Category: Employee Engagement

Flexibility in the Workplace: Rethinking Work

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Checking the status of an important project while waiting to catch a flight. Replying to a coworker’s email from the comfort of your favorite café. Shifting your hours to make time to take an aging parent to a doctor’s visit. Each of these scenarios has one thing in common – they are made possible through flexibility in the workplace.


Flexible work arrangements are surging in popularity. In the U.S., 94 percent of employers provide some form of flexible work arrangement according to a survey conducted by the International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans. A survey conducted by Regus revealed that some 54 percent of global respondents now report that they work remotely 2.5 days a week or more.


You may be wondering: What’s behind the surge in popularity for flexible workplaces? Well, the data speaks for itself. Global Workplace Analytics found the following:

  • AT&T found that its remote workers worked five more hours than its office workers.
  • Compaq’s flexible workforce increased productivity between 15 and 45 percent.
  • American Express’ flexible workforce had a 43 percent higher productivity level than their traditional counterparts.

In this article, we’ll cover what workplace flexibility means, why you should consider bringing more flexibility to your workplace and how you can best manage the challenges and opportunities presented by a flexible workforce.

So, What Does Workplace Flexibility Mean and Why Should I Care?

Workplace flexibility is an alternative to traditional workplace models that dictate when and where workers perform their work. Workplace flexibility permits employees to choose when, where and how they work.


Flexibility in the workplace shouldn’t be seen as just a perk you offer to employees; it should be viewed as a critical part of your organization’s talent acquisition strategy – and as a fundamental way to increase productivity.

Greater Employee Flexibility: How Employers Benefit With More Flexibility in the Workplace

Employee Flexibility
A Broader Talent Pool


When your workplace culture allows talent to work from anywhere, your talent pool instantly becomes global. Your organization can source and recruit talent across the country or across the globe. With the rise of communication tools such as Skype and Slack, secure intranets and video conferencing, distance is becoming less of a hurdle to collaborating with talent globally.

What’s more, the COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare the necessity for more employee flexibility. In fact, according to a survey from Gallop, “three in five U.S. workers who have been doing their jobs from home during the coronavirus pandemic would prefer to continue to work remotely as much as possible.”

Broadly speaking, organizations that maintain this new level of flexibility will likely fare much better when it comes to recruitment and retention efforts, and overall employee engagement, especially when compared to similar organizations that decide to go back to the old way of operating with less employee flexibility.


Improved Employer Branding


According to LinkedIn’s 2017 Global Recruiting Trends, 80 percent of talent leaders agree that employer brand has a significant impact on their ability to hire great talent. Offering flexible workplace policies communicates to potential employees that your organization is committed to helping its employees achieve a better work-life balance, which in turn can help improve jobseekers’ perception of you as an employer as you provide flexibility in the workplace.


Cost-Savings and Employee Flexibility


The most prosaic benefit to flexibility in the workplace is cost savings. Costs on business necessities such as office supplies, real estate and utilities are reduced when your organization provides employees the ability to work off-site.

How Employees Benefit With More Flexibility in the Workplace

Meet Personal Obligations


Employees have a variety of personal obligations and family responsibilities. If you provide them with a flexible workplace, they can make that important parent-teacher conference during the day, go back to school or simply be home when the engineer comes to fix the dishwasher all without having to neglect work in favor of personal responsibilities. If you trust people to get their work done in a way that works for them, that trust is usually rewarded.


Employee Empowerment
flexibility in the workplace


Flexible workplaces can give employees an increased feeling of personal control over their schedule and work environment. By allowing employees to set their own style for delivery, you appeal to the entrepreneurial spirit—which can be good for your employees’ sense of self-determination.


Reduced Commuting Time and Costs


For some employees, commutes of more than an hour each way are not uncommon. If employees are allowed to work from home that can potentially save them fourteen hours of time, untold money in fuel costs and wear and tear on the road – not to mention the effect on well-being.

Types of Flexibility in the Workplace

Job Sharing


Job sharing is when two employees share the same role. Job sharing can be very appealing for your employees who may not want to work full-time, for example after having a child or with elderly relatives in need of care.


In a job share arrangement, one role gains two brains – two people with passion and creativity who are committed to success.
There are a number of ways employees in a job-sharing arrangement can manage their responsibilities. Some employees sharing a role may segment the work by each taking responsibility for specific deliverables and tasks charged to them.


Others may split the same workload, with one employee working on projects and passing along their work to their job share partner while they are off the clock. The model you and your employees choose will depend on the nature of the work performed and what preferences and skills each employee possess.


At PeopleScout’s EMEA headquarters in London, we had the luxury of employing two wonderfully talented women in our Head of Assessment role. This role wasn’t initially designed to be a job share. However, after our incumbent in the role wanted to reduce their time in-office after becoming a mom, another talented colleague stepped up to support the team.

workplace flexibility


As both women began building their families and took on the challenges of motherhood, their ability to provide 100 percent to the role was never compromised, as when one needed to take a step back the other is always there to pick up where they left off.


By providing the flexibility our employees needed to share this role, we retained two of our brightest minds. And more importantly, we let our employees know that you should never have to choose between being a parent and being a professional, you can do both equally well with the right support.


Remote Work and the Flexible Workforce


Remote work is when an employee works primarily from home or an off-site location. A well-planned remote work program can help your organization increase overall productivity and promote greater job satisfaction among your teams and may even help you in improving your employee retention efforts.


For PeopleScout in London, we did not always see remote work as an employee perk, rather we viewed it as a practical decision to reduce office expenses at our London location. We began our intrepid adventure into remote work by hot-desking—the practice of multiple workers using a single work station—our client services team.


What began as a decision borne of necessity quickly paid unexpected dividends. When our client service team members didn’t feel the need to stay affixed to their desks, something marvelous happened, they became more engaged with clients .


We were not entirely sure what to expect when we initially opened up our organization to become more flexible. However, after witnessing the success of our remote work program one thing was clear: flexibility was a business asset, not a hindrance to productivity.


Flexible Scheduling 
flexible workforce


Flexible scheduling allows an employee to work hours that differ from the traditional company start and stop time.


According to data compiled by The Economist, working fewer hours correlates with higher levels of productivity. Nations like Greece average 2,000 work hours a year, while nations like Germany average around 1,400, but yield 70 percent more productivity at work. This suggests that fixed schedules and mandatory hours may not be the key to getting the most out of your employees.


Typically, a flexible schedule involves either a compressed work week or flexible starting and stopping times. In a compressed work week, the most common schedule is a four-day work week where employees work four ten-hour days—variations on this schedule could include three twelve-hour work days, etc. This scheduling flexibility allows employees to have an additional day or two to relax, spend with family and friends or pursue activities and causes that interest them.


At PeopleScout UK, we encourage our colleagues to take full advantage of our flexible scheduling options. For example, we had a colleague who wanted to leave work a half hour early once a week to attend choir practice. We not only supported them by allowing them to flex the hours, but we also couldn’t help wondering if they’d like to invite their co-workers to their performance. As it turns out they were happy to have some new people for the audience, and many members of their team showed up to cheer them on.


By promoting and supporting our colleagues interests and encouraging others to do the same, we are communicating that we see our workers as whole persons and that their personal achievements are just as important to everyone at PeopleScout UK as their professional ones.


When your employees feel you appreciate them for more than what they can contribute to your bottom line, that you appreciate what they contribute to their community as a whole, you help engender a familial office atmosphere where employees feel both empowered and respected.

Managing Flexibility in the Workplace

Stay in Compliance


Before your organization begins offering your employees flexible work opportunities, you need to make sure your program won’t become a legal headache. Issues to consider include workers’ compensation and state/national overtime regulations, as well as matters of individual responsibility for company property used off-site. Your organization’s legal counsel should review any flexible work program proposals to make sure you stay in compliance with your country’s employment laws and the regions your organization operates in to ensure you can provide the flexibility in the workplace you to your employees.


Stay Connected


It is extremely important to stay connected with employees in flexible work arrangements. Make sure that your managers and in-office employees remember to include remote employees and support them to feel like they’re part of the team. While conference calls and email chains are effective means of communicating with remote workers, nothing substitutes being in the same room. Leverage videoconferencing technology such as Skype or FaceTime to bring more of a face-to-face feel for remote employees in important meetings.


Be Fair


A major key to managing a successful flexible workplace is ensuring that employees who opt for more traditional work arrangements are treated as equitably as their non-traditional co-workers. When you treat your all employees fairly, they feel respected, cared for and may develop a stronger sense of trust in your organization. Make sure to monitor your flexible workplace policy and periodically tweak it to address new or unforeseen inconsistencies in the treatment of workers both in traditional and non-traditional work arrangements.

The Flexible Workforce and You

flexible working examples

To reap the benefits of flexibility in the workplace, you need to continuously evaluate your flexible work program and monitor which employees use it, how the program is being used and take note of any challenges participants and managers are experiencing.


You should routinely speak with both participating employees and managers regarding if your program is working as intended, how it can be improved and what their individual experiences are while using the program. Assess their satisfaction with the program and tweak it as necessary.

