Alignment & Direction Archives • SpriggHR

The Pros and Cons of Paid Time Off

Emily Barr — Fri, 07 Jan 2022 15:17:07 +0000

The Pros and Cons of Paid Time Off

Offering separate paid time off benefits according to an employee’s reason of absence sounds unnecessarily complicated, but it was the norm for employers not too long ago. Today, however, more and more organizations have adopted the newer, more flexible approach to absence benefits by incorporating a paid time off (PTO) system that encompasses all absence policies into one all-inclusive plan.

What is Paid Time Off?

A paid time off policy combines vacation, sick time, and personal time into a single bank for employees to use when they take paid time off from work. In essence, as opposed to having the employer differentiate between various benefits according to the employee’s reason for not being at work, a PTO policy creates a pool of days that the employee uses at their own discretion.

When an employee needs to take time off from work, regardless of the reason, the PTO policy allows for a certain amount of that time off to be paid hours. That way the employee uses their PTO hours is up to them, whether it be saved for doctor’s appointments, kid’s school conferences, childcare, or sick leave. Other examples of PTO can include maternity/paternity leave, jury duty, holiday pay, or disability leave. The key is that the use of the paid time off is no longer the business of the employer.

Is Paid Time Off Different from Regular Vacation Time?

While the terms paid time off and vacation tend to be used interchangeably by employees and employers alike, they are not actually the same thing. PTO describes any time an employee is getting paid while being away from work, meaning it is much more encompassing than “vacation”. Essentially, all vacation is Paid Time Off, but not all Paid Time Off is vacation.

Protecting the Employee and Employer

Before implementing a PTO policy in your workplace, there are a few things you will need to do first to ensure the protection of the company’s workload and customer service quality. Requiring employees to request paid time off with ideally one-week prior notice whenever possible is a good practice, unless the employee is truly sick. Aim to establish any other guidelines as needed, including setting parameters for employee sickness, vacation, and personal time, before adopting a firm PTO policy.

The Pros and Cons of Paid Time Off

The Benefits of a Paid Time Off Policy

Well-constructed PTO policies can offer several benefits to employees and organizations alike. By giving employees flexibility to the use of paid time off at their own discretion, managers are not put in the position of having to police their employees’ usage of their benefit, and employees are not put into disclosing what are sometimes very personal situations. Other key benefits include:

Paid time off gives the employer some control over unscheduled absences, which can become a serious problem not planned for or scheduled properly. When employees schedule their time off in advance through a PTO system, it assists with work coverage costs and planning.
Employees value the flexibility offered to them by a paid time off policy. Rather than having to follow the guidelines of sick leave or vacation leave policies, it provides them the option to use their paid time off for when they most need it.
When a company uses a paid time off policy, employees are much more likely to be transparent about their reason for absence. In the past, they may have been less willing to share about why they needed time off from work because they either wanted to preserve their privacy or were concerned about the optics of their absence. With a PTO system in place, employees can make decisions for themselves, cultivating a more transparent employer/employee relationship.
Employees and the Human Resources department only must track one bank of paid time off hours, as opposed to having to manage separate tracking systems for vacation, sick, and personal days.

When a company incorporates a paid time off policy, it is common for them to start seeing much more vacation time booked from their employees, and much less unplanned sick days in scheduling. This benefits employers significantly. Firstly, employers receive much more notice about scheduled vacations, and can plan for work coverage accordingly and in a timely manner. Second, employees who take vacation time are much more likely to return to work feeling more refreshed and productive, which may in turn reduce the over sick time taken.

The Disadvantages of a Paid Time Off Policy

While the benefits of paid time off policies are numerous, no work policy is immune to downsides. Some disadvantages of adopting a PTO policy can include:

Employers who implement a PTO policy sometimes fall into the trap of giving their employees fewer overall days off than they had previously, and/or new employees start accumulating paid time off days more slowly than longer-term employees.
Employees also run the risk of not distinguishing PTO from vacation and begin treating paid time off as vacation time and come to work even when they are sick. It is possible to discourage this practice by optimizing absenteeism management practices, but it is the employer who is responsible for setting the pace and expectations surrounding PTO and modeling the appropriate behaviour for their employees.
In some regions, accrued paid time off is required to be paid to the employee upon their last day of work at the company, but unused sick and personal time does not have the same regulations. This runs the risk of employees banking up their unused PTO and costing the organization much more upon their separation than if they were to have banked up regular sick and personal time off.

Time Away from Work is Beneficial

Regardless of the vacation, sick, personal, or paid time off policy you implement into your workplace, your primary goal should be to encourage your employees to use it. The benefits of employees taking time off from work are tremendous, and a company culture that supports time off hinges upon its managers leading by example and taking vacation and PTO days themselves. Aim to eliminate the guilt factor that was previously associated from work absences and demonstrate a true interest in how your employees have spent their time off.

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Building an Effective Corporate Communication Strategy

Emily Barr — Mon, 21 Sep 2020 19:53:56 +0000

Building an Effective Corporate Communication Strategy

Communication issues in businesses are not an uncommon problem. For US businesses alone, Inadequate communication to and between employees can cost up to $4 billion annually. The cost of poor communication may be high, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t effective strategies you can implement into your corporation to reduce its risk. By beginning each project with a clear understanding of what your Corporate Communication Strategy is, you can integrate effective time management into your businesses processes seamlessly.

What Is A Corporate Communication Strategy?

A Corporate Communication Strategy is the framework used by organizations to plan out communication with employees, customers, suppliers, and investors. When leveraged properly, a Corporate Communication Strategy can be the key to better understanding your company and enhancing its reputation with the people whose attitudes and actions influence your success the most.

Building a Corporate Communication Strategy

When it comes to constructing your own Corporate Communication Strategy, there is no in-depth one-size-fits-all solution. While you can probably find countless quick-fixes on the internet, creating an effective strategy is not a simple process. If you want your CCS to best suit your organization, and address and solve the communication issues unique to your business, you will need to invest research and time into the process.

A Step-by-Step Guide to Developing Your Core Strategy

Regardless of your industry, there are several aspects that remain universal in core corporate communication strategies. Generally speaking, it comes in three phases: pre-drafting information and research, formulating the strategy, and then examining examples of other communication strategies for further inspiration. This process can be broken down as follows to help you construct your core Corporate Communication Strategy:

1. Identify and Prioritize Your Executives’ Key Goals

Aim to first understand what each of your business executives sees for the future of the company, and what areas they are truly invested in. In order to collect this information, one of the most useful methods is to conduct individual interviews with as many of your top-level management employees as possible. In the interviews, ask them to clearly outline their top priorities for the upcoming year, and ensure everyone agrees on what message they want to put out for the company.

2. Conduct In-Depth Employee Surveys

Your employee insight doesn’t stop at high-level management. Employees are at the forefront of your business and are the both the backbone and driving forces for your organization. Understanding how your own employees perceive your company and brand is critical to understanding how others perceive it as well. This is how brand ambassadors come to be – while you construct your Corporate Communication Strategy, you need to ensure their voices are heard. How they respond will help you uncover the best way to go about communicating with your team as a whole. Leverage employee surveys to get them involved in the process and gain valuable feedback and insight into what’s working, and what isn’t.

3. Research Your Stakeholders’ Input

Stakeholders are one of the most vital parts of your organization, so if you notice that they are communicating something that isn’t confident for the success of your business, you need to adjust your communications strategy to address and fix that perception as quickly as possible. Communicating with stakeholders, shareholders, and investors in a way that is most effective for their own interests in critical for sustaining success and alignment with long-term plans.

4. Review Your Customers’ Comments

The insight your customers have to offer when it comes to their perception of how your organization is delivering on its promises should not be overlooked. Leverage the countless online, and often free, measurement tools to not only take advantage of social researching methods, but also to learn how to start conversations that will get consumers and potential clients talking about your brand in a positive light.

4. Include Your Suppliers in Your Research

Suppliers and partners that work closely with your brand can also be great resources for gathering useful information about your strategic corporate communication strategy. Ideally, your suppliers and partners should firmly believe that affiliating themselves with your business is beneficial for their business as well. If this is the case, take note of what it is they say they enjoy most about working with your company. Utilize that feedback not only to add structure to your partner relationships, but also to help strengthen your corporate communication strategy.

Best Practices for An Effective Corporate Communication Strategy

Conducting the needed research and interviewing processes is critical to cultivating a successful and effective Corporate Communication Strategy for your business. By gaining valuable insight into how your employees, executives, suppliers, and stakeholders perceive your company, and what it is they prefer when it comes to communication, you will understand what it is your CCS needs to set out to accomplish. Once you have a clear understanding of where you should be aiming, and also how your new strategy will fit into the broader framework of your organization, you need to begin setting up an essential roadmap for its implementation.

