Earn the respect you ask for

In all relationships, people are more likely to give respect in a situation where they feel like they are already respected. Employee loyalty is a form of respect. If you structure your company culture around excessive demands, arbitrary decisions, confusing plans and unresponsive leadership, would you really blame employees for wondering if their loyalty is valued? Good management at the C-Level is the source of so much else going right or wrong in the firm. If you run your company in a way that communicates respect for your employees, you’re that much more likely to inspire it in them

Employee Engagement Matters

As we at Kazi have talked about in previous posts, and as we believe firmly, employee engagement is really crucial to creating the right atmosphere and relationship with your staff. Building best practices around dealing with employee feedback, input and participation helps create a workplace centered on making sure employees understand that their insights and dedication are valued by their employers.

According to Forbes, better employee engagement also establishes a system that helps employees interact with the workplace in ways beyond just performing their day-to-day tasks.

Don’t micromanage

Loyalty is a corollary of respect. And you know what the best way to show employees you don’t respect them is? Micromanagement! As Inc explains in one of their pieces, a lack of trust is often the reason why managers micromanage.

When employees know their bosses are looming over their every move, they know that their own decision capabilities and ideas aren’t valued. This creates a corporate environment in which employees don’t feel comfortable expressing their opinions.

At Kazi, we work extensively on creating ways for employers to understand better their employees’ ideas and approaches. We can help you develop and implement procedures to get useful and respectful feedback from your employees on how they view and understand the work environment, and how to structure it and management behavior.

Be mindful about employee rewards

Bonuses are great, of course. Who doesn’t love more cash? But just equating employee value with more money diminishes the significance of the company culture. What about extra days off? Or equity? How and when rewards are given out, to whom, and why are all very important. And making sure that company signalling around them is clear and reinforced by management behavior is likewise crucial in creating a performance environment in which employees know that their efforts will be rewarded in a transparent and respectful way.  

In all human relationships, we value respect. That’s what commands loyalty. Work is the same. Cultivate and maintain a work environment that demonstrates to your employees that you respect them, and they will be loyal to you. At Kazi, we spend our time thinking about fit between employer and employee, and the point that comes up again and again by employees is making sure that they have a place that their contributions are valued and taken seriously. It might sometimes be a quick solution to push your people to do something they don’t want to do, but it doesn’t last.

Respect is the only thing that ensures loyalty. We can help you build it. If you’re dealing with an HR issue, Kazi can help you out! Drop us a line and we’d be happy to set up a consultation today!

The post Dealing with Employee Loyalty: this is how we see it appeared first on kazi.

Put the Emphasis on “Bottom Up” rather than “Top Down”

The most durable strategies and processes are the ones that are the most organic. When you try to force a change on people from above, they always resent it, and oftentimes will resist it. In this kind of situation, no matter how good your strategy might be in principle, it will fail in practice because people won’t be comfortable with it, and won’t want to adopt it. Consider instead starting your employee engagement strategy from the employees themselves. Rather than company-wide directives, maybe start with a few pilot projects at smaller scale, and include space and incentive for employees to participate in surveys and discussions with the company. Integrate the concept of employee engagement from the interest of the employees themselves. You’ll be surprised how quickly word of a good thing will travel within your company. Soon enough, other employees will want in on the same thing.

Get Clear about Your Data Targets

Everyone knows that you can’t get useful measurements if you’re not clear to yourself about what you’re measuring. No employee engagement strategy will be able to help you if you don’t know what kind of information you need to gather from the engagement. Prepare your strategy long in advance, and think through the kinds of issues you need to get addressed from employee engagement. A lot of people think questionnaires and interviews are as a simple as just asking a few questions. Well, they’re not. At Kazi, we’ve spent thousands of man-hours perfecting our expectations scan, so we know a thing or two about surveys and data collection. And you can’t underestimate the importance of question design. Take the time you need in advance of rolling out employee engagement to make sure you’re gathering the right data, and in a way that you will be able to use at the end. You’ll thank us later!

