28Apr

6 Tips to Promote Effective Communication in the Workplace:

IddieLeadership, Team

A guide for managers and team leaders

Effective communication is crucial for any organization, as it can positively impact employee engagement, productivity, and overall success. As a manager or team leader, it’s your responsibility to promote and facilitate effective communication in the workplace.

 Here are some tips to help you achieve this goal:

  • Encourage open communication: Create a culture that values and encourages open communication. Encourage employees to share their ideas, thoughts, and concerns freely. Foster an environment where people feel comfortable expressing themselves without fear of judgment or retribution.
  • Listen actively: Encourage your team to listen actively to one another. Model active listening behavior by paying attention to what others are saying, asking questions to clarify, and summarizing what you’ve heard.
  • Use multiple communication channels: Not everyone communicates in the same way. Some people prefer face-to-face interactions, while others may prefer email or instant messaging. Use a variety of communication channels to ensure that everyone has a chance to participate and communicate in a way that works for them.
  • Provide feedback: Regularly provide feedback to your team on their communication skills, both positive and negative. Encourage them to do the same for one another.
  • Set clear expectations: Make sure everyone knows what’s expected of them in terms of communication. Set clear guidelines for how often team members should communicate, what they should communicate about, and how they should communicate.
  • Lead by example: As a manager or team leader, you set the tone for communication in the workplace. Be open, honest, and transparent in your communication with your team.

 

In conclusion, effective communication is very critical for the success of any organization. By following these tips, you can create a communication-friendly environment that fosters collaboration, productivity, and success.

22Mar

How you can be the best at what you do (9 Ways)

IddieEmployees, Growth

Achieving career goals can be a daunting task. However, with the right perspective and strategy, it is feasible.

If you’re wondering what steps you can take to achieve your career goals, we listed some below:

Define your career goals: This is the first step in achieving your career goals. Write down the steps you intend to take in achieving these goals and break them into long term and short term goals.  There’s a saying that goes “The faintest ink is more powerful than the strongest memory”.

Develop a plan: Consider the skills and experiences you would need to acquire, the amount of time and commitment you would need to dedicate to achieving these goals. Be specific  and avoid setting unrealistic goals. 

Develop the necessary skills: Consider taking courses, attending workshops, volunteering, or being mentored. Be proactive in seeking out opportunities to develop your skills.

Stay focused: Focus on the steps you need to take to achieve your career goals. Avoid distractions and stay committed to your plan.

Build a network: Building a network of professional contacts can be invaluable in achieving your career goals. Attend networking events and conferences, and connect with people who are experts in your industry on LinkedIn. 

Keep learning: To achieve your career goals, you need to continue learning and developing new skills. Take courses, attend workshops, and read industry publications to stay up-to-date with the latest trends and developments.

Take risks: Taking risks in life is an essential part of achieving your career goals. Don’t be afraid to try new things or take on new challenges. Taking calculated risks can help you gain valuable experience and take you an inch closer to your career goals.

Be adaptable: The job market is constantly evolving, and it’s essential to be adaptable. Be open to new opportunities, and be willing to pivot your career path if necessary.

Seek feedback: Feedback is pertinent in improving your skills. Seek feedback from mentors, colleagues, and supervisors etc  as it will improve your performance.

In conclusion, achieving your career goals requires commitment, intentionality and dedication. Success does not happen overnight, but is a result of consistency.

19Nov

7 Tips To Build A High Performance Team

salveconsultingEmployees, Team

1. Cultural Fit

Cultural fit is the element that holds an organization together. Before hiring a new team member, the leader needs to be able to define and articulate the organization’s culture, key values, long-term goals and practices. If you are recruiting someone from outside the organization, this becomes even more critical. According to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), poor cultural fit ends-up costing more than half of someone’s annual salary. However, defining the culture of an organization is not a small task. What if the company, business or leader requires a significant shift in culture? What if the old culture is not what the company needs to be successful in the future. What if the hiring team has a significant mandate for change management? Whatever the situation is, it is imperative that the culture is clearly articulated to the candidate so that you can identify critical characteristics that will mesh well with that culture and effectively assimilate the new team member.

