Tag: coaching

5 Ways to Increase Employee Satisfaction

Posted on by Howard Shore

I’m working with many companies as a leadership development coach and have noticed that many of them lack good strategy in one key area: employee satisfaction. At Activate Group Inc., we use a system called Human Capital Management to effectively manage employees, and ensure long-term growth and satisfaction of “A” players. This process starts with hiring the right people and ends with maintaining employee satisfaction. As you probably know by now, it costs so much more to replace a great employee than to simply keep them happy.

How to Keep Employees Happy

Here are five ways to ensure your best employees stay happy, stay productive, and stay with you for a long time:

1. Hire Right.

The best way to ensure long-term employee satisfaction and success is to hire the right person for the right job in the first place. Too many companies hire “blindly” by simply scanning resumes, getting a few recommendations and hiring quickly. Using assessment tools to screen for people with the right skill sets for open positions (before you even look at resumes) is one of the easiest methods to increase the number of candidates that are a good match for the job and the company.

2. Regular Affirmations.

Show your people appreciation by saying it regularly. Recognize when someone goes above and beyond, even if it is something small. Thank them when they coach others. Here is a fantastic list of motivating phrases from the Bud to Boss blog.

3. Onboarding Plan.

When you bring a new employee onboard, you need to do it the right way. A detailed plan for the first 90 days for every new employee is a crucial tool in getting them off to a positive start with the company. Many employees who have a negative onboarding experience (no training, no expectations, no coaching, etc) end up leaving the company — and that costs you money.

4. Employee Recognition Program.

Every company should have an employee recognition program, even small companies and even if it’s just a simple program. Recognizing and rewarding employees for going above and beyond the call of duty is super-charged positive reinforcement, and is also highly contagious. A word of caution: avoid rewarding employees for simply doing their job. After all, they are being compensated for doing their jobs and achieving certain milestones. Rewards work best when they are reserved for special effort.

5. Job Satisfaction Survey.

Once a year (or every couple years) you should ask employees to fill out a simple survey about their experiences with the company. Keep it confidential and keep it relatively short — try for 20 questions or less. Ask them about their career development, relationship with their manager, team environment, and if they feel like they are contributing to the company goals. All of these things are essential to job satisfaction.

How to Keep Employees Motivated

How high is your employee satisfaction? Do you know or are you guessing? Here are a few more tips on how to motivate employees from one of my earlier articles.

Howard Shore is a leadership development coach who works with companies that need executive development and strategic business coaching. Based out of Miami, Florida, Howard’s firm, Activate Group Inc., provides management coaching to businesses across the country. To learn more about leadership development coaching through AGI, please contact us at 305.722.7213 or email Howard today.

Better Candidates With Better Job Descriptions

Posted on by Howard Shore

How do you know if you have the right person in the right position? How do you know if your employees and leaders are successful? How can you tell if they are achieving what you expect of them? More importantly, how do they know if they are focusing on the right activities? The truth is, unless you have defined realistic yet challenging success metrics for each position you have no better idea of your employees’ success rates than they do. This is the basis of Human Capital Management.

Creating employee success starts with the hiring process. It starts with writing the best possible job description—I call it a position profile. The difference between a standard job description and a position profile is huge.

Position Profile vs. Job Description

Typically, job descriptions are used in job posts to advertise an open position, to determine compensation, and/or to establish a basis for performance reviews. However, job descriptions are not constructed in a manner that allows for the vetting of potential candidates or the measuring of performance—a position profile does.

The position profile identifies a role in the context of the organization, and communicates the link between business strategy, internal processes and your people.

In short, a position profile:

  • Documents the expertise, skills and experience needed to perform the job
  • Communicates expectations for performance and results
  • Detailed description of the job from three key perspectives:
    • Supervisory (Strategy & Direction)
    • Employee (Role & Responsibilities)
    • Customer (Quality & Acceptance)

By clearly defining each employee’s role in the context of the organization, and providing detailed success metrics and milestones that employees and managers agree on, you will not only target the right candidates for open positions, but you will also understand your overall team performance.

To learn more about creating a performance-based talent system for your organization, download the free eBook on Human Capital Management from our homepage.

Howard Shore is a human capital management expert and sought-after business coach based in Miami, Florida. His firm works with companies to deliver transformational management and business coaching to their executive leadership. To learn more about human capital management through AGI, please contact Howard at 305.722.7213.

5 Signs You Need a Leadership Coach

Posted on by Howard Shore

Of the many hats I wear at AGI, I think my favorite is that of leadership development coach. The experience of working one-on-one with business leaders and helping them become the best leaders they can be is very rewarding. Once in a while, I encounter people who don’t know if they are at the right point in their careers to benefit from leadership coaching.

