By Alex Yohn
Mar 12, 2020
Well, here we are, a world dealing with a pandemic. Here we are, employers trying to do what’s right for our businesses and for our employees. I’m writing today as an employer and, hopefully, as a helping hand.
While many workplaces are just now figuring out how to operate remotely, many more are figuring out if they’ll even be able to keep their doors open for business. Remote working, after all, isn’t an option for many organizations using Kin – companies with factories, retail stores, places of worship, and medical practices.
Without employees though, most organizations can’t operate regardless of locality. This certainly applies to every Kin customer. Many employers are realizing that they’re potentially going to have to operate with fewer employees for a few months, for myriad reasons. Some will be sick. Others will have sick children or family members to care for. As unsavory as it may sound now, employers may not be able to retain their current staff due purely to the economic fallout of the pandemic.
So what do we do as workplaces to prepare ourselves and our employees?
Communicate
Employers don’t have all of the answers, but we do have the microphone, right? Employees look to us for guidance – we are the most tangible source of leadership most people interact with day in and out.
We can and should talk about how this pandemic may affect our operations. Answer employees’ questions even if the answer is “We’re not sure yet.” Ask questions too. Questions like “how is this affecting you?” and “what’s the most important thing we can do right now to help you out?” The simple act of talking openly goes a long way.
Be informed and be prepared
From sick time to parental leave, from non-paid time off to flex time, we owe it to employees to be up front and transparent about what our workplace can offer in times like these. Do you need to bump up your company’s time off and leave policies in light of these events?
It would be wrong to assume that every Kin customer can afford paid sick leave (in most U.S. states, paid sick leave isn’t mandated by law), but every employer can go into Kin today to ensure policies are generous enough to help employees through a tough time.
It will also behoove us all to pay close attention to changing local and federal laws on issues like paid sick leave, business travel, and work-related events. Times are changing quickly, and laws will too. Chances are we’re already doing the right thing; let’s make sure though, not just because of the law, but because of the people they’re meant to protect.
Be patient
The constant news cycle about this pandemic is a lot to constantly metabolize and that works itself out in curious ways at work. Meetings might not go smoothly. We might have a hard time staying focused or hitting deadlines. Let’s be mindful that everyone operates a little differently in emotionally fraught times. As employers, a little extra patience along with a little extra outreach will go a long way.
Be a community
Concerts, gyms, places of worship, and maybe even your own workplaces are all taking necessary precautions to protect the general population. This inevitably exacerbates feelings of anxiety and isolation. We’re social creatures after all. Our workplace, remote or not, may be the only sense of community beyond family and friends that our employees can depend on, and as such it will play an increasingly important social role for many people in the coming weeks.
We’ll get through this intelligently
We’re all in this together. Let’s be rational and smart and do what’s right for our more at-risk populations by heeding the health guidance and warnings we’re all well aware of by now. We’ll get through this, and our workplaces will be the better for the experience.
If you need help updating your time off and leave policies, please let us know – we’re a part of your community too, and we’re happy to help. Likewise, we’re a 100% remote workplace, so if you have questions about how to keep your workplace mission afloat even if remote working is a temporary change, we’re happy to gab about the tools and practices that have worked well for us.
By Alex Yohn
Feb 20, 2020
On March 17th 2020, we’ll be releasing some fantastic upgrades to Kin’s employee reviews. Our primary objective with the new experience is to make reviews easier to set up and easier to participate in.
If you’re new to Kin, or an existing customer interested in learning about Kin’s employee reviews, please join Melissa Benzo as she walks through the product on one of the following dates:
- March 18, 2020 at 4pm EST
Click here to register.
- March 20, 2020 at 8am EST
Click here to register.
- March 23, 2020 at 11am EST
Click here to register.
- March 25, 2020 at 3pm EST
Click here to register.
Unable to attend, or want to talk to Melissa one on one about Reviews in Kin? Click here to schedule a time directly with her.
An easier employee review experience from the top down
Creating reviews for your entire company should be easy. Select topics of the review, the employees involved and click go, right? Our new experience focuses on clarity and expediency.
