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Embracing Onboarding 2.0 for IT New Hires

Embracing onboarding 2.0 for IT new hires helps provide the foundation needed to be successful within your organization. For instance, an effective onboarding program helps new hires blend with your company’s culture. Also, onboarding helps increase engagement, productivity, and retention rates. These results strengthen your bottom line.

According to Bamboo HR’s report, The Definitive Guide to Onboarding, an effective onboarding program helps new hires feel 18 times more committed to their employer. Also, 89% of respondents said an effective onboarding process helped them feel very engaged at work. Additionally, these employees were 30 times more likely to experience overall job satisfaction than employees who felt their onboarding process was lacking.

As a result, you should embrace onboarding 2.0 for IT new hires. These suggestions can help.

Discover why and how to embrace onboarding 2.0 for your IT new hires.

Importance of Gamification in Onboarding 2.0

Gamification in onboarding 2.0 for IT new hires helps create a positive impression of your organization. Providing fun, engaging activities to learn about your company helps new hires retain and apply the information.

For instance, gamification provides instant feedback for learning. Also, the feel-good hormone dopamine is released when being rewarded for a specific action. As a result, new hires seek additional onboarding activities so they can be rewarded for learning.

Benefits of Gamification in Onboarding 2.0

Gamification provides a range of benefits for IT new hires:

  • Because gamification provides learning in a challenge-based format, new hires can chunk the information into smaller pieces that are easier to retain and apply.
  • The brain’s hippocampus, which controls knowledge recall, is strongly stimulated during gameplay, leading to better recall and implementation of onboarding activities.
  • Gamification forms an emotional connection between the activity and its relevance, resulting in a strong focus on the activity and implementing what is learned.

Tips to Gamify Your Onboarding 2.0 Process

You can gamify your onboarding 2.0 process with these methods:

  • Determine which elements can be delivered through a learning management system. Examples include what to expect on Day 1, education on the company’s products and services, and explanations of the job tasks and challenges.
  • Work with a design team to create the learning modules. Include the goals of each lesson, the tone, the look, and the use of live videos or animations.
  • Include in your learning modules knowledge checks, templates, handbooks, training manuals, and a directory of managers and support staff.
  • Use personalized avatars, points, and progress bars to create a sense of ownership of the activities.
  • Implement badges to demonstrate advancement in your onboarding process to peers and management.
  • Allow new hires to provide constructive feedback on the learning modules.

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8 Tips to Boost Employee Time Management and Efficiency

Your employees’ time management and efficiency impact productivity. The more focused your employees remain, the more they can accomplish.

How your employees control their time affects their creativity, work quality, and stress levels. Completing tasks before the deadlines supports work-life balance and minimizes burnout.

As a result, you should encourage your employees to boost their time management and efficiency. These methods can help.

Choose among these eight tips to boost employee time management and efficiency.

1. Stay Organized

Encourage your employees to stay organized so they can find what they need when they need it. Maintaining organized work areas lowers stress and anxiety for better mental health.

Your employees can stay organized by:

  • Keeping their desks free of nonessential items.
  • Keeping daily tools within reach.
  • Naming computer files for easy access and sharing.

2. Prioritize Tasks

Help your employees prioritize their tasks. For instance, they can use an Eisenhower Matrix to determine the importance and urgency of each task and schedule accordingly:

  • Tasks with deadlines should be done immediately.
  • Important tasks with no set deadlines should be scheduled for later.
  • Tasks that are not critical to company goals should be deleted.

3. Group Similar Tasks

Schedule similar tasks according to objective or function. For instance, generate and distribute reports from 9 a.m. to 10 a.m. and respond to emails from 10 a.m. to 11 a.m.

4. Create a Daily Schedule  

Encourage your employees to schedule time blocks for specific tasks:

  • Ensure the most important tasks are accomplished first.
  • Set realistic timelines.
  • Allow additional time for unexpected interruptions.
  • Include 10- to 15-minute breaks between tasks.
  • Follow the schedule as planned.
  • Cross off each finished task.
  • Move any unfinished task to the next day.

5. Complete One Task at a Time

Remind your employees to focus on and finish one task at a time. Then, they can move on to the next scheduled task.

The brain is not designed to move between tasks quickly. It takes time to refocus on a new task. Therefore, multitasking takes more time and typically leads to low-quality work.

