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Steps to Effective Business Leadership

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StrategyDriven Management and Leadership Article | Steps to Effective Business LeadershipIt’s important for business owners to have strong leadership skills first and foremost to ensure that the business succeeds, thrives and is able to remain in business.  Leadership skills help provide a vision for business projects/products/services and are necessary to help motivate employees to be their best.

Leaders often set the tone for morale, motivation and commitment, all of which affect the stakeholders/customers and again in large part determine whether the business will succeed.

Business owners also have to be able to establish an effective organizational structure, while influencing employees and very often the business owner/leader will have the strongest influence on employees and a good leader will be able to inspire and effectively communicate the mission and the vision to the employees so they feel empowered to do their best and be their best.

The business owner/leader has to be strong enough to balance the needs of the company with the needs of the employees; balance the need to get things done with the need to teach and mentor; along with balancing good professional boundaries with the ability to be empathic and accessible all the while balancing the demands of the job with the needs of the people who work for you.

Identify what the priorities are for the leader; you must also include short- and long-term goals, balancing the daily demands with the longer-term vision and mission.  The goals must be objective and clearly defined (SMART Goals are best-Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time Bound) and should include goals related to mentoring and fostering leadership in others, stronger relationships through advocating and support when needed; they should include goals related to active listening; developing increased confidence; time management; accountability and responsibility; cognitive flexibility )able to adapt/pivot when needed); should be able to make smarter and more strategic decisions while still managing, time, tasks and people and these goals should be focused on the development of the individual.

The best leadership goals every leader should have should include, but are not limited to, developing strategic thinking; active listening; coaching and fostering growth in others/employees; delegating… they should focus on self-discipline and personal responsibility; building resilience in self and others; developing multiple areas of expertise/competence over time (as indicated in #2); learning and understanding how to effectively influence and persuade others to follow while also focusing on the big picture while minding the bottom line.

Other important things a business leader should know about leadership development goals include keeping a long term focus; development goals should be few and simple so as not to confuse, overwhelm or detract from the priorities (goals should fit the SMART format/criteria) and it’s important that the achievement of goals be recognized and rewarded relative to the impact the completion of that goals had on the individual or business/organization.  Also, measure/monitor progress toward goals and provide regular feedback and coaching as needed.  Remember, the success of any business or team is dependent on the leader. A good business owner and leader knows how to inspire and motivate, adapt and problem solve and demonstrate personal ownership and accountability and leads by example.

About the Author

StrategyDriven Expert Contributor | Dr. Aimee Harris-NewonDr. Aimee Harris-Newon Psy.D., DABPS, C.HT. is a double board certified integrative and interventional psychologist, entrepreneur, author, speaker, and master success coach. She’s considered an expert in integrative health and believes in a holistic approach-treating the body and the mind.

She leads a very successful integrative and functional health and wellness practice, serving clients locally and internationally. She and her multidisciplinary team focus on wellness, preventive care and coaching to help people live healthier, happier and more satisfying lives. What makes her truly unique and exceptional is her broad and deep skill set and her approach to health and wellness.

As the founder and director of Dr. Aimee and Associates, and now The Center for Integrative and Functional Health and Wellness, Dr. Aimee Harris-Newon and her team of experts don’t just treat symptoms, they solve health problems, create better outcomes and change lives.

As a coach, Dr. Aimee Harris-Newon has worked with individuals and corporations including FedEx, UPS, McDonald’s, Red Bull and the U.S. Army. She is a frequent speaker at Harvard and regularly appears on television news shows such as ABC, NBC, and FOX. Dr. Aimee Harris-Newon also hosts the popular radio show, Mind Over Matters on AM 820, which airs every Sunday morning at 10 a.m. CST.

13 Apps & Ideas To Improve Your Company Culture

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StrategyDriven Corporate Cultures Article |Company Culture|13 Apps & Ideas To Improve Your Company CultureWhat is company culture?

Company culture essentially means the personality of a company; it includes all of the values, behaviors, and interactions of both management and staff. The company culture is reflected by how staff engage with their organization and how they relate to the business goals. The company culture is evident in many aspects of the business operations, including the office arrangements, the hiring decisions and the staff perks.

With a strong company culture staff will feel both valued and engaged. Companies with high levels of staff engagement are more productive and more profitable. By developing a strong company culture, you’ll also improve your branding and your reputation.

According to a study by Smarp, ‘companies that had the best corporate cultures, that encouraged all-around leadership initiatives and that highly appreciated their employees, customers, and owners grew 682 percent in revenue.’ There are many ways that you can seek to improve your company culture, so let’s take a look.

