“Why won’t millennials stay in the jobs we give them?,”

“What can I do to make improve millennials retention?,”

“My millenials change jobs like swiping left on Tinder!.”

These are the cries of frustrated leaders, managers and HR people everywhere as they struggle with changing demands for change led by the growing millennial body in our workforce.

But whilst Millennials may seem to be obsessed with job hopping, they are not, it seems, as obsessed with company-hopping. 50% of millennials surveyed by Gallup strongly agree that in two years time they plan to be working in the same company as now. So it seems that many don’t plan to leave the company, but most do end up leaving the job.

Two things are happening. Firstly too many millennials are disengaged in the average workplace. They are the least engaged generation in Gallup research with 55% not engaged by their jobs and companies. But rather than thinking of them as a disengaged generation, think of our workplaces as disengaging to them. It’s better to own the problem than shift blame, when you own it you can fix it.

Its also not helpful blaming them for wanting to job move. Millennials are the consumers of the workplace, wishing they would change is tantamount to saying the customer is wrong. Instead we need to do a better job of designing learning, development and progression into roles. Because when we don’t they go and look for the challenge and the progression elsewhere. Like any consumer with choices would.

An not only is the millennial generation our best educated generation ever, it’s also the one we’ve studied and therefore understand the most. Workplace science and analysis is more advanced now than ever.

• They want to work for companies who have a strong sense of mission and purpose
• They want leaders who communicate openly and transparently and have strong and visible values
• They want to have visibility on the impact they are making, recognition when they achieve and feedback on how to do better
• They want to see progress — we took away the idea of job for life and we left them fending for themselves, they get that.
• They want to work for companies that care about their wellbeing

It’s hard to see how these needs are at odds with what high performing companies want.

In fact rather than complaining about our millennials, we should see them as possibly the most workforce-ready, productive-positive generation of workers ever.

Millennials, or Gen Y already makes up more than a third of the US working population — the largest share of the workforce. Let’s get a grip on it. Gen Z is just around the corner and that’s going to be a whole different ball game.

Leadership, Job Design, Communications, Recognition — they are just some of the topics discussed in depth in “Build It : The Rebel Playbook for Employee Engagement” which is available to pre-order now from your favourite bookstore.

It’s a book for managers, leaders, CEO’s — anyone who needs to deliver business results by getting more from their people. The playbook shares the secrets that companies like Buffer, AirBNB, Linked In and Atlassian use to engage with their employees.

Pre-order now on Amazon UK, Amazon USA or Booktopia Australia

Millennials. It’s not them, it’s us. was originally published in Why work must change on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Startups Magazine went straight in for the kill in their interview with me. I did my best with the answers.

Here are some of the highlights

What is your greatest business achievement?

It has taken me 10 years to get the team around me as good as it is today, and I think assembling a group of people this talented, this engaged and this excited about our future, is my best achievement. It’s the hardest too.

What do you do every day?

I spend most of my time thinking about our people and organisation structure and our market. It’s my job to design the organisation so our people can do their very best work, and to see where our market is going so that we’re sailing in the right direction and we can make the big bets on the future in the right places.

What is the hardest thing you have ever done in business?

By definition, entrepreneurs create value and opportunity where other people don’t see it. That means you’re often the only person in the room who believes something can be done and should be done. I think the hardest times are when everyone you trust around you thinks one thing and you believe you need to do another — they are the real test of your leadership. Fundamentally, my approach is to counsel widely, listen carefully, then do what I believe is right.

Biggest business mistake?

Oh — there are so many. Do I have to pick one? Back in 2010 when we were 90 people I tried to take myself out of the day to day and it was far too early, we weren’t ready. We had no product team at the time, just me and the engineering team and I moved them to report to the CFO.

It was a disaster, we didn’t really build anything for about 18 months. I still cringe when I think of that decision now, I must have been out of my mind!

What one thing do you wish you’d known when you started?

I knew almost nothing when I started but I don’t really have any big regrets. I think you just make the best decisions you can on the day, stay true to your values and keep learning. I guess in the last few years I’ve really seen how much better my judgement on those hard issues when I’m rested and in a good space mentally. So maybe I’d tell myself that — prioritise good sleep!

What is the single most important piece of advice you would offer to a less experienced entrepreneur?

It’s the best job in the world but sometimes it’s the loneliest too. You need to be ready for the hard times when you’re filled with self-doubt and dig deep, get the courage to do what you think is right and remember to constantly iterate and adjust your course as you need to. “Fix in flight” is what I call it.

