COVID-19 Vaccines And Job Listings: Ways to Provide Comfort To Potential Employees

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StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article |COVID-19|COVID-19 Vaccines And Job Listings: Ways to Provide Comfort To Potential EmployeesDebates about the coronavirus vaccines and workplace mandates have everyone up in arms. As employers try to fill vacancies to enhance productivity and boost their bottom line, they run into serious challenges. Should you aim for herd immunity and mandate that employees and new hires get the COVID-19 vaccine? More importantly, how do you prevent these changes from discouraging ideal candidates from applying?

Encourage Vs. Require

Unless you own a business in the healthcare, warehouse, or retail industry, your best bet is to encourage instead of requiring employees to get the vaccine. Mandates can feel controlling and cause hesitant applicants to look elsewhere for employment. On the other hand, encouraging your employees through informative materials, seminars, training, communication, incentives, and reasonable accommodations lets applicants know they have a choice.

Work With An Expert

There’s a lot of misinformation out there about the COVID-19 vaccines. This type of content often fuels personal fears, prompting employees to remain hesitant about getting vaccinated. Trying to argue these claims on your own isn’t very assuring. If you’re going to make potential employees feel comfortable, the most efficient solution is to work with a few experts.

An attorney, healthcare professional, and human resources expert are better positioned to provide fact-based information. Consult with them to find out how to draft and implement your policy in a way that protects your business and your staff. Make a note of the experts or reputable resources you used to develop your policies to put applicants’ minds at ease.

Make It Plain

Life amid the pandemic is already unpredictable, so don’t make matters worse. If you want to ease the concerns of job seekers, you should state your company policies and requirements plain and clear. When creating posts for job boards, list the need for a job background check and policies or incentives for the COVID-19 vaccine. While this tactic might drive some applicants elsewhere, at the very least, it shows that your company is honest, transparent, and upfront. If they chose to continue with the application process, informing them upfront also allows them to prepare.

Offer Reasonable Accommodations

If an applicant expresses that they have reservations about the COVID-19 vaccine or objects due to religion or disabilities, be prepared to offer reasonable accommodations. You can allow them to work remotely, reduced hours in-house, or a hybrid version of the two options. If you have departments that don’t require a vaccine, you can recommend compatible positions. If they’re financially strapped, you can offer incentives like cash bonuses, transportation discounts, or paid time off to anyone that wants to get the vaccine.

Offering reasonable accommodations when applicants inquire boosts their confidence and lets down their guard. Potential employees will know that you’re interested in what they have to offer and that you’re willing to go the extra mile to accommodate their needs. This could encourage them to accept a job offer.

Highlight Other Health And Safety Measures

If you’re still on the fence about the COVID-19 vaccine mandate, or you’ve decided against it, you can still make job seekers feel comfortable working with your organization. On your company website or in the job description, ensure that you highlight other health and safety measures you’ve implemented. If they know that you require wellness checks, face masks, gloves, social distancing, frequent handwashing, and additional cleaning services, they’ll be less fearful about being in the workplace.

The COVID-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc on businesses in various industries. Business owners had to do what they could to survive while keeping their employees, customers, and the general public safe. Now that the coronavirus vaccines are on the scene, they have helped some sense of normalcy and control. As you begin putting up ads for available positions, remember to prioritize job seekers’ health, safety, and comfort. By applying the strategies above, you can put their minds at ease and increase your chances of attracting top talent despite the madness.

Top 7 Tips to Ensure Employee Satisfaction in Your Real Estate Brokerage

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StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article |Employee Satisfaction|Top 7 Tips to Ensure Employee Satisfaction in Your Real Estate BrokerageIf you want to attract the best of the best real estate agents to your brokerage, it’s crucial to ensure employee satisfaction. Indeed, even the best recruitment strategies will fail if you people keep leaving your brokerage every few months. With a high turnover rate, a prospective candidate might think that you aren’t taking good care of your people. Ultimately, this affects your reputation and can make people hesitant to apply.

In short, a good recruitment strategy must include good employee satisfaction and retention plans as well. For those in need of ideas to bolster real estate recruitment, getbrokerkit.com can help. Meanwhile, if you need tips to ensure employee satisfaction, here are just a few:

Listen to Their Concerns

Before you can solve a problem, you need to know what it is. The best way to find out is to go straight to those who are experiencing them: your employees. Ask them to identify their concerns and be as detailed as possible. This way, you can address the issues completely and prevent them from recurring. If you need help formulating questions, there are different kinds of survey software that can help in this regard.

It’s also ideal to have everyone rate their overall satisfaction with their jobs, even those in management and senior positions. In addition, ask them to provide suggestions that can help improve their rating. Then, make a reasonable effort to make these things happen.

