Aliens Among Us: Anyone Can Be an Innovator. You Just Have to Think Like an Outsider.
A few minutes into our interview, Michael Wade, a professor of innovation and strategy at IMD, asks me how I would define the opposite of déjà vu. The question takes me aback, partially because it's always a bit of an unexpected thrill when the interviewee turns the mic back at you, metaphorically speaking. But I also struggle to string a coherent sentence together because, well, that's...
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Don't Let Your Credibility Be Another Casualty of This Pandemic
Credibility and trust take years to build, but they can be undone in an instant. Once lost, they are really difficult — and sometimes outright impossible — to rebuild. We are living through the most stressful period of our lifetimes. A few fortunate people may be relatively unaffected, but in all likelihood, virtually everyone you know is feeling more stress than they normally do. In...
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'Like Holding a Yoga Pose for 24 Hours': Joann S. Lublin on the Challenges and Triumphs of Executive Women
While writing Earning It: Hard-Won Lessons From Trailblazing Women at the Top of the Business World, former Wall Street Journal career columnist Joann S. Lublin noticed something interesting. Among the 52 executive women with whom she spoke for the book, most were mothers. Among those who had become public company CEOs, the percentage of mothers was even higher. Lublin started to wonder:...
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Beyond Black History Month: Don't Limit Meaningful DE&I Work to February
There are countless African Americans who have had a profound impact on American history, yet many of their stories have gone untold or underappreciated, pushed deep under the surface of a white-dominant culture. If we want humanity to shine, those stories must be uncovered and celebrated every day as part of how we live. As we work toward that future, Black History Month provides an...
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Coworking Spaces Will Rise Again — and 4 Other Post-COVID Workplace Trends to Watch
Through mass layoffs, furloughs, and work-from-home orders, COVID-19 changed everything we knew about working in the city. For the first time, employees no longer need to live within commuting distance of their offices, companies no longer need to lease massive office buildings, and primary cities no longer have the numbers they used to. These trends will have a significant impact on the...
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Will My Employee Insurance Be Different Under COVID-19?
The COVID-19 pandemic changed the way we work. That, in turn, affects employers' obligations and abilities when it comes to employee insurance. Here are some things to keep in mind: Is Employee Liability Insurance Still a Legal Requirement? In the UK, the government advises employers to get employers' liability (EL) insurance as soon as possible. The policy should cover you for a...
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Using Nontraditional Health Benefits as a Cost-Effective Way to Attract and Retain Key Talent
The most valuable asset of any business is, undoubtedly, its workforce — particularly its key employees who strategize and execute the company's vision, growth, and success. Not surprisingly, today's top candidates make employment decisions based not only on salary but also on health insurance benefits. In fact, a survey conducted by America's Health Insurance Plans shows that 56 percent...
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2020 Was a Volatile Year for Employee Engagement. Can Employers Smooth the Bumps in 2021?
Gallup, which has tracked employee engagement levels since 2000, reports that engagement fluctuated more often — and more widely — in 2020 than any year on record. And you might be surprised to learn that it wasn't all bad. In May, employee engagement hit a record high of 38 percent. It hit another record high of 40 percent in late June. But it also had its downturns, falling to 31...
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Visionary Leadership: Developing Your Personal Problem-Solving Method
To be a leader is to be called in some way. Whether through strength of spirit or strength of the community you are part of, the vision is there. In ways great and small, you are asked to shoulder the burdens others can walk away from. For this reason, a leader needs a problem-solving approach that can be used for every organizational or individual challenge. Problem-solving can be a...
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Modern Business Doesn't Happen in a Silo: Using Transparency to Build a Better Work World
If there's one thing businesses should prioritize in 2021, it's transparency. Transparency is good for everybody. It leads to more efficiency and more diversity, and to a world that is more egalitarian and more connected. It's also good for business. As founder and CEO of a growth-stage tech startup, I quickly realized the power of transparency for my own company. My team has insights...
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We're in the First 100 Days of a New Decade. Let's Seize the Moment.
By now, we know that the business landscape will continue to be turbulent for some time to come. After the year we've just survived, it's clear that 2021 will bring additional change and pressure, and executives must be equipped to lead through a continuously shifting environment. If we take our cues from leadership experts and US politics, the first 100 days of a new era can make or...
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Neurodiversity: Paving the Way to Universal Design Inclusivity in the Workplace
Though these last months have been fraught with global challenges, we have seen some hopeful developments when it comes to diversity, equity, and inclusion. In particular, business leaders across the US, Canada, Australia, and the UK are providing more work opportunities for the historically marginalized group of neurodivergent individuals — people whose minds operate differently...
