Link: Create Connections—People Stay When They Feel Connected
By Bev Kaye

It’s easy to leave a workplace: 1) Where you feel no connection; 2) Where you have no colleagues who can offer support, information, or plain old gripe sessions; 3) If you do not have a set of relationships that enable you to get your work done; 4) If you don’t look forward to seeing the people with whom you interact. (read more...)

Celebrations at Lands' End
By Bob Nelson

Lands' End, the Wisconsin-based clothing and merchandise catalogue retailer, helps keep their employees excited throughout the year with zany and fun celebrations. Here's a sampling of some of the activities they did just last year. (read more...)

Childhood Dreams Come Back to Save Us
By Richard Bolles

Many of us take a job early in life that seems to offer everything we could want in a job: it puts bread on the table, clothes on our back, a car in the garage, and an interesting group of people to work with. (read more...)

Link: Create Connections—People Stay When They Feel Connected (^ top)
By Bev Kaye

It’s easy to leave a workplace:
• Where you feel no connection.
• Where you have no colleagues who can offer support, information, or plain old gripe sessions.
• If you do not have a set of relationships that enable you to get your work done.
• If you don’t look forward to seeing the people with whom you interact.

Are You a Linker or Non-linker?
A non-linker thinks: If I link my employees to other functions or departments, someone there will steal them.
A linker thinks: If I don’t link my employees to other functions or departments, their knowledge and skills are less likely to grow. My employees’ productivity will be limited to the resources of their own department.
Where can you start building links for your employees? Just about anywhere.
Try linking them to:
the organization as a whole
the team and the department
the professional community

Link to the Organization. You don’t need to work for the American Red Cross or Greenpeace to build a meaningful connection between your employees and your organization’s mission. Sometimes all it takes is discussing the company’s history, its founders, its “reason for being,” the important needs it meets, or what customers say the company has done for them through its products or services. Meetings with the president, CEO or other senior leaders are also critical to linking employees with an organization’s purpose.

Link to the Team and the Department. Have you ever really felt like you were part of a team? It may have been as a child, on a sports team or in the workplace. If so, you’ll remember the strength of that bond and the sense of commitment to team’s purpose and goals. The stronger your employees’ connections are with you and their team members, the more difficult it is for them to leave. In fact, today we read about entire teams that move from one organization to another in order to stay together. Leverage that connection by building team spirit, collaboration, and celebration of team accomplishments.

Link to the Professional Community. Professional associations give people a chance to “helicopter up” from their own organization and learn what is happening elsewhere. How are other professionals handling similar problems and pressures? What unique approach worked in their culture and how might those work in yours?
A connection with people who share common interests can build pride in the profession and commitment to growth and development. Hopefully, your employees will bring their new learning to your team.

Bottom Line
Connections are a major reason people say they stay with organizations. If those links are weak or non-existent, then leaving is simply easier. In the constantly changing work environment, it is up to you to strengthen whatever bonds you can between the people who work for you and others in the organization. Their links will strengthen yours—in a great quid pro quo—and they’ll be more likely to stay.

Celebrations at Lands' End (^ top)
By Bob Nelson

Lands' End, the Wisconsin-based clothing and merchandise catalogue retailer, helps keep their employees excited throughout the year with zany and fun celebrations. Here's a sampling of some of the activities they did just last year.

Going For the Gold. In order to continue to make Lands’ End a great place to work they decided to have a theme for the year and came up with “Going for the Gold.” They used that theme throughout the year in company meetings, Golden Customer Service Week, surprise “golden” root beer floats, Lands' End Summer Olympics, Golden Service Stories (customer letters), a 40th anniversary celebration, a golden torch sighting, and in breaking a world record!

World’s Largest Pillow Fight. In September, 2,776 employees and their families, retirees, community members, and local students joined Lands' End for the World’s Largest Pillow Fight. Following the pillow fight, a donation of pillows and pillowcases worth almost $100,000 was donated to the Association of Hole in the Wall Camps, with pillows matched with pillowcases embroidered with, “Sweet Dreams from Lands’ End,” prior to donation. Coverage of the event spanned from New York to California including a national spot on NBC’s Early Today show as well as MSNBC.

Summer Olympics “Golden Games.” The Lands’ End Summer Olympics was hosted July 13 – August 21, which featured such events as marshmallow golf, a beach ball throw, the plank walk, a free throw contest, and the gurney push. The top five teams at each event were be awarded points, which were accumulated by division, and the top team for each event will be awarded a traveling trophy and the honor, fame, and celebrity status that goes with being an Olympic champion! The event included opening and closing ceremonies and all finalists were honored at the company picnic.

