Have US insurance companies found the key to a more engaged workforce?

Follow my blog with Bloglovin

My husband works for an American finance company that is based in two locations across the US - Greenwich CT and Austin TX - and here in London. The company is run by Americans and has, what I term, a very American feel. 

"I often here about little quirks that we don't adopt here in the UK, like Assistants Day where executive assistants (or PA's as we call them) get given flowers and gifts to celebrate their good work. A great way to engage!"

Image source

The latest quirk

Everyone, in the 100 strong company, recently had the opportunity to take part in a fitness scheme, much like 'The Biggest Loser', to lose a defined amount of weight and get healthier.  

Of course, many companies adopt strategies like competitions and schemes to encourage their employees to be healthier, and ultimately to increase engagement at work, but this fitness scheme is a little different. 

Different how?

In the US, health insurance costs are through the roof, and in private companies, it is often the company that foots the bill. In an attempt to lower costs many companies are given money by their insurers to encourage their employees to live healthier lives and thereby reduce premiums. 

"My husbands company was given $50,000 by their insurer to invest in staff health and wellbeing."

image source

How did they invest the funds?

They chose to invest part of the funds in Fitbits for everyone who wanted to take part in the scheme. Out of the 100 people who could take part in the competition, 30 people took on the challenge. Each person had a maximum of 12 weeks to lose the weight they had agreed to lose, and they could track their progress using their Fitbit.  

Who benefits?

Everyone does. It's win-win all round.

• Companies who take part have an incentive to save on their insurance premium costs
• Employees benefit because they are encouraged to be healthy
• The health insurer may lose funds in premiums, but less insurance claims means more money in the bank. 

"Insurance claims for obesity in the US cost anywhere between an estimated $147 - $210 billion per year."

"The real question for us in the engagement field is, does it help to engage people at work?"

This scheme also has inadvertent benefits for both employer and employee. It means companies: 

• Take a bigger interest in their employees lives leading to increased understanding of their needs at work and how to meet them
• Facilitate stronger working relationships between employer and employee, and employee to employee
• Are encouraged to give their employees free time to exercise leading to more alert employees when at work and employees feeling fitter and healthier.

Since the Fitbit challenge, my husband has been eager to beat his number of steps per day and that of his colleagues. He's felt fitter, healthier and more motivated at work. He says his colleagues have had similar experiences. 

The right employee wellness programme can certainly help to get people more engaged at work, and have positive effects for health insurers, organisations, employees and society as a whole. 

I'm hungry, are you?

We're all hungry.  Hungry for information, data, updates, something to inspire and excite us... it's an epidemic.

In today's technological world, it's so easy to find your latest fix. We only have to pick up a mobile phone and we're greeted with a world of knowledge, where we can find out anything about everything.

How many times have you been in a conversation with someone and they say "hang on, let me just Google it." It happens everywhere; we're hungry and thirsty for any soundbite we can get our fingers on.

"So if we're so hungry why is it so difficult to get people to engage in your content?"

If you want people to read what you want to share the information needs to be:

• Relevant
• Interesting
• Delivered by someone who inspires the reader 
• About a topic the reader needs / wants to know
• Short and to the point - with regular headings / subheadings / breaks and interludes. 

"As a writer it's easy to get lost in the art of writing what I want to write; the goal is writing what your audience wants to read." 

In organisations, we experience a similar problem. 

We often misjudge how much information we need to give employees when changes are afoot. The message has always been 'communicate, communicate again and then communicate some more.' This is true, it is vital to keep people informed if you want to keep them engaged, but if you want them to absorb the information, make sure your message is succinct.

Ask yourself:

• Who do people want to hear from?
• What do they want to hear? 
• Do they really need to hear it?
• How succinctly can I say it?
• Will an image say it better?

Communicate well and your few words will tell a much bigger story. 

6 Atypical Ways to Get & Keep New Hires

There's always one. That person in your team who makes it difficult for everyone else. They are the ones that turn up late, have a bad attitude, are negative towards the rest of the team, and consistently look like they'd rather be at home in bed than at work.

Image source

You've tried everything. Weekly check-in meetings, the option to work from home once a week, and countless 'thank you, you did a great job' emails. Nothing works. Joe has been with the company for six months and, despite his glowing CV and track record in the field, you think you made a bad choice bringing him into the team.

So what went wrong? 

Unfortunately, when you get a new person into a role you barely know them from Adam. Going through the 'interview process', it's easy to forget that we are dealing with real people. Even the labels we use in recruitment evoke distance and detachment between the company hiring and the individual being hired.

How can we know who we're really hiring? 

