Looking After Your Staff

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StrategyDriven Talent Management Article |Looking After Staff|Looking After Your StaffYour staff are the heart and soul of your business, and if you want your business to run in the best way possible, then you need to look after them. Looking after staff is more than just money, although offering an excellent salary is a good start. The focus has shifted in recent years and it is about a combination of things.

Happiness

Happy staff are higher performers. They work harder just because they want to. It is your job to find out what makes your team tick. Is a beer on a Friday afternoon? What about having regular staff days out? It might be something as simple as good coffee in the machine. If you make their happiness a priority, then you will see an increase in their productivity. Good things all around.

Money

It is essential that you pay fairly. While you might not be in a position to be paying a significant 6 figure salary, your staff should be compensated fairly for the work that they do. So when you are hiring, you need to have an honest conversation with your potential hires. If you know you can’t meet what they are currently earning, then see what the perks would need to be to make it happen.

Experiment

No, not on your staff. You will probably have so many new ideas than you want to try out, sow when you are building your team you are going to want to talk to them about all of the new ideas that you have. Let them know from the beginning that you have a vision for the company, and you want to move forward in a creative way. If your staff share the vision, they will feel closer to the company and you, and like they play a part in moving the company forward.

Just because most companies go for a Monday to Friday 9-5 doesn’t mean you have to. It might be that you hire a lot of people that work better in the mid-afternoon and evening. In which case, it makes sense to make the most of their natural rhythm and shift the working pattern.

Insurance

It doesn’t matter what type of work your company does, there are things that can happen to your workers. Trips, falls, and chemical burns. It can happen to anyone at any time. If you make sure that you have worker’s compensation you will protect your company from going bankrupt should they be sued. If a worker has an accident, they might have some injuries. The injuries may mean that they can’t work for a short time, or perhaps forever. Workers’ compensation will mean that your staff is taken care of and so are their medical expenses.

Hiring

The people that you hire will have an impact on everything that you do. And when you hire you need to make sure that you are stick with all the rules and regulations. You should always be looking for the best person for the job. Employment discrimination lawyers will hold you accountable if you aren’t acting with respect. Something that is important to remember is that you can look at a skills base over experience in some cases. You have the freedom to create a talent pool that really drives your company forward. And that is exciting. But, as the saying goes, hire slowly and fire quickly.

Personal

When you know your staff on a personal level, you will be able to cultivate a close relationship with them. A great leader will be alert for a change in the demeanor or work of their staff. It doesn’t need to be a space for everyone to share their personal issues, but if there are external factors that are having an impact on their work, then a conversation and support matters.

Learn Together

As well as providing as many learning opportunities as possible for your staff, you should be taking them with your staff. The more that your knowledge aligns with theirs, the more of a cohesive team you will be able to create. There are new techniques and technology in every sector, and you as a leader should be in the mix off all of it. There will, of course, be higher up networking events and training that you should take. Keeping your finger on the pulse of your sector is great, enabling your whole team to gain knowledge is fantastic.

Make Time

There is nothing worse than trying to make an appointment with someone who is always busy. And if you are running a company and have zero time for your staff to come to you, you will soon feel a disconnect happen. It will become increasingly apparent, and your team will begin to feel less like a team. Projects can get weighty and take up a lot of time, but there needs to be time to catch up and grab a coffee. Showing your people that you value and respect them is going to make a big difference.

Opportunities

Aside from the training and the nice cohesive team, there should be some opportunities for new experiences. For example, if you have a copywriter that is particularly interested in dabbling in graphic design, give them some space on a smaller project to learn from the design team. Letting people work outside the lines of their role will provide them with an opportunity to grow in a way that training usually doesn’t.

Manage Expectations

People who are starting companies, or just have the cashflow to be able to hire are often very enthusiastic – and sometimes over-promise. Before you hire, people to spend some time thinking about what is realistic for you. Promising them big clients, a big bonus and a lease car, when they are your first hire, and you’re okay really able to stretch to a laptop and come excellent coffee isn’t cool. Although the latter will be great, it isn’t going to feel like the bonus and car would.

