Company leaders know they’re under pressure to upskill their workforces. As for employees, they clearly want to learn new skills. Recent research (and my personal experience as a recruiter) shows that L&D opportunities are a driving factor in employee happiness and retention. But those learning opportunities don’t always have to be the sole responsibility of the employer. There’s another highly effective strategy to pay [...]
Can employees retain 100% of productivity while working 80% of the time? That’s the question an enormous UK experiment asks. The largest research project of its kind to date involves 70 companies and 3,300 employees participating in the 4 Day Week UK Campaign. Companies include industries from banking to healthcare to retail to hospitality. The campaign aims to solve for better work-life balance, [...]
It's vacation time of year. What did your summer vacation smell like? Pretty great? So good you‘re ready to go back? Sensory appeal is increasingly being used by the travel industry to “scent” the tourism experience. And you bet they hope it lures you back. The research supports this, too. Smells are proven to act as a source of intangible information that our [...]
In 2022, paying people well is table stakes. If you really want to make a difference in your retention levels, take a look at employee experience. As Inc. puts it, “creating an environment that people want to work in is the most holistic and effective way to approach retention.” Holistic because it impacts everyone. Effective because people really care about their experience every [...]
Is our collective love affair with Zoom coming to an end? We've all experienced or heard of Zoom fatigue, but maybe there is more to the story. A new report by Columbia Business School suggests that people come up with fewer collaborative ideas on Zoom than in person. Researchers blame this on the fact that with Zoom, you’re essentially forced to look at [...]
Yet another gift the pandemic has given us: a new acronym to incorporate into our lexicon. Move over WFH, welcome in RTO. RTO stands for “return to office,” as the zinger I just read: “There’s a growing sense that RTO isn’t working.” For a lot of the companies I interface with, RTO does, in fact, seem to be working, and quite well. But [...]
“Tim, I hear you.” You might consider yourself a good listener, but what KIND of a listener are you? Harvard Business Review breaks listening down into four distinct personalities: 🔹 Analytical listeners analyze the problem inherent in what they’re hearing 🔹 Relational listeners aim to build connection on an emotional level 🔹 Critical listeners assess content for reliability 🔹 Task-focused listeners try to solve the problem as [...]
Power casual. Business comfort. Workleisure. Business Florida. All terms floating around to describe how people are dressing for work these days — when they actually go into an office, that is. Perhaps it’s the year-plus spent working from home in sweats, but people aren’t nearly as likely to don fancy shoes and starched cuffs anymore. This isn’t just a trend reflected in the meeting [...]
Everything seems to be getting radically more expensive these days, and that includes talent. The competition for the brightest and most creative minds is so intense that, according to Inc. magazine, the past two years have driven up pay by 20%. For smaller companies that don’t have that kind of wiggle room in their hiring budgets, it can feel impossible to compete. But [...]
There’s a psychological concept called “foot-in-the-door technique” that says if you want to get someone to do something big, first ask them to do something small. For instance, if you want to shift an employee’s job description fairly dramatically, first take a toe-dip by asking them to take on a new type of project as just one aspect of their day to day. [...]