How to Ignite Commitment and Keep Top Talent in the New Age of Work
By introducing Employalty
Where Does Commitment Come From at Work
Take care of the people and people take care of the profits. Oklahoma LED company is providing employees with higher pay, more time off, and different employee gifts, in return, they get more loyalty and better productivity.
The world needs a one-sentence answer to the question “Where does commitment come from at work?”
Two challenges for managers are: how to get people to join and how to motivate them. Employees want a more human employee experience, and they are getting it.
Employalty doesn’t mean “employee loyalty”. Employalty is a portmanteau of the words “employer”, “loyalty”, and “humanity”. Employalty is the commitment employers make to consistently deliver a humane, person-centered employee experience because that’s what leads people to the highest levels of commitment at work. Employalty is rooted in the idea that people do the best job possible when they believe they have the best job possible.
There is no staffing shortage. There’s a great job shortage. Employatly is a clear, simple, evidence-based framework for finding great employees and igniting their commitment.
Three questions for managers:
- The commitment question: Where does commitment come from at work?
- The staffing question: How do we find and keep employees in this new age of work?
- The performance question: How do we take our company’s performance to the next level?
Trying to find the best person for the job is an outdated strategy.
Employalty isn’t altruism. It’s a business strategy.
Commitment appears when people get to do their Ideal Job, doing Meaningful Work, for a Great Boss.
Becoming a Destination Workplace
The University of Alabama has the top college football program in the US. The Crimson Tide, as they are known. Alabama delivers on the promises they make to their players.
Where the school has a proven track record of accomplishment, it’s put on full display. Where a program lacks history, it sells hope and the chance to be part of something great that’s just around the corner.
You don’t get to pick people; you must attract them to your organization. The era of trying to find the best person for the job is over. You must now create the best job for the person.
You have three factors that are contributing to becoming a destination workplace, each with three dimensions:
- Ideal Job
- Compensation
- Workload
- Flexibility
- Meaningful work
- Purpose
- Strengths
- Belonging
- Great boss
- Coaching
- Trust
- Advocacy
These three factors impact retention, reputation, and revenue. A great boss and the ideal job is retention, a great boss and meaningful work is reputation, ideal job, and meaningful work is revenue.
When anyone binds themselves in a role where all three of the Employalty elements are present, and then some aspect of that experience slips or deteriorates, commitment is jeopardized.
Before we can create a destination workplace, we must understand exactly what’s been broken for so long – and why – and what can be done about it.
The breaking and upgrading of work
The World Health Organization defines burnout as a syndrome resulting from “chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.
In the US, the average worker gets just over nine paid days of vacation per year. One in four American workers gets no paid vacation days.
The pandemic just took an already exhausted, stressed-out workforce and broke it.
In 2021, Americans quit their jobs in record numbers. More than forty-seven million US workers voluntarily left their positions that year.
The Great Resignation term was unintentionally coined by an organizational psychologist Dr. Anthony Klotz. But people were not only quitting, but they were also changing jobs. That’s why, as a label, the Great Resignation is a misnomer. A more accurate title would be to call the trend the Great Upgrade.
The pandemic gave many workers a glimpse of a life they never thought possible.
This is the Employalty way. In an era of professional upgrading, the surest path to success is to be the upgrade.
Rehumanization and the myth of lazy
Layoffs are a fatal violation of the first and most basic promise you made to everyone you ever hired: to provide them employment. Layoffs are the price the innocent pay for the poor business decisions of those who, despite their failure, usually get to stay. Layoffs should always be a last resort.
Dehumanization is the perception and treatment of people in ways that ignore and diminish their intrinsic worth as humans. In the workplace, dehumanization occurs when workers are viewed solely based on their role or functionality.
Business routinely chooses financial prosperity over the well-being of people as a result.
One of the most ubiquitous observations that continue to get bandied about is that “no one wants to work anymore”.
As revenue, profits, executive compensation, and shareholder value have skyrocketed, nearly every aspect of the employee experience has gone in the opposite direction.
The only thing that is lazy in this equation is the accusation that “no one wants to work anymore”. The Myth of Lazy is almost always hurled at a combination of younger (younger than the accuser, at least), lower-wage, and less educated workers. The Myth of Lazy assumes that the only thing standing between you and prosperity is you.
People should be treated foremost and fundamentally as persons who have individual hopes and dreams, aspirations, worries, fears, personal values, and world views. That may mean spending more, keeping less, and growing more slowly. As doctors adhere to a “do no harm” oath, so too, should leaders and business owners.
