In 2020, maintaining and keeping good quality talent on your team isn’t just a want, it’s an absolute need. It’s what’s going to determine your success and the foundation of your business moving into this next decade.This next generation needs a purpose, something that fires them up and gets them out of bed in the morning. Yes, millennials want to make a living, but they want to make a meaningful living. According to Forbes (2019), millennials ranked meaningful work as one of the top needs they have from their workplace.

 The Harsh Reality

“People don’t leave bad companies, they leave bad managers.”  If leaders and those in positions of power can take this quote by Marcus Buckingham to heart, I believe we would see so much more retention amongst our profession.

Here are some harsh realities:

• According to a survey done by Deloitte, 49% will leave their job in two years.
• com says that in 2020 2 out of 3 plan to leave their job.
• Gallup reports that 21% have left their jobs within the last year, which costs the economy $30.5 billion annually.
• Bank Rate states that 69% of millennials have a side hustle.

These are some powerful statistics that mean if we aren’t encouraging a culture of growth, this next generation has no problem going to find it elsewhere.

Employee Engagement

How connected do you think your employees are to your company? If we are being honest with ourselves, there are plenty of areas we can improve in this category.

According to a study done by Gallup in 2017, 230,000 employees were surveyed in 142 countries on their current engagement. Employees fall into one of three categories:

• Engaged
• Not Engaged
• Actively Disengaged

Only 13% of employees they surveyed were truly passionate and motivated by the work they did every day. An astounding 63% were not engaged, and 24% were actively disengaged.

The impact of a disengaged employee can negatively impact your business in the following ways:

• They’ll be cutting corners, which results in poor decision making
• There will be no drive and no focus, which results in less creativity
• They simply don’t care, which results in negative customer reviews
• Less productivity requires more staff, which results in over-hiring with a lower ROI.

Unfortunately, there isn’t much we can do about the actively disengaged. They just need a path out. However, the statistics show that around 63% have the potential to be engaged if we put the effort in to putting meaning behind what they are doing.

What category would you put most of your employees in? Do they fall into the popular category not engaged? Maybe it’s time to rethink how you’re motivating your employees.  Do you share a common purpose that they can buy into with passion? How often do you give praise? Could it be time to put more incentive compensation plans in place? Purpose and incentive are the keys to motivating engagement.

Once we have worked to get our employees into the “engaged” category, the positive benefits have an astounding impact. Statistics show that 50% will post messages on social media and 24% are more likely to help boost sales than disengaged employees. Find ways to bring meaning back so that your employees live in the engaged category, and your firm is guaranteed to reap the benefits.

Create Your Plan

Hire the Right People. Obviously, all this talk about having engaged employees is only possible if we hire the right people from the get-go that are naturally motivated. Service attitude is a big thing we look for at JCG. Recognize if they have the natural ability to go above and beyond to exceed a customer’s expectations. Are they good listeners, do they care, are they genuinely interested in other people and have a desire to always be learning? You can teach service aptitude (the ability recognize service opportunities), but you can’t teach attitude (the desire to serve).

Onboarding and Training: Develop a welcome program that makes them remember their first day. Decorate their desk with a welcome sign, write an internal spotlight, or take them to lunch with your team. Remember, their first day of work is one way to set the tone for their engagement. Spend a lot of effort on helping them to understand WHY you do what you do and how they bring value to that purpose. The first few weeks are critical to employee engagement. The more they buy in early, the more likely they are to want to stick around.

Initial training an on-going training is essential to employee engagement. You must teach them skills to be successful. Have a minimum standard for customer service expectations in writing and don’t train just once. Reinforce the expectations as often as weekly. This includes modeling, observing, and measuring behavior.

Retention and Relationships: Employees are more engaged when they are recognized, so communicate! Provide for feedback, and even ask for feedback yourself. Peer recognition is another way to keep employees engaged. Set up a quarterly award that gets everyone involved to recognize their peers. Feedback is the key, as this next generation craves it.

So where should we start? A good place to assess where your engagement is at is to survey your staff about their happiness at work. Ask about if they feel valued, and if they appreciate the kind of feedback they get.

It might be a rude awakening, but we all have to start somewhere. Getting the data is the only way you can grow from today into reaping the benefits of having engaged employees long into.

 

Lori Salberg
Director of Technology

Lori joined Johnson Consulting Group in 2017, bringing experience in cemetery, funeral home, and pre-need sales management. Along with sales and operations management, Lori directed the development of two propriety cemetery and funeral home enterprise software systems. Lori began her career in 2001 as a Family Service Counselor for the Catholic Cemeteries in San Jose. She quickly moved into management and rose to Associate Director of three cemetery locations. In 2010, Lori furthered her career as General Manager of Holy Sepulchre Cemetery and Holy Angels Funeral and Cremation Center in Hayward, CA, where she also joined the Catholic Management Services leadership team. As Director of Administration and IT, Lori brought management expertise and software solutions to cemetery and funeral home clients. In 2015, Lori joined PlotBox as VP of Sales. Lori contributed to the development of a SaaS cemetery software program, and was principally responsible for introducing it to the US market. She is a frequent speaker at many state and regional industry events and an article contributor to many industry magazines. She is also a member of the ICCFA Sales and Marketing Committee, which plans and oversees the Annual World Wide Sales Conference each January. Lori balances her passion for helping clients prepare for the future with raising her three children, Catalina, JJ, and Lyla. She spends a lot of weekends at dance competitions and little league baseball tournaments.