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15 Ways to Show Appreciation for Remote Employees
Did you know that over 40% of the American workforce has been working remotely? Also, according to one study, 40% of employees who were ignored by colleagues reported that they were seriously disengaged from their work. Whether you have a few remote employees or hundreds, you may wonder how you can show them your appreciation.
While you can't meet them all in person, you can use video calls, emails, and other tools to share the love. Then, you can make your remote employees feel like part of the team and improve employee engagement.
Keep reading for some employee appreciation ideas on how to keep remote workers motivated and recognized.
Celebrate the Small Things
One of the easiest ways to show appreciation for your remote employees is to celebrate small accomplishments. For example, maybe you and your team members always struggle with technology during a virtual meeting.
Whenever you have a meeting where you don't encounter issues, take note of that. Congratulate your remote employees for getting through the meeting without typical problems.
You can also celebrate getting assignments and projects in on time. That may sound like the bare minimum, but it can be hard when everyone is working remotely. While working from home achievements can be easily ignored.
It doesn't matter how small something is; don't be afraid to celebrate it. You don't need every celebration to be huge,a small gesture of appreciation from the organization’s management goes a long way in combating feelings of isolation.
Share Positive Customer Reviews
You can also show appreciation for your remote employees by sharing positive reviews from clients or customers. Whenever your remote team's hard work goes over well, let them know that customers are happy.
Consider sending an email newsletter each month or week with positive reviews. Or you can use a platform like LIKE.TG to help recognize your remote team with effective employee recognition software. Workmates has a “kudos” feature that you can use to build a culture of recognition with rewards or give out a shout-out to specific employees.
You can also email or message your employees individually when you know they are the specific person on the project. Telling employees about their hard work can make employees feel great.
Now, you shouldn't lie about customer reviews if they tend to be negative. However, you can use those negative reviews to help make your team better by reworking your processes.
Talk About Your Personal Achievements
Work is important, but there's more to life than your career. When you get a chance, ask remote employees about their personal lives, such as their family or other activities.
You can then see if an employee has recently bought a house or had a child. Or maybe an employee just ran a mile or started a new hobby that they enjoy.
All of these are examples of personal achievements, and they're just as important as work achievements. If an employee has done something exciting outside of work, share that with the rest of the team.
Other employees can congratulate their coworkers, and that employee can feel good. Don't pressure your employees into talking about their personal lives, but don't be afraid to share exciting news when an employee does have some.
Pick an Employee of the Month
If you want to choose an employee of the month, you do need to be careful. Sometimes, this can lead to jealousy and tension between coworkers, but it can be a good option if you do it right.
Make sure you choose an employee who is doing a lot of good, hard work for your company. You can even have employees nominate each other to help make your decision.
Then, you can choose employees that other employees like and admire. You can give a shoutout to the employee of the month at your next meeting or on social media.
Or you can sit down with them and ask a few questions about their work, such as productivity tips. Then, you can share the interview to recognize your employees in a company newsletter.
Learn more on; how to start an employee of the month program in your organization.
Acknowledge achievements on video calls
Research studies have shown that public recognition is one of the best ways to appreciate your employees. Since employees are working from home, public recognition has been difficult. One great idea to appreciate employees is to recognize the efforts of an employee on your company intranet.
Food delivery and takeout discounts
Most people are running out of recipes to try out with their loved ones at home. Cooking meals can be exhausting every night, especially for parents who are trying to balance work-life. One of the best ways to show appreciation for employees who put in extra hours is by offering them discounts and credit to food delivery apps and giving local restaurants gift cards. A great way to do that is through customizable employee rewards software.
Share Important Dates
Another great recognition idea is to share important dates for your employees, such as their birthdays. If you have a record of them, you can also get the dates when each employee started their job. When someone's birthday or work anniversary rolls around, you can give them a shoutout in Workmates’ social intranet. Tell them how much you appreciate having them on your team.
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In the case of a birthday, you can send a card or a small gift. And a work anniversary is the perfect time to do an annual review where you can praise the employee.
Another way to praise all of your remote employees is to dedicate a day each month or year. Then, you can show appreciation for the team as a whole.
Send a Gift
Whether it's someone's birthday or not, there are multiple great opportunities for sending gifts to employees. You can send something simple, like a gift card to that employee's favorite restaurant.
Or you can let them order lunch using a company card. Then, your employee can enjoy that meal or purchase knowing that their employer loves having them on the team.
This is another great way to use the information you get regarding employees' personal interests. You can tailor each gift to the employee to show that you care.
Sending something small once or twice a year can be a great way to remind your remote employees that they're part of the team. Gifts can be an excellent addition to any peer-to-peer recognition ideas or in general to employee recognition programs.
Provide Professional Development
Professional development is important whether someone works remotely or at the office. If you haven't provided professional development for your remote team, it’s never too late to begin.
Consider offering courses or sessions to help your employees enhance their skills in the workplace. Investing in your employees’ development will improve their job performance, enhance their engagement, and give them a competitive advantage while fostering a culture of continuous learning.
The upfront costs may seem a lot at first, but in the long term, it brings a lot of benefits to your employees and your company.
If you can’t afford to send your employees courses or other materials, explore creative solutions like crafting an email series where you can empower remote employees with valuable knowledge just by including daily tips or insights.
Make Work a Game
Now, you don't need to make work something optional, but you do want to make it enjoyable. When people work from home, they can feel lonely and like there's a disconnect between them and the team.
Fortunately, you can use gamification to make work more interesting. If you run a remote sales team, for example, you can create a leaderboard. As someone makes more sales, they can earn more points and advance to the top.
You can also provide other incentives to encourage people to get their work done. If a leaderboard doesn't work, you can use flashcards or fun characters to make work fun.
Then, people can look forward to starting work each day, even though they're not in the office. Having a fun company culture can be a great way to show appreciation for all of your employees.
Take a Day Off
If your remote employees work from home for many days without much of a break, give them the day off. Your employees can take the time to relax or catch up on things in their personal life.
It’s a simple, yet effective idea for workers’ appreciation that will help them relax. Many people don’t feel comfortable turning off the phone or leaving emails unanswered on their days off because they are afraid to lose their employer's trust.
You can give the day a name, such as an employee appreciation day. Or you can simply tell your remote employees that it's time for them to take a break.
If you can't afford for your team to take off a full day, you can have them take the afternoon off. And if that's too much time, you can let people stop working an hour or two early.
Either way, giving your employees some extra free time can be a great way to make them feel good. When they return to work, they may have more energy, so they can enjoy work and get more done.
Schedule a Virtual Hangout
One of the easiest appreciation rewards is setting up virtual happy hours or game nights with the employees. You may already have video meetings to talk about company updates or client projects. However, most video conferencing programs allow for unlimited meetings.
Consider using one of those meetings to host a virtual hangout session for your remote employees. You can set this up at the end of the day or week, and you can have employees bring their own drinks or food. You can catch up on what’s happening outside of work or play online games together.
Then, your employees can get to know each other outside of work. They can talk more about their lives and see who they work with on a daily basis.
If the first one is successful, you can have virtual happy hours each month or week. That way, employees can connect more with their coworkers.
To learn even more about managing remote teams and keeping employees working at home highly engaged, download our ebook now.
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Be More Flexible
One of the best employee appreciation ideas is to give workers more flexibility. If you usually ask people to work a traditional schedule, consider letting people work when they work best.
As long as you don't have to do work at a specific time, this can be a great option. Remote employees are busy in 2021, so they may not be able to stay focused for eight hours straight.
Consider letting your employees work earlier or later, depending on their schedule. Then, they can get focused and be more productive when they do work.
Celebrating Your Remote Employees
Showing appreciation for employees in the office can be as easy as playing fun music or bringing in group lunches each month. But recognition rewards aren't as easy when you have remote employees.
Fortunately, you can find multiple great opportunities to celebrate and show appreciation to your remote team, such as virtual happy hours. Even though you aren't all together, you can still connect with everyone at work.
Do you need help showing your employees appreciation? Learn more about the LIKE.TG’s employee recognition program.
Provide equipment for remote work
One of the best ways to appreciate remote workers is by providing them with equipment that will allow them to work and achieve their daily goals easily. Most remote workers suffer from neck and back pain and bad posture due to poor working conditions at home. And this negatively impacts their health over time.
Your organization can fight these health issues by providing essential office equipment that alleviates stress. Start by creating a list of work-from-home equipment that your employees will need. And send it out to them to ensure that you don’t miss any important equipment. After receiving their requests, have the equipment shipped to their places of work directly. This will not only boost employee engagementbut also cut healthcare costs in the future.
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About Author:
This article is written by a marketing team member at LIKE.TG. LIKE.TG is a leading provider of proven HR solutions, including recruiting, onboarding, employee communications engagement, and rewards recognition. Our user-friendly software increases employee productivity, delivers time and cost savings, and minimizes compliance risk.
How to Motivate and Manage a Remote Team Effectively
The Coronavirus pandemic has been an accelerator for remote work.
Many people were forced to find new ways of getting their work done in the wake of a global pandemic. For many, this shift is permanent, and chances are your employees might never see a cubicle again!
There have been mixed reactions by people to the changing remote work environment. For example, based on a recent study:
98% of people would like to work remotely for part of their time or the rest of their careers
70% are happy about the amount of time they are working remotely
19% would like to work remotely more often
Only the 11% would like to work remotely less often
It is evident from the stats that employees can have many benefits from remote working.
Like any other change in business, remote work has resulted in some challenges for business owners, owing to its novelty and sudden implementation.
As a business owner, the chances are that you have the experience of working with a remote team at some point, even before Covid. If your team is still working remotely and plans to do so for a while, you need to implement some strategies to help you make the most out of a remote work environment.
The Challenges of Remote Work
While remote working is exceptionally beneficial for employees and businesses worldwide, most managers and company leaders are not familiar with the challenges of managing remote employees. Remote working differs from typical work in many ways, even though one could argue that the tasks are the same.
According to research by Buffer, there are significant challenges to remote working:
One of the biggest challenges of remote working is loneliness. The human factor is the most relevant point. Indeed, employees can be annoyed by an office full of people, full of activity, and the boss checking on them every hour until it is over.
Human interactions, socializing, and being around others are part of life and most people’s everyday habits and uses. Loneliness can create depression and other health problems if not dealt with properly. Needless to say, that work efficiency will also be affected.
We need to encourage communication with the other team members, taking regular walks outside, talking with family, and exercising outdoors amongst the workforce to maintain good mental health and high productivity.
Other significant challenges to take into account when dealing with remote employees are:
Communication problems: It is not only the lack of small talks and coffee chats. The lack of human contact for long periods can bring an employee to misunderstand the intent behind work instructions.
Feeling left out: Remote employees feel left out because they miss an opportunity to connect with managers and other employees. Based on an Indeed survey, 37% of remote employees think they are less visible and will not get promoted.
But, how to prevent and overcome remote working challenges? With the Pandemic still impacting some parts of the world, it's a now-or-never situation for businesses to be efficient with remote working.
Ready to get your business back up on its feet? You'll need a workforce that can function in any environment, and your employees will also be more likely to stick around in the long run.
This post uncovers some actionable advice on managing your remote team so you can generate better results for your business while ensuring that your team stays motivated and experiences the required work-life balance.
Let’s get started!
Hire the Right People
The best way to ensure that your remote employees are happy and productive is to hire people who will be a good fit for working remotely. It can be hard at first to find just the right person, but after you do, it'll all feel like it was worth it.
Hiring people for remote work offers the flexibility to hire from anywhere in the world, which was not encouraged previously as business owners preferred to choose only people near the office premises. Even though there is higher flexibility in hiring remote employees, there are specific traits to look for in a potential candidate.
Ideal candidates are people who:
Have already worked remotely before
Have demonstrated responsibility
Are great team members
Have high communications skills
Can work independently
Have strong work ethics
People with remote working experience are a plus because they have already done it, know how it is measured, and what is required to perform efficiently. People who are just starting may not know what they are going into and experience problems. Typically, someone who has already worked from home has a system that allows them to separate work life from personal life.
The following steps will help you find your perfect match:
Research remote work opportunities in different industries and companies
Create a list of desired skills, qualifications, and experience
Search for appropriate positions online or through referrals
Prepare an interview plan with questions that address skill level and personality fit
Communicate Often and Openly
While working remotely has its fair share of benefits, the constant communication gaps can sometimes get overwhelming and challenging.
Communication is critical with remote employees. Make sure to communicate often and openly to ensure everyone is on the same page. It includes setting up the business with essential tools to communicate with remote teams. You can leverage various strategies to ensure you stay in touch with your team.
Video conferencing and the more traditional yet effective VoIP phone systems for small businesses are never a bad idea.
Don't underestimate how much time it takes to establish a remote working relationship. Staying in touch and chatting once or twice daily is crucial for building rapport and having an open dialogue about any problems.
Set Clear Expectations and Deadlines
It can be hard to set clear expectations and deadlines while you’re assigning projects to your team in a remote setting. This is because you cannot see your employees face-to-face or get their feedback in person.
Try giving specific instructions instead of general ones to solve this problem. For example, if you want an employee to finish a project within the next two days, you can tell them that they need to work for four hours on the project today and three hours the next day.
Employing one of the efficient project management software can help your team stay informed of tasks, changes in plans, timelines, and overall strategies, making them feel part of a greater plan.
Establish a Process for Feedback
Establish actionable feedback (positive and constructive) processes to ensure that your remote team is always on the same page and that you don’t just hear what they want to tell you.
The benefits of constructive criticism are many: it helps employees improve their skills, fosters better working relationships, drives growth through healthy competition, and ensures accountability.
Constructive criticism can often be shared in a way that doesn't make employees feel attacked or demoralized. At the same time, it's essential to have formality because people won't take it as seriously without it.
Be Flexible
Working remotely can be difficult at first, but teams need to focus on their goals. Be flexible with work hours and locations, but do not let your team slack off. Instead, keep them focused on their daily targets. For example, your sales manager might not be fully committed to the monthly target while working remotely. You can divide the monthly goals into smaller, daily goals to ensure you’re on the right track.
Your project management software will come in handy here to set targets and deadlines for each team member. A manager can update the system with tasks and instructions while at the same time allowing flexibility.
It is essential to clearly define the goals and results, and then allow the employees to develop a plan. In short, you should focus on outcomes, not on activities. This practice will help increase engagement and empower employees.
Following this, creativity and ownership are enhanced. It is challenging to micromanage people, and no one likes it either. Therefore, it is better to develop other practices.
Some form of remote working could be bound to a schedule, like call centers or customer support. In this case, you have to figure out a work schedule for each team member to cover business hours. Besides those instances, remote working can be flexible with deadlines that have to be met.
Keep Company Goals Clear
Be proactive in keeping your remote employees engaged with company goals and initiatives outside their day-to-day work tasks. People working remotely can feel left out and not part of the team. Setting common goals and keeping them informed on the results can assure them that they are participating in something bigger than their daily work schedule.
This will keep your employees invested in company goals and initiatives and can be used as an alternative way of rewarding their hard work.
To learn even more about managing remote teams and keeping employees working at home highly engaged, download our ebook now.
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Hold One-on-One Meetings Regularly
Holding one-on-one meetings can serve to check in with each employee about how they're feeling about the work, what's going well, and what could be improved. Such meetings can also provide an opportunity to give them feedback on their performance and ask questions about how you can help them succeed at their job.
With the right tools, it is easier than ever to communicate with remote locations. You can choose a free platform like Google Meet or go with a paid plan from Zoom. The good thing is, the options go beyond these two and you can choose from hundreds of the best video conferencing software.
Meetings and communications are the fuel to remote work. Part of this is to make the employee feel motivated and engaged. Not all employees need to be called as often as others. Some may require less interaction due to the nature of their job or the ability to work independently.
Create a Culture of Trust
In a remote work environment, employee-employer relationship trust is of the essence. Employees need to feel comfortable taking risks without fear of being judged by others in the company (i.e., don't micromanage)
If you want a team of people that stick around for a while and want to keep them motivated and excited, you have to create a very distinct and defined company culture. A good vibe can have an overall significant impact on the overall success.
Encourage autonomy without micromanaging; trust that your employees know best when it comes to getting things done efficiently within the scope of their responsibilities. Don't forget that you hired them because they are experts at what they do!
Encourage Personal Development
It is essential to encourage personal development through education or professional employee training for those who want to grow in their career path or learn new skills to be more effective at their job.
Encouraging remote employees on your team will help build their skill set and the company assets simultaneously. When you do this, they know that you care for everyone and about their future.
It builds confidence in the company, boosts team morale, and adds value for everyone. You don’t have to spend tons of money on training courses. There are economical online course platforms that you can use for training employees.
There are many benefits to encouraging personal development for your remote team. It will help them keep up with the latest trends and technological changes that can improve their productivity or performance. When you expand, you can consider creating online courses for your employees, covering each aspect of their work.
By providing them education courses, you'll be investing in their growth as individuals who will undoubtedly result in a higher morale and retention rate.
Have Fun Activities with the Team
Make sure to take time for informal conversations and fun activities with your remote team. These virtual team-building activities are important ways to maintain relationships, build trust, and motivate employees.
It's easy to get wrapped up in work, but it's essential to take time away from your desk to engage with your employees on a personal level. Allowing yourself and your remote team members this time will make everyone happier and more productive.
For your inspiration, here are some fun activities companies can conduct to encourage interaction among remote employees:
Weekly Trivia contest
A pick into each other home
Online murder mystery to solve as a team
Solve an escape room as a team
Online office games
Team building Bingo
Companies are getting creative in selective team-building activities and fun games for their employees.
Unfortunately, focusing on team building is not a priority for many team managers. They assume that their employees don’t care about connecting with other co-workers. But in reality, fun activities combat loneliness, improve productivity, and build relationships.
Takeaway
Managing a remote team presents unique challenges. It is quite different from supervising a typical office scenario. The most common challenges include communication, motivation, making a remote team feel included in the overall business objectives, and keeping them improving personally and professionally.
Since remote work is expected to rise in the coming years, managers and business owners must become familiar with these problems and learn how to solve them. It starts with hiring the right individuals fitting for remote working to establish new routines and habits during the daily production.
The above points should give you a good idea of how to manage a remote team successfully. Good luck!
About Author: Martin Luenendonk is a 3x serial entrepreneur with a deep passion for digital business models and marketing innovations. He is the Founder at cleverism.com and founderjar.com
5 Ways Managers Can Help Teams Grow Leading by Example
Throughout history, leaders have paved the way for progress, inspired people to great deeds, and encouraged team and business growth. A good leader is an ambitious, supportive, and honest person, and one that understands the importance of facilitating successful professional relationships. Let’s take a look at five ways managers can help teams grow by leading by example. When a leader isn’t afraid to get their hands dirty, the team is more likely to follow their direction.
