Forget Kindergarten! I Learned About Workplaces From Batman!
Some people learned everything they needed to know about life in kindergarten -- but I learned everything I needed to know about life -- and the workplace -- from Batman! I'm not talking that Dark Knight guy; I'm talking about Adam West's Batman -- that fun, campy Batman from the 1960s. So slide down the Batpole with me, and let's explore! There Are Villains in Our...
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8 Qualities Every Entrepreneur Must Have
Lots of people dream about starting their own business, but wonder if entrepreneurship is right for them. Entrepreneurs come from all walks of life and backgrounds, so it can be tricky to nail down any particular formula for success. However, who better to ask them a group of already successful entrepreneurs? We asked a group of successful entrepreneurs and business owners for their...
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How to Create a Culture of Innovation
Every CEO from Connecticut to California urges their team to "think innovatively," yet few companies go the extra step to offer specific programs that create cultures of creativity. Often, the burden of promoting innovation falls onto the human resources department, as if innovation were some kind of magical process that could be initiated via a seminar or two. Of course, that isn't the...
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5 Thoughts That Crush Success
You'll hear that successful people think differently -- that they are somehow hard-wired for high performance. There's the notion that some entrepreneurs perfectly combine analytical and reasoning skills with optimism, creativity, problem solving and people skills. But successful people entertain the same kind of negative and self-limiting thoughts that everyone else has. What differs is...
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Creating Ethical Workplaces in the Sharing Economy
From time to time, I am guilty of letting myself get swept up in the wave of excitement that the sharing economy seems to generate. For example, when I spoke to Fyre CEO Tim Arnold this past January, I initially went into the conversation looking for a fight. Arnold had posed himself as an ardent supporter of the sharing economy -- which he refers to as the "gig economy" -- whereas I was, at...
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Why Employee Engagement Matters
An organization's workforce is the blood of the company, and an engaged workforce can create a competitive advantage. According to a report from Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, 71 percent executives believe that "employee engagement as very important to achieving overall organizational success." But why is this the case? Why are so many people concerned with employee engagement?...
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Become a Student for Life
This time of year always reminds me of when I was a student and the excitement I felt when finishing up another year of school. I was a good student; I loved school and that feeling that I had learned a lot. I also loved relaxing over the summer and looking forward to the possibilities of the new school year ahead. Once you graduate and become an "adult," as they say, life is never quite...
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How Informal Learning Can Enliven a Workplace
Traditionally, when employees needed to learn new skills, they took part in formal training sessions. Employees would dutifully sit for hours on end in cramped rooms, listening to instructors drone on and on about what they needed to know. Today, a number of innovative companies are actually building informal learning opportunities into their training strategies as a way to help...
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Is the Problem the Employee — or You?
A friend of mine just became the director of a small healthcare facility. She reports to an area director, who reports to a state director, who reports to a regional director, who reports to some V.P. of Look How Important I Am. Seriously, this is the Chain of Command. My friend, Joan, has a 25-year employee on her team -- a 25-year problem employee. The employee backstabs and undermines...
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Your Office Environment May Be Hurting Your Business [Infographic]
Did you know the temperature of your office can affect employee productivity? (Apparently, employees work best at about 22° C/ 71° F). What about the fact that certain computer monitors are correlated with decreases in typing accuracy? (We're looking at you, cathode ray tube monitors.) Don't confuse this for fear-mongering. We're not trying to scare you. We don't want you looking at every...
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Why Yoga Is Good for Your Company: Jason Garner's Surprising Business Advice
Jason Garner was once the CEO of Global Music at Live Nation. On the back cover of his new book, ...And I Breathed: My Journey From a Life of Matter to a Life That Matters, he looks more "handsome Yoga teacher" than "corporate bigwig." That's because Garner gave up his spot at the head of the rat race when the tragic death of his mother caused him to take a step back and reconsider his...
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5 Career-Boosting Things to Do Before Breakfast
Many of us probably don't think much about our early morning activity. We just get up and do what we have always done. But if we've never thought about it in great detail, we can't be sure that our morning routines are optimized to enable our peak productivity during the workday. We may have picked up some bad habits that actively inhibit our performance during the day, or we may just be...
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'If You Hate Your Job, You Hate Your Life': Sevenly's Dale Partridge on Valuing People Over Profit
"You can never complete this mission," says Dale Partridge, cofounder of Sevenly and author of People Over Profit. "This isn't something you achieve." Partridge is talking about what it takes to become a "people over profit" leader -- that is, a business leader who understands that their employees are people and that people should be valued over money. But Partridge doesn't mean to say...
