Why In-Person Interaction Remains Critical In The Age Of Remote Work

March 24th, 2022 Phil Kelley Jr. Leave a comment

Not long after the COVID-19 pandemic forced a shift to remote work, the internet security research firm Twingate conducted a national survey to find out what workers missed most about going to the office.

Heading the list: “Social connections,” followed closely by “human contact in general.”

Those answers aren’t surprising to Phil Kelley Jr. (www.philkelleyjr.com), author of Presence and Profitability: Understanding the Value of Authentic Communications in the Age of Hyper-Connectivity.

“Interactions with other people are essential to human beings and those interactions significantly affect our state of mind,” says Kelley, who is also president and CEO of Salem One, a company that specializes in direct marketing, packaging, printing and logistics. “We were built to interact, to socialize, to gather and sort ourselves into social groups.”

Kelley understands the need and advantages of flexible remote-work schedules. He just worries that if remote work isn’t handled correctly – and if trends continue such as hot-desking policies where no one is assigned a permanent workspace at the office – the big loser will be corporate culture. And when culture suffers, so does the entire enterprise.

“It’s well established that a great organizational culture – one where people feel engaged, connected, purposeful – helps achieve financial success,” Kelley says. “This is because the attitudes of the people in an organization ultimately reach and affect customers. To put it simply, satisfied employees tend to foster satisfied customers.”

Developing A True Connection

That’s why it’s important to promote the development of authentic connections and good relationships within a company, he says.

“Unfortunately, building and maintaining good internal relationships gets more difficult when those relationships are mediated by technology via email, texts, phone calls or video calls,” Kelley says.

While some communication is better than none, what’s ultimately important is making a true connection, he says. For that purpose, a phone call is better than an email, a video chat is better than a phone call, and in-person is best of all.

“If working from home is done in such a way that eliminates employee interaction, then you will lower the quality of your culture,” Kelley says. “That will in turn lower employee satisfaction and increase turnover.”

He says it all goes back to a saying popularized by writer and management consultant Peter Drucker: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” Kelley says, “because strategy is about abstract ideas and culture is about the connection between human beings. The more business people are attuned to the human need for making connections, the more successful they will be, because the need for connection is one of the most basic human needs.”

Making An Appearance

In that regard, Kelley recommends that ambitious employees make appearances at the office as much as possible, even if they routinely work remotely.

“If you are the sort of person who wants to advance, wants to sit in that big corner office, or even if you simply want the next promotion or raise, it is always best to take the path of highest relational value,” Kelley says. “Go into the office if given the choice of doing that or working from home. Go in person to that group meeting if they will let you in the door.”

He also suggests businesses make the effort to connect their brand to community-focused initiatives. That enhances corporate culture while helping the company connect in a different way with the customers it serves.

“Having your employees working alongside impassioned community volunteers and leaders for the betterment of all should be on the top of every brand promotion list,” Kelley says. “Engage your company with industry trade organizations, civic and church projects, charities, educational events, and so on. These kinds of activities are communication-value multipliers.

“Relationships are so important to people that any company that makes a real connection with a customer can win that customer’s loyalty for life.”

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Is Your Company In Culture Shock? How Leaders Can Practice What They Preach.

October 17th, 2021 David Friedman Leave a comment

As many workers flee their current jobs, burnout and lack of growth opportunities are being cited as two of the biggest reasons.

These changing work dynamics and employee perspectives, caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, are highlighting the importance of having a strong work culture that’s sustainable, says David Friedman (www.culturewise.com), author of Culture by Design: How to Build a High-Performing Culture Even in the New Remote Work Environment.

But unfortunately, Friedman says, while business leaders often talk about culture, many don’t have a systematic process in place to build and maintain that culture as they do for other important aspects of their business.

“Leaders should be as process-oriented about their culture as they are about their sales, finances, and operations.” says Friedman, founder/CEO of CultureWise®.

