It’s not a controversial statement to say that teamwork is important in the workplace. No one will deny that teamwork is a good buzzword to include in your company’s core values or mission statement. However, people often take this idea for granted. They don’t actually know why teamwork is so important and how this group trait can affect various aspects of your organization. So, what does teamwork mean to you?
Internships are becoming increasingly important for college students and entry level employees to build experience. According to a survey of more than 2,000 students, 85 percent said an internship is a valuable experience to enter their careers. Students use internships to develop specific skills and add workplace experience to their resumes. If you’re working with interns within your organization, you can develop this young talent and mentor them for future growth.
Company values are the core set of principles that your company stands by and promotes. Some might think these are just a bunch of nice-sounding slogans or a marketing stunt meant to attract customers. But when you stand by your values and place them at the core of your business, they can act as a guide for your employees in those unpredictable situations that aren’t mapped by your set of procedures.
Procedures are a well-established set of rules that let people know how they should behave in certain situations. These are in place to make the workflow predictable, the operations quicker, and the overall business more effective. However, you can’t possibly have rules for any possible situation, and you must make sure that your employees make the best decisions in those unpredictable situations. Therefore, both values and procedures are important for the prosperity of your business.
There’s no doubt that COVID-19 has changed every aspect of our lives over a very short period of time. We had to adapt to all kinds of new situations without prior notice, and that came with many challenges. Take work from home for example. Besides the ones related to infrastructure, equipment, and managing work-life balance, there is also an additional barrier. The communication skills of your team members are now at the make it or break it point.
Suddenly a good portion of the workforce finds itself working remote. If you’re an HR professional or manager who had new hires lined up pre-pandemic, you might be wondering how to onboard remotely. When you’re already dealing with an experimental distributed workplace, bringing on a new team member might seem at best, daunting, and, at worst, a nightmare.
Transparency may seem like a corporate buzzword, but it actually has real-world benefits. According to a recent poll, two thirds of consumers would spend more if it meant buying from a transparent company, and 94 percent of consumers rank transparency as the biggest factor in brand loyalty.
Our modern American culture glorifies busyness. In fact, the Journal of Consumer Research has found that “Those devoting more time to work and less time to leisure are often viewed as having more status.” But even the most packed schedule is not an automatic sign of productivity. A long to-do list might look impressive at first. However, the number of tasks, deadlines and appointments on your calendar does not always mean those obligations are done with excellence.
Company culture and communication go hand-in-hand. Without communication, it’s hard to build a culture where employees thrive and engage with their work because they’re likely to feel less involved, while also being less trusting and less connected with the company as a whole. An organization built on communication brings employees in, and encourages them to share their ideas, connect with their co-workers, and build relationships with the leaders who guide them. Communication is an enabler for employee engagement.
Everybody knows that motivation is key to doing good work. Company culture has become a popular term among corporate leaders; more and more companies are focusing on creating a culture that fosters motivation in their workforce and you know the saying: happy workers are effective workers. Thanks to an increasing body of research, we’re learning a lot about what it takes to build and maintain a high-performance culture within an organization.
Negative feedback is criticism you receive when things did not go well. At one point or another, we all find ourselves at the receiving end of negative feedback. Be it a school activity or an internship report. Or perhaps even a multinational merger.
Negative feedback is part of our lives. It is how we grow and develop. By all means, it is how we learn. Yet, it’s always difficult to accept. And things hardly get any better. Receiving negative feedback is tough at all levels. You certainly feel much better receiving compliments. But human interactions open us to plenty of negative feedback.