When employees insist on better pay, flexible schedules, or clear boundaries between work and home, they are acting in the best interests of those for whom they are responsible. This isn’t a character defect. It’s character.
Ideal job
Compensation
The further we’re removed from a pain point, the less pain we feel. You forget. It happens to all of us.
The concept of a living wage should not be confused with a minimum wage. A minimum wage is the lowest amount a worker can be paid hourly as determined by law. A living wage is an economic calculation of the lowest possible wage required to sustain a family’s livelihood. It calculates geographically specific costs of food, children, healthcare, housing, transportation, and other necessities with other factors like taxes and inflation.
Over the last forty years, the gap between living and minimal wage become a canyon. Gone are the days of splitting success more evenly between investors and labor. The decline in union access and participation for workers appears to have played a part.
Zeynep Ton is a MIT professor. In the book The Good Jobs Strategy, she presents that generous pay to employees often results in more profitable operations.
If a living wage is a floor for avoiding economic hardship, then generous pay would be a rate that consistently sits above that living wage calculation. To determine the right numbers, some companies are studying employees’ net disposable income. The goal is to get it to 20 %.
When companies commit to keeping top talent by paying a bit more, they often end up spending a lot less on turnover, recruitment, and training.
Companies that commit to generous pay attract a better workforce, which delivers a better customer experience.
Pay, in general, is an extrinsic motivator, which wears off over time. Generous pay appears to spark gratitude, ownership, and loyalty, which drives overall quality and business performance. Especially, when accompanied by other behaviors that treat employees as whole people worth investing in. This includes caring about their careers, their overall well-being, and the quality of their lives outside of work. These are good jobs.
Workload
In many jobs, the expectation of what one person can reliably accomplish or manage in their role has become unreasonable.
The author is suggesting that you exchange the same wages for less work than you have historically. Think of it as a recalibration, the result of which produces loyal, dedicated employees.
86 percent of Iceland’s workforce have either moved to a shorter workweek for the same pay or will gain the right to do so.
A manageable workload is not just about sticking to a forty-hour workweek or, if possible, implementing a shorter one. it also requires us to manage the workload that employees carry during their allotted work time.
The ideal job gives employees regular amounts of challenges that align with their knowledge and gifts. It doesn’t force them to operate constantly beyond the scope of their capabilities, though it might, occasionally, and it’s mixed with periods of recovery, connection, reflection, and development.
You can use instruments like the NASA Task Load Index (TLX), and the Subjective Workload Assessment Technique (SWAT).
Flexibility
You are not paying your employees for their time. You’re paying for a result. If they can get that result in less time, then I can give them that time back and that costs me nothing.
Motivation isn’t something you do to people. It’s something they experience when the conditions are right.
Flexibility is now the most sought-after work benefit, according to the Society for Human Resource Management. It is no longer a differentiator, it’s an expectation.
Expectation is connected with autonomy and is part of how we motivate employees to become committed and do quality work.
To begin offering more flexibility to your employees, you’ll first want to invite employees into that conversation, so you can engineer ideal arrangements together. By including your team in evaluating successes and failures, you’ll create buy-in for any boundaries or limitations that must exist in regard to your flexible work policies because they too will have seen why they are necessary.
If you want to grant employees more autonomy via flexibility, you and the employee will need clarity on individual expectations and outcomes.
Chart out timelines and schedules for projects in advance. Include key meetings and deadlines. Build-in update sessions.
These approaches should be paired with policies and messaging on boundary-setting, adequate time away, and email and meeting etiquette.
Meaningful Work
Purpose
Meaningful work can influence productivity, retention, and commitment.
What we each experience as meaningful is informed by our unique ambitions, values, and circumstances.
If you want the best chance of sparking meaningful work among your teams, there are three specific experiences you’ll want to engineer. You must ensure that people’s jobs include purpose, strengths, and belonging.
Businesses should share a fundamental commitment to all our stakeholders, not just shareholders.
When your organization demonstrates that it is truly impacting lives in a positive way, you’re attending to one of the essential ingredients of Employalty.
The purpose isn’t about the product. Purpose comes from the emotion that a product or service evokes in customers when it’s done well. Where most companies fall short on purpose isn’t in finding the right language, it’s that they fail to live that mission in their actions. Managers consistently articulating how employees’ work contributes to mission is the key to Employalty.
The most important driver of great work is recognition. Recognition is a 46 billion USD a year industry.
To truly leverage the power of recognition, stop recognizing people just for showing up. Instead, spotlight how they show up. You must explicitly state what it is they do or have done that has made a difference. Some researchers have suggested that recognition has a “shelf life” of about one week.
