Communication – Page 10 – mardihumphreys.com

It Can Be Tricky

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The approaching holiday has you all up in your thankful feels, but you’re worried about inadvertently offending instead of appreciating. When it comes to acknowledging your managers, remote teammates, clients, coworkers, volunteers, board members, mentors (Wow. You have a ginormous sphere of influence.), if you express your gratitude sincerely, specifically, and sensitively, then it has the best chance of being received well. Here are some examples of what not to do followed by a better way.

Sincere

DON’T: You stop at your teammate’s cubicle and see they are out to lunch. You leave a blank envelope containing a five-dollar gift card to their favorite local coffeehouse on their desk, then you go out to lunch. Your teammate returns and finds the random gift. Instead of feeling appreciated, they are creeped out.

DO: Wait for an opportunity to see them in person so you can look them in the eye and tell them why you’re giving them this gift. How did their recent action positively affect you? Simply saying, “I appreciate you having my back in the report-out meeting last month. Please have a cup of coffee on me at your convenience.” Will not only prevent them from being creeped out, it should also ensure their future support.

Specific

DON’T: You just gave your direct report a glowing performance review. At the end of the meeting, you say, “Great job last year. Keep it up. Have a good rest of your day,” then leave the video conference.

DO: You have to go through the standard on-a-scale-of-one-to-five form for HR, but if you want to retain this employee, you also need to draw a little deeper from the appreciation well. There are probably several instances when they made your life easier last year. Choose one and expound on it. For example, “Thank you for putting the Powerpoint presentation together last July for the contract renewal meeting. It took a lot of time to shepherd all the departments involved, fact check the slides, and incorporate everyone’s notes. Would you please write a report with your suggestions on how we can improve that process?” Not only does that express your gratitude for their mad follow-up skills, it also validates their work, lets them know they have a future with the organization, and encourages them to take on more responsibility.

Sensitive

DON’T: Once a year you give an award to the individual contributor that received the most positive feedback for customer service. This year’s recipient is known throughout the organization as an extreme introvert. You present the award to them in front of the whole company and their plus ones at the annual holiday lunch. Instead of feeling honored, they are embarrassed.

DO: Is it necessary to announce the award winner at the holiday lunch? If so, don’t force the extreme introvert to walk up in from of everyone to accept it. An award of appreciation should be thoughtful, creative, and personal. An announcement in the company newsletter and a handwritten note thanking them for the good care they took of your customers last year is more appropriate for an extreme introvert.

Thirty percent of employees quit their jobs due to lack of appreciation. Maybe your New Year’s resolution could be finding one thing to sincerely appreciate about one person every day. A daily gratitude habit can be contagious. You could revolutionize your workplace.

How often do you intentionally thank those around you? Please share in the comments.

Help Me Help You

You don’t get a raise because you need the extra money. You get a raise because you’ve made a positive impact on the bottom line and the company anticipates you’ll contribute in the future. If you executed duties above your job description, brought in revenue, and/or saved the company money, then you deserve a raise.

It’s Work

If you don’t have a “Brag File” yet, start one. Right. Now. Populate a new folder on your desktop with complimentary emails from both clients and coworkers, the link to your recommendations page on LinkedIn, awards, and any other evidence of the great job you did over the past 365 days. With this research, write a report quantifying your value to the company using explicit data to empower your case. For example, “I saved the company $19,800 in training expenses through my network connections and research.” Practice talking about how what you’re currently working on will benefit the company in the near future. Check out websites like salary.com to find out what others with your job title make. All these things pulled together enable you to enter the meeting knowing your worth.

It’s Scary

Your goal is to make you, your manager, and your company successful. You did your due diligence and have every reason to be optimistic, but it’s natural to feel nervous. Set a positive tone when you walk into the room. After greetings and small talk, use your curiosity to dive into your agenda. Ask your manager what their priority is right now. Follow up their answer with what you did this past year to help them get closer to their goal by pulling that report from your Brag File. Thank them for their insight. Tell them you’ll use it to further refine your process to assist them in achieving their priority. Of course, that means you will take on more responsibility and you anticipate that more compensation accompanies that effort. Say that with a poker face. Take the emotion out of the conversation. Report what you did to further the company’s success last year, demonstrate how you intend to keep doing it next year, and put a dollar amount on what the company should invest in your time, energy, and attention. It’s more scary to not get the raise you could’ve received if you’d simply asked for it.

