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How To Maximize Employee Retention
Gone are the days where you join a company straight out of school and work there until you retire. Today, people are not afraid to tell their employers what they want or to shop around for a better offer somewhere else. Employee retention is one of the toughest challenges businesses of all sizes and shapes are facing—even in a global economic downturn.
So, what does this mean to business owners?
Is it possible to keep hold of great employees, or do you just accept that low employee retention rates are the normal state of things?
The truth is, you will never stem the flow completely.
However, with the right work environment and strategies in place, you can make your business as attractive as possible to good employees and make them want to stay longer.
6 Strategies To Retain Employees
Ready to find out how to keep your employees from jumping ship? Let’s dive in.
Start With The Right People
A good team at work is critical to keeping people hired for longer. You don’t necessarily need everyone to get along all the time. But you need everyone to show motivation and feel that everyone else is pulling their weight. Employees start to feel disillusioned if they believe they are doing more work than others on the team.
When hiring new team members, think about their work ethic and personality. You want to try to ensure they will fit in with the rest of the company, and the general company culture. You can do this by getting more established team members to come and sit in on the interviews once candidates get to the final stage of hiring.
Treat Them Like Individuals
Stats show that people want to be heard and want to know that their needs are being taken into account. In order to do this, you need to have regular conversations with your team in group settings as well as in one-on-one settings.
This should take place in both the conventional work environment and in more casual settings, like having lunch or a cup of coffee outside of the office. This will make your employees feel like you are recognizing what they bring to the company.
When meeting with employees, remember to ask about how they are doing, both personally and professionally. They may have some great ideas about how other employees could improve the business or their own workflow. They may also be going through something tough or struggling with work-life balance, which could impact their performance and need some attention from you.
Set Clear Expectations
Another critical part of building a strong, positive relationship with good employees is to make sure that everyone knows where they stand.
A business relationship is all about meeting expectations. This means that both you and your employees need to understand exactly what they’re expected to achieve.
It’s also important to have this conversation up front in the hiring process, and then continue having it as new work or projects come up.
If you want to promote employee engagement and make them feel empowered and confident in their work, you need to be available for questions. They should never reach the end of a project or piece of work only to hear that it isn’t what they should’ve been doing, or that it wasn’t done correctly.
Offer Healthy Incentives
The more important an employee is to your business, the more you should be giving them in terms of incentives to stay with the company. This includes perks, such as flexitime or financial rewards in the form of a bonus.
When people get rewarded for hard work, loyalty or talent, they feel more inclined to stay where they’re recognized. Additionally, if other team members see their colleagues getting recognized and rewarded, it could very well motivate them to work harder to get the same bonuses and perks.
Recognition and reward don’t always have to cost business owners days off or bonuses. You can also acknowledge a job well done simply through a company-wide email to tell everyone that a project is completed and these are the staff members who made it happen. However, the more tangible the acknowledgment, the better employees will feel, especially in the long term.
Invest In Employee Development
People are often looking for opportunities to grow.
If they feel like they have stagnated in a company or have gone as far as they can in their careers in one place, they will start to look elsewhere for work.
As a business, you can find ways to offer professional development. This can be through paying for courses or training a number of employees to use software that streamlines operations. You can even give people room to switch gears within your company if it’s large enough.
Programs like this are great because they build up the skillsets within your business, as well as show your employees that you care about their personal development. Your faith in them is likely to be rewarded with their loyalty and continued motivation to excel at work.
If you aren’t sure where to start with an employee development program, ask your staff members what they want. In your meetings and catch-ups, talk to them about where they see themselves in the future and what jobs they want to be doing. This should give you plenty of information about how to structure a development program or what kind of courses you could invest in.
Be A Leader
The position of business owner or boss is something that so many strive for or yearn for. However, they don’t realize that you need to actually be a leader if you want your employees to be happy and stay with the company long term.
An effective leader inspires people to follow them and inspires loyalty in any number of employees. A regular boss is easy to leave when another job opportunity comes up.
Satisfied Employees Equal Retention Success
Creating a happy, healthy, and productive workplace is the key to employee retention. Focusing on maximizing employee experience and satisfaction goes a long way towards training workers who are an integral part of your business. Start implementing these employee retention strategies now and you should see the difference.
Author Bio: This 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!
Recruitment Tips For Startups: Hire From Day One
Hiring processes have evolved tremendously across all industries due to a global competition to attract the best talent. If you're new to the market, these startup recruiting tips are likely to be helpful.
Usually, behind creating a startup, there is a unique value proposition; but to develop that unique proposition, you need to create a unique team.
When a company is created, the founding team has a double challenge: making the startup profitable (in the shortest time possible) and building a team that helps fulfill the dream.
Probably among the priorities of the first stage will be:
Meeting minimum revenue to stay afloat.
Keep customers happy as they come in.
Develop a model that aims for profitability in a given period of time or accelerate the process in the next investment round.
What will help you achieve these goals?
Invest in building a great team
This advice will most likely seem premature if you are a startup. Besides, if almost 80% of hiring teams capture the best talent, how do you stand out from the already positioned competition in the job market?
We'll show you how to attract the candidates you need to boost your startup and fulfill your dream in this insight.
Hire from day one
If you are just launching into the entrepreneurial world, you and your founding team likely have an endless list of tasks. Maybe your proposal is still being validated in the market, you barely have clients, and you're focused on staying afloat. This is the scenario of almost all startups when they go to market.
So how do you go about "hiring from day one"?
It's just as hard as finding a quality research papers help service. Most startups don't think about hiring until they need to hire: they need to scale quickly after raising a round of investment, the product has been well received, and more people are needed for the sales team, or support, or customer success... or all of them.
This type of situation forces you to accelerate processes and hire quickly, running the risk of spending a lot of resources and time identifying candidates. However, you can prepare the ground and start recruiting long before you have the conditions to hire. Here's how to do it!
Build your employer brand from the start
Just because you're not in a position to offer new jobs from day one doesn't mean you can't start your hiring process.
When you have already set out to attract the right candidates, it will be easier to know each other. For his part, the candidate will already know your organization, its values, and how it works. From the company's point of view, you will have one or more profiles that you will have followed up, and it will be easier for you to attract them.
There are many employer branding strategies that you can develop from the beginning with very economical actions. You can share the backstage of your company on social networks, the workspaces, testimonials from the team, useful content to build a community of followers (among whom your future hires may be found), etc.
Work with talent pools
"Hire all the time" is an idea that you should embrace and be able to convey to your team. It doesn't matter if you will be in a position to sign a contract in a few months.
If you can identify early the people you want to add to your team and work strategically to attract that talent, you will be more likely to fill the available positions with the people you want. That's what working with a talent pipeline is all about.
How can you do it?
Participate and encourage your team to join online discussions and events in your industry. This will help them prepare, make the brand visible, and perhaps make the first contact with future hires.
Also, if you want to go a step further, work from the beginning on your Career Site and use it as a priority channel to make your employer brand visible. Work on your web positioning and, even if you don't have vacancies available yet, share the offers you intend to publish soon. This way, future candidates will have an idea of the opportunities they can expect.
Create a hiring plan
Having a hiring plan can be very useful in setting goals and setting the course for your startup's growth. It helps to answer and map out actions based on these three basic questions:
What needs to happen in the business to make a specific hire?
How much time will you need to make that hire once the vacancy is posted?
When should you start promoting the available vacancy?
It is a common mistake for companies to start promoting their job openings just when they need to hire. As I said initially, this leads them to rush the process, and they do not always consider whether the new hire meets the candidate profile they need.
Think of job offers as you think of your product
It is likely that, even though you have generated a talent base from your employer branding strategies and other organic actions, you are considering running advertising campaigns to drive recruitment.
This is where many companies "get carried away" and replicate traditional models for new hires: Contact with recruitment agencies, campaigns on every job board out there, endless requirements to fill the position, and so on. However, candidates now play a much more active role in the labor market, bringing new strategies to the table to attract the right candidates.
Establish a starting point. If sales strategies are evolving and you are constantly considering new ways to make your product attractive, why not do the same when finding the ideal talent for your company?
Define your "ideal candidate" profiles
Should you have only one ideal candidate profile? In this insight, we offer you some ideas to don't limit yourself when assessing various candidate profiles. It might surprise you how valuable it is to bet on the diversity of talent in companies.
However, just as it happens when you define your ideal client, you must segment and identify the profiles that fit your needs. To define your Candidate Persons and boost an effective recruitment campaign, you must take into account:
What technical skills are indispensable?
What soft skills will you take into account to consider them?
Should they have previous experience in similar companies?
What aspects do they value in an organization, and how can you satisfy them?
What characteristics do they need to meet to be "compatible" with the company's culture?
What social media platforms do they consume?
What communication channels are most effective for contacting them?
The answers to questions of this type will allow you to better focus your strategy and opt for techniques closer to inbound recruiting. Among the main advantages, two stand out:
You will be able to identify the most effective channels to promote your offers.
You will create ads better adapted to your target.
Don't turn the job description into a list of requirements
It's simple. If you are clear about who you are trying to hire, the description of your job offer and all the messages you use to promote it should be attractive to those profiles. Don't focus on the requirements. Instead, highlight what you offer your future employees and how they will benefit from joining your team.
View onboarding as an investment
You've probably read a lot about the importance of providing a good candidate experience. Most companies are very clear about this and strive to ensure it. However, contrary to what many think, the candidate journey does not end with the hire.
The onboarding process is just as important to the success of new hires. Just as the recruitment and selection process focuses on attracting and hiring the best candidates, their retention depends largely on onboarding.
The reason is very simple. Think about all the time and resources you have invested in hiring that person. Make sure you give them all the tools to do their job and facilitate their onboarding process. The new employee must have more than one reason to want to stay in your organization.
Again, you must think the same way you do with your customers. Just as we trace a funnel to generate value around our product, new hires must go through a whole cycle until they can make significant contributions to your company. Taking care of the onboarding process will help you accelerate that process.
Bring an onboarding plan and get results in the short term!
About Author: This 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!
Three Keys to Drive Engagement & Retention for Your Hybrid Workforce
Employee engagement is the concept of understanding the nature of an employee’s relationship with their employer/organization both quantitatively and qualitatively. In other words, the level at which an employee cares about his or her workplace itself, as well as its mission. While engagement has always been a challenge, it’s become even more so as the pandemic has changed the work environment to one in which employees work from home, some or all of the time. This new hybrid workforce has brought employee engagement and retention to the forefront of many HR departments and the goal is to continue seeing both, even when employees aren’t on-site every day. So what’s the solution? Engagement drivers are where it’s at. These differ from organization to organization, but some key engagement drivers will get you started. Of course, you can customize them for your workforce and use them to keep employees engaged so they stick around. Within each is some additional ideas that you can use as you create your engagement and retention plan.
What are Engagement Drivers?
Before we delve into the specific engagement drivers you can use, let’s learn a little bit more about what they are. They are your top options for making an impact on how employees feel about the organization and their role within it. Your goal is to choose the drivers that will result in the highest engagement. For example, your drivers may have to do with how managers respond to feedback and how well they listen to their employees. In this case, your engagement driver is manager communication. The best way to identify your engagement drivers is using surveys. The resulting data will help you see what matters to employees and how addressing those drivers will improve engagement and help retain employees. Let’s talk about the top three keys for employee engagement and retention.
Hire from day one
If you are just launching into the entrepreneurial world, you and your founding team likely have an endless list of tasks. Maybe your proposal is still being validated in the market, you barely have clients, and you're focused on staying afloat. This is the scenario of almost all startups when they go to market.
1. Future Outlook
People like to feel like they are part of something. That means that if they are excited about the future of the organization and where it’s going, your chances of employee engagement and retention are much higher. So how do you make that happen?
Communication
You won’t be able to get your employees on board for the future if you don’t clue them in. It falls on those in leadership roles to communicate the organization’s goals and visions.
Shared Goals
While leadership may create the goals, the entire team plays a part in reaching them. For that reason, it’s vital to hold regular meetings to update everyone about the steps needed to reach the goal.
Progress Updates
It’s not enough to share the goals and vision. It’s also important to keep employees apprised of progress toward the result. Sharing in successes is also necessary for engagement and employee retention.
Employees and Their Role
While everyone works as a team, each employee should understand his or her specific role and duties. This can be achieved by scheduling one on one time to discuss it.
2. Feeling Valued
Sure, getting paid what you’re worth is important, but a big factor in employee retention is feeling valued. Employees want to feel appreciated and like they are an asset to the organization. Here are some ways to do this effectively.
Employee Surveys
This is a simple way to gather feedback from your employees. The trick is to follow up appropriately based on the data you gather. Consider the data you received from employees. Keep in mind that employees may be more forthcoming if the surveys are anonymous.
Recognition
No employee wants to work their hardest to get zero recognition in return. Employees are more engaged and likely to stay when they are recognized for their contributions. Praise goes a long way toward making employees feel valued.
Flexibility and Trust
Micromanaging rarely goes well. Employees are hired due to experience and education so there needs to be some trust that they can perform their job without every action being scrutinized. In addition to autonomy, you can build engagement with flexible schedules and increased responsibility.
3. Career Growth and Development
Employees are more likely to stay with the organization when they feel like the company is invested in their careers. Providing opportunities to advance and grow their skills is a vital part of engagement and retention. Keep reading to find out how to do that.
Tuition Assistance
It’s expensive to get a higher education. However, many employees desire the chance to do so because it allows them to grow their careers. Investing in your employees by offering tuition assistance benefits them and the company. Your employees learn new and valuable skills that translate into the workplace as you strive toward the organization’s overall goals.
Promotion Opportunities
The top performers in your company should be given the chance to advance to a higher ranked position, otherwise known as a promotion. If there isn’t a position currently open, offer employees challenges in their current role so they continue to feel engaged in the job and won’t be seeking a new opportunity elsewhere.
Training and Mentoring
Offering support as employees gain skills and hone the ones they already have is a simple and valuable way to keep them engaged at work. These can be group opportunities or one on one chances to meet with someone who can provide training and encouragement as your employees grow in their careers within your company.
The Takeaway
The new hybrid workplace environment indeed makes engagement a challenge. When employees are working at home, they don’t have the same opportunity to connect with the organization and its other employees, which can be detrimental to feeling valued and engaged. While it may be a struggle, identifying engagement drivers can help you create a plan that keeps your employees engaged and provides them with the consistency and challenge that makes them want to stick around. Remember, making your employees part of the plan is the most important step. They want to feel like they matter and that their input matters. Begin with that and work the rest around it.
About Author: Paula O Gorman is the marketing manager at Promotive, a marketing agency in Ireland. Paula uses some of these techniques to help with employee engagement and retention at Promotive.
Everything HR Needs to Know About Cybersecurity Today
Cybersecurity has until recently not been a top priority for HR professionals. However, things have changed, and that is no longer the case today. This is even more important now because of the challenges brought by the pandemic in early 2020. Collaboration between cybersecurity teams and other departments such as HR is now vital.
Many businesses moved their operations online when the pandemic struck. Some went ahead to adopt a work from home formula for their employees, which posed serious cybersecurity challenges. This led to an increase in virtually all forms of cyberattacks on different organizations.
HR professionals need to understand their role in organizational cyber safety. This includes knowing how employees can cause security challenges to a company and the possible solutions. In this article, we will explore every detail that HR professionals need to know about cybersecurity.
Let’s get started.
How the Remote Workplace Affects Cybersecurity
Remote working wasn’t as widespread as it is until the pandemic disrupted our daily lives. Today, millions of people worldwide are working from home. However, remote working has multiplied the number of cybersecurity threats that businesses have to deal with today.
The remote workplace exposes companies to phishing schemes, insecure Wi-Fi, unencrypted file sharing, computer malware, weak passwords, among other risks. The good news is that you can prevent most of these security challenges, such as phishing and weak passwords, by conducting regular cybersecurity training.
You should, for instance, train employees on the identification of phishing emails. Make it continuous training with newsletters and periodic phishing tests. Train employees to avoid password sharing and repetitive password usage, and also how to set strong passwords.
Unencrypted file-sharing can pose serious security threats. Cybercriminals can intercept unsecured data-on-transit, leading to theft, ransomware attacks, etc. Thankfully, there are several ways to secure data before you send it over a network.
One of the best ways to do this is using Blazing SEO residential proxies when working on business networks. Proxies are critical assets for companies that handle sensitive data. Using them helps increase data security and efficiency, especially when the data users are working from remote locations.
The Common Cybersecurity Challenges
Remote working has given cybercriminals more opportunities to exploit. Companies that allow employees to work from home are increasingly getting targeted by these criminals. HR professionals have had to develop strategies to help them overcome the security challenges of remote working.
But then, the first step to overcoming cybersecurity challenges is understanding them. Let’s look at some of these challenges below;
Expanded Attack SurfaceRemote working means more devices accessing a network as everyone uses a personal device. It is not like in an office setup where a few devices can serve many people simultaneously. The challenge is that most personal devices may not be optimized for security, increasing security holes on the network.
Password Threats
Well, we have already mentioned how weak passwords can expose a business’s network. HR is responsible for ensuring that employees do their part in safe password use. Ensuring they avoid things like password reuse can help ensure cyber criminals do not crack your business systems.
Increased Uncertainty
There is a climate of fear that develops when you have a massive space to protect. The more devices used to access a network, the higher the doubt and urgency. HR is responsible for guiding employees on keeping safe as a successful attack won’t only affect the company network but also their household.
Employee Mistakes
Feeling tired or losing motivation when working from home can lead to employee mistakes. Research shows that 35% of employees experience this problem. The chances of such employees making costly errors are high. HR departments should set flexible schedules to allow remote workers to rest and reset.
Choosing Cybersecurity Solutions
As mentioned earlier, HR professionals have several ways to solve cybersecurity issues. This can be through following certain practices or infusing technology in their strategies. With a wide range of solutions available, it can be daunting for HR professionals to choose the best solutions.
The cloud is an excellent example of solutions that companies are using to boost cybersecurity. Data protection in the current online environment can be tricky if you do not adopt cloud-first security strategies for your company. HR should choose cloud vendors well to be sure of their cloud safety.
Another possible way to solve cybersecurity issues as an HR professional is using automation. Various technological changes are happening every day, and the use of automation technologies is one of them. Automation using AI-based systems can help you analyze massive security data.
This makes it easy for you to design your cybersecurity strategy to meet your current security needs. Besides, automation makes it easy to detect threats and reduces false alarm rates. Implementing these technologies as an HR department can help you realize security on a larger scale.
There are service providers who avail automation and cloud solutions to businesses. As mentioned earlier, the cloud vendor you choose matters, and the same applies to automation service providers. In the end, choosing cybersecurity solutions well can be of massive benefit to HR and the entire company.
How HR can Improve Cybersecurity in the Future
HR shouldn’t provide cybersecurity solutions that only focus on the present. There is a need to have future-proof solutions that a company can rely on in the future. The easiest way for HR to do this is to invest as many resources as they can on their employees to help prevent future attacks.
