Posts Categorized: Project Management Best Practices
Employee Communication Skills and Company Success
They are referred to in different ways – communications skills, personality traits, soft skills. But whatever they are called, recent studies have shown that they are just as important to a company’s success as other more quantifiable business skills. About 75 percent of those surveyed identified these employee skills as necessary to success. These skills Read more »
U.S. Firms Lag in Assisting Employees with Work/Life Balance
Companies in the United States do well in handling problems of discrimination in the workplace, but they don’t rate quite as well in aiding employees’ family life. That was the result of a recent study that compared U.S. companies with other firms in 173 countries on their guidelines for working families. The study used information Read more »
Health and the Workplace
According to a recent survey on employee health, workers could do more at work to eat better and be more active, while employers could improve workers’ health by doing more to encourage healthy lifestyles. The issue has become important because about three-fourths of Americans will be overweight by 2015, according to healthcare experts. And the Read more »
E-mail: Gossiping and Wasting Time at Work
Waaaay back in 2007 (remember those halcyon days, pre-recession?) a survey by the company MessageGate, Inc. found that employees considered e-mail systems the most important “corporate workflow tool.” Still, it also was a tool that helped employees “exercise poor judgment in its use,” and increased costs as well as business and legal risks. We can Read more »
Perk Power
On-the-job perks can be very powerful when it comes to recruiting and even retaining employees. Let us count the ways: 1) When employees feel they are being “taken care of by their employers” (more on this in a moment) the more likely they are to recommend your company to their friends, neighbors and former colleagues. Read more »
Important Employee Performance Management Tasks
When supervising employees, don’t forget these important performance management tasks: 1) Be sure to align your workers’ goals with your company’s goals. As you create SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) goals for your workers, be sure you align these goals with your firm’s vision and objectives. By doing so you’ll help employees understand Read more »
Developing Business Ethics in Your Employees
As the country reels from several business scandals of the past few years, the idea of training employees in business ethics is gaining traction. The idea is to help staffers and managers examine their own ethics and come up with approaches for handling the occasional “sticky wicket” on the job. Yet to really get your Read more »
Telecommuting Better Than Working in Office
A study conducted by Brigham Young University and published this past summer in the Journal of Family Psychology reported that employees who were able to work from home said they had a better work/life balance than their office-based colleagues — even though the telecommuters worked much longer hours. The study took a look at almost Read more »
Getting Employee Feedback
Many companies in the United States are not taking advantage of a key resource – their employees. A recent survey has shown that companies are not taking the time to listen to feedback or ideas from their workers. Nearly half of the companies contacted in a recent study did not use employee surveys. Moreover, almost Read more »
Failure as a Learning Opportunity
Companies that have recovered from major failures have learned more from the experience and have become more successful as a result, according to research from the University of Colorado Denver School of Business. The knowledge that came from success didn’t seem to carry as much weight as the knowledge that came from failure, which was Read more »