But how can one person achieve that without help or massive experience? Let’s solve this problem here and now: here is a set of management tricks that can greatly improve your workflow and make your team flow between the tasks!

Top Practices for Managing an Effective Team

Team leaders who want to succeed understand how important it is to develop interpersonal relationships within the group. They know that effective communication is the key to building trust, promoting collaboration, and enhancing teamwork. These are the factors that lay the foundation of a team that enjoys working together.

But to achieve that synergy as a project manager, you would have to adhere to the following time-proven principles:

• Prioritize planning
• Create positive environment
• Promote team spirit
• Recognize achievements
• Maintain good communication

Let’s break them down in more detail, shall we?

🤝 Hold regular planning meetings

To give purpose to the team and a sense of mission it is good to set expectations from day one. The best thing in managing a team is to organize a meeting where you will discuss and prioritize goals both for your team as a whole and each team member individually. This way you will keep everything clear and transparent. 

It’s also good to assign tasks at the beginning of the week so that everyone can use Mondays to analyze and strategize on current issues before diving into them. Such weekly planning allows you to keep things going and task management and workload distribution much easier. What’s more, this approach is suitable not only for weekly plans but monthly and yearly strategies as well. 

Everhour is the top time tracker for SMB teams, including software developers, marketers, designers, consultants, lawyers, you name it! Seamlessly integrating with popular PM tools, its user-friendly interface and customizable reports make it the ultimate time tracking solution. With dedicated support, our team is here to help you promptly and with a smile!

🤗 Build a positive workplace culture 

As a project manager, you need to keep the motivation and productivity of your team flowing. Therefore, you must take time and effort to assess all the problems your staff might have and help them through those issues. 

You must ensure that your employees are taken care of and have everything they need in terms of knowledge and support. You should also pay special attention to newcomers, helping them understand and adapt to your company’s work culture. 

💪 Focus on team bonding 

Nourishing a team spirit can be a challenging task, but participating in group activities allows everyone to relax while increasing their engagement and preventing potential burnout. There are many things you can do together, like workshops, game nights, or just a casual get-together that will facilitate team bonding.

If you’re managing a remote team, you can also arrange online learning sessions where your team members can study new things, develop various skills, and update their knowledge. This can help to strengthen communication and collaboration between different units and have a positive impact on their daily workflow. 

👏 Show appreciation to your employees 

Appreciation is a key element to any cooperation, especially if you want to build a positive employee experience. When your team is showing dedication, can successfully balance their workload, and puts in the effort to complete their tasks on time, don’t hesitate to show your appreciation for their hard work and contributions. The easiest way to praise the job well done is to send appreciation emails or messages. 

Managing a Team Across Time Zones

All these rules apply both when managing an in-house team and working with individual contractors scattered all over the world. However, the work-from-home model requires certain adjustments, which help motivate people to accomplish a set of goals for the organization.

Managing a team across time zones can seem like a challenging task, but in reality, it doesn’t have to be so. With the right strategy, it can actually bring numerous benefits both for business owners and project managers. Let’s take a look at some of the best practices for handling employees that work from different locations. 

🔨 Use the right tools for team management 

There are many technological advancements that can make it much easier to manage distributed teams. You simply need to find the virtual tools that will work best for you and your remote staff. 

✅ Communication. For starters, you will have to decide on the way of communicating with all of your teammates. The top choices among instant messaging tools are Slack, Discord, and Microsoft Teams. As you are likely to have virtual meetings with your team you will also need to pick a platform for video conferencing. You can try Skype, Google Meet, or Zoom. 

✅ Task management. In order to establish a smooth workflow, you need to get a project management tool that will help you oversee all the activities. Such applications usually look like a dashboard (for example, Trello), where team members can manage their tasks and set deadlines. Such tools eliminate micromanagement and allow you to see the whole picture of what is going on with the project. They can also help to manage the projects as a whole much quicker – think of Asana, Basecamp, Jira, or ClickUp as examples.

✅ Time tracking. The more productive your team is, the higher is their success rate. But to achieve good results they have to know how to manage and utilize their time properly. A time tracker such as Everhour can help to nail that task. 

🕕 Align your working schedules

One of the biggest advantages of having a team working across different time zones is that you can run your operations around the clock. You can try the asynchronous approach that will help you optimize work processes in your team and enhance your company’s culture. This method is pretty simple: when one person finishes working on the project, another team member can take it over and proceed with the next tasks in the pipeline.

With all the time zones covered, you will always have someone working on the new features or helping the customers. This way your staff doesn’t have to do late-night shifts or work large amounts of overtime. Just make sure each member of your team communicates their working hours in advance so that you can adjust meetings and stints accordingly.

On a final note

For many project managers handling a group of employees seems pretty daunting. However, with the right tools and some productive and supportive workflows, you can actually learn to do it the right way. 

The post Managing a Team: 6 Proven Strategies for Success appeared first on Everhour Blog.

