Friday, September 23, 2005

Employee Retention: It's a Changing Game

by Mike Beitler

As a management consultant, I have seen some poorly conceived retention policies at otherwise well-run companies. The philosophies underlying these policies lack some basic knowledge of two things:

1. human nature, and

2. the changing world around us

Human Nature

Let's start with human nature. The practice of management requires an understanding of how people work. Successful managers can be forgiven if they do not know how a particular machine works, or how to debit and credit the general ledger, or how to write HTML code. But, managers must know how people work. Specifically, they need to know how people work well.

People are motivated by goals… their own! Organizations that help individuals achieve their goals and career aspirations have less trouble with retention. Are you helping your best employees achieve their goals?

I recently read some research findings that were just plain silly. The findings you ask: Workers leave organizations for two reasons:

1. they feel mistreated or unappreciated

2. they can get more money/compensation from another organization

The researchers went on to say, most workers are unaware of more money at other organizations until they feel mistreated or unappreciated. Did you catch that? If not, re-read the "two" findings.

Here's my interpretation: If you treat your workers well and make them feel appreciated they will stay with your organization; money is not the primary driver for workers leaving. Help you workers achieve their goals. I believe "appreciative" workers are more motivated than "happy" workers.

Before you think this is more "soft" management talk, let's look at some "hard" facts. The average cost of hiring a new worker is one-and-a-half times the worker's annual salary. And, the average worker will need a year to master his/her job skills.

The Changing World Around Us

As the world changes around us, we must change the way we think about retention (and everything else). Gone are the days of the homogeneous workforce. The world is being changed by unstoppable trends: globalization and an aging workforce.

Future work teams will include three generations of workers (a 23-year-old worker, a 48-year-old worker, and a 73-year-old worker), workers with different religions and nationalities, and workers with dramatically different life experiences.

The brain drain in developed countries can be slowed by retaining older, highly skilled workers. But, that is not nearly enough. Companies must compete globally for talent. (And remember what is necessary to retain these individuals. We must understand their individual goals and career aspirations.)

American companies that hope to depend on American talent exclusively will fail miserably. American knowledge workers are losing their competitive edge. Let's look at some more "hard" facts:

1. In China, 42% of students earn undergraduate degrees in science or engineering. In the U.S., the figure is less than 5%.

2. Only 70% of U.S. high school students graduate. The U.S. public education system was recently ridiculed by a British news journal. When you consider that the British public school system is arguably the worst in Europe, Americans should hear this as a wake-up call.

3. Only 32% of U.S. students leaving high school qualify to attend a four-year college or university.

Add to this some alarming facts about off-shoring. One organization recently said it was off-shoring jobs to India not simply because the cost was lower, but because the quality of work was better. The off-shoring of high-level professional jobs (such as engineering and IT) is now a common practice.

Conclusion

Organizations must do two critical things:

1. develop retention policies that recognize the need to understand the individual workers' goals and career aspirations, and

2. learn how to recruit and develop talent from around the world.

These are big changes for most organizations. Is your organization ready for these changes?

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Dr. Mike Beitler is the author of "Strategic Organizational Change." Get a free 7-part mini-course and learn more about the book at http://www.strategic-organizational-change.com

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Wednesday, September 21, 2005

Clear Thinking About Stress

by Bruce Taylor

There seems to be a lot of confusion and loose thinking about stress in popular journals and books. How else can you explain terms like "good stress" and concepts like "A certain amount of stress is good for you," or advice like "Stress is unavoidable." Once you understand the meaning of stress you'll realize that stress is always harmful, that there is no "safe" level of stress, and that you can deflect stress if you know how. Let's start by straightening out the definition of stress: stress is not a mental or emotional state, and it's certainly not a moral or metaphysical issue. Stress is a physiological and medical condition, produced by prolonged feelings of insecurity and anxiety.

Physical and Mental Symptoms

The Japanese word, "karoshi" means, approximately, "death by stress," and it's a significant source of mortality among Japanese workers, especially middle-aged white collar men. Stress kills them either directly, by causing their bodies to break down, or indirectly, through depression and suicide. In either case, stress is bad news and it's no exaggeration to say that your life is at stake in a stressful situation. Chronic stress has been linked to degenerative diseases of the heart, brain, intestines, skin, liver, pancreas, kidneys, and immune system. There is virtually no system or organ of your body that isn't at risk from stress.

Our Biological Inheritance

If stress is so harmful, why in the world are we so susceptible to it? Wouldn't you think that evolution would have eliminated it? In a sense, stress was invented millions of years ago, long before we became human, as an adaptation to living in a dangerous world. To explain this paradox, let's imagine one of our long-ago ancestors on the plains of Africa who suddenly looks up and sees a leopard on the branch over his head. In much less than half a second, without any conscious thought, his brain registers the picture of the leopard and classifies it as a life-threatening danger. Then the brain starts to mobilize the body either to run away or for defense.

Fight or Flight?

When the brain perceives the leopard in the tree and decides that it is dangerous, it sends a signal to the adrenal glands, which sit on top of your kidneys. In response, the adrenal glands produce two hormones: first adrenaline and later cortisol.

