Behaviour

How Do You Show Your Employees You Care?

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How do you show your employees you care? You care for your employees’ children.

All employers are looking to use perks and other benefits to create sustainable bonds and lasting connections with their employees. Throwing more money at employees may seem like an easy way to improve employee workplace satisfaction but it is not they only retention tool out there. Employees stay with a company because they believe the company cares about them and their well-being.

If they really want to show employees they care, perhaps more HR departments should follow Starbucks’ lead and provide child care—not full-time child care, but a service many would consider almost as valuable—back up child care when an employee needs it the most.

Starbucks in the United States has partnered up with a company called Care@Work. Each eligible Starbucks employee will receive a free premium membership to access Care@Work services including subsidized day care at a cost of $1 per hour for up to 10 backup care days.

This isn’t only for child care, however. Starbucks realizes that many of their employees are in the sandwich generation and are looking after children as well as dependent adults. This benefit perk applies to both dependent groups.

Click here to read about Care@Work’s services.

With the tight labour market in North America, employers are looking for ways to stand out and attract prospective employees, while retaining existing ones. Providing subsidized child and adult care may be a key factor in helping your organization stand out.

Click here to read more about Starbucks’ innovative benefits.

Starbucks has been a leader in the service industry, which traditionally treats its employees as low-skill, entry level, transient workers. Starbucks has done the opposite by providing its employees with the full spectrum of benefits including medical, education, stock options, and even pensions.

Cynics might argue that Starbucks is adding all these benefits just to retain employees; however, it’s worth noting that the Starbucks mission statement highlights a desire to “inspire and nurture the human spirit”, and that among the company’s core values are commitments to foster a sense of belonging, to find new ways to take the company forward, and to “challenge the status quo”. Others might argue that in providing backup care for its employees’ loved ones, Starbucks is doing an admirable job of living up to this mission statement and these core values—that it is doing business “through the lens of humanity”.

Click here to read Starbucks’ mission and values statement.

Discussion Questions:

  1. Research two other service industry companies. What types of employee benefits do they offer their employees?
  2. Why don’t more service companies take the Starbucks approach to employee benefits?

The HR Pressure Cooker is Heating Up

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Santhosh Varghese/Shutterstock

Wages have always been at the forefront of any HR Department’s concerns, but it seems we are now approaching boiling point and that something may blow. Recruitment company Hays notes in its 2018 Salary Guide “a building pressure and awareness around compensation that [they] have not seen in previous years.” (Hays 2018 Salary Guide, p. 20.)

What does this mean for HR Departments? It is clear that they are feeling the pressure. Eighty-five percent say they want and need to improve their compensation plans in order to hire and retain top employees, but according to the Hays study, only 24% of HR Departments are allowed to offer more than a 3% compensation improvement.

Here is where the pressure is building for HR Departments — in recruitment. Compensation challenges and an inability to hire locally sourced talent is making it very difficult for HR departments.

The pressure is on, then, for HR to develop sophisticated, integrated strategies that address compensation levels, organization culture, and recruitment challenges. Perhaps HR professionals will increasingly need to show evidence-based research to convince senior leaders that they may have to increase their compensation budgets in the very near future.

 

Discussion Questions:

Research companies that lead the market with their compensation strategies. Identify why they have pursued these strategies.

Develop a 3-minute presentation to convince a Chief Financial Officer that an increase in the compensation budget is needed.

 

How to Bring the Apple Consumer Culture to HR

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Apple has long been recognized as a leader in creating innovative customer experiences, which is one of the reasons the company has developed what some consider a cult-like following. What would happen if HR could create a similar experience for their employees?

The Harvard Business Review (HBR) suggests that the concept of employee engagement is waning and that the true organizational leaders of tomorrow will concentrate on the “Employee Experience.” It is the employee experience that will shape employee engagement.

Research indicates that companies should care deeply about employee engagement. Gallup has found that, “companies with highly engaged workforces outperform their peers by 147% in earnings per share.”

What CEO would not want to see a 147% increase in share price?

Expanding on this research, HR needs to start treating employees like customers. This is not a particularly new idea. HR has attempted to treat its employees more like customers for years. However, it is now time to continue that trend, and to succeed in creating more positive employee experiences.