It’s Worth It

Seventy percent of employees who ask for a raise get one. You may be told no even though you performed your job above and beyond its description. COVID-19 decimated our economy and your employer may not have the funds to give you a pay increase right now. Ask if the company is open to other forms of compensation (e.g., flexible schedule). If your requests are rejected, schedule a meeting for six months from now to revisit the possibility. Ask what KPIs your manager would like to see you hit in the interim. Keep your manager updated on your progress either through scheduled 1:1s or an end-of-week emailed report showing that your work is aligned with both your manager’s and the company’s goals.

If the compensation conversation intimidates you, reframe your fear as excitement. You’re anxious to share the good news of how you’ve improved both yourself and the company during the past year. If your enthusiasm is welcomed by your manager, then that’s a good sign you have a future with the company. If it isn’t, well, that tells you something too.

What do you do to build up your confidence to ask for a raise? Please share in the comments.

Purposeful Procrastination

Here in the Digital Age where business moves at the speed of data traveling through fiber, if I’m not productive every minute I’m at work, I fear that I’m being lazy. Since emails are tasks someone wants us to do and they arrive 24/7/365, it seems I’m not the only one with boundary issues. In terms of time management, we put off completing a task because we have other tasks that are either more urgent or more important. Or, we put it off because we don’t want to do it. But what if we use procrastination as a tool to preserve our boundaries?

If/Then

If we restrain ourselves from replying all to a group email asking for volunteers to organize the office holiday party, then are we lazy or are we allowing someone else to step into leadership?
If we proofread the slide deck for tomorrow’s weekly team meeting because the team member assigned to do so hasn’t done it yet, then are we being helpful or are we doing their job for them?
If we accomplish a last-minute errand for a co-worker, do we then set ourselves up for accomplishing more last-minute tasks for this co-worker in the future?

This is Not the Admin You’re Looking For

For example, sixty-three minutes before my team was scheduled for a video conference with a client, the account manager emailed me saying that the client needed to reschedule. He tasked me with:

Notifying the other team members that the meeting was postponed
Checking their availability for the new meeting time the client proposed
Rescheduling the meeting on our video conferencing platform
Updating the meeting calendar invitation

When this task arrived in my inbox, I was preparing for a different video conference huddle that was only fifteen minutes away. I had time to send a quick group email, but I chose to ignore the account manager’s request and prepare for my imminent meeting.

Sixty-eight minutes later, the emails from my teammates flew, reply-all style. The account manager ended up completing all the tasks he attempted to assign to me.

Confession: I intentionally procrastinated.

Sorry (Not Sorry)

It was hard to restrain myself. I felt bad for not preventing my teammates’ confusion and for using them to force the account manager to do his own administration. But apparently, I did not feel bad enough to go ahead and do the account manager’s administration. I prioritized my boundary above everyone else’s convenience.

Proceed With Caution

Having said (and done) that, please remember that we should exercise good judgement when evaluating such situations. Using restraint to enforce boundaries can look like procrastination and can be detrimental to our brand. We need to examine who may be impacted and how negatively before we intentionally delay action. In the above example, three people were inconvenienced for a relatively short period of time and my brand was positively impacted because I’m not the team’s administrator. I used the passage of time to help me hold that boundary. Hours after the incident, I replied to the account manager’s original email. I suggested that it’s probably not a best practice to rely on me to complete last-minute tasks as evidenced by this incident. I have not received another last-minute task from him since.

Have you ever intentionally put off work? Why? Please share in the comments.

The Talk

It’s time for “the talk.” Not THAT talk; you need to talk to your family about retirement savings-both theirs and yours. Yes, the economy is suffering right now and it’s tempting to push pause on long-term savings, but the future keeps coming and everyone from Baby Boomers to Gen Z should continue to plan for it.

