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Recreating a Community at Work

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For decades, we’ve been living lonelier, more isolated lives. As our social connectedness and sense of community has decreased, so has our happiness and mental health. And with more aspects of our lives becoming digital, it has reduced our opportunities for everyday social interaction. The nature of our work, in particular, has shifted.

In 2014, Christine and Energy Project CEO Tony Schwartz partnered to learn more about what stands in the way of being more productive and satisfied at work. One of the more surprising findings was that 65% of people didn’t feel any sense of community at work.

That seemed costly (and sad!), motivating Christine to write Mastering Community, since lonelier workers report lower job satisfaction, fewer promotions, more frequent job switching, and a higher likelihood of quitting their current job in the next six months. Lonelier employees also tend to perform worse.

During the pandemic, many of us became even more isolated. Community, which we define as a group of individuals who share a mutual concern for one another’s welfare, has proven challenging to cultivate, especially for those working virtually. To learn more, we conducted a survey with the Conference for Women in which we asked nearly 1,500 participants about their sense of community at work before and since the pandemic and found it has declined 37%. When people had a sense of community at work, we found that they were 58% more likely to thrive at work, 55% more engaged, and 66% more likely to stay with their organization. They experienced significantly less stress and were far more likely to thrive outside of work, too.

People can create community in many ways, and preferences may differ depending on their backgrounds and interests. Here are several ways companies have successfully built a sense of community at work that leaders can consider emulating at their own organizations.

Create mutual learning opportunities

After creating an internal university for training years ago, Motley Fool, the stock advisor company, realized that the teachers got even more out of it than the students. The feedback led to a vibrant coaching program in which about 10% of employees act as a coach to other employees. For many, being a coach is a favourite part of their job. Chief People Officer Lee Burbage said, “When you think of progress and growth in a career, your mind tends to stay boxed into ‘What is my current role? What am I doing?’…we really try to encourage side projects…taking on a teaching role, taking on a coaching role, being a leader in one of our ERGs, that sort of thing.”

Burbage went on to describe how the company helped foster a sense of community by enabling employees to learn from one another in a less formal way:

We’ve had incredible fun and incredible effectiveness going out to [employees] and saying, “Hey, is anybody really good at something and would be interested in teaching others?” All it takes is for them to set up a Zoom call. We’ve had everything from DJ class to butchering class. How to make drinks, how to sew. Tapping into your employees and skills they may already have that they’d be excited to teach others, especially in the virtual world, that makes for a great class and creates an opportunity again for them to progress and grow and meet new people.

Plug into your local community

Kim Malek, the cofounder of ice cream company Salt & Straw, forges a sense of meaning and connectedness among employees, customers, and beyond to the larger communities in which her shops are located. From the beginning, Kim and her cousin and cofounder, Tyler Malek, “turned to their community, asking friends — chefs, chocolatiers, brewers, and farmers — for advice, finding inspiration everywhere they looked.”

Kim and Tyler worked with the Oregon Innovation Centre, a partnership between Oregon State University and the Department of Agriculture, to help companies support the local food industry and farmers. Kim Malek told Christine that every single ice cream flavour on their menu “had a person behind it that we worked with and whose story we could tell. So that feeling of community came through in the actual ice cream you were eating.”

On the people side, Salt & Straw partners with local community groups Emerging Leaders, an organization that places BIPOC students into paid internships, and The Women’s Justice Project (WJP), a program in Oregon that helps formerly incarcerated women re-join their communities. They also work with DPI Staffing to create job opportunities for people with barriers like disabilities and criminal records, and have hired 10 people as part of that program.

In partnership with local schools, Salt & Straw holds an annual “student inventors series” where children are invited to invent a new flavour of ice cream. The winner not only has their ice cream produced, but they read it to their school at an assembly, and the entire school gets free ice cream. This past year, Salt & Straw held a “rad readers” series and invited kids to submit their wildest stories attached to a proposed ice cream flavour. Salt & Straw looks for ways like this to embed themselves in and engage with the community to help people thrive. It creates meaning for their own community while also lifting up others.

Create virtual shared experiences

Develop ways for your people to connect through shared experiences, even if they’re working virtually. Sanjay Amin, head of YouTube Music + Premium Subscription Partnerships at YouTube, will share personal stories, suggest the team listen to the same album, or try one recipe together. It varies and is voluntary. He told Christine he tries to set the tone by being “an open book” and showing his human side through vulnerability. Amin has also sent his team members a “deep question card” the day before a team meeting. It’s completely optional but allows people to speak up and share their thoughts, experiences, and feelings in response to a deep question — for example:

If you could give everyone the same superpower, which superpower would you choose?

What life lesson do you wish everyone was taught in school?

He told Christine, “Fun, playful questions like these give us each a chance to go deep quickly and understand how we uniquely view the world” and that people recognized a shared humanity and bonding.

EXOS, a coaching company, has a new program, the Game Changer, that’s a six-week experience designed to get people to rethink what it means to sustain performance and career success in the long run. Vice President Ryan Kaps told Christine, “Work is never going back to the way it was. We saw an opportunity to help people not only survive, but thrive.”

In the Game Changer, members are guided by an EXOS performance coach and industry experts to address barriers that may be holding them back from reaching their highest potential at work or in life. Members learn science-backed strategies that deepen their curiosity, awaken their creativity, and help sustain energy and focus. The program structure combines weekly individual self-led challenges and live virtual team-based huddles and accountability, which provide community and support. People who’ve completed the Game Changer call it “transformative,” with 70% of participants saying they’re less stressed and 91% reporting that it “reignited their passion and purpose.”

Make rest and renewal a team effort

Burnout is rampant and has surged during the pandemic. In our recent survey, we found that only 10% of respondents take a break daily, 50% take breaks just once or twice a week, and 22% report never taking breaks. Distancing from technology is particularly challenging, with a mere 8% of respondents reporting that they unplug from all technology daily. Consider what you can do to focus on recovery, together.

Tony Schwartz told Christine about the work his group did with a team from accounting firm Ernst and Young. In 2018, this team had been working on a particularly challenging project during the busy season, the result being that the team members became so exhausted and demoralized that a majority of them left the company afterward.

To try to change this, the 40-person EY team worked with the Energy Project to develop a collective “Resilience Boot Camp” in 2019 focused on teaching people to take more breaks and get better rest in order to manage their physical, emotional, and mental energy during especially intense periods. As a follow up, every other week for the 14 weeks of the busy season, the EY employees attended one-hour group coaching sessions during which team members discussed setbacks and challenges and supported one another in trying to embrace new recovery routines. Each participant was paired with another teammate to provide additional personal support and accountability.

Thanks to the significant shifts in behaviour, accountants completed their work in fewer hours and agreed to take off one weekend day each week during this intense period. “Employees were able to drop 12 to 20 hours per week based on these changes, while accomplishing the same amount of work,” Schwartz told Christine.

By the end of the 2019 busy season, team members felt dramatically better than at the end of 2018’s. And five months after the busy season, when accounting teams typically lost people to exhaustion and burnout, this EY team’s retention stood at 97.5%. Schwartz told Christine that his main takeaway from that experience was “the power of community.”

