Tag Archives: employees

Company Morale:: How’s Yours?

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Want to boost employee morale in your organization? Here’s how you can bolster morale.

Employee morale describes the overall outlook, attitude, satisfaction, and confidence that employees feel at work. When employees are positive about their work environment and believe that they can meet their most important needs at work, employee morale is positive or high. If employees are negative and unhappy about their workplace, and feel unappreciated and as if they cannot satisfy their goals and needs, employee morale is negative or low.

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Respect:: Give It To Your Employees!

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Treating employees with respect and dignity is critical to retaining good workers, especially in a better job market. According to a survey conducted by Sirota Survey Intelligence and the authors of The Enthusiastic Employee, employees who feel they are not treated with respect by their employers are three times more likely to leave their jobs within two years than those who feel they are treated respectfully. And that’s money out of your business’s pocket.

If developing respect is not an important part of the management philosophy, a majority of employees in whom you have invested time and money to train will walk out the door after a couple of years. This may be just a blip on the bureaucratic human resources longevity chart, but the company has wasted all that time and money only to have to turn around and find, hire, and train new employees. In the meantime, company productivity lags because the employees who continue to put in their eight hours daily may have mentally quit, and their performance will show it.

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Tips To Reducing Your Company’s Overhead Expenses

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If you are self-employed or own a small business, you know all too well that out-of-control overhead costs can be crippling. Operating costs are a necessary evil– you need to spend money to make money, after all. But for businesses trying to weather tough economic conditions, or for start-ups just trying to break even, one month with too much overhead can be the kiss of death.

Overhead can include expenses like rent, utilities, office supplies, and advertising. And while all these expenses seem pretty normal, it doesn’t mean they are necessary. If you’re serious about cutting costs without cutting corners, the following tips can help reduce overhead in your business.

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Your Messy Desk Is Saying….WHAT??

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Office desks and the employees that use them come in all shapes and sizes.

Some employees have a spotless desk; others have a typical desk with some stuff here and there, while still others are lucky to be able to find their keyboards and the top of their desks in general on a daily basis.

So, does a sparkling, average or really cluttered desk mean anything in today’s workplace?

Having been employed now for 23 years, I’ve seen all kinds of desks, from the type that would pass the white glove test to others that were harboring biology projects with day’s old food. That being said, I like to think of the desks that I’ve had at the half-dozen or so places I’ve worked either full or part-time at as orderly.

During this time, I’ve come to gather that the majority of places I’ve been employed at had a casual approach to the desk and how you used other office furniture.  While things such as offensive imagery or sayings have been prohibited on desks, the places I have worked at have generally been okay with letting employees ‘police’ their own workspaces.

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Who Is Your Company’s Worst Employee?

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Pop quiz: who is your organisation’s worst performer? Without naming names, think about why they perform so poorly. Maybe they are just not up to the job, lazy, unmotivated, and poorly trained or managed. Maybe they’re winding down the clock until something better comes along, or don’t care.

Now think about how that employee makes you feel. You might be annoyed that your organisation tolerates deadwood for so long, or furious that the poor performer is milking the company. Perhaps you are peeved that you can’t get a decent pay rise because underperformers are chewing up too much of the company’s salary cap, and creating more work for others. Maybe you don’t care.

Go a step further: what is being done to help your company’s worst performer? Do they even know they are performing so poorly, and are they on notice to improve or leave? Have you made an effort to help the underperformer (if in a small team) and has your boss taken that person under their wing? Does your company banish underperformers to corporate Siberia?

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New Survey Reveals 61% Of US Workers Are Satisfied With Their Current Job

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Satisfaction.Some people can’t seem to get any. Others are overwhelmingly content. But how happy are people at their current jobs?

A new CareerBuilder survey revealed some surprising results on just how much workers enjoyed their position, whether they felt under-employed and if their current employer had ample career advancement opportunities for them. The survey was conducted by Harris Interactive from Nov. 9 to Dec. 5, 2011, of more than 7,700 full-time workers across industries and company sizes.

Let’s get to the results.

Sixty-one percent of workers reported that they were satisfied with their job overall, with health-care workers reporting in at 67 percent satisfaction. Workers intransportation and utilities had the highest rate of job satisfaction with 67 percent. Those least satisfied in their job? Retail workers. Nearly a quarter of workers in that industry found their job unsatisfactory.

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Money Isn’t Always The Answer:: Top 10 Ways To Motivate Employees

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Almost all employees want to do interesting work, secure a good salary and earn recognition for their contributions. But motivating employees takes more than money and an occasional “thank-you.” It requires a strategy tailored to each worker’s needs.

Either as the manager of a small company or a human resources department, you work  to get the most out of your employees. Here are 10 ways to make your motivational techniques work for every employee.

1. Ask what they want out of work.Just knowing that an HR manager or boss is interested in a worker’s goals will make many employees feel better about their jobs. It can be difficult to get a quick and accurate answer to this question, however. Some workers may say that they want to work on a prestigious project, for example, only to discover once they have been assigned to the project that it isn’t what they expected.

It may help to ask a more specific question. Have workers describe a previous project that they felt good about, then see what aspects of that can be repeated, suggested Michael Beasley, a career-development and executive coach who owns Career-Crossings in Portola Valley, Calif.

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Don’t Be A Stepping-Stone Employer

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What is a stepping stone employer? A decent company to work for, but one that doesn’t keep its employees. People will work there for a while, either for the paycheck, the benefits or the atmosphere, but they’ll move on as soon as they find a better position. This leaves you, the employer, in the lurch over and over again. How can you keep from getting stepped on and bypassed?

1. Make sure you have well-defined career development plans for your employees and communicate them. Employees need to know that there is room for professional growth and a chance for promotions and salary raises. Most people don’t want a dead-end job where they learn nothing and go nowhere.

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