What Lost Productivity Looks Like on Ineffective Teams

Dec 12, 2023

By Vivo Team

When looking for ways to manage costs, managers and executives are often trained to ignore money already spent, instead focusing on future spending. When it comes to tracking the cost and value of meetings, for example, managers commonly dismiss the cost of people’s time as a “sunk cost” because they’ve already committed to paying salaries.

Companies spend an enormous amount of money paying people to sit in meetings, but they fail to consider how efficient or effective those meetings really are. Furthermore, most people are not trained to participate in, or run, effective meetings.

Also frequently overlooked, the cost of lost productivity is a key culprit of financial drain for leaders, managers, and their company. Leaders now, more than ever, need to be equipped with data and insights about their people to succeed in this climate of uncertainty. Being aware of strengths, weaknesses, gaps, and leader/team effectiveness allows you to focus on areas for improvement.

For example, imagine an employee who loses 5 hours of productivity a day. If that employee is paid $50,000 a year, their lost productivity would cost the company approximately $32,370 annually.

Does 5 hours sound high? Lost productivity time can add up quickly:

Confusion/lost time due to poor communication (1-2 hrs/day)

Attending meetings you don’t need to be a part of (1-2 hrs/day)

Inefficiencies from a lack of structure or processes (1-2 hrs/day)

If proper structures and communication norms were improved on this employee’s team, the cost of lost productivity will be reduced. If reduced by 50%, that’s $16,185 in savings.

Now imagine that team has five other members who are also more efficient and productive as a result of training in structures and communication (5 x $16,185).

You just saved $80,925 in lost productivity costs.

Your company’s cost of lost productivity, as it relates to training and development, is a simple yet effective way to increase productivity and efficiency—ultimately leading to a positive impact on your bottom line.

Key indicators that lead to high-performing leaders and teams:

Communication – Clear and open communication reduces misunderstanding and costly errors, minimizes work delays, and enhances overall productivity.

Structures – Unifying and streamlining work processes and related behavioral norms builds the foundation for efficient and successful teams.

Interactive Feedback – A feedback culture provides essential information for decision making and performance improvement by reflecting on the past and anticipating future results.

Emotional Intelligence – Awareness and management of one’s emotions while navigating the emotions of others reduces assumptions and increases psychological safety and connection.

Accountability – Holding one another accountable drives innovation, trust, and productivity.

Cohesion – Team cohesion positively impacts project outcomes, client satisfaction, team engagement, and collaboration resulting in increased success and productivity.

By using behavioral analytics to evaluate your team’s effectiveness in these areas, leaders can uncover insights into where improvements need to be made to recoup losses. Team effectiveness and lost productivity costs are interdependent. Thus, by increasing your team’s effectiveness you will decrease your company’s lost productivity costs.

About Vivo Team

Vivo Team is a tech-driven learning and development company providing leaders and teams with the skills, analytics, and insights they need to succeed. This results in increased engagement and productivity—and the data to prove it!

Seven Strategies to Mitigate Labour Shortages in Your Organization

Oct 4, 2023

By Arlene Keis, Associate HR Consultant, Chemistry Consulting Group

It seems as if every day there are headlines regarding staff shortages in virtually every sector of the economy and in every province and territory.  While the reasons for such shortages are many and complicated, they do not appear to be going away anytime soon.  The issue has become a business imperative in boardrooms across the country as organizations large and small grapple with the economic fall out of this gap in labour supply.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution to address labour shortages, but there are many things that an individual business or organization can do to minimize the impact.  Many are finding that a multi-faceted approach gives the greatest odds of weathering the perfect storm that has produced the labour challenges. Consider applying the below strategies to your business strategy in the long and short term.

1. Become an Employer of Choice

In any competitive environment, people choose to go where they see the best value proposition.  This applies to their choice of employers, and the perceived value goes beyond just the salary.   The best employers recognize that creating an environment that shows their current and prospective employees they care for them gives them an edge in the war for talent. Becoming an employer of choice involves not only providing competitive compensation and benefits, but prioritizing  topics such as: recognition and appreciation, flexible and hybrid work schedules, open two-way communication, work-life balance, fair and respectful workplaces, mental and physical well-being, strong leadership and mentoring, opportunities for advancement and growth, diversity and inclusion, innovation, corporate culture, efficient and well-maintained tools and equipment, community involvement and last but not least, FUN!

2. Focus on Retention

Just as it is with customers, keeping employees you already have is easier and less costly than finding new ones. When employees leave, it is important to conduct exit interviews to gain insight about the reasons for their departure; better still, canvass your current employees to find out why they stay and how you can keep them engaged. There are dozens of tactics, strategies, and many books and articles on how to improve retention, but one of the best ways to find what works best in your organization is to ask your employees. This can be done through employee engagement surveys or focus groups, and fostering a culture of open communication and an authentic, listening management team from the top down.  Employees have choices and most prefer to work for a great company with a positive and healthy culture so there is great value in focusing on becoming an Employer of Choice.

