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Save Money by Improving Your Employee Relations

June 6, 2011 By Leave a Comment

It pays in big ways to have excellent employee relations. By keeping your staff happy, they’ll be more likely to continue working for your company. This saves you a bundle of money because you won’t constantly be spending money on new hires. Consider these strategies for improving your employee relations.

Create a Committee

So, nobody likes to be on a committee, especially at work. However, this committee is special because its members will develop ways to make the workplace more enjoyable. Recommendations might include giving employees one or two days off during a slow period for your company, offering on-site childcare, and giving wellness incentives. Some of these measures can save employers money in the long run in the way of lower healthcare costs and fewer sick days.

Offer Flexibility

If you don’t feel like you can give your workers additional time off, be creative in developing other ways to reward them. For example, find out if some jobs could be performed at different hours. Some parents might welcome the chance to work earlier hours so they can end their work day at the same time the kids get out of school. Additionally, many employers are making 30 hour work weeks available for certain positions. (Ideally, the employee continues to receive benefits, including health insurance.) There are cost savings because the employees take home three-fourths of the pay they received when they worked 40 hours per week. It’s a fair trade for many employees who enjoy having additional time off.

Keeping your employees happy may cost you up front, but many of these measures save you time and money in the long run.

Filed Under: Business Costs, Employee Relationships Tagged With: , ,

Hiring employees for less

March 28, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Maintaining a healthy head count is crucial for the success of any business. You don’t want to end up understaffed when you need the manpower to finish vital projects or overstaffed during lean periods that leads to unnecessary spending. Although companies generally have a plan on how they will be going about their recruitment process, smaller businesses often end up incurring huge expenses in hiring. They need skilled and talented employees yet can’t afford to pay high salaries or commissions to agents. Here are some tips on how you can get quality staff for your organization without having to delve too deep into your pocket!

1. Hiring immigrants instantly reduces the amount you will be spending on salaries. Immigrants, although highly talented, usually ask for lesser pay as their English may be flawed or they may not have enough local experience. With a little bit of training they can become high performers.

2. A lot of female executives leave their jobs to concentrate on their families once they have children. Often, however, they look out for part time jobs or work as consultants. They can provide you with much needed expertise at a discounted price!

3. Look out for people who work on contract basis. If you think you will need additional staff for a single project, hire employees on a contract that lasts the duration of the project. This way, your work will get done and you won’t have to pay for employee idle time.

4. Interns are a great way to fill up positions that don’t require a lot of experience. They look for jobs solely to gain experience and don’t expect much of a pay.

5. Encourage employee referrals to avoid paying huge commissions to agents.

Filed Under: Business, Employee Relationships Tagged With: , ,

Save money – promote your employees

March 20, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Hiring new recruits from external sources can consume a lot of time and money. You have to engage your HR team into the recruitment process, pay consultants for referring suitable applicants, train the new recruits and then go through a waiting period till the new employees fully settles into the job which could take months! Promoting employees within the organization is always the better way to go, especially for small businesses that can’t afford the cost of hiring new recruits. Here are a few tips on how you can use in-house talents t fill up higher posts:

1. If you have a small company, chances are that you will know what skills and abilities every individual working for you has. Make a list of all their educational and professional qualifications as well as soft skills that your employees may have.

2. Keep an eye out for high performers. People who are willing to go the extra mile and show an interest in development are likely to evolve into better roles over a course of time. Remember to be unbiased in your evaluation of your employees.

3. Make sure that every employee has a career path to follow. Have your HR team have one to one sessions with each employee to know how they see themselves progressing in the organization and plot a timeline based graph for their growth.

4. Have in-house training courses arranged that aim at developing employee skills that will benefit your organization. Keep a check on which employees shine during these training sessions.

5. Let your employees know that you are interested in promoting them and encourage them to approach you when they feel they are ready to take on more responsibilities.

Filed Under: Employee Relationships Tagged With: , ,

Effective Employee Orientation

March 16, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Most companies have an orientation program for new recruits to get them up to pace with the organization. Orientation fast tracks an employee towards better understanding of the organizational goals, the work environment, policies, benefits and lots more. Here are a few points that will make employee orientation more effective for any organization.

1. Have a good orientation plan. Bombarding a new employee with a load of information on the first day is never a good idea so spread your orientation over the period of a month.

2. On the first day, make sure the new employee gets introduced to all their colleagues as well as department heads.

3. Appoint someone from the employees’ department as his or her ‘buddy’. This person will be responsible for making the new recruit comfortable in the new work environment and help them adjust.

4. Create an Employee Handbook that contain all the policies pertaining to HR, administration, benefits, holidays and almost anything that an employee can have a question about. Give this handbook to the employee on the first day and ask them to read it thoroughly, indicating that their knowledge will be tested shortly.

