Gabby Davis is the Lead Trainer for the US Division of the Customer Experience Team. She develops and implements processes and collaterals related to the client onboarding experience and guides clients across all tiers through the initial implementation of Engagedly as well as Mentoring Complete. She is passionate about delivering stellar client experiences and ensuring high adoption rates of the Engagedly product through engaging and impactful training and onboarding.
A LinkedIn report suggests that 94% of employees surveyed feel that providing learning and career development opportunities encourages them to stay longer with the organization.
With the advent of the great resignation, it can be deduced that the current workforce isn’t the same as it was three years ago. People are quitting their jobs in search of more fulfilling career opportunities, and thus, the way talent management used to work has to evolve.
Businesses must realize that prioritizing retention and attracting top talent is paramount to organizational success. From offering opportunities to work remotely to providing pathways for career progression, businesses should shift their focus on adopting employee-centric initiatives to improve the appeal of their work environment to current and future employees.
Old-school talent management practices boast of training employees as one of the best practices for talent management. However, the contribution a robust career development provides to the company’s success is invaluable. This blog aims to understand the significance of employee career advancement opportunities, its benefits, and best practices.
The Concept of Career Development
Career development is an intra-organizational mechanism that shapes employees’ career paths. The process aims at planning, preparing for, and advancing an employee’s career over time. It involves coaching, mentoring, skills development, networking, and setting and achieving career growth goals.
The process of career development is crucial for both employees and employers. It includes the continuous upgradation of the skills and competencies of employees to meet the job’s current demands. Additionally, it provides organizations with a workforce ready to handle challenges head-on, thereby successfully navigating the complexities of the evolving work landscape.
Benefits of Career Development for Employees
A survey by Gallup found that 87% of millennials feel professional growth plays a pivotal role in creating a robust employee experience. Employees who lack opportunities for career growth and guidance in setting their career goals often experience burnout, leading them to seek opportunities elsewhere.
Employees need to feel valued, that their goals and development are essential, and that their employer cares about them achieving those goals. Here are four ways career development benefits an employee and the organization.
Boosts Productivity
When employees are assigned definite goals and given access to resources that help in achieving those goals, they learn new skills and, in turn, improve their productivity. Employee engagement also increases when employees are given a practical training ground to exercise what they have learned. Consequently, what employees learn can be passed on to their team members, contributing to the team culture.
Helps Employee Retention
Talent retention is one of the biggest challenges that labor marketing is facing today. Providing employees with career development opportunities is a great way to invest in talent because it communicates to them that they are important. A survey by Better Buys reveals that professional development can improve retention rates by up to 34%.
Attracts Top Talent
A LinkedIn report regarding hiring trends highlights that employees consider organizational culture as one of the core factors while looking for a job. They feel that career development is one of the major factors in determining an organization’s culture. To attract and retain the best talent, an organization must offer incentives that its counterparts don’t.
Increases Profitability
One of the most important benefits of an employee development program is the potential to increase an organization’s profitability. Employee career development boosts engagement, thereby creating a collaborative and productive workforce.
Engaged employees align their personal goals with the organization’s vision and values. This alignment not only encourages retention but also drives up profits and productivity. When team members prioritize their roles and find fulfillment in working towards a shared goal or vision, the organization’s profitability can significantly increase.
Following are the seven strategies employers can use to promote the development of employees:
Take an interest in employee career goals
Make sure you communicate frequently with your team members. To assist employees in seeing their future with the firm, managers must describe a possible career path for them within the organization. This involves determining the precise benchmarks for success and the supplementary resources workers may need to use along the way. Open, direct communication between managers and employees regarding career trajectories is crucial. Showing a personal interest in an employee’s career goals becomes even more important when managing a remote team.
Regular on-the-job training and education programs should support employee learning and development. Employers should encourage team members to enroll in appropriate business courses and online learning portals to boost their professional development.
A survey by Zippia reveals that 92% of employees feel well-planned learning and development plans can positively impact employee engagement. Apart from nurturing individual needs and honing specific talents, it’s crucial to keep employees updated on broader industry advancements.
Hosting lunch-and-learn events via video with either external or internal guest speakers is a convenient and affordable strategy. Moreover, give your staff the time and freedom to attend professional events.
Implement mentoring and job shadowing
Job shadowing is a training program wherein new hires learn tasks by following and observing an experienced employee who has been performing the role for some time. Encouraging a formal mentoring program or job shadowing can help workers grow personally and professionally.
Senior employees can share their well-earned knowledge and advice with less experienced peers. In turn, they can gain from emerging personnel’s new ideas and technical know-how.
Promote job rotation across departments and levels
Job rotation promotes employee growth and reduces employee turnover and stress. The practice creates an atmosphere that fosters fresh thoughts and perspectives on the work being done by the organization and further helps improve employee satisfaction and engagement.
Support employees’ work-life balance
Encourage your staff to work efficiently, be as productive as possible, and take time out for extracurricular activities. Being proactive about the health of your team members can help reduce their stress.
Organizations can boost employee morale by implementing flexible work policies that improve work-life balance. Assist employees in prioritizing work, managing personal responsibilities, and even partaking in professional development events that can enhance their careers.
Recognize and acknowledge good performance
Employees’ roles become more meaningful when their contributions to the company’s mission are recognized. Additionally, it increases their desire to take on more responsibility and move up the organizational ladder. Hence, give regular feedback on employees’ performance and let them know how their work impacts the organization daily. Highlight the company’s progress towards important goals and appreciate employees for their contributions to the company’s success.
Succession planning aids in retaining top talent by providing career development opportunities and a clear path for advancement. Have a succession plan in place for all the key positions in the company. It helps motivate employees to learn new skills and work on new projects needed for career advancement.
Examples of Career Development Programs
Organizations implement several career development programs to accelerate employee development. Below are some of the real-life examples of career development programs undertaken by organizations to support employee growth:
Workday employs a skill-based HR strategy to help staff members identify and develop certain skills. Using exclusive technologies like Career Hub, they link people with opportunities to work in various teams and departments.
Randstad has successfully implemented a global mentoring program for its employees. It has established a university for its internal learning management. The in-house LMS (Learning Management System) provides employees with an extensive catalog of courses related to workplace compliance, business development, etc.
Heineken adopted the reverse mentoring program to help senior leaders connect with junior employees and gain new skills and experiences. Additionally, Heineken’s diversity and inclusion program (DE&I) gave its employees the tools they needed to embrace the culture of the various countries it does business in.
Embarking on a career growth journey involves cultivating a deep sense of purpose while being vigilant in seizing opportunities as they present themselves. Here are some proven strategies for fostering career advancement:
Expand the job description of an employee to allow them to learn more.
Offer promotions to let the employee move up within the current organization.
Offer more responsibility and a better job title.
Facilitate employees in forging meaningful connections and expanding their professional networks by enabling participation in conferences and meet-ups aimed at enhancing their networking capabilities.
Allow employees to contribute to the decision-making process.
Summing Up
As workplace dynamics continue to evolve, businesses seeking to retain talent and improve their bottom line will need to pivot. One of the most powerful strategies to adapt to an evolving marketplace and retain talent is to build a strong and resilient career development program.
A good performance management system is one method companies can use to help employees understand their goals and contributions to the business’s overall growth. Engagedly offers a great performance management solution for a more accessible user experience. The all-in-one platform ensures employees have a robust career development plan that they can create in collaboration with their managers.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q1. What does an effective career development program include?
An effective career development program incorporates tailored training, mentorship, and opportunities for skill enhancement, aligning individual goals with organizational needs to foster professional growth and advancement.
Q2. How does career planning differ from career development?
Career development encompasses career planning and management. Career planning is part of career development. It includes identifying and implementing actions to achieve certain career goals.
Q3. What initiatives can organizations take to build an employee’s career path?
Building an employee’s career path needs to start from the onboarding process itself. Learn about each employee’s career goals, including their skills, education, experience, and other qualifications. Define professional development levels and assess the skill gap that needs to be addressed to help employees advance to each level.
Crisis management is a shared responsibility that extends from the boardroom to the field. A better understanding of crises can help an organization’s members prepare for any eventuality. Learning about crisis management training can help you understand its significance and determine whether you want to take such a course. This article discusses the definition of crisis management training, why it is important, what the best leaders do in times of crisis, how to adapt and lead in a crisis, and some frequently asked questions related to this field.
What Precisely is Crisis Management Training?
Crisis management training is preparing professionals to assist organizations during a crisis. The training can include a discussion of various scenarios, such as natural disasters and financial recessions, that may have a significant impact on the health of an organization. Crisis management training can include specific instructions on how to handle specific situations.
What is the Significance of Crisis Management Training?
Crisis management training is important because professionals’ ability to effectively handle business-related crises can have a significant impact on long-term organizational success. The overall goal of this training is for an organization to provide tools, knowledge, and practical skills to employees who are not experts in crisis management so that they can effectively manage crises if they occur. There are various approaches to crisis management training, which vary depending on organizational needs, company culture, and available resources.
7 Things Best Leaders Should Do in Times of Crisis
Because of the vast amount of change and the prevailing uncertainty, a static system will not work for leaders in the current state of affairs. Instead, leadership in crisis management requires a methodical approach that is agile, current, and accurate. They cannot rely on their previous leadership abilities to navigate these unprecedented times; they require a new compass. This results in the need of highly trained coaches who specialize in crisis and recovery leadership.
When there is a lot of uncertainty and ambiguity, people look to their leaders for answers. Here are seven strategies that effective leaders employ in these situations:
1. Provide a Specific Direction
Even when visibility is low during a crisis, leaders owe their people a clear sense of direction. Their focus can be on the short term, which, when combined with regular updates, allows them to respond to constant and rapid change.
2. Concentrate on People
Leaders must consider the human factor more than they have in the past. They must lead people as individuals. Leaders must offer proactive support, encouragement, and engagement to their employees because they are worried and uncertain.
3. Discover a Coach
Leaders must rediscover their humanity and bring it to the workplace — for many, this is the first time. They must discover in themselves the “soft areas” that allow them to connect with their team members beyond the crisis. This magnitude of change is nearly impossible to achieve without assistance or direction, which is where coaching can help.
4. Be Open and Honest
Leaders can inspire trust in times of crisis by providing transparent and frequent information about what they know and don’t know. Employees will develop the trust that is currently lacking in the world if the right information is provided at the right time.
In such times, leaders can also inspire hope, but it must be open-ended and without a deadline. No one knew in the beginning how long the pandemic will last, so offering a timeline (“it will be over by the summer”) would have been a mistake. If that timeline is incorrect, it could harm morale and psychological resilience.
5. Foster self-leadership
Leaders must set an example by pushing themselves beyond their concerns and uncertainties. Leading others in a crisis is difficult and almost unethical without self-leadership.
Self-leadership in turbulent waters is a process that begins with leaders deciding to stand up for their principles or values. They go beyond their limitations and difficulties to convey those principles and values, and they chart a clear course and vision for themselves. Only then can they provide that direction to those they lead.
6. Concern for Their Colleagues
Leaders must assist their team members in overcoming their fears so that they can return to being successful employees. They must legitimize people’s concerns rather than dismiss them. Great leaders such as Winston Churchill, Mahatma Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela are examples of this leadership trait.
7. Develop Your Leadership Skills
True leadership in crisis guides others from where they are to where they know they can go. Employees grow and develop with the right leaders, reaching new heights of achievement. Not everyone who is promoted to management is a true leader. Real leaders constantly learn and grow, and they recognize the greatness in themselves and others.
Going through a crisis is a rite of passage for any aspiring leader. After all, being a good manager is easy when everything is going well, but your ability as a leader is truly tested when there is a true crisis.
While leadership in crisis management is high on a manager’s priority list, it is also one of the most difficult areas to navigate. As a result, it’s not surprising that a company’s crisis preparation can range from $60,000 to $500,000. (depending on the industry and location). Unprepared companies in a crisis can spend millions of dollars on mitigation while losing hundreds of millions in reputation and shareholder value.
The real problem with crisis management is that it is so unpredictable. You never know when or how a crisis will occur. Think about the Covid-19 pandemic. We would have laughed if someone had told us in 2019 that the world would be in a two-year lockdown with a massive shift to remote work.
Meanwhile, according to a Spiceworks survey, while 95% of organizations have a crisis recovery plan in place, 23% never test the effectiveness of that plan. And, among those who do not test their plans, 61% blame a lack of time, while 53% blame insufficient resources.
As a result, it’s safe to say that most leaders are not only mentally unprepared to cope with a crisis, but they also don’t know how to manage their workforce in a high-risk situation.
How to Be an Effective Crisis Manager
A leader is expected to play various roles depending on the stage of a crisis. For example, in the early stages of a crisis, when its nature is ambiguous, you will be expected to be a problem solver and propose various solutions. Later on, when the facts and figures become clearer, you will be expected to shift gears and make difficult decisions.
The elephant in the room is how to be a better leader all through the leadership in the crisis management process. That is, how can you be a leader who efficiently assists your team in addressing a crisis without them eventually despising you? To put everything in perspective, here are a few pointers on how to be a good crisis leader:
1. Recognize the issue
Leaders may refuse to acknowledge that they are in a crisis, refuse to inform their people about the reality of the situation, make poor decisions, and thus become ineffective crisis leaders. Don’t use your usual strategy of sweeping the problem under the rug. Nobody likes being kept in the dark, and your employees are no exception.
Respect your employees and communicate the situation as it is transparently. However, you should knowbe aware that transparency does not imply negativity. Even if you have bad news to give, don’t get too caught up in it. Inspire your team to consider the big picture rather than what will happen in the short term. Discuss the next steps with your team, the risks involved with the action plan (if any), and what can be done right away to combat the issue.
2. Remove the red tape and minimize friction points
During a crisis, there is no time or space for lengthy deliberations. Limiting the number of friction points should be one of a leader’s top priorities during a crisis. A friction point can be anything that slows down decision-making, from an unnecessary hierarchy in the approval to a lack of emergency funds.
Besides encouraging self-leadership, leadership in crisis management can decrease bureaucracy by appointing a small group of team leaders to speed up decision-making. As a leader, you don’t have the luxury of second-guessing yourself, so for effectively managing a crisis, it all boils down to:
Making a no-nonsense priority list- You don’t want your employees squandering their time and effort on the wrong activities. Record your priorities early in the crisis, get your whole team on the same page, and leave some wiggle room for future changes to the plan.
Allow your front-line decision-makers complete autonomy- While there will almost certainly be mistakes made, this is an unavoidable part of the process.
Prioritize the decisions with the least impact first- To be honest, making the wrong decision, especially under duress, is all too common. That’s why it’s a good idea, to begin with, the decisions that won’t have a big impact and then move on to the ones that will. This ensures that your employees understand what is at peril while also having trust in themselves.
3. Don’t lose sight of your empathy along the way
Your employees may require you now more than ever. Taking care of your people is one of the most crucial things you can do during a crisis.
Not only does leadership in crisis management necessitate empathy for those affected, but it also necessitates the ability to pin down the source of problems by asking the right questions to the right person at the right time. Empathy is the equivalent of saying to your employees, “I care about your happiness and well-being,” but making sure they don’t interpret it as a sign of weakness on your part.
Employees are more committed to their employers when they believe they are more than just a cog in the machine. Empathy allows you to respond to your team’s needs with openness rather than distrust. It’s all about finding a happy medium between compassion and the real world.
The true challenge, however, is to be empathetic while still ensuring that team goals are met. Here are a few pointers to help you balance your empathetic and managerial sides:
Create a strong recognition culture- Purposeful recognition, no matter how small, can have a huge impact on the morale of your employees. Even the simple act of saying a sincere “thank you” can give your employees the boost they need, especially during times of crisis.
