Two Barriers That Traditional Human Resources Departments Need to Watch Out For
Post-recession, the drawbacks of many traditional HRDs that were implicit, have become explicit, with managers fuming over their inabilities to win in talent hunt and retention, and excellent human resources departments of yesteryear watching mutely their newer competitors edging ahead in the race.
The Three Types of Organizational Commitment of Employees
Employee involvement in the missions and visions of an organization, and the types of employee commitments towards an organization remain at the center of designing any management strategy. Business leaders have led through the centuries by understanding employee psychology, employee emotions, and employee expectations, and by catering to employee needs in a manner that resulted in a win-win situation for both employer and employee. This situation guaranteed organizational commitment of the employee and in turn helped the organization realize its goals.
Leading the Employee to Work Collaboratively
Getting employees to enter a collaborative mode of functioning, rather than viewing work as a series of tasks performed for the employer, begins with two things. First, the manager must develop a genuine relationship with the employee to open a collaborative process, and second, the employee must perceive ‘ownership’ of tasks.
Managing Communications About Replacements
While identifying and grooming replacements for key individuals in the organizations is a process mandatory for certainty and resilience of business, as is succession planning, mishandling communications about replacement planning can create unwanted reactions. The key issues are not only about spotting and grooming replacements, but about “when to tell, and how to tell it.” The mode and timing of communication about replacement is critical both in the case of conveying plans to the replacement, as well as to the person who is to be replaced. There are human, legal, and business issues involved.
Employee Engagement: Reality v Buzzword
The buzzword is ‘employee engagement’ is the new mantra seen as a broad cure for corporate maladies and poor productivity that fails to meet company objectives and targets. Employee engagement is also seen as a step towards employee retention: in part, this is true, but the common ground begins and ends with employee trust and credibility of the employer brand – the rest components of employee engagement hardly matter in employee retention.
Top Workplace Policies That You Need to Have to Protect Yourself from Liability
In a lawsuit oriented society such as the United States, the relationship between the employer and the employee is an extremely sensitive issue. According to recent reports, nearly 90% of U.S. corporations are engaged in some type of litigation, and the average company has a docket of around 40 lawsuits.
How to Motivate Your Sales Team without Focusing Solely on Money
A sale is a very important component of your business. Good sales are an indicator that your business is performing well, while poor sales ring a warning sign. Keeping your sales team motivated is definitely worth your time and effort. However, it is important to understand what motivates your sales team. And no, it’s certainly not just about the money. In fact, being too motivated by money can be a problem, as this may lead to poor team spirit and putting oneself before the team. Also, in situations where money is the only motivator, there’s nothing to prevent the competition from using the same motivator to attract your best sales people along with your customers!
Ten Steps to Effective Talent Management
The survival, profitability, and growth of a business depend to a large extent on talent management efforts. However, to be successful, talent management efforts need to have full commitment from all levels of existing management. Talent management is not an isolated task of the HR department, and without support and involvement from all levels of the managerial hierarchy, most talent management efforts end up as wasteful expenditure. This is why involvement of managers in other departments than HR is essential for any talent management drive. Each key group of stakeholders should have clear and defined roles in the talent management efforts, and in order to act effectively, their roles need to be clarified, prioritized, and communicated to them. Managers must agree to the talent management plan and their roles so that results can be achieved with greater transparency.
5 Tips for Writing Employee Performance Reviews
Writing employee reviews is an art and gives an insight into the employer’s strength in workforce management. Work evaluations are essential to the manager’s job. But they need not be boring and commonplace. One can write some apt and action-oriented assessments of employees that drive effective results.
Why Don’t Team Building Exercises Work Usually?
Team building exercises are meant to be constructive activities, which can actually create a sense of belongingness within the team. They are meant to break the ice between employees and get them to know each other for better camaraderie in the office. But these exercises might get terribly wrong too. Employees of a home security company called Alarm One Inc. were pitted against a rival company’s workers, according to some court documents. The winners poked fun and jeered at the losers, forced baby food down their throats and made them wear diapers. What happened next was a nightmare for Alarm One Inc. It had to cough up more than a million dollars when an employee sued them for gross misconduct.
