Melina Murray

Yesterday, the HR Daily Advisor wrote about a partnership between The Wall Street Journal and Winning Workplaces to select 15 top small workplaces.

The list of commonalities is worth noting:

Does your company have a mission statement? Values statement? Does everyone know the focus and goals? And, does everyone know how the work they do contributes to those goals?

Noting that none of the items on the lists requires a financial investment, only time and commitment, what can you do today to make move your company closer to being a “top small company”?

This is a phrase I have heard frequently, and Natalie at Employee Evolution gives 10 tips for improving communication and avoiding the “bad manager” label.

I would say one of the biggest takeaways from her posting is to be accessible. This means letting your team know how to reach you and more importantly, letting them know they CAN contact you. One of the most frequent complaints I have heard about managers is the lack of availability. Easy to fix!

Encouraging communication by both giving information and being perceived as open to receiving it will go a long way in building your employee’s confidence in you as their leader, and in return, their confidence in themselves to do the job. Talk to them about their projects and how those projects relate to the company’s goals and success. Take the time to notice those who are encountering difficulties and work with them to find solutions. Publicly congratulate good work. It benefits not only your team, but you and the company too.

I have been thinking about bonuses lately. Specifically bonuses tied to performance, whether company or individual. Overall, I DO think bonuses must be tied to performance. However, there are a couple areas that I have seen the “motivation” of bonuses backfire and cause immense “de-motivation”. Although I am talking about bonuses for non-sales employees in this case, it can relate to sales people too.

When individual goals are set by management to unreachable, unrealistic levels, the intention of making them “reach for the stars” becomes null and void. While I understand the idea behind doing this is to push employees even harder, encourage intense productivity, there is a line between aiming high and setting an unreachable bar. In these cases, the employee tends to become frustrated and defeated. Productivity goes down, not up. Both sides end up losing.

The other area that causes problems is when goals are set, then company direction/plans change without changing the goals. If the new direction (projects, resources, etc) do not support or relate to the previously set goals- AND- the goals are not reset, how can the employee possibly make their goals and bonus?

The best case solutions in these situations are when managers see the conflict and work with the employee to mitigate the discrepancy and reset or adjust goals. Simply making an effort on the manager’s part can go a long way in diffusing frustration that situations like this can cause.

Evil HR Lady mentioned the site Not Hired in a post yesterday. The site is “Dedicated to all those who wonder why no one has called to set up an interview…now you know”.

I took a look and am completely amused. It’s Friday afternoon- take a look and laugh (or cringe)!