How to Improve Flexibility in the Workplace:

To attract the top candidates, your company should create policies that provide the types of flexibility today’s employees seek. Here, we offer quick tips on how you can better meet the demand for a more flexible workforce:

  • Align incentives with outcomes. Instead of replacing face-time requirements with hours logged in on a virtual private network, which employees could perceive as inauthentic, you should simply set goals and deadlines. If employees meet them, their bosses can worry less about when they clock in and out.
  • Eliminate flexibility stigmas. Change your organizations culture as needed so no one is looked down on for taking advantage of flexibility options. This change needs to start at the top. Company leaders need to be transparent and lead by example.
  • Start small. Don’t try to transition your company culture to total flexibility overnight. Instead, take baby steps by allowing some employees to shift schedules or designate remote working days.


Remember, as employers, we hire whole people. We need to take them as a package: both the things that directly benefit our organizations and the things we may need to accommodate for them. This can best be achieved by providing workplace flexibility.
 

Attitude is the New Experience

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There have been numerous studies on turnover rates in multiple industries, and they all land on a similar conclusion: a high proportion of staff fail within the first 18 months of starting a new job. In fact, one study found that figure to be 46 percent of 20,000 new hires in America. When you look at the reasons why, 89 percent of those who failed did so due to cultural misalignment or attitudinal reasons, rather than technical capability.


To try and buck this trend, I’ll share with you a few tips on why it’s so important to attract and retain the right people, rather than the right skill set and how you can adopt this approach in your organization.


First, you need to have a great culture, which is essential to keeping people in the building. Each company’s culture and mission will be unique, and you need to make sure you have values that you stand by. Secondly – and this is the main area that I’m going to focus on in this article – you need to have a recruitment strategy that is aimed at finding the right people for the organization rather than the right skill set at every opportunity, from graduate roles through to senior management. At our client PHD Media Worldwide (PHD), we’ve focused on hiring people that align with our values of collaboration, courage and curiosity with conviction – and it’s really, really helped!


“Hire for attitude, train for skills” is a phrase that every HR professional has uttered once or heard being uttered from colleagues. However, unfortunately, only a small number of businesses apply it (like, actually apply it) to their recruitment strategy. Whilst a lot of job advertisements will focus on the soft skills and cultural alignment piece, often the interview process can revert to focusing purely on the hard skills and capability a candidate has from day one.


We work in an ever-changing industry, with the constant emergence of new technologies, new software and increasing shift in focus from traditional channels to more sophisticated digital channels. Change takes place now at a faster rate than ever before, and what you knew yesterday might not necessarily prepare for you tomorrow. So, with that in mind, why do some businesses focus on purely trying to tick skills boxes? The candidate who feels fully aligned with their organization’s strategy and beliefs and is a part of its continued success will be more motivated to learn the necessary skills for tomorrow than someone who only has today’s skill set and not the buy-in.


Here is how we can go about finding those right candidates in various levels of the organization:


Graduate Roles


For so long, the media industry, for example, has only considered candidates from a media/advertising/marketing-related field and often opt for interns who have gained first-hand experience working with their particular agency. When interviewing candidates with a specific degree and asking them what they know about a media planning and buying agency, their knowledge levels are comparable with that of any other degree – very little!


A huge amount of the first 12-18 months in a media agency is about learning as much as possible. A very small amount of what you learned in university actually applies to what you are now working on in terms of real briefs with real multi-million-dollar budgets attached. With that mind, at PHD we’ve had a lot of success in opening up our doors to entry-level staff from any degree/non-degree background.


Zac and Tiffany, two great coordinators who joined PHD in the last 12 months, even wrote an article recently on how university prepares you for your first job in media. Notice how throughout the article, it never mentions that it’s the marketing theory they were taught in school or the principles of advertising that has helped them succeed. Instead, it’s the focus on meeting deadlines, presentation ability, working under pressure and as part of a team. These are the skills that you need to succeed in your first job, and when you couple them with the right attitude, you can really learn anything, relatively quickly.


More Senior Roles 


Believe it or not, it’s those same soft skills that apply to the more senior roles that we look to fill. Let’s face it – at one point or another, we have all had to “fake it ‘til we make it” in our careers. A little white lie in an interview, a little oversell of our abilities and BANG, we’ve landed ourselves a gig without a clue of what we’re actually going to do. When faced with this situation, those with a good attitude, flexibility and the ability to learn quickly will be able to adapt and succeed in their roles better than those without these critical skills.


Additionally, no one knows exactly what they are doing on day one. We all have our own systems, processes and ways of doing things. At PHD, we have our proprietary planning tool, SOURCE. Unless you have worked on it before, there is a learning curve for everyone to pick it up, and it’s the pace and ability with which people pick it up that matters, as they would have zero experience in using it before. All companies have their own processes and tools, which they will expect you to learn over time.


Yes, you need to have a fundamental understanding of what you are talking about and the more senior the role, the more of an understanding we expect you to have. But we want to talk to someone about their attitude towards certain situations, learn how they act when everything goes wrong (because it does sometimes) and what they would do in the difficult times and how they bring a team along on the journey with them. Ultimately, someone who ticks the attitude box will get the job, and we will often wait until that person comes along, rather than simply fill a role with a candidate who doesn’t fit.


So, What is Attitude?


Attitude, for me, is a collection of soft skills that you can apply to every job. It’s not necessarily something that someone has been taught (or could be taught) but more an approach to work, an approach to learning and the way someone conducts themselves personally and professionally.


What does one look for when gauging attitude?
  • People who look for solutions to problems rather than people who find problems without resolve.
  • People who raise their hand rather than point their fingers.
  • People who make mistakes and have a sense of humility but then focus on what they can do next time to improve.
  • People who, when times get tough, dig in and rally everyone to achieve the same, rather than openly complain to others.
  • People who genuinely love their job and are interested in joining the organization – this is half the battle, finding someone who wants to be on the same journey as you.
  • People who genuinely seek development/career growth opportunities.

Too often, and it’s so easy to, we get bogged down by the immediate needs of our new hire. It may be replacing someone who has left, or it might be a new role that has popped up because of workload increases. However, it works, every time, to be cautious and focus on hiring the right person for the organization, because the longer-term impact of having the right person will really pay off and the struggle of having to dig a little harder to find them will soon be forgotten.


Read the original article on AdNews.au.

Through The Grapevine: How to Create and Manage an Employee Referral Program

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A well-managed employee referral program may be the single most powerful weapon in an organization’s recruitment arsenal. In fact, employee referral programs continue to be a top source for hires. By encouraging employees to refer contacts in their professional networks for open positions you can reduce recruiting costs, improve candidate quality and increase employee engagement.

In this article, we explore the case for employee referral programs, some of the top considerations organizations should be mindful of and how to properly manage a referral program.

The Case for Developing an Employee Referral Program

employee referral program

Intuitively, developing a formal employee referral program makes sense.

After all, who better to refer great candidates and sell those candidates on why they should join your organization than your own employees?

Employee referral programs make good business sense. Some of the benefits your organization may reap from an employee referral program include:

  • Faster time-to-hire: A LinkedIn study uncovered that it takes an average of 29 days to hire a referred candidate compared to 39 days to hire a candidate through a job board.
  • Less impact on your talent acquisition budget: An employee referral program is an inexpensive sourcing strategy that relies primarily on word-of-mouth and internal communication. You don’t have to pay to advertise job posts. Due to the faster time-to-hire, organizations can cut internal costs as well, since recruiters won’t be spending as much time sourcing and interviewing candidates for open positions.
  • Top talent begets top talent: Another LinkedIn survey revealed that star employees tend to refer other star employees. Tapping into your top talent can help organizations source and hire high performers more effectively.
  • Better employee retention: Not only are candidates hired via an employee referral typically of higher quality, they also tend to stay at their jobs longer, with 46 percent remaining in their position for at least three years.

Employee Referral Programs as an Extension of Employee Engagement

With employee referral programs, saving time and money is just the beginning.

Employee referrals also add value through improved employee engagement.

Using employee referrals to hire candidates builds a more robust corporate culture by intersecting performance and engagement to drive business success through tapping current employees for qualified candidate referrals, thus simplifying the sourcing process.

Employees who recommend a new hire have a vested interest in onboarding and retaining that person, as many referral programs include a requirement that the referred employee must be with the organization for a specific period of time before the referring employee can get a referral bonus.

What’s more, employees who refer candidates will feel a sense of commitment to ensure their referral’s success because they recommended the position.

Moreover, employees who are involved in the recruitment process may feel a greater sense of purpose towards the future of your company.

By encouraging employees to submit referrals, you are letting them know you value their input and contribution.

What to Consider Before Implementing an Employee Referral Program

Set Program Objectives

Before implementing an employee referral program, organizations should outline objectives in order to set a clear goal.

Defining objectives early on in the process helps ensure your team is on the same page and knows exactly what is expected and when.

Setting objectives can be achieved by holding planning sessions with key stakeholders where you share the vision for the program, develop strategies to achieve success and find solutions that are mutually agreed upon.

