Good afternoon. Welcome to PCI's webinar series. Today's presentation is Retention and Engagement. This webinar is brought to you by Miller Cooper and Company. My name is Nicole Clout, Marketing Coordinator at PCI, and I will be your moderator for this session. Before I turn the controls over to your presenter for today, I have a few introductory items to note. Earlier today, we sent a reminder email to all registered attendees that included a handout of today's presentation. Please note that the handout has been updated since this afternoon's reminder email. The updated handout for this webinar can be found in the handout section of your webinar pane. If you cannot download the handout, please email PCI Marketing at marketing at PCI dot org. Note that all attending lines are muted. The GoToWebinar toolbox has an area for you to raise your hand. If you raise your hand, you will receive a private chat message from me. If you have a question, please type it into the questions pane, where I will be keeping track of them and will read the questions to the presenter during the Q&A period. Also, a pop-up survey will appear after the webinar ends. Today's presentation will be recorded and uploaded to the PCI eLearning Center. Questions related to specific products or publications will be addressed at the end of the presentation. PCI is a registered provider of AIA-CES, but today's presentation does not contain content that has been endorsed by AIA. Today's presentation is non-CEU. Our presenter for today is Sue Winkler, Director of Client HR Services for Miller Cooper. She manages the firm's outsourced human resource services, providing HR compliance and best practice reviews, along with short-term or long-term HR support to businesses and nonprofits. She has over 30 years of HR leadership and management experience. The Client HR Services team supports the people side of the business. From conducting a review of the HR function to providing day-to-day dedicated HR assistance, they support this critical function with a wide range of services tailored to the needs of each client. Whether the company has an existing HR infrastructure or needs to enhance this part of their business, they are there to help. I will now hand the controls over so we can begin our presentation. Hi, everybody. Thanks so much for joining us today. It's great to be back with you. I don't know if some of you were able to join us last month when we talked about recruiting and onboarding. This session today on retention and engagement is a great counterpart to that as those activities all really connect with each other and support each other. So if you haven't had a chance to see that webinar, it is on the eLearning site, I believe, and Nicole can probably provide more information on that. But I encourage you to go back and take a look at that if you're interested in the recruiting and onboarding component. But today we're really going to focus on retention and engagement. Once you get those people in the door and we know how hard it is to recruit the right people, it's so important that we are building cultures and practices around how to retain and how to engage our employees. I always like to start with kind of an update on where things are at today. And this slide can be a bit sobering, of course, because we all know that turnover is really costly. We're not seeing the headlines like we had been on the Great Resignation, but the impact of what took place is still with us. And the number on the slide about the cost of voluntary employee turnover in the U.S. costing businesses over a trillion dollars last year is pretty staggering. To make that maybe even a little bit more personal, the cost of turnover for even one person can be as much as two times that person's salary. And I think we all have been through this enough to know that there's a cost that we can't quite put our finger on when it comes to turnover as far as the impact that it has on those people around the open position, the extra work that has to be absorbed, and just the time and attention it takes to recruit people. Also, in 2022, we saw about 40 percent of workers quit their job within the first year of employment. There was an Indeed survey that I saw that reported that 92 percent of workers voluntarily resigned from two jobs in 2022. I found that to be just a fascinating statistic and not necessarily in a good way. People who had resigned from those two jobs who were reported in that survey, they further said that the reason they did that is because life is too short to stay in a job that they're not passionate about. Lack of engagement, connection is what I believe is the driving force behind high turnover that so many companies have been experiencing. And the top reasons that are listed here as far as why people feel disengaged are not new. We may be under different circumstances. I do feel as though companies have struggled in this area for a number of years, and with everything that has happened, it's just been highlighted even more significantly. Number five on this slide is something that, again, is not new information necessarily. The impact of the direct manager has always been significant. To hear that almost two-thirds of employees say that they're not managed in a way that motivates them to do their best work is, again, a pretty good eye-opener and why the topics that we're talking today are so important. To get started in our journey on how to provide initiatives and policies and practices to drive an engaged workforce, we're going to start with defining culture. Culture is the foundation of your efforts around retention and engagement. And this is one of the most exciting things I think that company owners and leaders get to do because you get to decide what your culture is. This is something that you have some control over, and you can define what this looks like. But why does this matter? Why is this so important? It's actually really simple. This is where your purpose comes to life. Culture is what connects your employees to your company, and it's what drives them to get work done. And if you don't define your culture, somebody else will. This happens in casual conversation. It can happen online in today's environment. So you know how easy it is for people to share their thoughts about something, and it can spread to a lot of people. And that suddenly defines who you are based on a few people might say about you. Think about the post on Glassdoor or on social media and other places. They can have a significant impact on how a business is perceived. So it's important that you take the time to define it yourself. And having a strong corporate culture is really the difference between good and great companies. When you get it right, it has a really positive impact on your employee engagement. It can reduce turnover. It can increase productivity. And as we talked about in the last webinar in December, it actually helps you attract