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Remote Positivity: Emulating Optimism for Your Work-From-Home Employees

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StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article |Work From Home| Remote Positivity: Emulating Optimism for Your Work-From-Home EmployeesThe work from home dynamic has come into our society in full force. Since the pandemic’s effects have significantly impacted our ability to congregate in groups, many companies have used remote work to keep their workflow on a proper level and collaborate with employees working from home.

There are numerous ways that technology has adeptly adapted to this, with apps and services across multiple platforms able to aid in employee communications no matter their location. However, one must remember that there are psychological effects on social isolation, ranging from anxiety to sleeplessness.

It starts with a company leader addressing these issues and taking the initiative to create a realm of positivity for his or her working community. Once done, employees can more easily thrive in a workplace with core values of workplace strength and support.

Collaborate and Listen

The applications that the tech world has developed have been a mainstay in the work from home atmosphere. No longer do people need to leave messages, wait hours for contact, or wonder which roles they have on a company project. Whether utilizing instant messaging, video conferencing, or campaign tracking, apps like GoToMeeting and Slack have all been heavily downloaded and integrated into remote work environments. Digital transformation will only continue to evolve with further refinement of workflow customization tools.

However, it’s important to note that “collaboration” is an integral part of these workflow collaboration apps. That means rising together towards the desired group result–but more than anything, it means a leader willing to step up and create a constructive and enthusiastic environment.

Project management is an essential part of any brand, for example, but proper communication with employees is necessary to steady productivity. Make sure that your working community knows that they’re valued on a personal level. Checking in for friendly workforce chats weekly, making employee onboarding a priority for future work efforts, and rewarding especially excellent efficiency with warm messages are all ways in which you can exemplify your positive work atmosphere.

Zooming the Right Way

If you’ve been working from home, then you’ve probably been using Zoom: the video communications service that’s connected a multitude of remote work employees through web conferencing. However, during the past few weeks, there’s been a concern over the notion of excess comfort in personal home office use with Zoom.

The concept of “Zoom etiquette” is one that has recently been in conversation across multiple sectors. Specifically, there is debate about how many behaviors one may or may not allow when videoconferencing in groups. Addressing this topic with your employees will eliminate any chance of discomfort for them during video conferences.

For example, if one hasn’t had the time for a lunch break and needs to eat during a long meeting, should one wait and not interrupt? The consensus seems to be that it is alright. However, temporarily switching off one’s camera and muting one’s microphone so as not to disturb the other members with possible sound interventions is best.

Other possible scenarios involve establishing that social media alerts or other interruptions don’t divert your employees. These will limit their ability to remember aspects of your video meeting, as well as demonstrate a lack of professionalism that other employees might catch onto.

However, ensure that your workforce member isn’t excessively stressed if a child or pet causes a minor interruption. Know that there are some elements in the new normal that you can control as an authority leader and some aspects that you cannot. Your working community will notice you, and your bolstering environment, more for it.

Communicate and Know the Purpose

With an untold amount of startups in the current atmosphere and a market that seems to change every second, there is a measure of instability that can occur when a company operates on an unstable foundation. Profit may be coming in with a trending product or service, but long-term success is built upon leadership that understands its key areas of skills and fortitude. Having each of your employees understand your brand’s–and your own life’s–mission will give better clarity to your organization, helping align short-term wants with long-term goals.

But communication doesn’t just come from one direction. Through videoconference, asking your employees what they believe their strengths to be and what they want to achieve in life will open up mental pathways on both sides. It will give them a sense of purpose and resolve, knowing that you have a sincere interest in their skillset.

They’ll see that they can chat with you if they notice an additional lead or avenue that the business can take in the future. And for you, as a leader, you may learn an additional power area from one of your working community members that you can now count on moving forward.

Communication has evolved to a level that few of us expected to see a year ago. With digital transformation, we’ve seen video conferencing and webinars take hold in our day-to-day work experiences. However, this doesn’t mean that the foundational aspects of a positive work environment need to lessen. Using the proper strategies, an optimistic working community can advance and lead to a brighter future for every work-from-home member.

About the Author

StrategyDriven Expert Contributor |Veronica BaxterVeronica Baxter is a legal assistant and blogger living and working in the great city of Philadelphia. She frequently works with Todd Mosser Esq., a busy criminal appeals lawyer, Philadelphia PA.

