Why Employee Freedom Leads to a Better Workplace

It’s counter-intuitive, but increased employee freedom can boost productivity.

Managers can be reluctant to turn over more control to their employees. This was observed by Lisa Gill, who narrated her conversation with a team of managers.

They were trying to decide on how they were going to give rewards to employees. When Lisa suggested asking the employees themselves, the managers turned down the idea.

Outdated Assumptions

The assumption is that having a strict business structure yields the best results: if everyone follows instructions by seasoned managers, then everything should go according to plan.

This harkens back to the Industrial Age, where factory workers had very specific and routine tasks—so mechanical that it was practically impossible for them to make a mistake, or let slip any semblance of individuality.

As long as the managers focus on strategizing and giving clear instructions, and the employees follow, top-down, the expected results should materialize.

The Industrial Age began centuries ago—1700s, to be specific—and it’s an understatement to say that it’s outdated.

It’s Crazier Today

Because of the digital revolution–driven mainly by the Internet—how we’re doing business is changing. Tech startups, which are at the forefront of the disruption, are treating their employees differently, and they’re far from falling apart. They’re thriving.

They give their employees much more breathing room: unlimited holiday allowance, radical 6-hour days rather than the standard 9-to-5, the capacity to work remotely. Some of them even encourage employees to pursue side projects in the office—that’s how Google’s immensely useful Gmail and AdSense came about.

But surprisingly, this strategy was effective even in the 1980s. Chuck Blakeman’s interesting book (with the attention-catching title of “Why Employees Are Always a Bad Idea”) mentions a pickle factory that veered away from the traditional cog-in-the-system model.

As the story goes, the managers gave the pickle workers goals and told them to innovate on their own—they can do whatever they want, as long as they reach the goals. The entire company’s performance actually went up because the workers were able to improve the process with their own ideas.

The Psychology Behind It

Telling people what to do crushes their intrinsic motivation. The equation goes like this: being independent—and making their own decisions—is a major contributor to employee satisfaction, which naturally boosts productivity.

This goes hand-in-hand having an internal locus of control, which simply means that people feel in control of their own lives and take responsibility for their actions. Rather than blindly going about a task, they own up to it, want to get better at it, and are more willing to handle it themselves if something goes wrong.  

Run Your Own Experiments

To try this out in company, you don’t have to go to extremes all at once—take small measures and note how it affects people.

Maybe you can make working hours a little more flexible, or allow work-from-home days once a month, or even letting different employees run meetings so they can step forward and express their ideas—you might be surprised by what you discover.

Contrary to what managers might fear, giving employees more freedom won’t turn them into a bunch of lazy slackers who won’t do the job once you turn your back. It will definitely lead to more risk-taking and creativity—and potentially more mistakes.

But as Dan Levin, COO of Box, says: “Mistakes are a cost, but speed is a benefit. It’s critical to understand that at some point in your efforts to minimize mistakes, you’re going to lose out on maximizing workplace productivity and efficiency.”

The post Why Employee Freedom Leads to a Better Workplace appeared first on Sprout.

source https://sprout.ph/blog/why-employee-freedom-leads-to-a-better-workplace/

The Top Recruitment Metrics You Should Be Tracking

It’s been said that data rules the world–and even human-centric fields such as HR are being disrupted.

While HR will always be the province of flesh-and-blood human beings, there’s been a thrust for the past few years towards a data-driven practice. A key part of this is using specific metrics to objectively evaluate how well you’re doing. Take this further, and you get detailed graphs and algorithms that spit out surprising insights.

People can get a little too enthusiastic about metrics, though—you can list down at least ten for recruitment alone. Trying to keep track of all these will lead to too many data points and muddled thinking, and you can become obsessed with tracking instead of committing to action.

To avoid getting overwhelmed, focus on these top recruitment metrics first:

Source of Hire

Where do candidates come from?

The options here are limitless: social media, the company website, referrals. To a certain extent, getting a great candidate depends on putting the job post out there and having it reach as many potentially interested as possible—giving you more options.

Try to measure how many people come from each source. You can then channel your resources more into the higher-yield channels, while focusing less on those that don’t attract as much.

Consider, too, the quality of candidates—a few well-qualified candidates is better than a hundred mediocre ones.

Offer Acceptance Rate

How often do people accept your job offer?