6. Implement Time Tracking

Ask your employees to keep track of the time they spend on activities each day. For instance, your employees might want to use a time-tracking tool such as RescueTime to determine how much time is spent being productive and how much time is spent on non-work activities such as online shopping. Then, your employees can uncover the areas and habits that block them from reaching their goals and make changes to improve efficiency.

7. Use Time Management Tools

Suggest your employees use time management tools to boost productivity and efficiency. Examples include:

  • Slack for centralized team communications organized by channel
  • Dropbox or OneDrive for file storage, sharing, and backup.
  • Google Calendar or Outlook Calendar for scheduling, alerts, and reminders.

8. Maintain Boundaries

Remind your employees to say “no” when needed. There are a limited number of hours in the day, and your employees likely are at capacity with their workloads. Although helping out colleagues and coworkers is encouraged, your employees should maintain a work-life balance to avoid burnout.

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Anticipating and Managing Legal and Regulatory Changes in the IT Sector

Proactive adaptation in the IT sector includes anticipating and managing legal and regulatory changes. As an IT leader, you must help ensure compliance with these changes.

Smaller companies often are adept at dealing with changes to data privacy regulations, industry standards, and other IT compliance issues. However, medium and large-sized companies often need additional assistance to remain current with these changes. The following methods can help.

Choose among these methods to anticipate, manage, and proactively adapt to legal and regulatory changes in the IT sector.

Maintain Human Resources Updates

Connect with your benefits brokers, your local Chamber of Commerce, employment attorneys, and reliable HR newsletters, publications, and organizations:

  • Remain current with the free updates and resources provided.
  • Take advantage of email updates and complimentary webinars.
  • Keep this information in an HR Updates folder.
  • Access the details when needed.

Secure Legal Support

Legal and regulatory changes in the IT sector typically are not straightforward. Therefore, you should secure a legal compliance service or attorney to keep you updated on these changes and the legal analysis supporting the steps to take to maintain compliance.

You could supplement your legal knowledge with support from these sources:

  • Subscribe to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM)’s legislative updates.
  • Subscribe to newsletters from the Department of Labor or its equivalent.
  • Contact an employment law firm for state and federal newsletters.

Create a Compliance Team

Hire a compliance team to help you anticipate and manage legal and regulatory changes in the IT sector. The team can ensure you and the company maintain compliance with these changes.

Conduct Self-Audits

Schedule quarterly self-audits for compliance. These audits show clients and agencies that your company prioritizes compliance with legal and regulatory changes in the IT sector.

Participate in a Human Resources Organization

Encourage members of the HR team to join a professional HR organization. The organization can assist with a structured review process to ensure compliance with legal and regulatory changes in the IT sector. This review is especially important if your IT workforce is large and geographically diverse because there are more variables to consider.

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Building Trust in Remote Management: Strategies to Empower and Support Remote Teams

Building trust in remote management is essential to empower and support your remote team. You must trust your employees to complete quality tasks by the deadlines without seeing the work completed. Similarly, your team members must trust that everyone is doing their part to work toward shared goals.

Facilitating trust among your remote team helps your employees feel that everyone receives the necessary communication and that the work is evenly distributed. This trust encourages your team to remain engaged and productive. Trust also increases job satisfaction, team morale, and attraction and retention rates.

Choose among these strategies to build trust and empower and support your remote team.

Set Expectations

Clarify what you expect of each employee and your team. Emphasize work hours, communication, skills, learning and development, and other relevant issues.

For instance, you might expect your employees to work 8 hours daily and attend a weekly team meeting. Clarifying the level of contact gives employees control over their schedules for work-life balance.

Create Goals

Work with your team to develop project goals. Gaining employee buy-in increases the likelihood of reaching these goals.

Ensure the project goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). Include the following information:

  • What your team should accomplish
  • How each goal relates to the project
  • Why each goal matters
  • Which resources are needed to attain each goal
  • When each step of a goal should be accomplished
  • How progress and success will be measured
  • Which employee is responsible for each role, responsibility, and task

Provide Collaboration Tools

Facilitate collaboration by giving your team the essential tools to complete their work. These tools support sharing and storing information in a central location for easy access.

Examples of collaboration tools include:

  • Video conferencing software such as Zoom or Skype
  • Chat apps such as Slack or Discord
  • Cloud services and file sharing, such as Google Drive
  • Project management applications such as Hive or Monday.com

Schedule Team Meetings

Hold regular team meetings to help your remote team stay aligned on projects and goals:

  • Focus on what was completed since the last meeting, what is being worked on, and what still needs to be completed.
  • Provide time to address questions, problems, and concerns and provide support.
  • Celebrate your employees’ accomplishments.
  • Provide motivation to continue moving forward.

