How to Retain Your Remote Workforce Webinar – Data Dome & Live Tiles

Today’s environment requires a remote workforce to ensure business success. In this webinar, LiveTiles President, Dan Diefendorf, is joined by our President, Lisa Bouchard, who shares how to ensure employee success long after on-boarding and drive adoption for the tools that you have provided for the long run.

Grab a coffee, sit back and gain:

• The 3 key factors that are proven to help retain employees: clarity, connection and confidence
• Ways you can personalize communications and wellness initiatives to keep your workforce in the loop with company news and initiatives.
• Real uses cases from organizations who’ve successfully launched engagement initiatives in parallel tech tools

Great, thanks. Thanks, Dan. So, it’s a nice blend, because Dan’s organization is the technology but there’s a connection to people and our organization is definitely focused on the people. We have about 25 years’ experience. We work in three main realms. We really want to make sure people are bringing on the best people, the best hires. And then once they’re on, that they’re building really strong and effective teams. And then we also work with leaders to develop them to their full potential.

We use a lot of assessments in order to accomplish that. We really feel when people raise their self-awareness about how they can leverage their strengths and how they can work on some development opportunities, we really see that mesh with the mission that we have, and also using those tools to understand other people better and to build stronger partnerships. There’s a lot of things that people need to get done in organizations these days. We’re really trying to build partnerships in order to do that.

So, we do a lot of different programs. A couple of them are executive coaching and team effectiveness. Again, we do a lot in leadership development. We work with some sales teams around behavioral selling skills. One of the things I also think is very needed in organizations is working on difficult conversations. I think once people raise their self-awareness, know a little bit more about themselves and other people are really figuring out how to have difficult conversations in a productive way, there’s something else that we work on as well.

So, one of the things we wanted to talk about is about employee retention and why that’s such an important metric that we have. One of the things I think that’s interesting is a lot of times when we’re looking at retention and getting people in and having a great culture and training and developing and keeping them there. Some companies we hear there’s kind of a revolving door. It’s interesting. I think everybody’s looking at Glassdoor, especially the younger workforce these days, to actually kind of see about the culture of the company and how they bring people in and what they do to retain them and what the culture is like. Sometimes people will actually not want to apply for a job because of that, and some people can’t wait to get into a company because of that.

I have a funny story. Friend of mine’s daughter was looking for a job and had looked on Glassdoor. I heard that she was looking for it. It just so happened to a friend of mine is friends with the CEO at that company. I said, “Hey, I can give my friend a call and maybe she can talk to the CEO.” She’s like, “Oh, my God, that would be great.” And then she talked to her daughter and her daughter said, “Oh, please don’t have him do that.” I said, “I’m so intrigued. Why not?” She said, “Well, if you look on Glassdoor, he does not have very high ratings. I would be afraid that if I got the job there and there’s great with a great people that I work with, they might not like me because of the CEO.” So just so important the type of culture that we have and that we want to be a preferred employer that people want to come.

Sometimes you see want ads, because there’s a revolving door. Sometimes you see a lot of audience because companies are growing and expanding because they’re really making sure their employees are engaged and trained. There’s customer loyalty that we’re seeing there. So, again, employee retention is a pretty important metric. We’re going to have some statistics as we go through these. The first one is from Bonusly, it says, “The cost to replace a highly trained employee can exceed 200% of their annual salary.” Again, just why it’s so important once we get the right people in to make sure that we’re training them effectively.

The second quote is, “Highly engaged employees are 75% less likely to be looking for a job compared to actively disengaged employees.” So just so important that people are engaged. Sometimes we bring people in, we grow and develop them. Sometimes we’re not paying attention to them, and now they get stolen by some of the other best companies.

So, the next thing that we wanted to talk about, because I think it’s so important before you onboard people that you’re really making sure that you have a successful hire. So, we have a model that we use about hiring. It’s very simple model that it kind of makes sense when you’re looking at what you need to do to make a successful hire. The first piece of that is, “Can they do the job?” That’s just skill, education, experience, most of the things that you’d see on a resume. Quite frankly, that’s where we have the biggest impact, because we can train people in the skills that are needed. The second area is, “How will they do their job?”, which really has to do with behaviors and their style and their competency. With this particular piece, you do have influence over that.

