The Harvard Business Review has published an article this month that certainly supports the need to address the plight of dual career couples.
Follow this link to read the full article https://hbr.org/2015/04/navigating-tradeoffs-in-a-dual-career-marriage
Project Kindness – Who’s In??
By Angela McNerney
So…. last year I gave each of my 3 sons $50 around Thanksgiving and charged them with going out into their respective worlds and really look at at people. I wanted them to find someone who looked like they were struggling, having a bad day, stressed out or generally overwhelmed – to really ‘see’ them. I asked the boys (ages 19, 20 & 25) to go up to this random person, look them in the eye, give them the $50 and say, “Happy Holidays” …. and then walk away. And for Christmas…., I wanted their stories.
I think we all get turned around about what this time of year is supposed to mean. I brought my kids up with loads of presents under the tree every year and killed myself each year to make it happen… for what?? It wasn’t their birthday. They hadn’t earned it. Buying things they don’t need with money I don’t have wears a person down over time. But it was just too hard ‘not’ to do it. The older I get the more I have become beleaguered by the Hol-i-daze. My children are nice people, but do not need or deserve random expensive gifts in order for them to feel loved by me – although they may tell you differently. I’m pretty sure the gist of the Holidays is the focus on ‘giving’, but not necessarily to those who have so much already. Because the fact is.. it just feels so good to give, to contribute, to be useful and make an impact. I think that’s why the feeling may last longer than ‘receiving’ gifts.
Its not that I don’t want a nice pair of diamond drop earrings for Christmas, but I think I wanted their stories more. I felt great when my kids showed up early Christmas morning with their stories… and they begrudgingly admitted that they did too.
This year, I’m thinking I’m going to spread it to my nieces and nephew; so there will be (6) $50 bills = (6) Holiday Stories that I will get for Christmas.
Checklist is pretty straightforward:
• Option to match funds with some of their own money
• Find two random people who seem to be having a tough day
• Give them the money – wish them a Happy Holiday
• Don’t tell them who you are
• Try not to pocket one of the $50’s
I’m going to participate this year too, so my kids can have ‘my’ story! Some of my friends are going to incorporate this ritual into their Holidays as well. I have been asked to share this on social media to see if others want to join in these shenanigans.
So if you’re in…. let’s hear it?
Check us out on WNYT – Channel 13
News Channel 13 reveals the story of a professional couple who has located to the Capital Region. Their transition includes the challenges of dual career couples and building new networks.
I spent some time learning about the creative way in which one organization is pooling resources to attract and keep talented young professionals in the area. Laban Coblentz, Founder of Tech Valley’s Center of Gravity sits down with Proctors CEO, Philip Morris to discuss the Center of Gravity project. This creative community is a member driven club of people who’s talent is nurtured through the use of shared tools and ideas, often blending science and the arts. As technology bleeds its way through the fabric of our region, innovative ways to give these entrepreneurs access to resources that can support and accelerate their goals should be a priority to the entire business and arts communities because it fertilizes the growth of our own economic development. I think its called, “sustainability”… but….that’s just my humble opinion…… 😉
Click on this link to watch the interview in its entirety. To learn more about how you can support the Tech Valley’s Center of Gravity go to http://www.techvalleycenterofgravity.com/node/971 .
To learn more unique ways to address employee retention click on…Tech Valley Connect or contact the author at angela.mcnerney@techvalleyconnect.com . Angela McNerney is President of Tech Valley Connect, an organization assisting newly relocating professionals and their families to assimilate into the Capital Region.
One out of five. Maybe as few as one out of every ten. That’s how many available executive jobs are actually ever advertised. Here’s another fact to know: practically ALL executives looking for work apply only to advertised jobs. Put these two facts together and you have nearly 100% of executives in transition applying for 10 — 20% of the available positions. Which points to one more, clear fact: job boards aren’t the answer. The best hires come from personal referrals: people whom the hiring manager knows or who are referred by someone he knows…and trusts. Getting close to executives at target companies who will personally (and discreetly) refer you to the manager who will hire you is hard work.
Tech Valley Connect (TVC) makes these connections and they are still the only organization in the country modeling a regional commitment from employers to spousal employment. Having created a consortium of employers who commit to high level informational interview, TVC helps spouse/partners of new hires within the consortium find jobs 39% faster than the national average.
