HR Strategy – Page 6 – Pinnacle HR Solutions

Remote Work: Planning Long Term

As the world begins to settle into the reality of working from home as a long-term strategy, organizations must take the time to think ahead. When the pandemic hit, the world of remote work, which had been steadily gaining more and more attention, was fast-tracked into the right-now. There was (and in many cases, still is) a lot of maneuvering to make this new reality function properly.

Organizations had to grapple with new forms of communication, management, leadership, and company culture. Not to mention a load of new compliance regulations and resources that required some serious attention. But as time has passed, organizations have *begun* to find their stride, identifying new strategies, tools, and solutions to help them navigate this new world.

And as was predicted before the pandemic hit, organizations are starting to see remote work positions as viable options they can offer moving forward. While all the maneuvering and finagling to immediately make remote work happen will continue to serve organizations in the future, it doesn’t necessarily account for all that needs to be considered in the long term.

Here are three things to keep in mind for offering remote work indefinitely.

1. Where is your talent?

While your company may have historically stayed to the talent found locally, it may no longer be a smart requirement. Consider expanding the radius where applicants may be based. While working in different time zones can require some adjustments to how you communicate, it isn’t that hard to make the shift. Just be aware of the of needs within that role and determine how you’ll be able to meet those needs. For example, if checking in with a manager on a day-to-day basis is part of the role, being in a time zone close enough to allow for availability overlap may be a requirement.

The wonderful thing about expanding the radius of the talent pool is the exponential depth of field your hiring managers get to play within. This expansion affords you the flexibility to become more selective in your hiring, while potentially creating opportunities to connect with applicants of more diverse backgrounds, skillsets, and experience.

2. Re-evaluate organizational policies

Remote workers tend to have different needs than on-site employees. Take the time to re-evaluate what you’re offering employees and define what applies to those working remotely and those working locally. Here are examples of some policies you’ll want to consider:

On-site, or local perks such as gym memberships.
Remote working options often work well with flex time, while on-site work tends to lean away from this.
Hours tracking. How do you track time? Is it project-based, by the hour, or both?
Work-life balance policies addressing overtime.
Data and project tracking information. Is this available to remote workers?

If you’re choosing to offer remote working positions indefinitely, go through each of your practices with a fine-tooth comb. Identify what is and isn’t applicable and adjust as necessary. Not doing so will often leave your remote workers getting the short end of the stick, struggling to get their needs met.

3. Who’s remote? How do you support them?

Whether or not you’re offering remote work into the future, if you are doing so now, then be aware of the different circumstances of your employees. Do you have young parents whose children are home from school? Do you have students who might not have access to a private space? What are the resources available to your remote workforce, and how are you meeting their needs?

Do your research. Consider creating a company-wide survey asking about the challenges your remote employees are facing. Identify trends and find ways to help your employees overcome those challenges.

If you’re hiring for remote working positions for the future, identify your ideal candidate. What requirements do they need to fulfill the position? What are the ways you can support them in their remote role? Determine what all you need and communicate it to your candidates so they can make the most informed decision about whether or not they’ll be a good fit for your remote role.

Keep learning

As we continue to grow and change along with the changing demands of the economy and safety guidelines, businesses must keep a close eye on the inner workings of their organization. Just because you evaluated the challenges your newly-remote employees were facing at the beginning of the pandemic doesn’t mean you can afford to look away for more than a few months.

Needs change. New challenges arise. It’s up to leaders to keep a continual dialog going with employees to be aware of situations as they change and develop (not after they’ve been festering and growing). Keeping up this dialog will help you steadily improve your processes. Be proactive about it and offer space for employees to reach out with their needs. The better the communication is, the more successful everyone will be.

Photo by Michael Simons

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Employee Management: Avoiding the Pitfalls of Growth

See if this story sounds familiar. You get a job you love. It’s challenging, engaging, and fun. You work hard at it, overcoming the challenges, developing more efficient processes, and creating quality work. Your manager can step back and relax. They no longer have to look over your shoulder to make sure you’re getting the job done. In fact, they might not even know everything you’re doing in your role.