5. At the end of the first week, conduct a quick test to know if the employee understand his or her job role and how their own department functions.

6. AT the end of the month, arrange for an employee orientation day for all the employees recruited that month. Have senior managers and executives of each department brief them on how their department functions. It would be great if you could get a chief officer to explain the organization’s goals, mission and vision.

7. Conduct a final test to know if the employee is aware of all policies of the organization.

Filed Under: Business, Employee Relationships Tagged With: , ,

Shoe string training

March 9, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Companies may recognize the importance of training their staff but often find themselves cash strapped to invest in it. Many companies put their elaborate training programs on hold after the recent global economic crisis. Although this may save the immediate buck, it can prove costlier in the long run due to poor productive growth of employees. High end training is almost always difficult for small businesses to pull off and so they often ignore training of employees all together. Just because you can’t commit a massive amount s training budget doesn’t mean you have to forego training! Here is a look at some methods you can try to train your employees for barely any cost:

1. Form a training ‘Union’ of sorts with other small business owners. Use each others expert staff to share knowledge and skills. Each company will have employees with unique skills who can act as trainers for others.

2. When purchasing equipment of software, include product training as part of the contract. Get the manufacturer to send a representative to your office premises and train the employees on how to use the equipment of software. This will cut the cost you would incur in training the employees while your staff will get trained first hand by the manufacturer’s experts.

3. Form in-house training groups consisting of employees who have been identified as having good leadership and mentoring skills. Encourage them to set up weekly training classes for colleagues. Give them an incentive in the form of performance bonuses. This way, your employees will get trained for a fraction of the cost of hiring a professional trainer.

4. Try out one of the many online training courses available. Several sites provide free training material that can be utilized by your in-house training groups.

5. Send a single employee to a professional training camp and have the employee pass on the knowledge and skills to colleagues.

Filed Under: Business, Training Tagged With: , ,

How to make training effective

March 7, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Employees are one of the most crucial resources of a company. Gone are the days when staff was taken for granted and it was believed that paying them on time was enough to keep them happy. Employee productivity is no longer only about how many hours a person works but also about the quality of their work and how their skills can be developed for higher roles. Training goes a long way in the development of employees and most modern organizations pay a lot of attention to this facet of business. However, just getting your employees into a training room and lecturing them for hours is not enough. Here are some tips on how you can make training more effective:

1. Set clear goals based on your business objective. What are the skills you want your employees to develop? Is training going to be enough or does it have to be backed up by some formal education? How will the training help employees drive towards business objective?

2. Think from an employees’ point of view. They will be more interested in the training if they believe that they too will gain something from it. Link training programs to promotion or salary hike prospects. Make training a part of the performance appraisal process.

3. A lecture lasting several hours can be extremely boring. Make the training interesting by using multimedia like videos and presentations. Engage the attendees by interacting with them during the course. Conduct a quiz or debate o stir up some excitement.

4. Have clear expectations on what you want the training to achieve. If you are aiming at improving communication skills of employees then set a bar which every employee must cross after the training is done.

5. Training would be pointless if you can’t measure its effectiveness. Conduct a test or survey post training to see how the employees have progressed and encourage them to take further training if they miss the bar.

Filed Under: Training Tagged With: , ,

Benefits are Changing; Top Workplaces Offer More Than Vacation Packages

February 23, 2011 By Leave a Comment
What is considered a ‘good employer’ has changed. It used to be, all a boss had to do was offer a decent wage, paid lunch hour and some health insurance, and people felt they got benefits. However, looking at the list of the top 100 businesses to work for makes that seem minimal.
Here are some things the top companies are offering their workers:
  • Flexible work schedules – Some people cannot fit into the ‘9-5’ model that America’s gone by for so long. It’s important to let employees have a sense of control over their own lives and making a schedule that they like makes fewer days missed at work.
  • Child-friendly Workplaces – It’s okay to take several weeks off when a child is born, but now mothers are finding it’s okay to bring baby to the office while they work. Software firm SAS offers employees on-site health care, child care, and in summer they even provide summer camps. Many places are also becoming pet friendly.
  • Atmosphere of fun and creativity – At Facebook employees get around from meeting to meeting on scooters placed around the floor, and ping pong and foosball tables are scattered here and there, as well.  At Qualcomm employees enjoy baseball games, surfing lessons, kayaking tours and lots of other fun things.
  • Rewards great service – When people feel appreciated they make a point of doing a good job. The Methodist Hospital system gives quarterly bonuses of $300 to non-management staff. Annabelle’s Restaurant gives employees parties with great prizes like airfare and massages for high-revenue days.
  • Understanding employee’s lives – acknowledging that real people are working and not robots means that at times some amendments to scheduling may have to be made. Johnson Financial Group gives employees leave of absences with full pay.
  • Good incentive programs – every company on the list has some sort of great benefits for meeting incentives.
Filed Under: Business, Business Costs Tagged With: , ,

The Potential Employee

February 10, 2011 By Leave a Comment

In the cutthroat business world, there is so much riding on the resume and interview. It is very difficult to land a great job, so there will be many different applicants for open positions. Here are a few things to look for when interviewing potential candidates.

