The Best Tool For Recovery: Agility In Managing Your Workforce

Agile professionals and organisations can adapt quickly to new, unexpected circumstances. It's no wonder then, that "agile" is the word on everyone's mind, as the circumstances surrounding COVID-19 came on fast and furious - and brought on a lot of change in a short period of time for professionals and companies alike.

From a hiring perspective, being agile means adapting hiring practices swiftly to avoid missing out on top talent in the market. From an engagement and retention perspective, agile workforce management allows a company to make quick decisions that address changing needs and expectations of employees.

Companies entering the recovery phase are seeking out tools for recovery - and it's becoming clear that being able to manage your workforce in an agile way is one of the most important ones. In a recent webinar held by Michael Page Singapore, Nilay Khandelwal, Managing Director of Michael Page Singapore, Imran Bustamam, Head of HR, Ninja Van and Chris Mead, Head of Talent Acquisition, APAC, DuPont spoke about agility in the workplace and why organisations need to think 'agile' above all else when it comes to hiring and retaining employees.

In The Workplace

Being able to navigate unexpected challenges means that you have an agile organisation. When all your carefully-made strategies suddenly become irrelevant, the best prepared companies should be willing to keep the best practices, rethink short term goals and make quick pivots at all levels of operations.

Organisations that rely heavily on face-to-face interaction to build and maintain relationships, both internal and external will have to quickly adapt to digital strategies and seek out digital transformation sooner than expected. From a hiring strategy perspective, agility allows organisations to reevaluate their teams, projected hiring needs and other employee-centric policies and make changes in response to new criteria.

Agility And Hiring

When hiring, agility is essential as organizations need to be able to adopt new hiring practices that come along with virtual recruitment without missing a beat (or any talent). Most companies have adopted virtual recruitment as the way forward, and as circumstances return to some semblance of "normal", it is expected that many companies will keep elements of virtual recruitment within their hiring process.

Seeking Out Agile Talent

As circumstances change, demand for a certain employee is increasing - one who can easily adapt to unexpected situations, apply critical thinking at key moments and is able to go above and beyond what they were initially hired for. These traits aren't necessarily found on a professional's CV or in technical evaluations - it shows in their soft skills. Here are some important attributes that an outstanding, agile employee would possess:

● Resilient and the ability to handle ambiguity

● Willingness to contribute beyond job scope

● Ability to delivery on promises

● Action-oriented, rather than striving for perfection

● Willingness to learn and improve

Agility And Engagement And Retention

According to a poll conducted in the webinar, HR practitioners in Singapore found that employee engagement and retention was among the biggest challenges during this COVID period. If a company was not used to working remotely until now, it's no surprise that maintaining the same levels of connection through a screen is a major roadblock. Here are 3 way that companies can respond in an agile way to improve engagement and retention during these times:

1. Listen And Care For Employees.

While some HR practitioners feel apprehensive about conducting employee engagement surveys during this time, it has never been more important to gain feedback and insights to better understand where and how employees require support. Give employees a voice and follow up with actions to show your commitment for their well-being in the long run.

2. Understand That Employee Needs Are Changing.

The workplace is changing and employees' needs and expectations are included in that. Whereas before, a good paycheck and decent benefits might be enough to secure the talent you need, employers now need a much stronger Employee Value Proposition (EVP), good non-monetary benefits and a purpose to believe in.

3. Find New Ways To Communicate.

When you can't count on in-person interactions and an office to foster a strong culture that will help with retention, it's time to find new ways to communicate with employees. Communication has a strong link to employee engagement - so simply reaching out and talking to employees in a genuine, empathetic way can go far in ensuring your employees are in it with you.

Flexibility With Contracting And Freelancers

Contracting or temporary, project-based hires has emerged as an attractive, cost-effective solution for employers, as contractors help to fill staffing needs while still allowing for workforce flexibility as the global situation develops. Organisations that have this flexibility will gain an advantage in terms of reacting quickly to market changes without impacting productivity.

Becoming A Responsive Organization

Agility, at its core, is the ability for businesses to respond to a quickly changing business environment with little impact to the core structures of the organisation. If the events surrounding the global pandemic have shown anything, it's that we cannot take anything for granted as normal - and we must be ready to respond in an effective way to whatever is coming our way next.

Thanks to Michael Page / MichaelPage Singapore

https://www.michaelpage.com.sg/advice/management-advice/engagement-and-retention/best-tool-recovery-agility-managing-your-workforce?utm_source=mandrill&utm_medium=email&utm_content=The%20best%20tool%20for%20recovery:%20agility%20in%20managing%20your%20workforce&utm_campaign=blog+alert+email&uid_hash=7467b8466fe98e252754674d56765d8f

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How To Build A High-Performance Leadership Team Amid An Ongoing Pandemic Crisis?