Objectives for an employee referral program might include:

  • Improving quality-of-hire
  • Increasing new hire retention
  • Boosting employee morale and recognition
  • Lowering overall recruiting costs
  • Increasing diversity within the organization
  • Sourcing candidates with a specific skill set
  • Reducing the time-to-hire for external candidates
  • Better targeting and sourcing of passive job seekers
  • Deepening the pipeline of potential applicants

Leverage Technology

Technology can help make the employee referral process better for both employers, employees and referrals. Using your technology tools can streamline processes and minimize inefficiencies and missed opportunities in the referral program.

In an article with SHRM, Jennifer Newbill, Director of Global Employment Brand, Dell explains that Dell uses a combination of “white glove” and automated communications to manage its more than 40,000 annual employee referrals, making the process more manageable for the organization’s talent acquisition teams.

Social Media Referrals

Recruitment marketing technology can allow you to post jobs on your organization’s social channels in seconds. You can also leverage your existing employees’ social media networks – if your employees are willing to post on your behalf – to expand your reach.

Auto-Posting Open Roles

In order to get your employees more engaged in your employee referral program, you should consider sharing job openings on a regular basis. Instead of sending out emails manually every time a position opens, you can automate this process through your recruitment email marketing tools.

For example, gig-economy start-up Fiverr leverages employee referral software that gamifies the referral process by adding a competitive element to referring candidates. The software assigns points to employees and credit for all the actions they take. The software also keeps employees up-to-date on the status of their referrals.

Make Jobs Shareable Through Employee Portals

Make it easier for employees to share job opportunities through their social media accounts and email. Adding social links on job posts will allow employees to automatically share job openings with just a few clicks. The quicker and easier jobs are to share, the more likely your employees will participate.

Referral Tracking

Tracking and appropriately attributing a referral is crucial to the program’s success. To make tracking easier, a referral field should be added to applications. The referral field on the job application can be filled in with information about the referring employee, making referral tracking easier.

Managing an Employee Referral Program

When it comes to managing a successful employee referral program, there are a few elements to keep in mind. Ideally, every program includes the following:

  • Incentives
  • A simple process
  • Feedback

Below, we explain how your organization can manage each of these three elements within your employee referral program.

Employee Referral Incentives

According to a survey conducted by LinkedIn, 40 percent of respondents were motivated to refer candidates for a monetary reward. What’s more, 68 percent stated they submitted a referral because they wanted to help their organization. If you want to get the most impact out of your organization’s employee referral program, you should offer a combination of monetary and creative, non-monetary incentives for referrals.

  • Experiment with monetary reward amounts because there is no magic number that will motivate all employees. Periodically testing different amounts can allow you to optimize your financial incentives.
  • Employees who are more altruistic in nature may prefer the option of donating their referral bonus to a charity or cause close to their hearts.
  • An alternative to offering individual monetary incentives is to hold a quarterly prize drawing where every employee who has made a successful referral during the period is eligible to win.
  • While prizes and cash incentives can be great motivators, other perks can be just as effective. Non-monetary rewards can include reserved parking spots, extra time off or first choice of shifts and schedules.

For a PeopleScout client and multinational auto parts and accessories manufacturer, we encourage their store managers, area managers and team members to refer quality candidates, including friends and family, to current job openings.

Once the employee’s referral applies to a position, our client lets a member of our recruiting team know that a referral has applied.

In the system the candidate selects referral and the client lets us know. This ensures we do not miss a referral and/or they selected the wrong source code when applying. 

Our team then schedules an interview with the referral and if qualified, proceeds to extend a verbal offer. 

If the referral is qualified, they will be scheduled with the store/hiring manager for an in-person interview, unless the referral was a quality candidate from the store manager and they already met them in person.

To assist our client in tracking the referrals coming in, our recruiters maintain a digital log of the number of referrals that were phone screened and referrals that were hired.

Our client values this referral program because it yields quality candidates and results in a faster time-to-hire for critical positions. 

When a referral is screened the recruiter ensure the source code is correct in the ATS so we provide stats and results of referrals.

Program highlights include:

  • When we onboard and train our client’s new managers, PeopleScout emphasizes the employee referral program and its importance to the recruiting process
  • PeopleScout’s team has specific SLAs to ensure referrals are expedited
  • PeopleScout tracks time in status and conversion rates specifically for referrals
  • More than 25 percent of hires for our client come from referrals
  • More than 50 percent of referrals submitted are ultimately hired
  • PeopleScout hires between 9,000 and 11,000 people for this client annually

Simplify the Employee Referral Process

While 95 percent of HR professionals believe their employees fully understand how to submit referrals, 63 percent say they “very often or frequently” receive feedback that employees find it too complicated to refer someone.

When evaluating your program, ask yourself these questions:

  • Do employees know about your referral program?
  • Is it clear with whom or where an employee should submit a referral?
  • Is the technology used to submit referrals user-friendly?
  • Is it easy to track if the referring employee was given credit?
  • Is it easy to track the incentives that were earned?

If the program makes your employees jump through hoops to place a referral, you can be sure that it won’t attract many participants.

To simplify your program, start with the following steps:

Explain your employee referral program

Employees need to understand exactly how your referral program works to make it successful.

How you teach employees about the program depends on your size and how the workforce is dispersed geographically.

You might gather your employees together and give a brief presentation or create an online training course.

Or, you might do something as simple as sending an informational email or flyer for employees to review.

Set your requirements up front

If you want your employees to refer quality candidates, they need to know what traits and skills you are looking for.

Share the open positions you are hiring for and provide employees with the job descriptions, so they get a feel for the types of candidates that would be a good fit.

Provide regular reminders

You should periodically remind employees about the referral program. If you don’t, they may quickly forget about it.

InMobi, an Indian-based mobile technology company, offered a motorbike—a very popular vehicle in India—to any employee who referred a successful engineering manager candidate.

To keep the referral program top of mind, InMobi parked a motorbike right in front of their corporate headquarters so employees were reminded of the referral incentive every day while entering the building.

When you have an influx of open positions, send a reminder to your employees that explains how they can refer candidates and what the reward is for hired candidates.

You can also promote the referral program when you aren’t actively hiring.

An employee might refer a candidate you do not want to miss out on. You should add those candidates to your talent pool.

Collect and Provide Feedback  

Measuring results is critical to evaluating the success of the program and to finding improvement opportunities.

While metrics can vary depending on the goals you’ve set for the program, here are some good metrics to track:

  • On-the-job performance of referral hires
  • Retention/turnover rate of referral hires
  • Program ROI or the cost/benefit ratio
  • Employee satisfaction with the overall process

Provide notifications after an employee referral is made

Referring employees may be nervous about whether their referrals were any good. The best practice is to notify employees immediately when their referral is accepted/rejected, if the candidate is invited for an interview and when the candidate is finally hired or not.

Employee Referral Program: The Gist

Employee referral programs remain one of the top sources for candidates because they are a cost-effective, engaging talent acquisition strategy.

To get the most out of your referral program, understand what motivates your employees to refer candidates, make the process as easy as possible and maintain good communication with both the referrer and referee.

Employee Retention: Combating Turnover

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Employee retention is a major concern for many organizations. More than 50 percent of organizations worldwide have expressed difficulty in retaining some of their most valued employee groups according to a Willis Towers Watson study.

Although hiring has increased in recent years, turnover and attrition rates have also increased globally across all industries by more than 3 percent since 2013.

Turnover is not just an inconvenience for organizations, it can be expensive. Research from the Work Institute’s 2017 Retention Report uncovered that it currently costs 33 percent of a worker’s annual salary to replace them, with the major costs being recruiting a replacement, reduced productivity, cost of onboarding a new hire and training expenses.

This means for mid- to enterprise-sized employers, turnover can cost hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars a year. With turnover costs this high, it is important for organizations to improve employee retention.

Employee Retention: Employee Turnover and What To Do About It

The strong economy and historically low unemployment rates have made workers more confident, and as a result, they are more comfortable exploring the job market.

In the U.S., the unemployment rate reached 3.7 percent in October. Low unemployment is not confined to the U.S. The unemployment rate has also dropped to 4 percent in the UK and 5.3 percent in Australia.

In LinkedIn’s Why and How People Change Jobs study, the top three reasons employees leave a position are to advance their careers, dissatisfaction with their workplace culture and dissatisfaction with management.

Moreover, the study found that once employees resigned, 42 percent said they might have stayed if their employer had done something to show they valued the employee.

Below, we address some of the main causes of employee turnover and provide insights into how to improve employee retention.

Create a Positive Workplace Culture  

Stressful, negative and inhospitable workplaces are a recipe for high employee turnover. Research bears this out, as the American Institute of Stress reports that workplace stress can lead to an increase of nearly 50 percent in voluntary employee turnover.

How we feel about our work often depends on the relationships we have with coworkers, managers and the overall company culture. According to a study conducted by the University of Michigan, there are six essential qualities of a positive workplace culture:

  1. Caring for, being interested in and maintaining responsibility for colleagues as friends.
  2. Providing support for one another, including offering kindness and compassion when others are struggling.
  3. Avoiding blame and forgiving mistakes.
  4. Inspiring one another at work.
  5. Emphasizing the meaningfulness of the work.
  6. Treating one another with respect, gratitude, trust and integrity.