Make sure to acknowledge high performance

In any employee engagement process, you’re going to find out things about your staff that you might not have known before. And some of it – hopefully! – is going to be really encouraging and positive stuff. And that’s a good thing for you and your employees, as it gives an opportunity for them to have their hard work recognized. But in order for this not to be a lost opportunity, you’re going to need to be ready to acknowledge it and even provide bonuses and rewards that show the employees you see what they’ve done and you are encouraging. Don’t downplay the value of even a small gesture of support. It’s not only the right thing to do, it’ll pay dividends many times over in employee trust, enthusiasm, and loyalty!

Be Ready to make Cultural Changes

Any company that takes employee engagement seriously will eventually have to reckon with the changes to the company culture that this will bring. Both the actual experience of integrating the employee engagement processes into the regular workings of the company, but also the information, revelations, and consequences of what you will learn during your greater regular engagement with your employees. You might find that some people benefit from having more time to work at home, or others can help by moving around from team to team once a year, or even that others create far more problems than they solve. And if you collect and learn this information, and then don’t make the space in your company processes or procedures to do something about it, well, it’s all been a waste. At Kazi, we’ve been working for a long time on how to go from insightful information about your employees to making effective management decisions with your employees. Getting your engagement strategy deployed is going to mean changes are coming. You’re going to have to be ready to make them!

A solid employee engagement strategy is the key to a happy, enthusiastic, loyal staff, and a company that runs smoothly. But like with anything important, the devil is in the details. Make sure you think through the implications of the implementation and consequences of your strategy before rushing headlong into it. At Kazi, we’re specialists in helping our clients through problems just like these. If you’ve got an HR problem, drop us a line today, and we’ll talk!

The post Getting a Strategy for Employee Engagement appeared first on kazi.

Hire for Capability, Train for Talent

A lot of companies mistake the ability to do one thing well with the ability to be a great employee or all-around rock star team member. But the fact of the matter is that usually, before getting to your company and learning your style, approach, and the inner workings of your company, most people won’t know that much about how to be really amazing inside your work culture. Work to identify people who have some excellent core competencies, but who are superior at learning and growing with your team. You’ll get stronger talent than you expected, and often from unexpected places. That’s why Kazi relies on our unique expectations scan, which can help identify these kinds of skills in a latent phase

Remember that Recruitment is just another numbers game

At the end of the day, all the techniques in the world won’t change the fact that hiring is, really, a numbers game. And in order to meet the right people, you will sometimes have to go through a lot of other people to get there. What’s important about this is to make sure you approach it with the right attitude, and not to get discouraged, distracted or dispirited.

Even companies like Google or Apple still have to look through dozens of candidates for any one post to find the right person. Also important is to make sure you define your objectives well enough that you can recognize the right candidate when he or she comes across your desk, even amid all the hundreds of other applicants.

Don’t be afraid to offer high compensation

Rockstar employees know their worth. They’ve often come from lots of other high-powered jobs, and know what the market offers. If you’re going to commit yourself to hiring the best talent, be prepared to shell out for it. This is a combination of setting high benchmarks on your job listings to attract the right people in the first place, and also being willing to contend with people who are often very good negotiators.

But remember, sometimes what’s most interesting or valuable to a particular candidate won’t just be more money, but could be more flexibility, or some other perks. Understanding their personality is key.

Remember your internal talent pool

The most reliable pool of talent you have is the one that already works for your company!. When you’re small, it can sometimes seem like you want to grow the company with outside people, to increase your headcount if your workload is increasing. But your existing team already knows each other and works together. You’ve already gone through talent and personality assessments with them – maybe with the Kazi questionnaire – and they have experience with your culture, your work, your clients! That’s a lot of stuff that you will have to get other employees up to speed on. Sometimes, of course, it’s not possible, especially if you need a special skill set, but it’s usually worth looking into promoting from within! Save time, save money, keep the team together.

