Great Managers Understand Their People

HBS Working Knowledge has excerpted a Marcus Buckingham article from the Harvard Business Review In, it, Buckingham takes a look at the qualities that makes one boss stand out from another.

Average managers treat all their employees the same. Great managers discover each individual’s unique talents and bring these to the surface so everyone wins.

I’ve just started his new book, “The One Thing You Need to Know,” but this material seems to come from that source.

link from Contingent Workforce

Categories: Leadership

An open letter to the closed-minded boss

At Management-Issues, Dan Bobinski writes to the manager whose walk doesn’t match his talk.

After hearing one too many horror stories about bosses who never practice what they preach or rule with an iron fist with the “my way or the highway” approach, I’ve decided to pen an open letter on behalf of mismanaged employees everywhere.

Categories: Employee-Relations

Workplace Colleague Research

@ the John Molson School of Business

Principal Investigator: Martin L. Martens, PhD. Assistant Professor Co-Investigator: Dr. Robert Oppenheimer Management Department – John Molson School of Business Concordia University Phone: (514) 848-2424×2929 Email: mmartens@jmsb.concordia.ca

We would like to hear from you about the friendships you may have in your workplace. The purpose of our study is the investigation how your colleagues may influence your attitudes toward your organization.

We are interested in researching the idea that some people may be loyal to the organization in which they work and intend to stay with the company because, at least in part, they have important friendships with their colleagues. Alternatively, some people may be less loyal or may want to leave an organization because of poor relationships with coworkers.

Please take a few moments to think about how you feel about your colleagues in your current or previous workplaces and to reflect on whether your friendships or lack of friendships with your colleagues affected your commitment to the organization and your desire to remain with the company.

At the bottom of this form, please tell us about your thoughts relating to this issue.

Categories: Employee-Relations

Alberta minimum wage increase September 1, 2005

Minimum wage will increase to $7.00 an hour September 1, 2005

Edmonton… Alberta’s minimum wage will increase from $5.90 to $7.00 an hour on September 1, 2005. About 45,000 Albertans in entry-level jobs will benefit directly from the wage increase.

“Increasing the minimum wage is one way of ensuring Albertans get a better start in the workforce,” said Human Resources and Employment Minister Mike Cardinal. “Most Albertans, including employers and employees, agree that the minimum wage should be raised.”

More than 1,900 Albertans participated in a public consultation conducted from February 24 until March 29, 2005. Participants were asked whether the minimum wage should be introduced in one step or in stages. A majority of all respondents agreed that the increase should be introduced all at once.

“Government chose September 1, 2005 to introduce the new rate in order to balance the needs of both workers and employers,” Cardinal added. “Minimum wage earners will soon be able to earn a better income, while Alberta businesses will have four months to budget for the increase and make adjustments.”

Within the Employment Standards Code, government sets the minimum wage that employers must pay workers. Higher wages are negotiated between employers and employees, or their unions. Due to Alberta’s vibrant economy and low unemployment rates, most employers already pay more than minimum wage to attract and retain employees. The average hourly wage in Alberta is $18.55 an hour.

Alberta’s minimum wage was last raised in 1998-1999, in three stages, over a 12-month period.

For more information on the minimum wage or other employment standards, visit: www.gov.ab.ca/hre/employmentstandards.

Categories: Compensation

Info.com selects Indeed to Host its Comprehensive Job Listings Service

Partnership gives Info.com users access to millions of jobs via top search engine for jobs

STAMFORD, Conn. and Chicago, Ill. – April 19, 2005 – Indeed, the most comprehensive search engine for jobs, announced today a partnership with Info.com, a platform for vertical search engines, to provide Info.com’s users with access to Indeed’s job search results located at http://jobs.info.com.

“As the Internet has become the main way people find jobs today, Info.com is delighted to partner with Indeed, the leading search engine for jobs,” commented Info.com’s CEO, Stephen Scarr. “Info.com users now have instant access to search Indeed’s entire index of relevant and fresh jobs.”

