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Don’t Slack on Those You Hire

March 8, 2017 by Thomas Leave a Comment

handshake-1513228_640In order to give your small business the best chance to succeed, much of course depends on those you hire.

That said are you doing the best job possible when it comes to hiring talent?

In some instances, you’re going to miss on a few choices. If you can hire 90 percent or better successfully, you can oftentimes survive those cases where you made the wrong choice.

So, what goes into hiring the best possible talent out there for your small business?

While research on your part is certainly key, a little bit of luck certainly doesn’t hurt too.

From this day forward, will you do everything possible in hiring the right people time and time again?

Put Time and Effort into Your Review Process

When the time comes again for you to hire the right employees, keep in mind the following pointers:

  1. Experience

What employer would tell you that experience isn’t all that important? If you said very true, you’d be correct.

That said a person’s job experience up to this point can mean a myriad of things.

Were they in a position of management? Were they responsible for making key decisions for the employer or employers they worked for up to this point? Were they tasked with overseeing large sums of money? Lastly, were they someone who managed to climb the corporate ladder wherever they were at?

As you look at any candidate’s experience level, dig down deep to see just how thick it truly is.

  1. Research

Assuming you take your time to properly screen each and every prospective employee, that research should include a number of factors.

Along with standard items like education, job experience etc. you really need to be socially active in the process.

Yes, what a potential employee does on social networking sites is having more of an impact today with employers than even just a few years ago. While you should not automatically discount a qualified individual because of political posts etc. that you disagree with, look for the obvious.

If someone exhibits signs of racism, bigotry, questionable acts like inappropriate pictures or videos, yes, those are red flags you should not overlook.

  1. Education

Although some employers will tell you job experience is the overriding factor when it comes to hiring individuals, others certainly do not discount the importance of a quality education.

As you look at hiring educated talent for your small business, be sure you don’t neglect the value of those educations.

For instance, if you are hiring someone to work with your company in the criminal justice system, that education is as important as anything else you will review.

Hopefully, each prospective employee has used what they learned through schooling to put themselves and their experiences in the right position, the position of contributing to your business needs.

Lastly, as crucial as that education is, street smarts are imperative too.

That is especially true if you plan to offer someone a job in a field where snap decisions in law enforcement and related positions of higher responsibility are oftentimes required.

Personalities Can’t Ever Be Overlooked

  1. Personalities

Even as important as experience, education, and social media etiquette are, don’t ever discount the value of each and every personality you come across.

While someone can have fantastic experience and an education that is second-to-none, you want personalities that will mesh with your current team of employees.

That said be sure to keep the current makeup of your office in mind whenever you interview a prospective employee.

Ask yourself if this potential team member would in fact work well with the present team you employ. Could you see any personality clashes, perhaps people with personalities that are too strong or even too weak?

Finally, look to hire those individuals who exhibit a desire to go that extra mile for you and your employees.

In many instances, employees will have to do more than they’re originally hired for. The last thing you want is someone who complains about that.

Remember, when the team effort is in place, it is hard for a company to lose.

Photo credit: Pixabay

About the Author: Dave Thomas covers business topics on the web.

 

 

Filed Under: Business Life, teamwork Tagged With: business, employees, hire, production

Success Oftentimes Comes From Helping Others

March 4, 2016 by Thomas 1 Comment

A thermometer with mercury rising past the 100% goal mark and shWhat makes you feel successful as a business owner in today’s competitive world?

For some, it is seeing your revenue grow quarter to quarter. Others, meantime, like it when their brand not only gets lots of promotions, but is also expanding into other markets.

While those are all great marks for a company; so too is helping others.

When your brand can reach out to those in your local community (and even nationally at times) and lend a helping hand, it gives you a good feeling about your role as a business owner.

Business of Lending a Helping Hand

It truly doesn’t matter if your business is big or small, there are myriad of ways you can leave a positive imprint on the lives of others.