If you have really clear expectations and proper coaching, you can help people to adapt their behaviors and styles to fit the job. The last one and the one that I think is most important is, “Will they be motivated in the job?”, because people either walk in with motivation or they don’t. You have very little impact on that. So, this has to do with your motivators, your drivers, your work ethic. So, those are the three things that we think are really important. One of the things that we do in the hiring process is we use assessments. The quote here is an overwhelming 85% of people actually lie or kind of fudge their resumes a little bit.

What we really find in the hiring process if you can use assessments and match them to a benchmark of what you know has been successful in the position, it really takes the guesswork out of hiring to make sure you’re bringing on the best people for the position. The other thing is once people are on, I think one of the most important things that we see, and we really think is the key to success is the employee and manager relationship. I really feel when we work with organizations that we see that managers can either be the bridge to that success or they can sometimes be the barrier to that success. I think that’s so important. I even look at kind of my own path.

When I was in college, I kind of waitress myself through college, because my parents didn’t have enough money to pay for it. I just remember this one manager I had, he was just horrible, everything you would never want in a manager. I was kind of a young, bold kid. At one point, I just couldn’t take it anymore. I took off my little apron that we had and put it down and walked out the door, because I just never felt so degraded and not appreciated. I’d only been there three months and you already had me training all the new people, but he still treated me horribly. I remember what that felt like. It didn’t even matter that I was making a lot of money and really needed the money. I just didn’t want to be treated that way.

On the other hand, when I was in my career, I was partners in a larger consulting firm. The founder of that firm was the best manager, coach and mentor that I ever had in my life. He was just a wonderful person who always looked to bring out your strengths and make sure that you were doing what you loved, and you did a good job. You had everything to do that. There is such a level of trust and respect that I had for him. So, much so that when we went through a little crash in 2008, when a lot of people did, I worked for almost six months without a paycheck, because I cared so much about what he had done for me in the company.

So, I think managers, that employee relationship is just so important. What we really find is kind of a simple metric when you look at it is if managers treat their employees well and they’re really engaged, they feel that they care about them, have their best interest in mind, they’re coaching, developing, training them, they’re going to stay. They’re just going to provide better service because they’re in a good place.

When employees provide really great service, they tend to have satisfied customers. When customers are satisfied not only do they stay, but they grow. They also refer. When customers do that, that’s actually what is the key to profitability and growth. I really believe again, it all kind of starts with what we see with the managers. Dan, do you have any examples of good or bad managers or how you feel those relationships are important?

Yeah, well, I was thinking about it when you were talking that one of the assumptions that I think I’ve made over a lot of years is that what’s important to me is important to my team. I don’t mean just the things that… For instance, if I wanted to have a good performance review or if I wanted to get stock or if I wanted to have some reward that was sitting out there, over time, things have really shifted, what people work for different reasons. I’ve really had to change and adapt the way I think about what’s important to people by understanding what drives them.

Back to your Glassdoor example, employees are equally informed as prospective employees are before they come into the company. So, you either are sort of living those values and engaging them in a way that’s meaningful to them or you’re not. So, it’s a little bit anecdotal, but it is something that I think is more front of my mind than it was probably 5, 10 years ago.

Yeah, that’s great. Great. Thanks for sharing it. Yeah. So, the quote here is, “Companies with high employee engagement stats have a 50% higher customer loyalty than those with poor employee engagement stats.” It’s just so important that we just really see that engaged employees treat customers differently. Customers stay because of that direct connection that they have with the employees. It’s generally not with the managers, it’s with a frontline people that they have that connection with. So, very important.

So, three main things we’re going to talk about today when we’re talking about onboarding and retaining your workforce is first of all, we’re going to talk about really bringing clarity, that people have the right focus. We’re going to talk about connection, which is people working in what they would consider a great environment. And then the third one is really having confidence, so that there’s a high performing team.

About 25% of employers have an active engagement strategy for their company, only 25%, really looking at how that employee engagement is key to profitability of a company. It’s shocking sometimes that employees really don’t think about how important it is to keep people engaged. Again, sometimes we find when people aren’t engaged, you’ll even lose some of your best performers to other companies. They steal the good ones, not the other ones.

