“It’s unbelievable how much you don’t know about the game you’ve been playing all your life.” — Mickey Mantle Understanding what lies ahead is critical to making the right decisions. Accepting reality requires to remain open to new information — especially the one that challenges…
How-Tos Archives
5 Steps to Managing Your Benefits Program Like a Business
For the average organization, employee benefits can consume up to 30% of payroll. This spend is one of the largest on a company’s income statement. Yet, this area is often the least aligned with organizational objectives. Put simply, benefits are…
How to Keep Your Remote Workers From Feeling Isolated
Remote working has become an increasingly common practice for modern businesses worldwide, whether that’s as a full-time replacement for the 9-5 office job, or as an occasional bonus for regular commuters. Gallup found that in 2016 43% of employed Americans…
5 Rules Every Business Needs for Digital Meetings
Efficient and organized meetings among multiple stakeholders are critical, especially as the modern workplace becomes increasingly dispersed. A 2017 report estimated that as many as 3.9 million U.S. employees worked from home at least half of the time. The increased…
How Analytics Can Help You Decide Pay Increases
According to Aon’s 2017 U.S. salary increase survey, more than two-thirds of employers were taking some kind of action to increase merit pay differentiation, with 40% reducing or eliminating increases for lesser performers. This suggests that spreading pay raises across the…
Not Getting the Right Answers? Try Asking the Right Questions
Humans are curious by nature. At work, it’s normal for HR professionals, managers, and team members to ask and answer hundreds of questions a day — and the way we ask and answer questions is important for our projects’ success….
What Should You Look for in a Hire?
Competencies have become the building blocks to determining success in an open role. When you identify competencies that are required for success in critical roles within your organization, you create a higher likelihood of job fit and success. Additionally, the…
How to Get Your C-Suite to Care About Culture
How can HR professionals help C-suite leaders care about culture? Or, even better, help senior leaders proactively engage in culture management? The good news is that most senior leaders understand that culture is important. 82% of respondents to Deloitte’s 2016…
What We Can Learn About Engagement From Video Games
I sometimes joke with those who ask me what I do that I get paid to play video games. It’s actually half-true. As a behavioral scientist who specializes in understanding human motivation and emotion, my colleagues and I cracked the…
Yesterday a Colleague, Today You’re the Boss. Now What?
“How do you handle it when you are now supervising your former teammates?” is one of the top five questions I get when teaching supervisory skills. This situation is understandably awkward for both the person who got promoted and those…
Anxiety Is a Killer. Here’s What to Do About It
40% of America’s employees experience persistent stress or excessive anxiety in their daily lives. 72% of them says it interferes with their lives and performance. Globally, anxiety is the sixth-leading cause of disability (and growing). I’ve seen this trend growing…
How to Gracefully Admit You’re Wrong
In a past organization, I routinely interacted with an employee who just couldn’t bring himself to admit being wrong about anything. No matter if we were dealing with misjudgment about how well a new hire might work out, about the…
The Total Cost of Your Workforce Is Not What You Think It Is
Do you have a detailed and accurate understanding of your total cost of workforce (TCOW)? If your organization is anything like most large businesses, the answer is no. Organizations are usually pushed to review their TCOW only when facing upheavals,…
The First Step to Great Leadership is Self-Awareness
“While I was waiting for my interview in a reception area, a pizza delivery man, a young guy dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, carried in a heavy pack of pizza boxes and water bottles. He struggled with the door….
You Can Help Managers Be Better Managers
Everyone is aware of friction when it exists in the office. Whether it’s an undercurrent you feel or scuttlebutt around the water cooler, you want to shout out why can’t we all just get along? Consider that your leadership may…
How HR Can Make Budgeting More Precise
Our customers sometimes tell us the stories that led them to seek out a workforce intelligence solution. One such story clearly describes a core inefficiency that is common to many companies. At this company, the leadership team wanted to develop…
Here’s What to Ask When Choosing a PEO
You have an HR problem. You’re swatting metaphorical gnats — HR administrative tasks that are persistent, complex, and headache-inducing. You don’t have the time to take care of all these tasks on your own (or within your already established team),…
How to Build Bridges Among Your Diverse Workers
We live in a world in which challenging differences confront us on a daily basis. We often live with the illusion that we can keep these challenges at home and just go to work to do work. But people bring…
You Need the ‘Informal Leaders’ to Get Things Done
Everyone is familiar with the term C-suite. The C-suite is populated with the Chief Executive Officer, Chief Operating Officer, Chief Financial Officer… The list goes on and on. The people who inhabit the C-suite are the formal leaders of the…
What It Takes to Build Trust On a Team
Early in my career, I believed that exceptional individual skills and hard work were the only qualities anyone needed in order to succeed. Experience quickly showed me I was wrong. At the time, I had a strong friendship with one…