the right candidates and hire the people that are best aligned with your company. It gets everyone focused on the goals of the business. One definition that I came across of culture is that corporate culture refers to shared values, attitudes, standards, and beliefs that characterize members of an organization and define its nature. Corporate culture is rooted in an organization's goals, strategies, structure, approaches to labor, customers, investors, and the greater community. My definition, it's about your values and how they live in your workplace. It's how we treat people. It's what our priorities are. It's what makes us special. It becomes the basis for our policies, for how we give and get feedback, and our work environment. So where do we begin? You need to understand who you are today and decide if it's right for your company. Cultures can evolve, and it's helpful to have some idea of what is going on. Google actually tells us that there are anywhere from four to more than a dozen ways that you can define your culture. But what's most important is however you define your culture is that it's genuine and authentic and that you've taken the time to really understand what your culture is. So there are a few general ones that you can start to think about when you try to understand what type of a culture do you want to have. The ones on the slide I'm just going to touch on briefly. So the clan culture, it's just like it sounds, family-like feel. The values and beliefs promote the welfare of the business. This is close-knit groups, high levels of collaboration. There's an emphasis on consensus. These cultures are built on trust between management and staff. Then there's that paternalistic or hierarchy culture where there's a dominant authority figure, not a lot of transparency. Some would say it's like the parent-knows-best mentality. Not as much collaboration. Loyalty and obedience tend to be more about performance. And sticking to the rules and tradition. The purpose-driven culture. This is built on a defined shared reason for why you exist. I actually believe that this element should be across all cultures, defining why you exist. There's this feeling of giving back to the community. So many times a nonprofit might adopt this fully. They're not necessarily driven by profitability, but by doing good work. So again, that kind of has that little bit of that spin. But again, I believe that this is a culture component that a lot of companies are starting to embrace. Whether they're for-profit or nonprofit. Then we've got the creative. This focuses on individuality and what each person brings to the table. Creativity and innovation is encouraged as new ideas are really what drives the company. Manufacturing, IT, some of those high-tech industries, could really fall into this. Customer first. Focus is on satisfying customers and not as much on individual goals or accomplishments. Everyone's job ties back to making the customer happy, internally and externally. So as I said, there might be certain elements of each of these that are resonating with you. And I think it's good to sit back and think about what does your culture look like? Because there are aspects of each of these that can really drive your business and focus your employee energy. Like I said before, it really has to fit your business. It also needs to be driven by the top-down. John Maxwell said that a great culture starts with a great mission or vision statement. How do you tell your story? In my webinar in December, I had asked the question about what makes you special and how many of you can answer that question. I like to bring that up again because I think it's so important. And it's also important not only for recruiting, but for retaining and engaging your people. This is a foundational question. How do you tell your story? I like to bring that up again because I think it's so important not only for recruiting, but for retaining and engaging your people. This is a foundational question that I think everybody in your company should be able to answer. What's the elevator speech on what sets you apart? What makes you special? Why would somebody want to be working for you? When it comes to your mission, that's really your why, your purpose. Your vision is where you're heading. Values is something that is also incredibly important because the values are things that are going to align people to the work that they're doing. So when you have value alignment with the people at work, they're going to feel much more connected to it. And we're going to talk a little bit more about how important it is for people to feel connected to the work. As you think about your values, how are they demonstrated at work? So, for example, if you value integrity, inclusion, curiosity, collaboration, what does that look like at work? What is it that people demonstrate to show you that they are aligning with those values? Now, I worked with a client who did a really great job defining their values and stating how each one of these is demonstrated. So I want to give you an example of what this could look like. So we'll just take the example of integrity, which is a very common value, right? They define it as doing the right thing when no one is watching. And then they took that extra step that I talked about, which is how is this demonstrated? And they listed the following expectations. Not extending meal and restroom breaks. Clocking in and out each day. Adhering to the company's cell phone policy. Not stretching out the workload. I really loved the extra step that they took, and I thought that that was such valuable information for them then to be able to communicate to their employees. You'll hear me talk about values a few times. So if you haven't gone through this practice of really identifying your values and then also going that extra step to think about and document what those values look like, at your workplace, I really encourage you to do that and invest time into that process. It's also important to understand your leadership style and the style of your different department heads. Each leader of people has their own unique approach, and that then creates cultures within our culture. And that's okay. But are your managers supporting the mission and values of the company? And on an overall basis, how are they leading their teams? And is it aligned with the company's vision and mission and values? This isn't about creating a place where everybody is the same, because I think we all know that diversity of experience and thought and background is all really important and hugely valuable to business. But it is about alignment and diversity. So, use the topics on this slide to start to define who you are and what's important to the success for your company. And if you already have these defined, they're really good to go back and revisit once in a while, just to be sure that they're updated and that they are communicated. Many times