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Weekly, Monthly & More: How Your Pay Schedule Affects You
Let’s say you had a job as a cashier at your local grocery store that paid every two weeks. You quit that position and got a new job in an office, but this one pays once a month instead. What gives?
There are different kinds of pay schedules that determine when and how often you receive your paycheck. Businesses usually set their pay schedules to benefit themselves. Payroll management entails labor and costs, so companies will go for the option that is more convenient and saves them money. Employees (as opposed to freelancers) don’t normally get to decide how often they get paid, so it’s critical to factor your pay cycle into your weekly or monthly budget, especially if you live paycheck to paycheck. Will you have your money when you need it?
Here are four common types of pay schedules:
Kinds of Pay Schedules : Weekly Payroll
Some businesses pay their employees weekly, which means employees receive their income on Fridays. This schedule is more common amongst freelancers, contract workers, and trade industries like construction and manufacturing. These job types commonly have irregular hours, so it makes sense to pay workers according to a shorter time frame.
While weekly schedules are a favorite amongst employees because it means you have more regular access to your money. If you drained your bank account on bills last week because it was the end of the month but want a night out with your friends, no worries — you get paid on Friday, so you can afford that night out as long as you save enough for your upcoming expenses.
However, most businesses avoid the weekly system. Payroll vendors frequently charge money every time a company (their customer) runs payroll. Doing so weekly takes extra time to process, so companies will opt for more extended periods to reduce costs and add convenience.
Bi-Weekly Payroll
A bi-weekly pay schedule means you receive your paycheck every two weeks. This cycle amounts to 26 or 27 paydays per year. Many businesses prefer bi-weekly timelines because they save money processing payroll and can calculate overtime more easily (each paycheck accounts for approximately 80 work hours). As such, bi-weekly payroll is more common amongst businesses that pay their employees hourly.
Bi-weekly schedules are not challenging to manage, but two months out of the year will have three paydays instead of two. Accountants need to factor in these paydays when calculating voluntary employee deductions, like healthcare, which are equal in a bi-monthly pay schedule.
Bi-Monthly Payroll
Bi-monthly pay means your employer pays you twice per month, also known as semi-monthly. As such, you might receive your income on the first of and in the middle of the month (likely on the 15th), or in the middle and end. A bi-monthly pay schedule entails 24 payments per year, which makes it distinct from bi-weekly. If you earn $45,000 per year on a bi-weekly cycle, your paychecks (not accounting for taxes and deductions) will be around $1730.77 each, whereas your paychecks will equal $1,875 on a semi-monthly schedule. It’s the same amount of money but divided differently.
Bi-monthly payroll is common for salaried employees. Calculating deductions is easy for accountants, and you always know which dates you will receive your income.
Shirley GarciaAuditing and Operations Administrator of Medlinks Cost Containment, Inc. and Medlinks Staffing, LLC.
“I can’t say this enough: Without LIKE.TG, we could not have communicated important project information or demonstrated that we could take on an increased workload. We now provide real-time workforce statistics and productivity reports that have helped us win more projects.”
Monthly Payroll
You guessed it — monthly payroll means your paycheck comes in once a month. This format is ideal for businesses because it makes accounting easy and reduces processing costs, but it’s disadvantageous for employees and contractors because they have less frequent access to their money. If you work a job that pays monthly, you need to be extra careful with budgeting because you’ll only receive your income in lump sums 12 times per year.
How Does Your Pay Schedule Affect You?
Your pay schedule does not affect how much you get paid in a year, assuming you work the same number of hours either way. However, your pay cycle does influence how often you have access to your hard-earned money, and therefore the way you budget.
For example, let’s say you paid all your bills last month and now don’t have much left in your savings. Your job pays you bi-weekly, so you’ll have enough money to pay the first round of next month’s expenses, but your next paycheck won’t arrive in time to pay the rest. Now you’re in a tight spot.
One option is to make an early paycheck request from your employer. If your employer agrees, they will provide you all or part of your paycheck before they usually would, allowing you to pay your bills, but it lengthens the time between your next paycheck.
Another option is to use financial apps. Your job’s pay cycle is out of your hands, but you can control when you get paid with apps like Earnin. Earnin allows you to take out up to $500 of your earnings per pay period. This way, you won’t have to worry about missing a bill because your employer’s pay schedule isn’t in your favor, and you won’t have to pay mandatory fees for the convenience.
Your pay schedule affects your ability to pay expenses and for recreation, so it’s important to know how often you’ll receive your income when applying for a job or managing your finances. Though your pay cycle might not always work in your favor, there are ways you can control having access to your money.
This article originally appeared on Earnin.
About Author:This article is written by a marketing team member at LIKE.TG. LIKE.TG is a leading provider of proven HR solutions, including recruiting, onboarding, employee communications engagement, and rewards recognition. Our user-friendly software increases employee productivity, delivers time and cost savings, and minimizes compliance risk.
7 Recruitment and Onboarding Tips to Ensure a New Employee is a Good Fit for Your Remote Team
As your business turns to remote work, you would also need to adjust your recruiting and onboarding processes. Traditional methods might no longer work in this new setup. Factors such as the lack of face-to-face interactions mean it will be harder for you to determine whether your new hire is a good fit for your company.
According to Owl Lab, 80% of workers expect that they will be working from home in the coming months or years. It is highly possible that you might be recruiting and onboarding your new hires remotely as well. It is high time that you adopt new recruitment and onboarding strategies for remote employees.
With that, here are some tips on how you can effectively recruit and onboard new employees for your remote teams.
1. Leverage technology to go digital
Working remotely means moving away from the traditional pen-and-paper method and fully embracing the digital space. This would require you to digitize your documents, paperwork, and processes. A hiring manager needs the right tools to ensure everything you need remains accessible anytime and anywhere.
With technology nowadays, you can easily do all your HR tasks virtually. Various tools and software can help you recruit and onboard new hires remotely. Some examples are different types of HR software, video conferencing tools, recruitment and onboarding applications, and e-signing tools.
These software solutions also offer additional functions to help streamline your processes. For example, your HR software can automatically schedule onboarding orientations for your new hires and notify them for every step in the process. This way, you can focus on making sure your new hire is the right fit for the company, starting right from a successful onboarding.
Kaylee CollinsHR Analyst of Osmose Utilities Services, Inc
“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.”
2. Consider individualizing experience
Something you need to consider when you recruit and onboard remote employees are their respective working conditions at their home offices. In the case of remote work, there are many factors affecting their productivity and efficiency that you cannot control. This can come in the form of a family member or pet demanding attention, an urgent household chore, and many more.
Some of your new hires might not have the privilege of having a conducive environment to work in. To make sure that you give everyone equal footing, you should consider individualizing or personalizing your recruitment and onboarding experience. New hires feel valued by being able to choose the best and most optimal way to get to know your company and the culture within it.
Personalization can come in the form of booking their own interview schedule during the application process. You can provide an asynchronous orientation on your remote onboarding process, allowing the new employees to take in new information at their own pace and time. This way, you can assess all your new hires fairly.
3. Make onboarding materials always accessible
The benefits of going digital with your HR process is the opportunity of making important documents, files, and data more accessible to your employees. You can use this advantage to improve your virtual onboarding and the new hire experience.
By using software, you can make onboarding programs and materials always available for your new employees. You can put them in a cloud-based storage system which your remote workers can access anytime and anywhere. This allows them to easily pull out any information they need in between tasks.
After all, a one-time orientation might not be enough to cover everything they need to know about the company, its culture, and policies. By making essential onboarding materials accessible, they have something to go back to in cases they have questions about the processes or policies within the company.
This guide was designed to help you navigate through those difficult tasks and help determine the right software for your organization, download our eBook now.
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4. Create a buddy system for your new hire
Alone, your new hire might have trouble approaching the rest of your remote teams. They might even find it intimidating. But with someone at their side, the process can become a whole lot easier and seamless.
By using a buddy system, you can provide a more focused onboarding process with your new hire. Their buddy will guide them throughout their adjustment period while also acting as their mentor. This way, your new employee will always know who to turn to whenever they have questions during the process right from their start dates.
Their buddy can also act as a bridge that connects them to the rest of the team. They can introduce new hires with the members and explain the processes and dynamics within the team.
5. Schedule frequent check-ins
Effective employee onboarding can sometimes take time. First day orientations are just the beginning of the journey. It will take some time for them to adjust fully and get to know the organization and their colleagues more. Just make sure to keep track of their progress along the way.
This would require frequent check-ins to see how your new remote employees are acclimatizing to the organization. You can conduct a survey, asking how well they are adjusting and getting along with their colleagues. You can also ask feedback on their performance from their buddies or other team members.
Doing so will let you know whether your new hire is a perfect fit to the company. Likewise, it helps you determine the strengths and weaknesses of your onboarding process. This way, you can improve and optimize your strategy along the way.
6. Provide opportunities to bond with the team
One of the biggest questions when recruiting and onboarding new remote workers is how to make them feel welcomed to the team. After all, your new hire has little to no opportunities to interact with their colleagues personally. There are no team lunches or team building activities to get to know each other more. This can make it harder for them to connect with the rest of the team.
Keep in mind that face-to-face interactions aren’t the end all be all for team bonding. There are numerous ideas for onboarding remote employees to make them feel connected with the rest of the team.
For one, you can hold social events virtually. You can conduct simple team building activities online such as an introductory meeting where the new hire gets to interact with the rest of the team, weekly quiz or game nights, or just simple video chats where team members can catch up. This will make your new employee feel more welcomed and settled with the company, improving employee retention in the long run.
7. Keep communications line open
According to a Mitel report, 15% of employees’ total work hours is wasted on inefficient communications. This can be in the form of unclear set of instructions or the lack of effective communication channels within the team.
Keeping your communication line open is one of the most important remote onboarding tips out there. Fortunately, there are many ways for your remote workers to reach out to the team despite the distance. This includes emails, instant messaging apps, centralized dashboards, and SMS messaging.
Your new hires will have a lot of questions during their first few days or weeks in the company. And sometimes, these questions aren’t found in your employee handbooks or manuals. So, you must make sure that they can get all the support they need to adjust to their new environment.
The future of recruiting and onboarding
Times are changing. Many believe that remote work is the future for almost all businesses worldwide. Your company must be ready to adapt to such changes if you want to remain relevant and competitive in the market.
The challenge now is how to optimize and streamline your recruiting and onboarding processes for remote employees. You can start by leveraging technologies to help you migrate your usual processes into the digital space. And with these tips in mind, you can make sure that your new hires will fit perfectly with your organization despite the challenges of remote hiring and onboarding.
About Author:This article is written by a marketing team member at LIKE.TG. LIKE.TG is a leading provider of proven HR solutions, including recruiting, onboarding, employee communications engagement, and rewards recognition. Our user-friendly softwareincreases employee productivity, delivers time and cost savings, and minimizes compliance risk.
6 Advantages of an Employee Tracker Software
It doesn’t matter what kind of job you have, the employer is always going to expect his employees to be productive for their assignments. Tracking employee productivity plays a critical role in developing the productivity of your business and its growth. Both employees and the employer have to be aware of the benefits of using employer tracker software for their company. It helps them in improving their working style for enhancing productivity. Although tracking the employees of your company might seem like you do not trust them, it is a wrong belief. Let's take a look at the benefits of using this software.
Better project management
Employee tracking software allows you to manage company projects by planning, organizing, scheduling, and prioritizing different tasks. These tasks are then assigned to all company resources.
The software helps in planning and scheduling the different tasks by analyzing the time the resource will take for completing the assigned task. This is how you may organize and prioritize various tasks according to the planned schedule. The software allows you to track the productive time spent on different tasks and it leads to more effective project management. It is also useful to the PEO services working in places such as Singapore for instance that provide employee management solutions such as Singapore Payrolls.
One of the main objectives of having employee tracking software is for creating correct attendance records of the staff. You can find several factors associated with the attendance of an employee such as start time schedule, off time schedule, leaves, arrival time, break time, etc. All this apart, the hourly work attendance is significant for analyzing the performance of an employee. It is even easier to record employee attendance when all the employees are required to report to the same manager. However, you need many supervisors for various departments for recording the attendance of several members of the staff and workers scattered across the globe. In such cases, it is this work of recording the attendance that becomes a big problem. Therefore, while planning the leaves of the employees, it is necessary to monitor their attendance via a proper system. If a few minutes delay or latency is involved in finishing a job by employees, it can lead to a huge downfall.
This guide was designed to help you navigate through those difficult tasks and help determine the right software for your organization, download our ebook now.
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Establishes an effective and streamlined communication channel
Everyone is aware that you are required to interact seamlessly with different members of your team for fixing the issues you face during project development or while the work is in progress. By using the advanced technology for implementing the streamlining of all communication tools into one platform, they are in reality providing the software in the form of service. The employee productivity software is also useful for sharing files, handling text messages, video conferencing, emails, etc. by using a single platform. The effective communication channels that are used together with productivity tracking apps are beneficial throughout the project.
In most cases, the employees do not commit mistakes on purpose. They are also human beings and they may commit some errors without realizing that they have done so. This is a pretty common scenario when the employees have misunderstood the instructions provided to them by the managers for completing an assignment. But, many times it doesn’t matter whether the mistakes were made intentionally or unintentionally. The consequences involved in the errors can turn out to be drastic for the organization. Due to this, the team manager has to keep a close watch on the work completed by the employees so that he or she can identify the errors quickly before things get out of hand and it is too late. Some of the advantages of using the employee tracking software for this are that you can send them reminders, check the progress occasionally, and ensure that they are on the right track all the time. If you are using a properly structured employee tracking system, this whole process of rectifying the employee errors in the early stages becomes straightforward.
To learn more about giving access to vital HR and work information — even when they're not in the office. Download our ebook now.
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Simple employee evaluation
If the employees are using a productivity monitoring software, things become simple for the management to spot all the mistakes they are making during project execution. This software is useful for evaluating the performance of all employees in real-time. It will not only highlight the errors but the problems can be easily rectified on the spot. This leads to better quality at work and makes things simple for accomplishing successful project deliverables.
All business owners dream about having a creative and hardworking team at their disposal. However, in reality, it is extremely difficult to assemble such a competent team for any business. There are always going to be one or more members of the staff that do not follow the rules of the company and do not work according to the instructions provided. Therefore, it is the top priority for the supervisors to identify these incompetent employees and try to weed them out from their teams before they can corrupt the other members of the team with them. When you are monitoring the employees working in a place, the supervisors can get real-time notifications about the behavior of the employee and they can quickly and simply assess how engaged the employee is in his or her workplace. The process can filter out all the unethical members of your staff so that the management can take swift disciplinary action against these employees.
Assess the employee performance in real-time
Different managers will be able to see the real-time performance of employees by using perfect employee tracking software. The errors made by the employees are highlighted but, the good work they have put in will also be noted by the team managers. The team management can take screenshots of the work completed by the staff and motivate them to perform even better. When the manager has a clearer picture of employee real-time performance it is extremely beneficial to him for planning the appraisals and creating performance reviews.
One of the more significant aspects of maintaining a satisfied workplace will be promptly handling all the time off requests from the employees. In case an employee has to face an emergency at his residence and is forced to leave the office on short notice, then no employee is going to be happy about going from one office to another department to get the grant for a leave request. It will adversely affect the morale of the employee as well. Therefore, if a company introduces employee tracking software in its operations, it will allow the employee to keep track of their leave history and if required request a leave. This is a great boost to the morale of the employee. In addition to this, it will also save the time of his or her superior because there is no need to meet the employee personally for granting the leave request. By using just a single tap of the finger these leave requests can either be granted or denied.
Develop a stronger relationship
If you can understand the employee performance and interact with them for improvement in their skills at work, it allows the employers to develop a stronger relationship with the staff. The software allows the managers to conduct a one-to-one chatting session for highlighting and rectifying the errors instead of discussing these errors in front of all the team members. It makes the staff more comfortable with the employer and can motivate them to keep being productive at work.
The management can't judge the strengths and weaknesses of their employees in a single meeting. The employee tracking software allows the managers to provide a tangible, real, and accurate performance analysis to their employees. To systematically comprehend the decision-making, creativity, and communication skills of a staff member, the management has to closely monitor their employees in various situations. By using the employee tracking software the supervisors can take a look at the bigger picture and they can evaluate a person thinking out of the box. This will enable the management in their understanding about an employee that is capable of handling a specific situation. Full data about the strengths and weaknesses of the employee helps an organization in using his or her qualities at the time of crisis.
Provides employee recognition
Normally the employees feel that they are being monitored to find out their mistakes. But, the productivity tracking software also provides an opportunity for employee recognition.
The real-time performance of the employees is recorded as evidence of their performance for the appraisal and it also allows the managers to appreciate their good performance on the spot. This software allows the employees to feel happy and comfortable in their work environments.
Conclusion
The software generates productivity reports that are real-time for all the employees. The list of more productive employees is also displayed on the software dashboard. It allows all other members of the team to compete and maintain their position on the list. The software is a perfect platform for the employer and the employee both.
About Author:This article is written by a marketing team member at LIKE.TG. LIKE.TG is a leading provider of proven HR solutions, including recruiting, onboarding, employee communications engagement, and rewards recognition. Our user-friendly softwareincreases employee productivity, delivers time and cost savings, and minimizes compliance risk.
8 Benefits of a More Integrated Employee Communication
The dynamics of the modern workplace demand more integrated communication. There is a lot of information to pass around in an organization. Managers need to communicate to employees about new policies, instructions, upcoming changes, and much more. On the other hand, employees need to communicate with each other when collaborating in completing tasks.
How well such information passes across significantly affects how successful an organization will be. You see, there can’t be any progress if people in an organization don’t work on the same page. And, only integrated communication can be able to bring everyone together.
Besides that, here are 8 benefits an organization stands to gain with more coordinated employee communication.
Enhances innovation and knowledge sharing
Employees tend to withhold their ideas in a place where they feel they might be ridiculed or downplayed. On the other hand, an organization that encourages good communication manages to put confidence in the employees. As a result, they share ideas on projects, brainstorm on solutions to come up with killer end products. When employees pull together skills and knowledge, it results in a highly innovative team.
In addition, this sharing of knowledge and expertise results in employees learning new things, which enhances their skills. This can also be beneficial especially when onboarding new employees. The need for training is reduced significantly.
Innovation is critical for the success of your company. When the employees working in the organization are proactive in suggesting newer initiatives it will have a dramatic effect on the outcome of your business endeavors. Not only will the efficiency be improved you will find that the work quality has also taken an upturn. All this also provides a larger customer base. Innovation is critical for every definition of internal communication within an organization.
However, keep in mind that innovation doesn’t come from the top down. Many times it is the ground staff working on the shop floor that comes up with some of the more groundbreaking ideas. You just need to provide an opportunity to them to make their voice heard.
By using a good reliable strategy you are going to get the internal communication channels into place. These will in turn allow the employees to contribute their ideas to the long-term benefit of the organization and develop company culture. When quality feedback channels are available to the employees you will discover that the members of staff are more willing to offer their suggestions for improving the work environment. Once these employees begin to drive the change and make it their own, the employer is sure to benefit from an uplift in the engagement level.
Reduces turnover and builds teamwork
Integrated employee communication ensures that the company goals and objectives are communicated clearly. Employees know how their roles align with these goals. This gives them a sense of belonging and pride knowing that their work is important in realizing the bigger picture. Their loyalty and commitment to the organization are heightened, which reduces employee turnover.
In addition, when employees understand each other’s roles, it eliminates unnecessary competition. Every employee is focused on optimizing his or her role as well as working together in harmony, which enhances teamwork.
Christopher BaggottChief Executive Officerator of Medlinks Cost Containment, Inc. and Medlinks Staffing, LLC.
“Our staff has praised the increased communications 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.”
Increases productivity
Employee productivity can be directly linked to employee satisfaction. When there is proper communication, employees feel free to express their concerns and ideas. When employers address these concerns, employees feel heard and valued. Consequently, it boosts their motivation and morale and hence productivity.
In such a case, employers don’t have to worry about their employees’ productivity regardless of where they are working. However, working in workspaces that are designed to enhance productivity would only complement employee satisfaction with the employer. If a business is located in Denver, for instance, employers can look for coworking spaces in Denver, and further enable employees to work in optimal productivity.
Everybody is aware of the fact that the employees have to feel engaged if you are to get the best out of them. But, how can this be achieved? Even though engaging appears to be similar to communicating, actually there is a big difference between the two. Many times there is a one-way info stream happening where the leaders are delivering organizational info using communication tools and there are not communication platforms for the employees. But, what any internal communication design can deliver is a crucial two-way dialogue taking place between the leader and the employees. One of the key elements of better practices in internal communication is this reciprocating flow of information and it should never be ignored.
