Category Archives: Keep Your Employees Happy

Lydia Asks: I don’t know how to make some of my people feel more invested in their work. I would have thought success alone would be the best motivation, but apparently not. How can I get people to care more about their work?

Joel Answers: Increasing employee engagement is vital to retaining your people and succeeding as a company. Yet many companies’ “employee engagement plan” consists of giving out a survey and then telling managers to make things better, says Gallup. That’s probably why 70% of U.S. workers are not engaged in their work—or are actively disengaged—according to the organization’s data.

Here’s how to increase employee engagement, inspiring your people to achieve more than they thought possible.

Be Transparent

When employees feel the company is hiding something from them, they feel less invested in their jobs and may start to look … Continue reading How to Increase Employee Engagement →

One of the best ways to strengthen your company as a whole is to devote attention to developing your employee talent. If your staff isn’t given the proper encouragement or assistance needed to help them move forward within your company, it can be more challenging for the company itself to continue growing in its capabilities. There are several ways that you, as a leader, can help to develop the talent at your company. Talent identification and management begin with The Four Ps.

1. Pinpoint individual strengths

While specific roles at any company often require a specific set of skills, your employees will likely have additional strengths within those skill sets that can be utilized and honed whenever possible. Assess your staff in order to pinpoint each employee’s individual talents and areas of expertise, then find ways to incorporate those abilities into their daily workflow. This will … Continue reading The Four Ps of Talent Identification and Management at Your Company →

Research has shown that as leaders rise up in the ranks, their proficiency in nurturing talent declines rather than increases.

Why?

Too often, they’re not promoted based on their managerial ability. They’re promoted because of the skills that allowed them to excel in their previous role—not in the role they’re about to step into. When that continuously happens, organizations aren’t maximizing the potential of their leaders—or getting the most out of their workforce as a whole. Leaders should always be working to develop new leaders, helping their employees develop the skillsets that will allow them to effectively manage others.

Other factors may also inhibit leaders from investing time in developing their employees’ leadership abilities. They might feel like they’re so busy juggling time-sensitive projects and deadlines that they don’t have time to focus on the development of new leaders. They’re tasked with achieving bottom-line results, and they don’t … Continue reading How to Further Develop Your Talent (7 Easy Steps) →

If you’re a manager or supervisor, it’s your job to make sure your staff not only gets the work done, but finds fulfillment in their jobs. If you don’t, you’ll spend a lot more time than necessary in the hiring and training cycle because unfulfilled employees don’t tend to stick around. Start by busting a common myth. It’s not about the money. Rather, it’s about employee motivation and retention in a number of non-monetary ways.

1st Step Toward Keeping Your Employees Happy

While keeping employees happy may sometimes seem like “mission impossible”, following a few guidelines will help most of your employees feel good about the time they spend at work. Training and developing employees is the first step toward creating happy employees. In addition, this week’s Fulfillment Tips offers four additional simple ways to give employees more reasons to stay on the job than to leave it.

… Continue reading How to Keep Your Employees Happy →

What keeps you up at night? If you’re like many executives today, you’re worrying about employees — how to attract good ones and how to keep and motivate the superstars you already have.

Building and managing a great team takes constant vigilance. You have to know what makes your employees tick, what motivates them to be great. You have to provide rewards, monetary and otherwise. And you have to model leadership behavior. Sounds like a tall order?

10 Ways to Keep & Motivate Your Star Employees Empower Your Star Employees to Shine By Helping Them Own Their Gifts at Work. As you interact with employees, see every one as unique and gifted, especially the star employees. Your role as a good boss with outstanding leadership qualities is to find the innate gifts within each one of your fellow employees as you interact with them. Work with your employees … Continue reading Ten Ways to Keep Your Star Employees →

Companies Struggle with Retention of Top Talent

Despite the increasing rise of unemployment and staff cutbacks, recent studies indicate that over 80% of global business leaders believe that “people issues” are more important today than they were just three years ago during a booming economy.

Further research shows that most employers continue to struggle with retention because they rely solely on salary increases and bonuses to prevent turnover. Clearly, money itself is not the only answer to hold onto your core talent. A good employee retention strategy includes intangibles such as relationships, growth potential, and overall corporate culture.

How does your company retain their top talent?

Successful companies know how to lessen employee turnover by knowing what makes their high performers fulfilled in their jobs and then working even harder to make sure those needs are being met. Studies consistently show that even though employees may say they … Continue reading Retaining Top Talent →

Valued Employees are the backbone of your company, but you might be overlooking this potential gold mine as you contend with economic issues, a hectic schedule and an overload of pressing projects. In the process, you’re bypassing a valuable resource.

In developing your employee retention plan, forget about the raises and the big bonuses; that’s pretty much out of the question these days anyway. Instead, focus on the people themselves. Give your valued employees what they need to succeed.

Here are 6 tips on how to show employees you value them Ask the experts.

When it comes to their jobs, your employees are the experts. So go right to the source by asking your staff to suggest ways to improve productivity and in their jobs. Beware, however. You don’t want them to see your inquiry as a way of piling on their already heavy workload. … Continue reading 6 Ways to Show Your Employees
You Value Them →

Recent research from Towers Perrin reveals that U.S. workers remain focused on their jobs despite the tough economic climate, job layoffs, and other business challenges. On the surface, this may seem positive to employers who are concerned about retaining key talent or reducing the costly effects of employee turnover. However, the study also revealed that relatively few of the surveyed employees exhibited high levels of engagement or personal attachment to their jobs.

In short, what this study underscores is that there exists an ever-growing “rational endurance” within the corporate world in which key employees base their desire to stay at a non-engaging or non-fulfilling job they know they should leave solely on the safety, comfort, or security of being employed.

Ultimately, these very contagious feelings of being stuck, paralyzed, or unable to leave their jobs because of a limited job market result in a disengaged or disenchanted workforce focused on … Continue reading Highly Engaged Workplace →

Five-Mistakes-Leaders-Make

You’ve got both feet on the corporate ladder and you’re moving up. How can you avoid a slip-and-fall that could take you down a rung or two, and cause permanent injury to your career? Here are five common mistakes that potential leaders make and what you should do instead:

Laying bricks Acting like a manager Staying in the zone Taking credit Listening to yourself