The Science of Small Wins
Managing a remote team is about employee empowerment, not oversight.
Remote employees that excel are self-motivated, reliable and results-driven. As a manager, your job is to create a supportive environment that encourages employees to manage their own projects so you can focus on building a culture of trust and communication.
Here are seven things a remote leader must have to set their team up for success:
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.
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.
If you’re one of the lucky software engineers working at Google, you get to design your own workspace. And since everything the company does is done to increase productivity, you can bet this freedom to dictate how and where you work isn’t all just for fun.
You may not be a Googler, but if you’re lucky enough to work from home, you have the ability to customize your office and then some. Everything is in your hands, and you can set things up for maximum personal productivity.
While this degree of freedom can be empowering, it can also be overwhelming, especially when you consider that your performance depends on it. So here are some steps to help you out when customizing your home office to suit your style.
Unless you’re in the market for a new house, you’ll be limited by the square meters and style of your home. However, working within certain confinements can lead to surprising results.
Games tap into our inner desire to challenge ourselves. We love the thrill of scoring points and getting to the next level.
But games don’t always have to be a distraction from our everyday lives—they can actually make us more productive when used properly. Using a gamification strategy, you can help your employees get more done at work.
We’ve used psychologist Victor Vroom’s Expectancy Theory to explain how games can help your employees perform better. The theory includes three variables—expectancy, instrumentality, and valence—that describe how motivated employees are to do their job.
We broke down these three variables to help you design a gamification strategy that helps motivate your employees—instead of distracting them.
Google, Mattel, Apple, Disney and Harley-Davidson all have something in common: they started in someone’s garage.
Today, technology disguises the fact that your startup is operating out of your house, which buys you time before you need to start thinking about office space. You can hire a virtual receptionist, employ a remote workforce and implement enterprise-powered tools to run your business like an established company.
This is an amazing time for startups to grow without worrying about burning through cash for rent and equipment. But for many, there comes a point when the work-from-home lifestyle begins to stunt progress. There is no formula based on headcount or revenue to determine when you should consider a change, but there are a few telltale signs.
Here are three indications that it’s time to consider moving your team into a co-working space.
A few years ago you might have been scolded by your boss for goofing off at work. Nowadays smartphone usage seems to have become an accepted practice in the always-connected workplace. Whether it’s through two-factor authentication verification codes or JIRA SMS notifications, texts and push notifications have become a standard part of your workflow.
Even with the broadening acceptance of messaging and smartphone usage at work, the impact of this shift on one’s productivity is still unclear. Constant pings may offer essential info, or they can overwhelm you and reduce your efficiency. These outcomes surely differ by industry and personal preference, but it is up to you to figure out if this new notification paradigm is truly helping you get more done.
In this article we’ll examine how a notification-heavy workflow can impact and increase productivity, as well as learn about some of the most innovative implementations of text-improved workflows from platforms such as JIRA and RingCaptcha.
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.”
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).
Sending great gifs to your co-workers gives you more than just a laugh.
Humor in the workplace benefits:
Creating an office culture of humor can help you cultivate all these benefits. Keep in mind that humor can also go sideways fairly quickly, too. The wrong type of funny can lead to serious HR problems—there’s a thin line between goofy and unprofessional or between delightful and inappropriate.
You want your company to be a fun place to work, but you also want to make sure that it’s fun for everyone.
Here’s our guide on how to improve office humor that makes everyone feel included and unified.
Your team won’t stay together just because they work together. If you don’t give your team a chance to bond, you’ll spend more time handling workplace drama and politics instead of getting work done. You can use team bonding activities to encourage cooperation outside of the office and strengthen workplace bonds.Team building helps everyone get to know and trust their fellow coworkers, but you don’t build trust overnight. Your team goes through gradual stages as they grow from a collection of strangers to efficient collaborators. Psychologist Bruce Tuckman’s team building model describes three stages — forming, norming, and performing—to show how teams can become more united over time.
“I need to give my notice. I’ve found another job I’ll be starting soon.”
Stunned, my coworker sat not sure what to say. Julia was one of his best team members, and he thought she was valued and appreciated. Yet, here she was moving on to another role somewhere else.
What happened? Unfortunately, what was satisfying for someone a year or two ago, may not be so today. Fresh, exciting challenges from their early days on the job can grow to become stale, and boring once mastered.