For driving employee engagement to business success, different leaders have to show that they value employee feedback and the ensuing discussion. Similarly, the employees are going to need evidence about their voices being heard. After ensuring this, you can get a workforce that is highly engaged and is aware that their voice matters. When you are thinking about improving internal communication you will discover that active engagement of the employees will have a tremendous effect on the productivity and attitude of the employees.
Helps in positive adoption to change
They say change is the only constant thing. However, a sudden change in an organization can be disruptive and cause a sink in performance. On the other hand, employees accept change quickly and respond positively when it is communicated in a timely manner. The good thing is that integrated communication fosters open communication between managers and employees. In such an environment, managers choose to involve employees in everything rather than waiting for the last minute to drop the bomb. This especially eliminates rumors that can cause panic and anxiety in the workforce.
Fastens delivery time
Integrated employee communication fosters a timely and clear communication of instructions and expectations. Ideally, the successful completion of tasks depends on how well instructions are communicated. If employees have to go back and forth seeking clarifications, it eats into precious time that can otherwise be utilized constructively. Additionally, when expectations aren’t clearly communicated, employees tend to rely on their knowledge. This can have negative effects on the final product or even cause delays in deliveries. Employees can get better at internal communication by taking the online job training courses that specialize in business and management.
Enhances employer brand image
One would think that employees have nothing more to ask for in a place where they are compensated well. Surprisingly, a big percentage of employees would rather choose a workplace where integrated communication is fostered than a place with competitive perks. The modern worker is fixated on working for an ideal employer. If you are to attract top talents, you must embrace the efforts to improve your employer image which is possible by using social media platforms. Moreover, open employee communication is one way to get there.
Employee retention
One of the more significant benefits of using effective employee communication is that it has a positive effect on employee retention. Employee retention has quickly become a major challenge for employers. The majority of the employers admit that they are finding it hard to retain key members of their staff. Apart from that, you will find that the costs involved in replacing the highly-trained member of the staff are close to 200% of their annual salary. This indicates the economic benefit of retaining the existing employees. For achieving this, effective internal communication is your answer.
Many experts have indicated that what increases employee retention level to as high as 40% is the use of effective communication. In the end, the employees that do not feel engaged or involved in the company proceedings are likely to be disconnected. Different kinds of internal communication have to be prioritized. But, making sure that the employees are well-informed must be on top of your list of priorities. When you have a solid internal communication guide in place, you can move on to ensure that various employees working at different levels of a company feel that they are also in the know. Your aim must be to make your employees feel as if they are insiders who know as much about things as the employer and other top-level decision-makers in the organization.
Builds leadership
Keep in mind that all members of senior management are not natural communicators. They may be good are analyzing a spreadsheet or developing a strategy, but this does not necessarily mean that they can easily disseminate information from the employees in a resonating fashion. A leader that is no good at communication is more likely to cause harm to a project than do any good. It is one of the more common internal communications errors made. For driving engagement, the leaders have to show that they value the team members’ feedback and discussion.
Any internal communication strategies can put effective channels into a place that will facilitate the necessary interaction. The employees must see that the members of senior management are involved, active, engaged, and approachable. When you open a two-way dialogue which could be through a meeting, emails, or through a good internal communication app, you are making the leaders more accessible to everybody. This is particularly true while conducting communication during a crisis. A sense of direction and a strong voice coming from the team leader can make a massive difference between swim and sink.
Final words
Gone are the days when communication in the workplace involved employers talking and employees listening. Such a practice today can see employees abandoning their roles or working unmotivated. You can imagine how bad that can be to an organization. That’s why there is no other way around it, employers must embrace integrated employee communication if they are to achieve a successful workplace.
About Author: This article is written by a marketing team member at LIKE.TG. LIKE.TG is a leading provider of proven HR solutions, including recruiting, onboarding, employee communications engagement, and rewards recognition. Our user-friendly software increases employee productivity, delivers time and cost savings, and minimizes compliance risk.
Employee Experience in the New Normal
The COVID-19 pandemic drastically upended everyday life, causing prolonged physical isolation from loved ones, extra-vigilant cleaning routines, and mask-wearing practices as people did their best to follow health and safety procedures and stay protected from a deadly virus.
Even with vaccines now available, it could be a while before things return to relative normalcy. That reality led many people to say modern society must adjust to a new normal. What might that mean for the employee experience moving forward?
Different Desk Configurations and Safeguards
As kids gradually returned to school after transitioning to remote learning, many found the classrooms looked different than they remembered. School administrators often placed desks at least six feet apart to support social distancing. Some also installed plastic shields so teachers and students could remove their masks. Workplaces will introduce some of the same measures. They might even use entirely new desks.
For example, Nissan recently debuted the NV350 Caravan Office Pod. It’s a van with a cargo area that converts into a workspace. The automobile’s interior features a desk, office chair, and electrical outlets. That vehicle could work well if a company hires a short-term consultant or other service provider but does not have the interior space to safely accommodate them while they work.
Moreover, MojoDome announced its MojoDesk. That product features a retractable privacy shield surrounding the top and sides of a person at a standing desk. The company initially provided the product as a solution for having professional-sounding phone calls in noisy offices. However, besides helping block sounds, the product’s design could reduce germ spread.
If an office had an open plan before COVID-19, a business leader might decide this is the most cost-effective way to redesign without substantial remodeling.
The employee experience in the new normal may also avoid hot-desking, which lets any worker use designated unoccupied workspaces. Government guidance from the United Kingdom advises against the practice. Additionally, hygiene experts warn that hot-desking makes it more challenging to track and stop infection spread.
A Permanent Departure From a Shared Workplace
During the early days of the pandemic, HR teams quickly realized that the safest solution was to have people work from home whenever possible. Activities that ordinarily occurred in offices, such as onboarding, team huddles, and educational talks scheduled at offices during lunch breaks happened remotely.
People who got new jobs during the pandemic didn’t always head into offices for interviews, either. Human resources managers began more frequently using video-based meeting tools to screen candidates. Those who received offers often stayed at home to work rather than getting acquainted with new office spaces.
These emerging realities have also forced decision-makers to evaluate the need for massive physical offices. Were they still necessary, especially in high-rent areas? This shift has significant implications for advertising in the USA, as firms reassess their physical presence.
David Corns is the managing director of the San Francisco branch of global marketing and advertising agency R/GA. After discussing the matter with fellow directors at the firm’s other locations, he pulled out of the property’s lease agreement and transitioned to an entirely virtual San Francisco office.
Six months after the pandemic disrupted most of the world, the company’s employee experience team polled the collective 1,600-member worldwide workforce to learn how people felt about remote working. Many workers liked it and found they could easily stay on task. Only 7% of people said they got less done while at home, while 30% of supervisors reported increased productivity from teams.
Next, a set of surveys conducted in June and July of 2020 asked R/GA employees to envision the post-COVID-19 office. Most people preferred returning to a physical space for 1-3 days per week rather than following the previous five-day schedule. Also, major companies including Microsoft, Twitter, and Spotify recently started letting employees work from home permanently if desired. That’s more evidence people view office space differently and perhaps as non-essential.
New Specifics Written Into Contracts
The COVID-19 pandemic wreaked havoc in industries where companies often hire workers on contract to fulfill short-term obligations. For example, Boston’s mayor halted most construction during the pandemic, affecting billions of dollars’ worth of projects and leaving thousands of workers without jobs to do.
The novel coronavirus also introduced new situations where one or many parties may wish to terminate their contracts due to challenges caused by the global health threat.
These incidents made company leaders think differently about the legal ramifications of future pandemics or other circumstances that could affect how work gets done. For example, a business leader may decide it’s more sensible to hire people on a short-term contract first, using the associated time to see if circumstances improve in hard-hit industries.
Contracts will spell out employer-employee obligations during long-term work-from-home scenarios, too. For example, must a worker start their day at the same time throughout the week, or does flexibility exist? If an employee spills coffee on their laptop that doubled as a work machine, who pays for a replacement? Must an employee meet minimum internet speed requirements to receive permission for remote work? Will an employer use a performance management tool to monitor a worker’s output?
Clarifying those stipulations in contracts improves the employee experience by minimizing doubt. It could also show the way forward if things don’t turn out as planned with the work environment. Perhaps a worker signed a six-month contract for a remote position. They may realize three months later that their abode doesn’t let them stay productive due to noisy kids, cramped spaces, or another reason. Could they come into an office or use a coworking space for the remaining three months?
Employers Taking Holistic Approaches to Promote Worker Well-Being
Employers will likely start to examine health and well-being more broadly, too.
A March-May 2020 survey asked for employees’ feelings about how their workplaces handled the pandemic and how the health threat affected their lives. The responses from more than 24,000 workers indicated that more than 60% of those feeling highly satisfied with their workplace’s response believed that the respective companies put people first.
Happy, healthy workers typically have better output. However, leaders will need to look at new ways to support workforces. For example, remote work can negatively impact employees by making them feel less connected to their colleagues. Human resources teams might boost morale with interactive virtual games, book clubs, or other off-the-clock events that go beyond Zoom happy hours.
Additionally, keeping people performing at their best may mean offering them access to mental health services. The pandemic left many people grieving lost friends and family members. Others suffered so-called “long-COVID” effects that made them feel demoralized and unable to do activities they once loved. If the novel coronavirus created circumstances where a person can never go back to the “normal” they knew, mental health support could help them cope.
Maybe a company offered gym memberships for a business that permanently closed due to COVID-19. Alternatively, some people may not feel safe returning to fitness facilities for a while, if ever. In such cases, employee incentive packages might include an option to have the business pay for a workout app subscription. Then, a person could stay active from home.
COVID-19 Changes Will Persist for the Long Term
Employees and customers alike will probably notice that many companies keep taking precautions first implemented during the COVID-19 crisis long after it passes.
For example, retailers that once cleaned the premises daily may shift to sanitizing some highly trafficked areas more often. Employers may avoid keeping open containers of food in break rooms for anyone to grab. Keeping consumables out like that makes it easier for people to spread germs — coronavirus-related or not.
Additionally, employees who helped provide a business’s new services during the pandemic may continue doing so for the foreseeable future. For example, Nielsen recently reviewed Americans’ shopping habits to see what’s different. The data indicated a 100% increase in click-and-collect orders. Moreover, home deliveries increased by 57%. These trends may mean human resources teams hire more workers to accommodate these trends or assign workers to new roles.
The customer experience could feature more ongoing efforts from businesses to keep people loyal, too. A global survey of consumer sentiment in more than a dozen countries examined how people changed how and where they spend since the pandemic.
In the United States, 73% of consumers tried new brands during these challenging times. Moreover, 75%-83% of those intended to keep purchasing from them. In India, only 4% of consumers did not try new brands during the pandemic.
COVID-19 lessons may guide future workplace learning topics, too. Besides providing tips on customer service practices that help people stay loyal, employees may learn relevant cybersecurity practices for working at home.
United Nations representatives warned that the world must start preparing for the next pandemic now. Succeeding in that aim means understanding what worked and failed this time while getting people well-equipped for the future.
An Evolving Situation
This overview shows some of the most likely aspects of the employee experience in the new normal. However, the pandemic is still changing workplace responses and will continue to for the long term.
Employers must stay abreast of how things develop, plus continually listen to employee feedback. Doing these things will help company representatives take the most appropriate actions.
About Author: This article is written by a marketing team member at LIKE.TG. LIKE.TG is a leading provider of proven HR solutions, including recruiting, onboarding, employee communications engagement, and rewards recognition. Our user-friendly software increases employee productivity, delivers time and cost savings, and minimizes compliance risk.
Why an Organization Needs 90 Days to Observe Employees
The HR department has one of the most challenging yet critical jobs in the organization. The people you hire determine the success of the company. Every single day the department receives applications from job seekers.
The team must go through each to determine whether the potential employee is a good fit for the company.
In the end, the HR manager may find an ideal employee. But, the reality is the new hire may not always be the best fit. Some people are very good at job interview planning.
They may impress the interviewing panel with the ability to answer questions. Some may even fake their CVs. The 90-day performance review can weed out such people. It is a crucial onboarding tool that many HR departments use.
Let's look at the importance of the 90-day performance period in greater detail.
Why You Need 90 Days to Observe an Employee
The first few months for new hires are especially critical. For the company, it is the opportunity to gauge whether they made the right decision. The same goes for the employee. They must also determine whether the company and roles fit their expectations.
The HR departments use the first 90 days as a review period. It has become a popular management practice. It is critical for onboarding new employees. Let's look at some of the benefits to the organization.
It Provides an Opportunity for Orientation and Evaluation
90 days is enough for the employee and organization to know if the partnership works. The HR determines whether they have the relevant knowledge and competency. There should be a lot of communication between HR and the direct supervisor.
The supervisor is in the best position to give accurate reports. Some Industry reports show that up to 28% of new employees will leave within the first 90 days. Some of the reasons may surprise you. They include:
Unmet job expectations - 43%
Bad experiences within the job - 34%
Inability to fit in the culture - 32%.
Some new employees also have issues with the onboarding process. Lack of clear guidelines and need for more training accounted for 22% and 21%, respectively. Others felt that the co-workers were not welcoming, resulting in them leaving the jobs.
The HR department must pay attention to onboarding. The process of hiring new employees is costly and time-consuming. Once you have the right talent on board, it would be a pity to lose them for things that you can avoid.
Opportunity for Feedback on Performance
In 3 months, a supervisor will have enough feedback on the abilities of the recruit. You get to see how they are progressing within the roles. HR can also put in place things like training if they realize a knowledge gap.
It also provides time to shape the recruit into the organization's culture. Within this time, the HR and supervisors should institute an open door policy. The recruit should feel comfortable asking relevant questions.
It could be about expectations or even areas that they are facing challenges. They may also take the opportunity to ask for resources. They may also raise areas of concern that could impact their ability to do the job well.
It Provides Great Insights to the Company
A successful onboarding provides a fantastic opportunity for the company to learn. The process includes data collection that can be the basis for future decisions.
Some companies do not use the 90 days to observe employees. They depend on annual performance reviews to know how the employee is progressing. It could be a costly mistake if you have the wrong person on board.
The company also misses the chance to know what they can do to improve employee productivity. Within this time, the company should have benchmarks to measure the new employee. It helps with accountability and an easy way to check progression.
You Get To Avoid Any Surprises
You can liken a 90-day performance period to an early warning system. An employee can only pretend for so long. After 30 days, you will start to see their real self-emerging. By 60 days, all pretense will be gone.
By 90 days, the management will have all the information it needs to make a decision. The same goes for the employees. Three months is enough time for them to learn the company culture.
They will have a good idea about how management works. For both parties, it removes any surprises in the outcome. For the company, think about how much you could save. Instead of waiting for one year for the annual review, you get all the feedback you need within 90 days.
If an employee is not adapting well, you can release them early. You do not waste time and money on a partnership that will not work out in the end.
It is a Crucial HR Assessment Tool
The onboarding process lies primarily in the HR department. It comes up with the rules and regulations surrounding new hires. The aim is to ensure a smooth transition of the new employees into the company. The 90-day performance review is critical because of the following reasons.
It is the best way to determine the future performance of the new hire.
It provides an opportunity to share with the recruit company goals and expectations. That is why it is vital to have open communication lines.
The company uses the feedback to adjust or tweak relevant job performance metrics.
It is an opportunity to get insights on the company from the recruit's viewpoint.
It sets the ground for future communication between the employees and management.
Opportunity to Avoid Bad Hires and To Increase Staff Retention
Industry reports show that it could be as expensive as $5000 to hire a new employee. Yet, the cost of a bad hire can be as high as $25000. 41% of the cost goes to their productivity.
36% accounts for poor morale amongst other staff members due to a bad hire. 37% of the cost goes to recruiting or training another worker. 40% refers to the time you spend on new recruitments.
Some HR managers will hire because they need to fill a job position quickly. They do not take the time to review the performance within the past few months. It can be expensive trying to correct such a mistake.
Ninety days can provide the company enough time to keep good talent. If you show that you care about helping the employees progress in their careers, you win positive points. Training opportunities are a good starting point.
You may also offer company benefits like medical cover in pension plans. Other companies go further to offer things like childcare and wellness benefits.
Tips For A Successful 90-Day Performance Review
We have looked at the benefits of the 90 days observation period for new employees. But what are some of the tips you need to have in mind for successful completion? Take the following into account when coming up with your plan.
It Is Not a Probation Period
There is a negative connotation to the term probation. Probation sounds like the aim is to correct the employee. It can make the new hire feel under excess pressure to perform.
It could cause them to leave if they feel that they are failing in any way. Instead, the thought process should be that it is a time for learning and adapting to a new environment.
It should be all about open communication and feedback. The recruit should feel comfortable approaching management for help when they need it. All this, without feeling that the managers are questioning their knowledge or competence.
Let It Be a Strategic Process
It helps to have a plan and to put everything down on paper. It should not be a time when the HR and direct supervisors do things as they wish. It also helps to clarify to the recruit what will happen during this time.
Also, it is an ideal time to share company policies and any other important information. Look at it as an avenue for continuous conversation and improvement.
Final Thoughts
Does an organization need 90 days to observe an employee? The answer is a resounding yes. It provides a fantastic opportunity to determine whether the company has made the right choice. You look at their competence and ability to fit in and carry-out expected roles.
But, the employee will also see its benefits. They can decide whether your company is the right place for them. They also get an opportunity for the positive feedback that can improve their productivity. It is important to be strategic about the implementation of the 90-day review. In the end, you want a fair process for both the organization and the recruit.
About Author: This article is written by a marketing team member at LIKE.TG. LIKE.TG is a leading provider of proven HR solutions, including recruiting, onboarding, employee communications engagement, and rewards recognition. Our user-friendly software increases employee productivity, delivers time and cost savings, and minimizes compliance risk.
How to Get Your Employee Onboarding Process Right
When a potential buyer visits your store, company, or organization and gets inefficient service, your chances of them becoming a customer are slim to none. This is all highly dependent on the company onboarding process. However, a disgruntled employee is not necessarily that way because they lack skills. A lot of the time, this is because of the employer's inability to train and guide their new staff.
Proper company onboarding process takes time and is a work in progress. You need the right leadership, some technology-driven training and quality communication in the workplace. In return, you can get higher employee retention, job satisfaction, and with it – happier customers.
What is Employee Onboarding Process?
According to Guru, a quality employee onboarding process lifts the hire performance by as much as 30%. Moreover, according to some other surveys, new hires will be much longer if the introductory experience is good. But, what does this mean?
This process is a purposeful, systematic, and strategized transformation of a selected and promising candidate into a good employee. Why is it so important? Just imagine, you come to a new place, where you meet new people; you don`t know the customs and rules, so you try to choose each word so carefully, that it could even sound unnatural. Actually, in just a few minutes you turn from self-assured, qualified professional into a shy and uncertain outsider. This inner feeling influences a new employee`s abilities stay focused and think straight. If you put your new employee` shoes, you will understand how unsecure and powerless you feel by losing control of the situation. That is why succeeding in your employee onboarding process is a prime element of making everything work right. So, companies that have such a system function as flawlessly as possible, offering quality services to customers and excellent work conditions to employees.
How you approach your newest employees sets the tone for their entire experience in your company. Like any other important process, this also requires well-thought, deliberate steps. Here is what they include.
Attracting and Recruiting New Employees
The satisfaction and performance of employees depends greatly on the recruitment practices of the employer. First impressions aren't only important for you as a recruiter, but also for the person who has shown interest to work in your company. It is more than just a tiny moment; it is a vital element that launches a chain of events – the butterfly effect.
The tone of the conversation depends on two people, so when you recruit new people, you need to prepare yourself just like they prepare for the interview. Think the job interview questions carefully to sound confident, create a comprehensive and detailed job description, and review the information potential employees will find on your website.
If you need some assistance with creating your job description, crafting the questions, emails you send to interested parties, your terms and conditions, as well as policies, or even your website content, you might want to hire a professional like Study Clerk. Appearance is crucial for your business. Many of the people who will see your job description will want to learn more about the company before they apply to work there. The most qualified talent will be picky about where they'll work. As an employer, you must make sure that they are impressed from the moment when they read your ad.
This guide was designed to help you navigate through those difficult tasks and help determine the right software for your organization, download our ebook now.
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Employees' First Visit
Once you get people interested in your workplace, you'll want to invite them in for an interview. This is your opportunity to meet them. But, it is also their opportunity to see where they'll work and who they'll work for.
