The Top HR Challenges to Overcome in 2020

Managing people has never been an easy task, but the digital age and this year’s unprecedented circumstances has undoubtedly complicated this effort extensively. Human Resource management in 2020 has gained even more complexity, with its professionals having to face many unique challenges. However, spending the time, money, and effort to identify and overcome these key HR challenges is still resources well spent, since one of the greatest assets your company can boast is your employees. 

What are HR Challenges? 

Regardless of whether you are a small company or a much larger enterprise, you are likely to encounter some amount of challenges when it comes to managing your people. HR challenges emerge every year in response to changes in the economy, political climate, and social context and circumstances. Recently, a renowned focus has been placed on issues such as minimum wage increases, workplace wellness and safety, violence in the workplace, and updating HR policies on substance use.  In 2020 especially, Human Resource departments are facing even newer, and more unfamiliar, challenges to tackle and manage. 

HR management encompasses the ability of your organization to identify, understand and remedy the needs of your employees – an ability that will ultimately impact how your business competes for talent, both now and in the future. The first step to curating your workplace culture and business values to best suit the needs of your employees, while maintaining productivity and success, is to recognize the key modern HR challenges business owners and HR managers are dealing with in today’s workplace.  

The Top 7 HR Challenges in 2020 & How to Best Deal With Them 

1. Attracting Top Talent 

Not a new HR effort by any means, the attraction and retention of top talent has always been a focus for any business seeking sustainably high results. However, in 2020, attraction and retention require more discernment, time, and work than ever, making it one of the most important, and arguably daunting, tasks of Human Rresources altogether. 

In order to attract the right individuals for your organization, you first need to have a clear understanding of the requirements of the job and the objectives of the company. But as roles and expectations are continuously changing in the modern workplace, modifying your recruitment strategy to your shifting organizational culture can be difficult. A good starting point to grappling with this challenge in 2020 is to first examine how and where your company is marketing its vacancies. Identify the platforms and mediums your target talent is most likely to be frequenting, focusing most of your advertisements there. The preferred platforms will depend largely on your target talent’s skills, industry, and job level, so advertising in the spaces where candidates with those target characteristics will see it will save you a lot of time in the screening stage. 

Once you have gathered a pool of potential candidates from your advertisement efforts, it is now time to screen them. Rather than sticking by the traditional screening method of assessing how well the candidate is fit for the job, it is more critical than ever to focus instead on how well they will fit into the organization. Generate interview questions that gauge their willingness to learn, their readiness for taking on challenges, and their comfort level with change and adaption to the current shifting nature of work itself. By focusing on these essential qualities, you are much more likely to create a team of employees who can remain responsive and comfortable with change, even as organizational needs transform and shift over time. Remaining vigilant to the future of your company, rather than assessing they are a good fit today, is critical to overcoming this HR challenge. 

2. Embracing Change  

Aligning with organizational change is essential, affecting every dimension of the workplace from the working environment, to the nature of competition, to customer interactions. However, whether the change is managerial, structural, procedural, or technological, it is likely to invoke at least some amount of discomfort amongst your employees. Especially today, when so many organizations are forced to change in ways they never have before to accommodate the effects of the pandemic on business, the feeling of uncertainty that change evokes can bring about severe levels of anxiety amongst your team. 

Human Resource departments are typically tasked with managing employee morale, happiness, and cooperation through periods of change.  They now need to be consistently upskilling team members, so they are better prepared to meet the constantly changing needs of the business.  

Grappling with this HR challenge is particularly challenging and will depend largely on the nature of change occurring for your business. While many companies are encountering relatively similar demands for change simply based on the global situation, the ways in which your HR department chooses to best prepare your team members will vary. A good starting point for organizations is to simply aim to communicate frequently and transparently before, during, and after periods of change. Provide significant warning and notice of changes that will be coming and equip employees with the skills and competencies they will need to respond to and overcome it.  

3. Developing Leaders 

According to a 2018 survey, employees with poor relationships with their direct managers are four times more likely to separate from their company than employees who feel their leader is competent and skilled. 

Now more than ever, employees look to their managers as a source of inspiration and motivation. But this can be potentially problematic if those leaders-in-the-making stick around long enough to become leaders. And, in an increasingly millennial-heavy workforce, companies are seeing higher turnover rates from potential leaders than ever. This is what makes leadership development one of the largest HR challenges being faced today. 

How you actually go about responding to this challenge will vary, but at its core, retention is largely linked to motivation. Motivating your employees to stay by providing training that aligns with a clear career path is critical, since it demonstrates to your talented employees that you truly value them, recognize their potential for leadership growth, and are willing to actively invest in that growth.  

4. Fostering a Culture of Continuous Learning 

In today’s workplace, more and more employees are choosing to leave their jobs when there is a distinct lack of development opportunities being offered to them. In fact, offering career training and development programs would keep up to 86% of millennials from leaving their current position, according to this study. Essentially, learning and development opportunities are a critical recruitment tactic for attracting and keeping your team members stimulated, engaged, and loyal to your company. 

But, this hinges on a few key points. Training and development programs will only keep your employees engaged and loyal if it includes engaging content and is available in formats that allow for flexible learning styles. Gone are the days when training was a one-and-done, lecture-style process. Instead, companies that wish to remain competitive need to offer continuous training opportunities. 

But to the modern employee, this may make burnout or boredom all-the-more present. Addressing this HR challenge hinges on your ability to leverage the tools available to you. A great example is to implement eLearning options, or installing a Learning Management System into your company’s bank of resources. With online learning options available to your employees, they can complete their development opportunities from anywhere, and at any time. In addition, the unique features that online learning systems offer are much more likely to keep employees engaged in their training from start to finish. They will appreciate the flexibility of smaller chunks of learning and leverage them at times that are most convenient to them, which generally yields the most effective learning. 

5. Managing Diversity 

Globalization and diversification are affecting business everywhere. Not only are customer reaches extended past the traditional Head Offices, but talent can now be sourced from across oceans and borders.  

However, diversity in the workplace come with a few HR challenges, including managing diverse cultures in localized teams. While adhering to local policies and procedures, the Human Resources department’s principle goal should always be to foster a workplace environment that is comfortable, welcoming, and free of conflict. Implementing cultural awareness programs can be helpful in making employees aware of the benefits of a diverse workplace, drawing attention to the better ideas and innovations a diverse team yields, and the wider customer reach attainable for a diverse business. Another helpful tool for managing diversity in the workplace are team building activities, which can assist in integrating employees of different cultures and uniting them towards a collective business objective.  

6. Monitoring Health and Safety 

Keeping in line with health and safety standards have always been one of the most obvious HR challenges faced by businesses globally. Not only are these concerns governed by regional labor laws, they are also incredibly important to overall employee wellbeing, an area under increased focus as of late. 

In 2020, health in the workplace is about much more than just hygiene and safety. Higher demands and arduous workloads can cause the psychological well-being of your employees to deteriorate or lead to employee burnout altogether. Periods of stress are to be expected, and some employees may even produce their best work under times of healthy pressure, but high levels of stress are simply damaging over long periods of time. 

In response to the pandemic, employee stress levels are resting at an even higher rate than usual. This means being receptive to their individual health during this time and remaining aware of the need for appropriate levels of organizational lenience, is as critical as ever. Keeping a close eye on escalating workloads and stress levels, and checking in with your employees regularly, is a good way to overcome this HR challenge. An open-door policy where employees can freely discuss their anxiety, issues with their working hours, and any unfair expectations with you is critical.  

7. Creating a Quality Employee Experience 

High turnover rates in fast-paced, constantly changing companies are relatively common. While you may be extremely skilled in hiring the right people, it is keeping them around that becomes the next obstacle, and one of the largest and most persistent HR challenges professionals must overcome. 

