The goal of an employee onboarding process is to improve company productivity by quickly increasing a new employee’s effectiveness. The process begins the day the offer of employment is accepted and lasts until the end of the 90-day probationary period. Once the offer has been accepted, it becomes the manager’s job to ensure that the… Read more »
Business Management Blog
A Different Take on Employee Engagement
Gallup defines engaged employees as those who are involved in, enthusiastic about, and committed to their workplace. To find a way to measure this, Gallup studied tens of millions of people and determined that just 12 questions (the Gallup Q12) can provide effective metrics on employee engagement. Yes, engagement can be quantified and yes, you… Read more »
The Recognition Gap: Make Sure Your Team Feels Appreciated
The recognition gap is the space between the amount supervisors think they meaningfully recognize their employees’ accomplishments and the amount the employees perceive that recognition. Carolyn Wiley’s research reports that “while 80% of supervisors claim they frequently express appreciation to their subordinates, less than 20% of the employees report that their supervisors express appreciation more… Read more »
Five Not-So-Stressful Tips to Resolve Customer Complaints
While much has been said on how to avoid complaints from your customers, they will still happen. Assuming you’re a good person trying hard, being told you aren’t delivering takes your lizard brain from zero to sixty in a flash. You are under attack! Your heart starts pounding, blood flows from the extremities, you feel… Read more »
The Human Factors that Determine ROI on a Change Initiative
The goal of change is to deliver whatever the desired outcome was that precipitated the change. No company implements a new software system just to complete the implementation. Project management criteria such as on time or on budget are necessary but not sufficient for a successful change initiative. Companies implement software to realize financial gain,… Read more »
Communication: The Leader’s Role in Change Management
The goal of a communication plan (in change management) is to create awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, and reinforcement with each of the audiences that will be impacted by change. An effective communication plan builds awareness of the nature of the change and communicates the risks of not changing. It enables sponsors to interact with employees, formalizes feedback… Read more »
Building a Coalition: The Leader’s Role in Change Management
In our first article on the leader’s role in change management, we outlined the leader’s role in actively and visibly participating in change. The next role they play is in building a coalition of sponsorship, which involves finding the right people in positions of authority and proximity to implement the change. Note that leaders can never… Read more »
Active and Visible Participation: The Leader’s Role in Change Management
A company’s leader plays three primary roles in change management. Over the coming months we will unpack each of these roles in a series of blog posts. This post tackles the #1 contributor to the success of any change initiative, according to Prosci’s nine benchmarking studies conducted over 20 years: leadership’s active and visible participation…. Read more »
Make the Next Change a Spectacular Success
Improve the ROI of Change Initiatives Whether you’re implementing a new ERP or just changing the way timesheets are submitted, why is change so hard? Too often, it’s because the person in charge of the change initiative is a Project Manager and understandably treats it like a project, with timelines and deliverables, while ignoring the… Read more »
How to Become a Better Listener
The cacophony of opinions screamed into the world on social media, in meetings, at conferences, and in classrooms provides ample evidence that it is a human need to be heard. But with all this yelling going on, who is listening? Great leaders have learned to listen carefully to feedback from their staff, their customers, their… Read more »