How to Fix A Retention Roadblock: Low Engagement Rates

These 5 tips will keep your team happy, challenged, and invested in the work they do, which means they will stay longer, work harder, and improve the office vibe.

 One of the biggest factors affecting retention rates is engagement--how happy and satisfied an employee is with his or her work. Engagement is particularly important to millennial workers, a rapidly growing segment of the nation's workforce. According to research from www.gallup.com, 70 percent of U.S. employees are not engaged. That's troubling, because the same research shows that retention significantly affects everything from quality of work to employee turnover. No one can afford to invest in onboarding someone who quickly leaves the company. A recent study estimates that it costs between $15,000 and $25,000 to replace a millennial employee. Luckily, taking the right steps to improve employee engagement can benefit your business as much as your team. Here's what to focus on. Based on the results of its annual Survey of the American Workplace, Insightlink Communications identified a number of steps to maximize job satisfaction and engagement.  

Read the full article on INC.com

How To Make Employee Surveys Less of a Headache

Time and time again we hear from HR professionals that they dread the annual employee survey. It’s either work with some expensive consultant (and some of them are ridiculously expensive!) or try to do it all in-house with SurveyMonkey or Qualtrics and save the company a bunch of money (assuming your own time is worth about $2 per hour). Since 2001 we’ve been offering companies a better way. It’s all about fast and easy without compromising on quality. We’ve got the expertise, the goods and the know-how and we won’t soak you on the costs. We help companies of all sizes make sense of survey data and we can help you too. Let us show you how. 

Rock your culture. Keep employees engaged, impassioned and happy. Insightlink's 4Cs Employee Survey delivers the actionable data you need to make good decisions and build happy teams. Clients love us. Find out why.

33 Books Every Entrepreneur Needs on Their Reading List Right Now

Vacation time or busy season. Heat wave or comfortable living. Whatever characteristics the summer season conjures up for you, as a small business owner you're expected to tackle it with the same steam as every single other month of the year. It can also be a great time for reflection. For some, there’s no better summertime activity than to relax with a good book.

The following is a list of books that real entrepreneurs say shaped the way they do business, introduced new perspectives and essentially, changed their life. See the list here #theonething

Remote Working Tips and Tools

I turn on the computer and there they pop. The three Google Docs that I was working on yesterday now have my colleague’s comments appended. I chat with him in Slack to clarify what he meant. It only takes two minutes, even though we’re an eight-hour plane ride away.

Next tab is for Trello. That’s where we brainstorm ideas for our content calendar. I do it while my colleagues are sleeping, and they add ideas while I’m having breakfast.

Once we week, we catch up on Skype to get on the same page. It’s easy. It’s effective. And it’s flexible for everyone.

And we’re not alone in these habits. In the 2015 PGi Global Telework Survey, a whopping 79 percent of surveyed knowledge workers around the world worked outside the office. And the trend of working remotely – whether as an employee, an entrepreneur, or a freelancer – is only expected to grow in the next decade.

Naturally, the number of tools meant to assist in remote work is also on the rise. Dailybitsof.com asked nine remote workers what tools they use daily. Here is what they shared:

Japanese Workers Really Distrust Their Employers

A long economic slump has broken the once-unshakable devotion of the "salarymen."

Lifetime employment sounds like a great thing, but not if you hate where you work. That seems to be the plight of Japanese “salarymen” and “office ladies.”

Only 22 percent of Japanese workers have “a great deal of trust” in their employers, which is way below the average of eight countries surveyed, according to a new report by EY, the global accounting and consulting firm formerly known as Ernst & Young. And it's not just the companies: Those employees are no more trusting of their bosses or colleagues, the study found. By contrast, about two-thirds of workers in India and Mexico had a great deal of trust in their employers. 

The EY study confirms other research, including Aon's employee engagement survey and Edelman's annual trust barometer, and comes as Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has been looking to shake up Japan's hidebound corporate culture. The irony is that Japan was identified as a high-trust society by Francis Fukuyama in his 1995 book, Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity. That may have been true once, but Japan's long economic slump, which had already begun by the time Fukuyama's book came out, seems to have worn away that goodwill.  Read full report on Bloomberg

How a values-driven culture will help your business attract and retain top talent

Much has been made recently about millennials in the workplace, and with good reason: they are now the largest demographic in the workforce, and more than half are considering leaving their current position within three years, according to a 2015 study conducted by Elance.

These statistics can be alarming to business leaders attempting to build a committed and engaged employee base.

As a result, many companies are scrambling to implement targeted strategies that will attract and retain the generation’s top talent. The focus has been in the development of benefits and programs that speak directly to the oft-discussed ideals of millennials with regards to community involvement and positive social impact.

