4 Ways to Keep the Team Happy

In the Bay Area, you can bet it can be pretty tough to retain employees. In fact, a report by Payscale said that Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company, Google, and Amazon had the worst employee retention rates, and Google's average pay was the best. I guess it's not just about top-notch free food, free yoga, and Google airplanes.
 
What we've found at my email marketing company, VerticalResponse, is that people have to like what they do and like whom they work with. They need to trust that the people they work with are doing the right thing for the company. They also like to be acknowledged for their part in moving the company forward. Seems reasonable, doesn't it? 

Don't Pretend
I've found that when we are totally honest with people, they respect it whether they agree or disagree with something we're doing. We don't pretend to be something we're not. We don't put on suits when we meet with people; we don't clean up the office when people visit. We are who we are, and that's part of our culture. Our employees cherish this. 

Transparency Is Key
When I started VerticalResponse, it was easy to be transparent--there were only five of us in the office. But as we went through growing pains and lost people for not letting them in on company strategy and vision, we realized it's crucial to take the time and let people know what's going on. Now, I take copious notes in our weekly management meetings and send an email out to everyone in the company about where we are, what's happening (both good and bad), and what, if anything, we need to do to recover. I also just started putting an incentive into the email in which the first person who reads the entire thing and answers a question about the content gets a gift card. Readership has increased, to say the least. 

Give Them Space 
You can't please everyone, can you? In our office, we live in cubeland (albeit with low walls), where some people love their own space and some hate it. For those that love it, we conform to openness and invest in giving them space so they can create. For those that want to stand in their cubes, we do the same. We also invest in open areas so that those who are feeling stifled can slip away with their headphones to a beanbag chair in the corner. Letting people work how they want within some constraints can be really beneficial. 

Invest in Their Growth
Getting people to the next level is a goal that every manager may have, but you can't get hung up on it. You do your best and hope that if you invest in their growth (mentoring, a seminar, a class), people will stay and continue to contribute. If they leave too early, think of it this way: You just paid a bit early for them to not be part of your organization, because do you really want someone on the team that doesn't want to be there anyway?

The reality is, in order to attract and retain talented employees, you need to offer the things people need, such as good insurance coverage, free food, treats, and fun. But I firmly believe if you don't look at the foundation of how you treat your people as creative human beings that have a ton to contribute to your business, all the perks in the world won't keep them around for long anyway.

The Ripple Effects You Create as a Manager

 Each one of us holds a set of beliefs and attitudes — a mindset — that determines how we interpret and respond to situations. That mindset shapes how we interact with others, and therefore it also affects the people we work with — in ways both subtle and profound. A person with a distrustful mindset, for example, views situations at work as competitive and acts to advance his own interest at others' expense by politicking: shifting allegiances, taking credit, assigning blame, withholding or distorting information. These behaviors drive up stress and burnout in others, and undermine organizational effectiveness. On the other hand, a mindset of openness, trust, and generosity promotes behaviors that have beneficial effects on others. In his new book Give and Take, Wharton professor Adam Grant marshals an impressive body of scientific evidence to show how a mindset of generosity radiates to yield broad gains. Here's one powerful research example: a 20-year longitudinal study of healthy employees found that people with social support from coworkers were two and a half times less likely to die prematurely than those without. So it's not an exaggeration to say that by being supportive of people at work, you're not just brightening their day — you're literally helping to save lives. 

What you might not appreciate is that the socially-transmitted impact of your mindset extends well beyond those people with whom you interact directly in the workplace. It also touches those to whom they are connected — most notably their partners and family members, but also their larger networks and communities. A growing body of research confirms that the stress employees experience at work crosses over to and impairs the functioning and well-being of family members, even impacting children's performance in school. This chain may unfold as follows: a manager who believes that the best way to manage employees is to "keep them on their toes" habitually makes unreasonable demands, confronts employees publicly, provides little positive feedback, and withholds information. These behaviors cause stress in the employees who are subject to them. When they come home from work at night, the employees are more likely to display anger and impatience. Their spouses' stress levels rise and marital quality declines. Their children learn to leave the parent alone in the evening rather than risk getting yelled at, and their psychological adjustment suffers. And so on, into schools and communities. 

 Happily, positive relationships in the workplace also have strong ripple effects. The person with a positive, open, and trusting mindset acts in ways that build emotional resources among work colleagues, which in turn enrich the well-being and good functioning of their families.

Let's look at how a fairly common mindset plays out in the workplace and beyond. For years, many managers have believed that a mark of a competent, committed employee is that he or she is able to leave family and personal life at the office door and, while "on the clock," focus 100% on work. This assumption is powerful; it shapes expectations about what it takes to succeed in a career, how companies assess their employees' value and performance, and the way managers behave. 

