Every successful business organizes its employees to have enthusiasm about the work force. This article identifies three types of organizational commitment you can cultivate in your employees, from the prized affective commitment, where employees enthusiastically believe in the organization, to continuance commitment, where employees fear the losses of leaving, to normative commitment, based on a sense of duty. This was our most popular article because it simplifies the three strategies all employers must consider when drafting their mission statement and vision.
Before reading our most popular article on how to foster enthusiasm about your employees, it helps to hire the best employees possible in the first place – those who have the best fit, who work with the team you already have, and hopefully improve it. This article does not dull you with the psychology of interviewing, but assumes you already know all that, and just need some prompts on the sorts of questions to ask during the interview. Asking some of these will quickly expose the type of person your potential employee is.
Every employee can feel the difference in atmosphere when the boss is in the office and when he is out. While it may be difficult to fuss over the stress level of any given employee, the management is the anchor point that creates the atmosphere and sets the tone for how much stress a job has. Stress is inevitable, especially at the corporate or strategic level. Stress can be correlated to happiness, or lack thereof. Since enthusiasm for the job, a necessary factor for a loyal team, is an important goal, one of the best ways to foster a hearty team is to train the managers on how to structure a lower stress environment. This article details how.
With today’s tough job market, we have the advent of professional interviewees. These are people who know how to give an impressive interview, but are not top performers on the job. A savvy interviewer needs to know how to spot the fakes from the real performers. This article touches on how to do exactly that, with some rules of thumb for seeing through fake answers and electing the employees who will bring true value to the team. A few cues in the style of how interviewees respond is indication enough, but some special training for interviewers will also help.
This offers a great companion piece to our previous article. Once you’ve got a sense of formatting, you want to work on the content of your job posting. This is the front door to future employees, so you want to make it welcoming and simple to understand. By identifying these mistakes, you will be sure to write a compelling job description that makes immediate sense to those glutted with ads and postings on various media sites.
Not surprisingly, a few of our most popular articles concern stress, and as we all know, the office, where we spend most of our time, can be the most stressful environment of all. This article mentions 10 practical and simple things that put you in control of the stress level you feel while on the job. They are not overly complicated disciplines, but simple measures that can give immediate results, avoiding what so many of us have faced over the years: a mental breakdown.
So many of our popular articles concern hiring employees, but that’s only half the battle. Retaining them is just as important. After all, in today’s world, people switch jobs quickly, and once an appealing offer has been made, your counter offer will rarely hold them back. These four strategies will help you create the sort of environment where your best employees will not be tempted to leave in the first place, but will stay on and be loyal.
A poorly formatted job posting can glut you with responses from “Candidates” who don’t even remotely match what you are looking for. Given the various forms of media – newspaper, job posting sites, LinkedIn – and the endless ways you can present your job and company, some guidance on how to do it would be great. And this article gives exactly that, not just from one person’s perspective. It also offers advice from a series of experts all answering the same question in their own way, from years of personal experience.
Often having a sense of importance is more integral to an employee than compensation. Many employees would choose a better job title over a pay raise. This could be exploited as a gimmick, but it need not be. This article explains how using appropriate job titles leads to employee satisfaction, giving a sense of accomplishment and placement within the company. Some ingenuity in matching a job title to the right job description will keep names relevant and also give each employee a sense of place, belonging and importance in the company.
Job posting advice has been popular for us this year, and this article helps you get down to the nitty gritty. How should you structure the posting itself? How can you make it visibly appealing so the right candidate can readily understand who you are looking for and why? These formatting tips will help you create a compelling ad that is sure to attract the right candidates.
Just as the end of a romance is often the messiest part, the end of a job has the potential to go very badly, and how an employee is fired gives an ethos of anxiety, perhaps, to the retained employees. But this need not be the case, and firing employees is a regular part of doing a job. This article’s popularity is based on the simple practical ways to do the dirty business of firing an employee in a clean and easy manner, with minimum hard feelings.
Naturally, one of the biggest incentives new hires are looking for is an appropriate salary. You must offer a salary appropriate for what other employers are paying, the role of the hire in your organization, and of course what your budget allows. This article helps put this constellation of factors in orbit, so you can negotiate a salary that brings your new hire in smiling with a sense of achievement. They can feel like they have found the right job and want to work hard to retain it.
Many of our most popular articles focus on a job posting as an ad that attracts future employees. This one intensifies the general advice we’ve been giving by focusing on the unique opportunities the internet offers. Unlike traditional newspaper ads, space is no longer a limiting factor, and more creativity can go into attracting the appropriate employee. This article will advise you on how to do it right.
The popularity of this article is due, no doubt, to the all-too-human all too recognizable absurdity office dating can cause, the scenarios and situations one can get into – a set of stories we can all recognize as plausible and horrible. No definite advice is given into what sort of dating policy an office should have – most have none at all – but the suggestion that some simple and consistent policy could help end the madness is good advice.
Every new hire lacking experience but eager for a job will tell you how passionate they are about the industry. And just as being in love is so intoxicating because of the passion, so does a new hire bring an exciting dynamic when they have real passion. But is the passion genuine, or is it just an eagerness to find employment – any employment? This response from a dozen hiring managers will put this question in perspective, apprising you of how the experts have failed and succeeded when hiring for passion instead of experience.
This article gained popularity because it offers nine basic pieces of advice for regaining a sense of balance between work and life. The advice is concise, simple, and yet profound, and sure to help you integrate your work life, family life, health, and spiritual life. Since it is so easy to get bent out of whack, as an employee or an employer, this sort of common-sense wisdom needs to be remembered again and again.
Crafting a job posting requires precision, as you want to attract exactly the correct sort of candidate, and avoid being flooded with hopefuls who just don’t fit. That means you need to master the art of writing results-oriented job descriptions. These focus on the results you expect from a job, and clarify a bit about the purpose and importance of the job. Since your employee naturally will be attracted to purpose and importance, this matters. This article teaches you how to fine tune the process.
Bias issues are a minefield in employment. Failing to hire a qualified candidate for reasons of gender, sexual orientation, religion, or whatever else, can not only fetch you a lawsuit, but it can give your business a bad name – which is just as bad. Furthermore, and more practically, your personal biases may not serve your company, but bar you from seeing real talent who could do your company a lot of good. In this regard, this article helps you avoid the pitfalls of bias with some practical advice on how to structure questions and format the focus of the interview.
Many of our most popular articles regard that tricky business of hiring new employees. This article emphasizes the hunt for relevant talent, of finding people with the skills and even the genius to offer power to your team. As the article explains, this is more than an HR concern, but involves everybody in the company, who must coordinate their efforts in identifying exactly what talent the company already has, and what talent it needs.
You might be nervous to hire a mother or a previous stay at home wife into your company. This article explains why that nervousness may be uncalled for, by listing the unique skill set only mothers have. There is a lot of talent required to be a mother. Mothers develop years of skill, and such assets as multitasking skills, people managing, and loyalty. If moms with these skills are well placed, they will greatly enrich your team.