What would make you a better leader?

I think time makes me a better leader — you can’t beat experience. Every month that goes by, I’ll do something else imperfectly and learn something for the next time. If you’re genuinely open minded, time is a great trainer.

Read the full article over on Startups Magazine.

My biggest mistakes, views on VC’s, red tape and people. was originally published in Why work must change on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Even my own business, Reward Gateway had “Let’s make the world a happier place to work” as it’s mission for many years before we changed it to “Let’s make the world a better place to work”.

I’d known that our mission statement was wrong for several years — our definition of engagement was solid, our understanding of why engagement mattered was solid and neither of them mentioned happiness. I knew that happiness and engagement were related but I didn’t really understand the connection properly until the summer of 2016.

I have Reward Gateway’s Head of Programme Angie Angjelovikj to thank for enlightening me. Angie had been with us since we acquired Dazines, a software engineering company back in 2014 which she ran with her husband Seb Aspland, with Seb joining us as Head of Product. The acquisition was a big success and together we grew the product & engineering team from our 10 plus their 32 to nearly 100 people that we have today, building some of our best new products as a result.

But in 2016, needing to shift the footprint of the company to the US so we could position ourselves better for what was our biggest growth opportunity, I decided to move Seb’s position to Boston, recruit someone with US industry experience over there and I cut Seb’s UK role in the process.

Angie was furious with me.

Seb’s change was part of a bigger restructure and I followed our employee communications playbook to the letter — over communicating, staying with the issues, leaning in and explaining the Why. But none of it mattered to Angie.

With a super-strong work ethic born from a Balkan upbringing, there was no strategic reasoning that Angie wanted to hear. I’d fired her husband (her words) it was clearly a slight on his work and his effort and it was grotesquely unfair.

She was too cross to speak to me for a fortnight but then, at the end of a meeting about refurbishing our new Boston office, we were alone in a conference room and she gave it me with both barrels.

“What do you think you are doing?”

“Do you even know who does all the work round here?”

“It says employee engagement on the door but this is how we treat people?”

“Seb’s given everything to this business then you just cast him aside like he’s nothing?”

“This business is big now and you’re completely out of touch?”

“Why do you only reward people who do what you want and fire people who disagree with you?”

Angie is something of a force of nature. Rarely have I ever met anyone with anything like her capacity for work.

The previous time I’d incurred her wrath was back in 2015 when I suggested hiring a project manager to help us build a new London HQ. I suggested this trying to be helpful — it seemed a bit much to have Angie running our whole software engineering programme 7 teams and 80 people and then also run a £1.5m office refit project at the same time. But to Angie this was a slight on her work — “Why are you taking work off me? What have I done? How have I let you down? I’m busting my ass here to learn this new area and deliver these projects and this is how you repay me?”. It was a phone call I won’t forget in a hurry!

She’s a true superstar Angie. trustworthy, dependable, insanely hard working and formidable — the sort of person you want on your side. If she left, we’d have to replace her with a team of three.

While I gave Angie a “good listening to”, challenged her points as sensitively as I could, corrected the misunderstandings and re-explained the strategy, I went home that night and slept badly.

Was she right. Was I losing touch? Had I treated Seb badly? All entrepreneurs know those awful hours of darkness when the self-doubt sets in and the simplest thing becomes a huge, sleep preventing torment.

But I did finally get to sleep and when I woke up something was clear to me. Angie was a deeply engaged member of staff. She knew what we were trying to do as a business, she knew exactly how her role was critical to that mission and she was, in her words, busting her ass to make that happen. But at the same time she was not happy — either with me or the organisation. She was angry and disappointed. And it didn’t affect her engagement or her performance one bit.

So that’s the moment when I saw first hand that you could be highly engaged and, at least temporarily, unhappy.

The inverse is also true, contrary to what some people think, I’ve found you do not need engagement to be happy — it is not a critical ingredient.

I’ve found companies that have quite happy employees based on a combination of good working conditions, low ambition and low accountability for results.

This tends to result in the best people leaving and an average group of people staying and finding meaning and self-actualisation outside of work. It’s pretty dreadful for organisational performance though, and you can guarantee those companies won’t have the durable and resilient cultures needed to navigate the tough years ahead.

