4 steps to build a strong team

It is every leader’s envision building a strong team but how many has actually done it and successfully driving and retaining the team? Leaders see each individual as key contributors and when built a team who is of a group of understanding people and they are willing to put in the extra mile to work, you are on the right track.

Understand and know each team member

It is essential to embrace the differences of the team. While taking the opportunity to understand each individual, you can help each member understand their strengths and the area which they can contribute to the team. Additionally, keep outings relevant on a monthly basis to have offsite interactions and this will give members an opportunity to appreciate each other and build a strong camaraderie.

Celebrate milestones and overcome failures

Always remember that your team member is not a robot. Human works with feelings and emotions, and they like to be recognized and appreciated with their hard work put in. Thus, be sure to spend time to give members the proper accolades that they deserved. Leaders should rewarded as deem when necessary and never take job performed for granted. Give them a shout out to make efforts seen by others.

In contrast, if the team has not performed well in certain area of work, take some time to salvage and conduct damage control. This will help everyone put their thoughts together to resolute any situations as a team. Never jump into finger pointing and lectures without understanding what went wrong with the work put in.

Value every individual

Everyone has their strengths and weaknesses and since it is put together as a team. Bring the best of each individual’s strengths for the team to make a stronger team. While you get busy with your every day’s work, never forget that each individual is unique in her ways, and every contribution to work functions and operations are crucial to the team. Valuing them will drive them to strive with the team. Make every day a purposeful day to attend work for everyone and it will be appreciated. I’m sure no one ever wants to come to work dragging their feet and feels devalue each time you see your leader. 

Holds effective meetings

Every meeting comes with proper agenda to address official matters but informal discussions must be held for the team members to share some of their day-to-day work concerns or even help to bring in new ideas to improve work processes. When they know that their ideas are being considered to be implemented, they will feel that sense of belonging and usefulness to help the organization improve

4 Ways to Make Meetings Effective

Let's be honest - As much as we know that meetings are important and key to communications for everyone, most of us hate attending them. Usually, what goes on at the back of your mind during the meetings are the the pile of documents waiting for you to be settled at your desk to be completed today. 

Below are some ways we have put together to ensure that meetings are valuable and productive. This will also make sure that uses every attendee’s time fruitfully.

Start Punctually

Waiting for the latecomers will only mean that you agree and able to accept their late coming. That's a big no no. If the content of the meeting is really important, latecomers will eventually be on time to avoid any inconvenience for others. Of course, the person who have arranged for the meeting has to ensure that the meeting content is worth everyone's time.  

Set out a clear agenda

Agenda of meeting should be set out clearly two to three days prior to the meeting and the time needed for each topic should also be indicated. Topics should be as specific as possible so that the presenter may also know the key pointers to share. This will help attendees identify the topics during the meeting. This also gives the presenters a better gauge of time to move forward if they are next in line.

Presentation (Visual & Aural)

While we may think that aural presentation is sufficient to catch the attention of all attendees, we want our content shared during the meeting to be clearly communicated. Presenters must always go into meetings well-prepared with presentation slides, write-ups and figures. More often than not, graphs and images help in shortening meetings when every one of us can comprehend so much faster in seconds.

Everyone to Contribute

Meetings are meant for attendees to contribute their ideas and input suggestions and polls, with regards to the topics presented. Not for people to attend boring presentations. Such session is critical and to ensure that participants are engaged and important decisions are made during the meetings. To be polite, you may want to get allow people voice out non-urgent thoughts after the meetings. 

Is being a good leader always superior to being a good manager

If you are given the opportunity to lead a team – how do you distinguish between being a leader and a manager? There might be sometimes that you wonder if you should place priorities on the development of your team, or in ensuring things get done right in the fastest time possible. Like what Peter Drucker said “Leadership is doing the right things; management is doing the things right”

The following are the main consideration factors between when you should use which leadership style

Your current team culture

If you have a team who does not like change, and who prefer to be instructed than empowered – the team requires a manager instead of a leader. Leaders constantly challenge status quo and often have the courage to take on risk and it would be disastrous if the team is constantly fighting against change.

A leader also has a tendency to have highly stretched goals and the audacity of the goals and would be disastrous if the team feels it is unattainable, with a lot of self-doubts.

Urgency of tasks and amount of resources

If the tasks at hand are urgent, a manager would be better than a leader because they are more results and tasks orientated. Managers would be taking the defined goals and executing by having a list of detailed plans – so the goals would be achieved by average employees in the shortest time.

Existing culture of the company

If the current culture of the company is also risk adverse and where the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) of employees and incumbents are strictly monitored – then a leader would not be able to excel in this environment as well. Imagine if a leader invents to define new paradigms, using his creativity to be constantly rejected his Chief Executive Officer (CEO).