Tips to improve your company culture

1 . Offer Flexibility

When you offer your staff flexibility, you will boost productivity levels. Flexibility allows employees to feel free and creative, and this has a positive impact on engagement. There are several ways that you can offer flexibility, including:

  • Flexible shifts: Instead of insisting on a strict 9-5 work regime, try offering your staff a little more flexibility with their working patterns.
  • Remote options: Working from home has become the norm lately and many businesses are making changes to operate fully remotely. According to a survey on FlexJobs, ‘65% of respondents are more productive in their home office than at a traditional workplace.’
  • Special days off: You can offer flexibility by allowing your staff to take special days off. It might be birthdays off work or a certain religious holiday that they celebrate.

2. Staff perks

According to Employee Benefits research, ‘75% of employees are more likely to stay with their employer because of their employee benefits package.’ By offering staff benefits, you can improve staff loyalty, engagement, satisfaction, and retention. Staff benefits you could considering offering include:

  • Staff discounts: There are plenty of staff discounts you can offer your employees, whether it’s retail discounts, dining discounts, or fitness discounts. Staff discounts are an excellent way to ensure that your staff feel valued.
  • Healthcare plans: To look out for your staff’s health and well-being, try offering an attractive health care plan. When you offer a great healthcare plan, you’re more likely to attract and hold onto talented staff.
  • Wellness programs: Burnout and mental health problems are increasingly common, which is why it’s a great idea to offer a wellness program. Apps such as ‘wellspace’ can support you to offer a wellness program that prioritizes the mental health of your staff.

3. Regular one-on-ones

Get into the habit of having regular one-on-ones with your staff, use these opportunities to ask your staff for feedback, and give them any feedback that you may have. One-on-one catch-ups can be helpful to:

  • Ask your staff if there is any extra training they feel they might benefit from.
  • Discuss their goals within their role and within the company as a whole.
  • Create a roadmap to achieve their goals within their role.
  • Provide them with feedback on their progress and projects.

4. Social side

To improve your company culture, it can be a great idea to encourage a social aspect to your business. You can do this easily by hosting social events for your staff and management. Whether it’s team-retreats, dinners out, or drinks on Zoom, give your staff the chance to become friends and opposed to just colleagues. Building healthy relationships with colleagues can improve the morale and atmosphere at your workplace. During 2020, many businesses have no choice but to work remotely. Due to the coronavirus, many staff members may now feel more comfortable attending online social events.

5. Mentoring

To nurture the progress of your employees, it can be useful to offer a mentoring program. All you need to do is pair up your less experienced staff members with those employees who have a little more experience behind them. There are many benefits to offering a mentoring program, including:

  • Staff can learn from one another and exchange advice and tips.
  • Improve the relationships between your staff members.
  • Improve your in-house training regimes.
  • Peer-to-peer feedback can often be more well-received than traditional feedback.
  • Mentoring programs can help you to build a supportive community within your company.

6. Diversity & inclusion

To improve your company culture, it’s essential to think about diversity and inclusion. To build a diverse workplace, you must create a team that’s representative across different ethnicities, sexual orientations, and genders. Your team should also be representative of individuals with disabilities. To create an inclusive workplace, you must include that everyone is treated equally and included, without any level of discrimination or bias. To ensure that your business is diverse and inclusive, there are several things that you can do:

  • Unconscious bias training: This type of training focuses on helping individuals understand their unconscious biases and help them avoid accidentally discriminatory behavior. When we challenge underlying prejudices and seek to correct this behavior, we are better equipped to build an inclusive workplace.
  • Web Content Accessibility Guidelines: WCAG provides instructions and advice on ensuring that your content is accessible. By following WCAG guidelines, you can make sure that your content is easily accessible for people with a wide range of disabilities. Such disabilities might include hearing loss, blindness, or learning difficulties. If you’d like to get your website up to WCA standards, then check out digital accessibility with AudioEye.

Diversity apps

Besides these ideas, you could also take a look at applications such as Blendoor. It’s a people analytics app that can help you to prioritize diversity as part of your recruitment processes. The software hides photos and candidate names in the primary stages, to ensure that recruiters cannot be accidentally biased.

Apps to improve your company culture

8. Jostle

This application is a type of ‘people engagement’ platform and employee intranet. The app was created to improve staff engagement by encouraging excellent communication and a positive culture. Jostle helps everyone to celebrate the successes of their colleagues and share workplace stories. Jostle’s best features include events planning, surveys and polls, collaboration, and employee recognition. With Jostle, you’ll improve the communication between your employees. It’s simple to target the info you need using employee type, location, or division. Further features of Jostle include matrix reporting, employee targeting, and workplace structures.

