Category: Performance Management

In my last post, I discussed being able to identify signs of employee burnout. The first step is to recognize burnout; however, if you do what should you do? Below is a list of things you can do if you notice the signs. What can you add?

• Engage your employees. Spend time each day engaging your employees. Whenever possible, spend a few minutes with them in person. Monitor for changes as described above.
• Provide clear communication on expectations and success. Provide all employees with consistent fair feedback on performance. Thank you employees for coming to work and meeting expectations. Praise them when they exceed expectations and communicate with them when they miss expectations.
• Give employees as much control of their work as allowed. Most people assert negative control when they feel as though they have none. They do this by choosing to not stay late and coming in early. They make choices to “show you” that they don’t have to do anymore than they have to do.
• Communicate the importance of their role in the organization. Employees want to feel that they work is valued. Share how their work contributes to client and company success.
• Provide opportunity for growth and learning. This doesn’t mean requiring them to go to company provided training sessions that were planned by someone else (although it may be depending on the individual and the learning topic and environment). Let the employee guide this process. Discuss development with them. Avoid the following questions:
  • “In what areas do you want to develop this year?”
  • “What kind of training would you be interested in taking this year?”

Try Theses Instead

• • “What parts of your job do you most enjoy?”
  • “If you could create your dream job, what would it be?”

Use the dialogue to help identify stretch assignments or goals you can establish for the employee.

• Ensure the work environment is cooperative and respectful. Employees want to be treated fairly and with respect. As the supervisor you need to model this behavior and hold everyone accountable to it.
• Look for ways to remove obstacles to proficiency. Look to see what obstacles are blocking employee’s success and find ways to remove them. Look for unnecessary duplicate processes that can be removed.
• Engage employees in finding solutions. Operate an open door to bring concerns and questions. How you respond as a supervisor sends a key message to an employee. If an employee comes to you with a valid concern or suggestion, hear them out. Ask some of the following questions:
  • “What suggestions do you have to improve in this area?”
  • “How will this work in our department?”
  • “What benefits does it have?”
  • “What are the obstacles?”
  • “What support would you need to help implement this suggestion?
• Set realistic work expectations. Don’t expect everyone to work at the same pace and with the same strengths. Set expectations that are reasonable and as previously mentioned remove obstacles to success. Be flexible with how work is accomplished whenever possible to meet individual differences.
• Provide Fun. Offer ways for employees to relax for a few minutes during the work day. Host a potluck or special lunch for employees to socialize and network with one another in a relaxed setting. If you can’t find an idea, there are multiple books available with tons of ideas. Or just ask your employees what ideas they have.

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For more resources, See the Human Resources library.

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Sheri Mazurek is a training and human resource professional with over 16 years of management experience, and is skilled in all areas of employee management and human resource functions, with a specialty in learning and development. She is available to help you with your Human Resources and Training needs on a contract basis. For more information send an email to smazurek0615@gmail.com or visit www.sherimazurek.com. Follow me on twitter @Sherimaz.

Carrie walks in to your office this morning with an unfamiliar look on her face that reminds of the look your seven-year-old gives when they break a rule. The conversation goes something like this:
“Good morning Carrie! What’s going on?”
“Um, I need to talk to you.”
“Sure. What do you want to talk about?”
Carrie slides a sheet of paper in front of you. You immediately notice the word resignation. It’s there screaming at you. You take a breath.
“You are resigning. I’m surprised. Why did you decide to leave?”
How common is this scenario in your office? How often do you and your manager’s find themselves shocked by the notice? Are there signs you may have missed?
When you manage a team of high performing, high potential employees, missing the signs of an unsatisfied employee has a much greater cost to your organization than just recruiting. These are signs most managers can’t afford to miss. Below is a list of things to notice:
* Change in performance or productivity. It’s very common to dismiss a few performance misses with your top performers because most of the time because you want to give them the benefit of the doubt. That may be okay, but don’t ignore it. Monitor and address as necessary.
* Increased absences and tardiness. When the workplace becomes a source of stress for an employee, they will find reasons to avoid the environment. Look for any change in attendance. Does the employee seek ways to leave the office? Do they leave immediately at quitting time opposed to staying late as usual?
* Changes in demeanor. Have you noticed a change in mood from positive and upbeat to quiet, sullen or depressed? Does the employee seem irritated and negative? Also, look for any change that is not typical of that person including changes in focus. There may be an explanation from an outside source; engage in dialogue with them to determine this.
* Changes in break times. Is the employee taking more time than usual? Be careful of the clock watchers especially if this is a new behavior.
* Change of relationships with co-workers. Employees often form tight connections with co-workers. In times of stress those connections can be supportive or destructive. What to watch for in this case would be a change in behavior.
Now that you noticed, what can you do? Share your ideas and be sure to read my next post for more discussion on this topic.

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For more resources, See the Human Resources library.

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Sheri Mazurek is a training and human resource professional with over 16 years of management experience, and is skilled in all areas of employee management and human resource functions, with a specialty in learning and development. She is available to help you with your Human Resources and Training needs on a contract basis. For more information send an email to smazurek0615@gmail.com or visit www.sherimazurek.com. Follow me on twitter @Sherimaz.

Can having fun at work boost productivity? Professor Babis Mainemelis from London Business School thinks so, his study with Sarah Ronson found that: “Play at work improves employees’ motivational and cognitive processes and diversionary play fosters creativity.”

And the Institute for Social Research found that companies with high employee engagement saw a 13.2% improvement in net income growth over a one year period.

Innocent smoothies grew their business from nothing to £100 million in just eight years with grass flooring, table football and an indoor picnic area, review innocent success by clicking on the link and see how.

