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Words of Gratitude (#7) to Tim Sackett
 Words of Gratitude (#7) to Tim Sackett 150 150 Jason Lauritsen
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Note: I’m writing a note of gratitude on the blog each day in November leading up to the Thanksgiving holiday. My hope is that these posts will inspire you to do the same. Write an email, Facebook post, or a text to tell people they have made an impact on you. Gratitude is contagious. 

Anyone who knows me very well knows how much I love my work. I love to talk about work and the workplace and engagement, etc. Probably too much.

I’m also a pretty relentless relationship builder, always looking to connect to new and interesting people.

This combination of things has led to having a network of friends all over the world who share a common passion for the work. These are people who, when we get together to have a few beers, end up in long conversations about what else…how to make work better for people.

My professional journey has led me to connect with some really amazing people who I now consider friends.  One of those people is Tim Sackett.

Tim is a prolific blogger, speaker and crusader for better HR and recruiting practices. If your work involves recruiting and you don’t know about Tim, you need to fix that. He published a book this year called The Talent Fix: A Leader’s Guide to Recruiting Great Talent that you should probably buy.

Tim and I first connected through social media and then in person at a variety of HR and Talent Conferences over the years. One of the things that immediately drew me to Tim beyond his passion for his work, was his willingness to take a stand and occasionally espouse an unpopular opinion. While I may not always agree with Tim’s opinions, I always respect his authenticity and courage.

As I have been ramping up my business, Tim has been among the most supportive people in my network. Tim has been generous in his advice and support. He’s even helped me find business. One of my awesome clients, PeopleDoc, would not be doing work with me today if Tim had not introduced us.

Friends are those who come through for you when you need them. And Tim has done that a number of times for me.

Earlier this fall, one of my longtime friends and I had decided we wanted to go to a football game at a stadium neither of us had visited before. One of the options on our list was to go see a Michigan State football game in East Lansing.

Tim happens to live in that area, so I reached out and asked if he could help us find tickets. He did far better than that. We had the opportunity to have dinner with Tim and his wife the night before the game and then he invited us to tailgate with his friends. It was an awesome experience that would not have happened without Tim’s generosity.

Tim, I am grateful for your friendship, support, and time. I’ve really enjoyed the opportunities we’ve had this year to hang out talking about work and life. Your help and encouragement as I grow my business has been incredibly important. You have come through for me every time. That’s rare and amazing. Thank you. 

Technology’s Evolving Role in HR #HRTechConf
 Technology’s Evolving Role in HR #HRTechConf Jason Lauritsen
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The HR Technology Conference has become one of my favorite events of the year. It’s a great opportunity to get a feel for the broader trends in HR and work.  

Each year, I try to take in a few sessions and spend some time walking the Exhibit Hall. My goal is to try to understand what the technology vendors think is important to the HR community. This comes through loud and clear through their marketing messages and positioning at the event.

Based on my observations, this year’s overarching theme seemed the same as last year. Everything is about AI (artificial intelligence). Apparently, we are all so fascinated by the potential of AI that nearly every vendor is feeling the pressure to show how they are in the AI game.

I personally think that most of the talk about AI is distracting us from what really matters in making work better. That is an argument for another day. The bottom line is that for the second year in a row, AI was the dominant buzzword of the conference.

Another thing I love about this event is the conversation and presentations about the future of work. Technology companies are rightfully interested in understanding how work is evolving and what the future might look like so they can enable that future through their products.

Based on what I heard from Josh Bersin and others, it seems to me that there are some real shifts coming (and needed) in terms of what HR technology looks like and how it works.  There were three big things that I took away from this year’s event.

