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Future Proofing Your HR Strategies
Employees are one of the most valuable resources a company can have. The human resources department is responsible for building a talented team of employees who work well together and individually for the organization’s benefit. HR also takes on the hefty challenge of ensuring employees are wholly supported to perform at a high level.
Technological advancements and shifts in work culture continue to impact the way HR departments evolve. Human resources policies must be informed, flexible, and consistent if you want to ensure your department is set up to thrive in the future.
Let’s take a look at current human resources technology trends and a few notable shifts in workplace culture as of late. We’ll then leave you with some insight on how to design an HR department for the future.
Current Technology Trends in Human Resources and Shifts in Workplace Culture
Advancing technology continues to impact how we move through our personal lives and how efficient we are at work. Productive HR departments are especially mindful of current technology trends in their field and changes to the workplace that could impact how they do their jobs.Here’s a brief look into key HR technology trends and the state of workplace culture today.
Current trends in HR technology
Artificial Intelligence and automation are becoming the norm in most modern HR technology. AI-driven algorithms collect key employee and candidate data, thoroughly analyze it, generate actionable insights based on what’s learned.
Automation tools perform repetitive tasks like sending interview reminder emails, thank you messages, or organizing interview dates and times. AI and automation free up more time for HR teams to focus on tasks and projects that really need them.
They also boost employee engagement and performance through talent development and performance management tools. Their use in recruitment strategies is increasing as well because they help select potential matches faster and more accurately. AI-driven recruitment helps HR professionals get to know candidates more quickly by filtering their various social media profiles and other online activities.
Virtual-reality experiences are also being implemented more and more. They help streamline processes like interviews, onboarding, training and development, and job previews. Instead of being invited to an interview room, companies are inviting qualified candidates to a VR meeting space. They take new employees on a virtual tour of the office to get them comfortable before they arrive and engaged in the workplace culture.
The increased use of cloud-based HR software is another key trend to note. Any data entries in the cloud can be accessed in real-time, giving you the ability to make informed decisions faster and better control the data you collect.
Shifts in workplace culture
The COVID-19 global pandemic highlighted just how vital employee engagement and well-being are to productivity and performance. Physical, mental, and emotional health of all employees is now a huge priority for most companies. They’re pushing forward with health initiatives that ensure their employees can perform at their peak.
These health initiatives could include offering:
Tech tools like Fitbits, heart rate monitors, or blood sugar checkers to employees at discounted prices
Free or discounted gym memberships
Nutrition and/or personal trainer resources to aid employees’ physical health
Mental wellness resources like therapy or counseling
A health week at the office that allows employees to get certain health services on-site
Mental health and physical wellness team-building activities
Millennials and Gen Zers are taking over the majority of the workforce in the world. They’re especially interested in companies that offer personalized training and development plans for their employees. A blended learning approach that employs eLearning and in-class teaching resonate with these generations because it provides a self-directed learning experience. This modernized software focuses on up-skilling technical abilities and building more transferable soft skills like communication, time management, and empathy for others.
Many companies are offering fully remote or hybrid work schedules to their employees. These scheduling options resonate well with workers because of their flexibility and emphasis on giving them more control over their job responsibilities. HR professionals are also seeing a positive impact on recruiting because of this shift to remote work. They’re able to engage with top talent all over the world and hire a diverse workforce.
Future-Proofing Your HR Department Design
As you keep up with current trends and analyze how workplace culture is changing, you’re probably wondering how to future proof your HR department.
Instilling agility and flexibility in every aspect of your department is key to designing an HR team that can meet the future head-on.
Here are some tips on preparing your HR department for the future in light of technological advancements and shifts in work culture.
Adopt the right methodology
Consistency is crucial to building a trust-filled, loyal, engaged HR team. Without a specific structure for your HR team, you won’t be able to keep it organized, up-to-date, and productive. You must choose a suitable methodology for how you’re going to manage your HR department.
An agile methodology, for example, encourages flexibility and moves away from strict documentation as a hard requirement. This methodology is perfect for your team if your members are creative, adaptable, and geared up for an innovative future. The four values of an agile workforce are:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.
Working software over comprehensive documentation.
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation.
Responding to change over following a plan.
What’s the process for implementing changes? Who makes the final decision? How are projects delegated and teams formed? These are all questions you should answer to begin constructing the methods best for your team. Create a solid team structure by identifying how your team members work best together and how each of them thrives individually.
Keep up-to-date with trends
There’s a reason we dedicated an entire section of this article to current HR technology trends and shifts in workplace culture. Staying up to date with what’s happening in your industry is one of the best ways to prepare your department for the future. To keep your HR strategies current and effective, you must be mindful of popular HR trends and workplace culture shifts as they arise.
One crucial trend in the workplace right now is the rise of the gig economy. HR professionals are working with freelancers and contractors at a much higher rate these days. Fill in the gaps with full and part-time employees, and you’ve got yourself a well-rounded team. Being familiar with this trend allows you to keep up with competitors and hire from a wider pool of talent just as they are doing.
Another key trend is that most human resources departments are taking on a complete digital transformation. You should be comfortable with data and mindful of its influence on a seamless transition to digital platforms for your HR processes and procedures. Bookmark any resources that provide information about trends in HR and leverage this knowledge with your team.
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Implement top-tier technology and software
Your HR department’s effectiveness in the future will be highly dependent on the technology and software you implement. If you’re using low-grade software or out-of-date technology, chances are you’re a step behind your competitors. You’re most likely missing out on making critical improvements to how your team communicates, collaborates, and carries out its responsibilities.
Your Human Resource Information System or HRIS, for example, should be top-tier to ensure you’re able to grow your workforce and keep up with changes in your company effectively. Your HRIS helps keep employees engaged, satisfied, and continuously improving by fusing IT and HR functions like data entry, tracking, and management for human resources, payroll, and accounting.
You also want to ensure you’re factoring in the shift to remote work and implementing top-tier technology to keep your HR department productive, communicative, and able to perform their job functions as if they were in the office.
Conclusion
You can future-proof your human resources department by instilling agility and flexibility in every aspect. Prepare your HR department for the future by adopting the proper methodology to run your day-to-day, keeping current with HR technology trends and workplace shifts, and implementing top-tier technology and software.
About Author: This article is written by a marketing team member at LIKE.TG. LIKE.TG is a leading provider of proven HR solutions, including recruiting, onboarding, employee communications engagement, and rewards recognition. Our user-friendly software increases employee productivity, delivers time and cost savings, and minimizes compliance risk.
10 Personalized Employee Onboarding Tips For All Departments
For most businesses, hiring is part and parcel of the hiring process. With new employees come new ideas on how to carry forward the company mission and purpose. That is why there is a need for the onboarding of the employees to be spot on.
Personalized employee onboarding ensures the employees quickly acclimatize to their workplace and improve technical skills with its purpose and mission.
An ideal onboarding session will also have the employees learn how to use the company’s software faster, which will, in turn, enable them to serve the company better. Employee onboarding and training will be easier if you follow some of the tips we will share.
But before we get to that.
Why Do You Need Personalized Onboarding Training?
While it pays to focus more on your customers, it would be foolhardy for you to ignore your employees completely. New hires need to be shown the warm side of the company if you are to reduce worker turnover. That’s where personalized onboarding comes in.
A personalized employee onboarding process will enable you to conduct technical skills assessments and retain most of your new hires as it creates a connection with the company. Such a process will require you to let your new employees express themselves personally and professionally.
Personalized Employee Onboarding Tips
So, what are the tips that will make the whole onboarding process a personalized experience for the new employees?
1.Create a More Personalized Welcome Package
Handwritten notes from team members and new colleagues will help a lot in making the onboarding process personalized. It will give the onboarding strategy a personal touch, apart from helping the new hires feel at home.
You could also include token gifts such as notebooks and pens, which could play a significant role in breaking the ice with new hires. Another strategy to make the process more personalized would be creating a short video welcoming the new employees.
2. Let the New Hires Meet their Direct Colleagues
What will make it more personalized than if the new hires get to meet their new colleagues? Their colleagues should help them feel comfortable within their new surroundings and have them learn about the company's values.
You could give a few personal stories from the colleagues to help them get to know them better. It could build the connection you need between the new hires and your existing workers.
Their direct colleagues might help them to feel at ease and ready for the onboarding process. It would also provide the support network the new employees might fall back on throughout their first few days at the company.
3.Assign Each Hire a Mentor or Work Buddy
Mentors could come in handy when crafting a personalized onboarding process. Having someone to hold their hands through the first days in the company could go a long way in helping your new employees feel welcome.
The mentor doesn’t necessarily have to be older than them since you are going by the number of years the person has been in the company. A work buddy could also function as a mentor in some ways.
We all feel lonely in the first few days in a new place and would appreciate a friend or two to ease the loneliness. That’s where the work buddy comes into play! You could also add a small business phone system that will enable easy communication when they need guidance from a mentor.
4.Streamline the Onboarding Process for Each Department
If you have multiple departments, it would be better to have an onboarding process tailor-made for each department. The same would apply if you also have different teams or locations for your company.
This would help the new employees process the information they get in the onboarding faster. That’s because breaking down the onboarding process will make it simpler and reduce the amount of information the new hires are supposed to understand before starting work.
For the technical departments that involve having data scientists, and software developers it may prove to be difficult to test the programming knowledge of your new employees. Having online coding tests will help you shorten the interview process and get the best-suited developer to join your IT department.
A branched onboarding process is also easier to implement than the one you roll out for all company departments. It will enable the trainers to give more personalized training for the new hires as well.
“As soon as we saw LIKE.TG’s Onboard demo, we knew this was the perfect solution for us. We loved that it was extremely simple and powerful out of the box, but that we could customize it with advanced capabilities to make it work in our company setting.”
Elisa Garn Vice President, HR and Talent Christopherson Business Travel
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5. Dedicate Enough Time to the Onboarding Process
Most organizations will want their latest additions to join the workforce working as soon as possible. It is, however, impractical to have this if you don’t dedicate enough time to the onboarding process. Hurrying your employees to onboard gives out a negative vibe. You need to give them enough time to blend in and get to know their fellow colleagues at the workplace.
A personalized process will take you a shorter time as you get down to ensuring the new hire feels as comfortable as possible within their surroundings. A longer timeframe will also enable more hires to ace the technical skills assessment test they face.
It would take about a week for employees to have adequately been onboarded and taught all the company requirements. Giving the process enough time will ensure your employees don’t have to shuttle between working and training the new employees.
You also don’t want to rush the new employees through the process as this could affect their ability to be helpful to the business. That is why you need to ensure you dedicate adequate time to the onboarding process across all departments.
This will also require you to make an extensively detailed plan for the first few months of having the employees on board. Depending on the employees you hire, it might take some time for them to get used to the company. That’s why you need to give the onboarding process enough time.
6.Use the Best Onboarding Tools
When it comes to employee onboarding, it is all about your systems. If you have complex systems in place, it will take you longer to teach the new hires how things run in your company.
That is why you need to ensure you have installed the best systems to enable you to offer the best onboarding training. Using simple HR tools in your onboarding will also go a long way in the making of a simpler system.
If the system is too hard to understand, it also becomes difficult for you to have the employees work as you’d want them to. Your system should have an introductory phase for your employees to meet company staff and get acquainted with its culture and values.
7.Deal with the Paperwork Before the First Day of Onboarding
Most people would agree that paperwork can be a frustrating experience when onboarding.
That’s why it can be a good idea to ensure most of the paperwork doesn’t get to the first day of onboarding training. Contracts, policy acknowledgment, or payroll forms should all have been signed before the onboarding finally starts.
This will save you a lot of the stress of dealing with paperwork during the onboarding process.
You will then be able to concentrate on more critical parts of the process.
Having less paperwork will not only save time but also impress your new hires. So much hangs on an efficient onboarding process, and rescuing them from too much paperwork should be one of those things.
8. Involve Senior Management Figures
In as much as it could be challenging to have the newbies have a sit-down with the CEO, you could still attempt to have other senior figures in the company involved in the onboarding process.
There are no better-placed individuals in a company to speak to new hires as the senior management figures. No one knows the company’s ethos and values as well as the senior management of a company. That is why they can offer the best inspiration to the new employees. If the CEO could also get in on the act, that could be even better.
This could make the new employees feel like they are valued by the company. They also learn the company’s vision from the people that spearhead the company and ensure it doesn’t stray from its mission. The impact of this could be immeasurable.
9. Cut Back on the Deadlines
Companies want their new employees working as soon as possible. This could lead to a situation where the trainers rush through the onboarding process, making it have strict deadlines that could destroy instead of build.
The hiring of software developers is one of the most difficult hires to conduct because it requires a lot of technical skills testing especially with all these new libraries and frameworks popping out now and then. React and Angular which are javascript libraries need you to conduct an angular online test and a react online test to personalize and ease the onboarding process
Granted, most employees would have said they are comfortable working under pressure but a relaxed learning environment will go a long way in helping them understand everything required of them. This also helps them improve their technical skills.
This might not make sense to most people, but it could be what you need to ensure the new hires get to grips as fast as possible. No one is comfortable learning in a rushed environment, especially if they have to deal with a lot of information.
Being more flexible with your deadlines will be a sure way of making the process more relaxed to reap maximum benefits.
10. Allow the New Employees to Express Themselves
No two people are the same, which is why you need to individually speak to each of the new hires about their goals and qualifications. By letting them express themselves, you will help them set realistic goals throughout the onboarding process.
Therefore, each employee will know what to strive for in their aim to fit the organization better.
A personalized onboarding process will ensure your employees fit in as fast as possible and understand what is required of them—the more personalized the process, the better the results.
About Author: Dennis Vu is the CEO and Co-founder of Ringblaze, a virtual business phone system company that helps teams to better serve their customers, anywhere.
5 Benefits of Using a Global Payroll and Compliance Management System
Compliance refers to maintaining industry standards and regulations in a company's operations. It is one of the most crucial factors to avoid future penalties and negative public relations. A compliance management framework helps managers and businesses minimize risks and plan for future uncertainties that ensure adherence to regulatory guidelines and legal criteria.
A global payroll system like Multiplier is an integral part of the compliance management system that can be a success for your business. With this system, you can manage all your employees and payrolls from one system, minimizing uncertainties and increasing your business productivity.
Integrating such a framework can help a business to achieve exponential growth. Knowing the features of an excellent Global Payroll and Compliance Management System can help a company make an informed decision.
Five undeniable benefits of global payroll and compliance management system that you need to know:
Avoid Legal Risks and Cut Future Costs
A compliance management system will help your corporation avoid regulatory liabilities. It can save millions of dollars in terms of legal fees and penalties. You can avoid these costs only if your company follows proper compliance suggested by the government for your industry.
On the other hand, global payroll management can bring all your data in one place, making it easy for you to spot these irregularities before getting penalized for them. It also protects a company from losing consumer trust by minimizing accounting frauds as all the data is collected, managed, and analyzed in one place or platform.
Especially for a multinational corporation, it has to deal with rules and regulations being imposed in several countries. Automated compliance management systems are a must-have for such organizations. With an awful lot of data scattered across various nations, it can be troublesome to spot a compliance irregularity.
If a company fails to ensure these compliances, it might face severe charges. Automated payroll and compliance management systems can minimize these risks allowing a company to focus its resources on globalizing its business. It also helps in cutting down future uncertainties so that you can plan a business approach without worrying about compliances and payrolls getting in their way.
Write a Great Story
A company following proper compliance and government policies can quickly gain consumers' trust, compared to brands penalized for not doing so. Integration of compliance management systems with global payroll can boost consumer trust and brand recognition, resulting in positive public relations. You can use this opportunity to promote your business processes by proving its industry standards and global presence.
Moreover, with a centralized payroll team and compliance management, a company can facilitate employees' easy access to their financial data like e-Payslips. It helps to ease up the long-term process of applying for such data manually.
International payroll integration helps to transfer information to your payroll experts without a need to enter it again and again. Since such errors are much less likely to occur when data from your finance and accounting systems is routed directly into your payroll system. When the payroll professionals don't have to spend too much time looking for and correcting errors, they'll be more efficient.
A compliance management solution like Multiplier also lets the company show its contribution by implementing guidelines set by governing bodies, primarily for a consumer's good. This helps form good public relations and acts as a magnet to attract the best of talent. Many companies are in accordance with the local and federal labor codes that are employee-focused and can help recruit new talent.
Eliminate Costs Before They Arise
A good compliance management system with global payroll integration ensures that your company is future-ready. It lets you detect risks before they surface and resolve any such issues with ample time and resources. Compliance and global payroll do not necessarily have to be expensive.
For instance, an organization that deploys an employee self-service portal for online payslips and income tax documents in 25 different countries can reduce the cost of domains and build a good UI/UX experience. They can do so by developing one global platform to perform all accounting and risk management tasks with a single platform.
Ensuring compliance manually is a repetitive process and requires a lot of routine tasks. This leaves a gap for human errors. Using an automated compliance management system eliminates these errors and the costs that can arise because of them. You can easily save money if you have the proper structure in place. It automates enforcement reporting, reduces the need for extra human resources, and monitors regulatory developments in real-time.
Furthermore, with the right technology, you can eliminate the risk of human error and oversight, resulting in fines and punishments in the future. These features integrated with the company’s global payroll management helps in minimizing the risks of fraud.
Increased Accuracy and Security with Automation
Accuracy is one of the most significant factors when it comes to local payroll and compliances. There are various elements involved that can result in errors while calculating a payroll. These elements can be changes in tax rates, amendments in previous laws, or the addition of new laws in local, state, and federal regulations. All these elements make a company’s payroll and compliance management prone to human errors resulting in sizable consequences.
