Top Ways to Retain Employees

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StrategyDriven Talent Management ArticleWhether you’re the manager of your department or the CEO of a company, it’s so important to make sure you retain the attention and engagement of your employees. When your employees go through the hiring process, they’ve proven themselves to be the best men and women for the jobs your company offers. In order for the company to do well, there needs to be a level of continuity and consistency in the workflow. One of the best ways to make sure this happens is through retaining top talent. There are a few strategies to implement in order to make sure your company holds on to its best employees and attracts more awesome and talented employees in the future.

1. Mentorship
Partner new team members with more experienced employees. It’s so important to foster an environment of mentorship. The experienced employees can teach the newer ones the ropes of the company. There’s also a level of openness regarding how to improve and facilitate a better workflow. When the company implements a mentorship system within the workplace, it takes away the vibes of competition and backbiting. Everyone is in the room with the same goal: to make the company more money and win. When everyone is on one accord, the results can be truly divine.

2. Ownership
Take note of the strengths of your employees. If they’re not already exercising them in some way, give them opportunities to thrive. Sure, there is a level of initiative employees need to take. However, as the leader, it’s important for you to make it clear that you’re open to your employees taking on new roles, growing and improving company strategies. There are many employees that have lots of ideas, but have bosses with large egos. Don’t let ego get in the way of an employee’s ability to offer more to the company.

3. Gold Stars/Incentives
Money is a major motivator, but it’s not the only one. Bonuses are amazing for helping employees stick around. An upgrade to the company benefits package, weekly lunches and telecommuting are a few of the tricks to get good employees to stick around. If the work environment is conducive to their personal and professional happiness in a very tangible way, it’ll be hard to get them to leave.

4. Accountability
It can be really detrimental to a company when an employee decides to quit abruptly. If they’re a major part of the team, their presence is essential. Design an environment where members of the team are able to check in with one another and remain accountable to each other. This will foster a level of transparency. If a person is deeply unhappy in their work, that’ll come across when they interact with other employees. Keeping one another accountable will help the company become stronger as they’ve been bonded together.

These are a few of the best ways to make sure your company holds on to the best of the best. As you progress and tweak the process, keep an ear to the ground. You’ll want feedback to learn how you can improve as the head of the team. As you gain advice, listen to it and implement the most effective practices. A company doesn’t become a well-oiled machine overnight. In many cases, it takes years of mistakes and fine-tuning. Lean in and embrace the process because the company will be better as a result of it.

Five Tips to Recruit and Manage a Global Project Team

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StrategyDriven Talent Management Article | Recruit | Five Tips to Recruit and Manage a Global Project Team

To compete in global markets, you need global talent. The demands of a customer in China diverge widely from those of a customer in Canada. In this increasingly connected world, you can’t limit your recruitment to local markets.

How exactly can you adopt a global recruitment strategy? Once recruited, how do you effectively manage an international team? This article will answer these questions and more below.

1. Go Beyond Resumes

The traditional resume often fails when hiring internationally. Variations in local work and education standards can make it difficult to develop an evaluation matrix for shortlisting international candidates.

As an antidote, look beyond resumes and consider more standard signifiers of expertise. Internationally recognized certifications, standardized test scores, and even skill-based competitions can be a worthy replacement to resumes.

For example, if you’re hiring for a project management position, you might prioritize the PMP certification over a resume. If you’re hiring for technical talent, a team-based competition board like Kaggle can help.

2. Consider Local Talent Concerns When Making Offers

As any experienced international recruiter will tell you, local talent priorities and concerns vary widely across regions and geographies. For example, a MetLife survey found that more workers in China considered a higher salary as a reason to stay in a company. In India, higher benefits trumped a higher salary when it comes to employee needs.

Your goal should be to consider the expectations of local talent and design an attractive package. Your offer should align with the cultural practices, workplace expectations, and established employment trends in the region.

3. Invest in Team Building

Just because a team is working remotely from locations across the globe doesn’t mean that you can eschew team building. In fact, in the absence of a shared space or common culture, investing in team building activities becomes even more important.

Here are a few pointers for team building in global teams:

  • Respect cultural beliefs: Any team building activity you undertake should take cognizance of cultural beliefs of each team member. Get individual team members to buy into any activity before recommending it to the rest of the group. Make sure that team members don’t feel pressured into participating in any activity they are uncomfortable with.
  • Focus on collaborative digital activities: If your team is remote, your team building should revolve around collaborative digital activities. Think of multiplayer games, digital treasure hunts, etc. Pick activities that reward teamwork instead of skill (such as team-based strategy games instead of action games).
  • Encourage non-work collaboration: For a team to thrive, team members should have something in common that goes beyond their work responsibilities. Encourage team members to meet, converse, and collaborate on non-work activities. Create dedicated communication channels where people can exchange ideas and have conversations without the pressure of work.