3. Raise Awareness About Your Brand

Whether they know it or not, most companies have an external employer brand that can help or hinder their recruitment efforts.  The brand may be positive or negative, well known or obscure.  Clever employers are using the same marketing and brand awareness tactics for recruiting that they use for attracting customers.  If you have a great brand and are a good place to work but nobody knows about you, then focus on getting your brand out there.  Visit local job fairs, sponsor school or community activities or sports events, create a careers page on your website and get active in social and other media, engage your current employees & families in recruitment efforts by offering referral bonuses. Above all, if you find that your employer brand is not very appealing, or is getting bad reviews, fix it.  Reflect on what may be tainting your brand, and take focused and determined steps to improve how your organization is perceived.

4. Fish in a Different Pond

With the strong competition for workers, you are not able to rely on the old tactics of just putting an ad out, sitting back and waiting for the resumes to come pouring in.  Go fish where the fish are – which means looking for under-utilized labour pools, such as hiring across generations. For example, many baby boomers have retired from their professional careers and therefore may not be considered as available labour, however many still want to stay involved in the workplace.  Such individuals have skills to offer, have a home and vehicle, don’t require high salaries and don’t want to climb the ladder and take over the manager’s job.  Other untapped labour pools are Indigenous youth, people with disabilities, new immigrants and individuals re-entering the workforce after lengthy absence. Each labour pool provides a number of strengths and advantages, and this may require you to get out into the community to tap into these circles.

5. Recruit Nationally and Internationally

Community or provincial labour pools may not be big enough so efforts to find someone locally may not be successful, especially if you are located in a rural or remote area.  Casting a wider net and recruiting across the country and internationally may achieve better results, but not without a cost. Relocation, housing and immigration issues need to be factored in so the recruitment budget should be adjusted to provide assistance as needed.  International students are also another valuable resource as they can work while going to school and could be eligible to sponsor for permanent employment and immigration through various provincial nominee programs such as in BC.

6. Invest in Training and Development

It is important that your staff have the skills to do their jobs today but training them for potential jobs or promotions in the future can help you avoid having to go to market and compete for new workers.  “Grow your own” by training and developing individuals also provides a wide range of benefits to your business from improving customer service, motivating your staff and supporting succession planning.  You could also provide training opportunities to those who are still in school and could become part of your future workforce.  This could include hiring a co-op student, summer student, work experience or sponsoring an apprentice (which may be eligible for tax credits or government subsidies in some jurisdictions).  Many of these students or learners could evolve into wonderful and loyal employees.

7. Increase Productivity

“Doing more with less” can cultivate innovation and creativity in improving both worker and workplace productivity.  Productivity gains could be found in areas such as organizational improvements, busyness vs. work that adds value, inefficient meetings, emails, time management, putting off technology improvements, staying with manual processes etc.

In summary, while we are in this extraordinary labour market of competing for employees, an organization’s HR practices are now under the spotlight.  Those companies that pivot quickly and embrace new ways of thinking about the employee experience may find they have an edge in the war for talent.

Chemistry Consulting Group offers HR consulting services to clients across Canada and the in USA.  We have consultants based in Vancouver, Victoria, Nanaimo, Toronto and Montreal with virtual services offered in all other cities. We offer a range of solutions tailored to meet the diverse needs of businesses in these regions.

At Chemistry Consulting Group we have a team of certified CPHR strategists and we are experienced in taking on major human resources development projects such as organizational reviews and design, people and culture audits, 360 evaluations, employee engagement surveys, performance management tools, employee handbook/policy and procedure development, employee orientation program development, onboarding programs, total compensation reviews and comparative market research, job descriptions, equity diversity inclusion and belonging (EDIB) strategies with team-building and training workshops. We offer a convenient HR on-call service to support you as issues arise in your workplace, and HR on-site services as required.

Contact us today!

What BC Employers Need to Know: Pay Transparency Act

Sep 21, 2023

By Wendy Ferguson, Chemistry Consulting Group

The Pay Transparency Act is now law in BC and employers should prepare and take necessary steps to comply with the new legislative requirements. All BC employers must comply with the new requirements, unless they are federally regulated (whereby they would need to comply with the federal Employment Equity Act).

Disclosure of Salary/Wage Information on Job Postings

As of November 1, 2023, employers will be required to specify the expected salary or wage, or salary/wage range, on all publicly advertised job opportunities.  This will include job boards, company website career sections, professional association site postings and recruitment agency postings, etc.

Prohibited Conduct

Employers will no longer be able to seek pay history information about a job applicant unless the information is publicly accessible. Employers may not ask applicants directly about this information, or seek the information via a third party.

The Act prohibits employers from retaliating against employees who:

  • make inquiries about their pay;
  • disclose information about their pay to a fellow employee or job applicant;
  • make inquiries about a pay transparency report;
  • ask the employer to comply with the employer’s obligations under the Act; or
  • make a report to the director in relation to the employer’s compliance with the employer’s obligations under the Act.

Retaliation includes: suspension, demotion, discipline, harassment, termination, or disadvantaging an employee or threatening to do so.

