Category Archives: Blog

Recognition Awards

Employee Recognition Awards Create Progress 

awardsIn difficult situations, when companies are in crisis and can only be saved by major effort, group morale often rises to far higher levels than before. Individual objections and objectives are bypassed in the collective drive to do what must be done. This is where recognition awards take importance. High group morale can enrich individual motivation and performance remarkably! These are two types of awards: planned and unplanned.

Planned Awards:

1. Recognition Awards

On its basic concept, recognition awards are effective ways of increasing and boosting people’s morale. It encourages them to be accepting of and have a desire for change at all times. The change they will make is not entirely for the advantage of the company, but to their own personal achievement as well.… Read the rest

Best Practices in Performance Management

Recognition as Part of Performance Management

Performance Management is a system developed out of the best practice of top performing performanceorganizations to provide managers with a structured approach to the key retention criteria.Simplistically, most people will feel motivated and will want to stay in their job if their manager:

  • pays attention to their work
  • provides them with a job to match their skills, knowledge and experience gives them opportunities to grow and develop
  • judges their performance objectively

Most Performance Management processes contain critical opportunities for recognition.

Appraisals

Traditionally, the annual appraisal is the only meeting during the year when an average or better worker will meet his or her boss to discuss performance. People with poor performance can and do have a regular audience with their manager; sometimes on a weekly basis.… Read the rest

Avoiding Employee Failure

The Downward Spiral of Employee Performance

performance As a manager or organizational leader, you must be constantly aware of the environment you create. The environment can prove to be one where people perform well or one where people feel unappreciated and destined for failure. In a March 1998 article in Harvard Business Review, The Set-Up to Fail Syndrome, Jean-Francois Manzoni and Jean-Louis Barsoux discuss this exact situation.

Have you ever experienced a situation in an organization where, although you have been appointed to a responsible position, you don’t seem to be part of the in-crowd. Meetings are held without extending you an invitation. Your superior by-passes you, talking directly with your subordinates when requiring information or making decisions. You inclusion in social functions is often an afterthought.… Read the rest

Employee Absence

 Steps to Stop Absence and Make People Happy At Work

absenceIf you’re an employer or manager, then work place absence is costing you money, inconvenience, and upsetting your customers. So we all know, not all days taken off work are due to genuine sickness. Many employees “take a sickie” because their morale is low and they just don’t like or can’t do their work.

The challenge for employers and managers is to make people happier at work. If people are happy at work, they are less likely to take a day off every time they wake up with a stuffy nose.

Some bosses think that paying more money, improving job security, or working conditions is the answer. It isn’t and it’s also something that can be very hard to achieve.… Read the rest

Micro-Management

Six Danger Signs You May Be Headed to Micro-Management

1) Do you monitor and manage tasks or do you identify and train to essential competencies?

Do you want to know the big difference between due diligence and a core competency? Here’s a classic example: Collecting 50 business cards per day is an act of data procurement, while training to a 60% conversation to appointment ratio is focusing on an essential component to ensure your sales team’s success.

Don’t focus on accountability to tasks but enlighten to identification. It’s much more important to teach your people the ‘business’ of the business they’re in. If you currently have your sales team accountable to tasks, then you’re merely ‘managing’ tasks. In order to become more effective, you should be training on measurement of competencies so your people can ‘run their own business.’… Read the rest

Learn to Build a Great Organization

A Successful Organization Starts With You

organizationSo often we hear from the owner of a business or the manager of an organization lament about the performance of employees or associates. They speak of it as though they were having an out-of- body experience in which they were completely separated from the activities of the group. When I hear these types of comments, I am reminded of an old Greek phase, translated to the fish rots from the head down.

Leaders often feel helpless in changing the performance of a group. There are many practices and personal work habits that they can adapt which will make a difference. Let us look at three areas and look at behaviors and how each affects others in the group.… Read the rest

The Listening Side of Communications

Really Good Listening Habits Are Hard to Find

Listen

When is the last time you had a conversation with someone where you really felt like the person you were talking with was engaged in the conversation and was really interested in what you were communicating?

Their body language, eye contact, and tone of voice were focused and inviting and surrounding distractions seemed irrelevant. Every one of us can remember a meaningful conversation and what it felt like to “be heard.” Being heard is an important component to how we measure our self-worth and self-confidence.… Read the rest

Development of Human Capital

Human Capital is a Top Priority in Today’s Organizations.