The Characteristics Of A High-Performance Team Are Like-Mindedness And Interdependence.

All industries have been hit to varying degrees by the COVID-19 pandemic.  For many entrepreneurs, the capability of leadership is crucial to business continuity.

With the ongoing threats from the pandemic, what are the most profound challenges for corporate leaders and entrepreneurs? What should they do and how can they make the team more resilient? In this regard, Wu Gang, Managing Director of Performance Consulting International (PCI) China, gave his answers when he participated in the “Managing the 100 Great Lectures”.

1 … Two Profound Challenges Facing Corporate Leaders Now

In today ’s turbulent environment, leaders are facing the same challenges, which have nothing to do with their industry. Among them, the first challenge is: “What is the mentality to face the crisis and turmoil?”

Facing an pandemic and other crisis, should leaders’ accept fear, be suspicious, or just trust themselves and their team? Should they bear it alone or choose to depend on each other in the company? These two different mindsets and choices will determine two different outcomes.  When leaders are afraid, the way ahead will be more difficult. Whereas the mentality of trust will enable leaders to see more opportunities and potential in the team.  Bearing everything alone, the pressure is huge, but when the leadership teams work interdependently, more possibilities will be uncovered.

The second deepest challenge for leaders is to figure out: “Why do we exist?” Most companies or organizations know what they are doing, such as the products they produce or the services they provide, while some companies or organizations do not know what they do or what they are doing in times of deepening crisis.  In this context, it is necessary for leaders to figure out “why they exist”.

A company’s mission, products, services, and business models are all clear, hence these things are changeable, and they only need to figure out the “why we exist” question.  Once this is clear, the mission and purpose of the entire enterprise also become very clear, and they will know what to do and how to do in the face of crisis.

So, knowing the two major challenges under the current crisis, what should corporate leaders do to continuously improve the enthusiasm and resilience of their organizations?

2 … ‘Four Steps’ To Deal With The Turmoil Of The Current Crisis

The first step is to actively manage your mentality. An entrepreneur or leader working at this level is likely to be lonely because there are not many friends who can communicate and share their secrets. Coupled with short-term results and long-term performance pressure, all these lead to physical and mental exhaustion. Working long-term in high-pressure environments without relief will have a very adverse effect on health. Therefore, it is recommended to find an executive coach to help leaders face various pressures and jointly solve the challenges facing the current enterprise.

The second step is to solve the problem of enterprise survival. Here we need to ask ourselves “How do we sustain for the next 6 to 12 months in the current environment?” Once this is figured out, we will know what the bottom line of the company is, which is what they could bear. Knowing the company can persist for a long enough time, leaders will naturally become calmer and more stable.

The third step is to acknowledge the challenges facing the enterprise to the entire organization and leadership team, and invite the team to jointly explore future solutions. For example: “Under the current situation, it is necessary to carefully evaluate various risk situations and formulate counter measures to prepare us for a worse situation. At this point, I hope to hear more people’s thoughts and suggestions. “At this time, we need to exert the power of the team.

The fourth step, starting from the top, hold a conference on “Exploring the Road to the Future”. Use the “what if …” approach to creatively explore ways to deal with the future.

The First Two Prerequisites Are You Must Manage Your Mentality And Solve The Survival Problems Of The Enterprise Before You Have The Opportunity To Think About More Things.

3 … Four Steps To Explore The Way Forward

So, specifically, how to explore the road to the future?  There are also four steps here:

First, set company goals. Get everyone to think about how the company responds to the pandemic and how to respond to various business changes and challenges after the “resumption of business”, so as to set the target well.

Second, create an agreement for team work. Invite everyone to think about previous successful experience in similar situations, and write their ideas on the whiteboard or any visible places to ensure that the team stays aware. Sample agreements may include: courage, non-judgement, security, trust, etc. We must give everyone the mentality of mutual empowerment to do this.

Again, use brainstorming to produce ideas. Once the idea generation phase is completed, as a team, you need to discuss and review these ideas as a whole, decide which ideas can adopted, or if they should continue to explore more. The company is not a leader in a single word, as an executive team or a core team, they need to explore the future path together.

Finally, develop an action plan. Be clear on details such as the task owner, target completion time, and how the team or the leader himself (CEO) understands the key progress and status.