Reporting Requirements

Reporting requirements will be introduced in a staged manner, starting with large employers. For 2023, employers required to report include: the Government of BC, ICBC, BC Hydro, WorkSafeBC, BC Housing, BC Lottery Corporation and BC Transit.

Unless exempted by future regulations, the reporting requirements will apply to employers with the following number of employees on January 1 of the specified year:

  • 2024: 1,000+ employees;
  • 2025: 300+ employees;
  • 2026: 50+ employees; and
  • after 2026: less than 49 employees.

Reporting employers will be mandated to prepare an Annual Pay Transparency Report by November 1 of each year. The report will need to be distributed to all employees and published on a publicly accessible website.

The government has stated that details about what will have to be included in the report are still being developed.  An online reporting tool will be developed and available to assist employers with their reporting requirements.

The Act also requires that reporting employers make reasonable efforts to collect the gender information from employees, according to the new Gender and Sex Data Standard. Employers will need to inform the employee that their disclosure of this personal information for the purpose of the pay transparency report is voluntary.

The pay transparency report will include information about the employer, its workforce, the differences in pay in relation to employees’ self-identified gender, etc.  Employers will be required to report pay gaps (the difference between wages, overtime and bonuses received by men, women and non-binary people).

Starting in June 2024, the provincial government will publish an annual report including information about pay differences, trends, and reports of non-compliance.

Human Rights

While the Act does not provide employees’ any new rights or recourse if they feel that they are not being paid fairly, BC employees already have the ability to file a complaint with the BC Human Rights Tribunal if they feel that they have been discriminated against on the basis of their sex and gender identity.

Use of Personal Information

Employers should be cautioned about using personal information collected from their employees for other purposes. Applicable privacy legislation and requirements depend on whether the employer is a public sector or private sector employer.

Summary

According to the BC provincial government, the new legislation is intended to help close the gender pay gap by addressing systemic discrimination in the workplace.

While most BC employers will not have to comply with the new reporting requirements this year, most of the Act is now in force. BC Employers should become familiar with the proposed reporting requirements and consider how they will approach the collection and reporting of this information when the time comes.

Recruitment and hiring practices will need to be updated prior to November 1, 2023, in order to ensure compliance with new job posting requirements and restrictions on what information may be requested in the recruitment process.

For further information please visit: www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/gender-equity/pay-transparency-laws-in-bc

Chemistry Consulting will continue to monitor any further legislative changes.  Should you require support with updating your recruiting programs, policies or employment contracts, or creating a communication plan for your workforce, please contact us today.

Chemistry Consulting Group offers HR consulting services to clients across Canada.  We have consultants based in Vancouver, Victoria, Nanaimo, Toronto and Montreal with virtual services offered in all other cities.

Chemistry Consulting Group provides Professional Recruitment services that offer a range of solutions to help businesses find and hire the best candidates. These services utilize the skills of our certified recruitment specialists who identify and attract top talent.  Chemistry Consulting Group also offers value-added services such as background checks, skills assessments, employment agreement development, salary negotiations, and onboarding support to ensure a smooth transition for new hires. By leveraging our extensive networks and industry expertise, our professional recruitment services can significantly streamline the hiring process and improve the quality of hires.

Contact us today!

The Art of Retention: Strategies for Keeping Key Personnel in Your Organization

Aug 14, 2023

By Judith Mewhort, Managing Partner, Montridge Advisory Group Ltd.

The challenges that employers have faced over the last three years have been extraordinary.  Having survived the Covid-19 pandemic,  business owners and human resource directors now must adapt to a partially or fully remote workforce, quiet quitting, a rise in mental health concerns, a desire for greater flexibility, and so much more.  The shift in the concerns of workers worldwide has made it increasingly difficult to retain staff and none more so than your key people.

So what is an organization to do? The answer may surprise you. In a survey from Employ, 1200 HR decision makers and recruiters stated the number one reason people left their organization was for more money (37.1%). However, a recent article in Leaders Magazine, citing several surveys, concluded that while employees state that better pay is important, it ranks tenth, not first! Resolving the disconnect between what organizations feel is the key to retention versus what employees express is important to them could be a significant factor in your company’s future success.

So what are the areas that are important to workers and even more so to your senior people:

  • Purpose and mission
  • Alignment between their personal values and the company’s culture
  • Opportunities for advancement
  • Flexibility regarding hours of work as well as taking leave
  • Growth and development opportunities
  • Impact and influence over critical changes

So what are the things your organization can do to improve retention?

Be Clear About Your Firm’s Reason For Being 

This is more than a slogan. This is the embodiment of your values and how you demonstrate those values over time. To get it truly right, strategies, goals, tasks, and the work environment must reflect those values in large and small ways. For example, at Montridge, our Mission is “To support our clients in caring for the physical, emotional, and financial well-being of their employees”. Therefore, our work culture must reflect that mission not only for our clients but for our own employees. To help the well-being of our employees, we have implemented flexible work hours, a generous vacation allowance, a hybrid working model, and financial support. Our mission shows up in a variety of ways including an adaptable leave policy and adjustable working hours that enable people to pick up children from school or to take elderly parents to medical appointments.