4. Adopt Managerial Practices that Align with Cultural Expectations

To manage a multicultural team built across geographical boundaries, you have to eschew standard managerial practices. Instead, you have to accept, understand, and adopt cultural differences in your management approach.

A few things you should consciously look out for are:

  • Leadership approach: Leadership styles vary greatly across cultures. Some cultures appreciate a more collaborative approach to leadership, while others will prefer a more distant and forceful leader. Understand the cultural approach to leadership for all your team members and incorporate it into your management practices.
  • Time: How people approach time is also variables across cultures. Some cultures consider deadlines to be a hard stop in the work process. Others might see it just as a guide. If the people on your team come from cultures where time is seen as a flexible concept, change your management approach accordingly.
  • Responsibilities: In some cultures, speaking out and raising your hand to take on responsibilities is encouraged. In others, it is considered rude. As a manager in a multicultural team, you’ll have to understand each team member’s approach to responsibilities and change your expectations accordingly.

5. Adopt Practical Solutions to Time Zone Conflicts

If you’re managing a global, distributed team, one of your biggest problems will be dealing with time zone conflicts. The farther apart your team members are, the harder this challenge.

Some things you should consider are:

  • Changing meeting schedules: A fixed meeting schedule can often inconvenience team members located in different time zones. For instance, if you have early morning weekly meetings (by EST), a team member based in Australia will have to be up late at night to attend them. Fix this problem by changing meeting schedules regularly so all project team members feel that their needs are being met.
  • Automate messaging: To get around the problem of time zones, automate messaging as much as possible. For instance, instead of sending a deadline reminder manually, you can instruct your project management tool to send one automatically as per the task assignee’s local time zone. This can save you tons of micromanagement.

Recruiting people from a global talent pool and managing them effectively is one of the biggest challenges for modern organizations. Getting it right can improve your competitiveness and help you win against bigger, but less diverse businesses.

Have you ever managed a global team? What were your biggest challenges? Share your experience in the comments below!

About the Author

Puranjay is a marketing leader and founder of GrowthPub, a content-focused marketing agency that helps SaaS startups scale their digital presence. He also blogs at GrowthSimple.com

Upping Your Game If Your Business Is Under Strain

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All businesses hit rough patches. Of course, the problems really start when you struggle to get yourself out of that rough patch. Perhaps your business has been under strain for a while. Maybe you’re just not seeing the sales that you used to see. There are so many reasons as to why this might be the case, but the issues are often minor and easily fixed if you’re determined and motivated enough to fix them. Let’s talk about upping your business game to help relieve some of the strain.

Always head back to the drawing board.

Obviously, the advice in this article might help inspire you to get your business back on its feet. The suggestions might just steer you in new directions that help you to resolve issues within your company. However, you need to take the initiative. You need to head back to the drawing board on a frequent basis. When it comes to creating a successful business, your work is never done. The market is always changing, and you need to constantly work towards adapting your company in order to survive those changes. That’s why you shouldn’t wait for things to start going wrong before you make changes to your business; you should regularly return to the drawing board and ask yourself whether improvements need to be made.

Of course, it can be hard to keep up with consumers, competitors, and the market as a whole. You might forever feel as if your business is playing catch-up just to remain modern and relevant. The key is to create an effective business that works so smoothly that returning to the drawing board is a formality more than anything. You don’t want to have to spend hours, days, or weeks trying to pinpoint issues with sales, for example. You might want to look into some of the advanced ecommerce systems on the market because they could help you assess your business’ sales on a real-time basis. Having constant access to research and information will ensure that your company can make instant decisions regarding improvements to its structure. Heading back to the drawing board will become a straightforward and painless process.

Tidy up your promotional efforts.

If you’ve worked hard to deliver a product or service that’s just as good (if not better) than the competition then you might want to consider that your business is suffering for other reasons. Most commonly, poor promotional efforts are the reason for a company’s failure to secure potential customers. You need to tidy up your marketing strategy. Work on building your online presence if you want to up your game and compete with other businesses on the market. You need to improve the content on your website and social media profiles; the more relevant they are to search engines, the higher you’ll show up on result pages. Do some research into SEO if you feel out of your depth.