Through automation and a centralized management system, a company can ensure accuracy while managing compliance and payrolls. This eliminates future costs that can arise as a result of such errors. Automation increases accuracy while saving the company’s resources and time which would normally be allocated to repetitive menial tasks involved in this process.
A compliance management system ensures disparate systems that members of the company receive only the information for which they have been authenticated by granting limited and restricted access to employees. Information is communicated correctly, which removes errors and promotes a well-connected work environment. It's instrumental in companies with a large multi-departmental structure. This helps in enhancing data security, using an integrated system, following and maintaining proper payroll processes to pay employees and use cloud-based payroll data.
A Centralized Payroll and Risk Management System
Introducing new automation tools into the payroll data and compliance management processes globally is not an easy task. A central global payroll approach that brings payroll and compliance management in one software can be extensive.
In such cases, hiring an agency to do all your technical work for your business while you focus on other core aspects of running your business can bring your organization significant growth opportunities. This frees you from worrying about future legal hassles and a global HR helps in the overall management of your business.
With automated payroll and risk management, you can manage all the financial and legal data from one centralized system giving you clear sight to plan your future actions.
Final Tip
A compliance management system makes it much easier for a company to ensure obedience to market, regulatory requirements and render local compliance. It also helps to reduce risks associated with non-compliance and improve brand loyalty in their goods and services.
Modernizing compliance and regulation control procedures, automating compliance workflows, and offering data-driven visibility can direct a company towards exponential growth.
It helps a company by minimizing liquidity risks and reducing other financial and security threats prevalent in the industry. In the modern volatile banking environment, such a software framework can be employed for an organization's risk-free operations. However, it would help if you were more cautious while choosing the right partner.
About Author: This article is written by a marketing team member at LIKE.TG. LIKE.TG is a leading provider of proven HR solutions, including recruiting, onboarding, employee communications engagement, and rewards recognition. Our user-friendly software increases employee productivity, delivers time and cost savings, and minimizes compliance risk.
Why Wellness Benefits Are Crucial for Employees Beyond COVID-19
Wellness refers to being in a state of good health. This is often composed of multiple types of health, including both physical and mental. With companies, your employee wellness — their state of health in the workplace — is affected by factors both within and outside of work.
Balancing personal life and work-life has long been a subject of concern for many workers, but with remote work on the rise, there is a mentality shift to work-life integration. Work-life integration requires companies to offer flexible schedules and additional wellness benefits as part of their employee programs. These benefits are designed to improve overall wellness in life and bridge the gap between personal life and work life, which are so often treated as separate entities.
The idea is to improve a person’s overall health so every aspect of that person’s life can also benefit. For employers, the goal of implementing employee wellness programs is to have happier and healthier people, which can have the added benefit of positively impacting work performance. Though, the end goal should be to simply take care of the health of your fellow human beings.
According to a recent FinanceBuzz health and wellness benefits survey, 54% of surveyed workers with access to employer-sponsored wellness programs reported improved mental health in the last year. Compare this to workers without access to these programs, and only 22% said the same thing.
The data is significant, but what specific wellness benefits are most useful for employees and worth your consideration?
Types of wellness benefits
The FinanceBuzz survey mentioned above found a range of wellness benefits that were popular among employees. These included:
Healthy meal kit delivery
Mental health counseling
Gym membership reimbursements
Weight loss programs
Smoking cessation programs
Fitness tracker devices
Virtual workout subscriptions
Meditation or yoga membership/subscriptions
Reimbursements for smart home gym equipment
Many of these popular perks focus on ways to improve physical wellness, such as healthy eating or exercising. If a person feels better physically, it’s often easier to approach challenges and adjust to changes in life. This doesn’t mean a person no longer gets stressed out, but stress becomes more manageable.
However, it’s important to note that you have other options to promote workplace health and wellness. Mental health counseling and other benefits designed to help alleviate some of life’s worries can be invaluable for employees. This could include wellness benefits that focus on how to cope with financial stress.
According to a Mind Over Money Study from Capital One, 58% of Americans feel that finances control their life. Whether you know it or not, many of your employees are likely experiencing some sort of financial stress. This type of stress might wear on their mental health.
To help combat this stress, consider offering finance-related wellness benefits. Here are a few types of benefits you might want to think about:
A group life insurance plan that’s free or affordable for employees and doesn’t have strict requirements, such as passing a medical exam.
Health insurance coverage that aligns with your employees’ wants and needs. This could include more coverage options nationwide, low mental health counseling costs, and a variety of plans to choose from.
A 401(k) plan to help employees plan for retirement. It can be helpful to simply have access to a retirement plan, but the best employee benefits programs often include employer contributions. Seeing your company put money toward your financial future, other than your salary, can go a long way in fostering a caring and supportive environment. If you need help with creating these programs, reach out toemployee benefits providers.
Flexible paid time off policies gives employees the time they need to recharge and reset. Burnout and mental exhaustion are real and all too common among the workforce, especially in the changing environment brought about by the coronavirus pandemic.
Wellness benefits and remote employees
In the past year, companies have found a need to review and revamp their employee wellness programs. In many cases, this was brought on by the massive changes resulting from the coronavirus pandemic. Specifically, millions of office employees became remote workers virtually overnight.
Certain wellness benefits, such as paid group lunches and in-person gym memberships, suddenly weren’t as relevant. But what wellness initiatives for remote employees are actually valuable?
Consider the unique challenges a remote worker faces. They have many of the same general stressors as office employees, such as worries about physical health, mental health, and financial wellbeing. So the wellness benefits mentioned above are useful, but there’s still room for extra help.
Remote workers often suffer from a sense of being disconnected, especially if they aren’t used to working remotely. A FinanceBuzz remote work survey found that 49% of remote workers found it harder to build relationships with co-workers, and 46% reported feeling isolated.
Wellness benefits for remote workers should focus on providing remote employees with opportunities for meaningful connections and conversations with other people. This could include wellness activities with co-workers and virtual meetings with health coaches or counselors.
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A push for permanency
Reacting to a global pandemic may not be the most positive reason to introduce wellness benefits to your company, but it’s better than not having them at all. However, it’s important to continue advocating for adjustments to your employee wellness program even if things start to normalize worldwide as we enter a post-pandemic era.
The point of wellness benefits is to create a lasting positive impact on your employees and their lives. It would be challenging to make this kind of impression if the benefits were temporary and only available during the pandemic. That’s why it’s necessary to make helpful and valuable wellness benefits a permanent part of your business.
Some remote workers have already returned to the office, and others may be in the process of doing so. But that may not be the case for everyone. You or your company could still be managing a virtual team years down the road, many of whom would likely be grateful for employer-sponsored wellness benefits that positively affect their lives daily.
The bottom line
A quality benefits program isn’t just designed to make employees happier so that the business can make more money. Instead, these programs exist to make people happier and healthier so they can have more fulfilling lives. If your company grows and becomes more valuable as a result, that’s an added bonus.
Keep in mind that certain wellness benefits aren’t always the best options for each company. Each company is different and has employees with unique needs. If you want to find out what would work best for your company, get to know the people who work there.
Introduction to Conflict in the Workplace(and How it Erodes Productivity Culture)
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About Author: Kris Osborne is a Marine Corps veteran turned startup veteran and global Chief of Staff. He enables companies to accelerate growth by putting culture and people first, currentlyworking as the Chief of Staff forFinanceBuzz
How to Measure and Maximize The ROI of HR Software
When making an investment in HR software, including Applicant Tracking Systems(ATS),Employee Communications and Engagement platforms(ECE),Onboarding Tool (ON),and Human Resources Management Systems (HRMS), return on investment (ROI) can bedifficult to measure.
Why is this? In HR, unlike other parts of the organization, employees are the assetswe’re attempting to measure. Yet even top performers are hard to quantify in termsof their contribution to the organization’s bottom line.
If you’re looking to gain a fast—and significant—ROI with Onboarding and HRMSsoftware, there are three important factors to consider.
What is your total cost of ownership (TCO)?
When thinking about cost, make sure you calculate your true TCO, which is usually much more than the cost of the software. TCO gives you a more complete view of your investment by factoring in additional costs related to installation, configuration, training, support, professional services, and more.
Will my employees adopt this technology? If so, how quickly?
The most effective HR software solutions are designed to be as intuitive and easy to use as possible. This minimizes the need for training and accelerates employee adoption for the fastest time to value.
What value will you gain?
Ideally, Onboard software and HRMS solutions will provide many different benefits for employees, hiring managers/business unit managers, and HR teams. In doing so, a new HR solution should provide measurable gains in four key areas:
Streamline hiring and onboarding processes:
Automate and streamline recruiting processes to help hiring managers improve the way they attract and hire employees. This should help improve key metrics such as average time to hire, cost per hire, and more.
Improve regulatory compliance and reduce risk:
Auto filing federal and state employment forms eliminate errors and eVerify processes flag out-of-compliance employees which can generate costly regulatory fines. Ensuring proper employment records are maintained can prevent costly employee litigation and reduce errors and omissions (EO) insurance premiums.
Reduce recruiting costs:
An effective applicant tracking system (ATS) will significantly reinforce the company brand image and improve traditional hiring processes that included too much manual work and overhead. All of this helps eliminate these costs entirely.
Improve the employee experience as well as top and bottom lines:
The best HR solutions will give employees a seamless onboarding experience as well as a long-term foundation to focus on performance and satisfaction. In turn, this will help increase engagement, productivity, and even long-term retention.
Eliminate HR’s administrative burden:
HR technology will also empower HR teams with tools to increase personal productivity, reduce per-transaction metrics, and spend more time on higher-value work.
LIKE.TG is the Perfect Partner
LIKE.TG gives you everything you need to maximize your ROI: the right cost, technology your employees will embrace, and solutions are proven to deliver the gains you need to transform your business.
Cost savings
LIKE.TG provides many advantages to reduce costs and get the maximum valuefrom our solutions.
No software to buy, install, manage, and maintain. LIKE.TGs solutions run in all major web
and mobile browsers, giving any user fast, easy access.
Our solutions are completely cloud-based, which means you don’t need to invest in additional
servers or expensive hardware.
All features and updates are pushed live as soon as they’re available, so IT staff won’t have to
perform upgrades. Even better, these are included—at no extra charge.
Our solutions are completely scalable. LIKE.TG can grow with you—up to 50,000 users—to
fit in your existing workflows and support your business requirements.
The fastest, easy to learn and use systems and platforms
LIKE.TG’s solutions are designed with a single goal in mind: maximizing employeeadoption. All of our solutions are:
Designed to be as user-friendly and intuitive as possible. This eliminates employee resistance
and gives them a new tool they will love to use.
Fast and easy to learn—no need for time-consuming, expensive training or support services.
Able to operate in a PC, Mac, or mobile environment for maximum convenience.
Easily deployed. Technical support is rarely needed, yet if it is, it’s included with your HR
Cloud plan—no extra charge
Maximum benefits, maximum results
LIKE.TG delivers technology that is proven to provide many powerful benefitsand advantages. With LIKE.TG, your organization will:
Automate time-consuming paper approaches related to hiring, onboarding, and managing
employees.
Enhance employees’ onboarding experience to get new hires up to speed and fully productive
on day one.
Improve methods for tracking and analyzing employee information across the entire company.
Free HR managers and supervisors to spend less time managing paper and more time
managing employees. Cloud plan—no extra charge.
Create an internal social network to promote communication, collaboration, and productivity
Calculate your own ROI
At LIKE.TG, we believe our HR solutions will help you achieve the fastest time to value and maximum ROI. But just like every business is unique, the ROI you could potentially achieve from investing in HR software is specific to your business. To help, we’ve created a handy ROI Calculator so you can see exactly how your company could benefit by automating HR processes.
If you’d like assistance calculating the ROI for your organization, book a freeHR Process Consultation with our experts today
Why LIKE.TG?
LIKE.TG is your ideal partner for HR software and HRMS solutions that drive employee engagement to all-time highs. We are ready to help you onboard new hires, manage their data, create a company social network, and support employee development efforts.
With LIKE.TG, you’ll get the right technology at the right price to achieve benefits where they matter most: a faster ROI and a stronger bottom line.
About Author: This article is written by a marketing team member at LIKE.TG. LIKE.TG is a leading provider of proven HR solutions, including recruiting, onboarding, employee communications engagement, and rewards recognition. Our user-friendly software increases employee productivity, delivers time and cost savings, and minimizes compliance risk.
Creating the Ideal Team as a Sure Way to Success
You cannot overemphasize the function of a successful team in a business. Every association business needs a successful team to pave a smooth path to success. An ideal team can cause massive growth for your success causing you to dominate your industry. But how can you create this 'perfect' or 'ideal' that will suit your organization and boost its output? Building a successful team can be quite challenging, but you will get the best team for your association business with the right tips.
Set Your Goals
Setting goals should be the first step you take when creating a team for your office. A team without a purpose is just a group of personnel working randomly. The best they will do is complete their daily activities without adding any significant value to your organization. Your team should have goals and objectives to fulfill. These goals and objectives should be time-based, giving yourself a request to meet. Your goals have to be measurable, specific, and achievable. After setting your goals, you should keep track of the progress. You should also lead by example as a way of helping teams grow.
When setting your goals, you have to consider the specific abilities of every member of the team. You have to set predefined roles for each team member according to their skills and area of specialization. Each member of the group contributes an essential section of accomplishing the goals. If you set your goals and have professional team members to achieve these goals, then you are placed on the path to success. It is easier to monitor the team's progress and accomplishment to know where your progress stands because all members share the same team-specific metrics.
Good Relationship
A good relationship is one thing you should build when creating a successful team. If you check a dysfunctional and effective team, you will see one of the things they lack is a good relationship. A successful team prides itself on the relationship between its members. The relationship status makes the team's goal and every member's function clear without any dispute or form of argument. The association also allows the team members to assist one another and make the team objectives a success.
While building a good relationship between your team members, you also have to maximize their potential and provide them with full support. Your support will allow them to perform well and do their job at their best. You can also motivate your remote team to take calculated risks to get results they cannot get in their comfort work zone.
Communication
Communication is also essential when building that ideal team. You have to develop a good communication platform between your team members. Good communication skills will allow you to understand your team members' weaknesses, issues, and problems during a task. Your team members cannot read minds, so you will not pass your messages, ideas, opinions, orders, etc., to them with a lack of communication. Lack of communication can cause resentment and frustration among the team, which is not a good thing for a successful business. Good communication ensures the success of your team instead of putting them in a frustrated state.
Lack of communication can also put your team members in a confused state. Confusion can be one of the most significant setbacks in any business operation. Communication will also allow you to understand the ground's issues, making you decide based on facts and not assumptions.
Increased Accuracy and Security with Automation
Accuracy is one of the most significant factors when it comes to local payroll and compliances. There are various elements involved that can result in errors while calculating a payroll. These elements can be changes in tax rates, amendments in previous laws, or the addition of new laws in local, state, and federal regulations. All these elements make a company’s payroll and compliance management prone to human errors resulting in sizable consequences.
Through automation and a centralized management system, a company can ensure accuracy while managing compliance and payrolls. This eliminates future costs that can arise as a result of such errors. Automation increases accuracy while saving the company’s resources and time which would normally be allocated to repetitive menial tasks involved in this process.
A compliance management system ensures disparate systems that members of the company receive only the information for which they have been authenticated by granting limited and restricted access to employees. Information is communicated correctly, which removes errors and promotes a well-connected work environment. It's instrumental in companies with a large multi-departmental structure. This helps in enhancing data security, using an integrated system, following and maintaining proper payroll processes to pay employees and use cloud-based payroll data.
Using PEO Service Providers
Utilizing partnership with PEO service providers is also one of the best ways to build a team for your industry. The PEO service provider allows companies to lease employees for their administrative tasks and other jobs. PEO service providers help you get efficient and productive workers to make a good team. You can partner with PEO in Germany if you have your business located there. PEO Germany will help you create the ideal team for your management. The team will consist of professionals and experts that will bring massive growth.
Final word
Appreciation goes a long way when creating or maintaining a perfect team within your organization. When you appreciate your team of workers, it gives them the feeling of relevance and importance. Treat the members of your team well by respecting them, give them incentives, etc., and they will provide you with excellent results
About Author: This article is written by a marketing team member at LIKE.TG. LIKE.TG is a leading provider of proven HR solutions, including recruiting, onboarding, employee communications engagement, and rewards recognition. Our user-friendly software increases employee productivity, delivers time and cost savings, and minimizes compliance risk.
10 Steps to the Perfect Employee Onboarding Experience
Onboarding employees is a vital part of any company’s hiring process. It sets the tone for what your new employee can expect and helps them feel comfortable with their decision to join your team.
Converting a new hire into an engaged and productive employee is no small feat. Whether you offer an effective onboarding process can make or break their engagement, productivity, and your company’s culture for years to come. It’s worth the investment in time to get it right.
Accordingly, you may want to take advantage of online employee onboarding to make sure that the process goes smoothly. A web-based employee onboarding system can make sure that you don’t miss any important points.
Employers need to provide new hires with a good start. The perfect employee onboarding systems welcome new employees with open arms. What’s more, it provides them with the resources they need to succeed.
To learn ten steps to the perfect new hire onboarding experience, keep reading.
1. Make Contact Before Day One
Nearly a third of onboarding new hires decide to jump ship or stick around within the first 90 days of employment. With this in mind, it’s important not to throw your new hires to the wolves. In doing so, you’re sending the wrong message. With an official job offer, you can set the right tone from the start.
