Today’s post comes to us from Chris Mullen, Ph.D., SHRM-SCP, SPHR, executive director of The Workforce Institute.

With talks of a forthcoming recession growing louder by the week and the stock market dropping hundreds of points by the day, it’s easy to feel worried about the future of the U.S. economy.

Sure, stocks also rebound just as much and wise economists will tell you, “The stock market is not the economy,” but watching the volatility can be stressful. Add inflation concerns to the mix and it’s no wonder why many employees have economic anxiety these days.

Even more, according to a recent survey, almost 80% of employees reported fears of losing their jobs during a recession.

As a manager, it’s critical to remember that employees are people — complex human beings with thoughts, feelings, and emotions — and we must treat and respect them as such.

Caring about your employees’ feelings, especially about the economy, might seem like it’s beyond your scope of day-to-day leadership, but it’s not. Great leaders recognize that the lines of life and work often blur, and what’s going on beyond the walls of your organization can, and often will, impact your people inside the organization.

So, what can we do about easing employees’ economic anxiety? Last week, I had the privilege of chatting with my colleague Jayson Saba from UKG and we discussed that very topic. Here’s your chance to listen in on our conversation.

Replay our informative webinar, “Leveraging Technology to Help Calm Your People’s Economic Anxiety,” to learn strategies you can use right now to calm your employees’ economic anxiety, support their life-work journeys, and move your business forward.

During our chat, Jayson and I talk technology-enabled strategies to support flexible working arrangements, pay transparency and financial guidance, expanded and evolved benefits, and prioritized physical and mental wellbeing for your employees.

Check out the replay now. You can even earn credits from the Human Resources Certification Institute (HRCI) and the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) for watching.

Today’s post comes to us from one of our newest board members: author, journalist, and speaker, Ivonne Vargas Hernández, and it’s part one in a two-part series. Check out part one here.

Early this week, I discussed the state of mental health and wellbeing in the workplace (particularly in México), and the importance of companies caring for their employees — especially throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Today, I’d like to highlight a few companies in México that have implemented successful programs to help improve employee wellbeing.

Volkswagen’s Emotional Wellness Plan for Faculty Workers

In 2018, the México HR team at German automotive company Volkswagen surprised corporate with the proposal to develop a wellness toolbox. The mission was, and still is, for each department to design (at least) two positive actions that can be implemented yearly.

To date, more than 70 ideas companywide have been compiled through this strategy. Examples include putting up messages to recognize an employee; designing an event where the employees have 12 minutes to share with co-workers something that offers wellness to their lives; and even organizing virtual funeral services to offer support for those employees who lost a loved one during the pandemic.

The idea is to break with the stigma that personal and working life are disassociated, as well as to increase the level of wellness, commitment, and intent of the employees.

In the case of Volkswagen, focusing on wellness opened the door to being noticed by headquarters by presenting a model that integrates actions oriented on having happier, more committed teams. México became a role model for the entire company with this dynamic.

Natura: POV from Latin America

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Brazilian cosmetics group Natura has promoted workplace flexibility among its employees with hybrid working schemes and has invested in health to drive talent retention.

Breaking with the paradigm that flexibility means only not going to the office, it is one of the practices that HR promoted through limits in work schedules and campaigns with an inclusive point of view. For example, there were designated forums for parents focused on issues such as joint responsibility while raising children, time management, and family tasks, among other topics.

Natura also cut down the training connection time, with the idea to focus the learning according to each employee’s profile. People used to dedicate seven and a half days to training. However, the average is now five and half days, with a higher level of commitment to finish the training and gain specific knowledge.

Banregio Bank’s Wellness Program

The pandemic has decreased productivity among employees by between 10% and 15%, according to the Global Wellness Institute. Even though, according to information gathered by Instituto de Ciencias del Bienestar (Wellness and Happiness Science Institute in México), something as normal as requesting an employee to “jump” from one task to another, without clarity about expectations and adequate training, can cause mental blocks that damage productivity by up to 40%.

Keeping in mind these metrics and the development environments, Mexican bank Banregio decided to offer a more holistic focus to the wellness program, designing activities to take care of physical and emotional health through emotional health/life experience talks, family days, and developing a “Human Library” concept. The idea was to invite all employees — including executives — to share a difficult, challenging situation they have experienced, so employees could learn about how that person moved forward in the experience.

