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Do You Offer Clear Career Development Methods?

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Offering clear development methods is essential for business success. This emphasizes opportunities to add more value and advance within the company.

As a result, managers must look beyond the skills their employees need to fulfill their current job duties to promote career development. Managers also should focus on the skills their employees developed through previous roles, current interests, and hobbies that support advancement within the organization.

Follow these guidelines to offer clear career development methods within your company.

Prioritize Agility

Use technology to break jobs into projects. Then, let your employees choose which projects to work on. This process distributes employees’ skills and contributions according to need. It also supports career development.

Dividing jobs into projects helps you better understand your talent. Knowing their strengths and capabilities helps your employees adapt to changing business conditions and priorities. This includes evolving customer demands and competitors entering the marketplace.

Developing your employees’ skills reduces the need for hiring. Your employees can take on project-based work as part of the learning process. This provides exposure to new situations, colleagues, and coworkers who can help with upskilling while completing work.

Using an internal talent marketplace promotes equity and inclusion. Managers have a larger pool of workers to draw from to gain the skills and competencies required for a project. This minimizes favoritism in deciding which employees get which roles. It also increases engagement, performance, and productivity.

Inventory Employees’ Skills

Maintain a list of each employee’s current and desired skills. This helps managers understand the talent pool they have to draw from to complete projects. It also lets employees take on new projects to develop their skill sets.

Managers can divide the work into projects, then determine which skills are required to complete the projects. Next, managers can match employees who have or want to develop relevant skills to the appropriate project roles. This promotes career development.

You can use technologies that evaluate resumes, LinkedIn profiles, or your human capital management system to create your skills inventory. Then, you can ask employees to add or modify the skills in their profiles. You can use the information to match the right employee with the right skill level to the right project role.

Develop Adjacent Skills

Implement technology to help employees develop skills related to the ones they have. For instance, a programmer who is fluent in one language could learn to code in another language. This process makes it easier for employees to connect with colleagues and coworkers who can help them upskill. It also provides employees with clear career development methods.

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Set Employees Up for Success with a Great Onboarding Process

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Bringing a new hire on board takes time and planning. Your new hire’s experience acclimating to your company impacts their attitude about the work, their team, and your employer brand.

A great onboarding process prepares your new hire to become productive and successful in your organization. It helps develop an understanding of your company culture and how to fulfill the job duties and responsibilities.

Your onboarding process must help your new hire feel welcome and included. This promotes engagement, team cohesion, and retention.

Follow these guidelines to create a great onboarding process that sets up your employees for success.

Clarify Company Policies and Procedures

Give your new hire a copy of the employee handbook. Go over the relevant information.

Talk about how your new hire should go about their daily activities. Include where to find the necessary resources to maximize productivity.

Provide an Onboarding Buddy

Partner your new hire with a teammate to provide guidance. The teammate can show your new hire around, answer questions, and help resolve issues.

Matching your new hire with a seasoned partner helps build security and team cohesion. It also sets up your new hire for success in your organization.

Frequently Communicate

Regular communication with your new hire helps orient them to the job and work priorities. It also provides a clear picture of the reporting structure and an understanding of the business processes and procedures.

Provide clear expectations and milestones throughout the onboarding process. Include how progress and success will be measured.

Letting your new hire know what to expect helps them see their movement toward goals. It also helps them feel secure and succeed in their position.

Emphasize Inclusion

Share with your new hire your company resources for inclusion. This may include introducing your new hire to peers with common traits, hobbies, or interests. It also might involve educating your new hire on your employee resource groups (ERGs).

Prioritizing inclusion helps your new hire navigate the work environment and feel like a valued member of your company. This promotes appreciation, respect, and loyalty within your organization.

Request Feedback

Regularly ask your new hire for constructive feedback on your onboarding process. Find out what they like best, what can improve, and specific suggestions to do better.

Improving your onboarding process enhances the employee experience. This increases employee engagement, performance, and productivity throughout their tenure with your organization.

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5 Tips to Improve and Encourage Employee Engagement

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Employee engagement measures how strongly employees feel connected to their work and employer. This includes employees’ motivation to perform their best, commitment to the organization, and desire to refer others to the company.

