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3 Effective Strategies for Keeping Employees Focused on the Task at Hand

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The reason you worked so hard to complete an executive masters in business administration program is that you wanted to make a difference. Over time, you saw areas which could have been handled more efficiently and at lower costs within your organization. Although you were already in a position of authority, you felt you needed better skills to keep things flowing smoother in accordance with best practices, as outlined in the company manual.

The one issue you kept running up against daily was keeping employees focused on the task at hand. You’ve finally gotten that online executive MBA degree and it’s time to put it to use building strategies to keep your team on task.

1. Complete an Assessment of Why and How Employees Become Distracted

The first step in building any strategy is to determine what it is you’d like to accomplish. The end goal sets the stage for any strategy because, by its very nature, a strategy is a roadmap to success. In this case, you are using your MBA to define common causes for distractions, in order to facilitate a more focused approach to the jobs at hand.

2. Create New Policies to Avoid Distractions

One of the best strategies is one in which you set new rules. In the course of assessing the source of distractions, you’ve discovered that altogether too much talking is going on about things totally unrelated to what they are currently working on. While you don’t want to be a hard taskmaster, you do want to keep things moving along to increase productivity. Why not set a rule that talking is allowed only in terms of job-related issues and all other conversation is best left to the break room.

3. Keep Peripheral Distractions to a Minimum

As you studied for your executive masters in business administration online, you knew that you needed to be in a place where there were minimal distractions. As a result, you set aside one room in your home where you couldn’t hear the television and noises from the playroom couldn’t filter in. You can use the same strategy on the job! Reroute foot traffic through areas where employees aren’t sitting at desks or working on the line and try to keep announcements over loudspeakers to a minimum.

Research indicates that distractions on the job cost employers over $10,000 per person per year!

In the End – You’re the Boss

You can clearly see that distractions are costing your company a ton of money each and every year. Not only do distractions cut profits, but they also increase the risk of inferior quality of work. In fact, you may even want to open the floor for discussion among the very employees you’ve found to be most distracted while on the job. Their input could be invaluable. They might define a whole new set of issues they find distracting, after which you can devise strategies to reduce those as well.

Your job as an administrator is to devise and implement strategies. Reducing distractions is a great place to test your newfound skills. Don’t let it be your last.

What Does It Take to Create a Good Design Team?

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A great design team is only as good as the staff within it. The team itself includes the personnel, all of their assigned roles within the team, personal objectives, their methodologies and software (like the new Altium designer 18 package), and the framework they use. When any of the above component parts of a team are missing or misaligned, things tend to go wrong or are placed at opposing sides which leads to difficulties completing tasks on time, if at all.

Multiple Roles or Single Roles

Depending on the person and the size of the team, it may be necessary for team members to perform multiple roles on a project. When mixing too many roles for a single employee, this can create difficulties as it’s both difficult for them to embrace collaborators for each of their distinctive roles, but more so when two or more of their roles conflict with each other with no one to act as a referee.

Some roles also don’t mix well with others. The person funding the project shouldn’t usually also be a designer on the project because their motivations may get muddled. Is it more important to create a better designed circuit board or website, or to keep to the development costs within the budget set by upper management? Where is the line drawn?

Every Team Member Has Professional Advancement

With advancement, we don’t necessarily mean a promotion. It’s important beyond position and money that an employee feels invested in the project and its outcome. It’s also useful when they feel that the project adds something new to their cache in the industry and is something that can go on their resume as a selling point.

When a project lacks that special something that’s different to what they’ve done before, or they’re not being allowed to advance in their knowledge and involvement, they begin to feel stagnant. In some senses, it doesn’t matter if they been given access to the cutting-edge Altium designer 18 software ahead of its release or been responsible for new areas of a design project, there must be something there to spike their interest and sustain it throughout completion of the project.

Successful Teams Are Often an Eclectic Mix

When looking at any design team, you’re unlikely to see a herd that all dress alike, talk alike and look somewhat similar. Diversity across the team is a good thing in many cases as is the previous project experience they bring to the table. New blood brings fresh perspectives and ideas on how to do things differently, more efficiently, or simply better. It’s important that the team leader embraces diversity in the ranks and does not see a culture developing where people who are different get hammered down until they conform. Conformity is usually the death of the type of creativity that’s badly needed in great design execution.

Great design teams are carefully put together and managed. Every team is likely to be quite different to the next one. Embracing those differences rather than citing them as reasons why a previous failure occurred, encourages the best creatives to work in a team environment that they might otherwise find too stifling.

How to Recruit High Quality Staff

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When it comes to recruiting high quality staff, there are several key points to keep in mind. No matter what industry you are in, your business is only as good as the key people you have hired. In other words, your staff can make or break you, so keep this in mind when hiring. So then, how do you go about recruiting high quality staff? These tips may help.

Begin with Accurate and Thorough Job Descriptions

It is hard to find the right person for the right job if you haven’t made it perfectly clear what that job entails. You will be getting a smattering of applicants who are highly qualified and really top in their field, but they may not be what you are looking for at all. This is the first step in recruitment. Know what you are looking for.

Develop and Post Recruitment Ads

Once you have accurately defined the job description, it’s time to draft and post an ad. This is an important part of the recruitment process as well. It may pay to hire a writer to craft a well-written ad, but it is also important to know where you are most likely to find high quality recruits.

Industry journals are a good beginning, but there are online job postings as well. Sites like monster.com get a huge amount of traffic and if your job description is on the mark and if your ad is well-written, you are likely to attract the cream of the crop.