One of the biggest challenges in the company was to show that vulnerability is a part of everyone — including managers. Banregio developed a special session where every leader chose an experience and talked about fear and vulnerability. This helped changed employees’ perceptions about their leaders and, ultimately, their behaviors.

While these examples describe specific initiatives in México, companies across the world have made progress on the mental health front, with many new programs initiated as a result of the pandemic. However, there’s still a long way to go. We all stand to learn from these successful concepts and programs and to develop more innovative ways to help improve employee wellness at our own organizations — today and in the future.

Today's post is submitted by Joyce Maroney, Executive Director of the Workforce Institute. Here, she discusses how Kronos' successful transition to a cloud company serves as a great primer on organizational transformation for beginners.

My employer, Kronos Inc., was recently recognized as a Best Workplace for Innovators by Fast Company. While this award focused on a major technological achievement, it took far more than just an engineering investment to deliver this transformation. Founded in 1977, Kronos became a market leader in workforce management software over the next 30 years. By the early 2000's, though, software-as-a-service was rapidly gaining favor with customers. After more than 35 years in business selling on-premise software, Kronos found itself needing to take the leap into the cloud while continuing to leapfrog its competitors.

Making this kind of big change is not without its perils. Long time employees were nervous about their jobs. In the early years, not all customers bought into a cloud vision. Our entire customer service and support model had to be changed. Every process in the company, from sales to billing had to evolve to handle the new model. After years of making do internally, enormous investments in tech to enable our own employees had to be made.

And we did it. With great effort, focus and discipline. From creating a skunkworks engineering team to creating completely new organizations within the company, every aspect of our business was transformed.

We've received so many requests for interviews, tours, and recipes for how we achieved this transformation, that we've created a set of resources to answer those questions. If you are looking for guidance on how to plan and execute a major organizational transformation, these assets are a great place to start.

Photo Credit Rowan Walrath/Bostinno

Today's post comes to us from board member John Frehse. In it he asks, do you need to fire everyone in order to achieve cultural transformation?

Competition is fierce, digital transformation is happening (whether we like it or not), and many organizations will be out of business if they don't change at an accelerated pace. This means people need to change, and we all know people often struggle with change. So, what should be done?

Is firing everyone and starting over a good option?

It may be tempting to consider drastic action when needing to change culture. If we fired everyone, would we miss the coworker who never has a positive thing to say, the one who never shows up on time, or the one who doesn't pull their own weight? We all know these people and they drive us crazy. However, does it ever make sense to do the unthinkable and remove everyone and start again?

The short answer is “No! Do not fire everyone.”

Removing everyone and allowing anyone interested to reapply for their job has been done before but it is incredibly risky, yielding heavily mixed results. Even those employees who don't fit in well with the culture of your organization or lack the agility to change have experience and knowledge that bring some value.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, high performers may be offended by the notion that they have to reapply and could search for other employment - they are highly in demand, after all.

Companies requiring a major transformation know the road can be long and difficult. Employees are often set in their ways, comfortable with the status quo, and unwilling to entertain new ideas. There are many different ways to approach organizational change and all have their own challenges. The reality is that companies can be drastic without being destructive and irresponsible.

Flatten the Organization/Keep and Empower the People!

It is often the lack of decision rights that drives complacency, frustration, and disengagement. Layers of management slow down much needed change and are often too far away from the area impacted to even understand the value.

The Ankura Diialog survey, a cultural diagnostic often used to improve hiring, retention and labor performance, asks employees if “too many decisions are made higher up than they need to be.” When we see strong numbers for this question (4 or higher), we know there are significant issues surrounding culture and performance. The benchmark is 2.94 with a standard deviation indicating a wide range of responses, and we also see diverse responses from company to company. Gerry McDonough, the architect of this cultural diagnostic, says, “without decision rights, employees are often relegated to being button pushers, paper pushers, and culture killers.” By putting the power back in their hands, employees gain ownership and drive results.

This decentralization of power requires trust - something management teams are often not great at doing (for valuable insight into the magic that occurs when you trust your people, read Kronos CEO Aron Ain's recent book, WorkInspired which includes an entire chapter on trust.). We hire people because we trust them and then we make them “earn the trust back” after they join the team. This is illogical and stymies engagement, retention, and performance.

As it turns out, we do not need to start from scratch. We need to properly engage the people we already have. By getting it wrong, we are wasting our most valuable resources - our people.

Today's post comes to us from board member David Creelman. Here, he considers whether employers need to plan for employee absenteeism due to alien invasions.