we find our mission and vision and values like on a wall somewhere or in our handbook. They need to be more than that. And if you can incorporate these items into how you're communicating with employees and how you're setting expectations, it's going to make your team a lot more successful. So, I'm going to turn it over to you. Why does it matter to really understand and manage your culture? Well, there's a lot of reasons on this slide that make it the right business decision, and I would say it's a very smart business decision. Culture is the driver of strategy and strategy is what drives the success of your business. Culture is the foundation of strategy and what drives the success of your business. So, if you're going to build a company, you're going to need to have a culture of strategy. And I think a lot of people will be able to figure that out. And I would say it's a very smart business decision. Culture is the driver of strategy execution. Another way to look at culture is that it sets your north star, and we know that this matters. In fact, 72% of senior management in one survey that I looked at stated that they believe their culture helps successful change initiatives to happen. So, it's really important that as leaders and as managers that we're thinking about how can we incorporate the aspects of our culture into how we are leading our teams. 90% of executives have reported that they believe their culture and employee engagement is important. This is an interesting sidebar to that, but only 12% actually understand their culture. So, there's so many of us that we believe what I'm saying, right? We believe that, yes, this is important, but we haven't taken the time and we haven't made it a priority to step back and really understand it. So, that's why I wanted to start with this because it's so important to understand who we are, what our values are, how we need to work together, what the business needs are, because all of those things are going to impact retention and engagement. I know that there are so many competing priorities, but I hope that looking at the information on this slide is going to give you the business reason why this is an important step to take. And the statistics about it being just good business, you can't argue with those when it comes to why this matters, because the return on investing in your culture is significant. As you can see, it's directly related to aligning your hiring decisions with your culture and values. It improves retention, and it absolutely can have a positive impact on your employee experience. Engagement creates retention. These are not mutually exclusive initiatives, but rather they work together. If you think about it, you really can't have one without the other, because engaged employees tend to stay longer and be more satisfied with their job. And the more of your workforce is engaged, the less likely they will be to leave. So let's start to explore how we can create more engagement. First of all, I have one poll question that I would like all of you to take a minute to think about and answer. Who do you think impacts engagement? The employee's manager? The employee? Is it leadership's responsibility to have that big impact? Or is it our coworkers? What do you think? I think we're going to leave the poll open for just a little bit longer to try to get as many responses as we can. I think we're going to leave the poll open for just a little bit longer to try to get as many responses as we can. I think we're going to leave the poll open for just a little bit longer to try to get as many responses as we can. All right, so we've got the top two choices are the employee's manager and leadership. And I would say that this was maybe a little bit of a trick question. I think those two are absolutely critically important. I will tell you that the employee's direct manager is the number one. Leadership certainly has a very important role in that, and quite honestly, all four of these have a role. But the employee's direct manager for years and survey after survey after survey has shown that they have the most significant impact. Thanks, Nicole. We can go ahead and close the poll. So now let's focus on engagement and what really can drive it and how we can start to build some initiatives around this. This slide really talks about the specifics behind why engagement is so important. And again, coming back to why this should be a business initiative and why putting resources behind it can make some sense. In fact, I'll put some percentages around what's on the slide. When you have an engaged workforce, there's a 21% increase in profits, 17% higher profitability, 41% decrease in absenteeism. Engaged employees report that they are happier, miss work less, and tend to be more loyal. And if that's not enough, one study suggests that one disengaged employee costs their employer about $3,400 in lost productivity for every $10,000 of salary. That's a big number, and I'm not sure that that's even captured in that $1 trillion that turnover has cost us. This is the cost of disengagement. Lately, we've been hearing about this quiet quitting. This is where that cost is of people who are still showing up to work but are kind of checked out. And the numbers are extensive. And then you couple that with the fact that Gallup has reported that only 36% of employees in the US are engaged. I think that putting some time and effort behind this can really move the needle, not only on more productivity, less absenteeism, happier people, but that's really going to drive the business forward in ways that you maybe not be able to otherwise. It does start with leadership. And it was great to see how many of you thought that the leadership component and the impact on engagement was so significant because it really does start here. And I think this slide, Dale Carnegie put this research together, and I've always believed that this slide is just really powerful. 