When employees are satisfied with their role, responsibilities, workplace, and peers, they are far less likely to consider seeking employment elsewhere. In a 2018 Job Seeker study, over one third of job seekers reported leaving a job within 90 days of their employment. 43% stated that their day-to-day role wasn’t what they thought it would be, 34% reported that they were driven away by a bad experience, 32% cited company culture, and 11% said they had signed onto a new job but later changed their minds. 

While a strong recruitment process, and appropriately directed vacancy marketing, is critical, employers of today need to place the same level of focus on retaining that top talent. This can be done by focusing on fostering an employee experience that is above that of your competition. Offer engaging online training opportunities, benefits for gym facility access, flexible working time, remote work arrangements (though many organizations have been forced into this practice regardless), or other incentives you feel would best keep your employees content in their working environment. The best way to combat this HR challenge is to create a culture that solicits the opinions of their employees and that responds, by building sustainable programs and initiatives that both address and support those needs.  

Face Today’s HR Challenges with An Open Mind 

The world is seeing significant changes left and right, and the way we do business is changing along with it. Being able to adapt to those changes, however unfamiliar or daunting, is critical for sustainable business success. Above all, the biggest HR challenge professionals face is identifying and understanding the corporate landscape of the future. As industries and technologies continue to evolve, as new generations enter the workforce, as globalization increases competition, and as the nature of work responds and adapts to environmental influences, it will be Human Resources that will strengthen an organization’s key requirement: its people. 

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28 Important HR Metrics to Measure

Strategic HR is a practice that is ever-growing in popularity among businesses around the world. Perhaps one of the biggest indicators of that growing popularity is the increased focus on the use of HR metrics as a key component of an organization’s overall business strategy. 

But, what are HR metrics? And if executives are beginning to value them much more, how can a company go about improving their data analysis game to meet those increasing expectations? If you want to make a real impact on your organization, you need to have a thorough understanding of the basics of HR metrics, and which ones in particular you should begin measuring today.  

In a hurry? Take our HR Metrics white paper to go! 

What Are HR Metrics? 

Human Resource metrics are the measurements that help organizations track key areas in their HR data. More specifically, they are the metrics that track an organizations human capital, and measure how effective their Human Resources initiatives are on the overall success of the business. HR metrics can be broken down into three areas, each with their own set of key HR metrics associated with those areas: 

1. Organizational Performance

• Turnover percentages 
• Percentage of regretted loss 
• Statistics on reasons for personnel leaving 
• Absence percentages, and absence behaviors 
• Recruitment statistics (e.g. time to fill, number of applicants, recruitment costs) 

2. HR Operations

• HR efficiency (e.g. time to resolve HR self-service tickets)  
• HR effectiveness (e.g. perception of service quality) 

3. Process Optimization

• Changes in HR efficiency and effectiveness over time, which are used to re-engineer and reinvent the nature of HR in the organization, optimizing its delivery process for the future.  

These specific examples will be fleshed out in further detail later but recognizing the three overarching areas of HR metrics is critical if you hope to keep your tracking system organized and efficient.  

The Importance of Keeping Track of HR Metrics 

Measuring the types of information and data listed above helps organizations figure out their people strategy for the future, recognizing what is working well for the organization, what needs improvement, and what trends they can expect down the line. Both executives and HR professionals agree that measuring HR areas and monitoring its impact on an organization is critical. As a result, HR metrics are transforming from a business advantage to a must for any HR team that seeks to build up a solid, data-driven business strategy for their company.  

The 28 Most Important HR Metrics You Should Be Measuring 

The amount of data that can be tracked and measured in HR is astounding, but in order to gain the most from the HR metrics you gather, you first need to identify the key figures that will provide the clearest insight into how your company can grow and succeed down the line.  

HR Metrics in Recruitment 

1. Headcount: the total number of employees in the organization, or within the department you are tracking. 

2. Demographics: the characteristics of the workforce, including age, gender, education level, and length of service in the company. 

3. Time to Hire: the average number of days between when a job is posted, and when the candidate accepts the offer. 

4. Acceptance Rate: the number of offer letters extended by the organization, divided by the number of candidates who accept an offer. 

5. Cost per Hire: the average cost of hiring a new employee. This can be generated by calculating the sum of both internal and external hiring costs, then dividing that value by the total number of employees hired in a given period. 

6. Time to Productivity: the time it takes for new hires to become acclimated in the organization and start working at full productivity.  

7. New-Hire Turnover: the number of new hires who leave the organization within a set period of time (e.g. within their first year of employment). 

HR Metrics in Engagement and Retention 

8. Employee Satisfaction: the number of employees who would recommend the organization as a good place to work, versus the number of employees who wouldn’t. 

9. Total Turnover Rate: the number of employees who leave the company within a given period of time, divided by the average number of total employees. This is usually indicated in a percentage value, so this decimal is then multiplied by 100. 

10. Voluntary Turnover Rate: the turnover rate including only the employees who voluntarily leave the organization. 

11. Talent Turnover Rate: the turnover rate among the organization’s highest-performing and highest-potential employees.  

12. Retention Rate: the opposite of a turnover rate, in that the number of employees who remained in the organization over a given period is divided by the total number of employees. 

13. Retention Rate per Manager: the retention rate broken down by individual teams and managers. 

HR Metrics in Time Tracking 

14. Absence Rate: the average number of days employees are absent in a given period of time, not including approved PTO  

15. Absence Rate per Manager: the absence rate broken down by individual teams and managers.  

16. Overtime Hours: the number of overtime hours worked by employees in a given period of time. This can be calculated either as an average number, broken down by individual employees.  

HR Metrics in Employee Value & Performance 

17. Performance & Potential: a nine-box performance matrix where employees are categorized according to their performance and potential levels

18. Employee Performance: metrics as received through self-assessments, peer reviews, manager assessments, or a combination of all three. 

19. Goal Tracking: usually done so through a performance management software that include goal tracking, this metric monitors the goals employees have set, how they connect to larger organizational goals, the progress the employees have made on those goals. 

20. Company Performance: a comparison of how well employees are performing, versus how engaged and valued they feel within the organization.  

21. Revenue per Employee: the total amount of revenue generated in a given period of time, divided by the total number of employees. 

HR Metrics in Training and Development 

22. Training Expenses per Employee: the total cost of the organization’s training courses and programs, divided by the total number of employees. 

23. Training Completion Rate: the number of employees who complete a given training course/program, divided by the total number of employees. This value is then multiplied by 100 to get a percentage. 

24. Time to Completion: the amount of time it takes for an employee to complete a given training course or program. 

25. Training Effectiveness: this can be measured in several different ways, including running tests or assessments that generate a pass/fail rate for training programs.  

HR Metrics in HR Service & Software 

26. Ratio of HR Professionals to Employees: the number of employees in the organization per HR professional on the HR team. 

27. Cost of HR per Employee: the total amount the organization spends on HR functions and services, divided by the total number of employees in the organization. 

28. HR Software Employee Participation Rate: the number of employees who actively use the organization’s HR software, divided by the total number of employees in the organization. 

Begin Measuring HR Metrics Today 

The work to manage and measure the above-mentioned metrics in the Human Resources department is vital to any organization’s long-term success. However, when you aren’t measuring and tracking the key HR metrics that matter most, it becomes very difficult to pinpoint just how well your managerial efforts are working, or how you can best improve them for sustainable success. If your organization is not measuring any HR metrics right now, be sure to sit down with your executive and HR teams and identify the areas of data you need to start tracking. Especially for companies just starting out in the HR metrics practice, keeping it simple is key. There is no need to dive into hundreds of different reports right away. If your company is already measuring some HR metrics, ensure that all the data being collected is beneficial to your organization and is helping you to reach your company goals. 

Software tools such as SpriggHR can help streamline your HR metric tracking and measuring process, pinpointing the areas your company is succeeding in, and highlighting others that may need some improvement.  

Take our HR Metrics white paper to go! 

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The 6 Stages of the Employee Life Cycle

Designing and encouraging an employee experience that leads to longevity, success, and great employee engagement should be a permanent mindset within your company. Rather than looking at employee engagement efforts as one-time endeavors when morale is low, the employee life cycle model frames engagement as a designed experience embedded into the trajectory of every employee within your organization.  