Be honest with your team when things are good or bad. Remember that they are going to be as excited by your business as you are – treat them well, and you’ll all grow together.

5 Ways To Ease Your Employees Out of Debt

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StrategyDriven Talent Management Article | 5 Ways To Ease Your Employees Out of DebtThere are several ways that you can provide incentives or benefits to your employees. In this day and age, employers have come to realize the importance of having long-term employees that know the company’s trade by heart. It’s no longer a matter of hiring the best ones but a question of how to get these employees to stay.

Studies have shown that employees’ well being has a huge impact on their performance. Their financial worries take up 13 hours of their time in a month. That can be a huge loss of profit in a company if we’re basing it on productivity alone! So, what can a company do to ease the financial worries of his employees? Here are some of the proven ways that you might want to try.

1. Financial Security Program

Salary and wages are great ways to reduce the debt of your employees. But, like any other jobs, salaries are sometimes inadequate to meet their financial needs. This is why some companies have started offering financial security program in a form of retirement plan and the likes. It will also potentially increase the productivity of the employees and the company will surely retain their workers as well.

2. Assist Employees in Checking Credit Reports

Did you know that every consumer has a right to a free credit report every year? As an employer, this is the best way to assist your employees in looking into his credit reports and analyze his financial behavior. This can also be done on the internet by following the instructions given by the credit bureau. The report will show your employee’s exposure to credit and how well they are managing their debt. This should be done side-by-side with the employees. It can also improve your relationship in the workplace as the employee knows that you care about his financial well-being.

3. Provide Financial Literacy Course

Now that businesses and companies have realized the importance of financial literacy to their employees, there are several readily available online materials that can be offered to employees who want to avail of these financial courses. If you find that your employees could use some direction, ask them where they are struggling and look for materials that are available online that they might find helpful and interesting. To make sure that they watch these courses, you can even offer an incentive on whoever finishes the material first.

4. Offer Housing Allowance

Another thing that businesses might consider in assisting their employees financially would be to give housing allowance. Business leaders have come to prioritize the retention of their employees in a competitive marketplace and they know that housing is a huge factor that employees consider in getting a job. House allowance is given so that the employee won’t have to worry about meeting the cost of renting and accommodation.

Employers should look at local rent reports like this from ABODO where rent prices decreased over the last month. This may be a good thing to consider especially if rent prices are fluctuating from to time.

5. Convert Vacation Wages to Loan Payment

Ever hired an employee that has an unpaid student loan? Offering to convert their vacation wages as payment for their loan is just a brilliant idea to help them pay off their debt. Employees mostly get 28 vacation days in a year and if that is converted into cash to pay off their student loan, that is an ample amount that they will no longer worry about. It may not seem much on the part of the employer, but it will definitely mean much to those who work nonstop just to make ends meet. This will also be an additional productivity on the part of the employee.

Conclusion

With these kinds of strategies in the workplace, employees will be more capable of managing their finances, hence, they can focus on the task and improve their productivity. They will feel that they are being taken care of and will be more likely to stay in their respective jobs.

How to Create a Workplace to Maximize Productivity

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StrategyDriven Talent Management Article |Workspace|How to Create a Workplace to Maximize ProductivityWhile introducing innovative software and streamlining processes can create a more efficient environment, you shouldn’t underestimate the importance of improving your team’s workspace.

Your goal must be to create an organized environment that supports collaboration and improves employee morale. To create a focused, efficient, and happy team, read the following advice on how to create a productive workplace.

Add Office Plants

A study has found that office plants can increase employees’ productivity levels by 15%. It’s believed the plant life can boost staff members’ concentration levels while creating a higher level of air quality and improving workplace satisfaction. It can, therefore, support your employees’ health and quality of life.

