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Retaining Talent

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Employee Engagement

Performance Review. Feedback. Mentorship. How To Help Build Employees’ Career Paths So They Don’t Quit. American workers are worried about their career futures, and they are ready to quit if need be. This is according to the findings of an October 2017 survey released by the American Psychological Association’s Center for Organizational Excellence, which found that nearly half of U.S. workers are worried about how their jobs are changing. And, without supervisor support for career development, less than half are motivated to do their best work. “Job-skills training is a shared responsibility between leaders and employees,” says David Ballard, PhD, assistant executive director of the APA’s Center for Organizational Excellence. “If you want to have a healthy high-performing workplace, and if you want to succeed as a business, you have to do this.”

If you don’t, chances are your employees will jump ship. But whether it’s due to hiring freezes, small development budgets, or simply not having a clear development path, many companies struggle in their effort to develop employees. Hindsight. Working With Creatives: A Short Guide For Everyone Else. Being creative is obviously great–you’re always coming up with new and useful ideas, and companies are always claiming, at least, to be interested in hiring you (even when their actual management practices snuff creativity out). But working with creative people can be a challenge, especially if you aren’t particularly creative yourself.

For decades, scientists have found links between creativity and other behaviors that don’t always lead to easy work relationships. Creatives are typically more neurotic, more antisocial, and less conscientious than others. No doubt it’s perfectly possible to be both highly creative and an extremely well-adjusted, emotionally intelligent, collaborative colleague who’s a dream to work with. But in case your creative coworkers aren’t all like that, here are a few tips to build an easier work relationship for both of you. Related: Want To Be More Creative And Successful? 1. What you can do about it. 2. What you can do about it. 3. What you can do about it. Golf Champ Denied Trophy Because She's a Girl Raises Tough Questions for Any Team. How to Keep Perceived Bias from Holding Back High-Potential Employees. The Missing Piece in Employee Development. In some companies, traditional annual review processes are being replaced by ongoing efforts to help employees improve their performance.

The challenge? Many managers aren’t confident they can change employee behavior. A quiet revolution is underway in how companies manage employee performance. In recent years, organizations have begun to prioritize processes for improving future performance over evaluating employees’ past efforts. Yearly development objectives, annual reviews, and formal feedback tools, long championed by human resource departments, are being replaced by real-time feedback delivered directly by line managers.

Although this shift holds much promise, it risks bumping up against some hard realities — namely, the ability of line managers to help employees develop. A possible explanation of these findings is that change is tough. It turns out that psychologists and behavioral economists know a lot about how behavior change works. Want Your Best Employees to Never Leave You? Ask Them 5 Simple Questions. Want to do something that will launch you into the new era of HR?

Get rid of your exit interviews and replace them with "stay interviews. " If you're new to this concept, unlike the exit interview, managers are using stay interviews to get fresh insight into improving the work environment or their own leadership skills to retain those valued employees today--not after they have emotionally disconnected and stopped caring. Fair warning: Stay interviews are only as effective as people's willingness to demonstrate transparency. The whole premise is based on honest two-way conversations between manager and employee, where each side gets to listen, ask questions, and agree to follow up on ideas and action plans. Webroot Software, a 400-employee internet security company, implemented stay interviews right after a reduction in their work force. The 5 Questions Here's what to do: Make stay interviews questions simple and informal when meeting with direct reports one-on-one. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

5 Signs Your Employees are Unhappy and How to Fix it. As a business owner, you probably want your employees to be happy. Even if you aren't especially invested in their personal lives, you still want them to be happy, after all, happy employees are productive employees, which is good for business, which is good for the employees, so it's all win-win. With that said, sometimes, employees become unhappy in the workplace. But how do you know if your employees are unhappy? Most of them aren't going to come straight out and say it, but if you are paying attention, the signs are there. Here are five red flags to watch out for: 1. Okay, so they don't all have to be best friends for life or anything, but they should see each other as allies, have some shared values and generally enjoy each other's company throughout the day.

If this is the case, you haven't cultivated a culture that promotes bonding and friendship. 2. This is a huge red flag. If this is the case, your people are likely starving for acknowledgment, incentives and appreciation. 3. 4. How a Culture of Silence Eats Away at Your Company. Most people think they will speak up when something negative happens at work, but few actually do.

