Horizon Point Consulting

Category: Beyond Leadership

Beyond Leadership is Horizon Point’s line of resources for managers of people. Managing ourselves is a distinct set of behaviors from managers the work of others, and we are here to help. Read stories in this category if you are ready to take the next step into people leadership (or if you’re looking for articles to send someone else…).

  • How to Handle Mental Health Issues in the Workplace

    How to Handle Mental Health Issues in the Workplace

    I had a reader send me a suggestion for a blog post a little over a month ago. It said:

    “With the terrible shooting in VA yesterday, maybe an article on how HR can better handle identifying, coaching, counseling & later termination of disgruntled employees if coaching is not effective. I am sure HR departments are concerned about their own employees. Just thoughts.”

    With all our content written for the month, I told him I’d add it to the roster even though this shooting would be old news. The sad thing, though, is that I silently thought there will be something else like this happen again before I get ready to post something. And course, the news has covered other shootings since then.

    In thinking about how to address this topic, I kept trying to avoid talking about a very personal encounter I’ve experienced with this issue. However, I just kept coming back to it. Our marketing guru told me I needed to write about it in order to more effectively and personally address this topic, so here it goes.

    To make a long story short, a former pastor at our church upon leaving our congregation for another church (in the Methodist church pastors are moved by the conference, they aren’t hired by the congregation), shot and killed his wife, attempted to kill his daughter, and tried to kill himself. If you live close to where I live, you are familiar with this story, even though it has been a while since it happened. He was found not guilty by reason of mental defect and is in a psychiatric hospital.

    I could have told you ten years before this happened that he had mental health issues.  Serious ones. Through some personal dealings with my family and then similar stories that came to light through others, it is obvious he needed help.

    His actions led to much anxiety, bitterness, anger and resentment for me and my family. Our first reaction was not to help the man who had hurt us so much.  We talked to some people about the issues, but he had another side that many people saw and loved.  Through this, I believe he was able to mask some of the issues. It also led people to dismiss others who saw the issues and tried to bring them to light. So, we stopped trying to bring them to light and just retreated.

    Ultimately I believe the lack of confrontation with these difficult issues on the part of all of us including our church congregation and our United Methodist Conference led to the loss of life.

    From this personal example, here is a list of advice in dealing with mental health issues in the workplace:

    1. Don’t avoid

    Listen to people when they bring issues to light.  Don’t dismiss them.  Often there are many yellow flags before the red flag appears.

    Talk first hand and immediately with the employee who is disgruntled, having anger management issues, or acting suspicious on the job.  Give them specific, behavioral based feedback and specifically state the consequences of what will happen if the behavior continues.

    Make sure you have a process in place to hear both sides of the story.

    Do an investigation if needed.

    Terminate employment if issues don’t stop and/or one issue is large enough to put others at risk.   Have a specific process for doing so (some of the other tips below may help you think through this process).

    2. Put systems and structures in place to bring issues to light

    This is only possible when employees are comfortable coming to their boss and/or HR with issues; creating an open door environment is critical.  Knowing your employees and caring about them is the best way to keep a pulse on difficult issues and to mitigate them before they become a problem.

    Have a confidential reporting mechanism in place for people.

    3. Protect yourself

    Document everything.

    Always have someone else present when speaking with a disgruntled employee. If the person is a member of the opposite sex, have someone of the same sex as the employee present with you.

    4. Get people the help they need

    Although the person may not see it like this at the time, unacceptable behavior on the job may be a cry for help, make sure you have referral sources (EAP, mental health agencies, your occupational health provider, etc.) to provide more in-depth help and support when it is needed.

    Don’t let HR take on the role of clinical counseling.

    5. Fund and get involved with agencies and causes that combat mental health issues on a broader scale.   

     

    Ultimately, we never know when a genetic predisposition and/or life experiences could put any one of us down a road of mental instability. It is time we all move away from the stigma of mental health, especially HR professionals, by getting to know and care for others. The first step to truly caring for others is realizing that we’ve got to confront the issue head on. It’s a matter of life and death, literally.