What is the Employee Life Cycle Model? 

The employee life cycle model (ELC) is an organizational method used to visualize how an employee engages with the company they are a part of. There are six stages involved in this model: Attraction, Recruitment, Onboarding, Development, Retention, and Separation.  

The employee life cycle model is geared to encompass every stage of an employee’s experience within a company, formatting that trajectory into a framework that provides a different engagement strategy for each stage the employee enters. For example, if a company has an excellent and engaging recruitment strategy, but high turnover rates, they can focus on the retention stage in their ELC in order to develop a suitable solution for the issue.  

The employee life cycle model greatly resembles the typical customer journey, which is intentional! Essentially, designing an employee life cycle strategy is rooted in the idea that the employee experience is just as valuable as their customer’s experience. Many large organizations don’t have a true idea of the value of employee engagement, choosing instead to focus on customer satisfaction and viewing employee engagement efforts as temporary programs rather than a consistent corporate mindset. In order for your company to be able to capitalize on your workforce’s talent, you need to be able to turn engagement data into meaningful intelligence at all managerial levels, helping your employees recognize their contributions to the company and driving engagement and success.  

The Advantages of Implementing an Employee Life Cycle Strategy 

By mapping out the employee journey in the same way you map out the customer experience, your company will see two main benefits: better talent retention, and reputation improvement. The ability to effectively allocate resources and efforts to reduce turnover issues reduces the time and money that turnover costs cause for the company. Similarly, a better reputation increases the chances of hiring more new talent, meaning a more committed and driven workforce.  

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The 6 Employee Life Cycle Stages 

In order to understand exactly how each stage of the employee life cycle can drive employee engagement, let’s examine each stage in greater detail. 

1. Attraction 

The first stage of the employee life cycle is the employee attraction stage. Regardless of how innovative and strong your product or service is, without the attraction and retention of great talent, your company will fail. This makes the attraction stage one of the most crucial aspects to any organization’s growth strategy.  

The attraction stage is the only stage that occurs before you have an open position in the company. Also referred to as the employer brand, it is the projection of the image of your organization as a great place to work, both in the minds of current employees as well as key stakeholders in the external market. This means that active and passive talent candidates, clients, customers, and potential stakeholders have a positive perspective of how it is to work within your company.  

In order to build a great employer brand and succeed in the employee attraction stage, there are several key tips you can follow: 

• Raise Brand awareness. Have your managers attend seminars and conferences regularly, seek out speaking opportunities, and be a regular contributor or sponsor of popular industry magazines, websites, and blogs. This will help build up your profile within the industry as a great place to work. 
• Be known to have a great culture. Regardless of external marketing tactics, the employee remains the most valuable and convincing promoter for any company. By having a fantastic company culture, you only increase the chances that your existing employees will regularly tell others about how great it is to work within your organization. You can also amplify these efforts by sharing insights into your culture publicly using company social media accounts.  
• Offer attractive benefits and compensation. Being competitive with compensation is one of the most obvious efforts your company can make to appeal to the top talent in your industry. This does not mean you need to pay the most to attract the best, but you should never pay the least. Seek out opportunities to provide softer benefits in addition to your existing ones, such as team lunches, birthdays off, and so on.  

2. Recruitment 

The second stage of the employee life cycle is the employee recruitment stage, the period where you seek out and recruit the best talent to join your organization. Recruitment can occur as a result of an existing role becoming vacant, or a new position being created altogether. The best types of recruitment plans offer an optimal candidate experience, support collaborative hiring centered around clear criteria and processes, and provide meaningful data that can be used to improve hiring results over time.  

In order to succeed in recruiting the right talent for your team, here are several key tips to include in your recruitment stage: 

• Ask for referrals from your existing team. Perhaps one of the best recruitment strategies out there is a referral from one of your own employees. As active members of the industry, they likely know several people who could be a perfect fit for the role you are trying to fill. However, be careful not to hire close friends or family of existing team members, as this can make the dynamic more challenging. Typically, these referrals will share a similar value set also. 
• Try out various recruitment platforms. Sticking to only one major recruitment website or media severely limits your candidate pool. Ask yourself where it is that your ideal candidates frequent their visits. This could be an industry meetup, or a lesser-known but growing industry magazine that many new potential industry leaders are subscribed to.  
• Be specific in who and what you are looking for. A sure-fire way to limit the chances of recruiting the most suitable candidates for a role is to publish vague employment advertisements. While being broad can be useful in casting a wider net, you should still be careful to outline all the pre-requisites to save you and the candidate’s time in applying and assessing.  
• Involve your employees. In addition to encouraging them to refer potential candidates, you can also ask your existing employees to help determine the best requirements for the role. Your team members can even assist you in reviewing the resumes and qualifications of potential candidates, if you see appropriate. Another useful way you can involve your employees is to request that someone in a very similar role joins in on the interview process, in order to assess the candidates that best fit within the team.  

3. Onboarding 

The next stage of the employee life cycle model is the employee onboarding stage. Occurring after you have recruited the top talent, the onboarding period is critical to getting your new hires well-adjusted to the organizational environment and performance aspects of their new job as quickly and smoothly as possible. During the onboarding stage, new employees cover more in-depth aspects of their position, identify the attitudes, knowledge, skills, and behaviors that are required to function effectively within the organization.  

Making new hires feel welcomed in the team and well-acclimatized to the nature of both their role and the organization is critical to drawing out long-term contributions and engagement.  Here are some key strategies you can employ to ensure that the onboarding stage of your company’s employee life cycle run smoothly for all concerned: 

• Have a job description. It does not have to be a long and academic analysis of the demands of the job but aim to have a single page outline that lists the most important duties of the role, as well as any associated experience and skills. 
• Discuss the company’s vision and values. Laying out your company values and vision and discussing what they all mean with your new hire is a vital component of any onboarding process. Clarify any questions they may have and get a sense of what the values mean to them, ensuring their perspective aligns with success.  
• Outline your expectations clearly. The job description will carry some of the detail, but it is still critical to lead each new hire through the expectations you are asking from them, along with explaining why they are important to company success.  
• Do follow-ups regularly. Completing the first week’s induction stage and then leaving the new hire to fend for themselves is bound to result in a rapid decline in employee performance. Schedule face to face meetings with each new employee after a few weeks, checking in on how they are managing, what challenges they may have found integrating with the team, and so on. 

4. Development 

The following stage of the employee life cycle model is the employee development stage. It is during this period that you begin to consistently encourage professional development amongst your team, which acts as a catalyst in their skill development, and also helps provide them with a future career path within the company. 

Some key tips you can follow to improve the professional development stage of your employee life cycle model include: 

• Encourage external learning. Providing your team members with opportunities to attend relevant conferences and seminar yields tremendous benefits for their skill development (many are available as virtual offerings online). A good way to do this is to regularly send them at the company cost or offer all employees a company-covered budget for their own initiated event attendance. 
• Assess knowledge and skills together. In order to best identify an employee’s key skills and areas of expertise, managers should work with the employee directly. Leveraging their own insight into their performance, you can then plan out and prioritize the areas that require further development. This is also one of the best ways to establish an open, honest feedback-driven relationship between you and your employees.  
• Encourage your team members to be responsible for their own development. In order to ensure employees, remain focused, you should encourage them to each develop a professional action plan. This plan should set out to help them develop their abilities and increase their chances of career advancement. You can either collaborate with them on this process or provide a general template to the whole team that they can follow to complete their own simple plan.  
• Reward the employees who learn in their own time. Many of your team members likely take part in regular informal development outside of their normal work hours. When you hear of a staff member doing this, make a point of finding out more about it, and sincerely thank them for their efforts and ensure they know they are appreciated.  

