4Cs Blog: Happy Employees = Happy Customers

Are You Helping or Hurting Your Team?

A common theme that runs through our research for clients, as well as our own normative research, is the power and influence that good and bad leadership has on our feelings towards our jobs. We can work for a ‘great’ company but if our direct supervisor or manager treats us poorly, that can be reason enough to quit and we know that replacing employees is a costly and disruptive consequence.

This is why people in leadership roles must be aware of their impact on their team and take responsibility for how they interact. In a recent Fast Company article by Hans Hanson, he explores the idea that people are guided by one of two mind-sets that control their thinking, decisions and responses. The type of mind-set you have will determine how effective or harmful your, or your boss’s, leadership style is on you and the people on your team. Identify which mind-set describes you or your boss:

Smile More and Engage Your Team

At Insightlink, employee engagement is our ‘raison d’etre’, which is why we are excited to share Gordon Tredgold’s newest post for 2015. He gives the simplest and most digestible advice on how to become an inspiring leader, something all leaders should aspire to be, because inspiring leaders create inspiring teams, which can achieve inspiring results!
Here are his top 4 tips to make you a more inspiring leader in 2015:

Office Etiquette Resolutions for 2015

No matter where we find ourselves or in what social situations, good etiquette is required. Good etiquette allows us to show our respect towards others, by respecting their comfort and their privacy. As the New Year approaches, improving office etiquette could be your workplace resolution for 2015 especially if you work with people who are prone to bad manners. Bad manners can wreak havoc and be bad for business because they display a lack of respect and negatively affect employee morale and productivity.

 Credible Leaders Bring Out The Best In Us.

In a recent Forbes article titled ‘Good Leaders are Invaluable to a Company. Bad Leaders will Destroy It’, Amy Rees Anderson explores the good, the bad and the ugly with respect to leadership. Anderson says that organizations maintain and grow their reputations when they strive to demonstrate high ethical standards and give their employees reasons to be proud of their jobs, their performance and their organizations. Credibility like this is built by good leadership, which is developed daily through regular and open communication. Good leaders make certain everyone understands the goals and vision of their organization and everyone feels they are an important part of the whole, where every job matters and everyone has input. Promotions are based on merit and competition is based on personal best and getting ahead. When leadership is credible, sincere and meaningful, the result is high morale, good employee retention and sustainable long term success. 

A Good Manager

Since one of the top reasons employees leave an organization is because of a bad manager, it’s important to know what employees want, to help avoid losing them for this preventable reason. At the same time these wants have to be considered in addition to what managers want, to merge all the wants together for a seamless positive experience for everyone.

In a recent article written for Small Business Trends by Rieva Lesonsky the qualities employees most want in a manager include:
- Ability to give honest feedback
- Experience in the field
- Trustworthiness
- Makes time for employees
- Collaborative

With elegant simplicity, Dr. Bob Nelson, an employee engagement specialist, brings the top 10 most important ways to motivate today’s employees to life in a slide show format. We hope you will enjoy it as much as we did but if you really just want the nuts and bolts, we have transcribed it for you below. The important thing to remember is workers may not need a pay raise as much as a personal thank you from their manager for a job well done.

One of Insightlink’s 4Cs of Employee Satisfaction and Engagement

When we first established Insightlink and were in the process of designing our “standardized” employee survey, we did a lot of research on the factors that appeared to motivate employees to feel positive and energized about their jobs. As part of that research, we could see that the idea of “commitment” was very important to understanding employees and what kind of effort they were going to be making to their employers.

Get to Know Your Team

Managers and bosses can be instrumental in developing and nurturing teamwork and collaboration but their success depends a lot on how well they understand their teams. It’s not always easy but if the boss knows the full picture about what’s going on and consistently gets honest constructive feedback from their staff, they can help their teams achieve a greater sense of cooperation that will allow them to outperform teams that lack good interpersonal relationships.

Gaining employees’ trust so they feel secure enough to be completely honest with their boss isn’t easy, so it was refreshing to find 6 tactics in a recent article from the December issue of Canadian Business.

Control

Employees who have a say in setting goals and decision-making processes feel more in control of their jobs leading to higher levels of engagement.

Telecommuting: Not just another employee perk
SHRM research shows that “91% of HR professionals whose companies offer flexible work arrangements, such as teleworking, have seen positive results on employee engagement, job satisfaction and retention”.

In a recent New York Times article titled, ‘It’s Unclearly Defined, but Telecommuting is on the Rise’, the typical telecommuter is described as a 49-year-old college graduate — man or woman — who earns about $58,000 a year and belongs to a company with more than 100 employees, according to numbers culled from the Census Bureau’s annual American Community Survey. By one estimate, telecommuting has risen 79 percent between 2005 and 2012 and now makes up 2.6 percent of the American work force, or 3.2 million workers, according to statistics from the American Community Survey.

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