4 Steps to Maintain Organizational Culture with Freelancers

 

Organizational culture is crucial in creating a workplace where employees can work together as a team and contribute to furthering the company’s values and vision. Maintaining that culture in a shared office space is one thing…but when your freelance employees are scattered all over the country, maybe even the globe, that’s a different story. This management challenge is what I like to call “The Big Whopper.”

What do I mean about the “Big Whopper”? First, take a look at the following common scenario as it relates to freelance workers and organizational culture.

CHALLENGE: THE FREELANCE EMPLOYEE DOES NOT FIT IN WITH THE ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE.

Freelancer’s Perspective: I freelance for a large corporation in Midtown Manhattan. They invited me to a party to celebrate a company milestone (I have no idea what it was) so I thought I should at least pop by for a few minutes. When I walked in, everyone was in corporate attire. I’d been running errands all day in my jeans and a bulky sweater, and was carrying a few shopping bags. No one was engaging me in conversation, so I just had a few cocktails, made some jokes with the Intern (he’s the only one I really communicate with there) and took off. Those people really need to lighten up!    

Manager’s Perspective: We sent out a company-wide invitation to celebrate an important moment in our corporate history. We’d finally broken ground to build a water purification plant for a community that had been drinking increasingly contaminated river water. As an organization, we take our work seriously and believe that if we work as a team with integrity, we can change the world. When my freelance employee, Rebecca, showed up to our celebration honoring six years of hard work coming to fruition, she was not dressed appropriately. She seemed to only come by to have a drink, gossip with our intern, and head out to finish her shopping. The fact that her attitude and behavior didn’t mesh with our organizational culture really stood out. Did I hire the right person?

How could the scenario have been prevented with effective management? Here are four steps that will help maintain organizational culture with freelance workers.

Maintain Organizational Culture When Managing

Freelance Employees with These 4 Steps

Step 1: Organizational Culture Starts with You

Like many management challenges, maintaining organizational culture with freelance employees starts with you. You have to model the desired culture through your actions, behavior and communication style. Make sure that you are dialed in to the organization’s values and vision, and use that as a backbone for all of your freelance worker interactions. If you don’t know what your company stands for, how will your freelancers know?

Step 2: Keep Organizational Culture in Mind During the Hiring Process

When going through the hiring process, always keep your company’s vision and values in mind. If your organization values teamwork, hiring a very independent freelancer may not be a good fit. When looking at potential freelance candidates, don’t just look for matching skills and experience. Be sure to include questions that will gauge if they are a good cultural fit as well.

Step 3: Take Time to Integrate Your Freelance Employee into the Organization

Just because your freelance worker isn’t physically in the office does not mean that they don’t need the same thoughtful onboarding that you give in-house employees. Since freelancers work remotely, you can’t shuttle them around from introduction to introduction with an orientation packet in their hands; however, there are other things you can do.

• Pair your freelancer with a seasoned employee who embodies your organizational culture. After an initial introduction, tell your freelancer that they can turn to this employee with any questions they may have.
• Create a photo and bio sheet to distribute to freelance workers. This allows them to take a virtual walk through the office by putting faces to names. This also helps identify the roles of fellow in-house employees, which will help in collaborative projects.
• If possible, invite your freelance workers to the office. Let them experience first hand what your culture looks and feels like.

Step 4: Make Your Freelance Worker Feel Part of Your Team

Have you ever felt like a complete outsider at work? It’s not very motivating. Often, that’s how freelancers feel. It takes effort to make them feel they are part of a team that they rarely, if ever, see. Here are some ways you can do so:

• Keep your freelance employee informed about “what they are part of.” For example, if they have to create a massive Excel spreadsheet of film festivals in Chicago, let them know why. If the freelancer knew that the company produced a transformational documentary on the water crisis and that the spreadsheet would help market the film, she would feel more aligned with the company’s mission.
• Create large goals that remind freelancers who the company is and where it is going. Using the scenario above, an example of a large goal might be, “Provide clean drinking water to every human being in South America by 2017.” With that goal stated and reiterated, it is easier for in-house and freelance employees to feel part of the company’s mission.
• Be open with your freelancers about achievements and failures alike. When a freelancer works hard on a project and never hears if it had any impact on the company goals, it’s difficult for her to feel part of the team.
• If you send company holiday cards or host holiday parties, don’t forget to include your freelance employees.