5. Retention 

The fifth stage of the lifecycle model is the employee retention stage. It is here that you focus your energies on keeping your top employees, and ensuring they are happy and sufficiently challenged in their respective roles within the team. The influence of company culture goes a long way in this stage. If the culture in your organization is poor, it inevitably leads to a high employee turnover rate, meaning you will have to face replacement costs regularly. Improving the retention stage is a great way to counteract this risk and promote longevity and satisfaction amongst your team’s career paths.  

Some tips to help ensure you are retaining your key people, and improving the employee retention stage of your lifecycle model, include: 

• Hire the right people. In order to retain the top talent, you need to first attract and recruit the top talent. This is where the success of your attraction and retention stages can be measured – if you were careful in your process and approach of who you hired to begin with, then you will stand a better chance of keeping the right employees in your team. 
• Cultivate great relationships with your team members. Building and fostering an open, honest, and respectful relationship with everyone on your team is critical to keeping them motivated to stay with your company. 
• Openly communicate your organizational mission and team aspirations. In order to improve your employee retention rate, you first need to ensure that your team thoroughly understands and is committed to the same mission and direction as the company. You should be regularly communicating with them on where they belong within the company, and how their specific roles and accomplishments help the organization to execute its mission. 
• Seek out employee feedback and measure team morale frequently. For smaller companies, a weekly face to face meeting with the team can be useful, where you set out to discuss how the team is progressing and identify any problems or issues they are facing. Another useful tool can be employee pulse surveys. If you want to regularly measure team morale, and seek out constant effective feedback, utilizing shorter employee survey tools or implementing an online feedback mechanism such as Sprigg’s Continuous & 360 Degree Feedback tool can be particularly useful.  
• Understand what motivates your employees. No one employee is the exact same, and in turn, no one thing will motivate every single employee to work hard. Understanding what drives and motivates various team members means that you can engage your employees and ideally retain them. 

6. Separation 

The final stage of the employee life cycle is the employee separation stage. For most employees, there comes a point where their employment lifecycle will reach its conclusion, whether from retirement, new employment, or for personal reasons. Treating the separation process with equal importance as the onboarding process and being equally as strategic in how you approach this stage, is critical. When a team member leaves, it has an effect on other members. 

It is the responsibility of the manager and HR professionals within the company to ensure that the employee who is leaving, exits in a way that doesn’t cause major disruption. If you find yourself faced with a situation where a key employee separates from your organization unexpectedly, there are a few key tips you can use to minimize the effects of that disruption: 

• Understand the reasoning behind the resignation. What an employee states as their reason for resignation, and what the actual reasons are, are often not the same. Aim to dig deep at what truly caused the separation, so you can avoid the circumstances that led to it in the future. 
• Remain positive.  You will feel a sense of loss at a top performer leaving your team but it does not mean that you will never find another great employee to replace them. 
• Ask for honest feedback. When someone leaves a company, conduct an exit-interview as it is one of the greatest opportunities to glean honest feedback about what it’s truly like to work in the organization.  
• Remind the team to keep looking ahead. Oftentimes, the loss of a valued employee can cause a decrease in overall team morale. Aim to concentrate of reaffirming commitment to the remaining team members, reminding them that while their departure is disappointing, the team will ultimately recover and grow as a result of it.  

In Summary 

The employee life cycle model is one of the best was to visualize and plan for each stage of an employee’s interactions with your company, providing you with the insight necessary to make each stage of their time with your company as successful as possible. By focusing on doing the best you can at each stage, you are much more likely to attract and retain a fantastic team.  

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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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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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How to Conduct an Effective Peer to Peer Review

By their very association, peers can be excellent motivators. They are on the frontlines with you, working side by side, and relying on you for support, just as you rely on them. And, unlike managers, they have access to the finer details required of their coworkers to complete their duties. Because of their heightened insight into how their coworkers work, they have some of the most useful knowledge for contributing to performance review feedback.  

What is Peer to Peer Review? 

When people discuss “peer reviews”, they are referring to the process of employees being assessed by their colleagues in terms of their performance, strengths and weaknesses, and other work-related aspects. It is also a term often used by scholars and authors, when they have their articles, research papers, and other publication material subjected to review by other writers. Their work will be critiqued, suggestions will be made, and those suggestions may be incorporated into the work before it is released for publication.  

The same general principle applies to peer review in the workplace. A peer to peer review system formalizes the conduct of these types of reviews within the company, with definite rules and policies in place on the what, who, where, when, and how of the conduct of the peer review process. Oftentimes, the peer review process calls for the solicitation of inputs from peers – teammates and colleagues – about the performance of a specific employee, while keeping the reviewer anonymous. 

The process of peer to peer reviews can be accomplished through several different approaches. Some organizations may design their peer review system in a way that incorporates all approaches, or they can choose only those they deem applicable to their circumstances. Some of the most common peer to peer review approaches are: 

• Simple Review: comments are solicited from peers about the performance of a specific employee. This method is straightforward and rather informal in its execution. Usually, the peers are interviewed either one-on-one or with a group, and the information is obtained from those interviews. The general rules that the feedback provider will remain anonymous. There are cases when their identity can be disclosed, however, usually when the review is being provided directly to the employee being reviewed, and not just their supervisor.  
• Inspection: a more rigorous version of a simple review, that requires the most time and resources, inspections involve specific stages that everyone must go through. This approach is usually selected when the purpose of the peer reviews is to specifically identify the weaknesses or shortcomings of the employee being evaluated.  
• Team Reviews: this approach involves a panel or a group providing an evaluation or assessment of an employee one at a time. They usually sit together and offer up their individual assessments, reaching a conclusion together.  

The Benefits of a Peer to Peer Review Process 

One of the most noted reasons for utilizing peer review programs is the role it plays in lightening the workload of managers and supervisors’ administration roles. The bulk and breadth of the employee review process, which can be time-consuming for managers especially of larger corporations, are “passed on” to the organization’s peer to peer review program. However, peer reviews present several other benefits that go far beyond taking some weight off of managers’ shoulders.  

1. Peer to peer review provides a closer look at the employee being evaluated.

No matter how effective a manager may be at assessing their people, or how tight they are with their team; they are still likely to omit performance insights about any given employee. This is especially true if there are other employees that are being subjected to review and assessment along with them. 

Even in the most ideal of work environments, employees tend to conduct themselves in a certain way in front of their supervisors, and typically another way in front of their peers. Thus, managers cannot fully trust what the employee demonstrates as the most valid. Through the peer to peer review process, employee assessments are completed in a more objective light, giving a more thorough insight into the employee and their strengths, weaknesses, and overall potential. 

2. Peer reviews help monitor and improve employee performance.

Basing your assessment of employee performance solely on the output and financial results of the company is not the way to manage people. Human resources remain one of the most important aspects of every organization.  Peer reviews help to identify gaps in performance that may have been overlooked, providing you the opportunity to address the employee’s performance issues. An employee with constructive feedback will then be able to focus more on those gaps and ideally have the support to improve on them.  

3. Peer reviews help monitor business processes.

Peer review can also function as a roundabout way to assess whether your business processes are still working efficiently and effectively, or if any adjustments need to be made. They can also provide indicators of whether your organizational structure needs to be modified. Through peer review, you can have a clearer sense of the relationship between work quality and output, compared to the systems and structures in place in your company, from an insider’s perspective. Data points of performance by role and / or team can provide insightful information regarding business performance gaps. 

4. Peer review is effective for team building.

When it comes to motivating employees, team building is one of the most successful methods a company can use. Integrating the peer review process into your team-building setup is a great way to leverage those benefits. When peers provide their input, employee bonding can be strengthened, and this positive impact will have a ripple effect on employee performance once they have returned to their usual working environment. 

Linking a peer to peer review process to performance appraisal, and by default, employee rewards and recognition, is one of the most effective ways to provide support for collaboration and teamwork within your company. It is highly recommended that peers are provided tips / training guidelines on how to deliver feedback (even if presented anonymously).  