Hold informal check-ins once a week- Every week, set aside at least five minutes for one-on-one time with your employees. Make these meetings more unique by inviting employees to share their highs and lows from the previous week. Make certain that these conversations cover both the personal and professional elements of your employees’ lives so that you have a complete view of their mental health.
Make sure you have a mental health plan in place to assist employees who may need assistance.
Begin advocating for attainable goals and productivity standards- Dealing with a crisis not only jeopardizes your well-being but also that of your employees. In such circumstances, it is common to experience burnout, stress, and anxiety. It is your responsibility as a leader to foster a positive and uplifting environment in which employees believe they do not need to burn out to accomplish something. You can begin by using the SMART goals framework to help your team members understand what goals are achievable.
4. Develop a strong and adaptable communication strategy
A full-fledged crisis response will necessitate significant involvement and assistance from multiple internal organizational teams. As a result, whatever plan you ultimately implement will almost certainly be thorough, multilayered, and integrated throughout the organization.
However, for such a thorough plan to be successful, your internal teams must be conscious of what, when, and how their respective parts are expected to be carried out. Only if you have a solid communication plan in place to cope with such high-risk situations will you be able to do so.
This is where having an adaptive communication toolbox can assist leaders in cutting through the noise and assisting the team in collaborating effectively throughout all stages of the crisis. It also helps to have prior communication training for you and your team, in addition to having a clear communication strategy. While this may seem obvious, anyone who has been through an organizational crisis understands how different communication in a crisis is from communication during a project launch.
The need for crisis management in an organization arises from the imperative to effectively respond to unexpected disruptions and challenges. It provides a structured approach to handle crises, protect stakeholders, maintain business continuity, and safeguard the organization’s reputation. Crisis management helps mitigate the impact of unforeseen events, ensuring a coordinated and strategic response to navigate through uncertainties and recover swiftly.
Q2. What is the difference between crisis management and crisis leadership?
Crisis management encompasses the entire process of preparing for, responding to, and recovering from a crisis. It involves strategic planning and coordination. On the other hand, crisis leadership specifically focuses on the actions and decisions of leaders during a crisis, playing a crucial role within the broader scope of crisis management.
Q3. What are the most critical crisis-management abilities?
The most critical crisis-management abilities include effective communication, quick decision-making, strategic planning, adaptability, and the ability to coordinate and lead teams under pressure. These skills are essential for successfully navigating and mitigating the impact of unexpected challenges and disruptions.
It’s no secret how corporate training is vital for every business. In fact, 68% of employees regard training and development as a critical policy in an organization.
The statistics don’t lie:Nearly 95% of employees will stay in a company that offers learning opportunities. Meanwhile, companies that invest in training earn a 24% increase in return on investment (ROI).
But of course, you don’t just offer training to your employees. There’s a need to plan, strategize, and optimize your programs. One way to do so is to harness the power of today’s technology.
In this article, we’ll share with you how to leverage technological resources for corporate training. Read on to learn how to use them to your advantage and for the benefit of your employees.
To optimize your corporate learning management, what better way to proceed than harnessing the power of modern technology? Digital tools and technological resources used for training can streamline processes, facilitate better learning, and aid both mentors and trainees.
As such, many businesses invest in software technology for their training programs. The proof is in the numbers: The global training software market could grow from $52.7 billion in 2020 to $115.49 billion by 2028. It’s projected to achieve a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 10.34%.
But how do you make the most of technological resources for your business? Below are ways to leverage technology for your corporate training.
To invest in LMS, establishing an e-learning platform is the first step to take. With the help of technology, here are learning resources you can develop for your training:
Online Courses: Tap your training department to create different courses for various processes that trainees can access digitally.
Training Resources: Let them develop training materials that trainees and even employees can use quickly and easily.
Frequently Asked Questions: Add FAQs to your e-learning platform that all employees can access, especially your trainees.
Knowledge Base: Establish a go-to resource hub for all employees, including trainees looking for answers or needing to hone their skills.
Conduct Online Training Programs
Digital tools and communications technology have become such a game-changer in business. With the advent of globalization, they have paved the way for remote work. Think of the rise of the gig economy and the business process outsourcing (BPO) industry.
As such, Ryan Hammill, Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Ancient Language Institute, recommends conducting training online. “Since you have employees working in different parts of the world, train them via digital platforms. Leverage online tools such as Zoom, Slack, and Skype.”
That said, consider utilizing technology and conducting the following:
Webinars: Conduct seminars via the web to train your employees, no matter where they are in the world.
Online Workshops: Offer virtual workshops to enhance the knowledge and hone the skills of your remote employees.
Virtual Classrooms: Hold online training and onboarding via online classrooms for newly hired employees.
Create Video Content for Training
Did you know that videos resonate well with people? They are easily digestible and highly memorable for your employees. On the other hand, blocks of text can be boring and overwhelming for trainees looking to learn.
That said, here are video content pieces you can create for training:
Educational Videos: Produce clips about your company, department, processes, or tasks to educate your trainees.
Tutorial Clips: Create tutorials in the form of videos to assist and guide your learners during the training.
Interactive Videos: Consider clickable links, automatic quizzes, and other interactive clips for employee engagement during training.
Use Simulations for Practical Training
You might have heard of the extended reality (XR) technology. This technology provides people with immersive experiences. And using this applies to corporate training as well.
Linda Shaffer, Chief People Operations Officer at Checkr, suggests using simulations for practical training. “They enable trainees to hone their skills as if in real-life settings. Simulations allow them to practice and commit mistakes until they get better and better.”
That said, consider leveraging the following:
Virtual Reality: VR is a digital environment offering a fully immersive experience. It lets trainees immerse themselves in online platforms to learn more.
Augmented Reality: AR is a view of the real world, but overlaid with digital elements. It allows trainees to perform as if in actual settings but on online platforms.
Mixed Reality: MR is a combination of VR and AR. Combining the two creates an e-learning platform for an enhanced experience.
Conduct Interactive Assessments
Corporate training programs don’t only impart knowledge and hone skills. They also require evaluations to see if trainees have learned enough during the actual training. These assessments help you identify areas for improvement and make some necessary changes in your programs.
Jerry Han, CMO at PrizeRebel, suggests offering interactive assessments using technology. “It’s time to go beyond the typical training evaluations. Make these evals creative, engaging, and fun so your trainees learn even better.”
As such, Han recommends the following:
AMP Email Quizzes and Polls: Send emails to your trainees, but embed them with interactive polls and quizzes using AMP technology.
Drag-and-drop Activities: Ensure your e-learning platform allows trainees to drag and drop elements for online assessments.
Interactive Diagrams: Use diagrams to simplify complex ideas for enhanced learning, but incorporate interactions in the evaluations.
Gamified Assessments: What better way to spice up your evaluations than turning them into fun and exciting games?
Role-playing Simulations: Consider using XR technology to simulate training interactions and allow role plays.
Consider Gamification for Training
The time has changed for the world of business. To make employees focused, productive, and engaged, you must provide them with the best experience. Gamification in the workplace is best for a fun learning experience. And this practically applies to corporate training.
Below are ways you can turn your training programs into exciting and engaging games:
Leaderboard: Let your trainees compete for the top position on your leaderboard based on key metrics.
Point System: Award trainees for taking up courses, completing tasks, answering quizzes, or playing games.
Achievement Badges: Recognize the trainees’ accomplishments with digital badges they can use online during the course of training.
Quests and Challenges: Allow trainees to play course-related games for education and entertainment rolled into one.
Gerald Lombardo, Head of Growth at Popl mentions, “Gamification in the workplace has become an essential tool for modern businesses. It not only transforms training into an engaging experience but also taps into our intrinsic motivation to compete, achieve, and learn. By implementing gamification elements like leaderboards, point systems, badges, and quests, companies can revolutionize their training programs and unlock the full potential of their workforce”.
Set an LMS in place
Earlier, we emphasized the importance of investing in LMS. However, we only covered establishing an e-learning platform for corporate training programs.
Anthony Martin, Founder and CEO of Choice Mutual, highlighted the value of LMS. “It isn’t just a digital platform used for corporate training; it also serves as the backbone of your programs. It allows you to organize training materials, assist mentors, facilitate trainees, measure performance, and improve programs.
The LMS goal is to provide both corporate trainers and employee trainees with a seamless and effective training experience. Here’s what to consider:
Training Courses and Materials: As mentioned above, create an e-learning platform with all these training resources.
Progress Tracking: Monitor the performance of every trainee and measure their development against the key metrics.
Process Improvement Plan (PIP): Provide struggling employees with PIPs as part of their training programs.
Final Words
Corporate training is crucial in business. It primarily aims to enhance the employees’ knowledge and skills. Along with this is to address performance gaps, increase workforce potential, ensure employee satisfaction, increase business productivity, and more.
Utilizing modern technology is one way to optimize your corporate training program. To maximize it, consider the seven practical ways to leverage technological resources. But before taking the plunge, review your current programs, understand your employee needs, and decide what digital tools and technologies to invest in.
Harnessing the power of today’s technology can kick your corporate training up a notch. Ultimately, that can bring out the best in every employee for the good of your company!
It takes 41 days on average to hire someone for a position. Any costs related to hiring a new employee and integrating new hires into a company are referred to as recruiting & onboarding costs. Depending on the role being filled and the business’s industry, the true cost of onboarding an employee or recruiting a new employee varies greatly, but it is almost always enormously costly.
Benefits, marketing, and training costs must be considered when determining the true cost of employee hiring because they increase overall employer costs. In this article, we will go through the true cost of onboarding an employee in detail and offer a way to reduce your hiring expenditures.
The True Cost of Recruiting & Onboarding Employees
According to the statistics by Forbes, the average cost of onboarding a new employee is $1,400. A new hire costs a business about six months to break even, that is, to reap the benefits and returns from the new hire. You can minimize hiring costs and maximize your resources by developing effective hiring and onboarding procedures.
Investments in efficient and clever hiring practices yield larger earnings, faster revenue growth, and reduced attrition rates. Here, we’ll look at the most common hiring expenses encountered in every business and how they collectively affect the cost of acquiring a new employee. The primary factors contributing to the overall cost of hiring and onboarding new employees are listed below:
Emotional and Mental Cost
Finding and hiring fresh talent is challenging. 36% of HR executives claim they lack the funding to hire top personnel. Moreover, organizations are experiencing a financial strain due to increased requests for better pay, time off, flexible work hours, and more benefits. Hiring teams become mentally and physically exhausted as a result. This results in anxiety, depression, stress, and other mental and emotional side effects that affect the recruiter’s health and performance.
Recruiter’s Time, Effort, and Money
The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) found that companies spend an average of $4,129 and 42 days to fill a vacant position. Depending on the length of the search, the type of position, and the salary range, the cost to hire personnel rises accordingly.
A human resources (HR) recruiter is required to manage the hiring procedure at a business. To oversee the full HR administrative process, you require at least one HR manager and one HR recruiter. These HR personnel will use their productive time and specialized skills to screen, contact, interview, meet, and hire the right candidate.
They could spend the same time on other HR tasks like payroll processing, engagement initiatives, onboarding, etc. Therefore, to hire a candidate, you must consider the recruiter’s salary and the time they spend screening prospects.
Advertising Expenses
Hiring an employee includes the very expensive aspect of advertising. To hire the best candidate, you’ll first need an educational, persuasive, and noticeable advertisement for your target audience. Further, reaching your audience through one platform is difficult; you need a comprehensive strategy, including social media and other networks.
Many free solutions let you post a new job opportunity on websites like ZipRecruiter and LinkedIn, but the free or trial versions only provide limited tools to aid your search. So, typically, you’ll need a paid service to maximize a job site’s benefits. The advertising costs of all the platforms you use must be included in the entire cost of recruiting.
Compensation and Benefits
Ensuring your employee receives fair compensation is one of the hiring process’s more obvious costs. However, the extra benefits you provide to the employee might increase the total cost.
Per a survey by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics in March 2023, employers spent $29.70 on wages and salaries and $13.36 on employee benefits. Benefits like health insurance, retirement plans, and employee growth programs impact your budget.
Hiring a new employee with perks might cost approximately 40% of the individual’s base salary. Moreover, employers still have an additional cost for their workers: tax.
Background Checks and Pre-Screening
After shortlisting a small pool of candidates, you evaluate each applicant’s suitability before conducting an interview. A phone screening or a video pre-screening are also good options. Pre-screening is a crucial step to exclude applicants who would not be a good fit for the position. If your list of potential applicants has been reduced to 16, you should spend 15 minutes on a phone screening call for each candidate.
The cost of background checks or pre-screening varies from one organization to another. It’s recommended to discover more about your short list of suitable prospects through background checks before making an offer. You may check all information, including criminal databases, verification of their education, and prior employers.
Cost of Bad Hiring
Poor hiring will cost 1 to 5 times as much to replace the position in question, including the lost wages, benefits, and the costs of hiring and training new employees. The management, administrative, and legal expenses of a bad hire should also be considered. It also takes a hit on the direct and indirect costs of lost or damaged funds, supplies, equipment, the working environment, client goodwill, and the employer’s reputation.
Insufficient skill, a lack of expertise, and a lack of time are the key reasons hiring decisions go wrong. Thus, you can save time, money, and effort by outsourcing your HR processes, including hiring, screening, background checks, payroll, and other administrative tasks. However, at some point in their career, every CEO will make a poor hire; these costs are industry-normal.
Cost of Competition
The cost of “lost candidates” is a heavy financial burden to the business. Most small businesses lack the necessary flexibility in the onboarding process, such as providing the job offer quickly or documenting all the official employment details. They, therefore, have to work harder to find people, and if they don’t offer the position quickly enough, the candidates are hired by a different business.
Due to outside competition, the business suffers financial consequences from losing a strong candidate for the position midway through the interview process. HR professionals and recruiters, particularly in small businesses, must be empowered to act quickly on the recruiting and onboarding process.
Cost of Onboarding and Training
An employee must go through onboarding and training following the recruitment process. It could take almost a couple of weeks, which reduces the effectiveness of the job and productivity. The team manager must spend considerable time with the new hires daily to help them understand their tasks and adapt to the group. It takes away valuable hours from the manager’s schedule.
Onboarding a new employee also increases the accounting cost by filling out forms, collecting documents, and creating payslips. Some other expenses comprise:
The price of IT hardware (laptops, phones, and software licenses)
The price of training
Cost of employee support (time required for assistance from other team members)
Decline in productivity
A new hire needs 3 to 8 months to reach maximum productivity levels. During this period, businesses often lose money as new employees cost more than they produce for the company.
Summing Up
Determining the exact true cost of hiring an employee is difficult as the cost varies with companies and locations. Fortunately, you can reduce inefficiencies and raise onboarding efficiency by knowing all the costs involved. Your company’s success depends on how you bring in and keep top people in today’s competitive labor market. The time and money involved in finding, screening, shortlisting, interviewing, and onboarding employees represent the true cost of recruiting. Using cost-effective recruitment tactics is important to help your company save time and money.
Engagedly can assist you in streamlining your hiring procedure and saving money. It is a perfect tool for people and strategy alignment. Using Engagedly, businesses may develop robust teams that will lead to a successful corporation. To explore more, click on the link below!
Frequently Asked Questions
Q1. What is the average cost of onboarding a new employee?
Ans. As per a study, the average cost per hire is $4,700, but it differs among organizations. The cost includes the equipment you need for the new employee’s integration into your organization and the time your HR department spends on the process.
Q2. How to calculate the cost of hiring a new employee?
Ans. The cost of new hires can be determined by adding the money spent on marketing, interviews, and training in an online calculator. However, the soft cost, which includes time spent on the hiring process, the impact on morale, and the loss of production, cannot be calculated.
