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Every year for the past ten years, Glassdoor announces the top places to work all across North America and parts of Europe. The most unique part of this award? You can only win the award if your employees say so. Glassdoor's methodology for the award includes a collection of anonymous company reviews where employees share their honest opinion on pros and cons of working for the company, overall satisfaction, the CEO, and workplace attributes. They're also asked if they would recommend their employer to a friend. It's a juicy turn of the tables. Within the top 100 best places to work for, the industries that came out on top were tech, retail, healthcare, consulting, finance, and travel and tourism. The top cities included the Bay Area, Boston, and Los Angeles (just to name a few). So, what does it take to be the top of the top?
Via The Learning Factor
Here’s a grim stat: More than half of your staff is ready to leave the company, finds a recent Gallup poll. Vacancies impact the productivity and bottom line of your company, but a survey from Globoforce’s Work Human Research Institute uncovered a reason people stick around. When asked the question, “What makes you stay at your company?” the number-one answer, representing 32% of respondents, was, “My job–I find the work meaningful.” “Having a personal sense of meaning in one’s work was even more important than compensation, which ranked as the third most important reason for staying,” says Eric Mosley, CEO of Globoforce, a talent engagement software provider. The trick is that meaning means different things to different people, says Becky Frankiewicz, president of the staffing and talent management provider ManpowerGroup North America. “Our NextGen Work research found that Boomers value being appreciated and recognized, younger people look for purposeful work that contributes to society, while people of all generations desire work that allows them to improve their skills and balance work and home,” she says. “Taking the time to find out what motivates your people individually is the first step to helping them find meaning in what they do.”
Via The Learning Factor
According to a seven-year study on workers’ performance, an inability to make this break between professional and personal time ranked among the top-10 stressful situations that people were least effective at handling. Technology has, of course, exacerbated the problem, offering both convenience and imposition, by putting our workplaces just a touch screen away. How can we all do a better job of leaving work at work, so our home lives become more pleasurable and less stressful? Before leaving the office… Do one more small task. Make a short phone call, sign a document, or respond to an email. This way you end your day on a positive note of completion. There’s gratification in knowing that you elected to push yourself and now have one less thing to do the following morning. And, as research from Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, authors of The Progress Principle, has shown even “small wins” can enhance your mood. Write a to-do list. On paper or digitally, make a record of all the tasks you need to accomplish, ideally in order of importance. When my organization worked with the New York Presbyterian Hospital Cornell Medical Center to survey more than 1,000 workers living in the northeast we found that the practice of building such lists was among the top three most effective skills for enhancing work performance and positively redirecting stress.
Via The Learning Factor
You can feel it start to happen–at first slowly, then all at once. You get a little bit tired and before you know it, you’re mindlessly scrolling your Facebook feed. You’re distracted and spent–you just can’t handle another minute of real work. You’ve hit the mid-afternoon slump. “Most of us are sitting all day, staring at a computer screen highly focused… you can’t sustain that for long,” says internist Lorraine Maita, MD, author of How To Live Younger. “At about 3:00 or 4:00 p.m., your cortisol starts to drop.” While our automatic reaction might be to reach for a bag of Sun Chips and watch a random YouTube clip, those behaviors will only prolong the slump. You will be better off if you try to reset your body and mind to help you regain focus. Maita recommends a number of activities, including listening to upbeat music or breathing deeply for a few minutes, to re-energize the body. Below are few more examples of how to get your focus back.