Participating in a review
The new review experience focuses on feedback, and everything else has been designed to stay out of the way. Not just a visual improvement, the new review experience is much clearer about what to do now and what happens next.
Manage employee reviews in bulk
We’re also making it easier to manage your company’s reviews via a cleaner, more powerful listing page. Kin now has the ability to select multiple reviews and apply a change all at once, be it deleting, changing reviewers, or re-organizing them to different categories.
Once you start using these new editing capabilities we think you’ll want to see them in other places in Kin, like in Files. We agree :)
Important information about the updates
Changes to the employee review workflow
There are a few differences in how reviews are run in the new system versus what you may be used to:
- Feedback from both manager and employee is withheld from viewing by the other party until both have shared their feedback. This is to ensure feedback is given objectively, and not reactively.
- HR Managers are now able to sign off on every employee review on a manager or employee’s behalf.
- The meeting scheduler inside of Kin is exclusively available to Managers now – it’s their responsibility to schedule one-on-one’s with their employees insofar as Kin is concerned.
Finishing existing employee reviews before March 17
All existing reviews in Kin will be forward compatible with Kin’s new employee review system. However, there will be small differences in how they behave which align with the improvements described above. If you’re running reviews with your team during March 17th, no data or feedback will be lost, it will all be available to you in the new system.
A hat tip toward the future
Our strategy for employee feedback in Kin is to first improve the foundational tools Kin already offers, and then build upon them. Our release in March is a first step in that direction, and further down the road we’ll be looking at the customization of review questions, peer reviews, and bringing employee objectives into closer alignment with reviews. Stay tuned!
By Alex Yohn
Feb 10, 2020
We’re getting ready to launch some upgrades to Kin, both small and large. On Wednesday, February 12th, we’ll be releasing a better way to display accrual time off balances as well as some design updates to Kin’s digital document and signatures. A month or two down the road, we’ll be releasing a new and improved employee review tool followed by a sharp new company calendar. First things first though.
Coming Wednesday, February 12
How Kin displays accrued time off balances
If your company uses accrual time off policies, we’ve changed the way the “Available now” balance is displayed. Before the update, your available balance didn’t take pending or approved requests into account which led to some confusion. Now, available balances do just that. For example, if you have ten days of accrued time off available, and you request four, Kin will reflect 6 days available the next time you visit to take some time off.
We’ve also added some insights to the time off request page for accrual policies. Now, when you select a start date for a time off request, Kin will calculate how much time will have accrued by that date.
A freshly designed digital signature interface
The tools you use to create digital signatures in Kin are getting an upgrade as well. The improvements make it easier to create documents to begin with – no more hidden controls and options.
As for signing a document, the new design does a better job of leading an employee through each area of a document that needs completion.
On the horizon
Here’s a quick sneak peek of some larger feature updates we have in the works right now. We’ll be in touch well before these are released to give you some more detail into the features themselves and the timing of the releases.
Employee review improvements
We have some some major improvements to employee reviews in store that’ll allow for better management (read: clearing out old reviews and bulk editing!) and a more intuitive review experience for managers and employees.
Modernizing Kin’s calendar
Kin’s calendar is getting an overhaul too. Our “at a glance” approach makes it much easier to see who is out when, for how long, and who else is out during that time period. The traditional calendar view that Kin currently has just hasn’t proven adequate for that job over the long term. Another dramatic improvement is that this new calendar will perform much better in the browser for customers with large data sets.
Questions? We have answers.
If you have any questions about these updates, we’re all ears. Please write us at TheTeam@KinHR.com or via the support avatar within Kin.
By Alex Yohn
Feb 6, 2020
Employee Objectives in Kin is a simple way to manage the goals and objectives of your team members, and keep folks moving forward as individuals and as parts of a larger organization. So now that you’re getting a tool to manage and store them, you’ll need a few tips for creating employee objectives best practices that contribute not just to an employee’s well-being but help drive the entire company forward.