In this article, we’ll dive into the world of nonprofit communications, touching on the best strategies to improve communication streams and the keys to follow for success in this area of client relations.

How To Enhance Client Communication in Nonprofit Organizations

Creating better nonprofit communication with your audience isn’t just about sending out more messages. While regular updates can never be a bad thing, great communication goes beyond that. Great communication also acknowledges the differences between your clients. For example, the preferred marketing channel that a person who is 18 may favor against a person who is 75 may differ greatly.

Here are the leading strategies that your nonprofit can leverage to enhance its communication.

Customize your emails

When a donor or a client receives an email from your nonprofit, you want to make sure it is a memorable experience. One of the most effective ways of bringing that little extra factor to your email communications is by using an email signature.

Email signatures provide space on an email to bring an additional layer of humanity. After all, you don’t want to present your nonprofit as a faceless corporation. By sending out your emails from accounts with email signatures, you can show the real people behind your organizations.

What’s more, email signatures provide the perfect amount of space for a short story or anecdote. For example, you could include why the sender is passionate about your cause or what got them into your nonprofit in the first place. These small bits of additional information can go a long way to enhancing the credibility and warmth of your email communications. 

Equally, by using an email signature managemement tool, you can manage multiple email signature sign-offs at once, making sure you can rapidly select which one you want to include in an email. This will help build up a level of personalization on your emails, which brings us to our next tip.

Segment your clients

All of your clients have one thing in common – they’re interested in your nonprofit and the cause or causes you support. However, it’s more likely that your clients are more different than similar. With that in mind, a powerful way of enhancing your communications with your clients is to segment them based on psychographic and demographic factors.

By creating smaller groups of clients who share similar characteristics – like age, location, income range, or personal motivation for working with your nonprofit – you can create hyper-personalized marketing content for them.

By creating customized marketing materials for these smaller groups instead of your whole mailing list, you can create much more personal materials. Segmentation and communication personalization go hand in hand. 

Leverage all available social channels

While email is the most typical way you can get in touch with your nonprofit clients and donors, it is far from the only one. Every business, nonprofit or not, has access to a wealth of potential platforms they can use to communicate. For example, companies can use:

• 🌐 Social media accounts: You can either interact with accounts that have tagged you on social media or reach out to donors on these accounts. Social media is great for creating a larger sense of community and connecting donors with one another. 
• 📲 Text messages: If you have your donor’s numbers on record, you could send out direct text messages to their phones.
• 📞 Direct phone calls: If you’d like to speak to your donors over the phone, many would be happy to receive a call.

A great nonprofit communications strategy will leverage all of the tools it has available to it, not just one or two.

The Keys to Effective Nonprofit Client Communication

Depending on the current structure and style of your nonprofit, one of the above communication methods might be better for you. For example, a company that focuses on community support may favor social media, as it could create a group of clients and post updates to them directly. Alternatively, a nonprofit organization with a wider base of clients may opt for personalized emails, as these are the most effective ways of directly reaching many people.

Transparent

When addressing your nonprofit clients, your organization should strive to be as transparent as possible. No one likes feeling like they’re being lied to. Keeping everything as transparent as possible, including data where you can, and showing your internal metrics to your audience will help build up credibility and rapport. 

Regular

When providing a direct benefit to the public, your nonprofit should endeavor to update your clients whenever you do something. Regular weekly or biweekly updates will help show that you’re making progress and actively doing what you set out to do. An active nonprofit is a successful one from the eyes of a client!

Flexible

A great idea when improving nonprofit communications is to take feedback from your audience. Listen to what they like and don’t like, and then implement their feedback to enhance your communication style. Iterating this over time will allow you to build up a style of communication that fits your audience.

By remembering these pillars of nonprofit communication, your business will be well on its way to creating effective client messaging systems. 

Client Communications for Nonprofit Organizations: Final Thoughts

While the parties that work in the nonprofit sector range from local, grass-roots organizations to governmental agencies, the clients they have all share a common motivation for their causes. Learning how to address your nonprofit’s audience and build a great relationship with them will help your company thrive.

By leveraging the communications strategies on this list, your business will be able to create a more effective system of contacting your clients. Over time, this will help build stronger business-client relationships and drive the long-term success of your nonprofit.

The post Enhancing Client Communications for Nonprofit Organizations appeared first on Everhour Blog.

The answer is – by tracking the right metrics. Nowadays, many metrics can help optimize your recruiting process. Unfortunately, many of them are undervalued or unrecognized. One of these metrics is ‘time-to-hire’.

By tracking this metric, you can better affirm recruiting choices and streamline onboarding processes. It’s a worthy piece of data to pursue and puts you ahead of the competition.

Before we discuss why and how you can track time-to-hire, let’s see what this metric encompasses.

What Is Time-To-Hire?

Time-to-hire is the amount of time it takes your HR team to source, interview, and recruit a new employee. Thanks to technology and quality tools, recruiters nowadays can track just about everything. From time tracking to task management, the most time-consuming tasks can be done with ease.

