If talent and skill are so important and if every company and manager out there supposedly is aware of their significance, then why is it that far too many companies out there cannot seem to recognize, develop and celebrate the talents of their workers?

Management thinkers have it that only a fraction of workers these days are really committed to their work, and, as a result, these people are easily the most productive of all. This can be directly linked to the fact that few companies really invest in developing their workers’ talents.

What are some specific reasons why this is the case?

Firstly, when hiring new staff, companies can be extremely concerned with credentials and experience to the exclusion of talent. How many job vacancies on sites such as Jobstreet or Monster list talents or skills desired in the people who apply for those positions? The vast majority list experience and credentials, and many state that people who do not have the experience and credentials listed need not apply.

Stemming from this, companies may also be too eager to get “qualified” people in the door. Far too many of them simply usher people in once they pass cursory interviews and tests given for formality’s sake, when their acceptance is a foregone conclusion since it is based on their experience and credentials. This procedure does nothing at all to determine applicants’ skills and talents, or if it does determine them it does so cursorily.

Some companies, in addition, dehumanize their workers by seeing them almost as cogs in the machinery of the company, focusing only on their output instead of attempting to build competency. The talents of these workers are thus given no chance to develop. In addition traditional processes constrain the creativity of workers, forcing them to do things ‘the right way’ and not considering that any other way could also be correct or maybe even better than the ‘accepted’ way.

Lastly, some companies simply fail to celebrate the talent their workers exhibit and make use of in their day-to-day activities. These people and the creative solutions they come up with are simply ignored when they and their solutions should be promulgated to others who may benefit from them.

So work to recognize, develop and celebrate your workers’ talents to put both your company and your workers ahead of the rest!

Process optimization is done with an eye towards improving a company’s efficiency. If processes are optimized, costs can be reduced, quality can be increased, and a company’s workflow is greatly improved, among other things – all leading to increased efficiency all throughout, better morale, and a significantly improved bottom line.

In the past, when companies tried improve processes, which are “groups of related, structured activities that are performed to produce a service or product”, they focused on their workers. However, people can only be pushed so far before problems creep up and the point of diminishing returns is reached.

So it is high time companies begin to focus on optimizing their processes.

How can this be done?

Firstly, this may seem redundant, but it may be worthwhile to create a process that specifically seeks to optimize processes – a process optimization process. Companies that make use of Six Sigma utilize two processes of this sort: DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control) and DMADV (Define, Measure, Analyze, Design, Verify), but others use much less formal processes and, as a matter of fact, may not even realize they are practicing Process Optimization.

Another possible solution would be to make use of technology such as Business Process Management or BPM software to automate tasks. The size and complexity of some daily and/or repetitive tasks often means that replacing human workers with technology (in this case, software) is an easy and viable – in some cases, as a matter of fact, the only way – to optimize those processes. And of course BPM software can work to make existing software packages more efficient.

These solutions are of course neither contradictory nor exclusive and may be implemented concurrently depending on the needs of the company.

No matter how focused any of us are – and there are those out there who really can focus extraordinarily, ferociously well – we constantly need to be on our guard because despite this focus there are many distractions which may get in the way of what we want or need to do. Focus is never a permanent thing; once you’ve achieved it, you’re always in danger of losing it again.

Since the problem is constantly changing, the solution to it needs to be equally dynamic. You may have taken all the critical steps, but there are always many things that can disrupt your focus. Ergo, you have to keep tweaking what you do. Continuously experiment with your processes and procedures, and evaluate your changes ruthlessly. No sacred cows – if something doesn’t work, kick it out!

Part and parcel of maintaining focus is to become aware of possible distractions that can come up in future so that you can prepare to deal with them in advance. If you can cook up ways to prepare for the arrival of a noisy officemate or a lunch meeting that you can’t skip, then you’ll be able to deny those occurrences the chance to disrupt the flow of your work.

Distractions come in many shapes and sizes. They can be external ones, involving other people and/or the environment you work in; they can also be internal distractions, such as the niggling feeling that you need to be focusing on other things aside from what you’re dealing with at present. This could be true, or it could be false.

So here’s how to deal with distractions. The first thing you need to do is acknowledge that they could be things that you need to deal with immediately and not something that simply irritates you and thus needs to be blocked out or eliminated altogether. Back to your hunch or suspicion that something on your daily to-do list is more important than what you chose to work on – what if it’s true and your boss is impatiently awaiting your response to the email he sent? So find out first if what’s bugging you isn’t bugging you for an important reason. Give yourself the space and time to determine, and then decide what to do based on what you discover.