When you look at your organization’s mission, is it supported at all levels of your firm in both small and large ways?  If not, you likely have some work to do.

Nurture and Promote From Within

Promoting from within often garners increased loyalty which is one of the keys to retaining staff.  It is important that employees understand the steps necessary to move forward in their career path, such as goals to be met, courses to be taken, and skills to be demonstrated. Leadership needs to provide regular, meaningful feedback and ensure that skill and technical development is part of the nurturing and training of the next generation of management and leaders.

In addition to providing a clear road map to career advancement, it is vital that unconscious bias or discrimination doesn’t get in the way of promoting people. Your organization will lose excellent people who become frustrated and discouraged if they are overlooked due to our human tendency to want to be around others that look like or think like us.

If your organization is smaller with a relatively flat hierarchy promoting from within is still possible. It’s more about providing interesting work and offering new challenges for those that want them more than a new title.  However, be prepared to offer additional compensation or other perks when increasing job duties or responsibilities. Piling on more work without recognition and reward is a surefire way to a rapid exit.

In addition, there is often a longer timeline to leadership roles within a smaller organization due to fewer positions but the ability to have a greater impact on a firm’s trajectory will be rewarding in and of itself for the right candidate provided that there is a forward movement for their career path and the company.

Offer Professional Development Opportunities

Fresh ideas and the ability to share challenges, problems, and successes with colleagues in the same industry or profession can bring a fresh perspective and new energy to your management team. Industry conferences, working groups, courses, and working toward designations or degrees can be incredibly powerful. Developing new skills improves technical abilities but also provides employees with a confidence boost and can enhance problem-solving abilities.

When markets change or growth slows, professional development or travel is often an area in which firms cut back. While this can be a sensible approach in market downturns, it can come at the cost of slower long-term growth. Employee turnover is expensive.  Losing key people even more so. Be careful not to reduce expenditures that are central to retention, training, and promotion in the long term as a way to bump the bottom line in the short term.

Ensure Transparent Communication Both Up and Down the Reporting Hierarchy

The importance of clear, bi-directional communication cannot be overstated. When plans and strategies only travel in a downward direction with little or no meaningful input from those on the front line or nearest to the problem, the result is frustration, feeling undervalued, and being overlooked.

Not being heard or having one’s ideas co-opted by another may be the fastest way to having your best, most engaged people leave your business.

In larger organizations, a structured hierarchy can have many benefits but cross-pollination of ideas is not one of them. Ensure that there are both formal and informal ways to have information and ideas transmitted. Make sure that there are regular check-ins for key people with both their reports and those that supervise their growth and development.   When adopting new ideas, new technology, or new divisions, make sure that all the stakeholders are present and providing input, and the feedback of those on the frontlines be incorporated into the planning.

Offer Benefits Tailored to the Needs of Your People

Benefits and compensation are the go-to when employers are looking at recruitment and retention strategies. It makes sense, as 80% of potential hires consider compensation and the quality of benefits when weighing job opportunities. But the key to retention for senior people lies with aligning your benefits to support your mission and values as well as ensuring that the benefits on offer resonate and provide a degree of customization and individualization.

There is a tendency within organizations to want to treat everyone the same. Unfortunately, a plan that treats everyone the same is not equitable as the needs of individuals at various points in their careers differ. One of the best ways to find out what appeals to your key people is to ask them. Survey your key people to find out what their priorities are and be prepared to adjust benefits and compensation to suit their needs. Flexibility can be built into an existing framework through a variety of methods without creating a discriminatory situation. Allowing you people to tailor their total compensation to suit their individual needs whether it is enhanced leave, greater retirement contributions, more support for family, or support for charitable causes will go a long way to improving their perception of your organization as one that cares about them as an individual and values their role in your company thus increasing loyalty and productivity.

One additional word of caution is to ensure that compensation to your current key staff is equal to or better than anything you would offer to attract a new hire for the same position.  With compensation transparency legislation in force or planned for many jurisdictions, existing staff can easily determine if your organization is more interested in attracting new talent than retaining those already contributing to the success of your firm.

Manage Change Well

As companies grow, change is necessary for survival. The next generation of leaders needs to be involved in creating and leading that change and not simply left to implement policy after the fact.

When managing change, it is very important that people at all levels of the organization understand the reasons change is necessary, what the nature of the change will be, the plan to implement and follow through on the proposed change, how the process will be communicated, and how roadblocks will be dealt with as they arise. It is especially important that key people are armed with the necessary communication tools to convey their ideas, concerns, and frustrations but also those of their direct reports and frontline workers.

Companies need to be open to, and have a process for encouraging key people to propose and champion new ideas and processes. Ambitious, curious, and driven key people will leave an environment that is stagnating. Conversely, many companies are guilty of chasing the next shiny new thing without working through the recommended steps in the change management process or abandoning the change part way through the process. Stagnation or change for the sake of change are both surefire ways to lose your best and brightest.

Conclusion

As with many things in life, complex problems have simple, easy-to-understand wrong answers. When considering retention strategies for your key personnel, it is not enough to simply consider enhancements to compensation and benefits. While those are both important for your senior people – or those who wish to be – it is all the other more complex and harder to define elements that are key to retention.

