Trust and loyalty in the workplace are inextricably linked. Essentially, trust is the belief that drives the practice of loyalty. When trust is present in an organisation, people feel closer, more united and more willing to depend on each other. In its absence fragmentation, conflict and suspicion quickly fester. Colleagues become disconnected from a shared sense of purpose and often from each other. Loyalty inevitably suffers.

So, what if the erosion of loyalty in the workplace is actually a breakdown in trust? There is some compelling evidence in support of this idea, in the shape of a 2016 global study by EY into the topic.

Surveying over 9,800 full-time workers in eight countries, EY found that fewer than half of respondents had ‘a great deal of trust’ in their current employer, boss or team/colleagues. At the other end of the scale, nearly one in six had ‘very little’ or ‘no trust at all’ in their current employer.

These were the headline findings trumpeted by the report, but for us, there was a particularly alarming statistic buried on page 12:

A third (34%) of global respondents have “very little” to “no trust” in their current employer that if they “work hard” and “meet performance goals” they will be rewarded with “increased pay or a promotion.”

For some reason, these respondents no longer believe in the link between performance and reward in their organisation. Startlingly, they have lost faith in the employment contract.

This should sound alarm bells for employers everywhere, particularly when considering the four biggest consequences of lack of trust quoted in the EY report. Low-trust employees are most likely to:

1. Look for another job
2. Work only the minimum number of hours required
3. Be less engaged/productive
4. Make less of an effort to produce quality work

If one in six of your employees has this low-productivity, low-morale mindset, your organisation is in serious trouble. Not least because productivity and morale are only two factors affected by workplace trust. Creativity and ingenuity are two more, according to Jacqueline Oliveira in her illuminating TEDxCesena talk The behaviour of trust in the workplace.

So what can organisations do to safeguard trust and stop employees going on what leadership consultant Dennis Jaffe calls ‘an internal strike’? Fortunately, his excellent Forbes article on the topic of trust lists six building blocks of trust, which individuals or organisations can assess for in their relationships:

1. Reliability and dependability – Are individuals, particularly leaders, true to their word? Do they fulfil their commitments?
2. Transparency – Do managers and leaders keep their teams in the loop or do they meet in secret and withhold important information?
3. Competency – Do employees believe that leaders, managers and colleagues are capable of doing what they are supposed to do?
4. Sincerity, authenticity and congruency – Do employees believe that leaders say what they believe and believe what they are saying?
5. Fairness – Is respect, recognition and energy evenly dispersed through your workplace, or are some areas noticed and listened to more than others?
6. Openness and vulnerability – Are leaders and managers capable of apologising, admitting mistakes or being disagreed with?

Jaffe believes organisations that are able to assess the presence or absence of each of these six qualities are best equipped to build or restore trust. With prizes such as greater productivity, creativity, ingenuity and morale at stake, it’s well worth trying.

Those in the know, share. If you think your network would find inspiration in this post, we’ve made it really easy for you to tell them using the LinkedIn Share button below.

The post This is Why Workplaces Don’t Work Without Trust appeared first on EWS.

Nowadays, the argument goes, we’re all serial entrepreneurs continually reinventing ourselves in our work. Every role is an opportunity to hone new skills and boost our future employability. When we outgrow a role, we shed it like an old skin and move on to the next new challenge without a backward glance.

This has been described by one senior recruiter writing in Forbes as a transactional concept of loyalty, whereby:

“The mentality is, ‘You pay me to do X, I do X, and we are even.’ ”

The author also knows where to lay the blame for this state of affairs, opening his piece with the observation that “millennials were three times more likely than non-millennials to change jobs in the last year, and 91% don’t expect to stay with their current organizations longer than three years.”

At EWS, we’ve heard this a lot in the last few years. Millennials have cast off professional loyalty in pursuit of their own self-determined career planning. It’s an observation that’s cropped up in this blog more than once, in some form or other. And until recently we’ve taken it as fact, an interesting and valid insight into shifting workforce demographics and demands.

Then a couple of months ago we wrote a post about job auditions. In it was a story about web development house Automattic, which has successfully incorporated job tryouts into its selection process. The company did this, says CEO Matt Mullenweg, because it wants to build working relationships that last decades.

In a talent world that is coolly casting loyalty aside, Automattic – the name behind WordPress – is looking for, championing and structuring its HR processes around the trait.

For us, this last point is where it gets really interesting. Automattic actively models itself as a loyal employer. It gives out what it demands. Indeed, Mullenweg believes employers need to accept a share of responsibility for any diminishment in loyalty the world of work may be witnessing:

“Some people say that younger workers have a different notion of job tenure and want to move around more frequently. That may be, but I think companies, too, have changed. If a company treats people as if they’ll be around for a while, managers develop a different sensibility when it comes to investing in and retaining people. Loyalty is a two-way street.”