Q3. How to avoid bad hiring?
Ans. Bad hires can be avoided if you use appropriate tools and hiring strategies in your hiring process. The first step in reducing the danger of bad hires is to determine the cost of a bad hire. By doing this, you may improve your business’s productivity and recruitment.
Talent management is a crucial aspect of organizational success that involves a strategic approach to attracting and developing the right talent to meet the company’s objectives. By prioritizing talent acquisition and nurturing employee growth, companies can create a highly-skilled, engaged, and productive workforce.
In today’s competitive market, businesses must invest heavily in human capital to ensure success. But what happens when the workforce becomes disengaged and the organization loses talented people? If you don’t manage employee retention properly, it could spell disaster for your bottom line.
A study found that companies that invested in developing their employees had a 42% increase in profitability compared to those that don’t.
The definition of talent management varies depending on whom you ask. For some, it could mean building a strong culture around employee satisfaction, while others might consider it to be about providing employees with the tools necessary to succeed in their jobs. Regardless of what you call it, there are many ways companies can make sure they’re doing everything possible to keep their best workers happy and engaged.
The ultimate aim of successful talent management is to develop a pool of highly talented workforce that remains with organization for long term.
While an effective talent management system is directly proportional to employee engagement, the latter has become an increasingly important part of any company’s success.
The report showed that organizations that took steps to improve employee engagement saw a 21% improvement in productivity. In fact, there are now over 500 studies showing how investing in your employees leads to increased profits, better-quality products, happier customers, and improved morale.
Top 7 Benefits of Having a Talent Management System
TMS also plays a crucial role in boosting the overall productivity and profitability of an organization in the following ways:
Contributes to Strategic Hiring
A TMS allows you to automate many of the manual processes associated with recruiting, including creating job postings, managing applications and communicating with candidates. A TMS makes it easier to track each step of the recruitment process, helping you keep up with everything. You can even use a TMS to send automated emails to candidates based on specific criteria.
Enterprises need to have visibility into the destiny and pipeline tasks to make knowledgeable hiring selections. Resource capacity planning allows you to pick out the talent gap in advance. It enables avoiding last-minute scuffles for capable personnel and hires suitable talent units to fulfill destiny work demands. Depending on the scope and period of the tasks, you may hire permanent or contingent personnel.
Improves the Onboarding Process
The process of recruiting and hiring employees can be tedious and inefficient. This often leads to long hours spent filling out forms and waiting for responses. A good TMS can help automate the entire process of onboarding new hires. With a TMS, you can store all of the information gathered throughout the recruitment and hiring process into one centralized database. From there, it becomes easy to update each profile with relevant information.
You can even set up automated reminders to ensure that new hires are completing the necessary paperwork on time. This allows you to spend less time doing repetitive tasks and more time focusing on what matters most – growing your business.
An effective TMS solution also collects data about what skills an employee has. This information is used to provide personalized recommendations to the individual based on their job role and responsibilities. For example, an accountant might receive suggestions to learn how to use Excel while working on a specific project.
A good TMS enable employees to take advantage of educational opportunities and continue their professional growth. At the same time, it should make sure that every employee receives the appropriate training and supports for their career goals.
Implements Multi-Skill Building
Limited and monotonous repetitive work can reason boredom and a sense of professional stagnation for maximum personnel. Not exposing them to numerous roles and sports hinders employees’ professional targets ensuing in decreased morale, productivity, and unplanned attrition.
According to Gartner,” loss of profession improvement possibilities ends in 40% attrition in businesses worldwide.” Skill construction and improvement are substantial results of skills management.
Managers can enforce a task rotation approach that facilitates team contributors to diversify their ability sets. Workforce management answers seize their skills and allow the well-timed allocation of resources to the proper job. Encouraging personnel to construct a couple of secondary capabilities improves worker motivation and additionally allows enhances their billability.
Once you have the best employees in your organization, you need to keep those people. In fact, according to a study conducted by LinkedIn, companies lose up to 40% of their most talented workers every three years. And once they move on, there’s no guarantee they’ll come back. So why do we let our best people go?
A study by SHRM reveals that “the common hiring fee and lead-time are $4129 and forty-two days, respectively“. The employee turnover additionally consists of smooth prices which include reduced productivity, reduced engagement, training expenses, and cultural impact. Employee retention is an important factor of expertise control and consists of hiring the proper candidates, worker benefits, education, and development opportunities. If turnover is inevitable, additionally it is succession making plans for commercial enterprise continuity.
The truth is that retaining great employees requires effort. You need to invest in training, mentoring, and development. Otherwise, you risk losing out on some of the very people who can help grow your business. It is essential to enforce TMS in place to bring down the employee attrition rate in the company.
A TMS that integrates with HR software allows companies to improve the employee experience by providing access to payslips and holiday requests. This helps employees feel valued and appreciated, while also improving productivity and reducing the likelihood of employee burnout.
Businesses can use workforce planning equipment to schedule group individuals for activities primarily based totally on their capabilities and interests. It has a huge effect on worker motivation and productivity.
According to Gallup, “utilizing the skills and strengths of employees regularly improves their engagement by six times.”
Providing good enough training possibilities for reskilling or constructing new capabilities allow hold their Individual Development Plan or IDP. Training new skills additionally make sure that assets finishing up at the bench are billable as quickly as they’re rolled off from initiatives.
Helps Planning for Critical Positions
Succession planning is a vital technique of skills control that allows the creation of professional personnel able to fill management and different vital roles because the enterprise grows, changes, or develops. During enterprise enlargement or control turnover, succession-making plans guarantee that productiveness and worker morale aren’t always affected. Since the multi-professional team member’s function will want distribution amongst numerous employees, it may drastically spike resourcing costs. A workforce planning and management tool offers whole visibility of assets throughout geographical barriers. It allows distribution work amongst multiple people from low-price locations. Thus, agencies can keep away from an unmarried factor of failure if a vital resource leaves the employer without finances overrun.
5 Successful Talent Management Strategies
Talent management is everyone’s responsibility. But it doesn’t mean you have to do everything yourself. Here are five tips to help you recruit, hire and keep great workers.
Focusing on Data-Driven Recruitment
Data-driven recruitment strategies have been around for some time now. But it wasn’t until recently that we saw a shift toward a more data-centric approach to talent acquisition.
The latest wave of change began about four years ago, when companies like LinkedIn and Hired launched AI-powered tools to assist recruiters. These platforms allow you to curate relevant jobs based on specific criteria, such as industry, salary range, and location. They also provide insight into how many open positions there are within a certain radius, what types of skills are needed, and whether those skills are in high demand.
This type of information helps recruiters make better decisions regarding where to focus their efforts. And because the majority of recruiters are already spending most of their time looking for qualified candidates, having a tool that makes finding those people easier and faster is a huge win.
Enabling Automated Recruitment
Personalized, intelligent nurturing will continue to be one of the most important keys to providing a premier candidate and hiring experience. As we move into the next decade, it will become even more critical to understand each prospect’s unique needs and preferences, and tailor messaging to keep candidates engaged throughout the entire process.
One key facet of data-driven recruiting and Talent Acquisition (TA) is candidate nurturing. It’s about understanding how to reach out to candidates in ways that are relevant and engaging, while still keeping the conversation positive and productive. This includes reaching out via email, phone calls, text messages, social media posts, and landing page visits.
Promoting Internal Mobility
Talent acquisition leaders who prioritize internal mobile will be the ones who keep top talent. A recent study showed that nearly nine in 10 human resource leaders said 10% of the businesses’ open roles filled internally in 2021.
88% said their organizations encourage their people to apply for jobs within their companies. This is good news for those looking to fill positions, but it also highlights a growing issue for many employers: retention. The average tenure at an organization has dropped from 5.5 years in 2014 to 4.7 years in 2000.
Focusing on the Employees’ Mental and Physical Well-Being
Recruitment experts agree that companies should prioritize improving employees’ mental health and wellness. “As we move into the future, I think there will be a greater emphasis on how you treat people,” says Michael Littwin, CEO of TalentGuru. “You’re going to see organizations really focusing on making sure that they’re treating their people well.”
In response to the growing demand for help, many companies have rolled out programs aimed at addressing workplace anxiety. Some offer free access to counseling sessions via phone, video chat, or email; others provide paid assistance for those who need it. Others still are offering flexible hours and telecommuting options in addition to financial support.
The shift toward employee engagement is another trend that HR professionals should pay attention to. According to a survey by the Society for Human Resource Management, only 20% of respondents say their company provides training and development opportunities for its employees. That means 80% of workers don’t feel supported in their professional growth.
“Employee engagement is not just about creating a fun work environment,” says Laura D’Andrea Tyson, president of the Center for Workforce Development at New York University Stern School of Business. “It’s about helping your workforce grow and develop professionally so they can contribute more effectively to your business.”
To create a culture of learning and continuous improvement, companies must invest in training and education.
Talent Management and Talent Acquisition: Are They the Same?
While talent management covers the entire employee lifecycle, talent acquisition is focused on recruiting and hiring candidates. This includes everything from screening resumes to conducting interviews to onboarding new hires into the organization. While it might seem like talent management and talent acquisition are one and the same, there are some key differences between the two.
One major distinction is that while both involve managing people, talent acquisition involves finding and attracting those individuals. In addition to sourcing potential employees, talent acquisition professionals typically work closely with human resources departments to recruit and screen job applicants. They also evaluate and recommend compensation packages based on skills and experience.
Talent management, meanwhile, tends to focus more on retention and development. Organizations use talent management software to track performance reviews and provide feedback to help improve overall productivity and efficiency. By focusing on the entire employee lifecycle rather than just recruitment, organizations can retain better workers and prevent turnover.
Final Thoughts
Talent management is one of those buzzwords that seems simple enough, but it actually encompasses a lot of things. From recruiting to performance evaluation to compensation planning, there are many different aspects of human resources management that fall under the broad heading of talent management. In addition to being able to manage people effectively, you must be able to understand what motivates employees and how to motivate them.
You might think that this sounds like a tall order, but there are plenty of jobs out there that require just such skills.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q1. What is a talent management framework?
Ans. A talent management framework is a strategic plan that outlines what you want to achieve, such as increasing revenue, improving customer experience, or reducing costs. It often includes recruiting, hiring, engaging, developing, managing, recognizing, and/or promoting employees. You can use it to align your people strategy with your business goals.
Q2. What does talent management include?
Ans. There are myriad responsibilities associated with talent management, including workforce planning, recruiting, onboarding, training and development, performance management, succession planning, compensation and benefits, and compensation review. Many companies neglect one or more aspects of talent management, leading to poor outcomes.
However, investing in talent management can yield significant returns. For example, according to a study conducted by Towers Watson, organizations that invest $1 million annually in talent management see an average return of $2.5 million over five years.
Q3. What are the main objectives of a talent management program?
Ans. The main objectives of a talent management program are to develop a high-performing workforce that allows the company and its clients to achieve their objectives. This includes:
Creating a high-performance workforce, reducing the skills gap between employees’ skills and the organization’s business needs
Reskilling employees so the company continues to be competitive, retaining and motivating the most talented employees, increasing employee engagement with both learning material and the company’s vision
A workplace must have a culture of idea-sharing to be productive and innovative. Employees are encouraged to share their ideas and are open-minded toward new concepts. Employees who feel comfortable sharing their views are more likely to be creative and productive. Here are some ways to create a culture of idea-sharing in your workplace.
Encourage Employees To Share Their Ideas
Good ideas are the lifeblood of any successful organization. Without fresh ideas, businesses stagnate and eventually fail. That’s why it’s so important to encourage employees to share their ideas. When employees feel free to share their ideas, it helps create a culture of idea-sharing that can be a powerful engine for growth.
Of course, not all ideas are equally good, and it’s essential to have a process to evaluate and select the best ones. But even the act of sharing ideas can help to generate new and better ideas. So if you want to create a company culture of innovation, start by encouraging your employees to share their ideas.
Create an Open-Minded Environment
Creating an open-minded environment is essential for fostering a culture of idea-sharing. The best way to do this is to encourage employees to challenge the status quo and think outside the box. Employees who feel they must conform to a particular form of thinking are much less likely to share their ideas.
But if they feel like their ideas are welcome, they’ll be more likely to share them. One way to create an open-minded environment is to promote diversity in the workplace. When people of different backgrounds and perspectives come together, they bring a wealth of other ideas.
Another way to create an open-minded environment is to encourage debate and discussion.
Brainstorming is a great way to generate new ideas. When you bring employees together to brainstorm, they can share their ideas and build on each other’s thoughts. Brainstorming can also help break down barriers between employees, making it easier for them to share their ideas in the future.
If you want to hold a successful brainstorming session, you should keep a few things in mind. First, make sure everyone feels comfortable participating. Second, encourage employees to think outside the box. And third, ensure you have a process for evaluating and selecting the best ideas.
Reward Employees for Sharing Their Ideas
To encourage employees to share their ideas, you must ensure they’re rewarded. This doesn’t mean you have to give them a raise or a bonus every time they come up with a good idea. But it does mean you should recognize and reward employees willing to share their thoughts.
This could be done through a formal awards program or simply by verbally thanking employees for their contributions. Whatever form it takes, rewarding employees for sharing their ideas will help to create a culture of idea-sharing in your workplace.
Employees who feel like their ideas will be met with judgment are much less likely to share them. That’s why it’s so important to have a policy of ‘no judgment’ in the workplace and this should be implemented from the time you interview a candidate. This doesn’t mean that you should never critique an idea.
But it does mean that employees should feel comfortable sharing their views without fear of being judged. One way to create a ‘no judgment’ policy is to have a designated space for employees to share their thoughts. This could be a physical space like a brainstorming room, or an online space, like a forum or chat room.
Another way to create a ‘no judgment’ policy is to encourage anonymous idea sharing. This way, employees can share their ideas without fear of being judged.
Conclusion
Creating a workplace idea-sharing culture is essential for fostering innovation. The best way to do this is to create an open-minded environment, hold brainstorming sessions, and reward employees for sharing their ideas. Implementing a ‘no judgment’ policy will also help encourage employees to share their ideas. Follow these tips and create a culture of idea-sharing in your workplace.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q1. Why is it important to share ideas at work?
Ans. The culture of idea sharing at the workplace helps you to broaden your reach with your network of connections. Sharing ideas with your coworkers helps them to gain knowledge, which can be used in their work.
Q2. How do you reward employee ideas?
Ans. Some ways to give rewards to employee ideas are:
Lunch with the boss
Company apparel
‘Thank you’ meeting
Certificate of achievement
Recognition in front of peers
Spot awards
Hand-written note
Q3. How do you create an open-minded environment in the workplace?
Ans.
Avoid isolation and confinement
Ask lots of questions
Leave your comfort zone
Take lessons from anyone and never stop learning
Challenge limits
This article is written by Catherine Schwartz.
Catherine is a marketing & e-commerce specialist who helps brands grow their revenue and move their businesses to new levels.
Since the Great Resignation, many employees have left jobs that no longer serve their needs or value their effort. One commonality of these inefficient workplaces is poor internal communication, causing confusion, frustration, and stress. When management crosses lines or expectations aren’t properly managed, things get muddied. It can become expensive and exhausting to lose workers to poor communication, so it’s important to consider some easy improvements.
Providing a workspace that communicates effectively and listens to its staff can take a bit of work. Thankfully, this process can be made easier through just a few changes to your business’s dynamic.
Utilize Specific Communication Methods
Between all of the apps and software available these days for communication, it’s simple to find one that works best for your company. Some popular choices include Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Discord. However, you don’t want to throw too many options at your staff.