Employer Branding Starts Here

Jun 6, 2023

By Vivo Team

The best  brand ambassadors for your company are already sitting at the table! Your employees shape your culture, demonstrate your values, and live your vision and mission everyday.

“What’s important for me, as leader of the company, is I want to make sure that everybody can embrace our core values. That I too want to be a creator. I want to be a leader. And I want to be a champion. If we can all align with that, then we’ve got something to build on.”

– Renée Safrata, Founder and CEO, Vivo Team

Here are some ways to facilitate ongoing alignment to your employer value proposition.

Accountability to the Vision, Mission, and Values

With good leaders and managers that are tightly connected around their accountabilities, you will have an equation for success. Be accountable to your values, your vision, and your mission. Accountability isn’t a one-and-done. It’s all about ongoing alignment.

Here, Renée expressed: “I want my employees to be able to achieve our vision, mission, and values in their day-to-day and in their career achievement with us.”

Behaviors demonstrate accountability, so it’s important to behave in a way that supports and reinforces your vision, your dreams, and your aspirations.

One way we do this at Vivo Team is on a weekly basis, we provide feedback to one another in response to the question: “What are the behaviors that I, or others, demonstrated that align with our values?” It keeps our coast-to-coast hybrid team aligned and accountable!

Whether you do this in a regular meeting, during Friday afternoon “happy hour” or have a dedicated slack channel, regular interactive feedback should be a systematic practice within organizations.

Norms and Transparency

Just because it’s obvious to you doesn’t mean it is to everyone! By agreeing to a set of behavioral norms, teams increase productivity and engagement significantly.

Clearly outline the types of behaviors that are expected of existing and new employees. Do you have email norms? Meeting norms? A particular way files are stored and shared? Make sure these things are clearly laid out and that everyone understands and is aligned.

Increasing digital visibility among your team boosts productivity and reduces stress. At Vivo Team, we have access to everyone’s calendars, and everyone does a daily check-in on our internal communication platform (we use Slack). This makes planning meeting times a breeze because you know who’s available when. Also, by checking in each day, you won’t have to spend time and energy wondering where people are or what they’re working on.

Create Connection

Being in the same building doesn’t ensure employee connection; the key is really about developing a thriving company culture.

During onboarding, we ensure that every member of the team books our new team member for a casual get-to-know-you chat. They also get invited to participate in internal weekly training sessions on our core teachings to build their knowledge and connections.

We have tools and techniques embedded at the start (check-ins) and end (appreciation, difficulty, final statement) of every meeting to help build connection and increase interactive feedback.

Here are other workplace activity ideas that promote connection:

  • Share and celebrate wins, often—even the small stuff!
  • Plan weekly development meetups to stir the creativity and collaboration juices, where smaller groups work on learning something new together.
  • Assign a mentor to new employees for 30-minute chats once every week or two.

Walk the Walk

The words used to describe your company to current and potential future employees are certainly important, but behaviors speak volumes. Focus on the behaviors you, your leaders, and your teams demonstrate on a regular basis and prioritize them, ensuring that they align with your core values.

Since your employees are your unofficial recruiters and marketers, set them up for success to be able to communicate your company’s employer value proposition by incorporating into the day-to-day culture of the organization.

Refreshing Benefit Offerings to Attract and Retain the Modern Worker

Apr 12, 2023

By Damien Lacey, Marketing Coordinator, Montridge Advisory Group Ltd.

With the world of work continuing to evolve, business owners need to adapt their benefit offerings to attract and retain modern workers. Demographics are changing, workplaces are becoming more diverse, and the impact of technology is greater than ever before. Employees are looking for benefits that keep up with and match their needs and personal preferences. In this article we look at the importance of refreshing benefit offerings with the goal of attracting and retaining the modern worker.

The Landscape of the Modern Workforce & Remaining Competitive

The modern landscape of the working world has undergone a significant transformation over the past decade, and as a result of the pandemic, the traditional office-based work culture has undergone even further changes. Workers are no longer limited to working from the office or their homes, as technology has enabled them to work from anywhere. This has given rise to new challenges for organizations looking to attract and retain top talent. Companies that fail to adapt to these changes and refresh their benefit offerings risk losing their competitive edge in the market.

Simply put, refreshing benefit offerings is a key component to your overall strategy. With all these changing components in the modern workforce meeting workers needs and preferences must be done. If you are not first, then you are last. What does that mean? You don’t attract talent and time after time you lose employees to organizations with better benefits on offer.

With employees working from home or across different time zones, flexibility has become a critical factor in their decision-making process. Benefits such as flexible schedules, telecommuting options, and access to wellness programs can help organizations attract and retain top talent. In addition, employers must also ensure that their benefits align with the needs of their diverse workforce, including women, minorities, and LGBTQ+ individuals.

As the workforce becomes more geographically dispersed, companies must consider how their benefit offerings can be delivered to workers regardless of their location. For example, virtual wellness programs, digital mental health support, and telemedicine services can provide workers with access to vital services irrespective of their location. It is also important to consider the legislative and regulatory challenges when workers relocate to another province or another country either temporarily or permanently. Special consideration should be given to relocated workers to ensure their coverage remains in place. This may mean simply updating the insurer, but it may also mean the need for different types of coverage for those working abroad.

