Employers

No doubt, you care about our business and the image you put forth for your customers. But what about prospective employees? What do they think of your company? Have you ever considered the possibility that your level of timely responsiveness to job applicants plays a role in how your business is perceived – and thus, how well you recruit and hire top-quality staff?

It’s no secret that we’re in an employee job market right now. Companies are desperate for help. And no doubt hiring is a big concern for you. But do you prioritize calling back job applicants, scheduling interviews, or updating candidates in the pipeline? Effective communication is an essential value every company must commit to. But even companies that understand this often overlook responsive communication when dealing with potential hires.

The Cost of Neglecting Timely Responsiveness

If following up with prospective employees quickly and consistently is not a top priority for your organization, you could be losing out big. Here are a few reasons responsiveness in business matters:

• Money: When you fail to move a new hire along or lose out on a top prospect, there are associated opportunity costs like bad hires, open positions, etc.
• Branding: Because your track record for timely responsiveness will get around, your reputation as an employer of choice is at stake. Failure to respond to candidate questions can signal a lack of respect and damage your recruiting credibility long-term.
• Blowback: The way you handle job prospects through the application, interview, and negotiation processes often determines how you will be treated. If you find a well-qualified candidate, a great way to minimize the risk of being ghosted by that candidate is timely updates and staying in touch.

Timely Communication Matters

While it may seem harmless to push an email back to next week or drop a resume through the cracks on occasion, it’s not without consequence. Data released by interview scheduling SAAS provider Cronofy shows a lack of timely communication can actually be a significant driver in poor hiring outcomes.

A job search can be a very uncertain and stressful time for professionals. It helps reassure top talent when recruiters or hiring managers reach out regularly, even if only to say, “We’re still waiting on an interview time,” or, “The hiring team is still reviewing your qualifications.” Providing that contact and feedback builds trust in your hiring process, the company, and the decision to pursue this job.

When companies neglect timely responsive communication, statistics show, candidates will go elsewhere. According to Cronofy:

• 62% of professionals in senior positions report having abandoned an interview journey because of frustration with the interview scheduling process.
• The interview scheduling experience directly corelates to a prospect’s perception of your company.
• A full two-thirds of US applicants expect to hear back about an interview within just one week of applying.
• 18% of job applicants report responsiveness as the top frustration with the hiring process.

Putting Responsiveness into Action

At Building Careers, we’ve seen firsthand the power of implementing timely and responsive communication in recruiting top talent. While partnering with a recruiting firm is critical to effective hiring (especially in such a competitive market), we’ve observed many if not most recruiters ghost candidates at some point in the process.

As such, simply touching base with candidates throughout the week and addressing concerns early on is a clear differentiator in our field. Quality professionals know when they are appreciated. And they know when they’re not. So, when your recruiting partner or hiring team practices timely responsiveness, they set your brand apart from the others.

As a leading recruiter for the CRE space in Southern California, we’ve seen our network and credibility grow among commercial real estate’s top talent. We believe strongly in the values of open communication, constant communication, and timely communication. As a result, our contacts have come to expect real-time feedback and daily check-ins. And because we also emphasize internal responsiveness, our team is more current and helpful along the way.

Hiring rockstar talent that will take your company to the next level means implementing a comfortable hiring experience. And that hiring experience is only as good as its communication. Any friction in this process will negatively impact the potential hire’s perception of your organization and make it more likely you will lose them to a competitor. Alternately, implementing timeliness and responsiveness in all communications will ensure the hiring journey is smooth, positive, and effective.

Leadership is scary and hard. But leading your team to achieve big, daring goals is one of the most rewarding things you’ll ever do—if you do it well. And that starts with deciding to level up in how you lead. Just like there’s no magic pill for weight loss or better finances, there’s no magic pill to being a leadership expert. You just put one courageous foot in front of the other, day in and day out, getting better and stronger as you go. And using the transformational leadership style will help you shift your mindset to focusing on your team’s ability (not just yours) to get those big, daring wins.

You may be thinking that transformational leadership sounds like corporate mumbo jumbo. However, it’s anything but that. Imagine drama and bureaucracy in your business decreasing so productivity, innovation and creativity can take center stage. Imagine a team of go-getters who are motivated to win every day and enjoy going to work—that’s the culture transformational leadership can create for your business. As you inspire your team to think and work beyond themselves for the greater good, you are on your way to becoming a bona fide transformational leader. Is this really possible? Absolutely.

Define Transformational Leadership

In the words of the Transformer Optimus Prime, “Autobots, transform and roll out!” If only transformation was that simple for us non-autobots, right? But it’s possible to spur on change—and it starts with your leadership.

The idea of a style of leadership that transforms team members, businesses and the world was first introduced in the 1970s by sociologist J.V. Downton. The theory caught fire later that decade when James MacGregor Burns, a leadership expert and historian, wrote Leadership. In this book, James describes transformational leadership as a style where “leaders and followers raise one another to higher levels of motivation and morality.” This style is based on a leader who has built trust and respect with their team—and because of that, they can influence their team to work harder and think smarter to achieve a common goal.

James put a spotlight on a leadership style that increases loyalty, commitment and the ability to accomplish way more than the company and team members thought they could. So, what does a transformational leader look like?

Read More: https://www.ramseysolutions.com/business/what-is-transformational-leadership

Employee advocacy is one of the most effective ways to boost your public image and employee engagement.

Why? Because your employees are already posting about you. Half of all employees share content from or about their employer on social media, and 33% of all employees do so without any prompting.

Sounds great. But without a content strategy to guide them, you have no idea what they’re posting or the ROI of those efforts. With a formal employee advocacy program, you can expand your organic reach by 200% and increase profitability by 23%, among many other benefits.

