Category: Work Environment

Encouraging and setting employee goals is important for a healthy mindset, and will ultimately benefit not only the team, but the company’s success as well. Here are a few tips!

Goal setting is more than just a metric for performance – it’s an important motivational tool. It’s one that can help teams and organizations come together during these difficult times, when most of us feel isolated rather than part of something bigger than ourselves.

This message is more important than ever, as COVID-related research has gone to show that burnout rates among remote workers are at an all-time high.

But when setting goals, you have to come up with ideas that are attainable, sensible, and provide both individual and organizational incentives – helping employees and businesses alike feel that they are making progress on a day-to-day basis, rather than simply getting by.

Tip 1: When Goal Setting, Work Backwards

Goals should either be aspirational or grounded, but with the intent of supplementing a greater dream. Whether we’re talking about individual employee goals, personal goals, or the goals of an organization, the goal setting process must always begin with the fundamental question of: what do we want to achieve? 

At its core, every business has a vision it wishes to fulfill, driven either by its founders or its workers. Identifying that vision and defining what it might mean to fulfill that vision in 2020 should be the first step towards setting goals in a COVID world. How can you make a meaningful impact in the industry you inhabit over the coming months?

As for individual employee goals, the key is identifying a professional benchmark, as well as an educational one. The modern employee is one who embraces change – jumping at the opportunity to develop horizontally and vertically, picking up relevant skills in different fields and specializing towards the future.

Start by identifying an aspirational goal, then developing the benchmarks that you feel are most relevant to that dream or vision. Then identifying the individual monthly, weekly, and daily goals that would lay the foundation for your organization’s success, or an individual’s success.

Tip 2: Create Goals Around Achievable & Trackable Metrics

Goal setting is most effective when it leverages today’s wide range of existing data analysis tools and productivity metrics. If your ultimate goal for the year is to be the premier service in a specific region, identify the metrics that are most relevant to that goal – such as increasing the number of targeted ads you’re using in your marketing campaigns, shifting towards more local engagement, and picking up at least an extra client every month from key neighborhoods.

The same goes for individual employee goals during remote work. If you want to improve on your performance while working from home, consider tracking the amount of work you get done over a week’s total hours, picking smaller goals that help you improve that ratio. Examples would be:

• Eliminating avoidable distractions (such as mid-shift doomscrolling),
• Better organizing tasks and projects,
• Utilizing surveys to gauge and improve customer support,
• Creating a better system for organizing and sorting research,
• Reducing the total amount of weekly meetings,
• And more.

The use of day-to-day goals to gauge and improve performance will vary in both type and effectiveness. For example, it’s easier to track productivity when working at a call center, versus working the desk as a book editor.

In such cases, tracking measurable data can come at a cost of losing the forest for the trees, and focusing on the speed of a task over its quality. This is where employers and employees have to navigate goal setting together – and identify goals that would balance and satisfy a business’ need for growth with the professional’s desire for self-improvement and ensure the two never need to conflict.

Tip 3: Employee Goals Should Be Incentivized

Some goals are self-incentivizing, such as the goal to improve in one’s field, learn a new skill, or work towards a promotion. These goals all share the basic principle of personal progression, and the goal itself is the reward.

But when a business’ goal becomes an employee’s performance metric, additional incentive might be needed to help employees strive to achieve those goals. These incentives can also help employees feel that they’re being rewarded for a business’ success – and that the better they do, the better the company does, and the better the company does, the better they do.

Emphasizing this connection is especially important now, where many of us haven’t been able to return to an office setting, or redevelop ties with our fellow officemates, or the company’s culture and identity.

Whenever employees are given goals such as landing three clients this quarter, meeting a deadline for a application’s development, or improving the results on a biannual customer survey, incentivizing these goals is important – both through recognition and credit, and through compensation.

Tip 4: Include Employees in the Goal Setting Process

Management needs to include employees in the goal setting process, as they’re key to determining what’s needed and what’s attainable. Too often, the problem with goal setting is the fact that there remains a dissonance between leadership in a company and the company’s workers, and workers end up struggling under unrealistic deadlines or expectations that don’t match up with reality.

By ensuring that each team or individual is represented depending on the size of the business, managers can set more effective goals for individuals and the total organization alike.