The problem is, it's also flawed. Way back in 1977, Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter coined the phrase "the myth of separate spheres" to describe the problematic way in which managers thought about the interface of employees' work and personal lives. It was a myth then, and it's a myth now. Human beings can't completely segment their lives; expecting them to do so both increases strain and diminishes the gains that can be realized by deliberately seeking wins across multiple areas of life. While companies are increasingly awakening to awareness of the mutual gains of work-life integration, the separate spheres mindset still persists.

What do separate spheres and integration/mutual gain mindsets look like in action? Two starkly contrasting examples from the early years of my own career come to mind. I spent five years in my twenties working for an organization, the first two in one department and the subsequent three in another. Although the departments were located right next to each other and performed related work, they differed considerably in terms of management style and culture. I recall a particular meeting in the first. During a few minutes of small talk while people entered the conference room and settled around the table, I chatted with a colleague whose wife was shortly expecting their first baby. Being a new mother myself, I commiserated with him about late-stage pregnancy and the anxieties leading up to birth. "Will you take paternity leave when the baby is born?" I asked this question knowing that the organization had a policy in place that offered new fathers a week off with pay upon the birth of a child. He smiled and hesitated for a moment before his boss scoffed from the other side of the table, "Paternity leave? I'll give you your paternity leave: a box of cigars." And just like that, the door was shut, not only for the expectant father, but also for anyone else who may have wanted to use the policy. Like many work-life policies, the paternity leave was subject to supervisor approval. But this manager's separate-spheres mindset precluded consideration of what might have been gained by a valued employee, his family, and ultimately by the organization in exchange for a single week off work.

Two years later, when my second child was born, I went back to work full-time after six weeks of maternity leave. I was exhausted and found it stressful to be away from my very young baby for so much time. It was apparent to me that much of the work I performed could be done from home with equal or greater efficiency and no adverse impact on anyone at my office. I decided to approach my boss and request to work from home two days per week for the next six months.

 Somewhat to my surprise, he agreed. The fact that my manager was open and responded with trust and a willingness to experiment in order to meet both my needs and those of the department was transformative, not just for me, but for my family too. I cherished the opportunity to spend two extra days of each week with my baby. I was much happier and healthier. With my stress reduced, I approached my work with renewed enthusiasm. My husband, then a full-time student, had more time for studying and less work-life conflict. Importantly, I saw my manager as more multifaceted than I had previously appreciated, my respect for him deepened, and I felt a greater sense of commitment to the organization. 

 

So what can you do to radiate positive, productive energy through employees at your workplace and out through their work-life networks? Here are a few ways:

• Be a role model for work-life integration. Be open about your own challenges and strategies for fitting together your work, family, and personal life. Let your employees see you as a whole person.


• Appreciate others as whole people. The fact that everyone you work with has a life beyond work means that the team and the organization is embedded in a larger network of valuable relationships and shared goals. Appreciating the commitments that others have beyond work creates openness to looking for ways to create mutual work-life gains.


• Be willing to experiment. Keep the focus on what your team or organization is trying to achieve and how each person can best contribute to those results. Ask people what would help boost their ability to achieve desired work results while also increasing their well-being beyond work. When employees are involved in designing and implementing solutions, their commitment to making them work is strong.


• Offer socio-emotional support. Understanding of work-life challenges, sensitivity to how work can impact personal life, demonstrating respect, and offering encouragement go a long way in fostering positive relationships that help employees perform while keeping work-life conflict to a minimum.


• Be an advocate for work-life integration in your organization. Promote the cause of work-life integration. Talk about why you believe it's important to recognize and respond to employees' work-life challenges. Share success stories and examples with other managers to help decision-makers in the organization understand how to provide work-life support.

It can be difficult to recognize and change one's own mindset (in fact, this goal is at the heart of the leadership development industry). One way to approach an examination of your mindset is by asking this question: what kind of social influence would you like to have? Whether you realize it or not, each person you supervise or work with connects you to their work-life network — initially to their immediate family, but ultimately to communities and to society. What you must decide is what kind of ripples you want to transmit through these networks, because one way or another, you will create them.
   

Monique Valcour

Monique Valcour is a professor of management at EDHEC Business School in France. Her research, teaching, and consulting focuses on helping companies and individuals craft high-performance, meaningful jobs, careers, workplaces, and lives. Follow her on Twitter @moniquevalcour.

The 15 Most Important Minutes Of The Work Week

Feedback is a powerful management tool. But it's often misused. Here 15Five CEO David Hassell discusses why every employee should spend 15 minutes per week answering four short questions. Could the end of the annual review be near? 