One method will help streamline communication and ensure that nothing becomes lost in translation. Plus, it allows staff to refer back to messages, send media, and even create more informal channels, such as staff wins and pet photos, to build camaraderie.
With a constant influx of emails, it can be difficult to sort through them and respond to everything efficiently.
However, part of managing your inbox is ensuring communication doesn’t get lost in the shuffle.
Set aside time each day for emails, especially on projects or answers that require a swift reply. Set reminders for anything that can wait a day or two, and ensure any emails you send have all the information included so that nothing confuses your co-workers.
Pay Attention and Listen
Part of effective communication is active listening.
It can be quite defeating for staff to feel like their problems aren’t being heard or recognized, or their ideas aren’t valued. Pay attention to what people say and what isn’t being said, such as their body language during meetings and discussions. Create opportunities to listen to feedback, both positive and negative. Perhaps add an anonymous suggestion box or schedule a forum where everyone can share their ideas.
Provide Helpful Communication Resources
Apart from communication apps, having project management tools can also build a bridge of contact. These are useful in keeping track of projects, deadlines, and other pertinent information. Instead of employees having to chase down their co-workers to get updates, project management tools help to have a streamlined platform to detail new and old assignments alike.
You can also use them to send reminders, upload important media, and track working time on a specific task, all in one place.
Plan Meetings for Essential Business
For some, meetings can feel like a waste of time, especially when they don’t have to attend or you could easily convey the information via email. However, knowing you need to cover and collaborate on through a meeting is vital since you don’t want your employees to lose precious working time.
Decide which correspondence needs to be handled face-to-face in a meeting, such as discussing a new project that involves all hands on deck. Otherwise, save your staff a busy day of meetings so they can focus on other business.
Give Clear Expectations
Whether it’s for a certain role or task, giving clear expectations can help internally. It can be frustrating for employees to feel stumped on management expectations, work on the wrong things, or have to ask a supervisor what their role is constantly. Instead, set distinct goals and intentions from the get-go and have it written somewhere for future reference. This documentation will also let them feel open in communicating any potential questions or issues since you have established rapport, and they know to rely on you for precise instruction.
Many bosses and supervisors have an open-door policy that allows staff to feel comfortable approaching them with anything. These discussions can include work concerns or even personal matters causing issues. This type of trust and understanding lets employees feel respected and provides managers insight into their staff’s day-to-day. This trust can be crucial for a business to run smoothly while maintaining a positive internal communication environment.
Encourage Participation and Conversation
In grade school or college, certain activities may have involved participation points. Encourage participation by your employees through various methods. Engaged staff tends to perform better, so providing performance-based feedback, open discussions, and ways to earn perks will help build on your internal workplace communications.
Build on Relationships
One way to build on existing relationships is through team building. Slack channels where you can share memes and other casual correspondence are nice, but what about ways to strengthen those bonds?
Employees who trust their co-workers will be more likely to communicate openly, so planning a small retreat or after-work event can help. If you’re a remote-based business, plan a day for some activities via Zoom or Skype that teams can participate in, such as puzzles or virtual escape rooms.
Sharing with your employees the latest goings-on and happenings is important. Are there any updates they need? What about positive outcomes from recent projects?
Hosting periodic check-ins, whether weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly, can be a consistent gathering to fill everyone in. These check-ins don’t have to be overly formal or take up much of the work day.
A weekly email can help loop everyone in on announcements, upcoming events, or other information to provide open communication.
Conclusion
There are many ways to improve internal communication at your workplace, and while you may not need to overhaul your current methods entirely, you should at least consider the above list on where to start. Technology is one area that can certainly help, between communication apps, project management tools, and performance management.
Other practices involve active listening, open communication policies, and relationship building. So how will you use these to focus on enhancing your company’s communication?
All of us have passed a personality test at least once. We want to know which career path to choose, why we behave in one way or another, or what skills will help us in the future.
For example, is it reasonable to stay in a stressful environment when you better work with numbers and databases, not with people? That’s why personality tests exist. They illustrate where you’re the most productive and what makes you, you.
Knowing your predispositions isn’t just useful for you to know when applying for a job. It’s also helpful for recruiters and companies (when they hire Magento developers, designers, copywriters, office managers, etc.). Will the candidate perform well in a leadership role? Are they team players or individualists?
Figure out everything right from the start. It will help you predict whether the person fits the company. If not, there is a high chance they’ll quit at the first opportunity, even if they don’t plan it now.
So, if you want to not just “close” the position but find the most appropriate person, this article is for you. It outlines some of the most popular personality tests to gather your dream team.
Is it Necessary to Include Personality Tests in the Recruiting Process?
When hiring someone, you analyze various criteria such as education, experience, and skills. You might ask questions about candidates’ habits and personal traits during the interview.
But a 40-minute job interview doesn’t give a complete understanding of a person. Some may be nervous to respond adequately; others may be overwhelmed and act too fidgety.
That’s when personality tests come in handy. They provide more unbiased information on the candidates’ characteristics and can reduce employee turnover. For instance, revealing that a person is focused and calm may make them more likely to succeed in bookkeeping than in sales.
However, tests differ in terms of effectiveness and preciseness. Therefore, you need to carefully choose the test to diagnose the needed qualities to build a productive team.
Personality tests are more widespread among Fortune 100 companies. To be exact, about 80% of them utilize MBTI tests (Myers-Briggs type indicator) to ensure efficient teamwork. Unfortunately, only 13% of all American employers rely on personality tests. But those numbers will rise as smaller companies follow the lead of the largest corporations.
3 Personality Tests to Find Perfect Candidates for Team Roles
1. Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test evaluates people’s preferences based on Jung’s ideas of psychological types.
Isabel Myers and her mother, Katherine Briggs, took Carl Jung’s theory and developed this test for women. By creating this assessment, they hoped to make people’s lives happier and healthier.
People are classified into one of 16 personality types after taking the test. Note that they’re equal and don’t imply any weaknesses or abnormalities.
This testing allows you to understand the personality better and fulfill the potential. As a result, you can bring maximum value with your work rather than taking an unsuitable role and ignoring your true capabilities.
The questionnaire considers four scales:
Extraversion (E) – Introversion (I), meaning how much social interaction people need and whether they derive strength from communication or from being alone;
Sensing (S) – Intuition (N), showing how people gather information. They may focus on facts (sensing) or prefer intuition;
Thinking (T) – Feeling (F), illustrating how people make decisions. If thinking dominates feeling, people will rely on objective data rather than emotions;
Judging (J) – Perceiving (P), denoting how adaptable people are. The more people rely on judging, the less flexible they will be.
The Myers & Briggs Foundation states that this test is reliable and legitimate. However, the respondents’ results differ when passing the test a second time in about 40% and 75% of cases, so you can’t fully rely on them.
16Personalities provides a free test and analysis of each personality type (including workplace habits).
2. DiSC
Another personality profile test is DiSC. This technique appeared in the 20th century, thanks to psychologist William Moulton Marston. DiSC is an abbreviation standing for four main traits:
Dominance (D)
People with a high “D” score are decisive and result-oriented rather than process-oriented. Such people prefer fast movement, risk-taking, and getting what they want immediately. Their strengths are the ability to take responsibility, control the situation, and keep power in their hands. On the other hand, they can be impolite, inflexible, and act without reaching an agreement.
Influence (I)
The Influence personality is the most unpredictable, energetic, and extroverted team member. They are people-oriented and build connections with others. However, they can become unorganized, depending on people and ignoring details and duties. They can’t live without the approval of others. So they often react to pressure with verbal attacks.
Steadiness (S)
The Steady personality profile is quieter and more introverted. Such people are calm, patient, modest, and balanced. They are people-oriented and enjoy assisting others, collaborating, and establishing balance and harmony within a team.
At the same time, the desire to avoid disagreement may lead to unwanted results. They want to keep their relationships intact. That’s why they hesitate to speak up or draw attention, preferring to remain unnoticed. They may be afraid of change and look for stability and security. Indecisiveness may limit them.
Conscientiousness (Сompliance)
When the conscientious personality dominates, people pay attention to details, concentrate on the task and perform the work at the highest level. They are analytical, accurate, and cautious.
Such concentration on details may slow down the work. First, people with a high “C” score are usually perfectionists, which is unaffordable with strict deadlines. They expect everyone to adhere to their standards and everything to be flawless before finishing a task.
This test enables you to determine how team members will interact. Is it worth hiring a person where speed plays a role in decision-making? Will this person be decisive and communicative enough? Remember that there are no one-size-fits-all representatives. We are now talking about dominant character traits, but they can come with others.
You can take the free DISC personality test. It’s a short assessment based on 12 questions, so you can finish it in about 10 minutes.
3. StrengthsFinders
The third item on the list isn’t a personality test. The CliftonStrengths assessment is a performance-based tool. It aims to define your innate skills and the ability to apply them.
The Clifton StrengthsFinder serves to determine your talents. What natural predispositions influence your thinking, feeling, and behavior? The test relies on the idea that all people have 34 basic skills. Everyone is unique according to the degree of these talents.
In which sequence do they affect your personality? Some talents are especially strong, they come naturally, and you don’t have to put effort into doing something, i.e., communicating with large crowds. You constantly use such skills and are successful in them. Other talents are used extremely rarely and require significant effort. For example, you aren’t used to demonstrating emotions.
The Clifton StrengthsFinder is a set of 177 questions. You have a pair of descriptions on the left and right, such as “I am a sensitive person” and “I am a logical person”. You can click on the dots to choose the best-suited variant and the extent. A neutral response is also available.
You have to pick the right option within 20 seconds. Why? The reason is that the accuracy of the test results depends on whether you answer without thinking much. The next question will appear automatically after 20 seconds. The whole process takes 25-30 minutes to complete.
The test will define your top five strengths, explain their uniqueness, and suggest how to use them to your advantage. So it’s not just about looking for talents. It’s about harnessing the full potential. The assessment cost is $49.99.
Key Takeaways
Professional skills are still necessary when it comes to making the final decision. But how will the candidate complete tasks? Will the team be productive when it consists of leaders alone?
Strike a balance between various personality types. For example, a team of extroverted and creative people may generate innovative insights. But their energy may not often lead to actions to implement numerous ideas but remain on paper. So a successful business should maximize its effectiveness and employ people eager to follow instructions rather than create something new. That’s why you need to conduct personality tests.
They help you understand how a person will cooperate with others from the get-go. You can choose one of the tests I’ve provided above, such as Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), DiSC, and StrengthsFinders or discover other ways to check a candidate during interviews, problem-solving tests, and teamwork activities.
This article is written by Art Malkovich.
Art Malkovich is Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Onilab, a full-service eCommerce agency focused on Magento. Being a Certified Magento Specialist and Master Project Manager, he keeps up to date with the latest trends in SEO, SaaS, B2B, and technology in general. Art is a business development professional with hands-on experience in eCommerce, Magento development, and migration.
Are you still trying to decode the complicated challenge of employee engagement in your organization? Have you done well to reap the tangible business benefits of high employee engagement? As per Forbes, organizations with high employee engagement can drive 21 percent higher profitability. That does sound amazing for sure. However, it is also true that not all organizations have been successful in cultivating the kind of engagement that can effectively contribute to business success.
To substantiate, as per Gallup, not more than 36 percent of US workers are engaged in their work. This explains why organizations are now keen on looking at some novel and unique strategies for promoting greater engagement.
However, Cultivating strong workplace belongingness in employees can help you achieve exemplary levels of employee engagement. It is vital to ask here, what is workplace belonging and how can it help organizations unleash scalable engagement?
In this blog, we find answers to these questions that will help you understand how creating a strong sense of belonging among employees can be the key to employee engagement. To begin with, let us delineate the concept of workplace belonging.
Defining Workplace Belongingness
In the workplace, employees feel different kinds of emotions that reflect their commitment, behavior, and confidence. Among these feelings and emotions, the sense of belongingness that they feel for their organization is important for you as a leader to assess. In simple terms, workplace belongingness explains how accepted and valued your employees feel in the workplace.
When employees carry a strong sense of belonging, they manifest the belief that they deserve to be in the workplace and are valuable to the organization. Furthermore, this sense of belonging also influences the kind of emotional affection they feel for their employers and organizations. Simply put, when your employees feel a strong sense of belonging, they will have greater loyalty. Besides, they will see their individual success in correlation with organizational growth.
Now that we are on the same page regarding what workplace belonging signifies, let us understand its implications. The subsequent section elucidates the various ways in which workplace belonging can boost employee engagement.
5 ways workplace belonging can enhance employee engagement
Enhances confidence and performance
Let’s start this discussion with a simple question you must think about as a leader. Will your employees give their best unless they feel confident enough in the workplace? Needless to say, confidence is the foundation of exceptional performances. In fact, your employees’ self-belief and morale blend together to reflect the overall confidence that your organization carries.
But what do you think is essential for them to feel confident enough? Well, the answer is pretty simple. Your employees will feel optimistic when they feel valued in the organization. Confidence comes with acceptance and as a leader, it is your responsibility to make your employees feel accepted for their individuality, skills, talents, and opinions.
When you successfully promote that kind of confidence in them, performance levels are bound to go up. Can you perform exceptionally well despite the fact that you are not very confident about it? Certainly, the chances are quite bleak, to be fair. Having said that, you need to promote greater belongingness in your employees to channel their confidence in the right way.
The bottom line is that confidence and performance complement each other. When employees feel valued, they will feel the constant urge to raise the bar of performance and offer greater value to the organization.
To substantiate, Deloitte research reveals that a strong sense of workplace belonging among employees can increase their job performance by 56 percent. The report further highlights that workplace belonging can also lead to a 50 percent decline in employee turnover. Clearly, workplace belonging holds the key to workplace motivation.
Did you know that? Well, now you do and you must act on it to boost your company’s engagement scenarios.
Brings down absenteeism
Absenteeism is quite a realistic and credible metric of employee management, engagement, and satisfaction. Looking at the broader perspective, there could be multiple and subjective reasons for high absenteeism in an organization. Among these reasons, a desolate feeling of belongingness in the workplace is surely considerable. To explain, employees will only want to come to a workplace if they feel that strong sense of association and belonging. Otherwise, they can choose from a wide spectrum of excuses to make for not attending the office. Besides, when they have a strong sense of belongingness, they will understand their responsibility better. Consequently, they will not keep things hanging by taking arbitrary leaves.
Assessing further, there is a proven inverse relationship between workplace belonging and absenteeism. Research suggests that by promoting a strong sense of workplace belongingness, organizations can reduce sick days by 75 percent.
The lower the absenteeism rate in your organization, the higher will be the engagement. So, create a workplace people would love to be a part of on a daily basis. Give your employees a workplace that inspires the best in them every day. For that, it is essential to foster powerful feelings of belongingness among employees that enable them to contribute more proactively.
Promotes greater trust
As per Harvard Business Review, trust and employee engagement have a direct correlation. This correlation is explained through the following insights.
Employees in high trust companies exhibit 76 percent higher engagement and 50 percent higher productivity. Also, employees manifest 106 percent higher energy levels when trust is embedded in the natural virtue in the organizational culture.
In organizations that cultivate trust, employees express 29 percent higher satisfaction
In companies where there is high trust between co-workers, burnout rates are 40 percent lower and the stress levels are 76 percent lower.
It is amazing how a single virtue of trust can lead an organization to incredible things. What we need to figure out is the correlation between workplace belonging and trust. Acceptance is the basis of trust and this will always remain an undeniable fact.
When employees feel accepted, valued, and appreciated, they trust their co-workers with greater ease. This is how belongingness proves to be imperative for positive workplace relationships that can drive high engagement.