Via The Learning Factor
juandon Si ya hemos madurado lo suficiente y hemos entendido que aprendiendo con elearning, es mayoritariamente hacerlo por nosotros mismos, de manera autogestionaria (autoaprendizaje), por lo que nos acercamos y mucho a lo que la sociedad quiere. Ya ni el docente nos enseñará, ni los directivos tendrán que decirnos que nos pongamos al…
There is a fine line to walk while balancing a company’s bottom line and attracting great talent. Because the employees who work for you are the most valuable asset that your company has at its disposal, making sure they are productive and healthy and happy both in and out of the office is
If you feel closely connected to your work cronies, you’re likely the healthier for it—and this applies to both physical and mental health. A meta-analysis in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Review reports that people who feel more camaraderie with their colleagues, and more connection to the company itself, have better health and happiness and are less likely to burn out. Given all the past work on how important our social relationships are for all aspects of health, the results aren’t too surprising, but it’s nice to have this kind of confirmation from such a large study. The new analysis looked at 58 past studies that included 19,000 people in 15 countries. The participants worked in all different fields–health, sales, the military. The participants had answered questions about their work life, and their feelings about their colleagues and companies, and various aspects of their mental and physical health. People who identified more strongly with their colleagues at work and with their organizations had greater psychological well-being, and also better physical health.
Via The Learning Factor
Here's how to keep your employees feeling empowered and engaged, no matter where they are in the world.
Via Fernanda Grimaldi
If you want your employees to work well together and get more done as a team, it might help to pipe in some upbeat tunes. Research from Cornell University has found that employees who listen to happy music—like the Beatles's "Yellow Submarine"—are able to cooperate and make group decisions better than employees who work without a background soundtrack. "Retailers certainly use music routinely with the intention of influencing consumer behavior," says Kevin Kniffin, an applied behavioral scientist at the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management at Cornell University and lead author of the study. "The point of our new research is to draw attention to the role that music can have for employees, whether in retail workplaces or any other kind." Researchers played "Yellow Submarine"; "Walking on Sunshine" by Katrina and the Waves; "Brown Eyed Girl" by Van Morrison; and the theme song from "Happy Days" on a loop in a workplace environment, says Kniffin. "A definitional feature of happy music is that it has a rhythm to it," he says. "Happy music significantly and positively influences cooperative behavior," Kniffin points out. "We also find a significant positive association between mood and cooperative behavior."
Via The Learning Factor
In my role as a behavioural consultant, many of the business professionals I work with understand the importance – the necessity even – of continued development, change and moving with the times.
However, older or more established team members, whilst often performing well, can often be very resistant to change.
This is a common cause of conflict in the workplace and it does have an impact. People adopt the most common emotion that surrounds them and so this negative behaviour can hold back overall performance.
Embracing vulnerability in the workplace is key to employee & organisational success, but what steps can be taken to create a work environment where people feel safe to disclose their worries & fears to management?
Gary Cattermole, Director, The Survey Initiative, discusses how some companies in Scandinavia are introducing a six-hour day to boost levels of employee engagement and how this could really benefit businesses in the UK too.
Workers want more from their employer than a paycheck.
Via Sandeep Gautam
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Wasting time is one of the biggest reasons you aren't more successful right now. Review how you've spent your time today, and you'll likely find plenty of unproductive time that you may not have even spent relaxing or preparing to be productive later. Simply planning your day can make a big difference. Science has a lot to say about this. For example, it turns out that our willpower may be better earlier in the day and we need to take advantage of that. The idea is that planning creates a guideline the brain wants to stick to. Here's more on how that helps create success, as well as some other approaches that can help.
Via The Learning Factor
Regardless of your job or industry, there aren't always enough hours in the day to get everything done. As a result, you constantly feel like you're always behind. And that's just not good for your productivity or your health. So, what's the answer? Work more hours? Not necessarily. As Bob Sullivan explained on CNBC.com, "Research that attempts to quantify the relationship between hours worked and productivity found that employee output falls sharply after a 50-hour work-week, and falls off a cliff after 55 hours -- so much so that someone who puts in 70 hours produces nothing more with those extra 15 hours, according to a study published last year by John Pencavel of Stanford University." Instead of putting in those extra hours, you can become more effective at work by focusing on what really matters. And you can get started with that ASAP by following these ten simple tips.
