Use Workplace Software to Keep Boredom at Bay

Workplace software serves a variety of purposes in helping a firm reach its optimum operational levels. One use of workplace software is its role in developing appealing job descriptions. Usually text-based, creating job descriptions is a rather boring task for HR personnel. To counter that boredom, software can be used as a tool to develop graphics within job descriptions. Graphics are generally more appealing than words and hold the reader's interest for a longer period of time. Plus, you can use any number of color combinations, font sizes and other visually appealing characteristics to better deliver your point. Graphics also help keep the job description creator engaged. The more engaged your graphic designer is, the less bored they will be with their position.

Short and Frequent Performance Reviews Have Better Results

In business, time spent equals money spent. This simple fact means that for the sake of accountability, it's a good idea to hold regular performance reviews. Assessing your team's performance at different points during the year keeps the lines of communication open between you and your employees, and it makes meeting goals a lot easier.

When your company's performance reviews are shorter and more frequent, you come away reassured that your employees know what you're looking for. Here are some of the other advantages:

You can point out strengths you've seen in your employees. No matter the job, people like recognition for the work they do. When an employer can see talent and coach those who need it, employees are more loyal and enthusiastic about their work.

High job satisfaction is key to retention. When you meet with your employees briefly, but on a consistent basis, you have the opportunity to develop a strong relationship, understand their day-to-day work, and clarify expectations, resulting in increased job satisfaction.

Whether someone is doing fantastic, is having issues, or has just been distracted, regular performance reviews can make sure they're on the right path. Most companies start the quarter with goals in mind, but if these are met quickly, employees can be left sitting around.

Regular performance reviews allow you to track and grow employee outputs, without the stress of infrequent and uncomfortable annual appraisals. This is a great opportunity to set short-term goals that will keep people focused.

The most common reason for a performance review is to let employees know where they need to improve. For new and entry-level workers, especially in Generation Y, frequent feedback is vital to providing mentoring and constructive criticism. Quick conversations and short messages help your employees develop without the fear of defeat or termination.

The opportunity to talk about where employees want to be in the future does not often arise naturally in the workplace. Shorter and more frequent performance reviews are a great chance to bring this up. How do you feel about your job? What would you rather be doing? How can we help you get there?  These one-on-one communications can help fix minor issues before they become big problems.

Opponents of frequent reviews believe that the process is too time-consuming, which can detract from other important tasks. That's why it's vital that your feedback mechanisms are natural for your team, and compliment your other core managerial functions. 

Employees appreciate when constructive criticism feels like great advice, instead of behavioral correction. Many managers prefer providing feedback over the course of the day, instead of on a schedule, when it can feel like a chore.

Reviewing your employees' performance often will let them know what they're doing well, and where they need to make improvements. For a thriving business, open and honest communication is an absolute necessity.

 

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How to Leverage Personal Goals to Meet a Team Objective

We all have our own goals and priorities. As a business manager, your goal is to make your business thrive and ensure that your team stays happy and productive. For employees, goals often center around individual careers and needs.

Personal goals affect how an employee performs. While they can serve as motivation to be more productive and more successful, they can also cause conflicts between staff or between work and home.

Businesses are most successful when employees' personal goals are aligned with corporate goals. This can be difficult to do at times, but it is possible. Some companies, like Valve Software, make this happen by allowing any employee to make any business decision. If you're not ready to do that, read on.

The Team Goal Must be Understood

Before personal goals can leveraged in the pursuit of team objectives, employees first need to clearly understand what the team goals are. A clear understanding of your organizational values and goals will prevent any potential conflict and confusion.

Once employees understand team goals, they're better able to—and more likely to—integrate them into their personal goals. Team leaders, HR, managers, and senior executives can help to smooth this process by offering feedback and having one-on-one consultation sessions.

Find the Middle Ground

Most of the time, personal goals should still be work-related, such as achieving a sales volume, working a number of hours, organizing a specific project, or improving a specific skills. Finding common ground between these personal goals and your organizational priorities can be hugely productive.

The easiest way to do this is to simply ask employees what they think the team can do to help them reach their personal goals. Make sure you follow up by clarifying how their own goals are contributing to the overall team objective.