With high trust, people collaborate better and steer their organizations to new horizons of success. Are you willing to go that extra mile to create high trust in your organization? As a leader, you need to lead by example
Cultivates better inclusiveness
Inclusion and diversity are among the most significant trends in the contemporary workplace. Organizations are more eager than ever before to embrace the virtues of diversity and inclusion in the workplace. However, for that, hiring a diverse workforce may not be sufficient.
To get the best out of your diverse workforce, you need to incorporate inclusion as a natural virtue into your company’s culture. This is where creating a strong sense of workplace belonging among your employees can be of great help.
When you foster an inspiring sense of workplace belonging, you include your employees in the decision-making process and empower them to share their perspectives. Or to look at it the other way, when employees carry that feeling of belongingness, they feel like contributing more. In this zeal to add more value to the organization, they come up with innovative ideas and creative insights that can be of great value to any organization.
In fact, in the highly competitive business world, you need to innovate at every level to sustain your competitive advantages. What better than a workforce that feels excited every day to bring innovative and creative ideas to the floor? You can literally draw great value from a workforce that does not shy away from taking initiative.
By promoting a greater sense of belonging among your employees, you can also inspire greater creative liberty among your employees. This creative liberty will become the basis of a massive hike in employee engagement levels.
All in all, creating a sense of belonging in your workforce can lead to greater inclusiveness in multifarious ways. Further, this increased inclusiveness will lead to higher engagement in the workplace in multiple ways.
Leads to a more resilient workforce
In the contemporary corporate world, the skill of resilience has immeasurable value. In the last few years, daunting challenges such as COVID-19 pandemic have tested businesses to their core. Organizations that were resilient enough to these changes survived, while others went out of business..
Resilience has become a sought-after skill in the modern workplace. It also complements engagement in a direct way. When employees are resilient, they stay upbeat even in the face of adverse challenges.
As a leader, You would want your employees to have exemplary resilience at all times. But what does it take to inspire resilience among employees?
Employees will give their best to stand by their organizations when there is a powerful sense of belongingness. Why would they want to face all kinds of challenges for their organizations unless they are convinced that they are a valuable asset to the company? Therefore, it is correct to say that by promoting belongingness among your employees, you can make them more resilient and hence, boost engagement.
Conclusion
To encapsulate, there are multidimensional benefits linked to encouraging a strong sense of workplace belongingness among employees. When you help your employees build a deeper connection with your organization, they feel valued and empowered to bring out the best in them. Especially, when it comes to a diverse workforce, working on fostering a sense of belongingness among employees seems far more essential. As a leader, your ability to inspire belongingness among your employees holds the key to driving high employee engagement.
Author’s Bio
“Doing what you love is the cornerstone of having abundance in your life.” Wayne Dyer’s thoughts are well suited to Kiara Miller. She has been working as a content marketing professional at ‘The Speakingnerd’. Her passion for writing is also visible in the innovative joys of material she provides to her readers.
The relationship between managers and their direct reports is crucial to successfully running a company. And one effective way to achieve a positive relationship between them is through one-on-one meetings. A one-on-one meeting presents an environment to have honest talks on various topics, leading to a less stiff atmosphere between managers and their direct reports.
A crucial side of this meeting is asking the right questions to make the most of them. Asking the right one on one questions helps stir the conversation in the right and productive direction. This article will discuss the importance of one-on-one meetings and the type of one-on-one questions managers should ask.
Why conduct one-on-one meetings?
People, not robots, make up companies. Therefore, there should be a means to improve communication between employees and management. Fortunately, one-on-one meetings present managers with this opportunity. A study by SHRM found 89% of HR Leaders agree to ongoing check-ins and communication help retain and recruit better.
In this section, we will highlight the reasons for conducting one-on-one meetings.
Builds Trust
It takes effort to build trust, and it’s crucial to build trust between managers and direct reports to run a successful team and, by extension, a successful business. A Human Era at Work study revealed employees who trust their management also respect them. The study also found that when employees trust and value their managers, they were 58% more focused and 63% more satisfied with their jobs.
Improves Engagement
To get the best out of employees, they must be engaged. Employee engagement will improve with one-on-one meetings because it allows managers and direct reports to discuss issues they would not otherwise discuss during office hours. Direct reports feedback on the company, career progress, and current projects can help identify and rectify pressing issues. A study by Gallup backs up this point showing employees who have regular one-on-one meetings are three times more engaged and 21% more productive.
One goal of a one-on-one meeting is to understand your direct reports. It is getting to know them beyond the four walls of the office space or, in recent times, your laptop screens. Engaging with your direct reports as people and not employees helps improve your working relationship, which can help in raising teamwork. One-on-one meetings can also help to diffuse friction between colleagues by the manager becoming a mediator.
Reduces Staff Turnover
A study by salary.com shows that 23% of employees look for new jobs every day. Another research by Hogan assessment shows that 75% of employees state their direct boss is the worse part of their jobs. Holding one-on-one meetings can help reduce these figures, as one reason employees leave their workplace is due to lack of engagement.
One On One Questions to Ask Employees
When conducting a one-on-one employee meeting, the questions must explore the various areas of the direct report’s life. The questions you ask should cover their personal life, relationship with co-workers, career goals, the working environment, and feedback on management. Touching the various areas that affect your direct reports brings about an open meeting.
You can have a list of questions divided into separate sections to help you structure it. Also, while timing is essential, flexibility is much more effective because any question can become an issue that needs immediate attention.
This section will discuss the areas to ask questions and the type of questions you should ask your direct reports.
Personal Check-in Questions
Understanding the physical and mental health of your direct reports is crucial. Showing genuine concern and empathy can help break the ice and open up the floor for discussions. If this is the first one-on-one meeting, you can ask about their lives outside the workplace.
Questions about hobbies or what they find fun can help to ease tension. Who knows, both of you may enjoy similar activities.
If this is not your first meeting, you can ask follow-up questions from the previous conversation.
Questions to ask:
1. How are you feeling today?
2. What do you do over the weekend? / Do you have plans for this weekend?
3. How do you feel about your current work/life balance?
4. Do you have any hobbies you are passionate about?
Depending on the answers you receive to these questions, spend more or less time in this section. If the employee is not doing well mentally or physically, allocate more time to this section.
Career Goal and Progression Questions
A study by the Conference Board shows that only 57% of workers show job satisfaction, and for a typical worker who dedicates hours to their job, it’s a low figure. One good way to improve this figure is by understanding your direct reports’ career goals. Asking the right questions will allow you to help with advice, point them to books or other materials they need, and assist them in reaching their goals.
Many companies have lost excellent employees due to not understanding how their goals align with employees. Identifying the career goals of your direct reports can also help you assign projects they are interested in working on or projects that will help them develop their skill set.
Sample 1 on 1 career goals and progression questions to ask include:
5. What are your career goals? Have you put much thought into your career goals?
6. What can I do to help you achieve them?
7. What do you enjoy most about your work?
8. What skills do you think you need to develop? Do you feel you need more training?
9. Do you feel your current job role contributes to achieving your career goal?
10. Do you feel you can achieve your career goal with this company?
These one-on-one employee meeting questions will help you and your direct report clear the air regarding their career goals and progression. Their answers will highlight what you can do to help them progress in their career.
Workplace Environment and Condition
The workplace environment is vital in ensuring the success of a company. Employees are a significant source of feedback since they spend most of their time working and interacting in the office environment. A poor office environment can impede productivity, so it’s best to have feedback by asking one-on-one questions from your direct reports. Chances are you would receive a few.
Sample one on one workplace environment and condition questions to ask:
11. Are you happy with the current working environment?
12. What changes would you make to the current work environment?
13. Do you feel you can be more productive if we make changes to the work environment?
In a study by Gallup, managers determine how great or lousy a workplace turns out. The study states managers have a variance of 70%, suggesting they are vital in dictating the company culture. A positive atmosphere helps to foster teamwork and healthy work relationships. When managers promote a healthy culture, it improves employee retention and productivity.
One good way to determine if managers lead by example is by asking questions in one-on-one meetings with employees.
Sample 1 on 1 company culture and relationships questions to ask:
15. Is there any aspect of the company work culture you would want to change?
16. Do you feel the team works well together?
17. Is there anyone in the team you notably work well with? Why is this?
18. Is there anyone in the team you dislike working with? Why is this?
Managers Feedback
Managers need feedback from their direct reports. According to Gallup, managers provided with strength feedback showed a 12.5% increase in productivity and a 14.9% increase in turnover rates compared to those who didn’t receive such feedback. In short, managers also need feedback to improve, and a one-on-one meeting presents an opportunity for the managers.
Sample 1 on 1 managers feedback questions you can ask:
19. Do you feel I give enough feedback?
20. What can I do to support you better?
The aim is to make sure the employee is comfortable with your management style and get feedback on what you should do more or less. In this section, take the words of your direct reports in friendly spirit. If they are giving constructive criticism or observations they have made, it’s because they also want to see you grow. They could easily have kept quiet, spoken behind your back, or given a written complaint to HR.
Bonus 1 on 1 Questions
Managers and employees are busy individuals, and therefore they need to make every moment in the workplace count. On average, managers spend 23 hours in meetings during the week. That’s a lot of time spent in meetings, and because of this, it’s best to ask your direct reports about the effectiveness of your one-on-one sessions.
Do you feel these meetings are a good use of your time?
How as these one-on-one meetings helped you?
What do you think I should change about my approach?
Conclusion
Asking the right one on one questions in meetings with your direct reports is essential in getting the best from these meetings. The success of the one-on-one sessions is dictated by how well you can break the ice and have simple conversations, leading to more complex ones. As you question your direct reports, remember the aim is to understand your employees better, to provide adequate support.
Want to know how Engagedly can help you mange your remote employees better? Request us for a demo.
Teams that score higher in engagement are much more productive, creative, and innovative than their counterparts. Building great teams can be a bit tricky as the current work environments do not allow to gauge the non-verbal cues to understand the team members. It is therefore important to focus on team building activities that bring people closer and help them understand each other. While there are a bunch of activities that help in boosting motivation, productivity, and learning, it is crucial to involve the team in fun and creative activities too.
This article will discuss four creative team building activities that will help your team members come out of the silos and unite to bring more fun to the table.
Creative Team Building Activities
Here are four unique and creative team building activities for your employees that are fun guaranteed.
Team Building Activity 1- Two Truths And A Lie
This is one of the most engaging team-building activities for employees.
Recommended number of People: 10 to 15
Material required: None
Goal: To guess the true statement from other players’ set of statements and to make other players believe your false statements to be true.
How to play:
Step 1: Every player writes down three statements about himself (2 truths and one lie)
Step 2: Each player is asked to read those statements aloud to the group.
Step 3: Take a vote on which statement is a lie.
Step 4: The players who guess the false statement correctly get one point each. If no one is able to guess it correctly, then the player who wrote the statements wins the points.
Step 5: Continue steps (1 – 4) and the player with most points wins the game.
Team Building Activity 2- Back-to-back Drawing
Recommended number of players: Multiple teams of 2 people
Material required: Paper, pen and picture cards
Goal: To instruct your teammate verbally and help them draw the shape.
How to play:
Step 1: Divide your group into pairs, and have each pair sit on the floor back to back.
Step 2: Give one player from the pair a picture and the other, a pen and paper.
Step 3: The player who receives the picture, verbally explains the picture to his teammate and the teammate tries to draw the picture on the paper.
Step 4: On finishing, each pair compares their original shape to the drawing, and consider how they worked together, and where they could improve their communication.
Also Read: 5 Employee Engagement Activities On Budget
Team Building Activity 3- Acted Charades (Dumb Charades)
Another common, yet engaging team building activity for your employees
Note – The Engagedly team tried this out. It was a roaring success. 😉
Recommended number of players: 10-15 (two teams)
Material required: None
Goal: Convey the movie name given by the opposite team to your teammates by enacting and guessing the movie name correct when your teammate enacts.
How to play:
Step 1: A player from one team is chosen by the other team and given a movie name.
Step 2: The player enacts the movie name and tries to convey it to his teammates without talking or pointing out to any objects.
Step 3: If the team succeeds to find the movie name they win a point, if not the opposite team wins a point.
Step 4: Continue steps ( 1-3) The team with most points wins the game.
Team Building Activity 4- Winner/ Loser
Recommended number of players: Multiple teams of 2 players each
Material required: None
Goal: To change the negative perspective of your teammate to positive perspective
How to play:
Step 1: Both teammates write their bad experiences and share it with each other.
Step 2: Both partners, then tell the same story of their teammates, but relate the good things that came from the experience.
Just give these team-building activities a try. The goal is not to win, but rather to have fun and build team spirit!
Conclusion
Team building is critically important for organizations that are working in hybrid and remote working environments. As most employees are fixated to their systems throughout the day, it is important for them to be involved in activities that help them bring out their creative sides. The creative team building activities discussed in this article will surely help your team members have a great time. Share the activities that you enjoy the most with your teams in the comments sections below.
Want to know how Engagedly can help in managing and building highly productive and dynamic teams? Book a live demo to talk to our experts!
“When people are financially invested, they want a return. When people are emotionally invested, they want to contribute.” – Simon Sinek (Author, Start With Why).
In the era of digital transformation, changing technical landscape, and increasing competition, how do organizations keep their employees productive and aligned with organizational goals? The answer to the question lies in finding the organizational activities that contribute towards employee engagement. One of the ways that organizations use to understand the concerns and expectations of their workforce is through employee engagement surveys.
Through the decades, HR managers have used employee engagement surveys as a core strategy to comprehend staff engagement levels, initiate behavior change, and drive higher output. Not only do the surveys help organizations to create an impact on human resource management, but they also provide employees with a medium to share their experiences and views on the practices being followed. Furthermore, with the data revolution and digitization, surveys have become more effective and process-oriented.
There has been a significant improvement in the engagement of US employees over the last decade, with an overall 36% of employees engaged in their work. (Gallup – Employee Engagement Report, 20211)
As the world is still reeling under the stress of the COVID-19 pandemic, various aspects of employee engagement and productivity have changed in the last two years. Some progressive and innovative organizations have been making sincere efforts to keep their dispersed employees engaged and committed to the organization. Engagement surveys come in handy in such scenarios. They help in gauging employee engagement on different parameters and offer insights for leaders to take action.
Before we dive deeper into the intricacies of employee engagement surveys, let’s take a closer look at what employee engagement means to the organization and how engagement surveys provide actionable insights to leaders.
Employee engagement talks about the level of dedication, enthusiasm, and zeal that employees exhibit towards their job. Engaged employees are a real asset to the organization as they help in achieving organizational goals through exemplary performance. That’s the reason the majority of Fortune 500 organizations put great emphasis on employee engagement initiatives. Research has shown that some of the activities that help in elevating employee engagement are reward and recognition, learning and development, diversity and inclusion, ownership, and employee experience.
By creating a workforce of engaged employees, organizations can become highly competitive and transform themselves into market leaders. Higher engagement is also linked to increased productivity, reduced turnover, effective leadership, higher ROI, and overall happiness of the workforce. Therefore, by working towards the engagement of employees, organizations can reap multiple benefits and can create a workforce of dynamic employees that is performance-driven and result-oriented.
Measuring Employee Engagement
Employee engagement surveys are a strategic technique that helps in measuring the motivation, commitment, and purpose of employees towards their job responsibilities and, thereby, towards the organization. The survey reveals important information regarding employee perceptions towards the organization. Such insights help leaders and managers make a shift in the workplace to enhance the overall employee experience.
Carefully designed surveys can help organizations understand how their employees feel about work, leadership, any barriers to engagement and higher productivity, the causes of low employee morale, and much more. Responsiveness of the organization towards employee feedback can help drive major changes in the organization. It leads to lower absenteeism, higher retention, better customer centricity, customer acquisition, higher revenue generation, and a satisfied workforce.