25% of leaders make employee engagement initiatives an important part of what they think about, plan for, and do daily. And if they do it, look at what happens to their feelings about their teams being willing to go above and beyond. So leadership has a direct impact on this. And I know that the answer to the poll was the employee's direct manager, and we'll talk a little bit more about that. But it has to start with leadership. It has to start with leadership making this a priority and providing time for managers to engage in these activities. It's about creating the employee experience. This is what it is all about. So let's jump into some specific drivers and different ways that we can start to think about initiatives that we can build into a plan to start to create a more engaged workplace. These are the engagement drivers. Dale Carnegie, I'm going to cite them a couple of times because they have done research for an extensive amount of time. And they have come back to these five drivers that create the employee experience. And these are the drivers behind engagement. We've got the relationship with the immediate manager, belief in senior leadership, pride in the organization, balance with personal life, and work environment. And it's interesting because we've seen so many things in the last couple of years with changing expectations and changing priorities. And yet this research has been around for a long time and is still incredibly relevant. And even though they go through updating their research, it still comes back to these five drivers. So I really feel good about saying this is what the foundation of engagement really is all about. And then we have to take this one step further. Emotions lead to engagement. And these are the emotions that Dale Carnegie has identified that are behind those five drivers. It's about belonging and feeling that our ideas and skills matter and about our experience as an employee. How these drivers make people feel is the key to engagement. Engagement is rooted in emotion. When people feel valued, confident, connected, and empowered, they become more emotionally committed. In other words, when an organization starts to treat employees as valuable people with skills, rather than as people with valuable skills, engagement levels will rise. We've all heard this phrase over the years that people will soon forget what you said, but will long remember how you made them feel. Well, it's exactly the same when it comes to engagement. Companies that pay attention to how their employees are feeling about their job will absolutely outperform those that don't. So what initiatives can be built around these drivers? You know, just in all the different research that I've done over the years and just my own experience, I tried to find a way to have a very simple approach to this. So I'm going to share with you kind of where I've landed on all of this and give you hopefully a simple, easy path to start to build some initiatives around driving engagement. I want to focus on two driving principles, feeling connected and feeling valued. When you think about it, all five of those drivers come back to this. The emotions that are connected to those five drivers come back to this. So let's get into some of the specifics. Feeling connected. This is all about connection. Some of you may have started allowing more remote work, some maybe not. I think that's been an individual business decision, so this isn't necessarily how remote work has changed that. But if you are allowing more remote work, that definitely is having an impact on how people are connected for sure. But regardless of that, the pressures of business have had an impact on how we are connected to each other. And I would say that I don't know if we've always done a great job in boosting connection. I think many times it sort of happened naturally or it almost happened by accident just because of proximity. But things have maybe changed a little bit over the last recent years, and so I think it's time that we take a new focus and a fresh perspective on how can we intentionally start to build connections again. One survey that I saw said that 70% of Gen Z and Millennials said that they are less likely to feel included, they have weaker relationships with their teams, and are at a higher risk to leave. 70%, that's a huge part of a workforce that we have. But more than that, lack of communication and connectivity has been cited as one of the main reasons employees feel a diminished culture at work. And we already have heard about why culture is so important. So if culture is diminished, and if people don't feel included, if they don't have relationship with their teams, that doesn't sound like a very fun place to be, does it? Employees are looking to their employer to help them feel a part of something. We spend so much time together at work. How do we have a purpose? What does that purpose look like? So here are some ways that we can start to promote some of that connectivity. Performance feedback. I believe that this is the best gift that you can give an employee. It ties back to how values are demonstrated also. And it's really important that however you give feedback, that you give it timely, and you are very clear about what that feedback is. The bullets on the slide I find to be very interesting because this is actually from what employees are looking for. So we're just giving them what they're asking for when we give them feedback that is structured around authentic, you know, just giving it an authentic effort. Let's put the effort in to give feedback. Let's provide corrective feedback. Let's let them know when they are not successful, when something isn't going as well as it should be. Setting clear expectations. Helping them see what their future could look like and that they have a future with your company. And then what is it going to take for them to get there? This feedback piece is so important. You know, we have expectations on people, don't we, that, you know, we want them to come in and do the work and show up every day and whatever the job is, right? We've got expectations around that. But oftentimes we don't take the time to provide honest feedback on how well they're doing against what our expectations are. And if we don't take the time to do that, how can we ever expect them to be successful? Because they don't know. And so what you don't want to do is wait until the very end when somebody has been failing for a while and all of a sudden it's like, okay, well, we can't keep this person any longer. And they've had no opportunity to course correct. Being able to develop the people that you have, give them the opportunity to be successful and to meet your expectations is a great way to be sure that they are going to hopefully stick around and be productive employees for you. That's another way that you can really impact retention is to really take the time to help those individuals that are missing the mark and be very clear about what they need to be doing differently. The other piece on employee feedback and performance feedback that I want to mention is the tools don't need to be complicated and they don't need to be these big long forms that you go through. Determine what it is that you can do. And I think that there's two aspects of performance feedback. One would be what is kind of that day-to-day feedback that you can be giving people, both positive and negative. And then what is that annual or semi-annual, a little bit more formal process where you can have time to really spend with people and talk through how they're doing against what the job description, the job expectations are, and to talk with them a little bit about how they're feeling about the work that they're doing. That can be designed however you want it to be designed. It could be as simple as four or five questions and 15 minutes of conversation all the way through a more elaborate multi-page performance