Category: Skills Improvement

We all need a little personal development mixed in with our professional and career development. Read blogs in this category for personal skills improvement.

  • Five Elements of a Great Onboarding Experience

    Five Elements of a Great Onboarding Experience

    You found the perfect candidate, made them an offer they couldn’t resist, and now they’re ready to start work. While you’ve wowed them up to now, your onboarding and orientation experience is critical to keeping them and to your reputation as an employer of choice.

    • A study by Glint showed that employees who had a poor onboarding experience were eight times less likely to be engaged in their work, with 40% of those employees reporting disengagement just three months after hire. Those same employees reported that they would not recommend the company to others.
    • According to a 2014 study by SHRM, one company surveyed reported that new employees who attended a structured orientation program were 69% more likely to remain with the organization for three years.

    One of my favorite tasks in HR has always been designing and implementing onboarding and orientation programs for organizations. I love working with organizations to learn what processes they have in place, helping them determine where they need to make improvements, and then following up after implementation to see the results.

    So what makes a great onboarding and orientation program?

    1. Communication. As with most things, a great onboarding and orientation experience begins with communication. Even before a new hire’s first day, there is often communications that need to be sent out to them. This may include new hire forms, information on where they need to report on their first day, or even just a welcome email from the leadership team. Make sure this communication is welcoming, informative, and easy to disseminate. If you require new hires to fill out paperwork prior to their start date, provide clear and concise instructions on how to complete and return the forms. Try to think like a new hire, anticipate what questions they may have and answer them proactively.
    2. Preparation. The worst experience I ever had as a new hire was walking in on my first day and being asked to put together my own orientation packet! And it only got worse when I was shown to my office only to find out I had no desk, no computer, and a room full of storage boxes (and they had a month to prepare). Being ready for your new hire to show up on their first day goes a long way. Be ready to greet them at the front desk when they arrive, have their desk, computer, and any other equipment they need ready for them, along with all of their access and login information. Make sure that you communicate their start date with leadership and anyone else who may be involved in their onboarding and orientation so that they are not caught off guard. And maybe even have a few goodies waiting for them when they arrive that first day or plan to take them out to lunch.
    3. Elimination of downtime. One of the worst things I think you can do on a new hire’s first day is leave them alone. Think back over your first day experiences, were you ever left to your own devices? If you answered yes, chances are you also remember wondering why they weren’t prepared for you, why they didn’t have your first day scheduled out, and when someone was going to come to rescue you from your infinite boredom. There are so many tasks to accomplish when a new employee starts, so there really should be no reason to drop them in a room or at a desk and leave them. Designing a standard orientation schedule for their first day, and even their first week will help ensure that there isn’t an excessive amount of downtime for new hires. Consider what paperwork they need to complete, what policies and procedures you should review with them, what training should be completed and who will present it, and who they need to be introduced to. Consider establishing a mentor or buddy program where a tenured employee is paired up with new hires to help them get acclimated to the organization, then have that mentor or buddy help walk the new hire through orientation.
    4. Follow through. Onboarding and orientation are often used interchangeably, however, they are two very different things. While your organization’s orientation may take a day or even a few weeks, onboarding an employee may take up to a year. So what’s the difference? Orientation involves tasks like the completion of paperwork, reviewing company policies and procedures, introductions to team members, and introductory training to understand their role. Onboarding goes well beyond that and includes more in-depth training and management involvement. It is the process of helping the new employee get their feet wet and learn how to become a contributing member of the team. While orientation may be a very formal process, onboarding is often much more informal. Don’t drop the ball after the initial orientation. Make sure that the new hire is being provided with the tools, training, and resources they need to understand and be successful in their role.
    5. Follow up. Designing and implementing an orientation and onboarding program can be a huge undertaking. But all of that effort could be wasted if the program is not effective, so a critical step in the process is to evaluate the results. A great way to do this is to have new hires complete a post-orientation survey and provide feedback on what worked well, what didn’t, and what they felt was missing. I also recommend having a touch base conversation with the new hire after they’ve been with the company for 60-90 days and had a chance to get settled. Use the feedback from the survey and touch base meeting to continue to improve your organization’s onboarding and orientation programs. And as noted in the statistics listed above, another measurable indicator of an effective onboarding program is an increase in employee retention.

    Based on the five elements of a great onboarding experience, how would you rate your organization’s program?