How to Fire an Employee – 5 Ways to Get It Done Smoothly
It is common practice to fire an employee if the employee is not performing well in their job. When a boss fires an employee, it is most often because both have reached a dead end. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, most people average more than 11 jobs in their life. Employees come and go, sometimes voluntarily and sometimes involuntarily. Some are shown the door, while others just switch jobs out of boredom.
Support Your Employees and Help them Discover their Potentials
Talent management and talent retention are the pressing needs today in the face of a mobile and volatile employee market overcrowded with poor talent. Motivated, productive and talented employees are the key to survival of business organizations. And the productivity needs to be both short-term and long-term.
Helping Young Professionals Find Work-Life Balance
You might already know the answer to the question, or you might be asking yourself why you should help employees in your company find work-life balance. Why should you as an employer worry about that and how is it going to benefit you if the employee is going to leave the next day? Well, the rationale starts exactly here on this issue. You wouldn’t want trained employees and talented employees to leave your organization, and one of the best retention strategies to ensure that is to create comfort zones and proper work-life balance for your employees.
How to Integrate New Hires in Your Company Culture
A properly formulated new-employee orientation strategy should make the new employee feel welcome and knowledgeable about the organization, and also make him/her ready to go with well defined tasks. Any orientation program should succeed in clearly communicating the role and responsibility of an employee, and also mark out company conventions, hierarchies, and key people. It should also make the employee knowledgeable about where to find the resources and facilities he/she needs to carry out his/her job properly.
How to Retain Employees and Fight Employee Attrition
All employers are aware that the labor/employee market always experiences quantitative overcrowding and qualitative shortage, regardless of whether there is a recession or not. The problem with a recession is that it makes both retention and recruitment more difficult processes, as there is a glut of job applicants who need to be properly screened, and there is rising need to optimize business operations by retaining the right talent and getting rid of less-efficient employees. At the same time, every employer knows that it is the people who work for the company that make a company and losing key people can cause devastating losses to business operations.
Attracting Self-Motivated Employees
Self-motivated employees can prove to be a competitive advantage for your company. However, as an employer, you cannot create a self-motivated employee – you can only create an environment that fulfills your employees' needs, values and personal goals, to keep them committed towards the company's goals and objectives, with little supervision or direction.
Practical Management of Workplace Stress Made Easy Part-1
Trying to work out of workplace stress in a methodical manner, by itself, creates a huge stress on the management. Much of that stress is generated by an overload of conflicting, confusing, academic, and generalizing information and it can take years for anyone to make any real sense out of that mass of knowledge. So, we have decided to dump the learned approach and go for a short practical one – creating a blueprint for stress management that just touches on matters of academic importance and deals briefly with those of real importance. The rest is for you to assimilate, conceptualize and implement. At least, our series of articles on workplace stress management is guaranteed to cause less stress than most.
Leaving Employees to Self-Management
Traditionally, both employers and employees have developed stereotypes in different cultures and both employers as well as employees enter a workplace with those stereotypes set in their minds. Employers often use excessive and negative means to 'control' employees forgetting that they are buying service and not people, and employees who suffer learn to put all employers in the same cast. On the other hand employers are let down by negligent employees, procrastinating people with poor work culture, and some who do not keep trust or faith. Consequently, employers who have so suffered, see employees with suspicion and try to micromanage affairs. However, holding on to stereotypes is wrong since every individual is different and so is every employer as well as employee.
Communicating Across a Worldwide Workforce
‘Globalization’ is no more a jargon but an ordinary part of everyday life. Business leaders have learned long that the problem is not in ‘globalization’ or in ‘diversity’ but in the lack of cross-cultural competencies in communication. Executives, managers, negotiators, business leaders, or decision makers of any and every level can create barriers and hamper the smooth flow of business with their personal incompetence in cross-cultural communication creating pockets of miscommunication or negativity. To handle a workforce spread worldwide, a leader needs the following characteristics:
Important Salary Negotiation Tips for Employers
When you start negotiating the package of a potential candidate, there are some things that you can be sure of, and there are some things you need to be sure about. These provide you the points of reference for negotiating the salary of a prospective employee.