The answer to this is a percentage: number of acceptances divided by number of candidates given a job offer. Scoring low means that most of your candidates didn’t take you up on your job offer.

That’s a red flag—if they’d gone through your complete round of interviews, why wouldn’t they want to join your company? Maybe the pay is too low, or the benefits aren’t good enough.

What’s challenging about this is that candidates are rarely honest when you ask them why they turned it down. It might also imply a bad candidate experience—maybe they were genuinely looking forward to being part of your company, but the interview made them change their minds.

Time to Fill an Opening

How long does it take to hire a candidate?

Time isn’t the only variable, but in general, the more quickly you fill up a position, the better. When a job opening is left vacant, the involved team has to shoulder the extra work, which adds to their baggage and lessens productivity.

On average, though, it’s probably going to take more than a month to find someone new.

Time to fill is related to offer acceptance rate. No matter how efficient you are with gathering and interviewing candidate, progress will remain stalled if nobody accepts your offer.

Job still untaken after two months? That’s a call for you to reexamine your recruitment process and wonder if you’re simply not looking in the right places, if your standards are too high, or if your employer branding can use some work.

Turnover Rate

How many of your new hires quit even before a year?

A major concern in HR is trimming down the costs. HR can take up as much as 30% of a company’s expenses—and turnover adds to that cost.

It’s inconvenient when employees quit early, even before their probation ends. You have to go through the entire hiring process all over again—not to mention deal with the negative returns from another round of training.

The level of a recruiter’s success isn’t gauged by the offer acceptance rate alone. You’d have to look beyond that to the long-term result: will the new hire actually stay in the company? Moreover, if turnover does occur, is it because the employee quit on his own, or he got fired?

Quality of Hire

How good is the new employee that you hired?

Hand-in-hand with turnover rate is quality of hire—and you should never compromise quality. The ideal situation is hiring someone quickly, and getting that person to do well. However, if you focus on hiring quickly alone, you run the risk of getting someone who won’t perform well.

Quality of hire is mainly based on performance rating, which is judged against a set of KPIs specific to the position. This is usually measured after a year.

The best success you can have as a hiring manager is to find someone who can transform the company for the better. In line with this, there’s something called the Success Ratio, which compares the number of high-performing hires with the total number of new hires.

Bonus: Cost of Hire

What resources do you invest in hiring an employee?

This metric comes into play when you’re doing your budgeting. It’s usually an eye-opener—chances are, your estimate will be quite off the mark!

While you’re probably going to focus on monetary cost when filling out your spreadsheet, you also have to consider the other kinds of costs, such as the time you invested into interviewing.

Check out this graphic from Beamery for a breakdown of the costs you will inevitably encounter when hiring:

The post The Top Recruitment Metrics You Should Be Tracking appeared first on Sprout.

source https://sprout.ph/blog/the-top-recruitment-metrics-you-should-be-tracking/

Get a Mentor to Fast-Track Your Growth

What makes millennials stay at a job?

Higher pay, perhaps, or more flexibility, or neat perks such as ping-pong tables and gym memberships. All of these are fair guesses, but you probably wouldn’t expect that they also prioritize getting a mentor.

To be fair, mentorship has always been valued. Even in the Middle Ages, people would learn their trade by joining a guild—and would apprentice under a master until they rise up the ranks themselves. This style of learning corresponds more closely to internships or job-shadowing, but it’s far different from what happens in schools, where we sit as part of an indistinct crowd and listen passively as a professor lectures.

An alternative is online education, which gives more freedom to the individual. You can find information online on practically any topic and choose how little or how much you want to learn, effectively cobbling together your own curriculum.

However, it still doesn’t quite compare with having a physically present mentor or teacher who can guide you through the various stages of your growth.

Incorporating a mentorship culture into your company can reduce turnovers. A key reason why people quit is a sense of stagnancy, and mentorship prevents that. When managers also actively take on the role of mentor to their team, it opens up communication and can lead to better teamwork.

A mentorship culture is characterized by sharing knowledge openly—and the beauty of this is that you can go beyond the usual top-down model and make it an equal exchange, such that the mentor also learns from the mentee.

A mentor is much better than Google

The most outright reason for getting a mentor is knowledge. And not just any knowledge, either—it’s real-life, practical knowledge, distilled in someone who has already gone where you want to go. Of course you can read textbooks and watch videos, but getting it straight from a mentor is invaluable.