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How Entrepreneurs Can Close Their Knowledge Gaps and Run Better Businesses
A business consists of nearly innumerable moving parts: the product/service being offered; sales and marketing strategies; payroll and budget concerns; personnel management; etc., etc. No one person can be a natural master of all these things. That fact makes entrepreneurship more than a little daunting: you may want to start a business, but once you realize just how much goes into creating...
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Don't Just Talk About PTO Benefits: Encourage Your Employees to Actually 'Get Up and Go'
Recharged, renewed and ready to work... There's no question that the advantages of paid time off (PTO) are recognized on a global level. In fact, recent statistics show that 91 percent of senior business leaders agree that time off from work can deliver countless benefits to employees, according to Project: Time Off. However, despite this widespread agreement, PTO sadly remains underused...
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3 Great Ways to Increase Output Without Hiring Any Staff
Hiring a new staff member is the obvious answer to the problem of resource shortages, but it's not the only answer. Sometimes, before you decide to hire a new staff member, it can make sense to see whether you can increase output from existing staff, meaning you wouldn't have to increase headcount. This doesn't necessarily mean increasing the working hours of your staff, as research shows...
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How to Make Your FinTech Company a Cool Place to Work
If you ask your typical millennial to play a game of word association around the topic of financial technology (FinTech) companies, the words "bland," "boring," "overly buttoned-up," and "no fun" will undoubtedly come up. The harsh reality is that most young professionals associate FinTech companies with cubicles, dark suits, and a stuffy, corporate atmosphere similar to...
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'Management Happens on an Individual Level': Managing Millennials
Last summer, the INSEAD Emerging Markets Institute (EMI), the HEAD Foundation, and employer branding firm Universum teamed up to conduct what these groups call "the largest independent study ever conducted on millennials." Surveying more than 16,000 millennials from across the globe, the study delves into a variety of topics, including millennials' fears, hopes, beliefs, and desires. Over...
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Open-Door Management: How 'Short Conversations' Can Make Big Things Happen
"I think that the ways of doing business in the past are long gone, especially with social media and employer interaction," says Bill Peppler, managing partner at staffing firm Kavaliro. "You might as well embrace it and encourage the conversation. Be ahead of it instead of being reactive toward it." Peppler is commenting on a particularly interesting section of Kavaliro's 2015 Employee Outlook...
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Should You Allow Your Employees to Moonlight?
With the U.S. leading the way in low-wage work and the lowest wages for low-wage work, the conditions are absolutely right for a boom in moonlighting as more and more workers take second jobs in order to supplement the low pay of their primary jobs. Studies suggest that about 5 percent of the U.S. workforce hold more than one job, so many employers should find themselves facing the question of...
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4 Tips to Raise the Performance Bar in Your Business
You've most likely heard that the majority of the modern workforce is disengaged: Gallup reports that only a meager 13 percent of the workforce is engaged. There is a very good chance, then, that disengagement is currently harming your business and leading to suboptimal performance. Given this fact, it would seem that addressing engagement issues could be a key to boosting your business's...
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How to Implement a Powerful Employee Recognition Program
Employee recognition is more than just a way to stroke egos: it helps the success of your company as a whole. According to a report from Aberdeen Group, 37 percent of "Best-In-Class companies" say social recognition tools boost collaboration, recognition, and individual performance, and they act as a key driver of employee engagement. Do you have an employee recognition program? If not,...
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Are You Overpaying Your Staff?
Deciding how much to pay your staff members can be a very complex decision, especially if you operate in a niche sector or you hire for niche roles, which leaves you with few organizations against which you can reliably benchmark your salaries. Similarly, small companies may run into compensation issues when they have multiple employees sharing roles multiple roles, or one employee fulfilling a...
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Claim Your Tax Credits From 2014: What Employers Need to Know About WOTC's 'Transitional Relief Period'
The Work Opportunity Tax Credit (WOTC) is "a Federal tax credit available to employers for hiring individuals from certain target groups who have consistently faced significant barriers to employment," per the U.S. Department of Labor Employment and Training Administration. "Target groups" include certain veterans, recipients of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), ex-felons, and...
