Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink
Every action you take as a leader has a ripple effect, starting with your team, going out to the organization, and even out into to people’s personal lives. Here we offer you the chance to learn from real-life stories of leadership, so you can gain a deeper understanding, and level up your own skills. From communication, to culture, to power and equity, to feedback, to resolving conflict, and more. Join us and make sure you are creating the ripples you want.
If you would like your questions answered on the show, please share your story here: https://allthrive.ca/share-your-story/
To join the show live, go to: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leah-fink-all-thrive/
Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink
51 - Why Should I Work for You? Pt. 1
What if the way leaders perceive salaries could transform employee satisfaction and retention? In this episode, we challenge the deeply rooted fears and unconscious beliefs that salaries are a financial burden. We reveal how reimagining wages as strategic investments can create a sense of investment and foster a flourishing work environment.
Are your financial mindsets leading to your employees feel genuinely valued and motivated, or undervalued and demotivated.
If you want to ensure that your budget is fuelling growth and prosperity, you should join us for a listen!
Part 2 of this episode will be posted February 7.
To have your questions answered on the show, submit your story here: https://allthrive.ca/share-your-story
Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink is live every week at 12:00pm MST. Please join us to get answers to your leadership questions! https://www.linkedin.com/in/leah-fink-all-thrive/
Every action you take as a leader has a ripple effect, starting with your team, going out to the organization and even out into people's personal lives. Here we offer you the chance to learn from real-life stories of leadership so you can gain a deeper understanding and level up your own skills From communication to culture, to power and equity, to feedback, to resolving conflict and more. Join us and make sure you're creating the ripples you want. Welcome to Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink.
Speaker 2:Hello and welcome to Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink. I'm very excited because today is the first episode of our second season. Wow, I can't believe it's already been 50 episodes. This is episode 51, and we're starting off the year with something that I think is really, really fun.
Speaker 2:Over the holidays, I had this great opportunity to catch up with a lot of people that I know, to meet a bunch of new people, and through all of those conversations, I got a bit inspired for this question that I really want to ask, and it was why should your employees want to work for you? The perspective of employees and all the people I heard from is often very different from the leaders that I get to talk to, and something that came up again and again is different items, different pieces that people were dissatisfied with, and a lot of people who were questioning if they still wanted to work for these companies that they worked for. And I think about that with this concept that leaders care, that we all have great intentions and we're trying to support our employees, and so I really want to dive into a couple of things today that do impact why your employees work for you, that, if they want to work for you, if they're already thinking about leaving and of course, this is such a big topic. This is going to be a two-part episode. Today, we're going to talk more on the financial side of things, and in the second part of this episode, next week, we're going to talk more on the cultural side of things. This is something we need to talk about pretty frankly in this context. This is obviously a huge part of employee experience, and we're not going to talk about the basics of employees work for you because they need money to survive, but we're going to talk more about, as a leader, how you perceive your employees and the expense of having employees, and how that might be having bigger impacts than you thought on your success. Of course, leaders can have lots of different mindsets around finances when it comes to employees. You can even pause for a second. Think about what is your perspective on employees and the finance and the impact that they have on your finances.
Speaker 2:There can be a lot of stress, first of all, about being able to afford employees. That is pretty common. After all, you're not only taking responsibility for ensuring that you can pay this person consistently week to week or monthly, whatever. However you pay them, that you can pay this person consistently, week to week or monthly, whatever. However you pay them, and that has to be regardless of how your company does, what the draw is for and what your profit is. And of course, that's a big commitment. And I especially see this with owners of small businesses as they first start hiring employees and they're thinking, wow, this is huge. I'm now going to have to make sure that not only am I profitable, but that I can pay this person consistently, and that is very understandable. Of course it's a big expense. You only want to hire someone if you know for sure that you can take care of them and still have your company be financially successful.
Speaker 2:The challenge is, this mindset often persists, this sense of scarcity. It lingers and impacts how you're going to keep making decisions about your salary and team, even when you are more stable. Often this comes from a place of worry and fear, and this fear that salaries, which are a large expense, are one of the most dangerous parts of your expense, to this point where employees can actually feel like they're this burden to you that you have to take on. It can feel heavy and demanding and if you're taking on a burden, you might even be upset at employees if they ever have questions or raise concerns about compensation. How dare they not understand how heavy this feels to me, how much I worry about this, how much I risk on having this employee? They should be grateful that I'm paying them a salary, and this might not be a big conscious thought, but subconsciously you might almost want some empathy from your employees about how that stress is impacting you. You want them to understand that you are doing your best with pay, even if it's not to a large extent.
Speaker 2:If you are spending a lot of time worrying about how expensive your employees are, I'd argue there is some component of your mindset that is based in fear around having employees and you really want to take some time to look at that. So we've talked about this on the show last season. People have a negativity bias. It's very natural we're more likely to see the danger in a situation than we are to see the possibilities. We think about what we're risking rather than what might be at stake that we might be able to gain. And how do you think it changes how you treat employees on some level if you see them as a risk or if you see them as an asset to your company. That's going to make a big difference on how you see them and then, therefore, how you treat them.
Speaker 2:We do have a lot of leaders who will say employees are our biggest asset, or companies that say this, but there's a big difference in the actual intention behind that and how much they mean it, because when you approach people with the concept that they are actually an asset, you treat them differently. Suddenly, the money you're spending on salary is no longer a risky drain to your company, but an investment that is intentionally there to help you grow, to help you prosper. And what do we do with the investments? You get excited to make them and you take care of them. You realize that they are important to the success of the business and you give them this tangible proof that you want them there, that you care about them.