In the event you’ve not been too robust in community activities over the years or are new to the business world, keep some of these ideas in mind for 2016 and beyond:

  1. Outreach – What are you doing as a business leader to help those in your local community? Get together with your employees to come up with some ways of making lives better for those in and around town. There are options such as participating in running or walking events, book drives to get more people (especially kids) reading, packing up supplies to send off to the troops, doing toy fairs for area children and so much more. When you and your employees sit down and think about ideas, the best idea to come out of this is that you will be helping others;
  2. Partnership – If you do not want to headline a fund-raiser or other such event, partner with others in the community to do so. This takes the pressure off of you to be the prime organizer, yet you still add your company’s time and effort to the mix. Have someone on your staff be in charge of looking for opportunities to get your business involved. Work with the local chamber of commerce and other business leaders in the community to see where your brand can best leave its helping footprints around town;
  3. Educate – Learn from some of the “big boys” as to what they’re doing not only nationally, but in local communities. Companies such as McDonald’s, Nike, Target, Las Vegas Sands and many others are well-known for their efforts to assist others. Take a lesson from these and other known brands, learning how they put these different helping programs in motion. Once you’ve done that, you can then implement likewise efforts on your local level to help both individuals and families;
  4. Publicize – Once you have a fund-raiser or other such type of helping program or plan in place, promote the heck out of it for maximum success. You can do this through a number of channels, notably press releases and social media. Your press release/s should include pertinent details not only about the event, but how and why others in the community should get involved. With social media, you can inform countless people of the event planned and how to participate in it. Use your social networking opportunities like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc. to promote your plans. Lastly, share the plans with as many people you know in your social networking circle, encouraging them to promote as well. It is also a good idea to help promote others who are doing likewise initiatives in their respective communities. Another business in town may be doing its own type of fund-raiser that you’re not participating in, but that doesn’t mean you can’t give direct non-competitors a little promotion on your social sites. When everyone takes a little bit of time to spread the news about assisting others, much more gets done.

When you stop and think about it, having the right focus applies to many facets of the business world.

Yes, you’re in the business world to sell your product or service and ultimately make money.

That being said, helping others a little less fortunate along the way will bring you just as much success and a feeling of accomplishment at the end of the day.

Photo credit: BigStockPhoto.com

About the Author: Dave Thomas covers business and marketing topics on the web.

Filed Under: Business Life, teamwork

The Business of Helping Former Military Members

January 28, 2016 by Thomas 1 Comment

Working Together Blackboard Means Teams And CooperatingRetiring from a military position and moving into civilian life can be a challenge.

It’s a big transition, and if a veteran decides to stay in the work force, the question is what is a good career to take a look at?

Because many military personnel retire at a young age, they still want to work.

More and more companies are making it a higher priority to hire military vets; some that are known for doing a strong here are GE, USAA and Verizon.

Home Inspection – An example of a viable option

Some veterans may choose a career that they can do on their own rather than working for a big corporation, and that’s a good option, too.

One career to take a look at surprisingly could be a home inspector.

Here are 4 Reasons Why Home Inspecting is a Great Career Choice for Vets:

  1. Low Startup Cost – You can start with some basic things like a laptop and a clear space to work – which can even be your kitchen table. Many jobs have higher start-up costs, but with home inspection, it’s fairly low. You will have to pay for training and licensing, but that should quickly come back to you;
  2. Low Overhead – Once you’ve got your business going, it won’t cost much to keep it running. You don’t really need an office to pay rent on or anyone else working with you who you’d have to pay. You’re biggest expenses may be keeping your memberships current and paying for tools and mileage;
  3. Education is easy – Licensing is fairly easy and can be flexible. You can do this at your convenience when it makes sense for you and on your own timeline;
  4. Convenience – You can schedule your own hours and take time off when you need it. You can take clients and appointments on as you see fit, and you are the one who can best know what you can handle so you can keep your schedule manageable. You can set your hours and provide the freedom that may work so well for you.

Whether you are looking at a career in a big corporation, a small business or running your own business, you have some great options.

With a military background, you have excellent training and skills at the ready.

Now you can start something new that provides you convenience and satisfaction.

Photo credit: BigStockPhoto.com

About the Author: Heather Legg is an independent writer who covers topics related to social media, small business and education.