Sustainable employee engagement is based on intrinsic motivation. This includes mastery, autonomy, and purpose.

Your employees’ engagement levels impact their performance, productivity, and morale. It also affects retention and your bottom line.

Engaged employees are passionate, energetic, and committed to your organization. They go above and beyond to support company strategy and elevate your employer brand.

As a result, you must do what you can to improve and encourage employee engagement. Here are some suggestions.

Choose among these five tips to improve and encourage employee engagement.

1. Live Your Company’s Culture

Convey your company’s mission, vision, and values in your behaviors. This encourages your employees to follow suit. It also shows they are part of something bigger than they are.

Using your actions to demonstrate your culture enhances the work environment. It also adds meaning to your employees’ jobs.

Living your company’s culture shows your values align with business functions. This encourages buy-in from your employees.

Employees who understand the company’s culture feel inspired. This encourages employee engagement.

2. Prioritize Onboarding

Your onboarding process impacts how your employees view your company and their jobs. It helps your new hires align with company culture and understand how their role impacts your organization.

Use your onboarding process to show what makes your company unique and why your new hire’s role is essential for team and business success. Include information about the role and expectations. This promotes employee engagement.

3. Emphasize Career Development

Work with each employee to customize a career development plan. Include the knowledge, skills, and experience required to advance within your organization.

Provide the necessary training and development to move to more senior roles. This may include stretch assignments, cross-training, or mentoring. It also could involve seminars, conferences, or classes. Having a clear path for advancement supports employee engagement and retention.

4. Provide Employee Recognition

Regularly point out each employee’s accomplishments. Include the actions your employee took, their results, and how they impacted the organization. Provide a bonus, pay increase, or promotion when appropriate.

Recognizing your employees shows you appreciate their contributions and results. This encourages employee motivation, performance, and engagement.

5. Encourage Feedback

Remind your employees to give and receive constructive feedback. This helps your employees feel informed, heard, and respected.

Your employees can uncover inefficiencies in performing their work and suggest improvements. This enhances work processes and creates a more productive environment.

Consistently finding ways to improve employee and company performance helps reach career and business goals. This encourages employee engagement.

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Ask Your Employees These 6 Trust-Building Questions

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Creating a cohesive team requires trust. You must trust your employees to complete quality work on time. Also, your employees must trust they will be compensated for their contributions.

Building trust can be especially difficult when you have new, introverted, or remote employees. However, trust is essential to help your employee remain engaged, productive, and loyal to the organization.

Asking questions and actively listening to the answers is an effective way to build trust with your employees. Questions lead to conversations. Conversations build engagement and trust.

Ask your employees these six trust-building questions to increase cohesion among your team.

1. What is a great movie you recently watched?

Talking about movies helps your employees feel like they are talking with a casual friend. This promotes a casual work environment. You may learn about a movie that interests you. Watching it can help you connect with your employees on a personal level.

2. Can you recommend a book you recently read?

The types of books your employees read provide insight into their minds. You can learn about your employees’ thoughts, philosophies, and sense of morality. You also can uncover whether you like the same types of books or authors. This promotes mental connections.

3. What is the strangest meal you ever ate?

Your employees may have eaten tarantulas, snails, or other exotic food. Talking about these experiences promotes a relaxed atmosphere. It also helps you get to know your employees on a deeper level.

4. Do you prefer beer, wine, or neither?

Most employees enjoy humorous discussions about alcohol. You can use this topic to determine whether any of your employees prefer nonalcoholic beverages. This helps you provide appropriate beverages when you host an event.

5. If you could develop a new skill in 10 minutes, which skill would you choose?

Understanding the skills your employees are interested in is important. These skills indicate potential goals and career paths for your employees. You can implement training programs to help your employees reach their goals and advance their careers.

6. Which emerging technological innovation will significantly impact the industry in the next five years?

Find out what your employees think about the future of your industry. Also, determine where they see themselves working long-term. Talk about whether there are opportunities within your organization that may interest your employees. Discussing internal career advancement elevates employee retention.