Here are five easy-to-recognize signs that you are a leader who would benefit from a professional coach:

1. You frequently wish you had mentor. If you regularly have issues you wish you could bounce off an experienced executive, a leadership coach can help. Having an experienced advisor can help you gain reassurance that your decisions are thorough and can be an enormous benefit to you, your employees and the company. We coaches are also unbiased so we can offer sound, rational advice.

2. You want a strategic collaborator. If you need guidance from someone that can help you develop or review strategies, you are ready to hire a leadership coach. We’ve been a part of creating hundreds of successful business strategies, in boom years and downturns. When it comes to crafting the right strategic plan, we are incredible resources to draw from.

4. You need a confidential advisor. Like a consillere to the Godfather, a leadership coach can be your personal and private advisor. We all have moments when personal issues make us vulnerable and times when we need to discuss sensitive business issues. At those times, a leadership development coach can talk through things and keep the discussions “in the vault”.

5. You want access to the best tools and practices. Leadership development coaches have access to strategic tools that have been proven to increase company and people performance. When you engage with a coach, you automatically get access to those tools without the commitment of long-term contracts.

Think you might be ready for a leadership development coach? I’d love to hear from you!

Howard Shore is a leadership development coach who works with companies that need leadership development and strategic business coaching. Based in Miami, Florida, Howard’s firm, Activate Group, Inc. provides leadership and management coaching to businesses across the country. To learn more about leadership development coaching through AGI, please contact Howard at 305.722.7213 or email him.

Employees Are Your Most Important Customer, Part 2

Posted on by Howard Shore

I wrote an article about the many reasons why your employees are your most important customers. I wrote about how keeping your employees happy is one of the easiest ways to keep your customers happy. Happy employees give great customer service and create great word-of-mouth for the company.

When I read an editorial in the New York Times written by an ex-employee of Goldman Sachs on his last day of work, I was reminded again about the value of keeping employees engaged. This is a real-life example of how unhappy employees can cause considerable damage to reputation and potential threats to customer retention.

The Goldman employee, Greg Smith, spent his entire career at the company, rising up in the ranks and maintaining a great amount of pride in the company and its values. He says in the wake of a recent leadership change, the company lost sight of its values to focus on blind profits. He decided to exit the company in dramatic fashion by writing this lengthy editorial detailing his first-hand experiences and resulting disgust. He exposed degrading language used within the company and the practice of selling worthless assets to unsuspecting buyers.

Was his account accurate? We don’t know for sure. Regardless, what he did (besides commit career suicide) was create a great amount of doubt in Goldman’s trustworthiness. Plenty of Goldman customers read that editorial and some probably considered whether it was worth remaining customers.

Remember, your employees are the eyes, ears and voice of your company. They can be your biggest cheerleaders or your worst nightmares. It is crucial you keep them engaged and satisfied. Training, coaching and communication are keys to their engagement. And if they become disengaged for too long they will tell you…or anyone who will listen.

Howard Shore is a business coach who works with companies that need leadership development and strategic business coaching. Based in Miami, Florida, Howard’s firm, Activate Group, Inc. provides strategic planning and management coaching to businesses across the country. To learn more about management coaching through AGI, please contact Howard at (305) 722-7216 or email him.

10 Signs Your Employees Are Mediocre

Posted on by Howard Shore

It’s pretty rare to find a product or service that is truly unique. In my opinion, the only two ways to truly differentiate your business from the competition are through people and company culture. So let’s talk about people. Every leader with whom I’ve consulted says they only want to hire top talent. They say they have pride in their people and mediocrity is not an option. So why do they end up with a bunch of “C” players on their team? They don’t have a solid strategy for the management of human capital, and they ignore the following signs of mediocrity:

  1. People picking up the slack of others who don’t do their job.
  2. Positions are created to fit existing employees instead of hiring the right person for a position created to fit the company strategy.
  3. Managers tolerating the same mistake by an individual over and over again.
  4. Persistent complaints from co-workers about a particular employee.
  5. People waiting around to be told what to do instead of taking initiative.
  6. No innovation.
  7. High turnover in key positions.
  8. Higher overall turnover than best-in-class competitor.
  9. Managers spend more time “doing” instead of coaching, mentoring, recruiting and evaluating performance.
  10. Employees who aren’t held to the same standard because of their long tenure. i.e. their job is theirs forever.

At their core, these problems are human capital management issues that result in lost revenue, increased costs and lower margins. Ironically, some leaders find it easier to deal with revenue issues and their consequences than to learn how to build the right organizational structure and manage their human capital. By taking the time up front to do it right, they would grow faster, have more time, reduce costs, and expand margins. Instead, they choose what is comfortable.

