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Define Company Culture

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Company culture is a hot topic right now. Since 2020, COVID-19 has made a BIG shift in this area for many organizations. In this blog post, we are going to define company culture, how it works, and why it’s important!

Define Company Culture

Company culture refers to the attitudes and behaviors of a company and its employees. It is evident in the way an organization’s people interact with each other, the values they hold, and the decisions they make.

Company culture encompasses a variety of elements, including work environment, company mission, leadership style, values, ethics, expectations, and goals.

How Does It Work?

A company’s culture may be expressly and deliberately cultivated, or it may simply result from the accumulation of decisions made over time. With a strong company culture, employees understand the expected outcomes and behaviors and act accordingly.

Some companies have a team-based culture that emphasizes employee participation on all levels, while other businesses have a culture where formal, traditional, or hierarchical management is valued.

When you work at a company with a traditional management style, your job responsibilities will be clearly defined, but there may not be opportunities to advance without going through a formal promotion or transfer process.

At a more casual workplace, employees often have the opportunity to take on new projects, and additional roles, as time permits.

One example of company culture can be seen at Netflix, where it is encapsulated in their philosophy of “people over process.” In its company culture document, Netflix spells out its company values: judgment, communication, curiosity, courage, passion, selflessness, innovation, inclusion, integrity, and impact. These values are expected to be upheld by employees in every action and interaction, resulting in a creative, collaborative, and successful organization.

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Making The Right Connections For Your Career

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How do quick start a career that you love? Maybe you have a vision, a passion, an idea of where you want to go, but you’re not quite certain how to get there. This is where making the right connections comes in.

There’s a big difference between aimless networking and intentional networking. Needless to say, it’s key you make the right connections for the career path you’re pursuing.

So how do you make a connection, and then maintain it? Here are five steps you can take to meet the right connections, and foster beneficial work relationships to get your career started!

1. Determine Your Sharable Value

It might not always feel like it, but everyone has value to give to everyone else. If you know what value you present to others, you’ll be able to connect more easily and confidently. This could be something as small as finding something in common (for example, maybe you and the person you’re connecting with went to the same college). It could also mean offering a favor such as a link to an article, sharing information, giving them a referral.

2. Build A List

In order to connect, you should make a list of those you want to or should reach out to. And not just any list — an extensive list! Write down everyone who could possibly be a connection, even if they seem out of reach. The more people you have on the list, the less daunting it will actually be. Think about it this way: if you only have five people, you feel pressure to reach out to all of them. The longer your list, the less pressure you’ll feel, and the easier it’ll be to reach out. And maybe you will end up reaching out to those out-of-reach people. You never know! But having a list will at least give you somewhere to start.

3. Attend Networking Events

Did you know 85% of people find jobs through networking? Clearly, you want to take advantage of this. And what better place to network than events? Maybe you have a friend or coworker that needs a plus one to a conference or talk. Maybe you took to Google and found networking events near you. Whatever the case, put yourself out there and connect with as many people as you can. Bring business cards, talking points, and your best smile. This will help put you on the path of making the right connections!

4. Use LinkedIn

When it comes to networking, social media is your friend. LinkedIn is an especially great tool for reaching out to connections you’ve met at networking events or through your peers. Shoot them a quick message, making sure you give detail as to why you’re reaching out and how you know them. After all, keeping in touch is key to cultivating and maintaining relationships.

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Top 3 Steps to Help You Identify Your Dream Career

Leave a Comment / Blog, Job Search, Set Yourself Up For Success

You don’t always have to hit rock bottom to figure out your career path, but there are some things you need to learn about yourself if you want to identify your dream career.

These three steps might come immediately, or they might take years to uncover. Either way, consider them without judgment or blame for not knowing the answers, but with curiosity.

1. Identify Your Strengths

Stop everything you’re doing and take the Strengths Finder assessment today. It’s the most valuable assessment tool I’ve used. Know your strengths to the finest degree to discern what job is best for you.

According to Donald Clifton, founder of Strengths Finder, we’re the happiest when we get to use our strengths on a daily basis.

2. Who Is In Your Support System?

Another step is to identify your dream career is to think about who is in your support system. Sure, you might not have enemies in your job search, but it’s important to know who’s in your inner support circle. Sometimes, it can take a while to identify who is your ally, but pay attention to who gives you strength and who squashes your ambition.

Notice all of your conversations. Who is continually supportive? Who encourages you? Who makes you feel afraid or anxious?

Many people feel scared when you are reaching and leaping towards an edge, and they will project their own fears onto you. Don’t let them. Make a point to cut them off (kindly) or resist from talking to that person about your “big, hairy, audacious goals.”

