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Performance Management Isn’t “touchy Feely.” Here’s Why.
At Team Excellence, we help organizations manage employees and relationships. That means we get into the “people stuff” that some in the business world refer to disparagingly (and incorrectly) as touchy-feely.
The behavioral sciences are often referred to as “soft sciences,” especially in regard to management disciplines, while finance, accounting, manufacturing, engineering, information technology, etc. are considered “hard sciences.” Because psychology, sociology, and other studies of human behavior and interaction are not as precise or black and white as their hard science counterparts, they haven’t been considered necessary or important to how one actually runs an organization.
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Traditionals, Boomers, Millennials: How technology forms the next generation
Experience can shape our interpretations of reality, influencing our view of what we believe to be true. If you consider the collective experiences of a generation, could it be reasonable to believe that these have influenced that generation’s worldview.
Take, for instance, a generation that witnessed Kennedy’s assassination, the Vietnam War, the first man on the moon, and civil rights. Surely this might influence a different worldview than a generation that witnessed 9/11, Enron’s collapse, and the rapid increase of smart phones and texting.
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The Truth about Multitasking at the Workplace
Technologies have made us think that we can do multiple things all at once. We send emails while on the phone, watch TV while posting Facebook updates, and text while writing business letters. People tend to think that multitasking gets the job done faster. Does it?
An article published by Peter Bergman in Harvard Business Review reports that multitasking results to a 10% decrease in IQ. 10% may not seem much, but it’s actually equal to a night’s loss of sleep. Or even worse (or better, depending on who you ask), it’s twice the effect of smoking a joint.
The same study found that there was a noticeable 40% drop in work productivity in addition to an increase in stress levels. So if you think multitasking is efficient, think again.
Before multitasking in the workplace, think twice!
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Things to Consider When Shifting From Corporate to Working at Home
Millennials are individuals from the generation where technology has become a great part of human life. As a result, they have grown more accustomed to the use of technology in ensuring maximum productivity. According to Forbes, millennials will comprise 36% of the American workforce, and experts project that by the year 2025, 75% of the global workforce will consist of millennials.
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5 Questions to Ask Before You Hire a New Candidate
Picking the right candidate may be a difficult process, especially when you have many qualified prospects applying for a position that you have posted. Sometimes there are very little distinctions between two applicants’ resumes. How can you differentiate between two candidates? You may want to ask yourself these things before offering a position to a prospective employee:
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The Little Blue Card
David never got his blue card.
David is my lifelong friend from childhood. He had it tough. One of a preacher’s nine kids, he always had to be perfect. David was never allowed to make decisions: they were always made for him. So when he grew up and left home, he made lousy decisions because he didn’t know how to make good ones.
David joined the army and was injured during training, hit on the head with the steel door of an army tank. He’s never been quite the same since. He also got mixed up in using drugs, and has been a real mess his whole adult life.
Years ago, David was admitted to a mental hospital in the beautiful and serene Napa Valley. I flew out to San Francisco, rented a car, and drove to Napa to visit David. This was one of the most powerful, yet upsetting and depressing weeks of my life.
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21st Century Skills: You’ve Got to Learn to Samba
I once got a call from out of the blue, asking me to troubleshoot a project in Brazil. I’m not entirely sure why the company called me, other than sheer desperation, but this large engineering and construction company (specializing in electrical power plants) made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.
My prospective client had been hired by a major energy production company, which we’ll call Rio Bravo, to build an electric generation plant north of Rio de Janeiro. Since Rio didn’t have adequate electricity at the time, civil unrest was beginning to occur, prompting the President of Brazil to take a personal interest in the project. The President was pressuring Rio Bravo, which pressured my client, demanding to know “When!?”
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Can You Motivate Employees?
According to a Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM) white paper, “pay might not matter as much as you think in turnover decisions, as compensation and pay satisfaction are relatively weak predictors of employees’ decisions to leave. Thus, offering pay increases or bonuses to keep people at your organization may not be the most efficient way to address retention.”
This reinforces what most HR professionals have long known – that employee satisfaction and motivation are tied to various factors. The theory of organizational equilibrium, for example, states that employees will stay with an organization as long as the inducements, including good pay, working conditions, and developmental opportunities, are equal to (or greater than) the employee’s contributions of time and effort. In other words, people stay with an organization as long as they feel they’re getting as much (or more) from the company as they give.
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