Howard Shore is a sought-after business coach and an expert in human capital management who works with companies that need help with recruiting, hiring and developing the best talent. To learn more about AGI’s executive coaching, management consulting, and leadership training, please visit his website at activategroupinc.com or contact Howard Shore at (305) 722-7216 or email him.

Setting Examples Helps Employees Care About the Bottom Line?

Posted on by Howard Shore

As a leader in your company you are the foundation of the company culture. Like many business leaders, you may be struggling with how to build a sense of fiscal responsibility within your team. It’s a challenging thing to try to get entry-level employees to care as much about the bottom line as you do. The number one way to get employees on board with penny-pinching?

Set the example.

Spending money is a responsibility. And it is public, whether you want to believe it or not. When you spend the company’s money, employees make mental notes. If you are spending money frivolously, employees will get the impression that the company is rolling in dough. And when they see company leaders spending money left and right on non-essentials, they usually believe it’s okay for them to do the same.

I’ve seen CEO’s spend thousands on employee outings, perks for management, personal trips and entertainment, gadgets, etc. Not only do employees see this as a sign of prosperity and therefore excess, but also they see it as selfishness and favoritism. Giving certain employees (like yourself) valuable perks and excluding others is favoritism and a huge demotivator for the rest, which equates to less work effort overall.

By not controlling your company spending you are sending two very bad messages to employees:

  1. Spend money carelessly because I do.
  2. Only special employees get perks…and you aren’t one of them.

Double whammy on your bottom line.

The good news is that setting a good fiscal example is pretty easy. All it takes is discipline and prudence. Here are three easy tips for controlling your spending:

  1. Set an annual client entertainment budget. When it runs out, that’s it.
  2. Set an annual employee recognition budget. This could be spent on things like an Employee of the Month program and/or annual team party. Again, when it’s gone it’s gone until the next fiscal year.
  3. Instead of handing out individual perks to management or “favorite” employees without context, hold some kind of internal performance contest and reward the winners. Prizes should come out of the employee recognition budget.
  4. Never pay for personal perks or entertainment out of company coffers. As the company founder/leader you many feel entitled to reward yourself, but resist it because the message this sends is: “I worked hard and deserve a personal perk on the company dime.” You don’t want your employees thinking that way, do you?

Have you ever rewarded yourself on the company dime?

About the Author

Howard Shore is a business growth expert who works with companies that want to maximize their growth potential by improving strategy, enhancing their knowledge, and improving motivation. To learn more about him or his firm please visit his website at activategroupinc.com or contact Howard Shore at (305) 722-7216 or email him.

3 Lessons Learned from the Penn State Scandal

Posted on by Howard Shore

The Penn State scandal has been all over the news these past few weeks and it got me thinking. I wondered how such a respected and seemingly professional establishment could have allowed this situation to go so far. How did these secrets stay buried for so long and how could an organization with such moral conviction let these decades-long accusations fester in the dark without follow-up?

Looking from the outside in, I can only assume that the internal communications and processes for handling crises are severely flawed on many levels. Here’s what I think we as business leaders can all learn and apply to our own organizations after watching the Penn State scandal unfold.

1. The truth will always come out.

It’s the golden rule of public relations: attempting to hide a negative, potentially damaging situation within the company only makes it worse. By trying to bury the accusations against Sandusky, Penn State made the entire situation far worse by being exposed after it festered beneath the surface for years. I’ve seen it happen in many organizations. If someone in your organization—I don’t care who it is—is involved with something unethical or illegal, it must be dealt with immediately. Damage control processes need to be activated with your corporate communications folks and a crisis plan needs to be created. Because the truth will always come out, even if after many years in hiding.

2. The open-door policy must be lived, not just talked about.

Most companies have an open-door communication policy but many don’t live up to it. In the Penn State situation it was clear that Sandusky’s improprieties were witnessed and reported to superiors. Nothing was done about it. But something made the whistleblower stop there. Was he told to let it go? Was he made to feel like a detractor for blowing his whistle? Whatever the case may be, we can all learn that when an employee comes forward with something it must be taken seriously and there must be absolutely no element of discouragement or retribution for being the one that came forward. An open-door policy that is lived is one that instills a sense of comfort and safety for employees that need to bring bad things to light.

3. No one is immune from responsibility.

Joe Paterno is probably the most loved college coach of all time, and clearly a pillar of the Penn State organization—not just the football team. Yet even he is not immune from doing the right thing when faced with a difficult situation with one of his employees. All leaders should take this to heart. As a leader, you are responsible for the wellbeing of your company first. Personal relationships must take a back seat to the law.