The Workforce Institute at Kronos has done many studies on absenteeism due to the Superbowl; what's next may be studies on absenteeism due to alien invasions. The invasion in question is not happening in the physical world, but in a virtual world call Eve Online. This virtual world, now just over 15 years old, is set in outer space and has a population of several hundred thousand players.

What has happened is that, quite out-of-the-blue, a massive attack by previously unknown aliens is destroying the ships and star-bases human players have built.

So, why should an online alien attack matter to HR leaders? Because, employees who are players may be under pressure to skip work to repel the attack for the following reasons:

This may all seem a bit silly or unreal. In fact, it's an indication of how online worlds are becoming an important adjunct to the physical world. What happens in virtual outer space matters now, and it's going to matter even more in the future.

So, what should HR's policy be towards employees who want to take emergency leave to deal with the attack? 

I recommend being sympathetic to employees who need to take time off to deal with the invasion. I'd also take the invasion as a clear warning sign that virtual worlds matter; they will be a place to seek new employees, a place to get references and judge performance; and a competitor for the time and attention of talent professionals.

We might say that the alien invasion isn't real, but in more ways than not it is for the hundreds of thousands of players of this online game.

How many of you are scratching your heads over this post? I'd ask you to consider the many ways in which virtual technology is showing up in the workplace - for training, for assisting others who are remote, for designing new products. If some of your employees achieve their work life balance in a virtual world, is that really so surprising?

Today's post comes to us courtesy of board member Julia Hobsbawm and first appeared in Strategy + Business magazine. In it she explains that corporate wellness programs fall short when they fail to include social health in the equation.

If you have bought a pair of sneakers in the last year, or renewed your new gym membership, or downloaded a mindfulness app, you are not alone. The global wellness industry is now a US$3.7 trillion economy, according to the latest Global Wellness Economy Monitor, revealing just how much individuals are investing in their physical and mental health.

Corporate spending on workplace wellness programs is rising too: It is currently estimated at $50 billion globally and expected to grow 7 percent annually to 2025. The boardroom has embraced well-being in the last decade, as employees seek enriching experiences at work and stagnating productivity has shown the need for change.

But despite the cultural and emotional focus on wellness at work, today's emphasis on a healthy workplace remains disconnected from management-led solutions and management-focused solutions, and shifts the onus to the employee. The message seems to be: We will help you with your problems, because we are enlightened employers; here are some things you can do. This approach doesn't acknowledge the more complex possibility that the employer may be a large part of the problem. Further, companies are not measuring whether the programs offered actually make a difference.

The initial findings from an ongoing research program called the “Illinois Workplace Wellness Study” suggest they don't. The researchers analyzed survey responses from more than 4,800 people in the U.S. and measured 39 outcomes, including productivity, job satisfaction, and individual health spending, and found only two outcomes that improved over the two-year period covered by the study.

Why are so many well-being programs unsuccessful? The answer lies in a critical gap in the way we look at wellness.

When we talk about well-being, we tend to mean physical and mental health and stress relief. We know that key drivers of worker stress – which the American Institute of Stress says costs the country $300 billion annually and which in Europe accounts for 60 percent of working days lost – include long working hours, short deadlines, and bad management and lead to poor performance and unhappy workers.

Of course, workplace well-being programs that offer counseling, gym membership, mindfulness, and other abstract relief from stress are absolutely to be welcomed, not least as an important signal of the value the company places on the wholeness of a person who comes to work: We aren't drones or worker bees after all. The growing addition of compassion as a subset of well-being is also good news.

However, these programs often don't directly address the aspects of work that create stress. That wasn't always true. One of the oldest corporate well-being programs was established by Henry Ford in 1926, when he reduced the working week from 48 hours to 40, in order to improve worker productivity, and other companies followed suit. Ford's action may be the most successful wellness intervention for workers, other than actual health and safety regulation. Why? Because management made a decision that acknowledged the impact the workplace itself has on its workers.

We have reason to believe that leaders want to get well-being right, and have happier, healthier, more engaged, and more productive employees, so what gap in current corporate well-being programs can they fill?

I call that gap social health. Every person is wired to be social and to develop relationships and connections. The concept of social health is not new. It's suggested in the 1948 constitution of the World Health Organization, which defines health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”

It's there in black and white, and yet only the “physical and mental well-being” aspect is addressed by most wellness and well-being programs. Ensuring social health would address the gap in social well-being at work today by focusing on the very essence of how people connect and communicate, with electronic tools and interpersonal skills, to achieve the best we can in the time available.