Strengths
Strengths are the habits, talents, and skills that we do both well and easily. We tend to like doing what we’re good at. When we get to use various gifts for long stretches of time, it can lead to intense concentration and productivity. This feeling of being “in the zone” has a name. it’s called a flow state.
Investing in people’s strengths has proven to be a far more effective path to commitment at work than managing weaknesses. While minimizing weaknesses can prevent failure, research suggests that it cannot inspire excellence.
We move away from trying to find the best person for the job and instead create the best job for the person. This is the mutual commitment that is at the heart of Employalty.
Giving employees the chance to explore their interests, identify their gifts, and then consistently use their strengths is a critical component of meaningful work.
Prioritizing strengths means we must periodically challenge conventional thinking on who is the right fit for a job role or promotion.
Belonging
ERG – employee resource groups are employee-led groups that endeavor to make workplaces safer and more supportive for employees who share a characteristic, ethnicity, experience, or interest. They can be found in 90 percent of Fortune 500 companies.
Deloitte’s researchers define “belonging” as workers feeling comfortable at work, including being treated fairly and respected by colleagues, feeling connected to the people they work with and the teams they are part of, and feeling that they contribute to meaningful work outcomes.
Belonging is not a program or initiative, it is an experience related to social connectedness, feeling included, and being accepted, according to Dr. Rumeer Billan.
DEIB stands for diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging.
In addition to education, leaders must create psychological safety. One benefit of psychological safety is that it allows teams to open a dialogue.
When teammates see each other not just as the person responsible for a certain set of tasks or duties at work, but as a whole person with a life, interests, and meaningful relationships outside of work, they access each other’s humanity.
The third element of belonging is contribution.
Great boss
Coaching
75 percent of people who quit a job say their boss is part or all of the reason. According to Gallup organization.
Employees reported working to their full potential when six criteria were present:
- They are clear about what they are expected to do.
- They are willing to ask questions and feel safe doing so.
- They are not overwhelmed with rules about how the work has to be done or with unproductive meetings.
- Their organization supports creative problem-solving and provides rewards and recognition for jobs well done.
- Their supervisors notice and acknowledge employee feelings, understand how their decisions will impact employees, and help them manage their emotions.
- They see purpose and meaning in their work and are committed to their organization.
Companies fail to choose the right talent for management positions 82 percent of the time. According to Gallup.
Great bosses grant trust and work to earn trust, consistently advocate for what is in the best interests of their direct reports, and actively deploy a skill that the CEO of Gallup called the “silver bullet” of management – coaching.
Coaching is the act of helping someone sort through what they know, think, and feel to determine their next actions. A coach asks the right questions in the right order to create self-actualization. Coaching is not appropriate when someone lacks the information or expertise needed.
When employees are constantly directed, they don’t experience critical thinking, autonomy, and ownership.
Trust
To be a leader who earns trust several patterns of behavior are required according to David Horsager. Chief among them is pairing competence with humility.
Transparency when possible is one of the keys to trust. Another key is to work alongside their employees.
To nurture commitment, leaders must grant trust to employees often before it is earned.
Employees who aren’t trusted by their boss at work often use one word to describe that leader: micromanagement.
According to Horsager the easiest way to increase trust, especially in a virtual world, is to align on outcomes.
Years of trust can be lost in a moment.
Some people will never trust you simply because you are the boss.
Advocacy
When someone treats you well and genuinely cares about you like that, it just makes you want to work harder for them.
Advocacy is acting in another person’s best interests. Great bosses engage in ongoing advocacy for the person first, and position second. Advocacy is a central ingredient to being a great boss. Advocacy requires leaders to absorb blame and distribute credit.
Positional authority is the power inherently granted to someone in an organization by their title or position alone. Relational authority is the influence someone earns as a result of having developed a relationship with someone. The biggest difference between positional authority and relational is that the latter leads employees to want or choose to act.
Nearly nine out of ten bosses believe they are leading well, yet fewer than two out of ten employees say that they are.
Starting an Employalty movement in your organization
Have a 30, 90, 180-day plan.
Once you’ve put in the effort to make your company a great place to work, tell everyone.
Four outcomes: join, stay, care, try; are not all affected equally by the three factors of Employalty.
Ideal job is crucial for the join phase. Meaningful work and a great boss have an influence on care and try.
Employalty isn’t altruism. It’s a business strategy. It’s the new cost of doing business well. It’s the entry fee for success. It is an identity you choose and a path to follow.