The work environment is more important than ever. People who work in bad conditions are less motivated, productive, and more likely to look elsewhere for a job. That is why creating good working environment is a key element of a fruitful task accomplishing. So to get something from your staff, you need to offer them good work conditions.
The workspace compatibility has a huge impact on the work of your candidates. With that in mind, make sure that their first impression of your offices is positive. Give them a full view of the places they'll be seeing on a daily basis. Show them their office and desk. Introduce them to some of the people they'll work with. Tell them about the breaks, activities around the office, as well as their parking space. In other words, help your future employee feel comfortable in a new workplace.
Your Offer
If you find that a candidate is a good fit for your company, you'll want to give them an offer. You might even get a positive response from a rock-star candidate, one with excellent qualifications that gets to be picky about where he works.
When this happens, you need to send an attractive offer. This doesn't only refer to the sum you'll offer them as a salary. It is about the key things that create the whole picture of your company. For instance, language – it should be direct, positive and honest. Moreover, your offer letter needs to be detailed, specific, and enticing. It should show not only the needed information, but also mention the value of the employee, that they can bring to the company. In other words, it needs to welcome your new member of the company.
Continuous Onboarding
Hiring an employee is just the first step of the onboarding process. You need to continuously stimulate employees to work at their best and make them feel like they've made the right choice when applying to work at your company. The best and reliable way to help your employee professional development is not to make them improve their skills and perform the needed tasks, because you say so, but to create the atmosphere where each employee will be responsible for their actions and feel themselves an important part of the working process.
That is why you need to be accurate regarding each detail of an onboarding process. Make the most of your staff's first days in the office. Share relevant information, request their feedback, provide them with accurate and detailed information, allow them some time to adjust, and provide the necessary training. Remember, that each person likes attention and the feeling of value. The best motivation is not about money, it is about the spirit of the company and its culture that inspires to march ahead.
Treat your employees with respect and make them want to come to work.
Conclusion
If you want to increase employee retention and keep your staff happy, you need a good strategy for onboarding. This will, in return, allow you to attract more customers, save more money, and help run your business smoothly.
About Author: Helen Birk is a Human Resources manager at a popular company. She works side by side with employers and staff to assist them and motivate them. Birk holds a degree in Psychology and has a Master's degree in Business Communications.
Five Ways in Which Work Environment Affects Employee Productivity
Employee productivity in most cases is synonymous with employee engagement. When employees engage actively, they offer their best abilities to the organization. To substantiate, insights from the Workplace Research Foundation reveal an exciting take on the correlation between the two. They reveal that almost 40 percent of engaged workers prove to be immensely productive. HR managers must pay heed to the need to give employees an engaging work environment. The next fundamental prerequisite for employee productivity is the satisfaction and happiness of employees. As per Qualtrics, happy employees are five times more likely to stick to their organizations. All of these are attributes of the work environment that employees get in their respective companies.
There are diverse ways in which the working environment drives productivity. In the absence of an ideal work environment, employees feel burdened, unheard, disengaged, and unhappy. Although remote working opportunities and verticals are witnessing a steep hike, curating the right work environment is imperative. HR managers have their tasks made more complex in terms of sustaining the productivity of remote employees. Again, giving them an encouraging, empathetic, and inspirational virtual working environment is what will work the best. Most of the determinants of high productivity and engagement we talk about are elements of the working environment. Together they create a favorable and conducive work environment to give their best and innovate to overcome insurmountable challenges. To elucidate this assertion further, this blog will illustrate the various ways in which the work environment impacts productivity.
A Positive Work Environment Drives Positive Changes
Positivity is a luxury in the contemporary world, for humans tend to be more impressed by negative thoughts. In such a scenario, if employers and HR managers can foster a culture of positivity in the workplace, it can do wonders to enhance individual productivity. This positivity may come in various virtues and realms, adding up to make an opportune company culture. These include empathy, gratitude, employee wellness, team building, cordial workplace interactions, and so on.
Also, a positive work environment should not differentiate between genders and should ensure safety for all. In such a workplace, people will not have any other concerns than focusing on the quality of their work and organizational goals. To explain this better, we must pay attention to the findings of a report by Salesforce. It cites that if employees’ opinions are heard and valued, they are 4.6 times more likely to deliver performances to the best of their abilities. This validates that a positive, inclusive, and rewarding work environment inspires the best in employees. It drives positive changes in workers’ attitudes, and the overall impact is seen in the company culture’s overwhelming positivity.
A Favorable Work Environment Leads to a Reduction in Absenteeism
Employee absenteeism is a big hurdle in the flow of productivity of an individual, his team, and the organization as a whole. Yes, employees deserve their share of leaves and entitlements for genuine reasons. In genuine cases, the organization should not have any objections and rather be supportive. However, it may also be feasible that employees go absent from work frequently because of the work environment. Other causes of absenteeism may include workplace harassment, disengagement, employee burnout, and anxieties besides illness and personal reasons.
Given that, HR managers must identify these stressors among employees and support them. When employees’ issues are addressed in an assuring way, they will not have to escape from work to avoid stress or fatigue. A survey by CareerBuilder states that more than 60% of workers are burned while working. There is every reason why this can contribute to increased absenteeism and decreasing productivity. So, if the working environment provides better stress management opportunities to workers, scenarios can be better.
An Inspiring Work Environment Promotes Creativity and Innovation
Employee productivity is a dynamic term, and to take it to new levels, employees should have creative and innovative visions. Also, their creative insights can make a progressive impact on the overall success of the organization. After all, thinking outside the box is needed the most to survive the great competitiveness of the modern age. However, it is hard to inspire creativity if employees are not free to express their opinions. If they do not feel a sense of belonging and feel their ideas are invaluable to their managers, they will lose the spark.
On the other hand, in a working environment where employees are valued, empowered, and granted creative freedom, innovation will become a part of the company culture. As per LinkedIn Learning, creativity is the most critical skill in the world. Simultaneously, for this skill to have the right breathing space and contribute to productivity, the working environment needs to be inspiring. Besides, as Gallup reported, around 35% of employees get the chance to be creative only a few times a year. This is where they have to compromise with their natural productivity. The aura of the working environment should be such that employees feel a natural knack for investing creativity and innovation in every task they do.
A Learning-Oriented Work Environment Facilitates Continuous Development
A work environment where feedback is shared systematically and leaders support learning is ideal for high productivity. In such a work environment, employees get endless opportunities to recognize their shortcomings and areas of improvement. Based on the constructive feedback shared by their superiors, workers can streamline their professional development. They can learn something new every day with every task and hence augment their productivity. In fact, according to Hubspot, more than 60 percent of employees are receptive to feedback and would like to receive it more often. This is because they find feedback valuable to their learning, development, and growth. Hence, in a work environment that supports learning and growth opportunities, productivity will remain high.
In addition to sharing feedback, leaders or managers should also be selfless and sensitive to various employees’ learning needs. They will create enough opportunities for workers to analyze their employee's performance and work on consistent improvement. On the other hand, if leaders are not supportive, it can restrict the productivity of employees. To explain, according to a survey from Glassdoor, more than 85 percent of workers anticipate support from their employers. In the absence of direction from superiors and an encouraging work environment, employees will witness a decline in their work efficiency.
A Cordial Workplace Stimulates Cooperation
Workplace relationships and cooperation between colleagues are essential for employee engagement. To a large extent, cordiality in employee relationships depends on the working atmosphere. If a working environment is stained with office politics and conflicts, it will impact individual productivity and efficiency. On the other hand, if a work environment is enriched with mutual respect and collaboration, it becomes beneficial for everyone.
A lot of operations and projects in the corporate world are to be achieved in teams. In such situations, the efficiency of the outcome becomes dependent on the coordination between team members. For that, there should be healthy cooperation among colleagues and appreciation for each other’s abilities. This is, in fact, the reason why a lot of HR managers and employers pay heed to team-building activities.
To conclude, as explained above, the work environment impacts employee productivity in ample ways. Employees feel empowered to raise the bar of their performance when they feel happy, safe, appreciated, and supported. Furthermore, the work environment or the workplace’s physical environment depends on how managers and employers define working conditions. It further depends on how individual behaviors add up to formulate a company’s working culture. As long as managers realize the need to invest in giving employees a worthwhile work environment, workers’ productivity and motivation will remain high.
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About Author:
This article is written by a marketing team member at LIKE.TG. LIKE.TG is a leading provider of proven HR solutions, including recruiting, onboarding, employee communications engagement, and rewards recognition. Our user-friendly software increases employee productivity, delivers time and cost savings, and minimizes compliance risk.
Why Effective Communications Between HR and Employees Improves Business Success
Your employees are the heart of your business. If you’ve been in leadership for any period, then you know that establishing a strong connection through effective communication is vital to your organizational wellbeing. What you might not have known, though, is the critical role your Human Resources team plays in that process.
HR is responsible for relaying all kinds of important information — employee compensation, training, company news, updates — so any breakdown between HR and your employees will have serious consequences. This article will highlight those consequences, contrast the benefits of strong communication, then show you how to make proper HR-employee communication a priority for your business.
Poor Communication versus Strong Communication
There’s a heavy toll that comes with lackluster internal communication. Here’s how it can drag you down and how HR can intervene to set things right.
Your Employees Won’t Know What You Want From Them
If your business is large enough to have an HR team, then it falls to leadership in your HR team to effectively communicate to employees what is expected of them.
When HR fails to communicate job priorities and responsibilities, your employees won’t have the information they need to align their actions with your overarching business goals. As a result, you’ll fail to hit your objectives and fall behind on your targets for growth.
The remedy to this negative outcome starts during the employee onboarding process, where your HR team can ensure that new hires are clear on their roles and responsibilities.
HR can provide employee handbooks, for instance, that bundle all those initial details into one easily accessible package. That way, employees can refresh their memories on company policies and how they fit into the organization whenever they need.
Down the road, HR can continue to support the alignment of your business goals and employees by keeping them abreast of important organizational changes, upcoming company initiatives, and pertinent strategic plans.
This guide was designed to help you navigate through those difficult tasks and help determine the right software for your organization, download our ebook now.
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Your Employees Won’t Trust You
Let’s say your HR team is communicating details to employees, but those details are, at best, only partially correct. You’d probably label such communication incomplete, might decide that it’s misleading, and you may even go as far as deeming it untruthful.
Your employees are likely to opt for the harsher interpretation, and as a result, will be disinclined to believe what they hear from the HR team. Fast forward, may start to disregard HR altogether, deciding instead to get their information from even less reliable sources.
Ensuring all communications are accurate and complete, on the other hand, is a great way to boost employee trust and engagement. Your employees will feel more confident about the effort they’re exerting on the job and will be more willing to go the extra mile.
Your Employees Won’t Feel Valued
If you’re of the mindset that the only thing your employees value is money, prepare to be mistaken. Recognition and appreciation are key motivators for almost any worker, and a lack of communication from HR may contribute to employees feeling undervalued. Undervalued employees don’t work as hard, and more likely to call it quits.
Conversely, you can have your HR team take the lead on helping employees feel like they are important to the business. Clear and honest communication will be a good start here, but you can build on that with direct efforts to call attention to employee contributions, such as a formal employee recognition program and awards for a job well done.
Fostering Better Communications
Now that you understand the importance of communications between HR and your employees, you might be wondering how you can improve said communications to facilitate better business outcomes. There are three major strategies all employees can leverage to improve their communication skills.
A strong start to the empathy strategy might be evaluating your current communication tools to determine what works and what should be abandoned. Internal communications software is constantly evolving, so be sure to stay abreast of the latest and prepared to make a change if your current tools are hindering performance.
Next, you should ensure that messaging from HR to your employees emphasizes loyalty and remains consistent in its accuracy. This will help build trust and lay the groundwork for a strong employee-brand connection. You can build upon this by making communication a two-way street, and providing opportunities for employees to offer formal feedback.
Finally, don’t underestimate the value of metrics and KPIs. Keep track of these over time, and they’ll help you lock in on (and enhance) your best performing techniques while excising underperformers from your communications strategy.
Wrapping Up
Communication is critical for business, and your HR team should take center stage when it comes to keeping you and your employees on the same page.
Remember that neglecting communications will leave your workers confused and resentful, but emphasizing it can improve engagement and encourage them to perform at their peak.
With the right strategies, you can facilitate communications between your employees and the HR team, aligning everything with your business goals and maximizing the benefits for all.
About Author:This article is written by a marketing team member at LIKE.TG. LIKE.TG is a leading provider of proven HR solutions, including recruiting, onboarding, employee communications engagement, and rewards recognition. Our user-friendly software increases employee productivity, delivers time and cost savings, and minimizes compliance risk.
5 Must-Have Workforce Analytics Reports for your HR Dashboard
Analytics is becoming more and more popular, especially among HR professionals. According toa survey, around 94% of HR professionals believe that analytics is crucial for business growth. However, it can be challenging to manage data to meet the goals of your organization.
The HR dashboard comes in handy to help the HR department. It allows business owners, HR managers, and HR analysts to gain access to a centralized view of their workforce metrics and trends.
This post takes a close look at the top 5 Workforce Analytics Reports for your HR dashboard. You can take advantage of these reports fortalent managementand more.
What Is Workforce Analytics?
Before we dive into the Workforce Analytics Reports, it is crucial to know what Workforce Analytics is. In the simplest of words, Workforce Analytics is a useful algorithm-based model that leverages employee data for helping organizations achieve a higher ROI (Return on Investment) and better decision-making.
What Makes Workforce Analytics Different From HR Analytics?
Workforce Analytics and HR analytics tend to be used interchangeably. However, the two are slightly different. The main difference between the two is that Workforce Analytics is mostly used for talent management and focuses on analyzing data relating to people.
In addition to the above, Workforce Analytics relies heavily on analytical software for managing and reporting on employee data.
On the other hand, HR analytics deals with the organization at large. It involves tasks such as strategic organizational issues, procedure efficiencies, and day-to-day operations.
Now that you know about what distinguishes Workforce Analytics, you will have an easier time understanding the Workforce Analytics Reports.
The Top Workforce Analytics Reports That You Need To Include
With the following reports, you can achieve a lot more.
1. Compliance
One of the most important Workforce Analytics Reports is Compliance. Every HR department needs to make sure that every process and person remains compliant.
There is a need to report on policy violations and their severity along with KPIs on diverse and inclusive hiring as well as promotions. In the majority of cases, regulatory bodies require businesses to keep track of specified metrics for maintaining compliance.
2. Hiring Workflow
Another type of report that you can apply to any HR process or workflow is Hiring Workflow. It is meant to help out with hiring. You can use it for tracking the following.
The number of people that are active during the hiring process.
The amount of time it takes for candidates to move to “position filled” from “application” status.
The way candidates move from one stage to the next. It is perfect for monitoring the conversion rate of each progression level.
3. Source vs. Quality of Hire
Now, if you want to better understand where the top talent appears from or are planning to start the hiring phase, Source vs. Quality of Hire is just the report you need. It allows you to organize data to view sources, including job boards, recruiters, referrals, and more.
You can use it for the following.
Who is involved in the talent acquisition process
Where previous hires were source from
Which roles people are hired for
With this report, you get to match the data to find the quality of hire. It plays a huge role in performance metrics. Whether you are aninternet marketing servicesprovider or run any other type of business, you can take your business to new heights using this report.
4. Process Tracking
An important question that you need to consider is how long does it take for different HR processes. With Employee process Tracking, you get to track the start and end dates for on-boarding, recruitment phases, projects, settling issues, and more.
Moreover, this report lets you identify and report the key stages through the process. This means that you should be able to analyze just about everything, such as “interview time” vs. “number of interviews conducted.”
5. Employee Information
With Employee Information reports, you get to make the most of employee metrics. They will show you just how well each individual is performing.
Furthermore, you can leverage the report for determining how well the business is supporting employees to achieve the desired performance.
The following details will be mentioned in the report.
Turnover and headcount rates
Uptake of benefits
Usage of sickness leave and time off
1 on 1 evaluation scores
Use of training resources
NPS or wellbeing scores
Engagement (like event attendance and number of logins using the company intranet)
Setting Up the HR Dashboard
To set up the HR dashboard, you need to use an ATS (Applicant Tracking System). It will provide built-in reporting for automating most of the process. At the most basic level, you require the following.
Ways to find and collect employee and business data.
A tool or software for record-keeping to ensure that data is aggregated and kept in one place.
A mechanism for storing and accessing historical data for comparison and checking trends.
It is vital to collect and aggregate the data to take advantage of the Workforce Analytics. Then, you can start comparing to track employee churn rates and more.
When you measure the changes over time, you get to present valuable data to stakeholders to ensure that the right decisions are made.
Michael HawkinsFranchise Owner of Interim HealthCare SLC
“Interim Healthcare SLC needed HR technology, and we’re pleased with the results we’ve gained from LIKE.TG’s solutions for recruiting, onboarding, and employee engagement. Yet it’s an opportunity for all Interim franchises. It would be so great if each franchise owner could implement similar solutions to replace legacy systems that might not work as well as they should.”
How Workforce Analytics Benefit Organizations?
By using Workforce Analytics, organizations get to achieve a higher level of efficiency and are able to identify opportunities for better employee management. Generally, organizations can expect the following benefits when they use Workforce Analytics.
The ability to find the best candidates to meet the organizational needs.
The ability to forecast high-performers to ensure that resources are allocated to retain them.
Evaluate future organizational needs for ensuring that the right recruitment strategy is developed.
To determine employee satisfaction and engagement for sustaining high-performance levels.
Workforce Analytics Reports for your HR Dashboard
Once you have read this post, you will know everything there is to know about the different Workforce Analytics Reports.
When you use these reports in your HR dashboard, you will be able to maximize the efficiency of your HR department. Add these reports now to get more done.
How to Resolve Conflict Effectively
Workplace conflict — though fairly common — is an uncomfortable situation that can quickly escalate to a major problem if left unaddressed. It can result in increased workplace stress, decreased job satisfaction, higher rates of absenteeism, lower productivity, and poor morale and quality of work.
But conflicts are inevitable. The idea is not to try to prevent them completely but to resolve and manage them effectively. When people use appropriate strategies to address issues, they’re able to keep their differences from getting out of hand.
“Establishing conflict management processes in a company is fundamental, as it helps reduce conflict instances among employees,'' says Casper Hansen, an expert in resume writing from Resume That Works.
Below is a step-by-step process to help you manage and resolve conflict in the workplace.
4. Have a private and honest meeting.
Before trying to resolve any issue, find a safe, private, and neutral place to talk so that all parties involved feel free to participate in an open and honest discussion. Don’t choose the office of either party or a location near them.
Establish a positive and assertive approach. If necessary, set ground rules. Ensure that each side gets enough time to express their views — and feelings — regarding the matter. Creating time for people to publicly acknowledge hurt or anger can help them feel heard.
Then, get both parties to agree on what the issue is. Obtain as much information as possible on each side’s outlook. Continue asking questions until you’re confident that all the conflicting parties are on the same page.
5. Determine a goal and develop a plan.
Employees will find it easier to interact with one another if they realize that they have a common goal. Once that’s established, both parties should collaborate to develop a solution for the problem.
People approach conflict in various ways. A person may have one or more methods they prefer and use regularly. The Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument (TKI) is a psychological tool used to measure an individual’s inclination towards a specific method of handling conflict.
These are the five conflict resolution strategies from TKI.
Avoiding: Someone ignores the conflict or withdraws from it in hopes it will resolve itself or die down eventually. Oftentimes, this strategy is used when the discomfort of confrontation overshadows the potential reward of resolving the conflict.
Competing: An individual resolves a conflict by asserting their own interests and “winning” at the expense of the other party. It only works in situations that are not amenable to collaboration.
Accommodating: One party sacrifices their own concerns to meet the needs of the other party. This approach can appear to be a gracious way to concede, but it may also lead to unresolved issues if used excessively to maintain peace or avoid conflict.
Collaborating: This strategy involves working together to find a solution that meets the needs of all parties involved. This style is most effective when there is a need to find a mutually beneficial solution that requires a high degree of coordination.
Compromising: Parties that compromise are each willing to sacrifice something in order to reach an agreement. It’s the middle ground between competing and collaborating. In this strategy, every party gives up a bit of what they want and no one gets everything they want.
Find common ground and identify strategies each party can agree or compromise. Listen, communicate, and brainstorm together until you cover all options.
For example, maybe someone sensitive to noise says they need a quieter office mate. Start by figuring out which factors generate the biggest issues. Perhaps the person causing the bother simply has a voice that carries easily. If the upsetting sound level stems from a trait someone can’t help, the best option is probably to relocate them elsewhere.