Why Refreshing Benefit Offerings Is Important

One of the primary reasons for refreshing benefit offerings is to keep up with changing demographics. As the workforce continues to become more diverse, employers need to offer benefits that cater to the unique needs and preferences of different groups. For instance, younger workers may value benefits such as flexible work arrangements and professional development opportunities, while older workers may prioritize health and retirement benefits. With five generations in the workforce, this balancing act can be tricky.

In today’s world, workers are accustomed to fast, individualised service. There is an expectation among workers that benefits should be customized for their own situation and delivered in the same efficient manner as an Amazon package. This means that benefit plans need to be flexible, offer a variety of ways to access information, submit claims, and utilize services. For example, some people may wish to access counselling services in person. Others are fine with a digital or telephonic appointment. While certain people prefer text messaging. While it may be impossible to know which of your people prefer which method, being able to offer multiple modalities for the same service is key. The other key is to ensure that your people truly understand what is available and how to access it.

Another reason for refreshing benefit offerings is to stay competitive in the job market. Today’s employees have more choices than ever before when it comes to job opportunities. Offering a comprehensive benefits package can help an organization stand out in a crowded job market and attract top talent. Additionally, offering unique and innovative benefits can differentiate an organization from its competitors and give it a competitive edge.

Examples of Refreshing Benefit Offerings

There are many ways that organizations can refresh their benefit offerings to meet the needs of the modern workforce. Some examples include:

  1. Flexible Work Arrangements: Offering flexible work arrangements, such as remote work, unlimited paid time off, or flexible schedules can be a significant benefit for employees who value work-life balance and autonomy.
  2. Professional Development Opportunities: Providing professional development opportunities, such as training programs or tuition reimbursement, can be a significant benefit for employees who value career growth and development.
  3. Health and Wellness Benefits: Offering health and wellness benefits, such as gym memberships, mental health support, or healthy food options, can be a significant benefit for employees who prioritize their health and well-being.

Conclusion

Work is no longer what we initially imagined it to be. Workers are coming into the office, working from home, or even a bit of both. Teams no longer feature individuals in the local area but can branch across the country and even internationally. With a drive to attract and retain top talent, organizations should be considering how they can refresh their benefit offerings to meet the needs of their workers today.

Leadership Development – You Reap What You Sow.

Feb 13, 2023

By Ashli Komaryk, MBA, ACC, Associate Consultant, Chemistry Consulting Group

Each new addition to your leadership team represents a significant investment.

It’s a bit like gardening, actually. When you add a new plant to your garden you need to water it, make sure it has enough light, and maybe even add some supplemental nutrients or fertilizer for it to thrive.

Leadership Development is a highly effective nutrient to keep your new hire growing, blossoming, and evermore engaged.

Your investment starts with the time spent by an external recruiter or by your internal HR team on recruitment and selection. More time and effort is invested in the hiring process, and hopefully, on a thorough onboarding. Your new hire will need some time to integrate and acclimate as they go through your initial training and orientation, making connections and finding their place. In a supportive environment, they will quickly discover the best way to contribute to the team and to the organization’s success.

Terrific! Now how do you retain this great new member of your team and start generating some return on that initial investment?

What type of Leadership Development Program is right for you?

One size does NOT fit all.

Teams are made up of members with a variety of personality styles, learning preferences and differing types of tasks. Why wouldn’t you want a Leadership Development Program that takes that in to account and is as adaptable as your leaders need to be? Talk to your training provider about customization options. Choosing a rigid, prescriptive training model may risk alienating some participants – so if those were plants in your yard, you’d be aiming your watering hose onto the sidewalk.

Key Elements of your Leadership Development Program

A large part of Leadership revolves around the sophisticated art of persuasion. So, your Leadership Development program should touch on topics such as Emotional Intelligence, communication skills and listening skills.

Equipping your Leaders with the skills to understand diverse personality styles is just as essential.

Consider incorporating a personality assessment tool as part of your program. While there are many options available, DiSC® is one of the most popular and effective tools because of its powerfully simple yet intuitive format.

Debriefing the assessment report generated by DiSC®, provides a leader with deep insights about their personal communication style, needs, behaviours and priorities. This self-awareness is the first step toward understanding those elements in others and thus building better relationships and more productive teams.

In today’s globalized, multicultural workplace it’s more important than ever before to know how to leverage diversity to achieve a competitive advantage.

Inclusion

A quick review of different leadership styles and of the various sources of influence within an organization reminds us that anyone at any level can be a leader. You don’t need a fancy title or a big office to be a leader whom others follow. Those informal leaders set the tone and maintain your organization’s culture. Those charismatic experts up and down the org chart are your top performers, your high-potential contributors and your leadership succession-planning pipeline.

Therefore, to protect your investment in your people and to ensure it yields rich dividends, it makes sense to deliver appropriate Leadership Development programs at several levels of your company – just as you would tend with care to all the elements of your garden so they all grow well and bear fruit!