Look Carefully at Education and OJT Training

Say, for example, you manage a dental office and are seeking a high quality dental assistant. The dentists on staff don’t have time to train assistants and you are getting busier by the day. Do you want to hire a recruit that worked for another dental office or would you rather have one who graduated from a top caliber school listed on best-dentalassistantschools.com?

Perhaps you can have the best of both worlds. Find a graduate with high grades who has some experience in the field under his or her belt. It all begins with the quality of training each candidate has received. OJT dental assistant recruits may have had poor or insufficient training, so keep that in mind if you are hiring in a state that does not require formal licensure.

Don’t Settle for a Single Interview

Altogether too often employers settle for the candidate they liked best on the first interview. That can be a grave error in judgment. Some highly-qualified applicants may be having an off day for one reason or another and some candidates less-qualified might just be good at interviewing.

Some companies bring applicants through a series of interviews, each with a different interviewer. At the end, the best applicants are brought before the team of interviewers. The candidate/s chosen are then, brought back one final time where they are formally hired and led through the onboarding process. It may sound like a lot of extra effort, but you can never be too careful.

Hiring the wrong candidate costs time and money and that’s something you don’t have to spare. Save yourself major frustrations by getting it right the first time.

Why It Is Time to Invest in Professional Development of Your Employees

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One of the biggest challenges in today’s market landscape is finding the right team members. The growth of your business depends highly on employees supporting that growth. Filling key roles and managerial positions are even more challenging; it is more expensive too, especially with the market being as competitive as today.

Now is the perfect time for businesses – your business included – to start investing in the professional development of employees. There are a lot of benefits you will get in return for the investment. We are going to take a closer look at some of those benefits in this article.

Improved Productivity

Studies have shown that employees whose professional development is fully supported by the company are more motivated at work. That sense of appreciation and the support of the company are among the biggest factors that help employees stay motivated for longer.

In return for your investment in your employees’ professional growth, you get engaged employees who work with passion and who feel very connected to the company. Motivated employees put more into ensuring the smooth operations of the business, as well as helping the business grow at a faster pace.

Engagement is the keyword here. Employee engagement is something that needs to be developed naturally, and one of the best ways to do that is by encouraging – and supporting – professional development. Engaged employees will soon be your company’s biggest assets.

Experience and Added Resources

It is always better and more affordable to fill mid- to top-level management positions through a clear career path for all employees. When you promote a sales executive to the position of sales supervisor, for example, you shift the employee’s experience in the field and the employee’s ability to understand clients towards skills that are useful in the new role.

The trend can be seen in the healthcare industry. Many hospitals and medical institutions are encouraging their employees to pursue a health science degree online. The presence of online courses makes investing in your employees’ professional growth easier because they can still perform optimally at work while pursuing a higher degree.

Sustainable Growth

Another great advantage of investing in the professional development of employees is loyalty. Many businesses shy away from helping their employees grow out of fear of losing the best employees to other, better-paying companies. It is a justified fear, but one that must not hamper your efforts to help employees grow alongside the business.

Further studies have shown that employees whose pursuit of a master’s degree are supported by their employer have a higher loyalty to the company. They are more invested in helping the business grow and achieving great things together. The impact is clear; your business will benefit from a more sustainable growth, driven by capable people who are committed to delivering their best.

The market is evolving and the best way to stay ahead of the competition is by investing in the people around you. There are so many other benefits to gain from putting employees’ professional development as a priority. Now is the perfect time for your business to start.

Strategies for Recruiting the Talent You Need When Starting a Business

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You know going in that starting a business is no easy feat. Unfortunately, unless you’ve ever started a business from the ground up, there will be a number of things you simply aren’t prepared for. Finding the right talent to work with you is something you probably hadn’t considered. If that is the case, you may not even know exactly what you need in terms of staffing various departments. Here are some strategies you can use when looking for the top talent you need to launch your startup.

Define Steps to the Endgame

Obviously, the endgame is running a successful business. However, what will it take to do that? Are you going to be manufacturing products for sale, offering services or selling products made elsewhere? Perhaps you’ll be starting a distributorship or a restaurant or even a car dealership. Before you can run a successful business, you need to look at how many departments you will need to efficiently organize and operate a company.

Define Job Classifications

Now that you’ve outlined the various departments you need to staff, what are the job classifications within each department? For example, in accounting do you need an accountant or are there other professionals who could balance your books? Perhaps a bookkeeper or office manager could do the routine day to day tasks, necessitating an accountant to periodically go over your books quarterly and, of course, at tax time.

If you are totally unfamiliar with the workings of a department and you aren’t sure what kind of talent to employ, check out sites like jobdescriptionswiki.com. There you will find job descriptions, what it is they do, what they expect to be paid, and the education or experience necessary for the job.

Network at Trade Shows

If you know the positions that need filling but you are reluctant to simply put an ad online or in the classifieds, why not network at trade shows. They don’t even need to be local trade shows because recruits are often aware of the fact that they may need to relocate to get that once-in-a-lifetime job with a startup that has major growth potential.

Whether you pull the top talent from another business or find recruits looking for placement, if you know what you are looking for, trade shows offer one of the best ways of grabbing great talent easily under one roof.

In the End, It Is All About Knowing What You Need

The key to recruiting the talent you need when starting a business is to first define how your company will run and what departments you will need to set up. After that, it’s a matter of looking at the types of staff you will need in each department and then you can begin to look at what each job classification entails.

Strategies are dependent on understanding what you hope to accomplish and why it’s so important to have a good working knowledge of each position to be filled. Get this done right and you will be off to a good start. Remember, you can’t do it alone so choose the team you can work with and the rough going at the beginning just got that much smoother.