Community can be a survival tool — a way for people to get through challenging things together — and helps move people from surviving to thriving. As we found, it also makes people much more likely to stay with your organization. What can you do to help build a sense of community?

Given our current situation knowing that your colleagues or employees are best suited for this new scenario we find ourselves in. Finding the right talent, the best fit for the job and your organisation can be a very challenging task. It is now important to find out whether your managers or your team is well-equipped of working together from various locations. It requires deep knowledge of their personalities, strengths, weaknesses, interests, work style and other characteristics. Our technology and solutions will do the work for you, helping you discover if your people are resilient during times of hardship, if they are autonomous, if they are team players, without actual human contact. Given that our platform is cloud-based, everyone can use it from home as well. Humanity finds itself at a crossroad for various reasons now, why not help people discover and develop themselves from the comfort of their own homes?

Request a free demo:

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Sources:

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/11/researchers-discover-best-way-to-avoid-procrastination
https://medium.com/productivity-power/can-a-self-imposed-deadline-help-beat-procrastination-13936992d1ea
https://www.fastcompany.com/3026895/self-imposed-deadlines-dont-stop-procrastination-heres-what-might

No Deadline Keeps People from Procrastinating

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Usually, a deadline motivates us to do things we might otherwise put off, but the relationship isn’t always clear-cut. For example, although a long deadline theoretically gives us more time to finish a task, it often means that we postpone it over and over until eventually we forget all about it. Indeed, only 5.5% of the people who were given a monthlong deadline returned our survey, compared with 6.6% of those who were given just a week. But people who were given no deadline had the highest response rate of all: 8.3%. And they were more likely than the others to return the survey within three days.

They say procrastination is the thief of time—actually deadlines are

Mark Twain advised people never to put off until tomorrow what they can put off until the day after, and a lot of us listen. Estimates suggest that 15% to 20% of all people are chronic procrastinators, and that share goes up for situational delay: As one example, four in five people put off retirement savings despite knowing better. Then there are the innumerable office procrastinators, many identifiable by the mere fact that they’re reading this article.

The devious thing about procrastination is that while we tend to shrug or laugh it off as part of the work process, evidence suggests it’s far from harmless. At the root of the problem is our failure to differentiate between simply delaying a task, perhaps a healthy sign of organizational skills, and truly procrastinating on it, a self-defeating habit people know will hurt them later–a little like smoking. Not only does our work suffer from the real thing, but our well-being does, too.

Self-imposed deadlines – not as effective as external deadlines in boosting task performance

That puts strategies to counter procrastination at a premium. One of the most common is a self-imposed deadline, often scheduled long before an actual external deadline, an approach that acknowledges the problem and commits to resolving it. The intention here is great–instill some discipline in those moments when you have it–but whether or not self-imposed deadlines work is another question.

Some early research found that imposing a deadline might at least be better than waiting until the last minute. In a 2002 study, researchers Dan Ariely and Klaus Wertenbroch hired 60 students to proofread three passages. Some of these test participants received a weekly deadline for each passage, some received one final deadline for all three, and some could choose their own deadline. The readers got a dime for every error they detected but were docked a dollar for every day they were late.

Despite the penalty, participants who imposed their own deadlines performed worse than those given evenly spaced weekly deadlines in terms of detecting errors, finishing near deadline, and generating money (see below). Then again they did better than those given one final deadline. Ariely and Wertenbroch concluded in the journal Psychological Science that self-imposed deadlines, while a reasonable strategy to curb procrastination, “were not always as effective as some external deadlines in boosting task performance.”

A recent attempt to replicate that experiment found even less reason for hope. Researchers Alberto Bisin and Kyle Hyndman arranged for students to alphabetise three word jumbles. As in the earlier study, some test participants received evenly spaced deadlines, some a final deadline, and some could impose their own. Each finished jumble earned participants $15, though this time there was no room for tardiness; blowing the deadline meant blowing the cash.

A substantial number of participants who self-imposed a deadline reported themselves as being relatively low in conscientiousness–a sign that they were aware of being procrastinators and were using the deadline to address the problem. No matter. Bisin and Hyndman report that these participants nevertheless had the lowest completion rate of any group. Unlike in the earlier study, participants with self-imposed deadlines completed fewer tasks than those with just one deadline at the end.

Why the difference? Bisin attributes it to the type of deadline imposed. In the 2002 study, students had a “soft” deadline; in other words, they could salvage a little credit for finishing late. The “hard” deadline in the new study left no room for error. So procrastinators who waited until the last minute to start the task and found it too tough to complete in time simply quit, rather than press on and mitigate their losses.

“They think the deadline is helpful because it makes them do it,” Bisin tells Co.Design. “But they do it too close to deadline, and as a consequence, when they discover it’s harder, they drop it. This is the negative effect.”

When the deadline is self-imposed, its authority is corrupted and the motivation never materialises

Timothy Pychyl of Carleton University, one of the leading scholars of procrastination, isn’t surprised that self-imposed deadlines don’t resolve undesirable delays. Procrastinators may need the tension of a looming deadline to get motivated, but when that deadline is self-imposed its authority is corrupted and the motivation never materialises. “The deadline isn’t real, and self-deception is a big part of procrastination,” he tells Co.Design.

Which speaks to the distinction drawn earlier between time management and true procrastination. If time management were the essence of the problem, a self-imposed deadline should help. But Pychyl and other researchers have come to believe that emotional failures rest at the root of procrastination. Procrastinators delay a task because they’re not in the mood to do it and deceive themselves into thinking they will be later on. When that time comes and they’re not, they’re in the same emotional place but with less time until deadline.

Some experts believe that the best strategy for addressing procrastination is to find something enjoyable or meaningful in whatever task is before you. Easier said than done, for sure. But if you can make that chore or assignment almost as pleasant as, say, reading a book of Twain quotes, then maybe you’ll only put it off until tomorrow. You’ll have the whole day after to thank yourself.

Given our current situation knowing that your colleagues or employees are best suited for this new scenario we find ourselves in. Finding the right talent, the best fit for the job and your organisation can be a very challenging task. It is now important to find out whether your managers or your team is well-equipped of working together from various locations. It requires deep knowledge of their personalities, strengths, weaknesses, interests, work style and other characteristics. Our technology and solutions will do the work for you, helping you discover if your people are resilient during times of hardship, if they are autonomous, if they are team players, without actual human contact. Given that our platform is cloud-based, everyone can use it from home as well. Humanity finds itself at a crossroad for various reasons now, why not help people discover and develop themselves from the comfort of their own homes?

Request a free demo:

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Sources:

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/11/researchers-discover-best-way-to-avoid-procrastination
https://medium.com/productivity-power/can-a-self-imposed-deadline-help-beat-procrastination-13936992d1ea
https://www.fastcompany.com/3026895/self-imposed-deadlines-dont-stop-procrastination-heres-what-might

The Time Has Come for the Career Portfolio

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Ultimately, each employee is responsible for and owns their own portfolio. Unlike a job, a career portfolio can never be taken away. The past two and a half years have been a giant lesson in workplace flux. In any given week, month, or quarter, a new and often disruptive change emerges to knock leaders and organisations sideways. Regardless of whether or not a recession is on the horizon or the employer-employee power balance shifts, whipsawing change is here to stay. How can companies help talent thrive — at work and in life — regardless of what the future portends?