Something as simple as an offer letter or first-day welcome email can go a long way toward making a new hire feel valued. Alternatively, a comprehensive electronic onboarding may do the trick. Whatever method you use to introduce a new hire to your company, make sure to use it before their first day on the job.
2. Make Their First Day Great
Most new hires want to meet their manager on their first day on the job. They also expect to get introduced to their peers. These basic niceties set the right tone for long-term employment.
More often than not, someone will ask a new hire about their first day of work. This question is common.
However, the answer could mean the difference between a career staff member and someone who’s already thinking about the next employment opportunity. Accordingly, you want to make sure a staff member’s first day on the job goes smoothly. You can do so with the right employee onboarding tools.
3. Provide Structure
Strong HR onboarding software can greatly boost employee retention. It can also significantly impact productivity in a positive way. For instance, you might clearly list a new employee’s roles and responsibilities in your employee onboarding software.
It’s also helpful to schedule a new hire’s first week on the job a week or two ahead of time. The worst feeling for a new hire is not knowing what they should do next. With software onboarding, you can make sure that your new hires are always on task.
Moreover, a highly structured first couple of weeks gives new hires the right impression. It shows new hires nonverbally that you know what you’re doing. For example, you can schedule and track meetings using an employee onboarding website.
4. Assemble a Team for the Process
The amount of support provided by managers during the first two years of employment affects employee sentiment greatly. During this time, employees are clarifying their role with the company.
At the same time, they’re evaluating how they feel about the job. They’re even weighing whether their salary adequately compensates them for their work.
The best way to help your new hire maximize their potential is by assembling a team. The team will provide support and encouragement. You can coordinate the team with a new hire onboarding portal.
Firstly, you’ll need a coach who can take on the role of mentor or advisor. You’ll also want someone else with experience in the position they’ve accepted.
Your new hire will benefit greatly from their expertise when needed. What’s more, they can reach out to team members easily using your new hire onboarding software.
5. Take It Easy on the Paperwork
More often than not, new hires spend their first day at a desk or in a conference room completing paperwork. There are tons of forms to complete, including I-9’s, employee handbook acknowledgments and payroll forms.
Some jobs also require the reading and signing of lengthy nondisclosure agreements. As a result, the first day of work is typically associated with a massive amount of paperwork. However, you can use digital employee onboarding solutions to ease this burden.
There’s a drawback to dropping a load of paper on your new hire the first day on the job. A ton of paperwork on day one can make a new hire feel disenchanted or overwhelmed.
Alternatively, it’s better to spread paperwork out with HR onboarding solutions. Here, you want to afford your new hire flexibility to complete paperwork in a timely manner but at their leisure.
For instance, with the electronic onboarding of new employees, you can allow employees to check all the boxes at their own pace. You may even think about making use of an employee onboarding app.
6. Onboarding Programs Are a Team Effort
In a new workplace, it’s important to feel socially accepted. A feeling of social acceptance is a key factor in the success of new employees. With an HR onboarding solution, you can make sure that your new hires stay connected.
It’s important that a new employee integrates into a company social network. In part, this kind of engagement provides new hires with access to important information and resources.
It takes an entire company to integrate a new hire and get them up to speed.
Here, you want to schedule face time with new hires and veteran employees. You’ll want to have them meet with experienced staff members from every relevant department in their first few weeks.
Part of these meetings may include job shadowing when appropriate. You can schedule these activities with an electronic onboarding platform. You can also make use of employee communication tools that work just like social media.
“Our hiring managers now have a reliable system that is easy to navigate. Our HR team can actively monitor the process, and assist if needed, but Onboard has helped them save so much valuable time and effort while increasing data accuracy. All of this has helped us improve compliance and gives us a powerful tool to achieve even more results in the future.”
Kaylee Collins HR Analyst of Osmose Utilities Services, Inc
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7. Establish Goals From the Start
Most employees will stay with a company for three or more years when they have a great onboarding experience. Vagueness is the enemy of a great new employee experience.
New hires need realistic and defined expectations. What’s more, they need these expectations communicated to them clearly.
With a thorough understanding of their roles, new hires can effectively evaluate their own progress. More importantly, they can prepare for a future with your company. The right onboarding software can help your new hires keep their careers on track.
8. Maintain an Open Dialogue
Nearly half of all workers feel put off when their superiors dismiss their ideas. After getting put on the back burner, most new hires will put forth the effort to share their ideas in the future.
You want your employees active and committed. Actively listening to and responding to employees is a great way to boost employee engagement.
Moreover, it’s vital to leave a channel open for honest, open feedback. By doing so, staff members are more likely to provide you with solutions to problems.
In some cases, they may shine a light on a problem that you didn’t even know existed. Top-notch onboarding software solutions can help you maintain an open line with your new hires.
9. Share Your Company Culture
Rating systems are becoming the norm for everything—including employee satisfaction. As company reviews become more common, HR professionals are noticing that the higher a company’s rating, the more likely new employees are to stay on the job.
Most new hires don’t fail because they don’t know how to do their work. More often than not, their personalities don’t mesh with the company work environment.
Ideally, you don’t want to hire new employees who are a poor cultural fit. Accordingly, you might assess employees in this regard. Even so, you’ll want to actively communicate and emphasized your organizational culture to promote the success of new hires.
10. Give New Hires Time to Adjust
Often, both employees and managers look forward to a scenario where the new hire “hits the ground running.” This phrase gets thrown around a lot and career circles. In reality, however, most employees take about eight months to reach their full potential.
Unfortunately, most employees who try to start out as company rock stars end up failing miserably. Any employer wants their staff members to start producing results as soon as possible.
However, putting too much pressure on employees too soon can prove detrimental to their development. Even worse, it can harm employee retention.
Why Great New Hire Onboarding Matters
As of July 2020, there were 5.8 million new hires in the United States. During the same time, 5 million of them quit, were discharged or got laid off.
On a brighter note, these numbers show that the job market persevered throughout the pandemic. However, this amount of turnover is abysmal.
It can cost more than $6,000 to hire a new employee. As a result, it’s important to onboard new hires attentively.
Hire New Staff, and Keep Them Around!
Despite a new hire’s skill set, it’s important to teach them what they need to know to do their jobs. It’s also important to build trust during the employee onboarding process.
Employees leave new jobs for many reasons. Some employees feel unsatisfied with their managers. Others may feel unhappy with their salaries.
Yet other employees may feel unsatisfied with their career outlook or benefits. In many cases, however, you can avoid this kind of sentiment by setting up new hires to succeed.
There are a lot of steps involved in the onboarding process. With the right technology, however, you can keep it all in sync easily.
From Start to Finish—Your Partner in HR
Now that you’ve learned ten steps to the perfect new hire onboarding experience, all you need is the best onboarding software.
LIKE.TG is the most powerful employee management automation software on the market. Our goal is to help organizations manage human resource tasks more efficiently and productively. We’re committed to making your life easier by automating all of your HR tasks and providing you with a single, easy-to-use system that will save you time and money.
LIKE.TG develops end-to-end onboarding systems for new employees. Our technology also allows you to nurture high-performing employees throughout their time at your company.
With LIKE.TG, your HR team can easily manage every aspect of the job, including payroll, vacation requests, benefits enrollment, salary reviews and much more.
Don’t wait. Start on the path to improving employee engagement today by claiming your free LIKE.TG trial.
About Author: This article is written by a marketing team member at LIKE.TG. LIKE.TG is a leading provider of proven HR solutions, including recruiting, onboarding, employee communications engagement, and rewards recognition. Our user-friendly software increases employee productivity, delivers time and cost savings, and minimizes compliance risk.
10 Effective Ways HR Manager Can Boost Employee Morale
The pandemic completely changed how the world functioned. According to ILO Monitor, 114 million people lost their jobs globally. Such a severe health crisis followed by employment loss is unlike anything we have experienced before.
From astrophysicists to primary school teachers, nearly every professional had to switch to a remote work environment almost overnight. And understandably, positive employee morale took a hit amidst all the chaos and fatalities brought by Coronavirus.
There is no doubt that working from home offers a plethora of benefits for both the organization and employees. The organization can considerably reduce operational costs, while employees can work from their homes’ comfort and save up commuting expenses.
But it’s been over a year since the pandemic started, and there is no certainty about when it will come to an end. Now more than ever, it’s imperative that HR managers offer employees the support they need. And here are some effective ways your organization can do that.
1. Refrain from Laying Off Employees
Mass layoffs have a serious impact on employee morale. While the employees who managed to retain their position may feel a moment of relief, they are likely to live in fear of being next in line for losing their jobs.
As previously mentioned, tens of millions of people lost their jobs because of the pandemic. If your organization has reached a point where it’s necessary to downsize, you should consider alternatives to mass layoffs.
You can suggest reducing work hours or transferring idle employees to other departments. It can also save your organization from going through the exhausting process of layoffs.
2. Keep Employees in the Loop
Humans are naturally wired to resist change. And considering how rapidly things have changed because of the Covid-19 outbreak, your employees might be on edge about how their roles will change.
It is crucial to keep the employees in the loop about the organization’s plan of action for the pandemic. Otherwise, employees might resort to gossiping and believing false rumors, which can propagate unnecessary panic. Employees will be able to concentrate on work rather than getting distracted by what’s transpiring through the grapevine.
The leaders and managers should make it a point to communicate facts clearly. In a crisis, the best way is to lead with truth. If the organization is struggling and may have to take downsizing measures, your employees should be prepared for it.
HR mistakes impact your entire organization. Learn how to avoid the 12 most common mistakes with our free ebook.
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3. Follow Safety Guidelines
This pandemic can only be contained if everyone is following health and safety guidelines issued by official healthcare authorities. Whether you work in an industry where telecommuting is not possible or you’re planning to resume in-office operations soon, the health and safety of your employees should be a top priority.
Equip the workplace with basic amenities such as hand sanitizers and hand soaps. Furthermore, it’s important to rearrange the office layout to make sure there is adequate distance between employees. And of course, wearing masks should be mandatory.
4. Offer Essential Medical Resources
The constant fear of contracting Coronavirus or infecting a loved one can be a great source of stress. This is the time to think about offering your employees additional medical resources. Providing employees better medical coverage will be appreciated by them and boost employee morale.
5. Host Virtual Get Together
With traveling restrictions and social distancing measures, many people are unable to see their family or friends on a regular basis.
Therefore, with all the lockdowns and stay-at-home orders, your staff is experiencing isolation like never before. Lack of social interaction can have a significant impact on a person’s mood, well-being, and productivity.
The HR department must find creative ways to host virtual get together for employees. From Happy Hours on Fridays to Trivia Night, planning virtual events every week can help you ensure high morale. You can also explore virtual team-building activities to improve collaboration and communication among team members.
6. Establish Better Channels of Communication
The way this virus has affected the world was completely unpredictable and unexpected. With fake news and other false information circulating on the internet, HR should take the initiative to provide employees with reliable information from official sources. Creating and sharing a weekly newsletter containing information regarding the pandemic can help alleviate anxiety.
Clear communication plays a key role in seamless business operations. Establishing better two-way channels of communication is all the more important now. HR managers should take on the responsibility to routinely talk to individual employees to address their concerns.
Meeting with too many people can make it difficult for some of the staff to share their thoughts. It would be best to follow the 2-pizza rule for meetings to quickly resolve issues and ensure that no one is left behind.
7. Improve Flexibility
It’s quite possible that your employees are taking care of a child, a sick parent, or dealing with their own health issues. Leading with empathy is indispensable in these testing times. Rather than expecting employees to immediately respond to every email or Slack message, allow them more flexibility to manage their schedule.
Several organizations have introduced a flextime work policy. This involves setting a number of core work hours and giving the employees the freedom to choose their starting and ending times.
A compressed workweek is another great alternative to conventional 9-5 work hours. This allows employees to complete their standard 40-hour workweek in less than five days and enjoy a long weekend.
8. Prioritize Work-Life Balance
When employees are working from home, it can become difficult to distinguish between work and personal life. Employees may continue to work, despite completing their work for the day.
Managers and supervisors should avoid asking for updates or calling employees after work hours. Just because they’re at home doesn’t mean they have to be on-call 24/7. Prioritizing work-life balance is necessary to avoid burnout.
Just saying that you care about your employees’ mental health is not enough. It should be an essential part of your company culture. Lead by example and share different ways you are taking care of your mental health. Regularly check in with your employees with a simple ‘how are you?’. Just like email personalization makes customers feel special, it’s also effective in making employees feel seen.
9. Celebrate Personal Wins
These days there isn't much optimistic news to look up to. When every day feels the same, your employees can fall into a funk. This can severely impact their productivity and quality of work.
The HR department can introduce some positivity into employees’ day-to-day lives by celebrating personal wins. Start a newsletter and ask employees to share their achievements, no matter how big or small. Whether a staff member adopted a kitten or someone got to meet their family after months, it’s worth sharing!
10. Encourage Time Off
Since employees are working from home and probably can’t travel anywhere, why would they need leaves? Well, even if employees are not going to Europe on vacation, they still need time off to rest and revitalize. Encourage employees to utilize their paid leaves.
The Bottom Line
The anxiety and stress of these uncertain times are seriously affecting employee morale. Disengaged and unmotivated employees will produce poor quality work, which can be detrimental to your business. This pandemic is an opportunity for organizations to showcase how much they value their employees.
About Author:Becky Halls is a Co-Founder of Hyperise, a Hyper personalization toolkit for B2B marketers. She’s an experienced Growth Marketer, passionate about product design/development and online marketing.
WFH Burnout: A Few Ways To Engage Your Team While Working Remotely
Working remotely makes some things easier, but it isn’t perfect as a full-time approach. Notably, the employee experience still has a risk of burnout: in fact, research suggests (per Indeed) that most people think it’s worsened during the pandemic. Any team member who reaches that point will struggle to get by, and their team will lose productivity.
Due to this, the home office needs just as much HR work as its classic predecessor — or even more. Part of your job as a team manager is to prevent WFH burnout, but there’s a lot to consider. The structure and schedule of your workday, the solitude of working from home and related mental health concerns, the increased influence of remote employees’ personal lives… Juggling these concerns is the path to avoiding burnout in your remote workforce.
In this post, we’re going to cover some straightforward tips for how you can effectively engage a team of remote employees, helping to steer them away from employee burnout. If you can make good use of them in the long term, it’ll greatly strengthen your business. Let’s get started.
Encourage workers to change their surroundings
When you’re in a regular office, the necessary level of activity means that the immediate environment changes somewhat frequently (and the working environment really matters). Workers move post-it notes around, rearrange their desks, alter the lighting… They don’t radically shake things up, but they keep them slightly fresh. Most vitally, the commutes ensure that going to work truly feels like going somewhere.
But when you’re in a home office, it can be the same every day. Despite having the power to tweak it however you like, you might not have the will — and with no commute to keep things interesting, you can start to feel trapped. This is why you should encourage your remote employees to change their surroundings on occasion. It’s key to employee engagement.
You could make it a competition of sorts: who can come up with the most interesting home office arrangement? Alternatively, you could draw inspiration from the featured image and prompt people to take their work laptops outside. A mobile data dongle can easily provide enough speed for this. It isn’t an all-day option, of course, but just an hour or two working outside can leave someone feeling significantly refreshed.
Make the most of suitable communication tools
You may be feeling tired of Zoom at this point, but that doesn’t mean you can’t squeeze more from it. Instead of just holding boring meetings, why not run some social events? You could create some quizzes for people to enjoy, or even some video-gaming contests. Or maybe you could stick with a simple gathering: take an hour or so in the middle of a workday and gather everyone together to talk about whatever comes up.
Keep in mind that Zoom isn’t the only VoIP tool on the market, and others can do some interesting things. Topia, for instance, allows spatial video chat: in other words, participants can move in and out of conversations much as they would in real-world exchanges, elevating employee engagement. Additional features like this can do much to freshen online discussions.
Now, communication tools will never entirely make up for the loss of in-person meetings, so you should still arrange face-to-face meetings whenever possible. Even if you can only get your remote employees together a few times each year, the time spent in physical proximity will do more to support collaboration than anything you can achieve at a distance.
Offer simple suggestions for better work/life balance
Even though remote working has made some parts of work/life balance easier (less time spent commuting means more free time, for instance), it’s made other parts harder. Most notably, clocking in and out isn’t as straightforward as it was. There used to be a clear delineation: your workday begins when you reach the office, and it ends when you leave. Now things are blurry.
Working from home means that you can reach the end of your hours but remain at your workstation with little impetus to go elsewhere. You can unthinkingly work on a project for hours that you’re not getting paid for, then find that you’re feeling unusually weary. Part of this is due to the common fear of being insufficiently productive while working from home: something that can hugely detract from employee engagement even as it keeps people stuck at their desks.
As the team manager, some of the onus is on you to ensure that your remote employees aren’t working too hard. If people are struggling to handle their time effectively, address them not as the boss but as someone else trying to make the best of a tough time. Tell them about how you manage your schedule, and make relevant suggestions (including any time-management tips you can muster). They’ll appreciate the guidance.
Place more emphasis on personal development
The lack of colleague interaction makes remote-working days feel longer yet ultimately seem to have gone by faster. Each day is a grind, then you notice that several months have passed. It’s disconcerting and can make you wonder what you’re actually achieving. It bears noting that burnout isn’t always the result of too much stress, anxiety, or responsibility. Sometimes it can result from a fundamental loss of motivation — so what can motivate people?
Rewards are great, but you need something grander. This is where personal development comes in. Just having a stable job is enough to inspire gratitude, but not enough to really keep someone interested. By listening to what your team members want to achieve and coming up with plans to help them grow, you can solidify their loyalty through employee engagement that makes the average workday feel more meaningful through building up to something bigger.