Maybe employees are becoming less loyal. But maybe this is a legitimate response to the jettisoning of loyalty from the prevailing work culture. The more statistics we hear about millennials’ flighty attitudes, the more entrenched these pernicious beliefs becomes, and the less employers do to embrace loyalty in their own organisation. And thus turns a vicious circle; a race to the bottom ending in a coldly transactional and mutually untrusting employment relationship.

There are some statistics to bear this theory out. Only 54% of 3,600 employees surveyed by CareerBuilder in 2017 felt that their employer was loyal to them. Meanwhile in the 2016 Deloitte Millennial Survey, over 60% of respondents said that their leadership skills were not being fully developed at work. Is employee loyalty lag actually a sign of employee neglect?

To our mind, this line of thinking should sound a bleak warning in any beating HR heart. In fact, it’s merely part of the new consensus on loyalty. In researching this piece, we came across the following post on Quora from another HR senior, responding to the question “Why do employers want loyalty when they aren’t loyal?”

You may note the post ends with the same observation as Mullenweg’s, that loyalty is a two-way street. But there the similarities end:

“Loyalty is an older, broader term that is easily misinterpreted and is often used as a blanket for ‘do what I want’ (or you aren’t being ‘loyal’)… I often expand the term ‘loyalty’ to mean more what is usually meant by people using it – that is “blind loyalty”. No one today should be expected to give “blind loyalty” to anyone or anything…

“[We aren’t] surprised when a great employee continues to learn and grow and we can’t offer them something at their new capability level with proper pay, so we understand they will be looking elsewhere for better opportunities. So ‘loyalty’ is a two-way street.”

There’s a message for your employee handbook. Glibness aside, we of course recognise the need for a degree of hard-nosed pragmatism, especially in a global economy now in its second decade of seismic uncertainty. But this is surely no excuse for failing to even try to create a workplace where great people want to give their best for more than a couple of years.

It’s not as though being a loyal employer is even that difficult. There are all kinds of extra steps you can take to make your people feel acknowledged and valued enough to stick around. You can:

• Celebrate successes and support them in their struggles at work, and outside where appropriate.
• Invest in training to show them you’re with them for the long haul.
• Recognise and reward everyone equitably for their contribution in their specific role.
• Be clear in your company purpose and never miss an opportunity to unite people around it.
• Always try to promote from within in the first instance and only downsize as the last resort.
• Stand with them through company upheavals – this is when people need to know their employer has their back.

These aren’t all big structural changes. They’re mostly mindset shifts, mostly for managers, that pay enormous dividends if they help you keep hold of your top talent for longer. In the modern world of work, especially in the modern world of work, loyalty is a virtue worth fighting for.

Those in the know, share. If you think your network would find inspiration in this post, we’ve made it really easy for you to tell them using the LinkedIn Share button below.

The post Who’s to Blame for the Death of Workplace Loyalty? appeared first on EWS.

The Sunnyvale soothsayers are predicting that 2018 will see many more companies accepting that Diversity & Inclusion are only two points of a triangle. To truly help everyone feel included, accepted and effective in their work, employers also need to focus on creating a culture of belonging.

Now, it’s entirely possible that the reason why belonging features so prominently in the report is the identity of its chief cheerleader, Pat Wadors, who until late last year just happened to be CHRO at LinkedIn. But patronage or not, the trend is a hot one and we wholeheartedly agree that you’ll be hearing a lot more about it in the months and years ahead.

For our part, we’re finding ourselves fielding more and more requests from recruiters specifically for diverse candidate profiles. In 2018 there is barely an employer in the world for whom Diversity & Inclusion isn’t on the radar. But there are still plenty for whom it’s effectively a tick-box exercise. And herein lies the problem.

We’re all well-versed in the platitudes around diversity multiplying perspectives, fuelling creativity and liberating your work culture from uniformity and conformity. In spite of the ubiquity of such sentiments, many employers still look solely at quotas as their measure of success. The lived experience of their employees takes a back seat.

But what if that lived experience is what actually determines how successful you are as a diverse and inclusive employer? What if, regardless of background, people can only give all of themself to their job if they feel they can bring all of themself to work in the first place?

That, in a nutshell, is what belonging is all about.

It’s the idea that we can comfortably and naturally be who we are in the workplace, safe in the knowledge that we will be accepted and valued implicitly. The LinkedIn report uses a neat analogy for the belonging’s interconnection with Diversity & Inclusion:

• Diversity is being invited to the party
• Inclusion is being asked to dance
• Belonging is dancing like no one’s watching

In practice, that means things like feeling able to freely express opinions, having a genuine voice in team meetings and seeing accomplishments recognised.