Eradicate Daily Mess

A messy desk can equal a messy mind. Provide your team with mental clarity by encouraging your staff to eradicate mess on a daily basis, which can help them to remain both focused and productive. For example, you should encourage them to throw away unnecessary items, clean dirty dishes and keep personal items to a minimum on their desk.
It will free them of visual clutter and increase their focus on the task at hand. Eliminating clutter from the office space can also prevent your staff from misplacing items, so it can be an effective tactic for improving internal efficiency.

Set the Right Temperature

A hot, sticky office can considerably reduce employee morale and impact your team members’ concentration. For this reason, you should introduce a dependable air conditioning system into your workplace, which can help your employees to remain cool, calm and relaxed once temperatures start to rise.

Tweak Your Office Design

The layout and design of an office can determine the atmosphere within the workplace. If your employees appear unsatisfied in their role, it might be time to tweak your office space to improve your staff members’ job satisfaction, efficiency, and productivity levels.

For example, you should tinker with your office’s color scheme, lighting and general layout, which should improve light and space within the workplace. It could prevent your staff from feeling cramped and claustrophobic while improving their happiness each working day.

Provide the Best Tools and Equipment

Slow, inefficient equipment and tools could drain your employees of morale and make them long for 5pm to strike. It can also prevent your team from completing a task at a fast rate, which could lead to missed deadlines, unhappy clients and smaller profitability.

For this reason, you must review your current hardware and software to ensure they are up to your company’s standards, and you should ask your employees for feedback regarding their equipment, which you might need to replace as soon as possible.

For example, they could benefit from:

A few changes to your equipment could make a big difference to employee morale and can lead to greater individual and team performances in the workplace. While the above options can be expensive, they could potentially save and generate more money for your business over time.

Unusual Hiring Practices

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StrategyDriven Talent Management Article | Unusual Hiring PracticesInterviews are terrible vessels for people to get to know each other truthfully. Everyone is putting on a show. To make a terrible analogy, consider dating. People are at their best, hiding their flaws and playing up their strengths, flirting with lying and omission in order to control the perception of the other. Interviews share a lot of this.

The opposition between the interviewer and interviewee makes it so that both parties are trying to sell to each other. The interviewer sells the idea that working in that organization is a dream while the interviewee sells the idea that they are the perfect match for that position. It’s pretty ludicrous when you think about it. Rather than have an open and honest dialogue about the organization, the candidate and the fit or unfit, interviewers to flaunt about how great the organization is in, rejoicing in the schadenfreude experienced by the candidates who so desperately want to make it through and be accepted by the all-powerful interviewer. It boils down to power-tripping that adds very little value to a meticulous selection process.

That’s why I try to deconstruct this framework. Hiring is not about us evaluating candidates. It’s about trying to establish whether or not fundamentally there is a cultural and behavioral fit. We will also consider past experience and skills but as secondary to the decision making the process. The primary driver is the fit and both the candidate and the interviewer are discovering together whether the fit is there or not.

Even though it’s straight-forward, deconstructing the current paradigm is not easy given how ingrained it is in our thought-process. Deconstruction is a multi-pronged process and it involves the following elements:

1. Get out of the Evaluator chair. You are no different, no better than the person you are interviewing. Be normal, be human and make others feel comfortable. This gives people the chance to disarm and to forget about having to prove themselves. Having the chance to see people in their natural state is the greatest revelation you can attain from an interview. No one I know can work in interview mode all the time. It’s not sustainable. Work is stressful and the hours are long. That’s why we want an interview process that leads us to find people who feel naturally comfortable in our culture.

2. Focus on the behavioral aspects. We tend to be very impressed with big names and big titles on people’s resumes. But we are not hiring their education nor their work experience. We are hiring a person. And that’s what we want to get to know. How do they react when feeling examined? How do they feel when we are smiling? How do they feel about being confronted? How do they deal with pressure? And you don’t find out these behavioral trends from asking about them. You find out about these things by getting to know a candidate. Go beyond your own biases and use your senses.