“Leaders have a responsibility to be intentional and systematic about designing the culture they want, rather than settling for the culture that is created by chance.”

Friedman offers these suggestions for designing and driving company culture:

-Define employee behaviors that drive company success. Driving culture is mostly a teaching function, Friedman says. It requires building a curriculum around the specific behaviors, or fundamentals, the leadership team wants to teach daily, such as blameless problem-solving, honoring commitments and being a fanatic about response times. “Behaviors, because they’re action-oriented, are clearer than values, which tend to be abstract,” he says.

-Ritualize the practice of your fundamentals. “How many new initiatives have we started at work and in our personal lives, only to see them fall by the wayside as we got busy?” Friedman says. Those failures at work feed employee cynicism, he notes. “But by creating a structured, systematic way to teach winning behaviors repeatedly, they become ingrained in your people,” he says. “Without repetition, nothing lasts.”

-Select people who are the right fit for your culture. A new hire’s value system isn’t likely to change, Friedman says, so it’s vital they have the right values to fulfill the behaviors leadership wants to drive the company.

-Integrate new hires into your culture. A person’s first week on the job is hugely important in the context of culture, Friedman says. “It’s their first impression, and that tends to be lasting and difficult to change,” he says. “It’s remarkable how few companies spend appropriate time and resources orchestrating every aspect of a new hire’s early experience.”

-Communicate your culture throughout the organization. Too often, Friedman says, company leadership displays inspirational messages and posters on the office walls that are inconsistent with the way people behave in the work culture. “We talk about teamwork, but then people work and think in silos,” he says. “Or we talk about quality, but our people are forced to produce at warp speed and without the proper tools. If our culture is authentic, the more we see images and reminders of it all around us, the better.”

-Coach to reinforce your culture. “Coaching sessions by managers and supervisors are critical opportunities to teach and reinforce your culture,” Friedman says. “Using the specific language of the culture in the coaching session shows staff that the words on the wall are meaningful.”

“Most leaders think of culture as something that happens on its own,” Friedman says. “It’s never occurred to them that they can be as intentional and systematic about culture as they can about the rest of their business. And in these changing, challenging times, more are beginning to see how important it is.”

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David Friedman (www.culturewise.com) is author of Culture by Design: How to Build a High-Performing Culture Even in the New Remote Work Environment. He also is founder/CEO of CultureWise®, a turnkey operating system for small to midsize businesses to create and sustain a high-performing culture. He is the former president of RSI, an award-winning employee benefits brokerage and consulting firm that was named one of the best places to work in the Philadelphia region seven times. Friedman has taught more than 6,000 CEOs about work culture and led more than 500 workshops on the subject. With Sean Sweeney, Friedman formed High Performing Culture, LLC, based on the culture methodology Friedman created at RSI.

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Want to Ride the Coming Gig Economy Boom? Map Your Processes First.

December 23rd, 2019 Chris Dyer Leave a comment

Who sets workflow parameters in your business? Is it a control-heavy CEO? Department heads? The HR people who bring in the muscle? If it’s any of those three, your organization is overlooking the experts on what it takes to achieve goals and innovate: employees.

Trends in hiring options show big potential for companies to boost performance and nail objectives by augmenting permanent staff with project-oriented contractors. Project-based hiring promises greater efficiency and a chance to attract expert talent on a case-by-case basis, giving your workforce more power and flexibility. But to call this a move toward outsourcing is to simplify the job that business leaders and HR professionals face first.

Embracing new ways of hiring will depend on taking a fresh look at how work gets done inside your organization. In other words, to slot the right workers to the right projects, those projects need concise definition, so the right people can be found. The tool for that task is culture. Build transparency and acknowledgment into your company culture to fully identify and hone your job processes.

