“When your staff is connected, they work better, and productivity goes up.”

In episode #87 of Mission to Grow, the Asure podcast that serves as small business owners’ guide to cash, compliance and the War for Talent, Mike Vannoy sits down with Mary Simmons, VP of HR Compliance, Learning and Development to talk about Employee Engagement.

Mike and Mary discuss various strategies to engage employees and improve productivity, which in turn accelerates business growth. They focus on training as a vital aspect of employee engagement, emphasizing its importance for skill enhancement. Learn from Mary as she shares the importance of employee wellness initiatives, mission alignment, and how they affect employee engagement.

• Offering training engages employees because it demonstrates employer investment in their professional development. Both soft skills, like better communication, team building, and hard skills, like technical abilities, are important areas of training.
• Career pathing encourages employee engagement by providing a trajectory for their professional development. It’s advised to create a structure or roadmap showing potential advancements or career opportunities within the organization. This path could comprise promotions, additional training, or even cross-departmental experiences.
• Wellness programs or initiatives significantly impact the engagement of employees. Providing resources addressing physical, mental, and financial wellness is crucial. An engaged workforce is undeniably more productive, leading these wellness initiatives to indirectly contribute to the overall business’ success.
• Ensuring employees understand and align with the company’s mission can drive employee engagement. Employees who feel connected with the mission typically demonstrate higher productivity. It is crucial for leaders and communicators to consistently communicate the organization’s mission and how individual roles contribute to achieving it.
• With the changing work environment, offering flexible or remote work options can boost employee engagement. However, it does bring about the need for proactive communication and employee collaboration efforts, such as regular video meet-ups and virtual team activities.

Want to foster better employee engagement at your organization? Connect with one of our HR experts for small business today.

Read the Transcript:

Mike Vannoy:

Welcome to Mission to Grow the Small Business Guide to Cash Compliance and the War for Talent. I’m your host, Mike Vannoy. Each week we’ll bring you experts in accounting, finance, human resources, benefits, employment law and more. You’ll learn ways to access capital through creative financing and tax strategies. Tactical information You need to stay compliant with ever-changing employment laws and people strategies you need to win. The War for Talent Mission to grow is sponsored by Asure. Asure helps more than 100,000 businesses get access to capital, stay compliant and develop the talent they need to grow. Enjoy the show. Employee engagement. I can’t think of a better topic. When you’re thinking, how do you grow your business to have engaged, skilled employees that can help you accomplish your goals? So great guest today if you’re a regular watcher of the show, Mary Simmons. Mary is Vice President of HR Compliance at As Asure. She’s a SHRM certified professional. Also, for the last eight years, she’s been an adjunct professor at the New York Institute of Technology. Prior to Asure Mary was the director of HR consulting for a 58-year-old HR consulting firm in New York. Welcome to the show, Mary.

Mary Simmons:

Thanks, Mike.

Mike Vannoy:

Hey, so right off the jump, we’re going to dive deep and try to unpack this topic, but if a business is trying to grow, what’s the one thing that they really need to understand most about employee engagement?

Mary Simmons:

So I think a lot of business owners might, this is a fluffy subject, right? Employee engagement. What is that? Simply stated, employee engagement means that your employees are engaged in what they’re doing. That means they’re going to do a better job because they’re paying attention. They’re not looking at their cell phone, they’re not looking at the clock and saying, when am I getting out of here? And they’re more productive. So more productive work staff makes for a better growing business. So this one is a layup. This is pretty easy to make the connection between how that employee engagement ties to that business growing, not a flighty subject.

Mike Vannoy:

I think this is one of those things that maybe businesses haven’t developed as a strength. I’d say especially businesses that were around maybe for at least five years, established businesses, pre pandemic businesses that haven’t had to deal with the labor shortage for an extended period of time. Because historically there have been more jobs than there were job seekers. And I’d say employers kind of had the upper hand that if you didn’t have an engaged employee, and I don’t think both entrepreneurs do this, but you could let that person go and there’d be somebody else waiting, thankful to take the job. But the tables have turned. The labor shortage is a permanent thing based on, as you and I have talked many times, birth rates 50 years ago, 30 years ago. So the labor shortage is here to stay. It’s not just a pandemic thing, it’s not just an inflation thing. And so now it’s not enough to just, hey, bring in bodies in. You have to have them engaged in your work because they have choices. So what are the big things that you think really drive employee?