3. Pinpoint Your Goals

Where do you want to go? It’s a big question and if you don’t have the answer now, ask yourself every day until it starts to unfold. Take out a big huge notebook (the kind you’d buy a kindergartener) and colored sharpies and let your creativity flow.

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Leadership Mistakes To Steer Clear Of

Leave a Comment / Blog, Employers, Set Yourself Up For Success

Being a good leader is way easier said than done. Sometimes it seems like everyone and their next-door neighbor wants to be a leader, but not everyone has leadership qualities. Fortunately, leading is a skill that can be learned. And the most common way to gain experience is by making leadership mistakes.

But a less painful way to learn is from other people’s mistakes. So, with that spirit in mind, here are a few of the most common leadership mistakes and how to avoid them.

1. Being Halted by Fear

A small amount of fear is a healthy thing, making you stop and think before making any decisions. There are plenty of things in life we should be afraid of, like great white sharks and middle schoolers with Instagram accounts. But when fear paralyzes you, it’s a huge problem.

The Solution: First, recognize that you’re fearful and your concerns may be well-founded. A decision could cause you to lose money, customers or team members, but you can’t let that possibility drive you.

The best way to kick the fear right where it hurts most is to come up with a system to deal with it. Setting a deadline, gathering facts and options, and working out the worst-case scenario are just a few examples of the steps you can take to get over that fear. And remember, you’ve been promoted to a leadership position for a reason—you have what it takes, and your team needs you, so don’t back down now!

2. Mis-Hires

One of the biggest mistakes business owners make is hiring too quickly just because they really need someone. It does nothing but create more problems down the road, and you’ll probably be going through the same hiring process a few months later when you have to fire that crazy person.

The Solution: Take whatever time is needed to find the perfect person for the job. They should be a hard worker who has integrity and is on board with your company’s mission (not to mention whatever skills are needed for the position), and sometimes it can take a while to find someone like that.

3. Being an Oppressor

I know, I know. This company is your baby, and no one can treat it as well as you—but in order for it to grow, you have to let go. Remember those people you put through that rigorous interview process? You have to trust that they know what they’re doing and have the skills to do a great job. (Otherwise, why did you hire them?)

An example we have heard of is where someone who worked for a leader a long time ago who was such a controlling dictator that he made the whole environment fearful, stressful and miserable. The person loved the work itself, but didn’t want to go into the office, and couldn’t even lead their own team well because of their boss. Don’t be that guy!

The Solution: If you trust your team members, step back and let them succeed, no matter how nervous it makes you. Of course, when someone first joins the team, they should be trained and observed until they prove their competency and integrity. But once they’ve proven it, stop micromanaging them, or they will never perform to their full potential—and they may even quit out of frustration.

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Top Networking Skills for 2022

Leave a Comment / Ask An Expert, Blog, Job Search, Set Yourself Up For Success

You know that networking is in your best interest and that it can open up many doors, be them professional, social, or personal. However, networking is much easier said than done.

Unless you possess the right networking skills, you’ll have difficulty making personal or professional connections, as well as using them to advance your career. Wondering what those top networking skills might be and how you can learn them? That’s just what we’ll cover in this article!

Active Listening

Active listening is more than just hearing. The act involves paying uttermost attention to what the speaker is saying, following up with clarifying questions where relevant and necessary, and making sure you got the essence of the conversation.

Communication Skills

Communication is, if you ask us, the most important networking skill. You can be funny, insightful, skillful, and intelligent, and it would all be in vain if you can’t effectively communicate with people.

For this reason, when you’re networking, be mindful of the ways you convey, interact with others, and even tackle issues and discussions that may come up during the conversation. This includes your tone of voice, the language you use, and even your urgency to speak over others. Those are all elements that can make or break your networking.

Confidence

If you’re going to go to a place full of strangers or acquaintances with the goal of creating professional and social ties, then you definitely need confidence!

As a skill, confidence defines how sure you are about what you say, what you do (or plan on doing), and your decisions. Ways you can practice your confidence are by maintain eye contact with the speaker, speak in a friendly tone, or prepare something to discuss in advance so that you don’t stumble on your words.

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Lower Turnover Rate For Your Company

Leave a Comment / Blog, Employers, Set Yourself Up For Success

Turnover rate. It isn’t fun or sexy. That said, if you know anything about balancing the science of running a business and the art of having employees, you know it’s a vital measure of your company’s overall health and culture.

Before we get too much further, let’s be clear that there’s something in this for everyone. For the rookies, we’re going to cover the basics, including how to calculate turnover rate for your company. We’ll talk about how turnover rate pertains to the health of your business and nail down an answer to the question: What is a high turnover rate? And for the seasoned veterans in the audience, we’ll talk through how to reduce turnover rate with employee retention strategies.

Still there? Great—glad we didn’t lose you to a pie recipe. Let’s get to it.