Under this partnership agreement, Info.com is displaying a Jobs Tab on its home page powered by Indeed, so users can seamlessly search the entire Indeed index directly from Info.com. With 100,000 new jobs per day, Indeed is the most comprehensive search engine for jobs and its proprietary search technology returns only the most relevant jobs to users from their searches.

“Our partnership is putting the unrivalled power of Indeed’s job search in the hands of general search engine users,” said Paul Forster, CEO of Indeed. “Info.com’s broad array of vertical search capabilities is strengthened further by the addition of job search powered by Indeed.”

Indeed makes it easy for job seekers to drill down to jobs that fit their requirements precisely. Advanced search options are also available, such as searching on a particular company name, a particular job title, or specifying a maximum commuting distance. In addition, users can save job searches as email alerts or RSS feeds and track searches continuously.

Info.com recognizes that in an over-communicated and over-informed era, relevant and time saving information brands will become increasingly attractive to internet users. Info.com strives to do just that by continuing to develop a simple and time saving interface that seamlessly combines the best search technologies into one destination site.

Categories: Recruiting Technology

The Daily Five Minutes

About four months ago, Rosa posted an excerpt from her book “Managing with Aloha”. In it she outlines a simple yet valuable exercise that teaches managers to listen to their employees.

Perhaps my most valuable lesson in Ike loa was the one born at Hualalai out of our desire to know our employees well. We instinctively knew we could manage better the more intimately we knew those we managed. Ike loa became the birthplace of a core standard we initiated with all managers called “The Daily Five Minutes.” It started as an experiment, and it was so effective that it became non-negotiable as a habit my managers were required to cultivate and practice daily.

It is a simple habit: Each day, without fail, managers are to give five minutes of no-agenda time to at least one of their employees. They’d log the event in a simple checklist of names to ensure they didn’t miss anyone, and they’d speak to each employee in turn on a regular basis.

Talking Story with Say Leadership Coaching: The Daily Five Minutes. Categories: Employee-Relations

A Whack Up ‘Long Side The Head Of Human Resources:

The Leadership Imperative—by: Brent Filson

When we perceive the simple center in the seemingly complex, we can change our world in powerful new ways.

Albert Einstein perceived the simple E=MC2 in the complexities of physical reality and changed the history of the 20th century.

Big Daddy Lipscomb, the Baltimore Colts 300 pound all-pro tackle in the 1960s perceived the simple center of what was perceived to be the complex game of football. “I just wade into players,” he said, “until I come to the one with the ball. Him I keep!” — and changed the way the game was played.

Likewise, human resources, despite its complex activities, should have a fundamentally simple mission, yet it is a mission that is being neglected by many HR professionals. I call that mission the Leadership Imperative — helping the organization recruit, retain, and develop good leaders. Clearly, without good leaders, few organizations can thrive over the long run. What characterizes a good leader? A good leader consistently gets results — in ethical and motivational ways. Because they interact with all business functions and usually provide education and training for those functions, human resource professionals should be focused primarily on recruiting, retaining, and developing leaders that get results. Any other focus is a footnote.

Yet working with human resource leaders in a variety of companies for the past two decades, I find that many of them are stumbling. Caught up in the tempests of downsizing, compliance demands, acquisitions, mergers, and reorganizations, they are engaged in activities that have little to do with their central mission. Ignoring or at least giving short shrift to the Leadership Imperative, they are too often viewed, especially by line leaders, as carrying out sideline endeavors.

Many HR leaders have nobody to blame for this situation but themselves. By neglecting the Imperative, they themselves have chosen to be sideline participants.

Here is a three-step action plan to get the HR function off the sidelines and into the thick of the game.

Recognize. Link. Execute.

Before I elaborate each step, let me define leadership as it ought to be. For your misunderstanding leadership will thwart you in applying the Imperative.

The word “leadership” comes from old Norse word-root meaning “to make go.” Indeed, leadership is about making things go — making people go, making organizations go. But the misunderstanding comes in when leaders fail to understand who actually makes what go. Leaders often believe that they themselves must make things go, that if people must go from point A to point B, let’s say, that they must order them to go. But order leadership founders today in fast-changing, highly competitive markets.