  • 4 Ways to Help Change Happen When Change is Hard

    4 Ways to Help Change Happen When Change is Hard

    “For anything to change, someone has to start acting differently.”

    from Switch by Chip and Dan Heath

    Change is all around us.  In our personal and professional lives, just when we might get to used to something, it changes.  Many of the most life-altering personal changes that we choose like marriage and children we tend to embrace and get excited about.  We put ourselves in these situations of change.

    At work, though, changes often occur, and we didn’t prompt them. They are unsettling and hard.

    We work a lot with clients helping them manage change.  In addition, when we are asked to come in to do training, whatever type it is, it is usually because the organization wants some type of change to occur.

    So how do we help people through change?  I think the first thing to do is acknowledge that change is exhausting and then build strategies to help people avoid or overcome that exhaustion.  As stated in Switch by Chip and Dan Heath, “Change is hard because people wear themselves out….What looks like laziness is often exhaustion.”

     

    Here are four ways to help fight that exhaustion to make change easier.

    1. Limit your choices.  Much has been written about highly successful people who always wear the same clothes and/or always eat the same things, day after day.  Take, for example, Steve Jobs and the standard uniform he wore:  black turtleneck and jeans. Or Nick Saban and his supposed diet of a Little Debbie Oatmeal Cream Pie every morning for breakfast.  Why is this helpful?  Because if you don’t have to think about these things, it leaves you more mental energy to think about more important things.  Some practical things to do in limiting your choices:
    • Subscribe to services to limit your choices:  You may not want to eat an oatmeal pie every morning or wear the same thing every day.  Subscription-based services can help you limit your choices and also infuse variety in them. For example, meal services where meals are delivered to your door can be a good idea. What you eat is pre-chosen after you answer a few questions about preferences. These are saved and used to chart your weekly meals and you don’t have to think about your grocery list or if you forgot the key ingredient.  It is all right there. Subscriptions to clothing boxes (Trunk Club is my favorite), automatic reordering through Amazon, and other similar places can also help you cut the thinking out of everyday choices to help store up your mental reserves for more important things.
    • Set your three big to-dos for the day:  Your choices of to-dos are probably massive each day. Multiply that by weeks, months and years and it is a whole lot to wrap your mind around.  But, if you sit down each day (or week) and list the three things that are most important to get done that day, you are inadvertently limiting your choices of chasing multiple to-do rabbits.  I’m using Michael Hyatt’s FullFocus Planner to help me to do this.  Although some of the planners are overkill, I really like the set-up that prompts you to set three big rocks each day.  These should stem from the goals you set at the beginning of each quarter in the front of the planner.
    1. Scale the good.  Focus less on the bad.   Our minds are wired to problem solve.  While this is often a good thing, constant problem-solving mode zaps our energy and leads to fatigue.  To combat this mental default, sit down each week on your own or with your team and determine one thing that went right last week.   Use that to then focus your energy for the week of replicating that right instead of finding and fixing the wrong. Oftentimes this indirectly gets rid of a lot of problems.

    As it is stated in Switch, “Ask yourself, ‘What is the ratio of the time I spend solving problems to the time I spend scaling successes?’ We need to switch from archeological problem solving to bright-spot evangelizing.”

    1. Start behaving as though things are the new normal. I heard a clinical psychologist speak at a conference earlier in the week.   He described an activity he does with people who have come to him for marriage counseling.  In this, he asks the couple, what do people do in a happy marriage?  He said it takes a bit to get them actually listing behaviors, but when they get on this track, they list things like: they say I love you, go on dates, have sex, call to check in during the day, send flowers, cook each other meals, etc… You get the picture.  Then he tells them to pick one of these things and do it.  So, he makes them declare Thursday night date night (or hey, sex night) and asks them to commit to that.   He says, “Don’t try to be in love, just do what people in love do.”

    This obviously is tied to focusing on the good, not the bad as stated in number two, but it goes beyond that in building upon number one by not thinking about it. Just do it.  It builds in our automated sense to create habits, thus diminishing mental fatigue.

    1. Create change scripts.  If you are leading a change with a group of people, we find creating change scripts for communicating the changes to be very helpful.   We’ve created a format that outlines how to do this based on the way people process information. For example, most people start with the what when communicating change instead of the why, which immediately triggers the wrong part of the brain- hello panic- and then no one listens to the rest of what you have to say.

    You walk through filling in the blanks based on the outline, so it is designed to help limit the exhaustion and often paralysis that can come from thinking, “How on earth do I tell people this?”

    It also helps people stay on the same script, limiting confusion and assumptions that make change management harder than it has to be. If you’re interested in talking to us about this, reach out to us.