Mary Simmons:

I would also say, and I’m going to give you an example to highlight my thought process here. I think a lot of times the employer might say, okay, you’re not manufacturing that widget. My team isn’t manufacturing the widget fast enough. And so they look at the end result and try to fix that end result instead of going back to the employees and saying, Mike, what’s going on with your manufacturing that widget? So I had an organization that was a manufacturer, worked with them for years, and a manager came to me and said, Mary, I need to write up three people on my staff of six. I was like, what is going on? Let’s talk this through. And as we talked, he was concerned about the productivity or lack thereof of these individuals. And I said, did you ask them why their productivity is low? He said, no.

I told them they need to create and I’m just going to make up numbers. Five widgets an hour and they’re only doing two an hour. And I told ’em they have to go faster. Let’s go talk to the employees. And Mike, do you know how simple this was when I walked over to the line that these individuals were on creating this widget, they were actually packaging goods, they had gloves on. And I said, I noticed those three have gloves on and the other three don’t. Can you talk to me about why do you have gloves on? They’re like, it’s freezing in here. My hands are really cold. And in addition, and they had fluffy outdoor clothes, Mike, in addition, sometimes my fingers get cut on the packaging. I turned to the manager and I said, I think we have a solution here If they wanted, first of all, we turned, we got them little space heaters actually, because they weren’t going to turn up the heat in the entire warehouse was a huge warehouse. Number two, those that wanted them, we gave them nice rubber gloves that were well-fitted and it actually made the productivity go a little faster. They were tentatively putting things together. That’s employee engagement. It’s listening to your employees, it’s asking them questions. Let’s fix the problems instead of trying to fix the poor outcome, you got to start from the beginning. And that’s usually our employees, Mike.

Mike Vannoy:

I’m thinking that’s like a double whammy in my brain. Like, okay, there’s an obvious win of productivity improvement if you’re the business owner. But who wants to be, and I’m going to age myself, who wants to be part of cogs, Well’s cogs or Space Lee Sprockets where you’re just a cog in the machine. People want to be part of something, they want to be part of the solution. And I’m guessing it wasn’t just the productivity that came from a space heater in some appropriate gloves. You now have employees who feel hurt in part of the solution and it’s more than just they were

Mary Simmons:

So happy, Mike. I was like kind easy. It seemed like an easy fix. And listen, I also understand the manager, his goals are do it, do it, do it, do it and do it faster. So I understand that, right? So what comes out of that in my nerdy HR mind is, right, we need process, we need procedures, we need manager training. And we’ll talk later.

Mike Vannoy:

Yeah, alright, we little

Mary Simmons:

Alert.

Mike Vannoy:

So as always, I give the entrepreneurs and the business owners and managers benefit of the doubt. No one’s sitting here thinking that, no one’s watching this show thinking I already know a bunch of ways to drive better employee engagement. That will make us more productive, but I’m choosing not to do them. Right, exactly. So break it down. What do you think the big buckets that I’ll say maybe are controllable by a business owner or a manager? What are the controllable buckets that can drive employee engagement?

Mary Simmons:

So definitely career pathing, definitely training, definitely employee wellness or the top of list and tying them back to the mission of the organization. I always think of Nike, they have such great marketing, but you can’t just do it. It doesn’t really work. They need to know the why to be engaged. And my little making of a widget does tie into the success of the organization, but did we tell everybody that it does? So I think those are some of the big buckets that I’d love to discuss and unpack today.

Mike Vannoy:

That last one is probably my passion project, but you’re the expert here. So you lead us where you want to take us here. What would you think stays the first bucket here?

Mary Simmons:

So I always like to start with training, and that’s what you should start with when you bring on a new employee. So even if you bring on a new employee that has years and years of experience, they don’t have years and years of experience at your organization. And when I talk about training, I do include what are we doing onboarding? How are we bringing the person into the office? I kid you not, I had an employer who had somebody after a week one a quick because nobody showed her where the bathroom was. I was like, embarra, we did save the employee and then we did create an onboarding training procedure. So what are you doing day one to engage that employee? Did you give them their password to sign onto the computer? Did somebody take them to lunch? Did somebody give them some on the job training?