Leadership Development as a Powerful Motivator  

The message you’re sending to your team when you offer to enroll them in a leadership (or other) training program is powerful. You’re telling them things like: “you matter to us”, “you’re worth investing in”, “we want you to stay”, “your contribution is important”, “we want to support you as you develop into the best version of yourself”. Even if you’re seeking Leadership Development as a remedial expedient, the messaging can still be constructive.

In his book entitled Drive, thought leader Daniel Pink discusses the power of intrinsic motivators: Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose. Done properly, delivering Leadership Development training to your team will also serve as a powerful intrinsic motivator, building engagement, empowerment, loyalty and retention (Pink, 2011).

Leadership Development as a Bridge to Retention  

The cost of turnover is huge. Some research calculates this cost at an average of six to nine months of the employee’s salary. It can even be as high as 100% to 150% of the departing employee’s salary for highly skilled technical roles (Charaba, 2023). The cost will depend on the role, the loss of productivity, and the amount of time it takes you to find a replacement. If you can curb avoidable turnover, you’re significantly cutting unnecessary costs.

Just as a skilled gardener can detect the early signs of pests or weeds and take action to protect the garden, a skilled leader can detect when team members need added attention or support. A proactive leader will nip issues in the bud before they blossom into major problems that could lead to dysfunctional conflict or resignations.

Cultivating your Garden

At Chemistry, we recognize that your team is a unique constellation of contributors each with their own personality style, learning style, needs and preferences. Our Leadership Development division works with organizational leaders to thoughtfully curate an effective Leadership Development program built to meet the unique needs of your team. Reach out to us today for a conversation about where your team is at and how you want it grow. We’ll plot the course together.

References

Charaba, C. (2023, February 2). Employee retention: The real cost of losing an employee. PeopleKeep. www.peoplekeep.com/blog/employee-retention-the-real-cost-of-losing-an-employee.

Pink, D. H. (2011). Drive. Canongate Books.

Chemistry Consulting Group offers HR consulting services to clients across Canada.  We have consultants based in Vancouver, Victoria, Nanaimo, Toronto and Montreal with virtual services offered in all other cities. We offer a range of solutions tailored to meet the diverse needs of businesses in these regions.

Chemistry Consulting Group offers Leadership Development services that are designed to enhance the skills and capabilities of individuals at various levels within an organization. These services often include personalized coaching, team development programs, and organizational leadership solutions. Chemistry Consulting Group offers a range of services such as leadership training, 360° feedback assessments, and workshops tailored to both individuals and organizations. Additionally, Chemistry Consulting provides comprehensive, research-based leadership development programs that can be customized to fit the unique culture and needs of any organization. These programs aim to broaden mindsets, develop critical leadership skills, and drive transformational change across all levels of leadership.

Contact us today!

Promoting Health and Wellness in the Workplace

Dec 12, 2022

By Damien Lacey, Marketing Coordinator, Montridge Advisory Group Ltd.

When employees feel good, organizations benefit. But this doesn’t happen in a vacuum.

Employees may not be aware of best practices and exactly how to be the best version of themselves from a health and wellness perspective. This is where you as an employer come in.

What is the key for your workplace to create an environment for good habits and healthy choices? Support, support, and more support!

Here are seven measures you can take to enhance your workplace to encourage healthy behaviours and mindfulness to benefit your people’s physical and mental health.

1.  Encourage movement and exercise

It is very easy to sit at your desk all day long with your head stuck in your computer. Encouraging employees to step away from being engrossed in their work stations can do wonders for their health – increased blood flow and energy, improved posture and a clearer mind just to name a few. How about having a timer every 30 minutes that you have to do 60 seconds of exercise like jumping jacks or stretching to counteract the effects of sitting.

2.  Healthy eating habits

Food has a huge impact on our productivity levels. Having policies and best practices at work will help employees be healthier eaters. The changes to do so can be small. People tend to eat healthier in groups, so instead of leaving employees to eat at their desk why not have a designated area in the office or on site and encourage people to eat together.

3.  Educate, Educate, Educate

As the saying goes, we don’t know what we don’t know. It is key to provide resources and information to allow employees to make informed decisions on how they are eating, exercising and living. Bringing in experts to educate your people. Nutritionists, mental health experts, fitness trainers are all examples of great resources to have come in and speak.

4.  Create a wellness team

Designing and managing a health and wellness program is tough.One really effective tool is having a team made up of a cross section of employees from all company levels to help implement, and monitor the plan. Having leaders at various levels, in different departments will increase buy-in and provide effective feedback.

5.  Keep employees connected

Employees don’t like to be isolated. Humans need social interaction. What can you do to ensure this happens?  Keeping in mind that some of your people experience social anxiety.  Have in person office hours, weekly team meetings and opportunities for non-work related interactions such as an  in person or virtual happy hour, hobby clubs such as knitting, or cooking, or hiking. Even having a puzzle on a spare table that people can work on alone or together. Encouraging social interaction has become tougher with the changing work arrangements but it can still be achieved with a little imagination. Ask your team for suggestions.