Keep Everyone Updated

Communication is a two-way street. In the same way that you listen to your employees, you should also take the time to keep everyone updated about what’s happening in the brokerage. For example, if there’s an economic crisis, your people would appreciate knowing about your response plan. Even if the status quo won’t be affected, hearing from the higher-ups in the brokerage can provide a measure of peace of mind.

The bottomline here is to provide regular company updates. It doesn’t even have to be an all-hands meeting every single time. An email containing the latest news about the company—whether it’s good or bad—can do a lot in terms of transparency.

Develop a Recognition System

People want to be appreciated for their hard work. If your real estate agents exceed their targets or meet them before the deadline, find a way to recognize and reward the hard work. The same goes for every other employee in your brokerage who goes above and beyond their tasks. This will help boost morale and confidence, which in turn has a direct effect on productivity and job satisfaction.

Remember that recognition can come in many forms. You can award cash bonuses, vacation tickets, and other gifts to your high-performing employees if you have the budget for it. Still, even a genuine message of appreciation can mean a lot to someone.

Encourage Socialization

One of the most important components of happiness is human interaction. Indeed, even introverts need to socialize to help dispel bouts of loneliness and feelings of isolation.

In the workplace, you can encourage socialization through small celebrations. It could be for birthdays, a company milestone, or even a “just because” reason. It’s also a good idea to provide areas where your people can gather to take breaks and engage in conversation.

Outside the office, consider activities such as a mini sports fest or a volunteer program in the community. These can help promote camaraderie and a sense of belonging. Volunteering, in particular, can foster a sense of fulfillment and even boost your brokerage’s positive reputation.

Give Them Opportunities to Use Their Skills

For greater engagement, provide opportunities in which your employees can use their skills and interests. For example, if you have someone in your team who is passionate about tabletop games, why not hold a game night with them as the game master?

Remember that your employees have hobbies and activities outside work. Show your support for these endeavors and see how much happier they can be in your brokerage!

Help Them Improve

When your employees are equipped with all the right skills, they can do their jobs more efficiently. This is a win-win situation for the brokerage (which will experience a boost in earnings) and your employees (who will be happier and more satisfied). Continuous learning can also help prevent feelings of being stuck. Last but not the least, employees will also be more inclined to stay loyal to a company that’s concerned not just with profits but also with people development.

Promote Health and Wellness

Here’s a fact: healthy employees are happy employees. Real estate agents may often be on the go and are thus not as prone to a sedentary office lifestyle, but what about their mental and emotional health? In addition, you still have other employees in the office that you need to think about.

Fortunately, there are simple solutions that can help you promote health and wellness in the office. You can allocate 30 minutes a day for “deskcercise,” or perhaps you can sponsor the gym memberships of your employees. If you can, provide access to healthy meals and snacks. Paid sick days and vacation days can also go a long way in preventing stress.

Remember that if your current employees aren’t happy with your brokerage, it will be difficult to convince others to join your team. Meanwhile, if your employees are satisfied and feel valued, it will be easier to attract the cream of the crop.
Keep these tips in mind to ensure employee satisfaction and boost your brokerage’s recruitment efforts!

How to Create a Positive Work Atmosphere

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StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article |Positive Work Atmosphere|How to Create a Positive Work AtmosphereThere are plenty of ways to creative a positive working environment for yourself and your employees. No matter how large your workforce or the space you have, you can make some simple adjustments to boost the harmony and productivity in your office. If you are just starting out with a new team or are looking to refresh your workplace, here are just a couple of ideas to help you get started in creating a great working environment.

Keep it clean

Making sure your office or workspace is clean is essential for the health and safety of yourself, your employees, and anyone that enters. Using professional cleaning services is a great way to ensure that your space is cleaned to a high level. This can help reduce illness and injury, and therefore staff sick days. It is also important to keep your workspaces clean as this helps give a good first impression to anyone entering the area. Having a clean office can also boost productivity and help prevent things from becoming lost or damaged.

Bring the outside in

When you work in an office, you may miss being around nature. This is where introducing plants into your work environment comes in. This simple action has a multitude of benefits; from boosting productivity and creativity to cleaning the air, plants are a great addition to help improve your work environment. Not all plants will thrive indoors, so make sure you choose the correct plant for the location. Common office plants include snake plants, succulents, aloe, or peace lilies, as they are relatively easy to look after and do not need to be kept outside.

Color psychology

The colors that feature in your office can also have an impact. Color psychology is the study of the way in which different colors and hues affect and impact human behavior. Whether you choose to completely redecorate or invest in some colored accessories or furniture, thinking about what colors you use can have an effect on yourself and your team. For example, red can be a high-energy color to paint your office, and green can help to maintain a sense of balance and increase productivity.