Employees today are fed up. People are antsy for something better (and sometimes, simply new). They want to be seen, valued, and listened to. They want equity, dignity, security, balance, flexibility, and autonomy. They expect opportunities for growth, learning, meaningful contribution, and fulfilment. This may sound like a lot, but if we’re striving to help them reach their full potential and leave the world a better place, it’s actually pretty modest.

For organisations and HR, however, navigating this landscape is fraught. Companies seek to win the “war for talent,” yet almost every aspect of the battlefield has changed. Many people are no longer interested in or inspired by climbing a career ladder that someone else built. There have never been more ways to earn income or create a meaningful career than there are today. The question is no longer “What do you do?” but rather “Who do you wish to be and become?” Talent attraction, career development, and professional identity are all in flux.

From ladder to portfolio

In recent years, more people have discovered that the best career paths aren’t always straight lines. Authors Helen Tupper and Sarah Ellis refer to these non-linear paths as “squiggly careers,” which are “full of uncertainty and possibility.” Squiggly careers offer lots of benefits, but squiggly can also be messy.

This is where HR leaders often get nervous. Even if HR is wholly supportive of updating talent models, how do you attract talent with — or design policies for — squiggles? At the same time, HR leaders are often concerned that introducing new career models will nudge people to reconsider too much…and leave.

A career portfolio approach solves these problems and takes career development to a new level. It’s not only a tool for individuals to rethink their professional identity and reach their full potential. It’s also an arrow in HR’s quiver. It’s a way to attract and engage talent meaningfully and excel as a company. When done well, it actually helps talent stay. (Counterintuitive solutions are often part of a world in flux.) Think of it as HR future-proofing for success.

Here’s how to get started enabling and encouraging career portfolios within your organisation.

Do your homework

The career portfolio concept was introduced in the early 1990s by organisational behaviourist Charles Handy, who focused on the need to develop “portable skillsets” to succeed in a fast-changing workplace. Since then, portfolios have sometimes been associated primarily with freelance work and having multiple roles at once. That is one kind of portfolio, but far from the only one — and not the one that HR leaders should be the most enthused about.

Today, a career portfolio is the container for a person’s professional adventure. It’s far more than a resume or CV. Of course, it includes jobs, roles, and professional skills — typical resume stuff — but it also includes experiences and skills that aren’t on a resume yet often drive everything else.

For example, parenting and career gaps aren’t typically included on a resume. In reality, these things tend to be actively avoided and even stigmatized in the worlds of hiring and HR. But they’re at the heart of a career portfolio, both because they power what a person does and because they bring out a person’s full self. Parenting skills are superskills for teamwork, conflict resolution, and human connection — all of which are at the heart of thriving workplace cultures. Career gaps are often when great growth happens. Rather than hiding these things, a career portfolio celebrates them.

It’s important to note that a career portfolio is not the gig economy. The gig economy offers flexible work that can be flipped on or off at the swipe of an app. While a career portfolio also allows for significant flexibility (and gigs may be part of your portfolio), it’s focused on curating a portfolio of skills and services and future-proofing a career. It’s about intentionally creating and curating a career that changes and evolves over time.

For organisations, a portfolio approach harnesses the full potential of talent. It sees people for who they are — which is exactly what talent is clamoring for. Not being “seen” is why a lot of people are leaving. Furthermore, companies that help employees develop their portfolios — rather than merely climb a ladder — identify and unlock skills that had been hidden, create new avenues for internal mobility, catalyze creativity, and expand opportunities for leadership. You’re investing in professional and personal growth alike. You don’t see talent merely as employees performing a role, but as human beings capable of so much more.

Today, “climbing a ladder” is the career equivalent of “but this is how we’ve always done it.” In other words, it’s in dire need of a refresh. What got us here won’t get us there. We need models and narratives that are open to change, not impervious to it, and fit for a world in flux.

Shifting to a career portfolio lens offers an opportunity to update individual professional narratives. Equally powerful, it’s also a practical tool for organisations to rethink culture, expectations, and design. When an organisation sees talent fully and truly understands the future of work, it levels up the entire ecosystem within which it operates.

Given our current situation knowing that your colleagues or employees are best suited for this new scenario we find ourselves in. Finding the right talent, the best fit for the job and your organisation can be a very challenging task. It is now important to find out whether your managers or your team is well-equipped of working together from various locations. It requires deep knowledge of their personalities, strengths, weaknesses, interests, work style and other characteristics. Our technology and solutions will do the work for you, helping you discover if your people are resilient during times of hardship, if they are autonomous, if they are team players, without actual human contact. Given that our platform is cloud-based, everyone can use it from home as well. Humanity finds itself at a crossroad for various reasons now, why not help people discover and develop themselves from the comfort of their own homes?

Request a free demo:

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Sources:

https://trainersadda.com/stop-offering-career-ladders-start-offering-career-portfolios/45862/
https://ikoku-news.com/business/stop-offering-career-ladders-start-offering-career-portfolios/
http://www.inspiringportfoliocareers.com/inspiration/

Have Remote Employees Lost Touch with Customers’ Needs?

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Before companies went remote or hybrid, non-sales employees usually had some minimal interaction with customers. However, as time moved on, teams with no customer interaction started to lose their connection to them. Losing sight of customers means internal teams are more likely to double down on their own agendas, putting the organisation at risk of being out-innovated and eventually becoming irrelevant (in the long term). There are ways in which leaders can bring customers “back to life” for teams who don’t interact with them.

After months of successfully working from home, the finance, HR, and legal teams of a mid-sized bank decided that they were going to adopt a hybrid model, permanently. Covid-induced remote work had proven that physical presence wasn’t a requirement for productivity.

Some employees elected to be 100% remote, others came in a few days a week, and those who wanted to work in the office were given safe spaces to do so. It all seemed fine at first; productivity stayed high. Yet after several months, they began to realise that something was missing from their daily conversations — or rather someone. One operations leader put her finger on it when she said, “We used to start meetings talking about customers. Now we hardly mention them at all.”

While much has been written about the need to keep teams connected to each other in a virtual environment, losing your organisational edge in regards to the customer is more dangerous.

In many of our clients, we have observed the following: Before their companies went remote or hybrid, most employees throughout the organisation had some sight line to customers. Even if they didn’t interface with them directly, they had regular conversations with customer-facing teammates, and when the organisation talked about “customers,” everyone was clear on who they were and what they needed. And when the pandemic hit, people rallied. The top priority was keeping the business afloat, so teams leaned into taking care of customers.

However, as time marched on, non-customer-facing teams started to lose their connection to customers. The hallway conversations stopped. They didn’t run into a sales rep in the elevator or sit next to a customer success agent in the cafeteria.