Little Things Go a Long Way: 10 Ways Great Employers Set Themselves Apart From the Rest

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StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article |Great Employers |Little Things Go a Long Way: 10 Ways Great Employers Set Themselves Apart From the RestReally quick now, how well do you treat your employees? How happy are they working for your business? Guess what, if they’re not happy, how well do you think they’ll perform? How much attention to detail will they give to their work? How long are they going to hang around?

It’s so important nowadays for businesses to care about their employees and treat them right, but if you’re left scratching your head for ideas, here are ten ways you can set yourself apart from the rest of the employers out there.

1. Be Honest

When you’re talking to employees, it’s something easy to not speak the truth, whether you’re distorting facts or flat-out lying. Instead, be honest. All great leaders can be trusted because they know the truth is what matters, and people respect that.

2. You Connect with Them

Whether you’re merely asking whether your employees are okay as they come into work in the morning, or you’re communicating with them as human beings, talking and connecting with your employees is essential for making your place of work the best place it can be.

3. Avoid Micromanaging

This point speaks for itself, but just as a reminder, you employed your staff because they are capable of doing what you employed them to do. Delegation is essential. Micromanaging is crippling.

4. Stay Cool Under Pressure

There are going to be times when things heat up, and how you deal with them defines you as a leader and a good business. Instead of passing the buck or pointing fingers, a good business stands up and aims to get things sorted. No throwing anyone under the bus; you’re a team!

5. Make Your Employees Feel Valued

There’s nothing worse than working for a company where you’re treated as though you’re nothing. It’s like the work you do doesn’t matter and the time you’re spending there could be done by anyone. Even if that’s the case, appreciating your employees for working for you will make them feel as though they’re spending their life on something that matters, and this will dramatically increase satisfaction rates.

6. Looking for the Best

When you look for the best in others, people are more likely to want to show it to you, so actively seek it out. Try to find what the best your team has to offer is, and encourage people to share what they have.

7. Credit Where Credit is Due

Just like taking the heat when the going gets tough when things are done well, it’s important to remember that everything was a team effort, not just ‘oh, the business is doing really well right now,’ because it’s your employees making that happen. Share the praise with them.

8. Invest

Whether you’re providing promotional opportunities, training courses, or even just giving your staff the time of day, if you’re not investing something, you won’t have happy employees. You can use services like ServiceNow HR for employee experience to highlight the best ways to do this.

9. Create a Team Spirit

Few businesses run with just one employee, which means you’re working as a team. Just because you’re delegating the team and telling them what to do, that doesn’t make you better than them; you simply just have more responsibility to help guide the team in the right direction. Everyone is in this together.

10. Inspire Your Staff

There’s nothing more demoralizing than going to work for a company that feels like a dead-end job. A good business will inspire their staff to encourage them to want to be the best versions of themselves, no matter what that version may look like.

Summary

There’s no denying there are endless ways to make your company stand out from the rest when it comes to how you treat your employees and creating a work environment that people actually want to be in. Be proactive with a growth mindset, and you’ll see beautiful things start to happen.

6 Strategies for Improving Employee Productivity

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The more productive your employees, the better for your business. But it can be hard to get employees to actually be productive. There are always a few gems who will go above and beyond, who complete their work early and wonderfully… but those are rare. Most employees won’t do more than what’s expected of them, because what’s the point? However, unproductive employees could do severe damage to your business’s reputation, since you may be behind on certain orders or have unsatisfied clients. While you are the boss and it’s your job to delegate, you need to know that your employees will do their work even if they aren’t being supervised 24/7. Keep reading to find out what you can do to improve employee productivity.

Training

Training will equip your employees with a lot of skills that can help them be more productive. You can even send them for training on how to maintain motivation, since productivity can’t exist without motivation. They may even feel grateful for the opportunity to have received the training and decide to show their appreciation by being extra productive. Either way, training will definitely improve productivity in the workplace. Training during Covid-19 is still possible in most places, as long as it complies with regulations and you take the necessary safety precautions.

Give them proper technology

While a lack of productivity often comes directly from the employees themselves, it can also be possible that working with old or outdated technology is slowing down their work. It can be incredibly frustrating to work with equipment and have it be a constant struggle, and if the technology they’re given is slow, their productivity will be negatively affected, no matter how motivated they are. You can’t expect modern results and productivity without giving them modern equipment. You might not be able to afford new technology right now, but see if there are any updates that you can run. If not, you need to accept the fact that your employees will never reach their full potential for productivity.