To learn more unique ways to address employee retention click on…Tech Valley Connect or contact the author at angela.mcnerney@techvalleyconnect.com . Angela McNerney is President of Tech Valley Connect, an organization assisting newly relocating professionals and their families to assimilate into the Capital Region of upstate New York.
Do you speak another language? Do you have an alternate personality?
These two questions at first glance may not appear to be interrelated, but research has shown that those who have acquired skills in a second language often feel they have acquired a second personality along with it!
Perhaps you’ve already noticed this personality switch in yourself or in others. Personally, I can recall observing this phenomenon during a year abroad in East Asia. As newbies to the language that is often cited as the most impenetrable for native-English speakers to learn, most of my classmates and I spoke a brand of Mandarin that was as robotic as it was grammatically inaccurate. It was unnatural for us, with the exception of one classmate. She was a bit older than us and had experience with Chinese, having taken a few years of it in high school. When I met her for the first time, I remember being a little taken aback by her confidence and laid-back demeanor. About to embark on a yearlong home-stay in a foreign country without a single familiar face, she was without a trace of anxiety. For such a young person to have that air of assurance was both refreshing and inspiring.
By the time we began our intensive language classes, my fellow American classmates and I had grown familiar with each other – which may explain why it was so surprising to hear my normally calm, cool, self-assured friend speak in a voice that reminded me of Karen Walker’s (Megan Mullally’s) from Will & Grace. Her tone changed. Her inflection changed. The pitch of her voice was considerably higher. Her facial expressions softened. She smiled sweetly and giggled her way through sentences. Who was this person and where did my cool new friend go?
After years of pondering this question alone, I decided to ask thousands of former exchange students whether or not they have had similar experiences. Sharing this article, I was immediately bombarded by a deluge of responses from foreign language speakers from around the world.
Totally! My native language is Spanish, and when I speak English I don’t change that much. But when I switch to Japanese, even my body language is different, it’s like I’m someone else!
I totally do that. In English I’m mostly in control, but sometimes anxious. In Spanish I’m light-hearted and joking, and in German I’m either stony or silly. I think German has more to do with ability than anything else though.
I’m an English-native speaker and know Italian and Spanish…. I don’t notice much change when I speak Spanish, but I definitely have different inflection and even slightly different humor when I’m speaking Italian…. and while I rarely use my hands when speaking English, there’s no way to speak Italian without the gestures…
I speak Faroese, Danish, Norwegian, English and Spanish, and when I’m speaking Spanish, I’m a lot different than in any other language. I think it’s because Spanish-talking people don’t have the same humor as in North Europe.
Clearly, the sentiment was all-too-common among this crowd. With the exception of one quadrilingual individual who maintained that his personality did not change (to which others responded calling him a cyborg – hey, that’s not nice!), everyone agreed that switching personas along with languages was a regular occurrence. For some, learning a new language allowed them to “discover their true selves”, which brings the Czech proverb, “Learn a new language and get a new soul” to mind. For others, the phenomenon could be broken down and attributed to the different languages’ unique structural requirements. As one commenter put it:
Latin-derived languages (Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, etc) are EXTREMELY verb-oriented, the verb is crucial in the sentence so most of the ideas, hence the “feeling of the language” is toward doing something, will do something or done something… In English the noun is ‘more powerful’ and that certainly makes it different to me to even think in English.”
Body movements, hand gestures, facial expressions – even your sense of humor can change with the switch of a language. Through very limited and informal research, I have found evidence to support my theory that people are constantly in the process of changing and evolving. No matter how static one may seem, dynamism is truly at the core of every human being.
Jenna Brydges authored this blog and is a volunteer at Tech Valley Connect while attending the NYS University at Albany majoring in International Studies. Jenna has lived in China and speaks fluent Mandarin. To learn more unique ways to address cultural differences and employee retention click on…Tech Valley Connect or contact angela.mcnerney@techvalleyconnect.com . Tech Valley Connect is an organization assisting newly relocating professionals and their families to assimilate into the Capital Region.
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Don’t get scared. Get good!