Besides, the HR departments need to keep the ever-changing threat landscape in mind. Cybersecurity solutions that work today may not work in the future. Cybercriminals are getting smarter with their attacking techniques, making continuous monitoring and updating security solutions essential.
Another way to ensure that cybersecurity solutions work into the future is by taking responsibility. Many companies delegate their security to professionals and other firms. The problem comes when they feel too comfortable and leave everything to third parties who don’t fully understand their threat landscape.
Taking cybersecurity as a responsibility and embedding it into your company culture can be beneficial. It is vital to follow up on any third parties you contract to handle your security. The HR and IT departments should also work hand-in-hand to ensure employees do not become a weak link in their security efforts.
For instance, HR should deactivate the accounts of employees immediately after they leave the company. It is common to hear of suspicious activity happening in inactive accounts. The problem is that HR and IT departments take too long to detect such activities if they do not cooperate.
Conclusion
Fostering a cybersecurity culture in an organization is everyone’s role today. Employers, i.e., the HR department, are mainly responsible for employee recruitment and training. Security awareness is one of the essential things they need to train employees on before onboarding them.
Besides, HR teams must understand how remote working affects cybersecurity. We already mentioned how remote working could expose business networks. This can be through employees accessing the networks from unsecured devices, networks, etc. when working remotely.
The HR department needs to identify these challenges and find solutions for them. For instance, they should teach employees remote working best practices, put policies in place, etc. HR also needs to find future-proof cybersecurity solutions that will ensure continued security for their companies.
Author Bio: This 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!
What To Expect From Recruitment Trends In 2022
Recruitment trends are necessary for the recruiter to hire the candidates. The expectations of the candidates and companies are changing with time. Hiring a star candidate is a challenge, and the recruiter has to act more than other recruiters.
The recruiters who are still following the trends from the previous year might not work in 2022. The recruiters using the traditional methods for hiring need to have strategies. They have to leverage upcoming recruitment trends to get the most benefit. The recruitment trends for 2022 look promising.
This article will focus on the recruitment trends in 2022. Let us begin.
#1. Rise of Generation-Z workforce
Gen-Z employees are tech-savvy. They look for companies that provide them with the latest technology while working. Gen-Z is a multitasker and can handle plenty of tasks at once. So, hiring a Gen-Z requires a lot of effort.
So, recruiting Gen-Z means you need to adapt to a group. The same old applications won’t interest them anymore. It will not help the recruiters onboard them for their company.
You need to adopt the latest technology during the hiring process with chatbots. 2022 is the right time to update your company’s website and make it more Gen-Z friendly. The recruitment process has to be seamless, and they must be able to apply via their smartphones.
#2. Use of artificial intelligence more in the recruitment process
AI has been around for a long time. The recruiters are incorporating it into their recruitment process. The AI technology helps to streamline or automate the part of the recruiting flow. It consists of high-volume tasks and more. It allows the recruiters with blind screening for reduced bias and visibility.
Here are some more benefits of AI for the recruitment process:
Save recruiters time by automating tasks.
Hiring volume for a company increases every year. The recruitment team has to be ready to fulfill the requirements. The recruiters need to be efficient with their process. Screening resumes is an outdated practice, and the recruiters need something better. The screening takes plenty of time for a single hire. So, it is better to move on to AI to automate the tasks. Using AI won’t disrupt the workflow of the hiring process seamlessly.
It improved the quality of hires.
Quality of hire is the top KPI for the recruiters. AI promises the quality of hire. It offers to standardize the matching between the candidate’s experience, skills. The improvement in job matching leads to happier and more productive employees. They will be less likely to turnover.
#3. Predictive analytics will be key
The use of analytics is in the upward direction in the coming years. So the recruiters don’t want to miss out on this trend and are looking to apply it in their talent acquisition strategy as quickly as possible.
Predictive analytics uses the data to find the relevant patterns. It uses the model to predict the future trend. It helps to understand the past trends to make the right decision for the future. Here are the reasons that make predictive analytics ideal trends to use:
Attract relevant candidates via sourcing
For most recruiters, sourcing the candidates takes plenty of time. It is the reason they need a strategy that works wonders. A recruiter leverages predictive analytics by including it in the talent acquisition strategy. Thus, predictive analytics increases the effectiveness of the hiring process.
Predictive analytics helps in talent pipelining.
Predictive analytics optimize the talent pipeline by leveraging the talent data. It leads to better resource allocation. A recruiter knows where to invest in the recruitment campaigns for a specific skill.
#4. Candidate driven market
The significant change in the 2022 recruitment trend is a lot of jobs available in the market. It is the reason the candidates hold power more than ever before. Candidates have more options than they had in a long time and can negotiate salaries. The recruiters need to work harder to hire a suitable candidate than ever before. The same recruitment trends might not work to please the star candidates. So, in 2022 we can see better recruitment strategies, data-driven recruitment marketing.
#5. Virtual recruitment
Virtual recruitment has grown in immense popularity since last year. But the trend will continue to grow in the upcoming years. It is the primary recruitment method for many companies. Virtual recruitment offers plenty of benefits to the employer as:
Seamless hiring of the candidates.
Increase in candidates' reach.
Proper engagement with Gen-Z.
Time-saving.
The recruiter will schedule virtual interviews that are in the candidate’s comfort. 2022 will see a boom in the virtual recruitment process. It helps to reach a wider audience pool that is not limited to geographical areas. It increases the possibilities of the recruiter to get a large number of candidates for hire. Virtual recruitment is a win-win for both employees and employers. The employees are ready for remote work. Thus virtual recruitment is the workable option to hire them.
#6. Reaching passive candidates
Last year, we saw many companies competing for the same candidate. It means limited opportunities for the companies. Because of this, companies are willing to come in contact with passive candidates.
Passive candidates make better hiring. These candidates are not looking for a job change but can consider if the opportunity is right. They might get enticed by the employer brand. It is an upcoming trend, and reaching passive candidates helps to expand the talent pool.
#7. Remote recruitment process
Remote hiring is a trend that is growing and will continue to stay. The recruiters know this quite well and will plan their recruitment process accordingly. The candidates favor remote working and are more inclined toward jobs that have ‘remote work’ in them.
It will change the recruitment process making the recruiters rely on video and audio interviews to finalize the candidate. Virtual recruitment is a time-saving and effective way of hiring candidates. In 2022, the recruiter has to find ways to embrace the recruitment process. This way, the recruiters will reach a wider candidate pool not limited to a specific area. It benefits the workforce diversity and streamlines the hiring process of the team. When compared to in-person interviews, virtual interviews cut down this significantly.
#8. Recruiters hiring for soft skills
There is a lot of skill gaps present in the recruitment industry. And having soft skills in a candidate is beneficial. Upcoming jobs are focused on soft skills like communication and problem-solving skills. So, the recruiters are more inclined to hire soft skills to reduce the gap present in the recruitment industry. Here are some of the benefits to hire for soft skills:
It broadens and diversifies the hiring pipeline.
Increase workplace productivity and retention.
Ease of upskilling.
It improves customer satisfaction and experience.
Some tips for soft skills focused recruitment process:
You have to focus on your job descriptions. They must focus on soft skills such as communication and teamwork. Refocusing on the job requirements with soft skills helps find the best candidates.
Use pre-hire assessment tools that allow you to pinpoint the soft skills. By leveraging the tools, recruiters can hire up to 10 times more accurately. It saves time, money and provides a better candidate experience.
Try to source talent from places known for cultivating soft skills. Explore the places where you can find the relevant candidates having soft skills.
Author Bio: Ginni Agarwal is a Talent Acquisition Expert at Upright Human Capital with extensive experience in Tech and Non-tech hiring. The company aims to provide a healthy workplace for the right set of talent to the company without any fear of losing our human capital. She loves blogging, writing articles about Talent Acquisition, and the recruitment industry. She has been associated with the Talent Industry for a while. She enjoys sharing her experience with others.
10 Best Ways to Help Employees Deal with Stress
The worst mistake a company or a manager can ever make is making their employees not as productive as they could be! Research has indicated that over 55% of professionals in India feel stressed at work (source: LinkedIn survey). Work-life balance (34%), discontent with the incomes (32%), and unsatisfactory career growth (25%) are the significant factors that gang up on and overwhelm employees. To say nothing of adjusting to remote working environments made it hard for many to swim with the tide during the pandemic.
There is a mile-long chasm between employees' wants and what they are getting to cope with stress in their working environments. (Unfortunately, this happens pretty often!) Employees are falling into the abyss of stress and productivity.
Stress: Something more than the loss of productivity at work
A small amount of stress is good in the workplace, but sometimes it gets overwhelming. On-job stress can affect a person's capabilities and productivity and lead to higher incidences of making blunders at work.
Before you get into the solutions of helping employees deal with stress, here are some of the benefits of low-stress work environments:
Lower company costs: Excessive and constant stress can lead to burnout. Which, then, has the potential to break your business down. A study by Mental Health America indicates that workplace mental health problems result in as much as USD 500 billion of lost productivity annually.
Reduced absenteeism: It is a duck soup to understand that a healthier mind and body leads to lesser leaves and better engagement of the employees with the company. When employees know how to train their minds, they tend to be more punctual at their workplace due to increased focus.
Higher retention rate: Employees tend to stick to a company longer when they know their employers care for their mental health and well-being. Thus, leading to a lower attrition rate.
Improved performance: Too much stress is a monster! It reduces creativity, drains energy, and makes it hard to focus on the task at hand.
Connected company culture: The number of overstressed employees is directly proportional to the degree of happiness at the workplace. The employees feel more connected to the companies when they feel that their mental and physical health is being taken care of at their workplace.
Employers need to examine the environment they are creating for them and the source of the stress for their employees. As a leader, here is how you can help your employees bring down the tensity at work.
10 tips for reducing stress at work
Use these tips for enhancing your work environment to reduce stress:
What Is A Recruitment Strategy, And Why Do You Need It?
The fundamental definition of a recruitment strategy is the plan that explains what role you are hiring for, how much time you have, what tools you are going to use, and the requirements for successful candidates.
When it comes to recruitment strategies, the "one size fits all" approach doesn't work. Depending on your company's goal, the time frame, and other factors, the right recruitment strategy may differ from case to case. Therefore, instead of having a specific path in mind that you follow in every situation, you may want to develop creative ideas that can streamline your recruitment process. However, all these ideas need to follow your company's overall goal, be implementable, and be easy to communicate.
If carefully planned and implemented, recruiting strategies will help you position yourself in the job market as a reliable employer, helping you attract the people you are looking for.
1. Employee engagement is your secret weapon
ResearchandMarkets shows that the global employee engagement and feedback software market is poised to reach USD 1,908.3 million by 2027 at a CAGR of 11.8% from 2021-2027. The market research indicates the growing trend of employee engagement across a broad spectrum of industries.
Quizzes and hackathons are the blockbusters for employee engagement activities, but Business Simulation games are the new disruption in the market. They are now extensively used by corporations to educate, train and engage their employees. To put it simply, business simulation games give insights into the management process by providing real-world scenarios. Combining learning with gamified virtual programs and engagements eventually upskill the employees and improve their focus on everyday tasks.
Inquizitive, an organization-wide quiz contest by Reliance and Ideathon, a collection of various challenging and exciting activities by Mahindra First Choice Wheels, are the perfect examples of how to engage employees.
2. Give your listening skills a workout
Wrap your head around a simple fundamental principle - Don't hear, listen. Perhaps, the most basic and essential way to connect to your employee is to listen. Invite employees for open discussions or one-to-one meetings; talk about their challenges and concerns. This way, you narrow down their source of stress and take the necessary steps to cope with the stress.
Great leaders like Satya Nadella (CEO, Microsoft) and Jens Hofma (CEO, Pizza Hut) believe in respectful, believable, and honest communication with their employees.
3. Setting goals: Begin with the end in mind
Realistic and attainable goals help employees unlock a positive mindset, release creative ideas, and energy for goal attainment. Showing them how to plan, strategize and set similar pragmatic goals can ensure that the employees understand what's expected of them. It will help them save time, improve their performance, and strengthen the business.
SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based) framework is one such way to help them unleash their best potential and relieve stress at work.
4. Let's accept - surroundings influence productivity
Studies show that changing the work environment and aesthetics has a positive effect on the employees. Get your creative juices flowing and play around with the setting of the office. Make the office a little more alive by getting plants, creating opportunities for movement, building a break room, and designing a layout that meets your employers' needs.
For instance, Google offices make sure that their employees can relax and refuel during breaks. Fun fact: Do you know that Google has kitchens everywhere? Yes, because nobody is allowed to be more than 100 meters away from food!
5. Frustration happens; it's okay to conduct venting sessions!
"I just cannot take this job anymore."
Everyone has been there, done that! Yes, sooner or later, employees can become saturated and disengaged and end up venting out emotions to their colleagues. It can spread negativity and bring down the morale of the entire team. But when done right, it can work wonders. Here's how.
Organize workplace venting sessions where employees can post their concerns anonymously. However, on the other hand, motivate them to come up with solutions. This will meet their need to be seen and heard and help them focus on their work better.
6. Your office should not feel like a cell; give flexibility
After experiencing a remote work environment for more than a year, everyone knows that workplace flexibility now dominates the future of work. Instead of babysitting the employees, allow them to select their schedules and mode of working. This freedom will help them create a work-life balance and will make them feel less stressed.
Netflix outshines big names like Google and Apple when it comes to flexibility and convenience. Known for supporting its employees in their professional and personal lives, Netflix benefits programs are centered around creating flexibility for employees.
7. Implement mindfulness in the workplace
Charting a purposeful path to the next normal should be a pressing priority for every firm irrespective of its size, which can be achieved by practicing mindfulness. Intuit, an American business specializing in financial software, is an ideal example of implementing mindfulness at the workplace.
Their Well Minds program promotes mindfulness and resilience by providing tools to help calm the minds of their employees so that they can perform better. Further, their one-to-one counseling support helps with stress management.
8. Recognized employees are equivalent to happy employees
As a leader, it is vital to understand the principles of employee recognition and motivate others in the team to practice it in the workplace. Be on the lookout for opportunities to praise your employees. It will not only help them increase their productivity but also lead to higher retention of quality employees.
Try your hands on verbal recognition and written compliments, organize group lunches, or give them gift cards/bonuses!
9. Healthy snacking (nom, nom)
Healthy snacking has long been a cornerstone of reducing stress. Educate your employees about healthy snacking and make sure they have access to such stress-buster food at work.
Here are some suggestions for foods to snack on that can ease off the work stress:
Berries
Citrus fruits
Dark chocolates
Nuts
Yogurt
10. Practice vulnerable leadership
Showing your vulnerable side at work is not a weakness. Don't shut people out and let your authenticity stay intact because it is human nature to trust authentic people more. Remember, when the employees don't trust the manager, the company suffers. Admit your mistakes, take criticism, have an open-door policy, and connect with your team. Be a modern leader!
These are some ways you can try to eliminate stress from the employees and make your company a great place to work. Remember, your people are your product. Take time out to focus on the well-being of your employees, and they will reciprocate a thousand times!
Author Bio:
Dare2Compete,
Dare2Compete lets recruiters gamify learning, engagements, and hiring while connecting them with students, professionals, educators, and other learners.
Why Does Employee Retention Matter?
Are high sales rates and ROI the true measure of a thriving business?
While a continuous streak of customer acquisition and high-selling products is impressive, these all prove meaningless without a team of competent employees to carry out the business’s most essential operations.
When employees start leaving one after the other, it is usually not a good sign for any business. The failure to acknowledge and work through workplace issues affecting employee motivation and performance could potentially lead to a business's downfall.
In contrast, working hand-in-hand with staff to improve work performance and employee satisfaction is the first step to implementing an effective employee retention program.
What is employee retention?
Employee retention is the capacity of any company or business to keep its staff on payroll. Businesses with high employee retention rates imply empathetic management and well-accommodated staff. After all, why would people want to leave a company that adheres to their needs and demands?
There are internal and external factors that affect how well a business can encourage its workforce to stay.
During the onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic, companies worldwide experienced a dramatic decrease in their in-house workforce. If not due to income loss and forced closure, some employees had to resign to protect themselves from the deadly virus. Others chose to find a more convenient money-making alternative, either in the form of a home-based job opportunity or a new business venture.
COVID-19’s economic impact is an example of external circumstances that test employee retention. Although the pandemic is out of the employer’s control, there are still specific countermeasures that they can work on to adjust to the sudden shift in employee expectations. These countermeasures involve adjustments in the workflow, chain of command, and task distribution. It would not be reasonable to use the pandemic as an excuse for not being able to revise company policies for the benefit of the staff.
On the other hand, some of the most common internal factors that influence employee retention include salary rates, employee benefits, stress management in the office, and team dynamics. Overworked and underpaid staff are likely to resign and find job opportunities with higher offers. If the workplace is demotivating and tolerates toxic behavior within the management and staff, it discourages people from staying. At the same time, the lack of opportunities to advance their career are huge red flags, especially for tenured employees.
Why is it a relevant factor in a business’s long-term development?
Retaining employees, whether old or new, is a sign of empathy and concern for the welfare of the staff. Any business would find it almost impossible to advertise their products, engage potential customers, and sell without a team to back them up.
Who will carry out their marketing strategies? Who will engage interested buyers and address customer concerns? Who will represent the company and leverage its success with the business’s core objectives?
That said, employee retention is crucial in the following:
Reducing operational costs — Replacing tenured staff with new hires is costly for any business. The constant need to hire and train new personnel skews the time and resources meant for gaining stability and securing ROI for the business. Instead of moving forward, companies are held back by the repetitive cycle of guiding newly hired staff and orienting them about workplace culture.
Whereas, when trainees are molded into experts in their field, the company is also equipped with a well-oiled combination of skills and broadened knowledge base that enable companies to exceed customer expectations. More satisfied customers also mean more earnings for the business.
Boosting employee productivity — Employees are driven by management that proactively exhibits a consistent need to grow with their team. When staff observes that their colleagues are satisfied and encouraged to stay with the company for a prolonged time frame, it speaks volumes. It shows that the company values them as key players in sustaining and growing the business exponentially.
Reinforcing brand credibility — Customers are more empowered thanks to the interconnectivity of social media platforms. It is easy to expose brands abusing the rights and welfare of their employees. In contrast, businesses that encourage resilience, teamwork, and competence among their staff tend to gain the trust of their target customers. The drive to challenge employees to exceed their capacities in a nurturing and positive manner reflects favorably on a company’s new and existing clientele.
Enhancing customer experience — Happy employees bring happy customers. You can tell that employees are prioritized through their work performance and how they communicate with clients. They radiate positive energy and exhibit a professional and dependable work ethic. Moreover, their stellar customer service is consistent and easily recognized by both new and long-time customers.
Augmenting employee training/onboarding process — The better a company is at retaining their employees, the more they are inclined towards continuously improving how they meet employee expectations and demands. They are backed by constructive feedback backed by first-hand experiences of their long-time staff. Consequently, the management can draft employee welfare strategies that adhere to their needs and reflect the business;’s unique setup.