Below are a few best practices that’ve been helpful for our own teams at Kin through the years. Have a read, and give a bit of consideration to how you and your team will manage objectives. Why are they important? Well, they’re a healthy contributor to the well-being of company and employee alike – and they play a critical role in employee reviews, which is another new feature we’ll be releasing in the next several weeks.
Why create employee objectives best practices?
To create, track progress and celebrate the accomplishment of employee objectives requires a few ingredients: constant discussion, mutual understanding, and productivity.
The mere act of discussing objectives means that employees are made aware of where the company is headed, and likewise, employers get to know in which direction employees want to head. That’s a good thing.
In my opinion, employee and company objectives are the only way to have productive performance reviews. They’re actionable milestones that keep both sides of the employee/employer relationship aligned, if not always in agreement (more on that later).
Where traditional performance reviews serve as an opportunity to discuss where an employee (manager, company) stands at the moment, objectives are a dynamic, tangible roadmap to the past and the future. Without them, performance reviews are all but meaningless.
Are employee objectives personal, professional, or company-based?
Well-rounded employees need well-rounded objectives. That means they should focus on all facets of an individual, their role within a team, and the larger organization around them. Each time I work through objectives for myself or a team member, I try to include an objective for each of those tiers, ensuring that individual, team, and company alike are making strides.
For example, for an individual objective, the employee may need to do a better job with his/her written communication. For professional development, they may want to learn more about a specific technology. Lastly, the company may need them to work on their mentoring skills because of a recent boost in hiring.
These three objectives address not just how the company can get more value out of the employee, but how the employee can get the most out of the company they’re working for too.
For a more prescriptive approach to creating objectives or performance review criteria, Marnie E. Green, principal consultant of the Arizona-based Management Education Group, Inc. and author of Painless Performance Evaluations: A Practical Approach to Managing Day to Day Employee Performance, has outlined four general categories from which to create goals and objectives (*).
1. Essence of the Job Goals: goals that clearly define tasks that will be required to complete the job. These goals should be very personalized to the individual position and employee.
2. Project Goals: activities that the employee should pursue with a clearly defined beginning and end.
3. Professional Development Goals: what the employee will learn in the next six months and a year that will help their professional growth. It’s important to think beyond skill improvement classes and consider goals that develop not only the employee, but help your organization as a whole.
4. Performance Goals: very basic, but what time the employee should show up, what they should wear, etc. Many employees won’t need these goals specifically outlined, but it is good to document them in a clear and measurable way.
* originally sourced from Lou Dubois at Inc.com
When, how many, and how long?
The end of the year is a great time to create objectives with employees. You can review the year in arrears, and take a look forward into the new year – that’s 360 degrees of insight to fuel productive objectives. Alas, creating them is only the beginning.
If you’re not meeting up with employees at least once a quarter, it’s time to make a change. Quarterly check-ins (coupled with frequent, informal conversations) with employees are necessary to review progress to date and, as necessary, discuss objectives that have been achieved, change any which need tweaking, or add new ones into the mix.
The scope and specificity of an objective should determine how long it takes to accomplish, and how many should be assigned at once. Given the categories outlined above, and based on my own experience, three to four active objectives at any given time are plenty. If, perchance, an objective is achieved mid-year, that’s great – close it out, celebrate the success, and get the employee moving on with a fresh one.
Make Objectives comprehensible and achievable.
No objective should be left as a sound-bitey headline. While aspiration and ambition play a role in objectives, it’s the details of how to achieve an objective that serve as a roadmap to accomplishment, and outlining expected outcomes and a tangible plan of action for each objective is the way to do that.
An effective objective should come with an expected result, and can usually be broken down into a series of smaller, more bite-sized tasks which, one after another, lead an employee to the outcome. An awesome byproduct of smaller, actionable steps is a more frequent sense of accomplishment which motivates folks to take the next steps forward.
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Research, tips and ideas on workplace happiness.
Where to keep employee objectives, and how to keep them fresh: progress notes
If it’s not written down, it won’t happen. Companies that are serious about professional development need to have a place to manage employee objectives – be it a wiki, company intranet, or HR software like Kin. It’s also important that notes on progress toward the objective are kept at regular intervals – people, business, and objectives evolve, and those notes come in handy and create a case file of sorts for employees’ development at a company through the years.