Tip 5: Relevant and Time-Bound

The last two letters of the popular SMART goal-setting acronym represent the qualities of Relevant and Time-Bound goals, emphasizing that it’s important to pick and set goals that reflect the company’s and employee’s current needs, while imposing an attainable deadline that encourages performance without accidentally incurring the opposite through work-related anxiety. Especially in a time like this, where burnout is not just a plausible risk, but a seeming inevitability.

This ties back into the importance of making sure employees are represented or take part in the goal setting process. This helps ensure that realistic goals are not only set, but also met.

Remote workers can pitch in on monthly or quarterly meetings to chime in on or suggest company and individual goals, and comment on what kind of a timeframe they can support without burning out.

Tip 6:  Encourage Employees to Share Goals and Announce Achievements 

While there should be a boundary between personal and professional lives, there is always going to be overlap in places where employees are comfortable enough with one another to talk about non-work-related subjects, such as personal interests and hobbies.

Setting goals isn’t just important for the survival of a business during COVID, or for the continued professional improvement of an employee, but they’re important for a person’s own psyche as well, giving us something to strive towards and provide us with more structure.

A company could encourage remote employees to share both personal and professional goals through the company’s network and discuss or share whenever a personal or professional goal is met.

Landing a client, hitting a new personal record, finishing the tenth book of the month, or reaching a milestone in a personal project are things to be appreciated and celebrated. This helps give employees the sense that they’re part of a larger network, and encourage them to continue working on their goals.

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A company’s provided service or product is important, but a company’s employer branding is even more important for long-time success. Read more below, including how this special aspect can grow your business.

Nearly everything has a metric. Even employer reputation, and how it affects a company’s chances of securing top talent. Data shows that most workers – up to 86 percent – would not apply for or continue to work for a company with a bad reputation, either among the public, or among former employees.

While the importance of a company’s reputation has never been higher than in the age of social media, where every product and service is at the mercy of the opinions and influence levels of the customers who have had experience with them, a company’s reputation among its employees is equally important, if not more so.

Your employer branding, which represents how your employees perceive your company and how they rate their experiences while working with and for you, can be key to gaining and retaining talent, building a productive company culture, and avoiding bank-breaking controversy.

Defining the Employer Brand

At its most basic, a brand as a concept is a way to distinguish one service provider or product from another. The more your brand can separate itself from the competition in a positive way – through better quality, a better experience, a better reputation – the more likely you are to take control of the local, regional, and even international market.

The same concept applies to hires and long-time employees. Your brand’s identity at work and to the people who work with you is important as both an incentive, and security. Positive employer branding means people want to work with and/or for you, to the point that they’d take a position at a company with better employer branding for lower pay.

When things do get rough, having a great employer brand can help you keep your talent around. They know that it’s worth wading through a crisis together to help the company survive, than simply take the opportunity to jump ship and find a better place to work. But building an employer brand is a different process from customer-facing branding.

Building a Better Brand in 2020

When top talent looks for a place to work, they want their value to be recognized. They want good incentives, including great pay and benefits. But they also want a work environment that they can be excited about.

And when they’ll ask around to learn more about what it’s like to work at your company, they won’t just be interested in your products and services, but they’ll want to hear about day-to-day management, workplace culture, work philosophies, and the company’s ambitions and values.

They want to get a sense of what it’s like to be part of the team. And if that experience doesn’t sound appealing or doesn’t make for a very good story, then your employer branding is lacking.

Creating a strong employer brand requires a multi-faceted approach. Some things you want to be aware of include:

• Understanding who you want to attract, and what it is that might attract them.
• Creating and supporting a compelling narrative on the company’s values and mission.
• Figuring out how your existing employees feel through tools like Glassdoor.
• Keeping tabs on how the competition builds their employer brand.
• Generating branding through shared employee experiences.
• Developing an effective onboarding process.
• Prioritizing personal and career growth and constant learning.

With the advent of the COVID-19 crisis in 2020, a successful employer brand will also include a forward-thinking and adaptive approach toward the difficulties of the crisis. This means offering innovative flexible working conditions, a widescale adoption of cutting-edge communications tools and policies, and a speedy retrofitting of all existing office space to accommodate new workplace requirements and create a safe and secure workspace.