Speaker 2:When you think about it, we're looking at this from the employee perspective, and I think a lot of leaders can probably think back to when they were in that position and had something like this experience. Did you know when your company or your team saw you as more of an expense or an asset to invest in? Was your salary below industry standard? Did it change to reflect inflation. Did your leader ever make these kind of complaints about how hard it is to get funding for yourself or your team? All of these comments give this sense of as an employee, I'm a burden and I should just be thankful for what I'm getting, and unfortunately, the impact of this often falls on middle management, who may not have the power or ability to make the financial decisions they'd like for their team, but they have to take the brunt of that impact that this is having on staff. So I especially want to say, if you are listening to this and you are a person who has the ability to change this culture, to be aware of this, I really hope that this is a great episode for you and that you get to reflect on some things with it.
Speaker 2:The irony of all this, of course, and why we're talking about it, is that the more financial decisions you make from fear, the more money you end up losing, and you may not even realize it. It's the expectation of a lot of employees now that if they want to progress financially, it's better to go to another company with another job that'll actually help raise their salary more than staying in the same place, and there's never a basis with most companies to raise employee salary, as there is the need to pay new employees the proper salary when they come in and unfortunately, having an employee leave is much more expensive than most people think. By the time you add up losing the output of an employee while you're down the spot recruiting, training, hr paperwork, all the other expenses it usually costs about half of a position's annual salary to have to rehire for that position, and that's not even looking into the knowledge that you lose and the experience and how that might be affecting things like productivity or morale for your team. But we don't think about those things as actively when we're thinking about a place of fear. We're thinking of protect what we have and keep within our resources. We think about the short term and assume that our employees will just want to stay, or they might be scared of leaving, or it's too much effort to leave, so they'll probably stay here and that may happen. It certainly does. But if we want to be truly successful long-term, then focusing on this employee retention is a huge way to increase your profits and to reduce your loss.
Speaker 2:That's just talking about regular employee compensation, and I want to talk about another financial concept, which is that we often link finances or some sort of benefit with performance, and that could be raises, that could be bonuses and, of course, it makes sense. It's important that you are acknowledging the employees that perform well and you want to reward that hard work and dedication. And there is this underlying mindset in our society that hard work should be rewarded, that if you put in more effort you will get a greater reward. Now, next week we're going to talk about some of those cultural components and the non-financial pieces that we can link with this to make sure it's not just financial reward that is supporting our staff team. But often what happens when we focus on this fiscal side, which is what we're doing today is companies can end up actually putting themselves in a worse position when it comes to the employee perspective. And the biggest challenge that I see with this is consistency.
Speaker 2:Many companies have really well-intentioned initiatives around this. So maybe on your annual performance review, there's an opportunity to get a larger bonus if you exceeded expectations for your role for the year, or maybe there's a bonus for reaching certain milestones, or maybe your raise is determined by last year's performance. Those are all really valid things that are well-intentioned to try to show employees. Thank you for putting in the hard work and in years that things are going really well and that initiative is prioritized, it works out really well. High performing employees end up getting this financial compensation. They feel really good about it, they feel well rewarded and they want to keep investing.
Speaker 2:But what happens if something changes? Maybe in a subsequent year finances are a little bit tighter or the culture around this changes, it's no longer prioritized, or you get a key figure in these roles who changes. What happens now? You've built this expectation for employees and this whole framework around financial compensation that is linked to telling the employee how well they did, and maybe you no longer want to invest those finances, so maybe you decide that there's not the budget for bonuses this year. So an employee that goes above and beyond according to your rubric and is really dedicated is told that their work was acceptable, because if you categorize them as exceeding expectations, you'd have to financially compensate them, and you're not doing that this year.
Speaker 2:Do you know what happens to a very dedicated employee who goes above and beyond and is told that they met expectations? I'll tell you that it feels like a slap in the face that they feel that all the care and effort they put in was not appreciated in any way, and you're either going to lose the desire to put in that extra effort or they may even already have a foot out the door thinking well, I'm going to go find someone who will appreciate how hard I work and how much I care about this. So if you are going to offer any sort of financial reward, make sure that both you are very clear on expectations and that you can guarantee that this thing will be consistent year to year, so you're not accidentally telling your employees that they are not as valuable as they think or they're not doing as well as they think. Make sure that that piece can be consistent. This all being said, I of course recognize that whatever industry you're in, there's going to be variation on how you are able to compensate employees.
Speaker 2:I used to work in non-profit, which is well known for having a harder time with having good budget for employee salaries, and, at the very least, I hope that you are able to consider your employee experience relevant to the field, because they'll know the expectations of your industry roughly and they will be comparing you to how you prioritize them as assets or not, because at a deep level, this isn't about money at all. This is around your mindset about employees, the same question you asked earlier do you see them as a burden or do you see them as a strength and an asset to your company? How are you going to show that? Why would they want to work for you?
Speaker 2:As I mentioned, this is a big question we're going to continue to answer this next week, going deeper into some of those cultural pieces about how they can feel special and cared for and rewarded, even outside of this financial piece. So make sure you tune into that and, as a reminder, if you have a question or an idea that you want to share with the show, please share that with us. We would love to have it. You can find the link for that in the description below and we hope to hear from you. I want to thank you so much for learning with me today, for considering this. Some of these thoughts can be pretty insidious and deep in our mindset. The fear that we have around these things can have a pretty tight hold. So thank you for taking the time and the consideration to start exploring those little bits of fear with me and, as we close, remember to ask yourself what kind of ripples am I going to create this week?
Speaker 1:We hope you enjoyed the episode. Make sure to subscribe, comment and connect with Leah at meetleahca.