JobMax Talent Management Tips – Page 3

Five Tips for Hiring Seasonal Workers

It’s very common for organizations to look to the support of seasonal temporary workers to during peak production times. In fact, hiring seasonal workers on a temporary basis can be one of the best ways to realize a positive return on investment for your business because it’s less costly than hiring regular employees.

Each year, major retailers hire seasonal temps to help out during the holidays and support increased shopping demands. The biggest industries that use seasonal help are manufacturing, retail, hospitality, customer service, sales, and shipping and transportation. However, any company may choose to hire seasonal temps to cover summer vacations or maternity leaves for regular employees.

Seasonal assignments may last for a few days to a few months, depending on the need of each organization. During this time, it’s up to the company to provide training and supervision so that seasonal temps have the ability to be productive. There are some key ways that any business can get the most from their temporary seasonal staff.

Create accurate seasonal job descriptions. Your first step in maximizing seasonal staff ROI is to write seasonal job descriptions that clearly spell out the tasks and responsibilities of each assignment. Your seasonal workforce may have limited time to get projects completed, so make sure they are reasonable given the scope of work.
Provide training and resources to get the job done. Set up all seasonal work stations and systems in advance to make sure you get the more out of seasonal temps. Arrange for an orientation and training day, utilizing your seasoned employees as mentors to seasonal staffers. Give your seasonal workforce access to the information and resources to be successful.
Set clear goals and deadlines for tasks and projects. Your seasonal workers can only accomplish what you expect if you communicate this to them. Provide seasonal temps with a list of tasks they are to complete, along with daily and weekly goals. Provide reasonable deadlines for getting things done.
Give seasonal workers incentives to perform to highest standards. Seasonal workers often respond well to short-term incentives because they may not have access to the same benefits as your regular employees. Set fun contests and provide bonuses for top performers. Give seasonal workers incentives such as on-site lunches, wellness services, and discounts for merchandise.
Treat seasonal workforce with respect and offer some permanent jobs. The reason why some individuals take on seasonal work is to prove their worth for future employment consideration. Remember to treat all seasonal workers with respect and appreciation, offering a few the opportunity to become permanent employees based on their performance. You can find out who may be interested in perm placement by talking with your staffing agency.

Seasonal workers can be a valuable way to stay on top of busy production periods and project demands. Remember to make the most of your seasonal staffers by giving them rewarding assignments and interesting tasks.

How to Delegate Effectively

Managers get things done through other people. They delegate primarily because it makes their job easier. If they try to do everthing themselves, they become unnecessarily burdened; their performance and health deteriorate; they fail to develop their staff adequately; and in time the organization will suffer. Indeed, many believe that the ability to delegate is the main feature that distinguishes good from bad managers. Knowing how to delegate is, therefore; a crucial management and leadership skill.

From your prioritized jobs, select one to delegate: List in priority order those tasks you might consider delegating. To qualify for this list, a task should be:

taking too much of your time
not stricly relatd to your key role,
rather routine,
appropriate and chanllenging for another staff member, or,
better undertaken by someone with more appropriate skills or know-how than yours,

Define clearly for yourself the task to be delegated; Clarify in your own mind the task to be delegated. Think through each task so that you are clear about;

expected results or product,
how the task might be approached,
subtasks within the overal task,
limits of authority,
necessary timelines,
how you will know the task is done,
resources required,
necessary training.

Understand the task fully yourself so that later you will be able to thoroughly brief a staff member.

Select the right person for the job; As a good manager, you should be aware of the strengths and limitations of your staff and delegate accordingly. The ideal choice should have the ability, knowledge, skills, enthusiasm, talent, and time needed to get the job done. Unfortunately, such qualities are not always found in the person; so before selecting someone, ask yourself;

who has the necessary skills?
who would be most challenged?
who would be learn most? Who would benefit least?
Does the task require previous experience? Will training be needed?
What particular personal qualities are needed? Who has them?
Who can be trusted to do the job?
What other workload does that person have?
Is more than one person needed? If so, can they work together successfully?
Who would enjoy a job like this? How will others react?

Delegation to the right person should improve skills, morale, and esteem.

Conduct a thorough briefing; In handing over the assignment, be prepared to set aside adequate time in private to clearly communicate:

the scope of the task,
specific results requried,
time schedule and deadlines,
available resources,
the authority needed to carry out the jobs,
how performance can be measured,
sensitive or risky aspects of the task,
reporting procedures,
your confidence in the person you select.

Ask for feedback and encourage questions to eliminate any confusion.