The magic elixir: align employee objectives with company objectives
The most powerful employee objectives are those which align directly to a company’s own objectives. Employee and employer both should strive to create equitable objectives – improvements that benefit individual, team, and the broader organization.
For example, we recently had a team member itching to get into native mobile app development, which happened to be a prerogative for our consulting team as well. There was a clear business case for getting this fella trained, and bringing that competency in-house. So there was support from pretty much everyone else in the company to make it happen.
As candid as it sounds, failure to find common objectives between company and an employee may be a sign that they’re headed in different directions. It happens, and the process of creating employee objectives best practices is a proactive way of identifying this eventual rift.
Leadership clears the way for employees to succeed
Employees are only half the team when it comes to objectives. At small and large companies alike, leadership and management play a major role in the creation of good objectives
Once they’re created, leadership needs to clear the way for employees to attain their objectives. This means making sure objectives do, indeed, tie in with those of the broader organization, but it’s just as important for managers to work out any roadblocks in resourcing or assignments that may impede an employee’s ability to succeed.
In knowledge industries such as software and design, employees are an organization’s most important asset. Leadership shouldn’t kick itself in the teeth by watching employees, motivated by well-aligned objectives, slip through the cracks. With good objectives management comes ample opportunity for one-on-one conversations and check ins and awareness of where folks are headed, both of which serve to improve alignment, or identify potential rifts.
Public or private w/ team?
The good thing about allowing the entire organization to view one another’s objectives is that everyone can help their coworkers achieve them. Maybe they have a skill or experience in something a coworker is trying to develop and can help mentor them. Public objectives make improvement a community initiative. That said, not all objectives will make for great water cooler talk.
Choosing to diversify objectives across personal, professional, and organizational tiers may help you decide which ones are relevant to the greater audience (hint: the professional and organizational), and which ones are best kept between manager and employee. By implementing employee objectives best practices in tandem with an employee feedback program, you will go a long way in increasing employee engagement and job satisfaction.
By Alex Yohn
Jan 27, 2020
Regular check-ins are a good thing, and there is no one right way to do them. It can depend on your culture, the type of work you do, and ultimately, the personality of the employee. That being said, we’ve rounded up some great advice on how to make a schedule that works for you and your team.
After avoiding the most common onboarding mistakes you don’t just let your employees fly away and off on their own. This is where a lot of companies stumble and sometimes fall.
According to a Gallup employee engagement survey, only 30% of employees and 35% of managers are engaged at work. This low level of engagement is caused in part by unaccountable responsibilities and lack of communication from both sides.
Companies have tried ways of keeping engagement and accountability high in the past, which typically included an annual performance review process. The annual review hasn’t gone as planned for most organizations.
Bloomberg declared the annual performance review worthless in 2013. The author, Claire Suddath wrote, “Unsurprisingly, hauling people into a conference room and rating them on a numerical scale isn’t a popular practice.”.
In addition to treating employees less than human, Suddath believes that reviews don’t happen frequently enough. “Managers should address issues when they arise,” she writes, “not six or eight months later.”
The old, formal process of impersonal annual performance reviews dragged its slow-to-respond ideas into HR technology with the introduction of employee review software, but the new-and-improved annual review process still left 65% of employees wanting more feedback from their managers.
Our CEO Craig Bryant chatted with Bloomberg, and went as far as calling most performance review software, “abhorrent”. This feeling led us to develop better employee review features with our Kin HR software.
Annual performance reviews may always have a place in employer-employee relations, but it’s not how relationships are built or how employee engagement is crafted. If these ideas are your goals, employee check-ins can help you achieve them.
Build relationships and raise engagement
Creating a regularly scheduled check-in with your staff is a must in our ever evolving world. Not only does this help the employee understand where their boss believes they should be, it also helps the employer gauge the role, work level, stress, and other details of the job more often.
The reason you’d want to know these things is because they give you a complete look at the progress (or lack thereof ) the employee is making. In some industries, priorities can shift swiftly quarter to quarter and a check-in between parties will really help keep the employee on the same page as the company.