Ultimately, one leadership style is not a superior form over the other. To sustain and to remain competitive with their competitors, companies should have a good mixture of transformational leaders as well as good managers. When companies are hiring management levels, they should also understand what is the current culture of the company as well as the needs of this team. This can help define the purpose on why this new incumbent is brought on board

The distinction between working for a leader and working for a manager

The fact exists that sometimes when employees leave organizations, they are not quitting on the company, but rather their bosses. This fact is often hidden under the piles of other reasons during the exit interview process, or during a new job interview process. People know not to talk bad about their previous employers as it might hurt the chances of landing their new dream role.

The following are the main distinctions between a manager and a leader.

The difference between controlling and influencing

Leaders influence, motivate and empower towards the effectiveness and success of the organization, whereas managers direct and control employees towards accomplishing that goal. Leaders see problems as opportunities and think of solutions, together with their team. They excite their people and focus them to solve problems and excel. On the other hand, managers formulate strategies, policies and methods and get their people to execute to reduce unnecessary risk to get the tasks done.

The difference in the personality styles

Leaders usually come with great charisma, and are not risk-adverse. They encourage risks and usually will go against “status quo”. Managers take on the more rational, realistic approach and are control problem solvers. Their main focus would be on how to accomplish the goals and coming up with a structure to attain the goals based on the available resources. Their personalities are more geared towards persistence, strong will, analysis and intelligence.

The people they are managing

The people the leaders are managing are followers. This is because leaders are very people-orientated and they have the emphasis on leading people. Managers, on the other hand are leading subordinates because they are mainly tasks and results orientated.

There is no right or wrong in choosing a leadership style over the other. It really depends on your current situation such as the people you are managing, and their preferred working styles. The best bet is to engage your current employees, and understand the urgency of situation before deciding that one leadership style is more superior compared to the other. 

How to Reduce Workplace Drama?

I’m sure you have witness someone climb up the corporate ladder in some point of your career. You thought to yourself that this person does not put in extra hours, has zero knowledge so how did the progression come about? You start discussing about this with your close colleagues, and discussions slowly become gossips.

We know gossips are fun, but this hurts productivity at workplace so how do we minimize workplace politics?

Be Transparent and encourage two-way communication

Management has to be transparent and encourage open communication between employees and the management. Rather than let your employees discuss about was the person should get the promotion, management should provide a strong justification of why the person was selected.  
 
Through having a two-way communication would also allow management to have first-hand knowledge about what employees are discussing and can stop it when discussions become gossips.

Communicate and Evaluate employees on goals established for them

Communicating the goals is more important than evaluating employees on the goals established for them. This will result in fairness, where goals are communicated so employees are aware of how their performance are being accessed in a way whereby they are able to earn the promotion. This would then help management provide a stronger justification of the recent promotion.  
 
Communicating and evaluating goals would allow employees to feel that their contribution matters. With a stronger direction, this would actively increase engagement and morale between employees. To facilitate all these, you should also have a robust system to track your employees.

Focus on your recruitment

You would want to ensure you are bringing in the right talents to the company to achieve aligned goals between the individual and the employer. No matter how much you try to prevent office politics through changing your company’s culture -  a fishmonger would always be a fishmonger... 

and at CVista HR, we can help to filter fishmongers out from your pool of suitable candidates for your consideration!

How to Retain The Generation Y Employees

It is not difficult to foresee one day when you are sitting in your office, looking through the different resignations in your company. No company policy has changed, but yet why is the resignation list getting longer. Welcome to the world of Generation Y employees – where motives, and attitude varies very differently from the Generation X employees.
 
Let’s face it. What might work at one point of time, may not work now. Many companies want to tap on the potential of the technological savvy Generation Y employees, but not many have managed to retain them.

Before we talk about how to retain Generation Y employees, here is a disclaimer that this article could be written by someone from the Generation X who thinks he is a Generation Y employee. We all like to feel young.

Here’s How.

We like it two way

Generally, Generation Y employees like two way communications. They like to feel empowered to make the change, where feedback is not only given in the top down manner but in the bottom up approach as well.  

Generation Y employees generally appreciate honesty with their management and would like to know how they are performing and how they can even be better. They love to know they are making a contribution to society, so perhaps you should be thinking of how you can give back to the society with the involvement of your employees.  

In fact, instead of continuing to read this article – why not talk to your Generation Y employees to understand how can you retain them. This will allow them to feel more empowered.  

We are as delicate as the Balancing Bar

Generation Y employees do not separate work from life. Career are so important to us now, that they became our lives – and that is precisely the reason why work life balance is important. Generation Y employees would love to contribute to the company, but not at the expense of their own family or personal time. Give them the balance, and they’ll do the best for you.

