1. (late 2009) 60% of employees planned to pursue new job opportunities as the economy improves in 2010.
2. 54% of companies report having lost top talent during the first half of 2010.
3. 54% of employees have been approached by outside organizations in the last 12 months to discuss job opportunities.
4. 80% of employees say their workloads have grown in the wake of layoffs, their trust has eroded, and they are feeling increasingly discontented.

Now, I know that these are just statistics. They don’t necessarily suggest the situation where you work. But, then again, maybe they do…

If it has been a rough year (or two) for your enterprise, you may have–not surprisingly–been distracted from giving those staff still with you the attention they need, especially in tough times. And when we talk about your top talent, the ones that will be difficult and expensive to replace, this is a critical consideration.

So, here is just a quick reminder. Especially with your key talent, have you been…

• Indicating and reminding them that they are valued?
• Talking with them about their ongoing learning and development, in current and potential future roles in your company?
• Listening closely to them and scanning for their concerns and how they are, in fact, coping?
• Monitoring their work, not to overload them?
• Communicating the organization’s priorities and strategy and where they fit in?

These are some things managers can do to have a positive impact on employee engagement levels and reduce the huge cost of turnover of your best people. And, if you look at the list, none of them cost very much…other than some of your time plus the energy required to sincerely attend to their well being.

Quoting the study,

One of the most striking findings from this year’s study is the variability in attitudes and expectations across the workforce. We saw differences in why people join or leave organizations, how they define a career, how much risk they are comfortable taking on, what motivates them to give maximum discretionary effort, what they expect in terms of their reward package and what they want from their managers.

We found interesting differences among employee segments, for instance, in terms of their relative emphasis on skill building versus wealth accumulation, and how that emphasis shifts back and forth in importance across an employee’s working life.

This strongly suggests two things to managers:

1. Endeavor to learn what specifically is important to and motivates each one of your employees, individually. Yes, that means a separate one-on-one conversation with each staff member.
2. Keep in mind that their various needs and the level of priority of these needs can change over time. So, you have to keep checking back in with your people on this every year or two.

Oh yes, and when you query them on this stuff, don’t forget to raise some version of the question, “What do you need from me to enable you to be successful in your work?”

How much responsibility and risk can reasonably be shifted to employees without impeding their productivity?

And what can organizations do to equip individuals to be more self-reliant in owning and managing their own performance, career, financial security, health and well-being?

A core teaching in our management development programs at Fulcrum Associates is around how to get your employees to accept the “monkey of accountability” for their performance, career direction and job satisfaction. I am heartened to see this corroborated so clearly in this major study.

Here’s what employer organizations and their managers need to do build their overall self efficacy:

• Provide their managers with skills training in how to talk effectively with their employees about their performance (good, bad, or OK) and address their level of job satisfaction, should it falter.
• Engage employees periodically in a provocative conversation about their career prospects, what they want, what’s required of them to make this happen, and what they can start doing now to mitigate the impact of future economic downturns or a shift in job demand.
• Encourage managers to be a “pygmalion” to their employees by emphasizing the employee’s current strengths, assessing his or her potential (no matter how small) and expressing a belief in the staff member’s ability to achieve that potential.
• Make training available on personal financial management
• Promote health, fitness and wellness with initiatives such as learning programs, gym memberships, coaching in fitness and nutrition, etc.

These actions certainly fall within the core of that “significant workplace transformation” that TW referred to (see my previous Comment #1 blog entry) in their study.

Three main themes emerged:

1. The global recession has permanently altered the so-called “contract” between employees and their employers.
2. There is a gap between what employees want and what employers are able to provide them.
3. This is a pivotal time when employers have the opportunity to identify and put in place a more flexible, sustainable “deal” for their staff…before the economy takes off again and we see a flood of unhappy employees packing their bags for greener pastures.

Not surprisingly, the downturn has had an impact on the results in this year’s report. It has uncovered a couple of dilemmas:

• Employees want security above all else (76% of respondents) but only 51% believe it is attainable.
• People continue to hunker down in their current employment, putting having a stable job above the siren call of career opportunity. 81% are not actively looking for other jobs, despite the fact that 48% see no potential advancement in their current job.

News for leaders and managers! Confidence of employees in their managers’ interpersonal and relational (vs. operational) competence is alarmingly low…

• Only 38% think their leaders are sincerely interested in their well-being
• Only 47% see their leaders as trustworthy
• Just 42% say that their leaders inspire and engage them
• 53% question whether their managers have time for the people aspects of their job
• 61% question doubt their managers’ effectiveness in dealing with poor performers.

Clearly we have a woeful shortfall in the people side of leading at all managerial levels. Despite these numbers, TW sees this time as one of great opportunity for employers:

We are at the earliest stages of a significant workplace transformation that will profoundly affect how businesses approach people management and how individuals approach the workplace.

I’ll have some more to say about this in my next couple of postings.

Here reasons are:

1. It focuses on the individual only as an employee and not as a whole person.
2. It seeks to get more discretionary effort from staff without giving a lot back.
3. What the engaged employee contributes to his employer can’t be taken with him when he leaves.

If your employee chooses to give extra effort and creativity to her job, is she really getting the short straw in the relationship? That depends on whether you think the following outcomes that highly engaged employees typically seek are a fair exchange for added contribution to the enterprise: challenging/interesting work/more say in how your work gets done/career development and learning opportunities/a collegial work experience/opportunity to make a difference/opportunity to experience yourself frequently in a “flow” situation (aka “in the zone”).

I happen to think these are worth a lot, thank you very much. If you adopt an internal strategy of getting more of your employees to move into the “fully engaged” column, you can do it only if you inquire about and attend to your employees’ needs, especially the higher order needs contained in the above list. Engagement occurs when the employee is fairly compensated for his performance AND experiences some of these outcomes.