Get Involved
A leader doesn’t give orders and merely expects obedience. A good leader gets involved, oversees the task at hand, and guides the team toward progress.
Being a manager doesn’t mean you’re above anyone, but that you have an extra responsibility to inspire and motivate - and have more at stake when it comes to the team’s failures and successes. People respect leaders who get down in the dirt with the team and stand beside them rather than in front of them.
Empathy puts you in someone else’s shoes, so you can realize a situation or problem from their point of view. Empathy is an important leadership skill, acting as a bridge for facilitating meaningful personal relationships with others. This can help expand your worldview and make you more comfortable with the team as a whole, and vice versa.
Get involved in your projects. Ask team members for feedback on both the project and on your leadership. The best way to move forward is to be aware of any shortcomings, gain insight from others, and work to improve yourself and the team. By your example, they’ll learn to improve themselves, and thus, you’ll create the ultimate powerhouse of productivity, trust, and inspiration.
Honesty And Integrity
There’s nothing more inspiring in a leader than honesty and integrity. These two attributes will always matter to leadership because, without them, the basic foundation of any successful relationship—trust—can’t be cultivated. Honesty is telling the truth, and integrity in maintaining trustworthy conduct, especially when no one else is looking.
The two are halves of an all-important whole that all leaders should master. Trust is always a two-way street. Managers can’t expect their teams to be honest with them if they themselves are not honest with their team members. As a leader, part of leading by example means being honest with yourself as much as with others.
Admit when you’re wrong. Own your mistakes. Be honest about where you’ve fallen short. Be honest with your team, but never be “brutally” honest. Some believe the best approach is to be brutally honest in order to spur change in a person. In reality, this approach is more likely to create feelings of bitterness and lower self-confidence among team members. Be supportive, confident, and don’t tear other people down. Honest feedback should be constructive.
Recognize Teachable Moments And Take Advantage Of Them
Teachable moments are some of the most important situations a leader can share with the team. These moments can bring the team together, and allow both the leader and each team member to lend their own perspectives and expertise to solve a problem.
Look for times when the team is mismanaging a project, operating from a one-sided view, or would like an outside perspective. Sometimes when team members are stuck in a project, they can’t see past the nitty-gritty to the overarching goal. That’s where good leaders can come in, be the extra set of eyes, and offer a fresh perspective to keep the project on track. Effective managers recognize these moments, take the time to share their knowledge with their team, and reinforce those lessons with future reminders and encouragement.
For these teachable moments to have an impact, managers need to have a solid understanding of their team and how each member functions. When a team respects you and your perspective, the lessons are more likely to stick. Some lessons last a lifetime, and the simplest moments can turn into the most valuable ones.
Master Remote Leadership
While working remotely can be a challenge for the team, it’s also an opportunity to venture into new territory, and perhaps even expose some hidden skills you or the team never knew you had.
Remote leaders can be inspiring in the same way as in-person leaders. The changing landscape of our workplaces has created new expectations from employees and management alike. The first step to bridging the gap is by clearly defining those expectations. Let employees know what you expect from them. Remind them when necessary. And, in turn, listen to what they expect, too. Good leaders are also good listeners!
Establishing clear goals is an effective way to organize and keep your team aligned, especially in a remote environment. Consider utilizing a framework like the classic SMART goals framework, which suggests that goals should be specific, measurable, attainable, results-oriented, and time-bound.
Make sure to take advantage of the technology available to you. There are conferencing services, project management software, and so much more than ever at our disposal to bring teams together and facilitate a collaborative environment regardless of location.
Stand For Social Justice
Standing for social justice as a leader means readily including all available perspectives and creating diverse teams. Reach out to candidates from different backgrounds, cultures, and ages to join your team. Don’t limit yourself to one vision of the “ideal” candidate. Thanks to online hiring, you can recruit people from all over the world. Don’t pass up that opportunity—you might just find some amazing talent in the last place you’d expect.
Don’t support or excuse negative behavior like racism or sexism. As a leader, what you do in response to these behaviors can set a harmful tone or helpful precedent. When you ignore or dismiss such behavior, you’re essentially saying that it’s okay in your place of work.
Never alienate your workforce for the sake of one person. Inclusivity is a powerful tool in the workforce. To maximize its potential, leaders need to embrace new perspectives and encourage inclusivity and tolerance on their teams. If you lead by example, the team is more likely to follow.
Putting This Into Application
How successful you are in leading by example will ultimately rest on two factors: consistency and follow-through. Ensure you follow through on your words and set a consistent pattern of behavior, as both serve as signals to your employees that they can, and should, mirror your work ethic.
If, for example, you establish a rule for everyone to clock out of the office at 5:00 p.m., you should follow this rule just as closely as you expect everyone else to follow it. Your team may feel apprehensive to leave at 5:00 p.m. if you stay late to get more work done, and even begin staying late themselves—which defeats the purpose of the rule.
Examine your own behavior closely and regularly. If you criticize others for interrupting during a call, but you yourself constantly do it, you need to adjust your behavior accordingly. Otherwise, you risk eroding your team’s trust and respect towards you, especially if you allow this type of double standard to prolong. When appropriate, accompany your behavior change with a verbal acknowledgment of your previous behavior, as this can help reestablish the precedent that you not only are self-aware but are as good as your word.
The Bottom Line
Managers are important to the growth and success of their teams, but leading by example is by far the best way to reach them and help them grow. Remember that honesty, integrity, and empathy will always be important attributes of a good leader and that being inclusive and standing for social justice can set a positive precedent in your workplace. When people feel supported by their leaders, they can do extraordinary things. Don’t be an average leader—be a great leader by keeping these five considerations in mind.
To learn even more about managing remote teams and keeping employees working at home highly engaged, download our ebook now.
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About Author: Jamie Davidson is the Marketing Communications Manager forVast Conference, a meeting solution providing HD-audio, video conferencing and web streaming bringing teams together to work done
How the Workplace Can Help to Improve Employee Health and Wellbeing
A person residing in the UK spends around 3,515 full days at work throughout their life. This is a huge amount of time from a person’s life. Breaking it down to simpler figures, employees tend to spend 34 hours and 26 minutes on average at work in a week.
To stay fit, one must follow a proper diet. The diet just doesn’t include food; it includes what you watch, what you read, what you listen to, and whom you spend your time with.
To stay healthy physically and mentally, you need to pay attention to everything that you absorb. Since people spend so much time at their workplace regularly, it is important for them to have a healthy environment. The workplace has a huge role to play in an employee’s health and wellbeing.
A healthy workplace improves employee’s health behaviors, reduces elevated health risks, significantly reduces your health care cost, and prevents you from paying high fees to therapists. Besides that, your well-being improves productivity, is likely to reduce absenteeism, improve relations with your colleagues and co-workers. The most important is that it helps in sustaining high employee morale.
Here are a few ways how the workplacescan help improve employee health and wellbeing.
Encouraging Healthy Eating and Physical Activity
Food contributes directly to a person’s health. Eating healthy will keep you fit and active. A healthy body makes a healthy mind. Workplaces that support healthy eating habits among their employees are contributing to their health and wellbeing.
Soft drink vending machines are now being removed from the workplace. Some companies have also started programs that guide the employees about nutrition and a healthy diet. Besides that, budget-friendly plans are being provided to the employees that cannot afford to spend their entire month’s salary just on food. Fruits are being used as an evening time snack which is a healthier option.
You should also promote physical activity to improve employee health and reduce their stress levels by offering them gym facilities on-premise or giving them discounted gym memberships. You can also promote a physically active workplace by holding sporting events.
Use More Plants at the Workplace
There are numerous benefits of keeping plants indoors. The main job that they do is to naturally purify the air by taking in carbon dioxide and producing oxygen. Indoor plants at workplaces are also known to reduce employees’ anxiety and stress. They prevent employees from getting sick while also enhancing the ambiance.
Therefore, use plants to increase wellness. There are specific plants that are kept indoors which adjust to low sunlight and grow even in the presence of working air conditioners. Some low maintenance indoor plants which workplaces can keep to ensure the good health and wellbeing of their employees are:
Snake plant
ZZ plant
Spider Plant
Dracaena
Monstera Deliciosa
Introduction to Conflict in the Workplace(and How it Erodes Productivity Culture)
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Improving Indoor Air Quality
Poor air quality inside workplaces can cause “sick building syndrome.” This causes people to feel tired, dizzy, reduce concentration, and can also make the eyes itchy and watery. Improper ventilation at workplaces is the major cause that the poor air cannot escape out and fresh air cannot come in.
Synthetic materials that the building is made out of, chemical cleaners used on a daily basis, and the furnishing inside the office also contribute to the poor air quality inside the office. Air quality can be improved in the following ways, which will directly contribute to improving employee health:
Windows to be kept open so that the air flows in and out
Humidity levels to be kept below 60%
Reducing the usage of chemical cleaners
Servicing air conditioners regularly
Use air purifiers
Make sure cleaning is done properly
Stretching Breaks
Taking breaks while working is important to avoid exhaustion of your mind. Workers who care about their mental health and want to take breaks for reduced stress are sometimes afraid to take a break for fear of being presumed lazy.
Some people get so busy with work that they tend to forget to take a break. Sometimes they also forget to eat their lunch. Workplaces should allow employees to take a small break from work.
These breaks can be utilized to perform some stretching exercises that help in reducing muscle aches and eye stress. Stretching is a healthy exercise, and all the employees doing it together can be a lot of fun. In addition, breaks also enhance employee morale
Realize the Importance of Work-Life Balance
There is a difference in how machines are programmed to work and how humans are programmed to work. Understanding the employee’s potential and mental state and not overburdening the employees that they are forced into working overtime is one way the workplace can contribute to the wellbeing of their employees.
If the employee is mentally exhausted due to the workload, it can decrease the work quality and efficiency of the worker. To be able to give your best, you need to be mentally relaxed, and that is one thing workplaces need to understand. Allowing holidays, vacations, and sometimes early offs can help employees relax and stay healthy mentally as well.
Organizations can also provide benefits, such as health insurance, to promote the health of their employees. If they have health coverage, they will be more likely to visit the doctor before their health completely deteriorates. A healthy work environment is essential for employee productivity and perks, such as health insurance, are absolute.
Mental Health Training
We always see workplaces being concerned about the physical health of the employees. We have witnessed the use of safety equipment where employees possess the risk of physical injury. Fire-extinguishers are hanging on the walls of every office.
Just as caring about your employees’ physical health is essential, so is a concern for their psychological well-being. By providing mental health training to managers can help them in identifying if an employee is undergoing any kind of mental stress.
Be it due to work or personal reasons; workplaces should encourage the culture of helping out each other in such situations. These pieces of training are especially essential for the people working in the HR department as they are the ones who are coordinating with every employee.
Since mental health is being less stigmatized, creating a comfortable environment will allow employees to open up and seek health.
Ergonomic Equipment
Ergonomic equipment is designed to ensure the comfort and safety of the workers. Throw out your old, outdated, and non-ergonomic equipment, which is likely to cause injuries to employees. Replace it with fresh ergonomic mice, desks, office chairs, and monitors, etc., to reduce the risk of injuries and provide more comfortable workstations.
Using ergonomic equipment will improve employee productivity. You can use standing desks instead of sitting desks to avoid problems caused by sitting for a long time. Ergonomic screens are also built in a way that reduces the negative impact continuous light makes on the eye.
It may sound like a costly option; however, the quality and durability are worth investing in. Moreover, you would not have to worry about replacing or repairing them each year, so you are saving money by investing in ergonomic equipment.
This will make the workers feel more energized, adapt to a healthier work style and play a part in their mental health and wellbeing too.
Conclusion
Workplaces play an important role in making or breaking the personality of a person. That is the place we learn new things from every day. That is the place where we even go every day. The kinds of environment we get at our workplaces create a major impact in our daily life, including determining the status of our health and mental wellbeing.
About Author: This article is written by a marketing team member at LIKE.TG. LIKE.TG is a leading provider of proven HR solutions, including recruiting, onboarding, employee communications engagement, and rewards recognition. Our user-friendly software increases employee productivity, delivers time and cost savings, and minimizes compliance risk.
A Guide to Integrating Employee Engagement Platforms With ADP Canada
The Canada Human Resource Center issued a report that showed that 60% of Canadian employees are disengaged. Unhappy workers result in lost productivity. This costs North American businesses over $350 billion every year.
This is a staggering figure. But the great news is that there are many human resources information systems (HRIS) that help to improve employee engagement. This new digital landscape means limitless access to HR platforms for more effective human capital management.
This includes tools to help with:
Employee Communications
Onboarding
Performance Management
Payroll Time and Attendance
Industry leaders such as ADP Canada, have mastered the ability to provide small, midsized, or large businesses with effective HR solutions. These tools help you keep your employees happy.
Read on to learn more about these solutions and how you can implement them in your own business.
Ways to Improve Employee Engagement
Engaged employees are more productive. Businesses with higher productivity levels are better positioned to be more profitable. Here are a few ways to improve employee engagement in your organization:
Long-Term Strategies
Get It Right From the Start - Make a great first impression with an effective onboarding process for your new hires.
Train Managers to Engage Well - Your managers are the first point of contact for employees. Workers will rate an organization's engagement based on daily interaction with their managers. Have your managers trained in employee engagement best practices. It will help them empower and connect with their team.
Develop Your Employees - Let your employees know that you care about their development. Provide training opportunities that they can use in their current roles. But that can also help them advance to higher positions within the organization.
Assess and Improve Processes - Assessing processes will help to better streamline them. It will also eliminate inefficiencies.
Be Flexible - Establish flexible work schedules to promote better work/life balance.
Short-Term Strategies
Reinforce Your Core Values - Inspire your employees by reinforcing your company values and mission. This will also help to set the tone for the culture of your organization.
Engage Management - Model how employee engagement should look. Provide the example that your managers can follow. They can then implement it with their direct reports.
Provide Employees With Feedback - Feedback is the best way to let employees know how they are doing. Employees who receive feedback also tend to experience higher levels of engagement.
Let Your Employees Provide You With Feedback - Find out about engagement by asking. You can do this through employee engagement surveys. They provide an opportunity for employees to be candid. They will let you know what helps to keep them engaged and the things that don't.
Recognize and Reward Good Work - Recognition and rewards help to keep employees engaged. They will also want to do more for the organization.
Engagement Solutions by ADP Canada
These strategies seem easy enough, but you might be wondering where's the best place to start. LIKE.TG provides employee engagement solutions that can improve business results. They have integrated some of their solutions with the ADP Workforce platform.
LIKE.TG's integration with ADP and the ADP Marketplace will give your employees easy access to Workmates and Onboard solutions. If your business already uses ADP Workforce you can access LIKE.TG's payroll and HR options.
Onboard
LIKE.TG and ADP Workforce onboarding integration can help you get things right from the start. This amazing onboarding tool provides new employees with an easy-to-use self-service system. They can feel welcomed and 'at home' as they create their employee profile.
You can also create personalized portals. This will give them access to all their important HR documents. It also facilitates integration with ADP's payroll system. This ensures employee payments are accurate and on time.
Workmates
Workmates allows real-time communication and collaboration with employees. It facilitates remote teams and allows you to recognize and reward employees. You can integrate your ADP data into this platform as well.
This single platform allows you to share company news and create communities. You can share important project information and connect with employees regardless of their location. Workmates can help you to improve employee engagement. It increases job satisfaction, employee morale, and productivity.
The Perfect Solution
What's the ideal human capital management solution for businesses?
ADP's wider range of payroll and tax software solutions
LIKE.TG's employee engagement products
These are the only tools you need to help your employees reach their full potential.
Benefits of Having Engaged Employees
Employee engagement increases productivity. High productivity affects any organization's bottom line. But there are many other benefits of having engaged employees.
Increased Sales - Better customer service, quality, and productivity lead to more sales
Higher Stock Price - This is a natural result of higher productivity and sales
Greater Employee Safety - Employees that are more connected with their workplace will be more aware of their surroundings
Better Quality Products - Employees who care will want to produce high-quality products
Better Employee Health - When employees exercise more and eat healthier. This leads to less obesity and chronic diseases
Better Customer Service - Employees who care will want to provide optimal service to customers
Happier, More Content Employees - Recognition helps to motivate employees
Better Customer Service - Engaged employees care about their jobs and their customers
Greater Employee Satisfaction - Employees feel better about their jobs
Greater Employee Loyalty - Employees will stay at an organization where they feel successful and challenged by the work they do
Better Employee Work/Life Balance - Positive experiences at work spill over to the home
Higher Employee Retention Rates - Employees don't stay at an organization where they are unhappy
Lower Employee Absenteeism - Due to dedicated employees
Employee Engagement Made Easy
There is a reason why it is said that people are a company's most important resource. Employee engagement is crucial to the success of any company. Today's digital landscape facilitates better engagement with employees.
The right platform can make the implementation of employee engagement strategies easier. ADP Canada has combined their experience with LIKE.TG's globally recognized platform. It seamlessly integrates with ADP solutions providing a complete employee engagement system.
Contact us to request a demo. Learn more about the full range of LIKE.TG products, our business solutions, including ADP integration we can provide for your business.
About Author: This article is written by a marketing team member at LIKE.TG. LIKE.TG is a leading provider of proven HR solutions, including recruiting, onboarding, employee communications engagement, and rewards recognition. Our user-friendly software increases employee productivity, delivers time and cost savings, and minimizes compliance risk.
English Vocabulary for HR: Most Popular Phrases Used in HR Nowadays
There are so many companies now that would like to enter foreign markets. There is always a need for the cooperation of cross-cultural teams. An HR manager who speaks English is a priceless asset in the company's arsenal. The professionals have to know popular phrases in HR to perform their duties perfectly. This is why the knowledge of English vocabulary for HR is a necessity as English is becoming an integral part of professional activity.
The concept of Human Resources itself came from the West. It is pretty logical for foreign job titles to call the pros in the Western manner: HR manager, HR generalist, recruiter, HR analyst, Team-Lead. Let's look at the vocabulary hacks that help managers speak English fluently when working as an HR.
Job Positions in English to Know For HR
Chief Administrative Officer
It is the head of the administrative department. They are the people who oversee daily operations and are entirely responsible for the performance;
Chief Operating Officer
It is the position that occupies people in the highest rank. They are responsible for all the internal operations;
Executive Officer
This position usually refers to a person in a senior class who makes decisions and implements them;
Top (US) or Senior (GB) Executive
Top executives are on top of every performance, and they are responsible for all the processes and operations happening in the field;
A Middle Manager
This person is in charge of people or departments in a company but is not responsible for the entire company and does not decide about the company's future.