However, if it’s behavior-based, maybe the person concerned could adjust their actions a bit. For example, the problem may be that a worker plays music through headphones, and the noise-sensitive person can still hear it. Asking the listener to turn down the volume, only listen to music for a half-day, or use an alternating quiet-hour system could offer possible compromises.
6. Evaluate how things are going.
Never presume that an issue is fully resolved after you set up a plan. Continue to keep an eye on the issue and assess if the solution is working. If necessary, schedule follow-up meetings to check progress.
Plan to meet about two weeks after finalizing an action plan to give everyone a chance to try out the solution and assess how it works. These gatherings should involve both parties and give them ample time to discuss the actions they’ve taken to end or ease the tension.
Urging people to stay open and honest about what leads to progress can keep them on track. Notes about what’s working well make it easier to motivate people to continue pursuing positive change, too.
But conflicts don’t always resolve after the first attempt. So if the issue isn’t resolved or later resurfaces, take necessary action. This can include coming up with preventative strategies for the future.
7. Identify and Implement Key Takeaways
Lastly, look for lessons you can learn from the conflict and how you handled it. Reflecting on the conflict's resolution process offers valuable insights into the dynamics of your team, the effectiveness of your communication, and the resilience of your organizational structure.
You not only equip yourself with a better understanding of how to prevent future conflicts but also improve your ability to foster a more supportive work environment.
And documenting these lessons and sharing them with your team can also help in building collective knowledge and perhaps even company policy and procedures.
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About Authors:
Allen Cranston is an analyst and resume writer. Allen is committed to helping talented professionals show the world what he is truly capable of. Since launching in 2012, Allen has helped over 4,000 job applicants land their dream jobs for Resume That Works. He is constantly looking for new ways to help people achieve their career goals.
Additional reporting and insights were provided by Isabelle Foster, a professional writing tutor from papersowl.com. She worked in numerous online writing services as well as tabloids, alongside being an editor of a few co-produced books. Now, she offers top-notch tutoring on the subjects of conflict resolution, anger management, and life skills.
FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions
Have another question? We'd love to hear it.
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What is a workplace conflict?
A workplace conflict refers to a disagreement or friction between individuals or groups within an organization. It can arise from differences in opinions, values, goals, or communication styles.
Is conflict at work normal?
Yes, conflict at work is normal and inevitable. In any workplace, individuals with diverse backgrounds, personalities, and work styles come together, leading to differing opinions and perspectives. The focus should be on developing effective communication, and conflict resolution skills, and fostering a positive work culture that encourages constructive dialogue.
Can you ignore conflict at work?
Ignoring conflict at work is not a recommended strategy. While it may be tempting to avoid confrontation, overlooking workplace conflict can have detrimental effects on both individuals and the organization as a whole.
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6 Things To Consider When Choosing A Global Employee Recognition program
One of the sole responsibilities of the Human Resource department of any organization is to keep employees happy and implement strategies to make them loyal. Employee recognition and employee appreciation are more important in this competitive business environment than ever before!
Before we go more into the depth of the topic, do you know what an employee recognition platform is?
What is An Employee Recognition Program
An employee recognition platform is a process of recognizing the contribution of employees through monetary and non-monetary rewards. The intention is to encourage employees, increase productivity and employee loyalty.
Of course, no one would want to work in an organization where their efforts are not appreciated. An employee recognition program makes that the workers of any organization are valued. This is why many organizations have designed and implement employee recognition programs that aim to appreciate employees for their contribution to the success of the company.
Types of Employee Recognition Programs
Employee recognition program can be of two types:
A Formal Employee Recognition Program
An Informal Employee Recognition Program
A formal recognition program includes awards, increments, bonuses, gift cards, etc., while an informal recognition program can be either verbal or a letter of appreciation. Most of the organization uses a combination of both for the maximum output.
This guide was designed to help you navigate through those difficult tasks and help determine the right software for your organization, download our ebook now.
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Why Employee Recognition?
Why should companies invest hundreds of dollars in rewarding employees? The short answer is that a small amount of reward money pays back ten times in productivity. Time and again, research has shown that employee recognition is the best tool in HR's arsenal to motivate employees and increase productivity.
Here are some benefits of Employee Recognition for companies:
Saves Money
Research shows that employees are twice as likely to quit within the year if their efforts are not appreciated by the company. We all know that recruitment is a capital-intensive process; a lot of money is spent on hiring the right candidate, and if that employee quits within one year, the money is wasted.
Employee recognition is a cost-effective tool that keeps employees from quitting prematurely. Even informal and non-monetary recognition has the power to keep employees motivated and loyal to the company for a longer duration.
Higher Productivity
In the 21st century, employees are the best resource of a company. Every company has the same access to technology and supply chain. Employee ingenuity and dedication make the difference between good and great companies.
Here, employee recognition plays the essential role of keeping employees motivated to keep doing better and better each day. Studies show that effective recognition programs increase employee productivity by as much as 14%.
Moreover, employees are more likely to go the extra mile for their organization if they feel their efforts would be recognized and appreciated. Interestingly, employees are even motivated by negative feedback. Researchers at the Harvard Business Review found that feedback tells employees that their work is being recognized, even if it is critical. It is paramount in motivating them to do more.
Increases Trust and Loyalty
Effective employee recognition programs increase the trust of your employees in the management. If their efforts are appreciated, employees are more likely to believe in company values and dedicate their time to achieving company goals.
Moreover, recognition also increases employee loyalty. Employees who are praised and rewarded for their hard work are less likely to leave the company. In this way, organizations get to keep valued resources.
The article focuses on 6 things to consider when choosing and implementing a global employee recognition platform.
These are:
Define the Employee Recognition Strategy
The first thing to consider when making an employee recognition program is to define a strategy. It is the need of time to recognize the employees, but HR also has to consider some other facts too as it comes with a few limitations.
They should communicate the impact of the growth of the business on the employees. The workforce should know how these employee recognition programs are helping the companies and employees both.
The next thing to consider is the guidelines that depend on the location and a few other things like eligibility criteria, the structure of the business, and frequency. These set guidelines make the employee recognition programs as transparent as they should be. There is no room left for confusion on both ends.
There should be fixed criteria for winning. It means that all the employees should know what the process of participation is and how a winner or employee of the month/week is selected; what are the basic criteria for selection?
Allocating a proper budget for the resources is the last thing to consider in a strategy. The resources include both financial and human resources.
Multiple Programs for Global Companies
When a business runs globally, it should understand that it is not necessary that a single employee recognition program would be successful for all the employees working from different regions. A global organization has a workforce worldwide, and they cannot be motivated by the same program.
One employee program that might work best for one set of employees might not work for the other one. Various employees from various regions are motivated by different programs because of the different cultures and different mindsets.
For instance, you may motivate your Muslim employees more by giving those breaks at their prayer times, while Christian employees will appreciate holidays on Christmas.
An organization should first consider the factors mentioned above and carry research before finalizing a program. What an organization can do in that case is to collaborate with the local organizations to motivate workers and distribute rewards.
Multilingualism
The language barrier is one of the most important things for an organization to consider when expanding globally and designing an employee recognition program. When employees and management have a language difference, the chances of errors and miscommunication are high, thus leading to less productive employees.
When designing global recognition programs, organizations should categorize them according to the languages. To implement a global employee recognition program, the introduction of a virtual platform is important.
The virtual platform should have a built-in language conversion feature that allows employees to switch to the language they find suitable. This structure also allows the HR personals to keep a record and monitor the performance of employees accordingly and give them incentives.
Additionally, you must ensure transparency in the global virtual platform, so all your employees from any geographical location trust the system. At times, employees may feel that they have been overlooked because the company prefers a certain location more than the others. Hence, transparency is key to avoid such misgivings.
SOLI
SOLI stands for Standard Of Living Index. It measures the living expenses of people. With global expansion, there comes a lot of confusion because of the workers working from different corners of the world. It means that when designing an employee recognition program, SOLI should be considered as the standard of living of the workers varies from region to region.
This is not workable for two employees working from two separate regions to receive the same amount of cash reward. For instance, an organization has two remote workings, A and B‒ the former lives in Japan, and the latter resides in Pakistan. Paying them both a reward of $ 400 would not be fair since they both have a different SOLI.
Your global employee recognition program should be fair and equitable. Hence, reward employees according to their standard of living. One important thing to note here is that you must make sure to mention that the difference in rewards is because of the SOLI framework, so employees do not feel they have been treated unfairly.
Gamification
Many studies show that gamification can also play a good part in motivating employees. It makes workers more engaged. There are many examples of gaming elements in the training and learning of employees.
Adding gaming elements to the employees' recognition programs can work wonders for your firm. You can appreciate the employees with scores and badges. Gamification is also virtual. The HR team should consider their employee recognition software to boost the right behavior.
Workforce Metrics
At last, when appreciating employees, it is important to consider the workforce metrics. It means that the same reward might not work for every worker. For instance, a reward for a 25 years old might not make the 55 years old employee happy.
The rewards should be designed such that it holds an equal position for everyone. It is important to consider the factors that motivate different age groups when designing employee recognition programs.
Final Thoughts
When expanding your business globally, it is one of the sole responsibilities of organizations to design and implement employee recognition programs to keep them happy and motivated. Recognizing your employees saves the company money, ensures high employee productivity, and maintains loyalty which can lead to competitive advantage.
Therefore, companies must maintain an effective employee recognition program to avail its benefits. Keep the points mentioned above when designing your global employee recognition program, and you won't fail!
About Author: Shaheryar provides ghostwriting and copywriting services. His educational background in the technical field and business studies helps him in tackling topics ranging from career and business productivity to web development and digital marketing. He occasionally writes articles forMuslim Pro
Role of HR in Building a Company's Culture
Work culture echoes diversity, innovation, and individuality reigning supreme.
Corporate culture is a guarded secret. Top brands build a work culture identical to the image of their products, services. The same image becomes an extended part of public image in the marketing campaigns. The balance between how teams set new norms and how audiences shape the future line of products is a master act. All popular brands work hard to build a work culture with some aspects hidden from the outside world. You may put it across as an entrepreneur's sum of experience and vision.
Corporations can set definitive guidelines for the employees to embrace, endorse. Top management could imbibe it at the personal level too. The widespread acceptance and implementation at the ground level prove a challenge. Human resource management carries the baton. They march with pride and glory. They're the ones who set the pace, pave the ground for the teams to flourish.
HR Materializes the Corporate Practices
The entrepreneurial spirit seeks adventure even in mundane tasks. HR teams acknowledge the fact that a winning mentality needs a system. Why does dedication go missing in employees? Why does the recruitment team fail to pick bright minds? How many times do we see brands continue existing at a level below their potential?
Human Resource breaks down the corporate philosophy into an actionable plan. They go out in search of finding a viable model that could fit people from all levels. How to keep employees motivated? How to make them believe there's something for everyone?
Maintain a Strong Professional Network with Teams
Human Resource has one advantage over any other department. Their work profile enables them to build a concrete connection with employees. Employees could have a dialogue on any issues with HR professionals. It opens a venue for HR teams to gain trust. It's an advantage but not without responsibility. HR has insightful details on team members and their skill-set.
Operations teams approach HR first to fill the vacant positions within the organization. They want to promote someone who knows company culture in and out. It harnesses team spirit, instills ownership, and builds trust among employees. When a colleague gets promoted, it makes or a celebration for everybody. It shows every team has played its part.
Feedback Sessions or Mentorship Opportunities
HR policies are complex pieces of information drafted to make things convenient. The nucleus of every successful policy was once a part of an issue. The brainstorming and employee-centric approach turned into an element of solution with time.
Does it sound familiar? Does it remind you of one of the HR sessions? Top brands don't see problems as a matter of concern. They see it as opportunities to build progressive policies. The issues the employees face have their answers with the top-level executives. The mentoring sessions expand the mindset of employees. They gather a whole new perspective. It's how you build an ideal work culture.
Diversified Workforce and Culture-Driven Solutions
Diversified workplaces offer scope to look at existing issues from a different perspective. In a world where technology is shaping the future, every industry is looking to keep pace with time. How does your company ensure they're on the top of the game? Have you asked these questions, and have they been addressed?
HR teams have found a unique solution. Their success mantra is to hire talent on merit. They embrace diversity at workplaces. It ensures you don't miss consumer pain points. Or overlook the culture-specific viewpoint.
Communities are evolving. The entrepreneurial spirit is limited to no age, experience. The recruitment teams look for candidates coming from different backgrounds. They get excited to see candidates offering a new perspective on things. A unique outlook is what the world needs. The corporate sector didn't outthink the competition. Time outplayed every small or established brand with a limited take on success. Companies relied on old practices for too long out of the fear of losing their consumer base. In the end, consumers left them for another brand.
Embracing Technological Advancements to Liberate Creative Souls
Pandemic shook the world to its foundations. Each sector faced a challenge they never dealt with before. How do you feel looking back? We had an unfavorable situation at hand a year ago. Technological advancements rescued businesses by connecting remote teams.
HR software is a part of managing routine tasks. Entrepreneurs don't want HR professionals to sit behind the desk all day long. They have a different role lined up for them. Top companies see HR professionals as talent managers. They're responsible for bringing a seamless transition from old work habits to new ones. The new wok models include the latest communication and work-management apps.
The work-from-home model would make way for hybrid workplaces in the future. HR acknowledges the importance of preparing the team to self-monitor, stay self-motivated. In the corporate world, HR teams are the change agents. They execute the policies without losing the focus on the goal- Employee happiness.
Introduction to Conflict in the Workplace(and How it Erodes Productivity Culture)
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Hiring Aspiring Candidates By Endorsing Work Culture
What's the point in building a work culture if it doesn't inspire people to join? The work culture at top organizations helps draw talented individuals. If they fail to join, they see themselves as the disciples of identical work philosophy.
The work culture or work philosophy isn't for employees alone. It carries a light that shines to eradicate social myths and uplift the human spirit. There are two aspects of ideal work culture. What is work culture? It's a hub of creative practices carried out by employees to foster creative energy. These beliefs work the best in the company of the right individuals, the right mindset.
One aspect of work culture is to inspire the teams by the fire of their passion, dedication. Two, make the audience aware of their strengths by introducing innovative products. The motivational part is to outperform the previous industry standards.
Employee Management, Team Building, And Recreational Activities
Imagine the word carried by those who move to different places. HR teams invest resources in selecting applicants, preparing the questionnaire, and handpicking candidates. Filling a vacant position isn't about replacing a person. It's about setting a new standard for the same profile.
HR management software takes the guesswork out of the equation. The recruitment team wants to hire a leader for the same profile.
A leader could nurture talent and manage to fulfill its expectations.
Leading HR-related software breaks the silos of information into insightful details. HR teams perform query-based searches and figure out the top candidates. HR promotes a competitive spirit among employees. Every internal job posting brings along an opportunity to strengthen team spirit.
What does your HR think of mental wellbeing? Have they taken the initiative to address such issues? The work culture looks after various aspects of employee health. Mental wellbeing has caught a lot of attention. Recreational activities have brought eating, living habits into the sphere.
HR teams pay close attention to daily performance to pick up the signs of mental fatigue, burnout. The introduction of interest-specific holiday packages is one way of keeping employees active.
HR teams have identified the challenging areas. Employee health is at the top of the agenda. They put individual growth, happiness as high as customer satisfaction. They consider customer happiness one of the factors to evaluate success. It's not the only driving force. What about work satisfaction? How to keep them motivated, geared up to tackle adverse situations?
Work Culture and The Age of HR Software
HR payroll software is the best case study to learn about emerging trends. The manual entry is a waste of time. It's not about the size of the company. It's not about whether you need it or not. It tells us if you're prepared for future growth or not.
HR professionals could spend the same amount of time resolving employee queries. Not paying attention to suggestions or leaving feedback out demotivates employees. They don't find themselves a part of the organization. HR software may not seem a crucial factor in building the work culture of your choice.
Company culture is about bringing your perspective into action. Your voice represents the brand. Entrepreneurs love team members who bring questions to the discussion. HR teams acknowledge that these questions open up the conversation. They could lead to a solution or stop from moving in the wrong direction.
Companies consider transforming the corporate philosophy into a cultural theory the top priority. They sit with HR teams to set guidelines for the employees. These guidelines serve as the information center. The clarity about one's role lends direction, a sense of purpose. Employees feel encouraged to go to work every morning. They don't limit it to a job. They see it as a part of inner growth, a part of their dreams.
Look at your favorite line of products. Don't they speak about work philosophy, work culture? The place where you sit and work reminds you of the hard work put in to have a creative vibe flowing all around.
About Author: This article is written by a marketing team member at LIKE.TG. LIKE.TG is a leading provider of proven HR solutions, including recruiting, onboarding, employee communications engagement, and rewards recognition. Our user-friendly software increases employee productivity, delivers time and cost savings, and minimizes compliance risk.
HR's Role in Employee Training & Development
Highly engaged employees are usually the most productive, positive, dedicated ones. They’re willing to go above and beyond their job expectations and immerse themselves in achieving company goals. They also display deep loyalty to the companies they work for so long as they’re being provided what they need to be happy at the workplace.
One of those workplace needs revolves around being challenged and nurtured into the highest version of self. The top talent in your industry is primarily attracted to employee development and training initiatives. They’re insistent about adding value to their respective roles and the company culture by constantly growing personally and professionally.
Let’s explore your role in facilitating employee development and training and why your involvement in these aspects is valuable.
Five Ways HR Plays a Role in Employee Training Development
A survey found that “only 29% of employees are ‘very satisfied’ with their available career advancement opportunities. 41% marked those opportunities as ‘very important’ when it comes to job satisfaction, engagement, motivation, and employee retention.”
This means that the right opportunities for career growth can keep employees at your company longer, motivate them to perform at a high level, productively engage them, and keep them satisfied with their role.
Here are five ways you can deepen your influence in employee training and development.
Make sure all training materials are provided
Not having what you need to complete training can take the air right out of the development balloon. One way to positively influence employee training and development is to ensure that everyone receives the training materials they need on time.
For example, if your company uses virtual or e-learning services for its training or development activities, make sure that your employees are briefed on how to use these services responsibly. Give them information on browser security, privacy measures, and how to use the system. You could also make sure their training schedule is set and that they have a quiet workspace to ensure a productive e-learning training experience.
Audit your training materials. Make sure they’re the most current and safely discard those that aren’t. You could also make sure any software, technology, or services used for training is up to date and in top condition. Be wary of certification dumps and ensure all training materials are legitimate and up-to-date. Keep track of everyone who is training and check in with them throughout the process to make sure they have everything they need.
Facilitate meetings between company leaders and employees
HR professionals are often labeled as the bridge between leaders and workers. It’s not often that company leaders interact with those on the frontline of their companies and vice versa. But for training and development to be successful, company leaders and employees need to work together.
You should be scheduling and facilitating regular meetings between company leaders and employees. These meetings could be between managers and workers, CEOs and managers, even shareholders and top-performing employees. It’s highly beneficial for company leaders to hear what employees need in training and development straight from their mouths.
You may not be asked to lead or attend the meeting, but ensure you’re reaching out to company leaders to connect with employees on the frontlines. Offer to set up these meetings, send out emails regarding the request for them, or take notes on behalf of an attendee. Ensure you’re also responding promptly to company leaders that reach out to you with requests for information.
Help employees apply for open positions within the company
When an employee expresses interest in moving up in the company, it’s best to work with them immediately. This helps ensure they don’t look elsewhere for a higher position or feel devalued because they didn’t receive any guidance on moving forward with this request. Be intentional about helping employees apply for open jobs within the company.
Not all employees express their interest in moving up in a company out loud. But for the ones that do, you can work with their managers to see how to best support them in their next steps. This could mean sending them information on what to do if they’re applying for a position internally and how to fill out an application as an existing employee.
It could also mean offering any resources on bettering their resume by effectively showcasing the hard, soft, and transferable skills learned through their current position. Any classes, resources, or events on how to write a cover letter or brush up on interview skills would be suitable to share as well.
Keep up with training development trends
Each business owner, manager, employee, and so on have their unique strategies for successful employee training and development. We’re able to draw from a massive pool of thoughts, methods, techniques, and plans that influence training and development. Because workplace culture is changing so rapidly, it’s essential to keep up with training and development trends.
For example, one trend that’s surfaced is personalizing the training and development process to each employee. Personalizing the training process is highly dependent on understanding the way each employee learns. Whether they’re self-directed learners who would instead plan, carry out, and evaluate their learning experiences or experiential learners who lean on their own experiences to understand the information at hand, you should construct an individualized training program based on this information.