    In my personal example, the situation, at times, made me and my family want to loose our religion. Dealing with this inside the church was difficult. However, I firmly believe, at the risk of some people discounting the post, that we can find more answers and solutions to mental health issues inside the walls of the church than out.  For an honest and very personal view on what I think the world needs to combat mental health tragedies in our workplace and in our world download this podcast. Come, Holy Spirit, come.

  • Why does employee engagement matter?

    Why does employee engagement matter?

    I’ve been rambling on this month about how to drive employee performance.  If you missed the run-down so far, you can check out the posts here:

    What You Pay Does Matter

    3 Steps to Winning A Best Place to Work Award

    3 Steps for Driving Employee Engagement through Personalization

    But why does it matter? Why would you or any organization want to pay competitively, win a great place to work award and/or drive employee engagement through personalization.

    We’d argue first that it is simply the right thing to do. But this reason alone won’t keep you in business. However, doing these things just might.  Consider this data quoted in The New York Times article, Why You Hate Work.

    “In a 2012 meta-analysis of 263 research studies across 192 companies, Gallup found that companies in the top quartile for engaged employees, compared with the bottom quartile, had 22 percent higher profitability, 10 percent higher customer ratings, 28 percent less theft and 48 percent fewer safety incidents.”

    Make your employees happy, and most likely they will take care of everything else.

  • 3 Steps for Driving Employee Engagement through Personalization

    3 Steps for Driving Employee Engagement through Personalization

    Remember the wind chime, the umbrella, the party, snacks and bonus check in our last post?

    Well during the corporate foray of employee rewards and recognition efforts, everyone in the department, regardless of their level of involvement in the project, got the wind chime and the umbrella and the party and the snacks and, yes, the bonus check.

    In addition to the one size fits all approach whether earned or not, although an umbrella at some point is going to come in handy, and the wind chimes do actually still hang in my backyard almost ten years later, no one asked me, or anyone else if we particularly wanted any of it or we might have preferred say a rain jacket or maybe a decorative flag.

    You see, one of the main tricks of employers who do the employee engagement game well know that perks and benefits should be personalized, fitting with each individual’s motivational preferences based on their personalities, interests and place in life.

    As The 2020 Workplace: How Innovative Companies Attract, Develop and Keep Tomorrow’s Employees Todaystates,

    “Rather than a standard package of health, wealth, and paid time off, companies can provide employees with a budget and a widely diverse set of options. These can range from sponsoring paid community service time overseas to allowing for credits to buy a hybrid car or even financially supporting an increased personal skill, such as learning a new language. The options are endless.”

    So if you want to focus on making it personal, here are three steps:

    1. Ask.  Ask and ask often what employees want.   You need to do this in aggregate and individually.  We suggest you design a survey to ask employees what they want and value in order to design overall benefit package options and structure. However, each person should be asked individually by their manager what things actually motivate them and what situations they are experiencing in their life and in work that cause one thing to be more motivational over another. For a list of motivational factors we use, Gallup’s 12 engagement questions for this.  Regardless of the mechanism you use to measure employee engagement, these results should be positively correlated with desirable overall business results such as increased profits that every organization tracks.   More on these business results that should be seen in next week’s post…

    Are your rewards and benefits personalized?  If so, what positive results have you seen?

    If you like this post, you may also like:

    The Best Way to Thank Employees is to Make it Personal

    Want to keep great employees? Know how to compensate them.

  • 3 Steps to Winning A Best Place to Work Award

    3 Steps to Winning A Best Place to Work Award

    A wind chime.

    An umbrella.

    A large corporate hooray party.

    Office snacks on demand, at anytime, for free.

    A bonus check. One that at the age of 23 was a shockingly large one.

    All are things I’ve experienced in my career during a corporate change management project that constituted employee recognition and perks. Despite the fact that the umbrella was expensive (for an umbrella) because of its cute designer label and the bonus check as I mentioned was large for the context of my 23 year old, living paycheck to paycheck mind (so much so that my new husband and I actually went out to dinner at a place we never thought we’d be able to afford), none of them really positively affected how I felt about the job, or the hours and hours I put into the work and the project that was taking place.In short, they didn’t create engagement for me.