An organization undertakes an employee engagement survey to understand what factors lead to an engaged workforce and the hindrances to the process. Companies that are heavily invested in their employees are able to retain their best performers and build a brand that attracts job seekers. Let us try to understand the importance of conducting surveys and employee engagement in an organization through some statistics.
The number of engaged employees is significantly lower when compared to the overall workforce. In the US, the number of disengaged employees is just 64%, and globally, the number is down to 80%. (Gallup2)
Companies with higher staff engagement enjoy better productivity and profitability. The estimated productivity increase is over 20% or more. (Gallup3)
91% of the 1000 surveyed employees said that burnout affects the quality of work as well as their personal relationships. (Deloitte4, burnout report)
Gender diversity has a direct relationship with employee engagement. Employees who work under a female manager are more engaged than those working under a male manager. (Gallup5, Analytics and Advice for Leaders)
Country and age have a significant impact on employee engagement. US employees in the age group of 30-39 are less engaged than those in the age groups of 40-49 and 50+. (Sloan Center On Aging & Work6)
Employee engagement has a positive impact on all areas of an organization. Highly engaged organizations realize a 41% reduction in absenteeism, a 10% increase in customer ratings, a 20% increase in sales, and substantially lower employee turnover. (Gallup7)
90% of leaders think that engagement strategy has a great impact on business success, but only 25% have a strategy in place. (Muse8)
In the post-pandemic world, 8 out of every 10 employees would prefer employers that offer economic well-being. These include retirement plans, health, disability, and life insurance, paid family medical leave, and emergency savings programs. All the benefits have a direct relationship to employee engagement in the workplace. (Prudential9)
Employee Engagement Survey Purpose
Recent shifts in the global economy have put organizations at the forefront of employee engagement. To remain competitive in the current capricious circumstances, organizations need a highly engaged and productive workforce that can bring in results. Because of this, employee engagement surveys have gained prominence due to their ease of delivery, quick response time, qualitative and quantitative data, and feedback analysis.
It has been found in multiple studies that employees that actively respond to employee engagement surveys are enthusiastic about their jobs and want to share the feedback for the betterment of the organization. On the contrary, employees that do not respond to surveys are not engaged in their jobs. While there are multiple reasons for employees to not fill out the engagement questionnaire, some of the most prominent ones can be:
Dissatisfaction with their current role and responsibilities.
Lack of trust in the process of engagement surveys, i.e., they believe that feedback doesn’t matter in the current business environment.
Distrust in the management of the organization.
Lack of communication and interpersonal skills.
Employees are afraid to give their honest opinion.
An employee engagement survey serves multiple purposes for the organization in the following ways:
Drives Behavioral Changes In Employees
Psychologists have found that asking questions can prompt people to change their behavior. It is based on the fact that questions help people reflect on themselves. It helps with staying committed to a cause and changing personal traits and characteristics for future goals.
Coined as a “question-behavior effect,” the phenomenon was first published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology10. It states that asking questions about the future behavior of a person can speed up their process of being ready to change.
The same concept is used in employee engagement surveys. Questions prompt employees to understand their current behavior and the changes required to achieve their goals. The crux of the survey lies in initiating the behavior change process among employees.
Interacting with employees and taking their feedback sends a signal that their opinions matter to the organization. Sending out regular surveys and acting on them makes the workforce more engaged and dedicated towards their work. Let us look at the importance of hearing from employees using the below statistics.
86% of surveyed employees felt that people in their organization were not heard fairly or equally.
63% of employees felt that their managers ignored their voices in some way, which had a devastating effect on their performance.
Over 74% of employees felt more effective at work when their concerns were heard by the management.
Engagement is directly related to being heard in the workplace. Around 92% of engaged employees felt they were heard by more than 30% of disengaged employees.
The above statistics highlight the importance of hearing out the employees and taking appropriate action on that. Through employee engagement surveys, organizations can break the shackles and prompt their employees to share realistic feedback.
Predictor Of Employee Behavior
Employee behavior is central to the success of an organization. Much of how employees behave in their day-to-day lives predicts the culture of the company and ultimately drives results. Predicting employee behavior can result in multiple benefits for human resource managers. It helps in understanding the level of commitment of employees towards the organization and how long they are willing to serve them.
It has been observed that asking people in employee engagement surveys how long they are willing to serve the organization is twice as accurate in forecasting future turnover as a predictive analysis. Additionally, surveys also help in predicting the number of upcoming resignations. It has been found that employees who do not respond to annual engagement surveys are highly likely to leave in the next six months.
Employee engagement is critical to the success of an organization. By undertaking various engagement initiatives, organizations can improve their overall performance and create a dynamic workforce. Much research has shown that engagement is an indicator of progress, and companies with higher engagement indices do well, even in unprecedented situations.
Employee Engagement Surveys are a great tool to measure engagement at various levels of the organization. Let us look at some of its benefits.
Industry Benchmarks
Engagement is the result of multiple activities that an organization undertakes. The product of these activities vary across countries and industries. Consequently, organizations that are expanding to different geographies need to understand what engages their employees the most.
Knowing where the organization falls on the engagement spectrum provides a bigger picture of the organization’s policies and practices. With the help of employee engagement surveys, upper management can compare the organization with the industry leaders and focus their efforts on improving engagement.
Frequent surveying provides a glimpse of changing trends in employee engagement and experience. Thus, HR managers can understand which strategies are helping out the organization and which obstacles need to be removed.
Preventing Revenue Loss And Catastrophic Mistakes
An estimate by Gallup states that the US companies lose between $450-$500 billion12 due to actively disengaged employees. This is on top of the revenue loss due to the pandemic and the shift in the external business environment.
The statistics clearly indicate the importance of adopting employee engagement initiatives at all levels of the organization. The higher the level of employee disengagement, the higher the chances of making costly and catastrophic mistakes. Therefore, to prevent losing out on revenue, it is critical to hear employee feedback and take appropriate action to boost employee engagement in both the short and long term.
Employee Mental Health And Overall Wellbeing
Depression and anxiety are the leading causes of loss of productivity and employee engagement. It has a tremendous impact on the world economy; the world stands out on losing over $1 trillion every year due to a loss of employee productivity. (World Health Organization13)
Another survey14 by SHRM found that of 1,099 surveyed employees, around 40% felt exhausted, burned out, and despondent due to the alteration in their lives caused by the pandemic.
There is no doubt that the pandemic has taken a toll on the mental health of employees. Aggravated by the long working hours and stress of family and child healthcare, things have gotten even worse. Employee wellbeing has become a priority for employers, and organizations globally are investing heavily to counter the effects of the pandemic on the mental health of their employees.
But, how do organizations identify that their employees are stressed and in need of support? Employee engagement surveys offer insightful data to understand the employee’s wellbeing and the peculiar areas that are a cause of concern for them. Furthermore, employers can also focus on the departments or business units with highly disengaged employees and focus on their improvement to prevent breakdown.
Employee Turnover Data Analysis
The information collected in engagement surveys can be used to analyze the employee turnover data. By comparing the responses of employees with the turnover data, HR managers can comprehend the areas of employee experience that need improvement in order to contain attrition.
The process involves comparing the responses of employees who left the organization within 3–6 months of conducting the engagement survey. It reveals how employees felt about the organization and their overall experience before leaving. Furthermore, the perceptions of such employees can then be compared with the ones who stayed to gauge the reasons for employee turnover. Managers can then intervene in the areas that need improvement and strategize a plan to increase engagement and enhance the overall experience.
Connecting Engagement Initiatives To Key Business Results
Leaders throughout the world believe engagement to be one of the five most important strategies in creating a revolutionary organization. But the biggest challenge they are trying to solve is tying employee engagement initiatives to key business results. Having an engagement survey is not enough if it cannot produce the desired results. Therefore, to get the most out of the surveys, human resource managers need to develop them in accordance with the key business indicators, such as customer centricity, overall stakeholder value, company reputation, and brand building.
Such an amalgamation of business outcomes with employee engagement surveys helps in strategizing the operations across different departments. Furthermore, it can bring important insights that help in charting out how organizations utilize their employees in unprecedented situations, such as the sudden change in the business environment, regulatory compliance, new competitors, and changing customer expectations.
Creating an employee engagement survey is a tedious task. It requires months of planning to address the areas that the survey should touch upon, and the involvement of employees from every level of the organization. To yield actionable results from surveys, HR managers should consider forming a cross-functional team of experts to look into different aspects of survey creation. The following points highlight the extensive process of creating employee engagement surveys.
Define The Purpose of Survey
Employee engagement encompasses various factors, and working on all of them in one go is not possible. Though it can be tempting to include multiple focus areas in the survey, it might confuse the employees and digress from the current state of the company. Thereby a result, providing inaccurate results.
At the time of discerning, it is crucial to identify three or four high priority objectives, especially where engagement and productivity are lacking. For example, if customer acquisition and retention, employee turnover, and decreasing sales volume are the areas of concern, then the survey should only focus on these factors.
Involvement Of Leadership
For the survey to produce any results, the involvement of leadership is a must. The dynamics of leader-employee relationships are not one-directional, and that’s why involving leaders in employee engagement exercises can give direction and purpose to the process.
In the initial phase of survey planning, human resources managers must reach out to organizational leaders to get their input on the objectives of the survey. This also ensures they have a vested interest in taking action on the survey results.
Review Previous Surveys
While designing an employee engagement survey, HR managers can refer to the previous surveys to inculcate best practices and improvise on the ones that did not work well. It can offer meaningful insights, such as which survey designs were liked by employees, the response rate, accuracy of results, core focus areas covered, actions taken on the feedback, timeframe adopted for the whole process, and the overall engagement score. Such action points will help in designing the survey to bring in better results from employees.
Consider The Timing Of Survey
The timing of the survey is of great importance in order to get a higher response rate and data accuracy. HR managers should consider the following do’s and don’ts when deciding on the timing of the survey.
Engagement Survey Frequency
The frequency of conducting a survey is of the utmost importance. Some organizations conduct surveys annually and then wait for a year to collect input from their employees. Much has already happened in the gap, and if their surveys are not accompanied by action, then it might result in disgruntled employees.
Therefore, human resource managers must conduct engagement surveys regularly in order to send a message that employees’ inputs are being valued.
Drafting Questions That Provide Actionable Results
Drafting good survey questions is time-consuming. It generally requires collaboration from multilevel, cross-functional teams to understand whether the surveys target the organization’s key objectives or not. The questionnaire must cover all the aspects that are relevant to the purpose of the engagement survey. The quality of questions has a statistically significant effect on the survey findings; hence, one must take the utmost interest and care while designing them.
The questions must be drafted in a manner that elicits an accurate response from the employees. Open-ended employee engagement questions must be included in the survey questionnaire. It helps employees voice their opinions and ideas. Furthermore, managers can analyze the collected responses and can dig into the areas that they would’ve never considered looking into.
Testing the questionnaire is also important to understand the relevance and accuracy of the collected data. Organizations use techniques such as focus groups, cognitive interviews, pretesting, and combinations of these to test the survey. Thereafter, the insights collected from testing are used to refine the questions.
Select The Best Employee Engagement Survey Template
An employee engagement survey template includes questions that measure the motivation and engagement of employees to perform their job duties. Additionally, the responses collected from the survey are useful in understanding the performance, competence, and satisfaction of employees.
A template comes in handy when conducting a survey, as it helps in gathering, organizing, and analyzing the data collected from employees. A good template should be customizable as per the needs of the organization and must highlight the areas that need improvement.
Designing Surveys to Inform Better Decisions & Drive Meaningful Outcomes
Survey design requires some art, but even more science. Some research estimates that employees are surveyed 1.5 times per year. Given this fact it’s important that we implement sound practices in the design of organization surveys that help inform key business decisions.
When it comes to survey design validity is essential, it determines what survey questions to use, and helps ensure that we are using questions that accurately measure the issues of importance. Validity ensures that we are measuring what we say we are measuring.
The Engagedly Team has spent time and effort constructing an engagement survey that is valid, supported by research, and reviewed by industry experts. Now our clients can confidently assess employee engagement within their organization in a few simple steps. This new product offering provides our clients with an easy-to-administer employee engagement survey built around evidence based practices. Additionally, we provide insights to better understand employee engagement within and across the company while highlighting key strengths and areas for opportunity as well.
Now more than ever we can all benefit from thinking more like a scientist by applying more rigor and critical thinking in the work that we do. At Engagedly that is our responsibility, to marry science and practice, wherever and whenever possible.
Once the engagement survey is created, it is time to get it rolling. There are a few things that managers need to consider before they decide to roll out the survey. Following the best practices for employee engagement surveys will help in getting accurate results. Some of the tactics to be followed are discussed below.
Communicate The Employee Engagement Survey Purpose
Effective participation in surveys happens only when employees are clear about the purpose of the survey. To encourage employees to participate in the survey, organizations need to clearly communicate the following to their employees:
What is the purpose of conducting the engagement survey?
What does the organization want to accomplish by taking feedback from employees?
What steps will the organization take upon completion of the survey and the anticipated results?
How will the survey help employees in their day-to-day activities?
The projected timeline of events starting from conducting the survey to analyzing the results.
Emphasizing the importance of the survey to both employees and employers.
Maintain Employee Anonymity
It is important to keep the employee engagement survey anonymous. The reason behind this is that employees feel less anxious about the survey and are ready to provide open feedback without the fear of any retribution. Additionally, employee anonymity increases the likelihood of getting more responses.
By veiling the employee’s identity, surveys can prompt them to share their candid responses regarding the leadership styles, culture, interpersonal relations, support from managers, and other relevant areas that organizations want to mull over. Thus, it helps in gathering more responses with higher accuracy, leading to a better analysis of the data.
Commit To Taking Action
A sense of purpose is essential for an employee to work productively and contribute towards organizational growth. Without this, employers will lose their best talent to their competitors who value their employees more.
Taking action is the most crucial step in conducting a successful employee engagement survey. Employees value their employers more when they see their feedback is taken into consideration. Therefore, sharing key findings of the survey in a timely manner with the employees is important. By involving the workforce in survey findings, employers can make them feel valued and responsible for the solutions.
Please note that acting on survey findings also avoids “survey fatigue.”It refers to a lack of motivation to participate in assessments and can lead to fewer and (or) inaccurate responses. The fundamental reason behind survey fatigue, as found by McKinsey15 after reviewing 20 academic articles, is the perception that employers will not act on the results.
Often, employers do not tend to share the results or communicate with their employees after conducting the survey. This leads to an employee perception that employers do not value their responses.
On the contrary, sharing and acting on survey results leads to better response and participation from employees in future surveys. The below discussed best practices for employee engagement surveys will help in making surveys more effective and impactful.
Designing and conducting surveys takes a long time, and by not following the best practices, there is a good chance that it will not achieve its purpose. Asking questions that are ineffectively designed will lead to low response rates and inaccurate data. Thus, to avoid wasting time, effort, and money, it is pivotal to follow certain guidelines. The following points talk about employee engagement survey best practices that will help in designing and conducting surveys constructively.
Keep The Survey Short And Simple
Keeping the survey short and simple is an effective way to increase the response rate. The ideal number of questions to be kept in an engagement survey is around 75. And, it should not take more than 20 to 30 minutes for an employee to answer all the questions. Furthermore, try to avoid repetitive questions and confusing language. It may lead to vague responses if the employee is unable to understand the questions.
HR managers should also look into the previous surveys as well, to understand the optimal number of questions that got the highest response from employees.