4 … On The Verge Of Using The Crisis To Create A High-Performance Team

When we know the two major challenges faced by current entrepreneurs, and how to improve the enthusiasm and resilience of the organization, it is then very important to build a high-performance team amid the crisis.

In fact, there are two elements that drive high performance. One is that the team or organization has a mission and dream. The individual’s mission and values are connected to the team or organization. The other is that the leader can establish a team to monitor the current performance.

Many leaders are conscious, but it is difficult to start something from themselves. It is also impossible to expect the team to work hard independently. Everyone should be made aware that work is a life skill.

The characteristics of a truly high-performance team are having the same goals, like mindedness and interdependence. “Interdependence” is the complimentary team members’ skills and responsibilities.The first step in creating a high-performance team is to create a team work agreement. The work agreement refers to the rules that the team members should follow when working together before starting work. Only by communicating well in advance can we ensure the maximum efficiency of teamwork. Problems can also be solved quickly.

There are five steps to creating a team work agreement:
i) Leader questions. For example: “In the future, how should we work together?” “What are the events that will affect our work rhythm? What are the mentalities that we should adopt in facing the challenges?” Etc.

ii) Through brainstorming, fully capture team ideas and lead everyone to discuss. “Which of these are applicable only to individuals? Which are applicable to the entire team?” “Which are necessary but not yet involved?” Here we want to allow everyone to express their opinions.

iii) Leaders supplement their requirements. “This are some of my ideas. Let’s take a look. Where do we need clarifications and where do we need revisions?”; “This agreement is an agreement that we all abide by, so please be sure to put forward the ideas in your heart”.  This is where the leader needs to invite everyone to put forward their own requirements with the mentality to explore more together.

iv) The teams’ discussion forms the final text, which is then officially released. “How do we fully implement this agreement? If these agreements are damaged, how should we respond and deal with them?” After the agreement is determined, how to implement it is very important.

v) Review regularly. “Where do we do well in our agreement? Which ones can be better?”; “How have we done to ensure that the agreement is followed by everyone?”. The agreement will change, because people and situations will change, therefore it should be reviewed regularly and adjusted on-time quickly.

In short, the leader first needs to ask questions, and then the leader guides everyone to express their ideas, allowing everyone to fully participate in the discussion, then the leader puts forward his own requirements by asking for opinions, and finally the team forms a final agreement and which will be officially released and implemented.  After being publicly released, it must be reviewed regularly so that there can be continuous revisions and improvements.

It should be noted that a working agreement can only make a difference  when it is established through full participation of the entire team, and with the mechanism of independent decision-making, as opposed to the kind of agreement made from top to bottom. As a leader, you may have questions: “What if my requirements are different from those of the team?” Here, the leader is required to adjust his mindset. That is to choose to trust his team and just be like-minded, it is only then that everyone can rely on each other.

Thanks to ZhongWai Management Magazine / WiseNetAsia
http://wisenetasia.com/how-to-build-a-high-performance-leadership-team-amid-an-ongoing-pandemic-crisis/

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3 Reasons Why Taking Action On Survey Feedback Is So Hard (And What To Do About It)

It’s now a common best practice to regularly gather feedback on work, culture, and leadership through employee surveys. This practice matters because feedback is at the heart of learning and growth within an organization. It’s essential to know about the health and happiness of your employees—and have better insight into their engagement. But capturing feedback is about more than listening. The real value comes when your organization improves as a result of those insights. At a basic level, that means finding a sustainable and scalable path to taking action in your organization and across your teams.

3 Reasons We Don’t Take Action

Many organizations struggle to move from feedback to action for three main reasons.

1. Ownership Of Action Is Unclear

Everyone agrees that acting on feedback is important. But it’s often unclear who is responsible for action taking—or the necessary actions are unequally distributed.

In some organizations, taking action on engagement results is seen as HR’s responsibility. Glint data shows that employees typically expect HR and leadership to own action-taking on survey results, and that’s because in most organizations front-line managers don’t receive results for their teams, let alone, have the training to take action. As a result, HR teams feel responsible for addressing all the feedback that has surfaced during an engagement survey, which can be overwhelming. Additionally, HR is often not in the best position to meaningfully change the employee experience in ways that will impact engagement survey results. Finally, the limited interaction between senior leadership and employees means that employees have less visibility into actions being taken at that level, and the impact of that action on their day-to-day experience.