In this environment, even the most well-intended remote employees can forget that customers are their organization’s lifeblood. Internal teams are more likely to double down on their own metrics and agendas. In the short term, this puts the organization at risk for silos. In the long term, an organization without a clear sight line to customers is at risk of being out-innovated and eventually becoming irrelevant. One need look no further than Sears, Blockbuster or Monster.com to see what happens when an organization loses their tether to customers.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

When leaders are intentional about bringing customers to life for internal teams it creates an emotional (and practical) connection. It infuses the why of the business into the organizational groundwater. This has been proven to result in greater engagement, which creates bolder innovation, resulting in faster, more lasting growth.

Here are three ways leaders can bring your customers to life for teams who don’t interact with them.

1. Talk about specific customers (instead of the aggregate “customers”)

Ask yourself, which is more engaging: “Customers are counting on us!” or “Ken’s Plumbing Supply is counting on us to fill this order. Without it, he won’t be able to keep his team on schedule.”

Specificity matters. Instead of discussing customers in the aggregate, share details about individual customers to make them more real. Without this, remote employees will more likely see customers as abstract numbers on a page, rather than real-life human beings.

To build this tangible connection, we recommend leaders have regular conversations with customers, asking customers not just about what they bought, but about how what they bought is impacting their life and/or business.

Then, leaders should share what they’ve learned about specific customers (who they are, what they do, their daily challenges, etc) with all non-customer-facing remote employees. Telling an IT, or Finance, or HR team how a specific customer improved their life or business as a result of the organization’s offering infuses a purpose-driven ethos into the organization. Stories about specific customers are more memorable and repeatable than a generic value proposition.

2. Ask “How will this impact our customers?” during decision-making

Even if the decision seems like it has nothing to do with customers, putting a customer-oriented lens on decision-making enables teams to think more holistically and deeply consider the potential impact of their choices.

We recently worked with a team from a financial services firm charged with improving the cash flow of the organization. The organization had some long-standing process hiccups that were only made worse when the team shifted to working remotely.

The team met and quickly came to a decision: to require vendors to agree to 60-day payment terms in advance of working for the organization. At first blush, the decision seemed sound. Cashflow would improve and customers wouldn’t even know … or would they?

When the team asked, “What impact will this have on customers?” they realized some fatal flaws in the plan. For example: The organization had just partnered with an IT vendor who was supporting them through major internal system changes. A big part of the project was training all the teammates, some of whom are customer-facing, on the updated system.

If it took the vendor 60 days to get paid, the vendor would be required to fund staff while still waiting on payment. As result, the vendor would likely not allocate their best trainers to the project, meaning their teams wouldn’t have top-notch support and training to do their jobs. And an under-supported and undertrained team can’t support customers effectively. The team soon realized that their policy, which at first seemed unrelated to customers, could ultimately end up doing damage to customer relationships.

The ensuing conversation — which was challenging and took a while — resulted in a breakthrough. The team created a system to help vendors get paid over time, as they complete the work. This helped fend off major cashflow spikes, it made sure vendor relationships stood solid, and it enabled the organization to keep delivering for customers.

When non-customer-facing teams assess decisions and projects asking, “How will this impact customers?” it changes the frame. This simple question can be asked of any project or decision. In our experience, when internal teams make a regular practice of asking this question, the resulting priorities and projects are better aligned to improve the organization’s market position.

3. Include non-customer-facing teammates in customer meetings

When it comes to bringing customers to life, nothing is more powerful than meeting with a real, live, breathing human. One of our clients, a building supplier, began inviting one backstage team leader to each annual customer business review. When leaders like the head of supply chain, the HR manager, and the safety lead got the opportunity to meet with actual customers, even virtually, it shifted their perspective. They understood in a real and visceral way who the organization serves.

After seeing the impact, which ranged from increasing empathy for customers to actual policy shifts, the senior leaders of the organization went one step further. They made it part of each leadership role (no matter what functional area they led) to attend two or three customer meetings a year. Their only job was to listen.

After joining the customer meetings, the department leaders then briefed their teams on what they learned about the customers’ business goals and needs. This helped everyone see their customers more vividly.  After hearing the head of finance describe her meetings with several customers, one staff accountant said, “These customers used to be just numbers, now I see they’re businesses with their own hopes and dreams.”

In a world where customers have more choices than ever, it’s crucial that leaders help all employees understand who your customers are and how you serve them. Bringing customers to life for backstage teams does not have to be difficult, but it does require effort. Using these three techniques will ensure that everyone in your organization has a direct line of sight to the people who actually drive your business, your customers.

Given our current situation knowing that your colleagues or employees are best suited for this new scenario we find ourselves in. Finding the right talent, the best fit for the job and your organisation can be a very challenging task. It is now important to find out whether your managers or your team is well-equipped of working together from various locations. It requires deep knowledge of their personalities, strengths, weaknesses, interests, work style and other characteristics. Our technology and solutions will do the work for you, helping you discover if your people are resilient during times of hardship, if they are autonomous, if they are team players, without actual human contact. Given that our platform is cloud-based, everyone can use it from home as well. Humanity finds itself at a crossroad for various reasons now, why not help people discover and develop themselves from the comfort of their own homes?

Request a free demo:

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Sources:

https://hbr.org/2021/02/financial-targets-dont-motivate-employees
https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbusinesscouncil/2021/07/22/5-common-problems-plaguing-remote-workers-and-what-to-do-about-them/
https://www.pwc.com/us/en/industries/consumer-markets/library/prioritizing-customers-in-hybrid-work-environment.html

Great People Inside Conference “Evolving HR”, Qosmo Hotel, Brașov

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Registration is up and running for the Great People Inside Conference: Evolving HR, the only international human resources event that takes place for the XVIIth year in Romania.

It is not the strongest species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.

Charles Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest’ theory is not restricted to the biological world and the evolution of species, but rather it could be regarded as a general law when it comes to anything that implies competition; if we take that into consideration, then we should ask ourselves: is there anything more competitive than the business world with its fierce battle for talent?

In today’s business environment, with digitization impacting traditional business rules, the need for an agile, responsive and adaptive work force has never been stronger. The talent landscape is now generating the largest disruption business has ever seen – employees feel empowered and in control to decide on how, when and where they work, what they work on, and if they want to engage with certain companies or not.

A Korn Ferry study reveals that “global talent shortage could threaten business growth around the world and indicates potential Global Talent Deficit of more than 85.2 Million Workers by 2030”.

The most successful businesses will be those that will make a priority in reevaluating their talent strategies and attraction campaigns, in upskilling or reskilling their existing employees and enable them to adapt with the shifting demands of the business – and evolve.

So how can we future-proof our workforce for the digital era?

Join the only gathering in Romania for innovative HR leaders representing the largest companies in the world and get ready for the future of work!

This year, on the 25th and 26th of May, at Qosmo Hotel in Brașov, the Great People Inside Conference: Evolving HR will generate, along these two days, interesting and provocative discussions in regards to the pandemic, accelerated digitization, working from home and the investments made by organizations into their human capital are profoundly changing human resource management practices and the way employees are perceived in an organization, no longer considered a mere resource but viewed from the perspective of their human potential. Furthermore, starting this year you can purchase your two-day pass straight from our event’s website! For more details regarding the event you can check it out here!

