“[Human resources is] like what a malevolent AI would come up with if they were trying to sound like they […] don’t simply consider them food to be consumed at the end of the machine. It has the least humanity of any name I could come up with.”

– Jay Hanlon, People & Ops consultant

HR is dead.

For roughly two years I’ve been charged with writing expert content for our loyal “HR” readers. For roughly two years I’ve argued that “HR manager” is absolutely the wrong word. 

When this post came up on the roster, I begged our head of marketing to let me have it. Little did he know that he was about to play the part of Pandora. 

Make no mistake: HR, People Ops, what people think, and what those departments do are very dramatic debates with intense arguments from every side (and then some). Naturally, I intend to do a reverse somersault in pike position from 10 meters. 

(Apparently, that’s a difficult dive according to… diving people. )

While I’m certainly no diving expert, I am a bit of a maestro when it comes to rigorous research routines so you can bet I intend to make a splash:

• People Ops vs. HR: What’s the difference?
• People Operations: Rebranding or rethinking?
• Process Street poll: The public has spoken
• 3 key factors to shift from HR to People Operations

(Don’t worry – that’s the extent of my diving puns.) 

People are at the heart of any company. After all, what is a business without its employees? This is why it is so essential to build a company culture that values and supports the people who work there. To achieve this, a strong peer-to-peer recognition strategy is essential.

HR teams across a range of industries are starting to see the importance of employee recognition. It is just one of many vital HR processes that work to support any great team.

Let this Process Street article be your one-stop shop for all things related to peer recognition! We’ll cover what exactly we mean by peer-to-peer recognition, how it can benefit your company, and six best practices to include in your recognition strategy. 

• What is peer-to-peer recognition?
• What are the benefits of peer-to-peer recognition?
• 6 best practices to try now

Actively engaged employees. Disengaged. Unengaged. Actively Disengaged. Non-Engaged. 

The term “engagement” gets a lot of traction these days. 

You see posts everywhere with topics like “What is Employee Engagement and Why Is It Important? A Complete Guide” or “Employee Engagement: How to Get a Happy, Productive Team.” 

My favorite is “Employee Engagement & Motivation Policy: Why You Need One For Retention – Yesterday.”

The thing is, though, what do these terms actually mean – and how are they different from each other? 

How do you tell if an employee is really engaged or just a high-performer? What about an employee who has low output versus one who’s actively disengaged?

And what’s this “unengaged” thing about? 

Process Street has answers. This post will walk you through how to identify engagement, figure out the cause, and get your employees excited about their work again. 

• Know your employee (dis)engagements
• Digging out the root of unengagement
• 5 strategies to re-engage your employee
• A final tip before we go

What do a neuroscientist, a DJ, a college professor, and a bartender have in common? 

They all work at Process Street. 

Part of that is due to being a remote company (wider talent pool). Part is the type of person typically drawn to startup work (liminal weirdos). And part is a company culture that understands tacit knowledge is just as valuable – sometimes more valuable – than explicit training. 

This particular cocktail adds up to a company made up of people with diverse backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives collaborating towards a shared objective. 

The outcome – to use the technical term – is very cool.

This is the genesis of our Employee Spotlight series. Not only are our people highly talented in their company roles, but they bring with them a wealth of stories that make for some very entertaining small talk at the beginning of our monthly all-hands meetings.

In honor of International Women in Engineering Day, putting one of our engineers in the spotlight was a no-brainer. 

Allow me to introduce our Senior Frontend Engineer, wife, futsal star, dog-parent, and all-around exceptional human being: Leti Escanciano. 

25% of employees are at risk of leaving their job this month due to unhappiness at work. 

Not taking into consideration the financial, labor, and time resources required to replace a single employee, what would it cost to lose 1/4th of your workforce right now?

How quickly could you replace them?

More importantly: How quickly could you replace their unique knowledge and skills?

Probably not before the next 25% walked out the door. 

Sure, this is all a bit hyperbolic. That 25% is spread across companies and industries but it drives the point home.

Replacing even one employee isn’t cheap, quick, or easy. To rephrase my previous question: How many employees can you afford to lose per month?

No worries. Process Street has you covered. This post will go over everything you need to know (plus a few free templates) to keep those flight-risk employees grounded:

• What creates flight-risk employees?
• How to identify an at-risk employee
• 5 ways to keep flight-risk employees on board
• Parting is such sweet sorrow

While 52% of senior managers feel the annual engagement survey is an accurate assessment, 48% of employees do not. Factor in that 1/4 of managers think the surveys are pointless and you have a problem.

Annual surveys encompass such a long period of time that it becomes difficult to accurately measure which initiatives have been effective and which are not. 