Transparency Helps Outline Job Breakdowns

The key to contracting specific projects to specific talent is, well, being specific. If you’re looking for a full-time employee to cover a number of tasks, the old, broad job description model still works. But if you’re looking for a series of experts to carry projects over the finish line, you’ll want to pinpoint what you want those people to do, for how long, and to what end. You can use your permanent and rotating staff to help draw those outlines.

Since you may have many microhires, the best way to manage knowledge of the processes they’ll follow is to let everybody on your staff know those boundaries. A project may wend its way through several departments and dozens of desks. When your whole team knows what everyone does and why, anyone will be able to point a person or a process in the correct direction.

Transparency brings this information to every manager and employee. In your regular team-building interactions, create a role-and-goal component. On its face, this is simple. What does each person in the company do? Why do they do it? What do they hope to achieve? At meetings or in internal communications, quiz the whole staff, from the CEO to direct reports, on these items. This is the beginning of mapping workflow and processes, and it should be a perpetual effort, as new people come in and new goals need to be met.

Acknowledgement Reveals What Works

With multiple contractors cycling through your workforce, you’ll want proven processes to guide them. Who decides what works? In a supportive culture, everyone should have a say. Analysis of growth and market share will back up how well the company machinery is working.

In your initial process mapping, you’ll survey each employee and departmental reps on how they do what they do, and how efficient and effective they think those methods are. Then, you can confirm or reject process steps via their outcomes. To keep all of this front and center with employees, use an acknowledgment system that is open to everyone.

For instance, if Kate finds a way to skip a step and hit a goal more efficiently, a colleague might notice and call attention to her improvement. Then, the department manager may take note and decide to implement that process across the board. This is why an open recognition system is important. When peers and those up and down the ladder see which current practices or new innovations aid in job performance, they can adopt them as well or encourage others to do so.

Contractors Help Pay It Forward

Have HR or department heads document your evolving processes, so that there is a map of best practices at any given time. Your hiring and onboarding procedures for contractors will reflect these tasks and techniques. You’ll also include these temporary hires in your roles-and-goals education, to whatever degree is relevant. This may seem like overkill, but it will create stability in what is necessarily a fluid situation.

Now you’re ready to use those expert contractors to their full potential. The new skills and talent they bring to the table will further innovate your job processes. And their knowledge of your internal structure will make them ideal candidates for future projects.

But keeping contractors informed and in the feedback loop does more than just positively affect your workflow. It helps reinforce forward-looking company culture. An organization’s culture is a living thing that transcends who is on the payroll at the moment. A strong culture that highlights how work is best performed will serve whomever you hire, well into the future.

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Chris Dyer is a recognized company culture expert among leadership speakers and consultants. He has channeled what he has learned in his business research and as Founder and CEO of PeopleG2, a leading background check company, into his best-selling book, The Power of Company Culture (Kogan Page, 2018).

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What Are We Doing Wrong When It Comes to Promoting Women?

November 22nd, 2019 Rosalie Harrison Leave a comment

Most of our clients come to Borderless with a genuine desire to build diverse and diversity-capable leadership teams. That is, after all, our expertise. And at the top of their concern? Women in leadership.

With women representing more than 50% of the world’s population and a rapidly growing percentage of the most highly educated portion of the world’s employable talent, this focus is not a surprise. Companies paying attention are increasingly aware that creating a work environment where women leaders can advance, contribute and succeed is a vital competitive business advantage.

Nonetheless, despite often well-intentioned initiatives on women and their careers, many companies still fall short of their goals to promote and retain women in leadership positions and struggle to understand why. As you would imagine, the answer to this question is as varied as both the many women who are offered these opportunities and the environments in which such an offer is made.

Despite the complexities, and the lack of quick-fix answers, there is value in raising awareness around some of the more common issues that we see plaguing the advancement of talented women. In this spirit, we urge you to think about, ponder and explore these issues in the context of your own working environments.