3. I strongly advise candidates not to work with us. Why should we try to pretend that it’s great working here? It’s not. It’s work. Most people would not choose to work here if they had 50 billion dollars in the bank. That’s just a fact of life. We don’t want people choosing us for the wrong reasons. Paying bills, needing a job, wanting to advance a career. Those are all legitimate pursuits that most of us share. But we want to hire people based on the deeper motivational drivers. We want to find people who want to be a part of something bigger than their own selves, who do not mind getting into constructive conflicts and will stand by their opinion. We understand that people that we bring into the company are the very fabric of the company’s soul, which most of us refer to as culture.

So we deconstruct the traditional hiring paradigm by forgetting about skills and focusing on the person. We deconstruct the interview paradigm by not positioning ourselves as interviewers but as partners who are working together to find out whether or not this is indeed a good fit for all of us. We find out more about people when they get a chance to speak more honestly and when we truly hear what is being said. We forget about the labels and the brands that are pegged to resumes and we look at the intersection of values and goals. Those are the pillars for a solid and prosperous relationship. And that’s what hiring is in the end. A relationship.

About the Author

Gabriel Fairman, Founder and CEO of BureauWorks, has been working on transforming localization business processes into technology over the past 15 years. Over the past 5 years he has focused on developing algorithms that make sense of bigger data patterns in order to predict translator performance based on data obtained through peer reviews. The challenge on building AI towards that end is that translations can be great and still be significantly changed by reviewers. As changes are for the most pasty subjective, there is no direct correlation that can be established to easily determine the quality of translations based on simple data sets. The challenge requires digging deeper into more complex correlations that allow translation quality to be managed through algorithms that can reliably pair the right linguists to any given document. Gabriel’s focus is to think systemically as opposed to through a causality framework in order to solve these harder problems through AI.

Workplace Wellbeing—A Strategy for Leadership

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StrategyDriven Talent Management Article |Workplace Wellbeing|Workplace Wellbeing—A Strategy for LeadershipWorkplace wellbeing should feature prominently in any successful organization’s strategy. Creating an environment in which a well-managed and highly motivated workforce can flourish can elevate your organization to huge success. It can exceed in positive workplace outcomes such as high levels of corporate social responsibility.

In our experience, a happy and engaged workforce delivers extra-role effort by the bucket-load. But where do you start on this journey? Further, how do you orient your organization to this perspective? Well the good news is this is relatively easy to achieve and does not cost thousands of dollars. Although marketing a well thought out wellbeing plan effectively is often overlooked, we can provide insight into how to avoid this, giving valuable advice garnered from considerable knowledge in this field over many years.

The criticality of effective workforce wellbeing plans engrained in business as usual, as part of the brand, is key to business success. A focus on continuous professional development will help employees authentically link wellbeing to leadership, ethics and integrity; allowing your business to thrive, remain highly competitive and have a strong social responsibility ethic underpinning all that it does. Employees flourish in an environment that creates this. Further, and with a focus on flourishing, an emphasis on the personal resilience of employees can pay huge dividends.

There is a plethora of models to improve personal resilience and we are particularly drawn to positive psychology, utilising Martin Seligman’s PERMA model for example. What’s in it for your people in terms of what they will gain, or not lose, from a situation is critical and needs to remain at the forefront of your thoughts when promoting your wellbeing strategy. This vital component is worthy of detailed exploration, as it clearly links to how people in the workforce can make their life better, and connect to the meaning and purpose that is so important to leading a healthy and successful working life. Get these factors right with your leaders and your strategy will be on exactly the right track.

About the Authors
StrategyDriven Talent Management Article |Workplace Wellbeing|Workplace Wellbeing—A Strategy for LeadershipStrategyDriven Talent Management Article |Workplace Wellbeing|Workplace Wellbeing—A Strategy for LeadershipIan Hesketh, PhD and Sir Cary Cooper, CBE are the authors of Wellbeing at Work: How to Design, Implement and Evaluate an Effective Strategy. Both are associated with the National Forum for Health and Wellbeing at Work (UK). For more information visit: https://www.koganpage.com/product/wellbeing-at-work-9780749480684