How To Better Engage Your Employees

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Engaging your employees benefits everyone; your staff is happier, and the business experiences more success. It’s worth your time and energy to find ways that help build a collaborative environment. It’s no longer acceptable to hire people and let them figure it all out on their own.

Guide your employees and make them feel like part of a team. They’ll work hard and be more satisfied overall. Leadership has to step up and take the initiative if you want to experience real change. You’ll be glad to know that there are many practical ways for increasing engagement and creating a culture that encourages involvement and new ideas.

 

Ask for their Feedback

You don’t know what your employees want or what motivates them unless you ask. Be vocal and ask your staff to speak up when they have opinions or grievances to share. Include them in meetings and hold brainstorming sessions to get their input on important initiatives. Have a spot where they can go to share ideas and suggestions on a daily basis. This will not only engage them, but build a deeper connection between each other and different levels of employees.

Innovate Mundane Tasks

Take a look around and dive deep into getting a better idea of what your employees do all day. For example, if you have a call center, try sprucing it up by implementing call center gamification. It’s fun, it’s exciting, and it creates a better work experience. Upgrade your technology, innovate repetitive tasks and always be thinking about how to make your environment more engaging for your staff. This will keep them interested in their work and make them want to be loyal to the company for taking such good care of them.

Collaborate with Departments

Silos make it difficult for anyone to feel excited about their job. It makes you feel like you’re the only one doing any work and you never get the bigger picture of how the business works. Engage your employees by having them work together, no matter which department they’re assigned to. Create a company culture that’s informative of what others do on a daily basis, and that knows how to build relationships with each other, no matter their job or title. Set a goal to bring everyone together once a month or quarter and notice how much better everyone starts working together.

Assign Coaches or Mentors

Hold your employees accountable for the work they do. Push and encourage them to work harder by assigning each person a mentor or coach. These meetings will help make sure that your staff members are getting the attention they deserve and progressing along nicely. Your employees will be focused on getting involved in their work and performing better, since they know someone’s watching.

Conclusion

It’s always a good idea to invest in your employees. Keep them around longer by engaging them on a daily basis. Be open about your initiative and seek additional ideas from staff and leadership members.

Improve Your Employees’ Production Levels by Changing Up the Food and Beverage Options On-Site

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As the owner of a company, you’re always looking to find ways that improve the production level of your employees. Today’s employers know more about what motivates and drives their employees than ever before, which is helping them to enjoy some fabulous results. While there are all kinds of routes you can take, one that you may not have considered is the fuel you’re offering staff.

Pretty much every company, no matter the size, offers on-site snacks, beverages, and even meals for employees to access. Well, here’s the thing, did you know that the options you provide can actually have an impact on their productivity levels since the food and beverages affect their overall health? Let’s take a closer look.

What Fast Foods and Snacks Do to a Person’s Health

In order to get an idea of just how important the right food and drink choices are, one needs to look closer at what fast foods and snacks do to a person’s overall health. As reported in middaydaily.com, those under the age of 30 who consume fast food at least three times a week suffer higher levels of anxiety and stress. This is believed to be brought on by the high levels of fatty acids that exist in fast food.

As far as the healthiest diet goes, the same study went on to show that the Mediterranean diet is indeed one of, if not the healthiest, choices. This is a diet that is rich in fish, seafood, tubers, legumes, and vegetables.

Experts recommend looking at food the same way you look at fuel for an automobile. Sure, the regular fuel will give you what you need to get the job done, but when you go for premium fuel (the healthy food choices), the performance will be that much better. Food has a huge impact on a person’s cognitive performance, which plays into a person’s decision-making skills. If you want your employees to make sound decisions, then better food options may be the answer.

What Can You Do to Help?

So, what can you do to help your employees make food choices that will impact their productivity in a positive way? Well, you can start by encouraging them to eat small meals and/or snacks more frequently. Forcing your employees to go hours and hours without any fuel is going to greatly affect their performance.

Ideally, your employees should get a break every couple of hours where they can have a quick snack and re-fuel, keeping their mind sharp. Not only that, but it helps employees from feeling sluggish, which can then lead to mistakes and errors in the workplace.

Research has shown that foods such as carrots, blueberries, whole grains, avocado, nuts, and dark chocolate all help with productivity levels. It can be beneficial to add these choices to your snack stations or on-site cafeteria/kitchen. As well, be sure that employees always have a supply of fresh water available to them, instead of just coffee.

Providing your employees with energy and brain-boosting foods won’t just benefit them, but the whole company.

Don’t Fire Your Employees, Improve Them!

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Now, when businesses begin to struggle, there are various places that you can look as a business owner to determine where things are going wrong. Perhaps your products just aren’t appealing to the current marketplace. All you need to do to rectify this is work on product design and development. Maybe your advertising isn’t drawing enough attention. You need to reconsider your marketing campaigns and the way that they are put out to consumers. Perhaps you could try out PPC marketing or sponsored social media advertising. But every now and then you may find that problems are a direct result of your staff base just not meeting your expectations and standards. Staff errors or incompetency can bring a business to its knees. After all, your employees are the backbone of your company! They’re the individuals who keep things together, interacting with your customers, sealing sales, and acting as the face of your brand. So what do you do if you find that the root of your company’s problems are the very individuals who are meant to keep things running smoothly? Well, many employers will simply fire their staff in their rage. However, this isn’t always the best answer to their problems. After all, it costs a surprising amount of money to source new staff. You also have to invest a lot of time in the process. Instead, why not look at improving your current employees? Here are a few ways to go about it!

Gather Staff Feedback

First things, first, you need to communicate effectively with your staff. Often, problems arise from deeper sources than sheer laziness. There may be underlying issues in your business practice that you are currently unaware of. Perhaps you need to upgrade your software to allow your staff to do their jobs more effectively. Maybe staff merely need to feel a little more appreciated to put proper effort in. Gathering staff feedback will help you to unearth issues and rectify them.

