Free Employee Engagement & Retention Toolkit

Do your leaders know how to engage and retain your top managers? Most companies and leaders know that they need to become more agile and resilient if they want to perform at their peak. But too many leaders underestimate the importance of engaging and retaining the most important factor in building the workplace culture that they want - people managers. Simply put, great people managers engage and retain great employees.

Download 8 Tools to Engage and Retain your Top Talent

About LSA Global
Founded in 1995, LSA Global is a leading performance consulting and training firm that helps high growth technology, services, and life-science companies create a competitive advantage by powerfully aligning their culture and talent with their strategy. Learn more about getting aligned

How to Engage Employees in Challenging Times

A New People Test for Leaders The COVID-19 pandemic has presented a whole new challenge for companies – how to engage employees in unprecedented times. Businesses need to learn how to keep their employees engaged when they are no longer at their regular work sites and when their corporate lives have been turned upside down. Employees are understandably concerned about the health and safety of themselves and their families. They are under extra pressure as they work at home while often juggling extra parental and household duties. The future is uncertain in terms of when they can get back to work as they once knew it. And if it will never be the same again, they wonder what the new reality will be like and where they will fit in. The Good News The good news is that most companies were thoughtful about addressing the basic safety, stability, and security needs of employees during the first phase of the pandemic. According to a recent McKinsey survey, 78% of employees believe that their organization reacted appropriately to the crisis. It is quite remarkable how the urgency and clarity of a crisis can create high performance results. The Challenge The future is uncertain, the daily work lives of many employees’ have been significantly affected in the last few months, and people have varied expectations about their employee experience. The Opportunity The crisis has opened the door for companies to strategically rethink the employee experience to better align with shifting people and business priorities.  Company leaders can support their employees and keep them engaged during these times of stress and uncertainty by continuing to prioritize, involving stakeholders, taking decisive action, being employee-centric, and creating transparency. Fully engaging employees is a challenge in the best of times. Now as we transition in and out of shelter-in-place orders, are your employees feeling valued and ready to thrive?

Continue Reading to Learn the 6 Ways to Better Engage During Challenging Times

About LSA Global
Founded in 1995, LSA Global is a leading performance consulting and training firm that helps high growth technology, services, and life-science companies create a competitive advantage by powerfully aligning their culture and talent with their strategy. Learn more about getting aligned

Top 16 Questions that Measure Employees' Satisfaction with their Managers

Do You Know What Employees REALLY Think? It may be scary to learn what employees really think about you and your company, but you need to know if you want to truly engage and retain them. Employees who are dissatisfied with their company or their manager think seriously about giving less discretionary effort and about leaving for greener pastures. In fact, more employee attrition is due to dissatisfaction with managers than any other reason. Are you willing to risk losing team members when you still have a chance to find better ways to lead and work together? The Role of Managers Based upon over 500,000 annual employee engagement surveys per year, we know that management effectiveness - how well managers perform their jobs and how much respect employees have for their managers - has an extremely strong correlation to employee engagement. Employees who believe that their managers and supervisors truly care are more likely to be engaged in their work. And engaged employees are productive employees. Ask the Right Questions You need to ask the the right engagement questions to see how highly your employees rate your managers. We know what questions to ask because we know what areas correlate most to higher levels of employee loyalty, discretionary effort and advocacy. Do not fall into the trap of using questions that do not correlate to increased levels of employee engagement and retention. The Top 16 Questions that Measure Employees' Satisfaction with their Managers Overall 1. Do you regularly receive constructive performance feedback from your manager? 2. Do you understand how your performance is measured? 3. Do you think your manager cares about you as a person? 4. Does your manager care about your development? Communication 5. Does management clearly communicate expectations? 6. Does your manager effectively communicate the information you need to understand? 7. Does management explain the reasons behind decisions made? 8. Do managers handle disagreements professionally? 9. Does your manager explain how the organization's future plans affect you?

Read the Final 7 Questions to Rate Manager Effectiveness Now

About LSA Global
Founded in 1995, LSA Global is a leading performance consulting and training firm that helps high growth technology, services, and life-science companies create a competitive advantage by powerfully aligning their culture and talent with their strategy. Learn more about getting aligned

The Only 16-Step Employee Retention Strategy You Need

Talent management matters. The ability to attract, develop, engage and retain talent accounts for 29% of the difference between high and low performing organizations. 

Do you want to know the secret to lowering turnover and increasing engagement? It's all too simple. Treat your employees well. Increasing retention isn't a complex web of 100 different metrics; increasing retention comes from treating your employees like the people they are.