Prioritize Transparency

Be open and honest with your employees. Being transparent sets a positive foundation for managing your remote team.

For instance, show that you value sharing ideas, information, and perspectives and encourage your team to do the same. Also, hold your employees accountable for their work.

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Active Listening: Communication and Empathy as an IT Leader

Active listening is an essential skill for an IT leader. Your ability to communicate effectively and show empathy impacts your team’s success.

Focusing on what your employees say and understanding their points of view help you make decisions and resolve issues. These actions build trust, respect, and collaboration among your team.

Practicing communication and empathy with your team increases employee engagement, performance, and productivity. These actions elevate job satisfaction, employee morale, and attraction and retention rates. The results strengthen your bottom line.

Engage in the following behaviors to practice active listening and empathy as an IT leader.

Recognize Verbal and Nonverbal Cues

Pay attention to your employee’s tone, facial expressions, and other body language. These cues provide insight into how your employee may be feeling.

Keep in mind these emotions might not be verbally expressed. Or, your employee could say they are fine when they are not.

Focus on what your employee is and is not saying. Acknowledge what they are saying and how they are feeling. Ask follow-up questions to uncover more information.

For instance, “Thank you for sharing you feel about this situation. Would you share a bit more about your thoughts? I would like to hear more about your perspective.”

Process Verbal and Nonverbal Information

Work to understand the messages you receive from your employee. Also, keep track of the points made during the conversation.

For instance, “Here are some key points and areas of agreement and disagreement from our conversation. Here are more pieces of information to gather and suggested next steps. What do you think?”

Share Appropriate Responses

Use the information you gathered to reply to your employee. Include verbal acknowledgments, clarifying questions, or paraphrasing to show you were actively listening.

For instance, maintain appropriate eye contact, facial expressions, and body language while responding. Also, nod your head and use acknowledging phrases such as “That is a great point.”

Follow Up on the Conversation

Use your behaviors to show you were listening during the discussion. For instance, you might implement constructive feedback your employee provided. Or, you could talk about why you made another decision.

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Building a Resilient IT Workforce: Adapting to Rapid Technological Advancements

Building a resilient IT workforce helps your company adapt to rapid technological advancements. Because ongoing change impacts your business, you must be able to keep up to maintain your competitive edge.

The ability to maintain an agile, resilient workforce supports effective business operations. Your workforce can prioritize digital solutions that fill your company’s current needs while creating a platform for innovation. Then, your workforce can evolve to fit your changing business needs.

Implement these tips to build a resilient IT workforce to adapt to rapid technological advancements.

Focus on Digital Transformation

Determine which technologies and cybersecurity strategies are required to support a remote or hybrid workforce. Also, decide how you can use technology to promote a human-centered workplace. These approaches impact how your IT team helps support management practices that align with business strategies.

Embrace Cloud Technology

Take advantage of cloud technology to increase the agility of your business platform. This agility lets you add the capabilities and functionality needed to adapt to new technologies. This adaptation lets your company add capabilities to its tech stack to increase its competitive edge.

For instance, you might increase the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to improve efficiencies. You also could increase cybersecurity to improve your competitive edge.

Automate Decision-Making

Use AI and ML to create thresholds that indicate when an automated process requires human input. Increasing automation elevates efficiency in business operations for stronger customer management and product or service innovation.

For instance, you can use customer relationship tools to predict and flag your customers who are likely to stop making purchases. Then, you can take steps to encourage customer loyalty through discounts or related actions.

Drive Innovation

Use cloud capabilities to scale and support research and development. For instance, use AI and data analytics to reinforce discovery, modeling, and prediction for faster prototyping and testing with lower risk. Leveraging shared knowledge and data insights drives workforce and company performance.

Accelerate Your Ecosystem

Move to standardized architectures and cloud solutions that support the cocreation of performance and innovation. Examples include common services, application programming interfaces (APIs), reusability, and extensibility.

For instance, you might decompose your technology stacks for the continuous integration and delivery of new capabilities. Or, you could make it easier to share data and knowledge for greater insight and innovation along your value chain.