Incentives

If all else fails, bribe them. Okay, to be fair, incentives aren’t exactly bribery; more like rewards for good behavior. If you’re struggling to get your employees motivated and productive, your best bet is going to be to offer them incentives. Very few employees will go out of their way to be productive if there’s nothing in it for them. That being said, they’re more than likely to do it for money. Incentives are simple: the better their work, the more money they’ll get. There are various ways of designing employee incentive programs, so you should easily find a program that works for you as well as your employees.

Monitor

While you may not be able to watch your employees every second of their working day, there are ways of lighting a fire under them. If you pop into their office every now and then at random, they’ll never know when to expect you, and therefore always be on their best behavior. There are also ways of managing remote workers. There are apps that can tell you what time they logged on and off their computer, so that you can monitor how much time they’re putting in and ensure that they are working as many hours as they should.

Communicate

Miscommunications or misunderstandings can lead to work being done in the incorrect way. Of course, this means that that work will need to be redone and all the time spent on it was wasted. It’s your responsibility to communicate any instructions and deadlines very clearly to your employees, and it’s their responsibility to ask you for clarification if thy don’t understand you clearly. Being able to communicate effectively will help make your entire business run smoother. Employees are more likely to be productive if they know exactly what they need to do.

Remote work

If you have nay employees who you know are responsible enough to work from home, you should consider letting them. This will allow you to spend more time focusing on less-productive employees and you may even be able to pinpoint what is causing them to be unproductive, and work form there to fix it. Some employees may even be more productive while working from home, without the distractions of their coworkers. As mentioned, there are still ways to monitor remote workers, so that doesn’t need to be a worry. If there are less people in the office, the distractions will be less and your employees may be able to concentrate on their work. You may even like it so much that you decide to run your entire business with remote workers.

5 Tactics For Maximizing Business Productivity

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StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article |Business Productivity|5 Tactics For Maximizing Business ProductivityDisaster! That is what happens when a business is unproductive. This is because whatever product or service your business outputs takes money to create. Therefore, if you are doing this in an inefficiently, it will be costing you money, the very lifeblood of your company. With that in mind, it’s crucial that you maximize the productivity of your company. A topic you can find out more about in the post below.

Improve employee wellbeing

Now, you may expect an article all about boosting productivity to take about rationalization and process flows, and that is to come, but your employee’s wellbeing and happiness is essential here too. The reason being that morale is crucial to maintain a high level of productivity, as well as to avoid slow down when valued staff leave.

To that end, it’s essential that you care, not only about the work your employees do but their wellbeing as well. Luckily there are some relatively small changes you can make in your business to improve wellbeing that will allow you to reap the associated reward in productivity.

The first is to offer flexible working hours and locations, something that can help your staff achieve a better work-life balance, and so be more productive and motivated when they are working.

Additionally, instituting a wellbeing program in work can have a significant effect. Of course, the exact form of these will differ from one workspace to another, but many companies find that providing exercise classes, meditation sessions, and even healthy snacks to be very useful in upping morale.

Deal with issues before they become problems

Next, if you want to boost productivity in your business, you need to change the way that your entire company operates. In fact, you need to move from being reactive when problems occur to being proactive instead.

This means that you need to put systems in place that monitor what is happening in your business, and will pick up any issues that have the potential to become something more damaging. The idea being that you can then deal with and resolve them before they ever blow up to be a significant obstacle. Then you can avoid downtime and the bottlenecking of tasks that are associated with a major crisis.

In fact, this is a philosophy that you can use across many different aspects of your business to improve productivity. One example of this being managed IT services.

Of course, you may be asking what is managed IT services, and how can they help my business be more productive? Well, don’t panic because it’s actually a straightforward question to answer. Managed IT services are where you outsource your IT provision to an organization that takes over the proactive monitoring side of things for you. Something that can help your business because it means a vast reduction in network downtime and the associated hold-ups in working, communications, and even hits on your website. Thus ensuring maximum productivity.

Automate

Another way that you can maximize your business’s productive it to take a long hard look at the type of tasks that your employees do day in day out. In fact, when you do, so it’s likely that you will find many repetitive jobs that are done over and over again, and it is with these that you can begum automating things.

