Managing the New Recruited Employees

As managers and business leaders we all have faced the age old dilemma of whether to hire or not to hire new staff. Indeed, this question presents a weighty set of issues. On one side of the scale are all of the benefits a company hopes to gain by hiring more staff. On the other side of the scale are all of the concerns that either prevent hiring or result in limited training time for new employees.

This article will show managers that training new employees does not drain time and resources and that with a little effort they can tip the scales in favor of business growth.

A thorough hiring process prevents unforeseen costs of training new employees. Spending time and resources upfront on vetting potential candidates insures that the individuals you hire fit the mold of your organization. In the long run, the initial costs of hiring will pay for themselves because an employee who quickly becomes a seamless part of the infrastructure requires less training and yields productivity more rapidly.

Once you have hired a new employee, you do not need to complete all aspects of their training immediately. Keep in mind that business development occurs over time not overnight. Managers who avoid the rush to train employees give themselves the time to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the employee. Moreover, managers can then develop a training program specific to that employee’s needs. As such, your company avoids excess expenditures on unnecessary training. At the same time, you are putting the money where it counts: in training designed to improve upon an employee’s weaknesses.

Every expenditure made towards training a new employee does not translate into a cost for your company. On the job training, where new hires shadow their managers, permits managers to teach good business practices simply by performing their daily tasks. For example, good listening skills are critical to maintaining clientele. Permit your new hires to watch you engage in meetings with clients and have a discussion over lunch with your employee about what the employee took away from the meeting. Then at the next client meeting, let your new hire take the lead on engaging the client. A short feedback session following the client meeting should put your employee on the right track. This on the job training permits the employee to learn from actual experience rather than costly off site training programs. A little time investment was the only calculable cost.

Employees also can assume an active role in their own training. A system that requires employees to check in with their supervisors is more efficient than one that relies on managers to do the checking in. The former permits employees more flexibility to expand upon their interests in the company and more room for innovation. An employee driven system also relieves managers of the burden of overseeing every assignment managers give to their employees. Ultimately, the employee-driven system means that companies avoid unnecessary redirection of managerial time and resources.

Mentor programs provide a vehicle for teamwork and afford new employees a constant avenue for help. A mentor is a senior or mid-level employee who assumes the work of acclimating new employees. Without mentor programs, managers and supervisors will spend inordinate amounts of time training new employees and showing new employees the ropes. A mentor program, however, allows managers to pass off the task of training to a mentor who is equally as capable of indoctrinating the new employee. In fact, mentors often are in a better position to provide the necessary structure and guidance for new employees because mentors are still a part of the employee cadre. As such, new employees can learn by shadowing mentors and mentors can teach without interfering with their own work. Managers, by contrast, are more distanced from the daily grind and would have to distract themselves from managerial responsibilities to train new hires.

Training new employees need not deplete critical company resources. By following any or all of the above suggestions, companies simultaneously can conserve time, save money, and yield production. Just watch the scale tip in your favor.

More Simple Tips To Save Money For Small Businesses

Many small businesses are feeling the pinch of this current economic climate. Below are some simple steps that may help keep your small business afloat. These tips relate to your office, how you handle staffing issues, outsourcing, and using your money more efficiently. Review these ideas and see which ones will work for your business.

Office
1. Rent is one overhead expense that you may be able to decrease. Look into renting industrial space rather than commercial office space. The reduction of your monthly rent can give you the breathing room you need to stay in business.

2. Big expenditures can wait. Review the necessity of any large equipment expenditures. Can they wait a few months? Is it possible to lease the equipment rather than buy? If possible, hold off on the large expenses until you are more financially secure.

3. Review your shipping options. Are you spending a lot on shipping your products out? Some companies have found that working with Federal Express saves them money in shipping, reduces the time spent on handling and labeling packages, and, by paying with a credit card, such as American Express, they can receive points as well as a detailed statement each month to help with the billing process.

4. When buying supplies, buy in bulk. However, don’t leave all the supplies readily available. Lock the additional supplies away until needed so they aren’t needlessly wasted.

5. Most offices don’t need an inter-office phone system. Everyone has their own cell phone and most intercommunication is done through the computer systems. An inter-office phone system will most likely be unused and that money could be better spent elsewhere.

6. If at all possible, don’t have a company car. Between gas, insurance, and car payments, the value of having a company car available is not worth the investment.

Staffing

7. Discuss the possibility of changing your work week to a 4 day work week. By working only four days a week, you eliminate an entire day of overhead costs and your employees don’t have the expense of commuting that extra day.

8. Outsourcing projects that are not your employees’ area of expertise will save you money in the long run. By finding someone who knows how to do the project, you won’t have to pay for the time it takes to get your current employees up to speed on the latest information.

9. Is your business seasonal? If so, consider hiring temporary or seasonal staff with the understanding that they are only hired for a specific time frame. With seasonal staff that comes back each busy season, you can also reduce your training time as well.

10. Stock your office kitchen with sodas and buy a good coffee maker. Allowing your staff to have coffee breaks that consist of going to the kitchen rather than out to the store will bring them back to their desks quicker and will give you an energized and appreciative workforce.

11. Can some of your employees come in during off hours? If at all possible, find out if your employees can tailor their hours to curtail ‘rush hour’ traffic. This will provide you with more relaxed employees who aren’t late due to traffic congestion.

12. Look into having a gym at the office or find out if you can get a discount with a gym in your area. By offering your employees this perk, you will have employees who want to come in early or stay late to use the gym. In addition, your employees will be healthier, decreasing the amount of sick leave you will have to pay.

13. Find out if you can work out a discount from the local deli to bring in sandwiches or salads to your office. Your employees will spend more time at their desk rather than ‘out to lunch.’