Adrenaline acts very quickly on almost every part of your body. Your heart begins to beat more quickly and strongly, the small blood vessels in your skin contract (that's why you look "white as a sheet" after you're scared), your stomach stops digesting food, and your vision narrows to a "tunnel". All of these changes make you, for a little while, stronger and quicker than you normally are - ready to run away from the leopard.

As you're running away from the leopard, the adrenal glands start to produce a hormone called cortisol. Cortisol acts to increase the amount of sugar in your blood for quick energy, and if you have to flee for days and days without food, cortisol helps your body convert muscle and bone into energy.

The combined effect of adrenaline and cortisol is to give us the energy we need to deal with dangerous situations - and that's why we evolved the fight/flight response in the first place.

Where Does the Stress Come In?

As long as your body is reacting to a leopard in a tree, everything is fine: you run away and the stress hormones start to disappear after an hour or so. But if you can neither run away from the danger nor fight it, then the levels of stress hormones never go down. The adrenaline keeps on making your heart beat hard, and the cortisol keeps breaking down muscle and bone to keep your blood sugar high. If this goes on for days at a time, you will start to feel the effects: changes in your sleep and eating patterns, tunnel vision, abnormal tiredness, and a general anxiety and uneasiness. What we commonly call stress is your perception of your body's physical reactions to elevated hormones.

Why Does Work Cause Stress?

"Well," you might ask, "That's all very nice about reacting to the leopard in the tree, but why does my work trigger a stress reaction - I haven't noticed any leopards about." It seems that the brain is not very sophisticated about recognizing danger: it reacts to an angry boss, or an upcoming deadline, or an office bully in just the way it would react to the leopard: it starts to mobilize the stress hormones to either fight or run away. But in the office you can't do either one - you can't punch people in the nose and you have to come back tomorrow, even if you don't want to. This combination of perceiving danger and not being able to do anything about it triggers job stress, and it won't stop until you can either fight or flee.

More Control Means Less Stress

If lack of control makes stress worse, then it follows that being in control counters stress. "Being in control" means different things to different people. For some workers, it just means getting to decide when they take their breaks, and to have some flexibility in scheduling. For others, it means getting to decide how to get the job done: what order to machine the parts or how to process the forms most efficiently. But for all workers, getting to make decisions about how and when to do their job reduces the feeling of danger, lowers stress and improves health.

Learning Conquers Stress

Many, many studies show that one of the best things you can do to reduce your stress level is to start learning something new. Ideally, it should be something new at work, but that's not necessary. If you're feeling stress at work, taking an evening course, or even listening to books on tape helps put you back in control of your life and, as we've seen, more control produces less stress.

Social Support Helps Fight Stress

The last big thing that you can do to reduce your stress level is to build up a set of friends to support you. Studies show that, when assembly line workers are allowed to talk and socialize at their work stations, their level of stress goes down and the quality and speed of their work goes up. Similarly, if you can walk down the hall and drop in on a friend for a five-minute conversation, the social contact will start to reduce your anxiety and the stress associated with it.

What Does This All Mean For You?

We started out with the fuzzy thinking that produces notions like "good stress," and we learned that stress is inherently bad for you - very bad. We discovered that stress is not just in your head - it's making changes in your entire body. And we learned why we have stress in the first place - it's a leftover reaction to perceived danger, that gets triggered by modern-day situations like toxic work environments. And we learned at least three ways to reduce your stress level - take more control, start learning new skills, and develop a social support network. The bottom line is this: you need to take job stress seriously, because it can kill you; and there are actions you can take right now, on your own, to start lowering your stress.

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Bruce Taylor is the owner and principal of Unison Coaching, and helps people deal with difficult tasks and decisions in their lives. Bruce specializes in helping workers cope with stressful jobs, toxic job environments, and workplace bullying. He can be reached at bruce_taylor@unisoncoaching.com

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Road-Kill Mentality: Why Employers Aren't Calling You

by Marta Driesslein

Know the three reasons why you're not generating quality interviews? You're invisible, voiceless, or comatose. Pick one.

The longer you hibernate in the darkness of traditional job searching know-how, where no one can find you, the more likely your dormancy will negatively affect your career transition. When you decide it's time to make a career change, you have a choice: be the hunter or the prey. Choose the latter and you'll quickly become road-kill. Just ask the possum.

Playing possum neutralizes your marketability. Opossums are easy targets for vehicular traffic because they are slow-moving creatures. They quickly frighten and when they can't escape, they roll over, become limp, close their eyes, and hang their tongue out (which slows their heartbeat). To would-be predators, the animal looks dead, so interest is lost.

Sound like your job search? Are you as dead to prospective hiring managers or those in the position of assisting you through informal informational meetings? If there's no interest in what you have to offer, consider your branding -- the perception others have about you and your ability to contribute.

Do you:

• Complain you don't have time to conduct a job search?

• Suffer from paralysis of analysis in determining career options?

• Think "networking" is not for you because your contacts are limited?

• Project open reluctance to search in new fields for fear of rejection?