  1. HR technology tools need to be where the work happens. Almost all of today’s HR technology tools are part of a stand-alone platform or product. This means that the employee has to leave the technology that they primarily use to do their work (email, calendar, CRM, etc.) to find and log into another application before being able to take their desired action. It’s no wonder that we struggle to get employees to consistently engage with these tools. It feels like a hassle. The next generation of HR tech tools will be built into where you do work to make the employee’s experience much more fluid and intuitive. Keep an eye on companies like Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, and Slack as they are already starting to build some of their own integrated tools. It seems like there’s about to be a lot of innovation in this area. 
  2. We need technology to support wellbeing. Earlier this year, Stanford Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer published a new book titled, “Dying for a Paycheck: How Modern Management Harms Employee Health and Company Performance—and What We Can Do About It.” He argues that work is literally killing us. Much of that boils down to the immense stress that people are feeling today from both work and life. I’m convinced that tending to the wellbeing of employees will emerge as a business imperative over the next five or more years. Technology has contributed significantly to this problem in the past by enabling 24/7 connectivity. Now we need new technology to help us begin to fix it.  
  3. The future of work is teams. Bersin stood in front of a room full of HR technology marketers and declared that while more companies are organizing work in teams, today’s HR technology tools are almost exclusively designed around individual work performance. For those who work in a project team or agile environment, you can probably relate to how different it is to manage the performance and engagement of teams compared to individuals. As the way we work and our management approaches shift more and more towards teams and collaboration, we will need new tech tools to support that. And, it doesn’t seem that there are many tools here yet. I expect that to change quickly. 

Those are my takeaways from this year’s HR Tech Conference. If you are interested in technology and the future of work, I highly encourage you to give this conference a look next year. If you decide to go, look me up. I’ll be there. 

The Blindspot in Employee Engagement
 The Blindspot in Employee Engagement 150 150 Jason Lauritsen
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A couple years ago, as my wife and I were returning home from an employee engagement conference where I had spoken, she said something to me that I didn’t fully understand at the time.

I remember it sounding something like this.

“The content here was good, but it was all focused on the happy, positive side of being human at work. Where’s the conversation about all of the hard, painful stuff that humans bring with them to work? Why wasn’t anyone talking about that?”

I agreed with her because she’s always right (joking, kind of). But, the gravity of her wisdom didn’t set in with me until much later.

As I started to pay closer attention to the conversations happening about making the workplace more human, I started to notice what she was talking about. Most of the focus is on how to create a more connected, inclusive, mindful, nourishing, affirming work experience for employees.

All great stuff. All important stuff. Do that.

The problem, however, is that humans carry with us a lot of baggage when we show up to work each day. Regardless of how much we try to convince ourselves of the separation between work and life, it’s a lie.

Life is everywhere and everything we experience is life. Work is just one place where life happens.

Remember, work for employees is a relationship. The test of a good relationship is how you show up when things aren’t so good. The friendships that sustain are with those who are not only around when it’s time to celebrate, they also show up when things are hard (through an illness or breakup, etc.). It’s how they show up in these moments that creates the commitment and loyalty that lasts.

The same is true of the work relationship. It’s great that you celebrate victories and birthdays and new childbirths, but how do you show up during hardship and tragedy? That’s where the rubber meets the road.

This came into stark focus for me last week when I attended and spoke at the WELCOA Summit, the premier event for workplace wellness professionals. It seems that while most of us focus on creating the shining, happy workplace where all humans are welcome, these wellness champions are the ones worrying about the not so shiny, not so happy reality of being human.

The opening keynote by Mettie Spiess is a shining example of what I now realize is the real work of creating a truly human workplace. She sharing her gut-wrenching personal story of losing both of her brothers to suicide and of her own experience of living with mental illness. Her life’s purpose is to create a world without suicide. And she believes that’s possible, but not unless we make some major changes.

The statistics on suicide and mental health in the U.S. are alarming, to put it lightly.

Here’s the truth. Even if you have created an amazing, engaging workplace–these stats make clear that there are people walking through the door at your workplace each day who are silently suffering, maybe fighting a solo battle for their survival.

The bad news is that they aren’t likely to find much support at work because we aren’t looking for them. It’s easy to ignore the realities of mental illness unless you or someone you love is living with it. And to make matters worse, there’s such a negative stigma around mental illness (i.e. “I didn’t know you were crazy”) that it rarely feels safe to ask for help–even when there’s some sort of structure in place to do so.

One of the core messages I took from Mettie is that we must dramatically raise awareness and kill the stigma around mental health. To do this, we have to be very intentional in our efforts around education and awareness of mental illness and suicide in the workplace.

But beyond that, she reinforced the importance and power of authentic human connection and compassion to break some of these cycles. The CDC identified social connectedness as a key factor in the prevention of suicide. Fostering the creation and formation of healthy relationships through work could literally save someone’s life.

But, so too can showing care and concern. Simply paying attention to others and asking “how are you doing?” can make all the difference. This seems so simple and obvious but is easy to neglect in our steadfast commitment to being “busy” all the time.

Suicide and mental health probably feel pretty uncomfortable to read about, let alone talk about. I know. For me too.

