Tag Archives: incentivise

How to Improve Employee Retention

Posted on by

Employee retention is about keeping the great staff you have, once you’ve found them.  There are a number of factors that have an impact on improving staff retention, including:

  • Improving communication processes
  • Staff involvement
  • Confident senior and line managers with strategic direction for your organisation
  • Providing training and development opportunities
  • Market-aligned pay and benefits
  • Fair and effective management of staff by managers
  • Competence of line management.

Focus on improving these areas and you will be able to improve your employee retention. But don’t get complacent – there are many threats to retention. What might cause your employees to leave? They include:

  • Re-organisation of your company – particularly if staff are not consulted
  • Redundancies – people can lose morale when others leave
  • Recruitment freezes – this could be a sign that the business is not going places
  • Lack of confidence in management – if you people don’t have confidence in their managers they may not stay
  • Line manager incompetence ‘ your line managers may not have the skills to keep your staff!

What’s the biggest threat to employee retention? It is poor employee engagement. Work on improving your employee engagement and high employee retention will follow.

For more on employee retention, click here to watch a short video.

How Happy Are Your Employees? How Do You Know?

Posted on by

I’ve written a lot recently about employee engagement. What is it? It’s a positive attitude held by your employees towards your company and its values. An engaged employee knows where your business is going and works with colleagues to improve performance to benefit your business. But how do you measure engagement? How do you know just how engaged your people are with your business?

To find out how happy your employees are, you could start with a survey. This will give you a quantitative measure, such as a score or the percentage of people saying they are ‘very happy’, ‘quite happy’ and so on. It relies on a quantity of people answering the survey to provide an accurate result that is representative of your staff.

A good survey helps you not only determine the level of engagement (or disengagement) within your company, as well as which elements help drive engagement, are very good or need work. An employee engagement survey can help you find out how your people feel about whether or not they feel listened to, how much they trust their leaders and other emotions, views and experiences.

So why not just ask how engaged your employees feel?

Probably because job satisfaction is not the same as being engaged. Since studies show that 70% of UK workers don?t actually trust their management, can you trust them to give an accurate answer to this question?

The other thing to consider with surveys is that they are not engagement. When the results are in, what happens next? Engagement isn’t something you can tick off.

So what do you really want to measure? Employee engagement is inextricably linked to increased customer satisfaction and subsequent profitability. So rather than trying to measure employee engagement and customer satisfaction separately, you can evaluate the two together. If customer satisfaction improves, then your people are more engaged. If sales are up, customer satisfaction is increased and employee engagement is raised.

So what’s the best way to measure employee engagement? Start by carrying out an employee engagement survey to establish baseline scores. Use the results to decide what improvement initiatives you are going to use. Then resurvey periodically to measure the effectiveness of changes you make.

Just remember that employees feel engaged when they feel listened to. So if you carry out a survey, really listen to what your people say and do something about it. That way everyone will see the benefits – your employees, your business and your clients.

How happy are your clients? How do you know?

Keep Your Staff Happy to Grow Your Business

Posted on by

When your employees are engaged with your business, you have a much greater chance to grow a profitable business and keep your customers satisfied.

So what makes an engaged employee? How does their engagement affect your business? How can you achieve engagement with your staff?

As an employer you need to create the right environment to allow engagement to flourish in your workforce. To help you get the basics in place, here are four steps to follow:

1. Create a strategic story – Where are you? Where have you been? Where are you going? As a business owner you probably know this, but do your employees feel part of that story? If they know the story, it lets them see how the work they do fits in with the business’s goals. This isn’t something you can simply put on a poster on the wall to get buy in. You need to repeat the story over and over again to employees and give them a sense of ownership in it. If your story is on the wall, ask your staff to add to it; create a timeline of diagrams, new solutions and innovations leading to your company’s goals. Create a buzz and encourage people to share their ideas, so they can see how their achievements fit into your company’s ‘big picture’.

2. Engage managers – If you try to engage your staff without first engaging your managers you may get limited results. Many employees’ motivation and engagement will depend on how they feel towards their bosses. If those managers are not engaged themselves, where’s the motivation to engage their people? Engaged managers focus their people and enable them to get the job done, treat their team members as individuals and coach and stretch them. When your managers build bigger relationships with people as individuals, those workers will make bigger contributions.

