Jul23
How can I tell if my best employees are getting ready to leave?
Why would they want to leave?
How can I keep them?
Top 10 Clues Your Best Employees are Leaving
- They start dressing better
- They take lunches at different times
- Their production drops off
- They seem “quiet” or “down”
- They request vacation one day at a time
- They are “sick” more often
- They stop championing their positions
- They stop volunteering
- They get more incoming phone calls than usual
- They ask you for a reference
Why Would They Want To Leave?
Most employees cite “money” as their reason for leaving. In some cases this is true. However, we know that money is a satisfier, not a motivator. As long as an employee receives what they consider adequate compensation, more money won’t buy more production. And lack of more money won’t drive them away. Many departing employees use money as their excuse for leaving because it is a “safe” answer.
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\\ tags: Business, Management
Jul23
Many companies have done away with “sick leave” and “vacation” as employee benefits and have replaced them with “paid time off” (PTO).While this looks good on the surface, it can be a costly mistake.
What is Paid Time Off PTO
Paid time off is a bank of hours from which employees can draw. Employers credit additional hours to their employeess “banks”, usually every pay period. Most US employers offer their workers 10 paid holidays, 2 weeks vacation, two personal days, and 8 sick leave days per year. Under a PTO plan, the employees would be credited with 30 days paid time off instead (10+10+2+8).On a bi-weekly pay schedule (26 pay periods per year) employees would accrue an additional 1.3 days of PTO every two weeks. Where a semi-monthly pay schedule is used (pay days on the 1st and 15th of each month) employees accrue 1.25 days PTO on each of the 24 pay periods.
Why Paid Time Off PTO Is Good
The concept is good. Make your company more attractive to prospective employees and make it easier to retain current employees by increasing the number of days they can take off from work and still get paid. Since most employees are healthy and don’t ever use all their sick leave, why not let them take the difference as extra vacation vacation time. There is no cost to the company and the employees are happier. How could that be bad?
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\\ tags: Business, Management
Jul23
Managing change means managing people’s fear. Change is natural and good, but people’s reaction to change is unpredictable and irrational. It can be managed if done right.
Change
Nothing is as upsetting to your people as change. Nothing has greater potential to cause failures, loss of production, or falling quality. Yet nothing is as important to the survival of your organization as change. History is full of examples of organizations that failed to change and that are now extinct. The secret to successfully managing change, from the perspective of the employees, is definition and understanding.Resistance to change comes from a fear of the unknown or an expectation of loss. The front-end of an individual’s resistance to change is how they perceive the change. The back-end is how well they are equipped to deal with the change they expect.
An individual’s degree of resistance to change is determined by whether they perceive the change as good or bad, and how severe they expect the impact of the change to be on them. Their ultimate acceptance of the change is a function of how much resistance the person has and the quality of their coping skills and their support system.
Your job as a leader is to address their resistance from both ends to help the individual reduce it to a minimal, manageable level. Your job is not to bulldoze their resistance so you can move ahead.
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\\ tags: Business, Management
Jul23
Every morning, it seems, you read an article in the paper about layoffs at another company. Those layoffs are hard on the people who get laid off, but they are also just as hard on the people left behind. There is more work to be done and fewer people to do it. There is the lingering fear that more layoffs might happen or that the company might close altogether. Here’s what you need to know to survive in this business climate, both as a manager and as an employee.
As an employee
Your employer believes that you are good at what you do. You are valuable to the company and its plans for the future. That’s why they kept you and not someone else. They believe you are capable of producing more, or better, work than others. To survive in this climate every employee must look out for the Company’s interest as well as there own.
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Figure out what’s important and to do that. Work on what’s important not merely urgent.
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Recognize that there is not enough time to do everything. You have to do more, but don’t expect to be able to do everything.
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Find better ways to do things. Streamline and simplify. There isn’t time for a lot of things that people used to do before.
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\\ tags: Business, Management
Jul23
Many people believe that to be a good manager you have to give orders to the people below you. They are wrong. You do not have to give orders. In fact, you should not give orders.
Don’t give orders
When you give orders, you tell someone to do something. “Put that file on my desk”, is an order. So is, “put Roger on the late shift”. When you give an order, you do not allow the other person any latitude to think about what to do or how to do it. All they can do to satisfy your order is exactly what you ordered. There are two reasons why this is bad. First, you do not allow the person to figure out the best way to do the task. Second, you do not let them learn.Sometimes it is appropriate to give orders. In the military, there are times when a leader has to give orders. When you tell a squad to “charge that hill” you don’t want them to think about it. You just want it done. However, even in the military, leaders don’t give orders unless they have to. Instead of giving orders and telling someone what to do, good managers give instructions. Instead of telling them what to do, you tell them what you want done.
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\\ tags: Business, Management
Jul23
Question: What is restricted stock?
Answer: Stock is ownership of a company. When that stock has limitations on it, it is said to be restricted.
Question: What kind of restrictions?
Answer: One of the most common restrictions requires a certain length of time to pass or a certain goal to be achieved before the stock can be sold. This is the vesting period.
Question: What is a vesting period?
Answer: The vesting period is the length of time before the restrictions are lifted. If the restricted stock is awarded based on the employee remaining with the company for two years, those two years are the vesting period. If the stock vests when “gross sales increase beyond $30 Million” the vesting period is however long it takes for that to happen, if it ever does.
Question: What happens if I leave the company before my stock vests?
Answer: You forfeit the stock.
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\\ tags: Business, FAQ, Restricted Stock
Jul23
Many organizations evaluate companies and publish list of “best companies” for different groups. Listed below are a selection of such lists of “best companies” to work for. Some lists, like Forbes and The Times, are very broad. They simply list “best companies to work for”. Others have more narrow focus and list best companies for certain minorities, types of workers, or regions.
These lists usually are accompanied by articles or surveys that detail what made the selected companies stand out. If you want your company to be attractive to these workers, you can emulate the tactics of the companies on these lists, the companies who have succeeded in this area.
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\\ tags: Business
Jul23
We spend too much of our day trying to cram more into it. We adopted the computer term multi-tasking and tried to apply it to our own daily activities as another step in our quest to get more done. The problem is that multi-tasking doesn’t work.
Multi-tasking Doesn’t Work
As you brush your teeth in the morning, you think about the agenda for big meeting later in the day. It doesn’t take much of your brain’s processing power anymore to brush your teeth, so your agenda planning isn’t suffering too much from having to share. But what about two tasks that require more of your brain’s capacity? You might be talking on the phone while you’re preparing breakfast. You may get both tasks done correctly, but you would have gotten both of them done better, and in less total time, if you had done them one after the other instead of at the same time.
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\\ tags: Business, Management
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