Don’t Count on It

Do not make the mistake of counting on the United States government to fully fund your golden years. Social Security is intended for use as an emergency resource, not your main source of income after you leave the workforce. Plus, by 2034, projections reveal that the Social Security Administration will be paying out more benefits than they are taking in through payroll taxes because there will be more retirees than employees. If Congress steps in then it probably won’t run out. But if you want to live the rest of your life comfortably, then you should fund your own retirement.

It’s Not About the Money

When talking to your family about future finances, you’re not really discussing money. Whether it’s your adult children who want you to carry them on your insurance or your parents who want you to be the executor of their wills, money is just a representative. What you’re really talking about is both expectations and emotions. Whether fear, resentment, kindness or generosity, feelings are attached to financial conversations. These discussions are not one-and-done. For example, when your parents began telling you about the birds and the bees, it wasn’t just one talk, was it? When our daughter was three years old she asked me where babies came from. I told her Cleveland. That satisfied her for two years. As she grew older, her questions grew more specific. It’s the same for the money talk. As everyone in your circle of care ages, the questions you ask them should become more specific. For example, when speaking with:

Gen Z – Do you have an emergency fund with at least $1000 saved? If not, they should think about automating their savings. Here is how to create a plan
Millennial – Are you aggressively paying off debt? Here are some pros and cons
Gen X – Are you taking advantage of catch-up retirement savings? Here is how they work
Baby Boomer – Have you thought about where you want your assets to go after you’re gone? Here is what they need to know if they live in the great state of Ohio

Awkward

How you manage your money is a very personal choice. When it has the potential to impact, either positively or negatively, the people you care about, you must talk to them about it no matter how awkward it feels. Opening up a dialogue before a financial emergency happens allows you to remain calm when the crisis hits. It may even prevent the crisis. The result of uncomfortable money conversations with your loved ones is it becomes more comfortable the more you do it. The result is peace of mind, and you can’t put a price tag on that.

What stops you from talking to your people about their and your future finances? Please share in the comments.

My Way or the Highway

I keep stumbling over the word agency because it’s a contributing factor to The Great Resignation. It’s trending in the context of one of its lesser meanings (check out #9). As I struggled to visualize it, I received an unexpected email of encouragement from my manager. In reassuring me that I am achieving our goals, his email helped me label how I achieve them. It also woke me to the fact that not everyone has this freedom in their work. Employers had to give up a certain amount of control over their workforces at the height of COVID-19 when they weren’t allowed to have employees work under their watchful eyes. An employer who has issues with employees working remotely is not a logistics problem, it’s a trust problem.

Control

If it’s not enough to complete the task correctly and on time, but it also has to be done the way the manager prefers, then you have a lack of agency. For example: toward the end of her life, our grandmother was not physically strong enough to wash the windows on her house herself. During a visit, my husband offered to do it. She immediately pointed out what equipment to pull from where, gave him a recipe for the cleaner, dictated while he mixed it, and window by window instructed him on how to clean them. Kudos to him for his patience. There were 13 windows on that house. It was a long afternoon. Haven’t we all had a micromanager? Or one who insisted we be available to them 24/7/365 like Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada? If this is your current situation, can you set boundaries on when you’re available to your manager? Can you transfer to another department that allows you more freedom? Is having agency important enough to you to find a different job? Whatever you decide, take time to think about how you got into this situation. Are you habitually involved with people (managers, people you date, etc.) who want to control you? If you determine that you’re the common denominator in these relationship equations, talk about them with a trusted friend, therapist, or coach to help you identify red flags in both your behavior and your manager’s. Otherwise, the lack of agency is likely to follow you to your next role.

Trust

Your lack of agency means your manager doesn’t entirely trust you. Some things to consider:

Have you done something to lose their trust?
Are they micromanaging everyone, or just you?
Is your relationship strong enough that you can ask them what they are afraid of?
Is there a way you can reduce their insecurities?
If you do what you’re told the way you’re told to do it every single time, there’s no learning. Would your manager let you experiment, fail, then learn from the result? For example: Can you do a project how, where, and when you want to, successfully complete it, deliver a report of the results to your manager, then ask for this process to become your standard operating procedure?
Have you had success on your own initiative that you can remind them of to prove your credibility?
Would more communication (e.g., weekly status reports) on projects give them more confidence in you?