Yes, that right, you can easily free up your workers to focus on more important things, by automating some of the most basic tasks that need to be done in your business. Something that should help to improve productivity because you have more person-power to give to the jobs that genuinely need it.

In fact, automation can be done in a range of situation from the factory floor, to the stockroom, and even in the office with specialized software. Something that makes it a fanatics way of maximizing your company’s productivity.

Minimize distractions / maximize focus

Of course, we humans don’t do as well as physical robots or AI at being 100% focused all the time. In fact, focus and being distracted from it can be a major issue in many businesses that contributes to time wasted and reduced productivity. That is why it’s crucial that you change the way your organization deals with these opposing forces.

Now, to do this, it is essential to acknowledge that as humans, we need distraction as well as focus to work efficiently and retain the quality of the work we are producing. With that in mind, encouraging a time-batching system like the Pomodoro Method can be incredibly helpful, as they allow for small restorative distraction breaks, but also keep most people on task for the majority of the time.

However, that doesn’t mean that unnecessary distraction cannot be abolished, and in particular constant email access and use can be a real time and focus drain in the office. Something that may mean scheduling emails time into the am and pm is a much better way of managing such a task and so boosting productivity.

StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article |Business Productivity|5 Tactics For Maximizing Business ProductivityReview Processes

Finally, when it comes to maximizing productivity, reviewing and improving the processes that you use in your business is always helpful. The idea here being to remove any redundant actions and so streamline what you are doing.

Of course, this is often easiest to do when it comes to things like a production line of the factory floor, but that doesn’t mean that you can take a rationalized perspective to other business related tasks as well. In fact, it is entirely possible to make things more efficient in places like the office or even a store by realizing what time is being wasted and changing things to rectify this.

In particular, an example of this that nearly every type of business can benefit from is to reduce the volume and frequency of meetings that they have. In fact, instead of spending days rushing from one meeting to another, it can work well to hold a short stand up briefing at the beginning of the day. This being something that will save time, and prevent distraction from the critical tasks in hand and so maximize productivity in your business.

How To Choose Your Company’s Staff

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It is always said that the success of a company comes from its human capital. However, one wonders how the most recognized companies achieved such an efficient human resources department. Any entrepreneur should pay attention to this point because recruiting staff is a fundamental task in an organization.

StrategyDriven Talent Management Article | How To Choose Your Company's Staff

Finding the ideal professional for the position is often difficult. The reasons may be lack of experience or that the candidate does not have the required skills. Some companies have periods with constant staff turnover because it is difficult for them to locate the right employees, keep workers happy and satisfied with their work and wages.

Personnel recruiters must be specialists because they must know how to combine intuition with the ability to analyze, synthesize and evaluate, and involve quantitative scientific tools, which contribute to knowing what is not seen with the naked eye. The use of technological tools will help obtain greater accuracy and know the applicant’s scope.

Posting job advertisements in the correct places (according to the requested profile) makes the offer more attractive; therefore, the chances that the candidates will be fixed are higher. At the same time, the design of the ad also serves to attract attention. Take advantage of social networks, especially those of professionals like LinkedIn, so that you can learn more about people’s likes and interests in less time. It makes your searches more effective too and you can get a general overview quicker.

When conducting job interviews, it is essential to provide information on the specific skills and abilities. It is also valuable for the company to report what it has to offer by working there, for example, salary, hours, incentives, or rewards, and all benefits. Look at drug testing to ensure that you hire people who have no history of narcotics or drug abuse. You can look at stewarts drug testing for further information.

Look at the company’s goals.

Also, to have a good team that meets the company’s goals, we have some ideas that will help you select the candidates who are applying. Take note: Psychometric tests are part of job interviews. They are made scientifically, and it is an objective measure of the candidate’s behavior, which allows us to conclude the factors of his personality. They are easy to acquire and can be the first step in determining the applicant’s ability. You want to hire someone who has the potential for growth in the business.

When selecting people, use comments from their other jobs, who they worked with, colleagues, or previous bosses. Therefore, factual information is obtained on the skills and personality at work. At the end of the list of possible workers, it is advisable to carry out a socio-economic study and a personal interview. It will allow knowing the environment in which the candidate develops, how his family conditions, the place where they live, customs, habits, personal and professional information. With this data, unwanted situations can be avoided. You can certainly hire the best professional but the hard work is up to you.