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Archive for the ‘HR’ Category

Hiring Tips for an Improving Job Market

Posted on March 24th, 2011 by The BizFilings Team
Category: Grow a Business, HR, Launch My Business

A recent survey by the University of Maryland and Network Solutions found 28 percent of small businesses plan to hire this year – a rate that equates to the addition of some 3.8 million new jobs.

This, combined with ever-increasing entrepreneurial activity, suggests employers may need to ramp up their hiring processes. But how does a business improve its hiring? After all, it is an inherently risky and incalculable process of forming a company.

Employers can start by rethinking what it is they’re looking for, as it may not be what one would assume. For example, hiring people who think alike is probably not a good strategy.

“Everyone thinking the same way creates efficiencies,” Stephen Shapiro, author and former HR executive at Accenture, told Inc. magazine. “But today, you want innovation and growth to be competitive, and that can’t happen in a monolithic culture.”

“When you’re an entrepreneurial organization, you especially need to make sure you hire people with a broad range of styles,” he added.

It’s also vital to consider how candidates fit in, not just with the position at hand, but with co-workers, managers and even the business community.

For more on this topic visit Toolkit.com:
Recruiting and Hiring
Avoiding Negligent Hiring
Hiring Employees

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The Cloud and the Separation of Salesmen and Managers

Posted on March 21st, 2011 by The BizFilings Team
Category: Grow a Business, HR, Small Business News, Small Business Trends, Start A Business

The rapid development of cloud computing as well as advances in mobile technology may contribute to an ever-evolving workforce in coming years, as employees will be able to work from home or travel according to the needs of the business, never missing a beat or company update along the way.

“As organizations become more geographically distributed, they’re going to try to access the best talent wherever they may be,” Richard Lepsinger, president of New York virtual consultant OnPoint Consulting, told Inc. magazine. “They’re also trying to get closer to the customer. Now, you have technology that you didn’t have five years ago, and this whole notion of virtual teaming has become more prevalent.”

What these advances have provided is a means through which businesses can build dynamic sales forces entirely through the web – or the cloud – and forgo the traditional office-based politics.

However, that does not mean the value of trust and leadership are gone. In fact, this new geographical separation between salesman and manager may require even stronger relationships than when initially forming a company.

With that in mind, managers and business owners should establish personal connections and promote or encourage engagement with the company.

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Encouraging Team Loyalty, Even in Tough Times

Posted on March 14th, 2011 by The BizFilings Team
Category: HR, Launch My Business, Small Business Trends, Start A Business

Team LoyaltyAccording to Daniel Pink, the nature of loyalty in the workplace has changed in recent years. The author of Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, Pink points to research suggesting that loyalty to the company itself—what he calls “vertical loyalty”—has been replaced by “horizontal loyalty”—commitment to colleagues and shared projects.

As a result of this shift, the traditional means of encouraging loyalty—providing security, good pay, opportunities for advancement—while still important, are less important now than building a genuine sense of team among immediate colleagues. A few ways to do this:

  •  Acknowledge and respect individuals. It may sound contradictory to build teams by emphasizing individuals, but it works. Don’t limit your praise for a job well done to a “go-team” message. Know how individuals contributed to a great outcome and thank them, specifically and individually, for those contributions. But it’s not just about thanks where thanks are due. There’s also the question of simple human respect. Saying “Good morning,” or better yet, “Good morning, Cindy!” can go a long way toward building a sense of genuine community.
  • Stay in touch with the team mood.  Face-to-face is great, but you also want to offer opportunities for anonymous feedback. A good old-fashioned questionnaire can do the trick. In addition to the usual engagement questions, Mary Ann Masarech of BlessingWhite suggests adding questions directed at personal satisfaction: What are the aspects of your work that you like most? What would you like to learn? What are your aspirations? Which of your talents gives you the greatest satisfaction?
  • Make jobs engaging. The 2011 Employee Engagement Report from BlessingWhite suggests that a sense of purpose, opportunities for mastery, and autonomy are among the features that encourage loyalty to a given job. The Work Foundation’s Good Jobs Report identified several additional features, including task variety, workplace friendships, fairness, and a good balance between effort and reward.
  • Keep team members in touch with the big picture. Remind them why their work is important. Build excitement for the company’s goals. Keep them in the loop with continual feedback about the impact their work is having on those goals.

