Joe Morgan has been in the Human Resources field in various capacities for over 15 years, with a focus on public sector and higher education organizations.
He’s currently the Executive Director of HR at Middlesex County College in New Jersey where he oversees a team of dedicated HR professionals that drive the HR function and strategy for the college’s faculty and staff. Joe’s passion in HR is “Total Rewards” and he recently achieved Certified Employee Benefits Specialist (CEBS) designation through the IFEBP.
More from Joe…
One extremely important lesson Joe learned is not to assume what his employees want. He says you have to listen to what they want, and what they say, could surprise you.
He told us:
“One place I worked, we had a pretty even split of employees, who, on one side of the equation spent their entire career there, they were there from entry-level, all the way to retirement. And then on the other hand, you had a lot of relatively new employees. So there’s a little bit of a divide there culturally.
And then when we surveyed engagement, I remember we had a lot of assumptions on what we’d get back. We thought we knew, or we could forecast pretty well, what those results were going to be and they turned out to be really eye-opening.
The newer employees I remember, their focus was so much on culture. They wanted to connect with the employees who are more senior in the organization. A lot of them raised their hand and said, I want to really understand the culture here. I want to rein myself in the culture. I want to collaborate with people I can learn from professionally.
And then surprisingly enough, the more senior employees had a very similar feedback on those focus groups and engagement surveys where they said they wanted to participate in mentoring programs. They wanted to impart that wisdom that they had accumulated through all the years in their career. And that wasn’t even on our radar.
So I stopped assuming and I learned from that to say, don’t assume, just listen. I expected to hear give us more time off, let us work from home, give us less expensive health care. And what we really got was much more person-driven and a complete surprise, so I stopped assuming after that.”