Treat Women as Individuals

First of all, treat your promotable (female) executivesas individuals. We will start with an issue that should be readily apparent but often is not (even to women themselves). Women represent more than 50% of the world’s population. They are not a minority and they are as diverse as people can be. As a result, their reasons for accepting
and/or rejecting a promotional opportunity must always be negotiated and assessed individually.

This does not mean that women will not have some shared experiences, especially as it relates to their treatment within a given working environment. Such experiences, however, will not be because they are a homogenous group, but because the work
environment may treat them as they are. As such, if you are having problems promoting women, take a hard look at your working environment. The common threads preventing success are more likely to be in your work culture and environment than in the women themselves.

Moreover, do not confuse professional women’s issues as always being synonymous with working parent or caregiver issues. Twenty percent of professional women will not be a parent or caregiver. However, if the woman you are promoting is a parent or caregiver, working moms do share many issues and challenges that need to be
considered. But these issues are also quite relevant for all parents. In fact, these issues will be increasingly important to the younger generation of workers, both male and female, as parenting preferences and traditional gender roles continue to erode.

Flexible Terms

Secondly, signal a willingness to design terms, conditions and benefits for success. Within the context of any executive promotion negotiation, the terms and conditions should be designed to enable the candidate to succeed in the role. A standard package that has been designed for a traditional candidate may or may not be relevantly configured for your female candidate. For example, for a woman who is a working parent and whose spouse also has an executive position, covering (and paying for) caregiving and/or balancing or reducing travel requirements may be significant threshold issues to address before the candidate will commit to the demands of the new role.

Accordingly, to prevent women from just turning down positions as a result of these nontraditional considerations, it is important for companies to signal their willingness and commitment to have discussions about them in good faith and without future adverse
impact. This can be communicated in a variety of ways. For example, at the time the promotion offer is made, you can simply ask the candidate what she would need to be successful in the role and express your willingness to address and explore individual needs that may require adjustments.

You can also word a job description in such a way that invites alternative discussions on terms and conditions. For example, instead of saying “50% travel required,” you could say “Extensive travel may be required, but terms of travel to meet global demands can
be explored further.” Women are much less likely to self-disqualify if terms invite such openness to discussion. When invited to do so, we have seen female candidates have excellent alternative ideas for managing effectively.

Finally, when negotiating terms, women should not be unfairly burdened with the fear that they are creating a precedent for all women, unless such precedent considerations would also have been applicable to negotiations with male candidates.

Give Them Time

Thirdly, give your female candidates more time and support to consider a promotion offer. If a woman is being offered a promotion into an executive team that is (and has been) male-dominated and quite traditional, the task before her is daunting. She is not just considering accepting a new job with greater responsibilities, which on its own is a big decision. She is also often assessing her ability to be successful in doing so in an environment that is not designed for her, where there is little or no natural/social support, and where there are often unfairly high-performance expectations and no room for error.

Constantly proving yourself in such an environment is an exhausting undertaking and can also be quite lonely. (Notably, the same is true for any candidate that will find themselves in a minority situation within the executive team).

Women may also have non-traditional personal and family obligations to consider. For many, work and family life may currently be in a perfect, but quite fragile, balance with many ‘moving parts’ to consider. In such a circumstance, many women’s first instincts are to refuse such a promotion, especially if their perception of the new role is a misguided assumption that it will be more work being piled on them.

The reality is that executive promotions for women can often move them into a role where they will have much more control over how they work. It is the role just before that promotion that is often the worst in terms of workload and lack of control. This aspect of the promotion is often not fully appreciated or explored.

In such circumstances, it can be extremely helpful to use the services of a third-party consultant during deliberations and negotiations. Women considering promotions often need a safe place to voice their concerns, explore their needs and express their insecurities without undermining their executive voice and closely guarded credibility.

Tailored Support

At Borderless, we even recognized this as a need in our normal search and placement process, especially for female or minority hires, where they are placed into an environment where natural and social support may be lacking. In fact, we designed our Borderless 100 Days program with these challenges in mind, which allows us to provide continuing support for any placement during the first 100 Days in a candidate’s new role.

