How to Give a Meaningful "Thank You" by Mark Goulston

Forget the empty platitudes; your star employee is not a "godsend." They are a person deserving of your not infrequent acknowledgment and worthy of appreciation and respect. When was the last time you thanked them — really thanked them?

In my line of work, I frequently communicate with CEOs and their executive assistants, and nowhere is the need for gratitude more clear.

After one CEO's assistant had been particularly helpful, I replied to her email with a grateful, "I hope your company and your boss know and let you know how valuable and special you are."

She emailed back, "You don't know how much your email meant to me." It made me wonder — when was the last time her boss had thanked her?

This happens frequently. For instance, a few years ago, I was trying to get in touch with one of the world's most well-known CEOs about an article. His assistant had done a great and friendly job of gatekeeping. So when I wrote to her boss, I included this: "When I get to be rich, I'm going to hire someone like your assistant — to protect me from people like me. She was helpful, friendly, feisty vs. boring and yet guarded access to you like a loyal pit bull. If she doesn't know how valuable she is to you, you are making a big managerial mistake and YOU should know better."

A week later I called his assistant, and said, "I don't know if you remember me, but I'm just following up on a letter and article I sent to your boss to see if he received it."

His assistant replied warmly, "Of course I remember you Dr. Mark. About your letter and article. I sent him the article, but not your cover letter."

I thought, "Uh, oh! I messed up." Haltingly, I asked why.

She responded with the delight of someone who had just served an ace in a tennis match: "I didn't send it to him, I read it to him over the phone."

Needless to say, that assistant and I have remained friends ever since.

Yes, CEOs are under pressure from all sides and executives have all sorts of people pushing and pulling at them. But too often, they begin to view and treat their teams, and especially their assistants, as appliances. And a good assistant knows that the last thing their boss wants to hear from them is a personal complaint about anything. Those assistants are often paid well, and most of their bosses — especially the executives to which numbers, results, ROI and money means everything — believe that great payment and benefits should be enough.

What these executives fail to realize is that many of those assistants are sacrificing their personal lives, intimate relationships, even their children (because the executive is often their biggest child).

There will always be people who think that money and benefits and even just having a job should be thanks enough. There are also those that think they do a great job without anyone having to thank them. But study after study has shown that no one is immune from the motivating effects of acknowledgement and thanks. In fact, research by Adam Grant and Francesca Gino has shown that saying thank you not only results in reciprocal generosity — where the thanked person is more likely to help the thanker — but stimulates prosocial behavior in general. In other words, saying "thanks" increases the likelihood your employee will not only help you, but help someone else.

Here's a case in point: at one national law firm, the Los Angeles office instilled the routine of Partners earnestly and specifically saying, "Thank you," to staff and associates and even each other. Everyone in the firm began to work longer hours for less money — and burnout all but disappeared.

Whether it's your executive assistant, the workhorse on your team, or — they exist! — a boss who always goes the extra mile for you, the hardest working people in your life almost certainly don't hear "thank you" enough. Or when they do, it's a too-brief "Tks!" via email.

So take action now. Give that person what I call a Power Thank You. This has three parts:

1. Thank them for something they specifically did that was above the call of duty. For instance, "Joe, thanks for working over that three-day weekend to make our presentation deck perfect. Because of it, we won the client."
2. Acknowledge to them the effort (or personal sacrifice) that they made in doing the above. "I realize how important your family is to you, and that working on this cost you the time you'd planned to spend with your daughters. And yet you did it without griping or complaining. Your dedication motivated everyone else on the team to make the presentation excellent."
3. Tell them what it personally meant to you. "You know that, rightly or wrongly, we are very much judged on our results and you were largely responsible for helping me achieve one that will cause my next performance review to be 'over the moon,' just like yours is going to be. You're the best!"

If the person you're thanking looks shocked or even a little misty-eyed, don't be surprised. It just means that your gratitude has been a tad overdue.

Engage With Staff To Retain Talent by Steve Ewin

The famous 1955 movie The Seven Year Itch was based on census information that suggested couples were likeliest to want a divorce after seven years of marriage.

Experts suggest when it comes to your employees, however, the itch is much likelier to occur between the first and second year of employment.

Recent Hay Group data shows that 25 per cent of employees plan to leave their job within two years and an even more alarming 50 per cent intend to leave within five years. When you consider the amount of money that businesses in Australia are investing in trying to attract and retain their talent, in addition to the cost of replacing an employee, which is estimated to range from 1.5 to 2.5 times their annual salary, it becomes clear that this high level of turnover represents a real issue for businesses.

So why do so many people regularly leave their jobs after this relatively short period of employment? Most employees have high levels of engagement in the first six months but this level of commitment slowly fades as they become increasingly frustrated with the lack of support they are receiving from the organisation as a whole.

Effectiveness of employees depends on their being engaged - that is, motivated and committed - as well as enabled, which is a combination of first being suited to their roles and second having a supportive environment.

Organisations that have highly engaged and enabled employees generate higher revenue growth (in fact 4.5 times the revenue growth of companies with low levels of engagement and enablement), higher customer satisfaction, better individual productivity and higher retention rates.