And should you find that your focus continues to slip even if you keep on trying to force it back to what you’re doing, consider taking a break. You’re not superhuman; people need to rest their minds and heads from time to time. Working and pushing too hard will only exhaust you and your creativity and reduce your productivity no end.

In this networked and exceedingly fast-paced world we live in, email is indispensable. However, if faced with having to manage too many emails, our productivity can suffer as a result. Here are some tips you can use to prevent email from taking over your working life.

Firstly, set good email filters in place. The vast majority of email people receive nowadays is nothing more than spam. So unless your business requires you to go through tons of (poorly written) email hawking everything from Viagra to penile enhancements, make sure it all ends up in your spam folder where it belongs and where you can delete it once and for all and at your leisure.

Be selective with the email that does make it to your inbox. Your spam filters will only get rid of some of the junk. Some email will just be forwarded inspirational or motivational messages from well-meaning friends – thanks, but you have a job to do and there may very well be too few hours in a day. You can either simply ignore that kind of email or delete it once you do see it. Other email can be answered later on, so just leave it until you’re less busy.

Next, set a schedule for you to work with your email, and stick to that schedule. True email junkies can’t help but check their inboxes every hour or even more frequently to see the latest. But this will interrupt your work no end and you’ll be unable to get anywhere if you don’t build up a good head of steam. Check your mail, say, just thrice a day, and make sure that people know of this schedule of yours so they don’t end up pulling out their hair waiting for a response from you.

Lastly, make sure that you keep your emailed responses short and sweet. You don’t have time to agonize or dawdle over one or two or three emails. You have deadlines to beat and bosses to satisfy. It can help if you come up with standardized responses to common questions, if you have to deal with that sort of thing.

Use these tips to make sure that email doesn’t dominate your office activities and you’ll be a much more productive worker!

Over the past few years the world has done nothing but speed up – most often relentlessly so – and at a faster and faster rate as well. You see this trend everywhere, but it is never more true than in the business world.

Technological advancements have enabled us to do more than our predecessors ever could. Multitasking has become the buzzword of the present – and those who do not know how to do more than one thing at a time, and do all those things well to boot, are in danger of being phased out. Ever-more efficient computers give us the ability to do more in one day than ever before. It can also have a dehumanizing effect as people end up becoming cursory with each other and only interacting for work purposes.Our job descriptions become ever more complex as a result of this extremely fast pace, and there is also tremendous pressure on everyone to reach an ever-higher set of standards.

You have to wonder if overall productivity is really increasing as a result of all this. Because everyone is running themselves ragged trying to do their jobs, or at the very least, attempting to stay at least a step ahead of the team that decides who to axe next, it could very well be concluded that all this hurry and fuss is resulting in better output and more work done on a daily basis. Irrespective of whether or not this really is the case, however, it’s undeniable that working at such a furious pace is both unsustainable and puts one’s health and well being at risk.

The solution, then, is to slow things down – and for those of who you manage teams and fear that this will lead to slacking off, please realize that insisting on a hurried work pace and working your employees into the ground is only a short term solution that will only bring you problems (poor morale, poor performance, absenteeism, high turnover, and maybe even a lawsuit or two) in the medium- to long-term.

Some suggestions, then. Scheduled downtime during which you or your teammates do nothing at all can be very beneficial. It allows people to rest and relax a little bit, and you might be amazed at the creative and/or beneficial ideas that pop up during that time. (Google’s head honchos allow their people a day to do “nothing”, during which they get to work on personal initiatives – many of which end up benefiting the company. You might want to consider following suit.) Mealtimes are particularly important and the right of people to have relaxed meals should be respected – as a matter of fact, enforced.

Lastly, to counter the ‘distancing’ effect, whenever possible don’t resort to simply emailing people. Try to talk to them in person. Remember that emails filter out the emotional content of any and all messages, which is also important. Besides, you wouldn’t want to let your own social skills slide, or that of the team you manage.

A little downtime can make even the most hectic, stressful workplace livable or at least survivable – and it may even get your team to be more productive and healthier as well. This may be the very solution you need to get your team up to scratch!

Could your lack of employee productivity be due to the failure of your training programs to actually teach your staff to manage themselves?

If your training methods are focusing only on teaching them to do their jobs better – on ramping up their skillsets – and not on improving their work attitudes and work habits, then you may need to go back to the drawing board. Job skills are only one component; attitudes and habits also need to be looked at and cannot be ignored if you really want to have an effect.