However, engineering an organization’s culture to attract a specific demographic is a dangerous game that could result in an unstable foundation. Instead, the culture must be driven by what the firm values, and must be rooted in its vision and business purpose. Read more on Globe & Mail

How would you define your company’s culture? A 4Cs Employee Survey from Insightlink can help you.

Engagement and Purpose-Driven Work - A Natural Fit!

Back in the days of the dinosaur, the Bob the caveman would leave home, go to work, and eight hours later bring home a brontosaurus for his cavewoman, Sally, to cook. That was his purpose – he was the hunter and gatherer.

In 2016, a few things have changed. Sally has joined the ranks of the hunter/gatherer, and, depending on who arrives home first, Bob is cooking the Bronto-burgers.
However, there are things that have not changed. Employees are still looking for a purpose to their lives. Consider the fact that employees spend 40 hours/week, 160 hours/month, and 1920 hours/year working, mostly away from home doing a job for someone else's profit. Their reward – a modest paycheck, time off when sick, time off for a little fun, and a gold watch upon retirement (if you’re lucky).

So the desire to have a purpose for all this time away from family – beyond the paycheck – is extreme in an increasing number of employees. “I know my job is to tighten this screw on this doohickey, and do it well, but why am I doing it? Why is it so important? That word – important – is what is paramount to these employees. They want to believe they are doing something important. Bringing home a dino for the family was very important but tightening screws, maybeeeeee not so much. Read full article on Examiner.com

Why Your Employees Pretend to Work 80-Hour Weeks

Whether you know it or not, your employees feel immense pressure to be committed to their jobs--and available 24 hours a day. 

You might, at first, be happy about this. What kind of founder doesn't want a hard-working staff? But the reality is more nuanced. While you might think your team is devoted 24/7 to work, in truth, most of them are finding ways to deal with your company's inclination toward workaholism. 

In fact, according to research published yesterday in the Harvard Business Review, your employees are likely to cope with the pressure to be perpetually available in one of three ways...Read on Inc.com

3 Dysfunctional Ways We've Adapted To The Hell Of The 24/7 Workplace

How do you deal with the “cult of busy”? That’s the term Erin Reid uses to describe today’s work-first culture in which ideal employees are expected to put their jobs first, work all the time and be constantly available to the boss.

In the June cover story of Harvard Business Review, “Managing the High-Intensity Workplace,” Reid and coauthor Lakshmi Ramarajan describe how workers adapt to these demands. It’s not a good look for anyone.

“Our research shows that being always available is actually dysfunctional for everyone at some level,” Reid, an assistant professor at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business, told The Huffington Post.

Recall the recent portrayal of employees at Amazon, where work culture is so bruising that The New York Times reported workers were crying at their desks. In the company’s warehouses, workers collapse from exhaustion.

It’s not just employees who suffer. When companies create a work-first culture, turnover is likely higher — people quit, and the cost of replacing them is high. Read more on Huffington Post

Employee Engagement the UPS Way

Does your team lack cohesion? Do you often ask yourself if your employees are even taking you seriously?

Would you like to transform your “me” culture into a “we” culture?

In his new book, Leadership Lessons from a UPS Driver: Delivering a Culture of We, Not Me, former UPS International president and one-time driver, Ron Wallace, reveals how to establish quality employee engagement that builds strong, unified teams for lasting business success.

Wallace knows a thing or two about leadership and team building: during a career of nearly 40 years, he served as a UPS driver for six years and eventually became the president of UPS International, leading more than 60,000 employees and overseeing the operations of UPS in more than 200 countries. Drawing on decades of experience leading one of the most well-known and successful companies in the world, in his new book, Wallace shares essential tips for growing the best team of inspired employees to make any business thrive.

In the book, Wallace gives several tips on how leaders can build a “we not me culture” and deliver exceptional results. Read more on Huffingtonpost

Why Trust Motivates Employees More than Pay

Everyone knows that a workplace in which people feel appreciated and valued, with more autonomy, is a more pleasant place to work than one in which they don’t. What has been less certain is that workplaces with high trust and a strong culture actually do better as businesses.