The Floor Manager
A floor manager is a person who is responsible for all actions and operations of a specific floor or floor in a large store or office.
Skills
Hard Skills
Hard skills are responsible for the performance of tasks requiring specific education and training. They are the pieces of knowledge of programs and tools;
Soft Skills
Soft skills ensure the successful completion of a wide range of tasks regardless of the education received and professional activity specifics, such as communication, emotional intelligence, and planning;
Staff Recruitment
A Contractor
It is a person or company that organizes the supply of materials or the hiring of workers for different purposes;
Talent Management
Talent management is the company's division that attracts, recruits, develops, manages, and promotes sophisticated employees;
Behaviorally Anchored Rating Scale (BARS)
It is the scope of the quantitative data for a specific job and collecting information regarding critical behavior between successful and unsuccessful careers. These critical behaviors are then classified and given numerical values that are used as a basis for performance evaluation;
Human Resources Manager
It is the person who is taking care of the department that deals with the employment, training, support, and office work of the company's employees. This person is also responsible for drawing up job descriptions;
Behavioral Based Interview
It is a type of interview technique that focuses on candidates' experience, behavior, knowledge, skills, and abilities. It involves providing concrete examples from the past where they have demonstrated particular behaviors or skills to predict future behavior and outcomes;
Onboarding Proces
Onboarding
It is the process of adaptation of new employees, induction, and integration of new employees. It is the process of transitioning a person from applicant to employee status, ensuring that paperwork is complete and onboarding is comprehensive while implementing 4C’s of onboarding;
An Affirmative Action Plan (AAP)
AAP is a list of specific, results-oriented procedures that need to be followed. AAP is designed to address the consequences of past discrimination against women and minorities or their lack of engagement. The effectiveness of a plan is measured by the results it achieves, not the expected results;
Hawthorne Effect
The Hawthorne effect is an environment in which novelty, interest in an experiment, or increased attention to innovation leads to a distorted, often favorable result. Participants in the experiment act differently, more diligently than usual, only because they are involved in the investigation. The awareness can influence employee motivation that they are being watched and evaluated;
Succession Planning
Succession planning is the retiring employee replacement program that identifies long-term needs and attracts internal talent to meet them in the future. It helps in finding, evaluating, and developing the people needed to implement the organization's strategy.
Employees Motivation
Incentives
Intensives are different from bonuses or benefits because they are usually tied to specific performance goals, such as achieving a sales goal;
Bring Your Own Device
BYOD is used to describe the growing trend of using employee-owned devices within a business. It means that the employees own the laptops and other electronics that the company provides them.
Emotional Intelligence
It is the capacity to recognize, estimate, and manage your own emotions, as well as the feelings of others. Advanced emotional intelligence should have anyone working in the HR field;
Change Management
This type of management is a thoughtful approach to the transition of individuals or organizations from one state to another. They are designed for change management and monitoring. Companies can benefit by planning implementation, implementation and calculating the impact of significant organizational changes;
A Confidentiality Agreement
The agreement is an agreement between an employer and an employee of the company, in which the latter cannot disclose proprietary or confidential information. Many companies protect information that, if leaked, could have devastating consequences for the brand or the well-being of the organization. A confidentiality agreement provides legal protection against such events;
Distributive Bargaining
Distributive bargaining is the negotiation between competing parties, which includes the distribution of a limited resource. One company dominates to the detriment of the interests of another.
Retention Strategy
The retention strategy refers to the processes and policies used to ensure employee retention. To retain employees and reduce employee turnover, managers must help employees achieve their goals without losing sight of the organization's goals;
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Estimation of the Employee and Their Retention
Attrition
Attrition or a staff loss is a gradual voluntary reduction of workers (through retirement and retirement) that are not replaced after. The attrition reduces the amount of the workforce;
To Dismiss
Dismiss or remove from office or work; It also means to decide that something or someone is not essential and not worth attention;
Dismissal
The dismissal is a discharge from service. It is the termination of the case when the employment contract is closed. There are four different types of releases: fair, unfair, constructive, and wrongful dismissals;
To Sack
Sacking somebody means to fire the person for unsatisfactory performance or other reasons to save money;
Resign
Resignation means leaving the position. It happens when a person leaves the service by informing the employer;
Term of Notice
Term of notice is the minimum period within which the employee must inform the employer of leaving before leaving;
Retire
Retiring means leaving or quitting work due to old age or poor health. It often happens when the person is tired and old;
Reduction in Force
Staff reduction is the process of laying off employees due to a lack of funds, changes in job requirements, or a reorganization of a department or business operation;
Transfer
Transferring someone means moving something or someone to another place, organization, or team.
To Sum It Up
There are various words that emerge every year in the sphere of HR. A significant part of the English vocabulary for HR comes from Latin, which means that this language is a core of business progress. The more you learn English, the better you can perform as a Human Resources manager within global projects.
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About the Author: Ryan is a passionate writer who likes sharing his thoughts and experiences with the readers. Currently, he works as a digital marketing specialist; you can check out here. He likes everything related to traveling and new countries.
Motivate Employees with Workplace Gamification
2020 certainly presented HR teams with new challenges.
On one hand, many new employees joined new companies and new teams during the COVID-19 pandemic, but the vast majority were suddenly forced to work from home during this time. And if those companies did not have an official work-at-home policy in place before this sudden event, this new dynamic could present a number of real challenges, including low morale, demotivated employees, and lost productivity.
Despite this sudden challenge, HR managers and teams could use gamification in new ways to overcome these potential obstacles and actually get even more out of remote teams.
Gamification in the workplace is not a new concept. It has been used successfully by business leaders and managers for quite a while, but it’s worth a look at the potential of this strategy. Interestingly, this concept parallels the idea of "gamification in marketing" where engaging tactics are used to enhance customer interaction and brand loyalty. In both contexts, gamification leverages human psychology for positive outcomes.
What is a gamification program?
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines gamifying as “the process of adding games or game elements like keeping score and competing among teams as well as using other non-game contexts like online marketing, product promotions, or even a simple task.”
Recently, gamification has become an even more popular work trend in business environments, especially as a way to drive employee motivation and engagement. This leads us to a follow-up question: Just what is workplace gamification?
What is Workplace Gamification
In this context, gamification does not refer to turning work into a game. Instead, it is a play on human psychology, which uses a game context to motivate a person to attempt to compete with others and prove themselves to be the best in front of their manager (or other authority), peer group, and competitors.
To picture the value of gamification, just think of the good old days when completing your homework correctly meant getting a gold star on your paper and even a little praise from your teacher. That was the power of gamification.
You’ve been a part of these situations for a long time now, to the point where this idea has become a natural part of your daily life starting with school and now, in the workplace.
Examples of gamification in the workplace can include game-based activities such as keeping score of who closes more deals in sales, or who achieves a specific monthly goal first. Rewards and recognition approaches (and platforms such as LIKE.TG’s Workmates) are based on the same concept and can provide extra motivation for more collaboration and teamwork.
Benefits of Gamification and Game Mechanics in the Work Environment
While it may be tempting to rush in and attempt to take advantage of many different aspects as you implement gamification, business leaders first need to identify and focus on those that best suit our requirements.
Learning
Never underestimate employees’ urge to compete and “win” in their quest to prove that they are better than all others. In this case, your workforce will strive to be the best at their jobs but will also be interested in exploring and adapting to the most recent developments in the industry, both while on the job but also during any training or education they may be pursuing. This opens them up to a whole new world of learning, which leads to even more advanced skills. If done successfully, this new level of expertise will become a win-win: beneficial for the company and the employee.
Higher Efficiency
Higher skills lead to better efficacy in direct proportions, and that is what you as an employer aim for, isn’t it? This also positively affects the overall organizational productivity and works to motivate employees, thus propelling the enterprise towards its goals faster.
Challenges
Contrary to popular belief, everybody likes a challenge! And when it comes to a group task, let’s just say it’s a recipe for success. Creating inter-departmental teams and setting up competitive game-based goals is a surefire way of raising the workforce’s morale while also promoting teamwork between various departments. Many companies also use CRM software to ensure that all members are on the same page about each assigned task.
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Real-Time Self-Analysis
Having fun while working is important but what is also essential is the fact that each employee can analyze for themselves how well they’re performing or how far they are from reaching their targets in real-time. Keeping a check on one’s own work further builds responsibility and motivates the worker to try harder.
Tips, Tricks, and Ideas for Motivation and Engagement
Each company has its own policies for motivation and engagement and appreciation of their employees, and none can be considered higher or lower than the next. As mentioned before, you need to choose the best way to recognize and reward your workforce.
The following however are some generic ideas that may help you in successfully gamifying your organization.
Company-wide Recognition
Tipping your hat for their exemplary services in front of the entire office is sure to earn you their loyalty, while also motivating them to work harder and achieve more targets. Demonstrating appreciation in front of their colleagues is a great way to let all your employees (even worldwide) know digitally through your social media pages of their success. Everyone loves fame and recognition and giving it to them, even on a minor level, will increase their morale and encourage other employees as well to perform better.
Company-sponsored Skill Upgradation
Many corporations around the globe don’t just assign tasks to their employees but also help them in upskilling through various free and paid courses. These opportunities to learn more in their fields are respected and greatly appreciated by the workforce as it does not just display that the company has their overall welfare in mind, but also enhances their individual market value.
Free Services and Gifts
Company-sponsored trips, discounts on gyms for workers of a certain enterprise, free gifts on the business’ founding day, and gift cards to online or offline brands and stores on the personnel’s birthday are just some ways of celebrating the alliance between the organization and their employees. However, these go a long way in building a rapport amidst the parties, and the team steps up their game to justify these presents. You can gift them an experience as well.
Applaud Everyone’s Contribution
Often while commending the work of the highest achievers, the corporations forget to acknowledge the job well done by the rest of the team. This can hurt their confidence and determination, thus leading to a decline in their productivity. Thus next time, make sure all your employees feel appreciated while incorporating gamification at work.
Game-based Training
Use elements and game mechanics like scoreboards, leadership positions, points, and badges during the various training sessions of the workforce. You can also use social media platforms to keep a track of the highest scorers. This encourages the workers to give their best in the process which has a dual effect - on one hand, they learn better as that’s the way to higher rewards, and on the other hand, it builds up a healthy competition in the teams which further propagates inter-departmental and intra-departmental harmony and a happy work environment.
Ensure Employee Wellness
A sedentary lifestyle can lead to a whole lot of health issues for your workers. By including some gaming elements in their daily routine, like points to the one with the highest number of steps per day, can contribute to their good health while simultaneously showing how much the company cares for their well-being. This can also further reduce the number of sick leaves taken by the staff, annually.
Gamification to Games - Beware!
A common misconception in organizations, that stems from the term ‘Gamification’ itself is that it refers to turning work into a game.
That is absolutely not what it is though.
The best-gamified process is considered to be the one where the player doesn’t even realize that he/ she is playing.
Avoid building games on top of complex processes as that might result in lowering efficiency in the long run as the team now has to spend more of its resources on both the game and the actual task.
Conclusion
In the end, we are certain that you have accurately grasped what the term and its surrounding hype are all about. Now is the time for its effective application.
So what are you waiting for? Run for it now before someone else takes the cake. Best of luck!
About Author:
Pratik Dholakiya is the founder of Growfusely, a content marketing agency specializing in content and data-driven SEO. He regularly speaks at various conferences about SEO, Content Marketing, and Entrepreneurship. As a passionate SEO and content marketer, he shares his thoughts and knowledge in publications like Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal, Entrepreneur Magazine, Fast Company, The Next Web, YourStory, and Inc42, to name a few. He can be reached at Twitter @DholakiyaPratik
Improving the Employee Onboarding Process from Start to Finish
Why is Onboarding so Important?
In today’s competitive job market, companies need to do all they can to find, attract, and hire the right employees. Fair enough, yet surprisingly, even this isn’t enough to guarantee success.
To make sure employees are really able to make a difference and help the company become more competitive, new hires must be able to hit the ground running on day one.
This is why employee onboarding is so important. A good onboarding program gets the employer-employee relationship started on the right foot and contributes to increased morale, productivity, and engagement.
Yet a bad onboarding experience falls short of these benefits and inevitably leads to wasted time, money, and effort. Without an engaging new hire experience, your organization will find it increasingly difficult to attract and retain the best talent.
Plan for Success, Right from the Start
It all leads to an important question: What can you do to improve your onboarding process and make sure your new hires are happy, productive, and positioned for maximum success?
One of the first ways to accomplish this is to think about the entire process, including the right strategy and tools to support it.
For example, developing a detailed new hire checklist is a great way to consider the entire process, make sure nothing is overlooked, and ensure the entire experience is as smooth as possible. When creating new hire checklists, it’s important to think beyond traditional HR responsibilities. Other departments such as IT, payroll, and facilities usually play an important role in onboarding new employees.
Involve these departments to give new hires everything they need all at once, while also demonstrating that your company has it all figured out!
“As soon as we saw LIKE.TG’s Onboard demo, we knew this was the perfect solution for us. We loved that it was extremely simple and powerful out of the box, but that we could customize it with advanced capabilities to make it work in our company setting. We were sold.“ - Elisa Garn, Vice President, HR and Talent, Christopherson Business Travel.
Things to Consider When Developing Your Onboarding Checklist
It’s important to remember that the onboarding checklist is a vital document and one that should intuitively guide a new hire through all the steps of your onboarding process.
To make sure you give them everything they need—and help them hit the ground running on day one—consider all of these areas when developing your checklist.
Your corporate culture:
Plan to share important information to help new hires gain a better appreciation of your corporate history, values, and overall brand.
Details about their position:
New hires can benefit from understanding where their position fits within the overall organization, and how it contributes to helping the company achieve its overall goals.
Information about their department or the whole organization:
Include additional details such as all the other positions in their group or department, organizational charts, and more.
Training
Consider highlighting any training they may need, either in the short term to get up to speed or for longer-term options.
Goals
Any checklist should include specific goals and objectives expected of this new employee, including details on how they’ll be measured.
Onboarding tasks:
Outline all of the activities you’ll help new hires complete as part of their introduction to your companies. Examples of this include things like setting up laptops, creating logins and passwords, getting an official badge, learning where to park, and just about anything else that a new employee would need.
What’s on a Typical Onboarding Checklist?
Once you’ve determined what to include in developing your overall checklist, what should it include?
New hire paperwork, such as I-9 and W-4 forms
A statement of corporate values
A video that introduces the new hire to the company, including a brief overview of important products, services, and your overall brand
A detailed list of activities for the first day
A list of important contacts within various departments, including contact information
A timetable of important activities, and what to do if they have questions
More than just Paperwork
So many people tend to associate onboarding with paperwork. It’s true that paperwork is an important part of the process, but a successful onboarding process goes well beyond enrollment forms and payroll documents.
Instead, onboarding involves various meetings and important actions that must be carefully coordinated. Many innovative HR departments now assign a dedicated onboarding coordinator to spearhead the entire process. Part leader, part counselor, this coordinator goes over all the steps that must be accomplished, and also plays a role in scheduling all of the vital steps.
Onboarding Goes Well Beyond Day One
A new hire’s onboarding experience goes beyond the first day. The entire experience can take several weeks, if not longer. Along the way, various benchmarks may be established, helping new employees provide feedback about their work experience thus far and how they feel about the organization.
Everything about onboarding is intended to make the new hire feel welcome, valued, and empowered to do the job they were hired to do. This last sentiment is becoming more important as millennial and Generation Z employees begin to make up a larger portion of the workforce. These generations value the ability to contribute to the success of an organization and are not shy in speaking up to express their opinion.
This is a significant shift away from traditional hiring methods, where employees were brought on board, left alone to fill out paperwork and learn about their position, and then simply follow orders from their manager.
“We use Onboard to set up very detailed workflows, including multi-contributor tasks, notifications, reminders, and dashboards to see exactly where each onboarding experience stands at any given time.”
Miki Loveless, HR Business Partner, Christopherson Business Travel
Onboard by LIKE.TG
LIKE.TG’s Onboard solution now helps automate and improve the entire onboarding experience. Onboard streamlines the entire process and gives new employees the tools they need to make their first great.
For example, our Form Builder capability helps to eliminate what could be mountains of paperwork. You can easily create all the digital documents a new hire needs to complete and make them available in an easy-to-access self-service portal.
With Onboard, new hires have more time to make the right decisions when completing important forms. We also help you provide pre-built I-9, W-4, direct deposit forms, and more—all part of a full library of form templates available in the Onboard solution.
We even offer easy drag-and-drop capabilities to design customized documents to collect the additional required information. No matter what you need to improve your onboarding experience, LIKE.TG has you covered.
Making the Future Better
LIKE.TG is committed to providing the resources necessary to make onboarding effective. HR managers understand that orientation is the first step in what is hopefully a long career path. This means that the information gathered will help the employee begin an employment journey with the new company. We provide solutions and allow you to be even more efficient in the employment process.
For more information on how to use LIKE.TG to improve your overall onboarding process—and achieve impressive new results—please contact us today.
About LIKE.TG
LIKE.TG is a leading developer of HR software and HRMS solutions for businesses with a focus on effective employee engagement. LIKE.TG empowers teams to easily onboard new hires, manage employee data, create a company social network, and support employee development. LIKE.TG was created by the leaders at NEOGOV, the market and technology leader in on-demand human resources software for the public sector, with more than 1,500 government agencies and educational institutions using NEOGOV technology.
LIKE.TG is a modern and powerful cloud-based HRMS solution with a complete suite of HR functionality, including core, performance, onboarding, recruitment, absence management, and time and attendance.
For more information, please visit www.LIKE.TG.com or contact [email protected].
About Author: This article is written by a marketing team member at LIKE.TG. LIKE.TG is a leading provider of proven HR solutions, including recruiting, onboarding, employee communications engagement, and rewards recognition. Our user-friendly software increases employee productivity, delivers time and cost savings, and minimizes compliance risk.
Future Proofing Your HR Strategies
Employees are one of the most valuable resources a company can have. The human resources department is responsible for building a talented team of employees who work well together and individually for the organization’s benefit. HR also takes on the hefty challenge of ensuring employees are wholly supported to perform at a high level.
Technological advancements and shifts in work culture continue to impact the way HR departments evolve. Human resources policies must be informed, flexible, and consistent if you want to ensure your department is set up to thrive in the future.