You train people how to treat you. You cannot change other people’s behavior, you can only change what behavior you will accept from them. If you can’t achieve the autonomy you need at your current position, then your decision is whether to stay or go.

What do you do when you experience a lack of agency at work? Please share in the comments.

The Tide is High

You kept your business solvent during the pandemic. Now vaccines are available and buildings are reopening. Both you and your workforce are deciding where to go from here. Pivots like switching the product you manufacture (e.g., making hand sanitizer instead of bourbon) or shifting your employees to working from home has not only burned everyone out, but also revealed work-life integration paradigm shifts. You need to both retain your current workforce and attract new employees, but how? This week, let’s focus on keeping the folks you have.

Pivot Again

You regularly adapt your business to market conditions. This shift in the balance of power is a condition more abrupt than most, but it offers you a gift. It forces you to look at your mission, vision, values, policies, and procedures and sift them through the filter of The Platinum Rule. For example, employees hear the siren call of flexibility and autonomy in their jobs. Are your company’s paid time off policies amenable to employees with caregiving duties to young children, aging parents, chronically ill partners, etc.? If not, then it behooves you to reevaluate those policies. If your employees are being washed away by the Talent Tsunami, then you need to take a long, hard look at your company’s culture, protocols, and development paths. If your workforce was happy before the pandemic, then they would not be so tempted to leave now. You will be wise to shift your mindset to focus more on taking care of your employees and repeatedly communicating that commitment. People want to work in an environment where they feel valued. If your company has a vision the workforce can believe in, you coach them to share it, and demonstrate how their jobs are integral to realizing it, then employees get invested in meeting the company’s goals and want to stick around.

Engagement Brings Retention

The inconvenient truth is it’s cheaper to keep an employee than to hire a new one. If you don’t know what your employees need to achieve work-life integration, or to feel appreciated, now is the time to ask and actively listen to their answers. Individual contributors who feel they belong and have purpose are less likely to burn out. How do you know if your employees are burned out? Ask them. Company-wide email surveys are easy to create, send, and compile results. You can ask questions like: How do you think the company handled pivoting during COVID-19? How many days a week do you want to WFH? If the company reimburses you for upskilling, will you agree to work for us for a year? The answers will give you data that will not only help you to assess the risk of employees leaving, but also reveal what you can do to keep the good ones.

“Bye” the Way

Unless employees signed a contract saying they’d do one, they are not obligated to give exit interviews. A smart employee will not grant one if they don’t have anything nice to say. An exit interview is more of a benefit to you than to them. It’s an exiting employee’s gift of feedback to you. If the resigning employee grants one, stick to questions that will help you retain other employees. For example: What could the company have done to make it easier for your team to communicate with each other?

What are you doing to encourage your employees to join you in making your business succeed? Please share in the comments.

Should You Surf the Tsunami?

The number of posts from my LinkedIn connections announcing their new positions increases every day. Have you noticed it too? The Talent Tsunami is soaking us. Is it tempting you to find a new gig? Even now a job search can still be long, arduous, and uncertain. How can you tell when it’s time to move on?

In my role as a Change Agent, I ask questions so my clients can visualize both where they are and where they want to be. Next week, we’ll discuss how to figure out where you want to be. But first, here are questions to help you determine whether or not your current employment situation is still worth your T.E.A.M.

Your Body

Stress can physically manifest itself. Do you have headaches, nausea, and/or heart palpitations when you’re getting ready for work, at work, or just thinking about work? If so, your subconscious is trying to get your attention.

Your Mind

If your talents aren’t being tapped, you’ll get frustrated and, eventually, resentful.

Do your skills match the work you’re doing?
Are you unhappy the majority of the time you’re working?
Are you spending more time on social media than your work?
Are you watching the clock hoping time will speed up so you can leave?
Do you experience Sunday Scaries?
Are you looking at job postings and daydreaming about them?
Are you no longer proud of the work you’re doing?
Are you lowering your standards?
Do you hear yourself say, “It’s just a job”?
Have you lost your passion for the work?
Do you see your work as challenges or problems?
Careless mistakes (e.g., frequent typos, forgetting scheduled meetings) happen, but too many too often indicates that you’re disengaged from the work. Are you making too many glaring errors?