So there’s always going to be on the job training, but what are you doing to level set their skills and raise their skills within the position they have when an employee sees that you’re investing in them. So you’re investing time, energy, and money when you do training and all three things make the employee feel engaged because they feel like you really care about their success, they will not be successful without you. It’s not going to happen. So the employer has to say, what does Mike need? And you need to have a plan, but everybody might need something a little bit different when it comes to training. Big proponent,

Mike Vannoy:

And I love that you went to the engagement side of it, maybe not even the engagement side, how the employee perceives the fact that they’re doing training, right? We’ve had several episodes where we talk about the 2023 benchmarks, HR benchmark survey where we evaluate all of the HR best practices, pre-hire to post-employment and then correlate that to revenue growth. We’re in the process of preparing the 2024 benchmark report right now, but the correlation is clear. The fast growth companies do employee training at a much more meaningful way than flat or shrinking companies do. So the correlation is clear, and I think one of the things that you and I talk about is you don’t even have to be good at training. That might sound weird. So maybe you’re performing skills training, maybe you’re performing a relationship training, get to know your coworkers, whatever the training topic is, obviously the better.

The training itself, the curriculum, the higher quality of the training, the better. Hopefully they pick up skills in the process. But the unsaid thing here is you’re just signaling to your employees that you care about them and that you’re going to invest in them and you’re going to fumble your way through this and just do your best. But help me out guys here, I think we should just, I want us to be more productive. And I think part of that is relationship. So I’m going to do this relationship training. I might suck at relationship training, but you’re sending a really strong signal to your employees that, oh, maybe I’m picking up some skills, but more importantly, they care about me here and they want us to work together. What do you

Mary Simmons:

Think? I don’t usually disagree with you, but I might disagree with you here because I’m an HR nerd and training’s my specialty, I would say that the training should be good quality. And where I see organizations have a really big miss is when they don’t train their trainer. So yes, any training is better than zero training. So I think that’s the point you were trying to make.

Mike Vannoy:

Yeah,

Mary Simmons:

Yeah. But I also want to make sure that organizations don’t miss the mark and train the trainer because I do. So much training can tell you that we’ll give a summary or a follow-up afterwards and say, what did you think of the training so that I can make it better? And 99% of the people when they walk out of the room go, thank you so much for the training. And if the HR person or owner of the organization is in the room, they thank them personally. And in that feedback survey, they always say, I want to thank my organization for doing this. And I love that you say we don’t just have to do skills training. So we do extensive personality training, we use disc and that training, I’ve been sent flowers, candy balloons, like it’s so appreciated. So it can be soft skills or hard skills. And I think, so every organization can do some type of training. So if anybody’s sitting there going, well, I don’t know what training to do, everybody can do it. So because it can be soft skills, better communication, team building, and it can be hard skills like Excel, word, et cetera,

Mike Vannoy:

A hundred percent, hundred percent and clearly better quality training curriculum and teachers and trainers has hopefully obvious impact. You’re right. What I’m trying to make is I don’t want employers to think that perfection is the enemy here because oh, I’m not a good trainer, I’m not good in front of crowds. I’m not exactly sure what to say. There’s value in the effort. Obviously make it as good as you can and there’s probably a minimum threshold of good enough,

Mary Simmons:

But not to beat a dead horse, but you’re right, because that attention from the owner of the organization to everybody in the organization is so important. And that goes back to, oh, he knows who I am. He knows my name. My young working children who are 25 will come home and say, mom, the CEO said hi to me today and she’s on cloud nine. So that’s the impact that somebody of that level, the owner talking to individuals and training them, that’s the impact it has. She’s so engaged when that happens. One. Hello.

Mike Vannoy:

Awesome. That’s awesome. Alright, what else? Anything else you want to say in training or should move on to your other topics?

Mary Simmons:

Just I could go on and on about training, but I’m going to of course, let’s move on to another topic that sort blends into that and that’s career pathing. So career path, we talk about the different generations within the workforce and I will tell you that the generations, the millennials, which is the biggest generation and Gen Z that are in the workforce right now, they want training, they demand training good for them, and they also want career pathing. So what do I mean by career path? They want to know where they can go, Mike. So a lot of organizations may be listening to us and say, well, I’m relatively flat and that’s okay. So that career pathing doesn’t have to be, Mike is going to go from VP of marketing to CMO. It doesn’t have to be that way. If your organization is not big enough and doesn’t have the levels to support that type of career path, it could be as simple as showing Mike the training that we’re going to send him to the conferences, the trade shows, giving extra projects that’s part of career pathing.

So I have a nonprofit, they’re very, very, very small. They said, I have no money the other day. I have no money. I can’t even get a little bonus through for my staff. Mary, what do I do to engage them and to thank them? So one of the simple things that we thought of is these are really hardworking people really tied to the mission of the organization and they enjoy doing special projects because it gives them visibility with the board that they normally wouldn’t get. So we created a way for them to have a time where they can report not monthly like the executive director does, but quarterly each of them are going to start reporting to the board on a special project they created.

