Earn the respect you ask for

In all relationships, people are more likely to give respect in a situation where they feel like they are already respected. Employee loyalty is a form of respect. If you structure your company culture around excessive demands, arbitrary decisions, confusing plans and unresponsive leadership, would you really blame employees for wondering if their loyalty is valued? Good management at the C-Level is the source of so much else going right or wrong in the firm. If you run your company in a way that communicates respect for your employees, you’re that much more likely to inspire it in them

Employee Engagement Matters

As we at Kazi have talked about in previous posts, and as we believe firmly, employee engagement is really crucial to creating the right atmosphere and relationship with your staff. Building best practices around dealing with employee feedback, input and participation helps create a workplace centered on making sure employees understand that their insights and dedication are valued by their employers.

According to Forbes, better employee engagement also establishes a system that helps employees interact with the workplace in ways beyond just performing their day-to-day tasks.

Don’t micromanage

Loyalty is a corollary of respect. And you know what the best way to show employees you don’t respect them is? Micromanagement! As Inc explains in one of their pieces, a lack of trust is often the reason why managers micromanage.

When employees know their bosses are looming over their every move, they know that their own decision capabilities and ideas aren’t valued. This creates a corporate environment in which employees don’t feel comfortable expressing their opinions.

At Kazi, we work extensively on creating ways for employers to understand better their employees’ ideas and approaches. We can help you develop and implement procedures to get useful and respectful feedback from your employees on how they view and understand the work environment, and how to structure it and management behavior.

Be mindful about employee rewards

Bonuses are great, of course. Who doesn’t love more cash? But just equating employee value with more money diminishes the significance of the company culture. What about extra days off? Or equity? How and when rewards are given out, to whom, and why are all very important. And making sure that company signalling around them is clear and reinforced by management behavior is likewise crucial in creating a performance environment in which employees know that their efforts will be rewarded in a transparent and respectful way.  

In all human relationships, we value respect. That’s what commands loyalty. Work is the same. Cultivate and maintain a work environment that demonstrates to your employees that you respect them, and they will be loyal to you. At Kazi, we spend our time thinking about fit between employer and employee, and the point that comes up again and again by employees is making sure that they have a place that their contributions are valued and taken seriously. It might sometimes be a quick solution to push your people to do something they don’t want to do, but it doesn’t last.

Respect is the only thing that ensures loyalty. We can help you build it. If you’re dealing with an HR issue, Kazi can help you out! Drop us a line and we’d be happy to set up a consultation today!

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Foster an environment of Trust

This is the most crucial, and influences everything else. Making sure your work environment trusts and respects your employees will help them feel comfortable enough to believe their insights will be taken seriously. And this extends beyond just when you’re asking them for feedback. Make sure their work is taken seriously and that you trust them to manage their time without constant micromanagement. If employees get the sense that management doesn’t see them as serious professionals, they won’t want to offer their ideas. Treat people to a high standard, and watch them meet it.

Allow for both anonymous and attributed feedback

Not all kinds of feedback is the same. Some is uncomfortable, such as if a boss or supervisor is running things badly and makes people uncomfortable. Other feedback might be a source of pride or excitement for an employee who has come up with a way to improve things around the office. Employees might want credit for something like that, and you’d want to give it, right? Don’t assume that all will be one kind or another. So, if you’re designing feedback processes and forms, structure the attribution of the feedback around the kind of feedback you’re soliciting. We spend a lot of time at Kazi developing our expectations scans to get the right kind of answers from employees. It’s not just as simple as asking “What do you think?” You need to ask well to get useful answers.

Show feedback in action

There’s nothing quite so dispiriting as putting a lot of time and thought into a quality feedback for your employer, and then not seeing anything done about it. And not even a response. It might be the case that not all employee feedback is ready or ripe to be used right away, which is okay. But make sure that once you collect feedback from your employees, you make sure they know you got it, read it and took it seriously. If you’re implementing changes they recommended, let the company know! If you’re putting together a plan based on their ideas, tell them! And even if you can’t do what they said, acknowledge the feedback and help them understand why. Make sure employees understand that feedback is not a one-way process.

Make feedback a regular part of the company

If employees come to understand that their feedback is solicited only when something goes wrong or when upper management got bored for a while, they’re not going to value giving it, and not going to make an effort. This results is demoralized employees, and worthless feedback. Make feedback part of what goes on at the company normally. Maybe something really simple, like a suggestion box? Or yearly feedback meetings? Or regular CEO lunches with employees? There are literally an endless number of ways to integrate feedback into the background of your company. Kazi has developed a number of very effective methods that we’ve helped clients put to use for themselves.

The most important thing about feedback is that your employees understand you take them, and their ideas seriously. That doesn’t mean putting all of them into practice, but it does mean treating the feedback process like you care about it. This starts with the employee environment, and filters all the way through your interactions with them. There are lots of ways to improve the ways you collect and implement feedback, and at Kazi, we’d love to help you work through them. If you’ve got an interest in better employee feedback, drop us a line, and let’s chat!

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Understanding the Difference

The Employee Experience is the broader terms to cover all the parts of an Employee’s life with the firm, from the very first contact until an exit interview. How is the workplace physically and socially structured to improve and foster a robust employee experience? Some firms build an employee experience that’s more lively and vibrant, where other companies choose to create an experience that’s more reflective and focused on individual focus.

Employee Engagement centers on the channels and processes and cultures around how employees interact with the firm, its ideas, its objectives and its people. Just like with Employee Experience, there are multiple ways to do it, but what’s important is that engagement is open and transparent. In order to stay engaged, it’s crucial that employees trust that it will work for them.