Your Environment

Has the novelty of being the SME worn off?
Are you tired of being the trainer and never the one learning something new?
Does your employer provide company time and money for upskilling?
Is advancement possible?
In order for you to move up, does someone have to leave?
Can you have a transparent conversation with your manager to find out if what you’re looking for can be attained within the company?
Have you taken on more responsibility and the effort has yet to be acknowledged?
Have you asked for a promotion at multiple performance reviews and even after completing the tasks your manager told you would result in advancement, they tell you that you’re still not qualified yet?
Are you no longer getting highly visible assignments?

Your Relationships

How do you get along with your manager?
Does your manager habitually give you instructions and refuse to hear your insight?
Does your manager refuse to negotiate benefits or discuss salary?
Are conversations with friends and family dominated by complaints about your job?

When you evaluate whether or not your current employment is worth your T.E.A.M. (Time, Energy, Attention, Money) what criteria do you use? Please share in the comments.

Red Alert

Our daughter was born seven days before my 31st birthday. While pregnant with her, my OB/GYN referred to us as a geriatric pregnancy. Has a bit of a negative connotation, don’t ya think? I prefer to think of us as trendsetters because these days plenty of women are following in our footsteps. At the time, I hoped that within twenty-five years society would evolve to the point where it’s easier for parents of minor-aged children to work full-time. The deadline to fulfill that hope is January 2022. Looks like I’m going to be disappointed.

Acknowledge

The corporate sector has done little to address this issue, and as we discussed last week, bias against working mothers hasn’t changed much in 25 years. Since the pandemic spotlighted their plight, now is an opportune time to use that momentum and advocate for permanent changes with employers for both mothers and fathers. Child care is necessary for parents to work. Work is necessary to drive economic recovery from COVID-19. More than half of the parents who took this survey anticipate that the cost of child care will increase because of the pandemic. The child care crisis is now a red alert and it affects all of us.

Communicate

If you are a parent in the workforce, the pandemic probably taught you the necessity of work-life integration, especially if your children are very young and/or school-aged. For example, the need for your physical presence when your child is an infant is not the same as when that child becomes a teenager. Even if your work responsibilities don’t change during those years, where and when you do the work can. Gone are the days of sitting in an office for eight hours waiting for work to appear. Work happens 24/7/365; so does the rest of your life. Figure out where your boundaries are, then communicate and negotiate them with your manager. When your employer knows that you’ll write the quarterly report after your daughter goes to bed in exchange for attending her soccer game that afternoon, they should respect your work-life integration. If they don’t, then you can find an employer who will. Right now there are more jobs available than people to fill them. You need to be in an employment situation where you can have transparent, on-going conversations with your manager (e.g., performance reviews) where the goal is to define both what the company currently needs from you, and what you need from the company in order to meet its needs. The result should be an arrangement benefitting both you and the company. If you and your employer are both fair and flexible, not only will you successfully integrate the responsibilities of your life, but you, your employer, and your children will benefit also.

How does your business address the needs of working parents? Please share in the comments.

The Motherhood Penalty

During a networking lunch with a female colleague, we chatted about our grown-and-flown daughters. We have four between us and love them more than life. I said, “I think being a working woman in America is a challenge, but being a working mother in America is a problem. Having children is a luxury.” She replied, “Or a liability.” That’ll preach. She said out loud what plenty of people think but don’t publicly acknowledge because we’re afraid of either hurting our children’s feelings or being harshly judged by our peers.

Research reveals that when both a man and a woman are up for the same job, gender is a factor in who gets it. The general perception is that a man can focus on the job, while a woman, specifically a mother, will be distracted by her circumstances outside of the job. This unconscious gender bias is called The Motherhood Penalty.

It can show up in how managers talk to each other about their direct reports. For example, on Monday a department head comments that Joe is a good example to his children because he worked all weekend to finish a project, but when Jane does the same thing, this department head worries aloud about who is taking care of her children. Also, think about positions in your business that require travel. Are there more men in those jobs than women?