You do it long enough that it becomes second nature. Time passes, and your job ceases to challenge you. Because your manager is comfortable relying on you, they don’t feel the need to give you much attention. It’s in their interest to keep you doing your job since you do it so well, and they don’t think to offer you new opportunities for growth.

Your manager may even start taking you for granted. Because after all, you make all the hard work look so easy because you’ve mastered it. You begin to feel unfulfilled and frustrated, wanting more room to grow in an organization that wants to keep you where you are.

Eventually, you find a higher-paid, more challenging position, and leave the organization to start over.

It’s the natural cycle of most careers, and while it isn’t inherently bad, it does leave organizations missing a massive opportunity that impacts their bottom line, culture, and growth trajectory.

Integrating growth

When organizations are structured this way, they aren’t doing anyone any favors. Employees value opportunities for growth—a lot. And organizations that don’t understand this miss out on the potential their employees have to offer while dealing with higher turnover than necessary.

Organizations that haven’t built an integrated system for growth within their employee experience tend to struggle with employee development. But to maximize the value of each employee, organizations should create a system specifically designed for employee growth that is implemented from the very start of their role and lasts through the entire employee lifecycle.

This isn’t just in the interest of employees—it benefits everyone. Giving your employees chances to learn and grow in their roles not only helps them develop, but deepens their store of resources to offer your company, enriching both your organization and their career path.

Develop plans

But without a system designed to be applied to every position, you’re going to struggle keeping this growth alive. Consider implementing evaluation and development plans for each employee, defining goals and key measurements to track their progress and growth, and help them and their manager visualize their trajectory forward and upward.

Create accountability

Using the plan, set quarterly reviews so both the employee and manager can keep this plan top of mind throughout the year. Set expectations of your managers that they will prioritize these plans and continue to discover new ways their team members can engage and grow within the company.

Integrate this planning process as part of the company culture, developing an expectation among every member of your organization that they will have the opportunity to grow in their roles.

Break the cycle

By doing this, you’ll help to develop a company culture that promotes a learning environment, attracting talent that will be dedicated and engaged as they grow in their careers. It will foster a sense of loyalty and commitment that employers dream about.

But breaking out of any cycle can take time and be a challenge. If you want to maximize and retain the talent you have, give your managers the tools they need.

Ensure you’re training correctly.
Provide them with tools to identify areas for growth.
Allow the roles they manage to stay flexible.

Help your managers break the habit of complacency, and reward and celebrate the growth they help foster. Remember, growth is a team effort—everyone needs to be involved.

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Talent Optimization and Retention in the Age of COVID

Maintaining a healthy company culture and happy employees will always matter—even while millions are on unemployment and the power lies with employers. The economy has employers and employees alike feeling a bit trapped. Even if you find yourself with employees who feel they aren’t in a position to leave their job, you should still want them to be engaged and productive while they’re with you.

What happens to companies that have unhappy, disengaged employees? They fail. As your employees are responsible for generating the company’s success, you need them to be positively contributing to the organization. Now more than ever, you need employees to feel dedicated to their roles and your company as a whole.

Here are a few ways to build up both your employees and the company simultaneously.

Professional Development

Offering opportunities to develop and improve skills isn’t just something employees want—it also helps deepen your company’s assets, at a fairly low cost. Companies like Skillshare, Lynda.com, and edx.com, all offer reasonably priced online courses for professional development in subjects ranging from marketing to project management to graphic design.

Take advantage of these easy-to-access tools, offering your employees a chance to learn and grow. Through this training, you’ll be developing stronger relationships with your team, maximizing talent, and preparing employees to flourish within your company.

Hiring from within

While many companies struggle to effectively hire from their pool of existing talent, doing so is not only cost-effective and saves time but helps foster an environment of dedication and growth.

Train your managers so they can recognize when an employee has the potential for something different, and also allow the managers the authority to take action. It can be challenging for managers to allow for this growth when they have highly functioning employees who do their jobs well. The managers have little incentive to take a person out of their role, even if they would be a great fit elsewhere in the company.

Make sure you’re training your managers to train their teams with the goal of growth. And to plan for the eventuality that they will move on to other roles.