2. Diversity

To achieve peak performance and drive maximum results, a leader must strive to build diversity within their teams. A diverse, high performing team is characterized by open communication, constructive conflict, mutual respect, trust, collaboration, flexibility and willingness to renounce individual control to achieve greater collective results. Diversity obviously can take many forms, including gender, age, color, national origin, sexual orientation, work styles, experience, knowledge, abilities, skills, etc. The key is to look for these differences as you assemble the team and view them as assets rather than liabilities. The purpose of creating teams can be to solve problems, transform a business or evolve into a new business model. Whatever the purpose is, the leader must encourage and stimulate diversity of thoughts and perspectives to more quickly achieve desired results.

3. Clarity of Goals

What “exactly” do you want to achieve and by when? A goal that is not clearly defined will not be achieved. This statement sounds obvious, but the amount of energy wasted by individuals, business teams and corporations is enormous when the word “exactly” is ignored. Investing enough time early on to clearly define your goals is not only a must in business, but also in your life. The clearer you are about what you want, the more likely you are to do more of the things that are consistent with achieving them. Ensuring clarity of goals is essential to help everyone on your team be successful. So, define your team’s goals in great detail, make a timeline for achieving these goals, make them visible to all involved all the time, and finally, make sure there is mutual accountability amongst team members.

4. Alignment

Recent research underscores how important the connections between vision, direction, strategy, goals and purpose are to an organization’s sustained performance. One study found, for example, that when people understand, are engaged and excited about the direction of the company, earnings margin is twice as likely to be above the median. But I wanted to take one step forward with the concept of alignment: aligning these goals with individuals’ personal motivations. This is much harder to do and it requires complete dedication from the leader to achieve a level of trust with his or her team members so that these personal motivations can be discussed with full transparency. Aligning business goals with each member’s roles and responsibilities within the team is the ultimate step towards achieving sustained engagement, which will lead to enduring success.

5. Regular feedback

Constantly giving and receiving high quality feedback is a great way to build trust. For many leaders, this can be one of the most stressful parts of the job. Yet, delivering performance feedback is crucial to developing a high performing team. There are countless examples of employees who are doing excellent work leaving companies for other jobs because they didn’t know how well they were doing! Had they known their work was being appreciated, maybe they wouldn’t have started looking for another job. Similar to the alignment with individual’s motivations, a leader needs to be prepared to adapt feedback style to individual team members. It is helpful to remember to use different approaches that better match an individual’s preference to receiving and giving feedback. This skill does not come naturally to many leaders; it needs to be practiced with persistence and patience, and possibly some coaching.

6. Keep promises

No matter how small, always keep your promises. No one trusts those who don’t keep their word. We have already discussed the importance of trust, so keep your promises and stick to your commitments. Trust leads to loyalty and loyalty leads to people giving their best efforts to deliver outstanding results for you and your organization. Some leaders, even with the best intentions, motivate others with false promises of promotions, personal success and a greater future, but rarely deliver on those promises. If you are doing that, you need to stop and reassess your leadership style and tactics. If you truly want to be successful in life and in business, keep your promises!

7. Do the right thing

“Doing the right thing” is the essence of ethics and integrity. It is what defines you as a person and as a leader. It is about right and wrong in human conduct. Ethics is about choices, dilemmas and “grey areas.” It explores the question of what we ought to do, rather than simply discuss what people could do or actually do. But if you rationalize questionable decisions by saying, “everyone does it,” you should reconsider. Leaders face this dilemma frequently, because in an imperfect world, there are a lot of not-so-good choices, and few good, clear and right ones. But leaders must decide. That is your job. In fact, you are being evaluated all the time by how you decide, by your bosses, by your peers, by your subordinates and by your loves ones and family. True leaders will not do the “wrong thing” just to be liked. So, when in doubt, follow Eleanor Roosevelt’s advice: “Do what you feel in your heart to be right, for you’ll be criticized anyway.”

After all, these seven vital tips are just a reminder of what you should be striving for every day as a high performance team leader. It’s about common sense and treating others as you would want to be treated. It’s that simple. Or is it difficult? The American scholar, Warren Bennis, once said: “Becoming a leader is synonymous with becoming yourself. It is precisely that simple and it is also that difficult.” _____________________________________________________________________________________

Alvaro Vaselli is a Senior Global Business Executive with a 20+ year record of driving profitable growth in multiple B2B industries. Most recently, he was President of the Personal Care Division of a $1B industry leader in the plastic films business. Alvaro’s roles have included general management, business development, sales and marketing. He has a strong International background and speaks Portuguese, English and Spanish. Learn more at www.linkedin.com/in/alvarovaselli, or contact Alvaro at 484-432-3437 or avaselli@mac.com.

