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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.

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.

How To Improve Your Leadership Skills

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Wanting to be a better leader is a good goal to have. You’ll be strengthening your chances at moving up in your company and helping your organization to succeed. It’s a great personal goal because you can take the skills you develop with you and use them in all areas of your life.

Think about when you’re managing employees in the office versus when you’re at home. It’s likely some of the skills carry over and help you succeed in both environments. You can’t simply want to be a better leader. You have to put in the hard work it takes to achieve results.

Find A Mentor

Your first plan of action should be to find a mentor who you admire and believe has strong leadership skills. Make it your goal to observe them in their element and take notes about why they’re admirable to you. Ask to have a meeting with them and discuss your goals and any tips they have for you. Try to connect on a regular basis and keep learning from them as you start implementing some of their suggestions into your daily life.

Be Innovative

Always be thinking ahead about how you and your business can take your industry by surprise. For example, the painting and decorating company athdecorating.co.uk decided to launch a website for marketing their business, which they hadn’t previously done. It’s a great way to get their services out there and in front of their target audience. Think about how you can do this at your company. Put yourself in charge of the project to make sure it goes smoothly. Show you’re a leader by being attentive, organized and assertive when discussing the details and assigning roles.

Ask for Feedback

Be open and honest with others about what you’re trying to achieve and ask for feedback. Approach people you work and interact with on a daily basis for their comments and suggestions for improvement. You may find some of what they say surprising and be able to use their advice to help you improve your leadership skills. You never know what other people are observing that’s difficult to see for yourself. Focus on what you’re doing right and be honest about where you’re struggling, so you can fix it.

Take Advantage of Professional Development Opportunities

You’re not going to progress by sitting around and feeling sorry for yourself that you’re not a top leader in your company. Be proactive and ask your company what they offer for leadership training. Take an online course or an in person training session that allows you to practice your skills in front of others. Use this as an opportunity to educate and challenge yourself to becoming a better leader, boss and partner at home. Always be learning and jumping on any training classes that will help build your skills.

Conclusion

Be glad that there are ways to improve your leadership skills, so you can keep moving forward in the right direction. Don’t worry about your weaknesses. Look at them as opportunities for growth.

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.

What Does It Take to Create a Good Design Team?

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A great design team is only as good as the staff within it. The team itself includes the personnel, all of their assigned roles within the team, personal objectives, their methodologies and software (like the new Altium designer 18 package), and the framework they use. When any of the above component parts of a team are missing or misaligned, things tend to go wrong or are placed at opposing sides which leads to difficulties completing tasks on time, if at all.

Multiple Roles or Single Roles

Depending on the person and the size of the team, it may be necessary for team members to perform multiple roles on a project. When mixing too many roles for a single employee, this can create difficulties as it’s both difficult for them to embrace collaborators for each of their distinctive roles, but more so when two or more of their roles conflict with each other with no one to act as a referee.

Some roles also don’t mix well with others. The person funding the project shouldn’t usually also be a designer on the project because their motivations may get muddled. Is it more important to create a better designed circuit board or website, or to keep to the development costs within the budget set by upper management? Where is the line drawn?

Every Team Member Has Professional Advancement

With advancement, we don’t necessarily mean a promotion. It’s important beyond position and money that an employee feels invested in the project and its outcome. It’s also useful when they feel that the project adds something new to their cache in the industry and is something that can go on their resume as a selling point.

When a project lacks that special something that’s different to what they’ve done before, or they’re not being allowed to advance in their knowledge and involvement, they begin to feel stagnant. In some senses, it doesn’t matter if they been given access to the cutting-edge Altium designer 18 software ahead of its release or been responsible for new areas of a design project, there must be something there to spike their interest and sustain it throughout completion of the project.

Successful Teams Are Often an Eclectic Mix

When looking at any design team, you’re unlikely to see a herd that all dress alike, talk alike and look somewhat similar. Diversity across the team is a good thing in many cases as is the previous project experience they bring to the table. New blood brings fresh perspectives and ideas on how to do things differently, more efficiently, or simply better. It’s important that the team leader embraces diversity in the ranks and does not see a culture developing where people who are different get hammered down until they conform. Conformity is usually the death of the type of creativity that’s badly needed in great design execution.

Great design teams are carefully put together and managed. Every team is likely to be quite different to the next one. Embracing those differences rather than citing them as reasons why a previous failure occurred, encourages the best creatives to work in a team environment that they might otherwise find too stifling.