There are two fundamental concepts in developing a customer experience strategy for employees; the concept of segmentation and the customer journey. The following HBR article summarizes these two concepts.

Click here to read the article.

If organizations what to improve their corporate results, perhaps they should think about changing their employment engagement philosophy to one that truly focuses on the employee experience, which will in turn improve employee performance.

Discussion Questions:

  1. After reading the HBR article, create a journey map to improve the employee experience. Choose an organization that you are familiar with, or somewhere you have worked in the past.
  2. Think about a job you have had in the past. How would your relationship with that company have been different if they had treated you like a customer?

Pay for Production

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Are you paying for hours, or for productivity? The difference could be huge.

Woman balancing life and work
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All organizations need to develop an effective compensation strategy that is aligned with their business strategy; that is HR and Business 101.

Many compensation consultants discuss the concepts of base pay, performance pay and indirect pay, and most of those concepts are built on the foundation of an annual salary or hourly wage. Our society has been ingrained into the concept that a full-time employee works eight hours a day and 40 hours a week for approximately 2000 hours a year. It just can’t be any other way, most HR professionals would say.

  • What if our society’s concept of the paid hour of work for eight hours a day is a flawed concept?
  • Is eight hours the most productive number of hours per day to work?
  • Are there any alternatives?

Well, some researchers and some businesses are exploring alternatives to the eight-hour day and seeing very productive results. Tower Paddle Board, a manufacturer of stand up paddle boards (SUP), moved to a five-hour work day and a five-percent profit sharing model.

  • What was the result?
  • Was it higher costs?
  • Was there lower productivity and greater customer complaints?

I bet you can guess the answer to those questions was a big and bold: NO!

The opposite was true: workers’ wages went from $20.00 per hour to $38.40 per hour for 25 hours a week, and annual revenues were up 40 percent. Also, they have been named one of America’s fasting growing companies.

Click here to read about Tower Paddle Boards.

Discussion Questions

  1. Read the article about Tower Paddle Boards. Review the five steps Tower Paddle Boards used to implement a 25-hour work week. Pick a company and see if you could use those five steps to make a 25-hour work week work for that organization.
  2. Conduct some research online to learn about how other countries and companies schedule their work week. Come up with your own ideas for alternatives to the 40-hour work week.

Motivation Gone Mad

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Concept of failure of a businessman--man fed to sharks
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Our compensation studies focus on the push and pull of organizational rewards systems, and their direct link to employee behaviours. These systems are built on theories of human motivation, which guide our thinking about the way employees are supposed to react and respond in order to achieve organizational goals.

Usually these rewards systems focus on positive outcomes based on targeted goals. Positive outcomes are meant to reinforce constructive employee behaviours. What happens, however, when the pressure to achieve an expected goal overwhelms the employee’s ability to behave in a positive way?

The TD Bank Group has been in the news recently due to its targeted sales practices that have resulted in allegations of unethical and possibly illegal employee behaviours.

Click here to view the CBC report.

Click here to view the follow up CBC report.

While the allegations by employees in these reports are shocking, the revenue goals for the bank have been achieved. Bank profits have increased. Sales targets have been met. Underperforming employees have been placed on ‘Performance Improvement Plans’ to align expected behaviours with targeted sales-based performance objectives.

The questions must be asked: At what cost? Do the ends, in this particular situation, really justify the means?

This case appears to provide an extreme example of fear-based motivation. Fear of job-loss overrides the ethical judgement of employees and forces them into negative behaviours. The negative behaviours have a lesser consequence for employees than that of losing their jobs. In the context of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs theory (outlined in our compensation studies), job-loss for these employees means that they will be unable to provide food and shelter for themselves and their families. The choice to ensure that an employee’s personal food and shelter needs are met has a stronger pull than making ethically sound decisions for others.

This case points an accusing finger, not at the individual employees, but at the senior executive managers within the TD Bank Group, and at the system of rewards that are in place to motivate and influence the whole.

Discussion Questions:

  1. After reviewing the two articles, identify specific elements of motivational theory that are evident in employee reactions.
  2. As a bank manager, what types of rewards would you implement in order to influence employees to achieve profit-related targets?
  3. As an employee required to achieve these types of sales targets, how would you respond? What decisions would you make based on your personal ethics and values?