Now, let’s revisit the scenario above and examine how the problem could have been avoided.

SOLUTION: If Rebecca’s manager had embodied the company culture in their previous interactions, Rebecca would have known what to expect at the event. If, during the interview process, Rebecca’s manager had spoken to her about her interest in community and the environment, she would have a better idea if Rebecca was a good fit for an organization that values those things. Additionally, by having Rebecca primarily communicate with the intern (obviously not a seasoned member of the organization), she didn’t have a chance to be integrated into the company culture. So while Rebecca’s manager did include her in the company event, it ended up being an unpleasant experience for both of them.

Organizational culture is dynamic. As the centerpiece of culture among your organization’s workforce, you can make a tremendous impact. Start with yourself and take time in selecting and nurturing your freelance workforce. Above all else—remember that talent is not expendable, in-house or not.

Now that we’ve talked about communication challenges with freelance workers, how to facilitate effective collaborations between in-house and freelance teams, and explored ways to increase the likelihood of freelance employees meeting goals and making deadlines, do you feel confident you could successfully manage freelance employees? What challenges are you most wary of?

Tell us about it with a comment below, in an email, or on Twitter. Let’s get ready for the future of work together.

Subscribe To Our Newsletter

What The Heck Is Executive Coaching

“What the heck is executive coaching?” I get asked that question many times a day.

I admit that coaching is a nebulous term. When I say that I’m a certified coach, people ask if I coach sports teams. When I say that I actually coach work teams, people look surprised. ‘Why would a work team need coaching?’ they ask. Because work teams are just like sports teams:

• They are made up of different people who try to reach a team goal together.
• Each person on the team has two types of goals in mind: individual goals and team goals.
• Every team member has his/her own communication style, which may or may not work well with the others on the team.
• Although there is one official leader (the coach or captain), there are usually other team members who carry as much weight, if not more weight, than the official leader.

Similar to a sports team, thriving work teams need an ‘outsider’ to coach them to success, whether the whole team or just some of the team leaders. That’s what CHCI does. We coach teams and leaders to get from Point A to Point B, in the most effective way possible.

During the years, many people have asked for a practical book on coaching, so they can bring coaching skills to their own teams. That’s how Anne Loehr’s book, “A Manager’s Guide to Coaching” was created. Here is an excellent write up about one of the book topics: How to create effective coaching questions. Enjoy!

Let’s share experiences. Leave a comment below, send me an email, or find me on Twitter.

How to Train Your Staff With A Decreasing Budget

In our last blog, How to Use the 70/20/10 Model to Develop Careers, we discussed the “what”, “when” and “how” of using the 70/20/10 Adult Learning Model for employee development. Now let’s discuss the “why”.

Managers face daily decisions to ensure their team gets what’s needed for success. But with budgets getting smaller, it’s hard to stretch resources. After reading this blog, you will learn several tips on how to stretch your training budget, spend wisely, plan strategically and still meet your employee development goals.

The “Why” to Employee Development

What is the return on investment (ROI) for a manager who wants to allocate time and financial resources for her employees? Simply put: a better prepared employee is a more productive employee. According to the Association of Talent Development (ATD), companies that invest in training employees see a 218% higher income per employee than companies that don’t. The 70/20/10 model for employee development is one effective tool to leverage the current talents of your staff and build stronger teams, which increases the organizational bottom line.

