Horizon Point Consulting

Category: Talent Management and Development

We provide full service talent management and talent development consulting services. Read our blogs in this category for stories and best practices from real clients and real research.

  • Have an Employee Bored as a Gourd? Not an ideal employment state!

    Have an Employee Bored as a Gourd? Not an ideal employment state!

    What’s one thing that is extremely detrimental to both employers and employees? Boredom at work!

    I once worked with an adult client wanting to make a career change.  She was an extremely talented individual, and in talking with her about her then current employer she says she felt like she was just a “warm body”.  One of the main reasons she wanted a change was because she was bored as a gourd at work!  She worked for a government contractor (a waste of taxpayer money as she sat there bored) and none of her talents and skills were being utilized in that role.
    Also consider a quote from a book, Tribes by Seth Godin:
    “Consider the receptionist at a publishing company I visited a week later. There she was, doing nothing. Sitting at a desk, minding her own business, bored out of her skull. She acknowledged that the front office is very slow and that she just sits there, reading romance novels and waiting. And she’s been doing it for two years.” 
    Two thoughts come to mind on boredom at work:
    1. What a waste of money! As a leader, why would you pay people to be bored?
    2. What a waste of talent!  This may even be more of a shame.  Leaders should be making more leaders, and leadership isn’t cultivated through boredom.

    What if you are an employee and bored?

    Two courses of action exist:

    1.  Change your work environment. You may want to check out these two posts to discover if there is a better fit for you in the workplace:
    2.  Proactively ask for challenging or varied tasks.  Does your boss seem overloaded and stressed, but you are reading your romance novel?  Simply ask him/her if there is something you can help with.   If they don’t volunteer anything (why they aren’t volunteering, is again, a topic for another day) pay attention to what they are spending time on and see if you can help them without being asked.  Prove your worth and your talents by proactively getting things done without being asked to do so.
  • A Look Back On the Best Way to Thank Employees is to Make it Personal

    A Look Back On the Best Way to Thank Employees is to Make it Personal

    In 2015, we worked with a client where one of the company’s core values was relationships.  The value they place on relationships, with their employees and their customers, leads to a competitive advantage for the company. But I don’t think they do it because it creates a competitive advantage. They do it because it is just the right thing to do.

    One thing I learned from them is how this value actually plays out in the way that they recognize and reward employees.

    As an outsider looking in they:

    1. Get to know their people as people, not just as workers
    2. Set clear expectations for everyone in the company
    3. Reward people in a personal way when expectations are met. They are able to do this because they did step number one.

    Because they reward people in a personal way, their employees are more loyal, work harder and continue to meet and exceed the clear expectations that are set.

    For example, they have a high performing engineer. The guy loves anything to do with planes and flying. He did a great job last year. His bonus was flying lessons (and in case you didn’t know, flying lessons are not cheap).

    I have a book sitting on my shelf in my office that is titled 1501 Ways To Reward Employees by Bob Nelson. It is a good little book to get you thinking. It lists things like “provide a free makeover, give a full-day pass to a spa, give passes for bungee jumping, skydiving, hot-air balloon ride, whitewater rafting, provide lessons: golf, scuba, flying, rafting, tennis, horseback riding, cooking, painting…” and so on and so forth.

    All these things are cool, but if you give someone who is scared of heights skydiving lessons, that isn’t rewarding, that is scary to them.   I’d love a pass to the spa, but would my husband? Nope. And if you gave him a pass to the spa thanking him for a job well done, I think his first thought would be, you don’t even know me at all do you? Taking the time to know people on a personal level communicates to them that they matter and you care.

    If you are going to reward people, make sure what you are doing is actually rewarding. This means that giving the same reward to everyone company-wide, is oftentimes not rewarding to most.   A ham at Christmas is nice, but do all your employees like ham?

    And before you go saying, well money is rewarding to everyone, just give everyone money as bonus, stop and think about that for a minute. I just had a conversation with someone that is willing to take a pay cut for more flexibility at her job. Money isn’t rewarding to her, the flexibility is.   She will work harder for the boss that gives her more flexibility in getting her work done than she will the boss that pays her more.

    How do you personalize your rewards? When you do, what results do you see?

  • 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?

  • Building Culture When There’s No Building: Remote Workforces

    Building Culture When There’s No Building: Remote Workforces

    Even with today’s technology, many people have a hard time wrapping their minds around the concept of a virtual company. When someone asks me where Horizon Point’s office is located and I respond that we are a virtual organization, I often get some puzzled looks.

    Their first question is usually “If you don’t have an office, where do you work?” And that’s often followed up with something along the lines of “Don’t you miss interacting with other people?”

    Truthfully, I’m always interacting with people, including co-workers, clients, fellow HR professionals, and other members of the community. I just don’t do any of that from a central location. Depending on the day my office is at home, at a client site, in my car, or even at Panera Bread.

    Virtual organizations have unique challenges when it comes to creating a sense of company culture. How do you get your employees around the water cooler when the water cooler doesn’t exist and even if it did, your employees aren’t there to congregate?

