How to Motivate Your Team When People Keep Quitting

Summary.   

When teammates leave, it can have a ripple effect. How can you help mitigate further attrition and keep everyone motivated and engaged when someone else quits? The authors offer six strategies: 1) Create certainty for your team wherever you can 2)  Solicit feedback to assess individual and collective capacity. 3) Enable autonomy. 4) Give your team permission to push back. 5) Shield your team. 6) Create connection.

Maintaining good morale and engagement is part and parcel of strong leadership. When you have turnover on your team, it is especially imperative that you take measures to keep your team positive and motivated. Research has shown that, due to social contagion, when a coworker quits, it can spread to affect other employees’ quitting behavior. That is, when one person leaves your team, it increases the likelihood that others will do the same.

Given this, here are six strategies to keep your team motivated when someone quits:

Create terra firma.

The human brain was not built for the amount of uncertainty we are facing at work and in our lives, write social psychologist Heidi Grant and the Chief Learning Officer for EY Americas Tal Goldhamer. With ever-changing shifts in the business landscape, customer and employee expectations, work arrangements, and an unclear end to the pandemic, it can feel like the ground is continually shifting underneath our feet. This uncertainty produces a threat state in the brain, which can result in decreased motivation, cooperation, self-control, and overall well-being. Turnover on your team only adds to this threat state.

To counter this, create certainty for your team wherever you can. If you have no plans to leave the company, make that clear. You might say, “Just so you know, I don’t have any plans to leave. I will be here for you.”

Or, if your team is looking for clarity on the company’s strategic direction and you have questions about it as well, instead of saying something like “I’m sure we’ll find out soon,” provide process certainty by informing your team of your plan to seek the answer and a specific date by when you’ll get back to them.

This will help create more solid ground and a sense of stability for your team members..

Complete Article at HBR

 

Empathy Rules

 

Summary.   

Sociologist Emile Durkheim coined the phrase anomie to describe a destabilized and destabilizing state when rules and rule givers lose legitimacy. It’s what we feel when we face a virus that plays by one set of rules, politicians who play by another, and a professional life that proceeds independent of each — and when we face all of this in social isolation. Empathy can help us navigate this period of anomie. The author outlines four practices, which she calls “empathy rules,” that can help us cut across the divisions in our lives and build a sense of community.

In August 2021, my employer, MIT, announced that all instruction, without exception, would be in person, with vaccination and regular testing. In context, I found this anxiety-provoking. As soon as I took a Covid test, I was cleared to teach, even though I wouldn’t get my results until the next day. The protocol was designed not to protect individuals but to prevent community spread. Students would wear face coverings; my classrooms were a jumble of surgical masks and makeshift bandanas. Faculty were asked to teach without masks, a directive everyone seemed to ignore.

But those rules were only for MIT. The week after MIT began classes, I gave the freshman convocation address at Boston College. There, I was told, no masks were allowed on campus. I lectured by Zoom, my electronic presence an affront.

So it was, across offices and industries, corporations and legal jurisdictions — a patchwork of hygiene and work protocols, each fiefdom declaring its reality.

Complete Article at HBR

What Ford and Tesla's Digital Presence Can Teach Us

Ford and Tesla's web designs can give lessons as to why no brand can afford to ignore its digital presence.

From clothing to big-ticket technology items to vehicles, more than 87% of buyer journeys now start online, according to Salesforce. Still, so many legacy brands continue to underinvest in their online presence, even as they spend tremendous amounts on above-the-line (ATL) advertising (think TV ads, magazine ads and billboards). As CEO of a global digital agency, I see this often — large corporations that are too slow to recognize and capitalize on new opportunities, even moves as basic as creating an effective website. Take Ford: Once a pioneer in the auto industry, the manufacturer has kept its focus on ATL, even as younger and more dynamic brands like Tesla started eating into its market share by appealing to digitally-accustomed consumers.  

I recently compared Ford and Tesla websites to analyze how well they understand online audiences — in the process of examining messaging, user flow and UI/UX design — and some of its key points are explored below. The most fundamental takeaway, however, is that no brand, big or small, can afford to ignore its digital presence

A quick look at today’s car buyer 

2020 research from the tech journalism/report aggregator DataReportal indicates that “the average American spends 7 hours and 11 minutes looking at a screen every day,” which is just over the global average. Pandemic-related home-based work and lockdowns will likely have added to this already amazing number.

Complete Article at Entrepreneur India

To Find Creative Solutions, Look Outside Your Industry

Summary.   

The chaos and crises of the last two years have created all kinds of questions for leaders and organizations. One of the biggest questions is: Do we have new ideas about where to look for new ideas? When it comes to innovation and problem-solving, there will always be a place for old-fashioned, time-consuming R&D — research & development. Today, though, there is also a place for a different kind of R&D — rip off and duplicate. The fastest way for organizations to make sense of challenges they are seeing for the first time is to survey unrelated fields for ideas that have been working for a long time. Why gamble on untested strategies and insights if you can quickly apply strategies and insights that are already proven elsewhere? That’s how leaders can help their colleagues keep learning as fast as the world is changing.

A big challenge in times of disruption and uncertainty is for people and organizations to keep learning as fast as the world is changing — to analyze problems they haven’t encountered before, to make sense of opportunities they haven’t thought about before, to process emotions they haven’t experienced before.