    By some standards, all the perks and recognition could have been seen as the things that make a great employer and drive employee performance. And in some workplaces, they might be. But as the June 2015 cover story, What Makes a Great Employer, of HR Magazine states, “The foundation of a great workplace lies in a culture of trust and engagement that unites management and the workforce in a common vision that’s not only about success but that describes the type of organization an employer wants to be.”

    The article later goes on to state, “Indeed, the leaders of these companies talk about their people not as employees who can be satisfied with the right compensation package, but as colleagues who are invested in the business.”

    When the department managers brought around the bonus checks in my example, two of the three didn’t know my name. They didn’t know what role I was playing in the project or what contribution I had made (or had not made) to it. They were just passing out bonus checks.

    In order to help people feel invested in the business, organizations need to:

    1. Build an intentional culture.  Define the purpose and vision of the organization and how each job and therefore each person impacts that purpose and takes it on as his or her own. This vision and purpose should be imbedded into all people management aspects- selection, training, evaluation and compensation and most importantly lived out through leadership.
    2. Communicate with intention. Purpose and impact should be communicated regularly and should involve two-way communication that seeks to gain constant feedback from employees on what is going well and what isn’t.
    3. Live Transparent. Communicating with intention should foster transparency, but beyond communicating the message of the business and how each person fits into this purpose, transparency should include openness about financial and operational issues and should involve each employee feeling comfortable coming to his or her manager about any issue because the manager is seen as both approachable and accessible.

    These are the larger pieces of the puzzle that lead to respect and trust that foster empowerment and employee engagement. Without them, you can have the greatest perks in the world, but they will never lead to an organization winning a great place to work award. At the end of the day, an organization wins this type of award because employees feel valued.

    How does your organization create an intentional culture?

    If you like this post, you may also like:

    What You Pay Does Matter

    The Best Way to Thank Employees is to Make it Personal

  • What You Pay Does Matter

    What You Pay Does Matter

    “$11.32 an hour,” she said. “That’s what many people can earn sitting on their couch. How am I supposed to encourage them to get off the couch when many of the jobs they qualify for don’t pay that?”

    This statement came from a frustrated state career center worker tasked with getting individuals off federal and state assistance through a job placement program.

    I could turn this conversation into a political post, but I won’t go there.  Instead, I’d like to focus on how it illustrates a basic premise of motivation.

    I’m going to spend the next few weeks talking about how to give people what they really want out of work (motivational factors) through performance management and maximization practices, but let’s face it, when I do this, I’m making the assumption that a basic living wage, or even a wage that is competitive with the wage someone could go across the street and earn with the skill set they have, (a hygiene factor) is provided in all workplaces I’m addressing. I can talk all day long about how meaningful work leads to performance maximization, but if that meaningful work doesn’t meet basic needs, or if basic needs can be met by, well doing nothing, then people are going to turn to being unproductive or turn to walking across the street for the higher wage. They are going to sit on the couch either literally or metaphorically by the way the show up to work and well, do just about nothing, or by taking their skills and going elsewhere.

    It goes back to one of the basic premises of workplace (or well really any place) motivation that drives behavior:  hygiene vs. motivational factors. Thanks to Herzberg, we have this tried and true theory that tells us if you really want to get the most out of people, you need motivational factors in the workplace like challenge, autonomy, creativity, etc.- basically all things that lead to meaningful work- to actually have the power to truly motivate someone.

    However, hygiene factors keep people from being dissatisfied. And a lack of dissatisfaction is necessary for the motivational factors to work. Someone may be overwhelmingly content with the work they do, but if you don’t pay them enough to meet a certain standard of living, that oftentimes they compare to others around them that are doing the same or similar work, the motivational factors won’t work at least in the long run.

    So before you go giving someone autonomy and meaning in their work and assuming that will keep people satisfied at the least or motivated at the most, look at how much you are paying. Get out your local wage survey and examine if your wages are competitive with the competitor across the street and around the world.   Goodness help us all when the competitor across the street ends up being the federal assistance program (okay, maybe I did have to get a little political).

    When was the last time you examined your wage practices?