JobMax HR Advice – Page 3 – HR ADVICE CENTRE

How to Help Your Staff Achieve a Positive Identity

As a successful manager, it is your responsibility to clarify, emphasize, and establish the corporate identity of your support staff. Understand that you may have to contend with a corporate culture that has historically under-valued support staff importance. This is, unfortunately, apparently a common condition. Along with improving operations, you may further strengthen your brand and enhance your career options by establishing a support staff identity. Here are some suggestions to achieve this goal.

Foster innovation. Administrative, marketing, sales, and customer service support staff can make valuable positive contributions to operations. Innovation can be a huge motivator and contributor. Support staff, working daily in the corporate “trenches,” often develops wonderful innovative ideas and valuable suggestions to improve operations. Encourage the sharing of these ideas and suggestions. Exceptional pearls of wisdom may come from this open communications policy.

Instill a secure identity. Reinforcing the importance of support staff contributions creates security in the identity and purpose of their functions. Security in the importance of their contribution encourages higher performance and a more positive workplace. Feeling the security and confidence of management lifts the spirits and production of support staff, particularly if feelings of insecurity or unimportance previously dominated the workplace. Feelings of security lead most employees to strive for further achievement—leading to further strengthened security.

Encourage collaboration. Little establishes someone’s credibility and sense of value more than invitations to collaborate to create ideas to help solve a problem, or generate improvements at the workplace. Encouraging support staff collaboration to contribute to operational improvement establishes their identity as a meaningful source of help. Increased feelings of valuable self-worth, confidence, and empowerment supply the identity that support employees often lack.

Publicly recognize achievements to establish a pride culture. “Criticize in private and praise in public,” always improves workplace conditions. Public recognition of support staff achievements by managers can create wonderful on-the-job results. You will be impressed, even amazed by the reaction to your simple “Thank you,” spoken publicly to a support employee. Public recognition of an individual or team typically affects other employees, who now recommit to improving their performance to compete for future public recognition.

5 Simple Ways to Improve Your Human Resources Management Skills

If you’re a small business owner, you may feel that Human Resources Management (HRM) only applies to large companies and corporations. But effective HRM provides strategies for managing employees in any size business. If your business hires employees on any level, HRM policies can help you improve every aspect of recruiting, safety, employee training, hiring and even firing. Gaining new skills in HRM can help you better deal with every aspect of your business’s human resources.

Let your employees work together, share ideas and develop a sense of ownership over their jobs and the workplace. When workers feel free to share ideas, it helps them to be more productive and more effective in their jobs. Give them the freedom to express their thoughts and utilize their creativity whenever you can.

Build relationships with your staff, colleagues and managers. This is done by expressing concern for others, treating people with respect, trusting them to want to do their jobs well, and giving them your full attention when required.

Create an environment that encourages your employees to perform better and recognizes their efforts when they do. It’s easy to overlook a job well done, simply because it’s expected that employees perform adequately. But if you have an employee who has been struggling to improve and she finally makes noticeable progress, let he/her know you noticed. It can help him/her to improve even more just to know you’re aware of him/her efforts.

Learn to communicate clearly, whether in writing or verbally. Communication skills can be learned. In fact, if you struggle in this area, take a few eCourses to help you improve your skills. This is one of the most important things you can do to improve your HRM abilities.

Lead your team by example rather than simply direction. This will help your employees respect you much more because they can see you’re not asking them to perform tasks you’re unwilling to perform.

Recognize what works and what doesn’t work in your HRM and eliminate ineffective procedures. Develop systems for monitoring success and learn to adapt your policies as needed to ensure your business is running as smoothly and efficiently as possible.

Cooperative Communication

Cooperative communication, in the world of business, is generally defined as the skill and ability of employees to “get along” at the workplace; the techniques of sharing information in a non-threatening and polite manner are the basis of cooperative communication, and when properly implemented, cooperative communication enhances the workplace experience and typically inspires better performance.

It is natural that, during the complexity and repetitive nature of typical workdays, person-to-person conflicts will arise. The pressure to perform, both individually and as team members, can generate high-level negativity and conflict in many employees. Cooperative communication often acts as an effective “pressure release valve”.

Studies have shown that when cooperative communication is lacking, feelings of hostility, operational problems, and poor individual performance are among the unhappy results. This begs the question: Why isn’t cooperative communication practiced by all companies to avoid the problems created by its lack of implementation?

Unfortunately, there is a general lack of cooperative communication for a simple, but often undiscovered reason: Most people have never been taught the skill. Few schools and higher education institutions have cooperative communication on their course menu. Unless employees learned the skill at home from their parents, most have little appreciation for or the ability to use this important commodity. Unfortunately, this skill is often lacking in otherwise high performing managers, too.

