Thanksgiving is around the corner and it’s time to give thanks. This time of year is the perfect opportunity to show your employees how important they are and make them feel valued, which is something we crave as humans. 

CEO of The Energy Project, Tony Schwartz wrote an article for Harvard Business Review titled “The Only Thing that Really Matters”. He wrote that “the struggle to feel valued is one of the most insidious and least acknowledged issues in organizations. How we’re feeling — and most especially whether or not we feel acknowledged and appreciated — influences our behavior, consumes our energy and affects our decisions all day long, whether we’re aware of it or not.” 

Pulse surveys are as close to real-time feedback as you can receive, unless you’re speaking face to face with your employees about their sentiment daily. This is unreasonable and wasteful. However, it’s imperative to give employees the opportunity to voice their concerns and even more important that they feel heard.

Adopting an intranet has its potential benefits that are also potential problems. It could mean time saved or time wasted. The user-experience could keep employees coming back or drive them away. Content creation will fall onto employees and it will be another tool used in the office, both factors that could complicate things further. Here are a few things to think about before implementing an intranet in your company. 

Leadership effectively communicating with employees is not a simple feat. Things get lost in translation as they move down the ladder and what you meant to say may not be delivered in that way. Here are some common communication mistakes that leaders make that risk employee engagement and retention, and the simple solutions to these problems.

Employee NPS drives customer NPS and customer NPS drives company growth. So what is NPS? It stands for Net Promotor Score and it measures experience and loyalty. Basically, if you want to make money you have to keep your employees happy and loyal. Clear communication will outweigh any perks an office provides to its employees. If employees feel that management and leadership don’t effectively communicate with them and if they feel unfulfilled in their work, basketball tickets and raffles won’t stop them from seeking fulfillment somewhere else. This is why maintaining a feedback loop is crucial to running a good business. Here are some ideas to assure both leadership and employees are “in the loop”.

Did you know that 65% of all lost customers can be traced to a disengaged employee?  In many ways, the deskless workforce is the face of the company that customers see first and interact with directly. They’re on the sales floor, greeting you as you enter a store, working the lines in factories, performing inventory and more. They’re on their feet, in the field, facing customers daily. They're the backbone of most large companies making them an invaluable tool for leadership. They are who provide information on the pulse of the company’s day to day business. Who else knows the customer better? For these reasons and more, it’s crucial that deskless employees are aligned with leadership and a company’s vision.

The 9-5 workday is old-fashioned. People, especially millennials in the workforce, simply expect more from their employer. They want flexibility and freedom, the feeling of not being tied down, and an escape from the traditional. So what’s so great about working remotely?

At the top, the CEO sets a company-wide goal, then assigns roles or tasks to lower leadership in order to accomplish these goals. As you can assume, these people assign smaller goals to the employees beneath them, and it goes on and on. Although the goals get smaller, they must stay linked to the ultimate, company-wide goal. Employees should always keep in mind what picture their piece of the puzzle is helping put together.

With a surging percentage of millennials entering the workforce, employers are having to rethink old strategies for attracting new talent. A large salary is not attracting prospective employees the same way it used to.

According to Deloitte’s 2018 annual Millennial Survey, millennials prefer “a preference for plain talk, inclusiveness, and directness in their bosses; businesses that are involved in social issues and good causes for positive change; and the obvious potential benefits of automation in terms of productivity and economic growth, to name a few.”