Avoid Grouping Key Focus Areas
Grouping the key focus areas may confuse the employees and will result in uninterpretable responses. Avoid using double-barrelled questions regarding pay and benefits, growth and satisfaction, and learning and motivation. Even when the focus areas are closely related, grouping them will not be beneficial.
For example, an employee may find the pay satisfactory but not the benefits, or vice versa. In such a case, the surveyor will not be able to interpret the response, leaving no chance to create an improvement plan.
While building a questionnaire, managers should clearly segregate the categories and create questions around them. This will avoid any sort of confusion among respondents.
Involve Employees In Survey Design And Analysis
Before rolling out the survey to the whole organization, it is crucial to run it through a set of selected people to test its structure, consistency, and accuracy. It will help in redesigning unclear and ambiguous questions and will further refine the survey.
Involving heads of business units and departments in the design and analysis phases offers numerous benefits. They can highlight the areas that seem to be problematic and need to be addressed through surveys. Furthermore, they can help in laying down a strong foundation for examining the survey findings, leading to better analysis and actionable results.
Using Neutral Statements In Questions
The survey should have a mix of both positive and negative statements. Having plenty of positive statements such as “my manager understands my concerns” or “my team is quite responsive” will make the survey too rosy. Similarly, using too many negative statements will also subdue the intent of asking questions. Therefore, it is better to use neutral statements wherever possible, as they will elicit the best response from respondents.
Questions To Avoid
Management may want to include questions about age, gender, race, and other demographics to look into the trends or concerns of a group. For example, if women of color find the workplace to be responsible for their growth and development, or if employees in their 50s find the workplace more stressful. But such questions may raise one’s eyebrows, as employees might believe that management might use the data to target those specific groups. Thus, it is necessary to avoid or limit such questions in an engagement survey.
Another set of questions to limit is asking nice things about the management and focusing on the things that can be acted upon. Too many questions about management’s efficiency can put off the respondents. Instead, try to understand things from the employees’ perspective.
Question Behavior Rather Than Motive Or Thoughts
Questions about the thoughts, traits, and motives of an individual are disputable and will not provide any actionable data. The line of questioning should involve the observable behavior of the employee to understand their involvement and engagement. Thus, avoiding opinion-based questions in the survey will remove distortion from the results.
Another important aspect to work upon is removing personal bias from the survey. The questions should be drafted in a way that prevents any sort of bias from influencing the results. For example, asking questions about productivity and involvement of female employees can skew the purpose of the survey.
Include Some Verifiable Questions
Including questions with variable responses will help in establishing the validity of the survey. Such questions provide quantifiable data to understand if the responses collected are in line with reality. For example, a survey can include questions about the leadership of a particular department. The responses collected from the questions can be verified with objective measures like employee retention and overall departmental productivity. These measures will help in verifying the exactness of the collected data.
Another example could be asking questions about customer satisfaction from the client service department. The responses can be verified using metrics like call drops, frequency of calls from the same customer, and feedback submitted by the customer. The correlation of these metrics with the customer satisfaction index is a great measure to verify the survey responses.
What To Do With Employee Engagement Survey Results
The employee engagement survey forms the baseline for creating an action plan and implementing it across the organization. The real job starts after collecting the responses of employees in various key focus areas. Response data has to be thoroughly analyzed and subjected to various tests to check for validity and accuracy. To get the most out of the feedback results, management must follow the following steps to create a strategic action plan.
Share Employee Engagement Survey Results
There are multiple benefits to communicating employee engagement survey results. Firstly, it helps in building trust and shows employees that their responses are being taken into consideration. Secondly, it brings transparency to the system, which eliminates confusion, and thirdly, it creates a channel of communication between management and employees.
Sharing results with business heads helps them prepare to take action and hold discussions within the departments to find the root cause of the problems. Some issues will pertain to departments, and they can find the best solution by looking at the granular level of data.
The survey results usually provide insights about engagement, productivity, satisfaction, and other elements. Weaving them into a story will help employees understand the rationale behind the survey. Therefore, using a suitable medium like a presentation or an infographic, to highlight the results while narrating the importance of each focus area will be more effective.
Analyze & Identify Areas Of Concern
Analysis of survey results helps in finding the areas of concern and creating an action plan accordingly. Categorizing the results into different segments will help transform the data into actionable items. While some organizations rely on manual segmentation and analysis, some have transitioned to engagement platforms that come with tech-advanced algorithms to accurately analyze and interpret the data.
Such platforms help in providing a deeper understanding of every key focus area. For example, the survey results might show a positive organizational culture, but digging deeper into the data can reveal information about departments that are lacking support. Such an analysis is imperative for large-scale organizations with multiple business units and departments.
Facilitate Discussion Within Teams
Once the survey results are out, it is time to act on them and find solutions to the problems. By running post-survey meetings, organizations can ask people from different departments to brainstorm and come up with the right solutions. The purpose of these meetings is to involve people and give them an open channel to discuss issues and chart out an improvement plan.
Business heads or team leads must ensure that all employees participate in the process and establish a link between the survey results and employees’ perceptions. During the meetings, the problem statement must be clearly defined with the focus areas, and every employee must be given an opportunity to provide their thoughts on it. Through this process, employers can gather first-hand information directly from the employees who are facing trouble.
Make & Implement Decisions
The data gathered during engagement surveys and post-survey meetings helps in pinning down the problems. Leaders can utilize this information to create organizational-wide goals and cascade them to different business units.
Using Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle16 can help in streamlining the implementation process and providing observable changes and corrective actions to refine the processes. Introduced by Dr. W. Edwards Deming17 in the 1950s, PDCA is an iterative technique that helps improve business processes. It is used in designing and implementing decisions in the following manner:
Plan: It provides the framework for operations and is directly related to the goals and objectives of the survey findings.
Do: Also known as the action stage, the plan is set into motion and the insights are gathered for future evaluation. All the employees related to the focus areas to be worked upon are involved in this process. It may involve training, re-skilling, mentoring, coaching, and other significant activities required to improve staff engagement.
Check: Evaluating the action plan should be done in two steps. Once during the implementation process, as it helps in checking if the goals are correctly aligned, and twice at the end of the implementation to address the success and failure of the activities.
Act: At this stage, the reasons for the failure and success of the program are collected and used as feedback for running the next PDCA cycle.
Employee Engagement Survey Questions form the foundation of measuring engagement in multiple aspects. They should focus on solving organizational problems, get candid responses from employees, and intend to find the strengths and weaknesses of the organization.
Touching the core areas of engagement, such as satisfaction, leadership, culture, work environment, learning and development, organizational mission, and values, is imperative to have an overarching understanding of employee engagement. Let us look at some sample questions on different areas of engagement.
Sample Employee Engagement Survey Questions
Employee Work
I get a sense of accomplishment from my work.
I have access to all the tools and resources required to be productive at work.
The volume of work I have is manageable.
I feel my work is being valued.
Workplace Communication
My views and thoughts are taken into account while making decisions.
I am able to openly share my thoughts and experiences in my department.
I am well informed about the organizational values and policies.
I feel the communication models used by the organization are effective and sufficient.
Organizational Culture & Strategy
I feel the organization is open to feedback and criticism.
The organization is able to adapt to the changing business needs.
The organization is equipped to meet the challenges.
New ideas and innovation form the core strength of any organization.
I feel that my job is secure.
Employee Manager
My manager encourages me to take action and initiatives.
My manager provides honest feedback to me.
I need enough support from my manager to succeed in my role.
My manager is involved in my learning and development.
Leadership
I trust the leaders and their vision for the organization.
I see strong evidence of effective leadership in my business/unit head.
I see leaders committed to the organizational goals.
I am clear about the organizational mission and vision.
Learning & Development
I trust the process of learning and development being followed by the organization.
I have ample opportunities to grow and learn in my current job profile.
I get regular feedback from my manager.
The appraisal process is justified and helps me understand my quarterly and annual goals.
Employee Engagement
I am proud on the work that I do
I am immersed in my work
I find the work that I do provides me with purpose and meaning
Time flies when I’m working
I try my hardest to perform well on my job
I am fulfilled by the work that I do
Open Ended Employee Engagement Survey Questions
Open-ended questions provide deeper insights by encouraging employees to express their opinions and experiences. With the help of responses, it can become relatively easier to understand the cause of a problem. That’s why including such questions in engagement surveys is helpful. Check out the sample open-ended questions in the section below.
What improvements would you like to see in the organization?
Rate your overall experience on a scale of 1 to 10. Give reasons for the rating.
What changes would you like to see in the company’s policies?
What changes did you see in the organization since the last survey?
What strategies would you suggest the organization include for better work-life balance?
Much of the organization’s efforts in today’s world revolve around creating a dynamic, smart, adaptive, and engaged workforce. Organizations with a high engagement index are leading the way and utilizing various strategies for employee development.
Employee engagement surveys give employees a voice and assist employers in identifying areas for improvement.By taking employee feedback into consideration, organizations can dramatically improve their productivity and efficiency.
“To win in the marketplace, you must first win in the workplace!” —Doug Conant, Founder, Constant Leadership.
As a manager, it is your responsibility to lead your team effectively. The way you conduct yourself before them, affects their productivity significantly. There are many challenging issues that you have to deal with as a manger. One of such issues is not being able to improve team engagement at work.
As the corporate world is evolving for the better, the dimensions of project management are also witnessing major overhauls. The progression of the contemporary business world is quite synonymous with rampant digitalization. With technology at the helm, both companies and projects are now going remote. Having said that, it is time that project managers undertake the objective of incorporating project management skills desired for the future.
It is an undeniable fact that, alongside transformations in the corporate world, the competition is also growing at a swift pace. Ultimately, it all boils down to the parameters of skills that are meant for future success. Organizations will look to invest in people equipped with skills relevant to the future. So, irrespective of whether you are already working as a project manager or you aspire to be one, the last thing you would want to do is to be complacent about your skills.
No matter how skilled you are at present, to succeed in the long run, you need to upskill yourself. It will help you build competencies in alignment with how the corporate scenario is shaping. You need to invest in your skills today so that you can relish great success in the future.
Having said that, this thoughtful blog sheds light on the pivotal project management skills that are salient for future success. So, let’s elaborate on the verticals of project management that you need to focus on keeping your future career ambitions in mind.
Salient project management skills for future success
1. Virtual collaboration skills
Remote project management is the new normal in this revamped business world. It is quite evident that more and more businesses will take the remote or hybrid route in the coming years. In fact, a Gartner CFO survey concludes that by 2025, 74 percent of employers might shift their employees to permanent remote work. Clearly, the remote working culture will thrive at a greater momentum in the near future.
As a project manager, you need to work on skills that are crucial to successful remote project management. Speaking of the prerequisite skills for remote project management, virtual collaboration skills will hold the key. You will have to collaborate virtually with your team members and coordinate with much greater efficiency.
It is noteworthy that as per SalesForce, 86 percent of employees cite ineffective collaboration as the principal reason for project failures. In remote project handling, the vulnerabilities of project mismanagement will be even higher. Having said that, your virtual collaboration skills have to be flawless and should set an ideal template of collaboration for other team members to follow.
Your effectiveness at collaboration in the remote setup will have a critical role to play in the success of projects. Moreover, you also need to work on your adaptability skills to get used to the latest project management tools and software that will drive remote project management.State-of-the-art project management tools hold the key to the future of project management and you ought to briskly adapt to the latest tools in practice.
2. Open communication
Effective communication is and will always remain the key to organizational success at all levels. But in remote projects, the significance of open and elaborative communication will be much greater than ever before. Clear descriptions and instructions need to be communicated across digital channels with great effectiveness.
Thus, you need to further optimize your communication skills to attain the anticipated future success. The focus needs to be on open communication such that every team member understands project details, instructions, roles, and key performance indicators with precision.
Besides, you need to espouse the art of continuous feedback sharing to manage team performance. Needless to say, for this purpose too, you would require excellent communication skills. Projects will have the best chance of succeeding when faultless communication happens at all levels. It will ensure that team members are on the same page and have a sense of direction.
Being at the helm, open and transparentstrategic communication will be your responsibility. In fact, when it comes to communication skills, there will always be a scope of improvement, no matter how proficient you are. This is one skill for which you should commit yourself to consistent learning. Also, you ought to bolster your communication skills with active listening and attention to detail.
3. Effective cost management
You may otherwise have great abilities to manage and motivate teams, but if you are not very effective at cost management, it can turn out to be a roadblock in your career advancement. Cost is a key concern for organizations and the idea often is to deliver successful projects in accordance with lean budgets.
Therefore, to attain greater success as a project manager, you need to consolidate your budgetary planning skills along with a 9/80 work schedule. You need to learn how projects can be budgeted in an efficient manner while also taking contingencies into consideration. In the ultimate sense, your value as a project manager will be viewed in terms of your ability to deliver excellent projects at low costs.
The lower the cost of projects, the greater will be the profitability of an organization. Coherent to that, the greater will be your career advancement. In fact, in the coming years, project costs will be a key criterion for the success of businesses. It will emerge as an even more important differentiating factor for businesses to compete with each other.
The onus will be on the project managers to stick to the designated budgets. In fact, you should be the one suggesting smart cost-cutting ideas to your employer without compromising on project quality.
Download the case study to know how Experian saved time and money when they shifted to Engagedly.
The demand for emotional intelligence is growing at an exponential pace in the contemporary corporate world. In the coming years, we will see the relevance of EQ in the workplace amplify further. To substantiate, as perPR Newswire, more than 65 percent of people think that EQ in the workplace is either equally important or more important when seen in contrast to IQ. To add, 95 percent of HR managers believe that it is important that employees have EQ.
EQ is the ability of an individual to manage and control their emotions in an effective way to produce positive outcomes. Besides, people with high EQ are also proficient in steering the emotions of others in a positive direction to lead them to the desired results. It is an exceptional skill to have and certainly, there is a dearth of people with high EQ.
If we look at most people around us, they are vulnerable to being overdriven by negative emotional influences. It is common for people to feel overwhelmed by their emotions at times and end up making regretful decisions. However, such mistakes cannot be made when you are leading projects that are crucial for your organization. Emotional intelligence is highly quintessential for people in leadership roles.
As a project manager, you need to channel the emotions of your team in the right direction, such that their emotional influences do not interfere with the progress of the project. Also, you need to be empathetic towards your team members and respect their emotions.
In an empathetic team culture, they will be able to sideline their emotional insecurities and focus on their tasks. It is noteworthy that empathy is one of the most prominent traits of a high EQ. In fact, EQ in itself is a spectrum of different skills, each of which is essential for career success. The key components of emotional intelligence besides empathy are listed below.
Self-awareness
Self-regulation
Intrinsic motivation
Social Skills
As you can see, each of the above skills defines the modern-day core competencies of managers and leaders. This explains why employers and recruiters are now inclined toward hiring managers that promise exemplary emotional intelligence. EQ is a skill that can make you stand out from others. In fact, going into the future, it will emerge as one of the most imperative career skills for success and advancement. You have to make sure that you work on this crucial aspect of skill-building.
5. Critical Intellect
Jumping to conclusions without assessing the available information and verifying facts can be disastrous, isn’t it? This coming from a project manager can undoubtedly spell trouble for any organization. As a project manager, you will always have the added responsibility to examine the details and information in an intellectual way. In simpler words, you will need excellent critical thinking skills to perform with great efficiency.
Given the fact that every project is of key significance to an organization, you cannot simply choose to run through things. You need to act with attention to detail and critically evaluate all project details to streamline processes and set the course of action for a given project. Critical intellect is in direct correlation with responsible and appropriate decision-making.