As an organization, you should work to foster these qualities in your workplace. The University of Michigan research points to two key strategies:

Encourage Trusting Safe Relationships

Employees who trust that their coworkers and managers have their best interests at heart feel safe, as research by Amy Edmondson of Harvard demonstrates. Workplace cultures where leaders are inclusive, humble and encourage their staff to communicate and ask for help lead to better learning and performance outcomes for all employees.

Be Empathic

A brain-imaging study found that when employees recollected instances when a manager had been harsh or lacked empathy, they showed increased activation in areas of the brain associated with avoidance and negative emotion, while the opposite was true when they recalled an empathic manager.

Moreover, Jane Dutton and her team at the CompassionLab suggest that leaders who demonstrate compassion toward employees foster individual and collective resilience in challenging times. Thus, creating a workplace environment more conducive for overcoming challenges and obstacles.

Key Action:

Develop a workplace environment that meets employee needs whenever possible to drive positive organizational outcomes and increase employee retention.

Professional Development

In an article published by HR Dive, Laurie Bienstock of Willis Tower Watson states that “We know from our research and consulting that career management continues to be a top driver of attraction, talent retention and sustainable engagement for most employees…Effective career management at many organizations remains elusive. That’s one of the main reasons so many of today’s employees feel they need to leave to advance their careers.”

Well-thought-out professional development programs can provide your employees with opportunities and clear direction on how to increase their skills and advance their careers within your organization.

With an expanded skill set, not only will employees feel more empowered, they will also have more tools to help your organization. A win-win for your organization and staff.

When starting a professional development program, you can leverage the expertise you have within your organization. Senior employees, for example, can serve as mentors and help mentees sharpen both their soft skills and technical skills, gain practical knowledge, institutional insights and hands-on guidance, and can help mentees become more valuable and versatile employees.

At PeopleScout, for example, we sponsor a program where employees are paired with mentors at different levels within the organization to provide mentorship and career guidance. During the first three cycles of our program, 10 percent of participants received promotions after completing the program.

Key Action:

Invest in your employees’ career development and tie their career success to the success of your organization.

Management and Leadership

It’s often stated that “employees don’t leave organizations, they leave managers.” This is not a mere business platitude, there is evidence to back it up.

In a study conducted by Gallup, 50 percent of employees said they left a job “to get away from their manager to improve their overall life at some point in their career.”

What’s more, according to an article by SHRM, “Employees who trust their managers appear to have more pride in the organization and are more likely to feel they are applying their individual talents for their own success and that of the organization.”

To curb employee turnover that stems from mismanagement, organizations should train managers on how to constructively engage, develop and motivate their teams to improve employee retention.

One challenge managers may face lies in the fact that what motivates employees is often unique to the individual. To uncover the diverse factors that drive their team members, emotional intelligence is required.

Training support for managers should involve teaching them how to build better relationships, communicate more effectively, notice the early signs of employee burnout, delegate work and shift their mindset from being “the boss” to becoming a leader who empowers their team for success.

Moreover, managers should not have to wait for HR to step in with talent retention initiatives. Instead, managers should feel empowered to provide incentives and rewards, as well as the ability to develop their staff and offer meaningful opportunities to their team.

Managers should also be aware that meaningful recognition and praise can be powerful. Employee awards, recognition programs and praise might be the single most cost-effective way to maintain a happy, productive workforce.

Managers can send positive emails at the completion of a project or monthly memos outlining the achievements of their team, and organizations can develop peer-recognition programs to provide positive feedback to individuals as well as their teams as a whole.

What’s more, organizations can create formal employee recognition programs. These programs let employees know that their work is valued and provides employees with a sense of ownership and belonging within their organization.

Creating a culture of recognition is something any organization can do to improve their employee retention. The key to success is identifying how your employees like to be recognized and then finding ways to show recognition in their preferred method consistently over time.

While recognition programs can help improve employee retention, you still need to make sure managers are provided with coaching and training programs as well as supplied with the resources they need to become more empowered.

Key Action:

Enable employees to have positive social interactions with leadership and a rewarding work environment to increase satisfaction with their role in the organization.

Using Predictive Analytics to Track Turnover

Today, organizations are more data-driven, using AI and predictive analytics to better analyze data and drive business decisions. Predictive analytics can be leveraged by organizations to monitor and manage employee turnover by identifying which employees are at risk of leaving the organization.

Organizations should build their predictive models based on employee data tracked and stored in their HRIS or ATS. This historical data contains a wealth of information relevant to predicting employee turnover. Successfully leveraging predictive analytics to improve employee retention begins with the validity and quality of data fed into a predictive model.

Some of the most commonly used employee information for turnover-focused predictive modeling includes:

  • Tenure or duration of employment
  • Compensation level or ratio
  • Date of, or time since, last promotion
  • Percent of most recent pay raise
  • Job performance score
  • Commute distance
  • Job satisfaction score
  • Number of previous positions held
  • Years with current manager
  • Engagement score

These points of data can be analyzed to predict the likelihood and rate of turnover across roles within an organization.

For example, a PeopleScout client uses data and predictive models to assess turnover trends. The client uses employee demographic information such as age, tenure and their previous employer to predict when an employee might resign based on historical trends and patterns of similar employees.

Equipped with this data, the client is better positioned to prevent valuable employees from resigning by taking preemptive actions during periods or junctures where the employee is most likely to resign.

Leveraging Interviews to Improve Employee Retention

A key to improving employee retention is uncovering the unique issues your employees face day-to-day. Exit and stay interviews can give you a wide variety of perspectives from which to tackle issues that are driving employees away.

Exit Interviews

Exit interviews are designed to gather feedback from departing employees, and can provide an organization with insights that can be used to make current and future employees less likely to resign.

For example, if your exit interviews uncover that employees feel their duties didn’t match their original job expectations, consider changing your job descriptions and your onboarding sessions to better reflect the duties within a specific role.

What’s more, recruiters and talent acquisition stakeholders should be educated on the competencies and skills that are needed to be successful in a specific role and be able to communicate them effectively to candidates.

Tips for conducting effective exit interviews:

  • Choose the Right Interviewer: When conducting an exit interview, the interviewer should be someone with little connection to the interviewee or someone they feel comfortable sharing their true feedback and concerns with.
  • Ask the Right Questions: To get the most out of an exit interview, it is important to ask the right questions – e.g. what is the attraction of the new position?; how were relationships with colleagues?; was there an issue with benefits or compensation?; what could be done to make this company a better place to work?
  • Analyze the Interviews: Make sure you analyze the results of each exit interview and aim to find any common issues that are causing your employees to leave.

Exit interviews shouldn’t be the only time you solicit feedback from employees. Rather, you should foster a culture of constructive feedback. Employee engagement surveys are a good way to take the pulse of employees throughout their tenure with your organization. That way, you’re more likely to get honest, constructive feedback from current employees, as well as when employees leave.

Key Action:

During an exit interview, ask about things like the quality of leadership, teamwork across and within departments, opportunities for advancement and internal policies.

Stay Interviews

In some ways stay interviews are similar to exit interviews. They are both used to identify reasons employees like or dislike their job and can uncover concerns or issues an employer may be unaware of.

However, stay interviews can be more valuable than exit interviews because they provide insights managers can leverage to motivate and retain employees before they make the decision to leave.

Questions to ask during a stay interview:

  • What keeps you working here?
  • What do you enjoy about your job?
  • What would cause you to leave the company?
  • What would you like to change about your job, team or department?
  • If you could change one thing about the company what would it be?
  • Have you ever thought about leaving the organization?
  • What motivates you at work?
  • Do you feel appreciated in your role?
  • Where do you see yourself in five years?

After conducting a stay interview, be as transparent as possible with the interviewee about what you can or can’t do to remedy a particular issue.

Key Action:

Aim to conduct your stay interviews at least once per year to augment the more general information about team satisfaction obtained through engagement surveys. Schedule them separately from performance reviews so the goals of each meeting remain distinct.

The Gist:

Unmanaged employee turnover is costly and disruptive to organizations. Approaches to retaining top talent need go beyond compensation and benefits to include improving employee job satisfaction with meaningful engagement, organizational commitment to managing employees’ relationships with their managers and clearly communicating opportunities for growth and advancement with the organization.

Ghosting in the Workplace

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Ghosting in the workplace is an increasing concern for employers as the growing trend of candidates who don’t show up to scheduled interviews, don’t arrive on the first day of work or even quit without giving notice rises. This trend is also known as “ghosting” in the workplace.

“As labor markets tighten, recruiters and hiring managers say they’re experiencing a surge of workers no-showing at interviews or accepting a job only to never appear for the first day of work without explanation. Some employees are even quitting by walking out and saying nothing,” wrote LinkedIn’s Chip Cutter in an article on workplace ghosting.

What’s more, an article published by USA Today reports that 20 to 50 percent of job applicants and workers are pulling no-shows or ghosting in some form or fashion.

The ghosting phenomenon is global. “I thought it could only be in pockets of a country like the U.S., where the unemployment rate has sunk to an 18-year low,” wrote Pilita Clark in an article in the Financial Times. “When I asked around in the UK, where unemployment is at its lowest in over 40 years, I found a surprising number of victims of what is known in the online dating world as ‘ghosting.’”

To further explain what ghosting is, why it’s occurring and what your organization can do to minimize its effects on your talent acquisition program, we explore the phenomenon and its effects on employers.