The Rise of The Meaningless Promotion & What To Do

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Great news! You’re an asset to your company. You’ve been given more responsibilities…but no promotion. What can you do? Have you ever been given a boatload of new responsibilities without the title and pay increase to go with it? Or perhaps you got the title along with a vague promise that at “some point in the future” you’d get a raise to match your new responsibilities? It happens far more often than it should: A promised promotion that turns into nothing more than more work.

Promotions in title only aren’t a new phenomenon. Some leaders may think that by offering you a better title, they’re honoring your contributions and showing that they value you. Some might offer promotions in title only as a way to retain talent when attrition starts to spike. Or, with the pressure to show progress on their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) commitments, some companies will be looking for shortcuts — without doing the meaningful work.

Since the “diversity tipping point” of 2020, companies have pledged more than $35 billion toward advancing racial equity. With renewed attention on the lack of representation of Black talent across many industries, companies are under pressure to have their employee bases reflect the changing demographics of the U.S. Adidas, Facebook, Salesforce, Target, and The New York Times are examples of organisations across industries that have published pledges on their commitment to increasing representation of Black talent and people of colour more broadly.

Additionally, with the pandemic having had a devastating impact on women, companies are under pressure to hire and advance more of them. According to the National Women’s Law Center, women’s workforce participation has already dropped to 57%, the lowest level since 1988. Movements including The Marshall Plan for Moms, founded by activist Reshma Saujani, are upping the pressure on the public and private sector to help women get back into and stay in the workforce.

Offering fake promotions can be a form of diversity washing, where organisations look for quick fixes to their public DEI commitments. Here’s what to do if you fear you may be the target of diversity washing and are being offered a fake promotion.

Determine if it’s a fake promotion

Start by assessing what you’re being offered. What level are you currently at, and what is the proposed title they’re offering? For example, if you’re a manager being told that you should start calling yourself a director, what’s the difference in responsibilities? Will you be compensated as a director now? Remember that base salary is only one part of a compensation package. For example, at some companies, the director level comes with stock grants, access to a company-appointed financial advisor, and life and disability insurance.

Watch out for these other telltale signs that you’re being offered a fake promotion: Your manager makes no organisational or team announcement to share the news of your promotion. Or you’re pressured to change your title in your email signature and on LinkedIn to indicate to clients and vendors that you’re now a senior team member, but you see no change to your title or level in internal human resources systems, such as Oracle PeopleSoft or Workday.

Finally, figure out who else has been recently promoted to the title you’re being offered and talk to them. If they aren’t comfortable sharing what they’re making, ask them what the elements of the compensation package are at that level. Comparing the promotion you’re being offered to how others with the same title are being valued will be key in determining what you do next.

Take the title

If your boss makes it clear that you aren’t going to see any increase in salary, fight for the title increase. Why does it matter? I mean, other than your mom being proud of you. It matters because recruiters use titles as a proxy for responsibility level. They don’t go down each line on a resume and make note of the individual responsibilities on the first pass through. (They do, once they’ve narrowed down the pile.)

But, on that first pass through, you’re more likely to be hired into a job as a manager if you already have a manager title on your resume. If you’re acting as a team lead, it’s best to have that on your resume–even if there’s no salary to go along with it.

You Would Have No Real Authority, But Would Be Accountable

So you got that promotion and now have some employees reporting to you. But you may find it frustrating to learn that while you’re accountable for your department’s performance, there are outside factors that impact your ability to control outcomes. Before accepting a promotion, try to gauge how much input you will actually have on key decisions.

Your Work-Life Balance Would Suffer

Is this new job going to require longer hours at the office? Will you be on the road constantly? Will you constantly be on call? You may be at a point in your life when you need to be home more often to care for kids or an elderly parent. Or maybe you just want more time to pursue various interests. CNBC last year reported on some dads who said no to promotions because they wanted to spend more time with their families. You should not be so reliant on that extra paycheck that you’re willing to sacrifice the quality of your non-work life.

Decide whether to accept the new title

If you’ve determined that this is a fake promotion and you can’t find allies in your organisation to help, your decision is now whether or not to accept the offer. You should weigh the pros and cons of accepting the new title being proposed. While a bigger and better title may seem like a good idea, it may also leave you with self-doubt and make you question why you aren’t being treated fairly and equitably compared to your peers.

With the pressure to ensure the inclusion and advancement of people of colour and women, organisations must ensure internal practices are actually fair and equitable. Fake promotions can be another diversity-washing tactic that might ultimately give you a reason to go for the exit. If your company is willing to give you the title, they should also be willing to pay you, value you, and recognise you.

Given our current situation knowing that your colleagues or employees are best suited for this new scenario we find ourselves in. Finding the right talent, the best fit for the job and your organisation can be a very challenging task. It is now important to find out whether your managers or your team is well-equipped of working together from various locations. It requires deep knowledge of their personalities, strengths, weaknesses, interests, work style and other characteristics. Our technology and solutions will do the work for you, helping you discover if your people are resilient during times of hardship, if they are autonomous, if they are team players, without actual human contact. Given that our platform is cloud-based, everyone can use it from home as well. Humanity finds itself at a crossroad for various reasons now, why not help people discover and develop themselves from the comfort of their own homes?

Request a free demo:

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Sources:

https://www.business.com/articles/when-a-promotion-is-not-a-promotion-what-can-you-do/
https://hbr.org/2021/11/so-your-boss-offered-you-a-meaningless-promotion
https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/what-makes-work-meaningful-or-meaningless/

Trouble in Hiring? Workplace Culture May Be The Answer

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Workplace culture continues to evolve as the COVID-19 pandemic persists. If you’ve tried to recruit someone into your business over the past several months, you know how difficult it is to find qualified talent. If you’ve tried to recruit someone into your business over the past several months, you know how difficult it is to find qualified talent. While it’s easy to blame the pandemic for this disruption to the marketplace, this is likely a problem that will continue for at least the next decade.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are around 10 million positions currently open. At the same time, the Department of Labor reported there are 8.7 million potential workers who have been looking for jobs and are counted among the unemployed. That means we have a significant shortfall of available people to fill our positions. Employers are also reporting that the candidates who are applying have a mismatch of skills and they’re not seeing people who are able to meet their specific needs. Baby Boomers are exiting the workforce to enter retirement and are further complicating the already difficult hiring landscape. For companies that are trying to scale and grow, this is a challenge. If these same companies are willing to take a critical look at their workplace cultures and make adjustments now, hiring and retention don’t have to be quite so troublesome.

So, what is workplace culture? 

That’s a good question, because many people think of workplace culture as being about the look and feel of their environment. But an organisation’s culture is the set of behavioural norms and unwritten rules that shape how employees interact and get work done. Workpalce culture is critical to creating the best experience for employees. Corporate culture is formed from a company’s daily practices, traditions, beliefs, and programmes. When your workplace culture isn’t being treated as a priority, it’s reflected in employee performance, productivity, and retention.

Take a look at your culture to determine what’s working and what’s not

We have a tendency to look at the monthly profit and loss and the economic indicators of success in our businesses, but we also need to focus on our employees and their experiences working for our companies.