Filed Under: Business Life, teamwork Tagged With: business, Careers, military, workforce

Is Your Office as Productive as It Should Be?

June 17, 2015 by Thomas Leave a Comment

There are a number of ways to improve your office productivity this year and beyond.

Take an objective look at your office operations to see if you or your team are guilty of any of these time wasters.

Dissecting a Problem to Death

In any group of people, there are the talkers and there are the doers.

If you’re not careful, the talkers will suck the life out of the doers until the problem has been discussed, dissected, considered, disseminated and dried up. At some point, you need to have a course of action, and the first step is to stop talking about it.

Sometimes any action is better than no action at all.

If your team is unsure what to do to solve a problem, pick one proposed solution and implement it. Eventually, you’ll land on a solution that works, and in the meantime, you’ll all learn what doesn’t work.

Over-referencing

Some office managers love to create cross-referencing systems.

They’ll have employees keep a binder or Excel sheet of data, check off work that’s done on the project in five places, and create summary project binders for “dashboard” views.

If you have an office manager like that, he or she will have created a team of paper-pushers just for you. People will be so busy making check marks and flipping through binder tabs that no real work will actually get done.

Of course a checks-and-balance system makes sense. But invest in a software system designed to do all the backend heavy lifting for you.

Online dashboards can be customized for your business where your staff has only to enter data once and it can be viewed in a variety of different ways by team members both local and on the road.

Meeting Madness

Meeting madness is when you and your staff attend so many meetings there’s nary a minute left in the work day to actually get to any of the work that was delegated during the meeting. If your 8-hour days are spent more in the meeting room than at your desk, you may be a victim of meeting madness.

It doesn’t take a 45-minute meeting to announce that you have a new client and discuss their needs.

Instead, use email, memos and company newsletters to get any information across that doesn’t actually require feedback from employees. If you’re just announcing something, or giving out general instructions to a team, skip the meeting.

As the following article looks at, here are 6 ways to take your office productivity into the next generation:

File Disorganization

Remember the old days when your office used filing cabinets and if an employee removed a file they had to leave a sign-out sheet in its place? Of course, everyone forgot to leave the sigh-out sheet at least once, leaving the next person wondering where in the office the file was.

File disorganization still happens today.

Even if your company is on a network, misnamed and misplaced electronic files on the “system” make it difficult for staff members to get work done.

Move on up to the cloud.

With a third-party cloud-based system, multiple employees can work on the same file at the same time.

Everyone can have their own log in and username authentication, and employees won’t be stepping on each other’s virtual toes.

These are easy changes to implement in any office to enhance productivity.

About the Author: Kate Supino writes extensively about best business practices.

Filed Under: Productivity, teamwork

7 Decisive Changes to Jumpstart Your Team’s Productivity

May 19, 2015 by Rosemary Leave a Comment

By Tracy Vides

We’ve all looked at companies like Google and Facebook and envied them secretly for their fabulous looking offices, employees who seem super motivated all the time, and products that are world beaters. As managers, we may not have much control over how our offices look or whether every product that rolls out the door is a smash hit; however, we do have control over how our employees feel at the workplace.

Here are some simple changes that go a long way towards making your employees a tad less hassled and a lot more productive.

1. Cut Those Unnecessary Meetings

It’s the bane of modern corporate life. Calling meetings and spending the better part of the day inside conference rooms while work keeps piling up on your desk is a common lament we all hear. A recent study found that 59% of all respondents polled found endless meetings to be a major cause of their wasted time at work.

Avoid unnecessary meetings like those completely pointless ‘FYI’ type meetings. Or meetings that do not directly involve each person attending it. If you do have to meet, limit your meeting time to a maximum of 30 minutes. Anything longer than that and your team’s minds will be elsewhere and you’ll not achieve anything concrete from the meeting.

To make your team a lean mean productive unit, use meetings for three clear purposes:

  1. Brainstorming
  2. Decision making
  3. Team reviews and future planning

For everything else, just stick to your collaboration tools and email.