To set up an efficient workflow, you need to ensure that you have selected the right people for the job. For this to happen, you need quality offers as well as a great recruitment process. That is where the time-to-hire metric can be handy. 

Let’s say that you’re in the process of choosing the talent. It would indicate that you have a hiring framework, also known as a recruitment policy, outlining the process. It helps you comply with laws and legislation, as well as promote transparency and consistency for your company.

Based on this policy, you’ll be picking your candidates and executing their onboarding process.

As you can imagine, this process shouldn’t be too long. It means that you have little time to track it and use the data to your advantage. According to the SHRM (Society for Human Resource Management), the average time-to-hire is 36 days.

Why Tracking Time-To-Hire Is Crucial

Helps you learn if your HR team is fast enough

If your recruitment team is too slow, they are probably losing some high-quality candidates. Great employees won’t wait around for you to check their resumes or brainstorm for weeks. Chances are, they have applied elsewhere too.

If that other company has a faster recruitment process, they will throw in a tasty offer, and you’ll lose the opportunity to hire that person. This metric tells you how long it takes you to find a good candidate for a position.

Shows how long it takes you to onboard the candidates

Naturally, you have to decide what is the perfect hiring time for your company, as well as the job position in question. It is not the same for every organization, not even for every position.

For example, if you’re hiring someone for a lower position that doesn’t require tons of experience or training, the process should be relatively short. However, if you’re hiring someone who can truly impact the quality of your organization’s work, it will take longer to find a good candidate.

If your team is coming up with assessments while the hiring process is in progress, this can take forever.

Although, if they have a specific test to check the qualifications of the candidates, this can go much faster – and therefore avoid losing the great candidates because the process is too long.

There are many stages of the recruitment process. These include resume screening, interviews, assessments, etc. Break this down ahead of time to find out how long it takes you to move candidates from one stage to the next one.

Tracking Time-To-Hire

Are you aware that around 57% of job seekers lose interest because the hiring process is too long? It makes it highly important to track the time-to-hire. 

By doing this, you are measuring how efficient your recruiting plan and process are, and it shows you how much it takes for your business to get a replacement for a lost employee.

Here comes the most important part – how do you do the time tracking for that? Let’s look at the general formula for this:

The day your candidate accepts the offer to work for you – the day they applied for the job = your time-to-hire

Since the formula is quite simple, you can easily do it manually, but it can take forever, and human error is never out of the picture. Luckily, there are loads of tools that can help you with this endeavor.

Everhour is the top choice for small businesses and small to mid-size teams of 5 to 50 members, including professionals like software developers, marketers, designers, consultants, lawyers, you name it!

Seamlessly integrating with popular project management tools like Asana, Trello, and Jira, its user-friendly interface and customizable reports make it the ultimate time tracking solution for small and mid-size teams.

With dedicated support ensuring you receive timely assistance, our team is here to help you promptly and with a smile!

Here are the areas that a time tracker can take care of within the recruitment process:

Data analytics

A time tracker will automatically measure and track your time-to-hire whenever you are recruiting new employees. Based on this data, you can improve your strategies to speed up the process and find the best candidates. You’ll detect the stages of the selection process that take too long, and find ways to resolve that issue.

Budgeting

The longer this process lasts, the more applicants you’ll lose. The most qualified applicants will easily find work elsewhere, so it will take a financial toll on your business to find the right people. There’s also the matter of replacing employees you’ve lost, training the new team members and prepping them for the job, etc. Such a tool can help you manage the budget of your project in every sense.

Team management

Last but not least, various time tracking tools, for example, time clock apps will help you monitor the team members – from the moment they are recruited. If some of your candidates are in a trial period before they get recruited formally, this tool can help you evaluate their work and skills.

How Time Tracking Can Improve the Hiring Process

Look at it this way. The success of your company depends on how the people employed in it work. It depends on how well you track employees’ salaried hours, whether you provide them with good working conditions, what your reward programs are like, how you manage employee benefits, who you have appointed as a leader, etc. That being said, the hiring process is vital to the success of your business.

Final thoughts

Time-to-hire is an incredibly useful method for organizations in different industries and of various sizes. While some roles are easy to fill, other ones can prove to be a challenge. You can lose people because your process is not well-thought-out or your hiring team is too slow.

To prevent this from happening and maximize your odds of getting the best talent out there, you need to track this particular metric. Instead of guessing how long things will take and wondering if you made the right decision, you can get reports and necessary data that will boost your company’s recruiting – as well as its overall success. 

And if you’re wondering how to fire someone instead of hiring, we also got you covered 😉

All-in-one time management system for your team

Estimate tasks, set budgets, customize reports – direct in your project management tool.

✔️ Asana time tracking
✔️ Trello time tracking
✔️ Basecamp time tracking
✔️ Jira time tracking
✔️ GitHub time tracking
✔️ ClickUp time tracking
✔️ Monday time tracking

The post Time-to-Hire: What Is It and How to Track It appeared first on Everhour Blog.