This is especially true if your mentor is a master in his field. You can pick his brain, indulge your curiosity by asking questions, and get advice that you won’t find anywhere else, lighting up the way for you to achieve your own goals.   

A mentor can give smart criticism

To improve, you need to put in your hours—but blind practice will just leave you spinning your wheels. You need feedback to clarify your direction and point out your weak spots.

There are multiple ways to get feedback, but a mentor with an observant eye can isolate what exactly you’re doing wrong—and be completely unbiased and honest about it.

Feedback has also been shown to play a role in employee engagement. The more you act on feedback, the faster you can make progress.

A mentor can expand your world socially

One major difference between a mentor and a traditional teacher is that teachers can be much more distant, especially if you only interact with them in the context of a class.

Mentors—because of the increased closeness of one-on-one interactions—are more likely to become friends and confidants. There’s a certain warmth in relationship between mentor and mentee–psychological safety is a defining feature, and you can even say that your mentor is personally invested in your growth.

Beyond this, a mentor can also introduce you to her circles, so that you get to know her friends and business partners.

It’s not that one-sided

All of this sounds peachy—and seems to give much more benefits to the mentee rather than the mentor, who will at most get paid for it or gain a sense of fulfillment.

If you’re on the mentee side, though, it’s not exactly light. While there are formal mentorship programs—and your manager can be your mentor by default—more often than not you have to look for a mentor yourself. And once you do find someone, you have to put in good effort and be receptive to criticism.

Still, it pays off a lot: the right mentor will definitely put you on the fast track to growth.

The post Get a Mentor to Fast-Track Your Growth appeared first on Sprout.

source https://sprout.ph/blog/get-a-mentor-to-fast-track-your-growth/

The Proper Way to Reject a Job Candidate

Rejecting a job candidate can get awkward—and yet it’s an unavoidable part of recruitment. Open positions, especially when advertised online, can get hundreds, if not thousands of applicants.

The first point of contact tends to be through email: instead of a face, all you have to judge with are portfolios and CVs. As candidates get filtered through rounds of interviews, they become more emotionally invested in their application.

The loss hits hard when one’s nearly at the finish line—fully qualified, but beaten out by someone more exceptional.

The effect on candidate experience

With the volume of applications sent out to HR, it’s understandable that straight-out not replying has become a norm. No email one week after the interview? That’s assumed to be a clear sign that you’re not in the running anymore.

However, it isn’t very considerate or polite—and it can be harmful to your employer branding. In fact, more than 40% of applicants who don’t get a return email swear that they’ll never apply to that company again.

Being left hanging can lead to a terrible candidate experience, which you wouldn’t want to risk. Word-of-mouth gets around pretty fast, especially when posted online, and a negative review on social media or on job forums like Glassdoor can convince people to not apply in the first place.

Aim for closure

Even if you’re swamped with applications, though, consider how much effort every candidate has to put out. Beyond emailing their CV, they also need to write a cover letter, answer any exam screenings, and attend interviews.

Wherever they are in the application process, they’re still investing time and energy into it—and it’s worth respecting that, even if they don’t make it to the end.

First off, once a candidate has been rejected, it’s best to inform them right away. Don’t leave them hanging. This especially applies to applicants who have gotten through several rounds of interviews already. In this case, you can call them over the phone to tell them personally.

The usual protocol, though, is to send a rejection email. You can definitely use a template, but add a slight personal touch by tailor-fitting it for the candidate’s name and position.

If you feel like going the extra mile, you can also explain in polite terms why you didn’t get them—maybe you wanted someone with more years of experience, or they didn’t pass the screening exam. If you’re planning to keep their file for future openings, then be honest about that.

Rejection can be touchy, so try to have a kind and supportive tone while remaining concise. Finally, thank them for applying.

Rejection done right: Hootsuite

For an example of a well-done rejection letter, check out Hootsuite’s. They actually did a full-blown case study of their candidate experience, from editing their job description to sending out surveys.

The thought-provoking question that they explored was: what if companies offered more than closure? More than informing the candidate that they weren’t accepted for the position, Hootsuite’s template encourages them to check out the company’s new job openings from time to time.

Impressively, half of the template consists of helpful resources to help applicants with their job search, including interview follow-up tips and developing personal brand. This makes Hootsuite stand out from the vast crowd of companies that don’t even bother to reply to their candidates—and the magic is that even rejected applicants are left with a warm, positive impression.