However, before you can begin assessing the key diagnosis and guiding policies for your Corporate Communication Strategy, you first need to understand how it is your company will arrive at those ideal concepts. Consider the following tips while drafting your strategy:

Look at other corporate communication strategies from successful businesses.

Especially if you are new to the field of communications strategies, taking examples from successful businesses can be extremely beneficial. By looking at communication strategies that have worked extremely well for others, you can get inspired yourself, or even use their strategy as a starting template or jumping off point for your own planning. It is important to keep in mind that communication issues, and hence the strategies put in place to address those issues, will be unique to specific companies. Using a carbon copy of another company’s successful strategy will not necessarily work for your own, and additional research will need to be done to ensure its success for your business.

Identify your key metrics so you can track the best outcome for your strategy.

Your Corporate Communication Strategy will need to be analyzed for success throughout its use, so it is important to first father the basic key metrics that will be able to show you if it is working the way it should. In addition, statistics gathered from your corporate communications can also show you if your employees are actually using the communication tools being provided. If they are, you will be able to identify how they are using the tools, meaning you can pick apart your strategy and identify the aspects and areas that may need more strategic attention.

Set intuitive and realistic goals and timelines.

By setting goals for your company that make sense for your objectives and are also realistic in scope and expectation, you will be able to properly estimate the level of difficulty and projected time investment that will be required to integrate and establish your new Corporate Communication Strategy. With a clear picture of what will be required, you can plot out more efficient and worthwhile steps towards updating your strategy, leaning on the metrics you have gathered to identify the areas that will make the quickest impact through strategic change.

Keep in mind that any and all timelines set should be effective. A good way to accomplish this is to ask yourself questions that allow you to identify the information or data that is too excessive or unnecessary for business. Some examples of questions are:

What do I want our Corporate Communication Strategy to do for business?
Which areas are working efficiently and why, and what areas need immediate improvement?
How quickly do I want to be able to reach my business goals for the company?
Which communication tools, platforms, and existing strategies are available, given the organization’s size, needs, and goals for what employees should be accomplishing?

Regardless of your answers to these questions, they should aim to provide clarity into what your Corporate Communication Strategy is setting out to accomplish for your business.

Use collaboration tools.

Juggling several projects within a team can become complicated way too quickly. Often, organizations find strictly email communications between a large amount of team members to be ineffective in project completion. This is why it can be extremely beneficial to introduce collaboration tools that are useful and effective for project and team management. SpriggHR’s SpriggBoard is a great example of a streamlined collaboration tool you can implement into your strategy. While primarily utilized by Boards, it centralizes and manages all team tasks in one location, safely and securely organizing documents that need to be circulated throughout the team. Meeting agendas can be prepared and distributed, and Critical Paths and Action Plans for events can be shared instantly. By integrating real-time communication, it also eliminates the need for repetitive external email communications between your team members, reducing the time lost to sifting through email threads and allowing your team to focus on project development.

Actively participate in your teams.

While this practice is easier for smaller organizations where all team members know one another personally, larger companies can stand to benefit from this strategy as well. Part of your Corporate Communication Strategy should include your responsibility to communicate effectively with everyone in your company, and the best way to achieve the success rates you are aiming for is to be a part of the team yourself. Employees are much less likely to follow a leader locked away in an ivory tower, and by avoiding your employees and not engaging in rapport with them, your chances of effective communication dwindle rapidly. Aim to understand how your colleagues communicate with one another and make attempts to adapt to that preferred style of communication so you can reach them better. It is possible to maintain your authority amongst your employees and still communicate with your company at the same time.

Align your Corporate Communication Strategy to company goals and metrics.

When approaching your Corporate Communication Strategy, you need to ensure its implementation aligns well with your existing business goals. Target your communications to foundational employees, leveraging target audiences, managers, and key communicators. This will allow you to facilitate more thorough and engaging employee communications within your company. Similarly, implementing metrics and analytics into your corporate communication strategy that align with your organizational foundations is critical to evaluating the success of your strategy altogether. Methods such as employee surveys are useful, and should be included somewhere in your strategy, but your research should not rely only on them.

Aim for a company culture of communication.

If you want to improve corporate communications within your business, you first need to set out to create a culture of communication throughout the entirety of your company. This involves committing to transparency at the Executive level and introduce systems and practices that will support continuous and open dialogue between employees and their management teams. Consistent dialogue and conversation can be transformative for your company culture and can produce tremendous financial results for business. When a workforce communicates effectively with one another, they produce better output, and improve the company overall.

In Summary

Constructing a Corporate Communication Strategy that is right for your business does not have to be an impossible process. While it does require an investment of research, time, and thorough planning, once you have a complete understanding of where you strategy sits now, you can focus on how to scale your new strategy in the right ways to yield to greatest benefits from your communication efforts.

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8 Benefits of Using an Employee Vacation Tracker

Emily Barr — Wed, 22 Jul 2020 18:33:15 +0000

8 Benefits of Using an Employee Vacation Tracker

Tracking your employees’ attendance may sound a lot like micro-managing to some leaders, but rather, it is quite the opposite. Monitoring employee attendance and hours by keeping control over planned time off, overlapping leaves, and sick day requests can be a challenge for most managers. Balancing the demands that come from having to oversee the unique schedules of every individual employee can be very tricky, which is where the benefits of using an Employee Vacation Tracker become apparent.

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Vacation Tracker

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The Benefits of Using an Employee Vacation Tracker

1. Prevents Pay Errors

One of the largest risks of letting your employee attendance tracking system go unmanaged is the possibility that one or more employees receives a significant error in their pay. While you may aim to be diligent in how you track employee time manually, a proper Vacation Tracking system ensures that no one ever skips a week of pay or gets overpaid when they are taking unpaid time off. Employee vacation trackers also help your team members keep track of their remaining vacation days, and simplifies the creation of reports regarding employee leaves, which the HR department can then use to doubly ensure there are no pay errors on your employees’ pay cheques.

2. Prevents Micro Managing

With a Vacation Tracker, managing leave becomes much less complicated, saving the manager a lot of time and reducing the amount of interaction needed between managers and employees in the request for time off process. Sprigg’s Time Tracker provides leaders with access to their full team calendar, allowing them to easily identify any potential time-off requests from their employees. Programmed email notifications also accompany those requests, where Leaders are alerted and can respond to time off requests instantaneously.

3. Employees are Accountable for Time Off Requests

Rather than leaving it to a verbal agreement between you and your employee, an employee vacation tracking software ensures every employee is held accountable for their own time off requests. Managers can easily keep track of which team members are in and out of the office. This not only saves time for all parties involved, but is also increases an employee’s sense of accountability, responsibility, and engagement.

4. Promotes Simpler Communication with Remote Workers

Remote workforces are more widespread than ever, and though the entirely virtual office experience may have some benefits, it can be challenging to keep track of employee attendance and schedules simply because of the limited face-to-face interaction. A Vacation Tracker like Sprigg’s Time Tracker streamlines this process. In order for remote teams to function effectively, it is critical that there is frequent communication about their planned vacations, absences, or days off. Vacation Trackers help you ensure this communication takes place, where programmed notifications are sent out, so every team member stays in the loop about current or upcoming time off.

5. Boosts Employee Attendance

Perhaps a more unexpected benefit of using an employee vacation tracker is the uptick in employee attendance that comes along with it. This is simply due to the fact that when employees know there is a reliable attendance tracking system in place, they experience an increase in confidence when asking for time off. The immediate availability and ease of being able to request leave, vacation time, or days off for personal reasons reduced employee stress and overall absenteeism.

6. Provides Employees Access to Their Information

Transparency has always been critical to employee trust and engagement, and with a good Vacation Tracker system in place, employees receive this level of transparency. Rather than relying upon either their manager or HR to have documented their leave activity accurately, an employee Vacation Tracker provides employees with easy access to their remaining time off, the various types of leave they can request, and a history of their previous leaves.

7. Boosts Employee Morale

This transparency works as a fantastic morale booster for your employees. When scheduling time off is no longer a dreaded, days-long process, but can be done in merely seconds, everybody wins. By having efficient processes in place, it demonstrates to your employees that their time is valued, and that time off is important and should be taken.

8. Helps to Make Informed Business Decisions

One of the most actionable benefits of using an employee Vacation Tracker comes from their built-in reporting functions. Sprigg’s Time Tracker generates reports easily that provide clear and concise information about your employees’ out-of-office activities and vacation allotments. These reports, when used appropriately, can help inform your business decisions. For example, it could highlight absenteeism issues, it could help you to identify certain leave-related trends, and even help you recognize which periods are the most popular for taking vacations. With this information available, some aspects of decision-making become much more proactive.

