It’s Time To End Two Weeks Notice | Robert Glazer | TEDxKenmoreSquare

[Music] so I'd like to start with a question how many of you here are in a long-term relationship alright it's like about half my wife raised their hand that's good well question for those who raise their hand maybe even those that didn't how many of you would think it's normal if your partner who you thought was happy in that relationship suddenly told you that they were leaving in two weeks and moving to a new city with a new partner no hands or no one brave enough to raise their hand no one would and you know I can tell by your reaction you'd want to know why your partner never said anything about being unhappy your friends and family would be shocked and upset and I haven't had anyone tell me that this is a normal behavior well I'm not standing here today as a personal relationship guru in fact I am about as far from that as you could be I'm standing here as the founder and CEO of a global company acceleration partners that's grown a thousand percent in the last decade with an unwanted turn or a turnover rate that's a quarter of the industry and I after that question about relationships to show you that well we're really clear that it's not how we should end a personal relationship this has become the default way that we end professional relationships as I stand here right now an employee is walking into their boss's office and saying do you have a minute as a manager your heart probably sank a little bit as I said that you've been in these conversations you barely hear what comes next as your mind starts racing and figuring out how you're gonna replace this person and everything that they do and you probably only have two weeks especially here in the US same conversation also happens in Reverse for employees your manager asks you for a minute and you walk into their office or a conference room there's someone from HR sitting at the table your heart sinks you know what's coming next minutes later you're out of a job you're putting your stuff in a cardboard box and you'll get two weeks severance if you're lucky now what never happened in either of these conversations was an honest discussion about problems and performance and sadly this isn't the worst part of the story so the people who quit but people who leave or the people who you asked to leave are actually far better than the people who quit and stay quit instead these are the people who are mentally long gone from your company but are actually still on your payroll 51% of your employees are looking for a job and listen the disengagement has a really big cost to the tune of about five hundred and fifty billion dollars every year for businesses so what's going on here well management guru Jim Collins discovered that there's three keys to being a great leader and those are attracting the right people or he use the analogy getting the right people on the bus retaining the right people and then finding the right seat for them today we're just not having the honest conversations that we need to and the respectful dialogue we become conflict avoidant and really comfortable with lying and as a result we're keeping people that we should have moved on from we're losing people who we want it to stay and then this makes it very hard to recruit or attract people I also want to make sure you've met the future of your workforce the Millennials and Gen Z they're looking for meaningful work and purpose not just to be a cog in the wheel you really aren't giving them any commitment and a result they're not very loyal these two generations also live on social media they have a megaphone online and they know how to use it as Shakespeare reminded us and things are really important studies in psychology have repeatedly shown that the way something ends dramatically affects our memory of the entire experience years of a positive work relationship can be ruined in those last few weeks days or even hours and when something ends poorly for Gen Z and the Millennials they head straight to social media this is a real review that someone lacked on a very popular career site about a company that's seen by thousands of prospective employees each month as you can imagine this sort of review makes attracting great talent very difficult two weeks notice is also a risk for employees that new job that you took might not be as great as it seemed from afar grass often isn't greener you may actually have been happier if you spoke up and resolve the issue but if you burn a bridge with how you leave there's usually no going back you also may have broken trust with someone that invested in you for years and thanks to that same social media technology it's very easy for prospective employees to find past bosses and colleagues and deep back channel references without you even knowing these people may become an invisible barrier in your career I can tell you the peach people reach out to me all the time asking about ex employees without their knowledge as a leader of a company who strives to have a great culture based on transparency and respect I really wanted to break this cycle if don't misaligned when people would give two weeks notice and we never had a chance to fix the problem and when it wasn't working with an employee there really wasn't a good way to support them and moving on and so we started having discussions about how could we change this paradigm and an opportunity presented itself we had an employee who I'll call Jim everyone loved Jim great guy Jim just wasn't doing that well at work he had been on a performance improvement plan or a pip as they're called and like most of these plans had improved in the short term and then it had sort of fallen back down and we were kind of back where we started so we asked ourselves what should we do should be fired Jim should we put him on another another improvement performance improvement plan we decide to actually sit down with Jim and have a conversation and it turns out he really just wanted to do something different so we decided to try and experiment we let Jim continue in his job for the next