A schedule is a list of all the actions that the team must complete throughout the implementation of a project within the predetermined time frame. A project schedule aids in prioritizing a task and completing it in a timely way. It also helps to streamline the effective allocation of available resources and select the best candidate for the job.

In this article, we are going to break down the main project scheduling approaches and see how to make the life of a project manager easier.

What Does a Project Schedule Include?

All the project schedules are created at a particular time when the planning activities are taking place. They are critical to the development of the plan to be used in the project.

During these stages, project managers outline the plan schedule, the baseline, requirements, and other items of the project.

The baseline schedule is then compared to the project’s actual progress during the action stage of the project. To create your project schedule, you’ll need to consider the following:

• errands of the project
• starting time
• estimated end time
• working calendar
• working equipment
• availability of working resources
• analysis of the risks that the project may encounter, etc.

Why Is Project Scheduling Important?

A schedule is a calendar for your project, and it consists of sequenced tasks and milestones that your team must complete by a certain date. With a project plan, you’ll know exactly what has to be delivered and when. Finding and assigning the proper people is easier with resource allocation. 

The project schedule also serves as a foundation for monitoring and controlling project activity, assisting you in determining how to efficiently distribute resources to meet the project’s objectives and the impact of time delays on the project. 

Finally, with a project schedule, you can determine where there are extra resources that can be allocated to other projects, as they serve as a foundation for tracking project progress.

Everhour is the top choice for small businesses and small to mid-size teams of 5 to 50 members, including professionals like software developers, marketers, designers, consultants, lawyers, you name it!

Seamlessly integrating with popular project management tools like Asana, Trello, and Jira, its user-friendly interface and customizable reports make it the ultimate time tracking solution for small and mid-size teams.

With dedicated support ensuring you receive timely assistance, our team is here to help you promptly and with a smile!

Project Scheduling Steps

Creating a project schedule is super easy because you can do it with the help of a template. The template contains samples of project schedules that guide you in developing an exemplary project schedule.

Although the template can not fully aid you in creating a complete and viable project schedule, it acts as a good starting point. The project schedule you generate is more than just a simple timetable –  therefore, it can’t work for all projects.

This process incorporates a variety of project scheduling methodologies and other tools for project managing. In addition, each project has its own set of resources, timelines, opportunities, and other extra exclusive characteristics that you should take into account and apply to the schedule management strategy.

The schedule is integrated with additional tools used in project management like the dashboards, Gantt charts, and reports that help you track progress and the kanban boards that control workflows when using project management software. Whichever option that you take, below are the procedures you can use to establish a good project schedule:

• ✅ Generate the plan schedule to use in your project
• ✅ Specify who is in charge of the timetable
• ✅ Determine when all the project activities will begin and end
• ✅ Define task interdependencies
• ✅ Arrange activities and tasks in chronological order to make a project calendar (for example, in Asana)
• ✅ Calculate the number of resources required and the availability of those resources

Project Scheduling Techniques

To construct work plans and track project performance, project management teams employ a variety of tools and methodologies. One of the most critical activities of any project is project scheduling, which integrates time, tasks, resources, and costs.

Work schedules are made up of a list of tasks, the duration of those activities, and the linkages between them. The most frequent project planning and scheduling approaches and procedures used for establishing work schedules are Gantt Charts, Program Evaluation and Review Technique Charts, and Critical Path Method.

Depending on the project’s objectives and complexity, any or all of these network scheduling methods can be used. Project scheduling often entails a number of strategies, each of which is described in detail below.

1. Scientific analysis

The Critical Path Method (CPM) and Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT) are the first two methodologies utilized by project managers. These approaches can be used to compute the project’s estimated commencement and finish dates regarding the project’s known scope.

Critical Path Method

First, let’s examine the CPM. Consider your critical route as a tree diagram for your project. This method can assist you in determining both the longest and shortest project timelines. You can also use the CPM to designate critical tasks and tasks that might float. The schedule will not be affected if the latter’s delivery changes. 

To make use of  CPM, it is a must that you first determine the scope of your project and create a list of all tasks required to complete it. After that, figure out the amount of time that each and every task will take. 

Following that, make a list of all tasks’ dependencies. You’ll be able to see which ones may be finished independently and the ones that require the completion of earlier assignments. Finally, make sure your project has achieved some milestones or has gained deliverables.

When all dependencies and deliverables are understood, the CPM may be used to illustrate how the project is flowing, therefore determining its time. If the project has a lot of unknowns, this strategy may be of no use.

Program Assessment and Review Techniques (PERT)

PERT is a method of visualizing the flow of tasks in a project and estimating the timetable based on their expected duration, just like the critical path. This methodology also demonstrates task interdependencies.

The computation of the estimated duration for each activity is used in the PERT Method to determine project completion time. The PERT approach is used in conjunction with the critical path method. 