review process that has ratings and scores and all sorts of stuff. Figure out what it is that works for your company and figure out what it is that you can successfully implement and get started with providing this feedback. And then you can always let it evolve and grow from there. Next, I want to talk about intentional interactions. It is so easy to get bogged down in our work and the performance feedback process can help create some of these intentional interactions. And those are ones that are great between the employee and the manager. And I think that building that relationship is super critical and important. But we also want to have interactions with the leadership team, with the leaders, the owners of the business as well, and our co-workers. So there's multiple places where we want to be able to build connections and build those relationships. You know, having a friend at work makes a significant difference in how somebody feels connected. There's so much stuff out there that'll tell you about increased productivity and more collaboration and all sorts of good things for the business when people feel like they've got a friend at work. So how are we developing these relationships? Allowing for casual conversations before or after meetings, encouraging collaboration whenever you can, and just create opportunities for people to gather together. I also think that it's important that leadership is visible and connecting with people as much as possible. And then the third item on this slide is about giving input. And this is also the giving and the getting, right? So giving input is the feedback side. Getting input comes is information from the employees coming back to management. So we're going to talk a little bit more about some of these things. We've got engagement assessments and engagement interviews, but first I want to show you just a quick little engagement activity that you just might find to be helpful as you think about your team, levels of engagement, and maybe some things that you can start to focus on. So when you look at this grid, just think of one person on your team who you think is highly engaged. And if you have a piece of paper or something next to you, just make a quick note. Who are you thinking about? And then why did you pick them? What is it that they're demonstrating that leads you to say, this is an engaged, effective person on my team? Just jot a couple of notes on what you think that that, you know, what they're demonstrating. And now take, you know, think about somebody who you don't think is very engaged. And then what are they doing or what are they demonstrating to lead you to believe that they've maybe sort of checked out? And if you'd go through this exercise with everybody on your team, I think you're going to learn something pretty fascinating. I think you're going to start to see what are those either skills or behaviors or attributes that are causing you to see engagement out of people? What are those behaviors that are causing you to see disengagement? It's also going to help you identify who you think might be disengaged and who might need some time with you to sit down and talk. So I just encourage you to think about utilizing this kind of an activity and go through your team and just think about it. And then you take that information and you couple it with engagement interviews or assessments. You're going to get so much great information to help you be able to build your plan because everybody's plan is going to be unique and different. Your plan is not going to look like some other company's plan. There might be some general things that are going to seem similar, but you need to find out what's going to work best for your company and your people. So when we're talking about getting input from employees, assessments can be more formal and they can help with aligning values and work habits and identifying areas for training and or coaching. They can measure commitment, motivation, and even predict some behaviors. So assessments are becoming much more popular and a full-blown engagement survey that is more formal in nature. They often will tie that back to normative data, which gives you benchmarking information, which can be really, really helpful because it helps you understand if you're that much different than another company or if you're kind of where most companies are at, and it can really help you develop some initiatives to build off of results. A more informal process would be what I call engagement interviews. I think for years we've talked about them as state interviews, but with all of the retention issues that companies have been facing with, I kind of reworked the questions a little bit to have it more focused on engagement. So this slide has some sample questions to give you an idea of what I'm talking about. These can be 15-minute conversations with employees. If you're a larger company, you can strategize on how best to get this feedback and do more like focus groups or small teams or start with a particular department that has had high turnover and just go through this process. If you're going to adopt a process like this, there's a couple things I just want you to be aware of. This is a time to listen. This is not a time to give them feedback. This is a time to listen and hear from your employee. Set a time expectation. Like I said, these don't have to be long. They can be four questions and 15 minutes long. If you want to do more, you can do more, but they don't have to be. And pick the questions that are going to give you the best information for what you're trying to accomplish. This should be a conversation. Don't let it just be checking the boxes, but have it be a time for some meaningful connection. Use the information gathered from this activity to listen for certain cues that you might want to follow up on later. Sometimes you'll want to identify high-risk employees or at-risk employees through this process. You can start to understand that maybe somebody isn't really all that happy even though they're doing a good job. You might be able to discover some things that you can follow up on later to try to further explore what might be going on to see if you can't turn that situation around. I do recommend that the same person do these interviews where it may be somebody from an HR team. You can have a third party do that or somebody who can handle the information in a way that is confidential and then do some reporting out on trends that they're seeing and things along those lines. Outliers also, when you look at these things, are really important to pay attention to because even though you're looking for trends, outliers are sharing information with you that they're kind of taking a chance that you're going to listen. And so pay attention to those outliers. Then also be 100% sure that if you're going to go through this process or you're going to go through a more formal assessment process that you give