Employees with high levels of engagement but low levels of enablement - that is to say, they are motivated and committed but not supported by an enabling environment - are classified as "frustrated".

Reducing the percentage of frustrated employees should be a high priority for Australian companies, as these employees are likelier to leave an employer than those that have low engagement and low enablement.

To beat frustration and stave off the job itch, there are several practical steps an organisation can take.

Provide adequate resources. This is probably the most important and straightforward action a company can take to help employees to do their jobs well and with minimal levels of frustration.

Ensure training for current and new employees is readily available and aligned with changing job demands. This is extremely important when it comes to the retention of effective staff. It is also crucial to ensure work pressures do not hinder employees' access to training.

Have regular conversations about employee performance and development. Provide feedback on performance relative to expectations, coach your people in their development and discuss the barriers that may exist in the workplace.

As employees are inducted into their new environment, they are positive and look forward to exciting challenges.

They have joined the company for a variety of reasons, and it is now the responsibility of management to ensure that the reality of their experience matches the promise.

The cost of workers becoming frustrated and leaving is too high. The factors that will help sustain the relationship involve enabling employees for success and harnessing their engagement levels.

Companies need to provide the essential resources and support, train people continuously and give continual feedback to reap the benefits of increased productivity.

Steve Ewin is the head of Hay Group Insight across Australia and New Zealand.

HR Value Chain...Cornerstone of Successful HR Foundation by Raj Gupta

As an HR professional, our key job is to attract, retain and grow human capital. However, to do that, it would be an added advantage if we have an exposure to other functions i.e. sales, commercial, business analysis, quality, marketing etc. There are 4 key part of HR value chain as outlined in the picture i.e. Talent Acqusition, Organizational Development, Employee Engagement and HR Service Delivery which includes entire spectrum of HR transcation including compliance with law of the land.

To build successful career in HR, it is imperative that we build depth and breadth in each of these and subset of these strands and deliver consistently on defined CTQ's (Critical to Quality). If we skip any of these and somehow manage to reach to leadership positions in HR, we will find it difficult to strategize and even if we strategize, it would be difficult to visualize the entire execution phase.

Most of strategies fail not because they lack perspicacity and sound judgement on the part of strategist, however, they fail as it is difficult to execute them and the person who strategize without going through the rigmorale, fails to antcipate the bottlenecks in execution. I have seen HR People more willing to do employee engagement / Organizational development related roles and shy away from gettting their hands around transcational spectrum of HR which is a backbone of any HR organization.

In my view, aspiring HR professipnals must build the efficiencies, depth and breadth around all these strands. This will help them in the long run and catapult them into "hands on" HR leaders where they will not demand, however, command the respect of their staff.

Source:

HR Success Mantra

3 Emerging Trends in Employee By Kara Scharwath

From the Brighter Planet Report, "Greening the Workplace 2011"

Two years ago, when the concept had just started to really gain traction, we reported the results of a survey conducted by Brighter Planet on engaging employees on sustainability issues. The company just released an update to that study which includes responses from employees at some of the companies leading corporate sustainability efforts including Wal-Mart, UPS, and Coca-Cola. Since the first survey two years ago, employee engagement practices around sustainability have become increasingly more common and organizations are seeing and monitoring the impact of these programs. The results of the study suggest three surprising trends that sustainability practitioners should take note of:

1.The results aren’t all positive. Although more than half of the employers in the survey are frequently promoting sustainability within their organizations, most still lack official engagement policies, and fewer programs were rated as effective at actually eliciting the desired behavior from employees. According to Brighter Planet, this could be the result of companies not implementing best practices established by the leaders in the space; or, it could be that employees have been slow to adopt the newer programs. Regardless, there is the possibility that ineffective programs could undermine the progress made so far on employee engagement overall and threaten the effectiveness of this approach to implementing sustainable practices.

2.Effective programs go beyond traditional issues. The more effective engagement programs promote action from employees on a variety of different issues. Instead of focusing narrowly on more traditional green office initiatives like recycling, energy use, and commuting, the best programs go a step further by giving more attention to emerging sustainability issues such as water use, sustainable procurement, and business travel. It’s possible that by expanding the breadth of their initiatives beyond the status quo, these companies are demonstrating to their employees a more serious commitment to sustainability as well as a more innovative approach which is likely to inspire greater motivation and action.

3.Data and information are key to success. Of all the organizations surveyed, those that collect and report data relevant to employee engagement efforts were three times as likely to have a program that was rated as “very effective.” This includes information on employee sustainability efforts, data on the organizations environmental footprint, and on travel and commuting. The number of employers that are collecting this type of data also increased 15 percent since 2009. In addition, the programs that empower employees to share sustainability-related ideas with each other had a strong correlation to overall program effectiveness.

Although employee engagement is becoming increasingly mainstream, it is still a young tool, and the effectiveness of different approaches vary widely. As companies implement and refine their employee engagement efforts, it’s important that they continue to collect the kind of feedback that this survey from Brighter Planet provides so they can continue to improve their programs