Ensure that you’re using all of your platforms to stay engaged with training and development trends. When new concepts, programs, or solutions are introduced that could better your company’s efforts, share them with leadership and push to explore them fully.
Encourage the use of employee development plans
We’re getting further and further away from the days of training in groups and offering employees “one-size-fits-all” development methods. Each employee has their individual career goals, thoughts on where they feel they can make the best impact, strengths, weaknesses, and potential. Creating a detailed employee development plan can honor the individuality in your workforce.
An overall professional development plan that details how your company is committed to providing opportunities that meet your employees’ aspirations, long-term strategy, growth goals, and leadership training is essential. Using employee-specific development plans is an excellent strategy to ensure each person is being supported based on their individual needs.
If employee development plans aren’t being used in your company, encourage leaders to begin implementing them. If they are being used, ensure that managers and employees create them together and follow along with steps laid out. Ensure you also can explain your company’s overall commitment to nurturing employees to new levels in their careers.
The Value of having HR Involved in Employee Training Development
This world gives us no constants except change. So, you need employees who are passionate about growing professionally and personally if you don’t want to risk falling behind your competitors or getting out of touch with your clients’ needs. HR professionals give employees the support, resources, and guidance necessary for advancement.
Productivity gets better when employees are challenged and find new ways of excelling in their positions. They’re more engaged with their roles, coworkers, and managers, which influences the overall company culture. When you’re involved in employee training and development, you’re deepening your commitment to company longevity.
Nurturing and developing top talent is so crucial to company longevity. So, keep on top of training materials, bridge the communication gap between employees and company leaders, and help employees apply for internal advancement opportunities. You’ll also want to keep up with training and development trends and encourage employee development plans to ensure your as involved as you can be.
About Author: This article is written by a marketing team member at LIKE.TG. LIKE.TG is a leading provider of proven HR solutions, including recruiting, onboarding, employee communications engagement, and rewards recognition. Our user-friendly software increases employee productivity, delivers time and cost savings, and minimizes compliance risk.
Top 7 Customer Testimonial Tools to Help You Drive B2B Sales
Modern businesses revolve around customers because today, customers’ voices can be heard more than ever. With the advancements of technology and social media, it became significantly easier for businesses to obtain insights and for customers to share their experiences.
We all know how important it is to have more than satisfied customers and how much it can benefit a brand or a company. Therefore, successful businesses of the modern world are actively shifting their focus to the customers and their core needs.
But more importantly, giving your customers a backbone to share their satisfaction with your product/service will lead to building a trustworthy social proof. In that light, crafting great testimonials and effectively sharing your customers’ satisfaction stories is of utmost importance for your business.
Now, the latest state-of-the-art trends, which are giving businesses the upper hand in driving B2B sales and making prospects are video testimonials. A lot of thriving businesses already shifted gears to video testimonial services and added more depth to their customers’ stories.
There are a lot of video testimonial tools in the market, so here are the top 10 that can strike a difference.
Testimonial Hero
Testimonial Hero enables companies to create outstanding B2B video testimonials. Moreover, it is adapted to the current situation with the pandemic, and it specializes in remote video testimonials. By offering top-notch recording and editing services, crafted through a hassle-free process, it is one of the most popular tools on the list. Here is how it works:
Kick-off meeting with experts from Testimonial Hero who note your ideal interview questions and conceptualize how to shape the best video testimonial
30-minute hands-on with your customer to set everything up and film a remote video testimonial
Editing and transforming previously filmed content into a compelling 90-second testimonial
Pros:
Highly professional video testimonial service, using the highest-quality equipment
The staff takes care of everything and delivers a finished product
A multi-expert approach to cover the whole process from pre-production to post-production
Proven service with dozens of satisfied users
Cons:
Not offering any additional action and consideration metrics over published testimonials (not exactly a Con, but a “would-be-nice” feature to have)
Testimonial
This testimonial service brings a simplistic and user-friendly approach to easily record testimonials. The users of Testimonial range from startups through SMEs and even up to some of the Fortune 500 companies. Testimonial also offers your customers to make both text and video testimonials.
The service works by creating a link for users to send to their customers via multiple platforms. It also has a fair number of tweaking options for recorded testimonials as well as integration options across many platforms like WordPress, Wix, Appy Pie Website, etc.
Pros:
Reasonable price
Easy to use with minimalistic design
Money-back guarantee if you don’t get any testimonial from your customers
Cons:
It could have more editing tuning options for testimonials
Voxpopme
Voxpopme is a video testimonial service made to quickly collect the best insights from your customers while preserving the quality in the process. Additionally, it comes with an automated analytical toolset that helps with further understanding of your NPS and sentiment metrics. Lastly, it offers the versatility to tweak and tune collected video testimonials and further analyze them if needed. Voxpopme creates remote video testimonials like this:
Collects CX experience and feedback either from users’ or platform’s on-demand audience
Analyzes and categorizes gathered feedbacks and provides features to expand users’ customer understanding (“Test Single/Multiple Concepts” Feature for example)
Creates showreels and provides various sharing and embedding options
Pros:
Extensive toolset for various analyses including qualitative and quantitative metrics
Proven track-record
Cons:
Hefty price tag
GetBravo
GetBravo is a cloud-based platform that makes simple and affordable video testimonials. This solution is ideal for smaller businesses and startups or those with a lower budget in mind. It comes with a somewhat decent amount of options to publish embed completed video testimonials.
What’s more, GetBravo has everything you need built-in on their website, with a few useful articles on video testimonials. It is really easy to customize testimonial requests with the company's logo and even write specific questions you want to be answered. The only thing you need to do next is to embed the code of testimonial recorded to your website and you are all set.
Pros:
Very easy-to-use
Affordable price even for their top-positioned plan
7 day trial period to test it out
Cons:
Lacking more editing and post-production options
The quality of the video is limited by the interviewee's web camera
VideoPeel
VideoPeel is a mobile-friendly, remote video testimonial service that makes it easy to collect video social proof. Simply enough, users can provide their customers with testimonial links instantly, relieving them of any additional action to effectively record their testimonial. Even more, VideoPeel takes care of the entire process by automating everything from making initial requests to publishing and analyzing testimonial performance.
There are many options for various types of video marketing, but we will stick with video testimonial features that include:
Creation of user-tailored instruction forms for the customers (involving personalized prompts and branding)
Hassle-free recording process from customer side available via a single link
Multiple publishing options like video carousel, picture-in-picture, or video library intended to fit different platforms
Video testimonial insights analytics
Pros:
It doesn’t require any hassle from customers who are recording their testimonials
Great publishing features
Reasonable price tag
Cons:
Video NPS, Video Sentiments and Consumer Insights aren’t included in VideoPeel’s Video Testimonial plan
Only Premium and Enterprise plans offer publishing options and additional analytics
LivingLens
This flexible platform offers many features to craft distinctive video testimonials that highlight key points of user products services. Furthermore, it is mostly intended for brands, agencies, and technology healthcare enterprises. It comes with a dedicated set of tools for in-depth analytics for extracting insights and powerful publishing features.
LivingLens works like this:
Collecting video testimonials through surveys shareable via an app, cloud, or Zoom
Analyzing key elements of testimonials for better decision-making in what to publish — analyses are aided by smart BI and ML technologies
Creation of resourceful showreels that can trigger desired emotions or decisions
Pros:
Offering a lot of options for collecting testimonials
In-depth, state-of-the-art technology standards to extract insights and provide other significant metrics
Video insight knowledge base
Cons:
Some hassles with exporting multiple videos
The price tag is not publicly visible
“I can’t say this enough: Without LIKE.TG, we could not have communicated important project information or demonstrated that we could take on an increased workload. We now provide real-time workforce statistics and productivity reports that have helped us win more projects.”
Shirley Garcia Auditing and Operations Administrator of Medlinks Cost Containment, Inc. and Medlinks Staffing, LLC
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The Bottom Line
The last entry on our list is VideoGenie — a simple and user-friendly platform that helps capture testimonials in classic and simple ways. A lot of major companies are using this platform, like Facebook, Disney, and Levi’s, just to name a few. VideoGenie is versatile, covering all the phases to publish a testimonial — from various recording features to digital rights. It works like this:
Collection of customers’ video testimonials from multiple sources and platforms with a toolset to create effective prompts or restrain the recording with a pre-set timer
Reviewing of submitted videos to correct, tag, and set tracking parameters
Publishing videos to social platforms via embed code or simple download to publish on other websites
Applying metrics to analyze the impact of video testimonials — sales, generated traffic, time spent, etc
Pros:
Easy to use, versatile platform
Reputable and reliable service
Minimalistic approach with just enough features
Cons:
The whole process from collecting to publishing videos is almost entirely left to be conducted by the companies
The price tag is not publicly visible
Conclusion
To sum up, video marketing is the next phase in the digital marketing revolution.
As we speak, video campaigns are being conducted for virtually any type of business for many purposes. Driving sales and customer expansion and retention are essential, but what drives it is the story behind the satisfaction of the customers. Naturally, giving a face to your story with video testimonials and transferring satisfaction and life-changing experiences to the viewer watching is what sells.
Each tool within this listicle has its purpose, and it is up to you to gauge which will best fit your business. For really tight budgets — GetBravo will be enough. For those who want elite production and quality — Testimonial Hero is what you need.
To learn even more about managing remote teams and keeping employees working at home highly engaged, download our ebook now.
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About Author: Sam Shepler is the founder and CEO of Testimonial Hero. 150+ B2B revenue teams at Google, UiPath, Medallia, InsightSquared, and many others use Testimonial Hero to easily create customer videos that engage prospects, reduce friction in the sales cycle, and drive more revenue faster.
Workmates: A More Affordable Facebook Workplace Replacement
In the digital domain, Facebook is certainly the king of the hill. However, is Facebook really the best solution for your enterprise?
Even in the digital domain, you need the right tool for any job. This point is especially valid when considering business communication tools for your organization. The platform that you choose for communication can send a strong message to your employees.
You may currently use Facebook Workplace to manage corporate communication. However, you might find that Workmates is a better solution after taking a closer look.
Keep reading to learn more about Workmates a more affordable—and effective—Facebook Workplace replacement.
The Rise of Enterprise Social Networking
As the business environment changes, companies adapt and evolve. One way that companies have changed with the times is by using social media for corporate communication.
This practice is called enterprise social networking (ESN). It enables teams to stay competitive and collaborative.
At the same time, ESN enables companies to maintain a relevant communications infrastructure in today’s social network-driven environment. In this way, ESN brings the power of social networking to the business world.
However, ESNs aren’t for casual socializing. Enterprise social networking platforms increase business value. They enable companies to collaborate and communicate more effectively. With ESN platforms, employers, employees, and partners can stay plugged into conversations.
For example, platform users can receive regular status updates. They can also leave comments. Conversely, platform users can simply follow an activity stream.
In addition, ESN solutions enable real-time collaboration. For example, users can follow up on progress reports. They can also chat and make group contributions to projects.
Furthermore, an enterprise social network enables stakeholders to communicate in a variety of ways. For instance, one employee might start a conversation.
Meanwhile, other employees will add their opinions to the thread. Alternatively, users can visit existing threads and expand on a topic.
With an ESN platform, you can also manage corporate knowledge bases. For example, you can use an ESN platform to maintain a company wiki that will enable you to make the most of staff member expertise.
Shirley GarciaAuditing and Operations Administrator of Medlinks Cost Containment, Inc. and Medlinks Staffing, LLC.
“I can’t say this enough: Without LIKE.TG, we could not have communicated important project information or demonstrated that we could take on an increased workload. We now provide real-time workforce statistics and productivity reports that have helped us win more projects.”
Drawing the Line: Keeping Your Staff on Task
The use of public-facing social media on the job can reduce productivity considerably. Resultantly, a growing number of companies are banning social media use in the workplace.
However, social media platforms offer powerful, familiar business communication tools. Here is when an offering such as Facebook Workplace provides an advantage.
Today, just about everybody is used to instant communication and messaging. People know and love these features.
Facebook Workplace is basically like Facebook. However, it’s intended solely for business use.
With Facebook workspace, your contacts are limited to your coworkers. However, the platform does allow administrators to expand the network slightly. Companies can add external business partners to the system. This feature is helpful for project coordination.
Furthermore, ESN software makes it easy for project stakeholders to view important information in a single feed. Employees can monitor the feed to stay updated on the latest company news.
Still, you might wonder about its security and trusting your proprietary information to a service provider such as Facebook. To date, there hasn’t been a breach of the Facebook Workspace network. However, the company doesn’t have a stellar reputation when it comes to safeguarding user information.
The Best Facebook Workplace Replacement: Popular Workmates Features
Initially, you may think Workmates is a scaled-down model of Facebook Workplace. However, nothing is further from the truth. Still, there are some similarities between the two offerings.
For instance, both platforms offer instant messaging. Employees can also use them for convenient communication via chat and instant messaging. They both also offer the ability to create groups.
Furthermore, these ESN tools offer a convenient organization chart tool. They also include the ability to create a company directory.
The two platforms also integrate with popular productivity tools such as OneDrive or Google Drive. However, here’s where the difference between the two offerings starts to emerge.
Workmates offers a powerful content management system. Furthermore, it features your choice of two employee mobile apps so staff members can stay connected on the go.
Employees can easily download the app on the iOS and Android marketplaces. You can even requisition a white-labeled mobile app branded with your company name and theme.
Our service is a modern social intranet. We also provide a calendar so that stakeholders can stay informed about important dates. Furthermore, you can use Workmates to promote employee and brand advocacy.
There’s one more thing that you can do with Workmates that you can’t do with Facebook Workplace—improve employee satisfaction. With Workplace, for instance, you can create a culture of kudos.
Managers and coworkers can offer positive feedback using our platform. Our platform also makes it easy to offer recognition and rewards as needed.
Christopher BaggottChief Executive Officer of Medlinks Cost Containment, Inc. and Medlinks Staffing, LLC.
“Our staff has praised the increased communications 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.”
An Alternative to Facebook Workplace
If you’re looking for an alternative to Facebook Workplace, look no further than Workmates. Workmates offer all the functionality of Facebook Workplace.
The benefits of Workmates begin with comparing communication tool costs. You can access more features at half the price compared to using Facebook Workplace for corporate communication.
You may love the features of Facebook Workplace. However, you may not like the price.
Furthermore, the lack of business-centric features offered by Facebook Workplace may leave you unimpressed. Fortunately, you can get more for half the price by subscribing to Workmates.
It makes good sense to pay more for a service when you get more. However, that’s not the case with Facebook Workplace.
Facebook Workplace costs two times more than Workmates. If you consider the additional frontline employee upcharge, it cost three times more.
Still, you won’t have access to the range of features offered by Workmates. The Facebook platform also has fewer capabilities.
With Workmates, you’ll have access to a complete employee experience platform. You can access those features at a fraction of the cost of Facebook. Furthermore, Workmates integrates with several other powerful HR tools.
Increased Productivity With the Right Tools
One of the long-term benefits of Workmates is that you can use it to transform your company culture. We provide you with all the tools needed to create an exceptional employee experience.
Once you deploy our platform, you’ll notice increased employee engagement and morale. More importantly, you’ll see an uptick in productivity. In turn, you can enjoy increased profits.
Workmates gives managers and coworkers the ability to share digital kudos. Kudos makes it easy for anyone to give a shout-out for a job well done. You can also use Workmates to issue official company announcements and distribute employee surveys.
With Workmates, you’ll have everything you need to connect and engage with your workforce. More importantly, it can help you to reinforce a new commitment to excellence.
Our platform features an award-winning employee directory. What’s more, it works for businesses of all kinds and sizes. With Workmates, you can drive employee engagement successfully.
There’s a reason behind the success of Workmates. It’s engineered from the ground up to serve the needs of business users.
Resultantly, it provides a fast return-on-investment. At the same time, it offers a low cost of ownership.
To learn even more about managing remote teams and keeping employees working at home highly engaged, download our ebook now.
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Enterprise Social Networking With a Bang!
Workmates is your solution for simplifying corporate communication. It offers all the advantages of a modern, social intranet and more.
With our platform, you can create portals, pages, and content as needed. More importantly, you can share information with the right people at the right time.
Workmates is your key to streamlining communication. With it, you can make sure that everyone has access to vital information.
The most prominent feature of Workmates is the centralized news feed. It’s the focal point of the employee experience. What’s more, employees have the ability to personalize the information in their feed.
The Workmates news feed is an excellent way for employees to stay informed about relevant company news and updates. They’ll also receive important announcements immediately.
Already, you can see there’s a big difference between Facebook Workforce and Workmates. Yet, there are even more powerful features packed into Workmates.
If your organization is large, for example, it’s not easy to keep track of who’s available. With Workmates, however, employees can easily set up out-of-office notifications. You can also use Workmates to make sure that everyone knows about important events.
Furthermore, Workmates takes the hard work out of recognizing peers and showcasing the good work of employees. It also makes it easy for stakeholders to receive and share mission-critical information. What’s even more remarkable, however, is that these benefits are just the tip of the iceberg.
Our Technology, Your Team: A Winning Combination
Now you know more about Workmates—the more affordable Facebook Workplace replacement. Workmates is an LIKE.TG technology solution. We engineer industry-leading HR software.
Workplace integrates with our top-notch tools for recruiting, onboarding, employee engagement, and employee experience management. We also offer other powerful HR solutions.
With LIKE.TG, you get access to a range of powerful, cloud-based solutions. You can leverage our technology to provide an engaging, self-service experience for your staff members. In addition, our technology enables you to empower your team with connectivity, ideas, support, and recognition.
Contact us online today to request your free Workmates demo.About Author: This article is written by a marketing team member at LIKE.TG. LIKE.TG is a leading provider of proven HR solutions, including recruiting, onboarding, employee communications engagement, and rewards recognition. Our user-friendly softwareincreases employee productivity, delivers time and cost savings, and minimizes compliance risk.
Most Effective Digital Marketing Tactics and Techniques
Effective digital marketing tactics and techniques are a fundamental part of any successful online business. Reaching a bigger target audience, interacting with your followers, and converting leads are crucial steps in developing a strong and meaningful online presence. And you can only achieve that by leveraging robust and reliable digital marketing tactics and techniques. Read on to learn the most effective digital marketing tactics and techniques in 2021
Pay per Click (PPC)
PPC is a pay-to-play arrangement that helps improve the ranking of your website on Google search results. Everything is done in Google Ads, the most effective tool for designing campaigns and monitoring results. There are two major working environments in PPC: the Google Display Network and the Google Search Network. The former reaches 90 percent of Internet users and allows sites to join Google AdSense and offer advertising space. The latter focuses on enhancing results via search engine results pages (SERP). These two channels help you display tailored ads on Google at the different phases of the buyer journey
Chatbots
Chatbots are another effective digital marketing tactic in 2021. This artificial intelligence-based technology leverages instant messaging to facilitate real-time conversations with both your customers and website visitors. Many customers like engaging with chatbots because they are highly responsive 24/7, provide answers instantly, and accurately remember your purchase history, and are always patient. They provide excellent customer services by meeting if not, surpassing the expectations of customers and automating redundant tasks, allowing you to concentrate on more crucial tasks.
Conversational Marketing
With widespread preference and adoption of chatbots, it’s now clear that modern marketing has become more conversational. Customers prefer it that way, and businesses are working tirelessly to meet this need. One survey shows that 82 percent of consumers prefer a prompt response when they have a question. Conversational marketing allows digital marketers to have a one-to-one connection with their customers in real-time. This type of marketing is currently available in almost every channel, enabling brands to meet consumers on their terms – on the consumers’ preferred devices, channels, and time schedules.
Personalizing your marketing is the most effective tactic for standing out in 2021. And that involves personalizing your content, emails, social media marketing, products, and more including instant messaging apps, like WhatsApp for Business. Take a look at these personalization statistics:
63 percent of consumers loathe generic advertising blasts.
80 percent claim they prefer buying products or services from a company that provides personalized experiences.
90 percent say that personalization is attractive.
Personalization
If you want to choose an employee of the month, you do need to be careful. Sometimes, this can lead to jealousy and tension between coworkers, but it can be a good option if you do it right.
Make sure you choose an employee who is doing a lot of good, hard work for your company. You can even have employees nominate each other to help make your decision.
Then, you can choose employees that other employees like and admire. You can give a shoutout to the employee of the month at your next meeting or on social media.
Or you can sit down with them and ask a few questions about their work, such as productivity tips. Then, you can share the interview to recognize your employees in a company newsletter. Creating your own online presence is a must.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
By optimizing your website and content, it becomes easy for your target customers to find you. So SEO should be an important part of your digital marketing tactics and techniques in 2021. These two crucial statistics will help you make up your mind regarding the value of website and content optimization:
In a poll, Google found out that 49 percent of respondents use search to identify or learn about a new product.