feedback to your team and to your employees. Asking them for input and then doing nothing with it and providing no feedback is going to work against you and really end up being a disengaging process as opposed to what this is designed to do, which is to build connection, get input from people, and start to understand the initiatives that matter to them. And then you can take that information in and decide, okay, what works for our business? So part two, we started with these two driving principles. First one was feeling connected. The second one is feeling valued. So this really is the second key to engagement. I know that sometimes this might feel kind of warm and fuzzy, but it really isn't, especially when close to 70% of employees say they will work harder if they feel appreciated at work. That's a pretty good number to go after. So the items on the slide are areas that employees have said, this is what's important to me. And it's also some things that just from a business perspective, just makes sense when it comes to talking about how we help employees feel valued. So opportunities to grow. This seems simple enough, but there's many ways to offer growth to employees. Not everybody wants to climb the corporate ladder though either, right? I mean, I came out of manufacturing and I remember, and I've said this so many times, the people that I really was so appreciative of were the third shift machine operators who had no desire to be a supervisor or move to another shift. They were so valuable to me because they gave us our core third shift group and they were stable and happy and they did a great job. So you have to know your personnel is what's most important with this. Some people are definitely looking to grow and expand and be promoted and earn more and take on more responsibility. Other people might be looking for just expanding their skillset a little bit, right? Being involved in a special project or being asked to provide input to help solve a problem. So there's different ways that you can provide opportunity and a lot of it has to do with how you communicate it. You might say to somebody, I need you to do this spreadsheet for me. But if you say to them, hey, you know what? I know that you've been really wanting to further develop your Excel skills, and I've got this project that I need help with. And I think that you've got what it takes to learn how to make this happen. I would like you to take this project on, and it's gonna help you grow and help you learn a new skill. Putting a few words around why you're asking somebody to do something extra can really help instill that sense of helping them be valued and helping them see that this is really an opportunity for them to grow. How did the pay and benefits? I'd be remiss if this wasn't on the slide, right? Because this is important. So if you don't know where you're at from a benchmarking perspective, this is something that I always encourage because it's good to know where you are when it comes to paying benefits against your area and against other similar companies. It also helps you develop ways that you can talk about your benefits and your pay and compensation and things like that in a way that makes it very meaningful to employees. So that definitely is a way that people will feel valued. Access to leadership. We talked about this a little bit, when leaders take the time to talk to people, just the fact that they've carved time out of their day. And this is a side piece of the engagement interviews that connect it to feeling valued. A manager or an HR person or some other designated individual is taking time out of their day just to listen to somebody. That shows value in and of itself, let alone all that you learn through the process. So as leaders be accessible, walk around, schedule periodic meetings, share information about the business. Flexibility and trust. This is really at the heart of how people really want to work together. Employers need work done. We want people to do their best work and employees are asking for a little bit of control over their day and to be trusted. So when we go back to those key drivers of engagement, the ability to provide flexibility positively impacts several aspects of the employee experience that can really help to further enhance your engaged workforce. Pride in the organization, balance with personal life and how they feel about their work environment. Flexibility can look a lot of different ways. I'd mentioned that I came out of manufacturing, right? We didn't have a lot of flexibility with our schedules because we needed our machine operators to basically slide in and slide out, right? But there's some other things that I think we can consider and sometimes depending on our business and our structure, we just need to get creative. We need to think outside the box and see what are we able to do? Obviously the needs of the business have to be met, but are there some things that we can do to help provide just a little bit of flexibility that promotes that work-life balance that so many people are looking for now? And I can't say that I know what it is for you, but I would just encourage you to really think creatively and see if you can't come up with some things. And if you've got jobs that you just can't do it for, that's okay. I just think it's important then that you are willing to have that conversation with people if you need to on why you can't offer the level of flexibility that they may be looking for. And certainly make sure that you're clearly communicating that in the interview process, if that's something that is important for a candidate. And then recognition. This is at the top of the list for many employees. In fact, this is kind of the new hot topic. It's one of the most significant ways that you can show value and it doesn't really have to cost a whole lot when you think about it. A significant portion of employees consider recognition the most important factor for job satisfaction. What I want to encourage you to do is keep in mind that everybody appreciates recognition differently. That's why this question was embedded in the engagement interviews as one option so that you can start to understand how people want to be recognized because not everybody wants their name in lights. Some people just very quietly would like a simple thank you, but there are other people that want to have their name and their picture and be up on stage and all sorts of recognition, right? So it's important that you know who your people are and how to best deliver that recognition. Because this is such an important topic today and because so many employees are saying this is becoming more and more important to me, I want to spend just an extra minute on recognition and how to make it most effective. Because if you're going to go down this path, here's really what the structure is on how to be sure that you're going to get the biggest bang for your buck when you talk about