Let’s take a look at current human resources technology trends and a few notable shifts in workplace culture as of late. We’ll then leave you with some insight on how to design an HR department for the future.
Current Technology Trends in Human Resources and Shifts in Workplace Culture
Advancing technology continues to impact how we move through our personal lives and how efficient we are at work. Productive HR departments are especially mindful of current technology trends in their field and changes to the workplace that could impact how they do their jobs.Here’s a brief look into key HR technology trends and the state of workplace culture today.
Current trends in HR technology
Artificial Intelligence and automation are becoming the norm in most modern HR technology. AI-driven algorithms collect key employee and candidate data, thoroughly analyze it, generate actionable insights based on what’s learned.
Automation tools perform repetitive tasks like sending interview reminder emails, thank you messages, or organizing interview dates and times. AI and automation free up more time for HR teams to focus on tasks and projects that really need them.
They also boost employee engagement and performance through talent development and performance management tools. Their use in recruitment strategies is increasing as well because they help select potential matches faster and more accurately. AI-driven recruitment helps HR professionals get to know candidates more quickly by filtering their various social media profiles and other online activities.
Virtual-reality experiences are also being implemented more and more. They help streamline processes like interviews, onboarding, training and development, and job previews. Instead of being invited to an interview room, companies are inviting qualified candidates to a VR meeting space. They take new employees on a virtual tour of the office to get them comfortable before they arrive and engaged in the workplace culture.
The increased use of cloud-based HR software is another key trend to note. Any data entries in the cloud can be accessed in real-time, giving you the ability to make informed decisions faster and better control the data you collect.
Shifts in workplace culture
The COVID-19 global pandemic highlighted just how vital employee engagement and well-being are to productivity and performance. Physical, mental, and emotional health of all employees is now a huge priority for most companies. They’re pushing forward with health initiatives that ensure their employees can perform at their peak.
These health initiatives could include offering:
Tech tools like Fitbits, heart rate monitors, or blood sugar checkers to employees at discounted prices
Free or discounted gym memberships
Nutrition and/or personal trainer resources to aid employees’ physical health
Mental wellness resources like therapy or counseling
A health week at the office that allows employees to get certain health services on-site
Mental health and physical wellness team-building activities
Millennials and Gen Zers are taking over the majority of the workforce in the world. They’re especially interested in companies that offer personalized training and development plans for their employees. A blended learning approach that employs eLearning and in-class teaching resonate with these generations because it provides a self-directed learning experience. This modernized software focuses on up-skilling technical abilities and building more transferable soft skills like communication, time management, and empathy for others.
Many companies are offering fully remote or hybrid work schedules to their employees. These scheduling options resonate well with workers because of their flexibility and emphasis on giving them more control over their job responsibilities. HR professionals are also seeing a positive impact on recruiting because of this shift to remote work. They’re able to engage with top talent all over the world and hire a diverse workforce.
Future-Proofing Your HR Department Design
As you keep up with current trends and analyze how workplace culture is changing, you’re probably wondering how to future proof your HR department.
Instilling agility and flexibility in every aspect of your department is key to designing an HR team that can meet the future head-on.
Here are some tips on preparing your HR department for the future in light of technological advancements and shifts in work culture.
Adopt the right methodology
Consistency is crucial to building a trust-filled, loyal, engaged HR team. Without a specific structure for your HR team, you won’t be able to keep it organized, up-to-date, and productive. You must choose a suitable methodology for how you’re going to manage your HR department.
An agile methodology, for example, encourages flexibility and moves away from strict documentation as a hard requirement. This methodology is perfect for your team if your members are creative, adaptable, and geared up for an innovative future. The four values of an agile workforce are:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.
Working software over comprehensive documentation.
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation.
Responding to change over following a plan.
What’s the process for implementing changes? Who makes the final decision? How are projects delegated and teams formed? These are all questions you should answer to begin constructing the methods best for your team. Create a solid team structure by identifying how your team members work best together and how each of them thrives individually.
Keep up-to-date with trends
There’s a reason we dedicated an entire section of this article to current HR technology trends and shifts in workplace culture. Staying up to date with what’s happening in your industry is one of the best ways to prepare your department for the future. To keep your HR strategies current and effective, you must be mindful of popular HR trends and workplace culture shifts as they arise.
One crucial trend in the workplace right now is the rise of the gig economy. HR professionals are working with freelancers and contractors at a much higher rate these days. Fill in the gaps with full and part-time employees, and you’ve got yourself a well-rounded team. Being familiar with this trend allows you to keep up with competitors and hire from a wider pool of talent just as they are doing.
Another key trend is that most human resources departments are taking on a complete digital transformation. You should be comfortable with data and mindful of its influence on a seamless transition to digital platforms for your HR processes and procedures. Bookmark any resources that provide information about trends in HR and leverage this knowledge with your team.
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Implement top-tier technology and software
Your HR department’s effectiveness in the future will be highly dependent on the technology and software you implement. If you’re using low-grade software or out-of-date technology, chances are you’re a step behind your competitors. You’re most likely missing out on making critical improvements to how your team communicates, collaborates, and carries out its responsibilities.
Your Human Resource Information System or HRIS, for example, should be top-tier to ensure you’re able to grow your workforce and keep up with changes in your company effectively. Your HRIS helps keep employees engaged, satisfied, and continuously improving by fusing IT and HR functions like data entry, tracking, and management for human resources, payroll, and accounting.
You also want to ensure you’re factoring in the shift to remote work and implementing top-tier technology to keep your HR department productive, communicative, and able to perform their job functions as if they were in the office.
Conclusion
You can future-proof your human resources department by instilling agility and flexibility in every aspect. Prepare your HR department for the future by adopting the proper methodology to run your day-to-day, keeping current with HR technology trends and workplace shifts, and implementing top-tier technology and software.
About Author: This article is written by a marketing team member at LIKE.TG. LIKE.TG is a leading provider of proven HR solutions, including recruiting, onboarding, employee communications engagement, and rewards recognition. Our user-friendly software increases employee productivity, delivers time and cost savings, and minimizes compliance risk.
10 Personalized Employee Onboarding Tips For All Departments
For most businesses, hiring is part and parcel of the hiring process. With new employees come new ideas on how to carry forward the company mission and purpose. That is why there is a need for the onboarding of the employees to be spot on.
Personalized employee onboarding ensures the employees quickly acclimatize to their workplace and improve technical skills with its purpose and mission.
An ideal onboarding session will also have the employees learn how to use the company’s software faster, which will, in turn, enable them to serve the company better. Employee onboarding and training will be easier if you follow some of the tips we will share.
But before we get to that.
Why Do You Need Personalized Onboarding Training?
While it pays to focus more on your customers, it would be foolhardy for you to ignore your employees completely. New hires need to be shown the warm side of the company if you are to reduce worker turnover. That’s where personalized onboarding comes in.
A personalized employee onboarding process will enable you to conduct technical skills assessments and retain most of your new hires as it creates a connection with the company. Such a process will require you to let your new employees express themselves personally and professionally.
Personalized Employee Onboarding Tips
So, what are the tips that will make the whole onboarding process a personalized experience for the new employees?
1.Create a More Personalized Welcome Package
Handwritten notes from team members and new colleagues will help a lot in making the onboarding process personalized. It will give the onboarding strategy a personal touch, apart from helping the new hires feel at home.
You could also include token gifts such as notebooks and pens, which could play a significant role in breaking the ice with new hires. Another strategy to make the process more personalized would be creating a short video welcoming the new employees.
2. Let the New Hires Meet their Direct Colleagues
What will make it more personalized than if the new hires get to meet their new colleagues? Their colleagues should help them feel comfortable within their new surroundings and have them learn about the company's values.
You could give a few personal stories from the colleagues to help them get to know them better. It could build the connection you need between the new hires and your existing workers.
Their direct colleagues might help them to feel at ease and ready for the onboarding process. It would also provide the support network the new employees might fall back on throughout their first few days at the company.
3.Assign Each Hire a Mentor or Work Buddy
Mentors could come in handy when crafting a personalized onboarding process. Having someone to hold their hands through the first days in the company could go a long way in helping your new employees feel welcome.
The mentor doesn’t necessarily have to be older than them since you are going by the number of years the person has been in the company. A work buddy could also function as a mentor in some ways.
We all feel lonely in the first few days in a new place and would appreciate a friend or two to ease the loneliness. That’s where the work buddy comes into play! You could also add a small business phone system that will enable easy communication when they need guidance from a mentor.
4.Streamline the Onboarding Process for Each Department
If you have multiple departments, it would be better to have an onboarding process tailor-made for each department. The same would apply if you also have different teams or locations for your company.
This would help the new employees process the information they get in the onboarding faster. That’s because breaking down the onboarding process will make it simpler and reduce the amount of information the new hires are supposed to understand before starting work.
For the technical departments that involve having data scientists, and software developers it may prove to be difficult to test the programming knowledge of your new employees. Having online coding tests will help you shorten the interview process and get the best-suited developer to join your IT department.
A branched onboarding process is also easier to implement than the one you roll out for all company departments. It will enable the trainers to give more personalized training for the new hires as well.
“As soon as we saw LIKE.TG’s Onboard demo, we knew this was the perfect solution for us. We loved that it was extremely simple and powerful out of the box, but that we could customize it with advanced capabilities to make it work in our company setting.”
Elisa Garn Vice President, HR and Talent Christopherson Business Travel
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5. Dedicate Enough Time to the Onboarding Process
Most organizations will want their latest additions to join the workforce working as soon as possible. It is, however, impractical to have this if you don’t dedicate enough time to the onboarding process. Hurrying your employees to onboard gives out a negative vibe. You need to give them enough time to blend in and get to know their fellow colleagues at the workplace.
A personalized process will take you a shorter time as you get down to ensuring the new hire feels as comfortable as possible within their surroundings. A longer timeframe will also enable more hires to ace the technical skills assessment test they face.
It would take about a week for employees to have adequately been onboarded and taught all the company requirements. Giving the process enough time will ensure your employees don’t have to shuttle between working and training the new employees.
You also don’t want to rush the new employees through the process as this could affect their ability to be helpful to the business. That is why you need to ensure you dedicate adequate time to the onboarding process across all departments.
This will also require you to make an extensively detailed plan for the first few months of having the employees on board. Depending on the employees you hire, it might take some time for them to get used to the company. That’s why you need to give the onboarding process enough time.
6.Use the Best Onboarding Tools
When it comes to employee onboarding, it is all about your systems. If you have complex systems in place, it will take you longer to teach the new hires how things run in your company.
That is why you need to ensure you have installed the best systems to enable you to offer the best onboarding training. Using simple HR tools in your onboarding will also go a long way in the making of a simpler system.
If the system is too hard to understand, it also becomes difficult for you to have the employees work as you’d want them to. Your system should have an introductory phase for your employees to meet company staff and get acquainted with its culture and values.
7.Deal with the Paperwork Before the First Day of Onboarding
Most people would agree that paperwork can be a frustrating experience when onboarding.
That’s why it can be a good idea to ensure most of the paperwork doesn’t get to the first day of onboarding training. Contracts, policy acknowledgment, or payroll forms should all have been signed before the onboarding finally starts.
This will save you a lot of the stress of dealing with paperwork during the onboarding process.
You will then be able to concentrate on more critical parts of the process.
Having less paperwork will not only save time but also impress your new hires. So much hangs on an efficient onboarding process, and rescuing them from too much paperwork should be one of those things.
8. Involve Senior Management Figures
In as much as it could be challenging to have the newbies have a sit-down with the CEO, you could still attempt to have other senior figures in the company involved in the onboarding process.
There are no better-placed individuals in a company to speak to new hires as the senior management figures. No one knows the company’s ethos and values as well as the senior management of a company. That is why they can offer the best inspiration to the new employees. If the CEO could also get in on the act, that could be even better.
This could make the new employees feel like they are valued by the company. They also learn the company’s vision from the people that spearhead the company and ensure it doesn’t stray from its mission. The impact of this could be immeasurable.
9. Cut Back on the Deadlines
Companies want their new employees working as soon as possible. This could lead to a situation where the trainers rush through the onboarding process, making it have strict deadlines that could destroy instead of build.
The hiring of software developers is one of the most difficult hires to conduct because it requires a lot of technical skills testing especially with all these new libraries and frameworks popping out now and then. React and Angular which are javascript libraries need you to conduct an angular online test and a react online test to personalize and ease the onboarding process
Granted, most employees would have said they are comfortable working under pressure but a relaxed learning environment will go a long way in helping them understand everything required of them. This also helps them improve their technical skills.
This might not make sense to most people, but it could be what you need to ensure the new hires get to grips as fast as possible. No one is comfortable learning in a rushed environment, especially if they have to deal with a lot of information.
Being more flexible with your deadlines will be a sure way of making the process more relaxed to reap maximum benefits.
10. Allow the New Employees to Express Themselves
No two people are the same, which is why you need to individually speak to each of the new hires about their goals and qualifications. By letting them express themselves, you will help them set realistic goals throughout the onboarding process.
Therefore, each employee will know what to strive for in their aim to fit the organization better.
A personalized onboarding process will ensure your employees fit in as fast as possible and understand what is required of them—the more personalized the process, the better the results.
About Author: Dennis Vu is the CEO and Co-founder of Ringblaze, a virtual business phone system company that helps teams to better serve their customers, anywhere.
5 Benefits of Using a Global Payroll and Compliance Management System
Compliance refers to maintaining industry standards and regulations in a company's operations. It is one of the most crucial factors to avoid future penalties and negative public relations. A compliance management framework helps managers and businesses minimize risks and plan for future uncertainties that ensure adherence to regulatory guidelines and legal criteria.
A global payroll system like Multiplier is an integral part of the compliance management system that can be a success for your business. With this system, you can manage all your employees and payrolls from one system, minimizing uncertainties and increasing your business productivity.
Integrating such a framework can help a business to achieve exponential growth. Knowing the features of an excellent Global Payroll and Compliance Management System can help a company make an informed decision.
Five undeniable benefits of global payroll and compliance management system that you need to know:
Avoid Legal Risks and Cut Future Costs
A compliance management system will help your corporation avoid regulatory liabilities. It can save millions of dollars in terms of legal fees and penalties. You can avoid these costs only if your company follows proper compliance suggested by the government for your industry.
On the other hand, global payroll management can bring all your data in one place, making it easy for you to spot these irregularities before getting penalized for them. It also protects a company from losing consumer trust by minimizing accounting frauds as all the data is collected, managed, and analyzed in one place or platform.
Especially for a multinational corporation, it has to deal with rules and regulations being imposed in several countries. Automated compliance management systems are a must-have for such organizations. With an awful lot of data scattered across various nations, it can be troublesome to spot a compliance irregularity.
If a company fails to ensure these compliances, it might face severe charges. Automated payroll and compliance management systems can minimize these risks allowing a company to focus its resources on globalizing its business. It also helps in cutting down future uncertainties so that you can plan a business approach without worrying about compliances and payrolls getting in their way.
Write a Great Story
A company following proper compliance and government policies can quickly gain consumers' trust, compared to brands penalized for not doing so. Integration of compliance management systems with global payroll can boost consumer trust and brand recognition, resulting in positive public relations. You can use this opportunity to promote your business processes by proving its industry standards and global presence.
Moreover, with a centralized payroll team and compliance management, a company can facilitate employees' easy access to their financial data like e-Payslips. It helps to ease up the long-term process of applying for such data manually.
International payroll integration helps to transfer information to your payroll experts without a need to enter it again and again. Since such errors are much less likely to occur when data from your finance and accounting systems is routed directly into your payroll system. When the payroll professionals don't have to spend too much time looking for and correcting errors, they'll be more efficient.
A compliance management solution like Multiplier also lets the company show its contribution by implementing guidelines set by governing bodies, primarily for a consumer's good. This helps form good public relations and acts as a magnet to attract the best of talent. Many companies are in accordance with the local and federal labor codes that are employee-focused and can help recruit new talent.
Eliminate Costs Before They Arise
A good compliance management system with global payroll integration ensures that your company is future-ready. It lets you detect risks before they surface and resolve any such issues with ample time and resources. Compliance and global payroll do not necessarily have to be expensive.
For instance, an organization that deploys an employee self-service portal for online payslips and income tax documents in 25 different countries can reduce the cost of domains and build a good UI/UX experience. They can do so by developing one global platform to perform all accounting and risk management tasks with a single platform.
Ensuring compliance manually is a repetitive process and requires a lot of routine tasks. This leaves a gap for human errors. Using an automated compliance management system eliminates these errors and the costs that can arise because of them. You can easily save money if you have the proper structure in place. It automates enforcement reporting, reduces the need for extra human resources, and monitors regulatory developments in real-time.
Furthermore, with the right technology, you can eliminate the risk of human error and oversight, resulting in fines and punishments in the future. These features integrated with the company’s global payroll management helps in minimizing the risks of fraud.
Increased Accuracy and Security with Automation
Accuracy is one of the most significant factors when it comes to local payroll and compliances. There are various elements involved that can result in errors while calculating a payroll. These elements can be changes in tax rates, amendments in previous laws, or the addition of new laws in local, state, and federal regulations. All these elements make a company’s payroll and compliance management prone to human errors resulting in sizable consequences.
Through automation and a centralized management system, a company can ensure accuracy while managing compliance and payrolls. This eliminates future costs that can arise as a result of such errors. Automation increases accuracy while saving the company’s resources and time which would normally be allocated to repetitive menial tasks involved in this process.
A compliance management system ensures disparate systems that members of the company receive only the information for which they have been authenticated by granting limited and restricted access to employees. Information is communicated correctly, which removes errors and promotes a well-connected work environment. It's instrumental in companies with a large multi-departmental structure. This helps in enhancing data security, using an integrated system, following and maintaining proper payroll processes to pay employees and use cloud-based payroll data.
A Centralized Payroll and Risk Management System
Introducing new automation tools into the payroll data and compliance management processes globally is not an easy task. A central global payroll approach that brings payroll and compliance management in one software can be extensive.
In such cases, hiring an agency to do all your technical work for your business while you focus on other core aspects of running your business can bring your organization significant growth opportunities. This frees you from worrying about future legal hassles and a global HR helps in the overall management of your business.
With automated payroll and risk management, you can manage all the financial and legal data from one centralized system giving you clear sight to plan your future actions.
Final Tip
A compliance management system makes it much easier for a company to ensure obedience to market, regulatory requirements and render local compliance. It also helps to reduce risks associated with non-compliance and improve brand loyalty in their goods and services.