Crucially, belonging has to be baked into your way of working, not sprinkled over it from on high by another internal comms diversity campaign.

It isn’t about having a culture that accepts everyone (something that demands implicit permission to be part of it). It’s about having a culture shaped by everyone. Only then will those well-worn words of your equal opportunities policy bear fruit, as each employee applies the full force of their unique perspective to their work, rather than holding their tongue for fear of not fitting in.

For us, that’s a hugely appealing and motivating prospect. Here’s to the era of Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging.

Those in the know, share. If you think your network would find inspiration in this post, we’ve made it really easy for you to tell them using the LinkedIn Share button below.

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The death of the annual performance review has been talked for some time now. Evidence from multiple sources, in academia and business, has piled up and up into a towering mound of dirt alongside its open grave.

So why is the system still with us, wasting HR resources, inaccurately measuring performance and eroding morale with every checkbox listlessly ticked?

Reviewing the annual review

Before we get to answering that question, here’s a quick look at the story so far.

The topic was making headlines in 2015 when GE joined the likes of Microsoft, Netflix, Adobe, Gap and Dell in abandoning annual appraisals as a way of gauging employee performance.

It was a big deal because GE had been such a red-blooded adherent to the ‘rank and yank’ system popularised under the reign of former CEO Jack Welch. But now the company was changing tack, presumably in response to the weight of research stacking up against such methods of performance management (PM).

Fast forward a couple of years, and beyond the gleaming fortresses of those envelope-pushing giants, nothing much has changed.

According to a 2013 study by Mercer, 94% of employers conduct formal yearly reviews of worker performance. We doubt that figure has dipped significantly in 2017.

So why the stasis? Today’s talent teams have the means and impetus to retain and develop the best people in their organisation. So why do they cling to a flawed way of determining who those people are?

We see three possible answers to the question of why the annual review hasn’t died away yet.

1. It doesn’t deserve to die away at all.

Despite all of the above, what if the reports of the demise of the annual review are premature?

Fortune and The Economist have published knee-jerk responses in favour of the status quo, broadly agreeing that the problem lies in how appraisals are carried out, not the system itself.

But both articles seem circular and reactionary, essentially saying that we should stick with annual reviews because that’s how the system is set up and that’s what we’re used to.

The weight of research is dismissed seemingly for the sake of expediency, or perhaps in denial. These changes are upon us. The only question is how quickly they are embraced and adopted.

2. Nothing better has sprung up to replace it.

It doesn’t always make sense to follow a trailblazer until you (or indeed they) know where they’re going. So why pay much attention to the problem until the right solution has been found?

Because this time, the problem is actually an opportunity to create a system that works better for your company, your culture and your people.

There is a self-evident truth at the heart of the rejection of the annual review. As Susan Peters, GE’s Head of HR, puts it:

“The world isn’t really on an annual cycle anymore for anything.”

In this fast-evolving landscape, today’s employees (millennials in particular) demand faster, more regular feedback. It’s what they respond to and how they chart their improvement.

Microsoft has used this insight to transition from annual ratings that employees obsessed over to the point of distraction, to frequent one-to-ones about their impact, priorities and areas for improvement.

GE has developed a mobile app to collate real-time feedback from project co-workers as well as managers, giving each employee a clear, balanced and continuous view of their performance.

Deloitte has introduced weekly catch-ups between employees and team leaders to promote agile feedback and constant learning.

None is developing a one-size-fits-all solution. That’s the point. They’re looking at the problem through the lens of their workforce structure and organisational culture. And then they’re applying the new PM tools available to them (mobile tech, sophisticated data capture, reward and compensation etc.) to build systems that help their employees improve in service of their company.

The alternatives are there. The onus is on talent teams to know their organisation well enough to understand which will work best for their workforce.

3. We’re not ready.

This is the crux of the matter. Most employers are in wait-and-see mode; looking to learn lessons from the first movers.

There are still questions about how employee performance can be tracked and measured under a less formal and structured method. Likewise, a system of regular conversations and frequent thoughtful feedback sounds to many managers suspiciously another layer of meetings to fit in.

Such caution and suspicion are understandable and perhaps inevitable for now. But we’re firmly in the camp that says there’s no turning back the tide on performance management.

The cultural and productivity benefits witnessed by the early adopters are clear (albeit anecdotal). At the same time, the more millennials you hire, the greater your incentive for breaking down and reconfiguring your performance reviews.

Perhaps the biggest move employers can make in preparation is to improve managers’ ability to grow talent (their bottom-ranked competency according to research by the Korn Ferry Institute).

As ever, the key is to start now. If the annual review is on its way out, don’t let your organisation be the one in which it expires.

Those in the know, share. If you think your network would find inspiration in this post, we’ve made it really easy for you to tell them using the LinkedIn Share button below.

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