The post The Proper Way to Reject a Job Candidate appeared first on Sprout.

source https://sprout.ph/blog/the-proper-way-to-reject-a-job-candidate/

Behind the Scenes: Sprout’s Implementation Process

Celebrating Halloween at Sprout

Why Your Performance Reviews Aren’t Working

Hardly anybody looks forward to a performance review—and this applies to both employees and managers alike.

Performance reviews typically take place every year or every six months. The manager writes out a report about the employee’s good points and shortcomings and sits down with the employee for a one-on-one.

Scoresheets with hard ratings may be involved, as well as self-evaluations. The purpose of a performance review is to enlighten the employee about how he’s doing, and hopefully nudge him towards improvement.

It sounds great—except that performance reviews rarely live up to their promise and tend to reek more of compliance than genuine coaching.

The downside of performance reviews

For one, managers find performance reviews unpleasant. Aside from having to cite hard evidence for every point that they raise, they have to play along with the role that a performance review automatically assigns them—that of a higher authority passing down judgment.

This lends a defensive air to the entire meeting. Employees might feel attacked by helpful criticism, and managers might get evasive and avoidant, choosing to state only the positive.

An overwhelming 95% of employees don’t see performance reviews as helpful. In fact, research says that they “produce an extremely low percentage of top performers.”

Opt for regular feedback

Instead of conducting only a performance review—with all the hefty paperwork—you can opt to give regular feedback instead—say, once a month instead of every year. For employees to stay motivated with their work, they need to have some way to assess how they’re doing.

The more immediate the feedback, the better. If you only put in your observations on their performance once a year, it ceases to be relevant. Employees want to take action now, and they’d rather focus on the most pressing issues.

With that said, you need to be specific. Instead of saying that someone has no sense of urgency, point out a situation where they exemplified this, and give concrete advice for how they can improve.

Foster psychological safety

Aside from the frequency, the main difference between a performance review and optimized feedback is psychological safety. A performance review lacks psychological safety, in that it makes employees ill at ease.

Feedback is more of a two-way discussion, where the manager adopts a friendly, conversational tone and hones in on behavior that can be changed rather than throwing accusations at the other person. There’s a difference between saying “You’re a disorganized person” and “You usually miss deadlines, and we’d like to work on that”—the second one is more constructive and non-judgmental.

Such a setting allows the employee to speak up, too, and to state her opinion, to give a context for her actions. By putting both manager and employee on equal ground as conversational partners, camaraderie is established, and employees become more receptive to advice.

Conclusion

Organizational structure is shifting. Traditionally, managers and employees lie on a strict vertical hierarchy, with a utilitarian relationship: managers make the top-level decisions, and employees follow without questioning.

Now, though, work is evolving to be more humane and less bureaucratic. Companies are factoring in employee experience, acknowledging that individual happiness affects productivity.

More than labor that produces money for survival, work is being rebranded into the pursuit of purpose, and part of this approach is training managers to be concerned about the growth—rather than merely the performance—of their employees.

Performance reviews might still be useful for capturing the big picture, but if you’re aiming for raw improvement, then regular feedback is the way to go.

The post Why Your Performance Reviews Aren’t Working appeared first on Sprout.

source https://sprout.ph/blog/5184/

Common Video Interview Mistakes (and How to Avoid Them)

Interviews are generally tough, but video interviews set the bar higher.

Not only do you have to navigate the mind game of fielding the interviewer’s lethal questions, you also have to deal with other variables such as how awkward your face looks on that webcam and asking your housemates to get off Youtube and Netflix for a bit.

Research suggests that video interviews tend to be a lose-lose situation compared to in-person ones: candidates via video seem less appealing, and interviewees come off as colder and more unreliable.

The compromise of video interviews

It’s a side effect of essentially reducing the world into a two-dimensional copy. Rather than seeing the person in the flesh, taking in the entirety of body language from head to toe, even reaching out to shake hands, you only have a moving image of the person’s face—and that detracts a little from the humanity of it.

Still, though, video interviews have become an indispensable tool in a recruiter’s kit for conquering the world. There’s no other alternative if recruiters are looking for employees around the globe (or even several hours away).