A woman doesn’t have to be a mother to get penalized. Assumptions regarding women’s lifestyle choices are common. Some prejudice is so ingrained and subtle it occurs unnoticed until a vice president looks around the company and wonders why there are so few female directors. To get promoted to director, you first have to get promoted from individual contributor to manager, and that’s the problem.

The solution falls heavily on Human Resources. They possess the data and are in the position to ask questions about what it reveals. For example, if the organization has historically promoted more men than women from individual contributors to first-time managers, why? The answer may require an assessment of the performance review process to bring gender bias into the company’s collective consciousness. You can look at quantifiable statistics like skillsets and who consistently met their departments’ KPIs. But anecdotal evidence must be gathered too. Are female employees held to a higher standard than male employees in the same role? Are female employees’ mistakes criticized more and remembered longer than male employees’ mistakes?

Assuming it’s more risky to fill a leadership position with a woman instead of a man is false speculation. Anything could happen. The man could take all the leadership development you give him and go work for your biggest competitor. When organizations advance the person most qualified for the job and provide reasonable support for that person, everyone benefits; especially the clients.

How do you see The Motherhood Penalty at work? Please share in the comments.

Defense Mechanism

It’s my mom’s birthday and I’m reflecting on some of the work she’s done so far: Registered Nurse, Director of Nursing, Sunday School Teacher, and now a Christian Counselor. These jobs share a common thread: compassion. Being the well many draw from saps her energy and she has to intentionally replenish it. Can you relate? If you are a parent, teacher, or in any type of care-giving role, what you assume is burnout due to the constant stress, change, and loss thanks to COVID-19 may be Compassion Fatigue (CF).

What is it?

Also known as secondary traumatic stress, CF is one of your body’s defense mechanisms. You become emotionally and physically exhausted when you’re repeatedly exposed to stressful events. This can leave you numb to others’ suffering. The condition is usually associated with health-care workers, but anyone who is consistently exposed to someone else’s hardship (e.g., first responders, clergy, public librarians) can experience it. CF can also be caused by a heavy workload, excessive demands, and long hours. For example, the mom working from home while supervising her children’s online school is a candidate for CF. You’re particularly susceptible if you watch a lot of news, have too many priorities competing for your energy, or work in a dangerous environment. Remember, since COVID-19 began, environments once considered innocuous are now seen as dangerous (e.g., grocery stores). Any time you have less energy, add more fatigue, then have to expend more energy, you are at risk. For example, you’re worried about your at-risk parents’ health while you are working longer hours, then a friend tests positive for COVID-19.

What Does it Look Like?

Symptoms of CF can be both physical and emotional. Watch for these behaviors in both yourself and those you interact with:

Physical:

Distracted, forgetful, withdrawn
Aches, pains, nauseous, insomnia
Work absenteeism, unproductive, relationship conflicts
Self-medicating/Substance abuse (food, alcohol, drugs, gambling, more work)

Emotional:

Helpless, sad, hopeless, isolated
Anxious, worried, overwhelmed, depressed
Irritable, restless, tense, self-doubt
Dissatisfied with self and/or job

What Can You do About it?

Self-awareness: When you feel three or more of the above symptoms, define your triggers. When you just don’t care anymore, why is that? What is the root of the stress? What can you control? Will you accept help from others at home? Can you delegate tasks at work?

Boundaries: Prioritize your needs over what others need from you. Set, maintain, and enforce limits for: work-life integration, time spent scrolling through social media, care giving, realistic expectations.

Self-care: Do something everyday that boosts your energy: eat well, exercise, read, listen to music, drink water, journal, sleep, meditate, pray, talk to a friend, spend time in nature, laugh.

Compassion Fatigue should not be normalized, but talking about it openly should be because it’s not going away. Everyone has a new, longer-term complication and they want your support. For example, adjusting to emerging working conditions (e.g., remote, in-office, hybrid), concern for their young children going back to school, or comfort after the death of a loved one. Figuring out how to balance restoring, conserving, and giving away your energy is a key to effectively helping those you love and work with.

Are you experiencing Compassion Fatigue? What measures are you taking to recover from it? Please share in the comments.