And remember that a personal development plan doesn’t have to explicitly bring value to the business to be worthwhile. Suppose that one of your workers wants to start running marathons, for instance. It won’t generate any revenue for you, but it will make them healthier and more content, and those things will enhance their productivity. Make your remote employees happy and it’ll always work out well for your company.
About Author: This article is written by a marketing team member at LIKE.TG. LIKE.TG is a leading provider of proven HR solutions, including recruiting, onboarding, employee communications engagement, and rewards recognition. Our user-friendly software increases employee productivity, delivers time and cost savings, and minimizes compliance risk.
How HR Can Help New Employees Settle In
The first week at a new job can be a stressful experience. New hires have to adapt to a new setting, different job functions, and company culture while being the new kid on the block. And with the growing number of remote workers, settling into a new job is even more complicated.
Successful onboarding helps new hires adapt to all these changes. Human resources can take steps to make this process simple and welcoming. Employees start off with a positive experience, which can lead to improved productivity and better employee retention.
How can HR teams create a great onboarding experience from day one?
Welcoming New Employees Right From the Start
Making new employees feel welcome starts before they even step foot into the office. Human resource managers and departments are uniquely skilled to personalize this process for each new employee. Early onboarding strategies start with a congratulatory letter telling them that the company is excited to get them started.
A great way to welcome a new hire is to get their department involved in this process. Allow them to create their own welcome process. They can add their own special details, like making a short video introducing team members.
New employees are always excited to learn about the company's benefits. Ship out a package with your employee handbook and a list of the company's most exciting perks. Highlight unique corporate outings or activities, such as a company picnic or team building events.
You can even include some basic corporate swag like a branded pen and coffee mug. A strong, personalized welcome like this will go a long way to creating a positive memory for freshly hired staff members.
Simplifying the Onboarding Process
To help new employees adapt to the office and company procedures, adapt the onboarding process for a smoother transition. New hires have a lot to get done during their first few days. Simplifying tasks for them will help everyone get up to speed quickly.
Here’s how your department can do that:
The First Day
To ensure new employees have a near-perfect onboarding experience, their first day should be more welcoming and less overwhelming. Work with their department to ensure that they have everything they need to get started on day one. That may mean a bit of extra leg work to ensure that their technology and working spaces are in good order.
Next, make their first day interesting. It will be hard for new hires to retain much if they are forced to watch a one or two-hour video of policies. Go over the broad strokes of what they need to know and offer to answer any detailed questions later.
Meeting their team should be a pleasant experience. If you can, organize as many team members as possible for a brief conference with introductions. If there is more time, you can plan a lunch or breakfast meet and greet.
Getting these small details worked out beforehand will provide a better onboarding experience. When asked, “How was your first day?” new hires can give a good report. This will help your company to stand out to job seekers.
New Hire Documentation
While you don’t want to overwhelm new employees with a lot of paperwork, it is necessary to ensure that important business policies are written down and handed out. Have employees sign the form attesting that they have read and agreed to them as well.
These policies should include:
Rules for governing device use, repair, loss, and return, especially any that can be taken home.
Acceptable behaviors and disciplinary processes. Include social media policies.
Business and/or work hours, including holidays, paid time off, and sick leave policies.
Salary and payment policies.
A more detailed explanation of the benefits.
However, don’t overwhelm them with too much information at one time. Mail the document ahead of time and review the basics at their orientation. You can also provide electronic documentation to reduce paperwork for them.
Onboarding Beyond Day One
Employees should start their new jobs with clear expectations, goals, and the ability to ask questions to clear up confusion. Human resource managers should understand that onboarding doesn’t end with dropping new hires off at their departments to ensure this transition goes smoothly. Instead, HR should collaborate with each department to provide clarity and communication for a successful transition.
Here are some ways that groups can work together to help new employees have a better onboarding experience:
Assign a mentor or a work buddy. The first day in a new office can be intimidating. A mentor can help new employees navigate their career path in your company, and a work buddy provides a lunch partner for day one. They can also answer questions you might not have thought of, like “What do I do if something breaks?”
The more guidance they have, the quicker new staff members will integrate into the company. This will help them feel like part of the team right away.
Spread out the onboarding process. Outside what needs to be covered the first week, create a process to help employees get through their first 90 days. This can ease their stress compared to making them get everything done at once.
This also helps create a positive atmosphere to hit their stride without too much undue anxiety. At 30 days, send them a survey about their onboarding experience so they have time to process their experience. This data is critical to refining your onboarding process.
To improve employee satisfaction, keep in touch from time to time to see how they are doing. New employees who are struggling may feel like giving up after a month and a half. This is a good time to set up a check-in appointment.
If they are struggling, ask them about their specific challenges and if they'd like their department head to sit in a meeting. This will allow you to clear up minor issues and develop a strategy for bigger problems. Following up again at the end of 90 days shows them that they are valuable to the company.
Share company culture. A 2019 survey showed that 79% of adults look at a company’s culture and mission before they even apply. That means that most of your new hires are already keenly aware of this factor.
It’s up to you to make sure that they know what the culture looks like in practice. You may want to survey your current employees to describe your corporate culture. Draft a small document or graphic to illustrate it and make it part of your onboarding documentation.
Onboarding Remote Workers
Since the pandemic, many positions have switched to fully or partially remote. If this applies to you, you can still create a positive onboarding experience. It will just take a bit more effort for today’s HR managers to boost employee morale from a distance.
First of all, all documentation will need to be stored in the cloud. Use digital signatures to streamline employee responses. Work with your IT department to safely set up and secure these processes.
One of your most important tools is creating reliable communication and check-in processes, particularly for remote workers. Organize virtual get-together events along with regular webcam check-ins and work meetings. Integrate ice-breaker and team-building activities to encourage connection with your remote workers.
This new paradigm means you must address remote working issues for both new employees. Set up clear digital policies and make them part of your welcome package. Give new hires the tools to be successful when working remotely, including ways to manage work-life balance and how to incorporate company culture at home.
Providing a positive new hire experience even before their first day goes a long way to improving employee satisfaction. That can lead to more productivity and better retention. HR departments that develop positive onboarding experiences help their companies succeed.
About Author: This article is written by a marketing team member at LIKE.TG. LIKE.TG is a leading provider of proven HR solutions, including recruiting, onboarding, employee communications engagement, and rewards recognition. Our user-friendly software increases employee productivity, delivers time and cost savings, and minimizes compliance risk.
13 Fun & Creative Employee Appreciation Ideas
If you're a team leader, manager, or owner, can you think of the last time that you told your team they were doing a great job or that you appreciate them? If you have to think about the answer for a long time, that's not a great sign.
All too often, employee appreciation is either grossly overlooked or attempted with too little sincerity. When this happens, employees don’t feel truly recognized and respected for their hard work. But it's never too late to change that.
While celebrating Employee Appreciation Day is a good start, it’s actually far more important to show appreciation for your team members in some way every day. By investing time and energy into the self-esteem, confidence, and sense of value that your employees have day to day, everyone benefits from this healthy dynamic of mutual respect and gratitude.
Better employee retention, higher performance, improved productivity, and increased employee engagement within the workplace are all-natural by-products of regularly showing how valued each person is.
While gift cards, ice cream, and other tangible rewards are a great way of showing employees appreciation, below, you’ll find some simple but highly effective employee appreciation ideas that add value to your team members' daily lives and enhance your company culture.
1. Provide a Comfortable Working Environment
Physical comfort is a basic need for any worker. But going a little bit above and beyond can demonstrate your desire to make their day as comfortable and stress-free as possible.
Invest in ergonomic chairs, add some indoor plants, and make sure the office is always looking clean and inviting. Maintain great care of the spaces your employees occupy, as it shows continued effort on the company’s part to make their days as pleasant as possible.
If employees work remotely, ensure that they have the tools they need to get the job done. Working from home is already fraught with additional challenges. Ensuring your employees have a comfortable set-up with the right tools and equipment can reduce stress and improve morale.
2. Regularly Ask for Employee Feedback
Many times, management is clueless about how to really please employees. But there’s a simple solution: asking.
Holding feedback sessions, creating a “suggestions” box, and sending out feedback surveys can help bosses stay in the loop about what kinds of rewards and expressions of gratitude are appreciated most. You can also use one of the SurveyMonkey alternatives, as long as your survey is simple and easy to fill by your employees.
By making sure that employees from every level are provided with the space to speak up about new ideas or issues that concern them, you can hear directly from them how they’d like to be treated and what changes they might like to see in the future.
It also provides an opportunity for managers to pick up on any bullying, harassment, mismanagement or otherwise that may be happening behind the scenes.
3. Celebrate Birthdays and Work Anniversaries
Creating a birthday tradition in the workplace gives employees something extra to look forward to once a year. Plus, it provides everyone with a wonderful excuse to get away from their desks and enjoy a slice of cake!
Keep a birthday calendar in a communal space to help employees get to know each other better and give everyone an annual opportunity to feel celebrated. You can do the same thing with work anniversaries or other life events.
4. Provide Mental Health Days
Most organizations offer sick days and personal days, but few provide days off for mental health. These days are particularly beneficial to those suffering from anxiety, depression, or even high stress. However, they’re also good for when employees feel burned out or in need of a short break to prevent serious mental health issues.
Just like sick days, you can offer mental health days in a limited yearly supply, with the option to extend them if a serious issue arises. Giving your employees time to nurture their mental health shows that you care about them as a person and not just for what they can do for the company.
5. Be Flexible With Paid Time Off
Giving your staff members paid time off is a great way to show appreciation. You can award them additional vacation days that they can use at their leisure or dole out a few hours at a time with late starts, long lunches, and early quitting time. This gives them more time to spend with their family or do something else that they enjoy.
6. Cater Lunch or Provide Snacks
Employers can show appreciation through various food-related gestures that cater to the tastes and preferences of their employees. Here are some ways to incorporate food as a form of appreciation:
Employers can arrange for catered lunches to be brought into the office from popular local restaurants or specialized catering services that offer a variety of cuisines.
Arranging for food trucks to visit the office provides a unique and enjoyable experience.
Set up a well-stocked snack bar with a variety of healthy and indulgent options like fresh fruit, nuts, yogurt, chips, chocolates, and soft drinks.
Providing breakfast treats such as bagels, pastries, or a smoothie bar on certain days of the week can be a delightful way to start the day.
7. Make Celebrating Achievements the Norm
As previously stated, showing employee appreciation isn’t just about one day; it’s about creating a culture of appreciation.
Give positive feedback when your employees accomplish a small task or a big project. This feedback can be in the form of an e-mail or by stopping at their desk. Everyone has different comfort levels, so get to know your employees and what form of communication they are most comfortable with.
Or send out a company-wide email acknowledging your employee's hard work, recent success on a specific project, or anything similar. Other co-workers will most likely respond to the email, adding other congratulations and resulting in an even bigger act of gratitude.
One way you can implement this is by sharing your employee of the month through email. They will love the praise and be happier knowing you want to share their successes with the whole company.
Setting up an employee recognition program is another way to give everyone the opportunity to be recognized, and it helps promote productivity in the workplace.
8. Speak Out Against Discrimination
Having a company culture that refuses to tolerate any form of discrimination and aims to be as inclusive as possible is essential. However, taking measures to frequently discuss what that means will improve the employee experience and everyone’s sense of safety and empathy.
No employee should be made to feel uncomfortable or discriminated against by any person or policy within (or outside of) the working environment.
Show your appreciation for employees belonging to a minority or often discriminated groups. Make it easy for them to bring up concerns and normalize zero-tolerance for bias, bigotry, and discrimination of any kind.
9. Offer Career Advancement
Upskilling is one of the most desirable factors in employment positions. Now, more than ever, employees want to know that there is room for them to grow and expand their careers. Offering career development programs is one great way to give them exactly that.
The rapidly changing world of today means that constant reskilling and retraining exercises are necessary for certain employment roles to stay relevant. Implementing an upskilling program is one of the most useful, valuable, and future-oriented gifts a company can give its employees.
10. Give Career-Based Incentives
One of the most practical ways to show your appreciation for employees is to give them rewards based on facilitating their current job. A bigger working space, a private working space, and mentorship are all highly valued rewards by strategic employees.
Using job-based rewards as incentives for high performance shows that your company is ready and willing to compensate for hard work with realistic opportunities for individual career advancement.
11. Establish an Employee Recognition Program
A great way to show appreciation is to set up an employee recognition program. Appreciation through awards is a reminder of their excellent work. Awards can range in cost depending on the company, but we have a list of ideas for employee appreciation awards to get you started.
Another slightly more involved way is to use gamification to show your appreciation. For instance, you can have each team member claim a task. For each task completed, your team members will receive points associated with the value of their completed tasks.
You can then allow employees to redeem their points using a corporate rewards portal. In the portal, you can offer anything from vacation days, to work-from-home days, or even scholarships for continuing education.
12. Offer Gym Memberships
Employers can demonstrate commitment to their employees' well-being by offering free or discounted gym memberships, or by investing in an on-site company gym. These perks offer a convenient way for them to relieve stress, improve physical health, and boost mental clarity, all of which can enhance productivity and job satisfaction.For companies opting to build an in-house gym, it can encourage a healthy work-life balance, foster greater team bonding as colleagues may work out together, and ultimately, reflect the company's investment in its employees' long-term health and happiness.
13. Get Social
Your company’s social media pages are an excellent place to share some good news. You can use your social media channels to recognize employees on special days, such as their anniversaries or birthdays.
You could also post a photo along with a blurb highlighting an employee’s contribution to your company. You could also list fun and interesting facts about them that their current workers may not know. Or, you could write a glowing LinkedIn recommendation for a star staff member. This kind of recommendation can help them find success in their current role—and in the future.
The Final Word: Always Be Authentic
However your company chooses to celebrate achievements, express its appreciation, and reward employees, the most important thing is that it’s done with authenticity.People can pick up on forced or disingenuous gratitude far more easily than you’d think. That kind of expression is only going to cause a wave of eye-rolling and resentment within the workplace. Neither of which are good for the employees nor the company side they work for.
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About the AuthorThis article is written by our marketing team at LIKE.TG. LIKE.TG is a leading provider of HR solutions, including recruiting, onboarding, employee engagement, and intranet software. Our aim is to help your company improve employee engagement, employee productivity, and to save you valuable time!
Empowering your workforce to be creative
Without a happy and thriving workforce, your business will struggle to be successful. Creativity is key in marketing and empowering your experts can make all the difference to both atmosphere and output.
However, there’s little doubt that COVID-19 has shaken up business as usual – so how can your company balance essential processes with creativity?
Having full control of your marketing processes and utilizing the power of technology can certainly provide a launchpad for creative victories. In this article, we take a look at how you can transform your creative efforts effectively.
The roles of technology and in-house marketing
In-housing, driven by various factors including powerful technology, has been a hot topic in recent years. In a recent study, marketers revealed that they feel in-house marketing will be essential to the sector this year and in the future.
Bannerflow carries out an annual report looking into the state of in-house marketing – the 2021 study reveals that 58% of marketing decision-makers have noted creativity increases from their in-house teams.
Businesses involved in the study are looking to in-housing more and more, too – 73% said they’ve brought all or some of their digital marketing in-house showing a clear popularity increase.
CEO of Bannerflow, Nicholas Högberg, commented on the findings:
“After a turbulent and challenging year for most sectors, many marketing teams remain in-house, but it’s great to see that creativity isn’t being limited – instead it’s flourishing.”
Creativity certainly seems to have been high on the agenda for marketers in the past year. Many have strived to empower this within their in-house teams and maintain motivation during COVID-19 times.
So what have marketers done to inspire creativity in their in-house teams?
Creative workshops – 66%
Cross-team collaboration tasks – 65%
Collaboration tech – 63%
Training – 48%
Interestingly, barriers included organizational structure, pressure to deliver results, plus lack of time and technology.
When it comes to tech – digital transformation has been a big topic for many years, especially in the past year. In fact, digital communications have been sped up by up to four years due to the pandemic, according to a McKinsey report.
Widening your technical capabilities can be a huge driver for success in this area and can amalgamate with in-house marketing to inspire a recipe for success when implemented effectively.
In-house marketing is an exciting, evolving framework and solution – it’s also incredibly flexible and can work for your business in ways that can fit for your business. Businesses are choosing from three ways of in-house working that click with their structure – these are:
A complete in-house marketing agency model
A traditional method
A hybrid approach
Moving further forwards into 2021 and the future, 62% of marketers think in-housing will create the space for more efficient working in a remote setting. In addition, 58% envisage it helping to save on external costs and 57% believe it could increase creativity.
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The next steps you can take to empower your workforce
Get everyone involved
It’s not just the exec team who has great ideas. Lean on your delivery teams for inspiration and creativity when it comes to the services you offer and how to keep people happy in your business. They carry out the day-to-day work so know first-hand what’s important and what’s achievable. Blue sky thinking is great but only if the idea can be serviced.
Allocate time for creativity
Capacity may be tight but it’s important that time is allowed for people to get their heads together and thinking creatively. Schedule dedicated internal time for this and encourage employees to work collaboratively. This could be a regular meeting to discuss plans and strategy or simply an hour in an employee’s schedule for them to think about projects or plans and to offer up to three creative solutions for everyone to consider.
Mix up teams
It’s easy for people to get stuck in a certain way of thinking so have a shake-up when it comes to teams. Encourage cross-collaboration and ask that people learn what others have to offer or what they need for the business to thrive and be innovative.