It is unfortunate that even in a modernized society, people still hear personal accounts of abusive bosses and large-scale corporations notoriously exploiting their employees for their personal gain.
If you happen to be a business owner who stumbled upon this blog, do not be one of these heartless bosses who disregards the grievances of their staff. Instead, be a compassionate leader who takes the time to address employee concerns, discuss them with their team, and devise solutions to resolve these dilemmas.
Employee retention is not limited to keeping a team of professionals who will help them generate sales and acquire more customers consistently. It also focuses on promoting a harmonious work environment. People become more motivated when they have a positive working relationship with their colleagues and feel that they are appreciated in the company.
Next to customers and loyal patrons, well-accommodated employees are powerful advocates of what a business aims to represent and achieve.
Author Bio: This 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!
11 Ways to Engage Employees
When done right, employee engagement results in each member of a company giving their best. They’re better at collaborating with the rest of their team—both on a personal level and when completing their job-related tasks—and are committed to company-wide success.
If engagement at your company is lacking, there are a lot of ways an uninspired workforce can be felt across a company and create a dramatic ripple effect. The key to turning this around is a commitment to improving your company culture from the inside out.
So let’s get familiar with what employee engagement is and why you shouldn’t overlook it. Plus, we’ll offer our employee engagement ideas, which have been tested at organizations of all sizes and in a variety of industries.
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What Is Employee Engagement?
Employee engagement refers to the level of enthusiasm and commitment an employee feels towards their job and the organization. It encompasses how invested employees are in their roles and their willingness to go above and beyond to contribute to the company's success.
Engagement is, at its core, about company culture. The workplace should be a place where employees are generally happy, as they spend a lot of their time there.
The Best Employee Engagement Ideas
1. Compensate Competitively
People like to feel acknowledged for their hard work. And although salary is important, it’s not all they want. Be sure you’re staying on top in areas such as healthcare offerings, retirement plans, and generous PTO.
2. Establish a Rewards System
Whether it’s marketing, productivity, or engagement, there are a few things that wouldn’t benefit from the implementation of a gamified system.
Start by setting clear, measurable goals that align with company objectives, and then create engaging challenges or milestones around these goals. This system could involve earning points for hitting targets, completing tasks, or demonstrating company values, which can then be exchanged for various rewards such as extra vacation days, gift cards, or public recognition.
For example, employees might earn "innovation points" for contributing unique ideas, which are displayed on a digital leaderboard and lead to quarterly prizes for top performers, fostering a fun and competitive atmosphere that motivates everyone to engage more deeply with their work.
You can make this process even easier by implementing employee recognition software.
3. Offer Training and Career Advancement
Employees don’t want to stay in one position forever; they want to grow. That doesn’t mean that you need to prepare them to leave the company for greener pastures—instead, aim to make your company the greenest pasture out there.
Make sure every employee knows that promotions are not only possible but expected, given good work. Thus, you will find that training will be much appreciated. You can send them to conferences and workshops, assign them recommended readings, or provide them with company-branded how-to demo videos if they are working remotely.
4. Encourage Autonomy, Not Micromanagement
No one likes to feel that they are being micromanaged. Yes, employees should be held accountable, but they want to know that you hired them because you trust in their abilities to do their job. Give them direction, set deadlines, and then set them free to get the job done effectively.
You can of course, as a leader, guide them along the way if you notice that something they’re doing could be done more efficiently, but make sure you are not checking up on them at all hours of the day. Use your check-ins sparingly and they’ll be more likely to see them as help than feel a hint of dread.
5. Offer Remote Work Options
It may seem counterintuitive to let employees work from outside the office to boost their engagement, but negative office environments can cause work anxiety and thus hinder employee engagement.
In addition to relieving the stress of your employees, offering remote working arrangements will also help you stay competitive. This could look like allowing employees to work from home certain days of the week, setting up satellite offices, or even offering fully remote positions where team members can work from anywhere with internet access.
6. Encourage Personal Projects
One of the top things employees look for in a workplace is one that fosters a healthy work-life balance. Encourage them to have a life outside of work.
Do they want to hone a skill that is not directly related to their day job? Great, feel free to help them out if you know of resources you can suggest. Cheer them on. Show up for them however you can.
Managers and their subordinates should be able to talk about personal endeavors. If coworkers can share more and help each other out when it comes to their hobbies, they will be happier all around and learn to build each other up.
7. Facilitate Communication and Encouragement
Teams that like and appreciate each other work together best. Push for your employees to get to know each other and treat one another as respected individuals.
Plus, with the help of good engagement software, they can have a platform to give shout-outs and praise to their fellow staff. It shows each member of the workforce that the other members of the team truly believe in them and are taking note of their accomplishments.
8. Make Onboarding a Breeze for All
No one likes coming into a new job and filling out a ton of paperwork. Nor do you need it to be the first thing a new employee thinks about upon walking through the door on their first day—you want them to be excited about the orientation process and focused on the job they were hired to do.
The right software will enable smooth transitions for new hires rather than present a bit of a turnoff, as it may have been in the past. Getting the correct forms filled out and catching them up to speed does not have to be a dreaded task when everything is available virtually in one easily accessible place.
Today, it is more than possible to find an onboarding system that is a great experience for already busy HR staff and anxious new employees alike. With the latest technology, you can be sure they’ll feel welcomed rather than overwhelmed.
9. Welcome Employee Feedback
You want your organization to have integrity and transparency. This is not to say that you should toss out your corporate hierarchy framework. While most decisions should continue to come from the top, your employees need to feel that their voice is valued.
Invite feedback from all team members—yes, even from interns. Everyone should understand they deserve to have their opinions heard. They are more likely to be engaged and enthusiastically interact with their team if they feel they have a voice—and that you’re listening.
You do not have to accept every suggestion, but if an employee brings a concern to your attention or an idea of how to improve any area of your business, hear them out. Thank them for their contribution and see to it that it is at least considered.
10. Hold Contests and Have Themed Office Days
Who said work can’t be fun? Keep things interesting by, when appropriate, holding little games or themed days at the office.
Try a game night (or lunch). Whether it’s trivia, Pictionary, or even sports, having employees engage in friendly contests is always a good way to get the creative juices flowing and build relationships within the company.
Relay race obstacle courses, escape rooms, board games, card games, VR, you name it. As long as it’s something fun, cooperative, and takes away the stress of work then it’s a suitable candidate for game night.
Themed days can be aligned with major holidays such as a cook-off for Thanksgiving, costumes for Halloween, or a Secret Santa gift exchange for Christmas. And don’t forget about birthdays, as they’re easy to celebrate but just as easy to miss if you’re not keeping track.
11. Take Employees Out to Lunch
Going out to lunch with all the employees in your office provides a great opportunity to get to know everyone better. Plus, it gives them the opportunity to open up to you about any problems they may be facing.
Most veteran HR managers would agree that they’ve had better luck catching problems early when they already have a rapport with the employees at their company. It also helps you gather invaluable feedback about how the employees would want the company to run, what changes would make their jobs easier, and even any operational inefficiencies.
In addition to these small outings, you could also organize company-wide lunches every quarter so that everyone has the chance to build a stronger relationship both with their coworkers and the company as a whole. This reminds them that they’re part of something big and worthwhile.
12. Volunteer as a Company
Many enterprises make giving back to the community a priority. Don’t just give money, though, as things can easily be made more personal than that. One poll found that a staggering 68% of employees would take a job with a company that values volunteer work over one that does not make time for it.
We’re also seeing that corporate social responsibility (CSR) ranks highest among millennials. Cone Communications reports that up to two-thirds of young professionals said they wouldn’t even consider working for a company that does not prioritize this. Not to mention, it’s great for team building.
Encourage your staff to volunteer together instead of simply giving them time off to do their own individual community service. And don’t be afraid to change it up—if you don’t have a set organization to which you prefer to donate, you can even have employees vote on which charity or nonprofit they’d like to help each year.
13. Have Snacks in the Office
Employees are more likely to engage with their work if they have access to extra benefits, particularly yummy snacks. You don’t have to spend a fortune on professional catering or bog your employees down with junk food.
There are quite a few nutritious snacks that you can offer such as avocados, dark chocolate, or red grapes. These will keep your employees both happy and healthy. It even serves as an extra incentive to join when headhunting talent. And there are plenty of food ordering solutions available worldwide to make things even easier.
14. Review Regularly to Gauge Happiness
Employees who regularly get to use their strengths, skills, and abilities were found to be as much as six times more likely to be engaged at work—and 8% more productive, according to research from Gallup.
Hold regular reviews with the aim of not only gauging their performance but also checking in on their overall well-being. If they’re not showing the growth their managers were expecting, there could be an underlying reason for that.
Make sure these assessments are a two-way street—don’t just talk at them, rather, give them a chance to explain their side. Ask them what their goals are, what you or their supervisors could be doing better as leaders, and what would improve their outlook on the job.
Get them to understand that you take change seriously and that if something can be identified that will help them do better, you will do your best to make that a reality for them. In the end, this should end up proving to be a solution, both for them and for the company as a whole.
15. Meet In and Outside of the Office
With all the tools we have in this digital era, it doesn’t matter if your team is distributed across the globe or sitting across a section of cubicles from one another, there is a way for them not only to get along but genuinely like each other.
Make sure to hold meetings regularly so that everyone is on the same page. Employees should see this as an opportunity to collaborate and ask for help. When people come together to share ideas, fewer potentially great ideas will escape the organization. Some of the greatest innovations started from joint efforts.
If people are remote, have them call or video into a conference. Even if the team is all situated at a physical office location, don’t skip this step. Emails cannot always replace the nuances and camaraderie of face-to-face interaction.
And it’s not just about work meetings. Organize ways for your people to meet up outside of work as well. Hold private company holiday parties at rented venues, invite staff to join together at a bar if everyone is local—or, if you have the funds and some of the team is remote, try gathering everyone together for annual, or biannual, retreats.
You want your team to feel like a cohesive group. And those who have fun together often stay together, creating memories that can then be taken back to work with them and shared among work friends.
Why Is Employee Engagement Important?
Hiring Top Talent
When a candidate is first researching to see whether they might want to apply, they’ll often look at websites that show current and former employees’ ratings of employers. When the majority of employees are pleased with their experience at the office, positive reviews show prospective hires what a great place your company is.
Boosting Productivity
Employees tend to be more productive when their overall experience is positive. And more productive team members are, of course, great for your bottom line.
The stock prices of businesses that have made it to Fortune’s “100 Best Companies to Work for" have risen 14%, per a study from the Jackson Organization as reported by Forbes, while those not on the list are reporting a mere 6% increase.
When it comes to salespeople, for instance, happier professionals are reported to be able to raise sales by an astounding 37%, on average, according to the Harvard Business Review.
Improving Client and Customer Relations
Happier employees generally provide a better experience to clients and customers. They genuinely believe in what they are selling and want to go the extra mile for customers’ success.
Lowering Turnover
Don't lose your best employees because they aren’t happy enough while at work. Keeping employee engagement high boosts talent retention.
Voluntary employee turnover has many costs. Plus, filling an empty role has a negative effect on employee morale and takes time and money. When employees see others exiting the company, they might think something is wrong and consider other opportunities.
Employee Engagement Tools
If any of these employee engagement ideas got the gears turning and sparked excitement for you while picturing all the new, interesting things you can have your team do together, get in touch!
We can walk you through LIKE.TG’s engagement software, such as the ever-popular Workmates, to show you how tools that are easy, fun, cost-cutting, and time-saving can get you where you want to be.
A tight-knit, more communicative, and all-around more productive work environment is possible with our expert advice and acclaimed technology. To see happiness levels at your company rise quicker than you ever thought possible, reach out and we’ll help you reap the benefits of a more engaged workforce.
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Managing a Team Across Multiple Remote Locations
When getting into the remote developers’ world, you might encounter a big obstacle - working with and managing a team across time zones. If you think about becoming a manager of multiple remote workers within different time zones, you’ll need to have a good management approach and some help from technology. In order to successfully work across different time zones, you’ll need to have great organization and good company culture so you avoid frustration and misalignment issues. It’s not easy, but we’ve managed to gather up some great tips that might be able to help your teams work. If our remote teams worked through that obstacle - so can you.
Set Clear Expectations in Your Team
Since it’s not possible to manage each of the team members works working in your team in multiple locations, it’s best to clarify expectations at the very start. What we do is organize face-to-face conference calls to discuss and set all the expectations for each member of the team and for the team as a group so that everything is clear and transparent. We also assign all tasks at the beginning of the week (what better way to start your Monday) so that everyone can analyze and assess the work beforehand. By setting day-to-day objectives, we want to keep the workflow going without the impact of different time zones. And it also makes it easier to make weekly, monthly, and even yearly plans which will help with task management and workflow distribution.
Make Sure You Communicate Your Working Hours
Having work hours is important for any person - it’s not just that concerns teams. When working remotely, it's important to have a schedule that you will stick to so that you can keep the work-life balance. When it comes to working with a team, we've found that it's best to set the working hours on the company calendar so there is no confusion about availability. You should also have some flexible parts of the day when possible, in case a colleague's time zone doesn't fit your own at all but you need to discuss things or work together on a code.
When it comes to meetings, although you may feel pressure to say yes to every meeting even though it's 4 AM in your time zone, it's important to stick to your schedule. It's always best to check with your colleagues to schedule meetings in a time that will best suit everyone, without harming or forcing someone to be awake at 4 AM if they don't want to.
If you're managing dispersed teams of developers like us, you can also try working with a default time zone. Why exactly? To avoid any confusion when scheduling meetings or collaborating on something. Scheduling meetings and assigning deadlines in your time zone can cause unnecessary mix-ups when people try to basically translate the time into their time zone. To avoid this possible confusion, you can set an official time zone that will be used as a reference for all meeting scheduling and deadlines. This way you will be able to avoid misalignment, confusion, and even delays in the task delivery process.
Embrace an Asynchronous Collaboration Option
Having an asynchronous collaboration is a global workflow that remote team members are using to optimize work processes and company culture, especially when working across different time zones. Since it’s globally accepted as a way of working - we also decided to do it. With our team being geographically dispersed and working in different time zones, our asynchronous collaboration approach has helped us finish all the tasks within the given deadlines and even improved our collaboration.
Use a Platform to Help You Manage Everything
Working with a team in different time zones has been a challenge for years now, but technological advancements have enabled easier managing of multiple locations regardless of the different working hours.
Now, we all know Slack - everyone is using it. You definitely need a communication tool like Slack, Teams, or Discord, but you might also want to consider getting a project management tool as well. In order to make sure all of your tasks are efficiently taken care of, a project management system can help you manage your team, distribute tasks, and track the progress of everything that is being done. And by having the right tools like LIKE.TG, you can automate all the necessary tasks and manage your team regardless of where you're working. You will be able to increase the work efficiency using the employee handbook, track progress, and schedule meetings to discuss the progress and plan the next steps.
Appreciate Your Team Members and Invest in Your Team
When working in an office, adapting new employees and maintaining your current ones to your work culture is an easy task. What about when your offices are located worldwide and you don’t actually see your team outside of Zoom meetings even though you perform effective communication?
In a remote work environment, it's necessary to dedicate time to help all new employees understand and adapt to the work culture, but it’s also essential that you take care of your current employees as well. Appreciation has a great role when building positive employee engagement across different time zones. If your team is putting in the effort into balancing their workload and successfully completing all the tasks, they deserve recognition for a job well done.
Apart from sending emails (or slack messages) for appreciation, you can also organize different fun activities, workshops, or just casual chats that will help everyone grow professionally and bond with each other. Our team loves to get together once in a while and just have a relaxing moment without the pressure of work. It really helps with motivation and prevents any burnout.
Author Bio:
Daxx Team is a team of passionate creative writers, content marketers, designers who vigorously research internet as well as cooperate with developers and Managing Director at Daxx by Grid Dynamicsto provide you with the top-notch material about tech, salary trends, development team hiring and management tips as well as up-to-date information about Ukrainian IT outsourcing market.
Employee Engagement Strategies for Remote Teams
Engaging employees is hard for employers. But in a remote working environment, it is even rigid. Keeping them engaged during remote work is the key focus of the employers as they have to do it the ‘virtual way’.
The question for the HR team remains: is it demanding to connect with employees during the new normal? The answer is no. We’d be covering employee engagement strategies to make your remote teams happy and stay productive during the WFH scenario.
First of all, what is employee engagement?
Employee engagement makes employees feel happy, productive, and loyal towards the company. Employees nowadays don’t just want a salary, but they need appreciation for value, growth in their career. If you fail to give value and a happy workplace. They are most probably going to quit.
The positive side of keeping remote employees engaged provides greater levels of productivity, performance, and satisfaction among the employees.
Before employee engagement strategies for remote teams. We recommend you implement tools to help them stay connected and have seamless interactions between teams. Consider these tools:
Slack
Zoom
Asana
Jira
Employee engagement strategies you should implement for remote teams
#1. Virtual recognition and rewards
This particular remote engagement strategy makes a difference by improving the satisfaction levels of remote employees. Even working remotely, employees need to know they matter to the company. Without any recognition, your remote workforce is more likely to get disengaged.
Therefore, ensure that you plan rewards and recognition initiatives that don’t stop. Virtually recognizing employees is simple; a thank you on video calls will work. You can ask your team members to acknowledge when someone exceeds their expectations. You can also opt for remote-friendly options such as gift cards, reward points, etc.
#2. Conduct regular employee engagement surveys
As an employer, you need to know what your remote workforce wants. Employee engagement surveys are the way to go. To get results from your survey, you need to address specific questions that address workplace issues and be open about the survey.
Here are some questions you can include in your employee engagement survey:
Satisfaction questions
How do you feel about work today?
Are you proud of working for [organization]?
Do you enjoy working with your team?
Future orientation questions
Do you see yourself working here in a year?
Do you have the tools needed to maximize your potential here?
Have you recently thought about leaving [organization]?
Open-ended questions
Are there any problems with our culture?
How can we help improve your engagement at work?
What practices do we need to change?
Once you have analyzed the results of your employee engagement survey, you’ll be able to identify the areas where you need to work the most.
#3. Stop micromanaging
Team leads and managers believe in a need to micromanage the work. They recognize that without micromanaging, no task will get done. This misconception can make your remote employees disengaged. Employees want to work with autonomy and feel trusted. Micromanaging them will make them feel alienated and lose productivity.
Combating this problem is necessary for employers to focus. The solution is managers need to set expectations with the aid of KPI strategy. Setting specific goals for remote employees will provide them with an opportunity to grow, promotes transparency, and eliminate the need for micromanaging.
#4. Improve engagement with better work-life balance
The employer needs to know that employees are not machines. And when they are doing remote work doesn’t mean they are available 24x7. According to a study, working long hours backfired to company success.
That’s why maintaining a healthy work-life balance helps remote employees to reduce stress and prevent burnout. Here are some strategies you can implement to help the employees to maintain work-life balance:
Promote flexibility at work.