Take these examples from a recent survey we did with managers and employees: “We had an assistant who created a very adversarial atmosphere. We walked on eggshells around her. People would rather do her work themselves than engage with her. “Instead of confronting a problem in a project plan, it was whispered about. “When our president and CEO suddenly passed away, the top-level execs (including myself) dealt with a gaping sense of loss and grief.

These aren’t trivial examples. At VitalSmarts, we’ve researched the propensity for people to stay silent before. Speaking up about line cutting may seem frivolous — but in many other cases, giving voice to concerns saves lives. What are the costs and consequences of this kind of silence? Prickly peers. These behaviors aren’t just unhelpful; they’re costly. The hit to the bottom line is even more remarkable. Reverse your thinking. The Science Of Gratitude And Why It’s Important In Your Workplace. This is the time of year when we focus on giving thanks, with many of us sharing our gratitude with friends and family. But when is the last time you thanked your employees? Coworkers? Or boss? If you haven’t recognized the members of your work team lately, you need to repair the oversight before your Thanksgiving Day leftovers are history.

Gratitude is absolutely vital in the workplace, says UC Davis psychology professor Robert Emmons, author of The Little Book of Gratitude: Creating a Life of Happiness and Wellbing by Giving Thanks, and a leading researcher on the subject. Gratitude has been the subject of numerous studies, and the findings could be beneficial to your workplace: It Improves Corporate Culture Lack of gratitude is a major factor driving job dissatisfaction, turnover, absenteeism, and often, burnout, says Emmons.

Expressing thanks is a remedy against these symptoms, says Emmons. Gratitude also reduces aggression, according to a study by the University of Kentucky. Don't Quit Your Job If Your Boss Displays These 5 Awesome Habits. How to Nurture Your Superstar Employees - Focus on these three traits to help your top performers flourish—and stick around. Most organizations have employees who are solid performers; fewer organizations are astute—or lucky—enough to have superstars. So how can you ensure that your organization gets the most out of those superstars?

High-potential performers (or Hi-Pos) stand out due to their associative thinking skills—which help solve problems and drive innovation—their strong emotional awareness, and their incredible perseverance, according to Carter Cast, a clinical professor of innovation and entrepreneurship at the Kellogg School and former CEO of Walmart.com.

When your team lands a superstar-in-the-making, nurturing these traits is critical if you want that superstar to flourish. And tailoring a career plan gives high-flyers challenge enough to stick around. “With high-potential high performers, it’s important to put your arm around them and say, ‘I think you have a lot of potential, and one of my key jobs is helping you reach your potential. Encourage Associative Thinking Grow Awareness Follow Through. Why Companies Overlook Great Internal Candidates. While the days of retiring from one company after a 40-year career may be long gone, many believe that the pendulum seems to have swung far into the opposite direction. In July, for example, voluntary turnover reached a level not seen since the pre-recession days of 2007, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

And the much-documented job hopping trend might seem to indicate that employees have left company loyalty in the rearview mirror. This may be true for some. However, LinkedIn’s recent Talent Trends study, conducted between January and March of 2016 with more than 26,000 professionals, showed that 25% of professionals today have their eye on a promotion. That left us wondering, what’s the disconnect here? Perhaps. Hiring managers don’t feel that internal candidates have the right skills. Here’s a common scenario when it comes to the former: A hiring manager shares a healthy list of job requirements and asks their recruiter to find someone who fits the bill. 7 Reasons the Best Employees Quit, Even When They Like Their Job. Losing a great employee is a terrible thing. There's the expense of finding, onboarding, and training a replacement. There's the uncertainty of how a new employee will work out.

There's the hardship on the rest of your staff until the position can be filled. Sometimes there's a solid reason--the person was a bad fit for the team, or moved away for personal reasons, or was offered an opportunity too great to pass up. In those cases, even if it's a difficult transition, it feels fundamentally right. But what about the rest? Keeping your best employees starts with understanding why people leave. 1.

People don't want to think they're locked into a groove and will come to the same place and do the same thing every day for the next 20 or 40 years. 2. Some periods of stress and feeling overwhelmed come with most jobs, but nothing burns out great employees faster than overwork. 3. 4. 5. Even the most selfless people want to be recognized and rewarded for a job well done. 6. 7. Five Unmistakable Signs You're Too Smart For Your Job. Because we are so oriented to seek safety and security and a stable paycheck, we can easily fall under a spell and stay at a job too long. It can be hard to notice the signs that you are stagnating in your job. If you’re not learning new things all the time, you are slipping backwards, because time doesn’t stop.

