A great workplace doesn’t just pop out of thin air. It takes effort, culture building and a commitment to learning in order to create and maintain it. Some key pieces of a workplace running smoothly include understanding where employee satisfaction and happiness lies, being able to provide productive feedback and creating a space where good decisions can be made.
We’ve curated a list of three TedX Talks that hack the very idea of these topics. Check them out and let us know what tips and tricks you’ll be implementing at work in the comments below!
Happiness at work?
Out of three billion people working on this planet, only 40% of them report being happy at work. Before you go out and buy a ping pong table, an espresso machine or hand out more paid time off to improve happiness at your workplace, watch this video and see the actions that really increase satisfaction in the workplace:
Give better feedback
Only 26% of employees around the world agree that feedback they receive helps them improve their work. Ouch. But with this TedX Talk and the four part formula it lays out, you’ll be able to give great feedback that helps your team confidently do great work:
Make better decisions
Think quick! At work, decision making is something we have to do almost every day. But what happens when we have a fear that a better option is out there? Here’s a great lecture to help you make sound decisions at work every day regardless of what’s at stake.
By Alex Yohn
Jun 16, 2020
All good things must come to an end, and that includes favorite team members leaving our organizations. There are a lot of ways to say goodbye, and in companies it’s important that we give people who have provided so much value to us a proper send-off. A great end to someone’s tenure should include steps that protect both your company’s interest and the interest of the employee leaving.
With a sound employee offboarding process in place, you can provide a safe – and dare we even say it – pleasant final few days for an employee transition out.
What is an exit process?
An exit process, or offboarding, contains vital steps that help an employee transition out of your company either by their choice or yours. According to a recent study by Aberdeen, only 29% of organizations have a formal exit process in place.
What are these 71% of companies who don’t have one missing out on? A lot.
Studies show that if you don’t have a formal exit process, you may have some of the following issues:
Lack of security and legal issues surrounding what the employee still may have access to after they leave.
Untrained employees taking over the former team member’s role without an understanding of what is truly expected of them.
Continued issues that aren’t addressed which caused the initial employee to leave, and could cause other team members to look for work elsewhere too.
Plus, with an exit interview, you’re giving employees a chance to be heard for one last time. If the employee leaving was especially valuable to your organization, this could put you in a good position should they want to return.
In fact, companies that do well in offboarding score high marks when it comes to team members considering returning, or “boomeranging”. Nearly 40% of employees consider returning to an organization that they felt not only heard their feedback but worked to improve based upon it according to the Corporate Culture and Boomerang Employee Study which was commissioned by The Workforce Institute.
Now that we’ve convinced you how important it is to have a great offboarding process, let’s go through the basic steps you’ll need to implement one.
Get it in writing
First, when an employee approaches you about leaving, make sure to not only have the conversation with them in person (or via video chat, because 2020), but also ensure they send a written resignation letter you can keep on file. The letter should include the date they’ll be departing the company.
Next, ensure everyone knows the individual is leaving. This shouldn’t be left for rumor or watercooler talk. Someone in a leadership role should make a clear announcement that this person will be leaving their position on a date that you and the employee have agreed upon.
The message doesn’t need to be lengthy to the team, but it does need clear language.
It should include: who the person is, the role they currently serve, their last day, and any immediate plans for their transition out of the company. This could include beginning to recruit for the role, having the person stay on to help train the new hire, who will be taking over responsibilities internally if there will not be a new hire, etc.
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The more information you can provide, the more confident your team will be during the transition. Remember, the team is losing a member which may make them feel a bit uncomfortable. Providing clear messaging and a sound gameplan can help ease this and have the team continue forward.
Understand their workload
After you’ve announced the departure of said employee, have them create a list of their day-to-day workload, along with any long-term projects. It may take them a few days to create a completed list, so make sure to give them ample time to get it done well.
Once it’s completed, walk through it with them to really understand their impact on the company. Now is a great time to see if the role they were in was as effective as you believed it was, or if you’d like to change up a few things with the next version of it moving forward. Bringing the employee leaving into this conversation will empower them to help leave a great legacy at the company by creating a role that will help it move forward.
