People: Employee Engagement and Retention

To maximize senior leadership support of action to be taken on the results of a recent climate survey, which is the most important message for the HR manager to deliver?

Advise leadership to acknowledge strengths and weaknesses in practices and identify priority areas to focus on.

Equitable compensation

Aligns compensation with external market value and internal strategic value; ensures equity internally (with employees performing the same job).

Competitive pay

Attracts qualified job candidates

5 Types of Culture

Authoritarian Mechanistic Participative Learning High Performance

Which appraisal method describes examples of desirable and undesirable behavior?

Behaviorally anchored rating scale (BARS)

what are the two Performance standards

Behaviors - What the organization wants the employees to do. Results - What the organization wants the employees to produce or deliver.

the benefits of creating a corporate alumni network for the organization include:

Branding New business Industry intelligence Boomerangs Employee referrals

SHRM has put together a list of categories and activities HR professionals can use in measuring and analyzing employee engagement.. What are they?

Career development Relationship with management Compensation and benefits Work environment

Leadership characteristics Employee Engagement

Cares deeply about employees Clearly communicates corporate goals Is trustworthy

methods available for conducting an appraisal

Category rating methods Comparative methods Narrative methods management by objectives (MBO) behaviorally anchored rating scale (BARS)

Participative Culture

Collaborative decision making and group problem solving are embraced. Employees actively participate in the decision-making or goal-setting processes.

an engagement strategy should specify how engagement efforts will be sustained over time. Research and best practices suggest the following:

Commit long-term Measure consistently Connect engagement to business results Seek employee input Gain leadership support

To Increase Commitment - Strategic Compensation

Competitive pay: Attracts qualified job candidates. Equitable exchange: Signals commitment reciprocity. Flexible benefits and perquisites: Facilitate commitment congruence (e.g., work/family balance matched to stage of life). Retirement and seniority-graded pay plans: Foster long-term commitment and identification with the company.

A manager asks the HR manager to help with retaining a high-potential employee. Which of the following recommendations would best address this request?

Conduct a stay interview with the employee to identify job satisfiers and dissatisfiers that can be addressed.

What must HR do to overcome the biggest challenge in implementing an effective workplace flexibility strategy?

Confirm that the immediate supervisor understands the requirements of the work role and its duties.

To Increase Commitment - Job Enrichment

Connect employee jobs with the organization's strategy. Recruit internally for job openings.

Which is an example of a manager's behavior that drives employee engagement?

Considering the consistency of a candidate's preferences with the organization's practices before offering employment

Examples of Work/Life Programs

Convenience/ concierge services Employee assistance/ development programs Family assistance programs Flexible work arrangements Leave of absence Total working hours Wellness programs

What does an effective RJP do?

Dispels unrealistic expectations and accurately represents organizational realities. Promotes a healthy exchange between the applicant and the organization. Encourages self-selection. Helps increase job satisfaction. Helps prevent disappointments. Reduces post-entry stress. Reduces employee turnover.

Managing Effective Survey Programs

Do not conduct a survey unless you are convinced that your leadership team is committed to listening to and acting on feedback. Partner with a consulting firm. Set the stage. Invite your survey consultant to deliver the survey summary to your top leadership team. Establish a cross-sectional committee to review overall company results and to make recommendations to management. At a micro level, establish a local cross-sectional subcommittee to review local results. Have local committees adopt a common action plan template, and consider posting all plans on your intranet to encourage the sharing of best practices, collaboration, and consistency. Keep it simple and execute flawlessly. Plan your follow-up feedback mechanism.

Leaders of a new high tech organization are seeking HR's expertise in retaining their highly skilled workforce, especially as the organization expands. When should HR start the employee retention strategies and practices?

During the organization's branding and recruitment efforts

ELC Integration

During this phase, the employee gains access to information and tools required for the job and settles into the position. The employee also becomes familiar with the organizational culture, coworkers, and management.

ELC

Employee Life Cycle

Absorption

Employees are fully concentrated on and completely engrossed in their work.

Dedication

Employees are involved in their work and have a sense of pride and enthusiasm about it.

Vigor

Employees show high levels of energy and invest effort into their work.