If you care about your customers and their experience with your business, you should also be focused on your employee experience. Customer experience is a direct result of employee experience. A well-designed employee journey allows your staff to understand their value to your organisation. They feel well cared for and are set up for success at every key milestone during their employment. If your company hasn’t conducted a culture audit in the last two years, or you’ve never completed this exercise, it’s a good practice to learn what’s really going on in your employees’ journey. The culture audit can be as simple as asking employees what’s going well and what’s not, as well as learning more about the challenges they’re facing in their daily jobs. If you’re feeling really brave, you can also ask them questions about what would cause them to leave your organisation.

How much does workplace culture ‘cost’?

Culture often doesn’t have a line item in the corporate budget, but it should. Efforts to improve workplace culture almost always pay for themselves. When you have a workplace culture that supports employees, retention becomes easier, recruitment and re-recruitment costs go down, diversity happens more organically, and productivity goes up.

What about ROI?

Consider this data: Gallup estimates that a 100-person organisation that provides an average salary of $50,000 could have turnover and replacement costs of approximately $660,000 to $2.6 million per year. Even if your workplace culture efforts only save a few employees each year, it’s worth it. Companies that really excel in improving their cultures typically see significant returns in the first year.

The time is now!

It’s simple: Organisations must work hard against the forced entrepreneurship culture where smart, talented, and able employees say: I know I can do it better than you, so I will. Gather information on the employees who prefer to work virtually and understand what the non-negotiables are. Look for compromise. When employees recommit, continue to help them forge their career paths so they know you are committed to their futures, alongside that of the company. Let them know that they are valuable members of the workplace: an ever-increasing mosaic of new cultures, beliefs, and values.

A business is more likely to succeed when its culture is focused on the way employees view the company as a whole. If any of these stats felt like they hit close to home for your business, then it’s time to look into how to improve your company culture, such as how to improve internal communications, and better recognise achievements and engage with your employees.

It’s important to remember that there isn’t any “one-size-fits-all” type of culture that results in every single employee being happy and productive. But paying attention to what is achievable in regards to improving your culture will pay off majorly for your employees and your business. 

Given our current situation knowing that your colleagues or employees are best suited for this new scenario we find ourselves in. Finding the right talent, the best fit for the job and your organisation can be a very challenging task. It is now important to find out whether your managers or your team is well-equipped of working together from various locations. It requires deep knowledge of their personalities, strengths, weaknesses, interests, work style and other characteristics. Our technology and solutions will do the work for you, helping you discover if your people are resilient during times of hardship, if they are autonomous, if they are team players, without actual human contact. Given that our platform is cloud-based, everyone can use it from home as well. Humanity finds itself at a crossroad for various reasons now, why not help people discover and develop themselves from the comfort of their own homes?

Request a free demo:

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Sources:

https://www.saplinghr.com/blog/7-inexpensive-ways-invest-company-culture
https://www.morningstar.ca/ca/news/215638/moving-to-culture-20.aspx
https://fortune.com/2021/10/13/respectits-transform-your-company-culture-workplace/

Be Mindful When Returning to In-Person Work

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After months of anticipation, returning to in-person work has been a disappointment for many employees. Navigating the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath is one of the biggest business challenges of our time. To keep operations going, most companies adopted new ways of working that left their offices, factories, and stores empty.

More than a year later, the world looks much different. As business comes surging back, management teams are responsible for leading their companies through these fast-moving changes. Boards of directors also play a role. They need to help management think critically about the development and execution of their return-to-work plans. This starts with understanding the in-person work challenges executives face in a post-pandemic world so they can ask the right questions and act as a sounding board.

In a recent Gartner survey revealed that 82% of company leaders will allow employees to work remotely some of the time, which means work life is going to look and feel very different than it did before. The pandemic has also increased fears of automation in many industries, leaving almost 40% of workers believing their jobs will be obsolete within five years. These changes, along with the challenges we continue to face at home, can be major sources of stress and anxiety.

Some employers, however, have realised that several of the pandemic’s workarounds are cost-efficient, and are considering making them permanent. There are many corporate leaders who still recognise that, in Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s words, “digital technology should not be a substitute for human connection.” But in what we might call a “Zoom forever” move, many other companies are contemplating radically downsizing traditional office spaces and making remote work permanent for large groups of employees.

The problem is, if millions of people never return to in-person work in a way that resembles the pre-pandemic world, it could have drastic consequences for our well-being. There’s nothing wrong with a partially remote situation—say, work-from-home Fridays or more flexible schedules. But going fully remote forever could exacerbate one of the worst happiness disasters of the pandemic.

Aggravation from commuting is no match for the misery of loneliness, which can lead to depression, substance abuse, sedentary behaviour, and relationship damage, among other ills. And it is simply undeniable that remote work usually leads to loneliness. In research conducted more than a decade before the pandemic about remote work among journalists, the organisational psychologist Lynn Holdsworth found that full-time telework increased loneliness over office work by 67%. Based on data from 2019, the 2020 State of Remote Work report issued by the social-media management firm Buffer showed that loneliness is the biggest struggle remote workers say they face, tied with problems of collaboration and communication.

Practicing mindfulness can help us navigate change and uncertainty with a bit more ease. It allows us to detach from what was, and instead accept what is. The mind prefers familiarity, certainty, and routine, so meditation makes us better equipped to adjust to whatever is shifting within and around us.

As we train our minds to be more comfortable with change, we can make the transition to post-pandemic life with less stress, fewer anxious thoughts, and more focus. Instead of needing to know how things will be, we become okay with not knowing. That’s how mindfulness helps us to become more resilient, so we can better handle whatever may come our way.

What makes change so scary?

We often tend to jump straight to discussing the topics of stress and day-to-day anxiety as reactions to change, rather than talking about change itself. What exactly makes change so difficult?

On a fundamental level, as humans, we are built to choose. We have a need to control. By making choices and exercising that control, we build routines and structure to create a sense of safety and stability in our lives. When things change, our sense of security can break down and we can experience a range of emotions, whether it’s an undercurrent of discomfort or actually feeling threatened, especially when change involves a radical shift, or introduces something we haven’t faced before.

Of course, what we don’t realise is that change is an inevitable part of life. If we pay attention, everything is changing all of the time, whether it’s external — businesses opening and closing, people coming and going, places evolving — or internal — our thoughts, emotions, physical sensations. But understanding that concept and embracing its reality are two different things.

It’s possibly why we often make change harder for ourselves by resisting it and staying focused on what we don’t want to happen, rather than understanding what is happening. We become too involved with the emotions around change, and that preoccupation is one way stress and anxiety can arise.

Why we might experience in-person work anxiety

Everyone experiences stress and general anxiety, albeit in different ways and with different levels of intensity. In a nutshell, stress is primarily a physiological response to an external threat, or a perceived threat. Anxiety arises in the mind as a reaction to the stress; usually triggered by a certain fear or the way we interpret stress, and it’s often oriented in the future. So when we encounter uncertainty — such as making the transition to in-person work after a pandemic — it’s normal to feel anxious as we try to make sense of a shifting landscape. Anxiety performs like a self-reinforcing cycle that kicks in due to a specific situation or event that leads to a worried or anxious thought — bringing feelings of fear, tension, or dread. Before we know it, we have bought into the entire storyline of anxiety that the mind has spun.