That’s why leaders should encourage their colleagues to learn from experts in fields they haven’t worked in before. Practices that are routine in one industry can be revolutionary when they migrate to another industry, especially when they challenge conventional wisdom in that industry. What better way to fuel your company’s imagination than to look for inspiration outside your field? If you want to learn fast, learn from strangers.

Complete Article at HBR

3 Strategies for Holding Yourself Accountable

Summary.   

As you progress in your career, it often gets harder to ask for help in reaching your goals and staying accountable to yourself to achieve them. If you’ve reached a career plateau, the author recommends three strategies to hold yourself accountable to your goals: 1) Enlist an accountability partner. 2) Go public in declaring and sharing goals. 3) Change your environment.

At the beginning of your career, you were bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. You asked for help and soaked up the wisdom of your mentors and managers to climb the mountain. But once you experienced success, you found yourself scared to look down. After all, it’s intimidating at the top, when you think of everything you could lose. At this point asking for help begins to feel a lot less like a learning experience and a lot more like proof that you might not be cut out for the job at hand.

And the more successful you become, the less accountability you have. It’s not that you aren’t responsible to anyone; it’s that your goals become a lot more subjective: Lead the legal team, run the company, manage a department. So no matter the outcome, you can say, “Well, I tried my best.” At the same time, your calendar starts filling up with stuff you “have to do” as opposed to things you should be doing. So you find yourself in meetings you don’t fully believe add value and fighting tooth and nail to make time for tasks and projects that actually create impact.

Compelete Article at HBR

 

4 Ways Managers Can Increase Flexibility Without Losing Productivity

Summary.   

If employees want the benefits of flexibility, they’ll also need to shoulder some of the responsibility that goes with it, like autonomous problem-solving and providing and checking for updates. However, that doesn’t mean setting them adrift in the storm. Managers are still responsible for making sure everyone is rowing to the correct location in the same direction — even if they’re rowing at different times. To increase flexibility for employees without losing productivity — or sanity — managers will need to think differently about when employees work together, who works together, and how to share information and with whom, all while being careful to stay abreast of any changes and rapidly communicating changes in priorities.

The past two years have shown that employees desire greater flexibility — and they’re willing to change jobs to get it. Flexibility has tremendous benefits for employees, including reduced burnout and greater job satisfaction. However, it can also result in spiraling coordination costs for managers, untenable amounts of wasted effort, and the inability to respond quickly to client requests. The brief huddles that once allowed teams to promptly brainstorm solutions and align efforts are now harder to pull together. It can take days to get most members in the same virtual place at the same time (including one person who’s half-listening from the dentist’s chair).

To increase employee flexibility on their teams, managers need guidance and support — otherwise, they could burn out on the job or check out to find a new one. Here are four ways managers can offer their teams flexibility without breaking under the coordination costs or significantly stalling progress.

Rethink When Employees Work Together

For complex tasks that require teamwork, it’s not feasible to provide employees with complete flexibility (i.e., the ability to work for any duration at any time). However, returning to the standard in-office work week won’t work either. Thus, managers will need to think differently and deeply about project requirements and schedule accordingly.

Complete Article at HBR

 

The A to Z of testing before hiring

 

Before diving into the how and why of testing before hiring, it’s important to understand the objective behind it.

What’s the goal of testing before hiring? Many hiring managers view this as the magic bullet that is going to get them the perfect hire, while some view it as a necessary hurdle to closing positions.

However, mostly it is important to enhance the interview process and remove bias from it to hire the right fit. Because in an average interview many things are oversold including both experience and work accomplished, so testing can help us see though some of this fog, equip a trained interviewer to ask targeted questions and understand the responses much better, and remove bias from the hiring process.

In an exclusive webcast in association with Pearson, Yuri Roy, who heads Talent Acquisition at Tech Mahindra Business Services, shared insights into the A to Z of testing before hiring and why it becomes imperative in an interview process.

Defining the primary objective of testing before hiring

Before diving into the how and why of testing before hiring, it’s important to understand the objective behind it. Yuri shared that testing before hiring is a very individual activity-as an organization you need to decide what is the purpose the testing needs to serve. 

Complete Article at People matters

Want to Become a Millionaire? Follow Warren Buffett's 4 Rules.

How many entrepreneurs are as confident now as they were before the Covid-19 pandemic began? Yes, we know the majority of the S&P 500 are companies that began in down markets. And yes, the best entrepreneurs intuitively use hard times to lean in and listen even harder to their market and customers, innovating where necessary and making their companies more resilient than ever before. 

But for many of us, the current climate feels different. The exits many or even most were aiming for are now delayed or entirely different. Consumers are different in ways we could not have predicted. Employees are different and even the fundamental forms of employment have changed. 

Given this, is it still possible to become financially secure enough to retire? From my perspective, it absolutely is, but quite possibly through different methods than the ones you’d expected. I believe we can build a map for what we need to do now in four words: Think like Warren Buffett. 

That’s it. But when I say this, know that I’m defining a type and not necessarily extolling the person. Listen closely to the rules Buffet has defined through a variety of mediums (spoiler alert: the fourth rule was given to financial advisor Adiel Gorel, who created and hosted the PBS specials Remote Control Retirement Riches and Life 2.0, in the form of a personal note). These rules have been consistent for decades but are even more important during our current political- and pandemic-related economic travails. 

1. Pay your savings first

As Buffett has noted and demonstrated on multiple occasions, you should “pay yourself first” by putting a portion of your funds away first. 

Complete Article at Entrepreneur India