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How to Conduct a Peer to Peer Review 

Creating, maintaining, and supporting a successful real-time peer review program can be challenging, While there is no specific formula to creating the perfect peer to peer review process, there are certain best practices and general steps you can follow to ensure your peer review process delivers quality data. 

Reflect on Core Values 

Ensure that the metrics in part, upon which employees are measured are aligned with your company’s core values. In any review system, input is being solicited based on the opinion of how an individual demonstrates the metric in question.  If you don’t have clearly defined values (specific, desired behaviors) the evaluator will not be able to accurately assess their colleague’s performance.  

Choose the “Peers” Wisely 

While it is the supervisors and managers that will use the data collected by the review process for decision-making, the process itself is conducted by employees. They are the individuals who will play a key role in the review process, so it is critical to define the peer groups in a rational manner. One of the most important parts of this is identifying the groups that you will ask or get information from regarding the employee being assessed. In order to ensure the best quality feedback from them, you should put in place certain guidelines, such as qualifications that the evaluating employees must have in order to be interviewed.  A great example is to determine if the evaluator has any direct experience in working with the individual on any past projects thereby giving them a vantage point to providing quality feedback. 

Embrace New Technology 

Gathering input from employees about their peers does not have to be done solely through traditional methods. Today’s workforce is global and multi-generational, and more adept in social media and technology than ever. Choosing a program or software to streamline peer to peer reviews can be an effective way to keep employees engaged in the review process, while still drawing out useful information and evaluations from them. SpriggHR provides a Multi-Rather Feedback Option in its 360 Degree Feedback feature, where performance feedback can be obtained from supervisors, peers, and even customers alike, with a few simple clicks.  

Explain and Celebrate the Launch 

If a peer to peer review system is new and unfamiliar to the workplace, positioning it as a change designed to help recognize and celebrate your employees is a great strategy. Rather than framing the process as a new way to monitor performance, the process can be framed to ensure that your key objective is to recognize the qualities and achievements of employees that may be overlooked with a one-to-one review process.  

Get Buy-In from All 

The peer review process involves more than just the employee and their peers. Employee performance processes affect the entire organization. Managers and leaders especially should be early adopters and promoters of the new system. Active support from senior executives communicates to lower staff that the program is a priority. You should also ensure that any employee, at all levels, feels empowered to participate.  

In action, peer to peer review systems involve everyone, although to varying degrees. On the part of managers and supervisors, the system should be reinforced and promoted through their own self-reviews and assessments.  

Empower Managers to Track Results 

 Sprigg’s Continuous Feedback feature enables employees and managers alike to give or receive feedback instantly and provides managers with the much-needed insights to monitor employee growth against the parameters they were evaluated against. Staying on top of monitoring the appraisal process and the data points provided, is essential to identifying trends in employee performance. 

Make Room for Flexibility Within the System 

While the purpose of establishing a new evaluation process is to create rigor, structure, and ultimately fairness, it does not mean that flexibility loses importance. Designing something, especially a system that involves your employees so intently, in such a way that it cannot be modified to suit specific situations will only decrease the effectiveness of the system itself.  It is recommended that regular feedback on the overall effectiveness of the system be regularly solicited. Aggregate reporting or data summary output will also determine the value of the system’s capabilities. 

For example, when dealing with a certain employee, you may have to take a different approach or change up the questions being asked instead of “sticking to the script”. This adaptive approach should be allowed, and even encouraged where appropriate. Flexibility and relevance are key when measuring the performance results of an individual.  

Encourage Frequent and Timely Recognition 

Real-time feedback has been proven time and time again as the single most effective approach to shaping desired behavior. When solid work is noted immediately, the employee feels compelled to repeat it immediately, and their peers are more likely to emulate it quickly. If deserved recognition is delayed, the link between the behavior and the reward may be lost, minimizing the likelihood of that behavior being reinforced. 

Providing a quick follow-up to the conduct of the peer review is critical. If employees see that there is prompt and frequent recognition following the peer to peer review process, they are going to be more motivated and more involved in the process the next time around.  

In Summary 

Effective, real-time peer to peer reviews motivate employees to perform well every day of the year, not just when the quarterly or annual performance appraisal is approaching. By instilling a sense of accountability amongst and between your employees, and not just from the top-down.  It’s also important to emphasize that peer to peer review systems cannot be casually instituted into your organization. If they are to be at all successful, they need to be linked to the specific performance indicators required or expected of the individual and ideally, the core company values. The process needs to be compatible with the latest technologies, be launched and communicated well, be used by everyone in a timely and effective fashion and be deliver quality, useful data that identifies performance trends. 

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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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The Pros and Cons of Internal Recruitment

When it comes to hiring new employees, one of the most significant investments in selecting an external hire is their lack of familiarity with the team, culture, and policies of the organization. This is largely why so many organizations tend to rely on internal recruitment. However, despite the benefits of hiring from the inside, relying too much on promotions and lateral career movement can also have some negative impact. 

What is Internal Recruitment? 

Internal recruitment is the process of identifying and attracting candidates to open positions within the same organization. Rather than pursuing to fill the position externally, the Human Resources department of a company may choose to advertise a job vacancy internally, allowing only existing staff members to apply. Occasionally, organizations may see their internal recruitment efforts fail, in which case they will begin advertising the vacancy externally as well.  

Organizations today use internal recruitment to fill the roles that are best suited to having an insider’s knowledge of the company and its culture, goals, and views. It also helps to encourage loyalty and a sense of career succession for employees. Many businesses view it as a more efficient way to fill vacancies, since it tends to save more time, money, and resources compared to the process of recruiting externally.  

Types of Internal Recruitment 

• Promotions: this is the most widely used form of internal recruitment, and the most sought-after by employees. 
• Transfers: this usually entails moving to the same job at a different location, or to a similar level job in a different department of the same company. 
• Temporary to Permanent: this involves changing the employee agreement from a temporary position holder (or intern) to a full-fledged employee. 
• Employee Referrals: this type of internal recruitment is often overlooked, despite being one of the most cost-effective ways to get qualified candidates in front of hiring managers. A system that encourages the employee referral process helps to ensure a more constant, steady stream of employee-referred qualified candidates.  

The Pros and Cons of Internal Recruitment 

The Advantages 

1. Reduces Hiring Time

External recruitment almost always entails the enlistment of recruitment agencies to find potential candidates through sourcing or job posting, evaluating the list of candidates, and then persuading them to join the company. These efforts can translate into a very time-consuming process. 

However, when engaging with internal recruits, that process of locating and engaging candidates is reduced significantly. Even the process of evaluating internal candidates tends to take less time, since most internal hires are already pre-screened for culture fit, have easily accessible performance records, and may not require intensive interviews with managers. When time spent on all these stages are reduced, it makes internal recruitment a much more time-effective process of hiring.  

2. Reduces Onboarding Time

In a similar context, opting for external hires means a much larger investment of time dedicated to introducing them to the organization’s culture and values in addition to their new role and responsibilities. Internal hires, however, likely already have some level of understanding in these areas. 

When an existing employee fills a vacancy, they already have knowledge of how the company operates, and the policies and practices it abides by. They also may be familiar with people in their new team or may have had exposure to of the new role if they move within the same team or into a similar one.  

3. Lower Cost to Management

The process of external recruitment is a significant investment from internal recruitment. When you hire from within, you don’t need to invest in advertisements on job boards, or subscriptions to resume databases, or fees for obtaining background checks. 

Informing internal candidates about job openings can be done seamlessly, and at low to no cost, through company email or the company’s internal newsletter. For smaller businesses that are looking for location-specific hires, placing a printed job ad on the office intranet or Slack channel is also an option. Similarly, sourcing candidates on resume databases is not necessary, since hiring managers can simply ask their supervisors or investigate the HRIS to find potential candidates.  

4. Encourages Employee Engagement and Morale

When employees are given the ability to move upwards in their careers and are shown that management has a dedication to promoting their existing employees, it conveys the message that their work is valued. Providing more opportunities for career advancement, or even allowing lateral movement to different same-level positions that may interest employees, can build stronger morale. Even if they are not promoted to a higher-level job, employees who change roles develop professionally, and their peers recognize that they too may have similar opportunities in the future. 