In this environment, a new kind of leadership must be cultivated — leadership that aims not to order others to go from point A to point B — but instead that aims to motivate them to want take the leadership in going from A to B.

That “getting others to lead others” is what leadership today should be about. And it is what we should inculcate in our clients. We must challenge them to lead, lead for results with this principle in mind, and accept nothing else from them but this leadership.

Furthermore, leadership today must be universal. To compete successfully in highly competitive, fast changing markets, organizations must be made up of employees who are all leaders in some way. All of us have leadership challenges thrust upon us many times daily. In the very moment that we are trying to persuade somebody to take action, we are a leader — even if that person we are trying to persuade is our boss. Persuasion is leadership. Furthermore, the most effective way to succeed in any endeavor is to take a leadership position in that endeavor.

The Imperative applies to all employees. Whatever activities you are being challenged to carry out, make the Imperative a lens through which you view those activities. Have your clients recognize that your work on the behalf of their leadership will pay large dividends toward advancing their careers.

Recognize: Recognize that recruiting, retaining, and developing good leaders ranks with earnings growth (or with nonprofit organizations: mission) in terms of being an organizational necessity. So most of your activities must be in some way tied to the Imperative.

For instance: HR executive directors who want to develop courses for enhancing the speaking abilities of their companies’ leaders often blunder in the design phase. Not recognizing the Leadership Imperative, they err by describing them as “presentation courses.” Instead, if they were guided by the Imperative, they would offer courses on “leadership talks.” There is a big difference between presentations and leadership talks. Presentations communicate information. Presentation courses are a dime a dozen. But leadership talks motivate people to believe in you and follow you. Leaders must speak many times daily — to individuals or groups in a variety of settings. When you provide courses to help them learn practical ways for delivering effective talks, to have them speak better so that they can lead better, you are benefitting their job performance and their careers.

Today, in most organizations, the presentation is the conventional method of communication. But when you make the leadership talk the key method by instituting “talk” courses and monitoring and evaluation systems broadly and deeply within the organization, you will help make your company more effective and efficient.

Link: Though such recognition is the first step in getting off the sidelines, it won’t get you into the game. To get into the center of things, you must link your activities with results. Not your results — their results.

Clearly, your clients are being challenged to get results: sales’ closes, operations efficiencies, productivity advances, etc. Some results are crucial. But other results are absolutely indispensable. Your job is to help your clients achieve their results, especially the indispensable results. You must be their “results partner.” Furthermore, you must help them get sizable increases in those results. The results that they get with your help should be more than the results that they would have gotten without your help.

For instance, when developing company-wide objectives for leadership talks, you should not aim to have participants win a speaking “beauty contests” but instead to speak so that they motivate others to get increases in measured results. When you change the focus of the courses from speaking appearance to the reality of results, you change the participants’ view of and commitment to the courses and also their view of and commitment to you in providing those courses. So have the participants define their indispensable results and link the principles and processes they learned in the course to getting measured increases in those results.

Execute: It’s not enough to recognize. It’s not enough to link. You must execute. “Execute” comes from a Latin root exsequi meaning “to follow continuously and vigorously to the end or even to ‘the grave.’” Let’s capture if not the letter at least the spirit of this lively root by insuring that your activities on behalf of your clients are well “executed,” that they are carried out vigorously and continuously in their daily work throughout their careers. If those activities are helping them get results, you are truly their “results partner.”

For instance, in regard to the leadership talk courses, HR professionals can lead an “initiative approach.” At the conclusion of the course, each participant selects an initiative to institute back on the job. The aim of each initiative is to get sizable increases in their indispensable results by using the principles and processes that they learned.

The initiatives and their results should be concrete and measurable, such as productivity gains, increases in sales, operations efficiencies, and reduced cycle times.

The participants should be challenged to get increases in results above and beyond what they would have gotten without having taken the course. They should be challenged to get those increases within a mutually agreed upon time, such as quarterly reports.

In fact, if the participants don’t achieve an increase in results that translates to at least ten times what the course costs, they should get their money back.