Your marketing team, for example, may need more input from your sales team in terms of what messaging they think works with clients and what keeps people engaged.
Mix up your teams regularly, ensure people get face-to-face time with those they don’t work with day today and you’ll soon start to see creative solutions to problems at hand.
Delegate responsibility
It’s understandable as a manager or business owner to want to keep those creative ideas close to your chest but delegating responsibility for coming up with ideas can empower people to think creatively. Let people lead and take inspiration from them.
Set clear expectations
Don’t send your employees off on a wild creativity goose chase, ensure they understand why they’re being asked to come up with ideas or get involved with wider business decisions. Set boundaries on what they’re expected to achieve or offer up and you’ll find people more inclined to get involved.
Try to avoid tight deadlines, give people plenty of time to come up with creative solutions to problems. This means taking the time to scope out your plans for the months ahead and briefing people in beforehand on what you aim to achieve and how they can contribute.
Introduce tools that help with collaboration
Project management tools and collaboration tools that allow your workforce to band together to come up with more creative ideas is essential when adopting this shift in mindset.
It’s even more important with more and more businesses now working remotely, allowing employees access to platforms that make collaborations easy.
Reconsider what you can do in house
You know your industry and business better than anyone. Is there work that can be managed in-house that can be injected with a little creativity? As noted, marketing is one area where many businesses are implementing in-house teams.
This allows them to implement processes that allow room for creativity with no need to brief in and manage an external agency. Take back your content creation for social media channels and print advertising.
Is there something that can be done with tone of voice to increase engagement? Are you sharing your message on the right platforms? It’s time to rethink and strategize creatively when spreading the word about what you can do.
Be transparent
Much like setting clear goals and objectives when empowering people to be creative, you should also be transparent about why you’re encouraging this and what you hope to achieve. Everyone needs to be bought into this creative approach and so transparency at the start is key.
Moving your marketing team in-house can have clear benefits for your business – combined with being progressive with technology can contribute to empowering your workforce for years to come
About Author: This article is written by a marketing team member at LIKE.TG. LIKE.TG is a leading provider of proven HR solutions, including recruiting, onboarding, employee communications engagement, and rewards recognition. Our user-friendly software increases employee productivity, delivers time and cost savings, and minimizes compliance risk.
HR Management: What Traits to Look for in Remote Employees
As technology has evolved, remote work has become a new normal for many individuals. With recent technological advances, people can now work from anywhere in the world. Right now, there is an increasing number of companies that rely on remote workers. This year, 55% of businesses globally already offer remote positions, and 18% of the workforce telecommutes on a full-time basis. There’s really no denying how much working remotely has been booming, and right now, there’s no stopping it.
For many people, remote work is a lifesaver, and they have been delighted with this kind of work setting. However, it is not all roses. There are also plenty of things you need to know before your company/business decides on hiring people remotely. What are its advantages? How do you deal with the hiring process? Ultimately, what should you look for in a remote employee? Read on, and we’ll help you get answers to those questions.
Traits to Look For In A Remote Employee
It’s not as easy as it sounds to find a great remote worker. If you are on the hunt for someone to work with you long-term, you have to know what to look for. Your remote worker will be an essential asset to your company, and you should make sure they are a good fit. Here are some of the best qualities of a great remote worker that you should look for:
Communicative
One of the most difficult challenges in working remotely is constant communication. Make sure you look for a responsive candidate that is willing to stay connected with you and their future team, constantly keeping everyone in the loop. This will ensure that you are all on the same page and are working towards the same goal.
Self-Motivated and Disciplined
This is a fundamental trait when working remotely, as nobody is physical with them to make sure they’re doing their tasks and are motivated at all times. The best remote workers know how to move forward even without somebody looking over their shoulder. It’s also a great option to hire someone who already has experience working remotely so that they already know what to expect.
Has Great Organizational Habits
In line with being self-motivated and disciplined, great remote employees should have excellent time management and organizational abilities as well. After all, how their whole day will go all depends on them. So, look for someone who knows how to manage their schedule and keeps a detailed list of their daily tasks. They should also have great attention to detail and be able to meet deadlines.
Collaborative
On top of their strong communication skills, a great remote worker should also know how to collaborate with their remote team. They know what their fellow team members are working on, and they’ll make an effort to complement it.
Passionate
You’ll indeed be flooded with tons of applications, and plenty of them will put little to no effort into their application. A lot of them only apply for a remote job because they like the idea of working at home. Definitely a bad sign, isn’t it? What you want is the exact opposite of that — someone who is truly excited to be a part of what you want to achieve and will work hard to help you with it.
Resourceful
Remote employees wouldn’t have access to office amenities. This means they have to find their own way to be able to work effectively in their environment. On top of that, they would also be great problem solvers. They make an effort to look for resources that will help them resolve the issues they might encounter.
Adaptable and Flexible
A remote worker’s ability and willingness to adjust are vital to building an excellent relationship with their clients and teammates. There are instances when you need them for a meeting at a time that may be weird for them or maybe be unable to respond right away to their questions about work. A great remote employee will still be able to put their best foot forward despite those kinds of circumstances.
Confident and Reliable in Making Decisions
People who are constantly second-guessing themselves are absolutely not fit to be a remote worker. It would help if you had someone who can make thought-out and informed decisions about their work. Choose someone you’d be able to rely on to do the right thing and get the job done.
Business Advantages of Hiring Remote Employees
Still undecided whether hiring remote employees is for you? We’ve listed some of the business advantages of a remote work setting:
Reduced office costs. If you decide on hiring remote workers, you won’t have to spend money on leasing office space and extra utility expenses.
Limitless candidates. Deciding on a remote work setting also means having access to an entire world of possible employees.
Increased Productivity. According to FlexJobs' survey, 95% of their respondents have higher or the same productivity when working from home, and 51% of their respondents report being more productive when working remotely.
Quick Tips on Hiring Remote Employees
Finally, here are some quick tips that can help you through your remote hiring process:
Examine their resume well. A single resume can already tell you a lot about your candidate, so make sure to take a good look at it. Make sure their resumes are well-written. If you want a guide of what an excellent resume looks like, check out these executive resume samples.
Provide questions. Because you now have applicants from all over the world, you will need an efficient way to choose the ones worth interviewing. One way to filter them out is to make them answer a few questions and see if they meet your baseline criteria.
Take advantage of video calling. Hiring someone remotely means you won’t be able to sit with them in the same room during the interviewing process. The next best option you have is a face-to-face video job interview where you can hear how they speak and pick up the non-verbal cues they express while they answer your questions.
Get the candidate’s future team involved in the interview. After all, they are the ones who will collaborate and communicate with each other to achieve the company goals.
Take note of not only their professional background but also their work ethics. Do you think this candidate is really interested in what the company does? Do you think they’ll be able to handle the work well? Do they already have remote work experience? Ask questions that will make the perfect candidate stand out.
Final Thoughts
Nobody is perfect. It’s cliche but it is true. Looking for the best remote employee is definitely not an easy feat. It needs a lot of time and effort. The traits we’ve discussed are just a guide and are only supposed to help you know what qualities you should look for in a remote employee. In reality, you won’t be able to hire someone with all of those traits for every role you need to fill. The important thing is you look for someone that is best suited for each role, be supportive of them, and put an extra measure of patience and training. This way, you’ll be able to help your remote workers move towards success.
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About Author: Mindy Allen is a freelance writer who specializes in website content, blogs, email copywriting, and social media content. She was a former English teacher before she decided to start working remotely. She has been a remote employee for over two years and loves giving tips on remote work settings.
Remote Employee Support Benefits to Consider Giving to Your Team
The business world has become increasingly digital for decades now. Thanks to project management tools, video conferencing, chat platforms, and more, business no longer needs to be conducted under a single roof. Companies can now meet, collaborate, communicate, and get work done from virtually anywhere with an internet connection.
In the face of the novel coronavirus pandemic, remote work has become not just a luxury, but a necessity for businesses around the country. Companies have abandoned their perk-filled offices, and many of them plan to stay this way. This dramatic change has many businesses questioning one single thing: what do benefits look like for employees who work from home?
If you’ve found yourself pondering the same question, we’re here to help. Read on to learn about some employee support benefits to consider giving to your team while they work from home.
Upgrade Health Insurance Coverage
Health is top of mind for people around the globe right now. According to a nationwide Gallup poll, 60% of Americans reported feeling worried about their health in the face of the Coronavirus pandemic, up 21% from pre-pandemic times.
If you run an established company with a handful of full-time employees, chances are that you already offer health insurance to your full-time staff. If so, consider upgrading the health insurance that you offer your employees to help soothe worries and give them a bit more peace of mind.
Here are some modifications to your health insurance plans that you may consider offering:
If you don’t already offer coverage to employees’ dependents, consider extending your coverage to include them, too.
Increase the amount you pay toward your employees’ premiums to relieve some of the financial burdens on them.
Grandfather all covered employees into the next coverage period without needing to meet a certain threshold of hours worked; this can enable employees who need to take time off to do so without fearing losing their health coverage.
Cover Home Office Setup
Chances are, most of your employees never expected to work full time from home. As such, their homes may not be set up with a designated office space. They may find themselves working 8 hours a day from their kitchen table, or bouncing from couch to kitchen to bed to keep comfortable. It’s not optimal for comfort or productivity.
Help them establish a space in their home that’s appropriate for a full day’s work by providing a home office setup stipend. Provide enough for a desk, chair, secondary monitor, keyboard, and mousepad. You may also consider offering an ongoing stipend for internet, as many of your employees may be forced to upgrade their internet speed to enable them to complete work.
Offer Wellness Services
In addition to coronavirus-related health concerns, full-time remote employees currently face a wealth of new wellness concerns, too. Without an office to commute to and coworkers to co-mingle with, many employees face challenges with both physical and mental wellness. Employees risk increases in feelings of isolation, sedentary lifestyles, and stress and anxieties.
The good news is, there is a wealth of corporate wellness software that tackles just this issue. These aren’t your run-of-the-mill calorie-counting and exercise-tracking apps. These softwares offer holistic wellness services, including exercise, nutrition, mental health services, financial guidance, and more. Not only can these services help your employees lead happier, more fulfilling lives, but they can also reduce healthcare costs for you.
Take Care of Lunch
Did you offer employees lunch prior to the pandemic? Many employees rely on work-provided lunches when building their budgets, and the pandemic has caused a nationwide decline in income. In fact, according to a TransUnion survey, 58% of those surveyed reported that their finances have been negatively impacted by the pandemic. Why stop providing free lunch now?
There are a number of different ways to continue providing lunch to your employees, including:
Offer meal services designed specifically for work from home employees
Provide a regular gift card to a meal delivery app or home meal service
Give a weekly stipend to cover what you used too pay per employee for lunch
Childcare Services
Work is just one of the many things that have been changed by the coronavirus pandemic. For parents, perhaps one of the most substantial and complex complications created in the past year is the closure of schools, daycares, and other childcare facilities. Many parents are now faced with paying out of pocket for one-on-one childcare or managing both work and childcare at the same time.
If you have a significant number of parents at your company, it may be nice to offer a stipend to cover childcare during the pandemic. That will allow your employees to focus their full attention on work, eliminating distractions and increasing productivity.
Moving forward, this type of benefit can also open your doors to hiring highly skilled employees who struggle with accepting a full-time position due to childcare needs.
Education
Whether it’s pandemic times or not, education should always be a central feature of your employee benefits offerings. Ongoing learning and education are valuable for so many different reasons. A comprehensive education offering attracts employees who are interested in bettering themselves and growing their skills. That’s not only good for them but for you, too. Ongoing education enables your employees to become experts and thought leaders in your industry.
A thorough education package includes the following elements:
Personal and professional development courses
Industry-specific education and training
Tickets and incentives for attending industry-related conferences
Ongoing peer education via “lunch and learns” and other on-the-clock learning opportunities
The professional world may look totally different than in the past. But, just because times have changed, doesn’t mean you need to sacrifice the perks and benefits that make your company and employees stand out. Consider the above benefits to maintain a happy, healthy, and successful workforce. Who knows—your employees may be happier than they ever have been!
About Author: Matt Casadona has a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, with a concentration in Marketing and a minor in Psychology. He is currently a contributing editor for 365 Business Tips. Matt is passionate about marketing and business strategy and enjoys the San Diego life, traveling and music.
6 Tips To Prepare House for Hybrid Mode of Working Remotely
You probably heard about working remotely. The number of people working from home has significantly increased in the last few years - it doesn’t matter if a person offers translation services in Canterbury, a web developer in Los Angeles, or an HR specialist in Tokyo. WFH gained supporters in almost all niches and countries.
With more and more people joining the ranks of those who work from home, it has become one of the most popular work models in recent years. And, whether we like it or not, it seems like it is here to stay.
One of the solutions many companies implement is offering their employees a chance to work partly from their homes and partly in the office. This hybrid model allows for greater flexibility but also requires some much-needed preparations. If you need some tips on how to prepare your house for such a situation, read on. Below, you will find helpful advice on organizing your workplace, including making your surroundings look professional, inviting more natural light, and many more. Let’s begin.
Remove All Distractions
Working remotely is all about being able to concentrate. And that can be hard to do if you are surrounded by things that can distract you from the task at hand. The best way to avoid this is to remove all unnecessary items and furnishings from your house. Get rid of the pile of old magazines, newspapers, and books that you’ve been meaning to read for ages but never got around to reading. Remove from your sight the TV and computer games, as well as toys for children and pets.
Make Your Home Look Professional
If you want to make your home look professional, you will need to invest some money into it. According to experts from The Pattisall Group, the first thing you should do when trying to make your home more adapted to remote work, is to buy a nice desk and chair that will look great in your home office. Choose furniture that you will find comfortable and looks professional. Also, get it adjusted by a specialist so that you avoid back pain and strain later on.
Invite More Natural Light
If you want to feel more productive during your remote days, one of the best ways to achieve this is to invite natural light into your space. You can do this by opening windows, removing curtains, or buying new blinds. This way, you won’t feel like you are always at home when working remotely from here.
Make Your Office Space Inviting
In order to make your home office space inviting, you should consider putting up inspirational quotes and posters on the walls and purchase some nice artworks or decorations that add character to it. You can also put up photos of your loved ones, for example, or images of places you love. In this way, your office space will feel more like a real workplace and less like a place you have to be stuck at all day long.
Keep Your Workspace Organized
One of the most important aspects of organizing your space for remote work is keeping it tidy and organized. Put all of your papers in files or folders and label them clearly so that you know where everything is whenever you need it. You should also keep pens and pencils in a cup or a container so that they don’t get lost or scattered across the room when not in use.
This also applies to your printer, if you use it. You should clean it often so it doesn’t become clogged with paper dust and smudges. Also, there is nothing more frustrating than trying to retrieve a document from a printer that stopped working because it was full of dust or needed maintenance. Keep this in mind while setting up your home office space.
Update Your Technology
If you haven’t updated your technology in a while, now is a good time to do it. When working remotely, staying connected online at all times is crucial so having faulty equipment can cause problems with productivity and communication with your colleagues.
To avoid this, make sure that you have a good internet connection at home and a laptop or desktop that doesn’t break down easily. Also, there are plenty of applications available online that can help make your remote work easier and more efficient.
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The Bottom Line
Remote work has become a lot more popular in the last couple of years. More and more people decide that they prefer it over the traditional model of work from the office. Many companies understand that which is why they offer their employees a hybrid model of work, where they spend some time working from the office, and some from home.
However, to be able to adapt to this model of work, and continue to be productive, you need to prepare your home. Hopefully, this article showed you how you could do that. Good luck!
About Author:This article is written by a marketing team member at LIKE.TG. LIKE.TG is a leading provider of proven HR solutions, including recruiting, onboarding, employee communications engagement, and rewards recognition. Our user-friendly software increases employee productivity, delivers time and cost savings, and minimizes compliance risk.
5 Tips for Onboarding a New Team Member Successfully
Nothing is more important to the success of a company than its employees. They are those who work on the projects, answer customer calls and actually perform the services, and create/market the products you offer. Of course, in order to have solid employees who help your business, you need to first hire them and have solid talent acquisition strategies. This can involve performing background checks (learn more here), holding interviews, and several other things.
But once they’re hired, the onboarding program or process is what prepares them to work for you and gets them up to speed. Without any further ado, let’s go over some tips for a more successful onboarding process, to make sure every new team member can understand their role.
1. Use the Right Tools and Automation
If you want to onboard as efficiently and successfully as possible, you need to use the right tools and information. If everything is handled manually, it can be a process that drags on and hurts your efficiency. There are many different tools, and the right one will depend on your needs. In addition to using tools, you should automate what you can.
This can reduce the work required to get people onboarded, and can save you a lot of money and time. Everything from HR Payroll Systems to training software can have some automation that can drastically speed up the process, as well as make it go more smoothly for your new hires. Any tool you can use to improve the onboarding experience for every hired employee is a good idea to consider.
2. Be Clear With Duties and Responsibilities
Once a person is hired, it is crucial to let them know their duties and responsibilities as early as possible. They might have an idea from the description and the interview, but you need to now provide them with the specifics.
You need to prepare ahead of time, to ensure that you can clearly state what they should be doing every day. This could simply be explained, or you could even provide them with a role map to show them the scope of their position. If this is poorly done, they could be confused and end up focusing on the wrong things.
3. Set Expectations
It is crucial to set your expectations in terms of the schedule, how to best communicate with the team, the company culture of the business, and more. Every business and company operates differently, so the new team member might not immediately know how things are done.
The more your new hire can know about how your business operates and what is expected of them, the better. By doing this, you can ensure the new hire knows the best way to reach colleagues, how long they are expected to work, and the values or mission behind the business.