Define clearly for yourself the task to be delegated; When you give people a job, ensure you tell them how much authority you are handing over. Three prossibilities are;

“Look inot the problem; suggest three solutions; and I’ll choose the best.”
“Look into the problem; tell me how you plan to slove it; and do so unless I tell you otherwise.”
“Solve the problem and tell me when you’re finished.”

Set parameters and establish controls to ensure this authority and the accompanying power will be properly used. If necessary, inform other relevant staff.

Keep lines of communication open; When you delegate, you do not abdicate responsibility. You must maintain some control over the project. At the very least, agree to have your delegate inform you only when things are not going according to plan. Be accessible but not meddlesome. The delegate should make the first contact.

Monitor progress unobtrusively; Keep eye on your delegate’s progress without intruding. If necessary, confirm in advance how often progress is to be reported. As the delegate gains confidence, tactfully withdraw but remain alert for problems. Help if aksed to do so.

Reward performance; Appreciate a job well done by reconizing good work privately and publicly. Sincere recognition will increase your effectiveness in working with others.

Delegate as part of a master plan; Review the project on its completion to make sure your delegate has also gained from the task. See delegation as part of the planed growth of your staff. Through delegation, they grow in confidence; and they and your organization will benefit in the long run.

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.

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 Get the Best Performance from Diverse Teams

As more businesses rely on teams to perform projects and achieve goals, management must learn to maximize their productivity and minimize inherent potential downsides. This challenge is spiced with increasing diversity, including age, education, language and cultural differences.

Managers’ performance ratings often depend on the achievements of their teams. This condition mandates that managers learn to work well with diverse teams, using teammate talents to the max, while building a finely tuned group that is motivated to deliver high performance.

University of California, Irvine, PhD candidate Kenji Klein noted in the published paper, “Culturally Diverse Teams that Work,” that culturally diverse teams “. . . can boost firm performance, but that potential comes with some risk.” Klein’s research displayed that results of diverse teams are divided—sometimes they work well; at times they do not.

The prime questions that managers must answer: How to take advantage of diverse teams? Team diversity works best when responsible for the following tasks.

Projects that demand focus from a variety of angles and perspectives.
Subjects that include understanding information from various sources, requiring innovative answers and out-of-the-box ideas.

Managers facing more obvious, routine tasks or projects may generate better results by using less diverse, more homogenous teams. In these situations, teams with educationally and culturally similar members can benefit from the following advantages.

Faster and better communication.
Better cohesion and quicker collaboration to solve problems.
Smoother implementation of changes and solutions.
Projects having short deadlines benefit from using less diverse teams.

Assembling diverse high-performing teams require managers to have one quality above all others—patience. Research from a variety of institutions, including MIT’s Sloan School of Management, indicates that newly formed diverse teams initially do not perform very well.

However, over time, team members become more comfortable working with their teammates and deliver higher performance when their leader (manager) has the patience to let teammates adjust to each other’s differences and perspectives.

Along with exhibiting patience, managers should allow diverse team members to integrate their different views instead of encouraging teammates to suppress their age, cultural or educational differences. If managers select the right team members, while giving them the freedom to become a cohesive group over time, diverse teams tend to perform better than more homogenous groups in the long-term.

Managers, who are patient and offer diverse teams freedom to find their own ways to collaborate, enjoy the following benefits.

High-level innovative ideas and solutions.
Team members who are comfortable offering out-of-the-box thinking and suggestions to each other and to management.
Teams that overcome initial conflicts rising from diversity to become high performing, cohesive groups.
The ability to give these teams complex projects, requiring innovation and creativity, with the confidence that their valuable combination of diversity and cohesion will deliver outstanding solutions.

Two conditions seem to apply across the board with few dissenters:

Globalization of business demands that managers find ways to work with highly diverse teams.
Most diverse teams take a while to fuse and integrate their differences to focus on collaboration to achieve their goals.

Managers who accept and understand these consistent tendencies should enjoy excellent results from their diverse teams. Leaders still must be aware of potential conflicts arising from personality, not cultural, diversity. Assembling winning diverse teams may demand some management tweaking of team members involved in bad chemistry situations.

Evaluating team cohesion is important, even when managers assemble homogenous teams for shorter-term projects. Patient managers, who give their diverse teams the freedom to work past their initial cultural differences, will be pleased they adopted this approach. Diverse teams, aware of their leader’s patience and understanding, typically form high-performing, cohesive groups that solve the most complex problems with innovative solutions.