2. Tame the Email Monster

Speaking of email, that is another huge time killer in office environments. As you read this post, over 200 billion emails have been sent out just today. No wonder intra-team emails comprise one line additions, irrelevant comments, or long winded summaries of earlier emails that effectively add zero value to the final recipients.

A good way to avoid drowning in emails is to institute a policy within your team of keeping emails brief and to the point. Avoid running over three to four sentences in one email to avoid losing the reader’s interest. For feedback on a project or communication regarding tasks, rely on an instant messenger such as HipChat or Convo, or other dedicated tools.

To avoid being overwhelmed by all the email you receive, make it a point to first focus on your immediate priorities. Check email once every few hours, ideally when you take a break from your own to-do list.

3. Empower Cross-Functional Collaboration

A key step in leadership development is to widen the perspectives of your next-gen leaders. Typically, most employees have linear growth trajectories in organizations, where they specialize in one particular function, like marketing, product development, finance, and so on. Their understanding and comfort levels with other functions is often woefully inadequate.

Living with a situation where you only have employees who are super specialized in their own fields is a recipe for succession disaster. Often, people get stuck in an unimaginative quagmire purely due to the lack of a fresh perspective. When the same problem is viewed by a new pair of eyes, solutions surface unexpectedly. An effective leader needs an overall understanding of the business with keen, unbiased insights into what makes the company tick and what are its pain points.

As W. Earl Sasser from the Harvard Business School puts it,

“Expertise in only one area — think John Sculley’s unsuccessful jump from Pepsi consumer marketing to the top of Apple — can be a handicap.”

Therefore, it’s no surprise that cross-functional collaboration that is all the rage these days. And for good reason too. A study conducted by Teresa Amabile from the Harvard Business School on corporate employees across seven companies, shows that a collaborative environment where employees work together without being pitted against each other works best for creative thinking.

Many organizations are so committed to this concept of cross functional collaboration that they build it into their office design. Katherine Vong writes about the tech startup The Flagship, which created a centrally located Piazza (town square) in the office, aiming to encourage conversations and cross-pollination of ideas across teams that wouldn’t usually have interacted with each other.

To begin with, offer your future stars exposure to other aspects of the business than what they have handled so far. Let them spend considerable amount of time learning and getting their hands dirty in new functions. This multi-functional exposure broadens their perspective, preparing them for a more strategic role in the future. Also invest in a collaboration tool like Wrike or Grexit. Such tools allow you to brainstorm ideas, assign responsibility, and annotate or comment on work completed by a team member at your own pace and from the convenience of your Gmail inbox, without the wastefulness of calling multiple meetings.

4. Create SOPs

It’s a common refrain. Too many teams reinvent the wheel with every project that they undertake. In the absence of a documented ‘right’ way to accomplish a task, every employee will try and devise a solution to problems similar to ones that have been solved multiple times before, leading to a lot of wasted unproductive time.

Counter wasting time on unnecessary, repetitive work by developing clear Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) for common tasks that your team handles. Train your team members in becoming experts at this standard procedure, so that they can function a lot more efficiently when they next come up against a similar issue. Don’t know how to create a SOP for your team? David Grusenmeyer of Cornell University offers a scientific approach to writing the perfect SOP for your team.

5. Make Deadlines Stick

I love a relaxed work environment. However too much of a good thing can be bad for you too. Procrastination is a huge efficiency killer among teams, especially teams where bosses keep pushing the deadlines on projects in order to seem more employee friendly. I am not suggesting that your team throw flexibility out the window.

However, if your team realizes that deadlines can be extended all the time and for indefinite periods, they stop taking deadlines seriously. Which means your team’s productivity suffers and unsavory consequences follow.

Avoid all this nastiness by being clear that deadlines on various tasks are not negotiable. Your team needs to realize that a deadline that is announced is meant to be respected and will not change unless under very, very exceptional circumstances.

6. Bid Goodbye to Silos

While we hear of too many meetings being called that waste everyone’s time, we also see a large majority of workers carrying out their tasks in complete isolation, all by themselves. Independence is a great trait to have, but most office tasks are not new and have been done by someone before. Approaching a teammate for assistance on a task they probably have handled before is a great way to cut delivery timelines and improve efficiencies.