You also need to determine if your training periods are taking place too infrequently, especially if you intend to teach your staff skills that involve a lot of work. Practice always makes perfect – of course this is an oversimplification, especially since some things can be learned much faster than others and with less inputs from trainers to boot, but still. Could your team benefit from holding more frequent training?

Also, are you giving your team the opportunity to give you honest feedback regarding the training programs? You have to learn how these programs are impacting your staff – and if you are not getting honest feedback, you cannot see if you are really having a positive effect on your staff.

Ramping up productivity has everything to do with teaching each member of your team to manage him- or herself. good work attitudes and habits, plenty of opportunities to give these attitudes and habits a try, and a good interplay between you and your staff that incorporates honest feedback regarding these programs, among other things. If any of these is neglected, your team may not realize its full potential.

In today’s precarious business climate ‘creative thinking’ is more important than ever. The company or individual who can come up with innovative new ways of doing and seeing things places themselves way ahead of the pack. As a consequence he or she becomes far more valuable to their clients and the marketplace.

Are your clients constantly requiring you to come up with innovative and unique solutions? Is today’s business environment requiring you to come up with the same to stay afloat? Then you need to ramp up creativity – your own, your team’s, or your company’s.

Being creative is all about thinking differently and looking at the world from a different perspective. It’s about thinking out of the box and finding unique solutions to pressing problems. It’s all about the ability to look at things from a different point of view and cooking up answers that most people might not have been able to think up.

Creativity isn’t the exclusive domain of “creative people” – anyone at all can learn to think creatively. Of course the aforementioned creative people will be more successful at being creative and may come up with such solutions instinctively and off the top of their heads. Still, however, the “non-creative people” CAN learn to think creatively.

Here’s how you can learn to think creatively – or teach your team to do so!

First, be really clear about what you are trying to achieve. Know your objectives and purposes – don’t just memorize a document or parrot what other people have come up with. Knowing what you are out to do points you in the right direction. You or your team need to sit down and think – it may be best to write out your thoughts. You’ll know you have it if you all know your purpose enough to be able to sum it up in just one or two sentences – and this is understood by every member of the team.

The next step is known as blue-skying – just let your mind go and let those ideas flow! Let go of all your assumptions and your limits in order to shunt yourselves to a new perspective. The sky’s the limit. Don’t judge your statements or ideas, just keep them coming and note them down (or have someone else note them down) as fast as they emerge from the recesses of your brain. It’s best to do this with a group as you can bounce your ideas off each other. The moderator should take care that the group members don’t get sidetracked and begin to judge the ideas that emerge, as that will stem the flow of ideas.

It can also help to move the team out of its comfort zones. If you’re day people, meet at night or at dawn (after having slept earlier of course, or made other such adjustments). Meet at other venues – the cafeteria, the mall, someone’s house.

Carry this concept a little further and consult people you might not ordinarily consult – members of other teams, administrative staff, even children. You’ll have to phrase your ideas differently, even to the point of ruthlessly paring them down to the bare bones in some cases, but you just might get excellent inputs from someone who doesn’t share the perspective of you and your team.

After you’ve gotten a whole slew of ideas, stop. Now is the time to be selective. Ruthlessly pick over the ideas you’ve come up with and bounce them off your teammates. Be open to looking at some things again – an idea that can look silly at the outset can develop into a really amazing idea. If you’re dissatisfied with the results, run the procedure again – consider doing some things differently, of course.

This procedure can help even the most regimented thinkers come up with out of the box winners. Ramp up your creativity today and keep those ideas flowing!

Attracting good employees is only the start of any business’s staff-related struggles. Once you’ve got them in, you also have to do your best to keep them – and that’s not at all easy to do. Especially in today’s chaotic and uncertain times.

There’s no good side to having high employee turnover rates. Companies having employee retention problems lose extremely valuable resources. Money of course is one, as it costs a great deal to replace someone who resigns and to train his or her replacement, and knowledge is another. In addition, turnover contributes to declines in morale among the staff that remain – you can bet that people will think about heading for the door if they notice a lot of other people leaving as well – and significant disruption in customer service, even in companies where processes have been highly systematized and standardized. And of course companies whose workers need specialized skills suffer the most from high turnover rates.

What, then, can be done to counter employee retention problems? Here are some tactics companies can resort to in order to try and get those high retention numbers down.