But I think this is the essence of the work to create truly “human” places of work. We must create a place where humans connect together to not only create work product together but also to find belonging and acknowledgment and support–real support for both the good stuff and the bad.

Even the people in your work lives who seem to have it all together on the outside are probably struggling with something beneath the surface. It might not be mental illness or suicide, but it might be something that feels just as debilitating to them.

Maybe they are experiencing burnout.

Or maybe they are suffering abuse at the hands of an intimate partner. (20 people per minute are abused by an intimate partner in the U.S. and some of them work for you.)

Many are suffering from serious financial stress. One study reveals that 1 in 4 Americans suffers from PTSD like symptoms caused by financial stress.

The list goes on. Life is hard and the challenges are real.

If we are going to create a truly “human” company, this is the hard work. It’s not enough to simply focus on appreciation and connection and encouragement. We must also make room and provide support for the other side of the human equation.

Creating an engaging work experience for employees is meaningful, important work. But, changing or saving someone’s life is a whole different level of impact that we can and should have on the people who we employ.

Not sure where to start? Let’s chat. I’ll help nudge you in the right direction.

Oh, and how are you?  If you are struggling and need to talk, please reach out.

For more great reading on this topic, check out my friend Rachel Druckenmiller’s summary post about the WELCOA Summit. It’s full of goodness.

Suicide Prevention Hotline: 1-800-273-8255 or Suicide Prevention Lifeline

 

Does Your Company Discourage Vacations?
 Does Your Company Discourage Vacations? 1024 512 Jason Lauritsen
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A few weeks ago, I had an interesting chat with my Lyft driver on the way to the airport in San Francisco.

He was a career business development professional who uses Lyft to supplement his income. Our conversation turned to company culture and work experience (shocking, I know).

He told me about how he had changed jobs and moved his family to Sacramento because he worked for a company that consumed every moment of his life.

When he wasn’t traveling, he was expected to attend client events in the evenings. His wife and family hardly ever saw him.

Then there was the whole issue of vacation. He shared a story with me about a time early in his career when he’d qualified for a company-paid sales incentive trip to Hawaii.

He invited his girlfriend to go along. She agreed based on one condition–that he leaves his laptop at home. She knew that if he brought it, he’d work much of the time. He knew it too but didn’t feel like he had a choice. He chose the laptop and ended up making the trip alone.

At this same company, he described the ritual guilt trip that would be applied by management every time he tried to request vacation days. They’d always say the same thing, “We’ve got so much going on right now, can’t you find another time to go?”

He felt so tied to his work that he couldn’t disconnect, ever.  And, it had an impact on him and his family. Thus, he finally left.

I wish his experience was a unique one and that he just happened to work for a company that was getting it wrong. But, I know too many people who have had the same experience to think that’s true.

And, the data seems to suggest the same.

According to the 2018 Work and Well-being Survey recently published by the American Psychological Association, despite 76% of respondents saying that taking vacation time is important to them, only 41% reported that their organization’s culture encouraged taking time off.

That’s 6 out of 10 organizations where the employees feel like they are discouraged from taking a vacation. Let that sink in.

So, it probably shouldn’t be too surprising that 65% of respondents reported that the positive benefits they feel as a result of taking a vacation (when they do take it) either disappear immediately or within a few days.

This is crazy.

And it’s symptomatic of much deeper cultural and performance issues. If you feel like you cannot be gone from work for fear of lost opportunity or what might happen while you are out, that suggests a teamwork or trust deficiency.

If you don’t want to take vacation time because you feel penalized by a backlog of work that occurs while you are out, that’s a process and work design problem.

If you don’t want to request vacation because of how guilty your manager makes you feel about it, that’s a leadership failure.

The pace and intensity of work have increased steadily over the past couple decades thanks largely to technology. We spend more time connected to work than ever before.

That makes vacation time more important than ever before. People need time away from work to rest and connect to the things that are important in their life (family, friends, travel, etc.).

This weekend, I’m leaving for a week of summer vacation with my family. I didn’t realize how much I needed the time away until it started to draw near. It’s been a pretty intense year so far and I have not unplugged in a long time.

Time away from work is necessary to recharge.

Organizations should encourage employees to use their time off, even require it if necessary.  And, when people leave for vacation, expect them to disconnect and give their full attention to whatever they do while they are out.

Your organization’s posture towards vacation is a good indicator of how well you are tending to an employee’s overall well-being and engagement.