As the economy improves corporations are scrambling to come up with ways to keep their valuable human capital. Retention in the 21st century is a big deal because we have found cool analytical ways to find out just how much it costs us to lose employees. More and more companies are looking for distinguishing ways to keep their employees. I recently read about a company in Dallas, Texas that hired workplace chaplains (http://www.digitaljournal.com/pr/1336925). That’s right… you read it correctly.. workplace preachers to act as a respite for stressed out employees. Egads!
Marketplace Chaplains is the country’s largest and original chaplains’ service, where more than 2,700 chaplains serve in 23 various types of business industries in more than 3,000 client company locations, across 44 states and 983 cities, serving the needs of over 540,000 employees, and their family members, through care and compassion.
According to Digital Journal, one of the companies they interviewed said, “… to even consider hiring an employee, they spend $1,000 on pre-employment testing, along with an extensive training program. Many of our wire designers are still in training for up to a year. That’s why it’s critical to retain the right people and that’s where the chaplains come in, they help employees in need.” Marketplace Chaplains works with employees operating under the core principles of confidentiality, voluntary contact with employees and non-religious denominationalism.
I’m not sure how well that would go over outside of the Bible Belt, but it’s interesting to see what lengths employers are willing to go to keep their people. Corporate culture is fast becoming its’ own industry in the 21st century and it is being driven by recruitment and retention. With the advent of in house wellness programs, flex hours, tuition reimbursement, dual career support and Bagel Fridays – employers are trying to outrun their own awesomeness by building an internal climate making it difficult for employees to think about going elsewhere.
It’s not hard to let people know you care about what happens to them. And more and more, it is becoming necessary. With a new generation of workers more than willing to be an increasingly mobile workforce, it’s not that big a leap, if an employee decides they want to start looking for a better deal. This flexibility which was not in the workforce 20 years ago, is a real threat to employers and is costing them millions in the hiring and retention of new hires. So people are really starting to pay attention. They are sitting up, waking up and saying, “What can we do to make them stick and stay?” 
Beside the innovative practices at Tech Valley Connect, you will start to see a lot more ideas surface to combat this tide. Dual careers will, with much more regularity become an increasingly significant part of the hiring conversation as employers move to compete in this mobile marketplace. Hiring practices used to focus much of their funding resources primarily on recruiting. Today, it’s as if someone took the employer’s face with both hands and physically moved it to look at retention. The stakes are high folks and they wouldn’t be unless you guessed it…..cha-ching!
Regional infrastructure like the Tech Valley Connect consortium of employers is uniquely positioned to address dual career in a way that distinguishes the Capital Region from any other competing locale and this region is ahead of the curve on this. But not for long. The dual career business model for Tech Valley Connect is being actively sought out for replication in 5 other areas across the country.
So don’t be scared of the changing tides in hiring. Be good. See what’s out there and what’s coming out to address your corporate culture. Building strong bonds between your staff and the communities they just relocated to is a great way to start.
To learn more unique ways to address employee retention click on…Tech Valley Connect or contact the author at angela.mcnerney@techvalleyconnect.com . Angela McNerney is President of Tech Valley Connect, an organization assisting newly relocating professionals and their families to assimilate into the Capital Region.
Guess who gets it?? Ellis Medicine gets it. Big time. I stumbled on a little best kept secret last week that has had me smiling and believing in the power of going the extra mile for days. I was running for a meeting over there about a month ago and noticed for the second or third time, that every time, I walk in the place the Ellis Medicine staff are always….’smiling’. They smile and make eye contact and then they do the unthinkable…..they say, “How are you?” in a very sincere way. Like they MEAN it. 
What is that about? I didn’t give it too much notice until this past visit. I’m thinking, “What’s in the Kool-Aid?” So when I entered my meeting I mentioned it and they all gave each other these knowing looks and then told me it’s part of their business model. Whoa!
That’s right. Make eye contact, smile and extend a greeting. If anyone is looking lost or confused, the staff is strongly encouraged to walk people to where they need to go. All part of the Ellis culture. They told me that hospitals are places where a lot of serious things happen. When people are in crisis, they need support on many different levels. The ability for staff to be approachable and friendly becomes a foundation in which their constituency can find support and get what they need.