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Surprise Your Team to Promote Employee Connection

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An April 2022 Gallup survey showed that only 32% of employees were engaged at work. Disengaged employees are not very productive. They lower employee morale and retention.

To improve engagement levels, building employee connections should be among your top priorities. One way to accomplish this objective is by doing something unexpected for your team.

When humans experience change, they process what happened, then return to their typical level of happiness. This is beneficial when, for example, an employee is passed over for a promotion. They will return to their baseline happiness within a few days.

However, this adaptation to change is unfavorable when employees get used to the perks they regularly experience at work. For instance, if you provide bagels for your team every Tuesday, they will expect to eat bagels every Tuesday. At some point, your employees no longer will see eating bagels on Tuesday as an advantage of working for your company.

As a result, you want to regularly provide employees with novel experiences. This consistently disrupts their typical levels of happiness. The more times you add to your team’s happiness, the more fun they have. This increases engagement, productivity, morale, and retention.

Implement these tips to surprise your team and build employee connections.

Promote Creativity

Incorporate the “yes, and!” structure into your next brainstorming session. When one employee shares an idea, the next employee says “Yes, and…” to build on it. This activity encourages your team to develop what they have into something bigger.

Encourage Play

Put board games or question cards in the break room. Suggest coworkers play the games or ask each other questions during their downtime.

If your team is remote, use a video conferencing app like Mibo to create immersive online experiences for your employees. They can interact with each other in the virtual environment. These actions promote happiness and well-being at work.

Facilitate Fun

Create a Slack channel dedicated to fun. The theme may be memes, office pets, or anything else your employees may find amusing. Your team can laugh at the contents to reduce stress throughout the day.

Promote Laughter

Add humor to your presentations by including a meme. Laughter helps make your content more memorable. It also promotes participation, learning, and recollection of facts.

Encourage Collaboration

Plan team-building activities to build employee connections. Also, encourage social coffee breaks and walks with coworkers during employee downtime. Participating in fun activities and socializing with coworkers increase work engagement.

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5 Ways to Help Keep Communication Channels Open

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Maintaining open communication with your employees encourages them to share their ideas to improve the organization. Open communication also notifies you of problems, conflicts, questions, and concerns that must be resolved.

Encouraging open communication with your team promotes engagement, productivity, and collaboration. It also elevates job satisfaction, employee morale, and retention.

Implement these five tips to maintain open communication with your team.

1. Focus on the End Goal

Maintaining open communication with your team lets you know about problems as they arise. This helps you resolve the issues and minimize their impact.

Open communication makes you aware of ideas to improve your team. This may include increasing efficiency in workflows.

Openly communicating with your team helps improve your leadership skills. You can learn your employees’ strengths, talents, motivations, and goals. Then, you can use this information to increase your team’s engagement, productivity, and collaboration. This elevates job satisfaction, team morale, and employee retention.

2. Be Present

Stay in the moment when communicating with your team. Actively listening to your employees encourages them to talk about their ideas, issues, questions, and concerns.

Look at the employee who is speaking with you. Show they have your complete attention.

Nod, gesture, and use facial expressions throughout the conversation. Include responses such as “yes” and “uh huh” to show you are listening. Ask follow-up questions to gather more information.

Paraphrase what you are hearing to ensure you understand it correctly. You may want to say, “What I am hearing is…” or “Am I correct in thinking…”.

Wait until your employee is done speaking. Then, respond appropriately.

3. Encourage Team and Individual Communication

Although communicating with your entire team is important, there may be times when your employees prefer to talk with you one-on-one. They may feel more comfortable privately discussing a personal matter than sharing the details with the team.

Encourage your team to request individual discussions when needed. They may want to share an opinion that differs from the team’s opinions on how to proceed with a project. Or, there may be a family issue that could affect your employee’s work performance.

Show empathy and support during these private discussions. Work with your employee to resolve the issue however you can.

4. Acknowledge Employee Accomplishments

Give your team credit for their work. This includes when an employee’s idea is successfully implemented or a finished project attains the desired results.

Openly acknowledging your employees’ contributions and impact on the organization shows they are valuable members of your team. This promotes feelings of trust and respect. It also increases team collaboration and cohesion.