So, What is Ghosting in the Workplace?

In the dating world, “ghosting” is the practice of ending a relationship by stopping all contact and communication with a partner without apparent warning or explanation.

The discourteous act of ghosting is no longer confined to romance; it has now entered the world of work.

Ghosting in the workplace is similar to ghosting in dating. Essentially, candidates or employees avoid having potentially unpleasant conversations with recruiters or their employers by going radio silent instead.

ghosting in the workplace

Instead of telling employers, “I am quitting” or “I have accepted another job offer,” some workers are thinking: “If I ignore you long enough, eventually you will take the hint and leave me alone.”

Simply put, many job seekers do not want to have an uncomfortable conversation with a recruiter or manager, so they take the easy way out by ghosting them. Ghosting in the workplace comes in many forms including:

  • No-Showing for an Interview. This occurs when candidates do not show up to scheduled interviews. This can happen for initial interviews, or interviews further along in the hiring process.
  • No-Showing on the First Day. This occurs when candidates accept a job offer but don’t show up on their start date.
  • Quitting Without Notice. This occurs when an employee leaves for the day and is never heard from again.

While job candidates and employees have ghosted in the past, what’s unique now is the practice has now become more prevalent. According to a survey conducted by Washington-based research firm Clutch, 71 percent of workers admitted to ghosting at some point in the application process. What’s more, 55 percent of the respondents said they abandon one to five applications during a job search.

Why are Workers Ghosting in the Workplace?

Some experts believe it is due to changing candidate attitudes and others believe it is a result of the booming job market and historically low unemployment. Whatever the cause, ghosting in the workplace is becoming one of the top issues talent acquisition professionals face in today’s talent market.

Change in Candidate Attitudes

In an interview with the New York Post, Rob Bralow, owner of BLVD Wine Bar in Long Island says he schedules interviews back to back because the majority of applicants simply ghost the interview.

“If I have 10 people who have confirmed interviews in a day, and three people show up, I’m happy,” Bralow says. “And we’re talking about all pay grades and positions. It doesn’t matter what the pay scale is. I’ve had ghosts [no-shows] for $50,000 to $70,000 jobs, and I’ve had ghosts for minimum wage jobs.”

Clutch’s survey found 41 percent of workers found it acceptable to ghost employers, while 35 percent found it unreasonable for an organization to ghost an applicant. Clutch also found that of the workers that found ghosting acceptable, the most common reasons include accepting another job offer (30 percent) or deciding the role was not a good match (19 percent).

Improved Economy and Opportunities

Ghosting employers is not just a symptom of shifting attitudes in the workforce. It can also be the result of low unemployment.

At the height of the Great Recession, the unemployment rate reached 10 percent in the U.S. During this time, many organizations were inundated by the deluge of applications from job seekers and could not respond to every applicant.

What’s more, the global economy is expected to grow by 3.7 percent in 2018, further driving demand for talent.

As the economy and job market surge, the tables have turned. Employees are at an advantage because it’s a candidate’s job market and they have more employment options than they have in recent years.

In May of 2018, the unemployment rate reached an 18-year low of 3.8 percent. There were more job openings than unemployed workers for just the second month in two decades, according to the United States Department of Labor.

Low unemployment is not confined to the U.S., the unemployment rate in the EU has dropped to 7.1 and in the APAC region at 4.2 percent.

This means that employees have more options for employment and can move quickly from one job to the next, ignore employment offers they choose not to accept or accept multiple offers at once with little perceived negative consequences.

How to Survive Ghosting in the Workplace

ghosting employers

Ghosting is not only frustrating for employers and recruiters, it’s also expensive. The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) reports the average cost-per-hire for companies is $4,129 and the average time to fill a position is 42 days. Ghosting also causes lost productivity, as hard-to-fill jobs stay open longer than anticipated.

To combat ghosting, employers can implement the following strategies:

Developing a Talent Community Can Curb Employee Ghosting

With ghosting becoming the new normal, it’s essential to be more strategic and build long-term relationships with candidates. One method of building long-term relationships is with talent communities.

Talent communities are ideal for establishing long-term professional relationships with passive talent for future opportunities. This means getting to know the talent landscape and candidates regardless of whether or not they are looking to make a career change immediately.

Developing a talent community requires organizations to shift from reactive recruiting to a more proactive approach. Your organization’s mindset should switch from recruiting to fill an open position to thinking about who your organization should hire in the future.

By sourcing candidates earlier in the hiring process, you have ample time to engage them and develop closer and more personal relationships, reducing their likelihood of ghosting.

Tips for building a talent community include:

  • Determine what roles you want to target for your talent community (usually roles with high turnover or roles that are hard-to-fill.)
  • Look to past candidates, former employees and interns to build your talent community.
  • Source passive candidates by combining various sourcing techniques (e.g. social media, networking events, etc.)
  • Engage candidates through recruitment marketing until you have an open role for them.

Building a talent community isn’t a short-term strategy and takes time to develop and nurture, but in the long term the benefits are worth the investment and can help offset ghosting in the workplace.

Ghosting Employers: Evaluate Your Onboarding Process

While candidates ghosting job interviews can be a challenge, candidates who ghost on the first day or who resign their position without notice can wreak havoc on an organization.

To curb and deter this behavior, organizations should start the onboarding process early to build an emotional connection with new hires.

In fact, according to research conducted by Inavero, 77 percent of candidates are willing to accept an offer that is 5 percent lower than their expected offer if the employer created a great impression through the hiring process.

That is important because new hires decide to stay or leave a job within the first three weeks, according to a study by the Wyndhurst Group.

Despite the fact that it can take a year or longer for a new employee to reach full productivity, only 15 percent of organizations extend their onboarding past six months, according to SHRM. If employers want to keep their new hires from ghosting, they should consider extending their onboarding processes through the first year of employment. Here are some ideas for successful onboarding techniques at different key points throughout an employee’s first year.

  • Before start date: Prior to a candidate’s first day, reach out with friendly messages welcoming the new employee or sharing an introduction to some of the benefits your organization has to offer.
  • On the first day: When the new hire arrives for their first day, be sure they are personally introduced to their coworkers and designate a point of contact who will be readily available to answer questions.
  • The first six months: Now that the new hire has learned the ropes, continuous feedback is what is going to help them hone their skills, catch mistakes and take corrective action when needed. This is also a great way to establish rapport and trust with the rest of the team.
  • After the first year: After the first year, managers should start having conversations about a new hire’s future within the organization and their career development as a way to show the employee that the organization is invested in their continued success.

Conclusion

No one can say for certain if ghosting in the workplace is a trend that is here to stay or if the emergence of an employer-friendly job market will curb it. But one thing is certain; candidate’s attitudes have changed, so organizations need to take steps to adjust.

By building strong talent communities and engaging new hires early and often, you can better position yourself to reduce the likelihood of candidates and employees ghosting you.

Expanding the Talent Landscape by Recruiting Virtual Employees

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With very low unemployment in many of the world’s major economies, those seeking to attract talent should explore the benefits of recruiting employees that work from home. Since a number of these countries, such as the United States and the UK, are considered to be at “full employment,” where nearly everyone who wants a job has a job, the traditional formula of recruiting in the market where a company is located may no longer be as effective as it has been in the past. And since the top reason for quitting a current job is to increase wages, employers face the challenge of meeting candidate expectations for higher pay based on local salary ranges.

While remote work may not be viable for some positions, expanding the pool of candidates outside a specific geographic area allows employers to take advantage of the growing trend in telecommuting as well as potentially reduce attrition, decrease cost-per-hire and even improve productivity.

The Virtual Workforce is Substantial (and Growing)

A study by Global Workplace Analytics and FlexJobs released earlier this year reported that 3.9 million U.S. employees, or 2.9 percent of the total U.S. workforce, currently work from home at least half of the time. This number is up from 1.8 million in 2005, an increase of 115 percent. And as of 2017, 43 percent of U.S. workers worked remotely at least occasionally, up from only 9 percent of workers in 2007.

Growth in remote work is not limited to the United States. In the UK, one in seven people work from home, according to the Office for National Statistics. In Canada, nearly half (47 percent) of employees work from outside one of their employer’s main offices for half the week or more. And in Australia, the number of people who work from home has risen to 30 percent. The significant percentages of telecommuters is not the case for all economies. Eurostat reported earlier this year that working from home was slightly more common in the Eurozone than in the EU as a whole. And some non-Eurozone countries have a negligible virtual workforce. Bulgaria has only 0.3 and Romania just 0.4 percent of its workers working from home, as an example.

A Deloitte study on Global Human Capital Trends reported that 70 percent of employees value telecommuting, but only 27 percent of employers offer this option. Therefore, companies that provide opportunities for telecommuting may have a competitive advantage in attracting talent.

Reducing Employee Turnover and Increasing Productivity

While study results vary, there is evidence being offered that working from home can increase employee retention. One study by OwlLabs found that companies that support remote work have 25 percent lower employee turnover than those that don’t.