Mike Vannoy:

Yeah, that’s brilliant.

Mary Simmons:

They’re so excited and so engaged and that just makes the organization better.

Mike Vannoy:

I think commonly people under think career pathing. It’s like, I agree, we’re really small or maybe it’s a family business and whether my son’s any good it or not, my son’s get in the business. And so everybody knows that. So maybe they feel like there’s this glass ceiling or something, but it’s not. It can of course be a successional thing, climbing ladders and titles and all that. It can be that. But I think Gallup does their survey every year. Acquiring skills is one in experiences is one of the top requirements for new entrants into the workforce. You got to pay ’em enough. Everybody’s going to have their minimum dollar amount that they require to take a job. Beyond that, a lot of it is just are they acquiring the skills and the experiences that will take them maybe outside your building. It’s the old saying, what is it? Train your people well enough. And I’m going back to your favorite that what we started with is train your people well enough that they can leave, treat ’em well enough that they’ll never want to. Right? Maybe if you don’t have this climb the ladder thing that you can put in front of them saying, Hey, what are your goals? What do you want to be to your

Mary Simmons:

Son? Well, I think you’re making a really, really solid point there. I started doing my one-on-ones with my team just to ask them where they want to go. And sometimes it’s surprising. Sometimes you have a very high performer and you’re like, okay, they’re my next person that I’m going to promote. And they go, I love my job. I want to stay right where I am. And you’re like, great, that’s awesome. But that is the second part of it is I always recommend stay interviews to also engage your staff. What do you like about here? What are your ideas? Even if they sound crazy to change and how can I help you be more successful? And those answers will always help an organization and a department be stronger, but it also engages your staff like you care what I think you care about my opinion. And really good ideas come out of it. Really good ideas,

Mike Vannoy:

Right? And part of it maybe we talk a lot about smaller businesses. You’re the owner or the senior manager, maybe a mid-size company or large company, yet you might not control that person’s career path, but you can advise them and help them to be desirable by other managers to get promoted. That’s outside of your realm, right? Agreed. So if you’re, you try to get that employee engaged and part of your team, man, one of the best legacies you can ever have as a leader is the people that rise to the top that used to work for you, right? Yeah. That’s a hell of a legacy is like, yeah, that person used to work for me. I rock them.

Mary Simmons:

So

Mike Vannoy:

Proud of that one. And they to hear and this person aspired to there. So this isn’t just a small company thing and you don’t have to control the promotion and the corporate ladder, so to speak, to still drive engagement by talking about career paths, putting people on projects where they develop skills intentionally. Maybe it’s after hours, assignments, whatever it is to develop the skills, competencies, relationships that then foster new opportunities for them.

Mary Simmons:

Agreed. Couldn’t agree more.

Mike Vannoy:

Yeah,

Mary Simmons:

Couldn’t agree. Anything

Mike Vannoy:

Else on career pathing?

Mary Simmons:

Again, we could go on and on and on, but I think we can move to the next bucket, which I would say is employee wellness. And employee wellness can mean a lot of things to a lot of organizations, but I think let’s just say on the outset, just saying that we’re engaged and thinking about employee wellness right there, we’ll engage the staff. Again, we’re investing time and we’re investing money in the wellness of our staff. And that wellness can go anywhere from mental wellbeing, physical wellbeing, financial wellbeing. So I think what organizations small and large struggle with all the time is the cost of employee benefits. And I just want to open the minds to everybody that you do have to look at your population and meet the basic needs of your population besides being compliant with a CA when it comes to medical benefits.

But there are so many creative ways, Mike, that you can support your employees on a wellness side to help them. And let’s also just real quick talk about a good way to recruit people is to have a really good wellness. So when you look at your benefits, are you providing something for their financial wellbeing? We know there’s a large push for 401k and savings plans throughout the country, wink, wink. It might come to a national thing at some point, but even if you’re not in a mandated state, what are you doing for your employees to help support their savings plans later on? And that’s a really sticky way to keep them at your organization. Medical. Are you doing medical? Are you doing dental, vision, pet insurance now is a really big thing and we know medical costs a lot of money, pet insurance, and you can even pass on that cost to the employees.