Via The Learning Factor
When we find our work meaningful and worthwhile, we are more likely to enjoy it, to be more productive, and feel committed to our employers and satisfied with our jobs. For obvious reasons, then, work psychologists have been trying to find out what factors contribute to people finding more meaning in their work. Top of the list is what they call “task significance”, which in plain English means believing that the work you do is of benefit to others. However, to date, most of the evidence for the importance of task significance has been correlational – workers who see how their work is beneficial to others are more likely to find it meaningful, but that doesn’t mean that task significance is causing the feelings of meaningfulness. Now Blake Allan at Purdue University has provided some of the first longitudinal evidence that seeing our work as benefiting others really does lead to an increase in our finding it meaningful. “These results are important both for the wellbeing of individual workers and as a potential avenue to increase productivity,” he concludes in the Journal of Vocational Behaviour.
Via The Learning Factor
Possibly no piece of productivity advice is more well-worn than the adage, “Work smarter, not harder.” Of course, the directive points to the fact that it’s not how many hours you put in at your desk that matters—it’s how you spend your time there. In other words, get results faster and you won’t be spending so many late nights at the office. But what does it really mean to work smarter? “It means figuring out better, faster ways to work,” says personal productivity expert and trainer Peggy Duncan. But before you enrol in a time management course or start playing “beat the clock” with your project list, consider these counterintuitive ways to get more done.
Via The Learning Factor
The American work force has never been more diverse, with generations spanning from Baby Boomers to Gen X-ers and beyond. In recent years, however, Millennials (adults aged 19 to 35) have driven the biggest transformation in workplace dynamics. Experts and studies, for instance, tout how the Millennial generation is more collaborative than others and has a strong preference for remote work options. Additionally, Millennial workers are more connected and prefer to use technology to interact and get work done. Why do these insights matter more now than ever before? According to an analysis from Pew Research Center, more than 30 percent of American workers today are Millennials. They recently surpassed Generation X in becoming the largest share of the American work force. As more Baby Boomers retire, more and more Millennials will be stepping up to fill management roles. With Millennials moving into leadership positions, and an even younger generation (Generation Z) preparing to enter the work force, we predict there will be significant changes in office dynamics and operations starting in 2017, and lasting well into the coming years. Here are some typical workplace practices that will become extinct in 2017 and beyond, as younger generations begin to dominate the work force.
Via The Learning Factor
So, this is the second article in a series on how to improve our smile sheets. Article #1 highlighted the troubling fact that traditional smile sheets are virtually uncorrelated with learning results!
A case study on UK recruiting firm, Pure, focusing on how an internal communications strategy can build a people-centric culture via an employee intranet.
High performing individuals, teams and organisations focus on exploiting development opportunities in the workplace because that’s wher
In business we usually get things done by talking. But how well are you doing this? Kate Laws from people business Connor takes a look at why it’s important to assess your communication and influencing skills at work.
If you’re reading this as a commercial enterprise, purpose is not about ditching profit and suddenly getting all causal about things. It’s about putting purpose at the centre of your enterprise, putting it before profit and being purpose-led, because, ironically, companies connected to their purpose end up being 10 – 18 times more profitable than those companies who focus solely on profit itself. The two are inextricably interlinked. And it makes sense. Work is intensely personal. The more we as companies can tap into what our employees care about, the more inspired they will be at work, and the more inspired they are, the more they will contribute to the success of our company. If you add to this the possibilities of also connecting your other stakeholders to your purpose – selecting suppliers who resonate with your purpose, for example, and ensuring that the brand you put out into society reflects your purpose – then a powerful ripple effect is created that sustains itself and is far more effective than a leader trying to gee up the troops from the front.
Via David Hain
Coaching has definitely become mainstream. It seems as if high potential people in senior positions, at the mid-level, and even on the front lines in organizations have access to performance coaches these days. But does that mean that all high performers are a good fit for coaching?
Given the massive chunk of our lives spent at work, shouldn’t we enjoy the tools we need to use for our jobs? Shouldn’t they feel more human and..
Via Marc Wachtfogel, Ph.D.
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To be a desirable place to work for, making employees feel valuable and providing a competitive salary is only part of the equation.