This is a very complex thing to do in the “always on” era, where the smartphone has killed off any distance between being at home and being at work, and when the technology we need to communicate with one another socially is the same as what we use to get our jobs done.

How well or badly we function in our lives and at work is a health issue. But it isn't just about personal physical and mental well-being. It's about the social context in which that well-being is supposed to be fostered. This means, to quote the 1970s feminist rallying cry, “the personal is political.”

As Stanford University professor Jeffrey Pfeffer points out in his excellent book Dying for a Paycheck, “Societies will need social movements, or maybe several social movements, that make human sustainability and people's work environments as important as environmental sustainability and the physical environment have become.” France recently passed legislation that grants workers a “right to disconnect” outside of working hours, specifically to address the issue of information overload.

Until we sharpen our understanding of what wellness at work is; address the complex political issues around deadlines, workload, and management; and embed them in our strategies, we are unlikely to see systemic changes that deliver happy, healthier, and more productive workers.

Today's post, the final in a 3-part series, comes to us from Workforce Institute board member and HR Bartender Sharlyn Lauby. Here Sharlyn shares her insights about what it takes to create a trusting company culture.

Trust is important. Customers want to trust the businesses from whom they purchase products and services. Employees want to trust the companies where they work. Trust is the top driver of employee engagement. And companies with employee engagement strategies outperform those without by 3 times, according to O.C.Tanner.

But gaining trust isn't easy. The latest reporting from the Edelman Trust Barometer indicates that globally, 75 percent of people trust “my employer” to do what is right. This is significantly more than non-governmental organizations (NGOs) at 57 percent, business (56 percent) and media (47 percent).

So, businesses have some work to do when it comes to building cultures of trust. In this series, we've talked about the “5 Essential Currencies to Your Company's Employee Value Proposition” because employees need to trust that they will receive the currencies (aka employee value proposition or EVP) that they've been promised.

We've also talked about the “4 Steps Toward Building a Recruiting Process that Creates Employee Trust” because the recruiting process is where trust is initially built between employees and companies. It takes place during interviews, orientation, and onboarding.  

During KronosWorks 2018, Malysa O'Connor, senior director of marketing at Kronos, talked about the four qualities that are necessary to build a trusting workplace culture (note that these four things aren't just qualities needed at an organizational level. Employee-to-employee trust is just as important as manager- to-employee trust):

  1. Capability. Organizations and individuals need to have the ability to deliver on their promises. Does the company have the ability to give employees what they promise in the EVP? Employees also need to have both the responsibility and the authority to deliver on their promises as well.
  2. Transparency. Are employees and the company honest about their capabilities? This isn't designed to be a cop-out as in, “Oh me, I'd love to do that but the company won't let me.” Rather, that employees and companies need to be open about what they're able to do. \
  3. Alignment. This is about values. Does the organization have care and respect as a value? Employees should demonstrate care and respect in their interactions with customers and each other. And employees should hold themselves and others accountable for these organizational values.
  4. Past behavior. Ultimately, trust is built on what we say and what we do. We can talk about trust all day long, but we also have to live the qualities of capability, transparency, and alignment. People will look at past behaviors to determine if a person (or organization) is trustworthy.

Trust is essential in today's business world. This isn't just the latest trend du jour. It's also not a generational thing. Every age group wants work with dependable people and in a place they can trust. Companies that focus on building trusting cultures will win the talent wars and the customer wars too.

At the beginning of 2016, Kronos rolled out an unlimited vacation program for employees in the US and Canada we call myTime.  The objectives of the myTime program are to support Kronos' commitment to being a great place to work; promote an inspired culture that attracts and retains great employees; and thereby delivers great results to our customers.  Before myTime, there were specified categories and numbers of paid time off (PTO) days that employees could use each year.  Post myTime, days off for vacation, sick time, personal time, floating holidays, volunteer hours, and bereavement are consolidated into one myTime category.

The rollout of this program was a significant undertaking.  Both managers and employees needed to be educated about how to negotiate time off in a world where there were no longer one-size-fits-all PTO entitlements.  Both managers and employees needed to be able to have direct conversations about how the employee's request for time off could be managed within the needs of the business.  Almost 2 years later, the myTime program has been well adopted at Kronos.