Encourage time off.
Take mental health days.
Create realistic deliverables.
Scheduling weekly check-ins.
Eliminate challenges and roadblocks.
#5. Remove unnecessary team meetings
As the companies are shifting to remote work culture team meetings are constant. It is because the companies are trying to compensate for the lack of face-to-face interactions that used to be a part of regular work culture. However, unnecessary virtual meetings can prove harmful to already stressed-out remote workers. These virtual meetings can get replaced by a team-wide email. For the necessary virtual conferences, mark a calendar and ensure only vital people are in the interview.
#6. Keep remote employees engaged with collaborative tools
A study has found that 63% of the employees wanted to quit because inappropriate communication interfered with their ability to do seamless tasks. Many professionals are working as distributed teams making the interaction difficult.
Thankfully, we have the technology to fix this issue. Remote working tools like Slack, Zoom, and Skype helps to stay connected with the virtual team members. Employers must incorporate online tools to help the remote workforce. It allows the communication flow without a break in the task.
#7. Virtual knowledge sharing sessions
According to research, knowledge sharing positively affects employee engagement. This happens simultaneously when the workplace is open. But during remote work, it is a little bit difficult. Put some effort into structuring it. Here are some practices to follow that’ll help you to kickstart online knowledge sharing sessions:
Mentoring program
Problem-solving workshops
Discussion group
Monthly presentation or talk
#8. Plan fun activities for employee engagement
Giving your remote employees a chance to ditch their desks and interact with their team members will keep them engaged. Here are some of the employee engagement ideas when looking to plan fun activities:
Celebrate birthday week and work anniversaries: Let your employees know that you care for them beyond their role by recognizing special events such as birthdays and work anniversaries. It fits well during the remote work culture.
Monthly parties: A team that bonds well works together. Hosting a monthly-team party provides you with an opportunity to bond with the employees.
Skill-based games: For example, organize virtual puzzle competitions among teams. Solving puzzles promotes communication, better bonding. Attach incentives for adding more competitive spirit among remote work teams.
#9. Make your remote onboarding process fun
Organizations work hard to provide a seamless onboarding experience, and remote onboarding shouldn’t be demanding. Making new employees feel at home and connected in a virtual environment is key to retaining them over time. Consider hosting get-to-know virtual video calls where new employees interact with existing team members. Make a list of icebreaker questions to make the conversation easier for the new employees. An interactive onboarding experience will encourage new hires to participate in company events in the future.
#10. Create remote work policies
The freedom to work from anywhere can be exciting. To keep remote workers in sync, you need to craft remote work policies that set up expectations. These policies will give remote workers a tangible connection to the organization and let them know they have the same responsibilities.
The policies must address things like remote communication guidelines covering when everyone should be available for meetings. You can also use this opportunity to reinforce data protection policies when sharing information with clients.
Finally
Employee engagement strategies are crucial for engaging remote workers and improving overall productivity, happiness, and satisfaction. It is all about understanding what your employees want during the remote working scenario and working towards it.
Author Bio:
Ginni Agarwal is a Talent Acquisition Expert at Upright Human Capital with extensiveexperience in Tech and Non-tech hiring. The company aims to provide a healthy workplace for the right set of talent to the company without any fear of losing our human capital. She loves blogging, writing articles about Talent Acquisition, and the recruitment industry. She has been associated with the Talent Industry for a while. She enjoys sharing her experience with others.
4 Tips for Seamless Remote Employee Onboarding
It can be tough to onboard new employees, particularly if they’re remote. They can't just pop into the office for a meeting, and you can't always quickly bring them up to speed on all the company's goings-on. But with a little effort, you can make the process smooth for both the employee and your team.
Several tools and technologies can help make the onboarding process easier for you and your new employee. For example, video conferencing software like Skype or Zoom can be used for virtual training and tours. And there are many online tools, such as Google Drive, that can be used for collaboration and sharing documents.
In addition to taking advantage of these tools, you can make the onboarding process smoother and more efficient with the following guide, designed to help you get started.
1. Have a remote work policy
If you're going to be onboarding remote employees regularly, it's important to have a remote work policy in place. This should outline your expectations for how employees will conduct themselves while working remotely and what you expect from them regarding communication and collaboration.
Having a clear policy will help make the onboarding process smoother and ensure everyone is on the same page from the start.
And it starts in the hiring process: In your application, ask candidates what aspects of remote work appeal to them. Ask them to describe their preferred working style, communication style, and technical skills. If a candidate responds that they do not enjoy the isolation of remote work, you may want to move on.
2. Send equipment and a welcome package beforehand
Few things will frustrate both you and your new employee more than having them spend the first few working days ironing out technical difficulties. So, ahead of time, order all necessary hardware they’ll need and have it delivered to their home.
Here are some items to consider, depending on the requirements of the position:
Laptop or desktop computer
Monitor
Keyboard and mouse
Headset or earphones
Webcam
Printer/scanner
External hard drive or USB drives
Phone or VOIP equipment
Charging accessories and power strips
When it comes to software, if what employees need isn’t cloud-based, ensure it's pre-installed on their device. Include passwords, usernames, and any other security information needed so remote hires can easily get up and running.
Suppose you are working on many different online marketing tools. In that case, putting together a list of recommended tools for your new employee may be helpful. Or if you’re working with a project management tool, ensure that their accounts are already set up in advance, and they’ll have access from day one.
Additionally, making remote employees feel welcome can help embed them into your organization and feel like they’re part of the team. One idea is to send a welcome package with things like:
Welcome letter from the CEO or team leader
Company swag such as T-shirts, mugs, notebooks, or pens
Employee handbook
Snack box with an assortment of treats and snacks to enjoy while working
Tech accessories like USB flash drive, ergonomic mouse pads, or laptop stands
Gift cards for coffee or online retailers
Virtual event pass to an upcoming online workshop or team-building event
Desk plant to brighten up their home office space
3. Be prepared with virtual onboarding materials
Gather all your onboarding materials and make digital copies as part of your remote onboarding program. You may also want to mail them a physical copy along with their welcome package. Here’s a list of things you’ll want to include:
For all employees:
Mission, vision, and values
Organizational charts
Employee directories
Communication procedures (how and when to use email, video calls, and chat)
Tutorials for commonly used tools
Security standards
Templates for standard documents (presentations, email invitations, sales follow-up emails, etc.)
For marketing:
Lead qualification criteria
Content style guide
Blog and SEO best practices
For sales:
CRM contact information standards
How to order business cards
Travel and expense procedures
For software developers:
How to set up a development environment
Codebase
Development processes
Architecture standards
You can help employees track their progress by making videos of everything that they need to learn in modules. Or you can set up a video call so that they’re able to ask questions on anything they don’t understand and managers can easily answer them on the spot.
Creating these learning modules might be a bit difficult, but you can contract a Professional Employer Organization (PEO) to create learning modules for any job position.
4. Leverage existing technology and tools
Use video conferencing or online team meetings to ensure a smooth transition. Companies onboarding remote employees can greatly benefit from leveraging technology and platforms such as Zoom for virtual meetings, Slack for communication, Asana for project management, LIKE.TG for HR software, and Microsoft Teams for collaboration and document sharing.
For example, you can use Microsoft Teams to welcome your new team member, outline their responsibilities, and offer support. And some apps, such as Donut, allow employees to chat with a company representative through the internet. Onboarded employees can also receive useful information about company resources, such as knowledge bases, training software portals, and cheat sheets
5. Let new hires know what to expect
Working from home can be a brand new experience to most. Ensure everyone understands what's expected of them during the remote onboarding process. What information do they need? Whom will they be meeting with? What tools do they need to be successful? You can avoid confusion and frustration later on by getting everyone on the same page from the start.
This is also a good time to set expectations for communication. Will you use email, Slack, video conferencing, or a combination of all three? Let your new employee know how you prefer to communicate and the best way to reach you.
6. Set up a dedicated onboarding space
If possible, set up a dedicated space for their remote onboarding process. This gives them a place to go where they can find all the information they need in one spot. It can be as simple as a folder in your company's shared drive or an intranet page with links to all the relevant documents.
Having a dedicated space also makes it easy for you to keep track of your new employee's progress. You can quickly see what they've read and what still needs to be covered.
As your business grows, it might be a good idea to consider tools to help during this process. LIKE.TG’s employee Onboard platform can help to automate a lot of the repetitive tasks that build up as you get the hang of remote onboarding.
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7. Use self-onboarding checklists
Self-onboarding checklists are an effective tool for streamlining the onboarding process of remote employees, ensuring they complete all necessary steps.
These checklists should include tasks like setting up company email accounts, completing required paperwork, reviewing company policies and procedures, and accessing necessary software and tools.
Additionally, the checklist can guide new hires through introductory training modules, schedule their first team meetings, and prompt them to set up virtual meet-and-greets with key team members.
8. Introduce them to the team members
One of the challenges of remote work is feeling like you're part of the team. So take some time to introduce your new employee to everyone on the team, even if it's just through a quick email or video call. If possible, set up regular virtual coffee chats or happy hours so they can get to know their colleagues in a more informal setting.
You can also give them the company’s organization chart so that they do not have a hard time trying to remember who is who.
9. Give them a virtual tour
If your company has a physical office, give your new employee a virtual tour so they can see where their team members work and what the space looks like. If you don't have an office, you can still give them a tour of your company's website, intranet, or social media channels.
Make them feel like they're part of the team by showing them around and introducing them to everyone they'll be working with, even if it's just virtually. Always make an effort to have your camera on to create a warm face to face feeling when giving the tour.
Click Trough an Onboarding Process
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10. Assign a buddy
One way to help your new employee feel welcome is to assign them a buddy. This should be someone who's been with the company for a while and knows the ropes. They can answer your new employee's questions and help them feel comfortable in their new role.
A workplace mentor can provide initial guidance and help eliminate the anxiety many new remote employees experience. Moreover, use video coffee chats and other ice-breaker activities to break the ice.
11. Provide training and resources
As part of the onboarding program, provide your new employee with all the training sessions and resources they need to be successful in their role.
An onboarding training session should entail a thorough introduction to the company culture, key policies, and job-specific skills, along with interactive elements like QA sessions, practical exercises, and opportunities to meet and engage with team members and key department leads.
The goal is to set them up for success by providing everything they need to hit the ground running and make sure you’re both on the same page once their onboarding plan is complete.
12. Encourage communication and feedback
Working remotely makes it easy to feel like you're out of sight and out of mind. To avoid this, schedule regular check-ins with your new employee. This gives you a chance to see how they're doing, answer any questions they may have, and give feedback on their progress.
You should also be open to getting feedback from your employees. This helps you figure out problems and come up with solutions. Feedback will show you places where your new employees have problems. There are different ways in which you can collect feedback from your new employees. You can use surveys, meetings, or performance tracking software.
Check-ins also allow your new employee to bring up any concerns or issues they may be having. By addressing these early on, you can help them feel more comfortable in their role and prevent any potential problems down the road.
You can also ask them to turn on their video during conference meetings to make them settle in properly so you become aware of their onboarding experience. Since employees are not able to meet face to face, online meetings and daily communication are essential in team building and creating healthy remote team relationships.
13. Give them room to grow
Finally, remember that your new employee is still learning and growing into their role. They may make some mistakes along the way, but that's okay. What's important is that you give them the space to learn and grow.Encourage them to ask questions, try new things, and take risks. This will help them become even more successful in their role and feel like they're truly part of the team.
“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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About Author:
This article is written by our marketing team at LIKE.TG. LIKE.TG is dedicated to providing powerful solutions for your HR teams and creating an exceptional employee experience. Our aim is to help your company improve employee engagement, onboarding, and to save you valuable time!
Onboarding Checklist For Your WordPress Business
Whenever you need to onboard someone in my company, it's effective to use an onboarding checklist. This way, you can make sure you don't leave out any steps when training one of your new team members.
That's why this article talks about a general onboarding checklist that could be used by anyone in a WordPress business or any business for that matter.
1. Have a definite plan and goals
The right onboarding for any business is indispensable to its overall success, and WordPress is no exception. Considering the enormity and complexity of the WordPress ecosystem and webspace as a whole, it’s impossible to go live with an effective WordPress Service Offering without first crafting a well-defined onboarding plan.
You won’t be able to measure your success without a definite plan and goals. Is your goal to decrease employee turnover and measure retention rates to determine your progress?
Or do you want to determine the success of your onboarding campaign by conducting anonymousemployee surveys?
Another strategy is to carry outexit interviews when an employee leaves. For this, WordPress plugins like Cliptakes will help you to set interview questions and receive one-way video answers from prospects on your site.
Source
Whatever your plan and goals may be, be consistent and repeat the same onboarding plan for all new hires.
2. Prepare your new employee’s workspace
The last thing you want when a new employee arrives is to have to find a place for them to work. With a little forward-thinking, this won’t be an issue. When a new employee joins your company, their arrival should be streamlined and without any hassle.
Imagine joining a new job and not having the tools ready to perform? You are definitely going to have a negative first impression.
They’ll need a desk, name tag, and other items — let’s take 30 minutes and walk through the paperwork and preparations you should take to set up your employee for success.
Besides, set up your new hire’s computer, phone numbers, and email beforehand and provide access to any courses, software, or files they will require before their first day. It will make them feel valued.
In a recent employee survey, 69% mentioned recognition andrewards as the top factors that retain them at work.
Make sure that your business website is user-friendly as well so that your new hire will not have any difficulty accessing the info or whatever resource is required. Consider hiring enterprise WordPress development services for custom design, agile workflow, and user-friendly websites.
In case of any office supplies, they should reach the new employee prior to them joining work so that they can set up their workstation.
3. Conduct an orientation program for the new hire
New employees need to know certain information when they join the company to avoid confusion, stress, and errors. The new hire orientation program provides an introduction to the company policies, procedures, and culture.
It will help them understand how their work relates to other activities in the organization or department. This also helps in reducing errors due to a lack of knowledge of the new system or protocol.
Thus, it makes sense to introduce your new employee to your business structure, mission, vision, and values. Along with it, you should also highlight significant policies, offer mandatory training, and complete the necessary paperwork.
If you look at the stats, 94% of employees are willing to work in a company longer if they can learn and develop.
Source
You can rely on plugins, such as WalkMe, for employee onboarding and training. It can streamline employee onboarding with personalized training, offer employees self-service and contextual support, monitor usage, skill, and detect pain points to provide dedicated support.
You can also use the OnBoarding pluginfrom CreativeMinds to provide interactive training and in-app help while training your employees.
4. Don’t forget to send a warm welcome email
When hiring new team members, how much do you care about what they think of your company? Probably quite a lot since you've probably invested a lot of time and effort in finding the right candidate for the job. But have you taken the time to create a warm welcome email for them?
A warm welcome email can kick-start a healthyemployee-employer relationship. Plus, it is going to be the first official message that your new employee will receive.
Try to create a positive impression and set your employee up for success from the onset.
Here’s an example of a welcome email from Groove:
Source
Their first message welcomes the user and informs them about what they can expect in their inbox in the forthcoming days.
Further, you can see a link to a video tutorial that educates them about the details of the app.
Most importantly, they ask the users why they signed up. The answers let the company know what is most important to new users and accordingly transform the messaging.
This strategy also helps in building deeper relationships with the users as every user has unique goals or challenges that drove them to sign up.
When it comes to employees, you can ask questions like ‘why are you applying for this position?’ or their objectives. The answers you get will define what “success” means to your employees.
5. Personalize the onboarding experience
Every new hire situation is unique, which makes creating an onboarding plan quite challenging. Regardless of what your onboarding approach may be, there are ways you can make it more personal for each new hire to ensure they get off to a great start.
To personalize the onboarding experience, capture the data around your existing employees. Continue to gather data all through the hiring process, starting from application to interviewand onboarding.
Consider implementing an automated tool to capture and organize the skills data.The insights you gain from your data can help to develop or improve your onboarding plan.
Make sure to use tools that can help you measure progress and continue to improve your onboarding process.
6. Focus on constant employee engagement and team building.
Employee engagement and team building is complex issue for businesses because it’s not really about individual success. It’s about how organizations help individuals reach their goals and improve the workplace environment.
And if you look at the statistics, 71% of executives agree that employee engagement is crucial for a business’s success.
Source
Make sure that you have tools for all the following:
Tools that facilitate meaningful one-on-one conversations.
Tools that let users give and receive continuous feedback.
Tools that help you set and track essential goals.
And tools that help you recognize employee achievements.
Additionally, make sure to provide opportunities for new hires to build relationships by organizing team-building events. You can also randomly pair the new hire with employees in the company for virtual coffee meetings.
And set up a regular check-in schedule to find out how they feel overall and if they have everything they need to perform efficiently.
Wrapping-Up
The goal of this article was to help you create a framework for generating your WordPress onboarding checklist. Start with the list above, then think about what else should go into it.
Maybe you’ll want to add something about creating an SEO strategy for your website or making sure your business is registered with Google My Business. Perhaps you’ll want to include things like generating user accounts or registering your site with social media channels. You will likely want to tailor the scope of your onboarding checklist accordingly.
Whichever way you may wish to customize your onboarding process, it will prove to be highly effective if you choose to start with the above checklist first.
Author Bio: Lucy is a creative content writer and strategist at Marketing Digest. She specializes in writing about digital marketing, technology, entrepreneurship, and education. When she is not writing or editing, she spends time reading books, cooking, and traveling.
How to Improve Employee Retention Through Pay Raises
As we move through the year 2022 and beyond, rates of employee turnover have increased and the need for employee retention is more important than ever before. The arrival of the COVID-19 virus changed many aspects of our lives, and in addition to changing how we interact with one another, it has had many employees thinking about what is most important in their lives. The result has been what the media dubs to be the “Great Resignation.”
For a long time now, many employees have felt that they have not been paid accordingly for their efforts at work, and for as far back as we can remember, many just dealt with it. However, the COVID pandemic has changed how many employees feel, and they are quitting their jobs because they don’t want to risk their health in an unsafe work environment while making poor wages. Right now, money talks, so your company may need to offer pay raises to retain your current staff and bring in new workers. Let’s talk about the importance of implementing employee retention strategies and how to make it happen, even if you have a smaller company.
The Great Resignation
Since the COVID-19 vaccines have made the rounds, we have seen more of a return to normalcy, especially as jobs open up across the country. However, while the outlook appears bright, we are not yet out of the woods, and many people are changing how they think about their lives and how work fits into the equation. In August alone, 4.3 million people quit their jobs. Among the reasons for the resignations were considerations about their health and the hope of career advancement or finding a job with more flexibility.
Of course, the biggest factor is that many people want to make more money in the long term so they can provide a suitable life for their families. A lot of potential employees are holding out for that very reason, and if your company can set itself apart with higher wages, then you could be setting yourself up for success, especially if you are paying more than your direct competitor. Right now, around eight million people are looking for jobs, so you need to take this time to create a compensation plan so you can attract the best and brightest.