Unfortunately, people often come to a new role to escape something; they: 

• were a bad fit for a team
• didn't feel challenged
• didn't get along with their boss
• had outgrown the role
• wanted a higher salary for their efforts
• or, they were in a bad place in life, and they thought a new job would be the answer.

With all of this going on, it becomes rare that a new role will meet all of the person's expectations. 

So what's the answer?

The hiring processes used in today's workplaces are designed to help us know as much as we can in a short period and a cost effective manner. This means making drastic changes to hiring to allow us to spend quality time with future employees before they join the organisations is, in most cases, not possible. 

"We can't ever truly know who we're hiring, but we can get a positive and honest culture in place right from the outset."

Here are six great ways to get and keep the right new hires:

1. Ask them to be completely honest with you in an interview. 

Sometimes people arrive at your organisation just because they need a job. When this is the case, they are keen to say anything, or claim they will do anything in a role, even if its not their strength. Be sure to ask people what they love most at work. You'll see their face light up when they are being really honest, and it will help you to know if they are really right for the role. 

2. Try the informal approach:

Take your new starter out of the office for a coffee. Being in an informal setting can help people to be more open and honest with you about how they are settling in, and they will be more likely to share what's working and what's not. 

Image source

3. Ask the questions you don't want to know the answers to:

Try not to ignore the situation when people are difficult, there's always a reason people are challenging. Work with them as much as you can and be sure to ask the tough questions; "you seem down, is there something going on at work or home that we can help with?"

4. Give people options:

Help them to feel that if this wasn't the right move for them, or you, that you will give them support to find what is. Perhaps help them to move to another part of the company if that's and option. 

5. Make sure they know the cooling off period is for them as well as you: 

Encourage people to consider that the first few months they are in a role is as much a time for reflection about whether it's what they want, as it is for you to decide if they are a good fit for the role. Giving people a sense of control - and allowing them to continue to go to interviews if either of you is unsure - is a good way to help people feel engaged and not trapped. 

6. Give people the opportunity to make a difference: Your new hire has fresh eyes into the business, and the freshness isn't there forever so use it wisely. Ask people to tell you what works well here and what doesn't, and listen to them! Listening to and acting on the views of your people is a great way to engage them. 

The Purpose of Purpose

The pieces of your employee engagement jigsaw puzzle can seem too edgy, have too many holes, or like bits of undistinguishable sky. If this is you, you're not alone.

Image source

Many organisations realise they need to 'do HR differently' but often aren't sure what this means or exactly what is required to take them to a new reality.

Employee engagement - in theory - is really quite simple:

1. Performance Management (or 'Feedback and Reward' as I like to call it)
It's exactly what is says on my aptly named tin. Do your people receive enough feedback about their work - and by this I don't mean annual or by-annual reviews, I mean ongoing daily conversations about what is going well and what could be done differently. Do they receive the appropriate reward for the work they do? That's not just an annual salary and a bonus, that's recognition for good work in the form of non-monetary and/or monetary reward.

2. Leadership & Management 
Two very different things - naturally with some overlap - but both equally important. Do you people receive appropriate leadership and management?

Leadership is about inspiring your people to join you on an organisation journey. Building an empire around you that helps you to achieve the broader organisational goals while you continue to energise and support your people to deliver.

Image source

Management is distinct from leadership in that it requires a more hands on role. Managers get into deeper detail about what to do and how to do it, in purpose of the broader organisational goals.

3. Trusted to take risks
To grow any organisation people need to take risks. Sometimes they pay off sometimes they don't. It's the chance we have to take to develop new products, services and ways of working. It's how we grow. Unfortunately, many people in organisations don't feel they can take those risks without reprimand if they go wrong.

It is important to develop a culture where people feel they can have a voice to say what they think. Whether that be about new ideas and processes or about the way the organisation is currently run; there is little room for growth if people can't speak out.

Image source

4. Belief in the organisation
Would you fight for something you didn't believe in? I wouldn't. In fact, I'd probably fight for the opposite. If your people don't believe in what your organisation does, they will not have its best interests at heart. People need to believe in what the organisation stands for and feel that they can work each day towards achieving those goals.

This leads nicely to my last but most definitely not least point. In fact, without this all of your efforts will fall over:

5. A sense of purpose
Answer the simple question, why do you go to work every day?
If the answer is anything other than 'because you care about the work you do for the organisation you do it for', your sense of purpose is not aligned to the organisation and they are not getting the best from you.