You still have to have the basics of performance rewards in place. It’s when you try to engineer good feelings without paying for the work done that an employee engagement strategy becomes a scam.

A recent study published by the Employee Engagement Survey company, Modern Survey, has detected a trend that merits any manager’s attention. Since 2007 they have been tracking semi-annually five questions that they connect with levels of employee engagement, the percentage of employees who:

1. Takes pride in the company
2. Intends to stay with the company
3. Goes “above and beyond” (what’s expected of them)
4. Recommends the company (as a place to work)
5. Sees a promising future at the company

In February 2010 the percentage who responded affirmatively to all five questions dropped from the previous survey, conducted in August of 2009. The first two declines are statistically significant:

1. (Takes Pride) from 79% to 73%
2. (Intends to Stay) from 63% to 57%

You can read a summary commentary from Modern Survey. Clearly, many staff members are approaching the burnout stage. This has depleted both their energy for their work and their positive feelings toward their employer. Here’s my take on it and what I would advise my managerial clients to do.

First of all, if you have been distracted with the challenge of keeping your enterprise or institution solvent during the recession, it’s time to shift some of your attention to the current state of your employees’ state-of-mind and well-being. This is especially true for those stars and “solid citizens” whose loyalty and consistent performance enable you to sleep at night. Talk to them. How are they doing? How are they keeping up with the seemingly never-ending extra workload? How can you make things easier for them.

Secondly, as a consultant at Modern Survey recommends, express your appreciation for their hard work, positive spirit and performance contribution over these tough economic times.

Finally, (re)start investing some resources in their development. Send them to conferences and courses that keep them current in their functional/technical expertise. Put in place a leadership development initiative for your managers and supervisors. This does two things. It gives them an immediate benefit they may not receive elsewhere and it tells them that you mean it when you say they are valued partners in the success of the enterprise.

Scott Campbell and I went into more details about this in our article entitled, Down the Slope and Up Again.

Of the group that said their boss focused on strengths, 61% were “engaged” in their work. 45% of those reporting a boss who attended primarily to their weaknesses were engaged but, at the same time, 22% were “actively disengaged.” Except for the appearance of the actively disengaged group, focusing on areas to be development or turned around didn’t do too much damage.

But here’s the shocker. Look at the right hand column, reflecting employees whose boss essentially ignored both strong and weak points, in other words, giving no meaningful feedback at all. Virtually none of these (2%) were engaged and the rest were either neutral or disengaged.

“But, wait a minute,” you say, “maybe engaged employees, the keeners, are more inclined to see their boss as noticing and commenting on their strengths. Besides, since they are engaged, they probably are demonstrating their best talents on the job anyway. Their boss is just noticing what’s clearly evident.” This, of course, is the classic question with a correlation between two variables: which one is influencing which?

Let’s not go there. Instead, just consider the consequences of not giving your people any concrete feedback to speak of. It can severely dampen your employees’ level of engagement in their work. With all the data out there linking employee engagement to business results, we are talking lost productivity and creativity–big time!

25% of that “ignored” group of employees had a boss who gave no feedback. I hope you wouldn’t have been one of them.

These were outlets for my leadership learning to blossom. Looking back, I should have channeled this energy back into my career but, hey, I was young and naive. It seemed easier to make a leadership mark in a volunteer capacity. Furthermore, it was self-affirming, a lot of fun, and I received recognition for my efforts.

Leadership development, aka talent development and high potential (“hi pot”) development, is a hot issue, particularly in the private sector. The best organizations are always on the lookout within their ranks for potential future leaders. And at least the larger firms have formal processes for identifying these folks.

But how do you know that you have a future star in your department, especially if the work you have for them doesn’t provide an opportunity to lead others?

Listen for what your people do outside of work. With some, you’ll be pleasantly surprised–and impressed. Are they running a community baseball league? Organizing a 10K run for some worthy cause? Chairing a committee in a non-profit organization?

Now your challenge, as their manager, is to find ways for this enthusiasm to manifest itself in the workplace. What a loss if it doesn’t.

Knowledge@Wharton reports on a series of experiments by Grant, all linked to the idea that if you have the opportunity to meet, face-to-face, with at least a sample of the people who ultimately benefit from the work you do, your performance level will rise.

• In a fundraising call center, reps who had met a few of the recipients of the funds were more persistent, spending significantly more time on the phone, and secured significantly more donation money.
• Lifeguards who read case studies of people whose lives had been saved by the actions of other lifeguards increased the hours worked and were rated higher by their supervisors on helping behavior.
• Individuals at a Career Center editing the resumés of job seekers, if they had even just a brief chat with the applicants, spent much more time on the task.

Adam Grant summarizes the results: Employees who know, first hand, how their work impacts others in a positive and meaningful way are happier than those who don’t and are vastly more productive.

He goes on to point out that this dynamic holds equally for employees whose work product serves internal “customers” (end users).

Think of your work flow and administration processes in your organization. Food for thought…

In a similar vein, I put it to you that your most important three feet as a manager is that space between you and your employee. I’m not talking about so much about the physical space but more importantly about the mental and emotional space. How you handle this “I-thou” space will determine how effective a leader you are. It’s a distance across which pass–in both directions–information, meaning, expectations, resistance, appreciation, criticism, enthusiasm, hope, discouragement, fear, and much, much more.

We hear a lot these days about employee engagement, productivity, and retention, about talent development, and about leadership. These are all central to the results your employees ultimately generate and how profitable and successful your enterprise will be in creating wealth and achieving its goals.

Look at the organizations that do these things well and trace back to what’s behind it. Your search will eventually take you to that same “yardstick” of distance across which exemplary managers are leading excellent relationships with their employees. This is where the important work of leaders at all levels lies.