Now, with the release of a new study from ethics and leadership advisory firm LRN, we are getting closer to proving a link between the two. The 2016 edition of The How Report, provided exclusively to Fortune, has some surprising--and mostly encouraging--findings. The most compelling: Organizations deemed “self-governing”--defined by LRN as companies in which “employees are inspired by a desire for significance and encouraged to act as leaders regardless of role”--really do outperform their peers. That outperformance is measured by a yardstick that combines market share, customer satisfaction, employee engagement, and the longer-term sustainability of the business. Says LRN founder and CEO Dov Seidman: “What were once considered ‘soft skills’ are becoming the new hard currency.”  Read on Yahoo

Why Employees Quit

It has long been said that a company’s assets go up and down the elevator daily. Most employers tend to hire fast and fire slow, which is the exact opposite of what they should be doing. If your employees are your most important asset, then once you have made the decision to hire someone, you probably want to keep them in your employ as long as possible. In most cases, employees continue to learn and become more valuable to your business every day.  Read more on Herald-Tribune

How Technology Is Changing Market Research

Marketresearch.com asked a wide variety of market research professionals, executives, and consultants to explain how technology is changing market research. As you may suspect, we encountered conflicting points of view on this topic. While most responded positively, using words like “exciting,” “faster,” “cheaper,” and “easier” to describe the effects of technology on market research, a few others fell on the opposite side of the spectrum, citing reliability and quality concerns.

For a range of diverse viewpoints, read through the 23 different quotes from leading industry commentators. Read more on marketresearch.com

Top 10 Tech Solutions to Help You Overcome Your Engagement Woes

Employee Engagement: Top 10 Tech Solutions to Help You Overcome Your Engagement Woes: Given the severity of the employee engagement crisis, we thought now would be a good time to highlight 10 solutions that can help you engage employees at work.

Insightlink's Annual Survey of the American Workplace

The proportion of U.S. employees with more work than they can handle has increased steadily since Insightlink began conducting employee surveys over 15 years ago. This finding aligns with public health concerns that stress is becoming a workplace epidemic. Anxiety, exhaustion, burnout and fear of losing their jobs are reported with increasing frequency in Insightlink’s employee research. And not to forget that there is a clear correlation between high stress levels in employees and increased absenteeism, reduced productivity, higher levels of disengagement and excessive turnover. Read more on PRweb

1.2 million Walmart workers to get pay raise

Most Walmart employees in the U.S. will get a raise next month as part of the second phase of the company's commitment to higher wages.

More than 1.2 million workers at Walmart and Sam's Club will see a pay bump on Feb. 20, in line with Walmart's promise to bring its minimum hourly wage up to $10 this year. Entry-level workers, however, will still receive $9 an hour until completing an in-house training program. The average full-time hourly wage will become $13.38.

Walmart also announced a new paid time-off policy, making vacation days available immediately as they're earned and eliminating a previous requirement that employees wait one day before taking sick time. A new short-term disability plan will also take effect this year at no cost to full-time hourly employees. Read more on USA Today

Stay Connected: How Everyday Leaders Engage People

Right now -- as you are reading this sentence -- almost 70 percent of your staff is alienating your customers, keeping you from achieving your goals, or costing your operation money that could be used for more productive purposes.

Scary, huh?

What This Means For You

Creating a fully engaged team has a real impact on your results. Organizations in the upper echelons of employee engagement beat their counterparts in productivity, profitability, and customer ratings -- in some cases by more than 20 percent. They have lower absenteeism, less shrinkage, fewer accidents, and better quality.

The most actively disengaged are easily recognized. They undermine others' performance. Their discontent is readily visible, and they suck the life out of your organization.

Many of the unengaged are more difficult to see, however. They aren't necessarily unhappy, and they may even be meeting minimum job expectations. They just aren't providing the discretionary effort or sharing ideas that could make your operation stand out in the marketplace.

What You Can Do

Read more on HuffingtonPost

Workplace Stress: The Health Epidemic of the 21st Century

It's no surprise that workplace stress is a bigger problem today than even 10-years ago. In the 1990's the term work-life balance was coined to describe the solution for being able to "have it all" and manage it with ease. Time management courses popped up all over Corporate America in effort to help people balance their family, career, health and social life; promising a golden solution via setting priorities, maintaining a schedule and creating time boundaries. People everywhere jumped at the chance to bring solace to their life by way of this new buzzword, but rather than balance many found themselves taking on more and feeling greater pressure to perform better in all areas of life. The result...more stress. Read more on Huffpost

The American Workplace Is Broken. Here's How We Can Start Fixing It.

The way we work doesn’t really seem to be working.

 Americans are working longer and harder hours than ever before. Eighty-three percent of workers say they’re stressed about their jobs, nearly 50 percent say work-related stress is interfering with their sleep, and 60 percent use their smartphones to check in with work outside of normal working hours. It’s no wonder that only 13 percent of employees worldwide feel engaged in their occupation.

Glimmers of hope, however, are beginning to emerge in this bruising environment: Americans are becoming aware of the toll their jobs take on them, and employers are exploring ways to mitigate the harmful effects of stress and overwork. Yet much more work remains to be done.

Read full story on Huffington Post