People Management

Here's how to manage, build and grow your team in a human and effective way.

We'll give you concrete and unconventional tips from the most innovative companies and backed by the science of what motivates people.

Start here with our management guide and how to take back your work day.

How to Motivate Your Female Workforce After Maternity Leave

September 5, 2017 by Kaitlin Macholz Leave a Comment

This is a guest post from Kristen Craft, VP of Marketing at Ovia Health.

Every loss of talent is a blow to a team. Companies spend time and resources to recruit the best people, incorporate them into the team, and rely on their skill and drive to make the company the best it can be. When great team members leave, it hurts.

In particular, a lack of support after maternity leave can lead to major talent losses at a company. According to a study by KPMG, global companies spend up to $47 billion recruiting and training new team members to replace women who leave after having a baby.

Motivation after Maternity Leave

There’s no way this is sustainable for business or successful for team building. But it’s avoidable if you take the right steps.

New Approaches to Teaching Teamwork Skills

August 29, 2017 by Meaghan Murphy Leave a Comment

It’s no secret that AI will change the job market. An estimated 10.5 million jobs are at “high risk” of getting replaced due to automation and new technology, and 80% of employees are concerned about job loss due to AI.

But instead of panicking, we should be adapting.

Teamwork skills

According to an Atlassian report, teamwork is the most important skill for the future workplace. This report found that “90% of companies are confronting problems so complex that teams are essential to solving them.” AI can replace a human in pure computing power or in data analysis, but it can’t replace the magic that happens when you and your team learn to work together and really trust each other.

How to Make the Most of Your Summer Intern

July 25, 2017 by Loni Klara 1 Comment

Every year, a slew of young college students swarm your office looking completely clueless. Though they’re meant to help you and your colleagues out for a season, sometimes it feels like it’s more work to train them than it’s worth.

With proper procedures in place, training interns can be smooth and save you time. They’re in the office to make your job easier, not harder. But because most interns have zero work experience, it’s up to you to show them how things work.

Productivity increases when everyone knows the optimal way to complete their tasks. Train your summer interns the right way so you can relieve some of your workload and reap additional benefits down the road when you bring some of them back as pre-trained employees.

Why good interns make good companies

Companies generally hire interns once the workload becomes overwhelming. But a good internship program serves more purposes than the immediate relief of pressure for current employees.

A coveted internship program is the first step in attracting the best job candidates. Successful interns return as full-time employees down the road, giving the companies a direct ROI and a win-win situation for both students and employers.

A Universum survey including over 65,000 undergraduates found that 51% of respondents considered full-time employment opportunities to be the most important value of an internship. Furthermore, the study found that employees who started out as interns had higher retention rates.

4 Subtle Signs Your Employee is Looking for a New Job

June 20, 2017 by Sasha Rezvina Leave a Comment

You come into work, thinking it’s going to be just another day in the office. You have a friendly chat about your weekend with the office manager while pouring yourself a hot cup of coffee. You make your way over to your desk, and just as you start looking through your email, a nervous employee pops their head in and asks for a minute of your time.

At this point, the next sentence comes as no surprise: “I’m giving my two-weeks notice.”

employee-retention

Job-hopping has become the norm. While fifty years ago, people held positions for ten or more years, today, workers only average about four years at each job. And the stigma associated with switching jobs has also decreased. Employees that spent less than a few years at a job used to be considered flighty—now they’re considered ambitious and ahead of the curve.

The odds are stacked against you, but all hope isn’t lost when it comes to employee retention.

While some clues will tip you off right away—such as too many “doctor’s” appointments, or employees coming in dressed suspiciously well—most of the time, the signs that your employees are job-hunting are considerably more discreet. If you learn how to pick up on these subtle cues, you can nip this problem in the bud and retain some of your most valuable employees.

Here’s how to spot when employees are looking for a new job (and what you can do about it).

Your Employees Lie About Their Motivations — So What’s a Manager to Do?

April 3, 2017 by Jonathan Figliolino Leave a Comment

Employees often say that the best way to motivate them is with a raise. But that’s not really the truth. Only 20% of employers in North America say that a pay raise drives higher levels of performance. Most of your employees are effectively lying if they say that more money will make them a better worker.

We’re all guilty of hiding what really motivates us. But our internal desires are often very simple to identify.

We all have basic human needs that get to the root of what truly motivates us. The Self-Determination Theory states that people have three basic needs—autonomy, relatedness, and competence.

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Autonomy is the freedom for employees to choose what to work on and when to do it. Relatedness is the need to have close relationships with team members. Competence is the desire to master challenging projects.