When team members help each other to grow personally, they also help the team grow as a whole.

Value Personal Goals

Managers and team leaders should value the personal goals of their team members. It’s wise to let employees grow both within and outside of the business. Don’t suffocate your team by focusing only on corporate objectives. Of course, don't neglect the business by focusing only on personal ambitions, either.

Prioritizing and finding the balance between personal goals and team objectives shouldn't be a battle. Both are important. Synchronize them, and watch your business soar.

 

Track projects, engage employees, and tie goals and progress to organizational values, by using HR software from TribeHR. Packages start from as little as $2/user/month. Start with a free 60-day trial.

 

A Goal of Frequent Reviews: Heading off Trouble

When it comes to employee reviews, less is not always more. An overwhelming number of companies provide annual performance appraisals. But is there a better way? Certainly, some changes can provide a breath of fresh air to managers and employees. Why not start with more frequent reviews?

Frequent Small Reviews Can Eliminate Large Problems

In his Metaphysics, Aristotle coined the phrase “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” How apt for most businesses and nonprofit organizations.

When a relatively simple structure or shape is replicated many times over, it can take a very elaborate form with interesting outcomes. We see this every day, in the pattern of a snowflake, the creation of a termite hill, and even the way most skyscrapers are built.

This form of creation can be disassembled. You can break something down into its pieces. Each piece is small enough to manage and deal with independently. Project Managers often break challenges into smaller chunks of time and activities. Dealing with each chunk is easier than looking at the bigger challenge.

How does this apply to people management? The point is that big issues are made up of lots of little elements. Its easier to deal with these small pieces that the massive system. Put another way, it’s simpler to look at each of the little bits, rather than get overwhelmed by a large task.

An obvious area of HR to apply this to is performance reviews. Consider when someone is underperforming. You don’t want to just see them failing. You want to know what they're struggling with, and where. You examine the small bits of activity that make up their overall contribution to the business.

Finding the individual elements that are lacking gives managers opportunities for development and coaching.

All HR practitioners and people managers know that prevention is better repair, especially when it comes to performance. How can you do this? Simply by looking at the small stuff! If you assess small performance objectives, you'll find weaknesses. By helping employees to convert these into achievements, you can improve the entire performance.

What if it’s too late to turn around the performance on one objective? Don't let it come to that!

If the last review was a full year or more ago, then 12 months of deterioration have been established, and the poor performance has too much momentum to turn around. By shortening the period between reviews, checking performance more often, and spotting problems right away, you can prevent these problems from ever setting in.

Of course, it would be silly to have full-scale sit down reviews every day of the week. There's a healthy balance that needs to be achieved. But most managers don't review performance or offer feedback and recognition as often as they could or should.

Consider Jane. She has 12 tasks in her job description. Each one has a performance objective, which she needs to achieve each day. Some are tim- based, some are quality-based and some are volume measures. A simple number can be provided at the end of each day, week, or month, which says what Jane has acheived. A good manager will track Jane's output, and react if she starts to get too far off target. 

It's the same for employees with job tasks that are more difficult to quantify. Setting goals, checking in, offering feedback, and clarifying expectations are vital to keeping the team on track.

Jane and most other workers want to give their best in their jobs. Simple, quick, regular reviews helps them, which helps you. Early interventions, development programs, and coaching can and will improve performance. They also stop you from having to ever deal with major failures.

Frequent small reviews can eliminate large problems.

 

Give better feedback with less effort, and keep track of what projects your employees spend their time own, using affordable HR software from TribeHR. Find out more.

 

How to Reward: Top Performers or Team Achievement?

Rightly or wrongly, reward systems are embedded into most organizations' employee motivation schemes. For employees, working in a company that rewards both effort and results can offer an incentive put in that extra effort.

But for employers, one dilemma can make it challenging to come up with the right reward and incentive system. Do you reward the individual, or the team?

How to Measure Employee Morale

What's morale? That's a tough question. It's an emotional reaction, and not a visible thing. It's intangible. This can make morale very difficult to measure. How do you measure something that you can't see?

Morale in-and-of-itself is hard to describe; fortunately, it's a bit easier to track positive and negative morale.