The Disadvantages 

1. Creates a Culture of Resentment

While some may view their peers’ promotions as evidence that the opportunity exists for them too, internal recruitment can potentially create resentment amongst employees. Those who were considered for a role may feel indignant if a colleague is hired instead of them. On the other hand, internal recruitment can also cause managers to begin to harbour competitiveness or resentment. Oftentimes, managers are reluctant to, or uncomfortable with, losing their good team members, and may go so far as to hinder the transfer or promotion process to keep their top performers.  

2. Leaves Gaps in the Workforce

Promoting someone, or transferring someone, to fill an open slot ultimately leaves their previous spot vacant. This entails a series of moves, promotions, and transfers, that has the risk to cause major disruptions to business operations. In some cases, external recruitment may become necessary to fill the gap. 

3. Limits the Pool of Applicants

Any company is bound to have a pool of qualified applicants for specific positions, and though the lower risk of an individual already familiar with the company may seem tempting, those qualifications may not be necessarily applicable for every open role. For example, if a newly created position opens, existing employees may not have the skill sets required. It really depends upon your hiring philosophies in these instances. There is a sentiment that organizational ‘fit’ is a key hiring decision and that skills can be taught. 

Relying solely on internal hiring runs the risk of missing the chance to hire new people, with new skills and ideas that are more applicable to the role and have more potential to bring in success for the business. 

4. Promotes an Inflexible Work Culture

Getting comfortable with only hiring from the inside puts a business in a position where stagnancy can become the norm. Employees run the risk of becoming complacent and with no new perspectives, skill sets, or ways of thinking are brought into the workplace, it can be challenging to spot inefficiencies or experiment with new and better ways of working. While familiarity with the existing culture may be viable, so too is the potential that an outsider’s perspective can have on the advancement of the business. 

An inflexible culture also becomes problematic in how effective leadership initiatives are, especially for those leaders whose roles are to advocate for change and improvements instead of relying on established, inefficient practices. External recruitment is one of the best ways to shake up a company culture, offering a fresh perspective on existing problems.  

Build a Recruitment Process that Makes Sense for Your Company 

Especially in today’s age, when external hires are becoming less and less sought after as businesses around the globe are struggling to stay afloat, it is important to keep in mind that recruiting is never an easy job. Many companies are relying a lot on internal hires because of the inherent trust and familiarity that comes from an existing employee moving up in the same company. But organizational growth depends on more than what or who is familiar. 

It is worth investing time and resources to create a recruitment process that suits all your business needs, not just the immediate ones. Whether that is entirely internal, entirely external, or a combination of both, the goal of recruitment is to enlist individuals who will help your company grow.  

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Streamlining Processes for Maximum Efficiency

Streamlining processes in an internal context will ideally enable improved efficiency and promote a more seamless and simplified implementation of any newly introduced system or process. Whether its work allocation, quality inspection or project monitoring, teams can always stand to benefit from reviewing and improving upon existing approaches to work.  

What is a Streamline Process? 

Streamline is defined as the act of altering something to make it simpler or more efficient. In the context of work, this involves the reforming of a certain process or method being used to accomplish a task to improve its overall efficiency and / or effectiveness of yielding results. For example, the work of invoicing clients can be streamlined (improved upon) by ensuring the process steps are consistently and repeatedly followed by any one individual responsible for completing and distributing the invoices.  

A business process is any series of repeatable activities that are carried out by an individual or group, in a specific order, to achieve a result. Each of these activities constitutes a task, which may be part of a process or a one-off event on its own. The formality of business processes will vary among organizations, with the formal processes being documented. A streamlined business process results in faster outcomes regardless of formality and ideally results in fewer issues or inefficiencies along the way.  

 Some examples for several business divisions include: 

• Human Resources and Administration: new employee onboarding 
• Sales and Marketing: CRM process 
• Finance and Accounting: vendor invoice submission 
• Operations: product delivery and QA 
• Management: employee reviews 
• IT: security protocols  
• Asset Management: asset discovery and inventory 
• Supply Chain Management: replenishment of materials 
• Compliance Documentation: quarterly reporting 
• Project Management: task notification 

The Benefits of Streamlining Processes 

Employee engagement should always be an area being continuously analyzed and improved upon when necessary. A key factor that influences employee engagement is how well they understand their duties, and the degree of accountability they are working under. Streamlining processes not only reduces errors in work efforts and speeds up progress, it also helps to clarify those duties and enforce that needed accountability. As a result, it has a tremendous impact on employee morale, and ultimately increases employee engagement levels. 

Regardless of the size of a company, streamlining processes presents several major benefits. Some key advantages that come from its implementation include:  

• Increased efficiency, agility, productivity, and profit 
• Improved communication 
• Clearly documented procedures and greater visibility into processes 
• Reduction in errors, missed deadlines, delays, and redundant work 
• Improved compliance with industry standards 
• Simplified training 
• Improved employee adoption 
• Clearly defined task ownership and workflow hierarchy 
• Clarity of direction and accountability 
• Improved customer satisfaction 

10 Steps to Streamline the Work Process and Develop and Efficient Workflow 

To begin streamlining, you need a clear awareness and a thorough understanding of the process and documentation necessary in each stage leading up to the end project goal. In order to streamline a process and maximize efficiency within your workplace processes, follow these steps: 

1. Analyze the Current Workflow 

Not all organizations have a clear understanding of the extent of their existing processes (formal or informal). Therefore, the first step towards streamlining processes is always to list out every process, and then do a thorough analysis of each. You need to understand how each process in every division or unit of your company operates. The goal of this stage is to identify how the company has been operating so far, and where the opportunities exist to make improvements. Interview employees and solicit feedback on each process that your business follows.  

2. Identify Key Areas of Focus 

Once you have analyzed your existing work processes, you then need to identify the areas that need improvement. Look for processes and workflows that suffer from waning motivation from employees, unclear instructions, or decaying communication. Pinpoint the factors that can, or that already are, impacting the effectiveness of the existing processes and target to improve. 

3. Break Down the Process 

Once a process has been identified for improvement, the next step is to break up the work process into smaller, more manageable steps. Too many businesses get caught up in the dependencies and decision points of all their projects, largely because their work process is overcomplicated. Aim to keep the process simple, breaking it into discrete steps that aim simply towards the desired outcome.  

4. Prioritize the Work 

Once you have identified and broken down the processes that need improvement, you then need to rank them based on importance. Examine the list of processes you have, and rate each on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being the most important process and 10 being the least important process. This helps to keep priorities in focus, and clarify what resources are required when. 

5. Document Everything 

Every micro-step included in the process must be captured and documented; this is essential if you hope to accurately review the process. It is critical to validate each process step to ensure the process flow is occurring as described; this will be essential when it comes time to make recommendations on improvement. 

6. Automate the Work Process 

In a landscape of rapid technological advancement, it is no surprise that one of the most common elements businesses use these days to manage their workflow are modern work management software solutions. The process of accomplishing a task or completing a project is not immune to data errors and miscommunication. However, there are countless powerful software tools that are specifically designed to help organizations and teams streamline their processes and workflows. These modern management software solutions offer simple tools and apps, with advanced features and capabilities, that make the complex process of managing business processes easier than ever. Often a viable business case can be presented in favor of using such tools.  

7. Test the New Workflow 

The only way to measure whether your new and improved work process is effective is to test it. To do this, you need to evaluate how it responds in the live workplace environment. Initially, aim for smaller areas to test case the improvements. For example, you could apply the streamline process in an upcoming project and get a clear sense of how each element of the process works in action. 

8. Be Prepared to Adjust 

Once you have tested the new process in the live workplace environment, you need to be ready to refine your new workflow based on the results. Virtually all new initiatives (our those improved upon) take some time to introduce and effectively execute. Evaluate the effectiveness of each change in the workflow and ensure everything works to the best possible degree before implementing it to a larger scale roll out. 

