Employing Empathic Leadership to Unlock Productivity
BY Ellen Chang May 17, 2023Empathic leaders will motivate, retain, and ensure more productivity from their employees, several hiring managers said.The Covid era showed managers that employees have varied experiences and living situations that impact their work, as well as their colleagues. This topic remains at the forefront for many employers, says Shelby Stewart, news editor of Houstonia, who moderated a panel titled “Employing the Skills of Empathic Leadership to Unlock Employee Potential and Life Productivity” at From day One’s 2023 live conference in Houston.Being aware of an employee’s needs and challenges can help them perform better.“It simply means that we lead from a place of humanity that we view our employees as human beings and not robots, not machines, not workhorses,” said A. Denise Malloy, global vice president, diversity and inclusion at Johnson Controls. “We view each employee as an individual that's unique, that has a unique set of attributes and a unique set of contributions that they will make to the organization.”Giving employees recognition, rewards, and a path for advancement are all crucial, Malloy says.“It is my job and responsibility as your leader to give you the development and coaching that you need,” she explained. “When you find an empathic leader who really cares and who's committed to the growth and the development of their employees, then you'll find that your employees will thrive. They'll be more productive, they'll be more loyal, and they'll produce better outcomes.”Acknowledging employees for their efforts is “just low-hanging fruit in every corporate environment,” Malloy said. “It takes very little to give an ‘attaboy’ to tell someone that they did a good job. But yet for some of us, it's not our natural bent.”Managers should avoid making assumptions about their employees, said Pedro Neiva Botelho, human resources director, total talent management at Schlumberger.“We started to realize how many assumptions we were making on a day-to-day basis in many of the situations that we have in life and in our personal lives, as well,” he said. “As we went through Covid, we started entering much more into the personal lives of our people and our colleagues on our teams and realized how many of those assumptions actually weren't reflecting some of the initial understandings that we had.”By not making as many assumptions about generations, cultures, and genders, managers can avoid putting people into various categories that are not always accurate, Botelho says.Some managers were making assumptions based on an employee’s generation–for example, concluding that younger generations, such as Millennials and Gen Z, would be “thrilled the most in regards to hybrid work or working from home,” he said.The full panel of speakers discussing the importance of empathic leadership (photo by Cassandra Sajna for From Day One)After receiving feedback from some employees, he learned that many of them found it challenging to work from smaller apartments, where they lacked an office and often completed their work from a kitchen table.“One of the specificities of empathic leadership and the nature itself of empathy is to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and be able to view the situations through that lens,” he said.During the pandemic, when CEOs and managers showed, via online video conversations, that they were dealing with life experiences similar to those of their employees, it resonated with workers, says Julie Hulet Keller, executive human resources director, Baker Hughes.“Whenever there's any important initiative in any organization, people are going to look at the top-level leaders,” she said. “One of the things that we saw in our company that I think was just so impactful is that CEOs of our business divisions would show up on camera, in their homes, with their kids around, with their pets around, really showcasing that they have a life, also.”Employers should not, at this point, ask their workforce to compartmentalize their personal lives, since personal matters were often intertwined with professional ones during the pandemic.“What has resonated from an empathic standpoint is that we aren't asking people to undo that now,” Keller said. “I think the best-case scenario is that we figure out ways to move forward.”Managers must provide flexibility to their employees, open the lines of communication, and continue to provide psychological safety to promote inclusivity, says Debi Yadegari, founder and CEO, Villyge.“In order to drive belonging in our organizations, we need to see employees for their full selves, not just how they look on the outside,” she said. “What kinds of invisible handicaps might managers be dealing with? How do we provide organizations with the skills to do that?”Being an empathic leader means taking the time to speak with employees, as 49% of people report that they have left jobs because their managers failed to support them personally, Yadegari says.“That's a huge statistic that basically means five out of 10 high-performing employees have left a job at some point during their career because the manager didn't show up for them personally,” she said.A leader “who shows up” will receive ten times the effort back from an employee, Yadegari said.Empathic leadership needs to trickle down within an organization and is “not just kumbaya. It really drives productivity forward and creates organizations of care,” Yadegari said. “And when managers and companies care, employees care even more about their work.”Morale in the workplace can improve through coaching, mentoring, and acknowledging the needs and goals of employees, says Hailey Herleman, vice president of client partnerships, BetterUp.Data from research says that 60% of employees are languishing, while 55% “of us are just not as awesome as we want to be,” Herleman said. Acknowledging the fact that it is normal to have lower expectations about work will normalize the discussion.“Acknowledgment makes a big difference,” Herleman said. “From our research, we know you can grow, you can achieve, and you can get to where you're thriving.”Ellen Chang is a freelance journalist who is based in Houston and writes articles for U.S. News & World Report, TheStreet, Kiplinger’s and Bankrate. Her byline has appeared in national business publications, including USA Today, CBS News, Yahoo Finance and MSN Money.