Same with life insurance. So wellness to me is a huge bucket. One thing that I also did for this nonprofit that I was mentioning is we started to set up lunch and learns. So you can easily have speakers come, like a yoga instructor come and they can be very inexpensive or they will do a half hour session for free hoping that they get more clients. You could have a financial advisor come and speak for free a bank, come and talk about it. So there’s a million lunch and learns that you could set up for free that shows your employees, you are really concerned about their wellness. And look, Mike, selfishly speaking, just so the business owners can see that I am tying this to growth, if your employee’s personal lives are stable, they will be more engaged. We have a lot of employees of our clients that are taking care of their parents. What are you doing as an organization to support them? Are you explaining FMLA to them? Look, you have to give it. So in my mind, you should be explaining what FMLA is. If an employee is out a lot for caring for a parent, but there’s lunch and learns you can have with somebody that comes and talks about retirement, Medicare, all of those topics that could help your employees just go and focus on work instead of trying to do that while they’re working, do that research while they’re working.

Mike Vannoy:

Yeah. I mean, one of my sisters has her master’s in counseling. She works at middle schools. She’s pretty phenomenal person. And she’s like these kids who come in, they can’t study and focus when they got crazy trauma going on at home or they’re literally starving and all they can hear is their rumbling belly and not the teacher. I mean, what happens outside of school impacts what happens since school? Same thing at work. What happens outside the office impacts what happens inside the office and it’s maybe none of your damn business that your employees spouse just left them high and dry can’t. They’re wondering how they’re going to get groceries or maybe how they’re getting to work today because they’re got to flat tire and they can’t afford an Uber. There’s a million things and some of the solutions don’t have to cost you money. And we’re not advocating just for a bunch of greedy corporate bastards here that have the money and not treating their employees well. A business has to run and there has to be profit, otherwise you cease to exist. Right?

Mary Simmons:

Right. Just making the phone numbers and the resources available.

Mike Vannoy:

Yeah, so there’s so many things that I think that you can offer benefits that improve employee wellness that don’t have to cost anything. Some of ’em are pretty sophisticated tax strategies. So we help clients, and I’m not trying to pitch Asure here, we help clients, whether it’s on the 401k side where there’s all kinds of tax strategies. Employers can really offer this stuff for free. There’s health benefits that there’s FICA offsets because it’s pre-tax kind of stuff that there’s a lot of ways that you can offer probably benefits that you don’t even realize for net free, not gross, but net free through tax credits. But then I love your ideas about if you’ve got a financial wellness issue in your population, have a financial planner come in and just talk to everybody once a month, once a quarter, once a year. They’re going to just try to drum up business and hopefully they get some clients out of it, but you’ve a signal to your employees that you care about them in this topic and you’re trying to help. They’re not going to penalize you thinking, oh, well Mary just did that for free. That didn’t cost you anything. They’ll appreciate you for just trying. Right?

Bring in a dietician, bring in an exercise person, bring in financial stewards, bring in whatever. They don’t have to cost you money. And it’s not because a greedy capitalist pig, it’s because you’re just trying to find ways that you can afford to help your employees.

Mary Simmons:

Agreed. Agreed.

Mike Vannoy:

Anything else on this is a topic we should probably have a whole show or 10 whole shows on around wellness, anything else around productivity or engagement? And it’s maybe the lack thereof where for employees that aren’t well so to speak, that we need to unpack here.

Mary Simmons:

I’ll just end with one quick story. So I had an employer that had a lot of lower income individuals working for them, and he noticed that a lot of them were sitting in their car at lunch, not eating, sitting in their car at lunch. And this was a New York employer, so they have to give a half hour lunch period. So they were sitting in their car. Some of them would try to get home for lunch and then they’d be late coming back. So he started serving pizza on Wednesdays for lunch. His productivity on Wednesdays was through the roof. So that correlation can tell you a couple of things. Number one, nobody was late coming back for lunch. Nobody was missing the free lunch. So that’s number one. Number two, they were engaged. And I can tell you this, they were talking to each other. So it’s just like any team, you and I are big sports analogy people. So just like any team, when your players or your staff in this instance are better connected, they work better together and productivity goes up, you want them to want to come to work. And a lot of that is the personal relationship that they have with others. So now they’re all in the cafeteria, they’re all eating the pizza, and I don’t care if it’s pizza or tacos or pogies, whatever it is, like Philadelphia roots. So whatever that food is. And he actually did switch it up a little bit.