Don’t allow your attention to the details of team loyalty to become something you do when you have time, or you’ll never do it. Make it a regular part of your job and the jobs of others who care about building a healthy and stable workplace.

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How the Recession Has Forged a New Generation of Workers

Posted on March 2nd, 2011 by The BizFilings Team
Category: Grow a Business, HR, How To Information, Small Business Trends

Recessions tend to be fueled by vicious cycles – wherein high unemployment stalls consumer spending, which straps businesses’ finances, tightens private lending, cuts tax revenue and, finally, kills jobs and hiring trends.

Of course, this is an overly simplified explanation of how economic volatility operates, but it is nonetheless an important cycle to understand as the economy begins to emerge from the recession and employment begins to improve, however slightly.

One unexpected trend born from the economic crisis has been greater self-employment and entrepreneurship among  job-seekers with skills that can be applied independently. Small businesses need to take this into consideration when forging hiring plans for the coming year.

“It’s tempting to grab an old job description. But the recession has triggered new trends in staffing,” writes Kay McFadden for Inc. magazine. “More than ever, small firms need high-productivity, high-efficiency employees. That means evaluating beyond the position.”

The new generation of independent workers may have developed substantial self-employment skills, which make them strong job candidates and, more importantly, unwilling to take a job simply for the sake of a job.

For more on this topic visit Toolkit.com:
Recruiting and Hiring
Avoiding Negligent Hiring
Hiring Employees

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Study Finds Link Between Employee Satisfaction and Environmental Awareness

Posted on February 9th, 2011 by The BizFilings Team
Category: Green Businesses, Grow a Business, HR, Small Business Trends

One might expect that employee morale is intricately linked to the financial performance of a company. But new research suggests there is no such link and that, quite surprisingly, employee satisfaction stems from an entirely different area: environmental conscience.

A study by the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth published this week in the journal Interdisciplinary Environmental Review found employees are more likely to be happy with their job if their company is considered to be environmentally friendly.

“The results of our study confirm our first hypothesis by revealing that there is a significant positive relationship between perceived environmental performance and employee satisfaction,” wrote researchers Cassandra Wilson and Adam Sulkowski. “One can say with 99.9 percent confidence that the relationship exists as hypothesized.”

The study was conducted among 113 companies from the S&P 250, representing an array of sizes, industries and services.

Perhaps even more surprising is that the study found no connection between employee happiness and financial performance.

For entrepreneurs forming a corporation, the study may offer valuable insight for hiring practices as well as a point to consider when forging new company policies and operational procedures.

We established a BizFilings green committee a few years ago and have been continually adding new ways to reduce our carbon footprint even since – from smaller things such as copying and printing on both sides of the paper and eliminating disposable cups – to larger energy saving initiatives. One of our favorite projects is our Adopt a Highway program. We’ve uncovered a number of interesting things over the years!

We’d love to add to our list. What are some of the programs and changes you have implemented in your business to reduce your impact on the environment?

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Three Incentives that Actually Work

Posted on February 1st, 2011 by Jodi
Category: Benefits, Grow a Business, HR

Employee EngagementEmployee engagement is very much on the minds of business leaders at all levels today. And well it should be, whether you are starting a business or bringing it to the next level, having an engaged team is paramount for success.

Because they have a sense of shared interest in the company, employees who are actively engaged are the ones who keep an organization moving forward. Reports from Towers Perrin and the Hay Group indicate that engaged employees believe they can positively impact the quality of the organization itself as well as the lives of the customers they serve and are more willing to give the time and effort required to help the company succeed.

Given the importance of engagement, the 2011 Employee Engagement Report issued by BlessingWhite isn’t encouraging. Just 31 percent of respondents to that survey qualified as “engaged.”

Employers who have registered the vital importance of employee engagement are scrambling to create that connection with their employees. But many are stopped in their tracks by the mistaken belief that increased pay is necessary to motivate workers to the highest levels of productivity and engagement.

But it just isn’t true. According to 2010 study at MIT, if a job requires any level of creativity and thought, money isn’t the main motivator. It isn’t even in the top three. The study affirms the idea that you must pay a fair wage, but increasing pay after that point doesn’t increase productivity and engagement. In fact, for all jobs beyond rote manual labor, it can do the opposite.