So, the first thing we’re going to talk about is clarity. When employees have clarity, not only can they make better decisions and make quicker, better decisions, but they tend to be highly productive when they do that. People, we go to work, and we just want to be productive. We want to do a good job. We want to be effective. We want to make a difference. I know, when my husband comes home and says, “How was your day?”, when I say, “It was a really great day,” the next thing is I tell him all of the things that I got done. That was because I had clarity about what I wanted to do that day, what my goals were, what my priorities, what were the most important things to do.

Employees that don’t have that clarity, we really see them floundering. They’re not sure what to work on or they’re not working on the most important things or in the most effective way. They may be doing the wrong things in some cases.

Another thing about clarity, it’s interesting, I might go out to dinner with someone. Of course, after I asked them how their family is, usually the next question I asked them is, “How is work going?” A lot of times, what we hear with them is that they’re not sure about what they should be working on. There’s a sense of overwhelm that they’re feeling. There’s so many things that they’re working on that they don’t know which one to do next. They don’t know which one is most important. They’re drowning. They can’t keep their heads above water. Interesting we do leadership programs.

Sometimes what I’ll actually ask the leader and sometimes their team members is, “If I was to ask the people that report to you, what are the three most important priorities that they need to accomplish this year? Would their answer to that be the same answer that you have?” Just simple clarity between an employee and a manager relationship. Sometimes we just really don’t see that. So, some of the things, a couple other quotes here, “69% of employees are more likely to stay with a company for three years if they experience great onboarding.”

What we’ll talk about too as part of the onboarding is really just giving them clarity. It’s one of the things you really want to do in onboarding. Strong management transparency leads to 30% better employee retention. I think both people want clarity. They want the managers to really tell them what’s going on. Unfortunately, what a lot of us do when we aren’t exactly clear, or we haven’t been communicated with or there isn’t transparency is we kind of make things up. Generally, we don’t make up good things. So, really, really important that there’s transparency that goes along with that clarity.

So, how to bring clarity to employees so that they can hit the ground running? We’re going to talk about all of these first about onboarding. So, what are you doing the onboarding process and also ongoingly? So, that’s more about the retention. So, onboarding, it’s just so important to set time aside to really share and discuss these things. And then with ongoing, when we have changes, are we communicating those? Are we reinforcing those? Are we talking about them? So, a lot of times with onboarding, these are basic things. I think we all know these, but it’s just kind of a reminder, is really let people know about the company and where you have been. What’s the strategy for the future going forward? What are you looking to accomplish? What are the goals?

I think company culture is so important that people really understand the mission and the vision and the values of that particular company. There’s one company that is a client of ours that has about 1,900 retail stores, and they are growing like gangbusters. They have just a beautiful set of values that people actually live by. They’re not just hanging on a wall somewhere. The employees actually live by those values. They’re growing so quickly, because of the way they serve their customers. People want to work in this culture, because they want to be in a culture where they have shared value.

So, it’s so important that people understand that. Just basic human resource processes and procedures people have to know, sometimes they really get stuck when they don’t. But then I think the one of the most important things in onboarding is really making sure that people are really crystal clear about, “What are the priorities of the department? And then in our department, what are our team’s goals? What are the most important things for us? And then as myself being in the department, what are my roles? What are my priorities? What are my goals? How often can we sit down with a manager and make sure that the expectations of the manager and the employee are the same?” I think this is really important to make sure that we’re bringing that type of clarity.

So, Dan, anything else that you would add to bring clarity to the group or anything else that LiveTiles does to help with bringing clarity?

Yeah, we talk about our values quite a bit. We’re maybe similar to some, dissimilar in other ways. We’re a global company, but we’re fairly small in terms of our employee headcount. So, we’re just a little over 200 people. When you think about connecting 200 people across maybe 8 or 10 different offices and different countries and time zones, when you talk about the culture, it’s very easy to understand the words. But particularly now, when people aren’t physically getting together as much, even on video, it’s tough at times to create that connection. It’s hard to understand that sort of workflow and that cadence that brings the culture up in a lot of ways.