Manage All of Your Time-Off Tracking Needs

Managing the different schedules of each one of your employees can be challenging, but the use of an employee vacation tracker like SpriggHR’s Time Tracker eases this process, helping you refocus your saved time on more important duties.

Tracking vacation allotments is made easy through the custom Admin panel, where vacations are allotted by individual on a team-wide calendar, and employees are kept informed of their existing vacation balances. Responding to time-off requests is also done quicker, with managers kept informed on exactly who is out of the office and why through the appointment tracker. Monitoring team time and quickly and accurately tracking time-off requests from team members is also made easy, with any conflicts becoming immediately apparent through the full calendar viewing function.

Employees want to feel valued for their time and need a sense of security in how they can go about requesting time off if ever they need it. By using an employee vacation tracker, you can provide that needed transparency and ease to them, while also standing to benefit from the valuable streamlined processes that come with it.

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Vacation Tracker

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Strategy vs. Tactics: How Do They Work Together?

Emily Barr — Mon, 20 Jul 2020 18:58:00 +0000

Strategy vs. Tactics: How Do They Work Together?

Strategy and tactics are two common enough business terms. But, what exactly do they mean? What is the difference between strategy vs. tactics, and why is that difference so important? Understanding the contrast between the two is more important than many people think, and so too is recognizing the most effective ways to use each.

Strategy vs. Tactics

There are several key distinctions between strategy and tactics, but the central difference can be drawn out by thinking of strategy of the destination and how you are going to get there, and tactics as the specific actions you are going to take along the way.

Strategy and Tactics Defined

Strategy and tactics originated as military terminology about 2,500 years ago, when Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War, “strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. tactics without strategy is the noise before the defeat.” Examining this from a metaphorical standpoint, the distinction becomes clear. Strategy is the overarching plan or set of goals you are hoping to achieve, and changing them is a slow, arduous, but still possible process. Tactics are the specific actions or steps you undertake to accomplish that strategy.

When comparing strategy vs. tactics, it is important to note that they are not, and never have been, at odds with one another – rather, they’re on the same team. The strategic and the tactical can be defined as follows:

Strategy defines your long-term goals, and how you’re planning on achieving them. The strategy gives you the path you need toward achieving your company’s mission.
Tactics are concrete, and oriented toward smaller steps and a shorter time frame along the way. For your organization, tactics involve the best practices, specific plans, resources, and all other initiatives you use along the path towards achieving the organizational mission.

The Relationship Between Strategy vs. Tactics

Any time an organization decides on a goal, and invests in the resources needed to achieve it, it can be considered strategizing. Consider the example of war. Strategy in that sense is not about the moving of armies over geography. Rather, it encompasses the overall struggle of adversarial forces. In order to articulate a good strategy, you should be precise in your goal while still encompassing the entirety of what you are hoping to achieve. It is not about immediate success, but rather success in the long-term.

The central idea of strategy is the application of strength against the most promising opportunity. A strong strategy does not draw exclusively from existing strength, it also works to create strength. This is where tactics come into play. The definition of strategy as creating strength helps illustrate just how interconnected strategy and tactics truly are. As you execute your strategy, you choose specific tactics that reinforce and build strength and traction toward the strategic intent as they are deployed. Robert Greene stated in “The 33 Strategies of War” that “Strategy is the art of looking beyond the present… and calculating ahead. Focus on your goal and plot to reach it.” Along the way, the fuel that propels your company towards its goal will need to be replenished with carefully selected tactics, helping you stay on track towards your ultimate strategic goal.

Overall, a good rule of thumb for understanding the distinction between strategy and tactics is, “think strategically, act tactically.” Some examples of how strategy and tactics interact can help illustrate that distinction:

1. A strategy is based on extensive research, planning, and internal reflection.

Strategy is a long-term vision, setting it apart from tactics, which are short term actions. For example, your marketing strategy may be to improve your influence and performance on social media, so your tactics might be to determine the best social media channels for your company and the most effective messages to communicate to your audiences.

Keep in mind that it is much easier to adjust tactics to course-correct your plan of action than it is to completely overhaul your strategy. Tactics can and do have an influence on the success of your strategy, so if adjustments need to be made, do so with those rather than your strategic plan overall.

2. Strategy and tactics work together to an end.

A strategy without tactics won’t ever be executed or help you achieve your goals, just as tactics without a strategy won’t ever propel your business in the desirable direction. For example, your strategy may be to climb a mountain, and a key component of that strategy is to decide which side of the mountain you should climb. The tactics are the gear you’d buy, who you’d bring with you, your complete trip itinerary, the travel time, what season you’d go in, how long your trip would be, and so on. Simply put, one cannot exist without the other.

3. Strategy and tactics must always align with one another.

You may find a project or practice (i.e. a tactic) desirable or interesting, but it is only worth pursuing if it aligns with your long-term strategy. Your strategy should inform you on which tactics your company will execute or invest in, keeping your progress on track.

4. Even the best strategy and tactics won’t cover everything.

However ambitious your aspirations, resources will always be finite. Choosing the right strategy and corresponding tactics ensures your efforts are directed toward achieving your vision, but only in the most efficient manner possible. No process is immune to hiccups along the way.

Strategy vs. Tactics in Action

Before you can make any progress towards your strategic goals, you first need to have a solid set of objectives in mind. In order for your strategy to be most effective, and in order to develop that strong framework that will inform you on which tactics are most suitable for company progress, you need to have an outline of your goals and an intended audience already determined. Any goal you set should be S.M.A.R.T:

Specific – can the detail in the information sufficiently identify problems or opportunities?
Measurable – can a metric be created from a quantitative or qualitative attribute of the goal?
Actionable – can the information achieved from the goal be used to improve performance, or another important aspect of business?
Relevant – can the information achieved be applied to the specific problem being faced by the company?
Time–Related – can the information be viewed and referenced over time in order to identify trends?

In order to gain a thorough understanding of how strategy and tactics interact, let’s look at an example of what an organizational goal may be. Evidently, your company will have several goals running at the same time, and as such, your strategies should be structured in a way that differentiates your business from the competition.

Consider the goal of increasing sales revenue by 25% by the end of the fiscal year. You have nailed down the overarching organizational goal, now it’s time to identify the objectives involved in that goal, measuring them against the S.M.A.R.T criteria. Let’s say the specific examples you draw from this goal are as follows:

Increase brand awareness by 75% by fiscal year-end.
Increase website traffic by 50% compared to the previous fiscal year.

Examples of the strategies and tactics you could use to address these objectives are outlined below:

Objective

Example Strategy

Example Tactics

Increase brand awareness by 75% by fiscal year end.

Engage the target audience (TA) at key touch points in their day when they are the most receptive to brand messaging.

Run TV ads targeted at the TA in the middle of the day.
Run social media ads at lunchtime based around similar interests.
Acquire coverage in national magazines or blogs targeted at the TA.
Run online banner advertisements on XYZ sites targeted at TA in the evenings.
Sponsor local sporting events.
Create advertising content based around the lifestyle needs of your TA.

Increase website traffic by 50% compared with previous fiscal year.

Drive traffic from new unique visitors to your website.

Ensure the website URL is featured in all ads.
Add the website URL to all social media bios.
Start 10+ conversations per day with the TA on social media.
Lead industry-based social media chats online, encouraging influencers to join in.
Create video-based responses embedded in high-performing SEO blog posts, with transcripts.
Share video blog posts to people on other social media platforms, monitoring and responding to people asking questions.

In Summary

Define and clearly communicate your strategy. Identify the critical steps required to execute and aim to pursue clear and achievable objectives. Measure the progress along the way and Don’t be afraid to pivot during implementation, unforeseen circumstances are common enough and you must be agile enough to respond. If you map your strategy and execute carefully, you will achieve what most organizations do not.

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What is Career Pathing?

Emily Barr — Fri, 17 Jul 2020 18:47:53 +0000

What is Career Pathing?

Employee engagement and retention are the cornerstones of the modern workplace, but they are also two of the biggest challenges faced by any in-house, HR professional. There are several possible solutions to improving the decreasing numbers on engagement and retention, but one of the most valuable is the strategy of career pathing.

Career Pathing Defined

Career pathing is the process through which an employee plots out a course for career development inside an organization. One of the key functions of Human Resources focuses on identifying vertical and lateral opportunities for advancement for each employee, and also aims to helps employees understand the skills, experiences, and professional competencies necessary for success in each new role they enter on their career path.

The Importance of Career Pathing

When designed and implemented effectively, career pathing enables employees to identify the internal opportunities best suited to their own skills, experiences, competencies, interests, and preferences. As a result, your company sees dramatic improvements in several key HR areas, thereby offering extensive benefits to both individual employees and the organization as a whole.