Establish Agile Targets

Clarify how your workforce should evolve to support new technologies and operating models. Include the diversity, skills, and experiences you want to attain. Then, provide relevant resources and incentives to reach business goals.

Do You Need Help with Building a Resilient IT Workforce?

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3 Tips To Help Attract & Retain Women In IT

Attracting and retaining women in IT is challenging. Some of the most common reasons are slow salary growth, lack of career advancement, and limited opportunities to secure senior leadership roles.

Fortunately, you can take steps to help attract and retain women in IT. These suggestions can help.

Implement These Three Tips To Help Attract And Retain Women In IT

1. Offer Flexibility

Let your employees work remotely or hybrid. Include job-sharing options and a flexible schedule.

Letting your employees decide when and how to complete their projects shows your desire to fill your employees’ needs. It also demonstrates you trust your employees to finish their work on time.

Offer family-friendly leave policies. This provides your employees with time off to care for a sick child or tend to an aging parent’s needs.

Providing flexibility promotes employee engagement, performance, and productivity. It also helps attract and retain women in IT.

2. Prioritize Pay Equality

Provide equal pay for equal work. This helps attract and retain women in IT.

Many female employees who are mothers take time away from the workforce to raise their children. When these employees resume their careers, they often are paid less because of their absence.

Women with similar levels of education typically earn about the same amount in similar roles, regardless of whether these employees have children. In contrast, fathers typically earn more than other employees, including men without children, regardless of their education level. This significantly impacts the gender pay gap.

Female employees who are mothers tend to work fewer hours to fulfill family responsibilities than employees who do not have children. This often lowers the working mothers’ ability to earn income. As a result, an employee’s contributions and results should impact their compensation rather than the number of hours worked.

3. Promote Women

Provide additional support for your female employees to move up to leadership roles. Show that your employees’ knowledge, skills, and experience are valued and respected within your organization.

Offering a mentorship program for women helps develop them for your company’s more senior roles. Guiding these employees to meet the criteria for promotions encourages them to join your organization and remain long-term.

Supporting female employees’ career growth helps attract and retain women in IT. Having women in leadership positions encourages other women to work for your company.

Do You Need Help Attracting And Retaining Women In IT?

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Yes, Mondays Are That Bad: 3 Ways to Make Them Better

Monday has a reputation for being the worst day of the week. Many employees view Monday as disrupting the happiness they experience by not working over the weekend.

Zety research shows that 41% of respondents dislike Monday. They report having the heaviest workloads and lots of meetings, experiencing a high-pressure work environment, and being expected to work overtime.

Further, 80% of respondents say that Monday is the most stressful day of the week. As a result, they feel the least motivated and productive at the start of the work week.

Fortunately, you can help change your employees’ beliefs about Monday to set them up for a positive, productive week. The following suggestions can help.

Implement these three ideas to make Mondays better for your employees.

1. Emphasize the Importance of Each Employee’s Role

Remind your employees of how their work impacts the organization. Provide examples of how their contributions and results help reach company goals and contribute to the bigger picture.

Encourage your employees to tie their work to their identity. For instance, an employee who has a strong work ethic can demonstrate it by being productive throughout each day. Or, an employee who excels at motivating others can show it by positively impacting their colleagues and coworkers.

Support your employees in pursuing personal interests. Experiencing happiness in their personal lives impacts how they feel about their professional lives. This is especially important when your employees return to work on Monday.

2. Monitor Employees’ Workloads

Talk with each employee about their workload. Include the hours they invest and the tasks they must accomplish to attain their results.

Encourage each employee to schedule their work throughout the week to even out the demands of each day. Also, support being as productive as possible each day, especially on Fridays, to complete as much work as possible.

Find out whether an employee is unable to accomplish all the work that is assigned to them. Develop ways to adjust the timeline or delegate when needed. Also, establish ways to maintain healthy boundaries going forward. This encourages your employees to go to work on Monday.

3. Support Employee Relationships

Emphasize the importance of your employees’ building relationships with colleagues and coworkers. Encourage them to spend time together outside of work. Forming work relationships provides motivation and support for your employees to start each week with a positive mindset.

Support your employees in recognizing their colleagues’ and coworkers’ accomplishments. This encourages feelings of value, respect, and cohesion. It also makes it easier to come back to work on Monday.

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Work-Life Balance: The Evolution

Work-life balance looks different for every employee. However, balancing professional and personal responsibilities is essential for maintaining a healthy work environment.