6.  Create a supportive environment

A workplace culture where employees feel  that you value their health and wellness acts as an incentive to be more proactive. Create an environment which allows employees to flourish. Have healthy food choices in the vending machines, work schedules that allow workers to prioritise exercise, reward health achievements like completing half marathons for example.

7.  Encourage people to stop smoking/vaping

Millennial vaping is at an all time high whilst Canadian manufacturers produced 1.1 billion cigarettes in January 2022 (up 7.5% from last year). Encourage your employees to stop smoking and vaping. Even being in the presence of smokers can have detrimental impacts on your health.

Conclusion

Don’t worry, promoting health and wellness in the workplace doesn’t have to be expensive and really complex. Start with small steps.  Measure what has worked and what hasn’t.  Tweak the plan using feedback from your people and build on your successes. When you make this a priority, your employees will work harder for you.

Developing the Modern Learner

Oct 12, 2022

By Renée Safrata, Founder and CEO, Vivo Team

The leadership training industry has proliferated, with the rise of online, hybrid, and live, virtual instructor-led training. In a saturated field, what do you look for? How do you know what’s right for you and your teams and leaders?

Today, the “modern learner”, as Josh Bersin, Principal and Founder of Bersin by Deloitte describes, is impatient, distracted, and overwhelmed. The modern attention span is fractured at best–“most learners won’t watch videos longer than four minutes” (Bersin).

With 66% of knowledge workers claiming they don’t have time to do their work (The Modern Learner infographic), frequent interruptions (as often as once every 5 minutes!), and a 5-10 second window to catch one’s attention online (Bersin), catering to the infinitely distracted, impatient, and overwhelmed is more important than ever before.

So whether you’d like to accept it or not, successfully harnessing the meaningful and mindful attention of your employees and team(s) requires active and deliberate effort, response, and understanding. You have to be ready, willing, and prepared to course correct, adapt, and change with the times.

It’s essential that your leadership/management training takes these elements into consideration and is designed for the modern learner; otherwise, your investment will become just another item on your employees’ never-ending “To Do” lists, and another factor fueling this always-on, overwhelmed state of “I’m too busy”.

Vivo Team, under the guidance and research of EVP, Dr. Jim Sellner, has spent the last 10+ years developing the ideal methodology; it is simple, and three-fold: (1) diagnose, (2) train, and (3) track. This approach enables measurable performance and outcomes.

We use people analytics; live, virtual instructor-led training (Live VILT); and spaced learning to ensure the modern learner is present, engaged, and activated.

Here are a few of our top leadership training best practices that engage the modern learner to increase the impact of people development and business results.

People analytics in learning and development (L&D) provides insight into the efficiency of your talent and workplace culture by clearly illustrating what is working and what areas need improvement.

“People analytics in L&D provides the data you need to measure the growth, development, and successes of your team and/or leader development programs and coaching. This should be done in terms of behaviors and dollars (by measuring a decrease in the cost of lost productivity).

People analytics in L&D is highly accurate in diagnosing the effects of behaviors on teams. That’s why people analytics in L&D is so important!”

– Dr. Jim Sellner, PhD, EVP People Analytics and Talent Activation, Vivo Team

Live VILT is dynamic, engaged, and most importantly, two-way. Guided in real time, this instructor-led training and coaching is tailored to your specific needs, with leaders and their teams learning together.

A spaced-learning approach allows training to fit seamlessly into the workday (supporting the needs and preferences of the modern learner). Learning in this way–via a series of short, intense training sessions punctuated by a deliberate break in the learning–is highly effective, and better yet, research-based! With this approach, when training reconvenes, the learning objectives are repeated so there is no lag time; learners can see change by practicing and implementing their training right away. Gone are the one-off, multiple day, 8 hour training sessions of the past!

Like Bersin explains, the modern learner has come to expect “accessible, interactive learning experiences anytime, anywhere and on any device.”

The high demand on modern learners (i.e., YOUR employees and team members) must be critically considered and remain top-of-mind. If your learning and development leadership/management programs and platforms don’t take this into consideration, your company’s bottom line will suffer just as well as your team cohesion and collaboration.

Don’t let digital be a divide. Be open, accepting, and willing to adapt to the ever-evolving modern learner and you’ll get results and have the data to prove it.

Keep these leadership/management training best practices in mind and you’ll be sure to have a workforce that doesn’t fall behind!

Reference

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/meet-modern-learner-cristina-brembilla

About Renée Safrata, Founder & CEO, Vivo Team

Over the past 30+ years Renée Safrata has worked with thousands of companies and executives throughout North America and Europe, helping them to connect, adopt new behaviors, and become confident members of highly functioning teams. As Founder and CEO, she oversees Vivo Team’s full spectrum learning experience, develops leaders and teams through live, online training, coaching, and people analytics.

About Vivo Team

Watch your workplace culture and profitability soar! Vivo Team’s full spectrum learning experience develops competence, motivation, and collaboration among your leaders and teams through live, online training, coaching, and people analytics. The content and format are based on the latest, proven research in learning and development.