By: Lydia Dishman 

How often do you and your boss have a real conversation about your work?
For many of us, it’s likely a once-a-year-sit-down to parse your list of accomplishments and areas that need improvement, otherwise known as the annual performance review. Yes, the dreaded annual review. Dreaded because managers acknowledge that they don’t maintain an ongoing dialogue with individual team members and it's tough to give and get good feedback when you’re only meeting once a year. Despite this, only 3% of companies report that they stopped using annual reviews as a way to grade employees.

He may not be looking to completely eradicate the annual review, but David Hassell, CEO of 15Five, believes there is room to improve (or in some cases begin) dialogues between supervisors and staff. To do so, his firm has built conversation-starting software that it now sells to some 400 companies across industries.

The way he sees it, “Companies don’t have an effective communication structure in place to let employees have an outlet and a voice.” Even though he acknowledges that it does tend to be costly to hold weekly one-on-one meetings, Hassell’s a believer in the power of regularly giving and gathering feedback to boost engagement. And regular Fast Company readers recognize that one of the secrets to having a happy company is to encourage a hive of engagement.

So how to manage such a meritocracy? Ask the right questions. Often. Hassell took a page from Patagonia’s playbook, invoking one of CEO Yvon Chouinard’s philosophies that a regularly scheduled quick sweep of staff achievements and challenges could keep him in the loop and also motivate his workforce to maintain a competitive edge. The basic premise is held in Hassell’s company name: Every week employees takes 15 minutes to fill out progress reports. Then a manager spends no more than five minutes to read it.

Hassell says thanks to 15Five’s cloud-based software, the feedback loop can become “organizational habit on a lightweight basis” by providing managers a 360-degree view of the company from the employees’ perspective based on their answers to four basic questions. (For examples of the questions, see the sidebar.) 

Want to Improve Employee Feedback? Ask the Right Questions 

15Five has standard questions built into its software program but some companies create their own customized template. Here are some compelling questions they ask: 

What did I do this week to help another member of my local team? 

On a scale of 0 to 10, how happy were you at work this week? 

Did you learn anything new or awesome this week that you'd like to try or share with the team? 

What aspect of our company do you worry about the most?

Rather than trying to tease out what’s bothering disgruntled employees or to hit the sweet spot between praise and criticism (hint: it’s nearly six positive comments for each negative one), 80% of 15Five’s current roster of 400+ customers simply use the software’s default questions such as: What’s going well? What are your challenges? What help do you need to improve?” Veterans of the annual review process (like me) are probably stifling an involuntary shudder at the memory of being put on the spot when trying to spin a challenge into a positive.

By culling the feedback regularly, Hassell contends his staff is more likely to share the need for support as well as the success. “We are big believers that when people are really open and authentic you can build real trust and a solid powerful organization,” he says. Hassell does realize that openness can be a “pretty scary” concept for many organizations, but says 15Five’s implementation has already surprised him. For companies with a culture that leans toward open communication like Warby Parker, 15Five surveys even helped with innovation.

The eyewear company that upended the expensive retail model for prescription glasses spawned a slew of imitators. To stay ahead of the pack, Warby Parker tasks its entire team to produce ideas for innovation each week under the belief that great ideas can come from anyone in the company.

Kaki Read, editorial assistant and PR coordinator at Warby Parker, says that the company’s eschewed the basic questions in favor of custom queries. One is: "Please list one idea to improve your individual productivity, the team's productivity, our customers' experience or the well-being of one of our communities."

“The idea, which we call our weekly ‘innovation idea’ can be small (like adding additional break-out tables for meetings) or big (like an idea for a new product line or non-profit partnership),” she explains. “More often than not, the best ideas come from those closest to the problem.”

As a tool for providing managers with a quick, intuitive method for gathering and escalating team feedback, Read says the results were immediate. “We also ask employees to report their overall happiness score for the week. This brings concerns immediately to the forefront and increases overall productivity,” she adds.

Warby Parker also uses feedback to improve accountability. Read notes that employees list tasks achieved during the week as well as top goals for the upcoming week. The tool also helps senior managers keep a pulse on what's going on throughout the organization. “Managers are able to easily identify common threads amongst their team members and prioritize concerns that come up most frequently,” she says.

Hassell, like Oren Teich at Heroku, believes that to truly be happy and engaged, people have to feel like their work matters, that they're part of something bigger and that they're valued for their contribution. “The difference between showing up and doing the minimum for a paycheck versus giving their all comes down to whether they care about the company and their work,” Hassell argues. There's no simpler way or more clear statement a company can make than simply giving their employees a voice--asking them for feedback on a regular basis and engaging in an open and authentic dialogue about their successes, challenges, ideas, and morale.


 

Lydia Dishman is a business journalist covering innovation, entrepreneurship and style. She is a regular contributor to Fast Company and has written for CBS Moneywatch, Entrepreneur, and the New York Times, among others.