Don’t stop there. Getting an increase in results is not the end of the course, it should be the beginning — the beginning of a new phase of getting results, the stepping up phase. The more results participants achieve, the more opportunities they have created to achieve even more results. The leadership talk course should have methods for instituting results’ step-ups.

One such method can be a quarterly leadership-talk round table. Participants who graduate from the course meet once a quarter to discuss the results they have gotten and provide best practices for getting more. Human resources should organize, direct and facilitate the round tables. In this way, the results the leaders are getting should increase quarter after quarter.

When HR professionals promote such leadership talk courses, courses that are linked to getting increases in indispensable results and that come with the “results guarantee,” those professionals are truly seen as results partners in their organizations.

I have used the leadership talk as an example of how you can greatly enhance your contributions to the company by applying the Leadership Imperative. Don’t just apply the Imperative to such courses alone. Apply it to whatever challenge confronts you.

When you recognize how that challenge can be met through the Imperative, when you link the challenge to getting increases in measured results, and when you execute for results, you can transform your function.

You don’t have to be as distinguished as Einstein or as awesome as Big Daddy Lipscomb, but you will in your individual way perceive the simple, powerful center of things. You’ll be in the thick of the most important game your company is playing — helping change your world and the world of your clients.

2004 © The Filson Leadership Group, Inc. All rights reserved.

PERMISSION TO REPUBLISH: This article may be republished in newsletters and on web sites provided attribution is provided to the author, and it appears with the included copyright, resource box and live web site link. Email notice of intent to publish is appreciated but not required: mail to: brent@actionleadership.com

About The Author

The author of 23 books, Brent Filson’s recent books are, THE LEADERSHIP TALK: THE GREATEST LEADERSHIP TOOL and 101 WAYS TO GIVE GREAT LEADERSHIP TALKS. He is founder and president of The Filson Leadership Group, Inc. – and has worked with thousands of leaders worldwide during the past 20 years helping them achieve sizable increases in hard, measured results. Sign up for his free leadership ezine and get a free guide, “49 Ways To Turn Action Into Results,” at www.actionleadership.com.

Categories: Leadership

Canadian Headhunter Joins Recruiting.com!

All the best on the new set-up.

That’s right, friends. As of today, the Canadian Headhunter crew – Anthony J Meaney and myself – will abandon our former location and post our engaging remarks, links, pictures and paraphrases right here , with Jason, on Recruiting. com.

So, if you’re interested in how to dress on Casual Friday or the latest news about the CIBC-Genuity recruiting scandal, this is now the place to find it.

And, please, don’t hesitate to assault us in the Comments section. For, as you know, when it comes to feedback, too much is never enough.

Categories: Blogging

Dealing with notes

I remember investigating a sexual harassment complaint where the complainant listed personal diary entries as part of her supporting evidence. I said that I would need to see these entries if I was to consider them with any other evidence. At the end of our initial interview, I asked the her to bring in the diary. After a couple of days and no diary I called and reminded her and waited a couple more days. I made a follow-up call and told her that, if she wanted the diary entries to be considered, she had to have them to me that day. She showed up later in the day with scraps of ruled paper she had “torn out of her diary.” They were the kind of pages that you would find in any cheap ruled notebook. Needless to say, the information she had “documented” did not carry much weight in support her complaint.

I take my notes in a basic notebook that can be (and has been) shown when I need to support conversations formally at hearings, investigations, etc. If I want the information to be accesssible digitally, I transcribe my notes to my computer, but I don’t toss the notebook until the required record retention time has passed.

Of course, not all professions need that attention to record retention. Dwayne gives us a synopsis of his note-taking style over at Genuine Curiosity. He likes a tear-away notebook that allows him to process his notes through his systems, as required.

How about you? How do you deal with note taking?

April 19, 2005 Update: Michael Hyatt posts on the Lost Art of Note-Taking. Some great tips for the process itself.

Categories: Personal-Productivity

Best Site for Travelers

I’ve seen SeatGuru recommended from two sources this month: the Business 2.0 blog: Best Site for Travellers and Real Simple magazine’s May 2005 issue. If you are a frequent flyer, SeatGuru is worth checking out.