few months we agreed on the transition and he continued to work and look for a job and we started looking for his replacement and it worked pretty well he found a great job we found his replacement and although we made some mistakes along the way it felt really good and this experiment led to a program we call mindful transition which we really believe is a blueprint for how we can eliminate two weeks notice and bring more humanity to a workplace here are the four key principles of our program first one of the things we had to be really aware of is that there's a lot of psychology of play especially the principle of cognitive dissonance turns out it's really hard to separate our feelings about people as individuals and their performance in the business someone on your team can be a great person and a poor performer by objective metrics but they might just want to do something else and we realized that if we could train our managers to compartmentalize these two things we have the potential for much better outcomes second we also had to change the narrative and acknowledge people weren't gonna work at our company for life we had to make it okay to leave acceleration partners and I like to use a sports analogy in this area where you have people that are ending their contract they're going into free agency but they can still play with their team and compete for championships and we wanted to look at business in the same way but to do this we had to create an environment of psychological safety for our employees to get these issues out in the open psychological safety is a really hot workplace topic these days it stands the reason that employees don't feel safe you really can't expect them to be honest so we promised that we would not walk anyone to the door who came to us with an issue we committed to work together to figure out a solution which include a different job our company or maybe helping them find a new job and a new company and we actually told employees to call us out on this if we broke that promise in any way and lastly be committed to transparency and feedback we're having the tough conversations we also have several early warning detection systems to help us discover these small issues before they become big once the first is an exercise we call start/stop continue which is well-named we ask employees what are things we should start doing what are the things we should stop doing and what are things we should continue doing and we've actually identified some themes in these discussions that we're making a lot of employees unhappy and we were able to to fix those the second is we have monthly anonymous engagement surveys asking people about their level of happiness in the company and we have regular open town halls with leadership where people can ask questions either openly or anonymously and most importantly at least quarterly we ask every employee are you happy are you present and are you engaged and for us happiness is a key proxy of engagement 51% of exiting employees said that a manager or supervisor never asks them about their job satisfaction in the three months before leaving and finally and probably most paradoxically we talked about our unique transition program in the first week of onboarding new employees we all want to be on the same page about how we manage transitions and the expectations we have for each other so this leads me to another story about an employee I will call it David David had historically been a great performer at our company but he was visibly becoming less engaged in talking with a know him openly and honestly we knew that he wanted to do something different he had really started working with data and loved that and wanted to do it full-time the problem was we really didn't have a data role and wouldn't for a few years so we committed to keep talking openly and looking for solutions together probably wasn't a few weeks or months later that an industry partner set us a job description and asked us if we knew anyone on our team who would be a good fit our exec team chaired around I said to them and someone responded back to me and said you know this would be a really good job for for David and I agreed so I reached out to David and told him that while I didn't want to lose him he should interview for this role with our support and imagine the surprise of the person who sent me the Job Description when I referred her one of my best employees the interview went well David got his dream job at a company in Silicon Valley and a huge race to go along with that he moved to California with his family where he lives today and he's our proud alumni of acceleration partners and an advocate for our company his company is also a client years ago in a yoga class my instructor recited a quote that would go on that really shaped my values she said how we do anything is how we do everything and for years I actually attributed this quote to a yoga teacher before finding out there was a lot more famous and then been around for a while today we live in a world where people are dumped by text candidates come in for a job interview and never hear from the company again an employees accept a job and never show up for the first day of work our general level of civility is declining my team and I are doing our best to put a stake in the ground for how we think business should be done today it takes a lot of courage and vulnerability by both employees and managers to make something like this work but after four years I can tell you what's making a huge difference in the performance of our business and for both our current employees and our alumni we are what we repeatedly do and by building empathy and humanity into the workplace it is my sincere hope that these principles will make a comeback outside of the workplace as well thank you very much

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 57,619

Rating: 4.7868018 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Business, Cooperation, Goal-setting, Ideas, Success, Work, Workplace

Id: yV2Qfj0ft0o

Length: 12min 33sec (753 seconds)

Published: Fri May 31 2019