5. Request Constructive Feedback

Ask your team for input on your performance. Include what you are doing well and specific ways you can improve.

Talk more in-depth about the answers you need clarification on. The greater your understanding of an issue, the more effectively you can resolve it.

Implement the feedback you feel would be most beneficial. Regularly follow up with your team to discuss your progress.

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Work-Related Team-Building Activities That Enhance Morale

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Employee morale consists of the attitudes, satisfaction levels, and overall outlooks that employees have while working for a company.  Employees who are satisfied and motivated at work tend to have high morale. They typically stay engaged and productive throughout the day.

Employee morale is an important part of company culture. A positive collective attitude creates a positive work environment. This helps increase employee retention.

As an IT manager, employee morale impacts your bottom line. This is why you need to do what you can to keep morale as high as possible.

One way to accomplish this is by organizing work-related team-building activities. Employees who participate in shared experiences tend to increase their engagement and connection in the workplace. This typically elevates collaboration. The more effectively your employees work together, the more they contribute to your organization’s success.

Choose among these remote and in-person team-building activities to improve morale.

Remote Team-Building Activities

Eat Around the World

Learn something new as you explore different cuisines. Cooking shares part of a culture, enhances taste buds, and teaches new culinary skills.

You may want to create a bowl of the Korean rice dish bibimbap. You might make the Senegal rice dish jollof. Or, you could bake the Breton cake kouign-amann. This activity is best for up to 10 people.

Themed Trivia Night

Improve collaboration by dividing everyone into teams with people they normally don’t work with. You may choose ‘90s music or classic movies for the trivia theme. Or, you could educate everyone with a theme like Black history or financial wellness. This activity is best for up to 40 people.

Guided Mindfulness Session

Help everyone relax and unwind through meditation. Organizing a group session is an effective way to introduce everyone to this calming practice.

This activity is best for any number of people.

In-Person Team-Building Activities

Improv Workshop

Help everyone improve the way they work together. Teach them how more effectively communicate and read social cues.

This activity is best for up to 25 people.

Guided Hike

Learn something new while relaxing in nature. Organize a guided hike at a state park. Discover more about the area you live in while spending time together.

This activity is best for up to 15 people.

Wellness Day

Provide the time and space to completely unplug from work. You may want to begin with a group yoga session and end with a gong bath. These peaceful activities can spark meaningful conversations and organic connections with others.

This activity is best for up to 40 people.

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How to Combat Work Stress

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Stress at work can have a number of sources. Some of the most common include increased workloads, the pressure to perform well, longer work hours, downsizing, and issues with coworkers. Increased stress levels can lead to disengagement, reduced productivity, and greater absences. Bigger issues include sickness, depression, and problems at home. As a result, you want to monitor your stress level each day and take steps to combat potential issues before they get out of hand.

Use any of the following methods to decrease your stress level at work.

Time Management

Make a list of the personal and professional tasks you want to accomplish for the day or week. Your goal is to create a balance between work and family time and social and solo activities each day. Then, distinguish between the activities you need to do and the activities you should do. Place your required activities at the start of each day and the activities you should do later in the day. Allow enough time to finish one activity before beginning another. Also, schedule 10- to 15-minute breaks throughout each day and an hour for lunch. You need time to get up from your desk, take a walk, eat healthy foods, and clear your head.

Daily Exercise

Engage in aerobic activity every day. Increasing your heart rate for at least 30 minutes helps elevate your mood, energy level, and focus. Your body and mind are better able to relax then. Breaking up your exercise into three 10-minute intervals can be just as effective as exercising for a half hour all at once.

Healthy Eating

Consume just enough food and beverages to provide the energy needed to stay productive. If you eat too little and experience low blood sugar, you may become anxious and irritable. Or, if you eat too much, you may feel lethargic. Instead, try consuming small meals throughout the day. This can even out your blood sugar level, maintain energy, and keep you focused.

Adequate Sleep

Get at least 7 hours of sleep each night. This reduces your vulnerability to anxiety and insomnia. You are better able to maintain emotional balance when you are well-rested. Going to bed and getting up at the same time each day can promote rest at night. Disengaging from mobile devices an hour before bedtime can help as well.