So, we talk a lot about sort of understanding what the key values are and how people can demonstrate them. That kind of plays back into what you’re talking about clarity and their job role, which is they may know what their job is, but they maybe wouldn’t understand the style or the cadence or the context around it, particularly being so to some degree physically removed from people. So, we use the values as a means to help indicate kind of how you can be productive and still feel connected to what the company’s mission is overall. It’s tough. It’s tough to do it even in a perfect situation when everyone’s in the office. So, it’s something that we think we’re getting better at, but we still have a long way to go.

Yeah, and sometimes it’s just a reminder. We know them, but we get so busy in our day-to-day work that it’s sometimes just nice to have a reminder of those things. I think it is what really connects people in the culture too, if they’re like-minded about it. Great. Thanks, Dan. So, the next thing that we are going to chat about is connection. For Data Dome, this is really where we focus most of our time and attention is on the relationships that people have, in the connectedness that they feel to each other. We really find that people want to belong, they want to be part of something. Nobody wants to feel left out or not involved in things.

Sometimes the deeper those connections are and the more people really get to know each other and understand each other, we really see that that raises the engagement level that people have, and it also increases the loyalty that people have to the company. It’s interesting if I was to chat with most people and ask them, “At work, what might your three biggest complaints be?” They’re almost always the same every time I’m listening to people as they’re kind of complaining about work. The first one is what I mentioned before is people just feel overwhelmed.

I don’t know too many people that really just don’t feel like there’s so much they need to get done and they can’t do it, but I think what happens is often we just put our heads down and we’re trying to be independent, getting our work done alone. We really try to move people towards interdependency. How can you partner with other people? Because the things that I’m not good at, someone else is great at. The things that they’re really good at, they could probably use some things that I’m good at. So, the interconnectedness is really important.

The second thing people often complain about is someone at work is driving them crazy. Now, 9 times out of 10, it’s their boss, but not always their boss. It could be Bob in accounting, but somebody’s driving them crazy. There isn’t a connectedness. What we really find, again, if you’re trying to get work done, because we’re so busy and someone’s getting in the way of what you’re trying to get done, you might want to work really quickly and get to the result quickly and someone else is talking too much or nobody’s giving you information or they’re giving you way too much detail, we tend to take that 10% of the person that we don’t like, and it just annoys us. We can only focus on that 10%.

And then we start getting even more independent, we start working around or avoiding most people instead of working with them. We really try to help people look at the 10% about that’s how the person is. I always have a saying is that the person that annoys you the most is most likely the one you need the most, because they’re so opposite of you or maybe you need to be a little bit more like some of the really good traits they have. We try to have people look at the 90%. If they only look at the 10% that annoys them, they miss the 90% of what’s great about people and they miss that connectedness. You really find that if they can do that, they can produce more together.

The third one that we usually hear is a complaint outside of being overwhelmed and somebody’s driving them crazy at work is that they don’t often say this, but I know that they feel it and they don’t feel appreciated and the work that they do. We really find when people start to understand themselves in how they relate and interact with people, and they can adapt and adjust like Dan was talking about and his management style, and they start to understand others and really start looking for where they can form partnerships, we start to see things really change. And then people do feel appreciated, because people are using what’s great about them and they do feel appreciated.

So, the couple quotes for this is, “About 96% of employees, 96%, cite that empathy is an often overlooked factor that is also important for employee retention.” I think people want to be listened to, heard and understood. When you have a boss that has that type of empathy and they have the social skills, it’s really important. One of the other things is 51% of participants who strongly agreed with this statement, this is an old Gallup survey that has been around forever, I have a best friend at work. We’re engaged compared to only 10% of those who disagreed or strongly disagreed. Again, just focusing on how important it is for people to have that connection and have someone that they feel that connectedness to.

So, how do we ensure connection? Because what’s really important when people feel connection is they’re going to feel trust and they’re going to feel that appreciation that they have for each other. So, onboarding, we really take a lot of time to make sure we’re making introductions. People really are getting to know each other. We spend so much time in getting them to know their job and what they have to do and their goals, but how we’re getting to know the other people. And then ongoingly, is there a way that we can really build stronger relationships with the people that we have?

It’s interesting when I work with a lot of leaders, there’s so many things that they manage. They manage their budgets and their projects and their priorities, but often people don’t manage their relationships. Given that most of what we get done happens through other people, really building those stronger relationships and strategically thinking about how you can build stronger connections with people becomes so important. Probably to me, one of the most important ones, again, I keep going back to that employee-manager relationship.

