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

How To Make Sure You Hire The Right Person For The Job

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StrategyDriven Talent Management Article | How To Make Sure You Hire The Right Person For The JobHiring the wrong person can be a costly mistake and leave you feeling frustrated that you have no one to complete the work that needs to be done. Therefore, it’s extremely important that if you want your organization to succeed, that you hire the right person for the job each and every time.

There are steps you can take to help ensure you achieve this goal and aren’t wasting your time or anyone else’s. Remember that it’s never a bad idea to reach out to current employees when you’re on the hunt to fill positions to see if they have any suggestions before you go out looking elsewhere.

Work with A Specialist

There are companies such as Devonshire recruitment whose job and desire it is to help you fill positions at your workplace. They have a pool of candidates who are prepared to speak with you and will be a good fit right from the start. You can make sure you hire the right person for the job by being specific and transparent with your job description, and only bringing people in for interviews who align with your objectives and specific position requirements.

Invite Candidates to Take Psychometric Tests

There are dozens of psychometric tests such as The PI Behavioral Assessment Test, which help employers to filter out the best candidates for the benefit of their business.

These kinds of tests measure a candidate’s skill level in relation to problem-solving, ability to do the work, behavioral traits, and patterns and etc.

Contact References

It’s good practice to ask for several references from candidates on your final job application. Not only should you look to see who they are, but you should also take the extra step and time to contact them. You can learn a lot about an individual by how they’ve previously performed and what their strengths and weaknesses have been in the past. Ask the right questions and encourage the other person to be as candid and open as possible in their responses.

Hold Multiple Interviews

One interview isn’t going to give you enough time to figure out if the person you’re speaking with is right for the job. Therefore, it’s important to hold multiple interviews and in many different forms before hiring someone. For instance:

  • On the phone
  • Face-to-face
  • Interviews held by different leadership members
  • Interviews held by different department heads
  • Verbal and written tests

These are a few ways for how you can mix up the interview process and evaluate a candidate on their various skills and abilities to make sure they’re a good fit at your workplace. It’ll be helpful to get feedback from other people at your company as well to hear what they have to say about a potential candidate so you can compare notes.

Take Your Time

What’s going to help you out the most in your search to find the right candidate for the job is to go slow and take your time. Rushing through the interview process and failing to write a detailed job description is only going to hurt you and your company in the long run. Instead, take advantage of these suggestions for how you can make sure you’re hiring the right person for the job, and this way, they should also be more likely to stick around for the long-term.

How Educators Can Accommodate Varied Learning Styles

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Those who are educators will know that there are varied different learning styles and that to reach the understanding of your whole group; you need to be able to tap into each style equally. Whether working as a teacher, learning assistant, tutor, or a training provider in a workplace setting, it’s vital to consider how you can accommodate different learning styles.

Auditory Based Learners

Some of those in your learning setting will be auditory based learners. For these individuals, it’s essential that you put in place plenty of instances whereby they can listen to themselves and others. Such methods could include listening to task directions instead of reading them. For educators to accommodate these learners, it’s also a good idea to implement the use of podcasts in your sessions. You can use recording devices to have learners record themselves retelling vital information and then play it back. Provide audiotapes of your classes or training sessions for the same reason. Ensure that you read your students the learning material aloud and also have them read it out loud to one another. When auditory based learners have too much to read in their heads, it’s difficult for them to take it all in.

Kinesthetic Based Learners

Those who are kinesthetic based learners will absorb information better with a hands-on approach. Kinesthetic learners prefer to hold or touch to learn new things. Kinesthetic learners enjoy the principle of jumping in and trying things first! To aid these kinds of learners, you can help them to understand an idea with the use of physical objects. You could also make use of art supplies and allow students to move around and act things out. School Furniture and its layout, can help you to accommodate these types of learners. You might be able to use your furniture in a way that creates a great environment for kinesthetic learners. For example, by positioning the chairs in a circular shape facing each other or creating an open space to stand, move or create art on the floor.

Visual Based Learners

Visual learners gain the best understanding when they can observe and see things. They will produce their best work when they can look at demonstrations, diagrams, videos or pictures. If these learners can watch someone else complete the task at hand first; they will be able to absorb the information and produce their own results quickly. To accommodate visual-based learners, it’s a good idea to use flashcards, photographs, maps, flowcharts or video content. You can ask students to act out demonstrations for each other to watch and in this way, you’ll be catering to kinesthetic learners too.

When you are providing a class or a training session, you’ll always want to incorporate methods that appeal to every different learning style. By doing so, you’ll extend your reach and allow everyone in the group to reach their full potential. When your training session or class is complete, you can always ask your students for feedback so that you can make improvements ongoing. Training and education in the workplace or classroom, is best achieved by catering to every individual personally.