Category Archives: At the office

A series of insightful posts compiled with the workplace in mind.

Getting behind the concept of “loyalty”

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The Deloitte Millennial Survey 2018 highlighted an interesting statistic: 43% of millennial respondents stated that they intend to leave their current job within the next two years. The outcry from business ofcourse, is: “Where is their loyalty to my company?”, where loyalty is seen as synonymous with tenure.

It’s a misconception to believe that millennials aren’t loyal. They can be. Have a look here and here to see just how loyal they are. But, their loyalty isn’t a given, it needs to be earned.

How do I earn millennials’ loyalty?

Loyalty is grounded in the alignment that millennials can see between their own interests and those of their employer.

In an illustrative example; millennials link their personal brand to the reputation of their employer. So scandal challenges loyalty because no millennial wants to tag their work selfie with #underadministration #offtotheombudsman #yesthatoilspillisours

Below are just three ways to earn and foster loyalty in your millennial employee cohort.

It seems that loyalty is quite expensive. Does it need to be?

Yes, training and development can be costly. And yes, salary increases will add to your operating budget. But flexible working arrangements can increase productivity and profit, so that’s an area to explore if your finances are tight.

However, it’s important to remember and compare what it costs you to lose and replace an employee. When you make that calculation, spending on your current millennial employees starts to make #awholelottasense.

Loyalty is a long-term investment. A short-term investment in your millennial employees can lead to long-term rewards, and long-term cost-saving.

Reflect on conditions in your workplace.

Identify areas of the business where you have a high turnover. If you were in that environment, fulfilling that role; would you be loyal to the company? What would need to change for you to stay? Use the matrix below to see if you’re in the red zone!

 

If you’re wondering how to get from red to green, without incurring prohibitive costs and hurting your bottom line, connect with us at hello@meraki.co.za.

Is it urgent, or important?

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Workplace performance is influenced by a number of factors, including the production choices you make, put simply: how you decide to spend your time. Spend your time wisely, and the return on that investment will be increased productivity and improved performance. Prioritizing tasks that are both important and urgent is the performance equivalent of investing in high-return shares.

How do I know what’s important?

First-off, if you’re asking yourself this question it means that your KPIs have not been operationalized very well. You should have a clear set of outcomes for each area of your role, and you should know for which activities within that area you are responsible.

Consider the scenario below.

Siya is a Client Manager for a tech company. One of the indicators that is Siya doing a good job is an expanded client base. This will lead to a 20% increase in revenue, which is the company’s objective for the financial year.  The activities that have a direct link to the objective are the activities that are important for Siya to complete.

Siya is presenting at a conference next week. It’s fairly urgent that some flyers and business cards are printed, and that banners are ordered and collected. It’s also important to develop exciting content for the presentation that is relevant and well-researched. If Siya spends all of his time on the business cards and banners, he won’t have enough time to put a great presentation together, and hook potential clients into a follow-up meeting. He’ll be busy, and hard at work, but he won’t be able to meet the outcome of expanding his client base. In this case, productivity does not equal performance.

The matrix below illustrates how production decisions in contexts like this should be made.

How can I change the way I make production decisions?

If you’re struggling in your role to make decisions that prioritise tasks that are both important and urgent, and that lead to the achievement of your KPIs, ask yourself the following questions:

  1. Do you know what your KPIs are and what you need to get done to achieve them?
  2. Are you completing activities that fall into someone else’s outcome chain?
  3. Can you identify the team members responsible for the urgent but not important tasks that need to be completed in order to maximise your performance?
  4. Are you asking others to intervene when they need to?

Remember, being productive doesn’t translate to high-performance! Don’t fall into the trap of wasting your time on urgent but unimportant tasks that have little bearing on the achievement of your job-specific outcomes. Make production choices that prioritize tasks that are important, urgent and that reflect well on your workplace performance.

Not happy with your answers to the questions above? Contact us to continue the conversation: hello@merakicollective.co.za.