Sustaining a work-life balance helps reduce stress. It also lowers the odds of employees experiencing physical or mental health concerns.

Employees who experience chronic stress over an extended period may experience burnout. This can happen when continuously working overtime and not enforcing boundaries between work hours and personal time.

Creating a work environment that prioritizes work-life balance considers the needs of employees from all generations. Understanding the differences in beliefs and approaches to work-life balance can be beneficial.

Learn more about the evolution of work-life balance to better support your employees.

Baby Boomers and Work-Life Balance

Born between 1945 and 1960, baby boomers were exposed to hardships that resulted from World War II. Because earning a living was difficult, this generation desires opportunities for employment and workplace stability. Therefore, work-life balance is not a main concern.

Most baby boomers remain with companies for years. As a result, many hold senior- or director-level roles with significant amounts of responsibility and stress.

Generation X and Work-Life Balance

Born between 1961 and 1980, members of Generation X grew up seeing their parents work long hours. Therefore, Generation X experienced the impact of poor work-life balance on their families. As a result, they understand the importance of prioritizing work-life balance in their lives.

Many Generation X employees prioritize spending time with family and friends. As a result, they tend to use all their paid time off each year.

Generation X employees typically look for flexibility when deciding which companies to work for. This may include remote or hybrid work arrangements, flexible work hours, generous paid time off, and extended parental leave.

Millennials and Work-Life Balance

Born between 1981 and 2000, millennials view work as a part of life. Because their student loans are significantly high, millennials value stable employment to pay for their education and their children’s education.

Covering rising housing costs also is among millennials’ top priorities. Finding career paths that support their lifestyles also is important.

Supporting Work-Life Balance for All Generations

Encouraging employees to fulfill their professional and personal needs promotes productivity and healthy lifestyles.

  • Prioritizing a healthy company culture creates a positive work environment. This encourages employees to feel comfortable working to advance their careers rather than simply for a paycheck.
  • Providing competitive compensation and benefits, and opportunities for career growth increases employee tenure within an organization.
  • Offering remote or flexible work options, a flexible schedule, and generous paid time off increases employee engagement, job satisfaction, and morale. It also decreases employee stress and turnover. This benefits the bottom line.

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Gamification’s Importance in the Modern Workplace

Some of the most popular apps use gamification as motivation to hold users accountable and reach their goals. This may involve receiving badges for reaching milestones that promote progress.

Social sharing often is combined with badging to provide additional motivation to attain goals. Sharing achievements with others creates a sense of status that supports additional movement toward success.

Gamification can be used to motivate employees in the modern workforce. Combining badging and social sharing elevates employee engagement, performance, and productivity. It also increases job satisfaction, employee morale, and retention rates.

Discover gamification’s importance in the modern workplace and how it can benefit your organization.

Include Gamification in Your Learning Management System

Choose a learning management system (LMS) that combines courses with gamification options and integrates with your other employee experience (EX) technology. Ensure the LMS rewards employees for completing a set number of courses with a time-sensitive component. This may involve a badge or a place on the leaderboard.

Rewarding time-sensitive elements encourages employees to complete courses as soon as possible. It also encourages ongoing learning at work.

Implement Internal Recognition for Learning

Encourage managers to assign training courses with gamification elements connected to them. This encourages employees to complete the courses and further develop their careers.

Internally recognize employees who complete their courses. This may include using your intranet to share employee course accomplishments, scores, and rewards.

Seeing their peers’ accomplishments motivates employees to continue learning. Ongoing learning is important for career development in the modern workplace.

Provide External Recognition for Learning

Implement methods to share badges, course completions, and certificates to employees’ social media accounts as part of the gamification process. It is especially important for employees to share their accomplishments on their LinkedIn profiles for other professionals to see.

Offer rewards for employees who share their recognition on social media. This shows you actively invest in your employees. It also helps attract and retain employees in the modern workforce.

Pair Gamification with Real-World Rewards

Let employees use their badges and leaderboard positions to earn points toward attractive rewards. This may include gift cards, the option to work remotely for a day, or additional vacation days. Providing these rewards encourages employees to complete courses and continue learning. Ongoing employee learning benefits your company’s culture and bottom line.

Integrate Gamification with Performance Reviews

Use technology to include course completion, badges, and other rewards in employees’ performance reviews. This increases course completion and elevates the employee experience. It also promotes learning, career advancement, and loyalty to the organization.

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