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Why Recognizing and Rewarding Your Employees Matters Most
Many of us have heard the expression, "They didn't quit their job, they quit their boss." While this holds true for 3 out of 4 employees, we have to ask: aside from addressing a terrible boss, what can be done to keep employees in the office engaged, motivated, and inspired? Let's start by looking at what enticed the job seeker to come to your organization in the first place: 94...
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Growing Pains: How to Streamline Workflow in an Expanding Startup
Startups -- especially in the tech sector -- occupy a semi-magical place in the cultural imagination: we tend to think of them as little workplace utopias, small communities in which everyone wears jeans, lounges on designer furniture, and -- somehow -- disrupts the market while, at the same time, basking the day away in the glow of their super-hip offices. But the laxity of the startup...
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How to Manage Freelancers
"I offered Richard the service of my Free Lances, and he refused them ... thanks to the bustling times, a man of action will always find employment," Sir Walter Scott wrote in his classic novel, Ivanhoe. Scott (allegedly) coined the term "free lances" to mean people with no particular allegiance who would sell their services to anyone -- and thus, we get the modern word,...
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Reworking the Modern Office
If you're thinking about redoing your office, you have quite the task ahead of you. The vast, drab cubicle farms of the Office Space era still reign supreme: 40 million Americans are surrounded by modular walls as they work, and it doesn't look like that's going to change any time soon. Not only are workers who work within the confines of the cubicle more likely to get sick from bacteria...
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Ask Away: Do Company Dress Codes Matter?
Welcome to Ask Away, Recruiter.com's new weekly column! Every Monday (we know, we know: today is Wednesday. But usually we do Mondays!), we'll pose an employment-related question to a group of experts and share their answers. Have a question on jobs data you'd like to ask the experts? Leave it in the comments, and you might just see it in next week's Ask Away! This Week's...
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'Sometimes, Entrepreneurship Is Thrust Upon You': Guy Kawasaki on Art, Hard-Boiled Eggs, and Why Business Plans Don't Matter
Near the end of our conversation, Guy Kawasaki starts talking to me about hard-boiled eggs. If you had asked me just yesterday morning to guess what kinds of things the author, speaker, chief evangelist of Canva, and former Google advisor and Apple evangelist would bring up in our interview, hard-boiled eggs would not be on the list. But there he was, talking about hard-boiled eggs. Except, of...
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Reasons Your Employees Are Dashing for the Door
Roughly 2.8 million American people quit their jobs in September of 2014, according to CNNMoney. While the reasons why people quit their jobs are as varied as the reasons for why they take jobs, of few of those reasons are directly under HR's and management's control -- and all of them can be avoided, according to Susan M. Heathfield, HR expert from About.com. Some common reasons why...
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How to Create a Culture of Health at Your Office
I've written quite a bit about employee health and workplace wellness initiatives in recent months, largely because I think they're quite important. Health matters in a very basic and human way -- i.e., healthy people live longer and live better -- but it also matters economically and professionally. That is to say that healthier employees correlate to better business outcomes. See, for...
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The Problem With Complete Compliance in the Workplace
When you were hired for your current job, there's a good chance you went through compliance training, during which you were likely shown all the rules and regulations of your workplace, how to best follow them, and what happens when you break protocol. Understanding the rules of the workplace -- and how to work within them -- means bettering your understanding of where you work. It's...
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The Dos and Don'ts of Employee Distractions
What do we make of the word "distraction" nowadays? Employers generally used to accept as fact the belief that they should prevent employees from ever being distracted. Organizations took a cue from the old fast-food industry adage, "If you've got time to lean, you've got time to clean" -- that is, they saw not working as time wasted. Now, however, we're told that distractions...
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Creating a Cool Employee Handbook That Staff Will Actually Read
Few would disagree that the typical employee handbook is perhaps the dullest document in the corporate library, even less interesting than the company accident book. But perhaps we being too hard on the humble handbook. It's just a reference manual, after all, and with its faithful index and numbered pages it does that job perfectly well, doesn't it? Maybe not: a study from...
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Conducting International Business? Check This Out First:
Culture is a tricky thing. It can be hard enough to do business in your country, let alone to strike deals across international borders, where whole new minefields of unspoken assumptions, pregnant gestures, and deeply held beliefs await. Last May, I spoke with author and INSEAD professor Erin Meyer about the challenges of cross-cultural recruiting, but working with people from other cultures in...