And…. this mission is from the top –down. A program called ‘Manager on Duty’ exemplifies the commitment of Ellis Medicine’s leadership to this ideal. Affectionately known as the M.O.D. Squad, senior leadership including the CEO are on the schedule approximately once a month to not only welcome people who enter the hospital, but to walk them to their destination and answer questions. The concept was taken from the old McClellan hospital philosophy and reinvented after the merger of the three hospitals (St. Clare’s, Bellevue and Ellis). Tracy Blowers, Director of Service Excellence said, “That’s why my position exists – strictly to look at ways to improve people’s perception of how we care for patients. How are we talking to them? Do we send the message we intend? This is why people become loyal to Ellis.”
Blowers explains, “Senior leadership rarely get to actually ‘see’ patients as they are focused on running the hospital. This initiative gives them the opportunity to really experience the importance and the impact of their work. “
“Hospitals can be confusing,” says Matt Van Pelt, Communication Director at Ellis, “especially in an emergency.” Yeah, okay..so why not an information desk? Why the leadership? Here’s a thought.. because it’s a statement that instills confidence in patients who may have very real concerns about their current circumstances. It relays to people that Ellis really does care about what happens to you and they are willing to walk the talk. In a world where attending to your health gets more and more anonymous, with the feeling that no one professional really knows the whole picture, where it has become more common place for details to slip through the cracks – how gratifying it was to see a hospital step up with their leaders in such a tangible way. In a way that kind of says, “Hey…no one is falling through the cracks on my watch.” Getting people through the maze of new construction or to a department where their appointment is, can and does make the difference for people. But getting there with someone who is “in charge,” gets everyone into the right head space to attend to the seriousness of their situation.
Blowers said, “We are driven by what’s best for the patient and we don’t want to lose sight of that. So when they get a chance to do MOD squad duty, they get to help patients in real time. The managers really do love it. No one wants to give up their two hours.”
Now, if that doesn’t lead to customer loyalty…. I’m not sure what does! Tech Valley Connect prides itself on being associated with quality employers who care about their employees and the constituency they serve. Employers who can show creativity and caring in the workplace, certainly will attract and retain professionals who want to thrive in the environment they work in.
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To learn more unique ways to address employee retention click on…Tech Valley Connect or contact the author at angela.mcnerney@techvalleyconnect.com . Angela McNerney is President of Tech Valley Connect, an organization assisting newly relocating professionals and their families to assimilate into the Capital Region.
I’m willing to stake my professional reputation on the precept that over 85% of executive level jobs are secured from some form of networking. Throw a stone at the colleagues you can see from your desk and you are bound to hit somebody with a story that leads back to someone who knew someone who got her/him the interview that got them the job.
The Department of Labor only commits to 70% of all hires, but they don’t differentiate with that figure between blue and white collar workers. And if they did, my estimation may be conservative. It costs employers too much money to recruit a high level employee to risk not having some type of ‘context’ of the person we are giving responsibility too. Frankly, what we really want to know is…that the person who has just given us stellar credentials and a polished resume won’t upon their first week of employment start snapping gum and singing show tunes in the middle of board meeting.
Think about it. We are given a finite period of time in which to assess another human being as to their worthiness to; not only fill a position in our organization, but to play well with others, dress appropriately, have a strong work ethic, not talk on and play with their cell phones when it’s not job related and the list goes on.. .
Tech Valley Connect is founded on this very idea. Our dual career support business model is about getting newly relocated professionals assimilated both professionally and personally in the community they have just moved to. By forming a consortium of employers in the Capital Region who commit to high level informational interviews for spouses of new hires, we have accelerated the job search for spouse/partners 28% faster than the national average. These are not job interviews. They are face to face informal discussions with decision makers in the spouse/partners field – building a professional network that has some weight to it.
Tech Valley Connect is (but not for long…) the only organization in the country modeling a regional commitment from employers to spousal employment by committing to these informational networking interviews with newcomers. As a progressive and rapidly growing community, the Capital Region has raised the level of sophistication of its infrastructure by embracing this unique retention tool.
In American culture, it is common to see people shaking hands. When someone reaches their hand out to you, your body moves with instinct to take the hand. That’s why this works. It’s very difficult not to take the hand. This is networking at its finest hour. This… is how people get jobs.
By: Angela McNerney, President
Tech Valley Connect
Angela.McNerney@techvalleyconnect.com
