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