If you aren’t sure how you are doing, take a peek at how much vacation time is being used. Or even more simply, go ask some employees if using vacation time is encouraged.

Relationships and Accountability
 Relationships and Accountability 150 150 Jason Lauritsen
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If you’ve been following my work over the past couple of years, you know that I’ve been evangelizing the message that “work is a relationship, not a contract.” Because employees experience work this way, work and the workplace should be designed around the same principles that make a relationship healthy–things like appreciation, acceptance, and commitment.

As I speak and write more about what this means, I’ve been encountering an interesting objection.

 

“What about accountability?”

The assumption is that if we treat work like a relationship, it’s all about feel-good emotions without any regard to performance and getting things done. The fear, it seems, is that if we treat work like a relationship, accountability and performance management go out the window.

I was caught a little off guard by the question at first. But as I’ve thought about it, I think I understand where it comes from.

There are many kinds of relationships. Friendships, acquaintances, family, neighbors, and many more. If you imagine the work relationship as a friendship or a neighborly acquaintance, then it’s hard to connect the dots for how it translates into performance.  

The work relationship between employee and employer is a formal, mutually-committed relationship in the way that a marriage is in our personal lives. Both parties have made the choice to enter into this relationship. And while there are some laws in place that outline certain parameters of the relationship, what sustains the relationship and makes it work is an ongoing shared commitment to one another, reinforced by the experience of the relationship itself.

There is nowhere in my life that I feel more accountability than in my relationship with my wife, Angie. I often say that one of my life philosophies is “Happy wife, happy life.” And while that usually gets a chuckle from whoever I’ve just said it to, it’s true. To me, it means that I’m committed to doing what is in my control to keep her happy.   

I can’t control how Angie (or anyone else) feels. But, I recognize that how I show up every day, the way I behave, and what I give to the relationship can have a profound impact on her and how she feels.

I know when I don’t contribute around the house adequately, it will have consequences on our relationship. As a result, I try to do what I can every day to pull my weight and check in from time to time to see how it feels to her.  

If we don’t make time for one-on-one time together to talk, it causes us to fall out of balance. So, I make time when we need it. These are but two examples of many of how being accountable to the relationship is what makes it work.  

 

Accountability is core to any healthy relationship.

In the employee-employer or employee-manager relationship, the problem is that the accountability goes mainly in one direction.  Employees are held accountable and expected to be accountable to the organization, but they aren’t often rewarded with the same commitment from the organization.  

For example, if you do something that makes your boss feel insulted, there will be some backlash for you as an employee in one way or another. But, if a boss does something that makes you feel insulted, it can feel like there’s no way to even address that in a safe and constructive way. One way accountability.

Healthy relationships are reciprocal and balanced. Each party actively invests in and is committed to the other. When it’s one way, the relationship starts to deteriorate.  If you’ve ever been in a relationship where one person was far more committed than the other, you know how that usually ends. It’s not good.

Accountability in a relationship of any type requires these basic things:

  • Clear expectations. You can’t live up to expectations you aren’t aware of or that you don’t understand.
  • Communication. Being in an ongoing conversation about how things are going and what is changing is critical. These conversations produce feedback about how things are going and provide the opportunity to learn and adapt.  
  • Commitment. Being accountable in the relationship means that you will sometimes need to do things that you don’t want to do or could get away without doing. You do these things willingly for one another.  

That last bullet is a big one, particularly in the work relationship. Decades of layoffs and downsizing have created an expectation for employees that commitment from employers is conditional and often fleeting. That means that employers and leaders must go above and beyond to both articulate and demonstrate their commitment to employees.  

As you prepare for the weekend, I’d challenge you to think about how you could demonstrate and reinforce greater commitment to your employees as a way to strengthen the relationship.

Calling for a Retreat
 Calling for a Retreat 150 150 Jason Lauritsen
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In my June newsletter, I shared that my wife, Angie, and I had a “retreat” scheduled. For those who may not know, Ang is not only my life partner but is also my business partner. This quest to make work more human is a family affair for us.  

On a walk together in May, we realized that we’d started to lose some of the discipline we once had in regards to preventing the business from consuming our relationship. We weren’t anywhere near crisis stage, but we were seeing some warning signs.

The past couple years have been a whirlwind for us. Not only were we trying to grow a business together, but our oldest son was serving as a Marine including a deployment to Iraq. Angie also ran and was

A photo of all of us in April

elected to City Council in our community. Not to mention trying to keep up with two active younger kids. Somewhere in the middle of all that I wrote a book. It’s been crazy.