The only thing you will ever have to sell to a new employer or to your clients is your background — the experiences you’ve had, the judgment you’ve acquired and the stories you are in a position to tell. None of these things will grow unless you are growing in your job all the time! Many jobs start out as tremendous growth opportunities and then stall out. The challenges stop coming and you find yourself doing the same things over and over at work. Not only is this kind of work boring over time, but if the job disappears as more and more jobs are doing, what will you have to show for your last year or two on the job?

Here is a quick test. Photo by Eamonn Wilcox 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Why your IT organization needs A+ players now. My philosophy for IT talent management has always been to hire employees who are smarter, better, and faster than I am, and then set them up for success. If you adopt this principle, you will see greater results than you could personally achieve alone. You’ll start moving at the speed of trust by empowering a highly capable workforce to achieve great things. And all this will be possible because you'll be able to step into the role of the accelerator or a multiplier for the organization. Alternatively, if you hire people dumber or less motivated than you, or B players as I call them, then you’ll find yourself constantly doing their jobs. Everything is going to come back to you, and you’ll have to micromanage to maintain a level of excellence in the organization.

For CIOs who thrive on having control, maybe that sounds appealing. The trouble with B players My wife quips that it should be relatively easy to hire people smarter than me. Why you need A+ players now Keeping employees engaged. Don’t Coach Integrity Violations – Fire Them! | Marshall Goldsmith. 5 Reasons Companies Shouldn't Track Employee Hours. The Five Conversations Framework - From MindTools.com. An Alternative Approach to Appraisals © iStockphotoRrrainbow Invigorate your performance reviews with good conversation. Imagine it's time for your team members' annual performance reviews. You're keen to use these productively and effectively, and you look forward to building stronger relationships with your people through them. In your mind's eye, a member of your team is sitting across from you.

He or she is clear on what his strengths are, and what skills he needs to develop to perform even better next year. The conversation is open and honest, and discussion flows naturally... Now let's get back to reality. In this article, we identify the shortcomings of traditional performance reviews, and we'll explore how you can use an approach called the "Five Conversations Framework" to promote dialogue, increase positivity, and build better relationships with your people.

About the Tool Baker says the standard performance review can be: Costly to implement. Tip: them. Key Points Climate Review. If You Want Your Employees to Stay, Maybe You Should Do This. We all hear about the revolving door of engineers and programmers constantly changing jobs in Silicon Valley and other tech hotspots. The exit interview cycle in these companies (if they give exit interviews) must be a truly frustrating process from a human resources point of view.

As a result, more companies are starting to use “stay interviews” to retain employees. These interviews help employers figure out what employees like (or don’t like) about their jobs and the work environment while there is still a chance of keeping them, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Intel’s Huge Job Cuts Cap a Tough Era for Tech Workers The problem with exit interviews is that while they may provide great insights about what employees think about their work, their colleagues, and their bosses, they do little to retain the employees who, after all, already have one foot out the door. Melinda Gates’ Career Advice for Young Women. The Ambition of a Human Based Company. The Ambition of a Human Based Company About a year ago, when James Orsini joined VaynerMedia as our Chief Integration Officer (CIO), he was amazed at how low our voluntary turnover rate was. “What are we doing?” He asked me.

My response? “We are an HR-driven organization.” VaynerMedia is a private company, which means that I don’t have Wall Street breathing down my neck (so all my decisions don’t have to map out to 90-day profit behaviors). I truly believe that the continuity of a great team trumps everything. Despite the movies and the media portrayals, having endless snacks and espresso bars aren’t what creates great corporate culture. Company culture stems from the top. Caring about your employees doesn’t just mean providing them with health benefits or 401(k) plans.

The problem with a lot of companies is that HR comes second to their bottom line. But here’s the thing: You can’t put everybody in the same box — everyone is driven by different goals and aspirations. The Top 9 Reasons Why Your Best Employees Quit (And How to Stop Them) 35 things you can do to keep your best employees from quitting.

4 Surefire Ways to Save Your Best People From Quitting. Nine HR Policies That Drive Good People Away. Companies adopting employment brand to find & keep top talent. 5 Ways to Kill Employee Motivation. In The War On Talent, Use 'Stay Interviews' To Retain Great Employees. Managing the “Invisibles” California Chrome: Why You Shouldn't Discount the Underdogs at Your Company. Retaining Talent In Times Of Change: 5 Tips For Hanging Onto Good People. Reid Hoffman takes on management in The Alliance.