Rallying 30,000 Workers for the Great Energy Transition
BY Ellen Chang May 04, 2023Many employers are not well-equipped to retain their employees, says Rachel Clingman, executive vice president, sustainability and governance at McDermott, a Houston-based global engineering giant. Clingman spoke in a fireside chat with moderator Shern-Min Chow, Anchor, KHOU 11 News, at From Day One’s 2023 live conference in Houston.Managers tend to look at metrics in an effort to understand the employee experience objectively. But employees often prioritize more subjective factors, such as the company’s culture, mission, and value proposition.“So I feel like as management, we’re not really set up to match employee expectations,” Clingman said.Creating a sense of community and being able to appeal to the individual on a global scale remains a major challenge, she argues.While giving competitive salaries are critical, employees are often motivated by other factors.“I don’t think a lot of people move just for more money,” said Clingman. “How do you address that whole bucket of other things that are more subjective, that are, I believe, really going to move the workforce in and out? That’s our focus.”Instead of focusing on what employees say during their exit interviews, managers must focus on the people who remain at the company and why they have stayed instead of leaving for another organization or competitor.McDermott shifted their focus and conducted more employee surveys as a strategy to encourage its current workforce to speak up and discuss the reasons that they stay. Surveys asked, “What’s the best thing about this company? And how can we make sure everyone else sees that? And how can we tell our stories about our people?” Clingman said.Employees are interested in learning about how their colleagues have made contributions to various projects because doing so creates a collaborative culture and highlights what workers are accomplishing.Managers should also focus on the career goals and values of current employees, Clingman said.Rachel Clingman, McDermott's executive vice president of sustainability and governance, was interviewed by Shern-Min Chow during the fireside chat (photo by Cassandra Sajna for From Day One)Sharing examples of ideas that worked can create a culture of constructive feedback and result in more transparency from employees. In this way, managers will find that they have “created a safer, more trustworthy, trusting environment,” Clingman said.Another common challenge that companies face is that less than 10% of employees work at the same place for five years, which is why Clingman recommends that the onboarding process be sped up from six months to just six weeks.By the time some employees have received the tools they need for their position, they might be thinking about looking for another job.“So, we as employers need to be much better at onboarding and offboarding - bringing people in, giving them the tools they need, bringing them to our culture so they can be productive and effective quickly,” Clingman said.Hiring managers should also embrace “boomerang employees,” or workers who resign from the company and want to return later on. These employees often leave to obtain more experience in a different area or project.“I would encourage employers to be very welcoming to people coming back if [their reason for] leaving was to build experiences or to have some different work experience or job or profiling title,” said Clingman. “We used to build our résumés within a company, but people now build that same résumé by moving around to different companies,” Clingman said.McDermott is participating in the energy transition by building solar, hydrogen, and LNG projects, in addition to maintaining its more traditional focus on the petrochemical industry. The shift could attract employees who want to be part of the solution to less emissions, she says.“I think being inside is the best way to drive change,” Clingman added.Companies who can explain their goals to reach net zero will encourage employees to remain in the energy industry. “Have a clear value path that you can explain to people: here are all the things we're doing to try to make this industry better, and that's our value proposition,” said Clingman. “I think we can still appeal to youthful workers and those who maybe are more idealistic to come into the energy industry and help us.”Ellen Chang is a freelance journalist who is based in Houston and writes articles for U.S. News & World Report, TheStreet, Kiplinger’s and Bankrate. Her byline has appeared in national business publications, including USA Today, CBS News, Yahoo Finance and MSN Money.
Workforce Predictions: Are You Ahead or Behind?
BY Ellen Chang April 28, 2023The workforce is changing rapidly, and companies must adapt to keep up with the various shifts in order to recruit employees and avoid high turnover.By 2030, companies will no longer rely on employee résumés. These documents can become outdated quickly, and many of a worker’s abilities are “invisible” to managers, said Katie Hall, CEO, Claira, in a talk titled “Workforce Predictions: Are You Ahead or Behind?” at From Day One’s 2023 Houston conference. She pointed out that 44% of the U.S. population and 50% of the global population do not have a degree, and that “brick and mortar higher ed is also on the way out, potentially gone for good.” Employees who do not have undergraduate degrees might not have résumés, either.Focusing on an employee’s skills is therefore more valuable than focusing on their credentials. This shift in emphasis enables employers to find workers who can use software such as Python, speak Spanish, and more.Hall also predicts that, within the next seven years, human resource managers will no longer rely on job descriptions to announce various roles. Accessing an online global dataset of people and their skills will be the priority. A hiring manager could easily find someone in Nigeria “who can start working for you within the hour and being paid within the hour,” she said.How the workplace will evolve and look by 2030 remains a constant source of uncertainty for managers and employees. “I don’t think that much about the industrial system that we’re currently using will be in place,” said Hall. “I’ve gotten into a lot of debates about the future of work. But these are the trends that we’re seeing.”Throughout the world, companies need to know the competencies and skill sets that employees have. Hiring managers should have that information in a format that is digitally accessible.Katie Hall, the CEO of Claira led the thought leadership spotlight (photo by Cassandra Sajna for From Day One)If managers were able to access a competency database of “everything your people can do and update it in almost real time, you would be able to plug someone in on a manufacturing line when someone else is sick,” Hall said. “Or maybe there’s someone who knows Python who could help in the engineering department, but you didn't know that. Or maybe they’re a great communicator; they have good empathy because they were a waitress, waiter, or flight attendant.”Lacking a database of core competencies prevents companies from being able to hire internally or move current employees to different roles. “So, we say out with the old system,” Hall asserted.Machine learning can be an effective tool for employers, who can use it to register both the competencies they are seeking and the types of skills that current employees possess. Managers could then use this data to determine what types of skills they’ll need from employees in the next six months or longer, to plan for future hiring rounds, and to consider current employees for new roles. “If you put those two things together and package it as software-as-a-service (SaaS), which is what we tried to do, this system will start to work for you,” Hall said. The software can also help boost retention rates, helping companies save money.“When hiring is hard, you have to maximize the talent bench that you have right now,” she explained. “What you don’t know about people costs businesses a lot of money and a lot of wasted time.”Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner, Claira, for sponsoring this thought leadership spotlight.Ellen Chang is a freelance journalist who is based in Houston and writes articles for U.S. News & World Report, TheStreet, Kiplinger’s and Bankrate. Her byline has appeared in national business publications, including USA Today, CBS News, Yahoo Finance and MSN Money.
