HR Professionals Share Best Practices at SHRM Conference

The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) conferences provide opportunities for human capital professionals go to connect with their colleagues and obtain new learnings to grow their people and ultimately their organizations. Fahrenheit Advisors was an exhibitor at this year’s annual Arizona SHRM state conference in September where we displayed an engagement booth for attendees to share best practices with fellow attendees. What follows is a summary of the two prompts we asked which might be helpful for any HR professional.

When asked for some best practices for managing after a crisis, the following were added to the engagement board.

Best Practices for Managing After a Crisis

1. Take care of your people first
2. Including everyone in virtual team building
3. Offering a health coach to employees
4. Ask questions about what each employee is going through
5. Learn from past mistakes and successes.
6. Practice W.I.N. – What Worked? What needs to be Improved? What can we do better Next time?
7. Open, honest, and regular communication
8. Let employees know you value them
9. Remember that the person you managed prior to the crisis is not the same person today
10. Develop a plan and have a crisis mitigation team in place before something actually occurs
11. Following the crisis, revisit what can be changed moving forward
12. Realize employees will handle crisis differently and will need to assimilate to the new normal
13. Ask employees for feedback and ideas
14. Have empathy for one another

These are the talent attraction and retention strategy ideas shared by conference attendees.

Talent Attraction & Retention Strategies

1. Review compensation, consider sign on bonuses, and increase referral program awards
2. Gather ideas around job descriptions
3. Open communication from the beginning to the end of the recruitment process
4. Develop a coaching culture by training your leaders and managers to use skills and techniques to better connect with their employees
5. Hire for fit.  Train for skills.
6. Use feedback from exit surveys
7. Have multiple departments involved with selection and onboarding
8. Full cycle engagement, stay transparent and conduct regular formal 1:1 check ins
9. Pay above market for non-exempt roles
10. Offer commuter benefits
11. Provide healthcare benefits on day 1
12. Give employee stock for full time hires
13. Hold monthly job fairs for hard-to-fill positions
14. Bring food trucks to the office
15. Pay temps for holidays
16. Offer a lunch with the CEO
17. Make your staff the center of attention and they will tell everyone
18. Offer great benefits
19. Create an office environment that feels homey with an employee lounge
20. Unlimited PTO
21. Hold monthly team meetings and happy hours
22. Provide flexible work schedules

This impressive list of ideas from our colleagues demonstrates a lot of creativity and application for various sized companies. A related Fahrenheit article about employee performance reviews takes a deeper dive into how more regular employee feedback sessions can lead to enhanced employee satisfaction. Regular feedback versus waiting for an annual performance review has a significant positive impact. Gallup has found that when managers supply weekly (vs once/year) feedback, team members are:

• 5.2x more likely to strongly agree that they receive meaningful feedback
• 3.2x more like to strongly agree that they are motivated to do splendid work
• 2.7x more likely to be engaged at work 

As your human capital partner, we can provide customized solutions to enhance your crisis management as well as your talent attraction & retention strategies.  Here is a full list of the human capital services we can perform for your organization. Contact us today at Experts@FahrenheitAdvisors.com.