Modernizing compliance and regulation control procedures, automating compliance workflows, and offering data-driven visibility can direct a company towards exponential growth.
It helps a company by minimizing liquidity risks and reducing other financial and security threats prevalent in the industry. In the modern volatile banking environment, such a software framework can be employed for an organization's risk-free operations. However, it would help if you were more cautious while choosing the right partner.
About Author: This article is written by a marketing team member at LIKE.TG. LIKE.TG is a leading provider of proven HR solutions, including recruiting, onboarding, employee communications engagement, and rewards recognition. Our user-friendly software increases employee productivity, delivers time and cost savings, and minimizes compliance risk.
Why Wellness Benefits Are Crucial for Employees Beyond COVID-19
Wellness refers to being in a state of good health. This is often composed of multiple types of health, including both physical and mental. With companies, your employee wellness — their state of health in the workplace — is affected by factors both within and outside of work.
Balancing personal life and work-life has long been a subject of concern for many workers, but with remote work on the rise, there is a mentality shift to work-life integration. Work-life integration requires companies to offer flexible schedules and additional wellness benefits as part of their employee programs. These benefits are designed to improve overall wellness in life and bridge the gap between personal life and work life, which are so often treated as separate entities.
The idea is to improve a person’s overall health so every aspect of that person’s life can also benefit. For employers, the goal of implementing employee wellness programs is to have happier and healthier people, which can have the added benefit of positively impacting work performance. Though, the end goal should be to simply take care of the health of your fellow human beings.
According to a recent FinanceBuzz health and wellness benefits survey, 54% of surveyed workers with access to employer-sponsored wellness programs reported improved mental health in the last year. Compare this to workers without access to these programs, and only 22% said the same thing.
The data is significant, but what specific wellness benefits are most useful for employees and worth your consideration?
Types of wellness benefits
The FinanceBuzz survey mentioned above found a range of wellness benefits that were popular among employees. These included:
Healthy meal kit delivery
Mental health counseling
Gym membership reimbursements
Weight loss programs
Smoking cessation programs
Fitness tracker devices
Virtual workout subscriptions
Meditation or yoga membership/subscriptions
Reimbursements for smart home gym equipment
Many of these popular perks focus on ways to improve physical wellness, such as healthy eating or exercising. If a person feels better physically, it’s often easier to approach challenges and adjust to changes in life. This doesn’t mean a person no longer gets stressed out, but stress becomes more manageable.
However, it’s important to note that you have other options to promote workplace health and wellness. Mental health counseling and other benefits designed to help alleviate some of life’s worries can be invaluable for employees. This could include wellness benefits that focus on how to cope with financial stress.
According to a Mind Over Money Study from Capital One, 58% of Americans feel that finances control their life. Whether you know it or not, many of your employees are likely experiencing some sort of financial stress. This type of stress might wear on their mental health.
To help combat this stress, consider offering finance-related wellness benefits. Here are a few types of benefits you might want to think about:
A group life insurance plan that’s free or affordable for employees and doesn’t have strict requirements, such as passing a medical exam.
Health insurance coverage that aligns with your employees’ wants and needs. This could include more coverage options nationwide, low mental health counseling costs, and a variety of plans to choose from.
A 401(k) plan to help employees plan for retirement. It can be helpful to simply have access to a retirement plan, but the best employee benefits programs often include employer contributions. Seeing your company put money toward your financial future, other than your salary, can go a long way in fostering a caring and supportive environment. If you need help with creating these programs, reach out toemployee benefits providers.
Flexible paid time off policies gives employees the time they need to recharge and reset. Burnout and mental exhaustion are real and all too common among the workforce, especially in the changing environment brought about by the coronavirus pandemic.
Wellness benefits and remote employees
In the past year, companies have found a need to review and revamp their employee wellness programs. In many cases, this was brought on by the massive changes resulting from the coronavirus pandemic. Specifically, millions of office employees became remote workers virtually overnight.
Certain wellness benefits, such as paid group lunches and in-person gym memberships, suddenly weren’t as relevant. But what wellness initiatives for remote employees are actually valuable?
Consider the unique challenges a remote worker faces. They have many of the same general stressors as office employees, such as worries about physical health, mental health, and financial wellbeing. So the wellness benefits mentioned above are useful, but there’s still room for extra help.
Remote workers often suffer from a sense of being disconnected, especially if they aren’t used to working remotely. A FinanceBuzz remote work survey found that 49% of remote workers found it harder to build relationships with co-workers, and 46% reported feeling isolated.
Wellness benefits for remote workers should focus on providing remote employees with opportunities for meaningful connections and conversations with other people. This could include wellness activities with co-workers and virtual meetings with health coaches or counselors.
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A push for permanency
Reacting to a global pandemic may not be the most positive reason to introduce wellness benefits to your company, but it’s better than not having them at all. However, it’s important to continue advocating for adjustments to your employee wellness program even if things start to normalize worldwide as we enter a post-pandemic era.
The point of wellness benefits is to create a lasting positive impact on your employees and their lives. It would be challenging to make this kind of impression if the benefits were temporary and only available during the pandemic. That’s why it’s necessary to make helpful and valuable wellness benefits a permanent part of your business.
Some remote workers have already returned to the office, and others may be in the process of doing so. But that may not be the case for everyone. You or your company could still be managing a virtual team years down the road, many of whom would likely be grateful for employer-sponsored wellness benefits that positively affect their lives daily.
The bottom line
A quality benefits program isn’t just designed to make employees happier so that the business can make more money. Instead, these programs exist to make people happier and healthier so they can have more fulfilling lives. If your company grows and becomes more valuable as a result, that’s an added bonus.
Keep in mind that certain wellness benefits aren’t always the best options for each company. Each company is different and has employees with unique needs. If you want to find out what would work best for your company, get to know the people who work there.
Introduction to Conflict in the Workplace(and How it Erodes Productivity Culture)
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About Author: Kris Osborne is a Marine Corps veteran turned startup veteran and global Chief of Staff. He enables companies to accelerate growth by putting culture and people first, currentlyworking as the Chief of Staff forFinanceBuzz
How to Measure and Maximize The ROI of HR Software
When making an investment in HR software, including Applicant Tracking Systems(ATS),Employee Communications and Engagement platforms(ECE),Onboarding Tool (ON),and Human Resources Management Systems (HRMS), return on investment (ROI) can bedifficult to measure.
Why is this? In HR, unlike other parts of the organization, employees are the assetswe’re attempting to measure. Yet even top performers are hard to quantify in termsof their contribution to the organization’s bottom line.
If you’re looking to gain a fast—and significant—ROI with Onboarding and HRMSsoftware, there are three important factors to consider.
What is your total cost of ownership (TCO)?
When thinking about cost, make sure you calculate your true TCO, which is usually much more than the cost of the software. TCO gives you a more complete view of your investment by factoring in additional costs related to installation, configuration, training, support, professional services, and more.
Will my employees adopt this technology? If so, how quickly?
The most effective HR software solutions are designed to be as intuitive and easy to use as possible. This minimizes the need for training and accelerates employee adoption for the fastest time to value.
What value will you gain?
Ideally, Onboard software and HRMS solutions will provide many different benefits for employees, hiring managers/business unit managers, and HR teams. In doing so, a new HR solution should provide measurable gains in four key areas:
Streamline hiring and onboarding processes:
Automate and streamline recruiting processes to help hiring managers improve the way they attract and hire employees. This should help improve key metrics such as average time to hire, cost per hire, and more.
Improve regulatory compliance and reduce risk:
Auto filing federal and state employment forms eliminate errors and eVerify processes flag out-of-compliance employees which can generate costly regulatory fines. Ensuring proper employment records are maintained can prevent costly employee litigation and reduce errors and omissions (EO) insurance premiums.
Reduce recruiting costs:
An effective applicant tracking system (ATS) will significantly reinforce the company brand image and improve traditional hiring processes that included too much manual work and overhead. All of this helps eliminate these costs entirely.
Improve the employee experience as well as top and bottom lines:
The best HR solutions will give employees a seamless onboarding experience as well as a long-term foundation to focus on performance and satisfaction. In turn, this will help increase engagement, productivity, and even long-term retention.
Eliminate HR’s administrative burden:
HR technology will also empower HR teams with tools to increase personal productivity, reduce per-transaction metrics, and spend more time on higher-value work.
LIKE.TG is the Perfect Partner
LIKE.TG gives you everything you need to maximize your ROI: the right cost, technology your employees will embrace, and solutions are proven to deliver the gains you need to transform your business.
Cost savings
LIKE.TG provides many advantages to reduce costs and get the maximum valuefrom our solutions.
No software to buy, install, manage, and maintain. LIKE.TGs solutions run in all major web
and mobile browsers, giving any user fast, easy access.
Our solutions are completely cloud-based, which means you don’t need to invest in additional
servers or expensive hardware.
All features and updates are pushed live as soon as they’re available, so IT staff won’t have to
perform upgrades. Even better, these are included—at no extra charge.
Our solutions are completely scalable. LIKE.TG can grow with you—up to 50,000 users—to
fit in your existing workflows and support your business requirements.
The fastest, easy to learn and use systems and platforms
LIKE.TG’s solutions are designed with a single goal in mind: maximizing employeeadoption. All of our solutions are:
Designed to be as user-friendly and intuitive as possible. This eliminates employee resistance
and gives them a new tool they will love to use.
Fast and easy to learn—no need for time-consuming, expensive training or support services.
Able to operate in a PC, Mac, or mobile environment for maximum convenience.
Easily deployed. Technical support is rarely needed, yet if it is, it’s included with your HR
Cloud plan—no extra charge
Maximum benefits, maximum results
LIKE.TG delivers technology that is proven to provide many powerful benefitsand advantages. With LIKE.TG, your organization will:
Automate time-consuming paper approaches related to hiring, onboarding, and managing
employees.
Enhance employees’ onboarding experience to get new hires up to speed and fully productive
on day one.
Improve methods for tracking and analyzing employee information across the entire company.
Free HR managers and supervisors to spend less time managing paper and more time
managing employees. Cloud plan—no extra charge.
Create an internal social network to promote communication, collaboration, and productivity
Calculate your own ROI
At LIKE.TG, we believe our HR solutions will help you achieve the fastest time to value and maximum ROI. But just like every business is unique, the ROI you could potentially achieve from investing in HR software is specific to your business. To help, we’ve created a handy ROI Calculator so you can see exactly how your company could benefit by automating HR processes.
If you’d like assistance calculating the ROI for your organization, book a freeHR Process Consultation with our experts today
Why LIKE.TG?
LIKE.TG is your ideal partner for HR software and HRMS solutions that drive employee engagement to all-time highs. We are ready to help you onboard new hires, manage their data, create a company social network, and support employee development efforts.
With LIKE.TG, you’ll get the right technology at the right price to achieve benefits where they matter most: a faster ROI and a stronger bottom line.
About Author: This article is written by a marketing team member at LIKE.TG. LIKE.TG is a leading provider of proven HR solutions, including recruiting, onboarding, employee communications engagement, and rewards recognition. Our user-friendly software increases employee productivity, delivers time and cost savings, and minimizes compliance risk.
Creating the Ideal Team as a Sure Way to Success
You cannot overemphasize the function of a successful team in a business. Every association business needs a successful team to pave a smooth path to success. An ideal team can cause massive growth for your success causing you to dominate your industry. But how can you create this 'perfect' or 'ideal' that will suit your organization and boost its output? Building a successful team can be quite challenging, but you will get the best team for your association business with the right tips.
Set Your Goals
Setting goals should be the first step you take when creating a team for your office. A team without a purpose is just a group of personnel working randomly. The best they will do is complete their daily activities without adding any significant value to your organization. Your team should have goals and objectives to fulfill. These goals and objectives should be time-based, giving yourself a request to meet. Your goals have to be measurable, specific, and achievable. After setting your goals, you should keep track of the progress. You should also lead by example as a way of helping teams grow.
When setting your goals, you have to consider the specific abilities of every member of the team. You have to set predefined roles for each team member according to their skills and area of specialization. Each member of the group contributes an essential section of accomplishing the goals. If you set your goals and have professional team members to achieve these goals, then you are placed on the path to success. It is easier to monitor the team's progress and accomplishment to know where your progress stands because all members share the same team-specific metrics.
Good Relationship
A good relationship is one thing you should build when creating a successful team. If you check a dysfunctional and effective team, you will see one of the things they lack is a good relationship. A successful team prides itself on the relationship between its members. The relationship status makes the team's goal and every member's function clear without any dispute or form of argument. The association also allows the team members to assist one another and make the team objectives a success.
While building a good relationship between your team members, you also have to maximize their potential and provide them with full support. Your support will allow them to perform well and do their job at their best. You can also motivate your remote team to take calculated risks to get results they cannot get in their comfort work zone.
Communication
Communication is also essential when building that ideal team. You have to develop a good communication platform between your team members. Good communication skills will allow you to understand your team members' weaknesses, issues, and problems during a task. Your team members cannot read minds, so you will not pass your messages, ideas, opinions, orders, etc., to them with a lack of communication. Lack of communication can cause resentment and frustration among the team, which is not a good thing for a successful business. Good communication ensures the success of your team instead of putting them in a frustrated state.
Lack of communication can also put your team members in a confused state. Confusion can be one of the most significant setbacks in any business operation. Communication will also allow you to understand the ground's issues, making you decide based on facts and not assumptions.
Increased Accuracy and Security with Automation
Accuracy is one of the most significant factors when it comes to local payroll and compliances. There are various elements involved that can result in errors while calculating a payroll. These elements can be changes in tax rates, amendments in previous laws, or the addition of new laws in local, state, and federal regulations. All these elements make a company’s payroll and compliance management prone to human errors resulting in sizable consequences.
Through automation and a centralized management system, a company can ensure accuracy while managing compliance and payrolls. This eliminates future costs that can arise as a result of such errors. Automation increases accuracy while saving the company’s resources and time which would normally be allocated to repetitive menial tasks involved in this process.
A compliance management system ensures disparate systems that members of the company receive only the information for which they have been authenticated by granting limited and restricted access to employees. Information is communicated correctly, which removes errors and promotes a well-connected work environment. It's instrumental in companies with a large multi-departmental structure. This helps in enhancing data security, using an integrated system, following and maintaining proper payroll processes to pay employees and use cloud-based payroll data.
Using PEO Service Providers
Utilizing partnership with PEO service providers is also one of the best ways to build a team for your industry. The PEO service provider allows companies to lease employees for their administrative tasks and other jobs. PEO service providers help you get efficient and productive workers to make a good team. You can partner with PEO in Germany if you have your business located there. PEO Germany will help you create the ideal team for your management. The team will consist of professionals and experts that will bring massive growth.
Final word
Appreciation goes a long way when creating or maintaining a perfect team within your organization. When you appreciate your team of workers, it gives them the feeling of relevance and importance. Treat the members of your team well by respecting them, give them incentives, etc., and they will provide you with excellent results
About Author: This article is written by a marketing team member at LIKE.TG. LIKE.TG is a leading provider of proven HR solutions, including recruiting, onboarding, employee communications engagement, and rewards recognition. Our user-friendly software increases employee productivity, delivers time and cost savings, and minimizes compliance risk.
10 Steps to the Perfect Employee Onboarding Experience
Onboarding employees is a vital part of any company’s hiring process. It sets the tone for what your new employee can expect and helps them feel comfortable with their decision to join your team.
Converting a new hire into an engaged and productive employee is no small feat. Whether you offer an effective onboarding process can make or break their engagement, productivity, and your company’s culture for years to come. It’s worth the investment in time to get it right.
Accordingly, you may want to take advantage of online employee onboarding to make sure that the process goes smoothly. A web-based employee onboarding system can make sure that you don’t miss any important points.
Employers need to provide new hires with a good start. The perfect employee onboarding systems welcome new employees with open arms. What’s more, it provides them with the resources they need to succeed.
To learn ten steps to the perfect new hire onboarding experience, keep reading.
1. Make Contact Before Day One
Nearly a third of onboarding new hires decide to jump ship or stick around within the first 90 days of employment. With this in mind, it’s important not to throw your new hires to the wolves. In doing so, you’re sending the wrong message. With an official job offer, you can set the right tone from the start.
Something as simple as an offer letter or first-day welcome email can go a long way toward making a new hire feel valued. Alternatively, a comprehensive electronic onboarding may do the trick. Whatever method you use to introduce a new hire to your company, make sure to use it before their first day on the job.
2. Make Their First Day Great
Most new hires want to meet their manager on their first day on the job. They also expect to get introduced to their peers. These basic niceties set the right tone for long-term employment.
More often than not, someone will ask a new hire about their first day of work. This question is common.
However, the answer could mean the difference between a career staff member and someone who’s already thinking about the next employment opportunity. Accordingly, you want to make sure a staff member’s first day on the job goes smoothly. You can do so with the right employee onboarding tools.
3. Provide Structure
Strong HR onboarding software can greatly boost employee retention. It can also significantly impact productivity in a positive way. For instance, you might clearly list a new employee’s roles and responsibilities in your employee onboarding software.
It’s also helpful to schedule a new hire’s first week on the job a week or two ahead of time. The worst feeling for a new hire is not knowing what they should do next. With software onboarding, you can make sure that your new hires are always on task.
Moreover, a highly structured first couple of weeks gives new hires the right impression. It shows new hires nonverbally that you know what you’re doing. For example, you can schedule and track meetings using an employee onboarding website.
4. Assemble a Team for the Process
The amount of support provided by managers during the first two years of employment affects employee sentiment greatly. During this time, employees are clarifying their role with the company.
At the same time, they’re evaluating how they feel about the job. They’re even weighing whether their salary adequately compensates them for their work.
The best way to help your new hire maximize their potential is by assembling a team. The team will provide support and encouragement. You can coordinate the team with a new hire onboarding portal.
Firstly, you’ll need a coach who can take on the role of mentor or advisor. You’ll also want someone else with experience in the position they’ve accepted.
Your new hire will benefit greatly from their expertise when needed. What’s more, they can reach out to team members easily using your new hire onboarding software.
5. Take It Easy on the Paperwork
More often than not, new hires spend their first day at a desk or in a conference room completing paperwork. There are tons of forms to complete, including I-9’s, employee handbook acknowledgments and payroll forms.
Some jobs also require the reading and signing of lengthy nondisclosure agreements. As a result, the first day of work is typically associated with a massive amount of paperwork. However, you can use digital employee onboarding solutions to ease this burden.
There’s a drawback to dropping a load of paper on your new hire the first day on the job. A ton of paperwork on day one can make a new hire feel disenchanted or overwhelmed.