It was interesting. This was last summer, because we didn’t do a lot of social connection this summer, that we had our kids and so a bunch of their friends are over. They were all chatting about work and how work was going. I was just kind of in the background on the side with my margarita listening. It was interesting to me that the one person just gotten a promotion and a big raise and was looking for a job, because all he could do is complain about his boss and how he didn’t appreciate him. He didn’t help him. He took advantage of him. He was the one who had just come to promotion and the raise. And then there were some that were like, “Works fine, everything’s good,” kind of just going in, doing what they do.

There was one other person, this young lady, that was raving about her job, just raving about how much she loved her job and that her manager was amazing. And then she went on to say, “But right now, I’m doing the job of two and a half people, because we have people out. I’m covering both their positions.” Never even complained about it, because she loved her manager and had that trust and appreciation. So, I just think that’s really important.

So, especially when you’re onboarding, are you sharing your expectations? Are you telling them about your style and how you manage, good, bad and the ugly? Are you talking to them about the best way to communicate? Are you making sure that the development needs are being discussed? Are you talking about and asking your employees, “How can you best be managed? How can I best motivate you?” I think that that is just so important. And then you kind of build on that.

It’s really important to understand the team dynamics. Do I know each member of the team? Do I value what’s great about them? Am I clear about their area of expertise? Maybe even a team dossier that talks about each of the team members and those things. A lot of times when I see people are in a good shape, the team’s in a good shape, the next thing we sometimes see is the departments are kind of going back and forth. Sales are promising things operation can’t deliver and operations are doing things that customer service is having a hard time.

I mean, forming that deeper connection with other departments, really sitting down and understand, “What’s the most important thing to this department? What can I do that would help that or what can I do that actually hinders that? Can we have a discussion about that?” So, we can build deeper connections, even at a department level.

The last one and I think this one’s a little bit more for onboarding, but even ongoing, to have a buddy or have a mentor. Have a buddy that’s going to help you kind of navigate the organization, or maybe if you’ve been there for a while, really having a mentor that has your best interest in mind and is looking for what they can do to help ensure your engagement in the company. So, Dan, how about LiveTiles? I know you really do form connections, kind of taking technology to form connection. So, anything that you’d want to share in that area?

Yeah, there’s a few things. Again, some of it, we’ve been doing for quite some time, where there are some things we’ve been a bit more reactive to the current state that we’re in. But one of the things we started, in fact, one of our co-founders, Peter, started this quite some time ago. I’m not exactly sure what we call it, but for lack of a better term, it’s like phone a friend.

We have our internal social platform where a lot of people post things that are praise or information about particular departments or just announcements, but we ask that every month, someone pick up the phone and tag someone on the social chat that we have going and tag someone that you haven’t spoken with or someone that you haven’t spoken with in six months. And then they set up a time and they go off and they have their chat.

They usually have some anecdote that they come back with whether they play a same sport, or they have the same hobby or something. They grew up in the same town, they didn’t know it. There’s always these little connections that kind of sit back in our markers in your head that next time you pick up the phone and talk to that person, it’s a little bit more familiar. It creates that connection that you probably wouldn’t have, if you just needed to call that up and get something done in that moment.

Something that we do that’s a bit more process and procedural in some ways is we’ve created these outcome profiles. I don’t know how standard that term is, but we call them outcome profiles, where what we try to do is balance this idea of clarity and connection. Which is we’re all going to go through and create a pie chart of generally speaking, how you should be spending your time to create connection with whether it’s the company strategy or what we call living the brand. We try to map those back into how you actually focus your day-to-day work. It’s not a perfect science, but it is really good when you see the things that you put time into.

The example you had with a person that was doing two and a half jobs as one person, there’s probably a lot of things that could be overlapping or tasks that may be less important. If you know kind of what the outcomes are for each of those roles, maybe you can create some efficiencies that way. That’s not the reason why we designed those. It’s really meant for one person, one job, but it is something that’s good to have that creates at least a conversation about whether or not that person is spending the time on the right tasks and projects. And then if not, you have a conversation about how to improve that.