     

    Change is hard, but if you can limit the fatigue that comes from daily life that is compounded by the change process, you can help yourself and others navigate change more successfully.

    How do you keep your energy at a level at a place that allows you to navigate change effectively?

  • The 3 Quickest Ways to Turn Off a Hiring Manager

    The 3 Quickest Ways to Turn Off a Hiring Manager

    You’ve landed the job interview! In preparation for your meeting with your potential boss, what should you do? Start by checking out these 3 quick ways to turn off a hiring manager:

    1. Talking too much in the interview – Yes, the interviewer wants to know more about you and your experience. However, they don’t want your life history. Do your best to stick to short, concise answers to their specific questions. Don’t overshare – especially about previous terrible bosses! And, limit your questions to 2 or 3 good ones.

    2. Too much follow-up – A thank you note is always a good idea. And, asking at the close of the interview when the company expects to fill the position is acceptable. However, that is all the follow-up a hiring manager needs. If you call and/or email more than once, they will question whether or not you are someone they have the time and energy to manage.

    3. Negative social media image – Before you interview, be sure to clean up your social media. Trust me, the hiring manager will do an online search. Delete any unbecoming pictures, comments or even entire accounts if necessary. Avoid political rants at all costs and limit those selfies!

    Check out these articles from The Point Blog for more interview tips:

    3 Tips for Eliminating the Stress of a Job Interview

    How to Answer the Interview Question “What is Your Greatest Weakness?”

  • To be the Best, Run with the Best

    To be the Best, Run with the Best

    Since running my first marathon in 2009, it’s been in the back of my mind.  Can I run a sub-four-hour marathon?  Of the two I’ve done, I would have to shave more than twenty minutes off my time to do so.

    This summer, I started running occasionally with someone who runs fast.  So fast, she has qualified for Boston and qualified this year to run the New York City Marathon. I think her marathon PR is around a 3:24. This means she has finished a marathon about an hour faster than I have. She typically runs each mile at least one to two minutes faster, if not more even during her casual runs, than I am used to running.   And the other people she runs with do the same.

    I like her as a person and felt like her company would be nice. So I thought, well let’s just see if I can keep up.

    Running is often a metaphor for leading and living, and what I’ve found to be true in this new occasional running group is to be better, you have to surround yourself with people who are better than you are.

    Smarter, faster, stronger.  A better entrepreneur, wife, leader, heck, a better person in general.  If you want to be it, find someone or people who are that, and spend time with them.

    The things that I think hold true for being around people that are better than you are:

     

    1. You don’t have to be around them all the time to feel their impact. These ladies get up EARLY to run.  While in the summer that time was around 5 am, I went a couple times a week with them.  When that start time was pushed back to 4:30 am when school started back, I’ve found it hard to mentally wrap my mind around getting up that early.  Coupled with some inner ear problems I’ve had that is the worse first thing in the morning, I’ve only been running with them less than once a week now.  However, doing an 18-mile-long run with them showed me I could hold a sub-nine-minute mile for that long and make my sub-four hour marathon time possible.

    So, if you can devote one hour a week to being around those that are better in the arena you are trying to improve in, do it.  Everyone has one hour they can carve out each week, and it is worth it.  Schedule that time and stick to it.

     

    2. Their impact begins to become a habit or come naturally. When I’m not running with them, I’m still running faster than I used to.  Running in the nine to ten-minute mile pace has now become running in the eight to nine-minute mile pace for me.   The slower pace now seems weird or unnatural.  Running a half-marathon solo a couple of weeks ago led to a PR of 1:48:50 (8:18 per mile pace) and it felt good.

    So, when you aren’t physically with those who are better than you are, harness what they’ve taught you and practice it solo.   You might even want to schedule a solo “race” or trial run to help you see if you can go it alone, using their positive influence to move you forward.

     

    3. You’ll find that what you set out for them to help you improve in isn’t the only thing they make you better in. The person I started running with has a child the same age as one of mine.  They are both having a hard time reading in school.  I’ve found it hard to find people that I am friends with or that are good friends with my son who are dealing with the same challenge.  Talking about this while we run has helped me with perspective, insights, and calmness about the situation.  My husband ran with us for a bit right before the first report card of the year came out.  After we finished, he said, “Man, it was so good to hear her say she had the same worries that we do.  We aren’t the only ones dealing with this.”

    So, when you surround yourself with better people, don’t silo them into the one area you think they can help you improve in.  Be open to their insights as it relates to all aspects of life by building a holistic relationship with them.  Conversely, don’t see them as perfect either.  Just because they are making you better in one area doesn’t mean they are a God.  Offer them grace (and yourself grace) when it comes to learning and growing.