Alternatively, it’s better to spread paperwork out with HR onboarding solutions. Here, you want to afford your new hire flexibility to complete paperwork in a timely manner but at their leisure.
For instance, with the electronic onboarding of new employees, you can allow employees to check all the boxes at their own pace. You may even think about making use of an employee onboarding app.
6. Onboarding Programs Are a Team Effort
In a new workplace, it’s important to feel socially accepted. A feeling of social acceptance is a key factor in the success of new employees. With an HR onboarding solution, you can make sure that your new hires stay connected.
It’s important that a new employee integrates into a company social network. In part, this kind of engagement provides new hires with access to important information and resources.
It takes an entire company to integrate a new hire and get them up to speed.
Here, you want to schedule face time with new hires and veteran employees. You’ll want to have them meet with experienced staff members from every relevant department in their first few weeks.
Part of these meetings may include job shadowing when appropriate. You can schedule these activities with an electronic onboarding platform. You can also make use of employee communication tools that work just like social media.
“Our hiring managers now have a reliable system that is easy to navigate. Our HR team can actively monitor the process, and assist if needed, but Onboard has helped them save so much valuable time and effort while increasing data accuracy. All of this has helped us improve compliance and gives us a powerful tool to achieve even more results in the future.”
Kaylee Collins HR Analyst of Osmose Utilities Services, Inc
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7. Establish Goals From the Start
Most employees will stay with a company for three or more years when they have a great onboarding experience. Vagueness is the enemy of a great new employee experience.
New hires need realistic and defined expectations. What’s more, they need these expectations communicated to them clearly.
With a thorough understanding of their roles, new hires can effectively evaluate their own progress. More importantly, they can prepare for a future with your company. The right onboarding software can help your new hires keep their careers on track.
8. Maintain an Open Dialogue
Nearly half of all workers feel put off when their superiors dismiss their ideas. After getting put on the back burner, most new hires will put forth the effort to share their ideas in the future.
You want your employees active and committed. Actively listening to and responding to employees is a great way to boost employee engagement.
Moreover, it’s vital to leave a channel open for honest, open feedback. By doing so, staff members are more likely to provide you with solutions to problems.
In some cases, they may shine a light on a problem that you didn’t even know existed. Top-notch onboarding software solutions can help you maintain an open line with your new hires.
9. Share Your Company Culture
Rating systems are becoming the norm for everything—including employee satisfaction. As company reviews become more common, HR professionals are noticing that the higher a company’s rating, the more likely new employees are to stay on the job.
Most new hires don’t fail because they don’t know how to do their work. More often than not, their personalities don’t mesh with the company work environment.
Ideally, you don’t want to hire new employees who are a poor cultural fit. Accordingly, you might assess employees in this regard. Even so, you’ll want to actively communicate and emphasized your organizational culture to promote the success of new hires.
10. Give New Hires Time to Adjust
Often, both employees and managers look forward to a scenario where the new hire “hits the ground running.” This phrase gets thrown around a lot and career circles. In reality, however, most employees take about eight months to reach their full potential.
Unfortunately, most employees who try to start out as company rock stars end up failing miserably. Any employer wants their staff members to start producing results as soon as possible.
However, putting too much pressure on employees too soon can prove detrimental to their development. Even worse, it can harm employee retention.
Why Great New Hire Onboarding Matters
As of July 2020, there were 5.8 million new hires in the United States. During the same time, 5 million of them quit, were discharged or got laid off.
On a brighter note, these numbers show that the job market persevered throughout the pandemic. However, this amount of turnover is abysmal.
It can cost more than $6,000 to hire a new employee. As a result, it’s important to onboard new hires attentively.
Hire New Staff, and Keep Them Around!
Despite a new hire’s skill set, it’s important to teach them what they need to know to do their jobs. It’s also important to build trust during the employee onboarding process.
Employees leave new jobs for many reasons. Some employees feel unsatisfied with their managers. Others may feel unhappy with their salaries.
Yet other employees may feel unsatisfied with their career outlook or benefits. In many cases, however, you can avoid this kind of sentiment by setting up new hires to succeed.
There are a lot of steps involved in the onboarding process. With the right technology, however, you can keep it all in sync easily.
From Start to Finish—Your Partner in HR
Now that you’ve learned ten steps to the perfect new hire onboarding experience, all you need is the best onboarding software.
LIKE.TG is the most powerful employee management automation software on the market. Our goal is to help organizations manage human resource tasks more efficiently and productively. We’re committed to making your life easier by automating all of your HR tasks and providing you with a single, easy-to-use system that will save you time and money.
LIKE.TG develops end-to-end onboarding systems for new employees. Our technology also allows you to nurture high-performing employees throughout their time at your company.
With LIKE.TG, your HR team can easily manage every aspect of the job, including payroll, vacation requests, benefits enrollment, salary reviews and much more.
Don’t wait. Start on the path to improving employee engagement today by claiming your free LIKE.TG trial.
About Author: This article is written by a marketing team member at LIKE.TG. LIKE.TG is a leading provider of proven HR solutions, including recruiting, onboarding, employee communications engagement, and rewards recognition. Our user-friendly software increases employee productivity, delivers time and cost savings, and minimizes compliance risk.
10 Effective Ways HR Manager Can Boost Employee Morale
The pandemic completely changed how the world functioned. According to ILO Monitor, 114 million people lost their jobs globally. Such a severe health crisis followed by employment loss is unlike anything we have experienced before.
From astrophysicists to primary school teachers, nearly every professional had to switch to a remote work environment almost overnight. And understandably, positive employee morale took a hit amidst all the chaos and fatalities brought by Coronavirus.
There is no doubt that working from home offers a plethora of benefits for both the organization and employees. The organization can considerably reduce operational costs, while employees can work from their homes’ comfort and save up commuting expenses.
But it’s been over a year since the pandemic started, and there is no certainty about when it will come to an end. Now more than ever, it’s imperative that HR managers offer employees the support they need. And here are some effective ways your organization can do that.
1. Refrain from Laying Off Employees
Mass layoffs have a serious impact on employee morale. While the employees who managed to retain their position may feel a moment of relief, they are likely to live in fear of being next in line for losing their jobs.
As previously mentioned, tens of millions of people lost their jobs because of the pandemic. If your organization has reached a point where it’s necessary to downsize, you should consider alternatives to mass layoffs.
You can suggest reducing work hours or transferring idle employees to other departments. It can also save your organization from going through the exhausting process of layoffs.
2. Keep Employees in the Loop
Humans are naturally wired to resist change. And considering how rapidly things have changed because of the Covid-19 outbreak, your employees might be on edge about how their roles will change.
It is crucial to keep the employees in the loop about the organization’s plan of action for the pandemic. Otherwise, employees might resort to gossiping and believing false rumors, which can propagate unnecessary panic. Employees will be able to concentrate on work rather than getting distracted by what’s transpiring through the grapevine.
The leaders and managers should make it a point to communicate facts clearly. In a crisis, the best way is to lead with truth. If the organization is struggling and may have to take downsizing measures, your employees should be prepared for it.
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3. Follow Safety Guidelines
This pandemic can only be contained if everyone is following health and safety guidelines issued by official healthcare authorities. Whether you work in an industry where telecommuting is not possible or you’re planning to resume in-office operations soon, the health and safety of your employees should be a top priority.
Equip the workplace with basic amenities such as hand sanitizers and hand soaps. Furthermore, it’s important to rearrange the office layout to make sure there is adequate distance between employees. And of course, wearing masks should be mandatory.
4. Offer Essential Medical Resources
The constant fear of contracting Coronavirus or infecting a loved one can be a great source of stress. This is the time to think about offering your employees additional medical resources. Providing employees better medical coverage will be appreciated by them and boost employee morale.
5. Host Virtual Get Together
With traveling restrictions and social distancing measures, many people are unable to see their family or friends on a regular basis.
Therefore, with all the lockdowns and stay-at-home orders, your staff is experiencing isolation like never before. Lack of social interaction can have a significant impact on a person’s mood, well-being, and productivity.
The HR department must find creative ways to host virtual get together for employees. From Happy Hours on Fridays to Trivia Night, planning virtual events every week can help you ensure high morale. You can also explore virtual team-building activities to improve collaboration and communication among team members.
6. Establish Better Channels of Communication
The way this virus has affected the world was completely unpredictable and unexpected. With fake news and other false information circulating on the internet, HR should take the initiative to provide employees with reliable information from official sources. Creating and sharing a weekly newsletter containing information regarding the pandemic can help alleviate anxiety.
Clear communication plays a key role in seamless business operations. Establishing better two-way channels of communication is all the more important now. HR managers should take on the responsibility to routinely talk to individual employees to address their concerns.
Meeting with too many people can make it difficult for some of the staff to share their thoughts. It would be best to follow the 2-pizza rule for meetings to quickly resolve issues and ensure that no one is left behind.
7. Improve Flexibility
It’s quite possible that your employees are taking care of a child, a sick parent, or dealing with their own health issues. Leading with empathy is indispensable in these testing times. Rather than expecting employees to immediately respond to every email or Slack message, allow them more flexibility to manage their schedule.
Several organizations have introduced a flextime work policy. This involves setting a number of core work hours and giving the employees the freedom to choose their starting and ending times.
A compressed workweek is another great alternative to conventional 9-5 work hours. This allows employees to complete their standard 40-hour workweek in less than five days and enjoy a long weekend.
8. Prioritize Work-Life Balance
When employees are working from home, it can become difficult to distinguish between work and personal life. Employees may continue to work, despite completing their work for the day.
Managers and supervisors should avoid asking for updates or calling employees after work hours. Just because they’re at home doesn’t mean they have to be on-call 24/7. Prioritizing work-life balance is necessary to avoid burnout.
Just saying that you care about your employees’ mental health is not enough. It should be an essential part of your company culture. Lead by example and share different ways you are taking care of your mental health. Regularly check in with your employees with a simple ‘how are you?’. Just like email personalization makes customers feel special, it’s also effective in making employees feel seen.
9. Celebrate Personal Wins
These days there isn't much optimistic news to look up to. When every day feels the same, your employees can fall into a funk. This can severely impact their productivity and quality of work.
The HR department can introduce some positivity into employees’ day-to-day lives by celebrating personal wins. Start a newsletter and ask employees to share their achievements, no matter how big or small. Whether a staff member adopted a kitten or someone got to meet their family after months, it’s worth sharing!
10. Encourage Time Off
Since employees are working from home and probably can’t travel anywhere, why would they need leaves? Well, even if employees are not going to Europe on vacation, they still need time off to rest and revitalize. Encourage employees to utilize their paid leaves.
The Bottom Line
The anxiety and stress of these uncertain times are seriously affecting employee morale. Disengaged and unmotivated employees will produce poor quality work, which can be detrimental to your business. This pandemic is an opportunity for organizations to showcase how much they value their employees.
About Author:Becky Halls is a Co-Founder of Hyperise, a Hyper personalization toolkit for B2B marketers. She’s an experienced Growth Marketer, passionate about product design/development and online marketing.
WFH Burnout: A Few Ways To Engage Your Team While Working Remotely
Working remotely makes some things easier, but it isn’t perfect as a full-time approach. Notably, the employee experience still has a risk of burnout: in fact, research suggests (per Indeed) that most people think it’s worsened during the pandemic. Any team member who reaches that point will struggle to get by, and their team will lose productivity.
Due to this, the home office needs just as much HR work as its classic predecessor — or even more. Part of your job as a team manager is to prevent WFH burnout, but there’s a lot to consider. The structure and schedule of your workday, the solitude of working from home and related mental health concerns, the increased influence of remote employees’ personal lives… Juggling these concerns is the path to avoiding burnout in your remote workforce.
In this post, we’re going to cover some straightforward tips for how you can effectively engage a team of remote employees, helping to steer them away from employee burnout. If you can make good use of them in the long term, it’ll greatly strengthen your business. Let’s get started.
Encourage workers to change their surroundings
When you’re in a regular office, the necessary level of activity means that the immediate environment changes somewhat frequently (and the working environment really matters). Workers move post-it notes around, rearrange their desks, alter the lighting… They don’t radically shake things up, but they keep them slightly fresh. Most vitally, the commutes ensure that going to work truly feels like going somewhere.
But when you’re in a home office, it can be the same every day. Despite having the power to tweak it however you like, you might not have the will — and with no commute to keep things interesting, you can start to feel trapped. This is why you should encourage your remote employees to change their surroundings on occasion. It’s key to employee engagement.
You could make it a competition of sorts: who can come up with the most interesting home office arrangement? Alternatively, you could draw inspiration from the featured image and prompt people to take their work laptops outside. A mobile data dongle can easily provide enough speed for this. It isn’t an all-day option, of course, but just an hour or two working outside can leave someone feeling significantly refreshed.
Make the most of suitable communication tools
You may be feeling tired of Zoom at this point, but that doesn’t mean you can’t squeeze more from it. Instead of just holding boring meetings, why not run some social events? You could create some quizzes for people to enjoy, or even some video-gaming contests. Or maybe you could stick with a simple gathering: take an hour or so in the middle of a workday and gather everyone together to talk about whatever comes up.
Keep in mind that Zoom isn’t the only VoIP tool on the market, and others can do some interesting things. Topia, for instance, allows spatial video chat: in other words, participants can move in and out of conversations much as they would in real-world exchanges, elevating employee engagement. Additional features like this can do much to freshen online discussions.
Now, communication tools will never entirely make up for the loss of in-person meetings, so you should still arrange face-to-face meetings whenever possible. Even if you can only get your remote employees together a few times each year, the time spent in physical proximity will do more to support collaboration than anything you can achieve at a distance.
Offer simple suggestions for better work/life balance
Even though remote working has made some parts of work/life balance easier (less time spent commuting means more free time, for instance), it’s made other parts harder. Most notably, clocking in and out isn’t as straightforward as it was. There used to be a clear delineation: your workday begins when you reach the office, and it ends when you leave. Now things are blurry.
Working from home means that you can reach the end of your hours but remain at your workstation with little impetus to go elsewhere. You can unthinkingly work on a project for hours that you’re not getting paid for, then find that you’re feeling unusually weary. Part of this is due to the common fear of being insufficiently productive while working from home: something that can hugely detract from employee engagement even as it keeps people stuck at their desks.
As the team manager, some of the onus is on you to ensure that your remote employees aren’t working too hard. If people are struggling to handle their time effectively, address them not as the boss but as someone else trying to make the best of a tough time. Tell them about how you manage your schedule, and make relevant suggestions (including any time-management tips you can muster). They’ll appreciate the guidance.
Place more emphasis on personal development
The lack of colleague interaction makes remote-working days feel longer yet ultimately seem to have gone by faster. Each day is a grind, then you notice that several months have passed. It’s disconcerting and can make you wonder what you’re actually achieving. It bears noting that burnout isn’t always the result of too much stress, anxiety, or responsibility. Sometimes it can result from a fundamental loss of motivation — so what can motivate people?
Rewards are great, but you need something grander. This is where personal development comes in. Just having a stable job is enough to inspire gratitude, but not enough to really keep someone interested. By listening to what your team members want to achieve and coming up with plans to help them grow, you can solidify their loyalty through employee engagement that makes the average workday feel more meaningful through building up to something bigger.
And remember that a personal development plan doesn’t have to explicitly bring value to the business to be worthwhile. Suppose that one of your workers wants to start running marathons, for instance. It won’t generate any revenue for you, but it will make them healthier and more content, and those things will enhance their productivity. Make your remote employees happy and it’ll always work out well for your company.
About Author: This article is written by a marketing team member at LIKE.TG. LIKE.TG is a leading provider of proven HR solutions, including recruiting, onboarding, employee communications engagement, and rewards recognition. Our user-friendly software increases employee productivity, delivers time and cost savings, and minimizes compliance risk.
How HR Can Help New Employees Settle In
The first week at a new job can be a stressful experience. New hires have to adapt to a new setting, different job functions, and company culture while being the new kid on the block. And with the growing number of remote workers, settling into a new job is even more complicated.
Successful onboarding helps new hires adapt to all these changes. Human resources can take steps to make this process simple and welcoming. Employees start off with a positive experience, which can lead to improved productivity and better employee retention.
How can HR teams create a great onboarding experience from day one?
Welcoming New Employees Right From the Start
Making new employees feel welcome starts before they even step foot into the office. Human resource managers and departments are uniquely skilled to personalize this process for each new employee. Early onboarding strategies start with a congratulatory letter telling them that the company is excited to get them started.
A great way to welcome a new hire is to get their department involved in this process. Allow them to create their own welcome process. They can add their own special details, like making a short video introducing team members.
New employees are always excited to learn about the company's benefits. Ship out a package with your employee handbook and a list of the company's most exciting perks. Highlight unique corporate outings or activities, such as a company picnic or team building events.
You can even include some basic corporate swag like a branded pen and coffee mug. A strong, personalized welcome like this will go a long way to creating a positive memory for freshly hired staff members.
Simplifying the Onboarding Process
To help new employees adapt to the office and company procedures, adapt the onboarding process for a smoother transition. New hires have a lot to get done during their first few days. Simplifying tasks for them will help everyone get up to speed quickly.
Here’s how your department can do that:
The First Day
To ensure new employees have a near-perfect onboarding experience, their first day should be more welcoming and less overwhelming. Work with their department to ensure that they have everything they need to get started on day one. That may mean a bit of extra leg work to ensure that their technology and working spaces are in good order.
Next, make their first day interesting. It will be hard for new hires to retain much if they are forced to watch a one or two-hour video of policies. Go over the broad strokes of what they need to know and offer to answer any detailed questions later.
Meeting their team should be a pleasant experience. If you can, organize as many team members as possible for a brief conference with introductions. If there is more time, you can plan a lunch or breakfast meet and greet.
Getting these small details worked out beforehand will provide a better onboarding experience. When asked, “How was your first day?” new hires can give a good report. This will help your company to stand out to job seekers.
New Hire Documentation
While you don’t want to overwhelm new employees with a lot of paperwork, it is necessary to ensure that important business policies are written down and handed out. Have employees sign the form attesting that they have read and agreed to them as well.
These policies should include:
Rules for governing device use, repair, loss, and return, especially any that can be taken home.
Acceptable behaviors and disciplinary processes. Include social media policies.
Business and/or work hours, including holidays, paid time off, and sick leave policies.
Salary and payment policies.
A more detailed explanation of the benefits.
However, don’t overwhelm them with too much information at one time. Mail the document ahead of time and review the basics at their orientation. You can also provide electronic documentation to reduce paperwork for them.
