Horizon Point Consulting

Category: Performance Management

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 on Performance Management.

The Most Popular Emerging Employee Benefit is…

I remember thinking, how am I going to do this?

I had just started my first full-time job out of college, and I was getting married that year. I had been given two weeks of vacation for my first year that I had to earn throughout the year.

If I wanted to take a honeymoon and be off a day or two before the wedding, I really had almost no time left to take off. And a couple of my good friends were getting married that summer too, and I was in their weddings out of town.

Was I going to have to lie and fake sick to be able to take enough time off to be in attendance for these events (since sick time was a separate time off bank at the time), or was I going to have to choose and miss something in order to be at work?

And these decisions did not take into account whether I even needed to be present to get work done. I could actually report to work missing something important to me, and quite possibly not have much work if any, to get accomplished if I was wise with my time and worked efficiently.

According to a survey out by MetLife (click to download the full survey for this information), the most coveted emerging employee benefit is unlimited time off.

Seventy-two percent of those surveyed said that unlimited time off is the emerging benefit they are most interested in.

I could understand this in my early twenties when a benefit like this would have been unheard of, and I can certainly understand it now with my life involving time off needs that don’t just revolve around me but also the needs of a growing family.

The survey states: “Emerging benefits help employers create the kind of culture that demonstrates a deeper level of care for employees, communicating that their needs are valued and their employer is committed to their success.”

In addition, and possibly more importantly, unlimited time off communicates trust to employees. Trust that they know when and how much is appropriate to take off and for the right reasons.

It also demonstrates a level of trust in leaders who are managing employees’ time to be able to utilize this benefit in a way that leads to company and individual success.

So in a day and age where unlimited time off is an actually possibility, would it be your most coveted benefit offering?

And if you are an employer with the ability to provide this benefit, what keeps you from doing so?

Full disclaimer: We offer unlimited time off at Horizon Point, and I have found that our people have never abused it. If anything, there is not enough time taken off when needed.

April 2, 2019
When striving for a culture of “collaboration” kills your business
We conducted a focus group about a year ago with a group of business leaders around the idea of organizational values and culture. In this focus group, we presented seven key values, based on research that defined organizational culture. The goal was to see what these professionals thought about these seven values in the context of a broader assessment product. And whether this values set could predict a company’s culture in order to match candidates to cultures that align with individual the candidates’ values.

Often things like this come down to semantics, but one piece of feedback where there was agreement was that the value of “collaboration” is something all companies want. Is this really what we meant or did we need to change the name of this value to reflect more of something that could be seen on a continuum? Many of the others values we presented were viewed as a continuum that didn’t lend the value to be seen as right or wrong, just different in different work environments.

We haven’t changed the name of this value yet and maybe we will, but in reflecting on the feedback and on experience working with a variety of companies that try to promote a collaborative culture, I have seen the dark side of it.

The dark side of a focus on collaboration comes in the form of it sabotaging organizational health. It flows something like this from a behavioral perspective:
1. In the name of collaboration, we have to have “everyone” involved in order to make a decision big or small.
2. Because “everyone” has to be involved to make any decision, it takes forever. Never mind that we already passed a budget that has built in decisions in it or adopted a strategy that everyone agreed upon, we still need to meet on the minutia of those efforts. And, oh by the way, if you want to get everyone together in a meeting to decide on this minor detail, it will have to be in a month because everyone’s calendar is full from the other small decisions that it was decided needed everyone’s involvement that came up two months ago.
3. People get frustrated because everything takes so long and they begin to feel like they have no control over what they were hired to do. They don’t have any decision-making authority even if their job title warrants it.
4. It looks like everyone needs to be involved in the decision-making process in the name of collaboration, but everyone still knows who makes the final decision or whose voice is heard the most. So, a lot of political posturing takes place in preparation for those meetings that have to be scheduled for months out.
In the end, what is couched as “collaboration” is actually the complete opposite of it. And the results that the “collaboration” is designed to lead to ends up being missed opportunities and high turnover because of frustration and stalled decision making.

When have you seen “collaboration” go bad?
February 26, 2019
Do Meetings Negatively Impact Productivity?
Last week, during a meeting with a client’s leadership team, we got on the topic of just how much time they spend each week in meetings. One of the managers told me that meetings take up about five to six hours of his day, every day! That only leaves him two hours to get his work accomplished. When I asked him to tell me about his meetings, his list went something like this:

8 AM- Meeting with team 1 to discuss issues

9 AMM- Meeting with team 2 to determine what issues from 8 AM meeting are critical

10 AM- Meeting with team 3 to determine how to manage/resolve critical issues determined in 9AM meeting

And this is EVERY day! Three hours of his day are spent discussing the same topics with different groups.

How often have you attended a meeting and walked out thinking “that was a waste of my time” or “that could have been said in an email.” Have you ever gone to a regularly scheduled meeting for months and then have someone in that meeting tell you that there probably isn’t a need for you to attend?

Studies show that high level executives spend on average over twenty hours per week in meetings. That’s half of their workweek! Lower level managers spend between about ten and fifteen hours per week in meetings. They are such a part of our lives that companies like MeetingKing.com and Meeting Stats help to quantify time and money spent on meetings as well as help to organize and track meeting information.

While we can’t eliminate meetings from our workday, there are strategies that we can use to make sure those meetings are successful and lead to an increase in productivity instead of a decrease.
1. Before scheduling a meeting, ask yourself if it’s really necessary. Can you accomplish your goal by sending an email, or picking up the phone for a quick call? Are you duplicating information that is covered in another meeting?
2. Invite the right people. As you add others to the meeting invite, ask yourself if they really need to attend, or if the information presented during the meeting can be passed along to them afterwards. Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO, has the “two pizza rule”. Never invite more people than what two pizzas would comfortably feed.
3. Prepare in advance. In order to maximize your time, plan the meeting out in advance and send a copy of the meeting agenda out to the attendees at least 24 hours prior if possible. Then stick to it (both the agenda and the allotted time). According to Meeting King, research shows that 39% of employees admit to dozing off during meetings. Don’t let your meeting drag on so long that you’re putting them to sleep!
4. Designate a scribe or secretary. Have someone take meeting minutes that can be distributed afterwards to those employees who were not invited (or couldn’t attend), but need to know what was discussed or decided during the meeting.
5. Reassess the need. If you have standing meetings, reassess them occasionally to determine if they’re still necessary. Is the content still relevant, do they overlap with other meetings that could be combined, are those in attendance still required, and are they effective?
If you tallied up the time you sent in meetings in the last month, how much of that time would you consider productive versus unproductive?
February 21, 2019
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:

Know Yourself

Match Yourself

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.

January 22, 2019
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?
December 18, 2018