The study quoted earlier found that 32% of workers believe that insufficient collaboration with their co-workers acts as an impediment to their own productivity.

As a manager, encourage your team to always have each other’s backs. The definition of a team itself is a group of individuals who come together to accomplish a goal. Go back to basics by inspiring your team to drop their blinders and reach out and help their fellow members whenever needed.

7. Speed Up Rewards & Recognition

I saved one of the biggest contributors to productivity for the very end.

Even the most talented and efficient employee will soon lose all drive and interest in his work if his results go unnoticed.

Most organizations pay lip service to rewards and recognition by having an annual R&R ceremony where one person is felicitated for a good job done. Trouble is, a team is not made up of just one person. Every member of a team puts in effort all year long, some of which catch the public eye and many which go unnoticed in the larger scheme of things. When sincere efforts and small victories go unheralded, over time, workers become less motivated to put in their very best.

Don’t let this despair set in within your team. That will be your team’s death knell. Instead, institute a program of regular and instant recognition to make your team members feel valued. It doesn’t have to be something big or formal. Even a congratulatory email (copied to senior management) to employees on a job well done makes them feel important and appreciated.

Parting Words

High productivity is a fruit that is ripened by a positive and motivating team atmosphere as much as by an individual’s own drive. Tell us how you encourage productivity within your team. I’d love to know!

Author’s Bio: Tracy Vides is a content creator and marketer, who loves to blog about subjects as diverse as fashion, technology, and finance. She’s always raring to have a discussion on startups and entrepreneurship. Say “Hi” to her on Twitter @TracyVides. You can also find her on G+ at gplus.to/TracyVides.

Filed Under: teamwork Tagged With: bc

Small actions, taken consistently, can move mountains

June 12, 2014 by Rosemary Leave a Comment

When Rosa Parks decided she wasn’t going to give up her bus seat, she may not have had in mind kicking off a movement that would change life in America.

Herman Melville, writing the sentence “Call me Ishmael,” probably didn’t sit down to write “the novel of the century.”

Mother Teresa simply decided to care for one person at a time. She had no thought of becoming beatified by the Catholic Church.

We all have to find our own first small action.

One organization that is truly living this credo is Milaap. It’s a crowdlending platform that has raised more than $1.5 million, with a 98.48% repayment rate. They are celebrating their fourth anniversary with a 24-hour online conversation about sustainable giving.

Members of the site choose a project/borrower to support, and how much they wish to lend, and Milaap gives 100% of your loan funds to the borrower.

You then receive updates on the project via email, and get repaid. The funds can be reinvested in another micro-loan if you wish.

The concept is so simple. With each small loan, lives are changed. With each changed life comes promise and possibility for everyone touched by that life.

Reading through the available campaigns to support, you see families who can use a $100 loan to buy chickens to expand their chicken coops, to help abused women start their own businesses, or bring potable water to underserved areas. Each of these project groups are taking a single small action to improve their lives. The ripple effects over time will be enormous.

Maybe today you’re reading this post with a mountain sitting in front of you.

Is it a physical disability?
A financial hardship?
Do you have an enormous challenge at work?
A burning idea for a new business?

Whatever the mountain is, you can find a first step. Even if you’re moving it with teaspoons, you can make progress right now in this moment.

Maybe you can be inspired by Milaap and gather supporters to help you carry teaspoons.

Molly’s lovely post from this past Monday reminded us that we can’t do it alone. That’s even more true when the mountain looms large.

If you’d like to learn more about Milaap and the work they’re doing, visit their site at Milaap.org.

If you’d like to get help and support from your fellow teaspoon carriers, let us know in the comments. Let’s take the first action together.

Milaap infographic
Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for social strata — a top ten company to work for on the Internet . Check out the Social Strata blog. You can find Rosemary on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee

Filed Under: Community, Motivation, Personal Development, Successful Blog, teamwork Tagged With: bc, charity, nonprofit, teamwork

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