    1. Clearly define your company’s mission and core values. Make sure employees know the organization’s mission and core values, speak to them often, and ensure your employees actions are guided by them. Recognize employees when they exemplify your organization’s mission or core values.
    2. Take opportunities to bring your team together, whether in-person or virtually. If your employees are all local, hold regular meetings with the entire team to talk about what’s going on in the company or plan social events to bring them all together. If they are spread out, hold virtual meetings regularly. Give them opportunities to get to know each other and build a sense of teamwork. Come together at conferences, workshops, or other work-related events.
    3. Recognize employees for a job well done. Remote employees still need feedback and recognition. Give them a call to congratulate them or thank them, send them a card in the mail, or even send out regular recognition emails to your staff.
    4. Be there when they need you. Virtual employees can’t just come knocking on your office door when they need help, but you can ensure that you’re there when they need you. Be prompt in responding to their calls or emails. Take the initiative to check in with them regularly. Don’t ever make them feel like you’re too busy to give them your time and attention.
    5. Encourage them to lean on each other. Another way to help build teamwork is to encourage your team to support each other. If an employee comes to you with an issue and you know another member of your team has expertise in that area, connect the two and encourage them to work together to resolve the issue.

    Communication is key to building company culture, whether your employees are all under one roof or spread far and wide.

    For more on remote workforces, read our blog It Doesn’t Matter How and Where Work Gets Done. The Death of Office Space, Office Hours and the Employee-Employer Relationship.

  • Can You Really Reduce Turnover?

    Can You Really Reduce Turnover?

    Guest blog written by: Steve Graham

    Conversations around reducing employee turnover, also known as talent retention, have been around since work began.  Even though the topic is not new, the challenges facing employers and their approaches to reducing turnover is.   Generational attitudes about how long a person remains at one job has dramatically shifted. For decades, people identified a career or found a job and they stayed with one employer until retirement.

    One reason for this shift in tenure, is how the modern career path is navigated.  Many of the foundational thoughts on “career” do not apply in today’s workplace.  According to a recent article in the Harvard Business Review , by psychology researcher Tania Luna and international executive Jordan Cohen, said “ Modern employees are suffering from their belief in the “career myth,” what they describe as “a delusional belief in the outdated idea of linear career progression.” Luna and Cohen explained, “People today can no longer rely on an outdated system of career advancement — one that presumes employees will be given incremental chances for career advancement along with raises and title changes.”

    These shifts in career management and view of careers have created new challenges for the modern workplace in reducing turnover.  Some may argue about the importance of emphasis on talent retention, as a result of these changing attitudes about work and career.  Having a talent retention plan as part of an HR strategy is well advised. What is most important is ensuring your strategy and the approach addresses the new thinking about careers and the modern workplace.

    Understand that people will leave no matter how well developed your talent retention strategy, your benefits, perks, work-life-balance, etc.  People move on and understanding this reality will enable a better-prepared workplace for reducing turnover.   Experts argue over the key driving factors that cause turnover, and likewise, there are a lot of opinions on what helps reduce turnover.

    Turnover factors can be unique to an organization and industry sector. There are common methods in reducing it that can be applied to almost any work environment.  The goal of preventing turnover is not a reality. Reducing turnover should be the focus.  The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) provides benchmarking data on turnover.  They have found, regardless of industry type or bias, employee job satisfaction and engagement factors are key ingredients of successful employee retention programs. In a recent SHRM study, Employee Job Satisfaction and Engagement: The Doors of Opportunity are Open research report, employees identified these five factors as the leading contributors to job satisfaction:

    1. Respectful treatment of all employees at all levels of the organization.
    2. Compensation and benefits.
    3. Trust between employees and senior management.
    4. Job security.
    5. Opportunities to use their skills and abilities at work.

    *Source: SHRM, Employee Job Satisfaction and Engagement: The Doors of Opportunity are Open research report

    Related to factor five above, finding purpose is essential in creating an environment that promotes talent retention.  People who approach work with a purpose are more likely to be engaged and receive value in what they do, therefore, helping to reduce turnover.  Provide a work environment that allows people to find purpose and contribute at their highest levels.

    Having leaders with a servant approach can help cultivate purpose-friendly workplaces.  Zoe Mackey, of Berrett-Koehler Publishers, in her article titled: Why Servant Leadership Reduces Employee Turnover Rates said, “Adopting servant leadership can be an important part of the solution. After all, servant leadership is based on the foundational idea that learning to serve those around you helps them achieve their greatest potential. Who wouldn’t want to work for a boss like that?”  By creating a sense of community and strong foundation of trust, reducing turnover using a servant leadership approach works.

    People will not find purpose unless they are allowed to grow.  That is why a focus on career development helps reduce turnover.  The Association for Talent Development  (ATD) has extensive information on career development’s influence in reducing turnover.  A recent article from ATD stated, “Career development also can help with retention because employees can develop a sense of loyalty for employers who are willing to invest in them. Likewise, when it is time to hire new employees, career development programs can be attractive to job-seekers.” The sense of value to the employee is a driver in loyalty.  This is an important piece in talent retention.

    Turnover is never fun, but it is a reality.  Shifting your strategy to better align with the needs and attitudes of the modern career path is the first step.  Make it hard for people to leave your organization by offering them outstanding value and return on their investment in working for you.

     

    About the Author: 

    Steve Graham serves as vice president for marketing, HR business partner and college instructor. He holds graduate degrees in management and higher education. As a life-long learner, he has additional graduate and professional education in executive and professional coaching, health care administration and strategic human resource management. Steve is also the Founder and President of Valiant Coaching & Talent Development, LLC.

    He is a certified HR professional with The Society for Human Resource Management, certified coach with the International Coach Federation and a Global Career Development Facilitator. His professional memberships include: The Society for Human Resource Management, the American Society for Healthcare Human Resources Administration, Association for Talent Development and International Coach Federation.