We’ve spent most of the last 10 years wanting to make the world a happier place to work and I’m proud of the work we’ve done together. But as we look ahead to the next 10 years it was clear, making the world a better place to work was a deeper, more meaningful and more important challenge and one that we’re really excited about

This article was originally written for The Rebel Playbook for Employee Engagement, published by Wiley December 2017. You can pre-order and get early access to the VIP site with early content, video interviews and behind the scenes author updates. Visit rg.co/rebelplaybook.

Employee engagement vs happiness. Don’t get them confused. was originally published in Why work must change on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Well if we want our companies to innovate more, maybe we need to start rewarding failure.

The idea of rewarding innovation isn’t new, companies have been running new ideas programs for many years. But in most cases, only ideas that work our get rewarded. When it comes to major projects, the big gongs, bonuses and promotions go to the people who’s projects are a major success.

But Astro Teller thinks differently.

Astro is Head of “X”, a unit owned by Alphabet, the parent company of Google. “X” is Google’s “moonshot” division where they work on highly risky projects like self-driving cars, a Google contact lens and mysterious floating barges that, as yet, have no known purpose.

Astro told us that most “X” projects end in failure and he wants his team to get to that failure quickly so they can get on with the next project. The more projects that they kill as failures, they quicker they get to the projects that will really work. It’s not necessarily how you’d think of things but it definately makes sense.

Projects take time and cost money, the longer they run the more they cost. By recognising and rewarding failure, Astro gets his team to work on the hardest part of a project first so they can find out if there is an impassable bnlock, an achilles heel. Once they find it, he rewards them for calling it early so they can kill the project and move on.

So if you really wanty to create a culture of innovation, you need to accept the real risks in that. Back projects and reward staff for the ideas and the progress rather than the end result and you’ll start to build a culture where innovation, success and failure is all part of the job.

If you want innovation, start rewarding failure. was originally published in Why work must change on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Great cultures that foster employee engagement aren’t easy cultures, they’re just cultures. They are places to work where great things get done against all the odds. Places where people don’t always see eye to eye but passionately work to the same goal. They are by definition, “great places to work.”

So when we don’t have that, when things grind a bit slow, when you feel the leadership isn’t doing what it should, when you feel the wrong people are being rewarded, when you stop believing in the vision then you become disengaged. And when you become disengaged, as long as you have options, you start looking for another job — or maybe just keeping your eyes open, you know — just seeing what else is out there.

So there is absolutely a link between employee disengagement and higher than optimal employee attrition. So if you reduce levels of employee disengagement then you will reduce attrition.

But if your key engagement metric is retention, you’re worshiping a false god.

I’ve learned that lower attrition, or improved retention depending on which way you look at it, is a positive by-product of employee engagement and it should not be your primary goal.

And that’s because too many other things can also reduce employee retention. And they are bad things, bad things indeed.

Removing accountability, reducing ambition, and lowering standards — they all have a dramatically positive impact on retention. Unfortunately the wrong people stay — the good people, who want a challenging, exciting job that they are engaged in, well they leave pretty quickly because they see average performance being rewarded and they feel the results of the team reduce.

But people who are stuck in a rut, disengaged, unhappy and have average performance, they stay because their jobs just got easier.

Increasing pay is also a key way to lower attrition and if you use it selectively, only on those that you think might jump ship, then you can make it more affordable. Which leads to average people being paid above average wages and an increasing sense of unfairness in the workplace which also causes your best people to leave (and never think that pay is private because I am certain it is not).

I liken an obsession with retention/attrition stats as the same thing the medical profession does when it tells us to change what we eat or do so we can live longer. Duration, time — whilst easy to measure is not the be-all and end-all of things. Give me a short life lived well and enjoyed over a long life of pain and unhappiness any day. And the same goes for our people.

I want Reward Gateway to be a place where people can come, learn, grow, develop, and do their best work. I want them to achieve things that they never thought possible and I want them to go to bed often thinking “Wow, I’m knackered but damm we did good work.” And I want them to do that for as long as they are happy and engaged with us and for as long as we have the role at the level they need where they can do that to their best. Whether that is two years or ten, I don’t kid myself that it needs to be forever.

And that’s why for the whole decade that we’ve been around, I’ve never wanted to track our retention or leaver stats.

There is lots more practical advice and help on company culture, leadership and employee engagement in the new book “The Rebel Playbook for Employee Engagement”, published by Wiley December 2017. You can pre-order and get early access to VIP content by visiting rg.co/rebelplaybook.