4. Train Them Well
Depending on the nature of your business, it is also crucial to train your employees well. You need to ensure they know how to use the different software, apps and tools your team makes use of every day. If you simply throw a new hire into their role without any training, they aren’t very likely to be successful, and will certainly make mistakes.
In addition to training as soon as they’re hired, continued training over time is also a good idea to keep morale high and skills sharp. Training them well over time provides several benefits that can only help your company and employees. Whether they are new or have been working with you for 18 months, training can help them reach new heights.
If you are dealing with a remote employee, be sure to find ways to ensure they are adequately trained, as well. Remote work is growing more common, so you need to be sure you can handle them.
5. Stay Available and Communicate
Few things are as important as communication in business. This is especially true early on, as new team members are likely to have questions or things they will need clarification on. Make sure to communicate well with them, be clear, and ensure you leave an open line of communication if they need it. Employees feel a lot of pressure, so knowing they can turn to you for help can be beneficial.
Be sure to perform regular check-ins as well and ensure everything is going well, but be careful not to micromanage. Make sure to introduce them to the team as well, as building relationships is crucial in a business setting.
In conclusion, we hope that this article and the tips within it have been able to help you have an effective onboarding process for new team members and ensure you can achieve successful integration.
About Author: This article is written by a marketing team member at LIKE.TG. LIKE.TG is a leading provider of proven HR solutions, including recruiting, onboarding, employee communications engagement, and rewards recognition. Our user-friendly software increases employee productivity, delivers time and cost savings, and minimizes compliance risk.
Employee Engagement: Learning from Other Company’s Successes and Failures
Employee engagement is an important part of your business’s bottom line. Without it, you will experience high employee turnover and low morale. The following sections cover common engagement failures, organizations that faced them, and how to do better than them. So if you and your leadership team are ready for changes within your engagement system, here we go.
Failing to communicate
The business may be booming, but that does not mean you can stop proactively listening to your employees. This means scheduling time for QAs or circulating surveys. They need to know that you are keeping them informed and taking their advice and complaints seriously. Your business may be your baby but healthy employee engagement comes from the common endeavor, which means they have to be proud of it too.
Nike is a prime example of what happens when employees' concerns are ignored, and individuals are discouraged from voicing their concerns. In 2018, the company made headlines after numerous women came forward to news outlets discussing a toxic workplace environment. Although Nike did implement changes to address these problems, not before their brand took a lot of damage.
How can your company ensure lines of communication remain open? Regularly scheduled one-on-one sessions are a big way to make sure everyone’s voice is heard. Email communication is another way to involve multiple individuals in a conversation. But even if you speak with all your employees on a regular basis, do not lull yourself into a false sense of security. Be open with your teams and tell them you want to address their concerns, which will go a long way in overcoming engagement issues.
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Not recognizing employee’s work
Everyone enjoys recognition for a job well done. Your employees work hard to hit deadlines and present the best-finished product. A failure to give praise or an acknowledgment of this dedication will lead to poor performance and morale. Implementing a recognition program for top performers in your organization isn’t that hard. From weekly chat messages to company-wide eblasts, all of these are ways to shine a spotlight on your employees of the week.
The global hotel chain, Hilton, implemented a recognition calendar program for employees. This calendar included tips for managers on how to highlight individuals during each month of the year. The program was a great success for the company, especially with keeping individuals engaged in their job.
But it’s not just current employees that benefit from a culture of recognition. Prospective employees can look up your company’s recognition program or hear about it by word of mouth. If you have a great system in place then you can hook some great new individuals for your business.
Preventing individual skill development
Your industry is always changing and evolving, the same goes for your employees. They want to expand their skill set to improve their personal performance and your organization’s results too. But when you hamper any opportunities for education, then your workers end up in a rut. Supporting attendance at virtual events or signing up for educational websites will go a long way in preventing boredom and complacency.
ATT created its own university program for continuing education amongst its employees. The leadership-led program helps employees learn not only about their current position but sets them up for success with future roles within the business. But the company does not just rely on its special university program, it’s also developed other initiatives to help with continued learning opportunities.
Although you may not have the resources to create your own learning program, there are still lots of free resources for your business to utilize. Whether it’s masterclasses on YouTube or your own manager’s presentations, offering skill development is a big plus for employee engagement.
Overlooking support staff
Do not forget your behind-the-scenes people, they’re the ones that are a big part of making your company run smoothly. Whether it’s cleaning staff or part-time employees, they need their moments of recognition too. Although their work isn’t as directly vital to your immediate success your business will still grind to a halt without your cafeteria staff.
Food delivery company DoorDash soured its relationship with its drivers when they failed to properly reimburse them for their services. Although DoorDash’s business model relies on delivery drivers, the drivers didn’t feel they were properly paid for their service and created their own campaign to improve pay. Instead of listening to their employees, DoorDash ignored them.
To avoid a problem like this in your organization, don’t forget all the people that make it a success. Proper pay, recognition, and little acts of kindness go a long way in making your support staff feel appreciated.
Thinking engagement is a one-and-done session
All right, now that you’ve scheduled your monthly meeting with your staff, that’s enough of an investment in employee engagement, right? Wrong! Your relationship with your team is an ongoing process and it involves constant work on your end.
About Author: This article is written by a marketing team member at LIKE.TG. LIKE.TG is a leading provider of proven HR solutions, including recruiting, onboarding, employee communications engagement, and rewards recognition. Our user-friendly software increases employee productivity, delivers time and cost savings, and minimizes compliance risk.
Top 10 HR Trends in Employee Experience: What to Expect
As the new year arrives, companies will regain some control and lead their employees to a newly mapped future. With this comes significant improvement to the employee experience. We're anticipating the following ten new trends in 2021.
Organizations are going on to make preparations for the next twelve months after a historic year of uncertainty and upheaval and planning their company and employees for further changes related to COVID. Although hastily-made modifications to the way we operate were implemented in 2020, 2021 will be the year when these modifications are planned and executed.
Many of these improvements are not ideal like employees were forced to return home to work unexpectedly. Yet they are here to stay for the near future from this point of view. In terms of keeping organizations afloat, several new working ways have so far been successful.
Although some trends have been going on for a while now and have only been magnified by the year's developments, many of these are the inevitable consequence of drastic changes that organizations have to endure and still encounter in some cases.
Employee Experience in 2020
The word "employee experience" was used as a "should do" before COVID. We have been advised that we work on employee experience and see changes in levels of loyalty, retention, happiness, and satisfaction. For many organizations, EX had taken a back seat to more pressing concerns.
But by 2020, those who focused on EX sharply contrasted with those who did not. These groups have been able to successfully shield themselves from the brunt of the pandemic, as they had been supporting their employees with an excellent experience. If you have an organization that listens to its people, regularly evolves its handling of its employees, and takes input and suggestions into account — you have a company that is consistent through trembling or imbalance. Thus, those who practice EX were able to adapt to all aspects of the company when businesses had to make a sudden and immediate transition and were able to experience transformation quickly and efficiently.
However, as EX was not seen by many as a priority, such companies seem to belong to a minority. According to a Forbes report, less than a third of businesses perform quarterly surveys, and just a little more have a forum for workers to have a say. It can seem anachronistic to have a staff that cannot have any observations or perspectives on their personal workplace experience with systems in place. As the pandemic pressured employees at home to meet their homework and childcare obligations, such non-EX companies were practically oblivious to their workforce's needs.
Nevertheless, with efficient communications, two-way conversations and open culture, those highly experienced in EX were able to recognize weak spots, be available to employees' needs and identify possible problems until they become more difficult. When our work's future was imposed on us, the importance of EX was thoroughly and eventually understood.
And what are we expecting from the next 12 months? Do we perform well under these new circumstances? Does it promise more traffic next year? Or are we going to see a way out of the current chaos eventually? Here, we foresee the ten trends that will affect the experience of 2021 employees.
1. Flexible work takes precedence.
The mass migration to work at home caused great concern for the office's future. But home offices helped to maintain business continuity and were successful. We can see that work from home continues in 2021, but with a more outstanding balance with the company. When safe, employers will offer greater flexibility in terms of the workplace.
A Forrester report calls it "the hybrid model anywhere, were working outside the office, including outside of the pandemic limitations, is considered a regular thing. This requires organizations to review their full model – from real estate to management – and determine how they can accomplish long-term objectives outside their traditional offices' real estate borders.
2. System of reimbursement
The laws governing working at home are being investigated. When it becomes an essential part of everyday life, businesses will soon begin formally to change their work policies. In several countries, we have already experienced this. For instance, different nations handle institutional and ongoing job costs at home, such as the US government developing reimbursement arrangements for home internet service and other expenses. Denmark also adds coffee-like food prices to pay packages for its workers.
In order to cover Wi-Fi, utility bills, and even toilet paper used by those living at home, the Dutch Government is encouraged to contribute $2.40 a day to the employee pay packages. France has passed a law defending them against post-hours email; Britain has indicated that the rules on tax deductions on work-related equipment bought during this pandemic may be relaxed. Some improvements could take a few years to enter into law but display a foresight of a more willing government towards working from home.
3. Changes in HR Review Policies
When HR re-examines its policies for employees at home, they will also have to consider how this impacts them. Further lockdown limitations may, for instance, affect schools, nurseries, and childcare, and consequently, it is vital to take account of staff with children.
Any changes that are done must be made clear in advance to employees. Consider the company intranet as a central communication platform. Additionally, update staff manuals with new policies on work from home, evaluation requirements, and other appropriate interventions.
4. Culture has Now Become Reactive.
In the absence of a physical office, the office building can become secondary to the working culture. The digital workplace will grow further and create an omnichannel world where the office's tangible and intangible elements will be brought digitally to the employee. Types of events can be more intuitive and include spaces for workers to enjoy – like huddles, team reunions, all-hands meetings, and satellite workspaces for employees to work in solitude.
While the office culture was more ambient, cultural leaders in a remote work environment might be required. Some workers build programs, launch new camps and initiate conversations. Organizations should concentrate in 2021 on how their working culture is developed in a dispersed workplace.
5. Attention on Mental Health
Has mental health ever been more critical than in 2020? This continues as managers start to consider their employees' emotional and mental well-being and find ways to track it. Most people will establish behavior patterns and reactions and identify people who have negative emotions without meeting their colleagues.
As jobs began to consider the fundamental value of mental health for their employees, the effects of COVID have intensified this awareness, and in 2021 this approach will be further developed.
6. A Trust Culture
Though there were several "firsts," 2020 meant that companies had no choice but to trust their staff with the way they handled their home offices for some kind of continuity. The culture of physical presence could well come to an end as the relationship between employer and employee evolves into the relationship of trust and autonomy.
Organizations have moved to various softwares that help track the level of employee productivity. However, 2020 showed that workers apply the same degree of professional discipline at home when appropriately managed and with the right communication channels in place. The major concerns are loneliness and isolation, which need to be tackled on a case-by-case basis by flexible working, commuting, and better comms networks.
7. Global Workforce
The human resources would no longer look for people of a given location. Any potential vacancy should consider extending the talent pool into a global context. This improves chances for high-quality workers irrespective of their location.
This includes a revision of the typical lifecycle of the organization. Every aspect of your business' working life should be re-tuned, from onboarding to training and development, to be easily available online anywhere in the world. This, of course, poses new cultural and logistical challenges, but companies should start getting used to managing a global workforce.
8. The Importance of IT
In 2021 they will have to place much greater pressure on IT in order to concentrate on delivering a better employee experience. Their position in the process is crucial. They are majorly facing two challenges—a drop in expenditures as companies tighten up to reverse the current economic downturn and collaborate with existing software for a better solution.
IT needs to build ways to support and reduce discomfort for employees. The IT will bear all essential responsibilities, such as social coordination, data maintenance and security. This is not the year of short-term adjustments. By 2020, long due reforms have forced companies to work with speed, strategy, and enterprise to better tackle these challenges.
9. Communication becomes Crucial
The CEO's ability to have an insight into the office was enough to please the employees while leadership was present. At the desk, lunch breaks and sometimes talks, walking in the hallway — each little touchpoint meant a sense of communion and community. It's a little bit different at home. Not only must people feel noticed, but they must also be guided, and a home workplace can serve as a dialogue blocker.
Enable business leaders to look at how the whole company can enjoy similar synergies. At the same time, teams interact more closely than ever with daily stand-ups and immediate chat channels like Slack, Microsoft Teams, etc. The importance of pulse surveys, CEO-led zoom meetings and managers holding more one-to-one talks with team members is the only way to know what is happening in each employee's life at a micro-level. Helping ensure that several home offices collaborate as one company and continues to work seamlessly.
10. Higher need for Automation
With remote work becoming more regular, businesses need to implement software and technology that helps workers when they don't have a physical presence. This program is designed to provide a readily available, humanistic service: an employee's ideal experience.
This part of the company would be one of the first to use intelligent devices without, for instance, an HR department for people who talk face to face, plan meetings, and visit. The employee also maintains the same confidential service quality through applications to connect with the worker on annual leave, health, and job-related concerns while receiving consistent and accurate data that they can evaluate and work on.
The 2020 events have led us to behave reactively and, at times, hastily at a breakneck pace. Therefore, employee experience is an evolving process that transforms small doses but has a dramatic impact on the company. These changes are led by senior management in line with employee feedback, and a feedback loop is formed as these changes are centered. Feedback has taken center stage in such times to really understand what is going on in the home workplace.
This enables companies to step away from a more strategic, awake and considered 2021 mentality from the impulsive and abrupt 2020 decision-making.
That is why EX is more critical now than ever for our employees. Only if we take our workforce's experience exceptionally will we be able to keep track of the pace of change in workplaces and allow for accuracy, creativity and new opportunities – something organizations must concentrate on in the next 12 months more than ever before.
About Author: This article is written by our marketing team at LIKE.TG. LIKE.TG is a leading provider of HR solutions, including recruiting, onboarding, employee engagement, and intranet software. Our aim is to help your company improve employee engagement, employee productivity, and to save you valuable time!
10 Tips to Keep Your Employees Productive
Every business leader has a responsibility to make their employees happy and efficient. Employees are the important asset of a company, and having them engaged in business activities leads to business growth. However, planning an effective strategy is conversely difficult, as it needs too much thought and time. That’s where the role of human resource management comes to the fore. How do HR departments ensure that they keep the employees productive despite the hustle of their work-life? This blog focuses on a similar discussion, giving you the most actionable tips to keep employees productive and the business successful.
1. Make a model of clarity and feedback.
It is crucial to create an atmosphere where everything is clear. Like, if the manager does any mistake, it is their responsibility to admit it. Being honest plays a great role in the company's growth, and getting to admit your blunder is the most significant factor in building an atmosphere of trust and scrupulousness.
It has been seen that whenever a person performs in a leadership role, they try to express their power by proving themselves right in every situation. Moreover, it takes a lot of strength to accept when they are wrong, so forming a transparency layer whenever making any mistake will enhance your image in front of management and raise a new learning environment.
2. Provide a Pleasant and Motivating Working Setup
Another thing you can do is to create a suitable work environment for the employees. So, you can outline it in a way that makes the employees feel satisfied during working. A healthy work environment usually helps the employees stay focused and free of distractions.
For a relaxed atmosphere, you can keep in mind some things like Ample lighting, fixed setting, Pleasant temperature, Conventional space, Admirable food, and so on. Even meeting the necessities like Fresh and Clean air can make employees feel satisfied and keep them motivated the whole day.
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3. Give your team certain tools
When you decide to give your team all the high-quality tools, they will not feel needy and not lose their time asking the leaders to give them what they need to perform the task. Moreover, if the employees are working from home, try to give them the best management tracking applications that will enable them to efficiently connect with the team members and take precise feedback from the team. Also, the employee can put their queries through the tool. This can create a professional environment this is significant for every organization.
4. Help employees to feel valued.
Whenever any employee does the task at hand on time or delivers on other metrics, like improving the profits, it will work if you appreciate or credit them. Organizations that do so successfully build a feeling of pride and are admired by the employees. They try to perform better next time, and this is how they remain encouraged.
If any employee commits a mistake, instead of yelling at them or punishing them, give them the word "it's ok." This will not discourage the team members and make them more responsible for the future to not commit the same mistake again.
Also, through support, employees dedicate themselves to work, which increases their engagement, productivity, and satisfaction. Being a manager or a team leader, you can create a positive impact on your employees. Only a positive environment among all will be the most suitable option to get the desired outcomes.
5. Keep Employees Occupied
If you want your employee to stay productive and deliver great work, you can create a complete manual in a simplistic style. Keep in mind that the employee guidebook will consist of aspects like handling a specific situation or other things. To make them feel like a part of the organization, you can also ask them about their manual approaches.
Other than this, it will work if you have regular meetings with your employees to keep them occupied. Make sure that everyone gets the chance to raise their concerns. This will create a positive work-life balance that eventually leads to the company's progress. People feel that the entire team cares about their opinions when addressing their particular issues/products/services.
6. Dodge micromanagement
Earlier, the companies hesitated to provide remote work, as they were not convinced with the idea and believed that the same level of productivity could not happen remotely. However, these days, everyone is doing remote work. Therefore, managers find it easy to micromanage their teams to upscale their business. But, at the same time, companies should also respect their employees and set clear expectations.
As per the analysis, it has been noted that almost 59% of employees who worked under the manager were micromanaged. While 55% stated, it served them being fruitful. On the other side, 68% find that they overcame their confidence.