For interviewees, it’s more convenient—you can be in PJs and, after ten minutes, have your much-awaited interview in the comfort of your home, traffic from hell sidestepped.  

The price of convenience, though, is greater potential for embarrassment. And failing your application. These are common video interview mistakes:

Technical difficulties

This is the worst possible mistake that you can make because you won’t even get to the first question. Maybe your internet is too choppy and the video doesn’t work at all, or you can’t figure out how to turn on your webcam last minute.

To avoid this, check the equipment a few days before—and get earphones so your voice won’t come out all fuzzy. A common app for video calls is Skype, which conveniently allows you to make a test call. Guard your internet too, at all costs—risking it in a coffee shop isn’t a good idea.

Uncooperative environment

Here’s another reason not to do it in a coffee shop. As the star in your video interview, you need the right backdrop to pull it off.

Having people pop in and out behind you is extremely distracting, not to mention that all of the noise will filter through. Video interviews should always be done in a controlled environment, ideally in a room where you’re alone.

When doing your test call, scout for the perfect angle. Do you have a concert poster tacked up on the wall? Move your device to hide it; be mindful of the view.

Dressing inappropriately

Observe the general rule of interviews here: wear what you would wear if it were in person, whether that’s a blazer or slacks.

A temptation is to only dress appropriately from your waist up, such as having a formal top on but wearing shorts below. Because the camera’s only from your shoulders to your face, you can get away with this, right? Well, yeah, almost always—unless you have to stand up.

Notice, too, how colors play out on screen. Avoid black or white, which can come off as too strong on the screen.

Coming off as flat

Think of yourself as a theater actor. Because the audience can be as far as thousands of feet away, actors exaggerate their movements. The subtlety of cinema—a slight crinkling of the brow, a half-smile—doesn’t apply here.

Similarly, with video interviews, make a conscious effort to smile, and try to be more animated with your facial expressions, as most of your body language will be centered on your face.

To offset the flattening effect of video, exude more warmth than usual. Remember that eye contact is made by gazing straight at the camera rather than your interviewer’s face on the screen.

The post Common Video Interview Mistakes (and How to Avoid Them) appeared first on Sprout.

source https://sprout.ph/blog/common-video-interview-mistakes/

Sprout CEO Patrick Gentry Wins Founder of the Year Award

Patrick Gentry, the CEO of Sprout Solutions, won as Founder of the Year at the Philippine Rice Bowl Awards, which was held on Oct. 25 at ASPACE Greenbelt.

Rice Bowl Awards

The Philippines Rice Bowl Awards is one circuit of the larger ASEAN Rice Bowl Awards. True to its name, the Rice Bowl Awards brings together ten Southeast Asian countries (Malaysia, Laos, Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, Myanmar, Singapore, Brunei, Vietnam, and Cambodia) to celebrate entrepreneurship and innovation.

Rice is a staple food in Asia; an overflowing bowl of rice serves as a symbol of abundance that nourishes at the most basic level. Likewise, startups are the rice bowl that feeds the Southeast Asian economy, ensuring that it flourishes and grows.

The Rice Bowl Awards gives recognition to outstanding members of the startup scene, with multiple categories such as Best Social Impact Startup, Best Coworking Space, and Best Newcomer.

Patrick Gentry as Founder of the Year

The Founder of the Year is the only individual award category, drawing from diverse criteria such as personal leadership, sales growth, fundraising, and product innovation.

With Patrick at the helm, 2017 has been a great year for Sprout. From a one-man team in 2015, Sprout now has around 80 employees, servicing more than 200 local and international companies. It also holds learning events regularly and maintains a community of HR innovators.

Aside from constantly improving its products, Sprout HR and Sprout Payroll, it’s poised to launch Sprout Recruit, an Applicant Tracking System, by the end of the year.    

Other Founder of the Year winners are Sabrina Marie Cruz and Rafael Francisco Daez from Seabiscuit, which produces videos specializing in food, travel, and culture; and Eugene Jose Arboleda from Taxumo, which allows freelancers and entrepreneurs to conveniently file their taxes online.

They will be representing the Philippines as Founder of the Year finalists at the ASEAN Rice Bowl Awards in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia on December 13.

The post Sprout CEO Patrick Gentry Wins Founder of the Year Award appeared first on Sprout.

source https://sprout.ph/blog/sprout-ceo-patrick-gentry-wins-founder-of-the-year-award/