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4 Work Goals You Can Accomplish This Year

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Like many employees, you may be used to going to work, finishing your tasks, going home, and repeating the process the next day. Of course, putting in your best effort and fulfilling your responsibilities is important. However, you also should be focused on moving forward in your career. Taking steps each day to reach your professional goals helps you accomplish more of what you set out to do. The greater your achievements, the higher you can set your future goals.

The following are four professional goals you may want to achieve in 2022.

1. Improve Your Time Management

The better you manage your time, the more you can accomplish each day. As you begin to be more productive each week, you can take on more responsibilities that can result in a leadership position.

You may want to try time blocking. Make a list of each task you want to accomplish throughout the day or week. Then, schedule a time to complete each activity. You should plan your most complex tasks during the times when you are most productive, such as early in the morning or right after lunch. Be sure to allow flexibility for unexpected events that may alter your plans. If you do not accomplish a task, add it to the next day’s schedule.

2. Participate in a Course

Take part in an online course to promote your career advancement. This may include developing your coding skills through an online coding boot camp. Or, you might want to learn a new programming language through Codecademy. Make sure the course is the right fit for you and that the instructor/organizer has valuable information to share. Also, celebrate as you successfully complete each assignment and when you finish the course.

3. Increase Your Network

Make it a point to meet more professionals in your company and industry. This may occur in the breakroom, at a conference, or through a professional organization. The more connections you add to your network, the more opportunities you have to advance in your career path. The members of your network can alert you to job openings, introduce you to hiring managers and other IT professionals in their company, or serve as referrals or references during your job search. Be sure you offer to help your connections as well.

4. Find a New Job

Secure a better IT role with a different employer. You can meet more professionals and develop new skills that keep you engaged in your work. You also can gain more experience and increase your qualifications to take on higher leadership positions within the organization. This increases your career options both now and in the future.

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Easy Ways to Boost Motivation in the Workplace

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Like anyone else, your employees will have days where they lack the motivation to complete their tasks. Although this is completely normal, it can become a problem if they consistently become disengaged. You need your team to remain as productive as possible to continue to reach company goals. Fortunately, there are steps you can take to encourage your team members to remain engaged and continue to perform their best.

Implement these simple tips to maintain motivation and productivity among your team.

Maintain a Positive Work Environment

It is easier for your team members to stay productive when they feel happy. Maintaining a positive work environment promotes a better work experience and stronger relationships. These are significant factors in employee motivation, engagement, productivity, and success.

Create Employee Goals

Work with your team members to establish short-term goals. Include attainable objectives and clear measurements for success. This helps your employees stay on track, see the progress they make, and understand how their efforts impact the company. Be sure to celebrate each team member’s achievements along the way.

Recognize Employee Contributions

Your team members need to know their efforts and results are being noticed. This encourages them to continue to perform their best. Recognition also improves employee engagement, job satisfaction, and retention. Be sure you publicly and privately point out specific actions each employee took, what they accomplished, and how it benefitted the organization. Also, provide bonuses, raises, or promotions when appropriate.

Encourage Regular Breaks

Your team members need time to rest throughout the workday. Remind them to step away from their desks to stretch, meditate, or talk with coworkers who are on break. Also, emphasize the importance of taking a full hour for lunch. Promote healthy eating, walking, reading, and other relaxing habits. Taking time to disengage increases focus, concentration, and engagement in tasks. This helps your employees come back refreshed and ready to produce.

Promote Paid Time Off

Remind your team members how important it is to use all of their vacation days every year. Spending time away from the office promotes physical and mental wellness. Your employees need to create memories by engaging in enjoyable activities with their families and friends. The more time your employees take for rest and relaxation, the less likely they are to experience burnout.

Enforce Staying Home When Ill

Encourage your team members to stay home when they are sick. Your employees cannot perform their best when they do not feel well. Also, coming to the office and spreading germs is not beneficial for anyone. Ask that your team members finish the tasks they can from home while getting plenty of rest. The sooner they fully recover, the sooner they can return to the office and resume their duties.

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