The Big Bean Award. This new award is meant to recognize employees for any and all types of efforts such as assisting with a last minute task, staying late to help with a project, or finding a great employment candidate, in other words, to thank people for using their bean! Here is how the award program works: Each month when employees attend the employee services divisional meeting they have the opportunity to nominate someone who is deserving of the Big Bean Award. There is a ballot box where nominations can be made or employees can complete an online nomination in advance of the meeting. At the end of the meeting, one name IS drawn from the box to play "Bean Machine," otherwise known as Plinko. That person has the opportunity to win great prizes such as a Lands' End beanbag chair or a gift card to the Dry Bean—or some not so great prizes, such as pork and beans, kidney beans, or a beanie hat. Everyone nominated is sent a copy of their nomination along with a special bean prize and all nominations are displayed for one month on the employee services web site.

To make your company a fun place to work, try notching up the celebrations you do!

Childhood Dreams Come Back to Save Us (^ top)
By Richard Bolles

Many of us take a job early in life that seems to offer everything we could want in a job: it puts bread on the table, clothes on our back, a car in the garage, and an interesting group of people to work with.

But an increasing number of us find, as we move toward mid-life, that we grow restless, like a caged tiger pacing back and forth within its cage. And eventually, we realize that our work is the problem. We weigh it in the balance, and find it wanting. It feeds our body, but not our soul.

Long forgotten questions resurface in our mind, such as "Why am I here on earth? What was I put here to do? What is it I want to accomplish with my life, before I die?" We want to feel passionate about our work, so we search for clues. And, strangely enough, we often find the best clues back in our childhood.

Something about that period – our childhood – that made us see things more clearly than we knew, for we were innocents, and our business was to play. It is in our childhood play that the clues most often are found.

It was also our business as a child to daydream. And the phrase we often hear, today – "Find the job of your dreams" – hearkens back to our childhood dreams, when dreaming was what we did best.

The Story of Anne
All of this is perfectly summarized in the true story of Anne. She is a woman who tried to make her living, for many years, as, first, a musician, and then, as owner of her own small business. But neither satisfied her. After twenty years of this, someone told her she needed to go after her passion – and said it in a way that she could hear. She went to a career counselor, who had her write seven achievements of which she was proud, and then search for the skills they all used, in common "The common theme," she discovered, "was that I live for data. I like to gather it, analyze it, look at it, reproduce it, organize it and dream about it."

For insight as to "What kind of data?" the counselor examined with her each of her seven achievements. But let her tell her own story: "The one which jumped out at the career counselor was the fact that I had taught myself genetics in my childhood. He encouraged me to talk about what I'd done in genetics, particularly in sixth grade. After listening, he pointed out that most sixth graders do not invent races of people and then think about how all the racial characteristics would be inherited, or spend hours drawing out the predicted results of every kind of cross imaginable between my race and all the others."

So that was it. Her favorite skills were with data, and her favorite data was genetics. "I finally came to understand that I was a geneticist, whether or not I made my living that way." And this passion had manifested itself in her childhood, as early as sixth grade.

She knew she had to do something about that childhood dream, even though the idea was daunting for two reasons. One was that she was 39. The other was that she is legally blind.

Anne found the strength by pressing into service the delighted child that she once was.

"The thought of working in the lab to transfer 50 50-microliter aliquots of liquid from one flask to another was maddening to me at age 39. But the six year old Anne who filled her grandmother's drawer with tiny bottles and longed desperately for a way to transfer liquid accurately between them, found the experience absolutely delightful."

Anne also pressed into service from childhood the skills she'd learned from being blind:

"I knew, because I'd had to do it in my daily life how to infer physical location from numerical data. I could, from the very beginning, look at a set of mapping data and 'see' the map. The process of inference so essential to genetics had been a part of my life for years – because of my vision impairment, not in spite of it."

And so, from the memories of her childhood, Anne found all the clues she needed, to identify her passion, her skills, her special interests, and her mission in life.

When we are at that place in life ourselves, where restlessness grows apace, it is to our childhood we must go, in memory, and search to find again what once was very plain to us, and now has grown obscure: our passion in life. Or, as Anne puts it, "I wish I could make people understand that everything which delighted them as a child still truly matters."

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Featured Author: Richard Bolles

Read Bio


• Author of best selling book “What Color is Your Parachute”

• JobDig columnist since 2004

Other JobDig columnists: (click for bio)
- Nick Corcodilos
- Bev Kaye
- Richard Leider
- Bob Nelson
- Marshall Goldsmith