The simple act of cooperative communication can have a profound effect on management effectiveness in a variety of ways. For example, good cooperative communication will often:

Eliminate employee-to-employee friction. As workplace pressures escalate, so does the natural human conflicts that occur. Cooperative communication usually eliminates much of this vocal friction and helps teams work together more successfully.

Eliminate the attitude of “winning an argument” and introduce a philosophy of problem solving. Instead of a personal competition environment, staff normally adopts a winning attitude towards the team or department in which they function.

Eliminate professional personality and procedure conflicts. Instead of an attitude of “Do it my way. It’s the best way,” cooperative communication fosters an attitude of “Let’s work together to do it the best way”. This one attribute can help management immensely.

Eliminate conflict and wasted time at strategic and training meetings. Both staff and management often complain about the number of meetings they are required to attend. Yet, for all the jokes and complaints, management knows that most meetings are necessary. Cooperative communication in the meeting place saves time, helps the moderator stay on topic, and generates better results.

Eliminate many client and customer complaints about poor treatment by staff. Nothing can do more harm to a company’s branding and image efforts than a customer or client base that feels mistreated by staff. A habit of cooperative communication often eliminates much of the customer dissatisfaction (real or perceived) that afflicts many companies.

Cooperative communication is a simple concept that can deliver wonderful positive results to management. Managers should understand that because of lack of training at all levels of education many employees don’t understand how to use cooperative communication.

Depending on the size and/or structure of a company, the Human Resource (HR) Department, team leaders, or department managers can implement the training and support necessary to expose employees to the ways to use cooperative communication. This is a win-win situation for both staff and management, as employees will enjoy a more positive workplace experience by eliminating much of the natural conflict that occurs.

How to Attract the Talent You Want

Treat every candidate with respect for their interest. Whether you are recruiting inexperienced new graduates or C-level executives, give every candidate the respect they deserve as people. Being honest, open and professional is critical to candidates’ perceptions of your company. Never violate this rule in your talent-finding formula.
Create a professional hiring process; then follow it. Explain the hiring process to all candidates; follow it religiously. Depending on the authority level of different jobs, you’ll need to vary your process at times. However, to maintain your professional credibility, you must follow the process you have explained to the candidate.
Design a positive process for candidates that don’t “make the cut.” Have you experienced the horrors or heard about other candidates who were told that they would hear from a company after an interview, only to hear nothing? Employers who practice this “policy” must not realize the damage they do to their reputation and brand. Candidates have friends and family who are also consumers and can refer other talented people. Outstanding leaders develop a formula that offers dignified ways to deliver a professional “no” message.
Create a hiring formula that gives you flexibility. Your recruiting and hiring formula should recognize that you may sometimes need candidates with unusual educational or behavioral qualifications specific for the job, department or team. A winning talent-finding formula allows you to be consistent, but flexible when necessary. If you want to consistently attract the best talent, make flexibility your trusted partner.
Create a pleasant “candidate experience” for all job seekers and recruits. You might compare this component to the popular branding goal of creating a positive “customer experience” for all consumers who contact your company. Treating all candidates with respect, keeping your hiring process consistent, and having a professional communication strategy for non-hires increases your probabilities of attracting and hiring the best talent available.

Consider using some or all of these suggestions to create your effective plan and winning recruiting programs. If these features sound like basic human courtesy and respect more than textbook HR principles, you’re right.

Whether you are recruiting for a part-time mail clerk or a Vice President of IT, the candidate will judge your leadership ability—and your company—by the way you manage the hiring process. Your company faces no more risk when hiring a lower-level employee than when interviewing executive suite candidates. Your professional hiring process should be consistent for all candidates.

For example, the inexperienced part-time candidate may have an older sibling or family member who is eminently qualified for an open executive position. Further, lower level candidates may not be shy about telling everyone in sight about the treatment they received when interviewed by you or your company. If it was a positive experience, he or she may sing your praises. Conversely, if it was a negative experience, the candidate may be equally vocal in recommending that family and friends not buy your company’s products or services.

Join the fraternity of outstanding leaders by designing a professional, effective talent-finding formula. Your career and employer will reward you many times over.

How to Manage Your Gen Ys

If you’re like many managers, your employees are increasingly gen Ys who bring valuable qualities to the workplace. they’re willing to work long hours. and they relish working for organizations whose values matter to them.

To attract, retain, and get the most from Gen Ys, create the right kind of work environment. Start by emphasizing your company’s values, reputation, and community involvement to Gen Y job candidates. They often prefer to work on their own schedules, so be fexible about asynchronous work. Where possible, performance management should focus on task completion, not time spent.