Understand the deliverables for the position really well

Good talent knows the right questions to ask in a job interview. In fact, for the top candidates, it’s as much them interviewing you as you interviewing them. You’ll need to have really sharp answers to questions about the expectations, deliverables, and work products expected to come out of the position you’re talking about. How much work? How quickly? Delivered how? When you’re starting a small company, and working with a startup mindset, it can be common to just think about “winging it” a lot. And maybe that works, or was necessary, when it was only two or three of you. But you’re hiring with the big boys now, and you need to understand and communicate your job expectations properly if you want to compete.

Staying on top in the War for Talent is a complex and ongoing process. And at Kazi, we know you can’t manage it alone. That’s why we are here to help you navigate this quickly-changing Human Resources environment. If you have an existing HR challenge, or just want to hear about how Kazi can improve your hiring and retention processes, drop us a line today, and we’ll be happy to talk about it with you!

The post Keeping up with the War for Talent appeared first on kazi.

Foster an environment of Trust

This is the most crucial, and influences everything else. Making sure your work environment trusts and respects your employees will help them feel comfortable enough to believe their insights will be taken seriously. And this extends beyond just when you’re asking them for feedback. Make sure their work is taken seriously and that you trust them to manage their time without constant micromanagement. If employees get the sense that management doesn’t see them as serious professionals, they won’t want to offer their ideas. Treat people to a high standard, and watch them meet it.

Allow for both anonymous and attributed feedback

Not all kinds of feedback is the same. Some is uncomfortable, such as if a boss or supervisor is running things badly and makes people uncomfortable. Other feedback might be a source of pride or excitement for an employee who has come up with a way to improve things around the office. Employees might want credit for something like that, and you’d want to give it, right? Don’t assume that all will be one kind or another. So, if you’re designing feedback processes and forms, structure the attribution of the feedback around the kind of feedback you’re soliciting. We spend a lot of time at Kazi developing our expectations scans to get the right kind of answers from employees. It’s not just as simple as asking “What do you think?” You need to ask well to get useful answers.

Show feedback in action

There’s nothing quite so dispiriting as putting a lot of time and thought into a quality feedback for your employer, and then not seeing anything done about it. And not even a response. It might be the case that not all employee feedback is ready or ripe to be used right away, which is okay. But make sure that once you collect feedback from your employees, you make sure they know you got it, read it and took it seriously. If you’re implementing changes they recommended, let the company know! If you’re putting together a plan based on their ideas, tell them! And even if you can’t do what they said, acknowledge the feedback and help them understand why. Make sure employees understand that feedback is not a one-way process.

Make feedback a regular part of the company

If employees come to understand that their feedback is solicited only when something goes wrong or when upper management got bored for a while, they’re not going to value giving it, and not going to make an effort. This results is demoralized employees, and worthless feedback. Make feedback part of what goes on at the company normally. Maybe something really simple, like a suggestion box? Or yearly feedback meetings? Or regular CEO lunches with employees? There are literally an endless number of ways to integrate feedback into the background of your company. Kazi has developed a number of very effective methods that we’ve helped clients put to use for themselves.

The most important thing about feedback is that your employees understand you take them, and their ideas seriously. That doesn’t mean putting all of them into practice, but it does mean treating the feedback process like you care about it. This starts with the employee environment, and filters all the way through your interactions with them. There are lots of ways to improve the ways you collect and implement feedback, and at Kazi, we’d love to help you work through them. If you’ve got an interest in better employee feedback, drop us a line, and let’s chat!

The post Collecting and Using Employee Feedback Effectively appeared first on kazi.

Understanding the Difference

The Employee Experience is the broader terms to cover all the parts of an Employee’s life with the firm, from the very first contact until an exit interview. How is the workplace physically and socially structured to improve and foster a robust employee experience? Some firms build an employee experience that’s more lively and vibrant, where other companies choose to create an experience that’s more reflective and focused on individual focus.