Compensation matters

While employers understand that compensation is often a defining reason for turnover, its importance can’t be stressed enough. Employees are working to make money. Above all other perks and benefits, it’s what they need the most. Money is high on the list of factors that play into an employee choosing to stay or leave their position.

Compensation doesn’t just say something about how your company views the role an employee has. It also puts a numerical value on exactly how much an individual employee matters to the organization. Compensation also has a direct effect on how an employee views themselves within the company and factors into their satisfaction, dedication, and loyalty.

What you need to do is simple: make sure you are paying your employees what they’re worth, or they’ll leave for a job that will.

In this together

Whether or not the economy is struggling, you and your employees are in it together. By carefully strategizing, you can make decisions that have a positive impact on your business and the individual lives working within your organization. The talent of your company—what makes people want to work with you and buy from you—comes directly out of the talent working for you.

Lean into that talent. Boost it up and recognize it. Give it a platform to grow, and you’ll create an enriching work environment that mobilizes your company growth and pushes you towards success.

Photo by Anton Yankovyi

Content provided by Q4iNetwork and partners

Combating Presenteeism in the Workplace

Most employers have a good idea of the negative impact that employee burnout has on their culture, bottom line, engagement, and turnover rates. Needless to say, it’s big. Many things can lead to employee burnout, but most often left out of the conversation is the problem of presenteeism.

Presenteeism is the act of coming into work when you are not entirely up for it, either because of illness or mental health, and working at a reduced capacity. This leads to increased burnout because it stresses the body and mind when it should be resting, and is instead straining energy resources and stamina.

Successfully approaching the problem requires a multi-pronged approach.

Set the tone

While employees may read in your handbook that their wellness matters, it may not be evident within your culture. If you have managers and leaders within your company that pedestalizes employees who work overtime or come in when they are sick, you might as well be telling others that is the expectation of all employees.

Make sure you not only encourage people to stay home when they are sick, but also make a concerted effort to identify when people are at work when they shouldn’t be. And when that inevitably happens: Send. Them. Home.

Sick days aren’t enough

While sick days are essential, they don’t encompass all the other valid reasons for not coming in to work. Taking a day off for mental health reasons is just as valid as doing so because of physical illness. In today’s culture, younger generations are prioritizing mental health and wellness and want to see their company do the same.

Make an effort to destigmatize the topic of mental health in your workplace and encourage people to go home when they need the day off. Doing so will help you build strong relationships with your employees based on trust, loyalty, and care. When employees feel taken care of and are free to take care of their personal needs, they will become deeply invested and engaged with your company. The loss of one day of work may be all the difference someone needs to help them return with more energy, drive, and dedication.

Learn how to ask

Despite telling your employees it’s ok for them to stay home for personal reasons or due to illness, many people will push themselves to go into work regardless of their condition. It may take time for these employees to unlearn unhealthy working habits, and as leaders, it’s your job to help them do so.

Take care to notice when someone seems burned out, on edge, or sick. Take the initiative to ask how they are doing. In some cases, you may need to ask twice to get a genuine answer as the robotic response of, “I’m good!” because it’s so ingrained in our unconscious reactions.

When someone does tell you they’ve been having a hard time, or even just having a hard day, ask them to take the rest of the day off. Or suggest they take the following day off. This small act will help those who may not have even considered taking time off to take a step back and re-evaluate. These actions show employees that not only are you paying attention to their wellbeing but that you are prioritizing it.

Lead by example

If staying home from work makes you cringe, then this is for you. Yes, it is true that as leaders, you have the responsibility to show up consistently for your employees. But you ALSO have the responsibility to lead by example, to take care of your own wellbeing, and to show your employees that taking care of themselves isn’t just encouraged, it’s expected.

Being open and honest about why you are taking the day off may make a more significant impact than you’d expect. For instance, if you were to tell your staff you’re taking the day off for mental health, you are doing two powerful things: 1) you’re making a statement that mental health should be prioritized, and 2) you’re showing your employees that it’s ok to acknowledge mental health in the workplace. Being known as a leader who expects their employees to act like humans and not robots is a gift both to your employees and your company.