While a lot of employer branding relies on utilizing your own means to create a better employee experience, not every company has the means to invest heavily in creating safer workspaces. However, that’s where companies can turn to coworking spaces, and leverage their services to fortify their employer branding, with a focus on flexibility and safety.

Coworking places like The Collection help small to medium businesses opt for safe and flexible working conditions during and after the pandemic. They make for an excellent way to transition into a work-from-anywhere workplace policy.

Coworking spaces are also an excellent option for larger companies seeking to minimize costs as they transition into a hub-and-spoke model (based on hub-and-spoke distribution), without compromising workplace benefits or eating into their employee’s expectations of a convenient and welcoming workspace.

Live and Breathe Your Brand 

Customers spend time and money on your products and services. They expect quality on par with what they’ve invested. A successful business will go above and beyond those expectations and develop a relationship with a customer rooted in a product or service that is much better than the competition. And a customer experience that continues to outperform the rest.

But building a brand around that quality, and catering to a loyal customer base, is very different than building an employer brand.

Where your customers spend some time and money on your brand, your employees spend an inordinate amount of their time working to bring those results to the table.

Not only do they want to be appreciated and paid, but they want a company culture that reflects how they feel about their work – a sense of pride for quality, dedication to the end product or service, and a workplace they can be happy about. All of that requires a genuine relationship between the employer and the employee.

While marketing and a strong customer-facing reputation can mitigate the impact of a product’s weaknesses on a brand or minimize the drawbacks of an earlier-than-planned rollout, there’s no point obfuscating anything between a worker and their boss.

Employees know how a company operates better than anyone else, and any employer branding that doesn’t match the day-to-day reality and experiences in and out of the office will come off as disingenuous and condescending.

The worst thing you can do is try to sell your brand to your workers without the substance and culture to back up your material. It might work when it comes to attracting new hires – but if you plan on keeping them around, your employer branding should shed light on how great it really is to work at a company like yours.

Final Thought

Building your employer brand to attract and keep talent is a long-term process, one that requires identifying what your workers need, communicating often enough to ensure that they feel heard, and fostering a workplace culture and environment that makes your business the best place to work in town.

How can you grow a stronger team while working remote? By always improving the digital communication between each other. Read for some tips below.

With no clear end to the current crisis in sight, it’s likely that remote work will continue to play an important role in keeping non-essential workers healthy while they continue to do their jobs from home, or from safe and sanitized satellite offices. An important part of enabling continued remote work is strong digital communication.

Digital communication will remain the backbone for businesses seeking to thrive and grow during this pandemic, as well as after it. As we continue to look toward the near future with increased workplace flexibility in mind, finding ways to leverage current and upcoming communications technologies to make it easier and more convenient to cooperate remotely will be key.

Managers and leaders need to pick platforms that are easy to use and avoid overwhelming their employees with too many tools, systems, and messages, while current employees will need to learn how to best communicate with the platforms they’ve chosen, while onboarding new hires and integrating them seamlessly into the company communications network.

But navigating the new normal can be challenging, particularly when it feels like the sudden shift towards remote work has been especially hard due to cluttered, overwhelming, and disorganized communication. Making the most of digital communication tools is about more than just picking the right platform.

Here are some important tips.

1. Pick a Consistent and Effective Communications Platform 

Stick to the fewest possible number of communications platforms to enable you to do two things well: group communication and individual communication. To that end, pick a platform everyone is at least partially familiar with, or one people know for its shallow learning curve.

Make sure you can host clean one-on-one video calls, and effective group meetings. Pick a platform that lets you organize group chats, and effectively integrate collaborate tools such as Google Docs.

And finally, accept that email still isn’t going away for some time, so don’t try to replace it – and find a platform that exclusively fills the gaps where email fails, particularly in regards to instant messaging, group communication, voice, and video. Having too many platforms and avenues for communication can make it difficult to keep track of conversations, find files and topics, and get in touch with the person you’re trying to reach.

2. Always Schedule One-on-One Calls for Important Matters

Avoid hiding critical messages or important meetings in emails. Develop a clear and simple system for prioritizing messages, so when a message comes through on the appropriate channels, its importance is clear.

Something that needs to be addressed via a direct message might be much more urgent than an email, while something mentioned offhandedly or with a direct tag/mention in the group chat is probably more casual, or even off-topic.