 

I think we’ve done okay keeping our head above water, but the wear and tear of constant motion and stress was taking its toll. It was time to step back for a couple days.

Going through the retreat was a great reminder of how important and valuable it is to take the time to do it. Every team or workgroup I encounter is facing their own whirlwind. Your own team is probably stressed and tired from the grind too.

A retreat is probably in order.

The best retreats accomplish three things: build the relationship, clarify and renew a sense of purpose, and align future efforts.

 

Build relationship.  

When you leave a retreat, you should feel a stronger connection to the team. This means the retreat should have specific activities and exercises planned to cause people to both get to know each other better and to renew one another.

In one case, I asked each member of my team to write out a few bullet points about what they appreciate about each member of the team. To open the retreat, we went around the table to each person and had the team share what they had written

about each person. It was a simple exercise that ended up being really powerful and moving for everyone involved.  

For Angie and I, we used a series of relationship questions to open up some good dialogue about how things are going and where we might need to make some improvements. One thing we agreed we needed: regular date nights (no biztalk allowed).  

 

Clarify and renew a sense of purpose.

Before diving into any reflective or planning discussions, spend some time considering why what you do matters. This might involve sharing stories of how your work has made an impact. It might involve dreaming about how your future efforts might change lives. The goal is to create a renewed connection to the purpose of the work your team does every day.

In our case, it’s been easy to get focused on the numbers. How many speaking gigs do we need to book? How much revenue do we need to book? But, that’s not why we do this. We are working to make work more human by helping change people’s thinking–particularly those who lead and shape the workplace. When we motivate these people to shape a better work experience, it has the potential to improve the lives of countless people. That makes the hustle worthwhile.

 

Align future efforts.

Once you’ve renewed your sense of purpose, you can roll up your sleeves and dig into the work. There are a lot of ways to tackle this. Your team might need strategic planning exercises to help focus your efforts. Or, maybe you need to focus more on “how” you work. In this case, using the “start, stop, continue” prompts to identify what’s working and what isn’t can be helpful.  

While it’s not likely that you will have the time or ability to create any detailed plans in your retreat, you should be able to arrive at a place that helps the team have a shared understanding of what happens next. In our case, we needed both a conversation about how we are working together and what to prioritize. No huge changes needed, just some adjustments and prioritization.

When you feel like your team is really grinding and you begin to see cracks in communication and cooperation, it’s probably time to step back and regroup. The word “retreat” was historically used to represent a command given to soldiers during battle when it was time to withdraw or fall back, usually to regroup and find a superior battle plan. At the very least, retreat means you survive to fight another day.  

Particularly in the pressure-packed world of work today, teams need time to retreat from time to time. And they need leaders who understand the importance of making time to do it.  

4x4 performance management process
4×4 Performance Management
 4×4 Performance Management 1080 720 Jason Lauritsen
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One of the things I am most proud of from my corporate HR tour of duty happened during my last stop as an HR executive about six years ago.

Before it was trendy to do so, we lead a process to kill the traditional annual performance management appraisal. I won’t spend time here explaining why we did it as I think it’s become pretty common knowledge that annual appraisals are fatally flawed.

The process we used to make the decision to kill the appraisal and what to replace it with involved stakeholders from across the organization. They concluded that the annual appraisal process was ineffective and painful.

However, it wasn’t because managers and employees lack a desire to have conversations about performance. It was a broken process.

So, we helped them arrive at a better process.

A Better Way Forward

What we developed was called the 4×4.

At its most basic, the 4×4 boils down to a conversation between employee and manager that happens four times a year and centers on four questions.

Every time I mention this process when I speak, there are always one or two people who approach me afterward to ask about this process. So, I thought perhaps it was time to outline the process and the design principles in a post.

4×4 Purpose and Intent

The idea of the 4×4 was to create a simple process structured around a few questions that would promote productive conversation between an employee and their manager about performance. These conversations would happen at least four times per year. We wanted the process to feel meaningful and engaging for both the manager and the employee. And, we wanted the employee to feel a strong sense of ownership for the process.

The 4×4 Process

While the four questions are what most people first ask about (I’ll get to that in a minute), the design of the process is equally important.