We know that the manager cannot motivate an employee to improve; that has come from within the employee. However, managers can create a learning environment for them to grow. How? The first step is to take an inventory of the current staff, using a consistent assessment tool such as a 360-degree assessment, with an objective lens to collect skills data. This full assessment will provide two sets of data in one assessment: strengths and areas to grow. By selecting the right 360 tool, you can complete two tasks at once for the same price, creating cost savings for your budget. This 360 view lets managers begin to leverage the strengths in their staff that can be shared with other employees; it also shows the delta between the strengths and weaknesses, so you can create the best strategy to decrease the weaknesses of the entire team.

Why Are Employees Leaving Your Organization?

In our daily lives, we use personal biases, intuitions, and gut feelings to make our decisions. And that’s perfectly fine. They serve us well in many ways.

However, when it comes to improving work performances, personal biases, intuitions, and gut feelings just don’t cut it.

Data can improve your own, your team’s, and your organization’s performance; people analytics can help. People analytics is the data that identifies workforce patterns and trends. Here are some questions that can be answered with people analytics:

• How engaged are our employees?
• What skills does my organization need to invest in, to achieve our mission?
• Why are my employees leaving the organization?

These questions and many more are the kinds of questions that people analytics can answer. Even if you don’t regularly use data in your job, you can still learn a lot with people analytics, regardless of your supervisory level.

A brief primer on people analytics

Before we answer why employees are leaving your organization, let’s start by defining a few terms:

Data are facts, statistics, or other items of information. Data are all around us; you just have to know how to look for it, compile it, and make sense of it. We can use data to understand problems and processes at a micro-level (between individuals), at a mezzo-level (team-level), or at a macro level (organizational level).

So who uses data?

One group of people who use data are data analysts. Data analysts organize, examine, analyze and use data to draw meaning. They tend to focus on understanding previous events to describe things that have already happened.

People Analytics: Creating The Ultimate Workforce

People analytics, historically referred to as HR Analytics and utilized strictly as an HR function, has evolved into a systematic data-driven approach to improving your entire business.

If you are a leader or manager in a large organization, you are probably familiar with these terms. But you may be unaware how your organization can benefit from people analytics and what it will take.

That is what we will discuss today.

Table of Contents

·         What is people analytics?

·         Difference between HR, people, and workforce analytics

·         How organizations benefit from people analytics

·         Where do you begin?

·         How other organizations leverage people analytics

·         Understanding the ROI of people analytics

·         How should organizations implement people analytics?

·         What is the cost of implementation?

·         How does CHCI use people analytics to help organizations?

What is people analytics?

People analytics is the process of leveraging new or existing data within your organization to provide invaluable insights into your workforce and help you make better business decisions.

People analytics delivers facts about your organization such as why people are leaving your organization, the challenges they face, how much this is costing you, and more. Equally importantly, it paints a picture of how to anticipate and prevent these staffing challenges.

Difference between HR, people, and workforce analytics

People analytics, HR analytics, workforce analytics, and even human capital or business analytics are all different terms that share a common purpose: to improve all areas of business performance through the use of workforce data. Whatever you call it, the goal is to create a productive, innovative and powerful workforce, which positively affects the bottom line.

How organizations benefit from people analytics

The true value of a well-structured people analytics initiative will reflect directly on your bottom line. We’ll talk more about this in a minute, under the ROI section.

For now, here are a few ways your organization can benefit from people analytics.

Ten Ways Organizations Benefit from People Analytics

1.     Understand and improve retention

2.     Identify patterns of racial bias or inequity in compensation

3.     Create effective, non-biased processes for hiring and promoting

4.     Strengthen workforce decision making

5.     Increase accountability

6.     Shift team silos

7.     Improve employee productivity and commitment

8.     Determine the traits of your quality employees

9.     Seek better employee sourcing options

10.Develop a culture where decisions are made in accordance with the evidence

How does it help my organization make better decisions?

A crucial component of people analytics is the ability to make informed decisions based on user data. An example of this is McDonald’s. They learned that employees working in groups containing a healthy mixture of generations tended to be happier. Happier workforces can lead to improved service, product quality, and teamwork, all creating higher value for the restaurant brand.