That’s great. That’s great. Yeah. I think too, with everything being remote these days, I think the connection is even more important. So, I like the idea of talking to people you haven’t talked to in a while and people especially with the same interest. We’re finding some companies are doing fun things like forming little groups they share like their favorite movies or what they’re bingeing on Netflix or they’re doing book clubs. Actually, instead of doing a meeting, they’re having walking meetings, where everybody goes out for a walk at noon. They have walking meetings and just trying to form connections that way.

So, we have this one thing called A Minute to Win It. So, basically what we do is we have people either catching themselves doing cool things or other people catching other people doing cool things and just sharing them from around the world. We ask that they’re all videos, that they’re not just pictures of whatever. So, maybe someone walking on a hiking trail somewhere in Switzerland. It might be someone, like you said, doing a meeting, doing a webinar while they’re walking down the street with their dog. We actually had that happen once.

Oh, that’s great. I love it. I love it. It’s so interesting how technology can either divide us or bring us together. So, those are great ideas, great ideas. So, the last one we’re going to talk about is confidence. So, when employees feel confident, they perform their job duties faster and better. Everybody wants to do a good job. People want to grow. They want to learn. They want to be promoted. Making sure that we’re training people so that they have everything they need in order to do their jobs.

I think sometimes we just assume they know or when we hired them at that level, they should know how to do that. But it’s really making sure you’re doing an assessment of what training needs to be done and making sure that it’s done. Even ongoingly, people really want to grow and improve. I think it’s really important. This is an interesting story. So, I was doing a leadership development program at a company. This is years ago, but it’s always stuck in my head. There’s about 25 people. It was I think five- to six-month leadership program that we were doing with the group.

On the first day, this gentleman comes up to me and he said to me… This leadership program was for high potentials, you had to be chosen to be in this leadership program. This gentleman comes up to me and he goes, “I don’t know why I’m here.” He goes, “I do a great job. All my projects come in on time and under budget. I don’t know why I have to come to this and waste time when I could be working.” I go, “I got you.” I said, “Well, how about if you do me a favor?” I say, “Come to two sessions. If after two sessions, you really feel this is a waste of time, I will talk to the powers that you and I will get you out of this. I promise you that, but you got to come to two sessions.” He’s like, “Alright.” He was a little grumpy about it.

So, the first session we did a lot about talking about self-awareness and adaptation and how that helps or hinders results. I could see that he furrowed brow a little, so I could see that he was thinking. He came back to the second one and was much more engaged. But I still had a feeling he wasn’t going to come to the third one and I was going to have the conversation. But what was really interesting is he came back to the third one and he said to me, “I was wrong.” I said, “About what?” He said that “I couldn’t do things better.” He goes, “I found that my guys, I manage them to get everything done on time and on budget. I tell them everything to do.” He was a very detailed-oriented person. So, he trained them and did everything he needed to do. He had all his spreadsheets to do everything.

He goes, “But I’m not leading my people.” He said, “So they don’t have confidence because I didn’t have confidence in the.” He said, “So after the first session, I went back and said to my team, ‘Here’s our next project. Here’s when it needs to be done by. This is the budget for it. I would like you as a team to do it without me managing you. If there’s anything you need from, you come and ask me. I’m right here, but I would like you to do it.'” I said, “So, why were you wrong?” He said, “This is the first time in 13 years that something came in a week and a half early and under budget.” He goes, “That wasn’t the best part of it. I could see how engaged all of my team was, because they now had the confidence that they could do that themselves.” He goes in, “It had to be me letting go to do that.”

He goes, “And because I wasn’t managing them, I actually got to start thinking about things strategically and things that I could do differently and things that I could do to coach and mentor as opposed to manage.” So, he ended up coming to the rest of the session. So, this is kind of story about how important it is, I think, to have confidence. You want everybody to have all the tools that they need and the training they need to do their jobs, but you as leaders also have to give them the confidence. I find people that are confidence perform so much higher than other people.

So, the first one is 70% of the respondents indicated that job-related training and development opportunities influence their decision to stay at the company. Again, I do think people that feel like they’re not getting training and development opportunities are stagnant, they’re not going to grow. They would sometimes even take a pay cut to go somewhere or they would get more of that and get more growth. One in five employees is not confident that their manager will provide regular constructive feedback on their work.