In addition, it limits the ability to make changes to engagement and motivation policies as they need to happen and before it’s too late to correct any potential damage. 

An employee pulse survey is useful as a tool for monitoring engagement, but it can also be applied to other situations. A pulse survey might be used to evaluate new procedures, strategies, and business practices to measure their effectiveness. 

Paired with annual surveys, the pulse survey is a powerful tool that can keep your goals targeted and productive. 

This post for Process Street will cover everything you need to know about employee pulse surveys – and provide a template you can start using immediately with your free Process Street account.

• Employee Pulse Survey template
• What’s the difference between a pulse survey & an engagement survey?
• Pulse survey best practices
• Optimize employee engagement with this free pulse survey template

Let’s dive in!

Employee churn costs about $60,000 per employee, without taking into consideration the indirect costs such as lost business, lower morale, lost productivity, and the time and resources spent on candidate selection before hiring someone.

As a manager, preventing that from happening should be one of your top priorities. You can’t have a productive, successful team if you’re always training new members. 

This Process Street post will cover why churn happens — specifically among Millennials and Gen Z in the post-pandemic job market — and what you can do to prevent it. 

• Are we heading towards the Great Regret?
• Employee churn: Prevention is better than a cure
• Improve recruitment & prevent churn with process automation

Let’s get started.

When thinking of the world’s most popular brands, which ones come to mind? In Forbes’ annual list of the World’s Most Valuable Brands, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and (META) Facebook are identified as some of the top-performing companies, with earnings being a key indicator of their success.

But while revenue may be a significant proof point of industry viability, how you approach your customer experience is another metric that gauges the future prosperity of a business. And one that has an equally significant say in how your business fares in the future.  

In Aircall’s report, Putting Your Customer First, we found that more than 50% of customers stopped supporting a business after a poor customer experience. This shows just how impactful a negative customer experience can be, undoing potentially years of customer loyalty in a single interaction. 

On the flip side, though, a positive customer experience can make a profound impression on people and go a long way to securing brand loyalty in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

Either way, customer experience and going all out to impress your audience is one area you cannot afford to neglect. 

To make sure your strategy is as impactful as possible, this Process Street post will cover these five tried-and-tested ways to improve your customer experience below: 

• Be responsive to customer needs
• Provide multiple communication channels
• Follow up with your customers
• Value customer insights – good & bad
• Promote customer testimonials
• Perfecting your customer-first strategy

Without a well-structured policy, lack of engagement and motivation can slowly eat away and undermine your company and your workforce unnoticed until it’s too late. 

So, let’s talk about why engagement and motivation are so important and how to implement good policies without utterly alienating your workforce. Here at Process Street, that’s just the sort of thing we do best. 

Check it out:

• Are employee engagement & motivation the same thing?
• Deloitte’s 5 Elements That Drive Engagement
• The Zinger Pyramid of Employee Engagement Actions
• The Aon Hewitt Employee Engagement Model
• Using modern process management to build effective policies

Let’s dive in!

Jenna Bunnell is the Senior Manager for Content Marketing at Dialpad, an AI-incorporated cloud-hosted unified communications and call center IVR systems that provide valuable call details for business owners and sales representatives. She is driven and passionate about communicating a brand’s design sensibility and visualizing how content can be presented in creative and comprehensive ways. Find her on LinkedIn.

Personal user manuals are indispensable tools when it comes to working with new employees and perfecting your new employee onboarding process.

They are written guides that explain to others how best to work with you. They can either be targeted towards people working under you or people working with you.

Personal user manuals are full of information for other employees. They promote team collaboration by making others aware of your personal working style, and allowing them to work best with this.

They’re simple to write and maintain, and their purpose is to help you avoid giving multiple inductions to various new employees.

Having a written document is also useful as it’s information that your employees can come back to time and again—as opposed to a spoken induction when things can be easily forgotten.

If you’re working in a team that extends across multiple countries, there’s no need to plan multiple inductions to fit into everyone’s schedule. A personal user manual can be used instead, saving time, and allowing effective collaboration regardless of different time zones.

You may well be wondering: How on Earth do I get started with such an undertaking? Well, here are some steps you can take to create and maintain a solid personal user manual.

This post for Process Street will outline the 10 focus areas to include in your personal user manual:

• Choose a format for your personal user manual
• Personal user manual 101: Introduce yourself
• Outline your expectations of your team as a manager
• How to work with me: The essentials
• Scheduling: When are you accessible?
• What’s your working style?
• Troubleshooting your new manager
• Your user manual isn’t all about you
• Conflict resolution and you: Everything you need to know
• Personal user manual: The next iteration
• Check that your personal user manual works

Off we go!
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