Tracking Employee Lifecycle

We who study Employee Engagement are consistently looking for trends in hiring and the direct effect on retention. The Human Resource landscape is slippery, no other profession is tasked with such a diverse cycle of management skills. The ability to find great talent, train, engage and promote are an unenviable set of tasks. Recruiters mirror sales people, Total Rewards professionals have to have an acumen for numbers and the disparate technologies that represent the progression from hiring through promotion can make one's head spin.

So, we stare down the inevitable:

How do we create an synchronized strategy from recruitment to retirement.... ????

Let's start with the job market....
As a new generation of talent enter the workforce are expectations changing? 

Are those escalated in age better equipped with irreplaceable experience?

Is a recession coming?

Do elite talents have any interest in job hopping?

Those who are great at what they do are probably not interested in switching jobs and there are others who simply do not have the proper qualifications. So, staffing professionals are tasked with finding people who are qualified, able to engage and humble in their entry level financial expectations. 

Prospective employees have a few simple expectations:

• A product/service they believe in
• Leadership that is visionary yet receptive to change
• A culture of transparency
• A manager they enjoy serving

Sounds simple enough but the ability to pull together these traits under a common mission is difficult. Companies are often great at producing quality products but lacking in employee development. Again, our staffers are called upon to sell the good qualities of the company while side-stepping what isn't working.     

Sustaining Engagement....
Getting them in the door is one thing. Delivering on promises is another.

Once employees are trained they need to develop the confidence to acclimate to the culture. Our extended HR team has to sustain the attraction of the hiring process with technology that is accessible and intuitive. HR is then called upon to make sure there is a vessel for strong manager/employee communication while keeping leadership abreast of the action in the trenches.

Take inventory:

• Does training scale to specific functional traits while enhancing soft skills?
• Is your Human Capital Management technology integrated and engaging?
• If employees and managers aren't on the same page, how will you know?
• Does your CEO recognize general employee goals?

Train, Reward, Challenge and Eliminate Silos!
     
Seeing departures before they happen.....  
If exit interviews are part of your engagement strategy, you are a step behind. The popular counter is to have HR integrate "stay interviews". If you need to administer a survey for employees to validate your existence, your workplace relationships might be fractured. 

Managers should have an accountability plan for their employees that is more parts celebration of achievement than calling out deficiencies.

Recognize in public, discipline is private.

If in every day you leave people with a firm understanding of what is working and where they need development, there is no guess work. People know when they haven't performed to their fullest potential, calling them out twice a year doesn't work.

Ask yourself: do our hiring enticements continue through our day-to-day engagement propsition?    

We all just want to represent something we believe in among people we respect and an ever-evolving challenge cycle complete with rewards at every step of progression.

Don't Forget to Remember!

Dave