Therefore, it is not easy for a manager to bother their juniors to monitor everything going around. Instead, both should correspond to the specific goals, and if the goals are met, managers don't need to worry about the place and how.
7. Allow your team to work at a flexible schedule.
A 9-5 work schedule doesn't look fit at all. However, each employee who works under this span doesn't have to be productive. Thus, you can choose to provide your employees with adjustable work hours like the other companies without considering the negative aspects.
This will allow the employee to build a flexible schedule. Most likely, they will be more productive during the timings that they choose for themselves to work. Also, this will make them happy and content, which ends in boosting productivity. At first, you can analyze everything by outlining the guidelines regarding attendance, information, and availability.
Then, continue to start with a manageable schedule for a single unit and watch the employee's performance accordingly. If, after doing this, you find the employee to be productive then, you can decide on giving manageable timings to the other units. Don't forget to review their performance from time to time.
8. Allow Breaks
Most times, you will find your employees to be bored and dull during work hours. It implies that they need a pause from your side to refocus over. Therefore, it will be ideal if you give them a rest of 10-20 minutes after one 101 hours of working, as it will help them revive their mind and refocus later on. Suppose you encourage breaks, whether, for a snack, tea, bathroom, a glassful of water, or to move, you will find that your employees will stay stimulated, which continues the business' progress.
9. Make your employees part of the bigger picture.
As a team leader or a time manager, you can notify your team about the company's ultimate goals and strategies. This will strengthen communication, and it is an excellent way to keep everyone on the same page.
Your choice can make your productive employees feel appreciated, and it will direct them to work with more devotion for the company's growth and attainment of collective goals.
10. Be compatible
If you want everything to go smoothly, keep in mind to stay steady. At the same time, it is great to connect with the team members at every level. This will make you aware ofemployee happiness,and how they work to meet the organizational objectives.
Hopefully, after getting the information given above, it will clarify that both the commitment and productivity go concurrently. Therefore, by following the tips, you can create an environment that boosts up the employee's productivity, confidence, and recognition at the same time.
About Author: This article is written by our marketing team at LIKE.TG. LIKE.TG is a leading provider of HR solutions, including recruiting, onboarding, employee engagement, and intranet software. Our aim is to help your company improve employee engagement, employee productivity, and to save you valuable time!
Interview Thank You Email Templates With Examples
Sending a thank-you note after a job interview is a longstanding tradition in every industry. From the days of snail mail to the current digital era, employees use this gesture to show appreciation for the opportunity to go through the interview. So, it is essential to write a concise and convincing letter to the company’s employers following the interview.
Most job applicants are afraid to write thank you emails because it seems a bit too forward. Others believe that appreciation letters don’t affect your chances of landing a job.
Well, that’s not entirely true. A well-crafted interview thank you letter can be the ultimate decider between you and another candidate. Moreover, you don’t need to write a full-blown essay as your appreciation email. You can simply hire an essay writer to finetune your delivery.
Let’s discuss the processes involved in writing an appreciation letter and the perfect example to warm any recruiter’s heart.
Why should you send a thank-you email?
An interview thank you note is an excellent addendum to your CV and cover letter. But if you are still having doubts about an appreciation email’s relevance, check out the potential benefits:
Showing appreciation is an act of common courtesy.
If not for anything, you should thank the board for the opportunity after the interview. You should also thank the recruiter or interviewer for spending their time to share the company’s goals with you.
The letter allows you to reaffirm your candidacy.
When you write an appreciation email, it reminds the recruiter about you and your unique skills. You should understand that recruiters in massive companies interview tons of candidates for a vacancy, and your unique appreciation letter distinguishes you from others. And by the way, you can add extra information that you forgot to mention during the main interview.
It puts you in a pole position to land the job.
Recruiters often reach an impasse when choosing candidates. And this deadlock often triggers the ‘elimination’ process to find out the best-suited candidate to fill the position. With your appreciation email, you can tip the scales in your favor instantly.
Key considerations when writing a thank you email
Although sending an appreciation email is a good idea, you need to follow standard writing etiquettes to improve your chance of success. Here are the crucial considerations when writing a thank-you letter:
Timing
All your follow-up emails must arrive within the first 24 hours of the job interview. This technique is useful during the hiring process because it creates a lasting impression on the interview board. So, gather all the relevant facts during the interview and use them to draft an attention-grabbing letter to a specific email address.
Addresses
When it’s time to meet your interviewers, you will be face-to-face with about 3-5 people. Identify the key figures on the board and address your thank you email to them. You could ask them for their business cards after the interview if you couldn’t find their contacts on the company website. Always remember to thank the recruiter (HR personnel) and your would-be boss and make them feel free to contact you for further questions. Don’t send the same spam email to everybody on the board.
Content
An excellent follow-up email must contain accurate information. At the same time, you need to review your work to eliminate embarrassing errors. Also, don’t send generic letters to the recruiter. Let them know that you enjoyed learning from them during the interview. Personalize the contents of the letter to the vacancy requirements and most importantly, don’t use informal language in your letter.
How to write a thank you email
Writing a thank you email after an interview involves listening carefully during the interviewing process. Afterward, use this information to rehash your best attributes as regards the position.
So, how can you write an email that makes a lasting impression on the interview board?
Let’s break it down into seven key steps:
Come up with a clear subject line.
Your subject line should contain the addressee’s name and the purpose of the letter. Also, clarify the job title position. Focus on short descriptions that are readable at a glance.
Personalize the email.
Avoid writing “to whom it may concern” in your follow-up letter. Since you’ve met employers during the interview, you should know their names. Therefore, refer to the addressee by their full name instead of using a generic greeting.
Show gratitude.
Start the letter with ‘thanks’ before going into details. Thank the addressee for the opportunity and insightful conversation.
Keep it specific.
Discuss specific moments in the interview that you found interesting. For example, you can talk about your appreciation of the company’s objectives and direction.
Recap your professional skills.
Don’t assume that the hiring manager remembers everything about you. Mention your professional skills that are relevant to the vacancy. Leverage what you now know from the interview questions and focus on those qualities that align with the company’s values.
Proofread carefully.
Errors in letters can be deal breakers when applying for a job. Go through the letter more than once to ensure that the message is clear and the grammar is intact.
Sign off with a professional greeting.
Don’t forget to end the letter with a professional greeting. To be on the safe side, always use ‘yours sincerely’ as your sign-off greeting.
Moreover, some people still use handwritten letters to deliver their follow-up messages. Although this technique highlights your dedication to professionalism, it doesn’t always end well. For example, the letter could get lost in the mail. Or the addressee would not open it in time.
Therefore, stick to standard emails when writing your appreciation letter because it is more professional and convenient.
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Thank you email templates and examples
Now that we have covered the importance of appreciation letters, let’s go through a short interview thank-you letter sample:
Subject Line: Thanks For The Opportunity {Insert Interviewer’s Name}.
Dear {Insert Interviewer’s Name},
Thanks for the insightful conversation regarding the position at {insert the company’s name}. Our short interaction has piqued my interest more to become part of your workforce.
I was mostly attracted to your clear-cut approach to solving {insert the specific problem}, which is in line with my view on {discuss specific subject}. I believe that I can contribute to the realization of {insert goal} as {insert proposed vacancy} in your company.
Please, don’t hesitate to contact me for additional information. I look forward to your feedback and future cooperation.
Thanks again for the opportunity!
Yours sincerely,
{Full name and contact info}
You can use this email template for any follow-up message and job vacancy. But you need to mention particular areas of interest picked up during the interview. Don’t forget to highlight your ability to perform each task at a high level. And most importantly, keep your letter short and error-free.
About Author: Patricia Lockers is an essay writer helping students with their academic assignments. She has a Ph.D. in History from Stanford. At the moment, she also offers assistance to companies on content creation.
Mobile HR Apps and Best Practices
The Human Resources department of a company handles many responsibilities. Over the years, HR departments have undergone changes, from service-oriented functions to assuming more strategic and versatile roles.
These changes are now happening in the most progressive companies around the world and technology is at the core of these changes. Today, various employee apps offer a wide range of capabilities, and figuring out the ones which are most suited for your company's HR is very important.
LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a must-have app that will give you the capability to find and connect with companies, colleagues, professors, and more. You can even connect with industry specialists and recruiters to create a business network for your company.
Having a solid LinkedIn profile is essential to spread the word about your company. This app will also provide you with amazing networking opportunities while connecting you with a wide range of professionals and information on different topics.
LIKE.TG
Imagine HR software that helps you manage the complete employee lifecycle by automating the processes and digitizing the record-keeping and database management. This is what LIKE.TG does perfectly. From onboarding till the exit of an employee, LIKE.TG enables HR teams to work futuristically by streamlining communication, collaboration and engagement levels.
Employee experience is enhanced in an environment where HRMS is highly people-oriented and where their every need in terms of communication, rewards and recognition, and benefits is timely addressed. A heightened employee experience means higher motivation level, which in turn boosts company productivity. This is why many organizations, ranging from SMB’s to large businesses, trust LIKE.TG as their go-to software when upgrading their HR functions.
Human Resource Magazine SHRM
HR Magazine is a very popular periodical known internationally for HR specialists under the aegis of the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM). The articles in the magazine include topics on law, management, and business practices of the industry written by HR pioneers.
The updated perspectives and findings of these pioneers will keep you informed of the latest trends and news, which may contribute to your assignments and discussions in the company.
The magazine comes out ten times each year and you will find the same content in the printed version and the app. For the latter, you will also find a daily news feed, videos, and other features. You can download this app whether you own an Android or iOS device.
Where could you find some help?
Writing letters and other official documents is an important part of all HR operations. Just as a college student must complete plenty of writing assignments throughout their education, you also need to master writing official documents. While you study your company's policies to ensure that you are doing everything by the book, you can hire professionals to do the writing work for you, especially if you study part-time. It's also possible toask for additional writing servicesfrom EduBirdie. This is a professional writing service you can depend on at any time of the day for any academic work.
Apps for collaboration and learning
Using educational mobile apps has revolutionized face-to-face communication across a variety of work environments, especially for the millennial generation who expects their seniors and colleagues to friendlier, easier to connect with, and more collaborative.
Without these very convenient apps, employees would find their work processes compulsive and boring. Since most of today's employees stay connected using their smartphones, it becomes very important for mobile connectivity to be both dependable and fast.
As an employee, having such an app (or more) will increase your productivity and efficiency. Using an employee app that serves as a channel for communication with other employees will help you stay in tune and in touch with everyone.
Aside from boosting your productivity and efficiency, it will also make your work environment better by enhancing its flexibility. Mobile HR apps will also help you increase your scope through interactive learning.
You can consider these mobile apps as learning tools. Use them to learn the processes in your company and get the training you need too. If you have an HR app, you can use this to improve your skills and improve your productivity.
Easier HR operations
One of the most important reasons why you would download and use apps is to make HR operations easier. Many of the apps being extensively used today are for various HR-related functions like approvals, timesheets, performance appraisals, work schedules, and more.
All these essential processes can now be easily accessed using apps and these have made much of the HR department's work more efficient and faster.
Conclusion
The advancements in HR apps won't stop as technology will continue to evolve to make things faster and more efficient. Once you find the best app for your company, you can start using it to improve how your company'\s HR department operates.
About Author: Michael Turner ranks as the top-rated writer and editor for a highly-reputed academic assignment service for US and UK students. He strives to provide quality work consistently and does this by regularly updating himself with the latest trends. Besides his work, he enjoys blogging, reading sports magazines, and experimenting with new dishes in his kitchen
Fostering Employee Wellness Using Your Intranet
Do you want to create a culture where employees take better care of themselves? If so, your intranet can help.
It’s important for employees to care for themselves, both at work and outside of the office. However, it can prove hard for them to focus on maintaining healthy habits when their primary concern is getting the most out of their careers.
No-room-for-error projects and tight deadlines typically take priority over self-care. With technology, however, you can remind your staff about the importance of caring for themselves. In turn, you can help to boost employee wellness—and productivity.
To learn more about fostering employee wellness using your intranet, keep reading.
Benefits of Using Your Intranet to Foster Employee Wellness
You can get everyone involved in promoting their own wellness by leveraging your corporate intranet. Now, it’s easy for companies to run employee wellness initiatives in tandem with employee recognition programs. For example, you could use your company network to emphasize wellness events such as World Mental Health Day.
This kind of strategy supports a culture of mindfulness. It also builds confidence among employees in your company identity.
Alternatively, you can use your intranet to promote healthy habits in the workplace, such as mindfulness and fitness. As an example, you could encourage employees to occasionally tune out and turn off.
You can also use your intranet to encourage them to take time off that they need to recharge. This point is important, as nearly half of all employees don’t take needed and deserved vacation time.
Stop Conflict Before it Begins witha Culture of “Thank You”
Does your organization foster a culture of micro-rewards and gratitude? If you’re not sure or the answer is “no,” your company culture could be contributing to workplace conflict. Building a culture of “thank you” can be difficult (especially with remote teams), but it doesn’t have to be! Learn more in our eBook, "10 Free / Low Cost Employee Recognition Ideas.”
Learn how!
How Your Intranet Can Help
With the right software, you can manage your employee wellness system effectively. It will enable you to promote, monitor, and manage wellness activities. In doing so, you can create a team that thrives by minding to their health and wellness.
An effective management platform can help you track important wellness KPIs. It will also help you to access and manage risks as it pertains to employee wellness. Moreover, you can follow these metrics in real-time.
Premium software such as LIKE.TG can provide you with a customizable platform that supports your staffs’ wellness journey. With the top HR technology, you can provide a fresh user experience that’s easy to navigate.
For example, you could offer free wellness coaching. This kind of service is highly popular among employees with a desire to improve their wellbeing.
You can also set up a system to support employees in tracking their fitness activities and measuring the results. You can even motivate employees by offering them rewards for successfully completing wellness milestones.
Leveling Up Your Intranet for Employee Wellbeing
Employee wellness includes both physical and mental health. Both work-related and non-related factors affect the state of employees’ physical and emotional wellbeing.
Promoting employee wellness does more than increase workers’ productivity—it improves every aspect of their lives. With employee wellness, you want to build a happier, healthier workforce.
Doing so will positively impact employee performance. Ideally, however, as a human resource professional or company leader, you should primarily have the goal of promoting the health of your peers.
Tracking metrics such as those for participation is vital for the success of employee wellness programs. However, it’s also important to consider what benefits are most useful for your staff.
Different companies have different needs. For example, you may want to offer healthy meal delivery via your corporate intranet. Alternatively, you may offer mental health counseling.
You can even offer gym membership reimbursements as well as bonuses for employees that meet fitness goals. Here, you could tie in bonuses to employee performance in your company’s weight loss program. Alternatively, you might do the same for those who complete a smoking cessation program.
Implementing Your Digital Wellness Strategy
An effective workplace wellness program can help you improve your team and reduce costs. Today, leading firms use technology to drive wellness program participation and awareness. With the right platform, you can amplify your company’s wellness initiatives.
Many employees report conditions such as stress and depression. As a result, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for companies to manage. Resultantly, you must find a way to support your employees if you want to promote productivity.
To remedy this issue, you want to enhance your healthcare programs. To this end, it’s helpful to leverage your digital workplace to build a culture of wellness.
Everyone engages in wellness in different ways. Also, you’ll want to develop a holistic wellness strategy that encompasses both physical and emotional health. With technology, you can develop a wellness program that’s personalized for each of your team members.
Still, you’ll need a way to communicate these ideas with your team members. You’ll also need to communicate your company’s wellness initiatives to management.
Forging Ahead With Digital Deployment
Here, it’s important that managers know that they must empathize with employees’ health and emotional problems. Managers must show sensitivity in this regard. With this in mind, you can even use your company intranet to track managerial awareness of employees’ health statuses.
In the digital age, it’s never been easier to support employee wellbeing. Now, your intranet is a vital tool for creating a company culture of wellness and mindfulness.
Poor employee health costs companies billions of dollars every year. With your digital workplace, however, you have an opportunity to help employees improve their wellness.
It’s important to understand, however, that your company’s path toward wellness is a journey, not a sprint. With time and effective planning, you can promote a healthy, happy work environment.
HR mistakes impact your entire organization. Learn how to avoid the 12 most common mistakes with our free ebook.
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Steps for Getting Started
The losses due to poor employee health continue to rise. As a result, many companies are working for ways to keep these employee health-related expenses manageable and under control.
It’s true that your company’s health and wellness programs can help employees to achieve better health outcomes. Yet, they also help to reduce risk.
Healthy employees are less likely to have problems on the job—either emotional or physical. Furthermore, organizations with happy, healthy employees save on long-term health expenses.
With this in mind, you’ll want to provide your employees with the means and tools for them to take control of their wellness.
A well-executed wellness initiative supported by technology can reduce healthcare costs. It will also enhance productivity and boost employee retention.
The process begins with advocating for the establishment of a wellness program—if your company hasn’t started one already. Your program must provide access to various wellness offerings.
You’ll also need to design and implement the program. However, it’s important not to try to do it all alone. In other words, you’ll want to incorporate the help of experts where possible or needed.
Once you’ve completed these steps, you’ll need to communicate the components of your wellness program with your staff. You’ll also need to deploy mechanisms to increase participation in your company’s wellness program.
Manage the Many Moving Parts of Employee Wellness With the Right Technology
An effective employee wellness program has many components. In most cases, you must contract with several vendors to create the needed services for your wellness program. These vendors may offer services such as:
Disease management
Employee assistance programs
Ergonomics
Screening
Vaccinations
Wellness consulting
Wellness training
However, there’s one constant, no matter how many components you add to your wellness program. You’ll need to communicate your program and encourage employee participation if you want to reap the benefits of healthier employees.
