Whether it's deserved or not, the perception that management is "against" employees, once earned, is difficult to shake.
That's why it's vital for supervisors and HR to make sure all employees are treated fairly and consistently at all times, especially when it comes to discipline. To make sure your disciplinary actions are fair, ask yourself the following questions before taking action against an employee:...
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Q. We recently heard from a co-worker that an employee ("Mike") seemed to be having some health issues.
Mike hasn't said anything to his supervisor or anyone else as far as we know. What can we say? - M.D., Virginia
The Fearless Workplace Most workplaces operate under fear, and diminish employee productivity. Here is how to diminish fear in your workplace.
Based on a decade of meta research and more than 1,000 interviews, 64 percent of employees believe some degree of fear is present in all organizations, and it diminishes employee engagement.
The fear of change, failure, declining revenue, speaking up at meetings, the news of a layoff or even a manager can paralyze employees and diminish trust. If left unchecked, fear permeates relationships, processes and policies, creating a culture of fear. A fear-based culture depletes pride, undermines quality, reduces
profitability and stifles productivity. Fear also impacts how we communicate, make decisions, motivate others, build teams and resolve conflicts, all to the detriment of the organization. Today, employees want to be engaged in an environment that gives their lives meaning, and they seek organizations whose vision and
values create a culture based on trust. This foundation of trust can only be built when the psychological fear is eliminated from the workplace. There are many conditions that promote fear in the workplace:...
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Ten Management Practices to Axe There is a plethora of advice out there, here are some that should be removed from the list.
So you've studied all the best sellers about how to make yourself into a better manager? Well, you can't believe everything you read.
Every few years, a management book or philosophy emerges to change our thinking about the best ways to lead employees. From The One Minute Manager to Who Moved My Cheese?, new and revived leadership concepts have shaped the way we organize, evaluate, inspire, and reward team members. With so many
competing management theories in the mix, some ill-conceived practices were bound to take hold-and indeed, many have. Here's our list of the 10 most brainless and injurious:...
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Three Sins Against Innovation Keep your "idea monkeys" happy and going in the right direction to get the most out of their expertise.
In your enthusiasm to spur innovation, make sure you're not burning those who can provide it best.
Every once in a while it's a good idea to make sure you're not-inadvertently-making it harder for either yourself or your team to be innovative. Here are three sins even the best managers commit occasionally. (We have been guilty of them ourselves.) We also offer suggestions how to guard against, and recover from,
these pitfalls...
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Three easy rules that can make all the difference.
She was just shy of her 17th birthday. I was a year younger. It was my first time, but she was like a pro. When she started, my back stiffened and even my knuckles started to sweat. You see, my classmate and I were giving a presentation to our entire school. I was so nervous I had to clamp my hands to the lectern to steady
my shaking body. My only saving grace was so that no one heard the guttural sounds of fear groaning out of my mouth, because I was shaking so far from the microphone. Afterward, I was so embarrassed that I set myself a new goal. I would overcome my fear and become a proficient public speaker. I took a course in
speaking, trained hard and even spoke in competitions at local Rotary clubs. Now I travel the world from the U.S. to Thailand to Amsterdam doing several dozen paid speaking engagements a year. Public speaking is...
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Tips on Managing a Virtual Workforce Telecommuting offers big rewards but takes a different management style. Here are a few great tips from CEOs already "working it out".
As companies search for more productive and cost effective ways of getting work accomplished, there has been an explosion of virtual work and project teams.
As a result, it has become imperative for people to learn how to work together across boundaries of space, time, and yes, cultures. Driven by the need to leverage expertise located in different parts of the organization, companies are increasingly reliant on geographically dispersed virtual teams to plan, make
decisions, and take action on critical business issues. When such teams function at optimal levels of productivity and efficiency, they are a source of competitive advantage for their companies, bringing together a variety of different perspectives and experiences that have high value for innovation and
problem solving. On the other hand, teams working remotely face unique challenges in communicating and collaborating efficiently and productively. Research conducted by Wilson Learning a few years ago highlights this problem. Our research showed the most productive teams are those with a high level of
diversity and high levels of communication skills. However, if the communication skills are lacking, the highly diverse teams are the lowest performing teams. Thus effective teamwork and communication skills for virtual teams are even more important than for other teams. You can't walk down the hall or into the next
cubicle to discuss a problem if some people are in New York and others are in Santa Cruz, CA, or even Bangladore, India. As a result, without critical skill-sets, virtual teams will fail to fully engage team members, establish clear goals and standards, and establish the processes necessary to get things
done. Here is a "Top Ten" list of strategies that will help your virtual teams perform at the highest level and take full advantage of members' varying skills, knowledge, and capabilities...
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Two items caught my eye this month. I'm wondering whether they have anything to do with one another.
The first is a news release from The Conference Board reporting that its most recent periodic poll showed that only 45 percent of workers in the U.S. were satisfied with their jobs, the lowest level in the 23-year history of the poll-this in an era in which we are told that jobs are being enhanced by information technology. The
second is an article by Jeffrey Pfeffer pointing out the prevalence of "green" initiatives by business organizations. Invariably these initiatives are associated with saving the external environment. Pfeffer asks why, in the face of the evidence of its importance, do so few of these initiatives involve the sustainability of workers in
these same organizations? Citing Wal-Mart and BP, he maintains that...
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Watch Out: That Unpaid Intern Could Cost You The 6 strict rules for properly hired unpaid interns are very hard to qualify under; you are better off to pay minimum wage in most cases.
The Department of Labor is cracking down on unpaid internships. Here's what you need to know. Hiring an unpaid intern this summer? Your next hire after that could be a lawyer. The Labor Department is cracking down on employers who break minimum wage laws, investigating and fining companies that are taking advantage of (mostly) young people for whom paid jobs are scarce. When is it legal to have
someone work for free? Very rarely, it seems. "If you're a for-profit employer or you want to pursue an internship with a for-profit employer, there aren't going to be many circumstances where you can have an internship and not be paid and still be in compliance with the law," Nancy J. Leppink, the Labor Department's acting
director of the wage and hour division,...
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How to improve employee retention Make sure you pay attention now to employees' needs and wants, before the economy picks up and you lose them.
As the economy revives, companies with dissatisfied employees will experience a swift exodus of their top talent. Here's how to keep your staff engaged and happy. In a down economy, employees have fewer opportunities to take a job at another company, but entrepreneurs would be remiss to take their fingers off the pulse of company morale simply because employees have fewer options. "Companies that don't think about [employee retention], that basically rest on their laurels
and think 'the economy will take care of us, where are they going to go?' Those are the companies that, as soon as the labor market picks back up, their turnover rates are going to go from 5 percent to 50 percent and it will happen overnight," says Mark Murphy, author of...
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