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How Do You Deliver a Consistent Benefit Experience When Your Employees Are Scattered Around the Globe?
The international working landscape, in which skills and expertise are shared across borders, has increased the need for globally consistent employee experiences. This is especially true now, in the work-from-home era, which has added another layer of complexity to recruiting and engaging talent. Benefits are often more important than job title, colleagues, or organizational culture...
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How Employees Might Be Working in 2021
As we enter 2021, our typical work life looks different than it did in previous years, leaving many to predict what will happen to the future of the office.Office WorkWith many offices forced to close over the past year, employers and employees alike have had to adjust to the trials and tribulations of working from home. For many, the return to the office cannot come soon enough. The office...
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Employers, Meet Humanity: How the Pandemic Created a White Space to Reinvent Your Company Culture
The new year is upon us, and now more than ever do we need a slice of humanity at work. The pandemic forced many organizations into a tailspin, throwing employer-employee relationships totally out of sorts. But this situation has also created a real opportunity to reinvent that relationship and foster stronger cultures and companies. How will your organization respond?You often hear words like...
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Making Remote Internships Work: 4 Tips for Success
Consider two statements. First, no matter what happens in 2021, remote work is here to stay. Second, successful companies know that in order to build resilient, renewable talent pipelines, they need to have strong internship programs.Put those two truths together, and we find ourselves facing a clear challenge: Is it possible for remote internship programs to succeed? This is a challenge we...
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Refreshing Your Compensation in 2021: 3 Trends to Consider
It's that time of year again. The weather is getting colder, and many business leaders like you are taking the time to review the past 12 months and determine if any structural and internal changes need to be made. With the broad shift to working from home, stricter budgets due to an unpredictable economy, and political and social issues brought to the forefront of the national conversation,...
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Making Mentorship Human: How to Succeed as a Mentor During a Pandemic
During a global pandemic, one thing is certain: Everything has to change. While major companies may be hailing the switch to remote work and the increased productivity of their remote workers, employees themselves are facing more challenges than ever before. Many young professionals are worried about losing their jobs, missing crucial opportunities to progress in their careers, and finding...
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The Compensation Question: 5 Tips for Handling Pay Conversations With Employees This Year
As we approach the end of a very long and very tumultuous year, many employers are bracing for the inevitable: questions from staff about compensation in 2021. While some companies have actually seen huge positive shifts in their businesses since March, others have experienced significant difficulty and uncertainty, which will likely impact annual compensations plans. Regardless of the state...
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Celebrating the Worker Bees in Nature and Our Own Organizations
As a living system, nature holds many lessons we can apply to our organizations. Ants and bees, for example, both provide excellent models of problem-solving and teamwork. While serving as a worker bee might not seem as glamorous as being queen, it is the worker bee collective, operating as a single organism, that ensures a successful hive. Bees represent highly efficient cross-training at its...
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Work Perks and Working From Home: What Employees Want in a Remote Workplace
From 30-hour workweeks to surprise days off, companies are rethinking work perks in the remote-first workplace. But are employer instincts and worker wants aligned? To find out, we at HotelsByDay surveyed 1,109 remote workers based in the US. As a service provider newly serving remote workers, we were curious to explore the differences between office life and working from home. We wanted to...
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Navigating the Search for the Right Insurance Broker This Open Enrollment Season
This open enrollment season is unlike any previous season. The coronavirus pandemic has managed to upend the US healthcare benefits market in the most unexpected ways. Over the last 9 months, it became abundantly clear that employees have not been using their healthcare at the same rate as they did in 2019. Due to the pandemic, elective surgeries have been postponed, fewer in-person...
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People, Planning, and Platforms: How to Build an Effective Upskilling Strategy in the New Normal
Skills, knowledge, and expertise are essential elements of any organization's success, and they require constant training, development, and refinement. That's why so many organizations have been reviewing their internal skill availability amid the upheavals of the pandemic. With the economy on shaky ground, the firms that thrive most are those willing to embrace upskilling as a key business...
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The Power of Belonging: The How and Why of Building Community Across a Modern Remote Workforce
When the pandemic forced a sudden shift to remote work, many companies feared productivity would decline. Instead, more than 90 percent of employers now say productivity has stayed the same or even increased compared to before the pandemic. While this lays aside the biggest concern most companies had about remote work, another problem is brewing, and it may be just as harmful as a drop in...