Why Paying More is Key
While having a higher pay rate on day one will bring in some interested employees, your company could also see many other benefits by offering a higher pay rate for your current employees. Of course, employee retention rates are key. If you are paying employees more, they won’t leave because they know that your competitor is paying less. Once your employees realize that they are getting this great benefit, they are bound to have more pride in their organization and they will refer their highly qualified friends.
In addition to wanting to stick around, your employees will also likely perform better when they are making more money. After all, they know that if they want to continue making the same great salary, they need to perform well so they are not replaced. Employees that are not paid well are often distracted at work as they worry about how they will make ends meet and pay for what they need to support their families. If you make it a point to pay your workers a fair wage, they will be less worried about home and more focused on delivering high-quality work at the office.
How to Pay More
Once you realize how pay raises could help your company to retain your top talent and improve your profits, it is time to write up the details about how much you plan to increase the pay and when. Larger businesses may be able to reach into their expense fund and easily find the money they need to increase employee pay without sacrificing their operations. However, small business owners may be scratching their heads as to where you can find the funds to pay people more in the first place.
One way to find more money is to cut down on some unnecessary expenses. For instance, do you need a cleaning service to come in every day or can you settle for a couple of times a week? You could also take a closer look at your vendors and determine if you are paying too much for what they offer and if you can find an alternative. If this is the only vendor that will suit your needs and you have been in business for a long time, you could also try to renegotiate their costs and save money that way.
If your HR team and company management are stumped on how to find more money for pay raises, it may be time to bring in an outside expert. A financial advisor or Certified Public Accountant (CPA) can be a miracle worker as they will sift through your corporate finances and determine where you can cut funds or find money while ensuring that your company will continue to run smoothly.
Keep in mind that any strategy you use will be money well spent. The cost of finding new employees, providing onboarding processes for them, training, and creating more office space can be very costly. If you can pay more and retain the same employees now, and not need to worry about hiring later, then you could keep that leftover money and put it towards your business.
Paying Through Other Benefits Like Wellness Programs …
Even if you try to move money around, your organization may simply not have the funds to pay your employees a regular pay raise that they will see on their paycheck. However, your HR team can look at alternative perks that you can offer today that will save the employees money in the long run, so it is just like they are getting that money directly.
For instance, many employees pay a lot for health insurance, especially if they have large families, and the cost can be so great that their paychecks are lower because of it. To aid in this regard, your company could set up a wellness program where employees are encouraged to live a healthy lifestyle, and in exchange for showing positive results, employees could save money on their monthly insurance premiums. In addition to the money you’ll save, when your company culture supports healthier workers, they will also call out less often, and productivity
… Or a Remote Workforce
Since the COVID-19 pandemic hit our shores, there has been another shift in how the world conducts business and that is the popularity of working from home. Not only will this arrangement reduce the chances of employees contracting the coronavirus and improve productivity, but it could also save the employees a bunch of money that they could use for other expenses or to save for the future.
The fuel savings and reduction of wear and tear on employee vehicles due to the lack of a daily commute while working from home is a major cost-saving perk that could result in hundreds of dollars. On top of that, employees can also save money that they would spend on office attire and childcare.
Some HR departments may be hesitant about the idea of turning to a remote work environment because they believe that employees won’t be as engaged when they work alone or that they will not be able to communicate as freely as they do at the office. However, the opposite is true. The ability to work at any time and complete tasks without distractions has actually increased productivity since 2020. That means that your company could be paying your employees more and seeing a boost to your profits.
As far as the communication aspect, that is covered as well. There are many ways to meet and speak with coworkers from the comfort of your home. Zoom and other virtual meeting programs have allowed many businesses to have their regular meetings without missing a beat. There are also online whiteboards available that allow everyone on the team to contribute their ideas and mark off completed tasks in real-time. With these tools at your disposal, your company can save your employees money and work seamlessly, as if you were still in the same office.
As the feelings of our workforce continue to evolve, as should our businesses and how we treat and attract high-quality employees. By finding ways to provide pay raises, employee retention strategies, and other perks, your organization can hire the best people and keep them for the foreseeable future.
Author Bio: This 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!
Happy Employees And 5 More Benefits Of The Flexible Workplace
Covid has definitely made an impact on our personal lives and the way we work - there’s a true struggle of balancing out our professional and personal side. Employee happiness has become an ever-important factor, with burnout and disengagement becoming a real threat to the modern workplace.
As offices begin to reopen, and as we slowly return to our pre-pandemic routine, managers are getting a bit antsy over setting up their own workplace of tomorrow. For the employees who worked from home during the pandemic, this was a true test of resilience - and they’re becoming increasingly interested in more flexible work arrangements.
It seems that a more hybrid workplace is the way to go. According to a survey from Microsoft, up to 73% of employees would like more flexible remote work options. While there isn’t a one-size-fits-all type of solution, there are definitely benefits to this work model. After all, industries across the globe kept going, meaning the workforce adapted and overcame its obstacles successfully.
One thing is certain - happy employees are productive employees. And as trends shift in terms of employer branding and responsibility for a better employee experience, the ball is in the employer court. Here are some ideas on how you can increase employee happiness while running your business on the new normal standard.
Let Them Set Up Their Own Rules
The new work model obviously works, there’s no denying it. Granted, in the light of returning to the “old normal”, managers will be torn between rent prices for office space, and their team’s wish for a more flexible work model. The road they should take is establishing some ground rules.
Establishing feasible rules will only work if everyone gets to pitch in. Listen to your employees and figure out a solution that works best for all sides - employee empowerment begins by listening to what employees have to say.
The start can be fairly simple: establishing office and remote days. These can be predefined days of the week, or setting up the number of days your team is required to show up for work. A number of employers had work-from-home schemes set up prior to the pandemic, so it makes sense to beef up on those - especially if employees stand to benefit from that. Another way would be the company offering workations.
While you’re establishing ground rules on your work models, try to hear out various departments - especially if you’re running a middle or large operation. Chances are that work from home is not the same for developers, accounting and HR; different departments have different clearance protocols, and handling sensitive data on a home network might prove to be an issue. See which challenges lie in front of different departments, and how you can resolve them together.
Let Them Manage Their Own Time
There are challenges on managers’ plates as well. As immediate work locations changed overnight for a big number of employees, managers were left struggling to both maintain and assess work effectiveness and work hours. Luckily, new tech came running to the rescue, and the boat was kept afloat.
A number of tools, most of them in use even before the pandemic, quickly became staples of the modern workplace. As communication and management became easier, effectiveness and time tracking also became easy to handle and less of a challenge.
This has proven to be a twofold benefit:
it saves precious management time otherwise spent literally policing your team
by making work insights easily available, you’re not breathing behind your team’s neck, which can often deteriorate team engagement and happiness.
Modern times require modern rules, and an approach that moves along with the very dynamic times we live in. Empowerment is the buzzword in managerial circles, and it begins with a simple concept - trust. The modern manager must not only exude respect, but must showcase huge trust in their team being responsible for their actions.
The operational solution can also be as simple as the concept: one way to do it is to try employee scheduling tools and empower the teams to track and design their own work schedule. It makes perfect sense that this is counterintuitive to some, but you’re actually showing trust by giving your team the responsibility for the time they clock in. Not only that, you’re putting them in the spotlight in front of their peers, and peer pressure can do wonders for increased productivity in an adult, professional setting.
Provide A New Office Experience
The whole story about employee empowerment doesn’t have to stop with time either. A pre-pandemic study showed open-plan offices were actually making teams less productive and collaborative. It’s strange how being physically close can actually make us less productive, but it makes sense on a number of levels.
This is another cue for the modern manager to take. With the freedom to work from their homes - or any other location of their own choice - team members might be reluctant to come back to wide-open offices. The reasons can be productivity, concentration, privacy, even small and quirky workplace habits or better work life balance. And as shown during the pandemic, the office doesn’t have to be obligatory for the full time.
You can work with your HR team to determine employee preferences for the coming time, and to see how your office design can improve both work metrics and employee attendance (if you’re after improving that in the first place). Designing novel workstations might be the way to go.
The modern office can mostly do away with cubicles and personalized spaces for every employee, focusing instead on providing a place to work for workers when they do come to the office. The equipment and station design will vary greatly from one department to another, but in the era of powerful laptops (tablets even), this should not be an issue. Remember, the focus is setting up a working environment that enables people to come to the office when their presence is needed, and not go overboard with unnecessary gadgets.
Meetings Flexibility Is A Must
Whichever way your company - or your team - decides to go, meetings are inevitable. It’s also inevitable for them to be held in person in some instances, so this is another consideration when planning ahead.
Be careful when setting up requirements; not all meetings require physical presence. A hybrid model, with meetings held online, is very doable these days - comms applications such as Slack, Zoom, Google Meet, or even the old and faithful Skype, all allow you to take part, voice opinions, and see your team members in real-time.
When the time comes for actual meetings, or a situation requires you and your team to sit together and come up with solutions, make sure you can respect all the pandemic regulations. Also, if you’ll require your team to come to the office, try to come up with less formal parts on the agenda, and make a small event out of having all your people together in one place! An actual meeting is not only an opportunity for the employees to work together, but to be together after a long period of time!
Impress The Newcomers
Finally, growth will require you to expand your team at some point. As the trend of workplace flexibility is going into full swing, workers will naturally gravitate towards businesses that have already transitioned successfully. Taking into account all of the above, and making an action plan around those, will not only streamline your current workflows, but also act as a magnet for future hires!
Remember that, when we’re talking about employer branding, we’re not talking only about employee experience (and retention). CX - Candidate Experience - is another big thing these days, and a happy work experience begins right at the get-go. This is something to keep in mind when designing your hiring protocols and employee onboarding - there are no reasons not to do it virtually.
Parting thoughts
As trends migrate fully to new work models, it pays off to stay ahead of the pack. The modern workplace is designed to try and keep the employees happy and motivated, since we all saw it was them who shouldered the burden right through the pandemic.
However, the perks of the modern workplace are not mere benefits for your workforce, but actual catalysts for improving productivity and employee engagement as well. Leading your team (quite literally) into the future through these workplace improvements will prove to be a major employee retention factor!
Author Bio: Derek spearheads key initiatives at Deputy, a global workforce management platform for employee scheduling, timesheets and communication. With a focus on workforce, Derek helps business owners and workforce leaders simplify employment law compliance, keep labor cost in line and build award-winning workplaces. Derek has over 16 years’ experience in delivering data-driven sales and marketing strategies to SaaS companies like MarketSource and Griswold Home Care.
Modern Workplace Trends You Must Know
The modern workplace has changed more in the last few years than any other time in history. For most people, work looks very different when compared to two or three years ago. In this guide, we’re diving into the workplace trends you need to know about in 2022.
Why is it important to know the future of work trends?
Quite simply, you will probably want to know about the upcoming trends so you can stay on top of them. Modern companies need to give employees a modern workplace or risk losing top talent. In progressive industries, this becomes even more essential. You don’t have to run a Silicon Valley company to provide a great, exciting place to work.
Predictions of modern workplace trends
Let’s dive into the predictions for modern workplace trends and how things might change in 2022 and beyond.
Hybrid or remote working
A lot of people got used to working from home in recent years. The pandemic has led to workplaces being more flexible out of necessity, but many employees now expect this as the norm.
Remote working doesn’t have to mean you are a less effective team, but to keep everyone well-connected, we think more companies are going to move towards a hybrid approach so people spend some time in the workplace, and some time at home.
More personal and professional development
This makes a lot of sense. In fact, it is bizarre that a lot of workplaces didn’t really embrace this beforehand. It seems that the world of work is waking up to the benefits of development, not just professionally, but personally.
For example, in years gone by people might not have understood the benefits in giving your employees the chance to take courses together. Now, we can see that team-building and other opportunities for development are crucial. The benefits are many. You can build confidence, grow employee soft skills and incentivize your employees to continue to improve.
Workplace look trend predictions
The workplace look is likely to become a little more casual. This is the modern way, and trends can even be accounted for in this way.
Showing tattoos at work is one of the ways we might see a change. People who have visited the best tattoo shops in the US in order to get a beautiful sleeve or other ink want to show this off to other people, even at work.
Tattoos have become much more mainstream in general. We are used to seeing these when we socialize, and the excuses some bosses have to get rid of them in the workplace probably won’t stack up. Tattoos are not dirty, or unprofessional, or associated with gang culture (in the majority of instances).
Innate liking for flexible work schedules
More and more companies are offering flexible schedules for workers. Workplaces that don’t could be seen as outdated.
Flexible working schedules don’t have to make your team less effective, and employees appreciate the opportunity to run errands or even just take breaks when they want, and work on their own terms.
Many companies scared to take this approach before the pandemic has seen that their business can function with remote and flexible work.
Need for centralized communication
This way of working has also led to a need for more centralized communication, with a lot of companies moving to project management systems for assigning tasks, communicating with one another, and tracking the progress of your team.
Without a simple centralized method of communicating, it is easy for employees to feel lost, or potentially to even become less productive.
The emphasis on work-life balance
More and more employers are starting to understand that their employees value their personal time. Work-life balance is essential, and if companies want to keep their employees (and keep them happy) they should take steps to improve this balance for their staff.
There are some companies that are even changing to ‘trust’ systems where they don’t necessarily track employees’ time. As long as tasks are being completed then the employee can manage their own time.
Investing in employee wellbeing
We’ve mentioned this a little in terms of personal development. Mental health check-ins and even aids to keep staff happy at work will become much more common.
The modern approach to substances including CBD could change, too. A lot of people take CBD to help with stress and anxiety, and workplaces might reduce any regulations about these kinds of substances.
Many companies realize that unhappy employees are usually unproductive employees. By prioritizing their mental health and wellbeing, businesses can even reap the benefits in terms of productivity. What’s more, keeping your employees happy is the right thing to do, and leads to a far better working environment.
Author Bio: This 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!
4 Most Effective Hiring Strategies for SaaS Companies
With everything that 2022 has to offer, we believe now is a great time to rethink the HR and recruiting strategy in your SaaS business. We will discuss how AI and machine learning will change the HR industry, whether internal mobility is a thing, and how to get the most out of SEO. We have outlined four trends that will make 2022 a year to thrive.
1. Taking Advantage of SEO
Building an SEO strategy for your SaaS niche will bring you success in the long run. As the success of your SEO efforts highly depends on what strategies you use, it is better to work with an experienced SaaS SEO agency, especially if you are a newbie in the world of SEO. While some companies rely on performance marketing, they still depend on paid advertising. However, by staying on top of the latest trends and best practices, you can ensure that your SaaS marketing campaigns are always successful.On the other hand, thorough SEO ensures the traffic keeps coming even if the advertisement stops. Considering that SaaS is mostly a digital product that is not restricted to a certain location, it broadens the search and is great to expand with the help of SEO. Furthermore, digital product development services play a critical role in this scenario. These services allow for constant innovation, upgradation, and maintenance of the SaaS product, ensuring it remains competitive and relevant in the market. With professional assistance from such services, SaaS companies can effectively enhance their digital presence, thereby increasing the effectiveness of their SEO strategies. Moreover, when it comes to content, there's the option to work with a content marketing agency for SaaS which will help achieve more professionalism and success in the long term.
We prepared a list of the most helpful tactics you can adopt in your SaaS business — make them a part of your marketing plans in 2022 and see the difference in your bottom line within a year.
Optimize for Google’s Job Search
Many candidates simply put what they are looking for in Google when searching for a job. Google's Job Search is what they see first, which means you can take advantage of it and make sure candidates see your job offer first.
Post jobs both on the company website and job board — this way, your company’s website posting will be prioritized. You can also use Google's structured data guidelines. If you follow these rules, your job listings will appear correctly.
Target competitor keywords
One of the most effective ways to attract relevant leads to your website is to target competitors’ keywords. You can do that with the AdWords competitor targeting tool that allows you to bid on your competitor’s target terms. Use keywords related to the job search or career pages and get more chances to interact with your target audience.
Going forward, you can even analyze paid campaigns of your competitors with a competitive research tool from SE Ranking.
It shows their paid strategy and lets you find other brands based on similar keywords, get traffic forecasts, and more.
Enhance your career page
Once you have the content in place, it is time to take care of the SEO:
Make sure your page is indexable to drive more traffic to it. You may start by ensuring that it is easy for the Googlebot to crawl your website. Crawling means following hyperlinks to discover new content.
Check SERP (Google) snippets. You can optimize for SERP features by making sure you have relevant content that answers what, when, why, and how questions.
Ensure there are no broken links on your page so that people who run across you on the search get what they need.
Have a mobile-friendly website. As Statista shows, over 54% of all traffic came from mobile in 2021. Businesses must pay more attention to device adaptability. Your website should be mobile-friendly so that potential clients can easily scroll through the pages, find the information they need, schedule a call, or easily make some other call to action.
2. Building a trustful company reputation
When we are talking about the company’s reputation, we cover terms such as employee value proposition, employer branding, and company culture.
Company culture is what your teams share: goals, vision, attitudes. It includes everything that characterizes an organization.
On the other hand, the employee value proposition (EVP) is the promise the company gives to potential employees: benefits, work conditions, and more.
You can get inspired with the SE Ranking — as an SEO agency, it adopts solid working strategies and uses them to attract relevant candidates.
You can see everything you need to understand what the company wants to convey with a clearly stated mission and values. The page gains the reader’s trust before presenting open vacancies, leaving space for an action step and further interaction.
Employer branding shows the values, mission, purpose, and culture to the world.
Think about Google. If I were to ask you how it would be to work there, what would first come to your mind? Most likely, your opinion is based on different stories you have heard, posts you have read, and everything that caught your attention on the internet. That is what employer branding is.
In this way, EVP answers the question “Why?” while employer branding defines “What” and “How.”
Your branding, social appearance, and career page give candidates an understanding of whether your culture is the right fit on a subconscious level. The candidate can get to know your company through its values and social attitude and get interested in working with you specifically.
Let’s look at an example with a restaurant chain that managed to expand during COVID-19 times — Chipotle.
Right at the top of the company’s page, you can find a clearly stated mission focusing on people. Their values are embedded into the description: Chipotle supports diversity, well-being, and employee benefits. This is how they define their EVP, which drives their work.
With clearly stated values, mission, and social involvement, you have higher chances to attract more relevant candidates to your website and inspire them to apply. Adding social proof, testimonials and awards will show you as a trustworthy organization: use this option to connect with potential candidates from the very start.
Specialists will be excited to work with you when you have a well-built strategy like this in place. Moreover, it will help you attract solid customers and retain your existing ones, lowering the turnover rate and strengthening relationships in the company.
3. Adopting Data-Driven HR
Machine learning is here to stay, and HR is moving to the next generation of automation with it. IBM believes that data-driven decision, powered by AI, is one of the key pillars of the new HR generation. Such a concept allows HRs to make evidence-based decisions and reach a level of efficiency that would not be possible otherwise. Advanced analytics and automation tools have become great sources to drive efficiency, predict and prevent further challenges, and stay agile in the ever-changing business world.
