It seems like everywhere I turn lately, there is an article, conference or report addressing the issue of low employee engagement or employee dissatisfaction and the millions of dollars that this is costing U.S. companies each year. I participated in a TeleForum by Patricia Wheeler of The Levin Group, entitled “Keeping Talent Engaged…Successfully” (www.thelevingroup.com). She provided a very pragmatic approach to improving employee engagement and challenged each participant to finding ways to personally improve the situation.
Given a transient workforce, Ms. Wheeler asserts that it is up to companies to ensure that they use employee talent well while they are with the company, find ways to develop and grow employees and help them leave well when they exit the company. She also describe what leaders, mid-managers and HR/OD professionals can do to improve employee engagement as well as steps that can be taken immediately to improve employee engagement The second step is the “hire honestly” and effectively bring new leaders onboard.
After outlining how to get started, her call to action for participants was: What are you going to do to keep people more engaged at your company (or the companies you serve)? This got me thinking…as a retained executive recruiter, what am I doing to keep the people I serve - clients and new leaders - engaged? I can honestly say there are three things I am doing:
1. Working from a position that recognizes the transient nature of the workforce
Patricia started her teleconference describing today’s workforce as more mobile and expecting to have multiple corporate experiences. Suzanne Rey further asserts that “the days of the loyal twenty-year employee are gone…most people will have at least 10 jobs in their lifetime”. (source: press release for “Secrets from a Body Broker” ) Yet, it seems that most companies are still hiring and engaging employees as if it is the employee that would be the lucky one to work for their company. In my opinion, the company and the recruiter need to partner together to ensure that the sourcing and recruiting processes are adequately focused on the needs of “hot talent” – from things as simple as scheduling interviews that are convenient for candidates to the time it takes to come to consensus around which candidate will be offered the job. One of the regretful things that happens more frequently these days is having a hiring manager lose out on the “best’ candidate because he/she couldn’t be interviewed by “everyone” until next month.
2. Partnering with my clients to accurately reflect their culture throughout the recruiting process.
In her TeleForum, Patricia suggests that “hiring well” is critical to the employee/employer relationship. Part of this is making sure that the company accurately reflects itself and its culture during the hiring process. As a retained recruiter, I am challenging myself to provide an unbiased view of the employer brand to the client and invest the time to adequately understand the culture/subcultures of the company. With this understanding, my partners and I can align the process to ensure that it adequately reflects the promise that the company is making to the potential new employee. So many leaders fail in the first year of starting a new company because they underestimate the impact of a mismatch in culture and values. Although most candidates say that they can work for anyone, that doesn’t translate to the ability to navigate in unfamiliar cultural waters.
3. Helping employers align expectations with new leaders
Misaligned expectations are one of the major sources of failure for new leaders in their first year with a new company. To avoid this, two things need to be in place (1) alignment within the leadership team of the expectations of a new leader and (2) alignment and agreement between the hiring manager and the new leader. I feel confident that our JivaroCXO process facilitates this alignment. However, this is an area that can be quite intimidating to executives when they don’t have all the answers. After all…if it was easy…everybody would be doing it!
- Sue Schaefer, JivaroCXO