So what does work? It turns out that the more effective incentives are intrinsic rather than extrinsic motivators—specifically purpose, mastery, and autonomy.

1. Purpose
If your intention is to inspire employees to care about the company and to tie their destiny to it, telling them that their efforts are all about winning an additional 2 percent of market share from your competitor, there’s not much for them to hang their hats on. Such a goal does not encourage someone to pour his or her heart into the work.

But imagine instead that the job is about improving lives, bringing families together, or reducing fear or loneliness? Suddenly the heart is involved, and productivity and engagement can soar. The more you can connect work to a sense of purpose, the more purposeful and meaningful it becomes, and the more the employee connects and engages with the enterprise.

2. Mastery
Mastery refers to marked self-improvement. And the MIT study clearly indicates that once a fair wage is reached, opportunities for mastery are more important to engagement than additional money.

Training for mastery reframes skill building as personal development. The language and approach used should underline the employee’s awareness that he or she is getting better, not just the skill. It’s the difference between saying, “We improved our production numbers last year” and saying, “You came a long way as a contributor to the team last year!”

Best of all, this kind of reframing doesn’t have to cost a dime.

3. Autonomy
Oversight is part of a good process, but every step a manager can take to give employees a feeling of trusted autonomy will go a long way toward increased engagement. Take a few extra minutes to be sure instructions are clear enough for a given project, then give the employee space to feel some autonomous ownership of his or her work.

What are some innovative incentives or ideas you’ve implemented to motivate your team?

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The Bright Side of Workplace Conflict

Posted on January 27th, 2011 by Jodi
Category: Grow a Business, HR, How To Information

Small Business Workplace Conflict

Are you a small-business owner dealing with workplace confilct?  

A study on workplace conflict commissioned by Myers-Briggs publishers CPP, Inc. reveals you are not alone. In fact, it found that U.S. employees spent 2.8 hours per week dealing with conflict in 2008. At an average hourly pay of $17.95, that’s $359 billion spent each year by U.S. businesses on dealing with conflict. 

That’s terrible, of course, because conflict is a bad thing.

Isn’t it?

Not necessarily, says Jeffrey Sonnenfeld of Yale. Sonnenfeld’s work examining business communications strongly suggests that the difference between an effective board of directors and an ineffective one is the level of conformity among the members of the board. And it doesn’t go the direction you might think.

Those boards that punish dissent and stress unity often wind up in bad business patterns. Contrary to common sense, it is corporations with highly contentious boards that are most successful. These are the boards where a wide range of viewpoints will be heard and tough questions asked about the prevailing orthodoxy. All ideas must withstand a withering crossfire of challenge so the bad has a chance of being recognized and avoided.

Corporations with boards in which conformity was prized and dissent punished include Tyco, WorldCom, and Enron.

Conflict is a situation in which your opinions, desires, or goals are different from those of another person or group, and you both care enough to advocate for your positions. Differing opinions enrich possibilities and avoid “groupthink,” the tendency of individual in a group to adopt the opinions of the majority.

Whether you are running a small business or part of a larger corporation, steering clear of tense or even heated discussions does not ensure the best result. To get the best contributions from all participants, explicitly state that team members are expected to express their opinions freely, and that not all good processes follow a straight line.

Not all conflict is productive, of course. If conflict is ongoing or lapses into violence of any kind (physical, verbal, or emotional) or is disruptive to the workplace, it’s in everyone’s best interest to get a handle on it quickly.

Toolkit.com offers a number of excellent articles on dealing with conflict that boils over:

Preventing and Handling Fighting
Creating a Policy on Fighting 
Handling a Violent Incident

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When More Is Less: The Surprising Paycheck Paradox

Posted on January 26th, 2011 by Jodi
Category: Benefits, HR, Small Business

© Ginasanders | Dreamstime.com
© Ginasanders | Dreamstime.com

 Are you having a difficult time with employee morale? Providing larger cash bonuses may not be the answer.

One of the most surprising studies yet on motivation came out of MIT in 2010. Researchers gave subjects a set of challenges with three different reward levels. Subjects who achieved the objective by a small margin received a small monetary reward. Those who did moderately well received a moderate cash reward, and the subjects who hit it out of the park received a substantial cash reward.

