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

Your Best Guide to Employee Engagement Surveys in 2016

Are you planning an employee survey for your organization in 2016? 

Insightlink Communications has expanded and updated their definitive research manual to help guide your survey planning and implementation process. It's based on more than 30 years of real-world research experience.

Topics covered include:

• Establishing Meaningful Employee Survey Objectives
• Effective Objective-Setting Questions
• Deciding on the Appropriate Research Methodology
• Employee Survey Questionnaire Design
• The Key Principles of Employee Surveys
• Employee Survey Best Practices
• Maximizing Employee Participation
• Data Analysis and Reporting
• Interpreting Your Results
• Employee Survey Action Planning

It’s free to download here.

The secrets and myths of staff motivation

Good management, money and free food have all been shown to incentivize small business employees. Which combination should you try in the new year?

The key to unlocking staff motivation has become something of a holy grail for employers. But unless they really understand what makes their people happy, and therefore engaged with their job, it remains tantalisingly out of reach.

Traditional drivers of employee motivation range from cash incentives to less tangible rewards in the form of praise and recognition from the boss for a job well done. Then there are the quirky perks, like bring your dog to work days, creative activities, and social events that could potentially translate into higher levels of motivation.

As to which are the most effective incentives, countless workplace studies have yet to produce a definitive answer. Read full article on The Guardian

Daniel Goleman's Reponse to Gallup Employee Engagement Survey

Pay gap between staff and bosses is affecting motivation, report claims

The growing gap between the pay of executives and the rest of the workforce is having a "significant" impact on staff motivation, a new report has warned.

A group representing human resources managers said there was now a "crisis" over increases in pay for executives in the UK's largest organisations.

A study by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) found that three out of five workers felt demotivated by the high level of money paid to chief executives.

More than half of the 1,000 workers surveyed said executive pay was bad for the reputation of UK companies.

Read more on The Telegraph

Why you need to avoid conformity in your workplace

If you want a company that pulses with creative, engaged employees, you need to avoid rigid roles and let them to assert their individuality.

Fostering diversity in your workplace is key to running a smart, innovative, and productive company. But diversity in race, religious creeds, and sexual orientation is only part of what a successful business needs.

Your company needs to allow employees to be themselves--unique individuals with a range of perspectives, talents, and skills that help them accomplish great things. If you are looking for a polished, rigid employee who can be easily typecast into a specific role, you're going about hiring and running a business all wrong.

Rob Goffee, professor of organizational behavior at the London Business School, and Gareth Jones, visiting professor at the IE Business School in Madrid, write in Harvard Business Review about how developing conformity hurts companies.

Goffee and Jones studied a range of businesses that support "self-expression, individuality, and diverse experience" in their employees and leaders. Workplaces that support individual authenticity have higher employee engagement, they found, which in turn improves the customer experience, drives creativity, and helps create a pipeline of leaders growing within the company. Read more on inc.com

How one company is thriving on a 5-hour workday

In May this year, Stephan Aarstol effectively doubled the per-hour earnings of every employee at his business, Tower Paddle Boards. Yet payroll didn't budge. Aarsol did this by exploiting the insight that, for startups, time is a more malleable resource than money. So instead of giving his employees salary raises, he reduced the company workday to five hours. 

Aarstol, you may recall, is the guy who froze during his 2012 pitch on ABC's Shark Tank, but still walked off with $150,000 from Mark Cuban. Today, he and his team of nine operate the San Diego, California-based online paddle-board business in a city where the unemployment rate is well below national average.

"Part of our brand identity to do things differently," says Aarstol. He wanted people to quit their other jobs and come work for Tower Paddle Boards. Read more on BusinessInsider

Nearly Half of Happy Employees Are Angling to Quit

Just because an employee is engaged and happy with their job, organization, pay, benefits, opportunities, management and other various work aspects, doesn’t mean they aren’t searching the Internet for a new job.

That’s according to the latest Inside Employees’ Minds Survey from global consulting firm Mercer.

The survey, which included responses from more than 3,000 workers who represent a cross-section of the U.S. workforce, found that more than 40 percent of employees who report being very satisfied with their job (42 percent) and their employer (45 percent) are actually looking to quit.

The survey finding upends the natural assumption that a satisfied employee is active, engaged and loyal.

“The survey confirms what employers have been seeing first-hand — a workforce in transition and, increasingly, one on the move,” Patrick Tomlinson, a talent leader at Mercer, said in a statement. “The new twist is that the inclination to leave is increasingly detached from employees’ satisfaction with jobs, pay and even growth opportunities. Employers need to shift their talent strategies to understand the modern terms of engagement from the most productive employees.”

Overall, about 37 percent of workers, regardless of whether they’re happy or not, are looking to leave.

Why do happy employees want to leave and work somewhere else? According to CNN Money, the survey didn’t ask the question and unfortunately, there doesn’t appear to be an easy answer. Find out more at Yahoo Finance

When 'presenteeism' rises, productivity falls

Due to poor workplace well-being, “presenteeism” is a phenomenon spreading across the globe.

It describes the existence of disengaged employees who physically present themselves at work, but do not actually complete or achieve anything.

Combined with presenteeism, depression and anxiety are now the leading causes of long-term sickness absence from today’s modern workplace.

The direct health-care costs and the costs of productivity lost to presenteeism can total up to 35 percent of salaries.

Research shows that engaged employees produce more and cost less. Eight different studies by organisations, including Harvard Business Review and the World Economic Forum, show a return on investment of wellness programmes of between 144 percent and 3 000 percent.

Wellness programmes should be seen as holistic approaches to creating high-performance organisations through establishing the right workplace environments and surroundings. Employee engagement and workplace well-being relates to all aspects of the work life.

So, the question is: if we know that good health requires more than just physical wellness and that employee well-being can have a big impact on business outcomes, why do so few organisations make a serious investment in it? Read more at Business Report