In fact, this program has drawn a lot of attention from HR leaders who are considering whether and how to roll out a program like this for their organizations.  Our story has been shared in the Harvard Business Review and other leading publications.   If you are considering a program like this, we are happy to share some of the insights we've gained during the last two years based on the questions we are asked most frequently about myTime:

How do you get any work done?  It seems like people might take advantage of a program like this.

Before myTime, most Kronos employees in the US and Canada were not using all of their allotted PTO each year.  In fact, the average employee used fewer days than s/he was entitled to each year.  Since the program was rolled out, we've found the average person takes just 2.65 more days per year than s/he was taking before.

What do you consider to be the key driver that makes this program work?

According to our CEO, Aron Ain, "You can't even think about making a change like this unless you have fundamental trust in the people who work for you."  A program like this works when leaders focus on results vs. face time.

How does this program impact the cost of employee PTO?

Making this change does do away with the need to accrue a leave liability. Many companies who've made this change have opted to drop this savings to their bottom line.  We made the decision to reinvest those savings in other employee benefits. So in addition to offering an open vacation policy, we increased maternity leave, parental leave, and adoption leave; we increased the 401(k) match; we created a scholarship program for employees' children; we launched a child care assistance program; and we began contributing up to $500 a year toward employees' student loans.

How did you train managers to manage this program and these employee conversations?

Managers were given training about the program before it was rolled out to employees, starting with an announcement from our Chief People Officer, Dave Almeda.   This communication directed people managers to a library of resources including video and mandatory training.   HR business partners supported the roll out by coaching managers as needed.

How did employees react?

Not all employees immediately initially embraced this change.  Some were concerned their managers would deny them vacation if there wasn't a prescriptive policy.  Some managers had difficulty saying no when there wasn't a hard and fast rule to rely on.  Both sides have needed to learn to have time off conversations in the context of the needs of the business, the needs of the employee, and the performance level of the employee.

How has this program impacted employee engagement and retention?

One year after we launched myTime, engagement rose to 87% (from 84% the prior year). Year over year, our voluntary turnover dropped from 6.4% to 5.6%.  Anecdotally, we're seeing positive comments on sites like Glassdoor and hearing from job candidates that this is a differentiating benefit.

How do you continue to educate employees about myTime?

All new hires in the US and Canada are walked through this presentation that explains the basics of the program and where to find more information on the Kronos intranet.  You can download this presentation by clicking on its title below. Then you can view the voiceover notes that explain each slide.

Overview of Kronos myTime from Joyce Maroney

How can I learn more about the Kronos myTime program?

If you have questions about the Kronos myTime program, please submit them by commenting on this post below and we'll do our best to get back to you in a timely fashion.  You may also want to listen to this podcast in which I talk to Kronos Chief People Officer Dave Almeda and Sharlyn Lauby (the HR Bartender) about the program.

Additional resources you may find helpful:

Kronos CEO Aron Ain discusses unlimited time off with Harvard Business Review (podcast and transcript of the podcast)

Aron Ain discusses Kronos unlimited time off program and results on National Public Radio

Forbes interview with Aron Ain about Kronos culture

tweetchatWe had a very engaging tweet chat today regarding workplace culture and who defines it, based off our recent survey data. We had quite a few thought leaders weigh in on why HR, managers, and employees have very different opinions about workplace culture; who drives it and why; what's important to creating a great one; and what can destroy workplace culture.

You can view the entire tweet chat below (as well as here), or search via #KronosChat on Twitter. We'd love to know what you think about workplace culture and who defines it - tweet us using #KronosChat, or comment below to share your thoughts.

I recently interviewed former SHRM CEO and Workforce Institute board member Sue Meisinger about the chapter she wrote for our book, Elements of Successful Organizations. In her chapter, Sue discusses the role that HR leaders can and should play in creating a culture that encourages and facilitates innovation in their organizations.

She cites a 2010 IBM CEO survey in which CEO's identified creativity as the most critical factor required for the future success of their organizations. Leveraging her decades of experience leading and counseling large organizations, Sue shares a number of practical strategies for creating opportunities for creativity and innovation to flourish.

One very important point Sue makes is that meaningful innovation isn't limited to the Apples and Googles of the world. She encourages managers and employees to look for transformation in process improvements and the elimination of interdepartmental barriers. I encourage you to read the book to learn more, but you can hear the highlights of her advice by listening to the podcast of our conversation:

Podcast with Sue Meisinger 7/2/12

What is your organization doing to encourage creative breakthroughs?

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