19Nov

3 Stunning Ways To Motivate Your Employees

salveconsultingEmployees

Every organization is struggling with unmotivated employees. Some companies are proactive in dealing these issues while others are lagers. In recent Human Resource Survey, it is reported the problem in employee motivation arises when an employee experience a hitch with his or her direct manager. Hence, the responsibility falls on management’s shoulders to improve motivational levels.

Before we start in detail, let’s take a quick look at inspiring “work related quotes” by Vince Lombardi, who was an American football player, coach, and executive.

“The only place success comes before work is in the dictionary.” “Individual commitment to a group effort – that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.”

Here are 3 spectacular ways to motivate employees

1. Align employee’s economic interest with organization performance

Okay, so this first strategy is not that easy than it sounds as it takes a lot of doing at top management level than the rest. However, “incentive compensation program” offered to employees at all levels when the company prospers and motivates them to commit more to their organization.

Note – Here, individual’s solid performance must be measured for one to have his or her fair share of financial rewards.

2. Show genuine interest in their (employees) work life balance

Managers must understand that employees appreciate little sensitivity offered by their superiors in a workplace. It is not a suggestion anymore, but an essence of a time when managers need to step in and show little but genuine interest in employees work life relation.

Start by offering flexibility in schedule and be understanding about doctor’s appointments or family commitments and so on. Remember, small gestures make a huge difference.

3. Try to be the career planner for an employee

Even if managers simply exhibit an interest in employee’s career growth, this will do wonders for an employee attitude. He or she will start perceiving his or her manager as a mentor that will apparently enhance employee’s dedication and productivity.

Managers can start by monthly “career growth” meetings, discussing – additional training, and coursework. Eventually, moving forward as a career coach and mentor employees to plan a better career path for them.

Written By SUPRIYA NIGAM

10Sep

5 Reasons you need Outsourcing Services for your Business

salveconsultingOutsourcing 1

“ Is your business showing steady signs of growth? This is the best time to outsource some of your business functions. Read this article to know why.”

In most cases, entrepreneurs have to do most of the job themselves when they initially start with their enterprise. Marketing sales, human resource and technical components of the business- everything remains the sole responsibility of the business owner. However, as and when the business slowly starts to grow, they realise that handling everything on their own can be tedious.

So, they must hire someone who can do the non-core work. And this someone is none other than an outsourcing services company. This can be called a strategic move by the entrepreneurs. But can you tell why? Read on.

Control & Decrease the Operational Costs: Small business owners must be extremely far-sighted and should aim much higher. They need to identify and jot down their strengths and weaknesses. Outsourcing companies can cut down your operational and labor costs, making a positive impact on the company’s revenue recognition leading to valuable savings.

Put a focus on the company’s future growth: When a business outsources its non-core functions, the owner gets more opportunities to focus on the future plans and strategies for the growth of the company. While the external agencies can take care of mundane and time-consuming processes, the entrepreneur can focus on the main business processes.

Provide access to Top-notch capabilities: When small enterprises seek for investors or partners and outsource its financial functions to any insured, bonded and professional services with a secure technology, it enables them to resort to a global knowledge base with an access to top-notch abilities. This is mainly due to the virtual assistants who are proficient in multiple things and complete the work within a stipulated time. Now you can also hire a virtual assistant online.

Make the internal resources free for other things: Sometimes it may so happen that business owners try to do some task but later on realise they either don’t have the time for it or they are not very good at it. So, instead of wasting time over it and cleaning up the mess on failing at things time and again, it is better to hire an outsourcing services company.

Enhance Business productivity: There are many things like creating content, email management, following up with potential clients etc which need constant attention from the business owner. Such streamlining of business tasks is quintessential for your company. Now these tasks can be easily delegated to a virtual assistant company while the entrepreneurs can focus on the non-recurrent activities and issues of the employees. In this way, no aspect of your business will be neglected in the long run with only increased productivity for your business.

Frankly speaking, get your business tasks outsourced gives you more time to devote to the key area of your business. There are many functions like accounts payable and receivable, payroll processing, general ledger, financial statement preparation etc which are crucial for the smooth running of the business but are still not considered to be a part of the core business and neither do they have any specific competitive advantage. Hence, these are ideal for outsourcing.

Author Bio: Wendy Villar  has five years of experience of working in the outsourcing services company. Here, he tells us why one should employ a virtual assistant company or may also hire a virtual assistant online for the growth of their business in future.