Between Business Strategy and Business Results are your people. People are what ultimately drives the success of your business. Hiring the right people, giving managers the tools to effectively lead and build successful teams and decreasing turnover are the keys to long term success. Knowing the job behavioral targets and then matching hires to these targets is the key to great hires. Arming your leaders with data on how best to motivate and lead your people is the secret to high levels of engagement with greater ROI!
Josh Bersin, the founder of an HR research firm, says that “you have to run your company as if every employee has one foot out the door.” And he is right because employees today demand fast, positive change from their employers.
Let the data talk:
8 out of 10 employees feel ‘more empowered’ to hold leaders accountable for workplace changes in 2022.
And 56% of workers said they will only wait 30 to 60 days for employers to make needed changes before they consider leaving. (Human Workplace Index)
So what can companies do?
Well, every company is different and has its unique challenges. But one thing is for sure: now is not the time to let up on the gas (despite today’s prices, har har).
A universal principle is companies must deeply understand what their employees want and then take action to deliver. By collecting employee feedback, companies will unlock a treasure trove of opportunities to improve retention, productivity, and workplace happiness.
How can they take it a step further? Companies must double down on improving the employee experience end-to-end. To start, that means:
purging any signs of toxic culture (one way is to create a set of strong company values and reward the right behavior)
hiring the right people for the right roles
giving employees a meaningful mission and purpose to work toward
training managers to listen and support employees (versus telling)
creating and communicating legitimate career paths (only 11% of companies offer formal career pathing programs).
The MIT study also revealed four short-term strategies companies can use to increase retention.
What are the benefits of using teams as your primary structure for getting work done? Organizationally we know the highest performing teams with the highest quality results, do so while fulfilling many of the members basic as well as higher level human needs. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs applies to our whole lives including work. In my many years of learning, playing, working in and with teams, I have experienced the joys, the frustrations, and everything in between. We all know what teams can do when designed with the right members and right support. We also know what the costs are of our dysfunctional teams who are stuck with little hope of what magic might change the daily dredge on both the organization as well as the team members themselves.
Teams are worth the investment and there is science to prove it. We humans have worked in collaborative groups since the beginning of time. In a sense, teams are the reason we are all even still here on planet earth, credited as a key to the survival of our species. In this linked articlehttps://www.atlassian.com/blog/teamwork/the-importance-of-teamwork Tracy Middleton shares 11 benefits of working in teams and some of the science to support it.
Research has validated for us many realities of being human. How and why we respond to different stimulus in similar and categorically different ways can be predictably measured. Research on teams and collaboration has been a specific human dynamic that man has tried to understand since the beginning of time. The difficulty is that teams are constantly changing in membership, focus, process, motivation, reinforcement, qualities of relationships and so on. In the linked article written by Catarina Lino and Brad Desmond in Positive Psychology, the writers discuss 7 Habits that if practiced and made habits, consistently create highly effective teams. https://positivepsychology.com/psychology-teamwork/