Putting Well-Being at the Forefront of Company Values
BY Ellen Chang April 28, 2023Management can support employees and their well-being by encouraging them to take PTO, sabbaticals, and other breaks without fear for their standing and career advancement.In a discussion moderated by Matthew Kitchen, editorial director of the Houston Chronicle, at From Day One’s live event in Houston, a number of top employers offered these and other solutions. But managers must accept that employees all have different needs, says Michele Gest, senior vice president, total rewards, LyondellBasell. Employers need to make adjustments to their approach and ensure the solutions are “more personal,” she said.“What I think this COVID time has done is kind of open a window into people's lives that maybe we didn't have before,” Gest said. “I think when you really take the time to know people, then you can set certain things right that maybe you couldn't before.”Finding different methods for addressing employees’ needs is an important task for managers, she says. “We had to be real creative” in approaching solutions and in how “we think about things as a company and what's important and how we try to meet the needs of different people,” Gest said.Since LyondellBasell manufactures chemicals, it had previously taken a conservative approach to encouraging work from home, but its management has since gradually shifted its mindset and is now allowing employees to work from home three days a week. “But we're certainly, I think, being challenged in the recruiting space,” said Gest. “We haven't necessarily gone as far as 100% remote. And so I think that's where we're really seeing some of the challenges.”Employers need to find new solutions instead of relying on previous stand-bys, says Lucho Vizcardo, head of international human resources, Western hemisphere, Nabors Industries. “We need to start thinking out of the box,” he said. “But these last two and a half years we’ve needed to keep up with the pace, which is not bad. I truly believe that, at least personally, I learned a lot.”When managers stress the importance of wellness, whether it’s mental, physical, emotional, financial, or professional, they should lead by example, says Kojo Mensah-Bonsu, global director of diversity, equity and inclusion, CDW.Managers can be proactive by adopting small solutions, such as allowing employees to skip being on camera during video calls.“It doesn't sound like it is impactful, but there are leaders who demand that everyone stay on camera,” he said. “But, on some days, folks don't want to be seen, right?”Encouraging employees to take advantage of the benefits a company offers, such as time off for mental health days, is also crucial, Mensah-Bonsu said.“If I know someone is going through something or if I can tell just from body language, I'll extend that offer to them,” he said. “We’ve got this available to you; take full advantage of it.”The panelists from left, Kojo Mensah-Bonsu of CDW, Michele Gest of LyondellBasell, Lucho Vizcardo of Nabors Industries, and Jamie Walsh of Anco Insurance (photo by Cassandra Sajna for From Day One)When employees hear stories about their managers using those benefits, it makes a larger impact.“When people in your organization hear that coming from the leader, and you share vulnerability, that’s a big thing,” said Mensah-Bonsu. “If I talk about taking a personal day for something that has gone on in my life, and that benefit is afforded to everyone in the organization, I think it goes a long way. And so does expressing the impact and value of these behaviors. Making that known is pretty impactful.”HR leaders are wrestling with how often employees should work in the office and what a hybrid model should look like in order to build culture, define purpose, and develop new team members, says Jamie Walsh, benefits and risk consultant, Anco Insurance. But instead of focusing on where employees are working, Walsh says, the priority at his company lies with targeting presenteeism. “We believe that if the employee is present, then they're engaged, they're healthy,” he said. “If they're present, they're going to be productive, and productivity equals profitability.”The emphasis is on giving employees the tools they need to work efficiently. “So, that's really what we're focused on: supporting them, giving them what they need, and not being so focused on the definition of where they're working,” Walsh said. “We really want to help them be present as an employee.”Ellen Chang is a freelance journalist who is based in Houston and writes articles for U.S. News & World Report, TheStreet, Kiplinger’s and Bankrate. Her byline has appeared in national business publications, including USA Today, CBS News, Yahoo Finance and MSN Money.