Human CapitalIn fact many organizations are faced with the reality that they need to get more results through smaller and perhaps more fragmented teams. As your employees have added and shifted roles, positions, and responsibilities, how do you know you have the right people in the right positions in order to maximize your organization’s efforts and outcomes?… Read the rest

Three Questions

Three Questions About Business Success

Which three measurements give the best sense of a company’s or organization’s health? Whether business successyou’re talking to the business owner of a multi-site,multinational organization or the owner of a corner store, there are three critical measurements that denote the overall health and well-being of any organization: employee engagement, customer satisfaction, and cash flow. This applies to non-profit organizations as well as businesses.
… Read the rest

Measuring Business Success

If You Measure It, You Can Improve It

   Measurement is the First Step in Building Business Success

In sports, measure successthat scoreboard will report the runs, hits, and errors. In business, the scoreboard maybe a financial statement or a sales report. In a non-profit, it may be the number of people served or the number of programs run. These scoreboards reflect the end result of the business’ activities, but these types of measurements are difficult to use in defining a specific problem or developing programs to make improvements.Most businesses or organizations could not exist without a scorecard. … Read the rest

Review the Strategic Plan

Is It Time to Audit Your Strategic Plan?

Last year our board and executive committee met for two hours, once a week, for five straight weeks with a consultant and developed this new strategic plan. Everyone seems to love it and auditwas very excited by the outcome. Now a year later, nothing has seemed to change. We seem to have the same issues and problems that existed a year ago and spend our time at board meetings in the details of finding solutions. Sound familiar? This month’s issue of the Quill contains an article, The Strategic Plan That Never Happened which begins to discuss this very situation. Maybe it is time for an audit.

… Read the rest

Performance Management

A Performance Management Approach to Retaining Key People

employeeSimplistically, most people will feel motivated and will want to stay in their job if their manager:

  • pays attention to their work
  • provides them with a job to match their skills, knowledge and experience gives them opportunities to grow and develop
  • judges their performance objectively

Most Performance Management processes contain critical opportunities for recognition.

… Read the rest

Employee Motivation

Does the KITA Method of Employee Motivation Work?

 The most difficult dilemma business and organizational leaders face is that of motivating motivationemployees and staff. Sure there are marketing issues and financial issues that are difficult, but motivation seems to be the most difficult one to address. In a January 2003 Harvard Business Review article, One More Time: How Do You Motivate Employees?  , Frederick Herzberg presents conclusions on this subject. So what is the KITA method of motivation? Does it work? What does work?

 KITA Method of Motivation

 KITA is short for Kick in the A__. This method may be employed either in a negative manner or a positive manner. It can be employed either physically or psychologically. A negative physical KITA can result in retaliation, physical or otherwise, and in today’s society, be looked upon harshly.… Read the rest

Business Success Starts With a Sale

sales

No process improvement, quality control program, financial report, or employee satisfaction survey can start without the sale of a product or service. Business of any kind cannot exist without a sale. Young entrepreneurs and people starting business quickly learn this lesson and, unless they successfully master this skill, will not succeed.

Salesmanship in the 20th century was all about product knowledge, personality and persuasion. In the 21st century, the buy has a lesser need for that traditional method of salesselling. An article in a recent issue of the Harvard Business Review, Teaching Selling states, “In the realm of selling, it’s the buyer who is newly empowered. Customers no longer need a salesman to know about a company’s offerings, much less to place an order.… Read the rest

Employee Performance

Managing Employee Performance

 

team

Many managers fail to realize how their actions, attitudes, and communications affect the performance of a team or group of employees. They place the responsibility for performance on others and not themselves. Management success only comes when they learn to practice some basic principles of leadership and become someone who the employees wish to follow. Here are seven of these principles.… Read the rest

Thoughts on Hiring

Some Thoughts on Hiring from Richard Branson

In exploring the subject of hiring a new employee, we discovered a recent article by Richard Branson. You may know Branson as an extremely successful entrepreneur, the head of the Virgin Group which includes companies such as Virgin Airlines and Virgin Records.

He starts by emphasizing the importance of the having the right people in a company. “There is nothing more important for a business than hiring the right team. If you get the perfect mix of people working for your company, you have a far greater chance of success.” He also stresses the importance of finding someone whose personality fits with the company culture. Judging a personality during an interview can be difficult and he observes, “Personality is the key.… Read the rest

Interviewing

More Good Interview Questions

As the economy expands and the competition for quality people becomes intense, it’s important to realize that you have to use different tools to screen for the right candidates. Use these interview questions to help you discover the right people to join your company.… Read the rest

Some Tips on Interviewing Potential Employees

Business Success Comes From Finding the Right People 

Hiring, Business Success

Jim Collins, in his book Good to Great, explains that one of the first priorities in transforming an organization to greatness is, “first get the right people on the bus and then get the wrong people off the bus.” The bus, of course, is a company or organization wanting transition from being good to being great. Who to hire and who no longer belongs are difficult decisions subject to much uncertainty. They are made by business owners and managers, especially during the hiring process, based on extremely subjective criteria.  It always seems to be a gamble, so let’s see if we can consider some ways to improve the odds.

… Read the rest