But when something requires immediate attention or a prepared and nuanced conversation, schedule a call. Too much information is lost in chat or voice calls – make it face-to-face.

3. Consolidate Messages and Cut Cluttered Conversations

There’s little use in sending a dozen emails a day when there is so much else to do during the day.

It’s better to consolidate important or relevant topics for the day or week in a single long email at the beginning or end of the day or week, unless it’s an urgent message – in which case a direct message would be more appropriate, to convey urgency.

Learning to cut through the clutter and make it immediately clear when something should be responded to immediately and when it can wait (via something as intuitive as the delivery of the message) can help you avoid miscommunication and wasted time.

4. Make It Clear When a Response is (and isn’t) Needed

Emails can be notorious examples of miscommunication, particularly in cases where it isn’t immediately clear when a response is needed or not needed. This goes for any other messages, as well.

Consider making it clear in the body of an email or message if you need a response or not, so the recipient can be clear on whether they should respond immediately, respond later, or get to work and let you know when something relevant has changed or occurred.

5. Set Schedules for Communication 

Living in a mostly remote world has its advantages, but it also has significant drawbacks, especially with regards to hours spent at work, and work life balance.

Set clear schedules for when it’s okay to check into work and communicate on work matters and make it clear that there’s a cut off period for receiving, sending, and/or responding to communication.

There may be exceptions from time to time – serious emergencies – but there should be boundaries nonetheless, and any exceptions to those boundaries should be rare or nonexistent.

6. Create Clear Lines of Communication Between Management and the Workforce

One of the great benefits of effective digital communication is that it’s easier than ever to communicate with the people we need to communicate with, regardless of their physical location. Not only does this let a manager speak directly to any employee they need to address, but it also lets employees speak directly (and immediately) with their managers.

Utilize this as a strength, and establish clear and simple methods of reporting to and communicating with coworkers up and down the chain of command, making it easier to bring up grievances or suggest changes, vote on certain matters, or just ensure that management hears when employees have some sort of issue.

A culture of promoting openness and making it safe for employees to bring up any matters regarding management can promote trust between employers and employees, as employers know their employees can be more upfront with them, while employees understand that their individual opinions (and opinions as a group) matter, and can have an impact on the company.

7. Utilize Group Chats and Group Communication to Make Company Goals Clearer

At their worst, group chats can serve as a behemoth of information to wade through to get back to an old conversation, or a source of constant distractions.

But when organized, moderated, and used properly, group chats can enable companies and departments to communicate effectively, create a greater sense of cohesion and unity, and make it clearer to everyone what a company’s immediate and long-term goals might be. Every employee should be on the same page, and feel that they’re working towards something together.

Conclusion

There are many benefits to properly leveraged digital communication, and it’s more important than ever to take full advantage of these benefits.

If the goal of your business is to thrive, then be sure to strengthen the culture of accountability in the workplace. What does this mean exactly? Read below to find out!

When we consider the purpose of accountability in the workplace, we must consider the fact that most American workers are disengaged and are barely emotionally invested in what they do for a living. And it’s overwhelmingly a management issue.

Accountability is not only a critical element in establishing an employer-employee relationship that leads to tangible and impressive results, but it is the key to trust. Trust that allows an organization to function far more self-sufficiently and without the constant watchful eye of a resented taskmaster.

By bringing workers to care more for their role in the future and success of an organization, you allow them to play a part as a leader. They bear the responsibility for their own actions and their part in an organization’s success. And that only they can truly lead themselves towards making that contribution.

Yet to harness an employee’s passion, employers and managers must begin to strengthen the culture of accountability. Rather than relying on ineffective motivators or a superficial attention to teamwork.

Accountability Builds Trust

At the heart of the matter is the role of trust in an organization. Trust is a self-evident necessity in any group endeavor. That is because people are not uniform beings. We each have our own unique capacity for productivity, for honesty, and for discipline. And every employee has their own unique perspective of what they are owed and what they care about.

If you cannot trust that every member of your team has the capacity to adapt to the requirements of the job, in exchange for basic and individually tailored concessions to help them perform better, then the whole thing falls apart. Without trust in their abilities, and without them having trust in your capacity to listen to them and bring out the best in each of them, your workers will try to skirt responsibility, do the minimum, or only work in fear of being fired.