Don’t make a plane reservation without consulting SeatGuru. Pick your airline and the jet you are flying and a diagram of the plane appears. Pass your mouse over seats and you learn all kinds of valuable tidbits.

Categories: Travel Technology

Hiring and Retaining Good Employees

by: Myron Curry

Hiring good employees is not only important to business, it’s essential. Employees are the heart and soul of a business; they are the mechanism that makes a business run; they are the breath of life that enables a business to be something more than an idea. A business cannot run unless someone (employees, in this case) is doing the work. Any intelligent business owner should want good employees.

EMPLOYERS NOT THE ONLY ONES TO FEEL THE EFFECT Bad employees not only affect an employer by driving down sales, costing the company unwanted expenses due to negligence or simple lack of motivation, etc, but they affect the customer as well. Of course, once a customer has experienced a bad employee, it automatically affects the employer in obvious ways. Although this seems like common sense to most people, it is uncanny how most employers will overlook this fact, whether it’s because of time constraints to effectively deal with the problem or lack of better judgment. Whatever the case, it is a fact that sales get driven down and production slowed for a reason. That reason could very well be because of the customer’s lack of satisfaction with whatever service he or she had received and that lack of satisfaction stems from bad employees.

FIND THE RIGHT PEOPLE TO START WITH This is one of the most important things you, as an employer, can do. Getting the right people into your company to start with gets things moving in the right direction at the very beginning.

According to Chairman and CEO, Hal F. Rosenbluth, and Consultant, Diane McFerrin Peters, of Rosenbluth International, the third-largest travel management company in the world, “Most of us choose our spouse with care and rear our children with nurturing and compassionate attention. Yet, we tend to select the people who will join our company on the basis of an interview or two, and once they have joined, they often find that they must fend for themselves.

This contrast illustrates the disparity between the environments of family and work. But, given the amount of time we must spend at work, wouldn’t we all be happier if we took as much care at the office as at home to create a supportive environment? Wouldn’t we also be far more successful?”.

The answer is yes.

THE CUSTOMER DOES NOT COME FIRST It’s important to remember that if you want quality employees, your company must be of the same caliber. If you expect to attract an employee who thrives to be as dedicated to the business as possible, doing more than what is expected, and putting forth 110% without any consideration being given to the employee’s personal needs, thoughts, and desires, you are truly fooling yourself. And, eventually, your business will suffer for it.

It’s obvious to most, by now, that benefits and perks play a large part in attracting employees. I need not explain the many benefits that a company should make available to attract a good employee because it should be common sense to most, by now. I will say, however, that attaining a good employee must go much farther than just having a great set of benefits. After all, does a wonderful benefits package actually attract only good employees? Of course not. There must be more to it than that.

For the customer to be served with the best results humanly possible, a more modern approach to the theory of customer satisfaction must be realized which is that the customer should not come first; the employee should. Therein in itself is one of the most successful ways to attract a good employee.

When a business puts its employees first, many things can happen. To begin with, the employee is happy. If the employee is happy, the service that the employee provides to the customer will be far more outstanding than if he or she were not happy. If the service is outstanding, the customer will be happy and that only spells successful results for the business.

This does not mean that an employer must wait hand and foot on the employee. No, it simply means that careful consideration to what an employee thinks, wants, and suggests should be considered. Do not treat an employee as if he or she is a factory robot working on a clock. Treat them as people. Treat them with respect by talking to them as people and not “talking down to them” as “employees”. In fact, a good idea would be to remove the term “employee” all together. One successful company I know of refers to its employees as “associates”, thereby empowering their “associates” with a feeling of more respect and purpose.

EMPLOYEE LEADERSHIP AND FLEXIBILITY A MUST An open, friendly atmosphere is a must in a workplace. Micro managing, as most already are aware of, is frowned upon. This is for a reason. When a work environment is open enough for all employees to contribute and offer ideas and suggestions, without ridicule or negative response, this sparks creativity in an employee and, again, empowers them to contribute more to the business. If everyone feels as though they are a part of the leadership process and not just a worker bee, they will have a satisfying feeling that can go a long way. Micro managing completely kills this system.