recognizing employees. And what it really comes down to is exactly what this slide says. It should be personalized. So the importance of sincere appreciation is really important and I think we all know that. The hard part is that business needs take over and we don't always take the time or make the time to just say thank you or to recognize somebody's efforts. Sometimes we get caught up into having to fix the problem or the fire drill of the day or the employee who's not performing well. We don't carve out the time to say thank you or to recognize the people that are showing up every day and doing a great job. So this does have to be intentional because it's just the way days tend to operate, right? The most noise, if you will, in our day is what draws us and draws our energy and draws our time to it. And so we have to be intentional about this. So let me give you an example of what these four steps could look like. So I'm gonna walk through kind of how you can approach this when you're trying to show recognition to somebody. So, hey, Anne, I'm so impressed with how quickly you learn new skills. That's a genuine heartfelt comment, right? Now I'm gonna provide a more specific example. Reason I say that is yesterday when I asked you to proofread John's presentation, your feedback was on target and you caught things that only people who have been doing this for years would find. Now I'm gonna put this in context. Explain how this quality will help you or the team, the organization, the customer, et cetera, right? So this is the explanation then to Anne. Because of this, you have become a role model that our whole team can depend on to help with projects. And then you wanna reinforce it. I encourage you to contribute whatever you can to continue to add value to our team's goals. So sincere, put meaning behind it. Take the time to think about those extra elements that you can add that personalizes it and offer it as frequently as you can. Again, I know that everything that we're talking about is taking the time to plan for something, but think about how important these attributes are and these initiatives are and the impact that they're gonna have on your workforce. Because when you have that workforce who is engaged and doing what they need to be doing, you're gonna find that you're gonna get time back in your day, I believe. So leadership's role. I'd like to encourage that this is about trust. And like I said, to encourage that trust is something that is a focus of energy for the management team, for the leadership team. It's really important that trusting organizations are supported and built. The return on investment is significant. Define trust as, you know, and looking at a couple of different definitions and what I've pulled together is safekeeping, protection, belief, where confidence is placed. I love that piece. Reliance on something or someone. Leave the accuracy of. To permit to stay or go or do something without fear. Wouldn't that be awesome if that's how we all showed up to work every day? That we can come into work and that I think gives us the freedom to do our best work when we are in a trusted environment. People really do wanna work for people that they trust and respect. And here's why it matters from a business perspective. You can see how significantly it impacts engagement, but there's other things too that I think can really promote that employee experience when you have a trusted work environment. And I love the statistics on this slide. Low trust companies compared to high trust companies. High trust has less stress, way more energy at work. Look at that statistic. Much higher productivity, fewer sick days, way more engagement and a lot less burnout. And trust can be built and supported with a few simple actions. Be authentic. Be genuine in your actions and words. Follow through on what you say you're going to do. Be appropriately transparent. I always say appropriately transparent because the big buzzword for leadership is be transparent. I think we all know that we can't share everything, right? I mean, that's just not realistic nor is it necessarily the right thing for business to do. But find those places where you can be transparent. Let others in on challenges and what you need from them. Provide updates on the state of the business. And at times, maybe be a little vulnerable. Ask for their help. Admit when something doesn't go as planned. But be able to share information as appropriately as you can. Give others a role and a purpose. Leaders direct people for what they need to do next. And they establish order. And they definitely support purpose. And purpose is something that is so important to engagement. When people feel a sense of purpose, when they feel passionate about the job that they're doing, when they know their why. Why their job matters. Why the company matters. We all exist for a reason. And when we can connect our people to that why, it goes a long way to helping them feel more connected to the job and more fulfilled in the work that they're doing. And the last little action that you can take, and it's not so little actually, is to show compassion. I guess I would say above all else, demonstrate care and concern for your people. The genuineness of that speaks volumes when you show people that they matter as much as the work matters. So in summary, we've covered a lot of ground. And there's just a few final thoughts that I want to share with you. And then we'll have a couple minutes for some questions if there's any questions. Anyone who manages people, they need an extra dose of training. So many times this is an area that companies, I won't say they forget about because I don't think it's intentional. I just feel as though many managers are promoted to a manager level because they were really good at doing the work of what the team is doing. But that doesn't necessarily mean that they have the skills to manage people. And so that line, that frontline manager, if you will, is so critical to provide the soft skill training that they need to manage people. There's other training that is also critically important when it comes to compliance and risk mitigation and all those other things. But for the context of what we're talking about, just the soft skills, how to deal with a difficult conversation, how to provide good feedback to people, how to be a leader for that team and how to get the best out of people. Developing clear policies that your managers can rely on is another piece of this where it will give them confidence to handle situations in a manner that supports your culture, supports your values, and helps to align all of the teams under that umbrella. Employees definitely need clear direction. We talked about what this means. Accountability is, that's a whole nother topic, but accountability and building in the clear expectations is really important because we can't expect people to perform well if they don't know what