People know when they’re feeling positive. Positive morale is a fuzzy energy that makes you feel capable of doing more. By contrast, when morale is low, there’s a sense of apathy; a sense of withdrawal.

You know yourself can probably tell whether your morale is up or down. It may even shift from day to day. But how can you find out about other people?

The simple way to find out is to ask the question! A direct “how’s your morale today?” might not work, but more indirect questions can be helpful. Think first about the ways that positive and negative morale are expressed, and ask questions about that.

• Are you happy working here?
• Do you feel valued by the company?

These are your typical questions that form part of the assessment of morale levels in an organization.

When we talk about positive and negative morale, we pick up on these types of senitments. But to get a true measure, you need to conduct a comprehensive employee survey. There’s more to employee surveys than just morale assessments, and there's more to morale than employee surveys, but the two do go well together.

In 2009, organizational psychologists David Bowles and Cary Cooper published a book called Employee Morale: Driving Performance in Challenging Times. It mainly focuses on the benefits of improving morale, but has some great definition pieces on how to recognize morale, and how to change it. If you’re thinking about the types of questions you need to ask employees, this is a great resource.

The key areas you'll want to consider when it comes to morale are job satisfaction, engagement, appreciation, and consideration from management.

This piece started by discussing morale in definite opposites—a dichotomy. Is it positive or negative? In reality, like most measurements, morale has a variety of levels. This is helpful. If morale is already good, you can measure whether it's getting better or worse, before things are catastrophic. Simple yes and no answers aren't useful if you can't foster changes or improvments in your employees and work environment.

The simplest measures use numerical scales. Don’t ask “are you happy in your job?” but rather, “how happy are you in your job?.” Provide a scale of 1–10 or 1%-100%, and ask the employee for the value and a short explanation.

Alternatively, have them answer with by how much they agree with a statement. For example:

Please respond "strongly disagree," "disagree," "neither disagree nor agree," "agree," or "strongly agree," to the following statement: "I am happy in my current job."

With a series of related questions on engagement, values, involvement, and other related concepts, you can get a simple set of measures for morale. Repeat the same survey with different departments, or at different points in time, to track changes and determine variables.

This type of survey need not be restricted to morale. They can work great for leadership qualities, organizational communications, or just about any other intangible area that's vital to the HR portfolio.

 

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3 Easy ways to Promote Organizational Loyalty

It's a fact that job tenures have grown shorter over the past few decades. There's a perception that employees today are only "loyal" to the idea of furthering their own careers. But many business leaders still firmly believe in the notion of organizational loyalty. The challenge is to actually keep good employees working for you.

Workers don’t expect to stay in one company for years on end. In fact, they prefer not to. For companies, constantly replacing the workforce can prove costly. Yet even for employees, shifting between jobs can be dangerous—when the recession struck, many people who took time off between jobs were left with nothing for extended periods. 

The good thing is that human resource officers, managers, and organizational leaders can employ simple ways to promote company loyalty. By making employees feel that they belong, and keeping a healthy work environment, employees are more likely to stick around for the long haul.

1. Build a team

Studies have shown that employees who feel that they're a part of the organization tend to stay there longer. This is why some employees would feel de-motivated if their manager or close workmate resigns.

An easy way to promote loyalty is to start with the smallest group. Loyalty can then be expanded and grown by building relationships into and across this group. 

Many HR departments organize team building activities to foster camaraderie and loyalty. Working with their team gives employees a sense of pride and belonging, especially if they successfully reached a goal. After establishing a positive relation within teams, it’s much easier to stress the importance of teamwork across the organization as a whole. 

2. Increase benefits and offer bonuses

Many employees would agree that if they’re given the best benefits and bonuses, they’d end up staying longer with a company. While this can be a superficial form of loyalty, it can also be effective. There are a number of ways to provide employee benefits, from health insurance, to stock options, to transportation or gas allowances.

Bonuses are most often awarded at year end or on special anniversaries, and should be something that employees can look forward to. But they can also be more effective when they come as a complete surprise. Instead of only giving Christmas bonuses like a broken record, award them when employees least expect it:

"Hey Jim, I know you're having a tough time with this project, but I just want you to know that we really appreciate your hard work. Expect your paycheck this week to have a little extra money on it."