By prioritizing accountability as an important quality in the workplace, you are effectively entrusting your workers with the responsibility to play a significant role at work, and conferring a sense of mutual respect as you retain the ability to enforce that responsibility, yet also believe they have what it takes to live up to your expectations.

Trust Leads to Quality 

When workers begin to feel the stakes, they begin to work at a better capacity. We aren’t built to give our all every single day – and we each have our ups and downs – but a team that functions on accountability and trust is a team where every member has some skin in the game. And this spurns them to do their best regardless of what that might be, as their work naturally reflects on them, and the success of the business is something they can ultimately identify with.

To make the most of an employee’s talents, they must feel that their work is being rewarded in correlation to how well it is being performed. And that when they slack off, they feel it and are reminded of the importance of their commitment to the organization, and that when they do their best, they receive an award commensurate to the effort they put into being an accountable and responsible team member.

When you seek to enforce that sense of accountability and ensure that everyone feels they have skin in the game, you must find ways to reward effort and discourage disengagement.

Establish the Importance of Accountability Early On

A culture of accountability is only built by example. Make it a point, especially during the interview process and throughout the first few weeks of orientation and work, to drive home the point that a worker’s input is valued. And that their efforts are proportionally rewarded based on the results they bring in.

Give workers a myriad of ways to express themselves and ensure that they frequently hear about how they’re doing as well. Ensure that they understand that their work is a living breathing part of the business. And that its success relies on them. Furthermore, that they can benefit off the fruits of that success with better pay, bonuses, certain benefits, freedoms at work, or any number of tangible rewards. This allows them to celebrate alongside everyone else as they watch the company grow and mature.

This is especially true for small businesses. Success is often a question of just how many in the company are willing to work past the normal 9-to-5 for extraordinary results.

Give & Receive Frequent Feedback 

Communication is critical to accountability. Employees must be reminded of their responsibilities and the role they play. They must be given the opportunity to speak earnestly about the challenges that are keeping them from performing at their best.

A good leader knows how to draw the most out of their workers not by draining them, but by empowering them to push their limits. In addition, to seek out breaks when they need to and come back stronger, to give them the sense that they can be honest about their problems, and to teach them to expect only honest answers back.

It’s a two-way street, for both negative and positive feedback. And it’s only through a trusting and honest employee-employer relationship backed up by frequent communication that workers can remain engaged and feel truly accountable.

Workers Want to Matter (and Get Paid)

Why do we work? If it’s just to feed the kids, then we’ll do what we must to provide for those we love. Work becomes a toll on the soul that we must heal and nourish in every way possible. As it’s something we have no control over, no agency in. We begin to burn out.

But when we find that our work has purpose, when we can feel like a vibrant part of something growing and dynamic, when we can be a part of the ups and downs of a growing company or concept, or when we sense that our work is changing someone’s life in one way or another, we can nourish ourselves with a sense of purpose beyond the daily grind, a reason for getting up and doing what we do past a sense of obligation or the need to survive.

Conferring that to your workers via accountability and trust can help turn them from being disengaged to knowing that they matter.

It’s important to properly oversee your workforce to ensure not only productivity, but also that they are simply happy. If you are feeling like there are some disengaged employees, read the guide below on how to best approach the situation.

Employee disengagement is a worryingly common issue. While no executive or manager would argue with the idea that there are bad apples in the workforce, the majority of professionals are people trying to do a good job – and many hires do very well in the first few weeks at a new position.

But that enthusiasm often dies down and, after a honeymoon period, many employees begin to distance themselves from the person they were on Day One and start to feel absent and “barely there.” A more complex issue than meets the eye, disengaged employees are estimated to be a problem for most businesses as surveys indicate that two-thirds of Americans are disengaged from their jobs.

Most of these disengaged workers simply come in, punch in, and leave to go home as soon as they can. They don’t do overtime willingly, they aren’t invested in the company, they don’t feel like they belong or have any reason to be loyal to their employers, and generally just fly under the radar.

Can disengaged employees be motivated to do better? Oftentimes, yes. But only if you understand why they’re disengaged, to begin with.

What Makes an Employee Feel Disengaged? 

A disengaged employee is a person who is bluntly unhappy with their job. They feel that they either:

a.) don’t fit in

b.) are undervalued or poorly managed

c.) feel cheated, or wronged by their employers, either directly or indirectly.

