Engagement or endurance?

A few years ago a Towers Perrin engagement report described the mood of U.S. employees as having 'rational endurance' - meaning they were enduring their jobs because it rationally makes sense to stay put in your job during an economic slowdown. I thought of this recently because 'rational endurance' perfectly sums it up and is even more relevant today.

The same report went on to show, as all engagement research shows, that managers are the ultimate driver of employee engagement and that having 'sincere interest in the employee's wellbeing' was a leading factor in engagement. HR teams all know this but when was the last time your managers were to supported to succeed in this area?

This week we announced the dates in October 2009 for our annual public program for managers. This program equips team leaders, supervisors and managers with the skills to be able to communicate, engage and retain their team, enabling them to increase productivity and proactively increase engagement, efficiently.

The Reserve Bank's August meeting minutes suggest the Aussie economy is heading towards recovery. How many of your employees will 'jump ship' as soon as the jobs market improves? Don't wait to find out...... it's a far more cost effective strategy for their manager to truely engage them today.

Time for a temperature check!

We were in a meeting the other day and it was suggested that even with the economic downturn morale appeared, on the surface at least, to be high in that organisation. However, it was their view that employees were careful not to voice dissatisfaction as a precaution to keeping their jobs.

This just highlights the need for an effective process to be in place for employees to voice their real feelings and thoughts on an organisation, and perhaps even more so now, in the midst of a downturn.

A temperature check on how engaged and motivated employees are can provide valuable information to a business on what motivates their employees as well as areas of retention risks and dissatisfaction.

Here at Retention Partners we conduct confidential stay studies and can do so either on-line or over the phone. These can highlight why employees joined the organisation, why do they stay, and why would they leave. Recommendations can then be made on improving the effectiveness of recruitment campaigns, protecting and enhancing retention strengths, minimising attrition triggers as well as improving specific manager behaviour.

Call us on 1300 73 83 71 to talk about how we might be able to help you!!

Does you manager know how valuable you are?

Last week Lisa was a guest speaker at the 21st Women, Management & Work Conference which is an annual two day event put on by Macquarie University.

Lisa spoke to a packed room full of professional women about the importance of having a talent plan for themselves and ensuring that their manager understands the value of their contribution within the organisation.

The key point being that 'value' is, like beauty, in the eye of the beholder. What this means is that it is essential that your manager KNOWS about your value and contribution rather than you simply sitting there doing a great job and patting yourself on the back. Lisa suggested that as high valuable employees, the audience manage their manager's impressions of them and proactively advocated themselves to upper management.

Lisa's then guided the group to create a tailored 'Talent Plan' which outlines the employee's strengths, acheivements, future goals and is a tool to facilitate conversations about the future direction of the employee and any knowledge capturing that needs to happen so that the employee could be promoted without causing the manager a headache training someone new.

Of course, we usually create these plans for high value employees on behalf of upper management and it was great to put these plans in the hands of proactive employees who can go back to their organisation and assist their manager to do their job.