Retention of top talent is essential to the bottom line. Every time you lose an employee, you lose money, time and employee morale. Here are just some of the costs associated with employee attrition:

• Lost business if they go to a competitor
• Lost engagement when retained employees see a peer leaving
• Lost money and time hiring a replacement
• Lost money, time and team productivity while training the new employee
• Lost productivity while the new employee is in the early stages of the learning curve
• Lost business through inevitable learning errors

However, if you can increase employee retention, you can eliminate costs and reap additional benefits. Think of employees as an appreciating, rather than a depreciating, asset; they are worth more to your company the longer they work for you. Additionally, a consistent workforce is necessary to build a high performance company culture and organizational health.  

We believe that people are at their best when they feel happy, healthy, and heard. This is the key to retaining top talent-if you can make and support the best version of a person's self, it will be near impossible to get them to leave.

5 Steps to Keep Employees Happy

1. Hire right from the beginning.  A lot of workplace unrest comes from the mismatch between how the job/company was presented and what the actual job/culture entails, or between the capabilities of the new hire and what is actually needed to do the job. These mismatches create anxiety and mistrust, both on the employee's and employer's sides. Not only will properly informed and qualified candidates be happier in their jobs, hiring the right candidate will also reduce the number of people that leaders will have to let go. 
2. Provide challenging work and goals.  Employees are happy when they are making important contributions to the team. Challenging work, and goals built around those challenges, provides a sense of accomplishment and pride, both of which are important to employee engagement and retention. 
3. Recognize your employees, and help them recognize others.  One of the most meaningful gifts you can give an employee is recognition. Though there are endless ways to accomplish this, a sincere "good job" in front of peers is sometimes all that is needed. 
4. Give employees clear expectations, direction, and purpose. Employees are happiest when they are delivering on the expectations set for them. When they don't know what the expectations are, they feel adrift, spending their work hours checking boxes without knowing why. Connect your employees' tasks with the company's overall direction and purpose, and they will be less likely to leave. 

Engage your employees.  Employee engagement is the strength of the mental and emotional connection employees feel toward their workplace-and it's deeper and longer-lasting than happiness. Engagement keeps employees going during those rough quarters and makes it easy for them to say they love their jobs. Disengaged employees, on the other hand, are almost 4 times more likely to leave an organization than engaged employees. 

Get 11 Additional Strategies to Keep Employees Healthy and Heard

About LSA Global
Founded in 1995, LSA Global is a leading performance consulting and training firm that helps high growth technology, services, and life-science companies create a competitive advantage by powerfully aligning their culture and talent with their strategy. Learn more about getting aligned

Employee Engagement & Retention Health Check

Are you and your managers engaging and retaining the top talent you need to succeed? 

We define employee engagement as an organization's ability to create a work environment that drives high levels of employee advocacy, discretionary effort and intent to stay. 

• Employee Advocacy - Do employees think and speak highly of the organization, its leaders, managers, employees, products, quality and future outlook?
• Discretionary Effort - Do employees think of ways to do their jobs better?
• Intent to Stay - Do employees want to be a part of the organization?

The highest performing managers create the environment required for their employees to stay and thrive.  Why?  Because engaged employees are more than satisfied, more than committed; they are emotionally connected.  They consistently go out of their way to over-achieve, actively promote your business, and stay with you during good times and bad.

Put simply, engaged employees are more productive AND more profitable.

If you would like to know how you stack up to leading organizations in the areas of employee engagement and retention, then this health check is for you.

Assess Your Employee Engagement Practices Now

About LSA Global
Founded in 1995, LSA Global is a leading performance consulting and training firm that helps high growth technology, services, and life-science companies create a competitive advantage by powerfully aligning their culture and talent with their strategy. Learn more about getting aligned

Do You Have High Performing Managers? The 4 Management Metrics that Matter Most

Despite rumors to the contrary and the recent buzz around holacracies and self-managed work teams at companies like Zappos, management and managers are still a major factor in the running of most organizations. 

There are over 56 million managers in the United States making up 38% of the workforce and a significant portion of payroll. And in the UK, there are ten times as many managers as there were just 100 years ago. 

Many companies have also flattened their organizational structures to increase productivity and speed up decision making thereby giving managers wider responsibility over more employees than they had in the past. The good news is that managers have a big impact on performance. The bad news is that leadership gaps are growing. Corporate talent research shows that leadership bench strength continues to be the most pressing issue on the minds of business and HR leaders. The bottom line - organizations are having a difficult time finding the leadership capability they need to help them succeed.