They appreciated it. They engaged with each other and then they engaged with work. It was a home run. He was fighting me, I will admit. And it was really good to say, I told you so something small,

Mike Vannoy:

I’m going to go down a rabbit hole on this one. So we take the podcast and we put it on a website, we put it on YouTube, we cut it up into a bunch of short clips and put all over social media, had something at TikTok respond. It was a clip. I think you and I talking similar topic, pizza at work. And this guy kind of blew us up. They don’t want pizza, they want money. Just pay them fairly. A message from my heart here to ease. And employers, if businesses don’t have profit or at least break even, they don’t exist and there aren’t jobs in some businesses. The margins are simply so thin. The survival rate of businesses is, it’s low. Most businesses fail and the margins of so many businesses, even successful ones like say a grocery store, they operate on one and a half, two, two and a half percent gross margins.

There isn’t money left to give everybody, say at 10 cent raise a 50 cent an hour raise, a dollar raise, and literally maybe the only thing you can afford is a pizza. But the employees appreciate it. That pizza might cost you a fraction of what giving everybody a raise was. But you can’t afford to give everybody the raise. Maybe you could and you should. A lot of people, they just can’t. And so if nothing else, it’s a gesture. At best case, it’s actually food in the belly that people aren’t hungry and their productivity increases. I just want to be really clear. This isn’t figuring out growth hacker methods to trick and manipulate employees. These are strategies for employers to do the best they can with the resources they can to get the most productive engaged workforce Off my soapbox.

Mary Simmons:

Well, and I think that that ties relatively well to tying back to the mission. So I always think, and I’m going to take that in two pieces. So the first piece is I do think that it is really important that organizations, even if they’re not publicly treated and have to be transparent, are as transparent as they can be with their staff on the success of the organization. So hey, we’re having a down month this month would appreciate, and again, you’re engaging your staff, listening to them, would appreciate any ideas about how we can increase sales this month because they’re down town hall meetings. I’m a big proponent of town hall meetings because that way the organization is talking to their employees about here’s our growth goal and this is how you can help us get there. Again, creating that team environment, we’re in this together that engages staff, right?

It’s not just upper management or the salespeople that are responsible for the success of an organization. Every single individual. So when you tie them to the mission, you let them in on what your mission is and then you say to them, Hey, let’s check in. How are we doing on our mission? How are you in particular, Mike, tying to our mission, our vision, and our goals that engages, they want to be part of the team. They don’t just want to come and create that widget and leave. And I know I’m giving examples that are manufacturing, but I will tell you that I supported a law firm with similar disengagement, lack of communication, and they started doing lunches at work and their productivity went up because I can guarantee you they were talking about work when they were sitting at those lunches and one of the owners said, I started going into lunch with a pad and a pen. Because people were like, oh, and can we do, can we go to this trade show?

Mike Vannoy:

Yeah,

Mary Simmons:

Right. Listen, I’m a foodie that could flip that out for something else. Maybe once a week you do something else that engages the staff, like ask everybody’s favorite color or do some kind of game or something like that. So it doesn’t have to just be food. I mean, that’s just where I go. But anything that engages the staff and makes them feel a part of the team and the organization and the mission, it’s very important.

Mike Vannoy:

And I kind of think of this as a continuum. The best example is, and this may be a bit of a tired metaphor, but you ask the bricklayer, what are you doing? Are you a bricklayer? Said, no, I’m building a temple to worship my God in building the Sistine Chapel, right? So are you part of something and aligned to that mission? So there are some companies that really have that brand cachet. They can pull it off. There are people that will just work insane hours drive, have an insane commute because they want to be part of putting man on Mars. And so they’ll go work for Elon Musk at SpaceX. There are people that worship the towers of Google and they will commute two and a half hours each way to be just part of Google. It’s probably unrealistic that all of us will be able to pull off a mission that is so aspirational.

So when I think of a continuum coming farther down the way, maybe it’s something not quite as sexy, but it is being part of something, right? Maybe it’s just serving my local community and giving them the best food at an affordable price. That might sound not terribly sexy, but if everybody’s doing it together and it’s clear that this is what we’re all about and I’m part of that, maybe it’s a completely unsexy business that, hey, we’re creating a company from scratch here. And sometimes it’s hard. We don’t have the resources we need and don’t have the process to figure out, we don’t have all the people, but I’m part of building a company from scratch. I think these are the lower hanging fruit that people don’t see. What do you think about that?

Mary Simmons:

Oh, I couldn’t agree more. So when I work with an organization on a recruitment strategy, I start from the mission and vision and I say, why should they work here? And I can’t tell you how many employees that I talk to because I’ve done a lot of recruiting in my career. And I’d say, what does that organization do? And they go, oh. And they sort of know if your employees don’t know what you do and can give a really nice elevator speech about your organization, you’re sorely missing the mark because they don’t feel part of something. And I would also say that your employees are your best ambassadors of your organization. So that’s this selfish piece. But the other piece is if they’re engaged, if they’re happy, they’re going to ask their friends to come work for the organization and they’re going to just be more productive. So even though my HR heart says, employee engagement just makes your employees happy, healthy, and want to come to work, my help business grow hard, which is also very important to me. That piece of me says they’re tied together. This is not a fluffy subject. This is how you make your organization grow. I guarantee you, if your employees are not engaged, your business will not grow. They won’t be productive.