Noise

Another way to create a positive working atmosphere is to manage the noise. It can be very distracting if there is constant loud noise, and this can result in a lot of wasted time. If you cannot give employees their own individual work areas, items such as noise-reducing headphones can be incredibly useful. Quieter areas are also beneficial for taking breaks, so it is a good idea to have a separate area for breaks and rest, allowing employees to be distanced from their workspaces, which also prevents those around them from being distracted by colleagues on their breaks. You could even invest in nap rooms, as there are many benefits to taking a power nap at work. Interestingly, plants can also help reduce noise levels, as they can absorb sound or deflect it.

Employee Engagement Is The Key To Competitive Advantage

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StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article |Employee Engagement|Employee Engagement Is The Key To Competitive AdvantageEmployee engagement is often confused with the satisfaction or happiness of an employee. This is not the case. Employee engagement is when an employee genuinely cares about a business – it is their emotional commitment to the organisation in question. They genuinely want the company to succeed. This is imperative if you are to achieve a competitive advantage, and effective employee engagement software can help you to get there.

Why should you focus on employee engagement levels?

There is no better reason to focus on improving employee engagement than the fact that it will drive your business to greater success. If your employees are committed to the success of your firm, you are naturally more likely to succeed. This is even more significant nowadays due to a number of factors, including the fact that people have become the key source of competitive advantage and there is a war for the talent that is out there, with businesses becoming more serious in their efforts to attract and retain the best employees.

Using software to boost and manage employee engagement

So, where do you start? Well, first, you need to select employee engagement metrics, so that you can determine how engaged your employees are. Metrics include the likes of personal growth, feedback, recognition, happiness, wellness, relationship with managers, ambassadorship, satisfaction, company alignment, and relationships with colleagues. After you’ve done this, you need an employee engagement platform, which will ensure that initiatives run consistently and that cadence is maintained if things start to slip. The employee engagement platform will gather feedback from employees and crucial data that can help you make critical decisions on how to improve engagement.

What about remote workers? Can you make sure that they are engaged?

More and more businesses are embracing remote workers at present. This is a trend that was already starting to get more and more prominent. However, the recent pandemic has accelerated this trend further, and now more people are working on a remote basis than ever before. If you hire remote workers at your business, you may be wondering if you can keep them engaged at your business without seeing them on a day-to-day basis. The truth is that you can.

There are a number of ways you can go about this. Ensuring that communication is regular and easy is important. You should also look for different ways to bond and get to know your remote workers, such as virtual team building activities. Aside from this, it is important to make your remote workers feel just as valued as those who go into the office every day. Bonuses and small gestures can go a very long way, as remote workers often struggle to feel included or like they are part of a team.

The best way to unlock the true potential of your business is to invest in employee engagement software. This will help you to strengthen your employees’ emotional commitment to the business, which will have a positive effect on the overall profitability and success of your firm.

5 ways to create a productive and happy working environment

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StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article |Working environment|5 ways to create a productive and happy working environmentEvery business owner wants their operations to run smoothly. A place where staff get on well, communicate, and are as productive as they possibly can be. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work that way as personalities can clash, employees can become complacent, and animosities can form.

The good news is that there are many things you can do that can help send your business in that direction. Here are 5 ways to create a productive and happy working environment.

Don’t be too strict

Having policies and procedures is all well and good, but if you micro manage or don’t cut staff a bit of slack once in a while, they will eventually get sick of it. As long as the necessary work is being done, leave them to it.
If you need to intervene from time to time, that’s fine but if your team is self-driven, hardworking, and efficient, let them do their thing. If you don’t, it could backfire tremendously.

Create a welcoming space

An office that looks nice is far more enjoyable to work in, so if yours requires some TLC, you could reap the rewards by giving it a bit of an overhaul. Freshening up the décor, changing furniture, and adding accessories such as high quality custom planters or wall art will make your space feel far more welcoming. This is beneficial not only in terms of client perception but for your employees too.

Socialize once in a while

If your team doesn’t socialize, it’s worth trying to do so once in a while. Whether it be a game of ten-pin bowling, a meal, or a few drinks at the local bar, spending time together outwith the office environment will help you to get to know each other on a different level.

It usually results in better communication when you return to the office, which should, in turn, increase productivity and improve the working environment for everyone.

Reward hard work

If your staff have been working exceptionally hard or have met all their targets, reward them for it. It could be a monetary reward such as an annual bonus, for example. If you prefer to give something a little different, shopping vouchers or a nice bottle of champagne will always be well received.

Rewards make employees feel like their hard work is paying off, and they will be more inclined to continue working hard to make your business a success.

Ask for ideas and feedback

If an employee thinks you are listening to them, they will be more inclined to go that extra mile, so where possible, ask for ideas and feedback. There can be a lot going on in the background you don’t know about, so letting them know your door is always open will benefit everyone.

You are likely to be party to far more information than you would usually be, and they will feel like they can freely offer suggestions or opinions.

Most successful businesses usually have a team of happy and motivated employees lurking in the background, so if that’s something you can replicate, you will reap the rewards in the long run.