It’s interesting, I think, it’s telling to me that when people do performance appraisals, if they’ve coached and mentored and talked to their people the whole time and given them confidence, that performance appraisals are no shock because they’ve been talking about these things the whole time. Generally, you’ll see higher performers. But sometimes managers wait until performance appraisals to tell people all of the things that they’re doing wrong, that they haven’t even tried to talk to them about it or coach them or mentor them or help them with that. People really struggle with that.

So, with confidence, how do you instill confidence so that employees can perform at their very best? Again, these are pretty simple things that we all know. But when we’re onboarding, are we giving them the tools and the training, the feedback and the coaching that they require? Ongoingly, I think one of the things where people lose confidence is when there’s competing priorities or multiple demands or there’s a lot of changes happening, but nobody’s communicating those to them. So, how can we make sure that we’re communicating all the changes in talking to people about the training and development?

Again, this is such a simple one, but I was talking to a client just the other day. She started at a new company, and she didn’t have the tools to do her job. She’s like, “I don’t even have my email yet. They haven’t given me this. I don’t even have this program.” So just the simple office setup with technologies, programs, phones, all the basic things that you need. And then I think what’s really important with the onboarding is make sure you really clearly think about all the training this person is going to need to be successful.

You can actually go back to the can, how, will conversation we had about hiring. Are there skills that they need? Is there technology that they need? Do they need to be trained in competencies? Is it more of a soft skill? Is it more of a behavioral based thing that we’re seeing? Am I training them on the job, in the moment in what they’re doing? Really assess, “Here’s when I hired them. Here’s some areas that they were weakened. Here’s the areas that I’m going to make sure I develop them, so that they can do their very best at this job.”

If you were to rate people when you hire them on a 0 to 100 scale, I’d say most often, we’re hiring people that are about 75 to 80% of the perfect ideal candidate. When I find people that are really clear about how they’re going to train them, coach them, mentor them, they can take a 75& and make them a 90% performer. But people that aren’t clear about that and really haven’t thought about, “What am I going to do to make sure they have everything they need to be successful?”, sometimes you’ll take a 75% and they’ll slide back to a 60%, because they don’t have that clarity and they don’t have what they need to be successful. So, really important.

Always be coaching and developing, especially this is ongoing. People want to hear what they’re doing well. They want to hear where they can get better. They want those open, honest conversations. I told you when I worked at the larger consulting firm, the gentleman that I worked for six months without a paycheck because of how much I thought of him in the organization, probably had the hardest conversations with me anybody’s ever had with me, but I never once doubted it.

It wasn’t because he deeply cared about me. He would actually talk to me about things like other people would shy away from. So, coaching and development is just really important. Evaluate progress, give people feedback. People want feedback on how they’re doing in all of these different areas. So, Dan, did you have anything that you’d add about building confidence and employees or anything else that LiveTiles does?

Yeah, well, one of the things that comes to mind for me is making sure people know what the finish line looks like. And then there’s sort of short term, mid- and long-term finish lines and things like that. In our company, we’re growing pretty fast and we do have shifting priorities, whether or not the last six months happened or not. Sometimes we jump from one thing to another. So, the tasks or the projects in focus might be within the realm of reality of reasonableness that we think we can go jump on and shift to, but sometimes we don’t close off the thing we just came off of. Shifting those pillars and those focus areas sometimes gets people a little jittery that you’re not seeing things through them.

I think it does feed into the confidence that you can see things through and actually finished the thing that you were working on. So, it’s a lot better than it was in the early days for us, but it is something that’s sort of forefront in our minds, because we want people to feel like they can create something and finish something and then have the confidence to go off and go co-create something else kind of on their own. So, things are being more sort of in their control, more proactive as opposed to just kind of falling on their lap. So, we do think about that quite a bit.

Yeah, interesting that you say that. One of the assessments we do is called a stress quotient. It looks at seven different levels of stress in an individual and an organization. One of the top three almost always comes out, organizational change not being communicated. When people don’t understand things, again, they lack that clarity to go forward. It’s so important. We offer to a lot of companies, I do this with wonderful ladies that work with me. Every Monday, we get on the phone and we talk about what are the priorities for the week. We get really clear, and they often change. We thought it was one thing but something else happens. So, getting that clarity on priorities.