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Why You Need to Understand the Difference Between Praise and Employee Recognition
If, after investing a good amount of time and effort in a project, you got to choose either a generic "Well done!" ore more insightful feedback, what would you go for? Both types of comments can boost employee motivation, engagement, and performance. Based on my 20+ years of experience in HR, however, I feel confident predicting the vast majority of us would go for the second...
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As the Pandemic Continues, We Must Keep Our Core Values Front and Center
The Japanese business philosophy of kaizen promotes the continuous growth of all employees no matter where they are in the org chart. Consciously or not, many company leaders subscribe to this concept on some level when it comes to company culture. When you are intentional about creating strong growth and an adaptable culture, you position your company to attract top talent from all over...
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Reimagining the Corporate Work Experience: 3 Employee Engagement Trends to Watch for in 2021
Inarguably, 2020 has been a year of reckoning for corporate America. The compounded impact of COVID-19, political divides, social unrest, and constant economic uncertainty has forced company leaders to take a hard look at their priorities, people, and policies. As a result, the corporate landscape has shifted irrevocably. In particular, three employee engagement trends are beginning to...
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Managing Hybrid Teams: How to Keep Culture Strong and Productivity High When Employees Are Working From Home and the Office
The pandemic-driven shift to mass remote work has had its fair share of challenges, like a disrupted work/life balance and widening communication gaps. Despite that, many employees have come to prefer the flexibility of working from home over the rigidity of working from a shared office. At the same time, some roles will require a return to the office once doing so becomes feasible, and...
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Resilient Employees Create Resilient Organizations
"Resilience" is defined as "the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties" — and there has never been a time in the modern era when organizations have had to be more resilient than right now. The foundation of that resilience is built by a company's employees. Yet the same pandemic that demands organizational resilience also makes cultivating that resilience increasingly difficult....
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Traumatized by Your COVID Job Search? I Know the Feeling.
Hi, my name is Sarah — — and I suffer from COVID job-search PTSD. I do understand how challenging it has been for HR over this tumultuous period, but recruitment has broken somewhere and candidates are feeling the pain. So settle in for a spicy vent about my recent recruitment trauma. A Little About Myself I was recently unemployed for nine months. Feeling jaded by my job loss,...
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How's Your Team Really Doing? 5 Ways to Support Employee Mental Health
For many people, the pandemic is not only a threat to physical health, but also a mental health risk. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, three times more people are struggling with anxiety disorders this year than last year; when it comes to depression, the numbers this year are four times greater than they were in 2019. Earlier this summer, we at CHG Healthcare...
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Remote Work Is Here to Stay. This Is How You Can Protect Your Company Culture.
When remote workplace technology came on the scene, some predicted it would quickly catch on and make the daily commute obsolete. It didn't. In fact, according to the Pew Research Center, only about 7 percent of the US workforce had the option to work remotely in 2019. The pandemic changed that overnight. In an interview published in July 2020, Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom said 42...
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Open Enrollment 2020: A Complicated Shot at Reinvention
Open enrollment is a complex process under even the best of circumstances. In a pandemic year, it's causing employees and employers alike massive headaches — but it's also offering us a shot at reinvention. Employees were already big on their benefits before COVID-19 arrived on the scene. A February 2020 survey by Willis Towers Watson found that 37 percent of employees would prefer an...
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4 Ways to Tackle Absenteeism in a Flexible PTO Framework
Employee absenteeism can severely damage productivity and culture in organizations with flexible paid time off (PTO) if not tackled at the right time. The good news is there are ways to protect the spirit of your PTO policy without having to stand by and watch your employees abuse it. The first step is to invest in a system that helps you create a time-off policy, enforce it, and track it...
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Feedback Avoidance Makes Us Mediocre: Steve Herz on Why You Shouldn't Take 'Yes' for an Answer
Most of us are pretty good at our jobs, according to Steve Herz, president of The Montag Group, a sports and entertainment talent and marketing consultancy. The problem, however, is that we probably don't hear about the ways in which we're not so good. "The world will pepper you with these false yeses, and you'll get stuck in this vortex of mediocrity, because you're not getting enough...
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Create an Apprenticeship Program for Your Company From Scratch With These 9 Steps
Jobs without people. People without jobs. There's a mismatch between the skills people have and the skills companies need. Back in February of this year, ManpowerGroup reported US talent shortages were at a 10-year high, with more than two-thirds of employers struggling to fill positions. That situation is unlikely to have eased during the pandemic. Meanwhile, from the employee's...