You can utilize forward and backward computations to estimate the project’s critical route. PERT, on the other hand, is a time-consuming method that necessitates the use of the software.

When scheduling your project with the help of PERT, you are required to first specify all the tasks according to their order, depending on your project’s milestones, exactly like you would in CPM. You can also estimate multiple timetables for a project by the confidence level:

• Optimistic timing 👍
• Most likely timing 🤞
• Unfavorable (pessimistic) timing 👎

Although this method appears to be quite like CPM, the PERT calculates feasible timeframes using more intensive duration in ratio to guesses. 

2. Compression of time

Compression of time is a method of reducing the length of a particular schedule. It could be beneficial if the project is running late and all you need is to change the timeline without compromising the project’s scope. Fast-tracking and crashing are two ways that can be used.

Fast-tracking

Fast-tracking assists you in identifying jobs that can be completed concurrently or overlapped partially to expedite project completion.

Assume you’ve begun another project and you have gathered all of the necessary information. During this particular period, you might begin the design process and only start the software development once the design is complete.

However, in case there is a need to expedite all these processes, and the most crucial designs are complete, you may begin software development. Then, while programmers are implementing materials they’ve already received, continue to prepare later views.

It’ll be easy to make huge mistakes or forgo quality because you’ll be managing numerous vital activities at once.

Crashing

Crashing is another compression approach that involves allocating additional resources to complete the project within the schedule. You’ll need extra resources at your disposal for this to happen. Furthermore, adding additional resources does not guarantee that you will finish all of the tasks. 

Increased communication is the result of the need to add new members to help with the completion of the project and limited task divisibility. Paid overtime is also another way to use the crashing approach to a project, but it must stay within the set deadline. Unfortunately, this increases the project’s cost.

3. Simulation

You employ separate activities in the simulation methodology to calculate project durations. It’s especially beneficial when you have a lot of unknowns and variables.

You can design a timetable based on assumptions which means that a simulation can be used even without any specific knowledge if the scope ends up changing.  

A Monte Carlo Simulation is among the most famous models that you can employ. It considers several theories and possible events to arrive at an anticipated duration.

This technique has some benefits of accounting for the hazards and the uncertainties, so you can adapt your plan if you decide to change the scope or add new jobs/tasks.

4. Heuristics for resource allocation

Resource leveling is the process of slightly changing your schedule and the resources to reduce delivery time or avoid under-or overuse of resources. You can employ it to modify a single project activity. 

Organize or combine activities based on your resource availability to change a schedule utilizing resource leveling, ensuring that no team members are under or overused. 

The project management community still debates on the application of this methodology, as it has the potential to raise the project’s cost and duration. If you are willing to use this strategy, keep in mind the drawbacks.

5. List of tasks

Of all the project scheduling strategies available, the task list is the most basic. The list of all conceivable tasks in a project is kept in a spreadsheet or word processor. 

This project scheduling technique is the simplest and most often used of all. It comes in handy when working on little projects. However, task lists are not feasible for massive projects with various variables to consider.

6. Gantt diagram

The Gantt chart is a project management visualization tool for tracking progress and reporting. Most of the time, project managers utilize it to get an idea of how long a project will take to complete.

A Gantt chart for a project schedule is a bar chart that shows essential tasks in order on the left vs. time. Each task corresponds to a bar that shows the activity’s start and end dates, as well as how long it took to complete.

Project teams and stakeholders may quickly understand and manage their projects with the help of Gantt charts because they are quite easy to master. Because of its simplicity, the Gantt Chart is the most common scheduling approach.

However, updating activities, activity linkages, and managing changes as the project advances is challenging without the use of the proper software.

7. Calendar

When it comes to project requirements, many people overlook the importance of arranging work on a calendar. You can customize the majority of the calendars with unique names. In this situation, you can establish a calendar and events for each project separately.

A calendar displays the project’s timeline. Since it is shareable, it may be subject to change by any of the team members. While it appears to be an excellent method for time tracking a project, it does have certain drawbacks, such as the inability to assign tasks to specific people and the inability to view task dependencies.

Final thoughts

Project scheduling software, as any social media scheduling tool, can assist a project manager in allocating means and completing a project within the allotted time frame. They also assist in the preparation of timetables for any future initiatives.

Examining your team’s previous performance, as well as the roadblocks encountered while pursuing a project and ways of overcoming them, may be extremely beneficial.

The post Project Scheduling Techniques: An Overview appeared first on Everhour Blog.

But what are those strategies and how to implement them and develop your engagement plan? If you’re wondering about it, don’t fret. Let’s discuss the required methods that you can adopt and utilize in the present work environment in this article!

Understanding Employee Engagement

Employee engagement, at its heart, indicates the level of enthusiasm and connection that employees have with their company. It assesses how enthusiastic employees are about their jobs and how driven they are to put in extra effort or go the extra mile. It is also an indication of dedication to the organization and enthusiasm for the jobs and tasks that personnel accomplish.