Going the extra mile helps to keep employees happy, and happy employees are most likely to be productive and loyal to the organization.

3. Value tenured employees

Appreciating employees who have been working for the company for a few years will make them feel valuable and important. This will not only make them happier with their work, it will also make them think twice about leaving the company for another one. They can also be set as an example to other employees and make them look forward to staying.

Creating loyal employees is a business investment with rewards that go beyond what management can foresee. At the end of the day, loyal employees are happy employees, and happy employees are those who are most productive. 

 

Improve your team relationships, manage salary information, and show your employees that they're a priority, by investing in engaging HR software from TribeHR. Learn more.

 

Defining Job Roles to Build Employee Engagement

It's good to be clear about your R-O-L-E. Flickr/Al_HikesAZ

Employee engagement can be a horribly overused phrase in the HR space. Too many suggestions, improvements, and changes are “to increase employee engagement,” when sometimes they do exactly the opposite.

Getting employees engaged and enthusiastic about what they do—and where they do it—involves more than just saying it. To boost engagement, you need to commit to focusing on the employee. If you meet their needs, they’ll meet yours.

Last year SHRM published research findings on factors for employee engagement. Eighteen factors were considered, and the most significant was “the work itself,” closely followed by “opportunities to use skills and abilities,” “contribution of work to organization’s business goals,” and “meaningfulness of job.”

In fact, those four criteria were found to ultimately be responsible for 70% or more of engagement levels in employees.

This research confirms that employee engagement levels aren’t just about the individual—they’re strongly correlated with the job. Properly defining high-quality and desirable jobs, which employees want and will enjoy doing, is a clear way to promote employee engagement. 

In every organization there are vital jobs that people don’t want to do. They may be something above or below a person’s skill-set, or even just plain boring. It can be challenge to make sure that this type of work gets done, without reducing employee engagement.

There’s no quick fix, but you should consider two options. First, look for anyone with an interest in doing these jobs—a good employee survey can quickly find this sort of information (ie. “Would anyone enjoy task X? Reply with your name.”).

Next, try to spread the burden. Don’t make one job take on all of the frustrations, but instead divide them across many roles in the organization. It’s far easier for an employee to enjoy a job with only 2 or 3 hours each week of activity they dislike, than if it has 20 or 30 hours!

It’s crucial that challenges and frustrations are spread evenly across the workforce, with a healthy mix of tasks that people enjoy. Jobs and their expectations need to be clearly defined in order for this to work. 

If you can sugarcoat a bitter pill, the pill will be swallowed. And if you can wrap a challenging job with an enjoyable job, it will be more readily accepted.

To support this acceptance, you need to be transparent when detailing your jobs. Clearly define the requirements, outcomes, and expectations. Do this across the board. 

You should ensure that everyone on your team has the opportunity to stretch themselves. By this I mean the tasks that push the capability of the individual to further their knowledge and/or experience. These may be tasks that are a little bit challenging. The opportunity to develop is a key engagement factor, and having it as part of the job role is a great way to make it happen. 

By building a clear yet comprehensive set of job roles, you’re fulfilling the needs of the employee. They need to know not just what is expected of them, but how their role fits into the organization as a whole, and its business purpose.

Whenc combined, you should have job roles that not only help the business understand what it will achieve, but what each employee will achieve too. Employees who see and accept this will be enthusiastic and engaged.

Meeting employee needs for their jobs, meets your need for improved employee engagement.

 

Define, store, manage, and fill your engaging job roles with HR software from TribeHR. Follow us on Twitter for more.

 

The Work Environment Affects your Company's Public Image

The working environment of an organization is controlled in part by its corporate culture, and has a direct impact on its business performance. Since employees spend a large part of their day at the office, it's crucial that they enjoy their work and perform to their potential.

Unstated elements of corporate culture are usually much more effective at guiding employee behavior than are written policies and practices. A work environment that promotes high productivity and rejects unethical behavior will have a positive influence on the public's perception of the business. Conversely, the public's view of your company also affects the working environment and the performance of your employees.