Employee Engagement

Perhaps the area that stands to benefit the largest from career pathing, employee engagement sits at the top of any HR professional’s priority list almost always, and with good reason. A recent study by Achievers found that only 19% of employees consider themselves to be very engaged in their workplace, compared to the 14% who are completely disengaged, and 35% who are only somewhat engaged. Employee engagement statistics continue to decline, and while there are activities you can perform and methods of evaluation you can use to assess and improve employee engagement in your company, you can still use all the help you can get to keep your workforce happy and engaged.

Today’s workforce is looking for more than a satisfying paycheck. They are seeking out opportunities to grow, both personally and professionally, and career pathing is one of the critical tools you can use to keep those employees engaged and content. Now more than ever, learning and development have become a key benefit for employees, both current and potential. By leveraging career pathing in your employee engagement efforts, you can provide those opportunities to your employees easily.

Employees who engage in career pathing gain valuable insights into several areas of their performance, including:

Skills and competencies
Potential vertical and lateral growth opportunities within their organization
Existing skill and competency gaps they should address prior to the next step in their career
The resources and tools they can use to fill those gaps

As a result, employees have a clearer picture both of where they stand currently, and what’s in store for them in terms of career development, ultimately boosting their level of engagement.

Employee Retention

The list of reasons why people leave their jobs is endless, but among the top influences is a lack of career growth opportunities, and a feeling that their current job isn’t a good fit for them anymore. 82% of employees report that a lack of progression would influence the decision to leave their jobs. On the flip side, 73% say that they’d stay with their company if there were plenty of skill-building opportunities offered to them.

Offering career training and development opportunities to your employees is something that can make a huge difference in the retention rate of your company. It can keep as much as 86% of millennials from leaving their current position, a huge asset if you consider how millennials are currently the largest generation in the global workforce.

There are several key employee retention strategies you can begin to employ in your management practices, but one of the most beneficial is that of career planning. As mentioned above, career pathing provides valuable insight into your employees’ career advancement possibilities, and clearly outlines to them the various paths they can take to get there. As such, it can contribute significantly in lowering your employee turnover rate.

Succession Planning

In terms of frequent obstacles faced by Human Resources department, succession planning is always a front-runner. As a common talent management practice, it confronts the challenge of planning ahead to try and avoid skill gaps in both the employer and employee’s future. This has never been an easy practice and is increasingly challenging as today’s workforce ages.

Career pathing helps streamline this process, providing the necessary tools to help companies and employees alike better prepare for the future. It provides organizations with a clear overview of the skills and competencies of their current workforce, allowing them to identify who is best suited for what, including the training and development that may be required in order for those people to advance. The information gained through career pathing, combined with other data on employees’ interests and preferences, helps companies avoid situations where every employee is striving for the same position.

Mapping out your current workforce also enables you to detect when, and where, you may need to introduce new players to fill in the future gaps.

Productivity and Profitability

Disengaged employees can cost U.S. companies between $450 billion to $550 billion each year, according to a Gallup poll. Career pathing not only boosts retention rates and streamlines succession planning; it also improves employee engagement results that lead to an increase in productivity.

Organizations that see great employee engagement from their career pathing strategy increase their overall yearly profit, due to fewer turnover costs, fewer missed days from disengaged employees, more positive interactions with customers and clients, and less employee theft. When workforces are highly engaged, their productivity and sales success rate is bound to increase along with them, meaning a greater profitability rate for the organization as a whole.

How to Support Effective Career Pathing and Development

Any employee who seeks to create a career path for themselves first needs to see and understand what the opportunities are that exist for them within the company. This is especially important for ambitious employees, who both want and expect consistent career development opportunities in order to remain satisfied and motivated in their work.

A thoughtful career pathing and development plan is a key factor in employee engagement and retention, as we have already discussed. An organization contributes to an employees’ ability to develop a career path by making the knowledge, skills, experience, and job requirements for each position within the company transparent and accessible. When this information is made clear to everyone, the employees planning their career path can prepare for the various jobs and opportunities they will need to take part in along the way.

Your company can support employees in their career pathing and development paths by providing access to the following opportunities and information:

Job descriptions
Job specifications
Required competencies
A responsive internal job application process
Training classes
On-the-job development opportunities
Job shadowing
Mentoring
Promotions
Transfers or lateral moves
Coaching from managers and supervisors
A formal succession planning process

Additional Tools for Effective Career Pathing

Providing access to, and being transparent about, the necessary information required for employees to formulate effective career pathing plans is critical. However, there are still several specific tools you can utilize to increase the success rate of career pathing within your company. While there are countless digital technology opportunities that aim to provide career pathing software for your business, the central functionalities that permeate all of them include:

A development plan: a custom plan for your employees that outlines the learning, training, experiences, and any other requirements that will be necessary for them to reach their developmental goals.
Career mapping: these create awareness among your employees about the various job types that exist within the company, and the best ways to get to those jobs.
Implementation: integrating a career pathing strategy with existing learning and talent management platforms can be tricky, which technological implementation processes aim to streamline.
Job matching: employees are able to match their interests, preferences, and skills to existing roles within the company, helping them pinpoint which jobs are a better fit for them.

While there are several software companies that provide programs to help address these areas, once you have a thorough understanding of the benefits of each, you can implement them into your career pathing process, increasing the chances of success for even your most ambitious employees.

In Summary

An effective career pathing program empowers your employees, giving them the insight, motivation, and guidance, they need to set goals and work towards a successful and fulfilling career. When engagement rises, retention increases, and succession plans are made clear you have an empowered workforce that bolsters organizational profitability and ensures long-term financial success.

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4 Key Business Development Strategies for Optimal Growth

Emily Barr — Thu, 16 Jul 2020 18:28:58 +0000

4 Key Business Development Strategies for Optimal Growth

Your company’s business development strategies can be the key to the success or failure of your organization. It is the secret ingredient to transforming your business into one comprised of strong relationships, promising prospects, and increased revenues. Creating a strategy and an associated plan, and leveraging it in the right way, can propel an employee, a team, or an entire company to new levels of growth and profitability.

What is a Business Development Strategy?

Business development is the process used to identify, nurture, and acquire new clients and business opportunities to drive organizational growth and increase profits. Essentially, it is the creation of long-term value for a business from customers, markets, and relationships. The business development strategy is the document that outlines the strategy you will use to accomplish that goal.

The Importance of a Good Business Development Strategy

A strong business development strategy is the framework that instructs your team on how to find and generate high-value leads that will ultimately support the company’s long-term goals. If you do not have a strategy in place, your employees may struggle to identify those qualifying prospects, or even spend valuable time developing relationships with prospects who will never convert.

The scope of what business development looks like is wide, varying from organization to organization. Generally, professional service organizations generate new business by following a three-tier funnel approach. The first two stages are Attracting Prospects and Building Engagement, which are traditionally marketing functions. The third and final stage, Turning Opportunities into Clients, is traditionally a sales function. In this structure, the business development plan would be to seek out new channels of sales and distribution, as well as new marketing partners. This is an example of strategic business development.

Strategic Business Development

Strategic business development aims to align business development processes and procedures with the company’s strategic business goals. The object is to acquire the ideal clients for the organization’s highest priority services, accomplished by using brand promises that you are able to deliver on.

Actually, determining which targets to pursue, and which business development strategies to employ, to generate new business can be a risky decision. When a strategy is strong, suitable for the company’s goals, and is well implemented, it has the potential to drive high levels of growth and profitability for the business. A faulty strategy and implementation, however, can hinder growth and frustrate your top performers and most valuable talent. This is why it is critical to have a thorough understanding of the business development strategies that yield the best results for your company, and how to go about embedding those into your business development plan as a whole.

Creating a Business Development Strategy for Optimal Growth

The Four-Step Process

There are four main stages to go through when creating a firm, reliable business development strategy for your organization.

1. Identify Your Audience

In order to create a business development strategy that yields optimal growth and profit opportunities, you first need to identify your ideal audience. Focus on specific firms, industry fields, or individuals that are sure to propel your business forward. Aim for quality over quantity – a large audience is not always necessary, but a high-performing one always is.

Keep in mind that successful business development does not happen overnight. Strong relationships may take months, or even years, to turn into a sale. Similarly, unsuitable prospects will not reveal themselves to be so after your first encounter. This is why it’s important to nail down the exact target audience, so you don’t waste valuable time fostering a relationship with an unqualified prospect who will never close the deal.

2. Perform Market Research

Once your audience has been identified, you now need to learn as much as you can about them. Before you can begin encouraging them to work with you, you should be able to answer the following questions about them:

What are their primary issues?
What services do they need?
What is their approach to problem-solving currently?
How can your product or service improve their current situation?

Once you have a response to these questions, then you can begin to analyze your competition. Identify what sets you out from your competitors, leveraging that difference as your competitive advantage that you can then when communicating your value to prospects.