Manager Performance is Not Meeting Expectations

Most of our clients recognize the inherent challenges of finding high performing managers. But what concerns us even more is that, according to recent research, senior executives are not happy with the performance of their companies' frontline managers. 

According to McKinsey, nearly 70% of senior executives are only "somewhat" or "not at all satisfied" with the performance of their companies' frontline managers. And a stunning 81% of frontline managers are not satisfied with their own performance. This aligns with our own employee engagement research findings where 'trust in senior leaders,' 'manager effectiveness' and 'alignment with goals' consistently rank in the bottom quartile in underperforming organizations. 

How Important Is Manager Performance In Terms Of Business Performance?

It would be difficult to overestimate the negative impact of poor managers on the business success of your organization. 

Bad Management = Bad Business:

From a customer experience perspective, managers and line supervisors direct as much as two-thirds of the workforce responsible for defining, delivering and improving the customer experience. From an employee perspective, managers account for at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores across business units. When managers underperform, both the customer experience and employee engagement suffer. 

Good Management = Good Business:
According to a Harvard Business Review study, the most enduringly successful companies (those delivering a 10-fold return to investors over a ten year period) excel at ten specific management practices: strategy, execution, culture, structure, talent, innovation, leadership, mergers and partnerships, problem anticipation and performance coaching. When managers execute their responsibilities well, the organization can thrive.  

So What Should You Do to Increase Manager and Company Performance?
You need a comprehensive plan. The first and most important step is to clearly define what success will look like with three key stakeholders: 

1.   Your Target Audience

2.   Their Bosses

3.   The Executive Team

This phase is complete when all three constituents agree upon the critical few metrics to improve and their relative importance compared to other priorities faced by the organization. For management training, success metrics typically fall into four main buckets.

Read About the Management Success Metrics that Matter Most

About LSA Global
Founded in 1995, LSA Global is a leading performance consulting and training firm that helps high growth technology, services, and life-science companies create a competitive advantage by powerfully aligning their culture and talent with their strategy. Learn more about getting aligned

The 4 Most Important Attributes to Look for When Your Sales Reps Miss Their Targets

Only 21% met quota.

According to research by Xactly, a leading provider of cloud-based incentive solutions:

• As many as 79 percent of quota-carrying Software as a Service (SaaS) sales representatives missed their goals.
• 14% of sales reps in the study do not even achieve 10% of quota.
• Across the entire data set, the average quota attainment, regardless of tenure, was only 58%.

Pretty scary that only 21% met quota. What does this mean for you and your sales team?

First of all, if you want to create a high performance sales team, stop making excuses for you and your team. The most common excuse we hear from the VP of Sales is that the quotas are unfair. These sales leaders claim the quotas are driven by the CEO or CFO to meet unrealistic external expectations that are not based in the reality of the competitive landscape, the current value proposition or the available sales resources. While this may be the case, it is the sales leader's job to create the circumstances for their teams to thrive. 79% of reps missing quota does not calibrate to a high performance sales environment. That means sales leaders need to create the right sales strategy, culture and team to succeed.

The second most common excuse is that the sales team is littered with too many underperformers. If your team is anything like those in the survey, almost 80% of your reps may be underperforming. It is your job as the sales leader to hire people who will perform. It is also your job as the sales leader to identify the root cause of any performance problems and to help underperformers succeed or move on as quickly as possible - ideally within 90 days.

We believe that there are four attributes that sales leaders must incorporate into their hiring profiles and performance management processes to create a high performance sales team.

Read More About the 4 Key Attributes

Benchmark Your Sales Performance

About LSA Global
Founded in 1995, LSA Global is a leading performance consulting and training firm that helps high growth technology, services, and life-science companies create a competitive advantage by powerfully aligning their culture and talent with their strategy. Learn more about getting aligned

Top 9 Toolkits of 2014

Best practice insights and tools from industry experts (registration required to receive related healthcheck)

1. Sales Toolkit
2. Change Management Toolkit
3. Training & Development Toolkit
4. Employee Engagement & Retention Toolkit
5. Leadership Toolkit
6. New Manager Toolkit
7. Customer Service Toolkit
8. Project Management Toolkit
9. HR Compliance Toolkit

About LSA Global
Founded in 1995, LSA Global is a leading performance consulting and training firm that helps high growth technology, services, and life-science companies create a competitive advantage by powerfully aligning their culture and talent with their strategy. Learn more about getting aligned

6 Tips and Warning Signs - How to Keep & Onboard New Sales Folks

Because it takes time and money to get new salespeople up-to-speed and because buyers want stability, most of our clients want their sales force to stay over the long term.