9. Put the New Workflow into Action 

Once you have tested your new workflow, and made improvements wherever necessary, there is no reason to delay its implementation. Create a communication and / or a training strategy that ensures you clearly explain each aspect of the new streamlining process to your employees before you put it into action. It is critical that every member involved understands how the processes work, and what they can do to get the most out of them.  

10. Refine the Streamlined Process 

Even with the most rigorous refinement period before implementation, no work process or workflow is immune to flaws and disruptions. Once you have made improvements in your existing work process, don’t assume you won’t have to continuously refine it over time. There are workflow management systems that can make these regular check-ins seamless and can help you to adjust your streamlining processes to the changing work environment which will inevitably occur.  

Get the Most Out of Your Business Workflows by Streamlining Processes for Maximum Efficiency 

Like any other business practice, the size and type of your organization will help determine the depth of work required to streamline your processes. Putting this framework into action can help you to isolate workflow issues and depending upon those priorities addressed, streamlining processes have the potential to improve your business results significantly. 

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8 Learning Strategies to Optimize Your Training Process

Not everyone will learn at the same rate or in the same fashion. Training processes for new recruits need to be conducive to all types of employees, taking into consideration the diversity of learning styles. This can only be done when you learn how to effectively optimize the training process itself to suit as many learning strategies and methods as possible. 

The Individuality of the Employee 

Learning strategies, at their core, simply refer to the methods that students use to learn. In a job training environment, this means the ways in which new recruits learn, absorb, and apply the skills and practices being taught to them by their employer. 

Learning strategies cover a broad range of applicable uses, from techniques used to retain information long term, or better ways to absorb the information being taught to them efficiently. However, it is important to keep in mind the facilitator’s role in optimizing the learning process. The way in which the materials are presented are just as critical to their successful education as how the new recruits learn them.  

The Importance of Learning Strategies in the Development of Training Programs 

Incorporating the individuality of the employee, and the wide range of learning strategies that come with them, into your learning and development is critical to optimizing your company’s training process. The importance of incorporating a varied set of learning strategies into your plans for training processes can be boiled down to three main reasons, as determined by what employees and new recruits themselves seek out in employers: 

Flexibility

Employers who offer flexibility to their employees are widely sought-after. Flexibility in all areas of work, including communication, scheduling, and salaries, are all viable at one point or another, depending on the employee’s needs. 

However, flexibility pertains to more than simply where and when an employee works – it also extends to how employees want to do their jobs, including training. Incorporating various learning strategies into your training process provides more employees with the necessary tools to do their tasks effectively, and on a much more individualized level. 

Well-Being

strengthening employee skill sets is one of the principal goals of training itself. Paired with the increased focus on the health and well-being of employees, and the increased demand for employers to provide expectations well-suited to accommodate employees’ personal and work lives, methods of well-being in the workplace lend themselves to adaptive training processes. 

Added learning and development, that is adaptable and conducive to several learning styles, leads to further employee company advancement. And, in turn, this translates to financial well-being and satisfaction for employees. 

Purpose

Any individual, regardless of company ranking or learning style, responds much better to organizational and task-based demands when they have a clear sense of purpose in what they are doing. Simply put, every individual in a company wants to feel like their job is counting towards the greater good of the organization.  

Because of this, incorporating topics that aim to build a sense of purpose, such as workplace communication, company objectives, and understanding what the company offers, is critical. By drawing on learning strategies, you can cover this critical area of morale improvement, and can translate what the overarching purpose of every individual employee’s contribution actually is. 

The Top 8 Learning Strategies to Optimize Your Training Process 

Incorporating various learning strategies into your organization’s training program has a tremendous impact on how, and what, your employees retain from their time in training. For smaller companies, it can also mean the development of customized learning programs that fit every recruit’s unique learning style.  

But, in order to incorporate learning strategies, you first need to be aware of the leading strategies that employees today tend to rely on during training processes. Aim to incorporate these into your training programs and gain the top talent necessary for organizational success. 

1. Bite-Sized Learning 

Attention spans and concentration patterns vary depending on the individual, but it has been proven that nearly everyone retains information more over time if they break their learning up into smaller, bite-sized portions. 

Rather than offering a single, extensive training session that covers all aspects, break sessions down into modules. Identify the key topics and spread over a course of time. This way, employees can fully absorb one concept before shifting focus to the next. This also provides the opportunity for employees to recap what they’ve learned so far, ask questions and clarify any confusion, and then apply that new knowledge to the next lesson. 

Bite-sized learning sessions can be broken down in several ways, depending on the size of the training program and the number of participants or necessary areas to cover. Some common ways to break information up includes separating the following topics into distinct training sessions, with attendees varying depending on the necessity of their attendance: 

• Sales Training 
• Compliance Training 
• Safety Training 
• Software Training 
• New Hire Training 
• Product or Service Training 

2. Retrieval Practice 

Learning information, and retaining information, are two entirely different outcomes. Since employees are almost always engaging in multitasking in their jobs, it isn’t uncommon for newly learned information to be forgotten. This is what makes retrieval practice such an integral learning strategy.  

Unlike in school, where you would attend lectures, take notes, study from those notes and then be quizzed on what was learned, retrieval practices forces employees to use their memory, not relying on the crutch of notes or enforcing a study-testing system. Some ways to do this include having employees write out what was learned to see if they can recall the material or holding group discussions on what was learned. The ultimate goal should be to evaluate whether everyone attending the training session can recall the material learned, without looking through notes or handouts. This will provide a gauge on whether employees have truly absorbed the information being taught to them. 

3. Elaboration 

Another useful retention strategy, elaboration forces employees to dig deeper beyond simply recalling what has been learned, and actually explain in great detail what the specific concepts are. The objective of elaboration is for employees to connect what they have learned to actual, real-life experiences. This demonstrates how the new material should be incorporated into the individual’s decision-making process as a whole. 

There are several ways to incorporate elaboration into your training processes, but one of the most widely used is the method of interrogation elaboration. This is when you have employees ask themselves how and why a new concept works, and then have them come up with the answers to those questions. They should make lists of everything to be learned, and then formulate questions around each topic, aiming to answer some of these questions with the objective of identifying connections between various sub-topics of a lesson.  

4. Interleaving 

Almost all of the best learning strategies aim to focus on the retention of all new information being taught. Interleaving is another great retention learning strategy to incorporate into your organization’s training process. Essentially, interleaving is memorizing new material but woven in with other known skills. So, rather than focusing on one single concept at a time, there are several concepts within the same lesson plan. Doing so forces the learner to pay attention to relationships between concepts and models giving a richer experience to what is being taught. 

5. Examples 

Real-life, concrete examples are a solid learning methodology, and with good reason. Oftentimes, when new concepts or skills are introduced, it can be hard for a learner to see how they apply or relate to their actual life, or work efforts. By drawing on the method of concrete examples in abstract lessons, those concepts become usable ideas for employees.  

Concrete examples are examples that are easily relatable and look to gel understanding. Simply put, they readily resonate with the learner. Because of their relevance, it is easy for them to translate into actual experiences, which helps clarify the importance of concepts to learners. Concrete examples can also be measured and observed, which can help learners deepen their understanding of the concept itself.  

6. Dual Coding 

In today’s world, there are so many distractions that keep people from focusing on what’s important. In training environments, it can be difficult for people with certain learning styles to properly absorb what is being taught to them. As someone who may be responsible for knowledge transfer, it is your responsibility to be able to minimize these distractions. This can be done by employing dual learning, or dual coding, a method that aims to use different mediums to teach concepts in order to reach as many people as possible. 

Advertisers use social media, videos, memes, and graphics, to catch your eye. Your training program should aim to do the same thing. Dual coding is largely linked to visual learning, drawing on visuals to teach concepts rather than lectures or notes. The principle goal is to be able to explain a concept in both words and visuals, meaning any information taught is accompanied by some sort of visual component to aid visual learners. This can be infographics, comic strips, diagrams, graphic organizers, timelines, or graphs. Since everyone learns differently, it is important for training facilitators to make their content as accessible to everyone, on all fronts, in order to receive unanimous understanding.  

