Employee engagement

How to Keep Employees Happy and Productive (Without Huge Salaries)

Following up on the theme of last week’s post, we’d like to focus on how employers can keep and engage core talent by keeping employees happy and productive without paying huge salaries. That’s not to say that Gravity Payments' model, which involved CEO Dan Price taking a major pay cut to boost his employee minimum pay to $70,000, didn’t get Gravity Payments workers pretty excited; however, this model is...

Gravity Payments Pays Up: The Good and the Bad About a High Minimum Salary

The media is still buzzing after the CEO of Gravity Payments, Dan Price, announced that he was cutting his own salary to ensure that none of his employees make less than $70,000 per year. It’s a magnanimous move, and the employees, many of whom saw their salaries double instantly, are justifiably happy. For some background, Gravity Payments is a Seattle-based payment processing firm. In young tech companies like Gravity...

9 Tips for Employee Motivation in Stressful Times

Can’t seem to keep your workers from getting discouraged during a crisis? Try these 9 steps from The Wall Street Journal to optimize employee motivation in stressful times: 1. Be available for support. Make sure to be available for questions your employees might have, be honest and avoid making promises that you can’t keep. 2. Don’t hover over your workers. Have faith that your staff will figure things out on...

3 Top Investments to Improve Employee Engagement

Looking to foster more passion in your employees? Try these three steps by  Victor Lipman (via Forbes Magazine) to improve employee engagement. 1. Link Individual Prosperity to Business Prosperity This is not just about providing financial incentives. Financial incentives should, in fact, be applied sparingly as research shows that these can actually impede motivation and performance in circumstances requiring creativity and innovation. Learn to tap into people’s natural drives for autonomy...

9 Critical Mistakes Leaders Make

In this succinct and informative video, Harvard Business Review interviews 9 experts on leadership to discover what they think are the most critical mistakes leaders make. 1. Irresponsibility Good leadership comes from being responsible – for your company, employees and customers. Poor leadership results when you put your self-interest before the interest of the institution that you run. 2. Betraying Trust Trust is the most valuable currency not only for doing...

3 Keys to Reviving Work Ethic in Millenials

Think younger workers lack a solid work ethic? Canadian HR Reporter interviewed Eric Chester, author of Reviving Work Ethic, on the matter. Here are his thoughts: Value Differences Younger workers don’t have a poor work ethic, just a different one. New workers are entering the workforce with a different values and beliefs. It is important to understand that these values and beliefs are not necessarily bad.  They just offer a...

3 Habits of a Successful Manager

Starting a new role as a team manager can be intimidating, even if you are already have management experience. The reason? The natural impulse of anyone in a leadership role is to feel that they need to be the expert, have all the answers, and be able to jump in, take control and solve everyone’s problems. This approach, unfortunately, assumes that those you are managing are nowhere near as...

The Number One Secret to Managing Millennial Employees

If you are a Boomer or Gen X leader tasked with managing a team of millennial employees, there is really only one thing you need to know – they aren’t that different from you. Much ado has been made in the media about the differences between generations, but there is also ample research on their similarities. One such study, conducted by Ben Rosen, a Ph.D. and Professor of Organizational...