Onboarding Beyond Day One
Employees should start their new jobs with clear expectations, goals, and the ability to ask questions to clear up confusion. Human resource managers should understand that onboarding doesn’t end with dropping new hires off at their departments to ensure this transition goes smoothly. Instead, HR should collaborate with each department to provide clarity and communication for a successful transition.
Here are some ways that groups can work together to help new employees have a better onboarding experience:
Assign a mentor or a work buddy. The first day in a new office can be intimidating. A mentor can help new employees navigate their career path in your company, and a work buddy provides a lunch partner for day one. They can also answer questions you might not have thought of, like “What do I do if something breaks?”
The more guidance they have, the quicker new staff members will integrate into the company. This will help them feel like part of the team right away.
Spread out the onboarding process. Outside what needs to be covered the first week, create a process to help employees get through their first 90 days. This can ease their stress compared to making them get everything done at once.
This also helps create a positive atmosphere to hit their stride without too much undue anxiety. At 30 days, send them a survey about their onboarding experience so they have time to process their experience. This data is critical to refining your onboarding process.
To improve employee satisfaction, keep in touch from time to time to see how they are doing. New employees who are struggling may feel like giving up after a month and a half. This is a good time to set up a check-in appointment.
If they are struggling, ask them about their specific challenges and if they'd like their department head to sit in a meeting. This will allow you to clear up minor issues and develop a strategy for bigger problems. Following up again at the end of 90 days shows them that they are valuable to the company.
Share company culture. A 2019 survey showed that 79% of adults look at a company’s culture and mission before they even apply. That means that most of your new hires are already keenly aware of this factor.
It’s up to you to make sure that they know what the culture looks like in practice. You may want to survey your current employees to describe your corporate culture. Draft a small document or graphic to illustrate it and make it part of your onboarding documentation.
Onboarding Remote Workers
Since the pandemic, many positions have switched to fully or partially remote. If this applies to you, you can still create a positive onboarding experience. It will just take a bit more effort for today’s HR managers to boost employee morale from a distance.
First of all, all documentation will need to be stored in the cloud. Use digital signatures to streamline employee responses. Work with your IT department to safely set up and secure these processes.
One of your most important tools is creating reliable communication and check-in processes, particularly for remote workers. Organize virtual get-together events along with regular webcam check-ins and work meetings. Integrate ice-breaker and team-building activities to encourage connection with your remote workers.
This new paradigm means you must address remote working issues for both new employees. Set up clear digital policies and make them part of your welcome package. Give new hires the tools to be successful when working remotely, including ways to manage work-life balance and how to incorporate company culture at home.
Providing a positive new hire experience even before their first day goes a long way to improving employee satisfaction. That can lead to more productivity and better retention. HR departments that develop positive onboarding experiences help their companies succeed.
About Author: This article is written by a marketing team member at LIKE.TG. LIKE.TG is a leading provider of proven HR solutions, including recruiting, onboarding, employee communications engagement, and rewards recognition. Our user-friendly software increases employee productivity, delivers time and cost savings, and minimizes compliance risk.
13 Fun & Creative Employee Appreciation Ideas
If you're a team leader, manager, or owner, can you think of the last time that you told your team they were doing a great job or that you appreciate them? If you have to think about the answer for a long time, that's not a great sign.
All too often, employee appreciation is either grossly overlooked or attempted with too little sincerity. When this happens, employees don’t feel truly recognized and respected for their hard work. But it's never too late to change that.
While celebrating Employee Appreciation Day is a good start, it’s actually far more important to show appreciation for your team members in some way every day. By investing time and energy into the self-esteem, confidence, and sense of value that your employees have day to day, everyone benefits from this healthy dynamic of mutual respect and gratitude.
Better employee retention, higher performance, improved productivity, and increased employee engagement within the workplace are all-natural by-products of regularly showing how valued each person is.
While gift cards, ice cream, and other tangible rewards are a great way of showing employees appreciation, below, you’ll find some simple but highly effective employee appreciation ideas that add value to your team members' daily lives and enhance your company culture.
1. Provide a Comfortable Working Environment
Physical comfort is a basic need for any worker. But going a little bit above and beyond can demonstrate your desire to make their day as comfortable and stress-free as possible.
Invest in ergonomic chairs, add some indoor plants, and make sure the office is always looking clean and inviting. Maintain great care of the spaces your employees occupy, as it shows continued effort on the company’s part to make their days as pleasant as possible.
If employees work remotely, ensure that they have the tools they need to get the job done. Working from home is already fraught with additional challenges. Ensuring your employees have a comfortable set-up with the right tools and equipment can reduce stress and improve morale.
2. Regularly Ask for Employee Feedback
Many times, management is clueless about how to really please employees. But there’s a simple solution: asking.
Holding feedback sessions, creating a “suggestions” box, and sending out feedback surveys can help bosses stay in the loop about what kinds of rewards and expressions of gratitude are appreciated most. You can also use one of the SurveyMonkey alternatives, as long as your survey is simple and easy to fill by your employees.
By making sure that employees from every level are provided with the space to speak up about new ideas or issues that concern them, you can hear directly from them how they’d like to be treated and what changes they might like to see in the future.
It also provides an opportunity for managers to pick up on any bullying, harassment, mismanagement or otherwise that may be happening behind the scenes.
3. Celebrate Birthdays and Work Anniversaries
Creating a birthday tradition in the workplace gives employees something extra to look forward to once a year. Plus, it provides everyone with a wonderful excuse to get away from their desks and enjoy a slice of cake!
Keep a birthday calendar in a communal space to help employees get to know each other better and give everyone an annual opportunity to feel celebrated. You can do the same thing with work anniversaries or other life events.
4. Provide Mental Health Days
Most organizations offer sick days and personal days, but few provide days off for mental health. These days are particularly beneficial to those suffering from anxiety, depression, or even high stress. However, they’re also good for when employees feel burned out or in need of a short break to prevent serious mental health issues.
Just like sick days, you can offer mental health days in a limited yearly supply, with the option to extend them if a serious issue arises. Giving your employees time to nurture their mental health shows that you care about them as a person and not just for what they can do for the company.
5. Be Flexible With Paid Time Off
Giving your staff members paid time off is a great way to show appreciation. You can award them additional vacation days that they can use at their leisure or dole out a few hours at a time with late starts, long lunches, and early quitting time. This gives them more time to spend with their family or do something else that they enjoy.
6. Cater Lunch or Provide Snacks
Employers can show appreciation through various food-related gestures that cater to the tastes and preferences of their employees. Here are some ways to incorporate food as a form of appreciation:
Employers can arrange for catered lunches to be brought into the office from popular local restaurants or specialized catering services that offer a variety of cuisines.
Arranging for food trucks to visit the office provides a unique and enjoyable experience.
Set up a well-stocked snack bar with a variety of healthy and indulgent options like fresh fruit, nuts, yogurt, chips, chocolates, and soft drinks.
Providing breakfast treats such as bagels, pastries, or a smoothie bar on certain days of the week can be a delightful way to start the day.
7. Make Celebrating Achievements the Norm
As previously stated, showing employee appreciation isn’t just about one day; it’s about creating a culture of appreciation.
Give positive feedback when your employees accomplish a small task or a big project. This feedback can be in the form of an e-mail or by stopping at their desk. Everyone has different comfort levels, so get to know your employees and what form of communication they are most comfortable with.
Or send out a company-wide email acknowledging your employee's hard work, recent success on a specific project, or anything similar. Other co-workers will most likely respond to the email, adding other congratulations and resulting in an even bigger act of gratitude.
One way you can implement this is by sharing your employee of the month through email. They will love the praise and be happier knowing you want to share their successes with the whole company.
Setting up an employee recognition program is another way to give everyone the opportunity to be recognized, and it helps promote productivity in the workplace.
8. Speak Out Against Discrimination
Having a company culture that refuses to tolerate any form of discrimination and aims to be as inclusive as possible is essential. However, taking measures to frequently discuss what that means will improve the employee experience and everyone’s sense of safety and empathy.
No employee should be made to feel uncomfortable or discriminated against by any person or policy within (or outside of) the working environment.
Show your appreciation for employees belonging to a minority or often discriminated groups. Make it easy for them to bring up concerns and normalize zero-tolerance for bias, bigotry, and discrimination of any kind.
9. Offer Career Advancement
Upskilling is one of the most desirable factors in employment positions. Now, more than ever, employees want to know that there is room for them to grow and expand their careers. Offering career development programs is one great way to give them exactly that.
The rapidly changing world of today means that constant reskilling and retraining exercises are necessary for certain employment roles to stay relevant. Implementing an upskilling program is one of the most useful, valuable, and future-oriented gifts a company can give its employees.
10. Give Career-Based Incentives
One of the most practical ways to show your appreciation for employees is to give them rewards based on facilitating their current job. A bigger working space, a private working space, and mentorship are all highly valued rewards by strategic employees.
Using job-based rewards as incentives for high performance shows that your company is ready and willing to compensate for hard work with realistic opportunities for individual career advancement.
11. Establish an Employee Recognition Program
A great way to show appreciation is to set up an employee recognition program. Appreciation through awards is a reminder of their excellent work. Awards can range in cost depending on the company, but we have a list of ideas for employee appreciation awards to get you started.
Another slightly more involved way is to use gamification to show your appreciation. For instance, you can have each team member claim a task. For each task completed, your team members will receive points associated with the value of their completed tasks.
You can then allow employees to redeem their points using a corporate rewards portal. In the portal, you can offer anything from vacation days, to work-from-home days, or even scholarships for continuing education.
12. Offer Gym Memberships
Employers can demonstrate commitment to their employees' well-being by offering free or discounted gym memberships, or by investing in an on-site company gym. These perks offer a convenient way for them to relieve stress, improve physical health, and boost mental clarity, all of which can enhance productivity and job satisfaction.For companies opting to build an in-house gym, it can encourage a healthy work-life balance, foster greater team bonding as colleagues may work out together, and ultimately, reflect the company's investment in its employees' long-term health and happiness.
13. Get Social
Your company’s social media pages are an excellent place to share some good news. You can use your social media channels to recognize employees on special days, such as their anniversaries or birthdays.
You could also post a photo along with a blurb highlighting an employee’s contribution to your company. You could also list fun and interesting facts about them that their current workers may not know. Or, you could write a glowing LinkedIn recommendation for a star staff member. This kind of recommendation can help them find success in their current role—and in the future.
The Final Word: Always Be Authentic
However your company chooses to celebrate achievements, express its appreciation, and reward employees, the most important thing is that it’s done with authenticity.People can pick up on forced or disingenuous gratitude far more easily than you’d think. That kind of expression is only going to cause a wave of eye-rolling and resentment within the workplace. Neither of which are good for the employees nor the company side they work for.
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About the AuthorThis article is written by our marketing team at LIKE.TG. LIKE.TG is a leading provider of HR solutions, including recruiting, onboarding, employee engagement, and intranet software. Our aim is to help your company improve employee engagement, employee productivity, and to save you valuable time!
Empowering your workforce to be creative
Without a happy and thriving workforce, your business will struggle to be successful. Creativity is key in marketing and empowering your experts can make all the difference to both atmosphere and output.
However, there’s little doubt that COVID-19 has shaken up business as usual – so how can your company balance essential processes with creativity?
Having full control of your marketing processes and utilizing the power of technology can certainly provide a launchpad for creative victories. In this article, we take a look at how you can transform your creative efforts effectively.
The roles of technology and in-house marketing
In-housing, driven by various factors including powerful technology, has been a hot topic in recent years. In a recent study, marketers revealed that they feel in-house marketing will be essential to the sector this year and in the future.
Bannerflow carries out an annual report looking into the state of in-house marketing – the 2021 study reveals that 58% of marketing decision-makers have noted creativity increases from their in-house teams.
Businesses involved in the study are looking to in-housing more and more, too – 73% said they’ve brought all or some of their digital marketing in-house showing a clear popularity increase.
CEO of Bannerflow, Nicholas Högberg, commented on the findings:
“After a turbulent and challenging year for most sectors, many marketing teams remain in-house, but it’s great to see that creativity isn’t being limited – instead it’s flourishing.”
Creativity certainly seems to have been high on the agenda for marketers in the past year. Many have strived to empower this within their in-house teams and maintain motivation during COVID-19 times.
So what have marketers done to inspire creativity in their in-house teams?
Creative workshops – 66%
Cross-team collaboration tasks – 65%
Collaboration tech – 63%
Training – 48%
Interestingly, barriers included organizational structure, pressure to deliver results, plus lack of time and technology.
When it comes to tech – digital transformation has been a big topic for many years, especially in the past year. In fact, digital communications have been sped up by up to four years due to the pandemic, according to a McKinsey report.
Widening your technical capabilities can be a huge driver for success in this area and can amalgamate with in-house marketing to inspire a recipe for success when implemented effectively.
In-house marketing is an exciting, evolving framework and solution – it’s also incredibly flexible and can work for your business in ways that can fit for your business. Businesses are choosing from three ways of in-house working that click with their structure – these are:
A complete in-house marketing agency model
A traditional method
A hybrid approach
Moving further forwards into 2021 and the future, 62% of marketers think in-housing will create the space for more efficient working in a remote setting. In addition, 58% envisage it helping to save on external costs and 57% believe it could increase creativity.
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The next steps you can take to empower your workforce
Get everyone involved
It’s not just the exec team who has great ideas. Lean on your delivery teams for inspiration and creativity when it comes to the services you offer and how to keep people happy in your business. They carry out the day-to-day work so know first-hand what’s important and what’s achievable. Blue sky thinking is great but only if the idea can be serviced.
Allocate time for creativity
Capacity may be tight but it’s important that time is allowed for people to get their heads together and thinking creatively. Schedule dedicated internal time for this and encourage employees to work collaboratively. This could be a regular meeting to discuss plans and strategy or simply an hour in an employee’s schedule for them to think about projects or plans and to offer up to three creative solutions for everyone to consider.
Mix up teams
It’s easy for people to get stuck in a certain way of thinking so have a shake-up when it comes to teams. Encourage cross-collaboration and ask that people learn what others have to offer or what they need for the business to thrive and be innovative.
Your marketing team, for example, may need more input from your sales team in terms of what messaging they think works with clients and what keeps people engaged.
Mix up your teams regularly, ensure people get face-to-face time with those they don’t work with day today and you’ll soon start to see creative solutions to problems at hand.
Delegate responsibility
It’s understandable as a manager or business owner to want to keep those creative ideas close to your chest but delegating responsibility for coming up with ideas can empower people to think creatively. Let people lead and take inspiration from them.
Set clear expectations
Don’t send your employees off on a wild creativity goose chase, ensure they understand why they’re being asked to come up with ideas or get involved with wider business decisions. Set boundaries on what they’re expected to achieve or offer up and you’ll find people more inclined to get involved.
Try to avoid tight deadlines, give people plenty of time to come up with creative solutions to problems. This means taking the time to scope out your plans for the months ahead and briefing people in beforehand on what you aim to achieve and how they can contribute.
Introduce tools that help with collaboration
Project management tools and collaboration tools that allow your workforce to band together to come up with more creative ideas is essential when adopting this shift in mindset.
It’s even more important with more and more businesses now working remotely, allowing employees access to platforms that make collaborations easy.
Reconsider what you can do in house
You know your industry and business better than anyone. Is there work that can be managed in-house that can be injected with a little creativity? As noted, marketing is one area where many businesses are implementing in-house teams.
This allows them to implement processes that allow room for creativity with no need to brief in and manage an external agency. Take back your content creation for social media channels and print advertising.
Is there something that can be done with tone of voice to increase engagement? Are you sharing your message on the right platforms? It’s time to rethink and strategize creatively when spreading the word about what you can do.
Be transparent
Much like setting clear goals and objectives when empowering people to be creative, you should also be transparent about why you’re encouraging this and what you hope to achieve. Everyone needs to be bought into this creative approach and so transparency at the start is key.
Moving your marketing team in-house can have clear benefits for your business – combined with being progressive with technology can contribute to empowering your workforce for years to come
About Author: This article is written by a marketing team member at LIKE.TG. LIKE.TG is a leading provider of proven HR solutions, including recruiting, onboarding, employee communications engagement, and rewards recognition. Our user-friendly software increases employee productivity, delivers time and cost savings, and minimizes compliance risk.
HR Management: What Traits to Look for in Remote Employees
As technology has evolved, remote work has become a new normal for many individuals. With recent technological advances, people can now work from anywhere in the world. Right now, there is an increasing number of companies that rely on remote workers. This year, 55% of businesses globally already offer remote positions, and 18% of the workforce telecommutes on a full-time basis. There’s really no denying how much working remotely has been booming, and right now, there’s no stopping it.
For many people, remote work is a lifesaver, and they have been delighted with this kind of work setting. However, it is not all roses. There are also plenty of things you need to know before your company/business decides on hiring people remotely. What are its advantages? How do you deal with the hiring process? Ultimately, what should you look for in a remote employee? Read on, and we’ll help you get answers to those questions.
Traits to Look For In A Remote Employee
It’s not as easy as it sounds to find a great remote worker. If you are on the hunt for someone to work with you long-term, you have to know what to look for. Your remote worker will be an essential asset to your company, and you should make sure they are a good fit. Here are some of the best qualities of a great remote worker that you should look for:
Communicative
One of the most difficult challenges in working remotely is constant communication. Make sure you look for a responsive candidate that is willing to stay connected with you and their future team, constantly keeping everyone in the loop. This will ensure that you are all on the same page and are working towards the same goal.
Self-Motivated and Disciplined
This is a fundamental trait when working remotely, as nobody is physical with them to make sure they’re doing their tasks and are motivated at all times. The best remote workers know how to move forward even without somebody looking over their shoulder. It’s also a great option to hire someone who already has experience working remotely so that they already know what to expect.
Has Great Organizational Habits
In line with being self-motivated and disciplined, great remote employees should have excellent time management and organizational abilities as well. After all, how their whole day will go all depends on them. So, look for someone who knows how to manage their schedule and keeps a detailed list of their daily tasks. They should also have great attention to detail and be able to meet deadlines.
Collaborative
On top of their strong communication skills, a great remote worker should also know how to collaborate with their remote team. They know what their fellow team members are working on, and they’ll make an effort to complement it.
Passionate
You’ll indeed be flooded with tons of applications, and plenty of them will put little to no effort into their application. A lot of them only apply for a remote job because they like the idea of working at home. Definitely a bad sign, isn’t it? What you want is the exact opposite of that — someone who is truly excited to be a part of what you want to achieve and will work hard to help you with it.