Currently, only 10% of companies have adopted AI-based technologies for HR, which allows you to start the new year with a big advantage. Most HR specialists spend countless hours manually processing and analyzing results — instead, they can focus on expanding business value.
Using machine learning in their job is a great chance for recruiters to shift priorities, spend less time performing manual tasks, and spend more time developing relationships with potential candidates. The average number of applicants for a position rose by 39% in 6 years, Gartner Recruiting Efficiency Survey states. Recruiters need even more time reviewing CVs, which slows down the hiring process, not to mention the cost per hire keeps increasing.
You can benefit from AI technologies thanks to the tools already developed. We are sharing some of them below.
Fetcher’s solution helps companies reach hiring goals by offering tools that ensure diversity, measure team metrics, and make candidates’ profiles easy to read.
Humanly application has one of the highest rates from candidates. It facilitates candidates’ screening and selection process, finding relevant and strong candidates, and reducing average time-to-hire.
Arya focuses on candidate sourcing, letting you add multi-channel sourcing, automated candidates search, and analyze previous sourcing processes.
Pymetrics platform has a modern approach based on AI and ethical design principles that work in two directions: talent acquisition and talent management.
Let’s sum up the main advantages of adopting AI and machine learning for your SaaS business:
A combination of human and AI effort leads to better decisions
Enhance the hiring process by leveraging AI, stepping aside from manual candidates screening and application processing
Enhance the experience of candidates and employees, improving the reputation of the business
Focus on what matters the most, developing business values in your SaaS niche
4. Retention and internal mobility
You might have struggled with implementing internal mobility during the pandemic as priorities were different then. However, this year everything seems to return to its usual pace.
While finding external candidates remains a priority, retaining existing ones should also become a focus.
Internal mobility has a lot to do with digital transformation, especially true for the SaaS niche. Since the pandemic, most businesses have gone online, significantly expanding the hiring process. Now, when geographical location is not an obstacle anymore, candidates have much more space to look for better opportunities.
Internal mobility makes it possible for you to retain talented specialists, even if they decide to shift their careers. Moreover, specialists love how easy it is to get knowledge from the company — the more you can offer, the greater chances talented candidates will stay with you.
Yet, you should understand that such a strategy requires lots of effort, both for employees and specialists who will need time to onboard an internal candidate. Before you dive into internal mobility, make sure you have enough resources. Ideally, a combination of external and internal candidates’ searches will bring the most effective results.
Summary
Whether your business is just beginning or has been a part of the game for a while, it is high time to look at your strategy. Some of the changes may not be visible at first (such as SEO), yet they will ultimately bring amazing results. Adopting AI in your work and investing in your people will allow your company to expand even in the most unpredictable times.
Author Bio: This article is written by a marketing team member at SE Ranking. SE Ranking is an all-in-one SEO solution that helps business owners and agencies fast-track every search engine marketing task that includes keyword suggestions, check rankings, search competitors, and other helpful features.
8 Tips To Manage Remote Teams Effectively
A remote team involves individuals who collaborate with the same project to achieve specific objectives within a defined period. As each team member shares various skills, the team leader expects everyone to deliver refined work by reporting progress. Therefore, communication is crucial in maintaining a remote team.
To effectively share information within the organization, ensuring data privacy must be your main priority. Underestimating the power of unprotected information poses data breach consequences such as lawsuits, governmental audits, lost reputation, and bankruptcy.
To help you implement stable data management effectively, you can utilize online tools that allow you to assign and distribute tasks to your team. To track productivity even in a work-at-home setup, using tools such as Trello and other similar apps that help promote team spirit is a wise choice. These productivity apps are innovating the work processes to ensure efficient fulfillment of tasks even without much supervision. You can even export your trello data to excel by Coupler.io to blend information from different systems in one place.
Since managing remote teams is challenging, you can take online courses to sustain your guidelines. For example, you can understand how to build an online presence, use software, or train your employees using the tutorials. Thus, this article is for you if you plan to revise your organizational remote team guidelines.
1. Assess Existing Communication Guidelines
Evaluating the progress of your remote team members is an excellent way to start your organizational guideline revision. This strategy plays an essential role in analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of the previous and present remote team management. Therefore, you must track the existing communication guidelines to sustain organizational productivity while the team remotely works effectively.
Here are some questions to ask your organizational leaders upon planning to revise your remote team management:
Do you have a defined scale that can determine whether your recent virtual team management is successful or not?
Do you have enough tools to monitor the online team members' productivity effectively?
Can the productivity tools accurately determine the strengths and weaknesses of your team?
How can the organization adjust to the growing team requirements?
Do you have enough employee feedback about the existing team management guidelines?
Can the organization implement regular physical meetups?
Assessing your existing management guidelines will help your organizational leaders identify which strategies you can readily implement. In addition, the leaders will understand how to properly align the corporate objectives to the capacity of the remote team members. Indeed, revising new team management guidelines involves regular evaluation.
2. Understand The Obstacles Of Remote Management
Remote access is an increasing requirement for every organization. This situation allows mobile staff to have the privilege to access business processes, office systems, and customer data from different locations. While remote access includes hundreds of benefits for your business, this organizational requirement poses shared risks.
Underestimating the need to manage various management threats may be vulnerable to your business data. Since remote working depends on sharing organizational data outside the workplace, you have to find suitable technological devices to implement proper data protection. Therefore, consider investing in data restriction tools as you revise your remote team management guideline.
3. Illustrate And Appoint Responsibilities
While hiring a remote team reduces expenses, managing virtual team members are challenging. Since employee distance varies, communication is a crucial factor. Therefore, you must appoint separate tasks to sustain effective communication and real productivity between your workplace staff and remote members.
If you don't have first-hand experience managing remote teams, you have to gather enough knowledge initially. After understanding how virtual teams work, create a training program for your employees. This technique includes welcoming and orienting your remote staff by designing a presentation that provides individual roles.
Next, find the right collaboration tools to communicate with each team member. These tools include chat applications, project management tools, video call software, and screen sharing applications. Pick which communication tools work best with your in-house and remote staff.
Before conducting your first virtual meeting, set a regular conference with your team members. If an appointment for the entire organization is required, you must consider this scenario. Note that a daily meeting is a great way to gather updates from each team. In addition, remember that duration of these daily meetings shouldn't take more than 10 minutes. However, if you have further concerns, you can extend so.
After setting a regular conference schedule, appoint a team lead. This strategy helps in easy information transfer within different departments. Moreover, having a team lead lessens the time you'll spend meeting the entire team. Thus, appointing team leaders increases overall productivity.
4. Build Detailed Standards For Remote Work Productivity
While working from home decreases workplace costs, this situation exposes each remote team member to various distractions. These obstacles limit the attention and focus of the individuals who must stay on finishing tasks. Therefore, if your team members can't overcome work from home (WFH) challenges, these risks may harm their productivity.
If you want to improve your remote team's productivity, you should provide them with the right tools to help them connect and produce high-quality work outputs. These technological devices include project management tracking apps, messaging apps, and video conferencing apps. Entrepreneurs and virtual staff can all stay on track wherever they work by equipping remote teams with new specialized tools.
Take note that maintaining the accuracy of these work productivity tools requires assistance. Therefore, you must outsource professionally trained staff to ensure that you're utilizing these tools at their highest capabilities.
5. Don't Underestimate The Risks Of Overworking
While monitoring the constant progress of your remote team, being sensitive to the risks of overworking is equally essential. As a business owner, you should always remind your team leaders not to assign too much workload to each staff. Shortened deadlines may build up unnecessary pressure on your employees, which may hinder them from submitting quality work outputs.
To become more sensitive with your remote team, stay open to discussions. Prepare to adjust to your employees' physical needs to make things easier. Here are some work guidelines to help you implement healthy remote work productivity:
Set limits on the duration of daily work without breaks: Communicate the importance of proactively blocking periods on work calendars. To make this technique happen, advise your employees to hold themselves accountable.
Prevent work-life- boundaries fogging: Help your remote team understand the difference between work and play. Show the importance of the people-first approach.
Remind remote employees to take regular workouts: Tell your virtual staff to incorporate regular exercises into their daily schedule. Activities don't need to be as extreme as the tutorials you watch on television. You can schedule weekly company virtual yoga to make exercising a collaborative effort.
6. Collect Feedback From Your Employees
Gathering regular feedback from your employees is vital in monitoring if the remote team management guidelines work correctly. Feedback helps the organization determine weaknesses that require further adjustments. Moreover, this technique provides enough details on whether your management plan is working at all.
Here are two ways to collect feedback from your employees:
One-to-one meeting: This allows your employees to disclose project details, giving you weekly project performance reviews. Since loneliness is a common complaint by WFH employees, you need to immediately understand how to bridge the gap. Regular two-way feedbacks make communication personal, and the employees will feel more connected with the organizational leaders.
Anonymous polls: Although one-to-one meeting helps the team leaders receive enough information, sensitive details need anonymous feedback. Since the rise of technology provides advantages in maintaining remote teams, you can utilize additional tools that lessen the fear of retribution. With that, gather anonymous employee data that gives one-to-one approaches in receiving a more holistic sense of how your employees feel.
7. Deliver Emotional Support
Since you already understand how isolation can negatively affect the productivity of your employees, you must find ways to provide emotional support. As an entrepreneur, you shouldn't just focus on the welfare of your potential customers. Instead, you must invest in the dynamic agility of your internal employees.
If you want to manage your remote teams effectively, you must train the emotional intelligence of your team leaders. A great team leader should possess qualities such as empowering team members, creating a friendly environment and showing productivity. Moreover, having emotionally intelligent team leaders foster highly-efficient team cultures.
Since a leader's emotional distinction significantly affects organizational success, the team leaders must understand how to empower their team members. So, here are five ways a great corporate leader can encourage remote team members:
Actively listen to your colleagues as they speak.
Promote virtual empathy.
Utilize company values as a guide in making organizational decisions.
Show vulnerability.
Create a resilience routine.
The pressure lies within the emotional intelligence of remote team leaders; therefore, you must always recognize efforts. This technique empowers all your online teams, which increases organizational trust, empathy, and overall productivity. Indeed, training your team leaders is one of the best ways to manage your remote teams effectively.
8.Adjust Effectively
Managing a telecommuting team is a difficult task. Although some organizational roles can exercise flexibility overnight, other departments can stop micromanaging your virtual workforce.
For example, if your team members have set work hours within a week, allow individual restructuring. This method will give them enough free time to feel like they don't constantly work. Thus, those rest periods increase the energy of your remote team members, which adds to the organizational productivity.
Key Takeaway
To effectively manage your remote teams, you must assess your previous managerial guidelines and plan. As you move along with revising your remote team management, utilize technological tools to monitor workers' progress. However, don't underestimate the risks of giving too much workload because this situation may cause more challenges to your remote team.
Author Bio: This 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!
Common Assessments HR Departments Use to Test Job Skills
There are numerous ways to assess job candidates and determine if they have the skills and abilities required for the job, but not all of them are effective. The best skills tests can determine how well an individual will handle the job by emulating the roles they'll be performing every day.
While you might think you’re ready to take on any HR hiring assessment, the truth is that there are many different types of testing that companies use to vet job applicants. These tests come in many different varieties and can test a wide range of skills. Let's take a quick look at the most common assessments HR departments use to screen and hire the best candidate.
1. Organizational Skills Assessment
Organizational skills are fundamental in today's fast-paced, results-oriented work environments. They help determine whether a job applicant can get things done without being asked, or by staying organized enough that there is no need to ask. Hiring managers usually test organizational skills in various ways. You might be asked to submit a document you've previously worked on that shows evidence of your organizational skills (such as an academic paper).
An organizational skills assessment will also challenge job applicants on their ability to keep track of several different items in a short period. This is often done with paperwork, office supplies, or other similar objects. The goal is to see how quickly candidates can locate these items and return them in an organized fashion within a set amount of time.
2. Time Management Assessment
For businesses, time spent on employees not performing effectively or efficiently is a waste of resources. When hiring a new employee, one of their first tasks is to set clear expectations for their performance, including what needs to be accomplished and how quickly these tasks need to be completed. To do so, employers commonly administer time management skills assessments as part of a job interview process.
A time management skills assessment is an excellent way for a hiring manager to assess if you can manage your time effectively in high-pressure situations. The test could involve something as simple as a timesheet, which asks you to record when you started and finished tasks throughout your working day. Alternatively, it could involve a series of timed mental arithmetic tests or other exercises that require quick decision-making on busy jobs.
3. Communication Skills Assessment
Communication is a crucial skill for any job applicant. A communication skills assessment is designed to measure your listening, speaking, reading, and writing abilities. These assessments often include a mix of multiple-choice questions and practical exercises. In some cases, you may even be asked to interview someone or role-play a conversation between two fictional people.
The communication skills assessment evaluates job applicants' ability to accurately and concisely convey messages and information, both verbally and in writing. Whether on a resume or cover letter, an applicant should clearly explain why they're a qualified candidate for their chosen position. You should demonstrate your skills with both written communication, such as e-mails, memos, and reports, and oral communication such as interviews, presentations, and speeches.
Additionally, many HR departments ask job applicants to prepare and deliver an elevator pitch. An elevator pitch is a quick introduction about your product or service that allows you to sell your idea for 10 to 15 seconds, and no more than 20 to 30 seconds. When writing an elevator pitch, it's essential to be clear and concise while also giving enough information so that you may answer any questions.
4. Assessment for Software Use Skills
Hiring companies can use third-party agencies like Employtest to test your skills in software use. The assessment may include evaluating how you can complete a predetermined computer task. For example, you might be asked to log in and out of several programs within a set duration, enter simple information into an application, or utilize primary spreadsheet functions.
The purpose of these tests is to determine whether candidates have basic proficiency in typical office programs like Microsoft Word or Excel. A candidate who takes longer than others or makes more mistakes on these tasks is less likely to be hired.
Tip: Learn how to use Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and other standard software programs. You must know your way around these programs because many jobs require you to use them. If you don't have much experience using these programs, then practice using them on your own time. One good method is to watch video tutorials or ask an experienced person how to use a computer and navigate standard software.
5. Problem-Solving Skill Assessment
A problem-solving skills assessment can help measure whether an applicant can resolve issues that arise at work. Candidates should identify issues, propose potential solutions, and implement a method that fixes these problems as quickly as possible. There are various ways your skills can be tested using problem-solving assessments.
You must prove your ability to approach problems logically, break them down into manageable steps, and work through them systematically. Your employer will ask you to do a problem-solving exercise and explain how you solved it. For instance, HR may give you a hypothetical scenario and ask how you would handle it effectively. Alternatively, you could be given a real workplace problem and asked what actions you would take in response or even how would you resolve a conflict in the workplace.
6. Critical Thinking Assessment
This standard skill test is designed to test your critical thinking abilities. The critical thinking assessment tests an individual's ability to weigh both sides of an argument, identify faulty reasoning, and detect deception. The test may be presented in various ways and can involve written statements, reading comprehension, verbal interaction, or other communication tools. Since critical thinking is vital for success in so many jobs today, businesses often use critical thinking skills assessments as part of their hiring process.
Here, you may be asked questions such as:
Explain why it's important for employees on your team to stay updated on new technologies and information
What techniques could you use to ensure that your team is always aware of technological advancements?
The hiring managers use this type of assessment to determine how well you can think logically, solve problems, and make connections between different pieces of information.
To learn more about recruitment methods, download our ebook now.
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7. Leadership Skills Assessment
This assessment is meant to determine how well you handle yourself in a leadership role, whether your style is more visionary or hands-on. You'll usually be presented with a few scenarios and asked which you would choose and why. You may also be asked which characteristics of good leaders you possess. The leadership capabilities assessment is meant to measure what leadership qualities are innate and will develop over time instead of being taught.
The assessment may also assess an individual’s leadership skills, analytical thinking, and decision-making abilities. Some common questions asked during these assessments include:
How do you view and deal with change?
How effective are you at making decisions?
Are you good at getting people committed and involved in an idea?
Do you know how to hire talented professionals, develop and retain excellent talent?
8. Technical Skills Assessment
A technical skills assessment tests your ability and competence to use tools and understand complex processes in an industrial environment. Standard tools used for these assessments include computer programs, spreadsheets, calculators, blueprints, technical manuals, and other systems.
During a technical skills assessment, you'll be given some project to complete in your own time that usually requires specific software or hardware. You'll then have a one-on-one session with an evaluator, who'll ask questions about your progress, assess whether your finished product meets stated requirements, and evaluate how proficient you are at using whatever was necessary for you to do your project.
“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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9. Personality Assessment
When a business hires you, they usually want to know if you’re a good fit for the job. Personality assessments ask you questions about your personality and values. This assessment helps an employer understand how their work environment will affect you and deal with stressful situations effectively. A typical personality assessment will consist of an interview and delve into how you deal with stress, work in teams, and your career aspirations.
Depending on where you're applying for a job and what type of company you're aiming for, there can be more than one type of personality test. You could receive one or more assessments depending on how many positions you're being considered for at a given company. Some questions will make you feel like you're being judged, while others may seem a little odd or out of place.
10. Job-Specific Assessment
A job-specific assessment tests your knowledge of a specific job and demonstrates whether you have all the skills necessary for success. Your resume may be a powerful way to prove you have a lot of experience in your field, but it's a good idea to offer some proof that you can get stuff done. The hiring department will require you to take assessments; short quizzes that reveal job-specific skills.
Endnote
If you're applying for a job, there's no doubt you'll be facing some skills test or personality assessment during the hiring process. It may be a basic word puzzle or personality quiz or a more in-depth test with hundreds of questions and many different subsections. Whatever form your assessment takes, it's essential to know what skills test you can expect to encounter to prepare yourself in advance.
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Author Bio: This 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!
The 40 Best Thank You Messages for Colleagues
It is rightly said that “You never know when a moment and a few sincere words can have an impact on a life.”
When it comes to your professional life, there may be many occasions when you wish to thank your colleagues, but lack the words. A sincere thank-you for something nice the colleague does sets the tone for a good impression.
When people feel valued and are able to express themselves openly, they are happy. Leadership requires providing employees with effective feedback. It is your responsibility as a leader to give them the chance to do so through effective employee feedback. This will help build a positive and engaged workplace culture at the company.
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Thank You Messages for Colleagues
1.You bring in your core expertise to this software development company, which remains an inspiration for the co-workers. Your sincerity and dedication towards work remains commendable. It has been a pleasure knowing you.
2.Your eye for detail and that ear for giving a patient hearing in any situation remains inspiring. It won’t be an overstatement to say that you remain a role model for your co-workers in this company. You bring positivity in all its true sense.
3.It has been a great learning experience with you. Your domain knowledge and expertise remain stupendous. You remain invaluable to this company in more than one way. Here’s a heartfelt thank you.
4. Your support and commitment to work in this company creates a positive workplace environment that remains an inspiration for co-workers. You may be part of any team; your energy remains truly infectious. It has been a pleasure knowing you.
5. The incredible work ethic and organizational skills that you bring to this company creates a positive influence. You inspire your co-workers in every way. Thank you is the least we can say.
