Talent Engagement Cycle

Burnout. Gossip. Silos. Barriers. Drama. Toxicity. Micro-Management. Sunday Scaries.

All talent engagement challenges.

More and more people dread Mondays, or whatever your first day is for the work week.

I don’t think more pizza or doughnuts solve the problem. Ping pong tables don’t. You can’t fool generations with “things”.

Many businesses are trying to attract employees with remote options. That raises the challenge to a different level when employees are looking for connection and communication.

Employees, particularly younger generations, are looking for engagement. Research shows they want something meaningful.

What are you doing to help your employees develop professional development plans?

A Harvard Business Review article dove into the reasons behind this level of burnout. Author, Elizabeth Grace Saunders, identified six core reasons:

1. having an unsustainable workload
2. a perceived lack of control
3. insufficient rewards for effort
4. a lack of a supportive community
5. a lack of fairness, and
6. mismatched values and skills.

The talent engagement cycle addresses these and other workplace challenges.

5 stages in the talent engagement cycle:

• self-engagement (developing skills from the inside out)
• pre-engagement (promoting your business)
• on-engagement (from hiring through the first months)
• in-engagement (retaining your employees), and
• re-engagement (creating an employee alumni program).

Prospective employees and employees can come in and out at various points along the way. It’s a cycle in the sense you need to continue to loop through all of the stages.

Failing Forward

Every minute, hour, day, week, month, and year brings us a new normal. It brings us an opportunity to integrate specific strategies for enhanced engagement in the workplace.

Those same timeframes give us a new opportunity to have a fresh start.

Of course, if you overuse your fresh starts, you start spinning like a tornado. It’s okay to fail, fail fast or fail forward, but failure is not a goal or direction to go.

Let’s be honest. How many of us have successfully carried out a New Year’s resolution to its satisfactory conclusion? I’ve heard some research say that the vast majority of resolutions are blown out of the water by January 21. It’s Fall!

Can we “birth away” a workforce shortage?

Incredibly low unemployment across the international economy combined with lower birth rates is catastrophic. That’s what we’ve talking about for months and years.

In my community, even if all of the graduates stayed, we would not hit the employer needs with the silver tsunami taking place. That retirement rate may even be increasing as people tire of this mess and leave the workforce earlier.

What will the “new normal” be like then?

Right now, “it is what is it” and we need to re-establish the talent conversation. Help-wanted signs and posting online aren’t meeting the need.

Businesses are focusing in on these demographics and trends now more than ever. The numbers seem to be pretty obvious. Some waited too long to address it.

Get me people and I can grow my business. Simple and not easy.

Those people need skills, but what skills are most relevant. Does our education system need to train people on widget production or relational production? Is it hard vs. people skills?

Solution: Talent Engagement Cycle

Is your talent engagement cycle flawless? Will it attract the right talent? Will it attract entrepreneurs?

Do you even have a talent plan?

How is your plan impacting your corporate culture? How would employees define your culture (NOT your vision/mission—NOPE)?

How are you engaging with up to five generations in your workplace?

Next time we will go into more detail with the five stages in the cycle: self-engagement, pre-engagement, on-engagement, in-engagement, and re-engagement.