When taking action is primarily an HR and senior leadership responsibility, employees may not see the connection between their feedback and the changes enacted to improve their experience. It’s not uncommon for organizations to wait weeks after a survey closes to communicate results to give HR and each level of leadership sufficient time to synthesize results and prepare their response. This practice alone signals that it’s someone else’s data to own and act on. As a result, managers often abdicate the responsibility of following up to leadership and HR. All in all, managers don’t recognize that engaging their people is foundational to achieving business goals.

Even in organizations that have successfully shifted some of the responsibility of taking action to front-line managers, there are challenges. When managers are involved in the action-taking process, they often bear the entire responsibility. Instead of feeling empowered, they may feel overwhelmed by the expectation of fixing everything.

2. Lack Of Training

Managers play a critical role in fostering engagement and learning within an organization, but many lack the tools and support they need to contribute effectively to team performance and development. First-time managers on the front-line manage nearly as much as two-thirds of the workforce, and over half of these managers don’t get adequate training to prepare them for these roles.

As we mentioned earlier, some survey processes create a big gap between when employees give feedback and when results are released to managers and action can be taken. The result is a disconnect between the feedback and the impact it is actually having.

Additionally, a majority of action-taking processes over-index on planning. If 80% of action-taking effort goes to developing action plans, the process can feel cumbersome, which makes it easier to de-prioritize. Unless people are enabled to build good and simple habits around responding to survey feedback, and those habits integrate into other business priorities the action-taking process is likely to run out of steam.

3. Feedback Can Feel Hard To Act On

Whether giving or receiving feedback, people shy away from a being direct because it feels hard and uncomfortable, especially on teams that might lack psychological safety. Research shows that feedback that is perceived as negative often falls flat because most people want to avoid it. Receiving feedback feels personal for managers who may see it as a reflection on them and get defensive. Some will assume it’s their responsibility to fix all the issues while others may feel like the issues are not under their control and defer the responsibility. Rather than feeling empowered to make change happen with their teams, they may end up feeling deflated or helpless.

Change The Game On Taking Action

So how can you change your organization’s approach to acting on feedback to make it more agile, sustainable, and meaningful? Here are three ways to support your organization’s ability to take action:

Empower Teams To Own Results And Actions

It starts with awareness and education, about the role everyone plays in making your organization a great place to work. Show that everyone can participate in productive conversations about survey results and feel ownership over action. At a practical level, start by releasing results to managers as quickly as possible. Then, outline clear expectations for everyone, define prescriptive yet straightforward steps, and equip your HR teams to coach and guide managers and leaders to embody the right behaviors. No one person should be solely responsible for creating an engaged and high-performing workplace.

Supplement With Great Technology

Unfortunately, much of the advancement in analytic technology has focused on insights at the expense of impact. It’s common to assess technology based on what it can do for a small group of highly-invested stakeholders—talent analysts, executives with specific needs. Instead, evaluate a solution based on how it can enable managers of small teams to understand data and move quickly—at scale. An intuitive solution removes the friction of moving from insights to action. A great solution takes the guesswork out of the action-taking process and empowers managers to fulfill their potential as engagement leaders through frequent conversations.

Outline A Simple Process Aligned To Strategy

You need a sustainable, and simple process to move from one-way listening to effective action in an organization. Start by rethinking how you invest your time. Instead of improving your listening strategy, shift your focus and develop a conversation strategy. Fostering conversations between managers and teams provides an opportunity to use data to fuel action and change behaviors. Here are some key elements of a simple, agile process for taking action:

• Share feedback more frequently; timely, relevant data informs important business decisions and priorities.
• Reduce the time between feedback and action; get the data out as soon as possible in the hands of teams so they can get started working on it.
• Have a laser focus on one impactful shift at a time; don’t focus your team’s energy on creating long action plans.
• Make adjustments and learn together; evaluate what’s working and what’s not. Course correct along the way.
• Create a simple check-in process; help teams to collaborate and hold each other accountable—this can be a 30-minute check-in when the results first come out and 10 minutes on your monthly weekly team meeting agenda.

Get On The Sustainable, Scalable Path

In this post, you’ve learned how to improve how your organization takes action on survey feedback: adopt a more agile strategy and process, empower your team to engage with survey data and have ongoing action-oriented conversations, and implement technology that acts as a partner to your whole organization. In upcoming posts, we will explore the core elements of an effective engagement program further— people, strategy, and technology. Once you address each of these elements, you can fundamentally shift how you use people data and feedback to fuel business decisions and organizational success.

Thanks to Archana Ramesh / Glint / GlintInc.com
https://www.glintinc.com/blog/3-reasons-why-taking-action-on-survey-feedback-is-so-hard-and-what-to-do-about-it/

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