So here are 5 fun ideas to get your team working smarter: Continue reading “Funny Business – 5 ways to play at work and get more done”

The recession may be officially but do managers appreciate that Christmas needn’t be cancelled again this year?

Boozy parties are probably not the best way to mark the end of a tough year but that doesn’t mean there’s not value in gathering everyone together.

As we enter an era when return on investment is at the forefront of our minds the annual celebration needs to deliver more than just a few laughs and sore heads the next day.

So, while everyone is together in celabratory mood here are a few suggestions that will turn a turkey dinner into a turning point: Continue reading “Don’t cancel Christmas – do some team building”

The idea that staff set their own pay, come and go from the office as they please, all within a business that has no written strategy sounds like a recipe for disaster. Not the story of a company that’s gone from $4m to $160m.

Semco is no ordinary workplace, despite the fact that it operates in an industry as ordinary as engineering. Continue reading “A motivated workforce the Ricardo Semler way – Fresh or Foolish?”

The Belbin Team Inventory, also called the Belbin Self-Perception Inventory or Belbin Team Role Inventory is an assessment used to gain insight into an individual’s behavioural tendency in a team environment. It was devised by Dr. Meredith Belbin to measure preference for the nine Team Roles discovered whilst studying numerous teams at Henley Management College.

A Belbin team role as defined by Dr Meredith Belbin is: “a tendency to behave, contribute and interrelate with others in a particular way.” At Fresh Tracks we use ‘Belbin Team Roles’ a lot to develop teams but what are they? For this months video blog actor Andy Taylor explains.

[youtube width=”400″ height=”300″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9M0Al3Oi0-8&[/youtube]

Do you or have you used Belbin? Let us know what you think of it in the comment box below.

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For more resources, see our Library topic Team Building.

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This blog is by Fresh Tracks: Experts in Team Building, Team Development and Staff Conferences
Website: www.freshtracks.co.uk

We would like to share an idea for a team building energiser that can be run inside or outside and would work especially well with larger teams. It’s called ‘Team Jump’.

Overview:
This team building activity is a great way to re-energise the team and have a great photo memory of your day’s training.

Running the Activity: Continue reading “Team building energiser: Team Jump”

A recent survey conducted by SHRM indicated that human capital is one of the biggest challenges in the next ten years for business. Recruiting and retaining top talent should already be a number one priority of your talent management strategy; however, the challenge will be in adjusting the strategy to accommodate changes in the workforce. The real challenge for the HR professionals and business will be in developing innovative strategy to meet the new normal of the business world. Unfortunately, in HR innovation seems to be a missing skill. And questioning long held beliefs in talent management seems to be an even less common skill or practice found in today’s HR departments.

As a profession, we tend to get wrapped up in the compliance piece of the job and forget about what it means to recruit and retain talent. In the most recent issue of SHRM magazine, there is a great article on the biggest missteps in performance management. The information is solid and the article is filled with great advice. It lists information that seems to be often forgotten by managers in the workplace le reminding HR folks of all the little things managers do that drive us crazy. By being written from the vain of legal compliance, it reinforces that our job is so filled with compliance that we might not even realize that we have a greater responsibility in our roles as the drivers of talent management.

We owe it to our organizations to focus on innovative and creative strategies that will attract and retain the talent needed to meet the needs of the organization. We have to start by questioning everything we do in our current strategy and see if it actually yields the results that you have been taught that it does. And for all of you in HR who believe our mission is about the people, you should realize that by taking care of the people in your strategy, you will retain them and that is the win-win we always strive for in this profession.

If you want a place to start, look outside of the HR department. Start with the talent.

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For more resources, See the Human Resources library.

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Sheri Mazurek is a training and human resource professional with over 16 years of management experience, and is skilled in all areas of employee management and human resource functions, with a specialty in learning and development. She is available to help you with your Human Resources and Training needs on a contract basis. For more information send an email to smazurek0615@gmail.com or visit www.sherimazurek.com. Follow me on twitter @Sherimaz.

In our 24/7 world, time spent sleeping is in decline so it’s little wonder that some of us find it hard to wake up in the morning. It’s reported that we sleep at least one hour less each night than we did a half century ago.

A recent American study found that during a two-week period, 40% of workers reported fatigue. Of those, 65% reported health-related lost productive time. According to the researchers, workers with fatigue cost US employers $136.4 billion annually in health-related lost productive time.

Two-thirds of adults report frequent sleep problems, however only one in eight says those problems have been diagnosed. The ‘sleep deprived’ are also more likely to suffer from obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular, psychiatric and gastrointestinal disease, and impaired immunity. So it’s not just the quantity of our sleep that matters but also the quality; snoring loudly, daytime dozing, trouble falling asleep or waking unrefreshed are just a few of the signs that a person could be ‘sleep deprived.’

“Sleep is sort of like food,” says Robert Stickgold, a cognitive neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School. He adds, there’s one important difference: “You can be quite starved and still alive. But many of us live on the edge of sleep starvation and just accept it.” Continue reading “13 Tips to sleep more and raise productivity”

The theories behind team building could be a much older than originally thought. In fact Plato may have been the first ever team building expert!

For some years we’ve been saying “teams that play together, work together” and it seems that although team building is thought to be a comparatively new addition to business training Plato, one of the world’s most influential philosophers, had a similar view over 2000 years ago; “You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation” Plato

So we’d encourage you to make time to play with your colleagues this week, take a ball to the park, eat ice cream in the afternoon or play darts at lunchtime – whatever you think would be fun.

We spend most of our waking lives with our colleagues so let’s enjoy it.

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For more resources, see our Library topic Team Building.

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Blog by Fresh Tracks: Experts in Team Building, Team Development and Staff Conferences
Website: www.freshtracks.co.uk