Keep reading to learn how to build an employee advocacy program that your team will love, and that will contribute to your business results.

Define Employee Advocacy

Employee advocacy is the promotion of an organization by its workforce. Employee advocacy can take many forms, both online and off. But the most common and effective channel is social media advocacy.

Social media advocacy comes down to employees sharing your company’s content on their personal social media accounts. Everything from job postings (and other resources for job seekers), blog articles, and industry resources, to new product launches.

However, employee advocacy can also be original content that offers a glimpse into your company culture. Maybe it’s an Instagram post showing the free lunch spread you brought in last Friday, a special event, or a moment from an average workday.

All these activities can help boost your brand reputation with both customers and potential new recruits.

The Importance Of Employee Advocacy

A recent study found that employee advocacy benefits companies in three key ways:

• It positively impacts sales due to increased brand awareness and favorable perceptions (“brand sentiment”).
• It improves staff recruitment, retention, and engagement.
• It aids in PR crises and issues management.

Read more: https://blog.hootsuite.com/a-6-step-guide-for-creating-an-employee-advocacy-program-for-your-business/

As leaders, we sometimes lose touch of the importance of our employees. This is not to say that we forget them, it just means that we sometimes forget how important they are to our bottom line. After all, without our employees, we would not be able to perform the functions of our organization.

The reality is that if we do not give our employees the tools they need to succeed, they will either quit or “simply collect a paycheck” (i.e. perform their job to minimal expectations). Either scenario is detrimental to your business.

So what does it mean to “set our employees up for success”? It means we invest in them, giving them the tools needed to succeed, both personally and professionally. This concept can easily be dismissed by larger companies having hundreds and thousands of employees, with a pipeline of individuals ready to take on any job. However, the basic needs of an individual to feel successful, needed, respected, and appreciated do not change, whether in a small company or large. It does not take a Harvard graduate to predict the productivity and longevity of an employee that is set up for success versus one that is not.

So how do we as leaders set employees up to succeed and avoid leadership mistakes? Keep reading!

1. Be Mindful

As Brad Federman once said “Paychecks can’t buy passion”. The first step for a leader is to become aware that a paycheck alone is not going to create the motivation for employees to succeed. Or bring fulfillment for them at work. You will not retain the employees you would want to keep without giving them the opportunity to innovate and excel. As such, you must create opportunities for them to grow, for them to champion a process or skill set, for them to learn new things, for them to innovate and learn how to pick themselves up from a setback. These are not only skill sets that can help them professionally, but personally as well.

2. Create Programs

This is where we need to invest some time and money. Task your managers with identifying training programs that can ensure their employees are given the training needed to perform their job functions.

I would recommend digital training programs that can be accessed 24/7, ensuring consistent application from one employee to another of what is being taught and giving the employee opportunity to take the course at their own speed and as many times as needed. These three vital elements of learning (among others) do not always happen in a classroom environment, nor in subsequent training sessions. Creating digital training programs take time and money, but once the initial investment has been made, each employee will be given the same exact opportunity to learn how to succeed in their job.

3. Motivate Your Employees

Take success stories and share them with the other managers. Utilize the experiences of each manager to further tweak the programs and make them more effective and more successful. Build benchmarks that show progress and success and then rally around those numbers.

Use your marketing team to use these stories on social media or in the trade press. Get the word out that your company has a culture of success and you will recruit better employees and retain existing ones. Create these programs to give your employees the opportunity to better themselves and increase their skills. You will then begin to see an increase in productivity, innovation, initiative, and retention.

Let’s not forget about what it does for the personal life of your employee. If they feel successful, respected, and needed at work, think of the positive influence they will have at home and with others.

Read more: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/5-ways-leaders-can-set-employees-up-success-gary-fleming/

Teamwork. It’s a word that is thrown around in the office on a daily basis, but when was the last time you took a step back and actually evaluated the teamwork in your workplace?

Why Is Teamwork In The Workplace Significant?

Without effective teamwork, productivity and quality of work will likely suffer, even with a group composed of multiple brilliant individuals. Likewise, without effective teams, companies will struggle to keep pace with competitors who do have effective teams.

Multiple studies have shown that promoting good teamwork in the workplace will have positive effects on productivity, quality of work, creativity, innovation and job satisfaction, all of which benefit the company itself.

In a recent study by Stanford, participants who were working on a team as opposed to working alone persevered longer on difficult tasks, showed more interest and enjoyment in working on the tasks, required less self-regulatory effort to complete tasks, and generally performed better on the tasks. The participants who were part of a team even decided to do more tasks related to those performed in the study in a personal setting 1-2 weeks after the study.

How Can We Improve Company Teamwork?

Now that we’ve established the importance of teamwork in the workplace, let’s talk about how we can improve. Here are 8 tips on how to improve teamwork within any organization.

1. Build Diverse And Inclusive Teams

First and foremost, it is important that we focus on creating diverse teams rather than teams of all like-minded people. A group of people with different backgrounds are more likely to bring diverse perspectives and ideas to the table. With more perspectives, comes more thorough decision making. We often tend to want to surround ourselves with people who think and act in ways that reflect our own thoughts and actions.

While a group of like-minded individuals with similar backgrounds may get along great, we have to think about the bigger picture – Will they bring fresh ideas to the table? Will the team members challenge each other to tackle a project from all angles? Or, will the team members be so agreeable that they come up with ideas that don’t get questioned or elaborated upon? If all team members think the same way, come from similar backgrounds, and have the same beliefs and opinions, the work that the team produces will likely be one-sided and less creative. Whereas if each team member has unique opinions, beliefs, background, etc. they will likely produce work that reflects more creativity and innovation.

Read More: https://www.lumapps.com/solutions/enterprise-collaboration/improve-teamwork-in-the-workplace/