Google gets more than 70,000 searches every second.
These figures mean that if you don’t optimize, then you’ll be losing out on all this massive traffic. But with simple tweaks to your website and content, you can attract qualified traffic, improve your online visibility, enhance brand authority, and increase your conversion rates. For instance, a well-tailored SEO for dentists would involve technical SEO, industry-specific keyword research, tailoring your content to the target customers and formatting it for search, and debunkinglink building mythswhile building links correctly.
Responsive Web Design
Brands across the globe are reaching their target customers by mobile and that’s going to be the trend in 2021 and beyond. Optimizing your website for mobile screens is a fundamental aspect of digital marketing. A UX designer can be crucial in ensuring your website has an intuitive and user-friendly design. The only way you can pull this off is by ensuring your website has a responsive design. You can make your site work well on mobile screens and a variety of other devices like smartwatches and tablets by leveraging responsive programming. But if you aren’t familiar with web design,you should hire a professional UX designeror web designer to ensure your website is optimized for mobile users.
A good tip would be if you think of making use of coworking spaces. These places are great not only to boost your productivity and avoid boredom but also to meet up with other professionals. For example, this would be a great place to find the right web designer with whom you can collaborate. So, if you happen to be in Canada, coworking Toronto is waiting for you, and using coworking software can help you manage your interactions and workspace efficiently.
Search engine marketing
You may be new to the concept of SEM or search engine marketing. It is a kind of internet marketing that allows you to improve the SERPs of your website by using paid advertising methods. You are going to need an expert for using this field as well, especially someone that has worked with Google Ads for some time and knows display and search ads. If you are planning on using Google Ads, it might be a good idea to educate yourself first about the entire process. You are going to appreciate the fact about Google that it makes Google Ads simple to use by using customization. The tool allows you to decide whether you want YouTube video ads, graphic display ads, text-based search ads, or in-app mobile phone ads. All these things about the selection depend on the kind of business you have and the target audience you are planning on touching. Google makes things easier by using localized ad capability with superior metrics to keep track of how your ads are working out. Keep in mind other paid ad opportunities such as Facebook Ads. They provide ample opportunity for customizing several ad formats.
To learn even more about managing remote teams and keeping employees working at home highly engaged, download our ebook now.
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Using videos
During the last decade use of visual culture has attracted the attention of the digital world. There are many forms associated with this but without a doubt, videos are at the top of this list. We have reached a point where a lot of people looking for content prefer to use videos above all other kinds of mediums. Most internet marketers these days use platforms such as YouTube of some kind or another. This wave has come along largely due to the massive viewership of platforms such as YouTube, which has a user base of over 2.68 billion individuals worldwide. However, where you will post the videos will not matter much unless it has compelling content on it. Personalized videos have become the main attraction these days addressing different pain points for the users such as transferring large videos. It also makes your business appear more human. The videos can be about tours of your business or testimonials from customers depicting the human side of the business. If you can narrate a compelling story about the business and display that you can solve some pain points of the customers you will have a win-win formula.
Content marketing
Content marketing can be termed as an extension of inbound marketing. It plays a huge role in attracting your target audience. The more significant part of content marketing is that you have to make your content relevant, consistent, and valuable to make it worth the time and effort of the customers coming in. In these times you have to focus on creating content that will resolve the customer pain points and yet stay evergreen. Using black-hat SEO techniques or shortcuts to reach the top of search engines is not going to work thanks to the probing eyes of Google. As many people like to put it, "Content is the king". For making sure that digital content marketing strategy works out well, you will also have to concentrate on mobile-related content, influencer marketing, native advertising, and marketing automation. Take the mobile content seriously as smartphones make up for half of the devices used to access the internet. You can use automated tools that send your content to the searchers at exactly the right time. Or, you can use tools like an AI text generator to streamline your content production, enabling automated creation and timely distribution to reach your target audience effectively.
Social media marketing
You must have already posted some kind of content on social media before reading this post. However, is there a way of making the posts more effective and useful this year and in the upcoming years? For capturing the modern audience there are several things you can do as noted by Forbes. This includes automation for posting the content exactly at the time when you are aware that the target audience is reading it. You can use online tools for this post scheduling as it helps a great deal while reaching out to the users in several time zones. It is also a good idea to curate content for proving your clout. Do not be proud while doing it because it adds luster to the brand and your expertise. While you are curating content from other sources they are likely to reciprocate. Keep in mind to hire influencers for posting this content on various social media channels.
Creating a Google My Business Profile
Creating a Google My Business (GMB) profile is a foundational step for boosting your online presence for your business. GMB allows businesses to manage their online information as it appears in Google Search and Maps, which is vital considering most consumers turn to Google for local business information. By setting up a GMB profile, you ensure that your business details are accurate, and you can showcase your products or services through posts, photos, and customer reviews. Moreover, using a tool for scheduling your Google Posts can organize and speed up your postings, saving you time and effort. You'll be able to effectivelyplan and publishyour Google posts, ensuring a consistent online presence for your business and maintaining regular engagement with your audience. Ultimately, an active and well-maintained GMB profile, can attract more customers to your business.
Upgrading and optimizing your database
A robust database not only helps with more efficient digital marketing but also powers up other components of business operations. And if you're looking for speedier performance, security enhancements, and real-time data processing benefits, here are some optimization options to keep in mind:
Explore Upgrade Options: There are lots of alternatives out there if your current database isn’t up to scratch. You could consider upgrading from MySQL to MariaDB, or pick a marketing-specific CRM solution like Pipedrive to collect and organize your data.
Streamline Data Analysis: As crucial as it is to drive traffic towards your site with digital marketing maneuvers, having a sturdy backend plays an equally important part in holding onto customers once they do visit. Don’t try to analyze every single metric, but focus on the ones that matter most to your brand.
Make Adjustments Based on Customer Insights: Collect data on visitor habits once they land on your site, and tweak campaigns based on what you learn. If conversion rates are poor, this is a must.
Parting Shot
An effective marketing strategy can generate remarkable results, especially if you chose it based on the unique needs and requirements of your business. These six digital marketing tactics and techniques will help you grow your target audience and increase your sales in 2021 and beyond.
About Author: This article is written by a marketing team member at LIKE.TG. LIKE.TG is a leading provider of proven HR solutions, including recruiting, onboarding, employee communications engagement, and rewards recognition. Our user-friendly software increases employee productivity, delivers time and cost savings, and minimizes compliance risk.
15 Ways to Show Appreciation for Remote Employees
Did you know that over 40% of the American workforce has been working remotely? Also, according to one study, 40% of employees who were ignored by colleagues reported that they were seriously disengaged from their work. Whether you have a few remote employees or hundreds, you may wonder how you can show them your appreciation.
While you can't meet them all in person, you can use video calls, emails, and other tools to share the love. Then, you can make your remote employees feel like part of the team and improve employee engagement.
Keep reading for some employee appreciation ideas on how to keep remote workers motivated and recognized.
Celebrate the Small Things
One of the easiest ways to show appreciation for your remote employees is to celebrate small accomplishments. For example, maybe you and your team members always struggle with technology during a virtual meeting.
Whenever you have a meeting where you don't encounter issues, take note of that. Congratulate your remote employees for getting through the meeting without typical problems.
You can also celebrate getting assignments and projects in on time. That may sound like the bare minimum, but it can be hard when everyone is working remotely. While working from home achievements can be easily ignored.
It doesn't matter how small something is; don't be afraid to celebrate it. You don't need every celebration to be huge,a small gesture of appreciation from the organization’s management goes a long way in combating feelings of isolation.
Share Positive Customer Reviews
You can also show appreciation for your remote employees by sharing positive reviews from clients or customers. Whenever your remote team's hard work goes over well, let them know that customers are happy.
Consider sending an email newsletter each month or week with positive reviews. Or you can use a platform like LIKE.TG to help recognize your remote team with effective employee recognition software. Workmates has a “kudos” feature that you can use to build a culture of recognition with rewards or give out a shout-out to specific employees.
You can also email or message your employees individually when you know they are the specific person on the project. Telling employees about their hard work can make employees feel great.
Now, you shouldn't lie about customer reviews if they tend to be negative. However, you can use those negative reviews to help make your team better by reworking your processes.
Talk About Your Personal Achievements
Work is important, but there's more to life than your career. When you get a chance, ask remote employees about their personal lives, such as their family or other activities.
You can then see if an employee has recently bought a house or had a child. Or maybe an employee just ran a mile or started a new hobby that they enjoy.
All of these are examples of personal achievements, and they're just as important as work achievements. If an employee has done something exciting outside of work, share that with the rest of the team.
Other employees can congratulate their coworkers, and that employee can feel good. Don't pressure your employees into talking about their personal lives, but don't be afraid to share exciting news when an employee does have some.
Pick an Employee of the Month
If you want to choose an employee of the month, you do need to be careful. Sometimes, this can lead to jealousy and tension between coworkers, but it can be a good option if you do it right.
Make sure you choose an employee who is doing a lot of good, hard work for your company. You can even have employees nominate each other to help make your decision.
Then, you can choose employees that other employees like and admire. You can give a shoutout to the employee of the month at your next meeting or on social media.
Or you can sit down with them and ask a few questions about their work, such as productivity tips. Then, you can share the interview to recognize your employees in a company newsletter.
Learn more on; how to start an employee of the month program in your organization.
Acknowledge achievements on video calls
Research studies have shown that public recognition is one of the best ways to appreciate your employees. Since employees are working from home, public recognition has been difficult. One great idea to appreciate employees is to recognize the efforts of an employee on your company intranet.
Food delivery and takeout discounts
Most people are running out of recipes to try out with their loved ones at home. Cooking meals can be exhausting every night, especially for parents who are trying to balance work-life. One of the best ways to show appreciation for employees who put in extra hours is by offering them discounts and credit to food delivery apps and giving local restaurants gift cards. A great way to do that is through customizable employee rewards software.
Share Important Dates
Another great recognition idea is to share important dates for your employees, such as their birthdays. If you have a record of them, you can also get the dates when each employee started their job. When someone's birthday or work anniversary rolls around, you can give them a shoutout in Workmates’ social intranet. Tell them how much you appreciate having them on your team.
To learn more about the features and capabilities available in Workmates, download our ebook now.
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In the case of a birthday, you can send a card or a small gift. And a work anniversary is the perfect time to do an annual review where you can praise the employee.
Another way to praise all of your remote employees is to dedicate a day each month or year. Then, you can show appreciation for the team as a whole.
Send a Gift
Whether it's someone's birthday or not, there are multiple great opportunities for sending gifts to employees. You can send something simple, like a gift card to that employee's favorite restaurant.
Or you can let them order lunch using a company card. Then, your employee can enjoy that meal or purchase knowing that their employer loves having them on the team.
This is another great way to use the information you get regarding employees' personal interests. You can tailor each gift to the employee to show that you care.
Sending something small once or twice a year can be a great way to remind your remote employees that they're part of the team. Gifts can be an excellent addition to any peer-to-peer recognition ideas or in general to employee recognition programs.
Provide Professional Development
Professional development is important whether someone works remotely or at the office. If you haven't provided professional development for your remote team, it’s never too late to begin.
Consider offering courses or sessions to help your employees enhance their skills in the workplace. Investing in your employees’ development will improve their job performance, enhance their engagement, and give them a competitive advantage while fostering a culture of continuous learning.
The upfront costs may seem a lot at first, but in the long term, it brings a lot of benefits to your employees and your company.
If you can’t afford to send your employees courses or other materials, explore creative solutions like crafting an email series where you can empower remote employees with valuable knowledge just by including daily tips or insights.
Make Work a Game
Now, you don't need to make work something optional, but you do want to make it enjoyable. When people work from home, they can feel lonely and like there's a disconnect between them and the team.
Fortunately, you can use gamification to make work more interesting. If you run a remote sales team, for example, you can create a leaderboard. As someone makes more sales, they can earn more points and advance to the top.
You can also provide other incentives to encourage people to get their work done. If a leaderboard doesn't work, you can use flashcards or fun characters to make work fun.
Then, people can look forward to starting work each day, even though they're not in the office. Having a fun company culture can be a great way to show appreciation for all of your employees.
Take a Day Off
If your remote employees work from home for many days without much of a break, give them the day off. Your employees can take the time to relax or catch up on things in their personal life.
It’s a simple, yet effective idea for workers’ appreciation that will help them relax. Many people don’t feel comfortable turning off the phone or leaving emails unanswered on their days off because they are afraid to lose their employer's trust.
You can give the day a name, such as an employee appreciation day. Or you can simply tell your remote employees that it's time for them to take a break.
If you can't afford for your team to take off a full day, you can have them take the afternoon off. And if that's too much time, you can let people stop working an hour or two early.
Either way, giving your employees some extra free time can be a great way to make them feel good. When they return to work, they may have more energy, so they can enjoy work and get more done.
Schedule a Virtual Hangout
One of the easiest appreciation rewards is setting up virtual happy hours or game nights with the employees. You may already have video meetings to talk about company updates or client projects. However, most video conferencing programs allow for unlimited meetings.
Consider using one of those meetings to host a virtual hangout session for your remote employees. You can set this up at the end of the day or week, and you can have employees bring their own drinks or food. You can catch up on what’s happening outside of work or play online games together.
Then, your employees can get to know each other outside of work. They can talk more about their lives and see who they work with on a daily basis.
If the first one is successful, you can have virtual happy hours each month or week. That way, employees can connect more with their coworkers.
To learn even more about managing remote teams and keeping employees working at home highly engaged, download our ebook now.
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Be More Flexible
One of the best employee appreciation ideas is to give workers more flexibility. If you usually ask people to work a traditional schedule, consider letting people work when they work best.
As long as you don't have to do work at a specific time, this can be a great option. Remote employees are busy in 2021, so they may not be able to stay focused for eight hours straight.
Consider letting your employees work earlier or later, depending on their schedule. Then, they can get focused and be more productive when they do work.
Celebrating Your Remote Employees
Showing appreciation for employees in the office can be as easy as playing fun music or bringing in group lunches each month. But recognition rewards aren't as easy when you have remote employees.
Fortunately, you can find multiple great opportunities to celebrate and show appreciation to your remote team, such as virtual happy hours. Even though you aren't all together, you can still connect with everyone at work.
Do you need help showing your employees appreciation? Learn more about the LIKE.TG’s employee recognition program.
Provide equipment for remote work
One of the best ways to appreciate remote workers is by providing them with equipment that will allow them to work and achieve their daily goals easily. Most remote workers suffer from neck and back pain and bad posture due to poor working conditions at home. And this negatively impacts their health over time.
Your organization can fight these health issues by providing essential office equipment that alleviates stress. Start by creating a list of work-from-home equipment that your employees will need. And send it out to them to ensure that you don’t miss any important equipment. After receiving their requests, have the equipment shipped to their places of work directly. This will not only boost employee engagementbut also cut healthcare costs in the future.
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About Author:
This article is written by a marketing team member at LIKE.TG. LIKE.TG is a leading provider of proven HR solutions, including recruiting, onboarding, employee communications engagement, and rewards recognition. Our user-friendly software increases employee productivity, delivers time and cost savings, and minimizes compliance risk.
How to Motivate and Manage a Remote Team Effectively
The Coronavirus pandemic has been an accelerator for remote work.
Many people were forced to find new ways of getting their work done in the wake of a global pandemic. For many, this shift is permanent, and chances are your employees might never see a cubicle again!
There have been mixed reactions by people to the changing remote work environment. For example, based on a recent study:
98% of people would like to work remotely for part of their time or the rest of their careers
70% are happy about the amount of time they are working remotely
19% would like to work remotely more often
Only the 11% would like to work remotely less often
It is evident from the stats that employees can have many benefits from remote working.
Like any other change in business, remote work has resulted in some challenges for business owners, owing to its novelty and sudden implementation.
As a business owner, the chances are that you have the experience of working with a remote team at some point, even before Covid. If your team is still working remotely and plans to do so for a while, you need to implement some strategies to help you make the most out of a remote work environment.
The Challenges of Remote Work
While remote working is exceptionally beneficial for employees and businesses worldwide, most managers and company leaders are not familiar with the challenges of managing remote employees. Remote working differs from typical work in many ways, even though one could argue that the tasks are the same.
According to research by Buffer, there are significant challenges to remote working:
One of the biggest challenges of remote working is loneliness. The human factor is the most relevant point. Indeed, employees can be annoyed by an office full of people, full of activity, and the boss checking on them every hour until it is over.
Human interactions, socializing, and being around others are part of life and most people’s everyday habits and uses. Loneliness can create depression and other health problems if not dealt with properly. Needless to say, that work efficiency will also be affected.
We need to encourage communication with the other team members, taking regular walks outside, talking with family, and exercising outdoors amongst the workforce to maintain good mental health and high productivity.
Other significant challenges to take into account when dealing with remote employees are:
Communication problems: It is not only the lack of small talks and coffee chats. The lack of human contact for long periods can bring an employee to misunderstand the intent behind work instructions.
Feeling left out: Remote employees feel left out because they miss an opportunity to connect with managers and other employees. Based on an Indeed survey, 37% of remote employees think they are less visible and will not get promoted.
But, how to prevent and overcome remote working challenges? With the Pandemic still impacting some parts of the world, it's a now-or-never situation for businesses to be efficient with remote working.
Ready to get your business back up on its feet? You'll need a workforce that can function in any environment, and your employees will also be more likely to stick around in the long run.
This post uncovers some actionable advice on managing your remote team so you can generate better results for your business while ensuring that your team stays motivated and experiences the required work-life balance.
Let’s get started!
Hire the Right People
The best way to ensure that your remote employees are happy and productive is to hire people who will be a good fit for working remotely. It can be hard at first to find just the right person, but after you do, it'll all feel like it was worth it.
Hiring people for remote work offers the flexibility to hire from anywhere in the world, which was not encouraged previously as business owners preferred to choose only people near the office premises. Even though there is higher flexibility in hiring remote employees, there are specific traits to look for in a potential candidate.
Ideal candidates are people who:
Have already worked remotely before
Have demonstrated responsibility
Are great team members
Have high communications skills
Can work independently
Have strong work ethics
People with remote working experience are a plus because they have already done it, know how it is measured, and what is required to perform efficiently. People who are just starting may not know what they are going into and experience problems. Typically, someone who has already worked from home has a system that allows them to separate work life from personal life.
The following steps will help you find your perfect match:
Research remote work opportunities in different industries and companies
Create a list of desired skills, qualifications, and experience
Search for appropriate positions online or through referrals
Prepare an interview plan with questions that address skill level and personality fit
Communicate Often and Openly
While working remotely has its fair share of benefits, the constant communication gaps can sometimes get overwhelming and challenging.
Communication is critical with remote employees. Make sure to communicate often and openly to ensure everyone is on the same page. It includes setting up the business with essential tools to communicate with remote teams. You can leverage various strategies to ensure you stay in touch with your team.
Video conferencing and the more traditional yet effective VoIP phone systems for small businesses are never a bad idea.
Don't underestimate how much time it takes to establish a remote working relationship. Staying in touch and chatting once or twice daily is crucial for building rapport and having an open dialogue about any problems.
Set Clear Expectations and Deadlines
It can be hard to set clear expectations and deadlines while you’re assigning projects to your team in a remote setting. This is because you cannot see your employees face-to-face or get their feedback in person.
Try giving specific instructions instead of general ones to solve this problem. For example, if you want an employee to finish a project within the next two days, you can tell them that they need to work for four hours on the project today and three hours the next day.
Employing one of the efficient project management software can help your team stay informed of tasks, changes in plans, timelines, and overall strategies, making them feel part of a greater plan.
Establish a Process for Feedback
Establish actionable feedback (positive and constructive) processes to ensure that your remote team is always on the same page and that you don’t just hear what they want to tell you.
The benefits of constructive criticism are many: it helps employees improve their skills, fosters better working relationships, drives growth through healthy competition, and ensures accountability.
Constructive criticism can often be shared in a way that doesn't make employees feel attacked or demoralized. At the same time, it's essential to have formality because people won't take it as seriously without it.
Be Flexible
Working remotely can be difficult at first, but teams need to focus on their goals. Be flexible with work hours and locations, but do not let your team slack off. Instead, keep them focused on their daily targets. For example, your sales manager might not be fully committed to the monthly target while working remotely. You can divide the monthly goals into smaller, daily goals to ensure you’re on the right track.