Have you ever faced a difficult legal or ethical situation in your professional life? How did you choose to deal with it?

Howard Shore is a business growth expert who works with companies that want to maximize their growth potential by improving strategy, enhancing their knowledge, and improving motivation. To learn more about him or his firm please visit his website at activategroupinc.com or contact Howard Shore at (305) 722-7216 or shoreh@activategroupinc.com.

Finding the Right Employees

Posted on by Howard Shore

Many of the companies we work with and come across define their recruiting criteria incorrectly and some do not even realize they have a problem. The typical initial problem statement is, “We need to fill a position with a qualified candidate.” Defining “qualified” is where they tend to go wrong. Some go on to say, “We will have better results when we hire from the inside than from the outside.” Others insist, “We should only look at people that previously have worked in this particular function for a certain number of years.” Or, “We want someone that has been in our industry before so we won’t have to teach them our business.”  What these criteria and the initial problem statement often overlook is the real problem in the company. There is not an “A Player” in every position, and the company does not make defining, finding, keeping, and growing “A Players” a necessity.

When filling positions in a company, there is one common denominator that gets overlooked consistently in almost every company I come across. If you want to solve a problem, it is important to first define it correctly. Once you have defined it correctly, you can then come up with the questions you need to answer in order to solve your problem. Redefining “We need to fill a position with a qualified candidate” as “We need an “A Player” in every seat” forces you to redefine your expectations for the position and the criteria for the candidates. Many people you might have hired using the old definition should not get past your screening process.

The next time you fill a position in your company, ask the right questions:

  • What are the key performance indicators of “A” performance for this position?
  • What are the key success factors for producing this performance?
  • What qualities does the person need to have to produce this performance?
  • What track record do you want to see for you to trust that they can do this job?
  • What are the cultural aspects of your company that are important to consider when choosing a candidate fit?
  • What values must a candidate have in order to be hired, and what questions will you ask to test whether they’ve demonstrated those values in the past?
  • What early warning indicators will you put in place so that you can tell whether things are working?

We can help you find the “A Players”.

Howard Shore is a business growth expert who works with companies that want to maximize their growth potential by improving strategy, enhancing their knowledge, and improving motivation. To learn more about him or his firm please contact Howard Shore at 305.722.7213 or shoreh@activategroupinc.com.

Commitment to Change

Posted on by Howard Shore

Just like the people who work for them, CEOs and leaders come in all different sizes, shapes, styles, and backgrounds. As you can imagine, those variations influence how their people behave, who they hire, the systems and processes they use, and the strength of the team they have around them, etc. Dave Kurlan of Objective Management Group put together a list of 10 ways some CEOs react to recommendations he makes about their sales force. They are exactly the typical answers we’ve heard from the CEOs and seniors regarding unsuccessful projects of all types:

#1 – “Thank you for your advice. I’m not comfortable with that.” Who says that you have to be COMFORTABLE? You have to do the right thing for your company!

#2 – “I’m not quite ready for that. How about if we do that in six months?” This is a less honest version of #1 – at least be straight with me!

#3 – “Whatever you say. You’re the expert.” This tends to work out a lot like #1. Yes, they agree with whatever I say but are no stronger with management than with me and can’t drive change.

#4 – “This is B*ll S*it. They’re just going to have to do what you say, right now, or they’re gone.” That’s the spirit, but it isn’t driving change. You can’t pound people with a sledgehammer to drive change; you have to inspire them to change.

#5 – “Let me see if I can get some consensus for this.” Oh-oh, this isn’t going to work. You never get consensus from people who don’t want change in the first place!

#6 – “OK. Let’s talk about how we’re going to accomplish that, given our challenges.” Much better! At least we’re going to talk about how we can implement…

#7 – “Great – can YOU deliver that message for me?” This is even worse than #5!

#8 – “I’m not going to drive this. One of my senior managers will have to drive this.” OK, how many years are you willing to wait to find a genius who finds value in this AND isn’t threatened by it or me?

#9 – “Why aren’t my people doing what they’re supposed to do?” Because you have to be strong enough to tell them that it’s a condition of continued employment rather than quietly sitting there, not saying a thing, and expecting something to change!

#10 – I don’t want to do it your way. I think it should be done my way instead.” Ah, excuse me, but isn’t that the same way you were doing it for the last 10 years – and it didn’t work then either?

Remember, your people won’t be committed to change if leadership isn’t.

Howard Shore is a business growth expert who works with companies that want to maximize their growth potential by improving strategy, enhancing their knowledge, and improving motivation. To learn more about him or his firm please contact Howard Shore at 305.722.7213 or shoreh@activategroupinc.com.

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