3. Determine the Appropriate Channels

Once you have identified your target audience, learned everything there is to know about them, and established a plan of action to set you apart from your competitors, you can begin to outline the channels you will use to achieve your target. This involves assessing your total revenue goals for the year and outlining the specific methods you will use to reach those goals. These channels are covered in the top business development strategies and tactics you can use to generate new business, which we will discuss later.

4. Define S.M.A.R.T. Goals

For each channel you have, set S.M.A.R.T (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time-related) goals that will help you to measure and track your progress. Your overall business development goal does not necessarily have to be directly tied to generating profit and revenue, but there should be a component that aims at introducing new prospects to your company’s sales funnel.

Sprigg makes it easy to set effective SMART Goals that set you up for success!

The Top Business Development Strategies to Use Today

As discussed, the business development strategies used by your company can also be described as channels through which you work to achieve your total revenue and business targets. The most common business development strategies are a combination of networking, referrals, advertising, and content marketing. It is through the strategic use and leveraging of these outreach tactics that companies nurture successful business relationships and partnerships.

1. Networking

As the most universally used business strategy, networking is built on the theory that professional services buying decisions are rooted in trusted relationships, and the key to best developing new relationships is through face-to-face networking.

While many business relationships continue to develop that way, and the benefits of direct networking with your target audience remain valuable, networking can be an outdated practice in today’s market if utilized incorrectly. Modern buyers and prospects are time pressured, more so than they used to be, and face-to-face networking is a time-consuming process. It can also be expensive, if travel and time away from the office become habitual.

Companies can use new digital networking techniques to help cover the cost and time, reducing networking to a digital outreach strategy rather than a regular in-person meeting, but even social media requires an investment of valuable time and attention that can be lost if misused.

2. Referrals

Closely related to networking are referrals, which are often regarded as the mechanism that turns networking and client satisfaction into new business. A positive relationship with a satisfied customer can open the door to a whole new network of prospects, but reliance upon client referrals to drum up new business is risky if it is your only approach to growing as a company.

Referrals are useful, but they are also passive. They rely on your clients to identify the good prospects of your services, rather than you outlining a strategic advertisement plan, and also requires that they make referrals at the right time. While successful referrals happen all the time, referral sources often do not know the full range of how your products and services can help a potential client, meaning their success rate is much lower than if you were to do the outreach yourself.

Luckily, there are several new digital strategies that can accelerate the rate of positive and well-matched referrals. A critical point of this is boosting the visibility of your specific expertise. Your existing clients will have a better understanding of what it is you offer, leading to better referrals and an increase in a referral base larger than a few clients and business contacts.

3. Sponsorships and Advertising

Paid advertising and sponsored partnerships are a solid business development tactic. In today’s age when traditional advertising methods are losing their long-standing success rate, turning to well-targeted digital advertising is critical. The key to digital advertising is to find your target audience on their preferred platform and start your growth there. If your audience are avid YouTube users, create strong, targeted video ads and run them on there. If they have high engagement rates with your brand on Twitter, invest in advertisement there. Appropriately directed advertisements allow companies to get their messages and offers in front of the right people, without the excessive costs of general, sweeping ads on various platforms.

4. Thought Leadership and Content Marketing

The business development strategy of thought leadership and content marketing has one primary goal: make your expertise visible to potential clients and referral sources. We have already discussed the importance of refining your referral process to ensure the right expertise is being advertised among your referral pool, but that can only be achieved when your specific expertise is completely apparent.

This strategy can be accomplished through writing, speaking, or publishing content that demonstrates your expertise, and also how it can be applied to solve client problems. Long staples of professional business development strategies include books, articles, and speaking engagements, meaning many high visibility experts have built up their practices and businesses upon this strategy specifically.

Like all other approaches, changing times and technologies have reshaped the way this strategy can be leveraged to its highest potential. With digital communication the new norm, establishing your expertise to your target market is much easier and quicker than it used to be. Search engines have levelled the playing field, so that even relatively unknown individuals and businesses can become known to potential prospects outside their physical region. Webinars are commonplace, a democratized version that dominates the space public speaking used to take up, and blogs and websites give every business a firm 24/7 presence on the market.

In Summary

It is far more common than not for companies to combine different business development strategies to best suit their business and to reach their identified targets. However, it is essential that any approach to business development be carefully curated to eliminate the losses that come from misguided attempts to acquire new clients and business opportunities. Good intentions, no matter how ambitious, are of little real business development value. It is far more effective to implement a simple strategic plan than to dabble in several complex ones in hopes of positive results. Fewer elements, when competently implemented, always produce better results.

Ultimately, your business development strategy is the key to the success or failure of your company. It should be a primary goal to develop a strategy, and an associated plan of action, that will propel you and your company to new levels of growth and profitability.

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5 Business Disruption Examples and Key Takeaways

Emily Barr — Tue, 14 Jul 2020 17:58:40 +0000

5 Business Disruptions Examples and Key Takeaways

Understanding business disruption can help you get a better, clearer understanding of what true and productive innovation is, and possibly, improve your company’s overall results.

What is Business Disruption?

If you have ever encountered an article or think about a piece of popular new software, app, or tech-based product that has skyrocketed in use recently, it’s likely that at some point, you encountered it being described as “disruptive”. A hot-button term thrown around regarding many different business innovations, when it is applied to concepts in your own organization, it can be easy to write off as an invaluable assessment.

However, “disruption” goes beyond rudimentary critiques of start-ups and failed companies and products. Understanding what business disruption is can be the key to your understanding of what strong innovation is and can even help improve your business to produce more truly innovative services and products. So, what is business disruption?

When it comes to business strategy, “disruption” refers to a process in which market entrants come armed with non-conventional business models, and what at their outset seem to be poor-performing products actually come to challenge and eventually replace industry incumbents over time. Simply put, it is the process in which an underrated, or unexpected, product or service starts to become popular enough to replace, or displace, a conventional product or service on the market.

Innovation vs. Disruptive Innovation: What’s the Difference?

The concept of innovation is heavily linked to the idea of business disruption, largely because the origins of disruptive products and services derives from an unconventional approach to business and market innovation. In “true” disruptive innovation, the unconventional product takes root at the bottom of the market and develops a poor reputation because of it. However, over time, and due to a number of factors such as lower costs or higher accessibility, the product actually becomes more appealing than its contemporaries within the industry.

This is not the same as the traditional approach to innovation, also referred to as “sustaining innovation”. Traditional innovation is when new inventions and modifications are introduced by businesses in an attempt to stay relevant with customers, and competitive in the job market. That is not to say these innovations are invaluable, but they do run a higher risk of becoming too sophisticated, too inaccessible, or too expensive to hold any lasting power on the market. As a result, when sustaining innovations are deemed too frivolous, customers begin to look to less expensive, sometimes radical alternatives to meet their business needs, spiking the success of those disruptive innovations.

Business Disruption: Examples and Key Takeaways

The typical defining traits of disruptive innovations are lower gross margins, smaller target markets from the outset, and a product or service that is usually much simpler than their industry contemporaries.

However, organizations need to remain on guard when it comes to labelling any sort of industry-challenging innovation as disruptive. If the term is used too facetiously, it begins to undermine what true disruption actually is. It shines a spotlight on start-ups that have already garnered significant attention, while true market disruptors are climbing the industry ladder elsewhere, unnoticed by the giant competitors they’re meant to replace.

In order to develop a thorough understanding of what true disruption actually is, it is helpful to look at real-world examples of business disruption, and recognize when the term was suitable, and when it was not.

3 Examples of What Business Disruption Is

1. Netflix and Streaming Services

Netflix and all other streaming services are in the process of an ongoing disruption in the entertainment industry. They largely influenced the slow extinction of video rental stores and are now responsible for the ever-growing cancellation of cable subscriptions worldwide.

OTT options (over-the-top, in reference to devices that go over cable boxes to provide access to TV content) emerged seemingly out of nowhere several years ago and have since skyrocketed into the leading position in providing entertainment to customers. It was deemed a low-cost alternative to conventional subscriptions from the get-go, and once customers caught on to the rising popularity and innovation offered by streaming services, they began to think of their media consumption in an entirely different way.

2. Wikipedia

A lesser recognized form of true disruptive innovation is the international hub for easy-access research, Wikipedia. For centuries, it was encyclopedias that existed to provide important details on various subjects. That were written and published for profit, with hardcover volumes being released regularly due to the constant updates and changes to information that needed to be included. Wikipedia eradicated that necessity for expensive, unsustainable information access. It is constantly updated, available for free, and though it has an air of distrust surrounding the information it presents, it still was enough to drive Encyclopedia Britannica to publish their final volumes back in 2012, after 244 of circulation.