1. Increase salaries and provide performance incentives to spur good performance. This is the most evident solution, but it’s something employers must be careful with. Salary increases on case-to-case bases instead of across-the-board can actually be counter-effective if they impact staff morale.

2. Provide further training. People who are given the opportunity to train by their employers are more apt to stay than to consider leaving. They may feel more cared for than those not being given similar opportunities if they are invested in by being given chances to learn more.

3. Allow for flexible work arrangements to accommodate people’s personal lives and let them balance their work lives and out-of-work interests and objectives. Poor work-life balance is a major reason for high employee turnover rates.

4. Provide clear expectations of what is expected of your staff on a daily basis, keep constant track of their improvements or failure to improve in that department, and make sure to bring these up when you hold performance appraisals.

5. Make sure to recognize and celebrate milestones and good performance.

In general, a company that is perceived to be bending over backwards to care for its staff will engender more staff loyalty than one that does not. So if your company is suffering from high turnover rates, you may wish to bite the bullet and make decisions that positively impact your staff – or at least give them the impression that you’re doing so!

Not everything a company does is good for it. Things sometimes need to be shaken up; some old traditions and habits may very well need to be changed or stopped outright. However, many things can get in the way.

Red tape and/or torturous, convoluted processes are excellent examples of traditions or habits that, if retained, perpetuate themselves. In nearly all organizations, decisions have to follow a certain route. For instance, a person who needs permission to do a certain thing must ask someone else for permission, who in turn needs to clear this with a superior. This process continues until someone in authority finally makes the call and decides whether or not the first person is to be permitted to do so. In addition, this decision must make its way down the chain of command to the person who initially requested permission. In some cases this process can take so long to finish that by the time the response arrives, the request is no longer needed.

Pride can also be a big factor in preventing much-needed changes from being implemented. Many companies simply refuse to allow innovations and ideas that have shaken up other companies to take root. A sense of superiority (whether misplaced or not) can persist. Companies that have had a history of industry leadership most often fall prey to this lapse in judgment – and the sad fact is that many of them really do need to change.

Lastly, two emotions – fear of change itself and complacency, that feeling that everything is alright the way it is and change is both unnecessary and unneeded – can be found at many, if not every, level of various organizations and across various industries as well.

You need to be aware of the traditions and habits that hold back you and your organization from attaining the heights you are supposed to be striving for. Awareness is the first step from which all other steps follow. So work on building that awareness today!

People who have been working for some years now are beginning to realize that nowadays, on average, office folks are putting in longer and longer hours at work than they used to.
There’s a lot to do and most of the time it appears that there are too few people around to get it all done. (This is especially true in chaotic, uncertain situations like the one we are stuck in nowadays.) Company culture may also be the sort that rewards those who work longer hours than those who don’t, and/or those who take on more work than their job descriptions warrant.

You may work in a company like this – many people do – and you may also think that it’s not a problem, especially if you’re a go-getter. But you also can’t deny that a busy work schedule leave you less time for yourself and for the other equally important things that you need to take care of. Such as your family if you already have one. (The people who sell their services instead of their time – the freelancers, the contract workers – are of course less affected because they don’t have to report to offices full-time. Still, though, they do get affected as well if and when they’re pressured to deliver more and more.)

In addition, as most of us already know, the stress of too much work leads to health issues for employees. And since health insurance costs are so high, companies and employees both need to seriously think about how they might be going about their business.

The key words here are: work smarter, not longer, or even necessarily harder.

Whether part-time or full-time, every worker must learn to set priorities and stick to them. If you are at the office, make sure you focus on your work; be diligent and finish all that you have to do for that day. Try not to let yourself be distracted by your officemates’ chatter. Make a list at the start of the day and constantly update it as you go along. But be mindful of the fact that you can very well work yourself to exhaustion if you don’t take a break – make sure you give yourself a few moments each day to relax and unwind, even just a little bit, before going back to what you need to do. And when you leave work and head home to your family, focus on them; make sure you don’t neglect them.

Of course, all such efforts on the employees’ part to get things done wouldn’t matter one bit if the companies they work for wouldn’t also be supportive of such efforts. And at any rate they do make sense from the perspective of efficiency. If everyone were to finish up and leave at day’s end, the company wouldn’t have to shell out extra cash for overtime expenses or even to pay for the extra electricity usage, for example.

Learning to work smarter and more efficiently can work out to the benefit of both the company and its employees. It all boils down to another key concept: both the company and its employees must respect each other and work for each other’s benefit. Only then can the working relationship truly be beneficial for all involved.