they need to be doing and if they don't know if they're failing. We spent a lot of time on feedback, but I just wanna share kind of one last little statistics because I think this is interesting when you think about what the initiative for feedback should look like. 47% of workers say that they received feedback from their managers a few time or less. That's half our people are not getting much feedback according to Gallup. And of that group, only 26% felt that the feedback they did receive was helpful. So I think sometimes we need to take a step back and say, okay, well, I thought this made sense or I thought this was a good idea, but did you get the response that you wanted? Did you get the feedback that you wanted from the employee? Did the employee really understand what you were trying to accomplish? So those dots have to connect in order for the feedback to be truly meaningful and for it to be effective. And finally, I always talk about celebration because I think it's so important that we take time out to celebrate the good stuff. Business can be hard and stressful and it also can be exciting and fun. To celebrate and bring people together and recognize people and allow for that fun, casual interaction is a great way to support your employee experience. And that promotes all of the things that we talked about today. So thank you so much for joining me today. I hope that some of this information was helpful to put you on a path to start to create your initiatives around building an engagement plan, which is only going to enhance your retention efforts. And with that, I'm going to, let's see, I'm gonna come on video and then Nicole, I don't know if we've got any questions that you would like us to deal with in the last couple of minutes that we have. Of course. First off, thank you, Sue, for a great and informative presentation. We do have a few questions. So I'll start with the first question, which is exit interviews are a good way to understand why an employee is leaving and to learn how to change the workplace to make it more attractive. However, we have a hard time getting employees to complete the interview. Do you have any suggestions? I personally like exit interviews that are done in person to have it be a conversation. I do think that when it's done either online or as a paper survey or they have to turn in a form, it's very easy for them to not take the time to do it. If you package some of the exit interview questions around what the employee needs to know kind of as they're winding down their work or on their last day, there's always things that we need to communicate to employees as they're exiting our companies and building the exit interview around that, I think can really help with that process. I know that it takes time and I understand that that's a lot of reasons why companies will go to a survey or a piece of paper. But if you're not getting the result that you need from that, maybe try doing it a little differently and see. And I think exit interviews are great. But again, if you're not getting the value or you don't have the time to do it, it's not a must do, but it can really provide valuable input if that's something that you have the time to do. Wonderful, thank you. Our next question is, do you think employee rewards or incentives help engage and retain employees? Oh, let me think about that for a second. I think they can. And I think that, again, it's interesting because I've talked with a couple of clients and like they did some year-end bonuses and they felt like they were so excited to be able to give these year-end bonuses and they felt like it really fell flat and they didn't get the response that they were hoping for from their employees. So I guess my encouragement would be, there's nothing wrong with rewards and incentives. I would say be very thoughtful about how you approach it to be sure that you're going to get the result that you're hoping for. And also recognize that doing it all the time sometimes takes the fun out of it because it becomes expected. And so finding the right balance I think is important. Trying something new and different can just make it a little bit more interesting also so that people don't feel as though it's so expected. So just be very thoughtful when you approach it. But if you've got the budget to be able to do things like that and to be able to demonstrate how you're giving back, find out what's most meaningful to your employees. Find out what they would value the most. And maybe that's a way that you can include that into an engagement survey or just do a quick pulse survey to see what would be meaningful for people. Perfect, thank you. We have time for one more question. Okay. Do you have suggestions for a well-rounded soft skills manager course, one that could apply for any level from the new to the experienced manager? Oh, you know what? What I would love to be able to do, Nicole, if I could, could I maybe send a couple of resources your way and then you can share them. I don't know how that would work, but maybe share them with the participants somehow. Because there's a bunch of really good ones out there. I know I've talked about Dale Carnegie today. They are a phenomenal group to work with. I've worked with them for over a decade and they've got some terrific training. There are some different options out there. But I can send you some things that you can think about. The other component that I think is really important to make sure that you do manager training on, which is more of a, I'll say almost an in-house or an HR sort of focused training, would be training on just some basic employment law so that they can help from a compliance perspective. You also need to make sure that they're trained on your handbook and your policies and what the intent is behind those policies. And then also be sure that as you develop those performance feedback tools, that you do some training around that as well and make sure that everybody's on the same page with how those tools are gonna be utilized. So in a way, I will say there's kind of two sides of it. Because you can do the difficult conversations and handling conflict and some of those types of soft skill training classes. And then there's this other piece, which is really gonna be based on your policies and your practices and how to make sure that your management team and supervisors are aligned with your policies. Great, thank you. And Sue, feel free to send me that list and I'll make sure to get it sent out to all the participants for today's webinar. All right. Wonderful. So that concludes our Q&A portion of today's presentation. On behalf of PCI, I'd like to thank Sue for a great presentation. If you have any further questions about today's webinar, please email marketingatpci.org. Thank you again. Have a great day and stay safe.

retention

engagement

turnover

cultures

performance feedback

opportunities for growth

trust

recognition

soft skills