3. Skype

Skype, and video chatting platforms such as Google Teams and the booming Zoom, are perfect examples of true business disruption. While the existence of these types of platforms have been the norm for years, its conception was far more disruptive than many may remember. It introduced a new way of international communication, where users globally can chat, call, and video chat with each other for free. While its original target market was small, a key indicator of a disruptive innovation, Skype’s daily user count has ballooned up to 40 million. In response to Covid-19 and the increased demand for virtual meetings and learning spaces, Zoom increased its monthly active user count to 12.92 million. For some, these disruptive innovations have almost entirely replaced mainstream forms of communication altogether.

2 Examples of What Business Disruption Isn’t

1. Uber

Often cited as an example of disruption, the modern tech giant Uber is not an actual example of true business disruption. On the surface, it does have a few of the key indicators of a disruptive innovation. It has almost completely replaced the taxi industry for many travellers throughout the U.S. and internationally, with an annual revenue coming it at 65 billion USD last year alone. It offered a traditional service at a considerably lower price point and tore up the rule book of the taxi industry altogether.

But, Uber still cannot be classified as disruptive, since it didn’t open up a new market or capitalize on low gross margins. The taxi industry was in no way suffering or seeking rapid innovation in fears of it going under. Uber simply took the typical, successful taxi service model, and upgraded it with tech to make it more convenient and comfortable, and less expensive for the consumer. While both extremely innovative, and wildly successful, Uber cannot be classified as a disruptor.

2. Google

Google as a branded corporation has evidently explored, and dominated, many areas of tech. While it could be considered a disruptor in some of those fields, its emergence as the dominant search engine is largely mislabelled as a business disruption. Google was one of the first online companies to prove the value and potential of online search, and the very first to make astronomical amounts of money from online advertising. This means it did play a critical role in helping to spawn an entirely new industry, if not several. However, it still cannot be classified as a disruptor, simply because it wasn’t the first search engine. Similar to Uber, it took an existing model and improved upon it in way that pushed them to the top of the industry. While an extremely impressive feat, this doesn’t qualify as a true disruptive innovation.

Key Takeaways

Evidently, all entrepreneurs are not likely to found corporations or products as internationally and historically successful as those listed above but garnering a true understanding of what innovation is involves distinguishing it amongst some of the top corporate performers that exist today. Some of the key takeaways from these distinctions about innovation include:

Not all innovation is disruptive, and it doesn’t have to be. Disruptive innovation is only one type of innovation. In order to be a true gamechanger in your industry, you don’t necessarily have to be a “true” disruptor.
True disruption is risky. Even with a good vision, there is no guarantee that a new technology or disruptive innovation will actually take hold in your industry. Some inventions require several phases of evolution before they reach their final, most effective form. That means several losses of inventions in the shuffle before you reach that final point, and losses from unsustainable practices, market shifts, or stagnation.
Disruption is oftentimes stealthy. Understanding business disruption means understanding that it is far more than simply creating better ideas for an industry. A large part of it is staying on the defensive, keeping an eye out for new competition that might disrupt the industry in the future. If a start-up is labelled as disruptive, you should take notice, but the biggest threats are those you never see coming. Take all market threats seriously, and don’t discount underperforming competitors with lower profit margins and a smaller target market.
Business disruption takes time. While there are obviously some exceptions, no truly sustainable industry disruption happens overnight. Wikipedia’s conception was in 2001, meaning it took them 11 years until they overthrew Encyclopedia Britannica. Uber was founded by two graduate school friends in 2009 and didn’t expand outside their base city of San Francisco until 2 years later. True business disruptors don’t change the market entirely right after they enter it – it can take years, and sometimes decades, for their innovative ideas to take hold.

In Summary

When you have a thorough understanding of what business disruption truly is, you’ll not only be able to recognize and wade through those mislabelled start-up articles that circulate in market gossip every few weeks, but you’ll also be more prepared to find faster, more sustainable forms of innovation for your own company. You may not find yourself creating the next Netflix, or Zoom, or Wikipedia, but you can at a minimum guard yourself and your company against potential industry disruptors, and come up with more competitive solutions that will keep your business thriving well into the future.

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Delegation of Authority: A Step-by-Step Guide

Emily Barr — Mon, 13 Jul 2020 18:07:44 +0000

Delegation of Authority: A Step-by-Step Guide

As we advance in our professional careers and rise in the ranks of our companies, the level of responsibility bestowed upon us increases and eventually reaches a point where it outpaces the number of hours available in our workday. Therefore, staff are assigned to managers and individuals in supervisory positions. A manager alone cannot perform all the tasks assigned to them. In order to meet their targets, they need to be able to delegate certain tasks to subordinates.

What is Delegation of Authority?

The delegation of authority refers to the division of authority to the subordinate. It is the organizational process of a manager dividing their own work among all their subordinates and giving them the responsibility to accomplish their respective tasks. Along with responsibility, they also share the corresponding amount of authority so that responsibilities can be completed efficiently.

In other words, delegation of authority is the sharing of authority, and the monitoring of their efficiency by making subordinates accountable for their doings. Delegation is about entrusting another individual to do parts of your job, and to accomplish them successfully. There are three central elements involved in the delegation of authority:

1. Authority: in the context of a company, authority is the power and right of an individual to use and allocate their resources efficiently, to make decisions, and to give orders to achieve the organizational objectives. This component should always be well defined – everyone with authority should know the scope of their authority.

Essentially, it is the right to give command, meaning the top-level management always has the greatest authority. Because of the symbiotic relationship between authority and responsibility, authority should always be accompanied by an equal amount of responsibility if the task is to be completed successfully.

2. Responsibility: this refers to the specifics and scope of the individual to complete the task assigned to them. Like the conflicts that can arise when someone is given too much authority with too little responsibility, responsibility without adequate authority can lead to discontent, dissatisfaction, and frustration for the individual.

While authority flows from the top-down, responsibility flows from the bottom-up. Middle and lower-level management hold more responsibility.

3. Accountability: this component refers to the process of providing explanations for any variance in an individual’s performance from the expectations that were set. Unlike authority and responsibility, accountability cannot be delegated. Rather, it is inherent in the bestowment of responsibility itself, and anyone who sets out to accomplish a task and take on a job in a company becomes accountable for the outcome of their efforts.

The Key Features of Delegation of Authority

Under the delegation of authority, the manager never surrenders their authority completely. Rather, they share certain responsibilities with their subordinates, and delegates how much authority is necessary to complete that task.

The delegation of authority can manifest in many ways, depending on the management style and discretion of the superior. However, there are several key features of the process itself that all managers should keep in mind when delegating authority to their subordinates:

Delegation means giving power to a subordinate to act independently, but within the limits prescribed by the superior. The subordinate must comply with the directions provided to them by the superior, as well as the provisions of the organizational policy, rules, and regulations.
Once designated, authority can be expanded or withdrawn by the superior, depending on the situation.
The manager or superior cannot delegate the authority which they themselves do not possess. Similarly, they cannot delegate their full authority to a subordinate.
The delegation of authority may be oral or written and may be specific or general. This is all determined by the extent of authority being given, as well as the timeframe for which that authority is limited to.
Delegation of authority is adaptable to various circumstances and business situations but must always comply with all the fundamental rules of an organization.

The Zuckerberg Example

The distinction between authority and responsibility is an important aspect of understanding delegation. A great example that illustrates the difference between the delegation of authority, and the delegation of responsibility, can be seen in Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s response to the intense scrutiny Facebook and he faced following the 2016 presidential election.

In a press release following the first breaking of the scandal, where Zuckerberg set out to address the narrative that Facebook did not adequately protect the personal information of its users, Zuckerberg used the word “responsibility” 17 times. He also said, “I started this place. I run it. And I am responsible for what happens here.”, taking full responsibility for the shortcomings of the platform and company.

Facebook is a multibillion-dollar corporation, with tens of thousands of employees responsible for a multitude of tasks that keep operations moving. Like any other corporation, all those individual tasks have been delegated to someone other than Zuckerberg. However, in his statement, he reiterates that while other individuals have responsibilities, he is ultimately the highest authority figure that those responsibilities fall into.

The concept of delegating authority, while maintaining responsibility, can be challenging for managers, especially in times of duress or when faced with obstacles. However, good managers recognize that with their authority comes the weight of ultimate responsibility, and thus, accountability. Managers should be trained from the outset on the expectation of holding themselves responsible for everything within their purview, regardless of their delegation decisions.

The Process of Delegation of Authority

Now that the key distinctions have been made, how do you actually go about delegating authority? As mentioned earlier, the delegation of authority is an adaptable process wherein the manager assigns responsibility to their subordinates, along with the certain authority necessary to accomplish those tasks on the manager’s behalf.