Let them train the new hire/replacement (if you can)
At this point, you’ll likely be coming up on either hiring a new person or finding someone internally to take over responsibilities. If you are lucky enough to have the person who will be assuming the role and the individual leaving on payroll at the same time, take advantage of this!
No one is going to know that position better than the person leaving it. Let them work through training with the new person assuming the role and be there to answer any questions for a week or two at least. It’ll pay off in spades in the long run.
Gather company equipment
On their final day, you’ll want to have a checklist prepared of all of the company equipment they owe you. Beyond the big stuff such as a laptop, cell phone and credit card, there may be other smaller items such as a mouse or a laptop stand that need to be returned, too.
As you’re collecting equipment, you’ll also want to review any non-disclosure agreements (NDA) in place. This allows both you and the employee to be fully aware of what is expected once they exit the company as far as who they can and cannot work for within the said period of time in your NDA.
You’ll also want to give any information they may need about their 401K, IRA or COBRA health insurance. Get with your benefits providers ahead of time to ensure you have the correct information for their departure.
Have their final paycheck ready to go
One huge thing is to ensure that their paycheck is ready to go. You’ll not only have the pay due to them up until that point, but the check should also include any unused PTO if you have a policy of paying that out, or any other severance pay that you’ve agreed to.
If you have a policy of paying out equity at the time of departure, make sure to have your letter ready to sign at this time before you give them a check for it.
Conduct an exit interview
Let’s face it: It never feels great being left. And oftentimes, we’d rather not face it directly. But having a productive conversation with any employee who was a valuable member of your team can provide a lot of insight into making your company stronger.
Here’s a pretty extensive list of questions you could ask during it:
What could we have done better?
What would you not want to see change at our organization?
What led you to looking for another job?
Would you ever consider returning to our company?
What could we have done to keep you here?
Did you feel like a valuable part of the company?
What was your best day on the job like?
What was your worst day on the job like?
How do you believe other employees feel about the company without naming any names?
Remove access to any tools or software
Have another checklist ready to go with all tools and software an employee has access to that contains information about your company. From shutting down their email, to removing them from Slack, Basecamp or shutting down access to your VPN, you’ll want to make sure this can all be done swiftly within moments of them leaving.
No matter how great the relationship was between your employee and the organization, once they have left it is up to you to protect your company from anyone who is no longer employed there.
Everybody who can work these days is experiencing a heightened level of emotional stress, but even that is disproportionately distributed because of the realities mentioned above.
Work can be a respite of sorts from society’s ills, but only if our workplaces acknowledge and accommodate for the disproportionate number of stressors affecting our black team members. With acknowledgement comes solidarity. With accommodation comes action.
I implore every workplace to create unambiguous space for your team members to work through these challenges, especially for the black people with whom you work.
You can create space in time via reduction in work-related pressures and by encouraging time off for mental health.
You can create space in dialog by checking in one-on-one with each employee to listen to and share in their grief.
These small actions won’t solve our country’s racism. Rather, they’re a simple way to help employees process very difficult times. We may also find that small steps like these lead to larger organizational changes which our black coworkers see and need in our workplaces.
Thank you for striving to build healthier, happier workplaces … now more than ever.
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By Alex Yohn
Jun 5, 2020
Summer is here and it reminds me of a great perk that a past employer offered. They gave employees Fridays off during the months of July and August. Admittedly, most people didn’t use them; it was an advertising agency where seventy hour work weeks were the accepted norm. Time-off utilization was not a priority.
Employers pay a lot of lip service these days to paid time off which, as a reminder, is time we’re paid to NOT work. The proof is in the pudding though. As I’ve written before, unlimited time off policies often aren’t enforced with a minimum time-off policy or the likes.