A study conducted by a Stanford University professor set up a control group between office-based workers and those were allowed to work from home. As the Harvard Business Review reports:

“Half the volunteers were allowed to telecommute; the rest remained in the office as a control group. Survey responses and performance data collected at the conclusion of the study revealed that, in comparison with the employees who came into the office, the at-home workers were not only happier and less likely to quit but also more productive.”

The professor noted that “The results we saw at Ctrip, (the company studied, which is the largest online travel agency in China and the owner of other travel sites worldwide including Trip.com) blew me away. Ctrip was thinking that it could save money on space and furniture if people worked from home and that the savings would outweigh the productivity hit it would take when employees left the discipline of the office environment. Instead, we found that…Ctrip got almost an extra workday a week out of them. They also quit at half the rate of people in the office—way beyond what we anticipated. And predictably, at-home workers reported much higher job satisfaction.”

Providing the option of working virtually can be a crucial factor in retaining valuable talent. If an employee needs to relocate temporarily for family reasons, such as caring for an older parent, or permanently due to a spouse’s job transfer, the employee can remain with the company by working remotely. Having this option available allows the employee to remain with the organization while the employer retains experienced talent and saves the costs of hiring and training a new worker.

Cost Savings for Employers and Employees

This same Stanford study showed that the company saved $1,900 per employee working from home over nine months. Remote workers allow employers to save money on furniture, parking, office space, insurance costs and other expenses. Global Workplace Analytics’ research shows that a typical employer can save more than $11,000 per year for each half-time telecommuter, the result of a combination of increased productivity and reduced real estate, turnover and absenteeism.

The cost benefits of remote work also extend to employees. Those working remotely save on commuting expenses, depreciation on their vehicles if they drive and gain the time back that would normally be spent going to and from work.

Can Remote Work Be a Solution for Your Business?

The difficulties of recruiting locally and the potential returns of developing a remote workforce may be attractive, but it is also uncharted territory for many companies. How would you source candidates throughout the nation and even beyond? Can you develop recruiting processes, including interviewing, that are effective using video and other tools if you have only relied on face-to-face meetings until now? And once a candidate is hired, how will you manage the onboarding process remotely? The answers to these and many other questions confronting a company exploring a remote workforce option can be provided by a recruitment process outsourcing company (RPO). An RPO can provide the experience, technology and expertise to ensure your success as you remove the geographic limits of your talent pool.

Changing Workforce Demographics: Aging Talent

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An Aging Workforce in an Aging World

For the first time in history, the majority of people on earth will live to 60 years of age and beyond. This is true in high, medium and low-income nations. People are not only living longer, but they are working longer. In the U.S., 23 percent of workers are aged 55 and older. Over one-third of Canadians over the age of 55 are still working and in the UK, workers over 50 comprise 27% of the workforce. In Australia, labor force participation, (those working or actively looking for work), for those 55 and older has never been higher. The demographic shift towards an aging workforce brings both unprecedented opportunities and challenges for organizations that want to attract and retain talent.

A Talent Ticking Time Bomb?

The Deloitte 2018 Global Human Capital Trends Study notes that “population aging poses a workforce dilemma for both economies and organizations. Thirteen countries are expected to have ‘super-aged’ populations—where more than one in five people is 65 or older—by 2020, up from just three in 2014. These include major economies such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, Germany, France, and South Korea. China’s 65-and-older population is projected to more than triple from approximately 100 million in 2005 to over 329 million in 2050. In fact, analysts have estimated that 60 percent of the world’s population over 65 will live in Asia by 2030.”

The study notes that almost all developed economies have a birthrate below the “replacement rate,” or the rate of babies born that will ultimately replace previous generations, leading to a potentially catastrophic talent shortage. Citing the example of Japan, now the world’s oldest country in terms of population, a shortage of approximately 1 million workers in 2015 and 2016 is estimated to have cost the economy $90 billion.

To bolster its declining talent pool, Japan changed its laws so that descendants of Japanese citizens living abroad would be attracted by newly available long-stay visas and work permits. It had particular success in attracting workers from Brazil with as many as 320,000 Brazilians of Japanese descent working in Japan ten years ago, although that number has decreased in recent years. China also faces a steep plunge in its working population in the coming years and has made it easier for those of Chinese descent to live and work there.

Despite these developments in Asia, addressing a workforce shortfall through immigration appears to be an increasingly remote option for many advanced economies. A recent article in the Economist explains that the trend in many countries has been to place increased barriers to foreign talent. For organizations seeking to successfully navigate this demographic reality, success may depend on leveraging the talent of an older workforce, mentoring, succession planning and redefining the concept of retirement from work.

Older Workers as Outperformers

There is evidence that older workers have an edge on their younger colleagues regarding work performance. A study conducted by a management professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business concluded that older workers often out-perform their younger colleagues, stating “when it comes to actual job performance…older employees soundly thrash their younger colleagues…every aspect of job performance gets better as we age…I thought the picture might be more mixed, but it isn’t.”

Creative solutions which include accommodating the needs of older workers can help utilize their talent and positively impact a corporation overall. The Economist cites an example from BMW:

“When BMW, the German car maker, faced an outflow of workers it applied an adaptive approach for older workers with great success:…facing an imminent outflow of experienced workers, [it] set up an experimental older-workers’ assembly line. Ergonomic tweaks, such as lining floors with wood, better footwear and rotating workers between jobs, boosted productivity by 7%, equaling that of younger workers. Absenteeism fell below the factory’s average. Several of these adjustments turned out to benefit all employees and are now applied throughout the company.”

Employer Brand Ambassadors and Mentors

Older workers, especially those with significant tenure in an organization and industry, can serve a critical role in its talent lifecycle. Older employees can become employer brand ambassadors by effectively sharing their success stories with prospective candidates as part of an organization’s recruitment marketing messaging. Older employees can be mentors for new workers being onboarded that not only teach necessary skills but also help acclimate a new employee to the organization’s corporate culture. If a company’s workforce is reflective of the economy as a whole, then it should plan to see an exit of at least one-fifth of its employees due to retirement in the next ten years. These older workers form a natural base for a mentorship program which can play an essential role in succession planning.

Redefining Retirement Age

The days when turning 65 meant the end of working life appear long gone. Some workers past the traditional age of retirement have no choice but to continue working due to a lack of savings. Others choose to keep working, on a full or part-time basis, or as consultants. Companies will also have to compete with the trend towards entrepreneurship for talent 65 and over because this age group is more likely than any other to be self-employed.

Having the Competitive Advantage

What does an aging workforce mean for the overall talent strategy of your organization? Does your organization have the necessary insight into the challenges and opportunities that an aging workforce presents? If not, this expertise can be provided by recruitment experts such as a recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) company. Whether your strategy is developed in-house or with a partner such as an RPO, the current tight job market drives the need to build a talent program that integrates the reality of this important workforce demographic. As the Deloitte study concludes “The demographic math is undeniable: As national populations age, challenges related to engaging and managing the older workforce will intensify. Companies that ignore or resist them may not only incur reputational damage and possible liabilities but also risk falling behind those organizations that succeed in turning longevity into a competitive advantage.”

Medical Staffing: How to Engage and Retain Healthcare Workers

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Retaining healthcare staff and medical staffing are more important than ever. The lifeblood of a healthy healthcare organization is a happy and well-engaged staff, from food service and facility maintenance employees to clinical professionals like physicians and nurses. To ensure a happy healthcare workforce, medical staffing, employee engagement and retention need to be top priorities of healthcare HR professionals.

Unfortunately, many healthcare organizations lack concrete plans or programs for healthcare talent management, or the programs they have in place are antiquated and in need of updating. In this post, we educate healthcare HR professionals on ways to improve medical staffing by better engaging and retaining employees.

Why Engagement and Retention is Important for Medical Staffing

medical staffing

Healthcare employee turnover is high, according to a Leaders for Today (LPT) survey report, which included 852 participants of both clinical and non-clinical healthcare workers. The survey found that 43 percent of respondents reported they have been with their current organization for fewer than two years and 65.7 percent reported they have been with their hospital for fewer than five years. More than one-third of LPT survey respondents plan to leave their current organization within two years, and 68.6 percent plan to leave in five years.

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What’s more, the financial costs of high turnover can be significant for healthcare organizations. The turnover of a physician represents a $200,000 loss for a healthcare organization, according to a 2016 report from B.E. Smith, while the loss of a bedside nurse can cost up to $56,300 annually according to NSI Nursing Solution’s report. By better engaging employees, healthcare organizations will not only raise morale and lower employee turnover, but they will also improve their bottom line.

Four Key Areas of Medical Staffing and Employee Engagement

Developing an effective medical staffing strategy is a challenge, especially with the healthcare industry experiencing a shortage of medical professionals. Healthcare workforce planning can help resolve some medical staffing issues. However, organizations also need to factor in the following areas to ensure strong employee engagement and retention:

  • Onboarding new employees: Involves training, educating and getting new employees comfortably situated in their new position.
  • Engaging employees: Involves managing and developing employees to become more engaged with the organization.
  • Retaining employees: Involves expanding responsibilities of employees as well as offering incentives to stay with an organization.

Medical Staffing Basics: Onboarding New Healthcare Employees

Making sure new hires are comfortable, connected and productive as soon as possible is essential for the success of a comprehensive medical staffing program. New hires need to know how they fit into an organization and understand how their roles support the healthcare organization’s goals. When a healthcare organization takes the time to cultivate relationships with new hires, those employees feel like part of the team from day one and are more likely to stay in their positions.