Resume

When looking for a potential employee, the first thing you will see is their resume. It’s not just an outline of their work history or their education, it’s also a glimpse into their personality. If you receive a beat up, poorly printed resume full of misspelled words and outdated information, you probably aren’t looking at the next great employee. Only let the applicants through that meet the meticulous standards your company warrants.

Education

While looking at resumes, you will also be looking into the applicants education history. You first want to make sure that they meet the minimum education requirements that the position needs. It doesn’t matter whether it’s from junior colleges, online schools, or even ivy league schools, a commitment to education shows a lot about your applicant. A couple of red flags you want to look out for may be if they changed their major a lot, never finished, or got horrible grades, because indecisiveness, lack of commitment, or doing the absolute minimum required are all qualities you want to avoid in an employee.

Interview

You can learn so much about a person when you meet them face to face. When interviewing potential employees, you want to try and absorb as much about them as you possibly can. The person you want working for you will exude confidence, look you right in the eye when speaking to you, and seem comfortable around you. Although, you may want to be a bit understanding when it comes to nerves, because you don’t want to miss out on a great employee because they were a little nervous in the interview.

Filed Under: Business, Employee Relationships Tagged With: , ,

Employee Morale too Low in the UK

February 8, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Workplace dissatisfaction is running high in the world, with employees being overworked due to shortages in revenue, stagnating the hiring process and creating a workload too heavy for the current employees. The workers who are left have all the work piled upon them, making them tired and discouraged as other jobs are given to them on top of what they‘ve always done, and they aren‘t being fully compensated for it.
King’s College in London recently took a survey of over 500 HR managers and found that over 46% of employees experienced or witnessed stress-related problems on the job and 42% expect the situation to worsen in 2011. The survey shows there’s been a direct link between higher levels of stress and stress-related illness and absence in the workplace.
Over half of the survey respondents indicated working overtime due to staff shortages and although they’re doing more work, they aren’t getting raises or bonuses like they should. This causes stress for the managers as well as the employees, and the survey also shows that poor relations with managers are responsible for the higher number of grievances being reported. This also results in growing levels of employee absence.
Everybody needs their jobs, but overworked people don’t produce as much and unhappy people add to workplace unrest, which raises turnover levels. The thing is, not all companies can afford to replace and train people, so when some quit they aren’t replaced, adding to the already heavy workload on those that are left.
The survey revealed that workers anticipate seeing a further deterioration in employee relations and the number of employee grievances will climb even higher. Morale is just too low.
Employers and HR managers that try to involve their workers in workplace events and offer a light at the end of the tunnel or at least open communication have workers with less stress-related absence and less open unrest. Employers must remember that without these workers their business could not run at the current pace, so making a more comfortable place to work can only behoove them.
Filed Under: Business, Business Costs Tagged With: , ,

Cautious Hiring to Begin in 2011

February 3, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Hiring is predicted to be up in 2011. During the last several years there have been more hiring freezes and layoffs due to the slow economy, and it looks like that may be lifting for some cities. Slowly, people are starting to get jobs and it’s beginning to look a little better – but we aren’t out of the recession woods just yet. To err on the side of caution can’t hurt.
CareerBuilder.com did a survey of 1350 businesses with 500 employees or less, and found that over half of small businesses are expecting to hire permanent, full time staff in 2011 to keep up with production and demand, even if they are being cautious about it. Nobody trusts it when the job market looks up a little, but acting carefully can make it possible to navigate toward success.
Hiring in 2011 Will Improve, but Cautiously

Just 14% of those small businesses surveyed said they wouldn’t be able to keep up with current demand, so hiring more temporary and contract workers to help them get caught up is all they plan to do. However, 31% of those small businesses said they would take those temporary new hires and convert them into contracted or full time employees. That is good news.
Many small businesses expressed frustration at not being able to get the credit they need to support their businesses during 2010, and a quarter of those said they were unable to add more employees because of it.
Another 66% of businesses that were able to get credit did hire on new permanent employees, and survey responders indicated dissatisfaction with the associated costs. A full 50% cited higher costs in healthcare benefits, 27% cited marketing expenditures and brand-building, 26% indicated a lack of qualified applicants and 19% cited the relative challenges of hiring new people.
Six percent of the small businesses will actually downsize this year, reducing full time jobs by 6% and part time jobs by 3%. Between 64% and 66% will make no changes at all.
Filed Under: Business, Business Costs Tagged With: , ,
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