An employer must be flexible. Does there really need to be a rigid schedule? Does lunchtime really need to take place at a specific time? Who actually needs a clock to tell them when they are hungry? This line of thinking is what is needed in every faucet of business, as simple as it seems. It makes an employee feel more like a human; it makes them feel as though the business respects them as a person and will put them first. Once that consideration is instilled in an employee’s mind, there isn’t anything that he or she wouldn’t do for a business. And, when a person looks forward to waking up in the morning to begin working in a place where they feel management gives them respect and thinks highly of them, they will put forth the effort to show appreciation.

HIRE NICE PEOPLE Experience and degrees are great ways of measuring employees’ qualifications and potential…but ask yourself, are they nice people? A person can be the most qualified, educated, and experienced possible employee on the planet but if they have the personality of a wet paper bag or of a caged wolverine, it’s guaranteed they’re not going to do much for your business. Those that have to work with them will be disgruntled on a daily bases and begin putting out a poor performance. The customers that receive service from them will be unhappy and I need not say what happens after that.

Hire nice people. Nice people can do wonders for a business. Sound picky? It is. But, when it comes to your business, can you afford not to be picky?

A nice person can learn anything. Nice people are pleasant to be around and are easy to teach. They are notoriously quick to learn. So, even if your nice person does not have the skill set that you are looking for, one might consider the possibility of training. Think about the potential, especially if nice people seem to be rare in your neck of the woods.

HOW DO YOU FIND NICE PEOPLE This should be obvious. During the interview process, were they down-to-earth or were they focused solely on success, success, and more success? As crazy as it may seem, the total, success driven fanatic may not be the best option. Again, the person who seems more like a “person” would be the best candidate for hiring. In the long run, they will make your business more successful because they would make the customer, as well as those that have to work with them, happier.

Conduct tests and unconventional interview methods. Why should an interview consist of one or two meetings in a stuffy room? How can we really find out about a person that way? The answer is that we can’t. Instead, how about combining the stuffy office interview one day with another day of playing a game of softball with other, current employees, as Hal F. Rosenbluth and Diane McFerrin tend to do within their company? This would be great for company moral and, at the same time, provide a chance to see how the potential employee reacts in a team environment. If the person is bent on nothing but winning and becomes angry when other teammates drop the ball or do not hit as far as they should, perhaps this person is not the best employee to have around. Chances are that their performance on the softball field will reflect their performance in the office.

Go for a drive. As again explained by Hal F. Rosenbluth and Diane McFerrin Peters, the way a person drives an automobile says a lot about a person’s personality. Are they overly aggressive and speed through traffic, weaving in an out of other cars, determined to get to the point of destination no matter what the cost? Or, are they assertive drivers who consider the safety of their passengers and think of alternate routes when confronted with a traffic jam, focusing more on the drive than the destination? Which person would you rather have working for you? Which person would you rather have serving your customers? If you were a customer, which person would you rather have serving you?

Invite your new, potential employee to a company social event. Are they the type of person that talks only of themselves and continuously brags about all of the wonderful things that he or she has done? Do they even talk to anyone at all? These are the folks that either want to gain far more than they are willing to contribute or aren’t willing to gain or contribute. These are the type of people that will bring your company down.

So, some key points to consider thus far:

Consider your employees before your customers. Not only will the employee put out a far better performance due to feeling respected, but your company will also build a reputation as being “the company to work for”, which will attract other, good employees.

Be flexible. Constraints in the office constrain creativity and work performance. Go for casual clothing, if possible. Let your employee decide when it’s time to eat and take a break. Be flexible on your employee’s schedule, catering to his or her personal needs. The employee will show appreciation in return, by supplying a good output of production.

Hire nice people. Not one customer in the world, no matter what business you are in, enjoys service from someone with less-than-appreciative attitude. And, your other employees will not enjoy working with them either, bringing down moral and production drastically. This kind of person will not be willing to strive at contributing to your company; they will strive to contribute only to themselves.