Because a check-in doesn’t sound as serious as an annual performance review, if the employer creates the right environment, like going off-campus or going to lunch during the check-in, it can be a more candid conversation.
Asking the right kinds of questions during your check-ins will help you gauge the employees’ loyalty to the company, too.
What you’ll soon discover is that the frequency your company checks in with employees matter to building the relationship with them and raising their engagement levels at work.
Quarterly check-ins
One of the most common check-in structures is the quarterly check-in.
Quarterly check-ins are an easy sell. They connect with the quarters of the year (though, if your fiscal year is off from the calendar year, you could align here too), two-quarters playing a larger role than your average check-in.
The mid-year check-in can play the role of realigning the rest of the employee’s year with any new company goals and initiatives. If what your employee planned to do this year no longer makes sense, you’ll want to have this chat at the mid-year check-in.
Then there’s the end of the year check-in, which could play the role of your annual review. If you can avoid performance review failures, and structure your annual reviews more like a check-in, you and your staff will be better off for it.
This structure leaves the remaining two check-ins to be much less formal, and even more important to the “temperature check” that check-ins can provide.
A 360 review
Alana Martin, an operations leader at We Are Mammoth, Kin’s parent company, explains their processes for a formal check-in, “We use a process called a 360 review. For the second and fourth quarters, we ask the colleagues who work with the employee having the check-in to provide feedback on their working experience with them. We only do that twice a year because we like to have enough time to get substantial feedback.”
Staff working with an employee every day will have more on-the-ground information to share in their feedback, which is essential to a successful check-in process.
After a 360 review is completed, this info is fed into Kin’s review feature and discussed during a more formal check-in with the employees’ manager.
On whether or not this process works for everyone, Alana had more to say. “I think it depends on your level and role in the company. One of our software developers would check-in with his junior reports on a weekly basis. It gave them a chance to go over their shared objectives and to see how they’re handling their workload.”
Quarterly check-ins work for most companies as a whole, but a check-in process might be needed more often, like at a software development company.
The development team at a software company often works in what is called a “sprint”, a one to two week period where a team of developers work on a particular amount of work as a project.
Check-ins on objectives and employee outlook might happen as often as at the end of each sprint.
As for other industries, Alana doesn’t see there being a right or wrong answer. “It’s a touch and go situation. A once a week five-minute catch-up where an employee and a manager meet informally could also be the right decision, it all depends on your business.”
Find the right balance
While the frequency and how formal you choose to make the process are important, so too is finding what would work best for your industry and your folks.
You can start with a quarterly check-in and gauge the feeling. If it feels too often, scale back. If it feels like you need to check-in more, explore having a less formal, more often, check-in with employees.
Having check-ins with your team on a regular basis can help keep everyone informed, provide comfort in autonomy, and direct your employees’ objectives that lead to positive reviews.
Have you started having check-ins with your employees? Drop us a line and let us know what’s worked and what hasn’t. We’d love to feature your feedback in an update!
By Alex Yohn
Jan 12, 2020
Despite a large amount of research showing that the development of an onboarding process works wonders for companies with retention issues, lots of small businesses haven’t started developing their own onboarding processes.
Making a good first impression is crucial for new hires when interviewing with your company, and now it’s your turn to give a good first impression back to your new hire. Creating a good onboarding process serves as your new hires first impression on how your company conducts business.
According to an Aberdeen Research study in 2012, 90% of companies believe their new hires make the decision to stay with a company long-term within their first year of employment. But in reality, 90% of new hires decide to stay or leave a job within the first six months, and according to ERE Media, a third of new employees actually quit within the same timeframe.
This gap in understanding retention between your small business and new hires should dramatically shift how you hire and onboard new folks.
Specifically, there are two common onboarding mistakes to avoid that when taken seriously, will put your small business above competitors recruiting from the same talent pool.