As a manager, if you can meet these universal needs, your employees will grow and thrive within your company. We’ll discuss these needs to show how you can empower your team to succeed.

The State of Human Resources (Before I Done This)

March 27, 2017 by Jackie Cohen Leave a Comment

Human resources needs a swift kick in the butt. I say this based on experience — I’ve done a lot of back-office work while running TypeFrag, Carbonmade and other companies. I’ve set up and managed payroll, benefits, and on-boarding of employees more often than I care to remember. It’s always a painful process that you put off to the last minute because you just don’t want to deal with it.

Remote employees feel closer when you can offer them perks.

Jeff Bezos’s Peculiar Management Tool for Self-Discipline

February 14, 2017 by Walter Chen 5 Comments

The modern workplace’s vogue is informal information exchange. We sit in open floor plan offices so that we can spontaneously collide, chat, and collaborate. An office setup for generating ideas can be fizzy and energizing, though when sparks aren’t flying, the colliding can be noisy and distracting.

Jeff Bezos takes a totally different approach to management, far from that madding crowd. He has a contrarian management technique that’s peculiarly old school — write it down.

jeff bezos
In senior executive Amazon meetings, before any conversation or discussion begins, everyone sits for 30 minutes in total silence, carefully reading six-page printed memos. Reading together in the meeting guarantees everyone’s undivided attention to the issues at hand, but the real magic happens before the meeting ever starts. It happens when the author is writing the memo.

The Dangers of Knowledge Hoarding

November 22, 2016 by Georgina Parfitt Leave a Comment

Just like the poor souls on Hoarders, you may not realize you have a problem.

Think of all those little times in the day when you stop what you’re doing to ask “Emma, how does the copy machine work?” or “Bryan, how many days have you taken off this month?”

They seem like small-fry problems, but they are actually issues of employee empowerment. You stop, gather the information, and move on. But they all add up to a huge productivity drain for you and your company, for one single reason: knowledge hoarding. Information is stored in particular places, and particular people are responsible for it.

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Knowledge hoarding is normal but dangerous. Here’s why:

How to Burst Through Road Blocks To Maximize Your Team’s Productivity

September 27, 2016 by Willa Rubin Leave a Comment

Naming every minute road block—and then taking the time to fix them—makes your team more efficient and helps with team productivity.

team productivity

It sounds cumbersome, but resolving issues as they arise means faster problem-solving overall. Agile developers do this. They call road blocks “blockers,” and their teams grow revenue 37% faster, and their profits are 30% higher than non-agile teams.

Put simply, encountering blockers is great for teams. It’s a simple idea that any team can borrow from, but you need a process and tool to do it.

That’s why we’re adding “blockers” to our “done lists” here at I Done This. Putting all blockers in one place means that team leaders can help those who need it quickly. It also means that individuals can reflect on their own blockers, and see if they point to a greater issue that needs resolving.

All teams can benefit from using blockers to their advantage. Here’s what it can do for your team.

A PM’s Guide to Managing Your Team’s Project Roles with I Done This

September 20, 2016 by Sasha Rezvina Leave a Comment

Over half of all managers in the US are concerned about their team’s time management skills, according to an Institute for Corporate Productivity study.

As your employees’ heads are tucked behind computer screens and they’re clacking away on the keyboard, it seems near impossible to know how they’re spending their time. Are they in a private Slack channel chatting away about the new hire, or are they working? Should the project you assigned Linda take as long as it has? And if you don’t know what your local employees are up to, you can forget about getting insight into your remote employees time management habits.

In the internet-driven workplace, transparency feels like a pipe-dream. Not only do you have no way of telling whether your employees are slacking off, but you can’t even tell if hard-working employees are being tripped up by obstacles outside their control. The natural response to this issue is to micromanage and hover over their shoulder, but you want to empower your employees in their project team roles, not control them.

I Done This gives your whole team transparency without any of the negative side-effects. Here’s how.

People Management

How to Motivate Your Female Workforce After Maternity Leave

New Approaches to Teaching Teamwork Skills

How to Make the Most of Your Summer Intern

Why good interns make good companies

4 Subtle Signs Your Employee is Looking for a New Job

Your Employees Lie About Their Motivations — So What’s a Manager to Do?

The State of Human Resources (Before I Done This)

Jeff Bezos’s Peculiar Management Tool for Self-Discipline

The Dangers of Knowledge Hoarding

How to Burst Through Road Blocks To Maximize Your Team’s Productivity

A PM’s Guide to Managing Your Team’s Project Roles with I Done This

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