Moreover, another trait of critical thinkers is that they take everyone’s perspective into account before making decisions. From the perspective of project management success, it is imperative that project managers promote inclusiveness in decision-making. When you lead a team, you need to give each team member a strong sense of cohesion and belonging. You can do that best when you have distinguishable critical thinking skills.
The more critical your thinking gets as a project manager, the more optimized the outcomes you will be able to produce in terms of successful projects. It is an essential skill for people in leadership and managerial roles as it directly impacts their ability in terms of team management and intellect.
Besides, being a critical thinker, you will have a more productive and intelligible approach to resolving conflicts in your team. Conflicts among team members are a common phenomenon, and conflict resolution is one of the key metrics for evaluating project managers. For success across all these metrics, you need to be an extraordinarily critical thinker.
6. Creativity
Creativity is the foundation of stellar innovation and exceptional problem-solving abilities. Project managers need to be at the best of these capabilities at all times and hence, creativity becomes quintessential for future success. In fact, LinkedIn Learning infers that creativity as a career skill is of utmost significance across all domains. Moreover, as per IBM, a majority of CEOs are of the opinion that creativity will be the single most important factor driving future success.
Having said that, to prosper your career in the competitive domain of project management, you need to complement your expertise with class apart creativity. You would need to innovate at different stages of projects to optimize the process and the ultimate outcome. Along similar lines, you will have to navigate through challenges to ensure project success. Needless to say, almost all projects involve some complicated challenges that you need to overcome swiftly.
As long as you have a strong creative intellect, you can deal with project complexities in an impressive and brisk manner. Besides, you will also have to overcome team management challenges in addition to project complications. This explains why organizations will prioritize project management candidates that display exemplary creative intellect. It is time you pay greater heed to the development of your creative and problem-solving skills.
7. Resilience
Project managers are no less than leaders and leaders ought to display great resilience. If you envisage enormous success as a project manager over the coming years, you need to supplement it with resilience. It is your ability to withstand adverse situations, pressing problems, and challenges that will establish your worth as a leader.
Your team members will look up to you for support and guidance during adversities. You ought to inspire them to embrace the challenges and bring out the best in them. Besides, you need to model for them how one can sustain productivity and focus when things are not going right. For that, you need to have a character with distinct resilience and conviction.
We all witnessed how things began to fall apart at the advent of the unprecedented COVID-19 crisis. Those who were resilient enough to face such an unexpected challenge did far better in terms of coping than others. Resilient leaders were at the forefront of damage control that businesses had to bear in the face of the pandemic.
To continue, organizations would not be much interested in appointing project managers that crumble under pressure or challenging scenarios. They will rather be on the lookout for resilient and motivated leaders who can embrace challenges and keep their team morale high in a crisis. Interestingly, contemporary organizations are striving hard to build resilient workforces. So, if resilience is a key trait of your personality, you will, by default, have a competitive advantage.
To recapitulate, the corporate world is undergoing some paradigm shifts, and corresponding to that, the perception of prerequisite career skills is also changing. Speaking of project management specifically, as the trend of remote projects thrives further, project managers will need new dimensions of upskilling for future success. If you want to give yourself a competitive advantage over others amid the growing competition, the essential project management skills mentioned above will pave the way forward. To get to know more of the soft skills a project manager should possess and how to hone them, read this article by Toptal.
Want to know how Engagedly can help you manage your tasks better? Request for a live demo.
Jessica Robinson is a charismatic corporate leader, a selfless educator, and a versatile content creator. Despite a management degree, her vision behind blogging is not only to follow her passion but to create more informed societies. Her selflessness reflects in every piece of her work on The Speaking Polymath.
If you have been keeping your ear to the ground, upskilling and reskilling have been the buzzwords of the HR industry for a long time now. But with the pandemic changing the way everyone works, it has become a prime focus for organizations to keep the workforce agile.
HR leaders and managers often end up creating complicated and disconnected upskilling and reskilling strategies for their employees. They are mostly based on business needs, and employees are rarely involved in the process. As a result, it fails to align with employees’ personal and professional goals. Ultimately, such initiatives feel forced and tend to disengage the employees.
Skill Gap Analysis helps organizations to map the skill inventory with business needs and goals. They are able to bridge the gap between the desired and current skills of the workforce and plan for the future. It helps in identifying knowledge and skills missing from the workforce. Career pathing, on the other hand, is the process by which employees chart their career progression and development within the organization. It requires a sound understanding of one’s own skills, goals, competencies, knowledge, personal characteristics, and experience.
A proper understanding of skill gap analysis and career pathing of employees helps in designing effective upskilling and reskilling strategies. When organizations align skill training with an employee’s career path, they are more engaged and satisfied working at the organization.
Shortlist The Eligible Employees
This is one of the most difficult tasks in an upskilling and reskilling initiative. After career pathing and skill gap analysis are over, the next step involves short-listing the eligible employees. It requires thoroughly understanding the skills of each employee and asking the following questions to self as an employer:
Is it going to be a department/organization-wide initiative or only for a selected few?
Will technology changes or other factors affect any department drastically that will require employee reskilling?
If it is for an employee, then what impact it will have on the employee’s current team?
Have I identified the critical skills of the employees?
How to utilize the secondary and tertiary skills of the employees?
Do the employee’s professional goals align with the business goals?
Will the cost of upskilling/reskilling be more than the cost of onboarding new hires?
It will give a clear vision and a better understanding of which employees to select for reskilling and upskilling initiatives.
Once the candidates have been shortlisted, the next step involves choosing the correct method for upskilling and reskilling your employees. Here are some common ways:
1) Learning and Development:It is one of the most common upskilling and reskilling initiatives adopted by organizations.
Give your employees access to online academies such as edX, Udemy, Coursera, etc. These online learning options are easily accessible from anywhere and anytime, thus making the process more flexible. It also gives them access to a wide variety of options to learn from.
Organize skill-specific trainings, workshops, seminars, etc., for your employees by industry-recognized experts. Currently, as everything is remote, virtual platforms such as Zoom and Google Meet can be utilized to conduct these events.
2) Job Shadowing and Rotation: Job shadowing is a budget-friendly reskilling process in which an employee follows the day-to-day activities of an experienced employee. The new employee or the employee who wants to be reskilled follows and observes everything the experienced employee does. It helps employees to understand the daily tasks and take up a new position easily.
Job rotations are generally time bound and require employees to work in different departments of the organization. It helps them to understand how other departments function. And also, it gives them ideas on how to improve their own department. Job rotations improve employee retention as employees get more flexibility to change roles within the organization.
3) Mentoring: According to Forbes, 70% of Fortune 500 companies have a mentoring program in place.
Mentoring is an effective way for employees to connect with the seniors of the organization. Presence of a mentor in these uncertain times will be helpful for your employees. Mentoring will not only help them develop professionally but personally too. It also helps them to connect better with the senior leadership and the organization. Invest in mentoring software such as Mentoring Complete that uses their proprietary algorithm and a 3 step matching process to find the correct mentor-mentee match.
4) Form Learning Communities:Often, employees who are at a similar level or are from the same department show interest in learning the same new skills. It is a great opportunity for organizations to create peer learning platforms. Employees with similar interests can collaborate and learn together. It will give them a common platform to share learning content, guides, study materials, industry-related news, etc. Not only will it help them learn, but will also allow them to connect with others and stay engaged.
5) Digital & Soft Skills: Although this is not a method of upskilling or reskilling your employees, focussing on digital and soft skills is vital for all organizations.
When the pandemic hit, everything became remote and employees became completely technology dependent. Consequently, it is important for employees to stay continuously updated with the changes taking place in technology. As employers, train your employees on the latest software, tools, and applications that will help them work remotely efficiently. It will especially be helpful to the older generation of employees and bridge the digital gap.
Often organizations focus too much on hard skills or technical skills and tend to ignore the soft skills. Hard skills are important, but so are soft skills. Teamwork, communication, time management, leadership, etc. are some of the common soft skills which are required by employees in the long run.
Measure Success
Just upskilling and reskilling your employees is not the end. Measuring the success of the process is as important. Set up parameters and metrics to track success. Connect with your employees from time to time, learn how they are implementing their new skills and how it is helping them in their job roles. Conduct 360 degree feedback and employee surveys involving their managers and team members. It will give an accurate view of your employee’s performance. The reskilling and upskilling programs can be iterated accordingly.
Encourage Continuous Learning
Reskilling and upskilling is a continuous process and not a one-time process. Promote a culture of learning, growth, and development in the workplace. Employees should be enthusiastic about learning new skills and improve themselves. They should be excited about and eager to choose their own learning paths and development process. When employees are open to the process of learning, implementing reskilling and upskilling initiatives will become easy.
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When the pandemic began 1.5 years back, organizations saw a rapid change in the way they functioned. Not only this, the skill gap which was prevalent because of technology, increased after COVID hit. It became a challenge for organizations and leaders to fill the ever-increasing skill gap accelerated by the pandemic. The solution comes with upskilling and reskilling your employees. With the volatile nature of business and rapidly changing economy, now is the right time for HR leaders and employers to start these initiatives. It will not only help them in bridging the skill gap, but also help them achieve higher retention rates.
Upskilling and reskilling, although used interchangeably, have completely different meanings and significance. Both are ways for businesses to help their employees grow in the organization and improve their skills.
Upskilling – Upskilling involves employees improvising on the existing skill sets that help them grow in the current role. It ultimately prepares them to take up greater responsibilities and move to more senior roles.
Reskilling –Reskilling refers to employees learning new skills to move to different job roles in the organization. This is mainly done in two scenarios:
i) When an employee wishes to learn new skill sets and transition to a new role in the organization. ii) When an employer wishes to retain an existing employee and train them on new skills for a new role within the organization.
According to McKinsey, organizations that implemented reskilling programs were better able to address the skill gap created by technological advancement.
Skill Gap Analysis is a tool or process which helps in identifying and bridging the gap between the current skills and desired skills of the workforce. It helps employers and organizations to identify the training needs, uncover gaps, and help in succession planning, and career progression of employees. It serves as a tool for identifying individuals or teams suitable for upskilling and reskilling according to changing business needs.
Benefits of Upskilling And Reskilling Your Employees
Improves Employee Retention: Employees when see that their organization is invested in their career development and growth, they tend to stay with the organization for a longer period. It shows that employers and organizations care for their employees, which helps in retaining top talent and improves the overall retention rate.
Saves Costs: Hiring and training a new employee is costly! Getting a new hire onboard involves costs in terms of time and money. SHRM estimates that in the U.S. cost per hire is $4000, and takes about 42 days to fill a new position. Whenever an organization plans for a new hire, some of the costs involved is:
Advertising for a new role on job portals
Short-listing and interviewing candidates
Readjusting budget to meet new hire’s salary expectations
Waiting for the new hire’s term of employment to get over at the previous organization
Onboarding the new hire
Training them
Instead of hiring someone from outside the organization, upskilling and reskilling your own employees reduces the cost significantly. Although it involves the cost of training, it is much less than what goes into hiring someone new.
Helps Bridge The Digital Gap: The new generation of workforce is tech-savvy and cognizant of all the changes taking place in the field of AI, analytics, digital marketing, cloud computing, and so on. Upskilling and reskilling opportunities will help the older generation of employees to adapt to digital technologies easily. It will not only make them technology cognizant, but will also help them perform their roles effectively.
Builds A Culture Of Learning: Upskilling and reskilling initiatives create a culture of continuous learning in the organization. Learning becomes an ongoing process for all the employees. Employees continuously learn and hone their skills to stay updated with the latest in-demand skills in the market.
Workforce Is Resilient: Upskilling and reskilling your workforce prepares them for the future. It helps them to adapt easily and makes them more resilient to market changes. In a tumultuous pandemic-stricken business market like this, a resilient workforce is what makes a business stronger.
Employees become more engaged: A continuous culture of upskilling and reskilling keeps employees engaged and motivated. They become satisfied and happy at work. It increases the efficiency and productivity of the employees and the organization.
Upskilling and reskilling have now become an integral part of organization strategy and the way to sustain businesses in the post-pandemic era. Have you identified your employees who are eligible for upskilling and reskilling yet?
According to a recent research by Forbes, 80% of employees agree that video conferencing is the go-to method of communication among internal teams, and 84% agree that it is preferable over audio conferencing for communicating with external stakeholders.
With the transition that has happened over the past one and a half years, virtual meetings have become a common thing for all remote teams. From board meetings to Fun-Fridays, everything has gone virtual. Zoom, Skype, and Google Meet are some common tools on which we now spend hours collaborating with internal and external teams. Thus, video conferencing etiquettes have become important for the meetings to be professional and productive.
Here are seven common video conferencing etiquettes to follow.
1. Test Your Tech (Hardware & Software)
In this current era of remote working, almost everyone depends on technology for their day-to-day office work. The in-person all-hands and team meetings have transitioned to virtual remote meetings. Technical difficulties are a common occurrence. To make sure technical problems do not hinder your meetings, here are few things to check before you start:
Install the latest version of the videoconferencing software
Keep your conferencing tool open before the meeting starts, as most of the tools will throw a series of pop-ups asking for different accesses
Keep your laptop charged or keep the charger handy
Check your laptop camera
Test if your microphone is working
If you are presenting, keep your presentation ready
2. Be On Time
Virtually or otherwise, it goes without saying that being on time for meetings is important. So, video calls are no less official than in-person meetings at the office. Be on time or rather be ready a few minutes before the meeting. Utilize the grace period, and as mentioned in the above point, check your tech before the meeting starts. This will ensure that you have a smooth meeting with no technical glitches. Not only this, once you miss the start of the meeting, it is difficult to understand the context. Moreover, when you walk in late to a video meeting, it disturbs everyone else present in it.
So being on time is one of the key aspects of virtual meetings. And it also shows that you value everyone’s time.
3. Mute yourself when not speaking
Working from home can be quite noisy at times with various background noises. Children playing in the other room, construction going on in the next lane, someone watching TV, kitchen noises, dogs barking, etc., are some common distractions. If you are not speaking, then get in the habit of muting yourself while on the call. It will prevent others on the call from hearing distracting background noises. Unmute yourself only when you are going to speak. If you are the speaker, then work on reducing or eliminating the background noises before the call starts.
Also mute any loud notifications on your device if you are the speaker of the video call.
The need to get ready for office has become a redundant concept now. With everyone working remotely, employees need not follow a dress code anymore and work anyhow they want. But the scenario is slightly different if you are taking part in a video call. Get ready for a video call in the same way as if you are meeting someone in person. Brush or comb your hair, wear an ironed shirt or polo T-shirt, and be as presentable as possible. You not only dress for yourself but for the colleagues and clients you are connecting with.
5. Don’t Miss The Eye Contact
In a video conferencing call, many of us do the blunder of looking at the video instead of the camera. While we will say it is not wrong, looking on the screen makes you look distracted and not attentive. Instead, practice looking at the camera while on a video call. Put the webcam lens at eye level and look into it while you speak. This will give others the impression that you are maintaining eye contact continuously while on the call. This helps you establish a connection with your meeting attendees.
Stop working on other things or multitasking when you are on a video conferencing call. You will not only miss out on important things but it is also rude to do so. In a video meeting, it is very easy to understand when you are engaged in the meeting and when you are distracted doing something else. Behave in the same way as you would do in an in-person conversation and keep your other tasks on hold till the meeting gets over.
7. Lighting
Lighting plays an important role in a video call. Too little light and you will appear dark, and with too much light you will appear unnaturally white. There should be an optimal amount of light in the area from where you do your video call. To check lighting conditions log in before time and check the camera settings and its lighting. Adjust it till your face appears clear, natural, and non-grainy.
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Feedback is always a tricky line to tread. Leaders are in the unfortunate position of maintaining a delicate balance between being too overbearing or coming off as too lax.