What goes around, comes around

The lovely thing about becoming a company that does this is the reciprocal nature of the relationships you’re building within your company. As people are treated well and encouraged to take care of themselves, they will, in turn, treat your company well and value their roles within it. Taking this approach with your employees may have a lasting effect on their lives and your business.

If someone comes into your company from a culture that pushed them beyond what was healthy, their potential for growth is massive. They might not even be aware they have been burned out, but when you provide them with the opportunity they need to care for themselves, you may find that their store of energy and dedication grows and deepens beyond what you both imagined.

Think of it like a wilted tree. The more nutrients and water you give it, the larger and more resilient it will become, bearing fruit that will feed the land around it. Nurture your employees like you would that tree, and watch as they amplify their power within your business and become the force that pushes your organization forward and up.

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Photo by Volodymyr Melnyk

Don’t Lose Momentum (No, We’re Not Talking About Growth)

We’ve all been experiencing the effects of the pandemic for a few months. And chances are, you’ve begun to think about whatever the “new normal” is that people are talking about.

What is going to change permanently?
What will revert to how it was before the pandemic?
How will our jobs/company function for the foreseeable future?

You’ve got your mind on the future along with everyone else. You’ve seen all the posts about returning to work, what companies can expect when they reopen, etc.

In the first few weeks of the stay-at-home orders, it was challenging to have a conversation that didn’t revolve around the pandemic. Like at all. Leaders spent a lot of time reassuring their teams that everything would be ok, that they didn’t expect them to be perfect, that it was ok to feel anxious or scared.

And this was the right thing to do. During any time of transition (pandemic or not), employees need to be reassured that they’re allowed to take time to adjust, to make mistakes, and to struggle.

It’s a critical part of ensuring the psychological health of your employees, boosting a positive company culture, and developing trust-based relationships within your company structure. And generally, after a certain time, you can expect the transition period will come to an end, and you can begin looking for a higher level of consistency from your employees.

But this isn’t a normal transition. It isn’t a merger; it isn’t a change in leadership or processes; it doesn’t have that lovely, reliable beginning, middle, and end that comes with most other transitions.

Sure, it had a beginning, but we have no way of knowing exactly when this will all be over. We’ve been told to expect multiple waves of shut-downs and stay at home periods that could reach into the next two years. And no matter who you are, whether or not your job has been affected, you will experience the effects of the pandemic in your life.

Emotional burnout

So your company leaders did all the check-ins and wellness reviews they could when the pandemic started. But often those precious one-on-one check-ins that everyone is raging about are emotionally draining.

For leaders who made significant attempts to increase communication with their teams and to offer support to employees one-on-one, it wouldn’t be surprising if they have begun to feel drained.

Those check-ins demand emotional presence; they require tact and patience and genuine connection. All of which takes energy. Not to mention the extra effort it requires to do this stuff remotely. Plus, if you’re a leader, who’s checking in on you? No one? Your cat?

If you’re not emotionally drained by now, just wanting to focus on the work at hand, you’re probably part of a select few. The novelty of working from home is no longer filling the gap of social connection and society being open. For the majority of people, the consensus sounds something like, “We’re sick of talking about COVID, and we just want things to go back to normal.”

Nurturing that precious momentum

When the pandemic first struck and everyone was experiencing their first few weeks at home, the video calls, virtual happy hours, and one-on-one check-ins were running rampant. But now that we’re all tired and burned out, those key actions are becoming more and more difficult to maintain.

And unfortunately, there is no one solution to make it easier. But letting them slide because you’d rather focus on your work and ignore the pandemic isn’t a good solution. Those who are prone to isolation, anxiety, and distraction are now at even higher risk of losing their path.

It’s critical we continue to consistently check in with each other. If you’re a leader who’s feeling burned out on check-ins, consider setting up a buddy system and encourage team members to check in on one another. Spread the responsibility around to your whole team.

Remember, this is a long haul. To maintain the health of our communities, we need to buckle down on our wellness plans and cement them into our weekly schedules. This is not the time to let them slide.

If anything, the “new normal” will be more people and wellness-focused. So if you want to think about the future, go ahead. Just don’t forget to include the vital acts of community support and wellness that we all need so badly today.

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