Having a strong support structure is vital for new hires, managers should work to create a support network for their new hires in their departments to help them get up to speed as soon as possible. Managers should also be as available as possible to answer questions and provide feedback to new hires.

Instead of waiting for new hires to introduce themselves to their new co-workers, healthcare HR professionals should actively introduce new hires to their teams before their start date. This can be done with email notifications or a brief in-person meeting. Veteran employees should also conduct regular follow-ups with new hires once they have started to make sure they are acclimating well to their new environment.

Additional on-boarding suggestions:

  • Appoint point persons and mentors to welcome and orient new hires for the first 90-days of employment.
  • Before a new hire’s start date, send him/her a card or letter welcoming them to the organization and include important paperwork, employee handbook and benefits package along with an agenda letting them know what to expect on their first day.
  • Make sure the employee’s work area is ready.
  • Create lunch plans for new hire’s first few days, helping her/him feel at ease and welcome. This can also can serve as a way to introduce them to the team.
  • Promptly educate new hires on the healthcare organization’s culture and unwritten rules. For example, what is the preferred method of communication – email, phone, chat programs or in-person meetings?

Successfully onboarding employees can be one of the most effective weapons in a healthcare organization’s arsenal. Studies have illustrated that well-designed onboarding programs can quickly transform new hires into dedicated employees, reducing the costs associated with turnover and improving overall employee morale.

Engaging Healthcare Employees

Employee engagement is one of the most important elements of successful medical staffing. Highly engaged employees often have persistent feelings of work fulfillment. This work fulfillment can often translate into increased enthusiasm and passion in employees, resulting in higher than average levels of focus and energy put into their jobs.

Employee engagement has become more important to healthcare HR professionals because there is growing evidence that employee engagement correlates to positive outcomes for individual, group and organizational performance in the areas of productivity, retention, turnover, patient care and loyalty. Here are a few practices healthcare organizations can do to better engage employees.

Professional development: For healthcare professionals—especially clinical employees—the opportunity to learn and grow professionally is very important. To better engage employees, healthcare organizations should look to create a positive learning environment for employees who seek additional skills and professional experiences. Learning opportunities can pay long-term dividends, the skills and new experiences gained by employees through education and training can be utilized to improve performance in their current position, or they can transition into vacant positions, lessening the need for hiring new personnel.

Offer better work-life balance

Healthcare workers experience the same challenges in their personal lives as employees in other industries, they are trying to balance childcare, school schedules and needing time away from work. Adding some freedom to an employee’s daily, weekly or monthly schedule is often seen as a big plus for employees and can be more important than compensation in some cases.

Working relationships and mentorship

Strong bonds and relationships between team members are important for professional growth. Veteran employees who have been with an organization for years have a lot of experience, knowledge and advice to impart to younger and less experienced employees looking for career guidance. To build better employee engagement, healthcare organizations should create a formal mentoring program. Healthcare organizations can ask seasoned employees to guide younger ones in their careers to help engage both the mentor and mentee, giving a sense of purpose and direction to both parties.

Additional employee engagement suggestions:

  • Make staff meetings a time to celebrate successes and highlight individual achievements.
  • Have managers involve employees in determining their career path goals and development plan.
  • Promote values such as integrity, empowerment, perseverance, equality, discipline and accountability into the organization.
  • Let employees know they matter and make a difference within the organization.
  • Give employees responsibilities and new challenges.
  • Give employees thank you cards for going the extra mile.
  • Implement employee suggestions and ideas to show you care and value their input.
  • Create opportunities for employees to become a “leader” in something they are interested in and knowledgeable about.
  • Ask employees work-appropriate questions about their family life, hobbies and interests.
  • Always provide staff the care, tools and resources needed to be successful in their position.

By better engaging employees, medical staffing efforts will see reduced turnover and higher levels of job satisfaction among employees. Remember, managers are key in engaging employees and must pay attention to staff needs to help create a positive working environment.

Medical Staffing Retaining Healthcare Employees

Employee retention is certainly one of the most important ingredients for success for healthcare organizations. Improving employee retention allows organizations to avoid the high cost associated with replacing employees, improves patient care and enhancing the overall quality of service to the communities served. Below are a few ways healthcare organizations can improve their employee retention efforts.

Offer flexible scheduling: Scheduling can be a rather difficult part of medical staffing. A healthcare workers’ schedule can be exhausting, as they often have to work long and unpredictable hours. To better retain employees, healthcare organizations should consider offering a wide array of scheduling options. Employees will appreciate an organization’s attempts to accommodate their personal lives and needs, and in turn, become more loyal to an organization as a result. Employees who have more control of their schedules tend to feel more job satisfaction and often stay with an organization longer.

Remove frustrating obstacles: Many employees may truly love their jobs, but due to obstacles and unnecessary challenges associated with performing their duties, they become burned out. For instance, nurses might get inundated with never-ending paperwork. This may result in nurses feeling unsatisfied with their work. A solution to this challenge could be to implement a new technology to streamline the paperwork process. Without an overload, nurses will most likely feel greater satisfaction because their workload is more balanced between administrative and clinical work.

Conduct stay interviews: Interviewing employees is often reserved for before hiring or after an employee resigns their position. Stay interviews should be conducted at least once a year with employees on a one-on-one basis in a neutral setting. Employees should be asked questions about their frustrations and issues and about ideas on how improvements can be made for them.

Questions to include in stay interviews:

  • What about your job makes you eager to get to work?
  • What makes you want to hit the snooze button instead of coming to work?
  • If you were to leave the organization, what would you miss the most?
  • What would be the one thing, if it changed in your current position, would make you consider leaving?
  • What would be the one thing you would change about your department if you could?

Employees who are treated well will often feel a sense of obligation or duty to their organization. As a healthcare employer, each action an organization takes to improve employee job satisfaction, morale and productivity is a step towards improving retention and improving medical staffing outcomes.

Conclusion

For healthcare organizations, medical staffing is only as successful as their ability to engage and retain the best healthcare professionals. To achieve this end, organizations must be consistently vigilant of their employees’ needs and must develop talent carefully to keep employees engaged and committed to their job.

Age Discrimination in the Workplace: What Employers Need to Know

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According to the Pew Research Council, 18.8 percent of people over 65 worked in 2016, while the National Council on Aging reports that, by 2019, over 40 percent of people over age 55 are expected to be working. With the increase of older employees in the workforce, age discrimination in the workplace will become a greater issue, necessitating strategic planning to avoid age-related issues. In this post, we outline the issues and offer concise solutions to combat age discrimination in the workplace.

What is Age Discrimination in the Workplace?

In the United States, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) is a federal law that protects individuals 40 years of age or older from age-based employment discrimination. According to the ADEA, the following are examples of age discrimination in the workplace:

  • Not hiring an individual because an employer wants a younger-looking person for the role.
  • If a person receives a negative performance review because they were too old or inflexible to taking on new projects.
  • Firing an individual because management wants to hire and retain younger less expensive workers.
  • Turning an individual down for promotion because they are “too old” for the position or they want “new blood” in a position.
  • When company layoffs are announced, most of the persons laid off are older, while younger workers with less seniority and less on-the-job experience are kept on.
  • Before termination, supervisors or management made age-related remarks about an individual such as the person being “over-the-hill,” “ancient,” or “an old man or woman.”

If any of these situations take place, employees may have a solid case against a company for age discrimination in the workplace.

Managing Age Diversity in the Workplace

A study by PricewaterhouseCoopers revealed that 64 percent of CEOs surveyed had adopted strategies promoting diversity and inclusiveness. However, only 8 percent included age as a factor in their diversity strategy. This means that many businesses may be ill-equipped to properly manage an age-diverse workplace.

Older employees bring with them years of experience, tried and true ideas and problem-solving approaches that can be of great benefit to a business. However, multi-generational workplaces also come with unique challenges, which if mismanaged, can lead to unsatisfied employees and hampered business efficiency. This means getting it right depends on smart management and an open-minded leadership approach. Here are some ways businesses can effectively manage and create a positive working environment free of age discrimination in the workplace:

Flexibility:

Older individuals may need more flexibility in the workplace dues to age-related illnesses, family obligations and physical ability. Providing flexibility to older employees allows them to participate in the workplace without feeling like they are a burden to the company they work for.

Foster Multi-Generational Team building:

Building age-diverse teams in the workplace allows employees to learn from one another. Older employees can impart knowledge gained through experience to younger employees while younger employees can teach them how to use new technology and techniques.

Both parties benefit from the chance to challenge and motivate one another. That is why businesses should look for opportunities for inter-generational teams to collaborate on projects whenever possible.

Job Requirements:

There are a few circumstances when it is lawful for an employer to treat people differently if it is a legal requirement that the employee must be of a particular age. When deciding if this applies, it is necessary to consider the nature of the work and the context in which it is carried out. Jobs may change over time and companies should review whether the requirement continues to apply, particularly when recruiting for certain positions.