Mike Vannoy:

Yeah. Mary, put you on the spot. Any practical, pragmatic advice you can give folks for mission alignment? I’m almost thinking perhaps it starts with you as the owner or the senior business leader, do you know what your purpose is and can you declare it? But what practical advice can you give folks watching today?

Mary Simmons:

So I think some of the misses is not also if you don’t have a mission. So I’ve done this with plenty of organization and I can think of a freight forwarder family run company. Boy did they have a nice culture. The mother was Italian, she was cooking full course meal for lunch for everybody every day, but they didn’t have a mission, a clear mission and a clear vision. And they were kind of blurting it out at me. And I said, whoa, whoa, whoa. Slow down, slow down. Where are you coming from? So how did you come up with those comments? And you’ve been in business for 10 years, so the new business could do it, the business owner could do it, but somebody who’s been in business for years, and you better ask your employees, what do you think our mission and vision is? Right?

And then you tie it back in to where you want the business to go. And the new owner should also, in my mind, think about exactly what you said. Where do we want to go? But why do we do what we do? What’s our niche in this business? So hopefully they know where’s my niche? Do I have a better product? Do I have a better service? Do I have a better price? Am I in a market where nobody’s been? So that needs to be tied into your mission as well. So it’s business, but it does involve the people. When you talk about your mission,

Mike Vannoy:

Where I think sometimes, especially perhaps traditional Main Street, small businesses, they think mission, vision, values is this big corporate kind of thing. A little fancy schmancy, little nonsense. It says Joe’s Pizza right up top. Just look at the sign. We’re a pizza place and we’re on main street of this town. So that’s what our mission is. I think where you and I are trying to take that conversation is you don’t perhaps need the mission, vision, values from a marketing perspective for your customers, though they can certainly be aligned. And that’s a whole different topic. As a marketer, I’m passionate about that topic. But to build an employment brand, damn right, you need it. Why are the employees going to choose to work at Mike’s Pizza Parlor on this side of Main Street versus Mary’s Pizza Parlor on the other side of the street? If you pay the same, you’re both producing pizzas. Why would you choose Mike over Mary? And maybe it’s Well, Mary’s nicer than Mike. Well, how is being nice part of the culture, part of the mission, the vision, the values. It does become your employment brand,

Mary Simmons:

Right? Right. Yeah. And I think it’s for everybody. This was a small company. They had 20 employees.

Mike Vannoy:

Yeah. Yeah. All right. Anything else on mission alignment? I think where I would encourage folks is don’t think you have to be SpaceX and your mission is to put people on Mars. And since you’re not doing anything that sexy, you’re a main street business, this doesn’t apply to you. It absolutely does apply. Building your employment brand where people are going to collate around anything you’d say to recap that

Mary Simmons:

If you don’t know where you’re going, you can’t get there. So that’s Yogi Berra. I’m sure I butchered that quote, but I’m a big fan. And so that’s why every business needs a mission vision for sure.

Mike Vannoy:

Yeah. Hey, look, last topic I want to maybe talk about here, and I think you nailed it. Training, career pathing, employee wellness, mission alignment. I mean, the big ones, remote work. This is not a new thing some businesses doesn’t apply for. If you’re a restaurant, there’s no such thing as virtual work, at least for most people. Maybe some back office functions can plenty of white collar jobs. Your entire company can be virtual. And this is a continuum that started 25 years ago. I remember work from home pros is being an amazing thing and people having to have special authorization and phone lines to handle the fax machine that would be in your home office mean. So this has been going on for a while. Back when there was fax machines, clearly the pandemic accelerated. This whole thing about virtual work, there’s a lot of data out here and a lot of best practices around employee engagement. And it’s not, I think maybe the better term is flexible work arrangements, not virtual. What say you?