Stop measuring employee retention. It’s the wrong metric. was originally published in Why work must change on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In those days culture seems all about drinks, parties, and having fun on a Friday night. Reward Gateway was no exception and for our first five years, Friday evening office parties were legendary. Music would go on, a huge drinks cupboard would open full of spirits, staff would spill onto the office balcony and girlfriends, boyfriends, and flatmates would descend for an all expenses paid drink-a-thon.

Often on a Monday morning I would hear our then CFO Charlie Murphy on the phone to Westminster Council Environmental Health dealing with the noise complaints from our neighbors.

As we grew the parties became a little less frequent, they became more organized and moved to off-site. They were still great fun and included entertainment, free-flowing drinks, food, and unique venues. But as this aspect of work changed I realized that drinking and parties didn’t define our culture, our culture was defined by something far more important.

Company culture has little to do with parties and everything to do with how you treat your people every day.

How you treat people, whether it is written in an operating manual or employee handbook, is visible and has a huge impact on your culture and levels of employee engagement.

When other people are being seen to be treated fairly and with kindness it re-enforces the bonds between the organisation and the employees. Where people are treated unkindly, harshly or without humanity, a feeling of unfairness is quick to take hold. Unfairness and inauthenticity are Kryptonite to employee engagement they can kill years of hard work in months.

Your staff will judge you not on how you treat the most senior director, but how you treat the most junior. They will judge you less on how you treat the star performer in sales, but more on how you treat the person who is struggling.

At Reward Gateway I’ve always been obsessed about how we treat our cleaners.

Corina Aparicio was our first permanent office cleaner at Reward Gateway’s original head office in Notting Hill, London. She juggled several jobs working dawn until late evening to send money back to Bolivia for her son who lived with her sister. Working for us weekday evenings I remember the first time she told me why she loved her job :

“I’m visible here, I get seen. People know my name and they say hello, they smile. In other jobs me and my friends, we walk around but people look through us, they don’t see us, we are like ghosts”

We treat Reward Gateway staff well with good employee benefits, good employment terms, good perks and recognition. But when we don’t want to afford those terms to our cleaners we can end up sending the message that they are somehow not valuable enough — sub-human, or unworthy of the same treatment of others.

Like many companies, in our early days we used a sub-contractor for cleaning until the unfairness of that hit me one day. We quickly agreed buy-out terms with the agency and Corina joined us on staff so we could give her the same treatment as everyone else, including our employee share plan.

My favourite story of our first employee share plan is Corina’s

It was December 2010 when Inflexion Private Equity bought a majority share in Reward Gateway for £25 million. With 90 staff owning 5% of the business between them, they shared just over £1m.

Corina’s shares paid out just like everyone else and with the money she bought a plot of land back in Bolivia and built a house on it for her family and her son.

“ I’m the first member of my family to ever be a landowner”, Corina told me. “ I never thought this day would be possible. This has changed my life and my family’s life.”

In 2011 Corina moved back to Bolivia and she lives there now with her son. We keep in touch on Facebook.

We now have Erika as our daytime housekeeper at our new London HQ. She loves her job. You should see the pride with which she keeps the office clean and tidy against the will of nearly a hundred messy millennials! When we moved in she told me:

“I never dreamed I’d get to work in such a prestigious place, to keep such a beautiful office clean and tidy. I’m very proud to work here.”

Everyone knows Erika. She’s also in our employee share program, she gets the same benefits, perks, and terms as me and everyone else. She joins in our company all-hands meeting every quarter and when we’re having Christmas lunch or a party she is there too.

How you treat people is what defines your culture. A nice office — that’s the cherry on top.

“How do you treat your cleaners?” is an excerpt from The Rebel Playbook for Employee Engagement, published by Wiley December 2017. You can pre-order and get early access to VIP content by visiting rg.co/rebelplaybook.

How do you treat your cleaners? was originally published in Why work must change on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

To read the full piece, check it out on People Management’s website. As always, I’d love to know what you think about it and general feedback!

Replacing email systems with instant messaging systems in the workplace was originally published in Why work must change on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In my interview with Daniel Budzinski from the Dreamcast podcast, we discussed how to encourage honest and transparent leadership, create openness in the workplace, and get the best out of people.

You can find the full interview on iTunes or listen on this page through Soundcloud. If you’d prefer to read it, send me a note on Twitter or Linked In and I’ll email you the full transcript.