One challenge in time-off utilization however has to do with an employee’s own perception of what time off is used for: an ideal, multi-week vacation. A lot of employees end up hoarding their time off, like money, to spend it all at once. Alas, work and life get busy and before we know it the end of the year rolls around and employees start unloading time off. Get this, more than seven million days were left on the table in 2018 alone.
Employers can do a few things to encourage employees to take smaller, frequent breaks from work – a practice that both staunches the holiday bottleneck and keeps your workforce even-keeled throughout the entire year.
Give more time off and monitor time-off utilization
Get away from accruals, and increase the minimum amount of time you give. Just like unlimited time off policies lack a finite value, small policies do the opposite: they’re too precious to use. If you do use accruals, Kin is a great way to forecast accrued balances in advance of a time off request.
Manage time off before it’s too late
Minimum time off each quarter is a good way to enforce a policy of routine time off. You can get started by reviewing time off utilization reports in Kin monthly to see how everyone’s doing by incorporating it into the end of each month’s administrative cycle and, boom, half the work is done.
Communicate that PTO isn’t just for vacation
A day off for house maintenance projects, taking kids to a waterpark, or simply having a day spent doing nothing does wonders for one’s psyche, and it gives coworkers a chance to cover off for us. Believe it or not, names matter – ensure your time-off policy names are more inclusive to time off other than vacation (we call ours “Personal Time Off”).
If you haven’t noticed, work expands to fill the amount of time we give it. Scheduling regular time off, even in small increments like a half day, combats that reality. It also ensures employees don’t leave time off on the table at the end of the year which is literally the same as throwing money out the window (of your office!).
You may never be able to get one hundred percent time-off utilization across your organization, but the effort to get close will prove valuable in improving both productivity and employee retention.
By Alex Yohn
May 27, 2020
Kin’s Fireside Chats are a way for us to share experiences and best practices of companies around the world and, in our second episode, Melissa chats with Carl Smith, founder of Bureau of Digital.
Bureau of Digital’s entire business was based on large, in-person events so they’ve had to quickly bring its offerings online. Carl’s got quite a few stories and lessons to share for any other businesses who’ve struggled to find a path forward in these uncertain times, but perhaps the best lesson of all is the simplest: evolve.
By Alex Yohn
May 14, 2020
On May 21st we’re releasing a complete redesign of Kin’s calendar. More than just a new interface, we’ve rebuilt the calendar from the ground up. The result is an-easier-to read, quicker-to-load tool that keeps everyone apprised of what’s going on at work.
A faster, more insightful calendar
Faster performance in the browser
Kin’s old calendar tends to choke on large data sets, which is a problem for both large organizations and those who lean on the calendar for planning and resourcing. In the new calendar, large data sets load incredibly quickly, so there’s no more freezing or wait times.
Better insights into your company’s schedule
The largest visual change you’ll notice is we’ve done away with the traditional calendar layout which made it hard to grasp a week’s worth of company events and employee leave. We’ve addressed that challenge with a layout resembling a Gantt chart – where we list employees on the left side of the screen and, in turn, horizontally layout and stack time off and company events in a week by week view to the right.
Tips and tricks
Week and day views
In addition to the new week by week view, we’re introducing a day view which breaks events and time off down hour by hour.
A better way to show and edit events
Our new calendar is the first place you’ll see a slide-out panel to view and edit details of events. Over the next several months you’ll see this “Slideyboy”, as the team has endearingly named it, in other places in the app where you currently need to click through to new pages to add, edit, or delete information.
Subscribing via Google or Outlook
The new calendar is pretty great but it’s also helpful to have Kin’s calendar data integrated with the rest of your work schedule. Keep in mind that you can click “Subscribe” in the upper right of the page to get your Kin calendar pushed into your other calendars, like Google or Outlook. Here’s a tutorial with some more instruction.
What’s next?
We’ve got some great improvements to employee reviews in flight right now – including review templates which you can customize, and reporting which provides insights across your entire organization based on employee feedback.
As always, we’d love to hear your feedback. We can be reached via email at TheTeam@KinHR.com, or by clicking the support avatar from within Kin itself.