     

    4. Their impact allows you to have an impact on others.  The same child that struggles with reading does not struggle with running.  He loves it, and he is fast.  And if there is anything I’ve found to be true, it is when things are hard (like homework and school are for him right now) you’ve got to have an outlet to pursue some things you are great at and love.

    Running with her has allowed me to see this running fast thing as an opportunity to connect with my speed-demon seven-year-old.  Running unites us in a common passion. We’ve signed up for the Huntsville Marathon together.  He will do the kids’ marathon, where he will run 25.2 miles before race day, keeping a log, and then run the last one mile on race day when I run the 26.2 miles all at once.  I may not make my PR and sub-4:00 goals, but if I were a betting person, he will at least win his age group if not more.  Seeing him excel at something he loves is way better than me hitting my goal.

    My favorite runner is Shalane Flanagan.  She just finished 3rd in the New York City Marathon (where my fast friend finished in 3:42).  She’s my favorite because she seems to get this point so well.  She is committed to making herself and others better through creating opportunities for mutual gain.  To read more about this, check out the article from Runner’s World that was written after her stunning 2017 NYC Marathon win.

     

    When you find the opportunity to grow and learn from someone who is better than you are, take that experience and use it to help someone else learn and grow.  Or at least use it to share a passion with someone.

    How do you surround yourself with people who are better?

     

    Like this post?  You may also like:

     

    18 Powerful ‘Surround Yourself With People Who’ Quotes

    Why Smart People Surround Themselves With Smarter People

     

     

     

     

  • What You Should Title Your Job Posting

    What You Should Title Your Job Posting

    The job market is hot right now.  As mentioned in a previous post about targeting passive candidates, there are more job openings now than there are people to fill them.

    So how do you get a candidate’s attention for your job when you post it?  Obviously, some things to consider are where you post it (and hopefully you aren’t just posting and praying) and how you are advertising/boosting your post within those sites.

    But one thing we often neglect to consider is the actual title we place on the job when we post it.  Most often, we just pull the job title that is on the internal job description, but that title may or may not reflect what people are actually searching for in the market.

    So, to make the best decision about your job posting title:

    1. Make a list of the various titles you think would fit the job.  For example, Coder, Programmer, Developer, and Software Engineer could potentially all be a title on the list for a job that requires someone to perform computer programming.  Also, make a list of various qualifiers that may need to go in front of the keyword of the job title.  For instance, in this case, you may also need to use words like “Full Stack,” “Front End”,  “Java”, “Python” based on what specific skills/experience you need for the opening.

     

    1. Next, search for all these job titles you’ve come up with in the job posting board(s) of your choice by your geographic area. What brings up the highest volume of postings? Volume could indicate more people are searching for those keywords, thus more potential applicants.  Or it could indicate that you wouldn’t get noticed by applicants, and therefore fewer applicants because the list is so saturated.  In general, though, you want to be using a job title that will resonate with what candidates are searching for.

     

    1. Taking this information, you then need to do some testing. Take what you believe to be the top two job titles based on your search in number two, and post the same job posting with the two different titles on the same job board. Track the number of hits and applicants you get.  Which one performs better?

     

    1. It is a quality over quantity game. Even though you may get more applicants from posting a job one way does not mean that you are getting more quality applicants by posting it a certain way.  So, do an initial screening to see if the candidates are qualified for your opening to see which title is better.   For example, posting the job title “Developer” may get you a lot of applicants, but may not get you the level of skill you need. However, posting as “Full Stack Developer” or “Python Developer” or even posting as “Software Engineer” may get you the right quality of applicants.  That is why you have to test different titles and see what yields you the best results.

     

    1. In addition to tracking quality in the initial screening, track your quality over time. After you’ve made a hire, is it really a quality hire?  Obviously, there are a variety of factors that affect the quality of hire, but one could simply be the job title of the opening they were for which they were selected.  This is because your job title should reflect the reality of the position and steer people who have the knowledge, skills, and abilities that are a match for an opening.  For example, we have one client where “code monkeys” as they call them are not a good fit for their organization because the reality of the positions they have is that people need to not just know how to code but be able to more aptly be a “Full Stack Developer.”

     

    Making sure the job title reflects what the position really is as well as what will draw attention in the marketplace for the right applicants are the critical factors in determining what to “call” a job when you post it.

    How do you determine if you are posting a position with the right title?