4Cs Blog: Happy Employees = Happy Customers

How to Spot Toxic Culture Warning Signs

 Before you accept the job offer

When I read stories about people dying at their desks , Sweden’s move to adopt a 6 hour work week seems like an impossible yet hugely desirable dream. Working insane hours for many of us is often the result of unreasonable expectations and it really is killing us. To keep our jobs we are often under pressure to work longer and longer hours to prove ourselves. We no longer work for our families, we work for companies that don’t seem to care about their employees. The experiences of former Apple and Amazon employees make us wonder where senior management is learning how to treat people and why this behavior is tolerated.

Since 6 hour workdays are a long, long way off perhaps the best we can for now is be extremely careful about accepting job offers in the first place. Instead of accepting the first job offer to come along we need to look closer at potential employers and watch for warning signs that tell us we should say thanks but no thanks.

6 Ways To Cultivate A Low Stress Work Environment

Sure, a good work ethic and strong ambition are keys to success, which drives increased professional and financial opportunities. But our culture also suffers from the glorification of busy. If you're not overwhelmed — merely surviving — at home, and especially at work, then you're not doing it right. Longer hours, late-night emails and weekend check-ins are believed to be badges of honor and equate to status. The associated stress is just par for the course.

High levels of stress impede health and wellness, from sedentary lifestyles to lack of sleep. Second to money, work accounts for 60 percent of stress, according to the Stress in America survey by the American Psychological Association. Not only can stress take a toll on health, but it can negatively affect relationships as well. The APA

reports that 41 percent of adults who are married or living with a partner said they've yelled at their spouse because of work stress and 18 percent said they were short with a co-worker. To help combat the glorification (and suffering) of busyness and stress, employers can make cultivating a low-stress work environment a priority. Emphasize the importance of breaks, work-life balance and open communication to discuss any frustrations.

The following 10 tactics can also help create a productive and efficient environment where employees can relieve and manage stress.

Making It Work Takes a Little Time

How to be out of sight but not out of mind!

A stroll through the office can give you a pretty good sense of the mood at your work place. You can tell if it’s humming or if it feels broken, tired and pathetic. But what insight do you have when you work from home? No one can see you so they have no clue what your mood is. As more and more people choose to work from home, how can you tell if they are engaged if you can’t see them? And how, if you are the person working from home, do you feel connected to your company when you are alone at your house?

Work gets a lot more challenging when you are at home because you have to shift the way you approach your work and how you actually get it done. In terms of employee engagement, which is still very much a part of the remote experience, you have to realize you need to shift how you manage your own engagement and you have to own it. There is nobody around who can sense what you are experiencing, get signals from you or have a grasp on your level of happiness and satisfaction. Your engagement is all up to you.

4 key areas that help you to own it are as follows:

Money is the Worst Incentive

The most typical motivation plan is to reward top performers and ignore everyone else. It is common knowledge that if you want something done at work, offer a bonus!
The problem is that this commonly used technique for motivating employees does not work! Senior management may be notorious for offering cash incentives in an effort to encourage (or manipulate) us to do more but, it turns out, we are not as manipulable as some bosses think we are.

Dan H. Pink, a leader in motivation, work and management, explains that the way we think about cash bonuses is backwards from what we would expect. Interestingly, studies show bonuses actually de-motivate workers instead of encouraging them. In a clever RSA video Pink explains how rewarding top performers causes worse performance and that when employees are paid enough money, it is possible to incentivize them using other, far more successful, techniques that result in increased engagement and loyalty.

In his video, Pink lists three things that actually do lead to better performance:

Autonomy: the desire we all share to direct our own lives. There is proof that the more autonomous we feel at work the higher the levels of employee engagement will be.

Mastery: We all want to get better at something. This is why some of us use our free time to learn how to play the guitar or study photography; we aspire to learn a new skill or craft for the pleasure and satisfaction.

Purpose: we all want to feel like we are making a contribution. If money and profits matter without a sense of purpose bad things happen. Service becomes lame, products are bad and work becomes uninspiring.