Disengaged employees can be recognized by the hallmark signs of professional stagnation, diminished output, and toxic behavior.

As with any relationship where one party is deeply unhappy, the root of the issue is often misunderstood or completely unknown to the other party. An important step in converting any disengaged employee back to an engaged one is communication – allow them to earnestly air their grievances and explain themselves, and their lack of motivation.

This is especially important if the person in question was once a promising and very enthusiastic hire. This is someone with tremendous potential and great initial energy – why did they stop bringing that energy to work with them?

Is It Your Fault or Theirs?

The blame game rarely leads to any sort of productive change at the office or elsewhere, but it bears mentioning that surveys found about 70 percent of cases of employee engagement were due to bad management. More often than not, it’s the manager’s fault.

But what do you do with that information? First, don’t allow yourself to jump to conclusions. There are still cases where employee engagement drops simply because the employee no longer feels they are a good fit for the company, and they’re looking for the right opportunity to afford themselves an amicable exit.

However, when it is a matter of poor management, finding ways to effectively measure why your workers feel disengaged will play a critical role in managing and eliminating the disengagement.

Workers Seek to Be Valued

A common grievance for many employees is that they no longer feel they have any reason to feel loyal to their company. We spend more time at work than we do with our family, on average, which often means that the office and one’s coworkers effectively must function as a second family away from home. A lack of social engagement, a poor or hostile company culture, or a woefully inefficient leadership style can all contribute to feeling disappointed in one’s workplace.

However, the most common grievance for many is a lack of opportunities for continued growth. Workers want to not only improve themselves and become more effective, more efficient, and more skilled, but they want to be more valuable – and they want that value to be recognized.

Many workers today seek to be a part of something greater, and while not every worker can make a serious impact on the course of a company, every worker does ultimately matter. And making sure they understand how they fit into it all and see how the fruits of their labor are leading to positive change can be a great motivator.

Communicate Often

Millennials (born in the 80s up until the mid-90s) make up most of the workforce in America since 2016, and only about 20 percent report being happy with the way their performance is being managed and reviewed.

While generational differences are often exaggerated for clickbait, some of the marked differences in the way millennials engage with their work versus previous generations are real. Chief among them is the need for constant feedback as a way to seek out improvement and better efficiency.

If you are in a managerial position and largely employ millennials, be sure to provide feedback on their performance more often. Be constructively critical, praise them when you feel it is deserved, and help them achieve their goal of becoming a better and more efficient worker.

Offer More Location Flexibility

Today’s workforce, more so than at any other point in modern history, craves the ability to choose where to work. With remote working options touting a long list of benefits for productivity and creativity, it’s easy to see why the trend of working from anywhere but the office has grown drastically in the last few years.

Easy telecommuting tools make this much more feasible than it had been even just a decade ago. Coworkers can communicate, see each other, and collaborate on projects almost seamlessly, even across thousands of miles of distance.

Workers today shop online, do their banking online, date online, consume entertainment online, and communicate with loved ones online. With the spread of COVID-19, the transition into an increasingly digital world has been accelerated for many.

Rather than see the ability to work remotely as a privilege, many feel that modern technology has arrived at a point where, for most, it should simply be the new normal. Furthermore, consider that a whopping 44 percent of workers would agree to take a 10 percent pay cut for the ability to work remotely.

This doesn’t need to mean “work from home forever,” mind you. Companies can utilize the growth of coworking to encourage workers to work from anywhere, based on what currently suits them and their tasks best. Whether that’s the main office, a coworking space, a cozy and quiet café, or the comfort of their home office.

You can improve worker engagement by showing that you trust your workers to remain productive and dedicated to their job without constant micromanaging or supervision (but with constant access to a myriad of tools for instant feedback and communication).

You Can’t Force Someone to Engage

While you can adopt a variety of strategies to improve employee engagement, there will always be hires who started out looking like the perfect pick but lose interest over time.

Employees and employers can part ways amicably when their goals no longer match up. When an employee feels they’ve outgrown their position and their employer cannot offer a better opportunity, there’s no shame in ending a working relationship and wishing them the best in their endeavors. Disengagement is not always caused by a poor work environment – sometimes, it’s just not the right fit.