You would think the result was obvious—that the incentive of a large reward would lead to improved performance in subsequent challenges—but that was not always the case. If the task at hand involved nothing more than mechanical skill, with very little demand on the brain, the system of rewards worked as you would expect: the prospect of more pay led to greater productivity. But once the task called for even a little bit of brainpower or creativity, the larger reward not only failed to motivate, but actually caused performance to decline.

This shocking result was consistent through all levels of compensation, and the effect actually increased as pay increased. In short, when subjects got the highest compensation of all, their subsequent performance was the worst of all.

If you’d like to dive deeper into this study watch this 10 minute video presentation -The surprising truth about what motivates us.

This is just the latest indication of a disconnect between what employees want and what employers think they want. A study by the NOVA Group asked employees to rank ten incentives according to their importance, then asked their employers to guess how their employees would answer. 

Employers thought their employees would rank the incentives as follows:

  1. Good wages
  2. Job security
  3. Promotion opportunities

 In fact, these ranked 5th, 4th, and 6th respectively. 

More important to the employees were:

  1. Interesting work
  2. Appreciation and recognition
  3. Feeling “in on things”

Now before you go out and slash your workers’ salaries to get better results, read the fine print. The MIT researchers found that pay is far from irrelevant. People must receive enough money to take the issue of compensation off the table. But after that point, once fairness has been achieved, money is much less important than other considerations for jobs that require any degree of thought. Autonomy, a sense of larger purpose, and opportunities for mastery all rank higher than compensation.

This result is a wake-up call for employers who put employee engagement on hold, thinking money was required and knowing it wasn’t available. Companies that quickly incorporate the lessons of the MIT study into their incentive programs can energize their employee engagement without breaking the bank.

For more in this topic visit Toolkit.com:

How to Recognize and Reward
What Rewards Can you Give?

What are some of the innovative ways you motivate your team?

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Survey Reveals Small Business Owner’s Concerns and Goals for 2011

Posted on January 18th, 2011 by The BizFilings Team
Category: Grow a Business, HR

A new survey from online business community Manta reveals a number of key insights into small businesses’ spending, marketing and growth plans for 2011. Overall, it suggests the sector plans to increase spending over the next year, despite widespread lingering effects from the economic recession.

Among the findings, 77 percent plan to spend more in 2011, even while 85 percent claimed to have made across-the-board cuts in 2010. Of key interest is the report that the largest segment of surveyed small business owners, 47 percent, plan to focus their spending on marketing initiatives, while 24 percent plan to invest in business development – a statistic that may suggest increases in business filings.

Social media may also lead the spending uptick, as 42 percent of respondents claimed they find the medium useful in connecting with customers and prospects.

Small business owners express continued uncertainty about healthcare – an issue that has led much of the public debate in recent months. Although 2011 is expected to be the first year of significant implementation of the healthcare reform bill passed last March – including a critical small business tax credit stipulation – 62 percent of small business owners claimed to be concerned about the measure.

What’s more, 21 percent agreed “there has been so much written about its impact on small business that I don’t know what to think.”

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Two Small Business Human Resources Trends Expected to Unfold in 2011

Posted on January 17th, 2011 by The BizFilings Team
Category: Benefits, HR, Internet Marketing, Marketing

While the first few weeks of 2011 already noted a number of encouraging signs for the coming year – lower unemployment, higher small business borrowing, gains in manufacturing activity and small business employment – there are a number of critical changes expected to unfold this year -we’d like to explore two additional topics: healthcare reform and social media.

  1. Healthcare reform. Healthcare reform has been one of the most hotly debated issues in the country in recent years, even as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was signed into law last March. Although it is expected to be implemented gradually over the next several years, some key provisions will be enacted this year, including a provision that provides tax credits to small businesses to help cover up to 35 percent of employee healthcare premiums – a measure that is expected to free up budgets and boost business filings.
  2. Social media. Last year also marked a revolution for social media, as businesses began to embrace the phenomenon in droves. This trend is expected to continue through 2011, but as social networks are used most significantly for personal reasons, small businesses should consider adopting social media policies for their employees.

“A number of problematic workplace issues can arise when your employees engage in social media activities at work without a formal company policy in place,” writes Burton Goldfield for Entrepreneur magazine. “They might divulge trade secrets, violate confidentiality and their productivity could decline, to name just a few.”

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