Mary Simmons:

So I agree a hundred percent. So in the context of engaging your staff, number one, you do have to find what’s the perfect scenario for the organization. So if we say that three days in the office and two days home, because we need to compete with other organizations that are offering some remote work. And believe it or not, we did have a client with a waitress say, I want to work from home. And we were like, we don’t understand. But I use that example because it’s so on the minds of the workforce right now, and they all think they want it. And this is what I’m going to say about engagement. If you have staff that is partially remote or fully remote, you have to double down your efforts to engage them double down. How much are you meeting? You know me, I’m a big proponent of camera on what are you doing as far as setting up meetings so that everybody is sitting in a virtual room because they’re remote.

You still should be doing some wellness activities with your staff, but you have to double down on it because they’re not getting the engagement that would naturally happen by them being in the office sitting together and having food passing each other in the corridors. So we’re not going to spend a ton of time on what’s right or what’s wrong. It should be tied to your business. And can you attract people in your business by having them partially or fully in the office? I don’t know right now what organization, besides the organizations that have to manufacturing restaurants as examples, hospitals, but what are you doing to engage that staff? You need to double down,

Mike Vannoy:

Right? Right.

Gallup, I referenced earlier, did this annual on employee engagement. One of the things they measure every year is the relationship of on-premise work versus completely virtual work from home versus hybrid. And the data has been clear for a really long time. It hasn’t moved all that much. A hundred percent at work has the same level of disengagement as a hundred percent at home. What’s the most engaged workforce is some type of a hybrid where they can choose to come and go. To me, what that signals is really about flexibility. It’s not just place of work. It’s hours of work. It’s the way work gets done. People’s lives are so integrated from personal to work. I mean social media during work hours. I’m making a personal call. I’m attending a parent teacher Zoom conference during work hours, but I’m also maybe doing some work at night. I mean, the lines have really, really, really, really blurred different between work hours and personal hours here. I think maybe the message that I would give folks is just think about flexibility. It doesn’t mean you require less from your team. You can still hold a very high bar, but place a manner of work. You have to be flexible if you’re going to attract and retain talent in a world where there’s a labor shortage and it’s not changing.

Mary Simmons:

I agree a hundred percent. And just to continue the story about the waitress, when we dug in a little bit and we asked the employer, because we all giggled, right? I’m going to be honest. But then we said, well, tell me about the employees is a good employee. Did they give you a reason why they wanted to work from home a few hours? And they said, yes, they have small children at home. They really need the money. So they couldn’t just cut back on shifts. Excellent employee, excellent worker. I said, oh, alright. Is there anything that you could take off your plate and pay this individual at home A to-do for you? Oh yeah, the schedules. Oh my goodness. The schedule takes me forever. I go, bingo. Here’s career pathing training on the job training and it’s engagement. So that individual is now doing the schedules three hours a week at home. The manager’s happy to have that off their plate for the amount of money they’re paying this individual and sort of saying, oh no, maybe this is a lead or our next supervisor, we’re doing some, giving them a little piece of the skills that they’ll need for the next position. Win-win. Ask the questions that what I would end with, ask your employees questions.

Mike Vannoy:

The people who talk to your customers the most generally have a lot more wisdom than you might give them credit for, right?

Mary Simmons:

Yeah, agreed.

Mike Vannoy:

Yeah. Very employee wellness training, career pathing, remote work, mission alignment, all big things in of themselves. Maybe that’s a punch list for future shows. Each of those going deep on each of those. Anything else you’d want to add for today’s conversation about how employers need to be thinking about employee engagement and how to grow their business?

Mary Simmons:

I would flip that and say to everybody listening, do you want to grow your business? And if you want to grow your business, listen again to what we just talked about because you’re not growing without employee engagement. And there’s a lot of different pieces to this, but it’s all important and all integrated into the growth of your organization. And I think that every employer does want a happy workforce as well. Happy engaged workforce. But you got to work at that. It doesn’t happen automatically. It takes a little work, a little plan.

Mike Vannoy:

Yeah. If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, bring a team. But that team in 2024 has choices of which team they want to be part of, and they’re all going to be part of a team that they believe in. They aligned to the mission, they feel part of something. They feel respected and valued. So there’s the message for 2024. Mary, always love our conversations. Thanks so much. Thanks, Mike. Thanks everyone else for joining us today. Until next week. That’s it for this episode of Mission to Grow. Thanks for joining us today. For show notes and more episodes, visit us@missiontogrow.com. If you found this content valuable, I invite you to share it with a friend that subscribe to the show. If you really want to help, I’d love it if you left a five star review on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you listen. Mission to Grow is sponsored by Asure. Asure helps more than 100,000 businesses get access to capital, stay compliant, and develop the talent they need to grow. To learn more about how Asure can help your business grow, visit as Asure software.com. Until next time.