Which is most likely to occur when an organization's strategic plan is focused on creating an environment that promotes positive relations between employees and management and seeks to balance the needs of employees with those of the organization?

Employees will feel a greater sense of loyalty and will be more productive.

To Increase Engagement - Strategic Compensation

Equitable compensation: Aligns compensation with external market value and internal strategic value; Pay for performance: Focuses employees' attention on incentivized behaviors; depending on how performance is defined, can have unintended consequences. Competency-based pay: Fosters acquisition of knowledge and skills and enhances employees' performance, satisfaction, and self-efficacy.

Pay for performance

Focuses employees' attention on incentivized behaviors; depending on how performance is defined, can have unintended consequences.

In order to help shape the company's strategic goals, the CEO asks the HR director to implement policies and processes that encourage employees to take the initiative in suggesting and developing ways to improve customer relationships. Which organizational culture is the CEO seeking to establish?

High-performance

Administered on an individual or group basis, effective performance appraisals can:

Improve productivity through constructive feedback. Identify training and developmental needs. Communicate expectations. Foster commitment and mutual understanding.

When developing employee engagement surveys, organizations should consider the following guidelines:

Include questions that could be asked every year. Keep language neutral or positive. Focus on behaviors. Beware of loaded and uninformative questions. Keep the survey length reasonable. Ask for a few written comments. Consider doing more than one type of survey, each with different questions, frequencies, and audiences.

To Increase Engagement - Job Enrichment

Incorporate meaning, variety, autonomy, and coworker respect into jobs.

Which is a benefit of conducting stay interviews as opposed to exit interviews?

Information from stay interviews enables proactive HR steps.

A manager wants to implement a paid-time-off program for employees to volunteer in their local communities. What is the best way to respond to his request?

Initiate a joint management-employee committee to develop a policy for this type of program.

Work itself Employee Engagement

Is connected to organization's strategy Is challenging and meaningful

Employee engagement

It is an outcome-driven concept—Employees' emotional commitment to an organization, demonstrated by their willingness to put in discretionary effort to promote the organization's effective functioning.

Which of the following drivers of employee engagement is consistent in workplaces globally?

Job role that encompasses opportunities for professional and career growth

Implementation of work/life programs can be affected by:

Laws Labor relations Organizational culture National cultures Maturity of the organization Market practice Expectations and needs of employees Level of formalized human resource management—

Key Areas of Employee Engagement

Leadership characteristics Team practices Organizational values Work itself

To Increase Commitment - Performance and Career Management

Manage performance to: Enable employees to experience success over the long term. Facilitate work/life balance. Value the expertise of experienced employees.

A U.S. engineering firm has recently merged with an international company. With the change in leadership, management is worried that employees will begin leaving the organization. As HR prepares managers for their new international roles, what should HR recommend management focus on to have the greatest impact on employee retention?

Manager-employee relationships by working with each employee to understand his or her role

To Increase Engagement - Learning and Development

Offer skill development training to increase job performance, satisfaction, and self-efficacy.

HR at a professional services organization needs to assess employee interest in a possible new benefit quickly. Which is the best vehicle HR should use?

Online survey

Learning Culture

Organizational conventions, values, practices, and processes encourage individuals—and the organization as a whole—to increase knowledge, competence, and performance. Shared and continuous learning are embraced.

Leaders of a manufacturing company are updating the strategic business plan. HR is consulting with the branch managers on how to accomplish the plan's goals. What is the most essential driver of the performance management process that HR should have managers focus on during individual performance planning?

Organizational strategy and business objectives

HR notes an emerging trend among responses to the annual employee survey. Employees have shared that they do not have any interaction with leadership and that they feel disconnected from organizational goals. What process is lacking at this organization?

Performance management

Towers Watson defines well-being as encompassing three different aspects of employee health:

Physical—overall health, stamina, energy Psychological—levels of stress, optimism, confidence, control Social—work relationships, work/life balance, equity, respect, connectedness

Authoritarian Culture

Power resides with top-level management. Employees have no involvement in the decision-making or goal-setting processes.

Role of HR in Employee Recognition

Promote a strategic recognition program. Tie recognition programs to corporate values. Encourage corporate spending on employee recognition.