Employee Engagement centers on the channels and processes and cultures around how employees interact with the firm, its ideas, its objectives and its people. Just like with Employee Experience, there are multiple ways to do it, but what’s important is that engagement is open and transparent. In order to stay engaged, it’s crucial that employees trust that it will work for them.

The Right Experience for your Company

All companies have distinct, unique cultures, and so the employee experience that comes from them is also distinct. Some international companies, like Facebook, foster active, entrepreneurial, privateering collaboration, summed up in its famous slogan “Move Fast and Break Things.” Other companies choose to have a culture that’s more formal and tailored to quiet, personal work.

For both of these companies, the culture follows from the mission, and the Employee Experience follows from the culture. Employees at your firm should feel that the experience of working there is supportive, comfortable, and consistent with the culture of the company. How are meetings organized? What kind of noise level is the work environment? Is the experience conducive to the kind of work they have to do?

At Kazi, we encourage HR departments to understand how employees navigate the day-to-day work experience and find out if they find it reasonable or helpful for their work life and personal and professional growth. Build an Employee Experience that fits your companies, and inspires your employees.

Engaging People Right

Modern and Contemporary management science has taught us that work life can’t just be a unidirectional process of receiving orders and then performing them. This is dull and uninspiring, and sure to create unengaged employees. Improving performance comes from improving Employee Engagement: how connected do employees feel to the mission and ideas of the company? How valued do they feel as members of a team? If employees feel like their input doesn’t matter, engagement will suffer. According to Gallup, only 15% of white collar employees globally feel “engaged” at work. There’s a lot of room to improve. Managers play a huge role in improving and sustaining employee engagement, through team monitoring, regular conversations, and individual employee attention.

At Kazi, we help managers provide the right employee feedback and recognition to ensure that employees stay engaged and connected to the company’s work, and not left out of processes that matter to them. Engaged employees are happy, productive employees.

The Ideal Combination

When employees have a work environment that is comfortable, responsive, challenging and conducive to personal and professional growth, they return the favor to the employer many times over. But it’s crucial for employers to make sure they have sufficient attention to Employee Experience and Employee Engagement. The most gorgeous office and fun company culture won’t do any good if employees feel ignored. And even the best management practices can suffer if your workforce is stuck in a dispiriting dump.

Survey after survey shows that companies with better employee experience and engagement consistently outperform those without it. So this isn’t just an issue of altruism. Your ability to compete for talent, and compete in your market, depend on it!

Employees: The Most Valuable Resource

In the 21st century, the biggest key to a company’s success won’t be its control of some kind of physical space, or even a patent. It’s going to be the intangible asset of the team itself. Can you attract, train, retain, and grow the best talent on the market? The better your Employee Experience and Employee Engagement is, the better fit you’ll be for some of that talent.

And at Kazi, we know a thing or two about getting the right fit for your employees. If you want to know more about how to improve Experience and Engagement, drop us a line at Kazi, and we would be glad to help you out!

The post Understanding the Difference Between Employee Engagement & Employee Experience appeared first on kazi.

Getting the Description Right

Sometimes, it’s best to start with the most straightforward, and back-to-basics part of the process: the job description. This can sound rudimentary, but there’s a reason it’s the foundation of the right candidate. Getting the job description first of all makes sure that you and your team get your heads around the role properly. You can’t hire for a position that you yourself are unclear about it. This kind of planning and thinking clarifies your needs, and helps telegraph to potential candidates that the position is meaningful, and with a team that knows what it’s doing. Real professionals recognize and respect that. When your description is on-point, both you and your applicants are starting from a stronger foundation.