Its impact on the organization might be massive. Engaged employees perform 21% better than their peers. Because engaged individuals are more dedicated to taking effective action on what is essential, their dedication and passion can assist in fueling organizational success.

Disengaged personnel, on the other hand, may create harm to the company by lowering the standard of service or even driving away clients. That is one of the primary reasons why many firms want higher levels of participation in order to increase things like performance, employee retention, and innovation.

Fortunately, employee engagement is mostly determined by the organization, particularly the employee engagement activities pushed by leadership and managers. As a manager, you have complete control over the outcome of employee engagement.

Let’s discuss the employee engagement strategies that improve performance, productivity, work quality, and business culture.

Employee Engagement Strategies That Work Wonders

1. Assign appropriate job roles and training

Make sure the right people are on the bus and in the right positions. This means that all personnel acquisition and retention initiatives must align with the company objectives.

Employees that are engaged are doing meaningful work and understand how they contribute to the company’s vision, purpose, and strategic objectives. This is why, once again, they must be assigned to the appropriate role. Many have made the mistake of employing exceptional talent only to get them in the door — without a defined career path or function in mind for them. They’ll go if you don’t sort out those details immediately.

2. Set realistic boundaries

Setting boundaries at work allows employees to connect better. Employees are more likely to feel fulfilled at work when there are less stressful arguments and awkward confrontations.

Encourage employees to establish coworker relationship limits for what they consider appropriate. For example, an employee may make all of their phone conversations on speakerphones, causing great discomfort to all the other employees present. If it is evident that their coworkers find this objectionable, they may modify their behavior.

Processes and procedures at work ensure that teams complete tasks correctly. With defined boundaries in place, your company can optimize its processes and procedures even more. Creating structure is a crucial component of defining boundaries.

Also, you should consider implementing employee time tracking – not as a means of controlling your staff but to track the time it takes team members to finish a task. It will help you know how they rank in terms of speed and performance for better project management.

Everhour is the top choice for small businesses and small to mid-size teams of 5 to 50 members, including professionals like software developers, marketers, designers, consultants, lawyers, you name it!

Seamlessly integrating with popular project management tools like Asana, Trello, and Jira, its user-friendly interface and customizable reports make it the ultimate time tracking solution for small and mid-size teams.

With dedicated support ensuring you receive timely assistance, our team is here to help you promptly and with a smile!

3. Have an open communication channel

Effective leaders pay close attention to what employees and teams in general have to say and then act on the feedback. That is one of the reasons why yearly employee surveys are increasingly being replaced or supplemented by quarterly or monthly pulse surveys, and why performance dialogues are becoming more common.

At Whole Foods, entire teams vote on whether or not to hire new employees at the end of their probationary period. According to LeFranc, this method signals to employees that their opinions are valid and valuable. Furthermore, supervisors gain crucial information about the employee being evaluated.

4. Prioritize physical and mental health

When we talk about employee wellbeing, we are referring to both physical and mental well-being. Well-being is a crucial aspect of employee engagement strategies that many companies often underestimate.

Before we can even consider higher-level demands, we must first meet our basic needs, which range from rest to nutrition to stability:

• ✅ Is your company fostering healthy living in terms of physical health?
• ✅ Do your staff get enough sleep every night?
• ✅ Are they eating healthily both at work and at home?
• ✅ Are they at ease in the workplace?

In terms of mental health:

• ✅ Do your company’s culture and benefits work in tandem to create a friendly and supportive atmosphere for employees based on trust?
• ✅ Is your work environment psychologically safe?
• ✅Do you have a flexible work schedule?
• ✅ Is there a work-life balance among employees?
• ✅ Can employees openly discuss their plans to leave for appointments with the assumption of privacy?

Wellness, both inside and outside the office, is critical to assisting employees in bringing their full focus and involvement to their work.

5. Celebrate all special occasions

Allowing employees to leave their desks and form bonds with peers will keep them motivated and invested. There are several activities you can plan, but here are a few suggestions:

• Office amusements: organize a weekly afternoon quiz game or scavenger hunt, or go the extra mile with an annual Office Olympics event.
• Lunch & Learn: allow employees to give a TED-style lecture on a topic about which they are enthusiastic.
• Days with a theme: allow employees to dress up, bring in food for a potluck, or engage in a themed activity on certain days.
• Celebrate milestones such as birthdays, family occasions, and other anniversaries: recognize significant milestones in your employees’ lives to show them that you care about them outside of the office.

It is critical to schedule employment engagement events during the workday rather than after hours. Employees may otherwise feel as if work events are interfering with their personal lives.

6. Provide recognition for achievements

Companies must promote the meaning of their work since it gives workers a clearer picture of how they fit into the company’s objective and what types of behavior they should choose. Workers at Disney, for example, understand the importance of the customer experience and are rewarded for creating a fantastic atmosphere. This, in turn, helps individuals relate to their jobs.