Three Ways Learning Agility Can Help Your Career Growth

We have a guest blog this week about a fascinating topic: Learning agility. Thanks for David Hoff, co-author of Learning Ability-The Key to Leader Potential.

Learning agility is finding yourself in a new situation and not knowing what to do – but then figuring it out.

Why would that be important? In an organizational context, if you are promoted from one function to another or from an individual contributor to a manager role, how do I know you will be successful? The answer is that I don’t, because you’ve never done the job before. The research says if leaders make that decision without the help of an assessment process, the odds of the person being successful is 50-50 – essentially the flip of a coin.

What is the cost if the coin lands on the side of being unsuccessful? It depends; the range is anywhere from one to three times that person’s fully-loaded pay, including compensation and benefits. That’s an expensive coin toss!

Most organizations use a performance management system to give employees feedback on their performance and to equitably distribute merit increases. The output of this process is supposed to be a development plan, which describes the key objectives a person should achieve in the coming year and the areas he or she should begin to improve.

Some companies put additional time, effort and money into critical jobs and/or high-potential employees. There are different definitions of high-potential employees; a common one is a person with the ability to be promoted two levels above his or her current level. An example would be a manager with the ability to be promoted to a vice president. You can’t spend significant additional dollars on everyone, so who gets this extra time and attention? That is the $64,000 question.

One answer is to spend time on the most learning-agile person. But how do you determine learning agility? That question has stumped people in the talent management field for some time. My favorite response is, “Those who can learn on the fly.”

How do you operationalize that definition? What would I see a learning-agile person do? How would I teach someone to? Be more learning-agile? These questions are where learning agility becomes more complicated.

Researcher Scott DeRue, from The University of Michigan, established a model that identifies speed and flexibility as the two most important factors determining learning agility. Learning agility is about being able to digest a large amount of information quickly and figure out what is most important (speed). DeRue defines flexibility as the ability to change frameworks to help you understand how different things are related or connected.

DeRue also made a distinction between learning agility and learning ability. “Ability” means the cognitive ability or “smarts.” Ability is important to a point, but then, smarter is not necessarily better. Earlier, I noted that learning agility is being in an unfamiliar situation, not knowing what to do and figuring it out. The ability takes you to a certain point. Then, agility becomes more important.

DeRue says there are both cognitive and behavioral components to learning agility. The cognitive ones – the “hard wiring,” if you will – are difficult, if not impossible, to change. The behavioral ones are more learnable, because if you do the things described by the behavior, then you are demonstrating that part of learning agility.

Another researcher, Dr. Warner Burke from Columbia University, confirmed what DeRue described and found seven additional dimensions of learning agility. He embraced speed and flexibility; his research also identified experimenting, performance risk-taking, interpersonal risk-taking, collaborating, information-gathering, feedback-seeking and reflecting. Burke also developed a test to measure learning agility; his work led to a valid and reliable tool with years of research to support its results. This is a huge step beyond the 50/50 coin flip to determine who we develop and promote.

Here are three tips for using learning agility in your work:

1. In the future, people are more likely to be hired less for what they “know” and more for their ability to figure out what they “don’t know”. So get curious about what you don’t know as a way to make a difference in your career.
2. To increase your flexibility (one of the learning agility dimensions), take the opposing point of view (from your own position) during a discussion. Support that contrary position as strongly as you would your original position.
3. When seeking feedback (a dimension of learning agility), seek to understand what the other person is saying by truly listening. Defensiveness gets in the way of learning agility.

Want to learn more about learning agility? Reach out here.

Optimize Your Recruitment Process by Using Competencies

Recently, we wrote about the five steps to optimize employee development with a competency framework. This 5-step process begins with identifying organizational competencies and determining expected proficiencies by employee position and continues. The next two steps include assessing competencies and aligning the current proficiency with organizational needs and career aspirations. Finally, each employee should track progress to enhance accountability and results. This process helps develop employees and optimize organizational performance.