Resourceful
Remote employees wouldn’t have access to office amenities. This means they have to find their own way to be able to work effectively in their environment. On top of that, they would also be great problem solvers. They make an effort to look for resources that will help them resolve the issues they might encounter.
Adaptable and Flexible
A remote worker’s ability and willingness to adjust are vital to building an excellent relationship with their clients and teammates. There are instances when you need them for a meeting at a time that may be weird for them or maybe be unable to respond right away to their questions about work. A great remote employee will still be able to put their best foot forward despite those kinds of circumstances.
Confident and Reliable in Making Decisions
People who are constantly second-guessing themselves are absolutely not fit to be a remote worker. It would help if you had someone who can make thought-out and informed decisions about their work. Choose someone you’d be able to rely on to do the right thing and get the job done.
Business Advantages of Hiring Remote Employees
Still undecided whether hiring remote employees is for you? We’ve listed some of the business advantages of a remote work setting:
Reduced office costs. If you decide on hiring remote workers, you won’t have to spend money on leasing office space and extra utility expenses.
Limitless candidates. Deciding on a remote work setting also means having access to an entire world of possible employees.
Increased Productivity. According to FlexJobs' survey, 95% of their respondents have higher or the same productivity when working from home, and 51% of their respondents report being more productive when working remotely.
Quick Tips on Hiring Remote Employees
Finally, here are some quick tips that can help you through your remote hiring process:
Examine their resume well. A single resume can already tell you a lot about your candidate, so make sure to take a good look at it. Make sure their resumes are well-written. If you want a guide of what an excellent resume looks like, check out these executive resume samples.
Provide questions. Because you now have applicants from all over the world, you will need an efficient way to choose the ones worth interviewing. One way to filter them out is to make them answer a few questions and see if they meet your baseline criteria.
Take advantage of video calling. Hiring someone remotely means you won’t be able to sit with them in the same room during the interviewing process. The next best option you have is a face-to-face video job interview where you can hear how they speak and pick up the non-verbal cues they express while they answer your questions.
Get the candidate’s future team involved in the interview. After all, they are the ones who will collaborate and communicate with each other to achieve the company goals.
Take note of not only their professional background but also their work ethics. Do you think this candidate is really interested in what the company does? Do you think they’ll be able to handle the work well? Do they already have remote work experience? Ask questions that will make the perfect candidate stand out.
Final Thoughts
Nobody is perfect. It’s cliche but it is true. Looking for the best remote employee is definitely not an easy feat. It needs a lot of time and effort. The traits we’ve discussed are just a guide and are only supposed to help you know what qualities you should look for in a remote employee. In reality, you won’t be able to hire someone with all of those traits for every role you need to fill. The important thing is you look for someone that is best suited for each role, be supportive of them, and put an extra measure of patience and training. This way, you’ll be able to help your remote workers move towards success.
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About Author: Mindy Allen is a freelance writer who specializes in website content, blogs, email copywriting, and social media content. She was a former English teacher before she decided to start working remotely. She has been a remote employee for over two years and loves giving tips on remote work settings.
Remote Employee Support Benefits to Consider Giving to Your Team
The business world has become increasingly digital for decades now. Thanks to project management tools, video conferencing, chat platforms, and more, business no longer needs to be conducted under a single roof. Companies can now meet, collaborate, communicate, and get work done from virtually anywhere with an internet connection.
In the face of the novel coronavirus pandemic, remote work has become not just a luxury, but a necessity for businesses around the country. Companies have abandoned their perk-filled offices, and many of them plan to stay this way. This dramatic change has many businesses questioning one single thing: what do benefits look like for employees who work from home?
If you’ve found yourself pondering the same question, we’re here to help. Read on to learn about some employee support benefits to consider giving to your team while they work from home.
Upgrade Health Insurance Coverage
Health is top of mind for people around the globe right now. According to a nationwide Gallup poll, 60% of Americans reported feeling worried about their health in the face of the Coronavirus pandemic, up 21% from pre-pandemic times.
If you run an established company with a handful of full-time employees, chances are that you already offer health insurance to your full-time staff. If so, consider upgrading the health insurance that you offer your employees to help soothe worries and give them a bit more peace of mind.
Here are some modifications to your health insurance plans that you may consider offering:
If you don’t already offer coverage to employees’ dependents, consider extending your coverage to include them, too.
Increase the amount you pay toward your employees’ premiums to relieve some of the financial burdens on them.
Grandfather all covered employees into the next coverage period without needing to meet a certain threshold of hours worked; this can enable employees who need to take time off to do so without fearing losing their health coverage.
Cover Home Office Setup
Chances are, most of your employees never expected to work full time from home. As such, their homes may not be set up with a designated office space. They may find themselves working 8 hours a day from their kitchen table, or bouncing from couch to kitchen to bed to keep comfortable. It’s not optimal for comfort or productivity.
Help them establish a space in their home that’s appropriate for a full day’s work by providing a home office setup stipend. Provide enough for a desk, chair, secondary monitor, keyboard, and mousepad. You may also consider offering an ongoing stipend for internet, as many of your employees may be forced to upgrade their internet speed to enable them to complete work.
Offer Wellness Services
In addition to coronavirus-related health concerns, full-time remote employees currently face a wealth of new wellness concerns, too. Without an office to commute to and coworkers to co-mingle with, many employees face challenges with both physical and mental wellness. Employees risk increases in feelings of isolation, sedentary lifestyles, and stress and anxieties.
The good news is, there is a wealth of corporate wellness software that tackles just this issue. These aren’t your run-of-the-mill calorie-counting and exercise-tracking apps. These softwares offer holistic wellness services, including exercise, nutrition, mental health services, financial guidance, and more. Not only can these services help your employees lead happier, more fulfilling lives, but they can also reduce healthcare costs for you.
Take Care of Lunch
Did you offer employees lunch prior to the pandemic? Many employees rely on work-provided lunches when building their budgets, and the pandemic has caused a nationwide decline in income. In fact, according to a TransUnion survey, 58% of those surveyed reported that their finances have been negatively impacted by the pandemic. Why stop providing free lunch now?
There are a number of different ways to continue providing lunch to your employees, including:
Offer meal services designed specifically for work from home employees
Provide a regular gift card to a meal delivery app or home meal service
Give a weekly stipend to cover what you used too pay per employee for lunch
Childcare Services
Work is just one of the many things that have been changed by the coronavirus pandemic. For parents, perhaps one of the most substantial and complex complications created in the past year is the closure of schools, daycares, and other childcare facilities. Many parents are now faced with paying out of pocket for one-on-one childcare or managing both work and childcare at the same time.
If you have a significant number of parents at your company, it may be nice to offer a stipend to cover childcare during the pandemic. That will allow your employees to focus their full attention on work, eliminating distractions and increasing productivity.
Moving forward, this type of benefit can also open your doors to hiring highly skilled employees who struggle with accepting a full-time position due to childcare needs.
Education
Whether it’s pandemic times or not, education should always be a central feature of your employee benefits offerings. Ongoing learning and education are valuable for so many different reasons. A comprehensive education offering attracts employees who are interested in bettering themselves and growing their skills. That’s not only good for them but for you, too. Ongoing education enables your employees to become experts and thought leaders in your industry.
A thorough education package includes the following elements:
Personal and professional development courses
Industry-specific education and training
Tickets and incentives for attending industry-related conferences
Ongoing peer education via “lunch and learns” and other on-the-clock learning opportunities
The professional world may look totally different than in the past. But, just because times have changed, doesn’t mean you need to sacrifice the perks and benefits that make your company and employees stand out. Consider the above benefits to maintain a happy, healthy, and successful workforce. Who knows—your employees may be happier than they ever have been!
About Author: Matt Casadona has a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, with a concentration in Marketing and a minor in Psychology. He is currently a contributing editor for 365 Business Tips. Matt is passionate about marketing and business strategy and enjoys the San Diego life, traveling and music.
6 Tips To Prepare House for Hybrid Mode of Working Remotely
You probably heard about working remotely. The number of people working from home has significantly increased in the last few years - it doesn’t matter if a person offers translation services in Canterbury, a web developer in Los Angeles, or an HR specialist in Tokyo. WFH gained supporters in almost all niches and countries.
With more and more people joining the ranks of those who work from home, it has become one of the most popular work models in recent years. And, whether we like it or not, it seems like it is here to stay.
One of the solutions many companies implement is offering their employees a chance to work partly from their homes and partly in the office. This hybrid model allows for greater flexibility but also requires some much-needed preparations. If you need some tips on how to prepare your house for such a situation, read on. Below, you will find helpful advice on organizing your workplace, including making your surroundings look professional, inviting more natural light, and many more. Let’s begin.
Remove All Distractions
Working remotely is all about being able to concentrate. And that can be hard to do if you are surrounded by things that can distract you from the task at hand. The best way to avoid this is to remove all unnecessary items and furnishings from your house. Get rid of the pile of old magazines, newspapers, and books that you’ve been meaning to read for ages but never got around to reading. Remove from your sight the TV and computer games, as well as toys for children and pets.
Make Your Home Look Professional
If you want to make your home look professional, you will need to invest some money into it. According to experts from The Pattisall Group, the first thing you should do when trying to make your home more adapted to remote work, is to buy a nice desk and chair that will look great in your home office. Choose furniture that you will find comfortable and looks professional. Also, get it adjusted by a specialist so that you avoid back pain and strain later on.
Invite More Natural Light
If you want to feel more productive during your remote days, one of the best ways to achieve this is to invite natural light into your space. You can do this by opening windows, removing curtains, or buying new blinds. This way, you won’t feel like you are always at home when working remotely from here.
Make Your Office Space Inviting
In order to make your home office space inviting, you should consider putting up inspirational quotes and posters on the walls and purchase some nice artworks or decorations that add character to it. You can also put up photos of your loved ones, for example, or images of places you love. In this way, your office space will feel more like a real workplace and less like a place you have to be stuck at all day long.
Keep Your Workspace Organized
One of the most important aspects of organizing your space for remote work is keeping it tidy and organized. Put all of your papers in files or folders and label them clearly so that you know where everything is whenever you need it. You should also keep pens and pencils in a cup or a container so that they don’t get lost or scattered across the room when not in use.
This also applies to your printer, if you use it. You should clean it often so it doesn’t become clogged with paper dust and smudges. Also, there is nothing more frustrating than trying to retrieve a document from a printer that stopped working because it was full of dust or needed maintenance. Keep this in mind while setting up your home office space.
Update Your Technology
If you haven’t updated your technology in a while, now is a good time to do it. When working remotely, staying connected online at all times is crucial so having faulty equipment can cause problems with productivity and communication with your colleagues.
To avoid this, make sure that you have a good internet connection at home and a laptop or desktop that doesn’t break down easily. Also, there are plenty of applications available online that can help make your remote work easier and more efficient.
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The Bottom Line
Remote work has become a lot more popular in the last couple of years. More and more people decide that they prefer it over the traditional model of work from the office. Many companies understand that which is why they offer their employees a hybrid model of work, where they spend some time working from the office, and some from home.
However, to be able to adapt to this model of work, and continue to be productive, you need to prepare your home. Hopefully, this article showed you how you could do that. Good luck!
About Author:This article is written by a marketing team member at LIKE.TG. LIKE.TG is a leading provider of proven HR solutions, including recruiting, onboarding, employee communications engagement, and rewards recognition. Our user-friendly software increases employee productivity, delivers time and cost savings, and minimizes compliance risk.
5 Tips for Onboarding a New Team Member Successfully
Nothing is more important to the success of a company than its employees. They are those who work on the projects, answer customer calls and actually perform the services, and create/market the products you offer. Of course, in order to have solid employees who help your business, you need to first hire them and have solid talent acquisition strategies. This can involve performing background checks (learn more here), holding interviews, and several other things.
But once they’re hired, the onboarding program or process is what prepares them to work for you and gets them up to speed. Without any further ado, let’s go over some tips for a more successful onboarding process, to make sure every new team member can understand their role.
1. Use the Right Tools and Automation
If you want to onboard as efficiently and successfully as possible, you need to use the right tools and information. If everything is handled manually, it can be a process that drags on and hurts your efficiency. There are many different tools, and the right one will depend on your needs. In addition to using tools, you should automate what you can.
This can reduce the work required to get people onboarded, and can save you a lot of money and time. Everything from HR Payroll Systems to training software can have some automation that can drastically speed up the process, as well as make it go more smoothly for your new hires. Any tool you can use to improve the onboarding experience for every hired employee is a good idea to consider.
2. Be Clear With Duties and Responsibilities
Once a person is hired, it is crucial to let them know their duties and responsibilities as early as possible. They might have an idea from the description and the interview, but you need to now provide them with the specifics.
You need to prepare ahead of time, to ensure that you can clearly state what they should be doing every day. This could simply be explained, or you could even provide them with a role map to show them the scope of their position. If this is poorly done, they could be confused and end up focusing on the wrong things.
3. Set Expectations
It is crucial to set your expectations in terms of the schedule, how to best communicate with the team, the company culture of the business, and more. Every business and company operates differently, so the new team member might not immediately know how things are done.
The more your new hire can know about how your business operates and what is expected of them, the better. By doing this, you can ensure the new hire knows the best way to reach colleagues, how long they are expected to work, and the values or mission behind the business.
4. Train Them Well
Depending on the nature of your business, it is also crucial to train your employees well. You need to ensure they know how to use the different software, apps and tools your team makes use of every day. If you simply throw a new hire into their role without any training, they aren’t very likely to be successful, and will certainly make mistakes.
In addition to training as soon as they’re hired, continued training over time is also a good idea to keep morale high and skills sharp. Training them well over time provides several benefits that can only help your company and employees. Whether they are new or have been working with you for 18 months, training can help them reach new heights.
If you are dealing with a remote employee, be sure to find ways to ensure they are adequately trained, as well. Remote work is growing more common, so you need to be sure you can handle them.
5. Stay Available and Communicate
Few things are as important as communication in business. This is especially true early on, as new team members are likely to have questions or things they will need clarification on. Make sure to communicate well with them, be clear, and ensure you leave an open line of communication if they need it. Employees feel a lot of pressure, so knowing they can turn to you for help can be beneficial.
Be sure to perform regular check-ins as well and ensure everything is going well, but be careful not to micromanage. Make sure to introduce them to the team as well, as building relationships is crucial in a business setting.
In conclusion, we hope that this article and the tips within it have been able to help you have an effective onboarding process for new team members and ensure you can achieve successful integration.
About Author: This article is written by a marketing team member at LIKE.TG. LIKE.TG is a leading provider of proven HR solutions, including recruiting, onboarding, employee communications engagement, and rewards recognition. Our user-friendly software increases employee productivity, delivers time and cost savings, and minimizes compliance risk.
Employee Engagement: Learning from Other Company’s Successes and Failures
Employee engagement is an important part of your business’s bottom line. Without it, you will experience high employee turnover and low morale. The following sections cover common engagement failures, organizations that faced them, and how to do better than them. So if you and your leadership team are ready for changes within your engagement system, here we go.
Failing to communicate
The business may be booming, but that does not mean you can stop proactively listening to your employees. This means scheduling time for QAs or circulating surveys. They need to know that you are keeping them informed and taking their advice and complaints seriously. Your business may be your baby but healthy employee engagement comes from the common endeavor, which means they have to be proud of it too.
Nike is a prime example of what happens when employees' concerns are ignored, and individuals are discouraged from voicing their concerns. In 2018, the company made headlines after numerous women came forward to news outlets discussing a toxic workplace environment. Although Nike did implement changes to address these problems, not before their brand took a lot of damage.
How can your company ensure lines of communication remain open? Regularly scheduled one-on-one sessions are a big way to make sure everyone’s voice is heard. Email communication is another way to involve multiple individuals in a conversation. But even if you speak with all your employees on a regular basis, do not lull yourself into a false sense of security. Be open with your teams and tell them you want to address their concerns, which will go a long way in overcoming engagement issues.
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Not recognizing employee’s work
Everyone enjoys recognition for a job well done. Your employees work hard to hit deadlines and present the best-finished product. A failure to give praise or an acknowledgment of this dedication will lead to poor performance and morale. Implementing a recognition program for top performers in your organization isn’t that hard. From weekly chat messages to company-wide eblasts, all of these are ways to shine a spotlight on your employees of the week.
The global hotel chain, Hilton, implemented a recognition calendar program for employees. This calendar included tips for managers on how to highlight individuals during each month of the year. The program was a great success for the company, especially with keeping individuals engaged in their job.
But it’s not just current employees that benefit from a culture of recognition. Prospective employees can look up your company’s recognition program or hear about it by word of mouth. If you have a great system in place then you can hook some great new individuals for your business.
Preventing individual skill development
Your industry is always changing and evolving, the same goes for your employees. They want to expand their skill set to improve their personal performance and your organization’s results too. But when you hamper any opportunities for education, then your workers end up in a rut. Supporting attendance at virtual events or signing up for educational websites will go a long way in preventing boredom and complacency.
ATT created its own university program for continuing education amongst its employees. The leadership-led program helps employees learn not only about their current position but sets them up for success with future roles within the business. But the company does not just rely on its special university program, it’s also developed other initiatives to help with continued learning opportunities.
Although you may not have the resources to create your own learning program, there are still lots of free resources for your business to utilize. Whether it’s masterclasses on YouTube or your own manager’s presentations, offering skill development is a big plus for employee engagement.
Overlooking support staff
Do not forget your behind-the-scenes people, they’re the ones that are a big part of making your company run smoothly. Whether it’s cleaning staff or part-time employees, they need their moments of recognition too. Although their work isn’t as directly vital to your immediate success your business will still grind to a halt without your cafeteria staff.
Food delivery company DoorDash soured its relationship with its drivers when they failed to properly reimburse them for their services. Although DoorDash’s business model relies on delivery drivers, the drivers didn’t feel they were properly paid for their service and created their own campaign to improve pay. Instead of listening to their employees, DoorDash ignored them.
To avoid a problem like this in your organization, don’t forget all the people that make it a success. Proper pay, recognition, and little acts of kindness go a long way in making your support staff feel appreciated.
Thinking engagement is a one-and-done session
All right, now that you’ve scheduled your monthly meeting with your staff, that’s enough of an investment in employee engagement, right? Wrong! Your relationship with your team is an ongoing process and it involves constant work on your end.
About Author: This article is written by a marketing team member at LIKE.TG. LIKE.TG is a leading provider of proven HR solutions, including recruiting, onboarding, employee communications engagement, and rewards recognition. Our user-friendly software increases employee productivity, delivers time and cost savings, and minimizes compliance risk.