Define Turnover Rate

Employee turnover rate pertains to the percentage of your employees who leave your company over a specific amount of time. Think about all the people who quit voluntarily, get fired, or choose to retire—that’s what you should factor in when calculating your company’s turnover rate. Why is it so important to keep that pulse? Because you need to keep track of when and why employees “turn over,” not just wave goodbye and hope you can replace them as quick as possible.

Is Your Company Experiencing This?

Ugh. As if employees leaving wasn’t painful enough, now we have to do math. Most companies want to know their employee turnover rate on a quarterly or annual basis, by the way. Why? It just takes that long for anything meaningful to show out of it.

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Personal Connections Land Jobs

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Personal connections land jobs; everybody knows that. Hence, “It’s not what you know, but who you know.” Indeed, in surveys, it’s typical for roughly half of employees to say that they found their job through a friend, family member, or other type of social network contact. But not all connections are likely to be equal. In a job search, talking to people and networking is clearly important, but who are the best people to talk to?

How social networks matter for getting jobs—and all other sorts of life outcomes—has long pre-occupied sociologists and networks researchers. The classic answer to the question of which contacts matter for finding a job starts with the work of Mark Granovetter, who in the late 1960s and early 1970s interviewed a few hundred Boston-area job seekers. To his surprise, Granovetter found that people were much more likely to land jobs from information passed on by people they weren’t particularly close to. In interviews, Granovetter asked people whether a friend had told them about their current job, and time and again people said things along the lines of, “Not a friend, an acquaintance.”

Granovetter began systematically tracking the “strength” of the social tie between job seekers and the people giving them employment leads, and found that of those who found jobs through contacts, only 17% saw their contact “often,” while 56% saw the contact “occasionally,” and 28% saw him “rarely.” The punch line: the people in your life who you don’t know too well are the ones who often matter the most when it comes time to find a job.

Plenty of other studies since have backed up the importance of what Granovetter dubbed “weak ties.” The general interpretation is that people you don’t know too well tend to belong to social groups that aren’t your own. They therefore have access to information—including about jobs—that you wouldn’t otherwise come across. The people who you’re closest to, your “strong ties,” typically move in the same social circles as you do. Most jobs they can tell you about, you could have found out about from someone else anyway. As painful as it can be to talk to people you don’t know too well about the fact that you’re looking for work, those could very easily prove to be the most fruitful conversations.

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How to Find Fulfillment at Work

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A lifetime of satisfaction on the job isn’t just a preference – it’s a necessity. Without fulfillment at work, you simply won’t push yourself to excel. And even if your compensation is more than adequate, losing out on the personal satisfaction of excelling in your role isn’t worth it. You spend so much of your life at work. Why stick with a career that doesn’t engage you, grow you, and fulfill you?

Identifying Your Passion

Finding your passion has become cliché these days. But for good reason. In order to find fulfilment at work, you must first identify your passion. If you want to rise above the frenetic monotony of just going through the motions, find a career in what you love, what interests you, what makes you curious and engaged.

First, slow down and reflect. Your ideal career path is out there. But most people don’t find it until they take time to think it through and really connect with their passion.
Next, study yourself. Where do you usually wind up in the bookstore? What activities light up your brain with excitement? What activities positively bore you? Take notes.
Then, go deeper. As you begin to identify what you enjoy and what drains you, explore these interests deeper. Do more of those activities that feed into your passion and less of those you hate. This will narrow down these categories.
Next, reach out to others. As you begin to focus in on what may be your dream job, talk to others already in those roles. In finalizing what career path will contribute to your fulfillment at work, get a feel for how to excel in those specific roles.
Finally, keep your options open. As you pursue a career in your passion and grow within that fulfilling role, you may find another role is similar but even more fulfilling. Stay flexible. The journey isn’t over until it’s over.

Finding The Fulfilling Job

Knowing your passion is a critical foundation. But also important is knowing what to look for in a position. Not every opening in your target industry or function is necessarily a good one. Here’s what to look for when considering jobs that will provide fulfillment at work.

Good Pay Let’s not pretend compensation isn’t a critical factor in fulfillment. Of course, it’s not the only factor, but it is very important. Fulfilling roles will more than cover your basic living expenses. They’ll also afford you opportunities to chase other passions and interests in life.

Interesting Responsibilities

What sort of curiosities will this role satisfy? Will your work be interesting to you? A fulfilling job is one that involves responsibilities you find inherently fascinating and enjoyable. Conversely, boredom will sap your growth and engagement.

Enriching Environment

The right workplace culture is critical. Are your co-workers respectful? Do you have mutual interests and compatible personalities? Finding fulfillment at work often hinges on how well you fit into a team. When you are able to contribute and be respected and rewarded for your unique contributions, you will find fulfillment much easier to attain.