Age Discrimination in the Workplace and Recruitment

According to Department of Labor data, the unemployment rate for those over age 55 stands at just 3.6 percent, compared with 5 percent for the total population. While older workers have found a place in the modern workforce, many individuals find themselves the victims of age-based discrimination when it comes to being recruited and hired. There are many ways businesses can avoid age-based discriminatory hiring practices. Below we have listed a couple of tips:

Job Applications

Businesses should remove the age and date of birth fields from job applications. In addition to removing these fields, businesses should also review their applications to ensure that they are not asking for unnecessary information about dates. Asking for age-related information on an application could project an air of discrimination, which could be a liability and dissuade older candidates from applying.

Job Descriptions:

Avoid references, however oblique, to age in the job description. For example, a job seeker could challenge any time requirement, and a business may have to justify it in objective terms, again leaving a business vulnerable to discrimination allegations.

Harassment and Age Discrimination

Harassment is unwanted conduct related to a relevant protected characteristic, such as age, which has the purpose or effect of violating an individual’s dignity or creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment for that individual.

Harassment may be intentional bullying which is obvious or violent, but it can also be unintentional, subtle and insidious. It may involve nicknames, teasing, name calling or other behavior that does not have malicious intent but is upsetting. It may be about the individual’s age (real or perceived), or it may be about the age of those with whom the individual associates. It may not be targeted at an individual but consist of a general culture which, for instance, appears to tolerate the telling of age-related jokes.

Businesses may also be held responsible for the actions of employees. To ensure age-related harassment does not take place, businesses should clearly communicate an anti-harassment policy and make sure the policy is thoroughly enforced.

Conclusion:

Fairness at work and good job performance go hand in hand. Tackling discrimination helps to attract, motivate and retain staff and enhances a businesses’ reputation as an employer. Eliminating age discrimination in the workplace helps everyone to have an equal opportunity to work and develop their skills regardless of age.

Improving Racial and Ethnic Diversity in the Workplace

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In the modern workplace, companies are placing greater emphasis on diversity and inclusion initiatives to strengthen organizational adaptability, gain competitive advantage and reduce legal risks. Despite this trend, many companies still struggle with racial and ethnic discrimination and policymaking.

In fact, According to data collected by the EEOC, $112.7 million is collected from employers for racial discrimination violations on average each year. In this post, we outline what constitutes racial and ethnic diversity, its benefits to companies and best practices when it comes to implementing and monitoring a racial and ethnic diversity policy in the workplace.

The Benefits of Racial and Ethnic Diversity in the Workplace

ethnic diversity

Companies increasingly understand the value of recruiting and retaining diverse employees, as these workers play a critical role in a company’s ability to adapt, grow and sustain a competitive advantage in the modern business landscape.

However, some companies fail to recognize the benefits of having a racially and ethnically diverse workforce. Factors such as prejudice and stereotypes towards certain racial or ethnic groups, whether conscious or unconscious, can lead to discriminatory practices in hiring.

What’s more, to combat prejudice and internal resistance, companies need to create a business case for diversity by outlining the benefits of a racial and ethnically diverse workplace such as:

  • Gains in worker welfare and efficiency
  • Reduced turnover costs
  • Fewer internal disputes and grievances
  • Improved accessibility to new and diverse customer markets
  • Higher productivity and increased revenue
  • Increased innovation
  • Development of new products and services
  • Improved company reputation management
  • Greater flexibility and adaptability in a globalized world
  • More efficient risk management (e.g. legal risks due to non-compliance)
  • Prevention of marginalization and exclusion of categories of workers
  • Improved social cohesion

Companies are more likely to reap these benefits when they go beyond meeting the minimum requirements for legal compliance. Companies should strive to understand both the social and cultural complexities inherent in embracing diversity and strive to be diversity leaders in their industry.

Research Report

Diversity & the Candidate Experience: Identifying Recruitment Pitfalls to Improve DE&I Outcomes

read the report

Key Racial and Ethnic Diversity Definitions

diversity statistics in the workplace

To effectively improve racial and ethnic diversity in the workplace, companies need to understand some of the key terms and definitions including:

Racial Discrimination: Racial discrimination in the workplace can be defined as any exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, color, descent or national or ethnic origin which has the purpose of impairing an employee’s ability to exercise their rights to equal standing in the workplace.

Ethnic Group: The term “ethnic group” refers to a group of persons whose members identify with each other through such factors as common heritage, culture, ancestry, language, dialect, history, identity and geographic origin.

Ethnic Minority: Ethnic minority does not only refer to ethnic groups that are a numerical minority. Instead, it refers to any ethnic group that is not dominant socially, economically or politically.

Implicit Bias: Also known as unconscious or hidden bias, implicit biases are negative associations that people unknowingly hold. They are expressed automatically, without conscious awareness.

Inclusion: Authentically incorporating traditionally excluded individuals and/or groups into processes, activities and decision/policy making in a way that shares power.

For more diversity definitions and terms, visit Racial Equality Tools.

Employer and Employee Responsibilities

Both employers and employees have responsibilities when it comes to promoting and monitoring racial and ethnic diversity policy in the workplace. Both stakeholders have to work together to ensure the success of a company’s diversity initiatives.

Employer Responsibilities

Employers should act as facilitators and purveyors of knowledge to improve relations among their diverse workforce. Employers should also continuously work on the development of diversity policy and implementation. Management should also be trained to ensure the improvement of awareness on racial discrimination and ethnic diversity in the workplace. Furthermore, employers can help build the capacity of managers to ensure that the ethnic diversity policy is effectively applied within the company.

Employee Responsibilities

Employees and organizations tasked with protecting workers rights should lobby companies for strong ethnic diversity policies, ensuring that all workers enjoy equal opportunities at all stages of the employment cycle, including access to employment, training, promotion and retirement. Employees also have an important role in raising awareness amongst themselves on the right to a workplace free from racial discrimination and in supporting their coworkers when they issue complaints.

Introducing Racial and Ethnic Diversity Initiatives in the Workplace

lack of diversity in the workplace

Improving racial and ethnic diversity in the workplace often challenges the values and worldview of current employees. For this reason, introducing diversity initiatives is both challenging and necessary for companies looking to create a more inclusive corporate culture.

How companies introduce racial and ethnic diversity initiatives matters. To successfully introduce diversity initiatives, companies need to take a structured approach that involves assuaging feelings of uncertainty about the future of the company and effectively communicating new policies aimed at protecting workers belonging to certain racial and ethnic groups.

At the same time, companies should communicate realistic expectations to members of minority groups regarding the new policies to ensure they understand the goal and scope of the initiative.

Companies can communicate new racial and ethnic diversity policies by creating a consistent message delivered and sent to all hierarchical levels through email, internal media networks (including social media) and placing posters in high traffic areas. Messaging should also be designed to accommodate the different languages and literacy levels of employees to ensure everyone understands the new policies.

Creating an Effective Response to Complaints

race vs ethnicity

Making it easy for workers to raise complaints helps demonstrate a fair and concerted effort to understand their concerns and issues surrounding diversity. If it can be shown that the complaints procedure is confidential, backed by prompt and effective action to investigate and settle them transparently and seriously, there will be not only greater acceptance of the policy but also greater commitment to practice the policy throughout the company. There are two processes to resolve complaints:

Formal Process

A formal complaint process is one that provides a written summary of the full investigation to the complainant and the alleged offender. Both parties should be given the opportunity to provide comments on the content of this summary before the full report is finalized. The final report should include who was interviewed, what questions were asked, the investigator’s conclusions, and what possible remedies, sanctions or other action may be appropriate.

Informal Processes

An informal process involves conciliation, mediation, counseling or discussions in order to resolve complaints. Peer mediators should be used instead of HR staff to facilitate dialogue between the parties but not making any recommendations, sanctions or hand down rulings.

In addition to the two processes of resolving complaints, companies should also look to the following persons, departments and organizations for help in resolving diversity-related issues:

Focal Point: Regardless of the size of a company, it is important to have one or more officials dedicated to overseeing that diversity policy is upheld. These “focal points” should be reliable, approachable and respected by staff and management, such as members of the executive board, department heads or employee relations staff. The size of the company will determine the number of focal points and how many workers are covered by each one.

Human Resources: If a company is large enough to support a human resources, transformation or diversity department; then consideration should be given to appointing the main focal point from within these departments.

Unions: If the employee base for a company is comprised of members of a union, they will need assurance that they have union support to raise issues regarding racial discrimination. Some workers, therefore, prefer to call their union representative when dealing with discrimination issues. Companies need to make sure that they have open and clear channels of communication with unions representing their employees and an established protocol when it comes to dealing with ethnic diversity policy.

Call Center: For large companies, it may be cost-effective to establish a call center for employees who are not yet ready to lodge a formal complaint with focal points, human resources or their union. These employees can anonymously contact the call center if they wish to voice concerns and seek further advice about an incident. Call centers can also be an effective means of monitoring incidents to ensure they are being tracked and followed up by managers who are responsible for the work or by the department where racial discrimination is alleged to have occurred.

Conclusion

To thrive in the current diverse times, companies need to lead the way in inclusion by creating workplaces that promote and celebrate racial and ethnic diversity. By creating diversity-friendly environments, companies gain an advantage in the competitive search for skilled talent.