Gifts and bonuses, on the other hand, are generally given with little fanfare. That is not the case at Yum! corporate headquarters. The organizers bring out kazoos, tambourines, horns, and cowbells. Each month, a different corporate executive leads a band of employees in a march around the building performing “music” in honor of the six or so persons picked for distinction, attracting dozens of additional people as they go.

According to the company executives, the award stimulates the individual winners and acts as a “booster shot” for involvement across the firm because people respond to appreciation.

7. Invest in resources that encourage innovation

Engagement necessitates a multipronged approach that moves the needle deliberately and consistently over time. That is why, in order to execute the task correctly, you will need a variety of equipment in your engagement tool belt.

The resources do not have to mean additional expenses on your behalf. For example, you can equip the HR department with customer relationship management solutions to innovate engagement operations.

Efficient HR operational tools encompass employee engagement strategies and technologies that can assist you to:

• Discover employee experiences and chances for engagement.
• Engage in productive one-on-one discussions.
• Set and track crucial career goals by providing and receiving constant feedback.
• Recognize employee accomplishments more efficiently.
• Assist managers in becoming better leaders.
• Make better decisions at work.

8. Work on employee feedback

There can be no engagement without feedback. This includes both receiving and offering feedback from your team. Solicit input from your employees, if you haven’t already. Make it simple, provide anonymous methods, and test your feedback system to ensure it is simple and accessible.

When you receive input, make sure that leadership takes action on it. Even if you didn’t implement any changes, describe your reasoning for doing so – either publicly or privately.

Summing Up

In the business sector, employee engagement and wellbeing are now taking center stage. For far too long, they have been regarded as the job of the human resources department rather than an intrinsic aspect of corporate strategy.

However, it is becoming increasingly clear that unhealthy and disengaged employees have a negative impact on productivity, innovation, and the bottom line.

The post 8 Employee Engagement Strategies That Will Make Your Team Ecstatic appeared first on Everhour Blog.

In this article, we will introduce 5 practical steps and strategies on how to boost your employee management.

What Is Employee Experience?

It stands for creating the best possible environment for employees, so they are more likely to stay with your company in the long term. People want to feel good when they come to work, so it is your responsibility to ensure their satisfaction.

An essential part of employee experience management is to provide employees with tools and resources that help them do their jobs even better.

Steps for Superior Employee Experience Management

Now, let’s dive into practical steps and strategies that transform your team’s workplace into their home. It is in your best interest since businesses that invest in their employees’ satisfaction are proven to be more successful than those that don’t.

💜 Make your employees feel like they matter

Employees are the backbone of any company. One way to make your employees feel that they matter is through recognition programs. Some companies have already been using this strategy to increase employee engagement and retention rates. It usually involves a program where employees can be nominated for a workplace award in various categories, such as the best customer service representative or the most innovative engineer. 

These awards can be anything from a plaque or a certificate up to a cash prize, which has helped incentivize participation in these programs.

Besides employees incentive programs, it’s important to also show professional recognition. A Korn Ferry survey claims that 33% of people leave their job because they lack a challenge. Give them a chance at career development, from new tasks or courses to well-deserved promotions. Once a person feels there’s nowhere to grow, they may feel underestimated.

🤝 Create a culture that your employees will love

A company is only as good as the culture it develops. A strong, thriving environment is necessary to recruit and retain top talent. The studies made by Hays show that as much as 47% of job seekers consider leaving their job because of poor company culture. That’s unfortunate, since businesses where employees feel good usually reach more than 4 times higher revenue growth. 

To create a great company culture, you need to put in the work upfront. The best way to start is by understanding what your employees want. What do they care about and what are their needs?

A strong team bonding activity can also help cultivate your company’s culture. This usually includes team-building activities, offsite retreats, barbeques, lunches, or volunteer days. They allow employees to connect on a more personal level.

Another important point is building a work-life balance culture. Stress is a strong factor of employees dissatisfaction that may, if not taken care of, lead to burnout.

Not only is it problematic from a human point of view, but it also hurts business. With employees missing work or lacking focus, you face a lack of workforce and weaker performance. It can also affect your turnover rates. On the other hand, a sufficient work-life balance leads to higher motivation and productivity. 

Everhour is the top choice for small businesses and small to mid-size teams of 5 to 50 members, including professionals like software developers, marketers, designers, consultants, lawyers, you name it!

Seamlessly integrating with popular project management tools like Asana, Trello, and Jira, its user-friendly interface and customizable reports make it the ultimate time tracking solution for small and mid-size teams.

With dedicated support ensuring you receive timely assistance, our team is here to help you promptly and with a smile!

🧠 Know what your employees expect from their workplace

An employee expects a work environment that is inclusive, welcoming, and where they can do their best work without almost any restrictions. To perform at their best, an organization needs to provide them with the necessary resources and workplace amenities to achieve success.

Thus, the development of employee experience is now becoming one of the leading HR trends. It is a way to influence the level of turnover, increase the loyalty and satisfaction of staff, and, accordingly, the efficiency of the business as a whole. 

