How to Plan for the Future of Your Business with the Help of Employees

The opportunity to change the structure of the company toward a more versatile or bureaucratic structure can now be determined by your management team. The importance of the way your employees perceive your company and the way they think it should be, cannot be denied. These gaps between the actual and the ideal should be given special attention, and can provide your management team with ideas that can be developed and expanded in strategic planning sessions. Assessments can provide a most valuable tool that puts the management team on notice and causes them to consider change within the organization. These changes may never be apparent without this assessment, because it is unbiased, confidential, and provides a comprehensive diagnosis of an organization.

This is certainly needed in our highly competitive environment. Isn't it about time you got your camera out and took a snapshot of your company?

How to Properly Use Performance Appraisals

I was reading an article titled, “Bias Found in Employee Appraisals” on hreonline.com. It elaborated on the fact that new research shows vast discrepancies in employee appraisals by workers who report to two bosses.

Performance Appraisals have always shown bias from one manager to another. Many consulting firms even recommend that companies not spend money on the training and development of their managers regarding the delivery of an employee appraisal by a manager. If we don’t train to develop consistency in delivery, then how can we ever have a Performance Appraisal System without bias?

Small business owners and managers, listen up, it’s time to realize that the Performance Appraisal Process is the best means to communicate workplace expectations with the employee and that employee engagement is key to retention moving forward.

Employee Engagement is Performance and Productivity

Managers have more impact on engagement then their companies.

In Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to be the Best…and Learn from the Worst by Robert Sutton, the author noted that about 75% of today's workforce reports that their immediate supervisor is the most stressful part of their job. It has also noted by several surveys including the initial work by Gallup that immediate supervisors have far more impact on engagement and productivity than whether their companies are rates as great or lousy places to work.

How to Assess What Training Your Employees Need

This training needs assessment works best in small to mid-sized organizations. It will give you a quick assessment of the training needs of an employee group. It helps find common training needs for a group of employees.

Difficulty: Average Time Required: Approximately 1-2 hours

Here's How:

1. Gather all employees who have the same job in a conference room with a white board or flip charts and markers.
2. Before the meeting ask each employee to write down their ten most important training needs. Write specifics, like disciplining an employee when late or communication with other management.
3. Then during the meeting, ask each person to list their ten training needs. As they list the training needs, you capture the needs on the white board or flip chart. Make a tick mark when there is a duplicate need, some may seem a little different, but may be the same underneath the surface.
4. When all training needs have been listed, use a weighted voting process to prioritize the training needs across the group. In a weighted voting process, you use sticky dots or numbers written in magic marker to vote on and prioritize the list of training needs. Assign a large dot 25 points and smaller dots five points each. Distribute as many dots as you like. Tell needs assessment participants to place their dots on the chart to vote on their priorities.
5. List the training needs in order of importance, with the number of points assigned as votes determining priority, as determined by the sticky dot voting process. Make sure you have notes (best taken by someone on their laptop while the process is underway) or the flip chart pages to maintain a record of the training needs assessment session.
6. Take time, or schedule another session, to brainstorm the needed outcomes or goals from the first 3-5 training sessions identified in the needs assessment process. This will help as you seek and schedule training to meet the employees' needs.

Note the number one or two needs of each employee, that may not have become the priorities for the group. Try to build that training opportunity into the employee's performance development plan.

Tips: Training Needs Assessment can be, and often needs to be, much more complicated than this. But, this is a terrific process for a simple training needs assessment.
Make sure you keep the commitments generated by the training needs assessment process. Employees will expect to receive their key identified training needs met.

To discuss your employees needs call Innovative Leadership at 609-390-2830 or email us at info@innovativeleadershipdv.com

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How to Motivate Employees

How will you motivate employees, improve staff retention, increase productivity, and boost morale this year? All of this can be and should be summed up into one word: TRAINING.

Take for example Derek Christian's business, My Maid Service. He had extremely high turnover, two out of three new employees were leaving, which meant a less experienced and productive staff. The quality of work also lacked and it was having a huge impact on his business.

Once training was introduced, there is now virtually no turnover, his employees and customers are happier, which all translates into loyal customers and a bigger bottom line. Read His Full Story

So, what are you going to do this year? You can still give them a box of candy, but we highly suggest you take a serious look at the coming year and how training can help your company tremendously.

Innovative Leadership is a performance improvement company that provides solutions for today's business, small or large, challenges. Unique programs, products and processes all of which can be customized to fit specific needs of your company is what sets us apart.