3. Give employees a voice – Listening is a key part in giving employees a voice but it doesn’t stop at the 360-degree survey. A survey might tell you how people are feeling at a certain point in time but it doesn’t tell you why they are feeling like that. Members of staff have insights into why and where things are going wrong. Somebody knows before the event that something is going to go wrong. If they know that they can speak up and be listened to, the problem can be pointed out before it becomes a disaster.

Employees who are able to speak up will share the good as well as the bad. If they feel that their ideas are listened to, they’ll share them, which will increase their engagement in their work.

4. Make sure there is organisational integrity – This means avoiding the “do as I say, not as I do” mentality. If your company’s values are not reflected in the day-to-day behaviours of managers or colleagues, then it will be seen as a corporate spin exercise and will not be trusted by employees. When your values are aligned between staff and managers, then trust is created and so is engagement.

Different companies will need to create different engagement programmes, but if you follow these four steps, you’ll be able to create a strong foundation for any efforts you make to increase employee engagement and develop your business.

Are your employees engaged? Are they giving their all to your business? If they’re not, then come to our workshop on 17 April 2013 in Reading. During the workshop, from 9.30am – 12.30pm, we will look at key ways to improve engagement of your employee, in order toincrease profitability, efficiency and achieve faster growth, and improve attendance, retention and job satisfaction

It is being held at Symantec, Green Park, Reading and costs just £20 +VAT to attend. To book your place online, click here and scroll through the list of events to 17 April 2013.

Poor Performance – Can You Prove It?

Posted on by

Sometimes as a manager you need to deliver bad news or negative feedback to a member of your staff. You might need to pick them up on an issue of performance that you’re not happy with, or where they are not meeting your standards.

This is not a comfortable thing to do. You need to be quite assertive about it, to be taken seriously – and so that your member of staff doesn’t just argue with you! To help you discuss the issue in the right way, you need evidence of the poor performance. You have to be able to show your team member what they’ve been doing wrong or below standard. Just telling them that they’re not doing what you want them to do, won’t have any impact, if you can’t prove it.

So you need to collect the evidence, so your team member can really understand what they’ve done wrong and how you want them to change. It’s not about collecting evidence just to use against someone – you really need it in order to get the message across and to make a difference.

Is one of your team repeatedly late coming into work? If so, you need a recording system that shows them when they came it late and how often it happens. If your staff clock in and out every day, you have your system. If not, you need to look for another way of recording the time.

Does a member of your staff keep making errors in their work? How many times have they made a mistake and what was the result of it? Again, you need to create a way of recording the error rate and the consequences.

When you can show the proof of poor performance, it is much easier to discuss the issue with the particular member of staff and, between you, work out what needs to be done in order to improve their performance.

We discussed the importance of collecting evidence at one of my interactive workshops. Click here to watch the short video and find out more.

How do you collect evidence of performance issues in your business?

Employee Engagement – Or How to Keep Your Staff Happy

Posted on by

Not everyone goes to work for the money they earn. While some people do only work to earn a living, these days, many people are motivated by things other than just money.

I believe that a more engaged workplace is a more successful workplace. What do I mean by ‘engagement’? Employee engagement can be defined as ‘An employee’s drive to use all their ingenuity and resources for the benefit of the company.’

How do you keep your employees engaged?

If you’re a manager, you need to work on four important factors – motivation (inspiring your team), consideration (recognition and support for team members), care (and understanding of their issues) and conversing (informing and listening to them). Improving each area will lead to better engagement; your staff will be happier and will work harder for you.

If you’re a leader, there are four questions that you need to ask yourself. Do people have faith in me as a leader? Are they inspired by me? Are they excited about the future of the business? How do they perceive my morality? The answers to these questions will show how engaged your team is. If you don’t like the answers you get to these questions, these are the areas that you need to work on, in order to have a more engaged workforce.

What do you do to keep your staff happy? Leave a comment here to share you tips with us.

If you’re not sure how to keep your staff engaged and happy, then come along to the half day workshop I’m running in April 2013 in Reading. Email me if you’d like me to send you the details.

Scrooge’s Guide to Presents

Posted on by

In case you missed my December email newsletter, here’s a catch up for you!

The start of a new year is the time when some businesses think about how best to reward their staff for their hard work over the last 12 months. Instead of a one-off ‘thank you’, what about putting a more ongoing, sustainable rewards scheme in place?

Here’s the story of how one Dickensian employer got it right!

Ebenezer Scrooge loved Christmas! He really enjoyed giving his staff time off, to spend with their families over Christmas. He encouraged them to go Christmas shopping and to send cards to all their friends.