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Companies Settle Into New Normal With Focus on Working Parents
What do you do when you're on a Zoom meeting and someone's child suddenly pops up on the screen? It's bound to happen in this new reality, where parents are forced to run day cares and remote classrooms while keeping up with professional duties. And these aren't the only employees with caregiving responsibilities; many are also caring for parents or spouses. This new normal is something...
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Overwhelmed? Overstretched? Over It? Take Back Control With These 4 Strategies
"I'm currently trying to hold plank during a conference call so I can 'work out' today." "I'm going to be a few minutes late joining our meeting. I have to finish the lesson on the five senses with my kindergartner." "I just yelled REPEATEDLY 'Just carry the one! Just carry the one!' to my daughter while I was teaching math. And clearly 'teaching' is a stretch. Do you think this...
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Social Distancing Doesn't Have to Lead to Distanced Employee Relationships
Before March 2020, no one had even heard of "social distancing." Fast forward seven months, and it's all anyone can talk about. According to Statista, Google searches for "social distancing" increased 100-fold by mid-March, and I imagine searches will spike again now that many locales are reinstating COVID-19 restrictions due to significant rises in cases. Over the summer, there was a...
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What Side of History Will You Be On? 5 Remote Work Predictions to Help You Get Ahead in 2021
In every segment of the economy, from schools and nonprofit organizations to professional services and tech companies, the understanding of where people can and should work has shifted dramatically. Unless Elon Musk invents a time machine, workers will never go back to the office at the same levels as before COVID-19. Before the pandemic, only 5 percent of the American workforce worked...
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Doing More With Less: How to Grow Your Business With the Staff You Already Have
As a leader, you're a visionary. You may use terms like "cat-herder," "jack-of-all-trades," and "superstar" to describe yourself. However, just because you can accomplish practically any and every function necessary for the continued operation of your emerging enterprise, that doesn't mean you should. Ideally, leaders should spend the bulk of their time and energy doing that which only...
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Dealing With Employee Feedback: 13 Steps to Take
Welcome to Recruiter QA, where we pose employment-related questions to the experts and share their answers! Today's Question: So you've solicited employee feedback — now what? What steps should an organization take once employees have spoken up? These answers are provided by Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invite-only organization composed of the world's most successful...
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3 Reopening Lessons HR Leaders Can Learn From College COVID Outbreaks
College campuses are becoming the newest hot spots for COVID-19 outbreaks. While some argue about who gets the blame — students, administrators, or conflicting public health guidelines — there are valuable lessons any organization can learn from the experiences of American schools when it comes to reopening and avoiding heavy liabilities. (This article is not meant to serve as legal...
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Diverse Hiring Isn't Enough: The 4 Pillars of Becoming an Anti-Racist Organization
This year has been challenging — to say the least — in many, many ways, from a global pandemic exposing inequities in healthcare, education, and working conditions to renewed attention on police brutality leading to calls for an end to systemic racism. There is barely an area of life that has not been touched by these events, and that includes the workplace. There has been a lot of...
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New Study Finds Gig Work May Serve as a Social Safety Net
No one wants to find themselves staring down the barrel of a pink slip — just ask the tens of millions of Americans who lost work this past spring as the COVID-19 pandemic hit. New research, however, suggests the gig economy may be able to take some of the sting out of unemployment for many workers. In "Gig-Labor: Trading Safety Nets for Steering Wheels," authors Vyacheslav Fos...
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Leaders, It's Time to Unlearn the Skills That Made You Successful
As a leader, you've spent years — or decades — learning and honing the skills and characteristics that make your leadership effective. When circumstances change — as they very much have in the age of COVID — you may quite naturally reach for the very same set of skills you've used all along. This might not be the best approach. As a former Fortune 15 executive, I know from...
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Beyond the Pandemic: Finding Opportunities to Create Introvert-Friendly Workplaces
Keeping people engaged, focused, and able to perform has become even more urgent in these challenging times of the pandemic and economic and social unrest. Organizations can look at this period as an opportunity to make long-overdue workplace changes. Remote work, for example, has succeeded in ways many organizations never imagined. Team leaders can reach out in new ways to their team...
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Build Employee Loyalty in 4 Steps: Lessons From Southwest Airlines
Southwest Airlines prides itself on never having had to lay off employees in its 49-year history, and despite the rough weather it is battling due to the pandemic, Chairman and CEO Gary Kelly said there's no plan for pay cuts or involuntary furloughs this year. This is just one example of Southwest's many people-first policies, which have been the main driver of the company's success. At...
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