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Tag: workplace

How to stem the tide of turnover

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A “title wave of turnover,” a “turnover tsunami,” call it what you like, but 52 percent of employees plan to leave their jobs in 2021, a 43 percent increase over the two previous years, according to Achievers’ data. Most people quit or stay for reasons related to your workplace environment.

Understanding specifically why they come and go enables you to rethink your people strategies and their possibly unintentional consequences.

After the stress and uncertainty of the pandemic, working longer hours from home, and being disconnected from company culture and values, people are feeling overworked, burned out, and undervalued.

Research by Robert Half finds that 70 percent of employees say they’ve been working on weekends and working more hours than they did before the pandemic, yet 51 percent of them worry that their manager doubts their productivity. Who can blame them for looking for new opportunities in happier, healthier, and more trusting work environments? Employers cannot sit back and passively hope for the best. Listen hard to what your people want today, accept that your workplace will look different; and demonstrate that you value your employees and will fight to retain them.

As employees reconsider and reevaluate their priorities, the top ten reasons they quit haven’t changed dramatically in the last few years. People still want more appreciation and recognition, opportunity to grow and advance, meaningful work, and fair compensation and benefits. What has increased in importance over the pandemic are a desire for better work-life balance, more flexibility, and stronger connection—the kinds of things most companies find hardest to understand and implement.

The global pandemic has changed almost every aspect of work. As employees’ needs change, most companies are struggling to meet them in terms of policies, culture, and benefits. Here are some areas to focus on as you reconsider the effectiveness of your retention strategies.

Don’t Try to Go Back to the Way It Was

It may seem easier to go back to “normal” but it’s neither possible nor desirable. Sadly, this is exactly what’s happening in companies everywhere. Our workplaces are more diverse now than ever in the past, in terms of generations, gender differences, and ethnicities. Cultures have changed, leadership has changed, needs have changed. We have to have faith that we can not only handle it all but will benefit from moving forward.

Listen and Take Meaningful Action

Turnover prevention boils down to understanding what your people need. Employees have complained for decades that leaders are terrible at making needed changes in response to their feedback. Today’s employees won’t put up with lip service. Act on their feedback so they know you are listening and understand that they are appreciated and valued.

Create a Culture of Communication and Recognition

When people feel under appreciated for their contributions, it’s impossible to have a positive employee experience. Increasing recognition, along with prioritizing open and transparent communication, builds the strong connections and trusting relationships that employees want most.

Nurture a Healthy Work-Life Balance

Putting a higher priority on productivity than the well-being of employees leads to disengagement, burnout—and turnover. Focus more on work output than time spent. Give employees manageable workloads and the flexibility to get the job done in a way that fits their life holistically.

Let Go With Gratitude

Letting go of valued employees can be hard for us as leaders, but don’t hang onto people simply to increase your retention level. Sometimes good people no longer fit into your culture or no longer have the needed skills. Maybe you need them to work in the office and they want to continue to work from home.

It’s critical, and beneficial to both you and your employee, when you have an honest conversation about what each of you wants and find a solution. Loss and change are inevitable. Viewing them through a lens of gratitude brings cherished memories that last forever, and opportunity that’s achievable only when you let go.

Changes in the way we do things and think about things are happening in our workplaces faster than ever before, without much time to adjust to them. It’s a mistake to try to cling to the good old days, but totally appropriate to be grateful for them and for the people who created them.

Don’t excuse racism in your workplace, prevent it from happening

Following the killing of George Floyd and the related protests, virtually every segment of society began examining the issue of race in its respective organizations. Colorado business owners should be no different. Egregious racially offensive conduct in the workplace continues to exist.

Very recently, the NASCAR brand was put under a microscope when Bubba Wallace found a noose in a workplace garage. The fallout and investigation were ugly for all involved. Even the owner of a speedway had his profits affected through lost sponsors after making an off-color and ignorant post concerning the incident.

What’s bad is that the issue of nooses in the workplace continues to be a vehicle of racial harassment and a significant concern for employers to prevent. What’s good is that proactive employers are using such events as an opportunity to shore up their policies and corporate behaviors concerning race.

What’s at Stake? Unpacking the Risk to Employers

Race discrimination in a workplace harms the interests of every employer of every size, operating in every sector. Racism in the workforce impedes morale, creates distrust, and obstructs teamwork. At this time, Colorado employers must understand the issue of racial harassment and work to ensure that all employees will be treated fairly and equally in dealing with this issue.

Federal and Colorado laws prohibit race discrimination in employment. Racial harassment is a form of racial discrimination. Racial harassment places the employer in a position of confronting administrative charges filed by employees with state or federal government enforcement agencies, investigations by such agencies, and litigation initiated by individual employees or government enforcement agencies.

A claim for a hostile work environment based on race is the most common claim to address racial harassment. An essential element of this claim requires the claimant to prove that the discriminatory intimidation, ridicule, or insult is sufficiently severe or pervasive to alter the conditions of the claimant’s employment and create an abusive working environment.

A victim’s harasser may be the victim’s supervisor, a manager or supervisor in another department, a co-worker, or the employer’s clients or customers in the workplace. There is not any automatic number of offensive incidents, or specific forms of conduct, required for a viable claim. Each claim must be viewed in the context of the totality of the circumstances.