A Better Way to Manage Your Employee Wellness Program
In the past, employers relied on instructor-led, in-person coaching and hard-copy handouts. Today, however, an online solution is a pivotal part of a well-coordinated employee health program.
For instance, you can use your company intranet to provide basic nutrition training. Again, you can also use it to support physical activity.
You can even use your intranet to create a group where employees can share their wellness journeys. For example, you could set up group chats or forums where workers can share their experiences. Once you’ve established the group, you could further leverage it by inviting non-participating employees to join in.
Also, by leveraging technology, your wellness program could grow alongside your company. With the latest technology, you can add as many group members as you need seamlessly.
More importantly, technology enables you to customize your communication with your staff. With the right platform, you can make sure that every corporate message promotes your brand identity.
Still, how do you know what platform can empower you to deliver the many facets of your employee wellness program effectively? Luckily, we have the perfect solution.
Your Intranet Is a Powerful Tool for Promoting Employee Wellness
Now you know more about fostering employee wellness using your intranet. What you need now is an award-winning human resources platform.
LIKE.TG can help you manage the many moving parts of your employee wellness program. With LIKE.TG, you can make it easy for employees to find the wellness information they need on their own time.
With our platform, you can boost employee wellness programs and deliver employee recognition. You can also improve work culture, productivity, and morale.
Set your business up for success. Contact LIKE.TG today to request a free demo and learn more about starting the journey toward corporate wellness.
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.
6 Tools That Will Help to Improve Your Business Productivity
Business owners need to properly manage their time — as well as their team members — to ensure they get the most out of every day. In this article, we’re going to outline several different tools that can help you increase your team efficiency and productivity.
Let’s take a look!
Time tracking software that helps your team stay focused
One way to help your team stay focused and work effectively is to use time tracking software. This can help you to identify when your staff tend to get the most distracted, or when they might need more support. It can also help to ensure that everyone concentrates on the task at hand, and can make it much easier for you to price up jobs based on how long they actually take. This is particularly helpful if you run a business that involves charging by the hour.
LIKE.TG’s time tracking software can help you with all of this! It’s easy to use, secure, and will help you streamline your processes.
Templates that streamline processes and store information
Using templates for jobs you have to do over and over again is another great way to make your life easier and improve your business productivity. There are lots of different template types you could use, but let’s take a look at a couple of examples.
For instance, if you and your team members are focusing on improving your search engine optimization (as you should), Loganix has some great SEO templates that can help you to get more done and store important information effectively. One great example is the content brief template. This will help you organize all the information any writers and editors need before diving into creating your content. The document outline can keep things simple for your writers and help them get work done quickly, while also eliminating any back-and-forth between parties.
LIKE.TG has several helpful onboarding checklist templates, as well. Onboarding can be stressful for employers and employees alike — you don’t want this important process to be rushed or overlooked. To give your new employees the best experience possible, these checklists can help. They give you step-by-step instructions on how to prepare your employees for their new position.
Look at what you and your team members do on a regular basis, and consider if there are any templates that will help to streamline your processes and speed certain tasks up. They can make a huge difference.
Project or employee management software that keeps you on track
As a business owner, it’s a good idea to use a project or employee management program to track different areas and help you stay on top of things. Project management tools can help you set deadlines, make it easier to collaborate with other team members, keep your relevant documents in one place, and help you feel more in control. As a bonus, all of your employees who are using the software will be able to see their daily tasks at a glance.
You might also be interested in using a Performance Management System like LIKE.TG’s to frequently assess your staff, identify any areas they need help with, and provide them with feedback. These are all important jobs, but they can be neglected when you’re busy and struggling to stay on top of things. Having a real system in place will help you to stay on track, keep your employees happy, and make it much easier for you to handle HR-related issues.
Social media scheduling tools that help you stay ahead
Social media marketing is incredibly important for getting the word out about your business. And, bulk scheduling social media posts is often a lot less time-consuming than writing them on a daily basis. To help optimize your social media posts, dig into your analytics and see when your posts tend to get the most engagement, then schedule your activity in advance. Be sure to keep a regular schedule, posting weekly or daily, for instance, in order to get the most out of your content.
If you’re looking for a new tool to help you make the most of your social media time, check out SocialPilot’s round-up of the best social media analytics tools. They can help you make a decision based on a particular program’s price, features, and more.
Checklists that help you to stay on top of everything
Sometimes, it can be hard to stay on top of all of the little jobs you need to do on a regular basis. Creating checklists that you can refer to will help keep you on track and ensure you don’t forget anything. Checklists for daily tasks are certainly important, but it’s also worth creating lists for the things you only do every once in a while, like checking your finances, onboarding employees, preparing for industry events, and even spring cleaning your premises.
It’s easy to put certain tasks off when there's nobody holding you to account, but simply having a checklist to follow can make a huge difference. There’s nothing like the satisfaction of working your way through a checklist and having a spruced up office, better organized finances, and happier team members at the end of it.
Templates that will speed up your graphic design
People love visual content, and everything from your social media updates to your blog posts can involve some graphic design. However, making everything from scratch can be incredibly time-consuming, so it’s worth spending a while creating templates that you can then fall back on to speed things up in the future.
You could create templates for infographics, Instagram posts, blog visuals, email newsletters, and the like. Not only will this save you time and energy, but keeping these designs consistent by using templates can also help you build your brand identity and awareness. This will help to ensure your content becomes recognizable and keeps your business at the forefront of your audience’s minds.
When creating your templates, be sure to incorporate aspects of your branding, including your chosen colors, fonts, brand voice, and more. This will keep things consistent and allow you to stand out from the rest of the crowd.
About Author: Alex Ratynski is the founder of Ratynski Digital, an online marketing consultancy that focuses on helping small and medium-sized businesses achieve their goals. He set up his company after working as a local SEO director for a dental marketing agency, where he helped to turn clients’ ventures into thriving multi-million dollar businesses. He spends most hours strategizing SEO for his clients.
6 Best Job Experts to Follow on Twitter and LinkedIn
Whether you’re currently looking for a job or not, some good career advice can always come in handy. Especially if it’s offered by a top career expert with many years of experience and a bunch of loyal followers, some of whom have already put that advice to practice.
Some time ago, professional advice was not easy to find, but today, thanks to social media, you needn’t go far. Now, it’s the other way round: there are so many career coaches and job search experts that it’s hard to choose.
So, if you’re looking for immediate help with something specific like writing a resume, it’s better to hire a writer on a professional platform – for example, here at https://skillhub.com/blog/upload-resume-linkedin . But when you need inspiration, insights, fresh data on the job market, or first-hand job search tips, social media can be of service. Also, it could be useful for you to research what HR wants to see in candidates and you can do it here https://www.LIKE.TG.com/blog/LIKE.TG-blog-guidelines. It will be the best way to write a perfect resume.
But how does one choose from an abundance of social media experts and coaches? Well, we’ve done the job for you. In this article, you’ll find a list of the best job experts on Twitter and LinkedIn that we suggest you follow.
Twitter Influencers
Twitter is generally regarded as a platform for politicians, celebrities, and their fans. But that’s far from being everything this social network can offer. There are also a lot of experts of all kinds sharing their knowledge and insights – job experts included. So, here are our top-3 Twitter influencers writing career advice.
1. Adam Grant (@AdamMGrant)
Adam Grant’s Twitter profile states he’s currently an “organizational psychologist” at Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He’s also known as the New York Times #1 best-selling author due to his book Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know. He also has a podcast of his own on TED Talks called WorkLife.
Adam currently has over 400,000 followers, including Hollywood actress, businesswoman, and producer Reese Witherspoon, actor Ashton Kutcher, and other celebrities. The reason for such popularity is probably that Grant manages to maintain the right balance between inspirational tweets, useful research data, and interesting insights.
2. Hannah Morgan (@careersherpa)
A New York-based job market expert Hannah Morgan describes herself as a speaker, author, LinkedIn top voice, and an “unapologetic introvert”. Indeed, she’s better known as a LinkedIn influencer – but her Twitter account is also worth following if you need fast and accessible career advice.
However, if you’re looking for inspirational fluff or deep insights for (aspiring) higher-level executives, Hannah’s profile is probably not the place to go. Her page is about more down-to-Earth topics like:
acing an interview;
networking online;
job search strategies;
resume creation, and the like.
Morgan herself states that the account is aimed at job seekers looking for “help and hope for a faster job search”, so this is exactly what you’ll get there.
3. Alison Doyle (@AlisonDoyle)
One more seasoned job expert sharing useful advice on Twitter is Alison Doyle. She’s the job search expert for The Balance agency and founder of her own company Career Tool Belt that provides advice and assistance to job seekers.
Though she doesn’t have as many followers as “star” influencers, her page offers lots of hands-on tips that anyone still in search of their dream job can make use of instantly. On her account, you can find answers to such questions as what to name as a reason for leaving your previous job, how to choose a resume file name, and more.
LinkedIn Influencers
LinkedIn is still the ultimate place to go to for anything connected with jobs and career growth. Be it networking, posting an online resume, or looking for advice from top experts – this social network offers endless opportunities. And of course, there are many experts there who are worth following. Here are our top 3.
Andrea Koppel
Washington-based expert Andrea Coppel is particularly passionate about helping fresh college graduates make their first steps into their future careers. She’s pretty popular, too, with her profile being included in the 2021 Top Job Search Expert to Follow on LinkedIn by Jobscan and a top-100 Apple podcast of her own called Time4Coffee.
Andrea is also the founder and CEO of College2Career Academy – a company whose name speaks for itself. Koppel’s target audience includes college juniors and seniors as well as their parents, and she specializes in providing concrete actionable advice. But if you’ve only got a high school diploma yet, you can follow her as well.
Rosie McCarthy
Badass Careers founder Rosie McCarthy positions herself as a “career fulfillment coach”. As such, she is devoted to helping millennials and Gen Zs create their personal brands and build meaningful careers. Rosie is based in New Zealand but is committed to helping young people worldwide.
On her page, you can find advice ranging from how to find a career purpose or learn to love your work to practical tips on resume writing. She also offers free weekly training on her YouTube channel.
Lazlo Bock
Former Google employee Lazlo Bock is a big LinkedIn influencer with more than a million followers. He’s now CEO and co-founder of software company Humu, and he’s also known as the author of Work Rules! – a book where he shares his insights from work at Google.
Lazlo still writes a lot about work at Google in particular, but his articles also cover a wide array of topics from company culture to decision-making to resumes and interviews. Quite a lot to linger on.
Final Thoughts
Following job experts on Twitter, LinkedIn, or elsewhere can be very useful indeed. It’s a great way to find out job search tips and get inspiration, especially if you hand-pick the accounts to follow.
However, don’t let it become just another form of procrastination. Remember that knowing what to do is one thing, and doing it – quite another. So, if you find any piece of advice from the experts useful – don’t hesitate to actually follow it.
About Author:This article is written by the Marketing Team of LIKE.TG.LIKE.TG is a leading global provider of Applicant Tracking, Onboarding,Offboarding, Communications, Engagement, Recognition, and Financial Wellness solutions. Its powerful and user-friendly software eliminates manual/paper processes, increases employee productivity and engagement, improves time and cost savings, and reduces regulatory compliance risk
7 Step Recruitment Marketing Action Plan To Hire Candidates
In the hiring market, some challenges can arise at any moment. To overcome this challenge, the recruiter needs to have a recruitment marketing action plan.
Great recruiters can hire candidates at the right time. These employees will have an impact on your organization. Hiring great job seekers takes time, and a working recruitment marketing strategy is a must to find the best candidates.
The need for a recruitment marketing action plan is necessary because being a recruiter is quite hard to fill the job vacancies in this candidate-driven job market. These days candidates are aware and they control which company to choose and work for.
With a lot of companies looking out for the same candidates, one needs to have the right recruitment plan in place. Building a rounded strategy is what every recruiter is looking for.
This blog post will focus on how to build an effective recruitment marketing action plan. You will be able to use it in action immediately and begin attracting great candidates.
#1. First, Define Your Goals
The primary goal of any company is to build a team that is efficient and works toward the company culture. The overall goal of your recruitment marketing action plan is to hire the candidates, and for that, you need to follow the SMART approach. It goes like this:
S: Specific
M: Measurable
A: Achievable
R: Realistic
T: Timely
You need to define specific goals that are measured. Here are common recruitment marketing goals that include:
Improve candidate engagement
Improve employer brand awareness
Get more candidates
Get more career site visitors
Increase in the referral rate
And more.
#2. Recognize The Candidate Persona
A recruitment plan without knowing your ideal candidate audience is a sure shot recipe for disaster. One needs to understand the importance of the candidate persona. The candidate persona includes everything you are looking for in the candidates. Every company can have different requirements for specific candidates.
As a recruiter, you need to stay in touch with all the necessary departments in your organization. You need to keep every team in the loop and ask them about the metrics they need in a candidate. It will keep you updated on the customer portrait and get some tips about it.
Keep in mind what your team lacks and write down the insights. Does your team require a single player or a team player? Like you can narrow down your search and when you understand what you need. It would be easier to get rid of CVs that don't suit the company culture and the expectation of the job profile.
To learn more about recruitment methods, download our ebook now.
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#3. Have An Employer Brand
A recruiter knows that they are in the market, and not only the company chooses the candidates, the candidates also select the right company. You should know why you are the best choice and what extra you can offer to the candidates. Here are some ways you can improve the employer brand:
Nurture your culture: Sharing your company’s work culture with candidates is a sure-shot way to improve the employer brand.
Embrace technology: The use of tools present at your career site is beneficial for candidates, it increases the speed of the hiring process. Take help of chatbots, CRMs, and HRMs.
Treat candidates like your customers: Candidate experience is a vital factor during the recruitment process. Every candidate likes a seamless recruitment experience. The company needs to ensure every candidate gets a feedback email after the interview.
#4. Use Tools To Cultivate The Talent Supply
Candidates find job offers in both traditional and modern ways, the latter gets used more. The candidates with the desired skills are selective about which opportunities they are looking to pursue. Therefore, making it easier for the candidates is the right strategy to follow, do it on your social media channels and in which candidates can apply easily.
Use shorter applications that are prefield and use text messaging to recruit. You can rely on AI-enhanced recruitment trends to make it faster and easier for the candidates to apply to your company and move ahead with the process.
AI technologies help to automate manual and administrative tasks in the process enabling the recruiters to build the relationship and have a positive candidate experience.
#5. Consider The Role Of Social Media
Modern social media platforms play a vital role to communicate with audiences. Almost everyone uses the internet to stay connected with people. One should build the strategy around it.
The next step is to choose the right platform for your social media recruitment strategy. It will help you to target potential candidates. Some of them are ideal, for example, if you need a developer, you can leverage Linkedin for this task. Linkedin will serve a better purpose to source out the passive candidate. There are plenty of job boards present that you can utilize for hiring candidates.
You can use Facebook and Instagram to increase the brand awareness of your company. These two platforms are ideal for building your community by sharing content that is useful to the candidates.
Another thing you can focus on is building a social media career page, this way you will ensure that the candidates stay up to date with the job posting in your company and they can apply directly from your company’s social media account.
#6. Focus On Building The Internal Talent Pool
Promoting employees internally helps the company to solve the conundrum to hire candidates at a rapid pace and fill the open positions. It’s the ideal way to meet the hiring demands while maintaining quality.
Many recruiters believe that they need to hire people from different companies to improve the diversity and strengthen the company.
Focus on your internal employees. The benefit is that you work with them every day, knowing them better.
It’s a necessary point that one should include in their recruitment marketing action plan. Think of how you can improve the top talent pool. Here are some ways:
Know employee goals early: After the candidate’s onboarding is completed, the manager needs to sit down with them and ask them about their future goals and career.
Reward employees: It is ideal to ensure that you are offering opportunities to the employees that are tailored to their goals. Go with individual development programs for employees.
Understand what your employee needs: Employees love to be asked what they need to improve their overall experience in the workplace. It is vital while building an internal talent pipeline.
A recruiter can take the help of properly designed employee referral programs to maximize the internal talent pool.
To learn more about recruitment methods, download our ebook now.
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#7. Evaluate Recruitment Marketing Results
The goals should be measurable in your recruitment marketing action plan. You need to implement your goals and see the results they are providing.
Gather metrics that work for you and what does not work can improve your recruitment marketing plan.
To have better results, you need to experiment. You shouldn’t proceed with the results.
Therefore, HR teams must ensure they store and evaluate data and also track the recruitment marketing metrics. Otherwise, you will find yourself with wasted time and effort.
Wrapping up
Hiring is challenging, but a recruiter has to make a plan accordingly. There must be one plan that one should develop constantly. The best companies take leverage of the recruitment marketing action plan and work. They make changes where it’s necessary, and they know their target audience.
7. Ensure that employees enjoy working
Successful students spend a huge portion of their day reading and learning from the best. Employees also spend countless hours in the workplace. Therefore, you need to ensure that the workplace is a fun and enjoyable place to be for everyone. When you create an environment where employees feel comfortable working, they will be motivated to do their best.
This doesn’t mean that you have to spend thousands of dollars on installing luxurious items in the workplace. You can create a conducive environment in the workplace by allowing birthday celebrations, coffee breaks and encouraging your employees to have casual and friendly conversations instead of talking about work projects all the time.
About Author: Ginni Agarwal is a Talent Acquisition Expert at Upright Human Capital with extensive experience in Tech and Non-tech hiring. She loves blogging, writing articles about Talent Acquisition, and Human resources. She has been associated with the Talent Industry for a while. She enjoys sharing her experience with others.