Your project management software will come in handy here to set targets and deadlines for each team member. A manager can update the system with tasks and instructions while at the same time allowing flexibility.
It is essential to clearly define the goals and results, and then allow the employees to develop a plan. In short, you should focus on outcomes, not on activities. This practice will help increase engagement and empower employees.
Following this, creativity and ownership are enhanced. It is challenging to micromanage people, and no one likes it either. Therefore, it is better to develop other practices.
Some form of remote working could be bound to a schedule, like call centers or customer support. In this case, you have to figure out a work schedule for each team member to cover business hours. Besides those instances, remote working can be flexible with deadlines that have to be met.
Keep Company Goals Clear
Be proactive in keeping your remote employees engaged with company goals and initiatives outside their day-to-day work tasks. People working remotely can feel left out and not part of the team. Setting common goals and keeping them informed on the results can assure them that they are participating in something bigger than their daily work schedule.
This will keep your employees invested in company goals and initiatives and can be used as an alternative way of rewarding their hard work.
To learn even more about managing remote teams and keeping employees working at home highly engaged, download our ebook now.
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Hold One-on-One Meetings Regularly
Holding one-on-one meetings can serve to check in with each employee about how they're feeling about the work, what's going well, and what could be improved. Such meetings can also provide an opportunity to give them feedback on their performance and ask questions about how you can help them succeed at their job.
With the right tools, it is easier than ever to communicate with remote locations. You can choose a free platform like Google Meet or go with a paid plan from Zoom. The good thing is, the options go beyond these two and you can choose from hundreds of the best video conferencing software.
Meetings and communications are the fuel to remote work. Part of this is to make the employee feel motivated and engaged. Not all employees need to be called as often as others. Some may require less interaction due to the nature of their job or the ability to work independently.
Create a Culture of Trust
In a remote work environment, employee-employer relationship trust is of the essence. Employees need to feel comfortable taking risks without fear of being judged by others in the company (i.e., don't micromanage)
If you want a team of people that stick around for a while and want to keep them motivated and excited, you have to create a very distinct and defined company culture. A good vibe can have an overall significant impact on the overall success.
Encourage autonomy without micromanaging; trust that your employees know best when it comes to getting things done efficiently within the scope of their responsibilities. Don't forget that you hired them because they are experts at what they do!
Encourage Personal Development
It is essential to encourage personal development through education or professional employee training for those who want to grow in their career path or learn new skills to be more effective at their job.
Encouraging remote employees on your team will help build their skill set and the company assets simultaneously. When you do this, they know that you care for everyone and about their future.
It builds confidence in the company, boosts team morale, and adds value for everyone. You don’t have to spend tons of money on training courses. There are economical online course platforms that you can use for training employees.
There are many benefits to encouraging personal development for your remote team. It will help them keep up with the latest trends and technological changes that can improve their productivity or performance. When you expand, you can consider creating online courses for your employees, covering each aspect of their work.
By providing them education courses, you'll be investing in their growth as individuals who will undoubtedly result in a higher morale and retention rate.
Have Fun Activities with the Team
Make sure to take time for informal conversations and fun activities with your remote team. These virtual team-building activities are important ways to maintain relationships, build trust, and motivate employees.
It's easy to get wrapped up in work, but it's essential to take time away from your desk to engage with your employees on a personal level. Allowing yourself and your remote team members this time will make everyone happier and more productive.
For your inspiration, here are some fun activities companies can conduct to encourage interaction among remote employees:
Weekly Trivia contest
A pick into each other home
Online murder mystery to solve as a team
Solve an escape room as a team
Online office games
Team building Bingo
Companies are getting creative in selective team-building activities and fun games for their employees.
Unfortunately, focusing on team building is not a priority for many team managers. They assume that their employees don’t care about connecting with other co-workers. But in reality, fun activities combat loneliness, improve productivity, and build relationships.
Takeaway
Managing a remote team presents unique challenges. It is quite different from supervising a typical office scenario. The most common challenges include communication, motivation, making a remote team feel included in the overall business objectives, and keeping them improving personally and professionally.
Since remote work is expected to rise in the coming years, managers and business owners must become familiar with these problems and learn how to solve them. It starts with hiring the right individuals fitting for remote working to establish new routines and habits during the daily production.
The above points should give you a good idea of how to manage a remote team successfully. Good luck!
About Author: Martin Luenendonk is a 3x serial entrepreneur with a deep passion for digital business models and marketing innovations. He is the Founder at cleverism.com and founderjar.com
5 Ways Managers Can Help Teams Grow Leading by Example
Throughout history, leaders have paved the way for progress, inspired people to great deeds, and encouraged team and business growth. A good leader is an ambitious, supportive, and honest person, and one that understands the importance of facilitating successful professional relationships. Let’s take a look at five ways managers can help teams grow by leading by example. When a leader isn’t afraid to get their hands dirty, the team is more likely to follow their direction.
Get Involved
A leader doesn’t give orders and merely expects obedience. A good leader gets involved, oversees the task at hand, and guides the team toward progress.
Being a manager doesn’t mean you’re above anyone, but that you have an extra responsibility to inspire and motivate - and have more at stake when it comes to the team’s failures and successes. People respect leaders who get down in the dirt with the team and stand beside them rather than in front of them.
Empathy puts you in someone else’s shoes, so you can realize a situation or problem from their point of view. Empathy is an important leadership skill, acting as a bridge for facilitating meaningful personal relationships with others. This can help expand your worldview and make you more comfortable with the team as a whole, and vice versa.
Get involved in your projects. Ask team members for feedback on both the project and on your leadership. The best way to move forward is to be aware of any shortcomings, gain insight from others, and work to improve yourself and the team. By your example, they’ll learn to improve themselves, and thus, you’ll create the ultimate powerhouse of productivity, trust, and inspiration.
Honesty And Integrity
There’s nothing more inspiring in a leader than honesty and integrity. These two attributes will always matter to leadership because, without them, the basic foundation of any successful relationship—trust—can’t be cultivated. Honesty is telling the truth, and integrity in maintaining trustworthy conduct, especially when no one else is looking.
The two are halves of an all-important whole that all leaders should master. Trust is always a two-way street. Managers can’t expect their teams to be honest with them if they themselves are not honest with their team members. As a leader, part of leading by example means being honest with yourself as much as with others.
Admit when you’re wrong. Own your mistakes. Be honest about where you’ve fallen short. Be honest with your team, but never be “brutally” honest. Some believe the best approach is to be brutally honest in order to spur change in a person. In reality, this approach is more likely to create feelings of bitterness and lower self-confidence among team members. Be supportive, confident, and don’t tear other people down. Honest feedback should be constructive.
Recognize Teachable Moments And Take Advantage Of Them
Teachable moments are some of the most important situations a leader can share with the team. These moments can bring the team together, and allow both the leader and each team member to lend their own perspectives and expertise to solve a problem.
Look for times when the team is mismanaging a project, operating from a one-sided view, or would like an outside perspective. Sometimes when team members are stuck in a project, they can’t see past the nitty-gritty to the overarching goal. That’s where good leaders can come in, be the extra set of eyes, and offer a fresh perspective to keep the project on track. Effective managers recognize these moments, take the time to share their knowledge with their team, and reinforce those lessons with future reminders and encouragement.
For these teachable moments to have an impact, managers need to have a solid understanding of their team and how each member functions. When a team respects you and your perspective, the lessons are more likely to stick. Some lessons last a lifetime, and the simplest moments can turn into the most valuable ones.
Master Remote Leadership
While working remotely can be a challenge for the team, it’s also an opportunity to venture into new territory, and perhaps even expose some hidden skills you or the team never knew you had.
Remote leaders can be inspiring in the same way as in-person leaders. The changing landscape of our workplaces has created new expectations from employees and management alike. The first step to bridging the gap is by clearly defining those expectations. Let employees know what you expect from them. Remind them when necessary. And, in turn, listen to what they expect, too. Good leaders are also good listeners!
Establishing clear goals is an effective way to organize and keep your team aligned, especially in a remote environment. Consider utilizing a framework like the classic SMART goals framework, which suggests that goals should be specific, measurable, attainable, results-oriented, and time-bound.
Make sure to take advantage of the technology available to you. There are conferencing services, project management software, and so much more than ever at our disposal to bring teams together and facilitate a collaborative environment regardless of location.
Stand For Social Justice
Standing for social justice as a leader means readily including all available perspectives and creating diverse teams. Reach out to candidates from different backgrounds, cultures, and ages to join your team. Don’t limit yourself to one vision of the “ideal” candidate. Thanks to online hiring, you can recruit people from all over the world. Don’t pass up that opportunity—you might just find some amazing talent in the last place you’d expect.
Don’t support or excuse negative behavior like racism or sexism. As a leader, what you do in response to these behaviors can set a harmful tone or helpful precedent. When you ignore or dismiss such behavior, you’re essentially saying that it’s okay in your place of work.
Never alienate your workforce for the sake of one person. Inclusivity is a powerful tool in the workforce. To maximize its potential, leaders need to embrace new perspectives and encourage inclusivity and tolerance on their teams. If you lead by example, the team is more likely to follow.
Putting This Into Application
How successful you are in leading by example will ultimately rest on two factors: consistency and follow-through. Ensure you follow through on your words and set a consistent pattern of behavior, as both serve as signals to your employees that they can, and should, mirror your work ethic.
If, for example, you establish a rule for everyone to clock out of the office at 5:00 p.m., you should follow this rule just as closely as you expect everyone else to follow it. Your team may feel apprehensive to leave at 5:00 p.m. if you stay late to get more work done, and even begin staying late themselves—which defeats the purpose of the rule.
Examine your own behavior closely and regularly. If you criticize others for interrupting during a call, but you yourself constantly do it, you need to adjust your behavior accordingly. Otherwise, you risk eroding your team’s trust and respect towards you, especially if you allow this type of double standard to prolong. When appropriate, accompany your behavior change with a verbal acknowledgment of your previous behavior, as this can help reestablish the precedent that you not only are self-aware but are as good as your word.
The Bottom Line
Managers are important to the growth and success of their teams, but leading by example is by far the best way to reach them and help them grow. Remember that honesty, integrity, and empathy will always be important attributes of a good leader and that being inclusive and standing for social justice can set a positive precedent in your workplace. When people feel supported by their leaders, they can do extraordinary things. Don’t be an average leader—be a great leader by keeping these five considerations in mind.
To learn even more about managing remote teams and keeping employees working at home highly engaged, download our ebook now.
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About Author: Jamie Davidson is the Marketing Communications Manager forVast Conference, a meeting solution providing HD-audio, video conferencing and web streaming bringing teams together to work done
How the Workplace Can Help to Improve Employee Health and Wellbeing
A person residing in the UK spends around 3,515 full days at work throughout their life. This is a huge amount of time from a person’s life. Breaking it down to simpler figures, employees tend to spend 34 hours and 26 minutes on average at work in a week.
To stay fit, one must follow a proper diet. The diet just doesn’t include food; it includes what you watch, what you read, what you listen to, and whom you spend your time with.
To stay healthy physically and mentally, you need to pay attention to everything that you absorb. Since people spend so much time at their workplace regularly, it is important for them to have a healthy environment. The workplace has a huge role to play in an employee’s health and wellbeing.
A healthy workplace improves employee’s health behaviors, reduces elevated health risks, significantly reduces your health care cost, and prevents you from paying high fees to therapists. Besides that, your well-being improves productivity, is likely to reduce absenteeism, improve relations with your colleagues and co-workers. The most important is that it helps in sustaining high employee morale.
Here are a few ways how the workplacescan help improve employee health and wellbeing.
Encouraging Healthy Eating and Physical Activity
Food contributes directly to a person’s health. Eating healthy will keep you fit and active. A healthy body makes a healthy mind. Workplaces that support healthy eating habits among their employees are contributing to their health and wellbeing.
Soft drink vending machines are now being removed from the workplace. Some companies have also started programs that guide the employees about nutrition and a healthy diet. Besides that, budget-friendly plans are being provided to the employees that cannot afford to spend their entire month’s salary just on food. Fruits are being used as an evening time snack which is a healthier option.
You should also promote physical activity to improve employee health and reduce their stress levels by offering them gym facilities on-premise or giving them discounted gym memberships. You can also promote a physically active workplace by holding sporting events.
Use More Plants at the Workplace
There are numerous benefits of keeping plants indoors. The main job that they do is to naturally purify the air by taking in carbon dioxide and producing oxygen. Indoor plants at workplaces are also known to reduce employees’ anxiety and stress. They prevent employees from getting sick while also enhancing the ambiance.
Therefore, use plants to increase wellness. There are specific plants that are kept indoors which adjust to low sunlight and grow even in the presence of working air conditioners. Some low maintenance indoor plants which workplaces can keep to ensure the good health and wellbeing of their employees are:
Snake plant
ZZ plant
Spider Plant
Dracaena
Monstera Deliciosa
Introduction to Conflict in the Workplace(and How it Erodes Productivity Culture)
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Improving Indoor Air Quality
Poor air quality inside workplaces can cause “sick building syndrome.” This causes people to feel tired, dizzy, reduce concentration, and can also make the eyes itchy and watery. Improper ventilation at workplaces is the major cause that the poor air cannot escape out and fresh air cannot come in.
Synthetic materials that the building is made out of, chemical cleaners used on a daily basis, and the furnishing inside the office also contribute to the poor air quality inside the office. Air quality can be improved in the following ways, which will directly contribute to improving employee health:
Windows to be kept open so that the air flows in and out
Humidity levels to be kept below 60%
Reducing the usage of chemical cleaners
Servicing air conditioners regularly
Use air purifiers
Make sure cleaning is done properly
Stretching Breaks
Taking breaks while working is important to avoid exhaustion of your mind. Workers who care about their mental health and want to take breaks for reduced stress are sometimes afraid to take a break for fear of being presumed lazy.
Some people get so busy with work that they tend to forget to take a break. Sometimes they also forget to eat their lunch. Workplaces should allow employees to take a small break from work.
These breaks can be utilized to perform some stretching exercises that help in reducing muscle aches and eye stress. Stretching is a healthy exercise, and all the employees doing it together can be a lot of fun. In addition, breaks also enhance employee morale
Realize the Importance of Work-Life Balance
There is a difference in how machines are programmed to work and how humans are programmed to work. Understanding the employee’s potential and mental state and not overburdening the employees that they are forced into working overtime is one way the workplace can contribute to the wellbeing of their employees.
If the employee is mentally exhausted due to the workload, it can decrease the work quality and efficiency of the worker. To be able to give your best, you need to be mentally relaxed, and that is one thing workplaces need to understand. Allowing holidays, vacations, and sometimes early offs can help employees relax and stay healthy mentally as well.
Organizations can also provide benefits, such as health insurance, to promote the health of their employees. If they have health coverage, they will be more likely to visit the doctor before their health completely deteriorates. A healthy work environment is essential for employee productivity and perks, such as health insurance, are absolute.
Mental Health Training
We always see workplaces being concerned about the physical health of the employees. We have witnessed the use of safety equipment where employees possess the risk of physical injury. Fire-extinguishers are hanging on the walls of every office.
Just as caring about your employees’ physical health is essential, so is a concern for their psychological well-being. By providing mental health training to managers can help them in identifying if an employee is undergoing any kind of mental stress.
Be it due to work or personal reasons; workplaces should encourage the culture of helping out each other in such situations. These pieces of training are especially essential for the people working in the HR department as they are the ones who are coordinating with every employee.
Since mental health is being less stigmatized, creating a comfortable environment will allow employees to open up and seek health.
Ergonomic Equipment
Ergonomic equipment is designed to ensure the comfort and safety of the workers. Throw out your old, outdated, and non-ergonomic equipment, which is likely to cause injuries to employees. Replace it with fresh ergonomic mice, desks, office chairs, and monitors, etc., to reduce the risk of injuries and provide more comfortable workstations.
Using ergonomic equipment will improve employee productivity. You can use standing desks instead of sitting desks to avoid problems caused by sitting for a long time. Ergonomic screens are also built in a way that reduces the negative impact continuous light makes on the eye.
It may sound like a costly option; however, the quality and durability are worth investing in. Moreover, you would not have to worry about replacing or repairing them each year, so you are saving money by investing in ergonomic equipment.
This will make the workers feel more energized, adapt to a healthier work style and play a part in their mental health and wellbeing too.
Conclusion
Workplaces play an important role in making or breaking the personality of a person. That is the place we learn new things from every day. That is the place where we even go every day. The kinds of environment we get at our workplaces create a major impact in our daily life, including determining the status of our health and mental wellbeing.
About Author: This article is written by a marketing team member at LIKE.TG. LIKE.TG is a leading provider of proven HR solutions, including recruiting, onboarding, employee communications engagement, and rewards recognition. Our user-friendly software increases employee productivity, delivers time and cost savings, and minimizes compliance risk.
A Guide to Integrating Employee Engagement Platforms With ADP Canada
The Canada Human Resource Center issued a report that showed that 60% of Canadian employees are disengaged. Unhappy workers result in lost productivity. This costs North American businesses over $350 billion every year.
This is a staggering figure. But the great news is that there are many human resources information systems (HRIS) that help to improve employee engagement. This new digital landscape means limitless access to HR platforms for more effective human capital management.
This includes tools to help with:
Employee Communications
Onboarding
Performance Management
Payroll Time and Attendance
Industry leaders such as ADP Canada, have mastered the ability to provide small, midsized, or large businesses with effective HR solutions. These tools help you keep your employees happy.
Read on to learn more about these solutions and how you can implement them in your own business.
Ways to Improve Employee Engagement
Engaged employees are more productive. Businesses with higher productivity levels are better positioned to be more profitable. Here are a few ways to improve employee engagement in your organization:
Long-Term Strategies
Get It Right From the Start - Make a great first impression with an effective onboarding process for your new hires.
Train Managers to Engage Well - Your managers are the first point of contact for employees. Workers will rate an organization's engagement based on daily interaction with their managers. Have your managers trained in employee engagement best practices. It will help them empower and connect with their team.
Develop Your Employees - Let your employees know that you care about their development. Provide training opportunities that they can use in their current roles. But that can also help them advance to higher positions within the organization.
Assess and Improve Processes - Assessing processes will help to better streamline them. It will also eliminate inefficiencies.
Be Flexible - Establish flexible work schedules to promote better work/life balance.
Short-Term Strategies
Reinforce Your Core Values - Inspire your employees by reinforcing your company values and mission. This will also help to set the tone for the culture of your organization.
Engage Management - Model how employee engagement should look. Provide the example that your managers can follow. They can then implement it with their direct reports.
Provide Employees With Feedback - Feedback is the best way to let employees know how they are doing. Employees who receive feedback also tend to experience higher levels of engagement.
Let Your Employees Provide You With Feedback - Find out about engagement by asking. You can do this through employee engagement surveys. They provide an opportunity for employees to be candid. They will let you know what helps to keep them engaged and the things that don't.
Recognize and Reward Good Work - Recognition and rewards help to keep employees engaged. They will also want to do more for the organization.
Engagement Solutions by ADP Canada
These strategies seem easy enough, but you might be wondering where's the best place to start. LIKE.TG provides employee engagement solutions that can improve business results. They have integrated some of their solutions with the ADP Workforce platform.
LIKE.TG's integration with ADP and the ADP Marketplace will give your employees easy access to Workmates and Onboard solutions. If your business already uses ADP Workforce you can access LIKE.TG's payroll and HR options.
Onboard
LIKE.TG and ADP Workforce onboarding integration can help you get things right from the start. This amazing onboarding tool provides new employees with an easy-to-use self-service system. They can feel welcomed and 'at home' as they create their employee profile.
You can also create personalized portals. This will give them access to all their important HR documents. It also facilitates integration with ADP's payroll system. This ensures employee payments are accurate and on time.
Workmates
Workmates allows real-time communication and collaboration with employees. It facilitates remote teams and allows you to recognize and reward employees. You can integrate your ADP data into this platform as well.
This single platform allows you to share company news and create communities. You can share important project information and connect with employees regardless of their location. Workmates can help you to improve employee engagement. It increases job satisfaction, employee morale, and productivity.
The Perfect Solution
What's the ideal human capital management solution for businesses?
ADP's wider range of payroll and tax software solutions
LIKE.TG's employee engagement products
These are the only tools you need to help your employees reach their full potential.
Benefits of Having Engaged Employees
Employee engagement increases productivity. High productivity affects any organization's bottom line. But there are many other benefits of having engaged employees.