Typically, we then try to get rid of those feelings. Sometimes, we might even avoid the trigger point by trying to ignore it or distract ourselves. Other times, we might go the other way: seeking reassurance to try to control the situation. And while those control strategies sometimes work in the short term, we typically find that they don’t actually work to manage anxiety in the long run. The key here is that anxiety influences our thoughts, emotions, and behaviours in ways that will actually make it grow over time. And left unchecked, it can cause severe distress and impair our ability to function in daily life. One solution is to practice mindfulness to not only break the cycle of anxiety, but to transform our relationship with it.

Interrupting the cycle: how mindfulness can help

Mindfulness meditation can be a powerful tool for combating stress and helping people maintain focus once in the office, particularly as they navigate the transition back to the office from home. What makes it so effective is the element of attention training — bringing our attention to the present moment, and training the mind to be calm and engaged with each task at hand, without being easily distracted. Meditation activates an area in our brain called the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for higher-level skills like critical thinking, decision making, planning and focus.

While meditation can enhance areas of the brain responsible for thoughtfully responding to events, it can also deactivate regions and processes responsible for impulsively reacting to events. For example, it has been shown to reduce the size of the amygdala, an area involved with the fight-or-flight center, which is also responsible for fear and stress. Through a regular and consistent mindfulness practice, we develop the ability to turn reactivity into a considered, intentional response — and this establishes the basis of resilience. The more aware we are of how the mind behaves, the less influenced we are by its storylines and patterns. This leads to an incredibly valuable shift in mindset when it comes to navigating the kind of uncertainties the past year has presented, and the kind of changes we face in returning to the office. There are a few practical suggestions that are recommended for anyone who’s experiencing elevated day-to-day anxiety and stress right now. They’re all about limiting the impact of anxiety triggers and catching anxious thoughts. The more we understand and recognise the qualities of the anxious mind, the better equipped we are to interrupt the anxiety cycle.

Given our current situation knowing that your colleagues or employees are best suited for this new scenario we find ourselves in. Finding the right talent, the best fit for the job and your organisation can be a very challenging task. It is now important to find out whether your managers or your team is well-equipped of working together from various locations. It requires deep knowledge of their personalities, strengths, weaknesses, interests, work style and other characteristics. Our technology and solutions will do the work for you, helping you discover if your people are resilient during times of hardship, if they are autonomous, if they are team players, without actual human contact. Given that our platform is cloud-based, everyone can use it from home as well. Humanity finds itself at a crossroad for various reasons now, why not help people discover and develop themselves from the comfort of their own homes?

Request a free demo:

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Sources:

https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2021/04/zoom-remote-work-loneliness-happiness/618473/
https://www.benefitspro.com/2021/10/28/return-to-in-person-work-has-been-disappointing-for-many-employees/
https://fortune.com/2021/08/02/office-return-covid-reopening-plan/

Flexible Work Arrangements For Your Workforce

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As social distancing orders are lifted, and businesses reopen, employee requests for flexible hours and remote-work arrangements will be part of the new normal. Now that many employers have experienced how successful telecommuting can be for their organisation or how work hours that differ from the normal 9-to-5 can be adopted without causing dents into productivity, offering flexible work arrangements have become more commonplace.

Even in the absence of a pandemic, flexible work arrangements can improve recruitment and retention efforts, increase organisational diversity efforts, encourage ethical behaviour and help the organisation’s efforts to be socially responsible. Employers can experience cost savings, improved attendance and productivity, and an increase in employee engagement which almost always translates into more productivity.

Many U.S. workers now consider work/life balance and flexibility to be the most important factors in considering job offers. In fact, 81% of employees said they would be more loyal to their employers if they had flexible work options, according to a 2020 survey by FlexJobs. However, offering flexible work arrangements can involve a paradigm shift for organisations, especially smaller ones that may not have the critical mass of technology, budget, management and competitive flexibility necessary to make extensive use of flexible work arrangements.

It’s tough to satisfy everyone. The following practical, real-world approaches will help you treat your people as the individuals they are without creating a chaotic mess of confusing, arbitrary exceptions.

Also Read: Top 13 Recruitment Assessment Tools for 2021

Start one-on-one to understand real employee needs

We might assume, a full 18 months into the pandemic experience, that we’re familiar with what our team members want and how they function best. But people change their minds, or want different things as their circumstances change. So before structuring schedules or work formats, take steps to learn about employees’ current situations in terms of physical work locations and scheduling and gauge their satisfaction with work assignments and career trajectory. Questions to ask include:

  • How well has your team been working together?
  • Do you have access to the decision-makers you need?
  • How well have you been able to arrange cross-functional collaborations?
  • Are there tools, information, or other kinds of support that would help you perform better?
  • How comfortable do you feel about your current work situation?

You won’t be able to satisfy every preference, but when employees trust that you have their best interests in mind, the likelihood of improved retention, productivity, and innovation increases.

Ensure alignment with your own employer branding

If you have a history and culture that treats employees as crucial stakeholders, they’ll expect you to give significant consideration to their preferences and needs. If you’ve always talked about “being like a family,” now’s the time to make that promise real and take care of all your “family members” by accommodating individual needs for schedule adjustments and even modifications to responsibilities when people are under particular duress. If you’ve emphasised that your employees are your most important asset, be sure that you’ve provided resources and communicated about how people can use them to ensure theirs and their families’ wellbeing. This might include providing access to or references or financial support for childcare, eldercare, or mental health services during what continues to be a difficult period.

Don’t mistake physical presence for loyalty

Many leaders once believed that employees speaking openly about wanting to protect or support themselves or their families was a sign that they might not be fully committed to their leaders, teams, organisations, or missions. Employees’ extraordinary dedication during the pandemic should have put that belief to rest. Today, leaders who are unwilling to accept employees’ commitments to the rest of their lives will have a significantly harder time holding on to staff. Whether they work on-premises or remotely, employees who feel supported in doing what’s right for their own lives are likely to feel even more strongly about their commitment to their organisation, rather than suffering from ongoing ambivalence, fear, or resentment — all of which are likely to have a negative impact on their work relationships and output.

This tailored approach will be challenging and time-consuming in the beginning, but it’s significantly less costly than watching your investment in critical staff walk out the door, or not being able to attract the specific talent you need. In the long-term, most employees will observe how well the organisation adapts to theirs and their colleagues’ needs and will end up gravitating to the most popular and effective programmes and solutions.

Advantages of Flexible Work Programmes

Defenders of flexible work initiatives point to the competitive advantages that such programs bring to companies that offer these sorts of programmes. Perhaps the single most cited reason for introducing a flexible work environment is employee retention. Indeed, many businesses stated that the recent trend toward flexible time and other programmes has made it necessary for them to introduce their own programmes or risk losing valued employees. “Another business argument for flexible work arrangements is that they allow companies to match the peaks and valleys of activity,” wrote Elizabeth Sheley in HRMagazine. “More organisations have shifted their focus to how potential changes in schedule will affect the product. Reduced absenteeism, though often overlooked, is also a legitimate business rationale; flexible options not only strengthen commitment, but also give employees more time to handle the very situations that sometimes lead to absenteeism.”