  1. The employee schedules a meeting with their manager for their 4×4 conversation. Note that it is the employee who schedules the meeting. This creates accountability on the employee to ensure they are having this conversation. But, that doesn’t mean that the manager shouldn’t also be held accountable for the meetings taking place.  If your employees aren’t requesting the meeting, that’s an issue that needs to be addressed because they should want to have this conversation.
  2. Employee and manager both prepare independently by answering the four questions (details coming below). Ideally, the manager and employee share their notes in advance of their conversation.  This allows the conversation to feel less like an update meeting and more like a conversation focused on what is most important.
  3. Meet to discuss the questions, calibrate expectations and make decisions.  The design of the four questions was to focus the conversation on elements critical to performance.  As issues are identified, they are discussed and agreements/decisions can be made.
  4. Employee documents the key discussion points and decisions made from the conversation and shares with the manager.  Again, this puts the employee in a position of ownership and accountability to ensure value comes from the conversation.  Plus, committing information to writing creates a level of clarity that is too often lacking in performance management.
  5. Manager reviews the employee’s notes to ensure agreement and alignment.  This is one of the most important steps in the process. If the employee’s documentation does not reflect the conversation accurately (for example, he misunderstood some feedback), that’s a communication failure that the manager can address immediately. This loop in the process also provides a manager with real-time feedback to fuel their own development of critical management skills.
  6. Employee finalizes or closes the cycle. The employee gets the final word to reinforce that feeling of ownership of the process.

The Four Questions

The goal of these questions is to focus the conversation on the key elements of performance management: clarity of expectations, goals, feedback, support, and resources.

  1. What are your most significant accomplishments since we last met?  This question creates accountability for the employee to articulate progress and impact. This allows the employee to highlight things they are most proud of and own areas where they have been less successful. The manager can provide praise, appreciation, and constructive feedback here. It also gives managers a signal of where they should be providing more recognition based on what the employee is most proud of.
  2. What are the most important things you will focus on before we meet next?  This question is about alignment.  It prompts a discussion about goals and expectations. It allows the manager to see what the employee believes is most critical and where they are planning to focus their energy. This enables the manager to ensure the focus is in the right places.
  3. What obstacles are you encountering right now? This is an opportunity for the employee to identify any challenges they are facing. Maybe they are struggling with a colleague or they are lacking a tool they need to do their job effectively. Either way, it signals the manager where coaching might be needed or support is required. On the manager’s side, this is an opportunity to share observations and offer suggestions for how the employee could have more impact.
  4. What can I do better or differently as your manager to support you? This creates a regular feedback loop for the employee to help the manager get more in tune with their individual needs and style. As a manager, if you remain open to this feedback, it provides the fuel and reinforcement needed to continually improve your skills and effectiveness.

Role of Technology in Performance Management

While this process can be executed using email and word docs, there are numerous tools available that can automate this process (or a version of it). The advantages of using a performance management platform to automate are many.

For one, you can use the system to trigger conversation cycles four times a year. This means the employee gets a notification reminding them it’s time to start the process and providing them a link to do so.

Also, when you use a system, all of the notes that the employees and managers entered are stored in the same place and create a narrative of performance over time. This narrative is visible to upline leaders and HR.

Systems also make the sharing and documentation steps in the process much simpler and create a single place where the “official” conversation notes live.

While there are many advantages to using technology to automate this process, don’t stop if you can’t get the funding for it. The goal is the conversation, not the technology. So, use the tools you have to make those conversations happen.

Other Performance Management Considerations

  • Frequency: In my opinion, four conversations a year is not nearly enough. However, you should always pursue progress over perfection. If you struggle today to get managers to have one performance management meeting a year with each employee (which was the case where we designed the 4×4), then moving to four conversations a year is big progress. In my experience, a conversation once per month has worked ideally. But, the frequency should be determined based on your organization’s needs and business.
  • Questions: The questions outlined above are a solid foundation that I think could work in nearly any business context. But, they aren’t magic. Again, you should adjust these items to be culturally relevant to your organization and objectives. You may decide you want to add a question or two. The key is to be clear on the intention of the item (as I have outlined above for each). Over the past year, I’ve found it helpful to add an additional first question, “What is the most important thing we need to discuss?” I find this ensures that we spend ample time on the issues that are deemed most critical.

In the end, the thing to remember is that the goal of the process is to create an engaging conversation between an employee and their manager that has a positive impact on their performance. The rest is just details.