9. Quantum Workplace

Quantum Workplace is a type of employee engagement and performance management software. Using QW, you can access surveys, set goals, and take advantage of employee recognition features. The platform was designed to seamlessly fit management processes, and you can scale it to whatever your requirements are. Quantum workplace also has coaching features, so that you can make the most of the software. Other features of QW include analytics and feedback.

10. Lattice

Lattice is a people management platform which can support your company to encourage high performing and engaged teams. Using the software, you can carry out one-to-ones, set goals, use engagement surveys, and access insightful analytics. There are so many ways that you can customize Lattice, meaning that you can tailor this solution to your company culture. When teams are disengaged, it’s unlikely that they’ll reach their full potential or produce truly creative work.

11. Kudos

Kudos is a type of employee recognition platform, helping you to appreciate and value your staff. The tool has plenty of great solutions for employee recognition. The tool allows teammates to recognize one another’s achievements, which helps to boost engagement levels. It’s essentially a private social network that enhances communication between your teams. Kudos is also useful to represent your brand and to reinforce your core values.

12. Motivosity

The Motivosity application was developed to create a more fulfilling workplace experience. Using the platform, company owners can encourage higher productivity levels and help staff to each their true potential. Motivosity helps businesses to assign the right tasks to the right workers while boosting engagement. The platform allows staff and managers to show appreciation and recognition for workplace efforts. Further features of Motivosity include digital gifts, awards, organization charts, personality assessment, and milestone section.

13. Peakon

Peakon is a great employee engagement platform that can support you to improve your company culture. The app automates the collection of feedback, delivery, and analysis. Using Peakon, it’s simple for companies to be able to identify issues and deal with them appropriately. You can take a look at the highest performing teams, analyze their productivity, and use these insights elsewhere. When you increase your engagement, you’ll improve your company culture and see a greater ROI. Other great features of Peakon include trending dashboard, flexible scheduling, continuous monitoring, and personalized insights.

Improving your company culture means happier employees, improved branding, and, ultimately, higher profits for your business. Developing a strong company culture is a process that can take a little time. Most importantly, when you are recruiting new staff you should ensure that you are choosing individuals who are a good fit for your culture and company values.

What are Some of the Best Company Cars in 2020?

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Company Car| What are Some of the Best Company Cars in 2020?Looking for a company car in 2020? This is not a decision that should be made lightly and you will want to find a vehicle which fits in perfectly with your operation and helps your business to succeed. A good company car will be practical, comfortable, economical and safe, but you also need to think about how much you are able to spend so here are a few of the best company cars available right now in different price brackets.

£15,000 and Under

For those working on a tight budget, there are still a handful of excellent options to consider. One is the Skoda Fabia supermini which is a great all-rounder and much more affordable than other models in this class. It has a good amount of interior space for a car of this size along with low running costs so it is well-suited to those in a city. The Kia Cerato and Hyundai i10 is also worth looking at as a similarly priced option and a car that was widely considered to be the best city car a few years ago.

£20,000 and Under

Those looking to spend no more than £20,000 cannot go wrong with the Honda Civic. The Civic boasts sporty and stylish good looks on the outside to go with a comfortable and spacious interior, plus there are a range of engines to choose from including economical options which means that it ticks all of the boxes and your employees are sure to enjoy getting behind the wheel without breaking the bank.

£30,000 and Under

If you are looking to splash a little more on your company car then either the BMW 1-Series or 3-Series are your best options under £30,000. BMW are the kings when it comes to company cars with both of these models featuring the trademark sleek stylish, luxurious interior and excellent driving performances.

£40,000 and Under

If you are willing to spend a little more, the BMW 5-Series is a step up and certainly a car that will paint your company in a positive light. This is a car which shows you mean business with head-turning good looks, agility, comfort and heaps of technology to provide a fantastic experience behind the wheel. For those that are able to spend, this is certainly a great asset for your company but you should always take out a Gap insurance policy for financial protection in case the vehicle were to be written off.

Picking a new company car is challenging but the above are all excellent options for different price brackets.

Are Consumers Putting Pressure on Businesses to Go Green

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Green Business|Are Consumers Putting Pressure on Businesses to Go GreenConsumer behaviours always change and it is the consumer which has the ability to enact change as businesses always need to find ways to appeal to their target demographic. In recent times, one of the biggest consumer changes has people becoming much more environmentally-aware which is understandable when you watch the news and see the impact around the world.

