Articles - Training, Development and Retention

There is a Chinese proverb that says, “Life is an echo – what you send out comes back.”  We can say the same about our workplaces:  How we treat people is an echo – what we send out comes back.   How we treat people is a foundation element in the experience people have as employees.

Managing that employee experience is not fully the job of HR – rather, if we think about it as building a house, we might say that HR is the architect of the experience, the first line supervisors are the construction workers or skilled trades, and the employees themselves are the decorators.  The upper management team members have roles in the employee experience also.  They are the site engineers, construction bosses, and inspectors responsible for making sure our employee experience “house” is safe and habitable.

As HR, we design the experience, and then we empower and trust the first-line supervisors and organization leaders to build the employee experience through the various stages of what I call the employee lifecycle.  If done right, employees want to move in and participate in making their experience enjoyable – something they choose to return to day after day.  In fact, I define the experience of employee engagement is how people feel sitting down (or standing up) at their workplace every day.  Giving employees the opportunity to decorate their experience in ways that fit their wants and needs provides a foundation of engagement.  And, in the end, don’t we want engaged employees who choose to commit themselves, and their discretionary effort, to their managers, co-workers, and organizations?

How a company treats people starts at the moment an individual becomes interested in that company.   For example, the information on a website and the usability of the staffing portal gives clues to prospective employees about what the company is like on the inside and how much it cares about how it is perceived on the outside. 

Does your Talent Acquisition team make applicants and potential applicants feel welcome and valued, even if they are not selected for an interview or hired for a job?  In developing a blueprint for the employee experience, HR needs to consider the little things that can gain huge benefits in good will.  One complaint I hear often is that people apply for jobs and never hear back from the company, except perhaps for an automated message from an on-line staffing tool to confirm an application has been received.  When coaching people in transition who have that complaint, I ask them to imagine what values that company has that allows the choice of not following up on all inquiries.  Are these values compatible with their own?  Putting yourself in the place of an applicant, what would be your answer to those questions?

I have talked with HR at companies that do choose to ignore applicants if they do not pass initial screening.  To be fair, these HR folks feel they don’t have the time or resources to respond to every applicant.  Some on-line automated messages will tell applicants that if they do not hear from the company after a period of time, they should assume they are not considered for the position to which they applied.  Unfortunately, some applicants feel that the job search process is complex enough and being able to take a job off their radar screen earlier, rather than later, can help simplify and re-target their search.  Unhappy applicants are likely going to their job-search networking groups and telling the story about their treatment.  Most folks I talk to on the applicant side of the fence would accept an automated message closing their applicant status for the target job, with an invitation to continue considering application for future jobs posted by the company. 

Companies that don’t already have a way to close the applicant status, do have an opportunity to treat people better if they can have a secondary set of automated messages programmed into the staffing management system that can be activated based on codes entered by the Talent Acquisition team or screening system.  The added benefit is a reduction in the number of calls from people who did not hear from the company in the weeks following an application.

What we send out comes back.  In the case of applicants, if they feel treated with respect even if they don’t become candidates, they will tell that story to their networking groups.  The resulting good will is difficult to measure, but certainly we can imagine that if our most-desired employee hears a good story about the application process at our company, he or she will be more likely to start tracking our job postings and apply for the next job that fits them.  The interaction between applicant and company is the first phase of the employee experience.  The experience continues through the employee lifecycle, into candidacy, on-boarding, training, developing, growth, and eventually, exiting. 

The employee lifecycle is the full set of blueprints necessary to take the employee experience “house” from design to construction, then into decorating, remodeling, and eventually moving on when the house no longer meets the employee’s needs.   Maybe the most important thing for HR practitioners to remember is that in designing the employee experience, they are operationalizing more than a bunch of processes and programs; they are giving dimension to the organization’s culture and values.  It can be a wonderfully gratifying job!

Doreen Petty

For another viewpoint on the importance of letters to applicants: http://www.hirecentrix.com/job-applicant-rejection-letter-dos-and-donts-writing-an-appropriate-dear-john-letter-to-an-unsuccessful-applicant.html

Biography

Doreen Petty spent more than 20 years in the corporate world as a Human Resources professional, business partner, and leader.  Much of that time, she spent coaching other people at all levels of the organization to help them define, and then succeed at their goals.  In 2010, she started her own firm doing what she does best – helping people.  Doreen Petty Coaching’s primary mission is to help business owners and managers succeed, personally and professionally.  Through her coaching practice, Doreen helps clients accelerate progress towards goals by structuring an individualized coaching process designed with the client in mind.  With a network of specialist consultants, Doreen Petty Coaching’s HR consulting helps business owners ensure the best possible work environment for the people who depend on them.  By combining coaching services and HR consulting into one practice, Doreen Petty Coaching can support business owners, executives, and managers with ad-hoc services as well as offering a holistic perspective on the leaders and their organizations.

Doreen holds a Bachelor's degree in Business Management and a Master's degree in Psychology with a specialization in Leadership Development and Coaching.  She is a certified Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR) with experience spanning a broad range of HR competencies, including coaching, leadership effectiveness, HR program management, compliance training, organization development, employee relations, process development and implementation, talent management, organizational effectiveness, transition management, and more.

Find Doreen Petty Coaching on the web at http://coachingtheboss.com.  Read more from Doreen through her Coaching the Boss blog at http://coachingtheboss.com/ctbblog/ and “The Real Job of HR” blog at http://hr.toolbox.com/blogs/real-job-hr.  For regular updates, “follow” Doreen on Twitter, http://twitter.com/pettycache and “like” her business page on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/CoachingTheBoss.

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