Katrina has a unique way of fixing work. She’s blazed a trail into nearly uncharted territory with an audacious goal: to take high volume, low retention jobs and make them not suck. She’s not afraid of a challenge; one of her clients hires people for split-shifts to work with small children. We love kids, don’t get us wrong. But it’s not always easy to work with a group of someone else’s kids. So, Katrina wants to help people find the right job, not just any job.
- It’s not all on the employee to find the right job, which is why Katrina focuses on teaching the employers what that phrase means. Katrina rounds out her list of places that suffer from high turnover rates. Have you ever held one of these jobs? And if you’re the one hiring for these positions, well. You’ll want to take notes.
- How does Katrina help these employers? She explains some of the first things she does when she comes in to consult with a company. First among them is taking a psychological profile of the top, most successful, employees in the role.
- Katrina draws on her own personal experience when working with her clients, and she makes an ‘on the nose’ observation about how she felt in her various roles. She was needed but not valued. Take a moment and let that sink in. Needed but not valued. Katrina has a unique combination of skills which has landed her in a strange array of jobs, and she shares how, no matter the size of the company, no matter the job title, the day-to-day experience rarely changed. And that’s why she started her own company.
- Laurie makes an interesting assertion that employees rarely grow within a company. Instead, they grow by going from one job to another. This is especially true for Katrina; as a consultant, she hops from one situation to another, and in doing so, she’s fixed work for herself. It wasn’t an easy road for her; she was conditioned to the stability of a guaranteed paycheck every month. Her first stint as an entrepreneur didn’t end well, and it wasn’t because of lack of clients. It was because of fear.
- Katrina was much more focused for Round 2 of being an entrepreneur. She reveals her mindset and what she did differently this time around, a lesson you can take if you’re ready to break out of your own job and fix work for yourself. Even if your parents were strict military.
- If you’re currently struggling in YOUR role, Katrina has some fantastic advice. But to start, you have to answer one question. Are you going to stay or are you ready to leave? Staying at a company where you’re unhappy IS a valid choice, but there’s a very important consideration. If you can’t be honest and transparent about your unhappiness, then you need to leave.
- As a manager, keeping your employees motivated and engaged is a constant battle. So is keeping yourself motivated and engaged. Katrina shares WHY retail jobs are so challenging and it all comes down to one thing: the more humans you have to encounter in one day increases the ratio of assholes you deal with. You might think that good jobs don’t exist in retail jobs. But Katrina says that isn’t true, at least for all people.
- There is one problem at work that Katrina is currently obsessing over that no one else is even thinking about. It’s the Fallacies of Work, a rote list of do’s and do not’s that somehow still exist from a totally different age, and Katrina smashes every single one of them.
The DIY HR Handbook
Wouldn't you love to get your hands on Laurie's no-holds-barred, honest DIY HR Handbook for employees and pros alike? Download it for free!
Katrina Kibben:
Activity