Increased Sales - Better customer service, quality, and productivity lead to more sales
Higher Stock Price - This is a natural result of higher productivity and sales
Greater Employee Safety - Employees that are more connected with their workplace will be more aware of their surroundings
Better Quality Products - Employees who care will want to produce high-quality products
Better Employee Health - When employees exercise more and eat healthier. This leads to less obesity and chronic diseases
Better Customer Service - Employees who care will want to provide optimal service to customers
Happier, More Content Employees - Recognition helps to motivate employees
Better Customer Service - Engaged employees care about their jobs and their customers
Greater Employee Satisfaction - Employees feel better about their jobs
Greater Employee Loyalty - Employees will stay at an organization where they feel successful and challenged by the work they do
Better Employee Work/Life Balance - Positive experiences at work spill over to the home
Higher Employee Retention Rates - Employees don't stay at an organization where they are unhappy
Lower Employee Absenteeism - Due to dedicated employees
Employee Engagement Made Easy
There is a reason why it is said that people are a company's most important resource. Employee engagement is crucial to the success of any company. Today's digital landscape facilitates better engagement with employees.
The right platform can make the implementation of employee engagement strategies easier. ADP Canada has combined their experience with LIKE.TG's globally recognized platform. It seamlessly integrates with ADP solutions providing a complete employee engagement system.
Contact us to request a demo. Learn more about the full range of LIKE.TG products, our business solutions, including ADP integration we can provide for your business.
About Author: This article is written by a marketing team member at LIKE.TG. LIKE.TG is a leading provider of proven HR solutions, including recruiting, onboarding, employee communications engagement, and rewards recognition. Our user-friendly software increases employee productivity, delivers time and cost savings, and minimizes compliance risk.
English Vocabulary for HR: Most Popular Phrases Used in HR Nowadays
There are so many companies now that would like to enter foreign markets. There is always a need for the cooperation of cross-cultural teams. An HR manager who speaks English is a priceless asset in the company's arsenal. The professionals have to know popular phrases in HR to perform their duties perfectly. This is why the knowledge of English vocabulary for HR is a necessity as English is becoming an integral part of professional activity.
The concept of Human Resources itself came from the West. It is pretty logical for foreign job titles to call the pros in the Western manner: HR manager, HR generalist, recruiter, HR analyst, Team-Lead. Let's look at the vocabulary hacks that help managers speak English fluently when working as an HR.
Job Positions in English to Know For HR
Chief Administrative Officer
It is the head of the administrative department. They are the people who oversee daily operations and are entirely responsible for the performance;
Chief Operating Officer
It is the position that occupies people in the highest rank. They are responsible for all the internal operations;
Executive Officer
This position usually refers to a person in a senior class who makes decisions and implements them;
Top (US) or Senior (GB) Executive
Top executives are on top of every performance, and they are responsible for all the processes and operations happening in the field;
A Middle Manager
This person is in charge of people or departments in a company but is not responsible for the entire company and does not decide about the company's future.
The Floor Manager
A floor manager is a person who is responsible for all actions and operations of a specific floor or floor in a large store or office.
Skills
Hard Skills
Hard skills are responsible for the performance of tasks requiring specific education and training. They are the pieces of knowledge of programs and tools;
Soft Skills
Soft skills ensure the successful completion of a wide range of tasks regardless of the education received and professional activity specifics, such as communication, emotional intelligence, and planning;
Staff Recruitment
A Contractor
It is a person or company that organizes the supply of materials or the hiring of workers for different purposes;
Talent Management
Talent management is the company's division that attracts, recruits, develops, manages, and promotes sophisticated employees;
Behaviorally Anchored Rating Scale (BARS)
It is the scope of the quantitative data for a specific job and collecting information regarding critical behavior between successful and unsuccessful careers. These critical behaviors are then classified and given numerical values that are used as a basis for performance evaluation;
Human Resources Manager
It is the person who is taking care of the department that deals with the employment, training, support, and office work of the company's employees. This person is also responsible for drawing up job descriptions;
Behavioral Based Interview
It is a type of interview technique that focuses on candidates' experience, behavior, knowledge, skills, and abilities. It involves providing concrete examples from the past where they have demonstrated particular behaviors or skills to predict future behavior and outcomes;
Onboarding Proces
Onboarding
It is the process of adaptation of new employees, induction, and integration of new employees. It is the process of transitioning a person from applicant to employee status, ensuring that paperwork is complete and onboarding is comprehensive while implementing 4C’s of onboarding;
An Affirmative Action Plan (AAP)
AAP is a list of specific, results-oriented procedures that need to be followed. AAP is designed to address the consequences of past discrimination against women and minorities or their lack of engagement. The effectiveness of a plan is measured by the results it achieves, not the expected results;
Hawthorne Effect
The Hawthorne effect is an environment in which novelty, interest in an experiment, or increased attention to innovation leads to a distorted, often favorable result. Participants in the experiment act differently, more diligently than usual, only because they are involved in the investigation. The awareness can influence employee motivation that they are being watched and evaluated;
Succession Planning
Succession planning is the retiring employee replacement program that identifies long-term needs and attracts internal talent to meet them in the future. It helps in finding, evaluating, and developing the people needed to implement the organization's strategy.
Employees Motivation
Incentives
Intensives are different from bonuses or benefits because they are usually tied to specific performance goals, such as achieving a sales goal;
Bring Your Own Device
BYOD is used to describe the growing trend of using employee-owned devices within a business. It means that the employees own the laptops and other electronics that the company provides them.
Emotional Intelligence
It is the capacity to recognize, estimate, and manage your own emotions, as well as the feelings of others. Advanced emotional intelligence should have anyone working in the HR field;
Change Management
This type of management is a thoughtful approach to the transition of individuals or organizations from one state to another. They are designed for change management and monitoring. Companies can benefit by planning implementation, implementation and calculating the impact of significant organizational changes;
A Confidentiality Agreement
The agreement is an agreement between an employer and an employee of the company, in which the latter cannot disclose proprietary or confidential information. Many companies protect information that, if leaked, could have devastating consequences for the brand or the well-being of the organization. A confidentiality agreement provides legal protection against such events;
Distributive Bargaining
Distributive bargaining is the negotiation between competing parties, which includes the distribution of a limited resource. One company dominates to the detriment of the interests of another.
Retention Strategy
The retention strategy refers to the processes and policies used to ensure employee retention. To retain employees and reduce employee turnover, managers must help employees achieve their goals without losing sight of the organization's goals;
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Estimation of the Employee and Their Retention
Attrition
Attrition or a staff loss is a gradual voluntary reduction of workers (through retirement and retirement) that are not replaced after. The attrition reduces the amount of the workforce;
To Dismiss
Dismiss or remove from office or work; It also means to decide that something or someone is not essential and not worth attention;
Dismissal
The dismissal is a discharge from service. It is the termination of the case when the employment contract is closed. There are four different types of releases: fair, unfair, constructive, and wrongful dismissals;
To Sack
Sacking somebody means to fire the person for unsatisfactory performance or other reasons to save money;
Resign
Resignation means leaving the position. It happens when a person leaves the service by informing the employer;
Term of Notice
Term of notice is the minimum period within which the employee must inform the employer of leaving before leaving;
Retire
Retiring means leaving or quitting work due to old age or poor health. It often happens when the person is tired and old;
Reduction in Force
Staff reduction is the process of laying off employees due to a lack of funds, changes in job requirements, or a reorganization of a department or business operation;
Transfer
Transferring someone means moving something or someone to another place, organization, or team.
To Sum It Up
There are various words that emerge every year in the sphere of HR. A significant part of the English vocabulary for HR comes from Latin, which means that this language is a core of business progress. The more you learn English, the better you can perform as a Human Resources manager within global projects.
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About the Author: Ryan is a passionate writer who likes sharing his thoughts and experiences with the readers. Currently, he works as a digital marketing specialist; you can check out here. He likes everything related to traveling and new countries.
Motivate Employees with Workplace Gamification
2020 certainly presented HR teams with new challenges.
On one hand, many new employees joined new companies and new teams during the COVID-19 pandemic, but the vast majority were suddenly forced to work from home during this time. And if those companies did not have an official work-at-home policy in place before this sudden event, this new dynamic could present a number of real challenges, including low morale, demotivated employees, and lost productivity.
Despite this sudden challenge, HR managers and teams could use gamification in new ways to overcome these potential obstacles and actually get even more out of remote teams.
Gamification in the workplace is not a new concept. It has been used successfully by business leaders and managers for quite a while, but it’s worth a look at the potential of this strategy. Interestingly, this concept parallels the idea of "gamification in marketing" where engaging tactics are used to enhance customer interaction and brand loyalty. In both contexts, gamification leverages human psychology for positive outcomes.
What is a gamification program?
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines gamifying as “the process of adding games or game elements like keeping score and competing among teams as well as using other non-game contexts like online marketing, product promotions, or even a simple task.”
Recently, gamification has become an even more popular work trend in business environments, especially as a way to drive employee motivation and engagement. This leads us to a follow-up question: Just what is workplace gamification?
What is Workplace Gamification
In this context, gamification does not refer to turning work into a game. Instead, it is a play on human psychology, which uses a game context to motivate a person to attempt to compete with others and prove themselves to be the best in front of their manager (or other authority), peer group, and competitors.
To picture the value of gamification, just think of the good old days when completing your homework correctly meant getting a gold star on your paper and even a little praise from your teacher. That was the power of gamification.
You’ve been a part of these situations for a long time now, to the point where this idea has become a natural part of your daily life starting with school and now, in the workplace.
Examples of gamification in the workplace can include game-based activities such as keeping score of who closes more deals in sales, or who achieves a specific monthly goal first. Rewards and recognition approaches (and platforms such as LIKE.TG’s Workmates) are based on the same concept and can provide extra motivation for more collaboration and teamwork.
Benefits of Gamification and Game Mechanics in the Work Environment
While it may be tempting to rush in and attempt to take advantage of many different aspects as you implement gamification, business leaders first need to identify and focus on those that best suit our requirements.
Learning
Never underestimate employees’ urge to compete and “win” in their quest to prove that they are better than all others. In this case, your workforce will strive to be the best at their jobs but will also be interested in exploring and adapting to the most recent developments in the industry, both while on the job but also during any training or education they may be pursuing. This opens them up to a whole new world of learning, which leads to even more advanced skills. If done successfully, this new level of expertise will become a win-win: beneficial for the company and the employee.
Higher Efficiency
Higher skills lead to better efficacy in direct proportions, and that is what you as an employer aim for, isn’t it? This also positively affects the overall organizational productivity and works to motivate employees, thus propelling the enterprise towards its goals faster.
Challenges
Contrary to popular belief, everybody likes a challenge! And when it comes to a group task, let’s just say it’s a recipe for success. Creating inter-departmental teams and setting up competitive game-based goals is a surefire way of raising the workforce’s morale while also promoting teamwork between various departments. Many companies also use CRM software to ensure that all members are on the same page about each assigned task.
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Real-Time Self-Analysis
Having fun while working is important but what is also essential is the fact that each employee can analyze for themselves how well they’re performing or how far they are from reaching their targets in real-time. Keeping a check on one’s own work further builds responsibility and motivates the worker to try harder.
Tips, Tricks, and Ideas for Motivation and Engagement
Each company has its own policies for motivation and engagement and appreciation of their employees, and none can be considered higher or lower than the next. As mentioned before, you need to choose the best way to recognize and reward your workforce.
The following however are some generic ideas that may help you in successfully gamifying your organization.
Company-wide Recognition
Tipping your hat for their exemplary services in front of the entire office is sure to earn you their loyalty, while also motivating them to work harder and achieve more targets. Demonstrating appreciation in front of their colleagues is a great way to let all your employees (even worldwide) know digitally through your social media pages of their success. Everyone loves fame and recognition and giving it to them, even on a minor level, will increase their morale and encourage other employees as well to perform better.
Company-sponsored Skill Upgradation
Many corporations around the globe don’t just assign tasks to their employees but also help them in upskilling through various free and paid courses. These opportunities to learn more in their fields are respected and greatly appreciated by the workforce as it does not just display that the company has their overall welfare in mind, but also enhances their individual market value.
Free Services and Gifts
Company-sponsored trips, discounts on gyms for workers of a certain enterprise, free gifts on the business’ founding day, and gift cards to online or offline brands and stores on the personnel’s birthday are just some ways of celebrating the alliance between the organization and their employees. However, these go a long way in building a rapport amidst the parties, and the team steps up their game to justify these presents. You can gift them an experience as well.
Applaud Everyone’s Contribution
Often while commending the work of the highest achievers, the corporations forget to acknowledge the job well done by the rest of the team. This can hurt their confidence and determination, thus leading to a decline in their productivity. Thus next time, make sure all your employees feel appreciated while incorporating gamification at work.
Game-based Training
Use elements and game mechanics like scoreboards, leadership positions, points, and badges during the various training sessions of the workforce. You can also use social media platforms to keep a track of the highest scorers. This encourages the workers to give their best in the process which has a dual effect - on one hand, they learn better as that’s the way to higher rewards, and on the other hand, it builds up a healthy competition in the teams which further propagates inter-departmental and intra-departmental harmony and a happy work environment.
Ensure Employee Wellness
A sedentary lifestyle can lead to a whole lot of health issues for your workers. By including some gaming elements in their daily routine, like points to the one with the highest number of steps per day, can contribute to their good health while simultaneously showing how much the company cares for their well-being. This can also further reduce the number of sick leaves taken by the staff, annually.
Gamification to Games - Beware!
A common misconception in organizations, that stems from the term ‘Gamification’ itself is that it refers to turning work into a game.
That is absolutely not what it is though.
The best-gamified process is considered to be the one where the player doesn’t even realize that he/ she is playing.
Avoid building games on top of complex processes as that might result in lowering efficiency in the long run as the team now has to spend more of its resources on both the game and the actual task.
Conclusion
In the end, we are certain that you have accurately grasped what the term and its surrounding hype are all about. Now is the time for its effective application.
So what are you waiting for? Run for it now before someone else takes the cake. Best of luck!
About Author:
Pratik Dholakiya is the founder of Growfusely, a content marketing agency specializing in content and data-driven SEO. He regularly speaks at various conferences about SEO, Content Marketing, and Entrepreneurship. As a passionate SEO and content marketer, he shares his thoughts and knowledge in publications like Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal, Entrepreneur Magazine, Fast Company, The Next Web, YourStory, and Inc42, to name a few. He can be reached at Twitter @DholakiyaPratik
Improving the Employee Onboarding Process from Start to Finish
Why is Onboarding so Important?
In today’s competitive job market, companies need to do all they can to find, attract, and hire the right employees. Fair enough, yet surprisingly, even this isn’t enough to guarantee success.
To make sure employees are really able to make a difference and help the company become more competitive, new hires must be able to hit the ground running on day one.
This is why employee onboarding is so important. A good onboarding program gets the employer-employee relationship started on the right foot and contributes to increased morale, productivity, and engagement.
Yet a bad onboarding experience falls short of these benefits and inevitably leads to wasted time, money, and effort. Without an engaging new hire experience, your organization will find it increasingly difficult to attract and retain the best talent.
Plan for Success, Right from the Start
It all leads to an important question: What can you do to improve your onboarding process and make sure your new hires are happy, productive, and positioned for maximum success?
One of the first ways to accomplish this is to think about the entire process, including the right strategy and tools to support it.
For example, developing a detailed new hire checklist is a great way to consider the entire process, make sure nothing is overlooked, and ensure the entire experience is as smooth as possible. When creating new hire checklists, it’s important to think beyond traditional HR responsibilities. Other departments such as IT, payroll, and facilities usually play an important role in onboarding new employees.
Involve these departments to give new hires everything they need all at once, while also demonstrating that your company has it all figured out!
“As soon as we saw LIKE.TG’s Onboard demo, we knew this was the perfect solution for us. We loved that it was extremely simple and powerful out of the box, but that we could customize it with advanced capabilities to make it work in our company setting. We were sold.“ - Elisa Garn, Vice President, HR and Talent, Christopherson Business Travel.
Things to Consider When Developing Your Onboarding Checklist
It’s important to remember that the onboarding checklist is a vital document and one that should intuitively guide a new hire through all the steps of your onboarding process.
To make sure you give them everything they need—and help them hit the ground running on day one—consider all of these areas when developing your checklist.
Your corporate culture:
Plan to share important information to help new hires gain a better appreciation of your corporate history, values, and overall brand.
Details about their position:
New hires can benefit from understanding where their position fits within the overall organization, and how it contributes to helping the company achieve its overall goals.
Information about their department or the whole organization:
Include additional details such as all the other positions in their group or department, organizational charts, and more.
Training
Consider highlighting any training they may need, either in the short term to get up to speed or for longer-term options.
Goals
Any checklist should include specific goals and objectives expected of this new employee, including details on how they’ll be measured.
Onboarding tasks:
Outline all of the activities you’ll help new hires complete as part of their introduction to your companies. Examples of this include things like setting up laptops, creating logins and passwords, getting an official badge, learning where to park, and just about anything else that a new employee would need.
What’s on a Typical Onboarding Checklist?
Once you’ve determined what to include in developing your overall checklist, what should it include?
New hire paperwork, such as I-9 and W-4 forms
A statement of corporate values
A video that introduces the new hire to the company, including a brief overview of important products, services, and your overall brand
A detailed list of activities for the first day
A list of important contacts within various departments, including contact information
A timetable of important activities, and what to do if they have questions
More than just Paperwork
So many people tend to associate onboarding with paperwork. It’s true that paperwork is an important part of the process, but a successful onboarding process goes well beyond enrollment forms and payroll documents.
Instead, onboarding involves various meetings and important actions that must be carefully coordinated. Many innovative HR departments now assign a dedicated onboarding coordinator to spearhead the entire process. Part leader, part counselor, this coordinator goes over all the steps that must be accomplished, and also plays a role in scheduling all of the vital steps.
Onboarding Goes Well Beyond Day One
A new hire’s onboarding experience goes beyond the first day. The entire experience can take several weeks, if not longer. Along the way, various benchmarks may be established, helping new employees provide feedback about their work experience thus far and how they feel about the organization.
Everything about onboarding is intended to make the new hire feel welcome, valued, and empowered to do the job they were hired to do. This last sentiment is becoming more important as millennial and Generation Z employees begin to make up a larger portion of the workforce. These generations value the ability to contribute to the success of an organization and are not shy in speaking up to express their opinion.
This is a significant shift away from traditional hiring methods, where employees were brought on board, left alone to fill out paperwork and learn about their position, and then simply follow orders from their manager.
“We use Onboard to set up very detailed workflows, including multi-contributor tasks, notifications, reminders, and dashboards to see exactly where each onboarding experience stands at any given time.”
Miki Loveless, HR Business Partner, Christopherson Business Travel
Onboard by LIKE.TG
LIKE.TG’s Onboard solution now helps automate and improve the entire onboarding experience. Onboard streamlines the entire process and gives new employees the tools they need to make their first great.
For example, our Form Builder capability helps to eliminate what could be mountains of paperwork. You can easily create all the digital documents a new hire needs to complete and make them available in an easy-to-access self-service portal.
With Onboard, new hires have more time to make the right decisions when completing important forms. We also help you provide pre-built I-9, W-4, direct deposit forms, and more—all part of a full library of form templates available in the Onboard solution.
We even offer easy drag-and-drop capabilities to design customized documents to collect the additional required information. No matter what you need to improve your onboarding experience, LIKE.TG has you covered.
Making the Future Better
LIKE.TG is committed to providing the resources necessary to make onboarding effective. HR managers understand that orientation is the first step in what is hopefully a long career path. This means that the information gathered will help the employee begin an employment journey with the new company. We provide solutions and allow you to be even more efficient in the employment process.
For more information on how to use LIKE.TG to improve your overall onboarding process—and achieve impressive new results—please contact us today.
About LIKE.TG
LIKE.TG is a leading developer of HR software and HRMS solutions for businesses with a focus on effective employee engagement. LIKE.TG empowers teams to easily onboard new hires, manage employee data, create a company social network, and support employee development. LIKE.TG was created by the leaders at NEOGOV, the market and technology leader in on-demand human resources software for the public sector, with more than 1,500 government agencies and educational institutions using NEOGOV technology.
LIKE.TG is a modern and powerful cloud-based HRMS solution with a complete suite of HR functionality, including core, performance, onboarding, recruitment, absence management, and time and attendance.
For more information, please visit www.LIKE.TG.com or contact [email protected].
About Author: This article is written by a marketing team member at LIKE.TG. LIKE.TG is a leading provider of proven HR solutions, including recruiting, onboarding, employee communications engagement, and rewards recognition. Our user-friendly software increases employee productivity, delivers time and cost savings, and minimizes compliance risk.