As recently as April 13, 2020, the federal court in Colorado addressed the use of the most heinous racial epithet in the Ostrom v. Mountain Top Inc. case. This matter involved an ice cream shop in Vail, where a co-worker repeatedly referred to Ms. Ostrom’s boyfriend with the N-word and repeatedly threatened to shoot him, including the nonverbal conduct of simulating the firing of a gun. This conduct resulted in Ms. Ostrom lying on the floor of Mountain Top in a fetal position and ultimately running out of the store to the police. A single workplace incident, if sufficiently severe or pervasive like the one described in the Mountain Top scenario, is actionable and can suffice to assert a hostile work environment claim against an employer.

Preventing Racial Harassment in the Workplace

Every employer is unique, and every employer improves by developing a program that is both consistent with its operations and management, and effective in preventing racial harassment in its workplace. Recently, the University of Iowa football program and the NFL Washington Football Team were confronted with numerous complaints alleging that each organization had a discriminatory work culture. The Iowa program faced the issue of race, and the Washington organization addressed the issue of sex discrimination. Rather than merely investigate specific complaints, these organizations retained outside law firms to conduct a comprehensive analysis and investigation of the culture of the organization concerning the type of discrimination in issue.

While the investigations concerning the Iowa program and the Washington NFL team were in response to a series of complaints, every organization may benefit by conducting a comprehensive evaluation of its workforce and practices to prevent harassment. The Report of the Co-Chairs of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s Select Task Force on the Study of Harassment in the Workplace identified five core principles that have generally proven effective in preventing and addressing harassment that Colorado businesses owners can benefit from:

  • Committed and engaged leadership
  • Consistent and demonstrated accountability
  • Strong and comprehensive harassment policies
  • Trusted and accessible complaint procedures
  • Regular, interactive training tailored to the audience and the organization

Now is the Time to Prevent Racial Harassment in the Workplace

Extreme racial harassment in the workforce continues to exist. An effective, comprehensive analysis of the workforce may serve as a first step toward implementing a program to prevent race harassment. The time to act is now, before an embarrassing incident occurs or a lawsuit is filed.

Employment lawyers can help you review your organizational culture concerning race. They can also work with your team to prevent new complaints by examining prior complaints concerning race discrimination and harassment and by interviewing key executives, managers, supervisors, and affected employees. Your company has the opportunity to develop proactive training programs concerning racial bias, unconscious bias, as well as diversity and inclusion in the workplace. Finally, a review and modification of existing policies might be necessary. In 2020, when issues surrounding race and racial harassment are top of mind, all employers have the opportunity to benefit from implementing an effective program to prevent race discrimination in their workforce.

Steven Murray is an experienced attorney in employment and civil rights law, litigation, and trial practice. Steven’s experience has been virtually exclusively devoted to practicing private and public-sector employment, civil rights law, and trial practice. www.smurraylaw.com

How leaders can better support black employees

As our cities and towns become quieter and the protests seem to be dwindling, it’s easy to think that America has moved on from the social and racial justice movement of a few weeks ago, and shifted its entire focus back to COVID-19.

But don’t be fooled by the perceived calm that has developed over the past few weeks. Just last month, the international news reported that protests were occurring on three of our seven continents. That kind of passion doesn’t simply disappear.

The racial battle being fought today is ultimately about power and policy. Who has the power and who do the policies benefit? And, why don’t they benefit all of us equally? There’s no easy fix or 10-point plan to rapidly correct something that began 400 years ago and is still being cultivated.

However, there is one place where rapid change can happen, where diversity, equity, and inclusion can be real more quickly: The American workplace. We know that most companies are quite agile when they need to be and, as such, are well equipped to make change happen.

I, for one, am counting on business leaders to lead the way. In the meantime, here are some thoughts on how they (and you) can get started.

  1. Recognize that the time for reaction is in the rearview mirror. It’s time for response and time to keep the commitments you or others made in the heat of the moment.  There will be public scrutiny and your response as a leader and a company will have wide-reaching repercussions.

  2. Keep talking and listening. In the world of corporate and business communications, there is a saying about the importance of leaders sticking to a message, “When you get tired of saying it, your employees are just starting to get it.”  Usually, this applies to slogans or key messages that CEOs think they’ve said ad nauseam and are ready to throw out in favor of new messaging. Messages of anti-racism, equality, and inclusion, followed by action, never gets old. Keep the conversation going and listen more than you talk.

  3. Understand that this is not a diversity issue; it’s a systemic racism issue that has been built into our systems for hundreds of years. I encourage you to look at your policies, practices, and processes to identify and root out any instances of bias. Use a third party if necessary.

  4. Put your white privilege to work. Keep in mind that “privilege” does not mean wealth in this context; it means advantage.  Put your white advantage to work to call out racism when you see it; when you vote; and in all that you do. Make anti-racism and diversity business priorities and business values.

  5. Lead by example. There is no better way for a CEO to underscore commitment than through their own behavior change. If you’re wondering what behavior changes you might need to make, I encourage you to take the Harvard Implicit Association Test. It’s a simple test that helps determine if you are subconsciously racist.

As a leader of a company, or just simply as a human, the best way to encourage change is to start with ourselves. Learn as much you can and what it means to be anti-racist today; then take a visible stand.

Many people of all races are unaware of the ways Black people have intentionally been held back by policies of white supremacy. Saying you’re non-racist or your company is inclusive means virtually nothing in these times—especially if there isn’t visible evidence. These terms have become a business pablum.

People—your peers, your colleagues, and your employees—need to hear and see your anti-racist action. And, you can take action without becoming an activist. Be an example for others to follow.

Dsc 3037 (1) (1)Charlene Wheeless is a black woman, mother, renowned communications expert, author, and speaker with more than three decades of experience in corporate communications. After serving 15 years in C-suite positions, Charlene revamped a 120-year old company and has developed compelling communication strategies.