Incentivize your employees.

As a final piece of advice, the best way to up your game if it’s under strain is to increase your business’ productivity. Motivated staff can completely turn things around for a struggling company. So often, the problem is that the workforce isn’t incentivized to go the extra mile. You have to give them a reason to do so. Perhaps you could offer perks and rewards such as bonuses or free lunches for the hardest workers every week or every day. Do something that proves how much you value your employees.

Don’t Just Survive, Thrive!

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There are far too many businesses on the market today with owners who accept survival as enough. This means that rather than seeking higher profits, a business will work simply by breaking even or just barely scraping a profit. In some cases, this type of mindset can be beneficial. At the start of your business and the first years on the market, you will be keeping your company small and nimble. This will hopefully lead to your business staying a float and keeping up with the competition.

As well as this, a business not focused on profits can instead ensure that they are delivering the absolute best service to their customers. Take diapers.com as an example. The company actually started selling at a significant loss, but the name quickly attracted a large audience. At that point, Amazon took notice, buying the domain for millions. Still, it is important to realise that in this scenario, the business shut down and if you don’t want to suffer the same fate, you do need to think about how to thrive on the market. There are a number of options you can consider here.

Aim For Innovation

You need to make sure that your business is an innovative and exciting force on the market,  with fresh ideas and new possibilities that customers are unable to find anywhere else. How do you achieve innovation? We suggest that you keep track of the latest tech developments as we can assure you, there will always be something that could be of interest to your company. For instance, there is a great deal of focus on augmented reality right now that could benefit every business industry from medical to marketing. If you use AR in marketing, you can make your business campaign far more immersive and exciting for your customers.

Expand Internationally

You might start on the market by selling to a local audience, perhaps only a few miles from your business headquarters. However, at some point, you should consider expanding your business to an international level. By doing this, you can attract more customers, gain in greater profits and solidify your company as a force to be reckoned with on the global market. To do this, you will need funds, but getting a small business loan that can help you drive your business forward is easier than you think. All you need to do is decide how much money you need and apply.

Outsource It All

Finally, if you’re going to thrive on the market, you don’t just want more buyers, you need to do everything in your power to keep costs low and under control as well. By doing this, you will keep your company in a competitive position. Outsourcing is your best option here, and you should consider outsourcing any area of your business that is too complex or expensive for your company to handle. Outsourcing gives you the expertise without the cost and guarantees that your business will stay nimble as well as effective.

Protecting Your Business’s Brand

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Your business’s brand is your business. It is what consumers think of when they see your business, and it is what they see when they think of your business. It is the image that your business gives off about itself and it is what your business is known for and as.

So, yes, your business’s brand is of the utmost importance! And, you need to protect this brand with your life. To see how that is done, make sure to read on.

Manage your digital assets

Today, a lot of a business’s brand can be found online and wrapped up in all of its digital assets, i.e. all the things that exist online that your business has a right to use, such as photos, logos, presentations, etc. So, digital asset management is important. It is important that you manage your assets and know exactly where they are and how they are being used at all times. And, only when you embrace this very important form of management will you be able to be sure that your copyrighted online material is not being misused or being taken advantage of anywhere, even in the darkest crevices of the Internet.

Something else that you can do to manage and protect your digital assets is to set up Google Alerts. Basically, what this would do is alert you every time your brand is mentioned or used in any way online, meaning you can act quickly to tackle the situation should it arise.

Get registered

If you truly want to protect your brand and your trademark, then you need to get them legally registered. You need to get them legally registered because that is the only way you are going to protect them to the absolute full extent.

When seeking to get your trademarks registered with your country’s Patent and Trademark Office, you should most certainly enlist the services of a trademark attorney to assist you. You should do so because the process of getting registered in this field can be long and tedious, and one false move on your part could see the whole venture crumble.

Always think globally

Of course, it is pivotal that you trademark your brand in the country that you trade in because then your direct competitors will know not to infringe on your intellectual property. But, you should always be thinking globally when you seek to protect your brand.

You should always think globally because different countries have different rules and laws in place in regards to copyright. What this means, simply, is that just because you are protected from brand theft in your country, you might be so covered across the globe. In China, for instance, the trademark system works on a ‘first-to-file’ basis, meaning that even if you’ve used a trademark before in your country, it will not legally be yours in China until you go through all the red tape that that country asks you go to.

Your business’s brand is its most important asset, and you need to protect it as much and as well as you can.