Benefits of Surveys

Provide a direct means of assessing employee attitudes that would otherwise be unreported. Improve employee relations by signaling to employees that their views are considered important. Increase levels of employee trust—if results are acted upon. Improve the satisfaction levels of customers—happy employees can translate to happy customers. Detect early warning signs of workforce problems and/or sources of conflict.

Performance appraisals accomplish three purposes:

Provide feedback and counseling Help in allocating rewards and opportunities Help in determining employees' aspirations and planning developmental needs

To Increase Engagement - Performance and Career Management

Provide: Challenging goals that align with the company's strategic objectives. Positive feedback and recognition for accomplishments. Appraisal methods free of bias. Recognition and appreciation for extra voluntary contributions.

Measures of employee performance include:

Quality. How well the work is performed and/or how accurate or how effective the final product is. Quantity. How much work is produced. Timeliness. How quickly, when, or by what date the work is produced. Cost-effectiveness. Dollar savings to the organization or working within a budget.

On its website, the HR department posts a video that showcases the company's culture and features interviews with employees about their experience with the company. Which employee engagement practice does this demonstrate?

Realistic job preview

Equitable exchange

Receive something equal to what is given - Signals commitment reciprocity.

What are the 4 phases of Employee Life Cycle?

Recruitment Integration Development Transition

Due to a significant increase in head count, a company is in the process of changing its performance management system. Which of the following activities should the HR director consider when evaluating the new system?

Review the alignment of the system with the organization's strategic goals.

Competency-based pay

Rewards individuals for the capabilities they demonstrate and acquire. Fosters acquisition of knowledge and skills and enhances employees' performance, satisfaction, and self-efficacy.

Aon Hewitt engagement model categorizes engagement outcomes as

Say—Speak positively about the organization to coworkers, potential employees, and customers. Stay—Have an intense sense of belonging and a desire to be a part of the organization. Strive—Are motivated and exert effort toward success in their job and for the company.

An organization conducts a confidential survey of employees to assess workplace satisfaction. Responses are received from 75% of employees, and, after analyzing comments, management requires mandatory retraining of all supervisors. What important step has the organization omitted?

Sharing feedback with stakeholders

Employee turnover is on the rise, and management is looking for cost-effective ways to stop this trend by improving employee engagement. Which manager action can make an immediate improvement without affecting the budget?

Show gratitude to employees by thanking them.

To Increase Commitment - Learning and Development

Signal commitment reciprocity by: Company investment in training. Modes of training delivery that accommodate employees' other commitments.

A new chief HR director joins an organization and discovers that it lacks a robust performance management framework. After weighing the various performance process gaps, which is the first step the director should take to begin building a new framework? Answers

Solicit leadership support to align the organization's business goals, objectives, and performance standards with individual employee goals.

ELC Transition

Specific activities during this phase are dependent upon the type of transition (e.g., resignation, firing, transfer, promotion, demotion, or retirement).

High-performance Culture

Talent is championed. Innovation, elevated performance, customer-centric strategies, relationships, communication, and other characteristics are driven from the bottom up.

Mechanistic Culture

Tasks and responsibilities are defined clearly to the employees and shaped by formal rules and standard operating procedures. Communication processes follow the direction given by the organization. Accountability is a key factor.

ELC Recruitment

The employer-employee relationship is initiated

In the final round of hiring, an employer invites candidates to spend half a day working alongside an employee and an hour with HR reviewing total rewards and company policies. The employees who work with the candidates are chosen because of their tenure with the company and their strong performance ratings. The employees may or may not be performing the job that is being filled. This practice has not increased retention levels. What might be wrong?

The job preview may not be realistic.

Four drivers of engagement appear to be consistent among employees around the world:

The work itself, including opportunities for development Confidence and trust in leadership Recognition and rewards Organizational communication that is delivered in a timely and orderly way

performance appraisal

This process measures the degree to which an employee accomplishes work requirements.

What are the 3 primary objectives of an RJP?