Offer Additional Education or Training

Your staff can never be too education or overly trained. So offer them the chance to expand their knowledge and improve upon their existing skillset. Put on role-specific training programmes, seminars, or training days. They will quickly become more proficient and confident within their positions. You can also engage in a little self-improvement in this area yourself. Something like msc business management could offer you a more in-depth understanding of how to run things as effectively and productively as possible.

Put on Team Building Activities

Your staff will always be better when they are working together. After all, every individual member will have specific knowledge or skills that work well alone, but put together almost anything could be achieved! Take a look at this creative list of team building activities for you to consider.

No matter what staff issues you face, never act hastily. Firing individuals should be an absolute last resort. Not only does a consistent, permanent staff base offer a sense of consistency in the workplace, but keeping staff content and comfortable in their positions will result in better brand loyalty and higher levels of productivity!

How To Ensure Employee Comfortability In Your Business’ Working Environment

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When it comes to success, your employees can have a huge impact on the level. You probably already have an extensive training programme in place to ensure your employees are well equipped and confident to give the best possible service. However, there are quite a few factors that can affect the efficiency of your employees, and therefore your overall business efficiency. Feeling tired, overwhelmed, and hungry can all be contributors to lack of concentration and an increase in human error.

Below are some ways you can ensure your employees are comfortable in the workplace and working at their highest capacity.

Provide An Outside Space

Being able to take a five-minute break for fresh air will help your employees to reduce stress levels, boost vitamin D levels and white blood cells that fight infection. Fresh oxygen also helps to energise you and help you to feel less overwhelmed, helping a big workload to feel much more manageable. If you do have employees who smoke, not being able to satisfy a craving will prevent their concentration being completely on their work, making mistakes highly likely. Providing aluminum canopies or something similar that provides shelter for your employees from the rain and too much sun will mean getting a fresh air fix will be possible in all weathers and seasons. You may think giving five-minute breaks when needed will be counter-productive to efficiency; however, small breaks at regular intervals can help to keep the brain working at maximum capacity, meaning that the time spent working is far more productive.

Make Sure There Is Sufficient Light

Low lighting, or having computer screens at too high of a brightness level, will put extreme stress on your employees’ eyes and could lead to permanent damage. On the other hand, being in direct sunlight will not only give your employees a headache due to eye strain, but also there is an increased risk of sunstroke and dehydration (see below). It is important to have vertical blinds or similar, so your employees are able to block out the sun when necessary, and have overhead lighting that is sufficient to ensure maximum eye comfort for your employees. Replacing any blown bulbs as soon as they are noticed should not be disregarded either.

Provide Water And Snacks

Dehydration can make your employees feel fatigued and develop a headache, which will severely affect their performance over the day as a whole. Providing fresh water that is readily available, either through a water fountain or specially allocated taps, will help to regulate your employees’ water levels, and help them to feel fresh and alert. H2O also helps to improve clearer thinking, helping your employees to problem solve quickly, take initiative, and stay focused. Hunger can also be extremely distracting, and although your employees will have a sufficient lunch break, you cannot predict when your stomach is going to start rumbling. Taking care of your employees by providing fresh fruit to snack on will mean they will reward you for your kindness by performing at an optimum level.

Hopefully, this has given you some ideas on how you can create a comfortable and focused atmosphere for your employees to work in, ensuring the procedures of your business are in well-equipped, capable hands.

3 Effective Strategies for Keeping Employees Focused on the Task at Hand

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The reason you worked so hard to complete an executive masters in business administration program is that you wanted to make a difference. Over time, you saw areas which could have been handled more efficiently and at lower costs within your organization. Although you were already in a position of authority, you felt you needed better skills to keep things flowing smoother in accordance with best practices, as outlined in the company manual.

The one issue you kept running up against daily was keeping employees focused on the task at hand. You’ve finally gotten that online executive MBA degree and it’s time to put it to use building strategies to keep your team on task.

1. Complete an Assessment of Why and How Employees Become Distracted

The first step in building any strategy is to determine what it is you’d like to accomplish. The end goal sets the stage for any strategy because, by its very nature, a strategy is a roadmap to success. In this case, you are using your MBA to define common causes for distractions, in order to facilitate a more focused approach to the jobs at hand.

2. Create New Policies to Avoid Distractions

One of the best strategies is one in which you set new rules. In the course of assessing the source of distractions, you’ve discovered that altogether too much talking is going on about things totally unrelated to what they are currently working on. While you don’t want to be a hard taskmaster, you do want to keep things moving along to increase productivity. Why not set a rule that talking is allowed only in terms of job-related issues and all other conversation is best left to the break room.

3. Keep Peripheral Distractions to a Minimum

As you studied for your executive masters in business administration online, you knew that you needed to be in a place where there were minimal distractions. As a result, you set aside one room in your home where you couldn’t hear the television and noises from the playroom couldn’t filter in. You can use the same strategy on the job! Reroute foot traffic through areas where employees aren’t sitting at desks or working on the line and try to keep announcements over loudspeakers to a minimum.

Research indicates that distractions on the job cost employers over $10,000 per person per year!

In the End – You’re the Boss

You can clearly see that distractions are costing your company a ton of money each and every year. Not only do distractions cut profits, but they also increase the risk of inferior quality of work. In fact, you may even want to open the floor for discussion among the very employees you’ve found to be most distracted while on the job. Their input could be invaluable. They might define a whole new set of issues they find distracting, after which you can devise strategies to reduce those as well.

Your job as an administrator is to devise and implement strategies. Reducing distractions is a great place to test your newfound skills. Don’t let it be your last.