The specific ways in which the steps unfold can vary depending on the company and the manager, but there are four key stages that the process of delegation always tends to follow:

1. Assignment of Duties to Subordinates

Before delegation can begin, the delegator needs to determine the duties which they want the subordinate(s) to perform. It is in this stage that the superior lists the activities they want to be performed by their subordinates, along with the targets to be achieved, and then communicates this to those recruited. Duties are then assigned to the subordinates, as per their job roles, rankings, and expectations.

2. Transfer of Authority to Perform the Duty

The second stage is when the delegator determines the necessary amount of authority required to perform the assigned duty and bestows that on the subordinate(s). During this phase, the manager must always ensure that the authority is strictly delegated just to perform the assigned responsibility, since disproportionate authority lends risk to misunderstanding by the subordinate.

3. Acceptance of the Assignment

It is in this stage that the subordinate can either accept or reject the tasks assigned to them. If the delegate refuses to accept the duty, and subsequently the authority to perform it, it is the responsibility for the delegator to either investigate as to why the delegate has refused or to identify another person who is capable and willing to undertake the assignment. Once the task is accepted by a subordinate, the process reaches its final stage.

4. Accountability

The process of delegation of authority concludes when an obligation is established on the part of the subordinate, that indicates the performance expectation and the amount of responsibility and authority assigned to him. Once the assignment is accepted, the subordinate becomes accountable for the completion of the duty and is held responsible to their superior for their performance.

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In Summary

A manager alone cannot perform all the duties assigned to them. They need to be able to successfully delegate authority and responsibility to their subordinates, dividing their workload effectively so they can reach their goals and ensure constant progression and development for their company. Delegation of authority is all about entrusting someone else to do parts of your own job and counting on their successful completion of those duties. This makes the process of delegation of authority one of the most important responsibilities of supervisors and superiors everywhere. If a manager’s subdivision of power and responsibility is distributed ineffectively, there can be serious consequences for the organization.

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The Role of HR in Organizational Development

Emily Barr — Fri, 10 Jul 2020 17:52:26 +0000

The Role of HR in Organizational Development

The precise difference between human resources (HR) and organizational development (OD) can be hard to define. Both functions deal with people, so many professionals naturally assume they accomplish the same thing. However, there are far more differences between HR and OD than there are similarities.

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Human Resources and Organizational Development: What’s the Difference?

Human Resources

At its conception, Human Resources professionals were primarily concerned with the efficient management of the employment process. Though their duties now extend far beyond the processes of recruitment and termination, this was traditionally the central duty of an HR professional. The Human Resources department also focused on assisting the organization in complying with governmental regulations, and in mitigating employment-related risks and conflict.

Because of the nature of their duties, HR professionals in a corporation usually found themselves acting in a support role to all the other business units within the company. As a result, the HR culture seemed largely transactional, and Human Resources were heavily utilitarian and process-and-compliance-oriented in their function.

Historically, Human Resources departments were concerned with the following:

Managing the hiring, onboarding, retention, and performance processes
Appeasing employment-related risks
Ensuring legal, governmental, and contractual compliance
Ensuring sufficient equity and diversity among the workforces
Developing and enforcing policies and procedures
Reducing and maximizing labor costs
Promoting workplace health and safety

Organizational Development

As opposed to Human Resources, the conception of organizational development was founded on a need for a systematic means of applying behavioral science to help organizations improve individuals and processes. The goal of organizational development is to assist individuals in functioning better, within an organizational context. Essentially, OD strives to represent and promote meaningful and purposeful change for a company.

An organizational development professional focuses on data and research that can advance their efforts to improve an organization’s overall systems and processes. Traditionally, organizational development sought to:

Improve organizational effectiveness, while still adhering to the company’s culture and values
Maximize employee potential, help them amplify their contributions, and leverage their accomplishments to further organizational success
Assess the existing processes involving people within an organization, then conduct interventions to try and create positive and productive improvement
Align individual behaviors with the company’s strategy, structures, objectives, processes, etc.
Help promote organizational values throughout the workplace and amongst the workforces.

Blurring the Lines Between Human Resources and Organizational Development

While the distinctions between HR and OD seem apparent when comparing their traditional objectives, over the past several years, management experts have started a shift in their HR practices that lean largely towards what OD set out to do in the first place.

It is not uncommon to hear the phrase “strategic HR” in the modern workplace. This newer notion encompasses a shift in focus towards transforming HR into a business partner that provides business solutions and strategies, not just transactional services. This outlook on how Human Resources should be managed has embedded itself in many companies and made the goal of a strategic HR department commonplace. Some companies have even forgone internal organizational development departments altogether in favor of strategic HR.

The blurring of lines has taken place between organizational development, and it isn’t likely that this shift in thinking will backtrack or remedy itself. But, is it an actual issue? Should the organizational development community worry about it, should they really push for a return to a company culture with more rigid boundaries?

Human Resources professionals have demonstrated that they are ready, willing, and capable of merging the functions of HR and OD for the benefit of the company. The organizational development community could fight to keep its practice and strategies unique and separate, or OD professionals could shift focus alongside HR. Organizational development practitioners can begin to focus on teaching, promoting, and developing the key principles and practices involved in organizational development. These are then made accessible to all types of business professionals, making it a transferrable skill that is still unique to the OD source.

Simply put, rather than striving to keep organizational development as a separate business function only practiced by a few trained professionals, OD professionals can push to keep organizational development as a distinct, and recognizable, business discipline that can be used by many.

The concept of strategic HR, and incorporating organizational development practices into HR efforts, is likely here to stay. The principle goal should always be to constantly improve the people-side of business, and that applies regardless of which type of professionals are leading the advancement of that cause. Rather than trying to segregate things by who traditionally does what, the better course of action is to ensure HR professionals understand and appreciate when they are applying organizational development techniques to solve dilemmas, and which problems require OD solutions rather than HR solutions.

18 Techniques to Promote Organizational Development in Your Company

Despite its distinction from traditional HR practices, the field of organizational development is still technical, and so too are its interventions. Organizational development interventions, also called OD techniques, are constantly expanding and adapting to suit modern business demands. The necessity of certain techniques over others depends largely on the makeup of every individual company but having a general overview of the different types of intervention is still critical if you seek to promote OD within your company culture.

Human Process Interventions

These interventions are the change processes that relate to interpersonal relationships, as well as group and organizational dynamics.

1. Individual Intervention – this targets the individual, usually aimed at improving communication with others. In this process, the individual is coached on their existing behaviors that are deemed to be counter-productive to interpersonal communication.

2. Group Intervention – these are aimed towards the process, content, or structure of a group. The process refers to the group’s internal practices, the content refers to what the group is working on, and the structure relates to the recurring methods being used to reach tasks and deal with external issues.

3. Third-Party Intervention – this type of intervention is often used when conflicts arise. Not all conflicts are inherently bad, but there do exist those that need to be resolved quickly to avoid major disruption. A third-party intervention, usually appointing an organizational development consultant, helps to control and resolve the conflict efficiently.

4. Team Building – this is one of the better-known organizational development techniques. It refers to a range of group activities that help teams improve upon the overall team dynamics; e.g., the way they accomplish duties and tasks.

5. Organizational Confrontation Meeting – this type of intervention is aimed at identifying problems, establishing priorities and setting action targets, and beginning work on the identified problems on an organization-wide scale.

6. Intergroup Relations Interventions – these aim at recognizing, diagnosing, and understanding intergroup relations. Like organizational confrontation meetings, problems and conflicts are identified, priorities and action targets are set, and work begins on the identified problems.

7. Large-Group Interventions – these interventions aim to bring many organization members and major stakeholders together to organize individuals into teams. The goals of these large-group interventions are to identify and resolve company-wide issues, to design new approaches to structuring and managing the organization, or to propose future directions for the business. Oftentimes, these interventions are referred to as “open space meetings”, “world cafes”, or “future searches”.

Technostructural Interventions

These interventions are the change processes that aim at improving on the technology and structure of the organizational itself. Because of today’s rapidly changing and advancing markets and technological landscapes, these techniques are growing largely in popularity.

8. Organizational/Structural Design – the key to how an organization functions lies in its functional structure. The classical hierarchal organizational chart is an example of a functional structure. Others can include divisional, matrix, process, customer-centric, and network structure. The key practices in this organizational development technique are reengineering and readjusting organizational design. This means rethinking the way in which work is done, adequately preparing the organization for shift, and then restructuring the company around the new processes.

9. Total Quality Management – also known as continuous process improvement, total quality management arose from a manufacturing emphasis on quality control. This technique represents a long-term effort to orient all company activities around the concept of quality.

10. Work Design – all work is accomplished with the goal of achieving some sort of outcome. Jobs and their descriptions can be realigned to gear themselves towards the most efficient way of achieving that outcome. Or, alternatively, the needs and satisfaction of the employee can be put front and center. Depending on the chosen approach, different OD skills are needed, but any design of work that leads to optimum productivity is called work design.