 

 

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What Exactly Is Discretionary Effort?
 What Exactly Is Discretionary Effort? 150 150 Jason Lauritsen
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A lot of my work lately has been focused in the area of employee engagement, including as it relates to discretionary effort. In fact, I’m speaking at a number of conferences this fall, sharing my presentation “Employee Engagement Is Broken” with human resources professionals.

One of the things that is fundamentally broken about the practice of employee engagement is that there is a lack of a clear definition of the concept. Every employee engagement survey provider in the country has designed a tool that measures engagement in a different way based on their own definition. That’s good business practice for engagement survey providers, but bad news for the leaders and HR professionals who want to do some meaningful work to leverage engagement within their organizations to drive results.

The most common phrase or concept you’ll hear when you start looking for definitions of engagement is “discretionary effort.” A definition of engagement might suggest that the degree to which an employee is engaged is proportional to the amount of discretionary effort they put forth in their job.

This might be a new term for you if you don’t work in HR, so here’s a pretty straight-forward definition of discretionary effort I found:

“Discretionary effort is the level of effort people could give if they wanted to, but above and beyond the minimum required.”  —Aubrey C. Daniels, Ph.D.

Discretionary Effort and Employee Engagement

On the surface, discretionary effort probably seems like a reasonable way to measure engagement.  For years, I thought this made plenty of sense.  But now, I’m not as sure.  Here’s why.

Discretionary effort is less a matter of engagement than it is of performance. When you look at the definition above, discretionary effort assumes that a baseline exists that allows for someone to “get by or make do” and that level of effort is somewhere less than what the individual is capable of.

Based on some conversations I’ve had recently with people who manage teams and run companies, most of them hire people with the expectation that they will give their best every day. They hire people with the expectation that they’ll be committed to the organization and their job, that they’ll do their best, and that they’ll do what’s asked of them to help the company succeed. They only tolerate job descriptions because HR forces them to, but they don’t consider a job description anything more than a document. The manager expects the individual to give all they have to give to make the company better.  And, then they know it’s their job to incent and reward them for doing so.

So, if a leader’s expectation is for you to give your best, what then is discretionary effort? What is more than your best? If a leader’s expectation is that you give your all and do your best, and yet we still find that there is a need to talk about and measure for discretionary effort, then I think that points to poor management skills rather than poor engagement. If managers have high expectations but lack the skills to invite their teams to live up to those expectations and hold them accountable, then a gap develops.

In engagement terms, here’s how we describe this gap:

  • Engaged – Someone who voluntarily meets expectations to be their best.
  • Disengaged – Someone who is allowed to perform at less than what is expected

When you look at this through the lens of performance, maybe a new definition is warranted for discretionary effort:

Voluntary employee effort applied to make up the negative performance gap created by either lack of management ability or chronically low expectations.

It bothers me that we’ve gotten so comfortable talking about discretionary effort as the holy grail of engagement. I think it’s time to take a step back and reconsider this notion.

If you do, you may just find that rather than spending so much time trying to improve your employee engagement survey score, you should be putting that effort toward fixing your broken performance management systems, building leaders who invite people to be their best, and creating accountability.

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What Would You Wish For?
 What Would You Wish For? 150 150 Jason Lauritsen
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Last night, my son was watching a TV show where the storyline apparently included a genie being released from a lamp to grant three wishes.  After a few minutes, he asked me, “What would you do if you were granted three wishes?  What would you wish for?”

It’s one of those questions that I haven’t really contemplated since I was a kid.  My wife was with me in the kitchen when the question was posed, so what followed was a really interesting conversation about what our three wishes would be.  I won’t bore you with our responses, but I will say that I found the answers to this question to be insightful.

And I love a great question. After noodling about it, I think this could be a great interview question that could get a person to reveal themselves in ways that are usually difficult to achieve in an interview.  Test yourself:

What would you wish for if you were granted three wishes?

The answer to this question reveals where your values lie.  Do you think of others or do you focus on yourself? What kinds of things do you wish for yourself or others?

The answer also reveals if you are short or long-term focused and the degree to which you are strategic.  Do you wish for specific things with short term utility or do you wish for resources that would help get many things with short and long term utility?

This question also tests your creative and flexibility. Do you accept the question and try to make the answers meaningful, despite it being a whimsical exercise? Or did you reject the question as silly and only answer half-heartedly?

Whether you use the question for interviewing or just for fun, it’s an interesting question to think about.

Jason Lauritsen