7. Metacognition 

Metacognition, as the name suggests, is simply the process of thinking about thinking. In a training or work environment, it refers to how an individual thinks about life and work. it involves a self-reflection on future goals, actions needed to be taken to achieve those goals, and strategies to use to reach personal targets. Unlike other learning strategies that have a distinct process you need to work to implement, every human being is typically well-equipped with metacognition. 

However, although we already possess it, metacognition can be developed in such a way that it becomes a useful learning strategy. When practiced enough, it can help propel an employee to improve their knowledge and skills base far beyond what are taught to them in training sessions.  

8. Lateral Learning 

With standard logic, you begin with certain pre-existing ingredients, just as you start a game of chess with given pieces on the board. But, what are those pieces exactly? In most work scenarios, those pieces are not explicitly given, we just assume they are there. We assume certain concepts, boundaries, and perceptions, before beginning our work. Lateral thinking, as defined by Edward de Bono, is not concerned with playing with existing pieces, but rather, with seeking to change those very pieces. In other words, it is concerned with the perception part of thinking.  

In order to understand the method of lateral learning in the frame of corporate learning strategies, consider it in context of a workplace example. Say you develop a training course in sales techniques, with the end goal of getting employees to use the new strategies to gain new customers. However, although you are providing the new skills to the employees, the issue is the assumption that the ideal situation is bound to play out when using them. But in real life, perfect examples never play out exactly as they were taught. Lateral learning fixes this issue. It teaches employees to take what is taught, and then use their own perception and instinct to know when to use each particular skill.  

Training is Only the First Step to Creating Positive Change 

It’s one thing to create a training program for your company, but it is entirely different for employees to engage in the learning process itself. By utilizing different learning techniques, varying training methods, and giving employees new ways to master skills, it can help learners to overcome the obstacles in their learning process, leading to better performance overall.  

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11 Productivity Improvement Tips

It goes without saying that a productive team makes for a successful company. However, in times such as these, some companies may be encountering a widespread decrease in employee morale, and as a result, productivity levels are suffering as well. As a response to this, productivity improvement is a business strategy rapidly increasing in popularity.

Continuous Productivity Improvement

Productivity improvement is defined as the process of achieving more output from an hour of work. There are several forms of productivity improvement, including but not limited to:

• Capital: investment in facilities, software, infrastructure, machines, etc.
• Strategy and Business Model: developing a business strategy and model that are more likely to yield successful results.
• Tools: apps, workflow models, other resources, etc. available to employees for the successful and timely completion of tasks.
• Automation: systems and machines that automate work to boost productivity.
• Process Improvement: discovering and reducing wasted efforts in repeated business processes.
• Time Management: the personal process of identifying and reducing sources of wasted work time.
• Outsourcing: recruiting and paying individuals to do work that are outside of your current talent.
• Performance Management: the management process of setting goals for employees, monitoring progress, and evaluating results.
• Organizational Culture: developing norms, habits, expectations, standards for behaviors, and shared values as a group that are conducive to productivity.

There are also several general guidelines that leaders and employees alike can follow in order to maintain productivity improvement and maximize their success.

11 Productivity Improvement Tips

1. Quality Over Quantity

Oftentimes employees misunderstand how their employers define “efficiency”. It is not, in fact, necessarily completing as many tasks as possible in a given timeframe. Instead, the work being completed should offer value to the clients receiving it. Completing two projects that conform to the specifications of the client is far more preferred than pushing out five projects that don’t reflect the client’s needs and specs. You can greatly affect your productivity improvement by realizing that quality should never be compromised for quantity. Otherwise, the inevitable and more costly and unfavorable task of rework begins.

2. Don’t Over Extend Your Resources

Burnout is a very real possibility for employees who are not balancing their work/home life properly, also for those who are working too long without breaks. This can also apply to other resources being over-utilized such as technology, meeting rooms, etc.

3. Group Similar Tasks

If a worker or team has several tasks to complete, and some of them are similar, working on those tasks first will lead to productivity improvement. When an employee has to switch tasks to something that is completely different from the first, there is time lost as their brain adapts to the new actions they’ll need to take. For example, shifting from sending emails to making social media posts would be a lot easier than shifting from sending emails to preparing a technical presentation.

4. Budget the Time Spent on Tasks

Especially for employees managing several projects at once, or leaders faced with continuously arising challenges they need to navigate, it is very easy to lose track of time when you’re engaged in a single task. A good productivity improvement tip in managing your time is to set an alarm to remind you that you may be spending too much time on something, which will ideally prompt you to set attention to the other tasks.

5. Take Breaks

Although it seems contrary to being productive, taking regular breaks at work can actually help you get more work done. Some studies show that working in 90-minute intervals is ideal for peak productivity. This is because it’s hard for humans to focus fully after this amount of time. Take short breaks, and try to vary what you do during them – meaning, don’t take a break from writing an article and then just scroll through your social media all the time. Try to fit some exercise into your breaks so you don’t become sedentary – even if this is just a quick walk around the office (or yard), it helps. Make sure you’re eating as healthily as you can as well. With appropriate breaks, you’ll notice a huge spike in productivity improvement.

6. Set Deadlines for Yourself

While this may seem similar to managing time spent on a project, it’s actually another way to improve your productivity. For many people, having a deadline to complete something makes them much more likely to work on it – if something needs to be finished “by next week” or something similar, the lack of urgency may see it relegated toward the bottom of your to-do list. Even if something has a flexible due-date, set deadlines for yourself and you’ll see your productivity go way up.

7. Complete Short Tasks Right Away

If you come across a task that can be completed quickly and easily, do it right then and there. It saves the trouble of adding it to your to-do list. If you quickly – but efficiently – complete all short tasks that surface as you see them, you’ll have a lot less to do at the end of your day and create a greater sense of accomplishment. When you are confronted with a lengthy list of tasks, removing anything, even the smallest item, can be very gratifying as you reduce the list.

8. Re-work Your Meetings

Many people dislike going to meetings. Today, when so many meetings have shifted to virtual sessions, employees are seeing themselves less and less engaged with the content of the meetings themselves. If you want to see productivity improvement in your workplace, seriously consider whether a task requires a meeting at all. Can it be achieved through emails, phone calls, or another means of remote communication? If so, do it that way. If a task absolutely requires several people to meet to discuss it, try eschewing the cliché meeting format in favor of something more varied and engaging.

9. Don’t Try to Multitask If You Aren’t Efficient At It

While multitasking can be beneficial, if you aren’t efficient at it, it can actually be detrimental to productivity. When you are not adept at it, trying to focus on two or more tasks can lead to diminished quality in all of them, which you obviously want to avoid. Unless you’re skilled at multitasking, stick to one task at a time.

10. Minimize Interruptions

While this is very dependent on your workspace, try to minimize the distractions. When so many workers today are displaced and working from home, distractions are an ever-growing obstacle. With demands from family, to greater access to personal devices, many team members are likely feeling the effects of distractions now more than ever.

A good way to do try and minimize interruptions throughout the work day to turn off notifications for certain things – for example, email. Set aside specific times to respond to emails, and otherwise don’t let them dictate how you allot your time (unless you’re waiting for important emails, of course). Turn your phone on silent if you’re able to, shut your office or workspace door if you have one, even announce to those you live with that you are “going to work now” and that a quiet environment is required.

11. Continuously Try to Improve

Productivity improvement is one of the business strategies that never actually stops. No employee or leader reaches a certain point or standard of productivity, and all of a sudden is at their peak and cannot improve any more. Productivity improvement practices can always be implemented and improved upon, and they should remain at the forefront of any worker’s professional mindset.

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The post 11 Productivity Improvement Tips appeared first on SpriggHR.