Tag Archives: retention

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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10 Tips To Dealing With Difficult Employees

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1. Separate, in your mind, the person’s professional role from his or her difficult personality. After all, you need this person for to contribute, but you don’t have to have to wake up or go to sleep to the obnoxious behavior day after day. Count yourself lucky not to be in a personal relationship with the employee and focus only on the professional contribution you need. Don’t engage on an emotional level (e.g., don’t get into arguments; don’t allow yourself to be goaded or your buttons to be pushed, etc.)

2. Use self-deprecating humor. This is very disarming, particularly to difficult personality types. The ability to laugh at oneself is a key indicator of emotional intelligence, or the ability to connect well with other people. Connecting and listening are the two key skills of good communicators. And being a good communicator is even more critical when you’re managing a high-demand employee.

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Employee Retention:: 5 Tips To Keeping Your Team

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They didn’t do anything special for your birthday.

They didn’t remember your anniversary.

And after you invested so much time, they didn’t take your relationship to the next level.

Check, please! This is about the time where you part ways, brush yourself off, and move on.

It may seem like we’re referring to your last romantic relationship, but we’re actually (and very accurately) describing many employers’ relationships with their employees. Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon to come across poor work habits and old traditions that have died hard in manager-employee relationships. Yet management still questions their high turnover rates.

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Exit Interviews – The Real Purpose Of Them!

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Employee engagement continues to be an issue for organizations.  There is constant conversation about being over-worked and under-paid.  We all realize times have been tough but now is the perfect time to examine some of your processes to ensure your business remains healthy.

One of the overlooked opportunities to communicate and learn more about your organization is the exit interview.

Conducting exit interviews can be a valuable experience for any organization.  Provided of course that the exit interview is done with proper planning and for the right reasons.  If you’re doing exit interviews to get the heads-up on whether the departing employee plans to sue you and your company, well…that might be good to know but it’s not really the best use of an exit interview.

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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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Improving Employee Retention NOW!

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In a down economy, employees have fewer opportunities to take a job at another company, but entrepreneurs would be remiss to take their fingers off the pulse of company morale simply because employees have fewer options. “Companies that don’t think about [employee retention], that basically rest on their laurels and think ‘the economy will take care of us, where are they going to go?’ Those are the companies that, as soon as the labor market picks back up, their turnover rates are going to go from 5 percent to 50 percent and it will happen overnight,” says Mark Murphy, author of The Deadly Sins of Employee Retention and CEO of Leadership IQ, a Washington D.C.-based executive education firm.

So what’s one of the biggest reasons people quit their jobs? “One of the major reasons is being dissatisfied with their supervisor,” says Linda Argote, a professor of organizational behavior at Carnegie Mellon and editor-in-chief of Organization Science. And in the cramped confines of a small business, that relationship can create even more of a strain. “In bigger companies there are more opportunities to move to other jobs if you’re dissatisfied with a particular supervisor but like the firm, whereas smaller companies may have less options so they run the risk of losing the employee,” Argote adds.

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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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How Employers Can Contain Costs With Staffing

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What business isn’t looking to control expenses? Staffing firms offer many effective solutions for reducing overhead, managing operating costs and improving organizational performance. Used effectively, staffing services can save you more than they cost.

Here are some key ways you can use staffing to reduce costs in your organization:

Convert fixed expenses to variable.
Develop a plan to staff your business strategically. Minimize the number of permanent employees on your staff to the level needed to sustain your core volume of work. Proactively plan to bring in extra help when it’s needed.

Bring in expertise on an as-needed basis.
Temporaries can deliver the experience and skills you need without impacting fixed expenses. As an added benefit, temporary “experts” are often less expensive than consultants.

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Does Your Company Culture Attract Greatness??

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Why do companies as disparate as Google, Southwest Airlines and Zappo’s get such great reviews from their employees? How do they attract top candidates? Easy. They’ve worked hard to develop company cultures that epitomize strong values, a modern work ethic that includes fun, and service above all.

If you want to appeal to the top-drawer candidates that apply to these popular companies in droves, it’s time to think about what your company can offer. Has your company defined its core values? Created a distinct corporate culture? Have you expressed these values on your web site or in your job listings, where candidates can see them?

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