Starting the onboarding process on their first day
More often than not most first-day-on-the-job situations end up feeling like an awkward middle school dance. To quote our CEO, Craig Bryant, on this feeling, “why do so many companies treat their employee’s first day like it’s the first time they’ve even considered getting their new hire plugged in, informed and productive?”
Consider providing your new hire the red carpet treatment to make them feel welcomed, and that carpet should begin unrolling before the first day on the job.
From the moment the candidate accepts your job offer, it’s off to the races. Your response to their acceptance should include all of the paperwork your new hire needs to fill out and return to you.
New hire paperwork is nearly the same forms from new hire to new hire, pending any job-specific needs. At the minimum, have these files zipped in a folder and ready to send to new hires. Want to take your prep a step further? Fill out the areas you’re responsible for (and that stay the same across all new hires), and never need to take that time again!
Give your new hire instructions on what to fill out, where to sign, and when you’d like the paperwork returned by. Here’s the secret key, set a due date that is before their first day on the job! If you can, put a system in place that allows you to keep track of their paperwork process, and keep it organized. The worst thing you could do is get the paperwork back in your email, but miss it with the hundreds of other emails that day.
This gives you a good amount of time to answer any questions prior to your new hire’s start date and also provides time to put all of their information into the system in time for their initial walk through the front door of your office.
“I’d argue for thinking of the onboarding process as a team-building exercise rather than simply a time to get all the necessary forms filled out properly.”, says Meghan Biro, founder and CEO of TalentCulture, in a Forbes write-up about onboarding. If your company is big on team building (and it should be), send your new hire the paperwork in advance for their review and schedule an hour or two where they can stop by the office before their start date to fill out the paperwork together.
Welcoming your new hire with a pile of paperwork isn’t something either party is looking forward to. Get this work done and out of the way of one of the most important areas of onboarding, assimilation.
Just because you got all of your new hire’s paperwork done before their first day, doesn’t mean your job is done. There is one more major mistake to avoid.
Ending the onboarding process on their first day
Paperwork, check. The first day, check. Time to keep onboarding!
Just how long should the onboarding process last? The answer differs. Some say 90 days, others up to six months, whereas few call for a full first year to be considered part of their onboarding process. What works best? Well, look at your company culture and consider the areas of business each new hire would need exposure to and learn about before simply saying a number.
There are other questions to answer as well. Does your company work remotely? Remote companies typically have some unique challenges to culture and would require a different outlook.
Answering these kinds of company identity and assimilation questions will put you and your team in a place to develop an onboarding process that extends past the honeymoon phase of their job.
Lou Dubois, a marketer who focuses on small businesses, writes for Inc.com, “You can do a lot of different things to increase an employee’s comfort level and productivity in the first ninety days, from lunches to meetings to introductions and more.”
Schedule regular check-ins periodically during the first year or so to do a temperature check on new folks you’ve hired. 30 days, 90 days, 6 months, and part of the annual performance review process are the most common check-in periods. Not during a run-of-the-mill performance review, but paired with performance review best practices.
Outside of a formal check-in and performance review process, show your new hire how involved your company will be in their job by working to develop a career development plan.
While there are a number of career development stages and the process continues throughout your new hire’s life, taking a stake in their direction proves to be a positive motivator.
“Career development helps with retention because employees can develop a sense of loyalty for employers who are willing to invest in them.”, says Monica Gomez, a writer for the Association for Talent Development. She continues on, “Likewise, when it is time to hire new employees, career development programs can be attractive to job-seekers.”.
It’s time to break out the thinking caps and put together a career development plan that raises employee engagement and is at the forefront of your onboarding process.
Not the first or last
Onboarding is an ongoing process. It sounds kind of funny, but it’s true to life. A new hire at your company might not be exposed to an area of business or a particular practice your company has until long after your current onboarding process is over (if you have a process).
What is key here, though, is creating a company culture that fosters ongoing communication, where an onboarding process and regular check-ins with your folks blur the lines between being a new hire and an experienced employee.
After all, your company is only as good as your staff is. Put your new hire in a position to succeed by avoiding these costly and common onboarding mistakes.
Has your team redeveloped your onboarding process? Tweet us @Kin_HR and tell us your story.