Innovative Candidate Assessment

Once you’ve put your job description out there and gotten your first batch of applicants narrowed down, you need to start separating the “wheat from the chaff,” as it were. In the past, some companies and organizations have tried multi-directional and highly expansive tests – like Google – where others look for much more specific job-knowledge skills – like government agencies. But in the fast-moving corporate environment that dominates the experience of many younger and tech-focused companies, the nature of the job itself can often be subject to change from month to month, or even day to day. For that, you need to get more of a sense of how the candidate functions in different situations and with what kind of work focus. This is at the core of why we developed our Kazi Expectations Scan for potential candidates. Rather than focus just on personality or job knowledge, it mixes both to provide a more rounded understanding of the candidate’s best ability and work style

Get out of the Interview Room

We’ve all heard the metaphor that dating can be like an interview? Well, it works both ways! Interviewing can be like going out on a first date. And few situations are more constructed and artificial as a first date – or interview – atmosphere. Most of a company’s time spent with an employee is in a more natural, working situation, not a highly rigid question-and-answer session. Often times, people function very differently in each of these, and being able to shine in an interview might not be a reliable indicator of someone’s work style. Kazi’s Expectations Scan incorporates knowledge about how your candidates like to get down to business, but it’s always a good idea to deploy this knowledge quickly. Try to incorporate job tasks, or a day in the office, along with your interview work, to get a sense of how the candidate behaves at work. The results could be surprising!

Broaden the Interviewer Pool

Everyone on a team has a unique and valuable insight into the workings of the company and the nature of the projects. And yet, often, the only people who assess whether a candidate is right for the team are those within the HR department. Consider integrating the input of people on the target team about their new potential candidates. You can even combine this techniques to get the candidates out of the interview room and collaborating with the target team. By broadening the the scope of internal team members who can weigh in on a candidate, you develop a much richer and deeper understanding of what your candidates are really like. The Kazi Expectations Scan can help you design the proper kinds of tasks and work projects to get the information you need, and your team can help answer your questions. Don’t underestimate the value of diverse input!

Getting the right candidate for the job is a perpetual challenge, but one that, at Kazi, we’re determined to help you overcome! By deploying the right kinds of assessment techniques, and expanding your definition of what constitutes useful information to understand your candidates, you can dramatically improve your ability to attract and hire the best job applicants to your company. Drop us a line today to see how Kazi can help you!

The post This is How You Identify the Right Candidate appeared first on kazi.

Harnessing the Power of Two

One of the most important processes we share with clients is the importance of having more than just one Human Resources manager. We understand that at most companies, when the top leadership is thinking about priorities, you usually focus on your core competencies, right? Because that’s where most of your activity happens. If you give attention to HR, it’s usually just enough so you think the job gets done. But let us tell you that one People Manager is not sufficient to find and retain the top team you need. One thing we’ve found in our research and experience is the fact that when you have two or more People Managers working on your team, you get more than the sum of the parts.

Team Roles and Work Profiles

Our proprietary expectations scan at Kazi helps create categories for potential job seekers based on their Team Roles and Work Profiles. The first covers what kind of employee the person is – more of an Executor, or a Team Player, for instance. The second covers what this person finds important in his/her work – is (s)he results-driven, or ambitious? We have found this is the most predictable, reliable way to ensure team members are optimally assigned, happy, and productive. But this means that you need at least one People Manager to make assessments about the job seekers, and another to understand and manage your teams internally, to make sure placements are made properly. The Kazi expectations scan can deliver excellent results, but execution is as important as preparations.”Done properly, people management becomes the way your am succeeds, through better recruitment, better personnel oversight, and better retention”

A well-oiled machine

At Kazi, we know that your team is the key to your company’s success. That’s why we’ve devoted so much time, creativity and talent to developing the best possible methods for assessing and placing job seekers and understanding your own team. This is what we call people management. And done properly, it becomes the way your team succeeds, through better recruitment, better personnel oversight, and better retention. Kazi knows that these are the places where you need partners. And that’s why we’re here.

Want to know more about how Kazi can help you? Check out our site!

The post Why your company needs more than one people manager appeared first on kazi.