Think about it. Most of the people who answer this question would say they work to make money; to feed their family, to pay for their weekly night out on the tiles, to pay the rent. And rightly so, that is one of the main reasons we work, but what if the people in your organisation actually wanted to be there because they cared about what happened to the company. Do you think you would get different behaviours from your people? Would they be more likely to put in that extra effort for no overtime payment? Would they be likely to take better care of your equipment and offices? Would they be keen to grow and develop personally to assist in the growth of the business? Probably. Of course, we don't want to exhaust people, people can only give so much so there has to be give and take, but getting that relationship right can take your business from good to great.

Image source 

Creating a sense of purpose that everyone in your organisation can buy into isn't easy. You need to dig deep to find the real, heartfelt reason you exist. All organisations exist to make money; that's a given. What you need to find is what is really at the heart of what you are trying to achieve. That's purpose. If you can get your people to join you on that journey - supported by the four other pieces of the engagement jigsaw - you'll be on your way to happy people, happy business and organisational growth.

Managers, are you really getting the most from your people?

As a manager, it is very tempting to ignore requests for change from employees; these requests often mean spending large chunks of money on a new process or system, or a request for a salary increase. What we often fail to see, is that even just by listening to someone and showing your empathy and understanding, but often doing little to change the situation, can help. 

Listen to your people

Ultimately, it is likely that your teams know more about their working challenges than you do, due to the simple fact that they work with the challenges on a daily basis. Listening to your people is vital. Sadly, this is often ignored, especially when it comes to large scale change across organisations. 

There is a well known psychological study which led to what we know today as the Hawthorne Effect. This phenomenon occurs when people improve their behaviour or productivity output due to the simple fact there has been a change in their working environment, whether or not the change results in an improvement to their working conditions. 

Image Source

This change can be as minor as being observed for a short period. Of course, we can't observe everyone all of the time, and we wouldn't want to because the effect would wear off, but by showing people you care, they will respond accordingly. The key is sincerity. 

Granted, this is a temporary measure, but it shows the potential positive impact of creating an environment of listening, sharing and displaying genuine concern for one another in the workplace. It also provides you with vital insight into the workings of you teams; you never know when this information might be useful. 

The crux of this is that people want to feel like they matter. Employees want to feel they are part of something important and without them the end goal wouldn't be as possible. But in order to bring people with you on your journey, you need to understand their motivations for work. 

Understanding your people

Knowing your people is the key to a happy workforce. In our modern world of non-traditional male and female roles, and the widespread introduction of flexible working, you are very behind the times if you are not sensitive to the work / life balance needs of your people. 

I recently spoke to a friend of mine and she relayed to me the challenges she could see across her national team, and that she knew she could help to make changes to ensure the team operated more efficiently. However, she is also the mother of a young child and was concerned to speak up at the fear that she may have to travel extensively and work long hours to achieve her goal. 

This fear factor is exactly what we should be trying to eliminate if we want a successful business. The environment we should be creating is an open forum for ideas and discussion and the opportunity for people to take calculated risks. 

The lack of this in the workplace, again comes back to our fear of spending; if people are allowed to have ideas, it often means spending and change. But, by talking together about reaching a larger purpose or goal, the smaller things become easier to achieve because they are in service of a bigger purpose. You become more creative, more resourceful as a team and can get things moving in the right direction - together.  

Image Source

It is sad that people have less passion for their work because they don't want to travel or leave work late instead opting to be at home with their child; but why wouldn't they?? It's normal to want a work / life balance. But whilst at work, we are not getting the best from our teams because they don't want to rock the boat and put themselves in a difficult position. We need to get the best from our people to get the best out of our business. 

There is another common principle used in psychology called the psychological contract. This is an unwritten contract between you and your people; an expectation of how you will both behave during your contract together. By being mindful of what your employees want, expect and need from you, you will get more back from them.

Here are some tips to help you do that:

1. Talk to people - find out their honest career goals - what do they really want out of their career and what work / life balance do they want. Give a little back to your employees, and they will give you more. 

2. Be flexible with hours. If someone needs to leave at 4.30pm to collect their child from school - let them do it. You've likely lost their engagement for the last hour of that day anyway because they are thinking about where they would rather be and should be - with their family. Even if they are only there for six hours a day, but they are happier and more motivated, you will get more from them than you would in their normal eight hours.

3. Provide people with the best resources to get the job done. Don't just say - it's too expensive to send you to X so you can't visit that team or take that course. Ensure you talk freely with them to come up with an affordable but effective option for making the job possible. You will get more from people if you work WITH them, not against them.

Being a manager is a tough job, but it can be made much easier if you have happy and effective employees. Take some of these tips on board, and you will be surprised at what can be achieved.