Consider the unconventional when interviewing an employee. The more often you can set a scenario that a potential employee will not expect or could find to be an unusual method of interviewing, the better. It will give you a chance to see what that person is really capable of, as a person.

RETAINING GOOD EMPLOYEES As important as attracting good employees is, it is just as important to retain them. As always, benefit packages help to retain employees. But, again, this is something that most people are already aware of. Sure, there will be those that will want to stay for the great benefits. But, is that all you, as an employer, can offer? No.

After spending as much time as you should have in attracting good employees, it only makes sense that you would go to certain lengths to keep them. Chances are, if you really attracted a good employee, it wasn’t just because of the benefits. And, chances are that your good employee will not stay just because of the benefits. Benefits, although a positive force, are not the end all and can, at times, be a false sense of security to an employer. Not everyone develops his or her retention decision on a benefits package, at least not the smart employee.

LET THEM CHANGE IT UP NOW AND AGAIN Let your people explore your company. Don’t lock them into one, specific type of work, especially if they express desire to try other things. In today’s job market, job-hoping, as it is known, is a regular occurrence. If you provide your employees with the chance to job-hop “within” your company, this is one way of keeping them there. Give them the opportunity to gain new experience, knowledge, and skills. This will only enhance your company anyway, by having an employee that can do and handle more. It also increases confidence in the employee and makes their work more satisfying. The United States military and civil services such as police and fire departments have already figured that one out. They call it cross-training and fleeting-up and it’s a great idea.

COMMUNICATION Communicating is very important, not only in day to day business, but in retention as well. People need to feel as though they have a grasp on what is going on within the company. They want to know where the company is going and how they will be part of that process. They need to feel they are involved in the company. Being part of any planning processes, being able to contribute ideas for the company, and essentially being heard is all part of communication. Again, this is emphasized in most of the U.S.’s military forces as well, even though they conduct themselves in more of a dictatorship.

Know why your people wanted to join your company in the first place and hone in on that. Keep that priority of the employee in consideration, always acting on it and developing it, and the employee will want to continue that purpose with a strong sense. Talk to your people. Not only should you get to know them, you should get to know what they continue to want and think. And, don’t think for a minute that a person’s desires and thoughts on particular matters will be the same later down the road as they were when they first joined the organization. Things change, including your employee’s thoughts and desires. Keep up with those changes.

Get feedback from your employee’s. Find out what they think is right and wrong with the company. Provide a feedback forum. And, most importantly, act on the information you receive from this feedback.

In summary: Let your employee job hop and provide an opportunity to let them do it within your company, instead of having to go outside the company. More than likely, if they can’t do it in the company, they will venture outside to a place that they can. Take advantage of the multiple skills your people can learn within the company. This not only helps your company out, it gives the employee a feeling of more purpose and he or she will enjoy not having to go far to expand their skills.

Keep your people in mind when it comes to information on where the company is headed and what it is doing. If the employee does not feel informed on what is happening, they will not feel as though they are part of the company and, therefore, will not want to stay, in the long run.

Get to know what your people want, when they first enter the organization and periodically throughout their tenure. People’s motives and desires change. The good employer is the one that can keep up with those changes. Offer feedback methods and make sure you act on the results.

Above all, remember what it was that got you that good employee in the first place. The concepts mentioned in this article that enable an employer to attain a good employee to begin with are basically the same principals of retaining them as well. It’s that simple. Anyone who works for a company that considers their needs, is just, and can remain flexible, as well as provides other good employees to work alongside, will want to continue working in that company. Hiring and retaining good employees goes hand in hand.

About The Author Myron Curry is President and CEO of BusinessTrainingMedia.com a leading provider of workforce and business development training programs designed exclusively for corporate deployment. Myron has over 20 years of successful management experience with leading fortune 500 companies and has written numerous articles about workforce management issues. You can contact Myron at: myron@business-marketing.com or visit his company’s website http://www.businesstrainingmedia.com.

Categories: Recruiting

Employee Motivation: Quote

Employees don’t want handouts, they hate favoritism and they are uncomfortable with entitlements. They want to be acknowledged for doing what they signed up to do. -- Bob Nelson