4 Ways to Lower the Costs of Employee Perks

A good benefits package can make the difference between winning over a talented and in-demand employee or losing him or her to an established competitor in your industry. But the costs of benefits grows every year and can leave you pinching pennies elsewhere just to keep the doors open. Benefits can make up a large portion of an employer's costs. In fact, a recent report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that private industry employers spent an average of $31.39 per hour worked on employee compensation, and that the cost of benefits made up an average 30.5 percent of these costs. Bearing this in mind, here's a look at how you can maintain a good benefits package while cutting costs.

Tailored Benefits

Your current benefits package may not be appropriate for your employees, as there is no one-size-fits all package. Some benefits providers base their packages on demographical information for your company, while others compile packages based on the group experiences of companies in your industry. If you are a small company, your benefits provider may be calculating the individual health risks of your employees rather than aggregating your data with that of other companies in your industry. If this is the case, you can save money by choosing a new benefits partner that takes into account the industry average costs rather than your company's individual risk.

The Employee Survey

 Is it dead?

Absolutely not!

Employee surveys are not only a valuable weapon for getting financial support from senior management to fix employee engagement problems, they are also the only way to measure progress and benchmark success. Besides, how else would you know what your employees think unless you ask them?

Make it work for you and make it count with these essential tips:

Do Not Look Back

You Are Not Going That Way!

When it comes to the pursuit of Employee Engagement what does the direction you are looking have to do with it? 

From an employee survey perspective looking back and looking forward have a lot to do with employee engagement. We find that a lot of employee survey companies only want to look back to find out how you got where you are. It is true that if you suffering from turnover, low productivity, low morale and there is an air of discontent in your workplace, looking back gives you some historical perspective to better understand what may have gone wrong and what might not be working. We find employees have a very good sense of where they stand and how they feel and when asked they will share these thoughts and opinions with you. Most often we find they appreciate being asked and are happy and motivated to tell you (as long as they are confident their anonymity is completely protected). And you may shudder to discover you have what we politely refer to as 'areas of concern'.

We strongly recomment that you commit to knowing the level of employee engagement in your organization to ensure you are healthy because as we explain here,  ignoring any 'areas of concern' will cause greater problems over time.

But we also find there is a lot of evidence that shows there is great value in asking employees about the future too.

4 Not So Ordinary Careers for Millennials

Millennials are quickly becoming the world’s leaders, which means it really is time to figure out what you want to be when you grow up. But in a time when there are so many more career possibilities than becoming a doctor, teacher, policeman or astronaut, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by what path to choose. So how about venturing outside the proverbial box? Below are four ideas perfect for the millennials in search of a not-so-ordinary career path.

Shut Up And Quit Already

In most organizations one out of 10 employees has their foot out the door.

We call this group Satisfied Opportunists because they appear satisfied when actually they are just waiting for a better opportunity to come along. In other words they could care less about you and are hard-wired to jump ship at any moment. You might even wish that they would quit already instead of wasting valuable resources.

Using our loyalty matrix you can actually classify all your employees into one of four groups of employees and when you do this, you get a very clear picture of your workforce and where they stand in terms of being loyal to you and, more importantly, how long they plan to stay. Not only does this information help you to predict and manage turnover it also allows you to see areas of opportunity where you can make changes that will increase employee engagement, loyalty and retention simultaneously.

To classify all your employees into one of four groups we ask two key questions- how satisfied employees are, and how long they expect to stay at the organization. Years of surveying employees has revealed to us that most people know exactly how long they plan to stay if nothing changes.

Work Should Not Be Hell

What gets you up and out of bed and off to work every day?

For some of us the work we do is challenging, engaging, stimulating, meaningful and it might even be important. Many employees would say they love their jobs so much that what they get paid is secondary. But work for the majority of people has none of these characteristics. Just think about the people whose work is monotonous, meaningless and soul-deadening. These are workers who get up and head off to factories, call centers and warehouses where the only reason they do what they do is for pay. As many would say, what other reason is there?

In a recent TED Talk Barry Schwartz suggested Adam Smith, the father of the industrial Revolution for creating this situation saying Smith, “was convinced that human beings were by their very natures lazy, and wouldn't do anything unless you made it worth their while, and the way you made it worth their while was by incentivizing, by giving them rewards. That was the only reason anyone ever did anything”. Smith, the guy who gave us this incredible invention of mass production said of people who worked in assembly lines “He generally becomes as stupid as it is possible for a human being to become”.

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