To give candidates as much information as possible so that they can make an informed decision about their suitability for the job To allow the organization the opportunity to portray the job objectively—including both favorable and unfavorable aspects To increase the potential of a good match between the candidate and the organization

ELC Development

To promote engagement and retention, the organization invests time and resources in the employee's development. As necessary, the employee participates in internal training and external professional training programs funded by the organization. HR and management typically work collaboratively with the employee to develop performance objectives and goals in conjunction with performance evaluation frameworks or systems.

behaviorism theory of B. F. Skinner

To strengthen a behavior (ensure its recurrence), an employer could provide: Positive reinforcement or adding something valued Negative reinforcement or removing something disliked

Which type of engagement can present risks to employees' well-being and to the sustainability of their engagement and performance?

Transactional

Team practices Employee Engagement

Understands customers Excels at strategy Rewards employees for adding value

Transactional engagement

Undesirable form of engagement - employees appear engaged by working longer hours, but do not think in an engaged way. Negative well- being outcomes. Employees need to act and think engaged for positive well-being outcomes.

In a learning culture, how should an HR director respond to a manager who wants to discipline an employee for failing to secure a new account using an unproven sales methodology?

Use the failure as a growth opportunity to reinforce employee learning, and acknowledge that failure is not wrong.

Organizational values Employee Engagement

Values employees Is customer-focused Gives back to employees and society

Organizations can do realistic job previewing in a variety of ways. A few examples are:

Videos about the organization and its brand. Tours of the workplace (virtual or walk-throughs). Interviews with future coworkers. Job-related videos. Simulations that replicate working conditions. A simple but wise saying applies to realistic job previewing: It pays to tell the truth.

In looking to engage employees globally, employers should:

View global HR decisions in the context of national culture. Use valid research—not stereotypes—to align HR practices for a local population with actual employee attitudes and perceptions. Remember that the norm for engagement varies widely from country to country, making it critical to have data on national norms to interpret employee surveys correctly.

Employee turnover is generally classified as:

Voluntary Involuntary

organizational commitment

a desire to stay with the organization in the future

Recognition

addresses employees' psychological needs—the desire for approval and distinction, for growth and advancement

employee survey

an instrument used to collect and assess employee attitudes on and perceptions of the work environment

engendering

an undesirable form of engagement—transactional engagement—where employees appear engaged, for example, by working longer hours and even responding as such in engagement surveys, but are not actually engaged.

realistic job preview

any part of the selection process that provides an applicant with honest and complete information about a job and the work environment—a clear picture of what a job will be like if the applicant is hired.

Employee attitude surveys

attempt to determine employees' perceptions of such topics as company culture and company image, the quality of management, the effectiveness of compensation and benefits programs, organizational communication and involvement issues, diversity, and safety and health concerns.

Trait engagement

describes the inherent personality-based elements that make an individual predisposed to being engaged—a natural curiosity, a desire to be involved, an interest in problem solving. These traits may figure into recruiting and hiring efforts.

Two of the most established tools for identifying what matters to employees are

employee engagement surveys stay interviews

stay interviews

employees discuss why they like (or do not like) their current job. Stay interviews also help to assess the degree of employee satisfaction and engagement that exists in a department and/or organization.

Employee engagement surveys

focus on employees' level of job satisfaction, commitment, and morale. Survey questions or statements should explicitly link to business objectives.

Behavioral engagement

is evident in the effort employees put into their jobs, which leads to greater value, creating higher performance than from their less-engaged counterparts. It can occur when both trait and state engagement are present.

State engagement

is influenced by workplace conditions or practices (e.g., task variety, opportunities to participate in work decisions) that can be improved through organizational interventions directly under management's control.

Reward

may be seen as more transactional—the various financial and nonfinancial benefits for which superior performance can be exchanged.

Employee turnover

occurs when employees leave an organization. Employees leave organizations for a variety of reasons

Managers are ______________________components of employee engagement.

one of the most important

RJP

realistic job preview

Employee opinion surveys

tend to measure important data on specific issues. These surveys may seek to gain opinions on specific processes an employee performs, safety procedures, or some other issue the employer may be evaluating or considering.

Retention

the ability to keep talented employees in the organization. Organizations aspire to keep high performers and to exit the low performers.

Performance management

the process of maintaining or improving employee job performance. It involves the use of performance assessment tools