Some companies choose to apply time tracking for their teams – it helps employees to record work hours, watch their progress, and easily estimate how much time any task can make in the future.

Therefore, begin to research and develop employee experiences in departments that recognize and notice the challenges and the importance of working with people. Involve executives and top managers of the company in developing the employee’s experience. Make interaction with the company more effortless, more efficient, remove barriers, and minimize what hinders employees.

👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Create positive relationships with employees

Every organization needs to keep its employees happy. Effective communication strategies within a company, such as praise for a job well done, play a big part in this. To showcase an example, a study on top performance motivators claims that around 37% of employees feel extremely encouraged by professional recognition. 

On the flip side, low engagement means low productivity. Employees who feel dissatisfied and not involved in the process may further undermine the work of others. 

To wrap up, engaged employees are the company’s most valuable asset. Companies with engaged employees may gain 2,5 times more revenue than their competitors with lower engagement levels.

📢 Build strategies for effective employee experience management

Now, we will talk about effective employee experience management strategies that are important to organizations of any size. 

The solution for the entire employee lifecycle in an organization aims to create an outstanding employee experience. It provides answers to the most critical questions. Cultivate organizational productivity and agility, and use powerful analytics to coordinate every employee journey, from joining the organization to retirement.

An employee’s experience involves working through many stages, during which you can implement different strategies for effective employee experience management. Let’s take a look at some of them.

Hiring strategy

This strategy includes all the steps a company takes to hire an employee. It is necessary to estimate how long it takes you to find and hire a specialist, the effectiveness of posting vacancies on job portals, a career site, and social networks. 

You should also analyze the recruiting process and evaluate the interaction of the recruiter with the candidates. Based on this, you can further develop your hiring strategy. If it turns out that the new employee isn’t a good fit for the position, there can be holes in your hiring process.

To avoid wasting your resources to onboard a person who isn’t who you’re looking for, consider asking more specific questions. Those help you to recognize if the candidate is truly motivated and skilled enough, as well as if they fit your company culture. That is also extremely important. Further, if possible for your position, give them a task to test their abilities in practice. 

A good trick to make the hiring strategy organized is to create a checklist before starting a hiring process. Write down all the cornerstone attributes of what your ideal employee should have and before hiring, make sure they comply with at least the most important points. 

Adaptation of beginners

According to research by the Human Capital Institute, 20% of employees leave the company in their first 45 days of work. It means that one in five newcomers does not stay in the workplace for more than 1.5 months. To prevent newcomers from leaving and evaluate employees’ experience at this stage, it is necessary to carefully consider all onboarding stages. 

These stages include welcoming, adaptation, probation meetings, acquaintance with the company and the team; signing a contract and documentation; providing access to mail, working tools, programs, and creating a development plan for a trial period. 

Yet, the most important is proper training and an assigned team leader who can always assist the newcomers, so they feel supported. Employees who feel lost in their duties naturally feel stressed and disconnected from their work. 

Employee development strategy

One of the essential stages in the employee experience is the development of specialists. It is crucial to understand that employees develop throughout the entire work period. As professionals develop within their roles, you need to quantify their productivity, teamwork ability, and career drive.

In addition, you need to remember the importance of introducing corporate exposure or individual development plans.

And organizations that supported talent development were twice as likely to retain key employees.

Employee retention

When people are fully integrated into work processes, it’s time to implement a retention strategy. That includes all possible ways to keep employees as motivated and focused as possible.

Here are 7 most important steps for employee retention strategy:

1. Help them feel valued
2. Support inclusive and supportive culture
3. Make clear what do you expect from each job position
4. Build a cohesive team, even if you work remotely
5. Don’t overwhelm employees with more work than they can handle
6. Provide transparent professional growth possibilities
7. Incentivize your employees with meaningful benefits

In this way, you can maintain employee productivity, increase their engagement and loyalty. Another method is to remember important days and holidays. Consider sending holiday-related emails, Christmas newsletters, and other messages to engage employees more.

Dismissal strategy

The dismissal is still a stage in the employee’s experience. Not less important than the previous ones. Many companies do not attach much importance to offboarding, since it proved to be costly. It is imperative to remember that when employees leave, they can still return to the company or work for your competitor.

Prepare carefully for the employee’s dismissal: analyze the situation why the employee leaves, how it could have been prevented, and do not forget to conduct an exit Interview. The final meeting will help you understand what caused you to leave, and in connection to the previous hiring strategy, find areas to improve in the company’s hiring process.

Finishing Off

An employees’ experience is the journey that they take within the entire lifecycle in your company. It includes interaction with your business from the hiring process until dismissal, for whatever reason that may be. 

An efficient employee experience management can also contribute to having an opportunity to look at the company through the eyes of an employee. This teaches you what works well and what to improve. 

It allows you to create an experience that inspires professional achievement, enhances individual and teamwork, and consequently, boosts the effectiveness of your business as a whole.

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