A meaningful competency framework can also improve recruiting practices. By aligning organizational competencies and expected proficiency levels with position descriptions, it allows you to hire people who are a good fit for the organization in a strategic and targeted way. Here are three ways to do this:

1.     Assess and categorize competencies by type.

2.  Map the minimum expected proficiency by competency within each group to position descriptions.

3.  Identify and align behavioral questions with priority competencies during the interview process.

Assessing and Categorizing Competencies

Many organizations have “core” or “foundational” competencies that are distinct from technical competencies. Core competencies are the skills, knowledge, and abilities that all employees should have and work to improve, no matter their technical expertise. Examples include effective communication, problem-solving, and customer service. Technical competencies capture areas of expertise needed to be successful in a particular job series or position. Examples include competencies related to accounting, mechanical engineering, or computer science.

Identifying the expected proficiency for core competencies can often be streamlined by creating categories instead of defining them position by position. For example, CHCI recently updated its competency framework and categorized its foundational competencies into four groups: 

1) Corporate Member
2) Senior Consultant
3) Consultant and
4) Organizational and Project Support. These categories were defined by responsibilities and experience across all current and projected CHCI employees. 

Mapping Expected Proficiency to Position Descriptions

Once the categories are defined, the expected proficiency by core competency can be set. This expected competency clarifies the behaviors and skillets expected of employees in a particular category, at the time of hire or in their current position. Returning to our example, a small group at CHCI went through each foundational competency and identified the expected proficiency by competency in the four categories mentioned above by using a standard proficiency scale ranging from 1: Awareness to 5: Expert. The process included a select group of individuals who aimed for consensus agreement. The following criteria and/or process steps were identified to ensure consistency:

• No category of the employee should have an expected proficiency of “5” or “expert.” This doesn’t mean that an individual cannot have a current proficiency of “expert” but that it should not be expected in order to be successful in the organization. This criterion also encourages the idea of development and growth for all individuals, regardless of title.

• Key assumptions were identified that distinguishes the categories. For example, responsibilities in the Executive Member category focused on organizational outcomes and integrating processes across the organization while the Senior Consultant category focused on integration across the project as well as project delivery and leadership. Other assumptions included general levels of responsibility and proficiency required to be successful across all categories.

To define expected proficiency for technical competencies, a slightly different process was followed in the CHCI example:

1.   Position descriptions (PDs) were written for new hires based on priority needs and organizational capabilities.

2. Each group member independently identified expected proficiency across technical competencies using the PDs and the standard proficiency scale as their guide. It is worthy to note that not all technical competencies were required for each PD.

3.   The results from each individual’s process were consolidated into a matrix. The group met to review and analyze results.

4.   Expected proficiency scores were agreed upon and finalized for both technical and “foundational” competencies for each position description. A rationale for each expected proficiency was documented across all competencies for each PD to double-check the logic.

Aligning Competencies with the Interview Process

The example mapping exercise allowed PDs to become competency-based, aligning potential employees with both organization culture and performance. The alignment then streamlined the interview preparation process for hiring managers, allowing them to prioritize questions based on targeted competencies and expected proficiencies in a particular position.

For CHCI, that meant preparing interview questions for Senior Human Capital candidates in four priority areas. Behavioral questions were developed to understand the depth and breadth of each candidate’s experience.

Creating a recruitment process that incorporates the organization’s competency model will lead to high-performing hires that make a good cultural fit for the organization, the project, and the position. When individuals fit into the culture of the organization, they are likely to be more motivated, interact more easily with other employees, and stay happier in the job. All of this translates into higher-performing employees who will stay longer and potentially become highly qualified candidates for succession plans.

Once you hire a candidate, you can reinforce the organization’s values, culture, and competencies through your onboarding programs, annual competency assessments, and constructive feedback. This helps bring the entire talent life cycle together Click here.

Do you want to learn more about aligning competencies with your hiring process? Learn more by contacting us.