Topic: Leadership + Management

Leadership + Management | By Tom Murphy,

Forget About Ping Pong! Employees Want Career Development.

Not every employee on your team is interested in taking on more responsibility, moving up the food chain, or even learning new skills. But you can bet your best and brightest are.

Often, these are the same people you worked really hard to get and have invested a significant amount of time and resources into. So how do you make sure those career-driven employees view your company as a viable, long-term option rather than a short-term stepping stone or resume booster? If you have clear and visible career paths in place, you’re definitely on the right track toward better employee retention.

Make sure your new hires know about these opportunities from the get-go. As time goes on, discuss where and how your team members fit into the bigger picture and ways they can work toward selected goals. Even better if you talk about these things outside the context of review time.

Tip: The more you get people thinking about the possibilities available to them within your organization, the less likely they will be to start looking for opportunities elsewhere.

If you’re running a smaller company, or one with very low turnover, new positions and promotions may not be readily available. That’s okay. You can still give your employees some exciting personal and professional development options through one or more of the following:

  • Create a career mentorship program
  • Offer cross-training across departments
  • Support employee education and skill building
  • Provide opportunities to work on new projects
  • Solicit input and participation on company initiatives
  • Encourage informational interviews and job shadowing
  • Allow staff to attend professional conferences and events
  • Consider tuition reimbursement for career-related classes and degrees

Research shows that employees rank career development and growth high on their priority list. If it’s not high on your priority list, maybe it’s time you moved it up a notch.

Bottom line: A dead end job isn’t going to entice career-motivated individuals to come on board or stick around, which will eventually end up affecting that other bottom line. Yours.

Running into challenges with employee engagement, turnover, and retention? We’ve got ideas to help you address these issues and more. At Sonus, we build cost effective, long-lasting employee benefits strategies to keep your business— and your employees— in optimum health.

Culture & Community | By Tom Murphy,

What Does Leadership Have to do With Employee Turnover?

Good employees are hard to find. Great employees are even harder to come by. When one of them leaves, it hurts. And we’re not just talking about your feelings.

Employee turnover hurts productivity, morale, and your bottom line. Busy Human Resource managers end up with more work on their already full plates in addition to dealing with the cost and effort that goes into hiring and training someone new. All of this can be even more aggravating when you thought you’d hired that perfect fit.

The thing is, even the most dedicated employee will consider leaving under the right circumstances.

It’s often said that employees don’t leave bad positions. They leave bad managers. If you want to hold onto your most creative and capable team members, you need to provide them with one critical incentive.

Inspired Leadership

Go-getters like other go-getters. If you hire someone for their awesome skills, outgoing personality and can-do attitude and then place that excited new hire with a negative boss or in a stagnant department, the honeymoon won’t last very long.

Even if they truly love the company product, goals and/or mission, your gold-star employees will soon feel disillusioned if they aren’t given the tools and the leadership necessary to succeed.

So what does inspired leadership look like? Let’s break it down to 10 key leadership attributes. Effective leaders:

  • Lead by example
  • Are open to new ideas
  • Empower staff to succeed
  • Make themselves accessible
  • Create an inspirational vision
  • Provide guidance and support
  • Communicate openly and often
  • Trust their teams and processes
  • Recognize and reward hard work
  • Value their employees as people

In this kind of environment, most employees will feel supported and successful. In addition to giving you their best and sticking around for the long haul, they may even refer other fantastic people to your team.

If there’s a lack of organizational or team leadership, the very same people in the very same jobs will have a very different experience. Instead of being excited about working for you and inspiring talented friends and colleagues to join them, they’ll be asking their friends about their workplace cultures and leadership styles. And potentially jumping ship.

Don’t let lackluster leadership be the reason your hard-earned hires leave. Commit to great leadership and your employees will be more committed to you.

 

Already have great leadership in place? Awesome. Do your employee benefits live up to the same high standards? Recruiting and retaining employees is easier when you can proudly offer a comprehensive benefits plan that makes your team members feel as valuable as they are.

At Sonus, this is what we do for clients throughout the Midwest every single day because we believe Happy Teams are Productive Teams. Get in touch to see how we can help your organization become a local employer of choice.

 

Leadership + Management | By Sonus Benefits,

WEBINAR: Marketing ROI – What’s Your Strategy – 2/22

To register for this webinar:
CLICK HERE
Password: RIO0222

Join Glenn Smith of World Synergy for a special marketing strategy webinar that will help you in Identifying your customer, recognizing your added value, or value proposition, develop a marketing roadmap with checkpoints to evaluate successes and misses.

Glenn reinforces the importance of an eStrategy process and tracking your resources with an attribution model.

 

February 22, 2017

12:00 pm to 1:00 pm  Eastern

11:00 am to 12:00 pm Central

10:00 am to 11:00 am  Mountain

9:00 am to 10:00 am  Pacific