Mr Scrooge even loved giving presents to his staff. But he often struggled to find the best gift for each person. So one year, had a great idea. Instead of buying each member of his team a gift at Christmas, Mr Scrooge decided to set up a reward system for all his staff, which would run all through the year, rewarding them on an ongoing basis for their hard work.

Here’s what Ebenezer Scrooge did to create the best Christmas present that lasts for 12 months:

  1. He put a structure in place – just a simple one to begin with
  2. He took the time to identify the things that were really important to his staff – including non-financial benefits – and incorporated them into his strategy
  3. He invested in making his company an interesting and fulfilling place to work. This helped him to attract great people and helped keep overall pay costs down
  4. He created a scheme that was simple to understand, so that his line managers didn’t struggle to explain it. They were key to making his reward structure a success
  5. He didn’t assume that it was just about pay. According to research that Mr Scrooge read, some executives would consider a pay cut of up to 35% in order to get their ideal job.
  6. Then he reviewed the scheme and the effect it had on his staff throughout the year, to make sure he was still getting it right
  7. And finally he enjoyed spreading Christmas cheer amongst his staff all year long and they loved working for him!

 

Think about how you can engage your staff beyond Christmas by setting up a reward scheme this year.

How to Be a Great Boss

Posted on by

It can be tough at the top. Here are some top tips to improve your personal success as well as the success of the people working for you.

  • Lead by example. Provide guidance and support and set the benchmark for team cohesiveness and performance.
  • Understand yourself and work on bettering yourself. What are the things you do well and what can you improve? How effective is your management style? By investing time in developing your individual skills you will drive your business forward and reap the rewards in terms of how successfully you lead your team.
  • Be a good all-rounder and play to all your strengths. Technical skills are important but so are soft skills such as people management skills. Do not neglect one in favour of the other.
  • Learn to delegate effectively. You can’t do it all! By relinquishing responsibility to others you are not only ensuring that your efforts are always directed to best effect but also that the people around you feel empowered to make decisions and improve the business.
  • Build a team that can work without you. A team that falls apart when you are on leave or away from the office is not good business.
  • Maintain boundaries: Whilst it is good to develop a good personal relationship with your colleagues, you must establish appropriate boundaries. This will be important during times when you have to make tough decisions that may not always be welcome by others.

What do you do to make sure that you’re a good boss? Share your tips (or mistakes!) with us by leaving a comment here.

How Do You Get More From Your Staff? Part Two

Posted on by

In a recent blog we looked at the importance of managing performance as a way of getting more from your staff, without dramatically increasing your costs.

Here are some top tips you can actually put into action, to get more from your people:

  • Provide a stimulating working environment that encourages members of staff to contribute to the progress of your business.
  • Encourage your staff to reach their full potential by providing opportunities to develop their skills through training and development, as well as coaching in the soft skills needed to be an excellent team member.
  • Carry out formal performance reviews on a regular basis, setting clear objectives and achievable targets; don’t wait for annual appraisals.
  • Build good relationships by providing regular informal feedback and guidance; allow your staff to air their concerns within an environment of trust and honesty.
  • Deal with issues as soon as they arise – don’t wait for them to become problems.
  • Offer a clear career path, to encourage employees to be the best they can be and stay with you for the long term.

How do you get more from your people? What have you done that has worked – or not worked? Leave a reply below.

If you still have questions about how to improve the performance of your team, come to our next workshop on 22 November 2012 near Henley. Places are free but limited, so click here for full details.

How to ensure your employees are performing to the best of their ability

Posted on by

Your people are the heart of your business.  By investing in them you are investing in your success.

Here are our top 10 tips to help you get the most out of your most precious asset, your people!

  1. Provide a vibrant and stimulating working environment and a culture that values the contribution made by each and every individual.
  2. Actively embrace the diverse range of skills, expertise, experience, attitudes and backgrounds of all your staff.
  3. Encourage your staff to reach their full potential! Provide opportunities to develop their expertise, both in terms of technical and soft skills
  4. Provide formal and informal performance reviews on a regular basis.
  5. Set clear objectives and achievable targets and allow your staff to air their concerns within an environment of trust and honesty
  6. Deal with issues as soon as they arise, don’t wait for them to become  a significant problem
  7. Equip your managers with the skills required to deal with difficult situations confidently and effectively
  8. Reinforce/reward good performance
  9. Offer a clear career path that incentivise employees to be the best they can be.
  10. Conduct regular employee questionnaires to highlight areas for concern and ensure staff feel that you value their opinions