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3 Steps to a Dream Employee Appraisal Process That Makes Staff Soar
The performance appraisal process, that stalwart of modern performance management practice, now finds itself on shaky ground -- but why? Two separate studies from Cornerstone OnDemand and Globoforce show that just over half of employers feel that appraisal feedback is not fair or accurate, and Globoforce found that people who think appraisals are inaccurate are twice as likely to leave their...
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'Fit-Friendly Worksite' Tips for Promoting Employee Health
Recently, the American Heart Association (AHA) named First Green Bank -- a bank that "promote positive environmental and social responsibility while operating as a traditional community bank" -- a "fit-friendly worksite."According to the AHA, this designation is reserved for "employers who go above and beyond when it comes to their employees' health." Looking at the workforce wellness...
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4 Work Arrangements That Challenge the 9-5
The standard workweek is falling apart. Flexible work arrangements (FWAs) are on the rise, and the traditional 9-5 routine is being challenged by generations who want (millennials) and need (gen. X) more flextime. Forty-five percent of millennials tend to choose work flexibility over pay; many are going the freelance route to facilitate this. If your company is looking to attract millennial...
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Practice What You Preach: Spreading Workplace Wellness Through Insurance Firms
Stress, as many of us know, can be a real monster. Among the havocs that stress can wreak on a body are headaches, depression, anxiety, Alzheimer's disease, obesity, and heart disease, to name only a few. According to the American Institute of Stress, work is the No. 1 cause of stress for American adults: 80 percent of workers report feeling stress on the job, and 65 percent of workers say...
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Do You Know How to Clone Your Superstars?
If you look at statistics on the predictive reliability of the hiring process, you'll find that the hiring process is, on average, about 50-60 percent reliable, if executed well. The point is that hiring is a bit of a gamble, and many would say that a 50 percent chance of success is unacceptable. Most employers should realize that, given the frailty of the hiring process and the hostile...
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How to Empower Introverts in the Workplace
The idea that extroverts alone should lead the workforce is slowly fading away. Susan Cain's book Quiet: the Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking and a wealth of research about how introverts do best in the workplace are actively reversing the myth that introverts are not as valuable to an organization as extroverts. Both types of people are equally capable of being great...
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Forget Rec Rooms: the 3 Pillars of Real Company Culture
Let's play a word association game: when I say "company culture," what words come to mind? If you're like a lot of newbies in the talent world, you might be thinking "beanbag chairs," "happy hour," "free food," or "massage tables" (if you're especially indulgent). But if you're like Emmanuel Tahar, CEO and cofounder of research firm Cognolink, a few other, less sexy terms come to mind:...
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For Businesses Big or Small, Employee Happiness Is King
Glassdoor recently published its list of the "Best Places to Work" in 2015. The company compiled two main categories: companies with 1,000+ employees (big businesses) and those with less than a thousand employees (small businesses). Looking at the lists, it's hard to ignore the rise of the tech startup: top contenders in both categories include Facebook, Apple, tech giant F5 Networks,...
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3 Steps to Creating a More Creative Workplace
If you work in any sort of creative industry (like marketing, writing, advertising, or recruiting, to name a few), you've probably dealt with a lack of inspiration. Writer's block, indecision, apathy, or a simple loss of focus can seem impossible to deal with in the moment. We can wait these hurdles out, or we can do something to spark the creativity we need to push through and get our...
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'Fail Your Way to the Top': Learning the Don'ts of Entrepreneurship
As a cynic, I gravitate to the negative. Maybe that's why I so thoroughly enjoyed MJ Gottlieb's How to Ruin a Business Without Really Trying. As you can probably tell from the cheeky title, this is not your average "entrepreneur's guidebook to success" -- this is a book all about failure, comprising 55 case studies that focus on "the most prevalent and destructive mistakes entrepreneurs...
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Why Your Office Health and Wellness Programs Fail
Office health and wellness programs matter. Every dollar spent on workplace wellness programs can reduce health care costs for employers by $3.27, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Health-related absenteeism also costs the economy $84 billion in lost productivity every year. The CDC reports that...
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5 Tips to Make Your Staff Excited About Coming to Work on a Monday Morning
You may be one of those successful, highly effective types who bound into the office on a Monday morning full of excitement and inspiration, ready to join an equally supercharged and hungry team. Good for you! You probably don't need to read any further; you're already golden. But given an 87 percent staff disengagement rate, it's likely that many of you preside over a workforce that...
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