Consumers Becoming More Selective

Modern day consumers are becoming increasingly eco-conscious with scientists encouraging both businesses and individuals to make positive changes in their life to protect the environment. More and more people are now becoming selective when it comes to the businesses that they use and people will favour those that have green credentials so companies are now under pressure not only by new regulations and scientists but also modern-day consumers.

Sustainable Packaging

This is evident with a recent study by Trivium Packaging, which discovered that 74% of consumers would be willing to pay more for sustainable packaging. More than two out of three stated that environmentally-friendly, recyclable packaging was important which is not surprising when you see the attention that supermarkets and other stores get for plastic packaging. The report stated that these findings present “ a real opportunity to impact purchasing decisions by offering environmentally friendly options for their consumers” and it is certainly something that businesses need to think about.

In a time where people consume a huge amount and get items shipped through online shopping, sustainable packaging has become incredibly important and a way for businesses to improve their green credentials. It is important to use recycled materials and to use reliable and eco-friendly couriers when it comes to shipments so that you can satisfy today’s eco-aware consumers, otherwise you could fall behind the competition as well as continue to harm the planet.

Positive Change

Harmful packaging is quickly becoming a thing of the past which is positive to see and evidence that consumers can make a difference when they are selective of the brands that they use. While packaging is a major topic when it comes to environmental-impact, it is not the only one and consumers may start to shun businesses for other reasons soon too and favour those that are green.

Other Areas

This means that businesses need to think about ways that they can protect the environment not only from a social responsibility standpoint but also so that they can continue to attract their target customer. This might include remote working, increasing recycling and using renewable energy to reduce their impact.

It is fantastic to see that so many businesses are changing to sustainable packaging and shows that consumers have the power to make changes, but there is still a lot of work to be done and big changes to make in the coming years.

Click Fraud Is a Plague on Online Advertising

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Online Advertising|Click Fraud Is a Plague on Online AdvertisingAs more businesses go online and compete for the same customers, PPC ads seem like the best way to capture users and direct them to their websites. This is because when users see highly targeted and personalised PPC ads for products and services they are interested in, they are much more likely to click on those ads and purchase the products and services. However, some businesses do not want to compete fairly in this way and this is why click fraud is becoming a problem.

What Is Click Fraud?

Before we look at whether click fraud is illegal or not and what can be done about it, we need to look at what click fraud is exactly. Click fraud is any type of invalid click on a link, with malicious intent. In many cases, click fraud is perpetrated by people who want to drain their competitors’ advertising budgets. They know that if they do this successfully, their competitors will not have any funds left to run their advertising campaigns. This would leave the field open to only them. This article from ClickGUARD answers the question, “What is click fraud?” in more detail, and they also provide tips on how to prevent it from happening to you.

What Are the Sources of Fraudulent Clicks?

These sources often include bots, infected computers and servers as well as real people clicking on ads with no intention of interacting with the website the ads lead to. It is important to remember that these sources of malicious clicks will continue to become more sophisticated and varied and this is why it is important to identify these new sources as they emerge.

Tools like the abovementioned ClickGUARD are very effective at identifying the sources of these malicious clicks thereby stopping click fraud before it happens. They monitor your ads to identify threats to your links and ads, thereby getting rid of wasteful clicks. This ensures your website receives quality clicks from real people who are likely to convert.

Is Click Fraud Illegal?

Click fraud is considered illegal in many parts of the world. Many people do not know that clicking on people’s ads with malicious intent is illegal, but it is. Because of how much money is lost and how many businesses are decimated due to click fraud, it should be stopped before it even begins.

It is important to remember that most countries do not have specific laws about click fraud, but people have been jailed due to click fraud and this is why it is considered illegal. In many cases, laws that cover cybersecurity, wire fraud, deception, data theft and money laundering have been used to prosecute these cases.

By its very nature of being one of the most progressive regions for digital rights, the European Union has some of the strictest laws against fraud. Law experts think that with the data protections afforded by the enacted GDPR laws and these anti-fraud measures, it could form a legal basis for these cases.
Many countries have some form of protection against ‘computer fraud’ but what that means depends on the context, the country in question, as well as the evidence law enforcement officers can gather.

Click fraud is one of the worst things that could happen to digital and online advertising. It robs businesses of precious advertisement funds, it prevents consumers from finding the right websites, products and services and it wastes everyone’s time. It is time that countries came up with comprehensive click fraud laws to cover this one specific area.