then not be happy or successful in the new role. Once you have a succession plan designed, you can start working with those employees that would be good candidates for promotion and help them start obtaining the skill set needed to move into that next role.

    While it’s important to create a continuous training plan for your organization, it’s also important for leaders to understand that training doesn’t have to come in the form of a formal program. Some of the most important skills I’ve learned in my career have been through impromptu training opportunities. As you’re completing a task, ask yourself “is there someone that could benefit from learning what I’m doing or understanding what I’m working on?” If so, ask them if they have five or ten minutes to shadow you in your task.

    I encourage you to ask yourself “What have I taught someone this week?”

  • Change Management: Celebrating the Small Victories

    Change Management: Celebrating the Small Victories

    Change is never easy. I remind myself of this daily as I navigate some major changes in my personal life. And my experience has been a great reminder of why change is often viewed so negatively. It’s the unknown. While they say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, the thought of changing that pattern and not knowing what the result will be is often petrifying.

    I recently started working with a client who is experiencing a great deal of change in their organization and as a result, is seeing a decline in employee morale. As part of the change management process, I have begun meeting with managers on a weekly basis. While part of the goal of these weekly meetings is to talk through issues or concerns they may have, the primary goal is to help them focus on the positive and then find ways to share those positives with employees.

    I start each meeting with one simple (yet difficult) question. “What went well this week?”

    The natural reaction to this question is to try to think of major accomplishments, but when experiencing change and a decline in morale as a result of that change, employees need steady reassurance that the change is having a positive impact on the organization. Without that reassurance, morale will continue to drop. By showing employees the positive impact change is having, even if a small impact, you’re easing their anxiety over the change and gaining their buy-in.

    So, after watching the managers struggle during that first meeting to answer my question, I gave them some guidelines:

    • Think smaller. It doesn’t have to be a major accomplishment to be worth celebrating. Instead of waiting until the completion of a project to celebrate the work done, set milestones along the way and celebrate when you hit each mark.
    • Celebrate the now. If it’s progress today, celebrate it. Even if it falls apart tomorrow. Deal with tomorrow then, but today it’s a small victory and deserves recognition. And there’s always that chance that it won’t fall apart down the road.
    • Tie wins back to change. If the win was a result of a change that employees viewed negatively, acknowledge that the win was a positive result of that change.
    • Decide how to share with employees. Is it a win that everyone should know about, or just a specific department? And how will you communicate it to them in a way that will ensure they receive it?

    Even though we have only met a few times so far, I have seen a shift in the managers as well. The first week they were hesitant to claim any wins, but during our most recent meeting, they walked into the meeting with a few to share.

    So, ask yourself what went well this week and have you shared that with your employees?