And then a lot of the companies what we offer to them too is just to a 15-minute stand up meeting in the morning. Everybody grab their coffee, stand up, have a quick meeting. Talk about what’s really important today, what are the priorities, where somebody stopped, what we can we do to help you. Sometimes just every day, having a quick conversation about that gives people that confidence and that clarity to move in. So, I think those things are definitely important.

So, just to kind of wrap up the three things, again, really looking at how can we ensure the most success for people when we’re onboarding them and retaining them? Again, the first thing is just they really have to have the right focus and that clarity by looking at strategy and goals, objectives, roles and responsibilities. Again, having really clear expectations from their manager.

I think the second one is really making sure that people are in a great environment, because they have that connection. Building trust, there was a book that was put out a while ago is called The Speed of Trust, Stephen Covey’s son wrote it. The whole book was about how building trust produces results for organizations. Some of the most successful organizations have the highest trust scores. People know and value your strength. There’s open, honest communication and really great environments. People make really great commitments and hold each other accountable to those commitments. For high performance, can we build that confidence? Just in training and skill building, coaching and developing and giving feedback. So, that’s kind of a blend of all of them in this.

One of the things that we were going to offer to you, because a lot of you are working from home is we have a working from home report. It’s really an interesting report. It only takes about 10 minutes to fill out and it’ll email to you directly. It talks about your style at work and where that might help or hinder you when you’re working remotely. And then it also talks about reading the styles of the people that you’re working with and knowing how to adapt to increase communication and effectiveness.

Then there’s also a worksheet that you can kind of go through to raise self-awareness and be a little bit more thoughtful about that. You can just go to TTIsurvey.com and enter that code. Again, it takes about 10 minutes, and you’ll have a report for yourself after. So, I hope that’s something that would be beneficial for people as we’re kind of all going through these challenging times working remotely. And then Dan, I’ll bring it over to you.

Yeah. Thanks, Lisa. Thanks for that. That’s fantastic information. I mean, I think, it’s a mix of fundamentals right now and things that we should be reminding ourselves that we should be thinking about as we’re all working more remotely, but also, things that are a bit more pragmatic in terms of how we can use data and information to help drive these connections and confidence in our employees. To tie this off, we were kind of at the onset talking about technology and technology serving us. Not to get overly too focused on technology here, but technology can help unearth resources and information to create these connections and clarity and to some degree, build competence to do our work better.

We don’t pretend we’re the only ones to come up with these ideas, but we do believe that every company should be able to reach their employees. We have a product that’s actually its namesake is LiveTiles Reach. What we’re really trying to do is give people the means to create targeted connection and targeted information to help people do their work. And then we also have two other key pieces of technology that we think help support the human connection. We have LiveTiles Everywhere, that surfaces things to you in one screen. That is basically your job in one navigation that follows you, if you will.

And then we have a really, really cool directory offering that proactively gathers information about employees. Now, if you think about directories for one second that people think phone books and maybe profile pictures, but in many cases, you don’t know much about the employee beyond who they are and maybe the office they work out of. It was funny, so many customers came to us and they said, “Can you help us just get cell phone numbers of our employees? We don’t have cell phone numbers from them.”

But we do get beyond that, you start thinking about, “What can you tap into within your employee base that you don’t have?” They may know different languages. They may have worked in different regions. They may have skillsets that are completely outside of their college degree or their job that they have. These are things that should feed into this ongoing dynamic profile that you have in an employee that can go towards not only helping leading a manager, but also helping connect them to work in a career path that they wouldn’t have had.

So, not to geek out too much on technology, but there are ways to automate this. So, what we do is we offer all these tools for free trials. If they work for your organization, we’d love to engage with you. If not, you can still use them on the free trial and hopefully learn a little bit about how to connect with your employees in a way that you weren’t doing it previously.

Yeah, just in the last slide here, Lisa, if anyone does want to reach out to LiveTiles or Lisa and Data Dome after this, please send an email to [email protected]. We’ll be happy to connect with you and talk to you about anything relative to this webinar or any topic of interest to you. So, thank you. I hope you made it this far. Lisa, thank you for your time and for your information.