6.Your co-workers have to say one thing in unison about you: a true role model. There is so much to learn from you in this company. Your professional expertise and domain knowledge is indeed unparalleled. So, it has been an immense pleasure to have you as a colleague.
7. I would like to express my sincere appreciation for the professional ethics and expertise that you bring to the table in this company. Your actions speak for themselves, and you inspire everyone around you in an exceptional way. You remain a true asset to this company. Thank you.Another way to show your appreciation is with the employee recognition software.
8.I take this opportunity to thank you for being a complete team player. Any team in a company can function efficiently only if there is proper coordination. Your helpful nature remains truly inspiring. It’s great to work with you.
9.There is so much to learn from you as a colleague in the company. I have realized from you the importance of supporting and nurturing our fellow colleagues in the workplace. I truly remain indebted to you for imparting me this essential skill. Thank you for being an amazing colleague.
10.A thank you is the least I can say for the support you give me as a colleague. In this company, you have emerged as a go-to individual on whom anyone can truly bank on for getting a job done. You remain an inspiration for others.
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11.Your company as a colleague in the company tends to have a direct influence on the productivity level. It is no wonder that we remain such a strong team. So, kindly accept my sincere thanks for your constant support and inspiration.
12.It won’t be an overstatement to say that you are a great colleague. The professional attitude and approach towards your work continues to inspire me every day. There is so much to learn from you. Thank you for being the great person you are.
13.There have been times when you have stepped out of your way to help and support your colleagues in the company. I want to let you know that your efforts are noticed. Thank you, and please be sure to let me know when I can return the favour.
14.Thank you for being the most thoughtful colleague I could ask for. Your support and words of wisdom mean a lot to me. It makes sailing through a working day a lot easier on any given day in this company. We truly make a great team.
15.As they say, two heads are better than one, you compliment my work in so many ways. You have stood by me whenever I needed sound advice or a helping hand. Your efforts are commendable and truly inspiring. I take this opportunity to thank you.
16. Thank you for always sharing your professional knowledge and expertise. It’s so inspiring to have a colleague who helps others, and who contributes to the development of this company. You are a real asset to our work.
17.Thank you for always being such a tremendous help around the office. It’s good to know that when one of us is under pressure, you are always there to lend a helping hand, regardless of your workload. Your continued support is much appreciated. Here’s a big thank you from the bottom of my heart.
18. Your focused approach towards your goals has inspired me in many ways in this company. Your support has been invaluable in this company for your co-workers. I want to really thank you for your professional approach and attitude.
19. I consider myself truly lucky to have a co-worker like you. It is great working with you on any given day and personally, I have learned so much in this company. Thank you.
20.Your calm demeanor and professionalism are truly inspiring. Especially in situations when everything around us seems to be falling apart. There is so much to learn from you at every step. I count myself lucky and it remains such a pleasure to work with you. Thank you for everything.
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21.Thank you for helping me in the company. Your thoughtfulness has helped me in overcoming some of the trying situations at work. It always remains an assurance to have you around. You truly are a great individual and an inspiring colleague.
22. You inspire confidence and I wish you to know that. It gives me great peace of mind to know that you are part of our company. You remain a benchmark of excellence for your colleagues. Thank you for all that you do.
23.Your incredible aptitude, dependability, and commitment to hard work push me to strive for excellence at work on any given day. You are an inspiration in every way, and I remain grateful to you for everything.
24. I am so grateful to have you as my colleague in this company. Your support remains invaluable on any given day at work. I wish to let you know what a difference you make to my working day. Thank you for your constant support.
25.Software development is all about cooperation and coordination besides domain knowledge. Your complete professional attitude towards aiding your colleagues in times of extreme pressure shows what a thoughtful person you are. I believe you are a true role model to the rest of our co-workers; this includes me as well. Thank you.
26. Thank you for sharing your expertise with me and helping to achieve a successful outcome in the company. It has been a great learning experience and knowing you as a wonderful colleague.
27. Thank you for being a thorough professional while multitasking. The way you have tackled projects at software development has been inspiring, and there is no doubt you helped your co-workers in more than one way. I am so grateful to have such a wonderful colleague.
28. I am truly appreciative of your consistent and dependable nature at work. Your support and your approach towards tackling projects at the company, no matter how difficult, remain inspiring. I am fortunate to be able to work with someone like you as a colleague.
29.It has been an exceptional experience working with you on the project in this company. I truly appreciate your work ethic and how you adopt an approach to pursue excellence. You inspire your colleagues in every way. Thank you for all your efforts.
30.I would like you to know how much I value you as a colleague in this company. Your professionalism and work ethic are truly commendable, and in fact, I can’t think of two better qualities to have in a colleague. It has been a great experience to have you as a colleague.
31. You remain a role model for your colleagues in more than one way. The way you conduct yourself at work on any given day remains inspiring. Your presence at the company inspires others to give their 100%. Thank you for being such a great colleague.
32. Thank you for being an impressive source of knowledge in this company. Your expert guidance has helped me fulfill the tasks in an efficient manner on several occasions. Thank you once again for being such a dependable colleague.
33. Thank you for the efforts you undertake every day, which make a difference to all of us in the company. Without your thoughtfulness, things wouldn’t run as efficiently as they do. I would like to think that I speak on behalf of everyone when I say that we truly appreciate it.
34. It is colleagues like you that make this company a great place to work. Thank you so much for the positive vibe that you bring to work every day. You are a real inspiration to me and everyone around you.
35. Thank you for always making an impact in this company. Your professionalism and positive energy spill over onto me and help keep me going whenever I am facing a trying situation at work. I wanted to let you know that you truly inspire me, thank you is the least I can say.
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36. There is no one quite like you, and I mean that as a big compliment. You are an exceptional co-worker and I consider myself truly lucky in this company. Thank you for being such a wonderful colleague.
37. You truly are a gem at this company. I have never met anyone quite as dynamic and energetic as you are, and I really appreciate being able to work as a colleague. It remains an honor to be associated with you. Thank you.
38. You are not just a wonderful colleague but a remarkable human being. You brighten every workday with your positive energy and enthusiasm. Your presence means a lot for the company. You remain a true inspiration for me.
39. The dedication and effort you bring to the company remains exceptional. It remains inspiring to work with you as a colleague. Your energy and efficiency is something I try to adopt in my work too and I wanted you to know that. So, thank you in more than just one way.
40.Your domain knowledge and expertise in the company is truly commendable. It is such a good skill to be able to translate such a complex task into manageable goals. Thank you for your constant support and it remains a pleasure to have you as a colleague.
Ending Note
The benefits of this practice are immeasurable, and your employees will appreciate you. Consider going full-blown when it comes to expressing your appreciation instead of saying nothing or only a few words. The more the merrier. Your employees will appreciate this practice and the results are great.If you want to take it to the next level, take a look at our recognition and rewards platform called Workmates.
“Our staff has praised the increased communication level Workmates delivers. We use it to communicate important project matters and give staff specific ‘kudos’ or even recognize their birthdays. More importantly, we use Workmates to clarify important project details that needed rapid dissemination among the entire team.”
Christopher Baggott Chief Executive Officerator of Medlinks Cost Containment, Inc. and Medlinks Staffing, LLC.
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Author Bio: This 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!
How To Engage Employees In Online Harassment Trainings
All employees should feel safe to work, learn, and grow. However, workplace harassment can eliminate your employees’ sense of comfort and safety at work. This harrowing experience might forever tarnish otherwise their positive experiences and memories in your company.
Every employer and manager have the responsibility to ensure team members are safe from these kinds of threats and harm. One way to do this is to conduct online harassment training. Unfortunately, it can be a challenge to ensure engagement during these kinds of virtual training.
This article provided some tips on how you can shape your sexual harassment training to encourage engagement and boost its effectiveness.
If your business is based in New York City or nearby areas and you’re looking for a reliable online harassment training provider, there are a lot of reliable institutions you can reach out to. They usually offer interactive sexual harassment education and additional training for employees. This course training meets the compliance requirements from all 50 states, including New York State and California.
1. Ditch Theories And Focus On Real-Life Stories
Most businesses’ human resources departments might make the mistake of simply discussing the boring, theoretical instances of workplace harassment. For instance, they tend to empathize with the rules and guidelines in place, but don’t explain any relatable or real-life applications.
Employees need to be aware of how this annual training ties into their professional lives and work duties. So, if you’re comfortable with it, you can focus more on giving real-life stories or personal anecdotes to reveal what it is like to experience that offensive behavior.
After all, the power of storytelling is one of the best ways to engage people. A good story can connect with people on an emotional level and actually holds their attention as certain scenarios unfold.
Of course, you shouldn’t name names. You should simply highlight experiences from the past to help connect with employees.
Behavior-based harassment training can humanize your topics through relevant examples and stories, motivating employees to reflect upon their conduct and think of what they can do to make positive changes.
2. Include Scenario-Based Examples
Sharing real-life experiences may be limited. So, if you can, you should also include scenario-based examples of what workplace harassment looks like.
Most harassment training includes videos where actors portray the scenarios. That said, unless you have the resources to have a professional-level video production available or to hire actors, it may be better to stick with written scenarios.
Unrealistic or campy video examples can actually make it look like a joke and reduce the seriousness with which employees view the training. This can result in not fully understanding the gravity of the issue.
3. Incorporate VR
Latest technological innovation like virtual reality has provided valuable benefits in several sectors, especially in the training industry.
If you have the budget, you can incorporate VR as you include scenario-based examples in your sexual harassment prevention training to boost employee engagement. This can also help employees understand the purpose of such coaching better.
Employee training sessions can include using digital VR goggles to immerse learners in a 3D world where they are subjected to different scenarios—whether they watch a co-worker experience harassment or their digital character experiencing it ‘firsthand.’
This allows employees to learn how to identify and respond to sexual harassment in the workplace when it’s happening to someone else. Also, it can teach employees how to react if it ever happens to them.
Perhaps the greatest benefit of incorporating VR instead of simply explaining it is that the scenario can feel authentic and organic. Users will be prompted with suggested responses to a situation. The story would then unfold depending on what response they make or how long they react.
4. Encourage Safe Discussion and Collaboration
Workplace harassment training is often done in teams. This helps promote a culture of openness and trust among employees which can help enhance their engagement levels.
Encouraging your employees to discuss these issues and achieve the training goals and outcomes can increase interest in the harassment prevention training program and create more favorable conditions for active participation.
You can also introduce collaborative activities that can cultivate their ability to work effectively with one another. Through this, you can promote knowledge and experience sharing. These activities can help drive toward a common goal and encourage the creation of solutions that will benefit everyone and the company as a whole.
That said, workplace harassment is a sensitive topic. So, you must create a safe space where employees can openly discuss these topics. Make sure to include a moderator to control passionate conversations and debates because tempers can flare.
You don’t want an online anti-harassment training discussion to become a new harassment platform. After all, in such situations, particularly online, people often attack each other with the excuse of “just being honest.”
Conclusion
Every business has the responsibility to maintain a workplace that’s free from any kind of harassment. Training your employees is a cost effective and valuable way of minimizing and preventing workplace harassment issues. Making sure your workers receive training will help make your company a safer, more positive workplace for everyone.
To ensure effective online anti-harassment training, make sure to follow the above tips in keeping employees engaged, allowing them to be inspired to implement what they’ve learned into their lives. Establish workplace harassment prevention as compliance training. Ensure that the online training you acquire is compliant with federal and state training requirements and other local laws. You should also take any sexual harassment complaints and other grievances that may reach your knowledge seriously.
Author Bio: This 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!
OKRs Can Support Performance Management - Here’s How
OKRs are used by teams and organizations everywhere to translate high-level strategy into short-term goals. As a team dedicated to managing your company’s human resources (HR), you might be overseeing teams who are using OKRs in their own work or are interested in implementing them for yourself. But while OKRs are a great tool for teams looking for ways to plan out what they intend to achieve and how to get there, they’re not the best for evaluating employee performance.
Don’t fall into the trap of pinning compensation to key results. Instead, here are four ways you can use OKRs to bring out the best in your employees, encourage collaboration and drive employee engagement.
Why OKRs Don’t Work Well for Performance Management
Goal setting has historically been used by HR teams as a way to evaluate an employee’s performance. However, experts generally advise against the use of OKRs for traditional performance management, where employees are assessed and rewarded for individual performance.
In fact, doing so can lead to situations where we see unhealthy competition between members of the same team, weak goals picked over challenging ones because they were easier to accomplish for a bonus, and demotivated employees.
Instead, OKRs work best when used to measure team and company performance, not individuals. Rick Klau, Chief Technology Innovation Officer at Google, echoes this, saying, “OKRs are not synonymous with employee evaluations. OKRs are about the company’s goals and how each employee contributes to those goals.” Performance management should be separate from employee OKRs.
As an HR team, use OKRs not for individual evaluation, but as a way to keep employees accountable, engaged, and inspired to work together towards a set of common goals.
Tip: If you need help setting up an OKR framework for your team, here’s a handy guide to help.
How HR Teams Can Use OKRs Effectively
1. Write high-level OKRs – for your own team
Just like any other team, OKRs are a wonderful way for HR teams to set their own goals for the year. While the leadership team is responsible for setting the company direction or the ‘why,’ it is up to individual teams and departments to work together and set the ‘how.’
Get your team together to set the key results the team will work on for each cycle and the tasks needed to accomplish them. Don’t brainstorm alone; working together will help your team feel more connected to each other and other teams. You can also use a hierarchy tree that shows how tasks link back to each OKR as a reminder that the work done contributes to a wider goal.
A screenshot from the OKR for Jira app
Use a hierarchy tree to show who is responsible for which task, and how each key result relates back to the objectives.
Lastly, don’t set easy goals. As an HR team manager, encourage stretch goals – if you’re completing every goal, you’re not aiming high enough. OKRs work best by pushing boundaries, not by setting easy goals.
Here are some examples of OKRs that HR teams can set:
Objective: Improve flexible work options for employees.
KR #1: Evaluate three solutions for cloud storage and select the best one for the team.
KR #2: Ensure sufficient IT support by having a 1:40 ratio of technicians to employees.
KR #3: Achieve a 90% satisfaction rating of the new system.
Objective: Improve the onboarding process for new employees.
KR #1: Onboard all new employees within the first two months of them joining the company.
KR #2: Increase the pass rate for new employees to 95%.
KR #3: Achieve a 90% satisfaction rating of the onboarding process among newcomers.
2. Review teams’ OKRs to find gaps
One of the most challenging tasks for HR teams is discovering how you can best support the teams under your purview so they can achieve more. It can be difficult to pinpoint exactly what the team needs outside of annual reviews or one-on-one meetings.
The OKRs can be a great source of data on possible gaps. Every OKR cycle includes review meetings where teams are encouraged to bring up any issues or blockers they may have met along the way. Some of these issues may be things that HR can help with, such as ensuring a team has enough skilled people to complete a project within the period.
Ask questions such as:
What was the main reason that prevented you from completing the set goal?
Was there a particular resource or skill that was lacking?
What are your ideal working conditions to be the most productive?
In addition, ensuring that employees have what they need to perform at their best at work will make them feel supported, raising engagement and motivation.
3. Focus on outcomes, not output
OKRs boost performance on the whole because the objectives provide everyone a sense of purpose. By explicitly defining success, clear goals can enable employees to do their best work.
While OKRs should not be a direct evaluation for employee performance and compensation, they can be a source of great data. For example, an employee who took initiative to set and lead a difficult goal, even if it wasn’t 100% achieved, is someone who showed accountability and demonstrated valuable leadership skills. Someone like that could be a great leader in the future.
You can also use outcomes to design individual development plans. If something didn’t go well, one reason could be because the individual needed more training or experience in that area, which opens them up for a discussion on possible training plans. If something did go well and an employee excelled in a particular subject, they could be placed to teach others or become a subject-matter expert in the company.
Don’t forget your own team. As a manager, give your teams qualitative feedback on OKR-related behavior, such as “I like how you took the lead by volunteering to oversee the first key result” or “If you’re not sure what to work on next, you could always refer back to the team’s OKRs when prioritizing tasks.”
4. Use OKRs to encourage (and reward) teamwork
Successful teams collaborate and communicate well, and the OKRs provide a base system that encourages these traits.
If you’re interested in using OKRs for your own HR team, set this expectation for teamwork from the start by including everyone involved during the goal-setting stage and keeping your goals transparent. When teams work together towards a goal, they’ll feel that they ‘own’ the product and share ownership in the results.
If you’re supporting teams who use OKRs, look at the key results to see which teams have pulled together over the past year to achieve some truly incredible moonshot goals – these are the teams where everyone has contributed significantly over a period and should be recognized for their collaboration. Use a tool that tracks the progress of OKRs and links them to tasks assigned to teams. That way, you can monitor which key results a team has contributed to and identify highlights.
How an OKR tool helps teams visualize and keep track of progress
OKRs are a great tool for any team – especially HR teams. But managing multiple teams’ OKRs on top of your own processes can be challenging, which is why you might want to consider using a performance management tool or an OKR tracker.
If your employees use Jira, the best way to get an overall view of the OKRs and how the work assigned contributes back to the goals is with a Jira app. OKR for Jira links Jira issues with OKRs, allowing HR teams and managers alike to see all the issues under each key result. It also comes with a shared dashboard to ensure transparency and help keep the OKRs fresh in everyone’s minds.
Whether you are considering using OKRs for your own team or are supporting other teams using OKRs, a tool will help automate many of the small details, freeing you to focus on what matters the most – the people.
Author Bio: Weronika Spaleniak is the Product Lead at Digital Toucan, an Atlassian app vendor dedicated to creating apps like OKR for Jira that bring data to life for agile teams. One of her most recent projects is an implementation guide designed to ensure a smooth rollout for teams looking to implement the OKRs.
4 Common Obstacles Remote Workers Experience and How To Overcome Them
Remote working is a term we have all become familiar with throughout the last two years. What was once a flexible working option offered to a handful of individuals has become something that most office workers are doing. With the recent news that introverts have thrived in these environments, and with companies big and small expressing an interest in continuing to work remotely, we have every faith this is something that is set to continue as we make our way into the new year and beyond.
While remote working has certainly enabled companies to continue working as normal, it would be naïve to smooth over the obstacles remote workers face when adapting to this new way of working. As briefly mentioned previously, some people have thrived in this environment, but there will undoubtedly be some others who have found themselves struggling at varying points.
Much like in the office workspace, there are obstacles at home to overcome to complete your job to the fullest extent. Interested in finding out a little more about these obstacles, but most importantly, how best to overcome them? Read on for more.
1. Being Comfortable When Working
This is sure to be up there at the top of the list of obstacles that remote workers face in this day and age. When working from home, you want to ensure you are as comfortable as possible; having a numb butt or legs is sure to be distracting during one of your many zoom calls!
While nothing stops you from working at the coffee table or using the sofa as your workspace, this is not something that is suitable as a long-term solution. Sitting on something like this is sure to cause a twinge in your back, which could cause more problems over time. At the same time, it is important to distinguish and uphold a separation between the working space in your home and the areas in which you relax.