We love opportunities

Opportunities to learn, and have personal and professional development would usually excite Generation Y employees. This only means you need to have a very strong internal hiring program where you encourage transfers between department and progression internally rather than external hiring.  

Trust us

Companies who are very regimental are usually boo boos for Generation Y employees. Generation Y employees appreciate employers who trust, and provide them the flexibility. If you currently restrict content on your company’s internet or penalizing them when they are 5 minutes late, you might want to think again.

Keeping Onboarding Relevant

I can still remember the first day when I started work. Introduction of colleagues, and assignment of buddy was all in place – everything was perfect; except telling me where the toilet was. In my desperation, I had to ask my buddy where was the toilet. The rest of the story was pretty embarrassing.

I bet you don’t remember how anxious you were (which kind of explains the volume of pee I had then), now that you are very comfortable in your surroundings. This article can help remind you how important and critical it is to provide the necessary support and knowledge sharing sessions for new employees.

Onboarding programs are no longer just administrative work such as signing of offer letters. This article will share with you what is onboarding programs really about.

Why is Onboarding Programs Important?

Two words - proper communication. Would you rather have an effective onboarding program in place, or would you rather your current employees who are serving their notice period share their opinions about the directions and the culture of this company?

Onboarding programs can help new employees get their feet running by equipping them with information such as the key responsibilities and direction of the role, and how is their performance being accessed.
This allows: 

• Faster transition into the new job 
• Reduce lag time to get work done 
• Reduce of the time for your company to find your new employee’s replacement if he leaves 
• because of the lack of clarity about his job scope and environment…
  … and time means money. We get it.

Who should take charge of Onboarding programs?

Everyone! Why should HR only be responsible for this onboarding program when the operations should know the working culture and deliverables better?

How long should onboarding programs be?

If you think onboarding programs are just a day event, you’ll be shocked when we share with you onboarding programs are more effective if it is done in the course of 6 months. This allows better engagement of your new employees.

In fact, it would be even better if your onboarding happens the moment your potential future star employees accepts the offer.  

Pointers to take not of when setting up an onboarding program

• Intensity of the Programme
  In event if the transition and knowledge content transfer is too much for a new employee to absorb, always break them down in different phases for knowledge transfer.
   
• Buddy System
  New employee can be paired up with a buddy or mentor who can continuously help in keeping the work done in check and show the ropes. This helps to facilitate interaction between the new entrant and the existing employees.
   
• Better Understanding of Employer
  Don’t be surprised when you know there are some new employee who joins the Company without even understanding the Company’s directions and culture. Employers should share more information on the employer’s positioning and brand to ensure proper alignment.
   
• 2 Way Feedback
  Understand from each individual department what the situations are when new employees first join the team from both the reporting superior as well as the new  employee. These issues should be addressed the moment employees embark on the onboarding program.
  
   

Reference:
http://www.hrmasia.com/content/onboarding-hit-ground-running

Engaging Your Older Workers

If this is seen as a problem to you, it could be seen as an opportunity to your competitors. If you have thought that older workers are not able to value-add to your companies – you might want to reconsider.

Job redesign and salary reduction should be the least priority when they hit the age of re-employment. Instead, you should change your perspective and understand how they can value add.

• Older workers can demonstrate ability to support the companies with their industry with their business knowledges and experiences over the accumulated years of service.
• These workers can also serve as advisor and mentor to the younger workers so that the knowledge can be carried forward which also helps to close any information gaps.

If you are still not convinced, let me share this with you. The ageing population in Singapore is targeted to grow to a large number of 900,000 in the year 2030.

Companies will need to invest efforts to constantly motivate and engage them to value add to your companies.

It is a win-win as senior individuals are constantly looking to work beyond their retirement age to stay socially engaged and mentally active.

These are just ways to engage them:

Re-training/ Skills Upgrade

• Certain technical or hard skills may have been improved due to advanced technology. Giving the older workers the opportunities in training will ensure that they feel level with the younger workers.
• Recognize the effort of older workers sharing the knowledge, skills and competencies is important to the continuous improvement of the companies. 

Appropriate Work Environment

• Ensure that work safety is well taken care of for all ages, e.g. work-at-height limits 
• Offer wider ranges of work flexibility – work hours, job sharing, work-from-home 
• Ensure that hiring and employee engagement activities are suitable for all ages 
• Promote health and well-being activities to keep them engaged

Plan ahead and engage the workers today! This effort on your end is an investment for the group of people who are ever ready to continuously contribute to your company’s growth with your
employment opportunity you have provided for them.

Reference:
http://population.sg/key-challenges/#.V3-CVrh95Ag