Don't Re-invent The Wheel. The Traditional Employee Survey Still Rules.

How do you go about measuring employee satisfaction and engagement? Wee Pulse? Itsy-Bitsy Pulse or Rapido-Speedo Pulse? Big Data? Ginormous Data or Mega-Humongous Data? Artificial Intelligence or just Fake Intelligence? SurveySquirrel? SurveySnake? or maybe SurveySoothsayer? The choices are dizzying and unless you have focus and experience, the fads will inevitably lead to analysis paralysis. The plain truth is, traditional employee surveys are a tried and true research methodology that still work. The assumption being, of course, that you have a skilled survey writer at hand and a solid model for analysis of the results.  You have that, right?

Read why traditional employee surveys are still the gold standard.

Does Anonymity Matter in Employee Surveys?

I think it does and so does every survey taker I've ever talked with. Read my thoughts on the topic here.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/yes-anonymity-still-important-employee-surveys-george-gillies/

Is Your Parental Leave Policy Driving Away Top Talent?

Small businesses that don't accommodate families will lose talent to larger companies that do.

Employee turnover is too expensive for entrepreneurs to ignore. What small business leader has $15,000 to spare every time an employee disappears? How many have 10 hours to spend on new hire paperwork? Worse, how many can afford to wait up to two years for a new hire to reach full productivity? Turnover happens for plenty of reasons, some of them unavoidable. The truth, though, is that around 50 percent of voluntary turnover is preventable, according to research by Insightlink Communications.

Read the full article on Entrepreneur.com

Guide to Successful Employee Surveys

Employee surveys have evolved significantly over the past few years to become a critical component of effective HR management, regardless of what type of employee survey is used. In the past, many organizations viewed employee surveys as simply a human-resource driven initiative that gave their employees the opportunity to "let off steam" but had little strategic value. 

As a result, the results were often not regarded highly enough outside of HR for any positive action to be taken. It's quite a different situation today, with employee surveys now being seen by many large and small organizations as a major business improvement tool.

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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