Creating an at-home office filled with suitable furniture and equipment will ensure you can complete your job to the fullest extent while remaining as comfortable as possible while doing so. If you find yourself without a specific room in your home, in which you could turn into a home office, using room separators and the likes is an ideal substitution.
2. Remaining Productive Throughout The Day
We feel right in saying there are more distractions around you in your home than there would be in the workplace. From other family members being at home – whether through working from home or online schooling – to the precious family pet being needy, you might often find yourself drawn from your laptop screen and workload at various times of the day.
Creating an area in the home for your office is one way of minimizing the distractions around you and is recommended by many who have been working from home for some time. Creating a routine and sticking to it is also something you should be thinking about when working from home. The temptation to work in your pajamas is sure to remain high but quash this habit as soon as you can; if you feel the part, you are sure to execute it as well.
Productivity at home is something that we feel most people have struggled with at some point or another. While most employers understand their employees will be slightly more distracted than they usually would be, remote employees must take it upon themselves to find ways around this. Finding what works best for you and fits into your routine will go a long way and ensure you continue to complete your job to the best standard.
3. Feelings Of Loneliness and Isolation
Social interaction is a key part of the workplace model. This includes chatting with your remote team members throughout the day and collaborating in person on projects you are working on. Remote working throws a metaphorical spanner in the works. Socialization and human interaction levels are reduced significantly when working from home, even when using video conferencing and messaging platforms to stay in contact.
While there is no doubt these means of team communication make a bit of a difference in how one might be feeling, it is not a full substitute for chats with colleagues around the coffee station. When experiencing feelings like these, it is important to make it clear to your manager or superior; they will be able to work alongside you to combat them while referring you to any resources that might prove helpful.
At the same time, there are measures you can take as an individual to tackle these feelings of loneliness and isolation, including setting aside a section of your day to talk with your colleagues, not just about work, but about in your personal life too. Doing what you can, both individually and collectively, will ensure that the wider team feels connected.
4. Technology Troubles
We have all been victims to our laptops deciding to update at the most inconvenient moments, and it often feels like it is when we have the most to do! Experiencing technology problems is something that was commonplace in an office environment but is something that extends to the home working environments too. From the likes of poor broadband speeds to loading speeds remaining low, these are obstacles that many workers face, which can be challenging to tackle.
Should you find you are experiencing slow broadband, consider getting a Wi Fi extender for your home or connecting your device manually using an ethernet cable. On the other hand, you could consider contacting your provider and negotiating for a different package, including faster speeds.
Regarding your laptop updates, checking whether there are any updates at the end of the working day before logging off is always recommended. It would prevent the laptop from updating during crucial parts of your day. Not to mention, these updates are often released as a means of securing your device from third parties while also ensuring your laptop can use any software or programs relevant to your job.
Many obstacles crop up throughout the working day; some will disrupt your working rhythm, while some will not. Knowing how best to tackle and overcome them is the best way of navigating this process and ensures you remain a motivated and exemplary member of the team when you work from home!
Author Bio: This 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!
6 Employee Retention Tactics Used by HR Services
Hiring quality talent and training them to become the best version of themselves is the dream of every company, especially ones that are new to the business scene. And a lot even achieve that by hiring brilliant HR Services but retaining your talent while adding on new hires is where the skill comes in. And good employee retention is the sign of a great HR consultant. In this blog post, we will discuss different tactics used by HR companies to make sure you can retain your workforce for as long as possible!
So, without further ado, let's start!
6 Employee Retention Strategies by HR Services:
It's the job of an HR consulting firm to make sure employees keep engaged with the company and don't leave for any outside offer they may get. To see through to this, there are a few strategies they make use of. Let's discuss them in detail.
Recognition and Rewards:
Employees love to be appreciated for their hard work. It makes them feel comfortable and valued and like they are a part of something special. The HR team makes sure that employees receive recognition in the form of awards, privileges or even simple thank-yous from time to time. This can keep them happy and more likely to stick around for longer periods of time. You may start to see improved employee retention rates after implementation of this strategy.
Flexible Work Arrangements:
The work arrangement is one of the most important aspects that employees look for in a job. Nobody wants to be stuck at their desk from nine to five when they could be out enjoying the sun. That's why HR offers flexible working hours and even remote work policies so that employees can have a little more control over their time. This encourages employees and gives them a sense of freedom and makes them stay with you for a long period of time.
If you are looking for exceptional outsourced HR consultancy then HR Options is worth taking a look at. Their expertise in the field of Human Resources can be a great asset to your company.
Opportunities for Growth:
No employee wants to feel like they are stuck in the same position forever, doing the same thing day in and day out. This is why it's crucial to provide opportunities for growth within the company. Knowing that there are chances to be promoted or get responsibilities of bigger projects is what keeps employees engaged. Secondly, if an employee sees himself growing with a company, they are less likely to leave. It’s great for professional development.
Team Collaboration:
Collaborating with other team members and making new friends in the office can not only make work more fun but also encourage them to stay longer. This has been proven by different studies which show that people who enjoy working together tend to stick around for much longer periods than they would otherwise! The HR team can plan interactive sessions to make sure the employees share healthy communication together.
However, remember while you put different people together there can always be conflicts. This is totally normal, to avoid any ugly outcomes, you should always haverisk management solutionsin place.
Company Culture:
A strong company culture always helps when it comes to employee retention. If management encourages a family environment within the organization, then most employees feel like this is their own little space where they can flourish without any discrimination. And this makes them want to stay.
Outstanding Onboarding Process:
Lastly, a good onboarding experience is yet another way of retaining employees. As soon as an employee joins the company, it's important that they feel welcome and get familiar with their surroundings quickly to avoid any miscommunication or confusion later on. HR teams should make sure this happens properly by planning out all events in advance according to what suits the situation best. This includes proper introduction of the new hire to all employees and little welcome gifts that go a long way. It Improves work environment and employee turnover rate.
As you can see, there are a lot of ways HR Services can make sure you get the best out of your employees. With all this knowledge about employee retention, we believe you are better equipped to overhead any HR service you may hire. Labor market could be hard to understand on your own. Hiring HR can be a worthy investment into the future of your company!
Frequently Asked Questions:
I'm not sure what my employees are looking for in a job. How can I find out?
One great way to do this is by conducting a survey or simply asking them directly in an interview. This can give you a good idea of what they want and how you can accommodate their needs long term.
What if my company can't afford to offer flexible hours or work from home policies?
You don't have to! There are other ways to show your employees that you care about their work-life balance such as providing opportunities for growth, team collaboration, and maintaining a strong company culture. You can offer side activities like games to relax and destress in the normal working hours to make up for it.
Is it really necessary to provide opportunities for growth?
Employees might be content with where they are at the moment but that can only keep going like this for so long. You have to provide opportunities of growth for your employees to stay with you.
Author Bio: This 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!
Common Obstacles Remote Workers Experience and How To Overcome Them
Remote working is a term we have all become familiar with throughout the last two years. What was once a flexible working option offered to a handful of individuals has become something that most office workers are doing. With the recent news that introverts have thrived in these environments, and with companies big and small expressing an interest in continuing to work remotely, we have every faith this is something that is set to continue as we make our way into the new year and beyond.
While remote working has certainly enabled companies to continue working as normal, it would be naïve to smooth over the obstacles remote workers face when adapting to this new way of working. As briefly mentioned previously, some people have thrived in this environment, but there will undoubtedly be some others who have found themselves struggling at varying points.
Much like in the office workspace, there are obstacles at home to overcome to complete your job to the fullest extent. Interested in finding out a little more about these obstacles, but most importantly, how best to overcome them? Read on for more.
Being Comfortable When Working
This is sure to be up there at the top of the list of obstacles that remote workers face in this day and age. When working from home, you want to ensure you are as comfortable as possible; having a numb butt or legs is sure to be distracting during one of your many zoom calls!
While nothing stops you from working at the coffee table or using the sofa as your workspace, this is not something that is suitable as a long-term solution. Sitting on something like this is sure to cause a twinge in your back, which could cause more problems over time. At the same time, it is important to distinguish and uphold a separation between the working space in your home and the areas in which you relax.
Creating an at-home office filled with suitable furniture and equipment will ensure you can complete your job to the fullest extent while remaining as comfortable as possible while doing so. If you find yourself without a specific room in your home, in which you could turn into an office, using room separators and the likes is an ideal substitution.
Remaining Productive Throughout The Day
We feel right in saying there are more distractions around you in your home than there would be in the workplace. From other family members being at home – whether through working from home or online schooling – to the precious family pet being needy, you might often find yourself drawn from your laptop screen and workload at various times of the day.
Creating an area in the home for your office is one way of minimizing the distractions around you and is recommended by many who have been working from home for some time. Creating a routine and sticking to it is also something you should be thinking about when working from home. The temptation to work in your pajamas is sure to remain high but quash this habit as soon as you can; if you feel the part, you are sure to execute it as well.
Productivity at home is something that we feel most people have struggled with at some point or another. While most employers understand their employees will be slightly more distracted than they usually would be, employees must take it upon themselves to find ways around this. Finding what works best for you and fits into your routine will go a long way and ensure you continue to complete your job to the best standard.
Feelings Of Loneliness and Isolation
Human interaction and socialization are all part of the workplace model. This includes chatting with your colleagues throughout the day and collaborating in person on projects you are working on. Remote working throws a metaphorical spanner in the works. Socialization and human interaction levels are reduced significantly when working from home, even when using video calls and messaging platforms to stay in contact.
While there is no doubt these means of communication make a bit of a difference in how one might be feeling, it is not a full substitute for chats with colleagues around the coffee station. When experiencing feelings like these, it is important to make it clear to your manager or superior; they will be able to work alongside you to combat them while referring you to any resources that might prove helpful.
At the same time, there are measures you can take as an individual to tackle these feelings of loneliness and isolation, including setting aside a section of your day to talk with your colleagues, not just about work, but about things outside of work too. Doing what you can, both individually and collectively, will ensure that the wider team feels connected.
Technology Troubles
We have all been victims to our laptops deciding to update at the most inconvenient moments, and it often feels like it is when we have the most to do! Experiencing technology problems is something that was commonplace in an office environment but is something that extends to the home working environments too. From the likes of poor broadband speeds to loading speeds remaining low, these are obstacles that many workers face, which can be challenging to tackle.
Should you find you are experiencing slow broadband, consider getting a WiFi extender for your home or connecting your device manually using an ethernet cable. On the other hand, you could consider contacting your provider and negotiating for a different package, including faster speeds.
Regarding your laptop updates, checking whether there are any updates at the end of the working day before logging off is always recommended. It would prevent the laptop from updating during crucial parts of your day. Not to mention, these updates are often released as a means of securing your device from third parties while also ensuring your laptop can use any software or programs relevant to your job.
Many obstacles crop up throughout the working day; some will disrupt your working rhythm, while some will not. Knowing how best to tackle and overcome them is the best way of navigating this process and ensures you remain a motivated and exemplary member of the team!
Author Bio: This 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!
Increase Employee Engagement: 10 Steps Employers Need to Take to Reduce Fear of the Future
A company culture that encourages employee engagement is pretty important for your organization, but can it actually reduce fear of the future? When done right, engaged, confident employees aren’t the only benefit of a positive company culture.
Psychological safety is vital for team innovation, but employers fail to encourage confidence in their employees when it comes to sharing their ideas.
It’s much easier to default to safe silence. No one wants to risk their job over an idea, comment, or disagreement. In some cases, where employees are encouraged to speak up, 56% of them won’t because they don’t think they’ll receive credit for their ideas.
Knowing why your employees feel afraid of speaking up is essential. It’s the whole reason why cultural assessments are a thing. By getting to the bottom of why your employees can’t see a future in your company, you’ll start to understand why they’re afraid of their future, in general.
In the end, it all comes down to improving your company culture. If you follow our steps, you’ll be able to create a culture that increases employee engagement across your company.
Why Employees are Afraid of the Future
Our employees don’t exist in a vacuum; they have lives separate from work, previous employers, and varying life experiences that influence how they speak and act.
Speaking Up In the Workplace
A tight-lipped workplace is a constant across industries, cultures, and countries. Employees often withhold their voice because they think it will not be heard or fear it will backfire.
There are two theories as to why employees remain silent in the workplace. One is the personality perspective, where employees lack the disposition to stand up. The other is the situational perspective, where work environments don’t encourage speaking out.
Based on research, strong environmental norms override the influence on personality on the employee’s willingness to speak up. In other words, social norms matter more than timidness when an employee decides whether they should or shouldn’t speak up.
A Culture Ruled By Fear
A Harvard University piece explored what factors lead to the cultural phenomenon of being fearful in the workplace. Harvard found that self-preservation, implicit assumptions, and hostility led to silence. Employees won’t speak out unless they won’t experience consequences.
Management is aware that they hold power that the employee doesn’t. If an employee speaks out, even in a helpful way, management could fire them, and they can’t do anything about it.
Wrongful dismissal is illegal, but that doesn’t stop employers from breaking the law.
For example, although recognizing your unconscious biases can make you a more inclusive leader in your organization, it’s still a rampant problem in the workplace. 40% of employees who make an accusation over discrimination face retaliation, punishment, and/or layoffs.
Although most employees avoid rocking the boat from the assumption of punishment, some employers will actively discourage it and accuse their employees of “whistleblowing.”
For instance, Canada’s Phoenix pay system fiasco cost the federal government $1.5 billion. The cause? A company culture that won’t “reward those who share negative news.”
To summarize: employers who hide information from their employees, reprimand them for small mistakes, and/or micromanage tasks scare their staff into silence. At the same time, employers who don’t clarify if an employee can speak up when necessary also silence their workforce.
Is it any wonder at this point why employees are terrified of the future?
Fear of the Future: What to Change
Fear of the future is more than just an abstract idea. There are several reasons why your employees are unwilling to take chances, make mistakes, or speak up, including:
Fear of Failure
Embarrassment
Underperformance
Rejection
Change
Isolation
Confrontation
Speaking up over concerns, options, and ideas is vital for organizational performance and innovation. On the other hand, silence is the cause of many disasters, like the Boeing incident, where employees felt pressured to work insane hours or lose their jobs.
It shouldn’t take a disaster for your organization to change its company culture. A strong company culture can improve employee performance, staff retention, morale, financials, job satisfaction, and recruitment. It’ll also reduce employee stress and absenteeism.
Above all, company culture will keep your employees engaged and invested in their job. You should make it your company’s mission to create a culture that prioritizes employee happiness.
Engaged Employees in the 21st Century
As of writing this, employees are still rebounding from COVID-19's impact on the workforce.
According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace report, 45% of people say their life has been affected “a lot” by the pandemic. Gallup suggests leaders invest in an employee engagement strategy if they want to support the current workforce and build organizational resilience.
Gallup’s 2017 report showed that 15% of employees worldwide were engaged in their jobs. After years of a steady climb from 15% to 22% in 2019, employee engagement dropped two points in 2020. Gallup blames a poor employer response to remote work and the pandemic as the cause.
Employee stress reached a record high level in 2020, moving up five points from 2019. 43% of employees say they’re stressed at work. Employers need to address this to decrease burnout.
To help find disengaged employees in your business, we recommend utilizing engagement surveys. However, it’s essential to remain objective here. An anonymous employee engagement survey will ease your team member's fears of reporting in the first place.
How to Increase Employee Engagement This Year
Employee engagement fuels your staff with drive and motivation to complete tasks. Encouraging your employees to speak up is difficult, but adding the following techniques will make it easier.
Step 1: Set Clear SMART Goals
Creating well-thought-out goals can help you create an employee engagement program that works. To motivate your employees, you should consider asking them what they need from you.
To do this, we recommend following the SMART goal-setting method because it enables you to develop specific, measurable goals that are attainable, relevant to you, and timely.
Specific: I want to create an employee engagement program that increases productivity.
Measurable: I will track my progress by calculating completed projects over the month.
Attainable: I have enough resources and manpower to achieve my goals.
Relevant: There is a clear value for my team. More productivity = more cash flow.
Time-Bound: I will finish three more projects by the end of the month.
The SMART tool can give your team the clarity and focus they’ll need to achieve their goals.
Step 2: Establish and Communicate Company Values
Your company’s core values are the principles and beliefs that unite your team. They’re a key feature of great company culture because they help employees feel like an integral part of your company. However, they have to be cohesive, authentic, and clear to work in your favor.
Your company’s values must be audible across all your internal communications, from your leadership seminars to your company newsletter. Businesses can accomplish this by using logos, graphics, slogans, and customer service initiatives that unify their brand’s voice.
Step 3: Improve Your Onboarding Program
A standardized onboarding experience keeps employees engaged. In fact, employees who undergo an onboarding program with a clear structure and managerial guidance are 54% more engaged than those who don’t because they understand their role within the company.
Step 4: Offer Competitive Compensation and Benefits
Low pay is the second most common reason people quit, but poor company culture, lack of work-life balance, and sub-par benefits packages often land in the top ten. The easiest way to boost employee engagement is to appropriately compensate your staff for what they do.
If you can’t give your employees a pay raise, consider updating your benefits program. A fantastic physical/mental health package will reduce employee fear of future health problems.
Step 5: Measure Employee Engagement
By tracking your employee engagement programs, you can determine where your organization stands and where improvements are necessary. Start by monitoring communication, like:
Email opens
Read time
Anonymous comments
Survey responses
By crunching the numbers, you can put resources in the places and progress your program.
Step 6: Encourage Feedback and Celebrate Achievements
Recognition and positive employee feedback empowers your staff to reach for the stars. Start by telling your team that they did a great job on their project, or comment on their preparedness at your next meeting. You can even acknowledge your top performers in your weekly newsletter.
Employers should also encourage regular feedback from their team members. Use employee surveys that ask about general happiness, recognition, and how likely they are to recommend your business.
Step 7: Plan Team-Building Activities
Humans spend 30% of their life working, making workplace relationships vital to your employees' happiness. By implementing team-building activities, you encourage open communication and collaboration, which are necessary components to resolving conflicts.
Step 8: Invest in Employee Wellness
Research shows that wellness benefits were crucial for employees during COVID-19, but they’ll still matter post-pandemic. Your employees want to do well, but if they’re sleep-deprived or stressed due to an upcoming deadline, their morale suffers. Poor morale extends to a decrease in productivity, which affects your bottom line significantly.
Ensuring wellness means taking an active interest in your employees' mental and physical wellbeing. You can do this by creating a wellness program and using your intranet.
Step 9: Promote Inclusion in the Workplace
Another important way to invest in wellness is by promoting diversity and inclusion in the workplace. Employers should welcome people of all backgrounds and value their ideas. An open company encourages speaking out against problems affecting minorities.
Step 10: Create Mentorship Programs and Development Opportunities
Your employees want to grow with your company. By offering mentorship programs and development opportunities, you can engage your employees throughout their tenure. To set up these opportunities, send out a weekly newsletter to ask who’s interested in taking the next step.
Author Bio: This 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!