11. Job Enrichment – this can be considered a sub-component of work design. The goal of job enrichment is to create a job that is interesting and challenging for the individual doing it. Some factors considered can include skill variety, task identity, autonomy, and employee feedback.

Human Resource Management Interventions

Evidence of the blurred lines between HR and OD, these organizational development techniques focus on the way in which the individual is managed. These are the interventions most frequently used by strategic HR departments.

12. Performance Management – good performance management includes strategies such as goal setting, performance tracking with appraisal, and typically a reward systems

13. Developing Talent – this intervention method draws on talent management practices such as coaching and mentoring, technical skills development interventions, career planning, and leadership development.

14. Diversity Interventions – a diverse pool of talent is the key to innovation. This includes diversity in age, gender, race, sexual orientation, disabilities, and culture and value orientation. These interventions aim to increase company diversity.

15. Wellness Interventions – these interventions include the implementation of stress management programs and employee assistance programs. They address social trends and promote a healthy work-life balance for employees.

Strategic Change Interventions

These organizational development interventions are the larger-scope ones that focus on the change processes. Regardless of the influence of strategic HR in these efforts, the OD department always plays a crucial part in executing such changes.

16. Transformational Change – this is a change process that seeks to change an organization’s a majority if not all systems and processes potentially impacting extensively several operational practices.

17. Continuous Change – a technique that challenges companies to review and revise an identified system; a common focus is in the way in which new skill levels are strengthened or if in fact, a company is striving to become a learning organization.

18. Trans organizational Change – this technique involves employing change intervention strategies that move beyond a single organization. This includes mergers, acquisitions, allying, and strategic networking.

The Role of HR in Organizational Development

Organizational development has the power to dramatically improve companies and the well-being of their employees. For that reason alone, organizational development is deserving of consistent effort and attention by business leaders everywhere. In today’s modern business market, a company ready and willing to enact change wherever and whenever necessary to respond to demands, or to improve their chances of long-term success, are those organizations that will undoubtedly sustain growth and success. Every organization must look to build an effective employee experience that helps attract, retain, and engage the right talent, and that begins when you have an effective integrated approach to HR and OD practices.

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Authority and Responsibility – How Do They Compare?

Emily Barr — Mon, 29 Jun 2020 14:15:26 +0000

Authority and Responsibility – How Do They Compare?

In an organization, efficiently dividing work among people and coordinating their duties and tasks towards a common objective should always be a central goal. Managers and employees alike will find an extra layer of job security, and overall company success, if they have a thorough understanding of two essential work concepts: authority and responsibility. Success at work requires both of them, not just one.

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Authority and Responsibility: What Do They Mean?

What is Authority?

In simple terms, authority refers to the commanding of subordinates, the issuing of orders and instructions, and the process of exacting obedience from a workforce. While authority is defined as having the power to give orders and be obeyed, it also encompasses the power to make decisions on the organization’s behalf. As a result, whether or not someone in a position of authority acts hinges upon their own perception of the objectives of the organization.

Usually, any official authority embedded into a job description is ineffective. While status and ranking influence the amount of leeway your subordinates have, authority is influenced largely by the individual characteristics of the leader. For example, the presence of leadership traits such as intelligence, experience, and creativity, are likely to influence the amount of respect garnered for your authority, thus increasing your power to command others.

A manager needs authority. It makes their position real and quantifiable, and provides them the power to order their subordinates and get them to comply in accordance with the company’s objectives. Whenever there is a chain of superior-subordinate business relations in a company, it is authority that binds them and provides a framework for responsibility.

What is Responsibility?

Responsibility refers to the state of being accountable or answerable for any obligation, trust, or debt. It is the obligation to complete an assigned task on time, and to the best of your ability. While authority does not automatically come with every job, task, or duty, responsibility arises in every single position in a company. It is always some combination of tasks, duties, goals, objectives, teams, deadlines, and all other terms that describes what someone does at work. Responsibility, is, essentially, the ability to respond to various work-related tasks, making it a universal facet of any job.

Authority and Responsibility as a Character Trait

Employees of any standing will have varying levels of innate initiative and leadership abilities. When an individual has a high amount of these qualities in their everyday work, they can easily create their own authority and ensure the completion of their tasks is done properly and in a timely manner. These are the individuals who ask before they are told, who suggest and negotiate, who persuade through diplomacy, fact, and reason. These are the individuals who think through all possible options and scenarios, getting themselves ready for a delegation of authority from their boss should that conversation come. Instead of waiting for authority to be plopped into their laps by some higher-up, they are proactive and authoritative with themselves consistently.

Authority and Responsibility: How Are They Connected?

The Relationship Between Authority and Responsibility

Responsibility without authority is a common problem in organizations with uneven, inconsistent management. Individuals who end up with responsibility without authority will always find it much harder to succeed and will find themselves in trouble more frequently than those with a strong authority presence. This is largely due to the interconnectedness of authority and responsibility when it comes to making an organization successful as a whole. Proper authority exists to delegate tasks effectively in order to meet the organizational objectives. When there is no authority, the enforcement of duties and tasks falls to the wayside, and employee efforts stray from the path towards progress.

If an individual is given some level of responsibility without sufficient authority enforcing that, they are likely not going to perform to the best of their ability, and could even fail to accomplish the task at all. However, the relationship between authority and responsibility is reciprocal. While sufficient authority should be a given, too much authority with a disproportionate amount of responsibility can also cause issues. If excess authority is delegated to an individual without a matching amount of responsibility, then the delegated authority will be misused in one way or another.

The Key Differences

The objective of any management team is to establish a sound organizational structure, and the only way to do so is to have an effective authority and responsibility relationship embedded into the company. As we have already discussed, whenever authority is used, responsibility ensues. But what are the distinctions between these two concepts?

Basis for Comparison	Authority	Responsibility
Meaning	The power or right, that is attached to a particular job or designation, to give orders, enforce rules, make decisions, and exact obedience.	The duty or obligation to undertake and/or accomplish a task successfully, as assigned by the senior or determined by the individual’s commitment or circumstances.
Definition	The legal right to issue orders.	The corollary of authority.
Results From…	A formal position in a company.	A superior-subordinate relationship.
Task of the Manager	To delegate authority.	To assume responsibility.
Requires…	The ability to give orders.	The ability to follow orders.
Direction of Flow	Downward.	Upward.
Objective	To make decisions and implement them effectively.	To execute duties and responsibilities, as assigned by a superior.
Duration	Continues over a long period of time.	Ends once the task is accomplished.

In Conclusion

Authority and responsibility are inherent to organizational roles and positions in very different ways, but are symbiotic and codependent enough to make them both critical points of focus for any successful company. While assigning certain responsibilities to an employee, the required amount of authority should also be bestowed on them so they are able to successfully complete it. Essentially, the delegation of authority can only be effective if it matches with the assigned responsibility.

If an authority is given to an individual that is much greater than the responsibility, it ultimately results in the misuse of authority. Similarly, if responsibility is assigned that is greater than the authority provided with it, the tasks will not be carried out properly. The primary goal of managing the relationship between authority and responsibility in your business endeavors is to find the balance between the two. As a delegator of authority, it is your responsibility to find the right ratio of authority to responsibility that will yield a successful completion of tasks consistently across your workforce.

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Alignment & Direction Archives • SpriggHR

The Pros and Cons of Paid Time Off

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The Pros and Cons of Paid Time Off

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Protecting the Employee and Employer

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Building an Effective Corporate Communication Strategy

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What Is A Corporate Communication Strategy?

Building a Corporate Communication Strategy

A Step-by-Step Guide to Developing Your Core Strategy

1. Identify and Prioritize Your Executives’ Key Goals

2. Conduct In-Depth Employee Surveys

3. Research Your Stakeholders’ Input

4. Review Your Customers’ Comments

4. Include Your Suppliers in Your Research

Best Practices for An Effective Corporate Communication Strategy

Look at other corporate communication strategies from successful businesses.

Identify your key metrics so you can track the best outcome for your strategy.

Set intuitive and realistic goals and timelines.

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Actively participate in your teams.

Align your Corporate Communication Strategy to company goals and metrics.

Aim for a company culture of communication.

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8 Benefits of Using an Employee Vacation Tracker

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The Benefits of Using an Employee Vacation Tracker

1. Prevents Pay Errors

2. Prevents Micro Managing

3. Employees are Accountable for Time Off Requests

4. Promotes Simpler Communication with Remote Workers

5. Boosts Employee Attendance

6. Provides Employees Access to Their Information

7. Boosts Employee Morale

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Strategy vs. Tactics: How Do They Work Together?

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What is Career Pathing?

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