Key company culture takeaways :

• Be as open and honest with your staff as you can as early as you can.
• Culture is an output, not an input.
• Give everyone the benefit of the doubt.
• People can handle the truth. The thing they can’t handle is the lies.
• Leadership is about being human & being humble.
• Walk the walk.
• Never burn bridges.
• If you make a great job of today, tomorrow will often sort itself out.
• Explain the why.

Getting the Best Out of Everyone in the Workplace — Interview with Daniel Budzinksi was originally published in Why work must change on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

• The company is really successful; Why its that? What are you really doing differently?
• You’re outperforming everyone else? What are your USPs? Are they sustainable?
• The culture, the people feels special. How will you maintain this as you grow?

Company culture is the real sustainable USP

It didn’t take me long to be certain that the first two questions were, of course, answered by the third one. Our culture is our only true competitive USP and its the only one worth investing in. And I said to our new owners back then

“If it’s important to us, then we’ll make it happen. And culture is everything to us so I’ll figure out how we scale it.”

In the years that have passed, I’ve realized just how common this issue is. Every single day, our front line staff in sales and service are talking to and helping, amongst others, companies just tipping over that pivotal, one hundred people mark, where it starts to become harder for the CEO to know everyone, it starts to become harder to keep everyone on the same page.

But the good news is it’s far from impossible.

So here are just 3 of the things we’ve done that have stood the test of time and are worth drawing out.

1. We documented our company values

Around 2012, we asked for a group of volunteers covering each department to get together and document the values that they saw the company do every day. Their brief was “just look and what we’re doing that you don’t want us to stop doing, and write down what you see”. That resulted in our Culture Book which every member of staff gets on recruitment and we live by all the time. I refer to mine almost daily.

2. We implemented continuous employee recognition

There are many forms of employee recognition, but continuous recognition is without question my absolute favorite. Rather than having annual or quarterly award programs, or employee of the month, you simply integrate employee recognition into every single day. We use our own product, as you’d expect, and any employee can send any other employee an online recognition card, sometimes called an eCard, for any reason.

We have an eCard that matches each of our 8 company values and we also have a few extra ones, like the simple “Thank you”, “Congratulations” and “Good Luck” ones. They have no financial value, so there is no limit to how many can be sent and each one is public in the company so everyone can see who is sending and who is receiving them. Scanning down our online “recognition wall” and seeing how people say thank you to each other is one of my favorite things to do.

3. We started to make a bigger effort to connect with important life events

When you’re small and you have that wonderful family feel, you naturally connect with the important life events of your employees. You’re there for them with their ups and downs and you share in their celebrations and disappointments. As you get a bit bigger, you need a bit more structure around those but you can still do them.

Here’s what we did :

• We created a bonus when you get married or civil partnered.
• We created a bonus when you have or adopt a baby
• We started to make a little more of a fuss of service anniversaries

These are just three things of the many that we do at Reward Gateway to maintain family feel and culture as we grow. And the truth is your culture does change, it has to, you just can’t do or operate the same things when you’re 300 staff as when you are 50. But whilst it has to change it doesn’t have to degrade or stop being special. You can work hard on your culture and it can keep getting better and stronger as you grow.

So that’s why I’m starting this new theme on my blog. Every couple of weeks I’ll be writing more specifically on the topic of maintaining and improving your company culture as you grow your small business. So if you’d like to stay with me, you can subscribe to my blog’s email or follow me on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Thanks,

G

Maintaining your company culture as you grow was originally published in Why work must change on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In particular I’ve been intrigued by Henry’s discussion of recruitment success vs onboarding success. The point he makes is that it’s very hard to predict if someone will be very good as an employee in a particular role. So what they have done at eShares (who make it possible to convert paper shares into electronic ones) is accept that they are average or maybe just slightly better than average at recruitment, and really invest in being exceptional at onboarding and increasing the chances that an employee will be successful once they are in.

This is something very relevant to me at Reward Gateway at the moment as we’ve just started looking more at our whole recruitment and onboarding process, so I’ve been thinking a lot about it. We’ve made a lot of improvements in onboarding and induction in the last year or so but I know there is much more we can do and it seems like a no-brainer place to invest.

It’s a great 36-minute podcast, and Henry goes on to talk about how he manages engineering, using time boxing as a prioritization technique. Let me know what you think.

Should you be invest in better hiring or in better onboarding? was originally published in Why work must change on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.