• Believe finding a job is most easily discovered using job search engines?

• Obscure your visibility to power executives due to confidentiality issues?

• Require a set-in-stone level of compensation or geographic preference regardless of market conditions?

If you answer yes to any of these, your career change is in dire need of resuscitation, and every second counts.

Velocity uncovers signals of hiring patterns. Most animals travel in packs or herds. Possums don't. They're hidden night creatures that often become road kill because they're secretive, go about their foraging in solitary, and are slow-moving. You'll bring speed and verve to your campaign and improve your odds of employers calling if you are:

• Mentally adaptable

• Emotionally flexible

• Geographically-mobile

• Financially-unshackled

• Professionally-scalable

Vitality gets you hired through emotional attachment. Radiate a genuine hearty enjoyment of living. An infectious positive attitude coupled with precision target positioning will land you a prized role; perhaps one custom-created for you where there were no posted openings.

Marketing success is two-fold: market share and mind share. People first buy emotionally, then logically. Hiring managers do the same. Capture both, the territory and their minds. If your career history and extracurricular activities demonstrate a 'joie de vivre' (joy of life), you'll inspire greater interest and remembrance from decision-makers over those better qualified.

If you're remote, sullen, or cynical, grow up, get help, get over it. Hiring often times is driven more by perceived cultural fit than professional industry-specific competency.

Secret job searches yield mediocre results. Counter anonymity in a fiercely-competitive employment market by ensuring you don't:

• Send mass resume mailings to untargeted employers

• Peruse online job boards for your main source to uncover jobs

• Remain a generalist in terms of career focus and position objectives

• Use resume software programs that auto-generate templated resumes

• Forget to follow up on every oral and written job hunt communication

Key rules in product marketing equally apply to your tactical career moves. Remember you're the product and your customer is the person who has the ultimate power to hire you. Keep in mind:

• Brand awareness and consideration are not one-time events

• Continually communicate the central message you want your audience to perceive about your product

• Branding creates a singular distinction, strategic awareness and differentiates the product in the mind of the target market

Revive a lifeless career campaign by gaining early and steady visibility. The fact is that gaining notoriety through a personal public relations campaign should not start at the point of market entry.

Top-of-mind awareness is an integrated marketing strategy that deploys multiple channels to ensure a product's branding prevails. It's done foundationally and consistently. Early, steady visibility preemptively brings you, to them.

Know the causes for employer snub?

• A lifeless or negative persona

• A career path with no pulse or vibrancy

• A rigidness that contradicts changing market conditions

Road-kill or road racer? Which one are you? You have a choice. You better find out what's needed to resurrect yourself, and soon. Your competition just got off of life-support, while you're in a daze still trying to figure out what just happened. Get moving.

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Marta Driesslein, CECC is a management consultant for R.L. Stevens & Associates Inc.

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Recruitment - What you're really, really looking for

by Alan Fairweather

Imagine that you're a sports coach and you need a new player on the team. Would you walk up to someone in the street and say - "I want you to come and play for my team. I'll train you to become the best player in the country." Sounds a bit ridiculous doesn't it?

What you'd probably do is watch players in other teams. On the other hand, you might decide to find some young player that you could develop for your team. So you'd spend some time looking for players in schools and colleges.

What is it you're looking for when you're watching these young people or more established players? Is it experience of the game or perhaps an all round knowledge of how it should be played or even just a good all round player. All of these would be good to have but what you're really looking for is - talent!

You're looking for that gift or flair or capacity to achieve your outcomes. If you're looking for a goal keeper, then you're looking for someone with that extra something that keeps the opposition from scoring. If you're looking for a shooter, or a winger or a quarter back then it's the same story, you're looking for talent.

It doesn't really matter how long they've been a player or whether they have a great knowledge of the game - you just need them to produce results.

It's no different when you're picking someone new for your team - you're looking for talent. And it's a different talent for every job. It could be:

*The talent to strip down an engine and rebuild it in record time *The talent to make other people feel at ease *The talent to produce reports that are clear and easy to read *The talent to persuade people to buy your product or service

Be absolutely clear what you need this person to do - keep in the forefront of your mind the outcomes that you'll be ultimately judged on.

Use your talent, be happy

It's important the person you employ is happy in their new job. Think for a moment about something you're good at, a talent that you have, something you can do better than lots of people. Do you enjoy doing whatever it is, does it make you happy? I'm sure it does.

When people use their talent in their job - what they do best, it makes them happy. It makes the customer happy, it makes the boss happy and it makes the person more productive. Sad to say it's not like that out in the world.

The Gallup Organisation did some research by asking millions of employees from countries throughout the world to respond to this statement -

"At work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day." The results were staggering; only 30% of employees were able to reply in the affirmative. And it's extremely unlikely that the remaining 70% will achieve world-class performance.

If you want success in your business and in your team - Pick people for what they do best, what they have a talent for.

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Discover how you can interview and recruit the best people for your team! Alan Fairweather is the author of "How to get More Sales by Picking the Best Team" This book is packed with practical things that you can do to - make your life easier and achieve your business goals.

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