Growth Opportunities

We need challenges. We are hardwired to look for the next mountain to conquer. Find a job that has clear advancement opportunities to remain engaged and fulfilled at work.

How to Be Fulfilled in Any Job

Maybe you’re not looking for a new career. Maybe you’re already at a great job and just want to find a better work-life balance or to infuse passion into what you already do. No matter what your current situation, here are the essential components necessary for fulfillment at work.

Define your personal mission to live by each day.
Work towards achieving goals to consistently achieve fulfillment in any position.
Invest in your professional development long term.
Maintain an attitude of gratitude to make each day a bit brighter.
Enjoy your job more by investing emotional energy and initiative into everything you do.
Never stop learning.
Create positive relationships by genuinely listening to and helping others around you.

Whatever your career choice or current job, you can find fulfillment at work. Don’t settle for the mundane 9-5. You know you weren’t meant to just collect a paycheck. Take the time to identify just what it is you were born to do, find the right career path to do it, and then proactively create a fulfilling set of conditions around you. You’re investing, not only in a career, but in yourself.

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Headed Back To The Office? How to Adjust!

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Our working situations have changed dramatically since early 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic caused many people to lose their jobs, and companies around the world made the move to remote work. For example, by June 2020, 42% of the US labor force were working from home. Over the past year, we’ve nailed the bed-to-Zoom commute: We can be up, presentably dressed (our top half at least), hydrated, caffeinated and in front of the screen in minutes.

Despite the challenges of making our living space into our working space, we’ve gotten used to the comforts of working from home. Surveys show that employees are feeling anxious about returning to the office. As COVID cases drop, more of us are being asked to go back to in-person workplaces. So how can we make this transition easier? Here are 6 tips for returning back to the office:

1. Be Considerate

The shift to home working was sudden, and that kind of change was psychologically jarring and therefore negative for most people, according to Meag-gan O’Reilly PhD, a psychologist at Stanford, cofounder of Inherent Value Psychology Inc. What’s more, this shift was combined with uncertainty about the future; the loss of autonomy, freedom, and connection that came with lockdown.

Being at home all the time and losing familiar structures and routines led some of us to overwork — which might have included taking up new hobbies with overly high expectations — while others struggled to focus.

Consider the things that have changed for you this year and decide what elements you want to keep. Besides these huge societal issues were the minutiae — the cancelled holidays, birthdays over Zoom instead of in person, not being able to hug loved ones or even stop by a coworker’s desk to say “hello” in the morning. We lost or had to adjust the little daily routines that make up our lives, and as many of us are exiting crisis mode, it’s time to take stock of both what your life is like now and what it used to be like.

2. Be Intentional

If a commute is part of your return to the office, your time is likely to be squeezed during this transition.

To help motivate you as you go back to the office, think about what projects, teams, activities and individuals you want to be more connected with. How can you show up where you want to be? How are you going to distribute your finite energy and time intentionally? Are there certain things you’ve invested time or energy in that you want to continue? Or leave behind?

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Making A Good First Impression

Leave a Comment / Blog, Interview Tips, Set Yourself Up For Success

During the interview process, you have the opportunity to make a good first impression by the way you speak, act and how well you listen. Making the most of this opportunity is important to landing a job and winning over your new colleagues. In this article, you’ll learn what a first impression is, why a good first impression is important, how to make a good first impression during a job interview and how first impressions can affect you in the workplace.

Define A First Impression?

A first impression is the initial consideration or judgment someone makes about who you are after their first interaction with you. Several factors may influence someone’s first impression of you, such as how you look, what you wear, how you speak and your overall emotional state. When you are looking for a new position, how you present yourself on your application, in your resume and during an interview can all impact the recruiter and hiring manager’s first impression of who you are.

Why You Need A Good First Impression

First impressions are important because human nature compels us to hold on to our initial impression of someone and we can find it difficult to change this opinion even when the other person presents us with evidence contrary to that belief. This makes it very important for us to know the impression we portray of ourselves when we first meet someone in an interview or the workplace.

How To Make Good First Impression

Follow these steps to ensure you make a good first impression during your interview:

Prepare Beforehand
Arrive on Time
Dress Professionally
Use Good Posture
Use a Friendly Greeting

1. Prepare Beforehand

The best thing you can do to make a good first impression during an interview is to be well-prepared for the interview when you arrive. Before your interview, research the company and know what they do, what your responsibility would be in the position you are applying for, what the company’s core values are and how you can add value to the company. Showing you have done your research can leave the interviewer with the impression that you are serious about the position you have applied to.

You can also role-play with a friend or family member to practice interview questions you expect the interviewer to ask. Prepare answers to both technical interview questions related to the responsibilities of the job and behavioral interview questions. Practicing answers to interview questions will show your confidence during the interview.

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