Flexible work programmes provide a way for businesses to increase employee loyalty without resorting to making fundamental changes in their operations. Indeed, Sheley observed that “the most popular flexible work options are those that involve the least change. Flexible time and compressed work weeks, for example, call for the same number of hours, at the same workplace, as in traditional work arrangements.”

Disadvantages of Flexible Work Programmes

Flexible work programs have many apparent advantages, but critics point out that ill-conceived programs can have a negative impact on businesses, and they add that even good programmes often present challenges that a business has to address. First of all, business owners and managers need to recognize that flexible work arrangements are not always appropriate for all people, jobs, or industries. Telecommuting and other “flexplace” arrangements, for example, can be disastrous (or at the very least a productivity drain) if used by employees who are unwilling or unable to put in a full day of work amid the non-work temptations (television, pleasure reading, housecleaning, etc.) of a home setting.

Critics also contend that flex programs often leave managers in exceedingly difficult situations. “Far too often, flex is embraced for its ‘family-friendly’ aspects long before the corporate support needed to manage it takes root,” wrote Martha H. Peak in Management Review. “In these companies, flexible policies are outlined in the employee manual but implementation is left up to individual managers. Then, when managers try to implement these programmes, they discover that to be fair, flex requires them to treat different employees differently.”

In today’s business world, flexible employment staples such as flextime and telecommuting continue to grow, in large measure because businesses that introduce them continue to prosper while simultaneously improving the quality of life of their employees. Looking ahead, it seems clear that flexible work programmes will continue to be used more and more frequently. With the rise of the Internet and rapid spread of high-speed connections to the Internet in homes and offices alike, the tools necessary to make flexible work programmes successful are multiplying. Creating a flexible work programme suitable for a particular business and company will continue to be an individual endeavour but one that is made ever easier with new technologies and communication tools.

Given our current situation knowing that your colleagues or employees are best suited for this new scenario we find ourselves in. Finding the right talent, the best fit for the job and your organisation can be a very challenging task. It is now important to find out whether your managers or your team is well-equipped of working together from various locations. It requires deep knowledge of their personalities, strengths, weaknesses, interests, work style and other characteristics. Our technology and solutions will do the work for you, helping you discover if your people are resilient during times of hardship, if they are autonomous, if they are team players, without actual human contact. Given that our platform is cloud-based, everyone can use it from home as well. Humanity finds itself at a crossroad for various reasons now, why not help people discover and develop themselves from the comfort of their own homes?

Request a free demo:

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Sources:

https://hbr.org/2021/10/creating-flex-work-policies-when-everyone-has-different-needs
https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/tools-and-samples/toolkits/pages/managingflexibleworkarrangements.aspx
https://www.inc.com/encyclopedia/flexible-work-arrangements.html

Questions To Ask Your New Boss

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No matter how many years you’ve worked, starting a new job is often nerve-racking. There are so many unknowns to figure out, and one of the biggest questions are about your new boss. How can you set your relationship up for success?

Understanding Your New Boss’ Expectations

When you get a new boss, things are bound to change. Your new boss will most likely have different expectations for you and your team, a different view of your department’s direction, different ways of communicating, and different priorities than your previous boss. Part of managing your career is taking a proactive part in understanding what is expected of you by your new boss.

Beginning a new job is always a little overwhelming. Not only are you adjusting to a whole new project, office, and set of coworkers, you’re also trying to figure out what your boss wants and how to deliver it. The answer is the same as with getting to know anyone new in your life, whether socially or professionally—you start a conversation, you ask questions.

Of course, it’s not always easy to be the one starting a conversation, but establishing good rapport with your new boss will go a long way toward creating and maintaining a positive work environment. Talking with your boss is the best way to get valuable feedback on your performance, even when it is not annual review time. And, more times than not your relationship with your boss is one of the key factors in advancing your career.

While there’s no universal or simple formula for improving your ability to get along (and work effectively) with your new boss, the good news is that you will make a great deal of progress if you can ask the right questions. Here are a few questions you may want to take into consideration.

1. Who should I meet with outside of our team?

This is why office politics are so important; your ability to figure out how to influence others will improve if you can get to a quick understanding of the unspoken or informal networks that govern the social dynamics of your new team or organization. Your boss is ideally placed to provide you with this intel. 

2. What’s the best way to ask for your input and feedback?

Establishing a cadence where you can get regular feedback on how you are doing, even via 15-minutes weekly chats or regular email check-ins, will help you regulate and calibrate your efforts to improve your performance. 

3. What would you do if you were in my shoes?

This question will not just invite your manager to empathize with you — allowing them to see things from your perspective — it will also show them that you respect them and appreciate their expertise. No matter how logical or insightful their advice may be, it can create a good connection between the two of you and further deepen your understanding of how your manager thinks, feels, and acts.

4. How can I further develop my potential?

Great leaders excel at coaching and mentoring their people. You can nudge your boss to play this role by asking them to assess and develop your potential. This means going beyond your performance to focus also on what you could do. In a world that is increasingly pushing us to reskill and upskill, it is hard to underestimate the importance of expanding our horizons and being open to reimagining or reinventing our talents to future-proof our career. Incidentally, this question will also clarify the existing criteria for promotion and advancement, which will help you be objective and pragmatic about your plans (and will keep your boss honest).

5. What could I be doing better?

After a few weeks on the job, asking this question may encourage your boss to provide you with much-needed guidance for closing the gap between how you are performing and what your boss expects from you. In their attempt to avoid conflict and maintain positive morale, many managers find it hard to provide employees with negative evaluations, so wording your feedback request in this way can help them focus on your improvement areas. It also signals that you are eager to understand how you can get better, even if you are doing well. 

A final point to consider: every person is unique, including you and your new boss. Invariably, this means that some of these questions might not be be applicable given the situation and your growing relationship. But the general rule still stands: you will accelerate your career success if you can manage your boss better. This requires you to understand them better, and a deliberate strategy that starts with smart questions can help. 

Given our current situation knowing that your colleagues or employees are best suited for this new scenario we find ourselves in. Finding the right talent, the best fit for the job and your organisation can be a very challenging task. It is now important to find out whether your managers or your team is well-equipped of working together from various locations. It requires deep knowledge of their personalities, strengths, weaknesses, interests, work style and other characteristics. Our technology and solutions will do the work for you, helping you discover if your people are resilient during times of hardship, if they are autonomous, if they are team players, without actual human contact. Given that our platform is cloud-based, everyone can use it from home as well. Humanity finds itself at a crossroad for various reasons now, why not help people discover and develop themselves from the comfort of their own homes?

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Sources:

https://hbr.org/2021/10/7-questions-to-ask-your-new-boss
https://leadhonestly.com/blog/9-questions-to-get-to-know-your-boss
https://www.donnaschilder.com/blog/leadership-blog/questions-to-ask-your-new-boss-to-quickly-create-a-productive-relationship/