The Right Experience for your Company

All companies have distinct, unique cultures, and so the employee experience that comes from them is also distinct. Some international companies, like Facebook, foster active, entrepreneurial, privateering collaboration, summed up in its famous slogan “Move Fast and Break Things.” Other companies choose to have a culture that’s more formal and tailored to quiet, personal work.

For both of these companies, the culture follows from the mission, and the Employee Experience follows from the culture. Employees at your firm should feel that the experience of working there is supportive, comfortable, and consistent with the culture of the company. How are meetings organized? What kind of noise level is the work environment? Is the experience conducive to the kind of work they have to do?

At Kazi, we encourage HR departments to understand how employees navigate the day-to-day work experience and find out if they find it reasonable or helpful for their work life and personal and professional growth. Build an Employee Experience that fits your companies, and inspires your employees.

Engaging People Right

Modern and Contemporary management science has taught us that work life can’t just be a unidirectional process of receiving orders and then performing them. This is dull and uninspiring, and sure to create unengaged employees. Improving performance comes from improving Employee Engagement: how connected do employees feel to the mission and ideas of the company? How valued do they feel as members of a team? If employees feel like their input doesn’t matter, engagement will suffer. According to Gallup, only 15% of white collar employees globally feel “engaged” at work. There’s a lot of room to improve. Managers play a huge role in improving and sustaining employee engagement, through team monitoring, regular conversations, and individual employee attention.

At Kazi, we help managers provide the right employee feedback and recognition to ensure that employees stay engaged and connected to the company’s work, and not left out of processes that matter to them. Engaged employees are happy, productive employees.

The Ideal Combination

When employees have a work environment that is comfortable, responsive, challenging and conducive to personal and professional growth, they return the favor to the employer many times over. But it’s crucial for employers to make sure they have sufficient attention to Employee Experience and Employee Engagement. The most gorgeous office and fun company culture won’t do any good if employees feel ignored. And even the best management practices can suffer if your workforce is stuck in a dispiriting dump.

Survey after survey shows that companies with better employee experience and engagement consistently outperform those without it. So this isn’t just an issue of altruism. Your ability to compete for talent, and compete in your market, depend on it!

Employees: The Most Valuable Resource

In the 21st century, the biggest key to a company’s success won’t be its control of some kind of physical space, or even a patent. It’s going to be the intangible asset of the team itself. Can you attract, train, retain, and grow the best talent on the market? The better your Employee Experience and Employee Engagement is, the better fit you’ll be for some of that talent.

And at Kazi, we know a thing or two about getting the right fit for your employees. If you want to know more about how to improve Experience and Engagement, drop us a line at Kazi, and we would be glad to help you out!

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Getting the Description Right

Sometimes, it’s best to start with the most straightforward, and back-to-basics part of the process: the job description. This can sound rudimentary, but there’s a reason it’s the foundation of the right candidate. Getting the job description first of all makes sure that you and your team get your heads around the role properly. You can’t hire for a position that you yourself are unclear about it. This kind of planning and thinking clarifies your needs, and helps telegraph to potential candidates that the position is meaningful, and with a team that knows what it’s doing. Real professionals recognize and respect that. When your description is on-point, both you and your applicants are starting from a stronger foundation.

Innovative Candidate Assessment

Once you’ve put your job description out there and gotten your first batch of applicants narrowed down, you need to start separating the “wheat from the chaff,” as it were. In the past, some companies and organizations have tried multi-directional and highly expansive tests – like Google – where others look for much more specific job-knowledge skills – like government agencies. But in the fast-moving corporate environment that dominates the experience of many younger and tech-focused companies, the nature of the job itself can often be subject to change from month to month, or even day to day. For that, you need to get more of a sense of how the candidate functions in different situations and with what kind of work focus. This is at the core of why we developed our Kazi Expectations Scan for potential candidates. Rather than focus just on personality or job knowledge, it mixes both to provide a more rounded understanding of the candidate’s best ability and work style

Get out of the Interview Room

We’ve all heard the metaphor that dating can be like an interview? Well, it works both ways! Interviewing can be like going out on a first date. And few situations are more constructed and artificial as a first date – or interview – atmosphere. Most of a company’s time spent with an employee is in a more natural, working situation, not a highly rigid question-and-answer session. Often times, people function very differently in each of these, and being able to shine in an interview might not be a reliable indicator of someone’s work style. Kazi’s Expectations Scan incorporates knowledge about how your candidates like to get down to business, but it’s always a good idea to deploy this knowledge quickly. Try to incorporate job tasks, or a day in the office, along with your interview work, to get a sense of how the candidate behaves at work. The results could be surprising!

Broaden the Interviewer Pool

Everyone on a team has a unique and valuable insight into the workings of the company and the nature of the projects. And yet, often, the only people who assess whether a candidate is right for the team are those within the HR department. Consider integrating the input of people on the target team about their new potential candidates. You can even combine this techniques to get the candidates out of the interview room and collaborating with the target team. By broadening the the scope of internal team members who can weigh in on a candidate, you develop a much richer and deeper understanding of what your candidates are really like. The Kazi Expectations Scan can help you design the proper kinds of tasks and work projects to get the information you need, and your team can help answer your questions. Don’t underestimate the value of diverse input!

Getting the right candidate for the job is a perpetual challenge, but one that, at Kazi, we’re determined to help you overcome! By deploying the right kinds of assessment techniques, and expanding your definition of what constitutes useful information to understand your candidates, you can dramatically improve your ability to attract and hire the best job applicants to your company. Drop us a line today to see how Kazi can help you!

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