Our BorderlessWIN services (Women in Negotiation) enables us to provide such third-party support on a consulting basis for internal offers and promotion. The services are designed to increase the rate and success of our clients’ internal efforts to promote and support their high performing women into leadership roles. As you might have guessed, such services will need to be customized for each individual circumstance.

Are you enabling women in your organization to achieve their full potential?

Let me know your thoughts at rosalie.harrison@borderless.net.

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Score a Workplace Win with These 5 Traits of Successful Athletes

April 25th, 2019 Grant Parr Leave a comment

When Tiger Woods thrilled the sports world by winning The Masters golf tournament, many golf experts and fans viewed his triumph as inspirational.

After all, the 43-year-old Woods demonstrated not just athletic skills, but also mental strength that allowed him to overcome declining physical prowess and years of adversity that included a sex scandal, divorce and numerous back and knee surgeries.

For high-performing athletes, that’s not so unusual because mental attitude is often critical to success in sports. But the same can be true in the workplace for those willing to learn from the practices of athletes and apply them in their own lives, says Grant Parr (www.gameperformance.com), a mental sports performance coach and the author of The Next One Up Mindset: How To Prepare For The Unknown.

The key, Parr says, is to be prepared when big opportunities arrive – sometimes unexpectedly, as it did for Woods.

“Many of the demands we face at work are not so different than those faced by high-caliber athletes,” Parr says.“The need for mental toughness in the face of chaos and adversity is similar.

“But what happens when a big moment is at hand, like a promotion, and people aren’t ready for it? What did they not do to be properly prepared? The world is filled with unexpected opportunities for greatness, and there are processes that athletes and people in all types of positions can execute to get prepared for that moment.”

Parr focuses on five areas where athletic examples can be applied toward readiness and success in the workplace:

Applying grit in the face of adversity. “Handling adversity starts with being flexible,” Parr says. “Take difficult people you have to deal with; you must be able to adapt and adjust, know when to let things roll off your back and when to stand your ground. Or when you’ve missed your sales quota, you lose key people, etc., the stress can be enormous. These are times you have to rely on your inner warrior and draw on your past examples of strong mental performance.”

Turning crisis into opportunity. Some athletes are summoned to a bigger role because the performer in front of them is ineffective or hurt. “Can you see opportunity when everyone else sees uncertainty?” Parr asks. “When others react with fright, you can choose mental might.”

Embracing your role. Every team requires people who fulfill their roles. Part of embracing your role is recognizing that the team’s needs are bigger than your own. “Rock your role, and people will notice,” Parr says. “But keep aspiring, studying the practices of those in higher roles, and you’ll be fully prepared for advancement when it comes.”

Visualizing success. So critical to success in sports, visualizing success is just as vital in business. “See the performance as you wish it to go,” Parr says. “See yourself performing with energy and confidence; pump yourself up with positive talk.”

Assuming leadership. “Doing your best, showing enthusiasm and trustworthiness help establish a culture that lifts everyone up,” Parr says. “Showing leadership when you don’t have a formal title allows you to develop the skills you’ll need when an opportunity arises and offers evidence you’re the one to fulfill that opportunity.”

“You may wait 10 or more years for a big opportunity, or it may come suddenly,” Parr says. “But if you’re not ready mentally, that opportunity will pass you by.”

About Grant Parr

Grant Parr (www.gameperformance.com) is a mental sports performance coach and the author of The Next One Up Mindset: How To Prepare For The Unknown. Parr owns and runs GAMEFACE PERFORMANCE, a consulting firm that enhances mental skills for athletes and coaches. A recruiter and sales leader in the corporate world for 17 years, he now works with a wide variety of athletes including Olympians, professionals, collegians and high school athletes. His podcast, 90% Mental, provides a window into a broad range of athletes’ and coaches’ mental games and shares their insights around mental performance.