While the desired length of time is unique to each business model, less than twelve months seems universally unacceptable and three-to-ten years of tenure appears to be an attractive range for sales leaders.

It Starts with Hiring Right
If you did your homework as a sales manager and hired well, your new hire will have the right interpersonal, motivational and intellectual competencies to thrive on the job and in your corporate culture. But your job as team leader is not yet over.

Know Why Top Talent Leaves
It is as much your responsibility to keep "A" players on the team and successful as it is to select them in the first place. That means that you have to keep an eye on the top three reasons that most salespeople leave:

1. Greater opportunities for advancement, learning, promotion and commissions
2. Easier sales situations with more differentiated solutions or in less competitive sales environments
3. Better cultural fit regarding how things actually get done in the organization

Make On-Boarding Count
Even though your new hires may be well schooled in complex, solution and value selling, they are not familiar with your organization, with their co-workers, with your products/services, and with your customers. Help ease their transition to their new job by practicing six sales on-boarding tips and identifying the six early warning signs that you need to take action.

Read about the 6 Onboarding Best Practices and Warning Signs

Take New Employee Orientation Health Check

About LSA Global
Founded in 1995, LSA Global is a leading performance consulting and training firm that helps high growth technology, services, and life-science companies create a competitive advantage by powerfully aligning their culture and talent with their strategy. Learn more about getting aligned

3 Smart Questions to Keep 92% of Your Top Talent from Abandoning You

Could it be that only 8% of your workforce truly wants to stick around?

Last month, the New York Times reported that the jobless rate in the U.S. is the lowest in 5 years. Manpower ran a recent online poll of nearly 900 workers that found 83% are actively looking for a new position and another 9% percent are networking to see what is available. That adds up to 92% of respondents on the move. Add these factors to LinkedIn becoming such a powerful passive recruiting tool, and the situation adds up to a wake-up call for leaders looking to grow. Put employee retention on the top of the strategic agenda at your very next management meeting.

If your top talent--the ones who watch your back and who can run with any ball you toss their way--is leaving (or at risk of leaving), you had better figure out why. You need to put a stop to the brain drain. Not only can your organization lose momentum as you try to fill the gaps, but it also risks failure without those key folks.

Ask yourself:

1. Do we have right talent management processes and systems in place to predict, track and minimize turnover in the next 12 months?
2. Have we uncovered the critical few employee engagement weak spots for our most important jobs and top talent groups?
3. Have we clearly identified our key talent and conducted "stay" interviews with them recently?

Historically, the beginning of the year (this month and next) is the most common time for organizations to hire...they need to fill positions for new budgets that become available in January and employees are also more open to make changes at this time.

The bottom line: Act now so you don't risk losing your top talent. Do not wait to get the engagement and retention discussion started with your leadership team.

Read more about engaging and retaining top talent...

About LSA Global
Founded in 1995, LSA Global is a leading performance consulting and training firm that helps high growth technology, services, and life-science companies create a competitive advantage by powerfully aligning their culture and talent with their strategy. Learn more about getting aligned

Are You Paying Enough Attention to Your Top Talent?

According to the Wall Street Journal, 34% of workers left their jobs as we came out of our last recession in 2003.

Unfortunately for many companies, the majority of the 34% that left were top performers moving on to greener pastures.

In today's environment, you should be asking yourself 3 key questions regarding your talent management strategy, in particular your top performers:

1. Can you risk the loss of your top talent?
2. Is your organization paying enough attention as recruiters begin to contact and lure away key performers?
3. Are your key workers at risk of leaving this time?

While budgets are still lean, one proven low cost strategy to retain top employees and engage the workforce is to provide career development options and navigation skills.

As companies become more confident, we predict that new positions will open up before the end of this year.

Opportunities for advancement will be possible if your people have the right skills and experience.

One of our clients recently turned to LSA for just this reason. This company was entering a new market space at the same time as a formidable competitor. They could not afford to lose any key players.

LSA's expert designed and implemented a career development and performance management system for the company. The system included key tools and targeted development for new managers and employees as well as internal career and executive coaching. The goal was to provide their top talent with a vision for a future within the organization and the ability to take advantage of new opportunities.

As a result of our work, employee engagement scores have increased across every dimension while turnover in critical roles has dropped below 4%. This translated into significant cost savings and increased productivity.

Read more about:
Managers Developing Top Talent ..
Employees Navigating Their Careers ..
Employee Engagement Survey Best Practices..



About LSA Global
Founded in 1995, LSA Global is a leading performance consulting and training firm that helps high growth technology, services, and life-science companies create a competitive advantage by powerfully aligning their culture and talent with their strategy. Learn more about getting aligned