Getting Ahead Of The Competition

Both an individual and a business work in the same way and are motivated by the same things.  You may see businesses as illusive, inanimate entities but we all know that businesses are made up of individuals and if those individuals are not performing at their best the business most certainly will be affected negatively.  So I see businesses as a living breathing group of unique individuals rather than a machine that is beyond our grasp. As businesses are an accumulation of individuals, we can consider the desires of businesses the same as when we just speak of individuals alone. Do you want your business’s performance to be one of excellence and great abundance, do you want fast sustainable improvement or do you want mediocre, slow improvement?  Do you want your own life experience to be one of excellence and great abundance, do you want fast sustainable improvement or do you want mediocre, slow improvement? I know, dumb question, but most people and businesses are choosing the latter.  They are choosing strategies that will only bring them slow and unimpressive improvement at best.  Business success levels prove this without much investigation.  There are more so-so businesses than there are highly successful businesses.   Why, because we have been following the wrong path to advanced, acute, top of the pile success for too long. 

Everyone is looking for that little extra that will propel them ahead of their competition.  Individuals and businesses alike want to be the best.  They want to out shine everyone in their field. Why? Well it’s all for the same reason really it’s just that we don’t recognize it. It’s not because you get more money, it not that the shareholders will be happy, its not to be able to move into the big corner office, its not to be able to buy the big car, house or trip overseas.  No I can say with absolute strong belief and conviction that none of these reasons is why any of us want to enjoy business success or personal success. The key is…… you want to feel good.

It’s the feeling the promotion gives you, it’s the feeling being number one gives you, it’s the feeling that you get stepping into your new favorite car for the first time gives you, it’s the feeling of sitting in first class on your way to your dream holiday gives you. Businesses are no different because it is the feeling experienced by the individuals that make up the entity called “the business” that determine its direction and evolution.  Individual human beings drive the business so we need to look at what drives the drivers. It is not the actual achievement itself it is the feeling it gives you that drives you to want to be the best in what you do.

I want you to stop reading now and consider what I have said.  Imagine you have achieved your greatest desire.  Imagine sitting behind the wheel of that car for the first time, imagine the day you walk into the office and some tells you just got the biggest contract of your career. Imagine the feeling that comes over you when you have what you really want right in the palm of your hand.  Name it, feel it.  Is it joy, excitement, relief, contentment, elation, do you want to tell the world, or the one you love, or are you happy to sit with it and savor it all through your body? Being able to feel what it is like when you achieve your goal will fast track that goal toward you.

So what do you think the most successful people in the world do?  They chase that feeling.  Sure they can look at being better time managers, better public speakers, better at balancing the books, but what they do best is keep focusing on that feeling of being successful and what it means to them.  Focusing on the right things will allow you to be open to finding ways to achieve that thing.  The feeling of achievement, the feeling of mastery, the feeling of satisfaction, all these positive feelings can be achieved in endless ways.  It’s the feelings that we all chase not the “things”.  Yes we have preferences of things but that’s because we believe that it is one thing over another that will bring us the best feeling.

So if we are all really chasing feelings how then can we make this work to achieve what we want? The answer is simpler than you would think. Chase the good feeling things every day in every aspect of your day. The newest way of describing this approach is called “playing to your strengths rather than your weaknesses”. Discover what empowers you. What are the things that you love to do?  What are the things you look forward to doing? These are the things that strengthen you.  To reach levels of advanced success you need to find ways to do more of what excites and uplifts you.

So if you are not playing to your strengths most of the day (73% of 198,000 workers polled by the Gallop organization, don’t use their strengths most of the time) think of the improvement that is possible.  That’s over 7 out of 10 people at your company who are not working to their potential.  If your business has room for improvement look at what you have to tap into. If you would like greater profitability look at the potential.  With over 7 out of 10 people not playing to their strengths everyday, any wonder there were 1.6 million people according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics who started a new job in the 2006-2007 financial year.

One of the main reasons a person leaves their job is because of lack of job satisfaction.  People will even accept lower pay if they have high job satisfaction. If you can increase the amount of time that people do tasks that strengthen them they are more likely to be more productive as they are efficient at what they are doing, they can perform the task well many times because they are good at it and they enjoy it.  You are more likely to hold on to valuable company members and therefore reduce the need for training and retain valuable company knowledge.  Absenteeism is likely to be reduced due to increased job satisfaction.  The list goes on and on.

Focusing on people’s weaknesses will further drain already dissatisfied employees.  Certainly there may be a case for neutralizing some weaknesses that people possess, but exponential growth will not come from minor increases of people’s weaknesses. Don’t forget, our aim here is to achieve large, decisive, exponential growth, not small improvements.  So if people aren’t playing to their strengths what are they doing? They are trying to “fix” their weaknesses. A weakness is something that depletes you that you hate to do, that you avoid at all costs.  Spending the majority of your time doing these tasks means your performance is most likely to be negatively affected. All the opposites of what we have talked about with strengths are more likely to occur.

As we all know, a great way to get ahead of your competition is by reducing costs and increasing productivity.  Encouraging people to play to their strengths instead of labouring over their weaknesses is certainly a way to achieve these goals.  It has many far-reaching positive effects and can be used to the advantage of all.

Project Management Success with the Top 7 Best Practices

Managing a project can be daunting. Whether planning your wedding, developing a new website or building your dream house by the sea, you need to employ project management techniques to help you succeed. I’ll summarise the top 7 best practices at the heart of good project management which can help you to achieve project success.

Define the scope and objectives

Firstly, understand the project objectives. Suppose your boss asks you to organise a blood donor campaign, is the objective to get as much blood donated as possible? Or, is it to raise the local company profile? Deciding the real objectives will help you plan the project.Scope defines the boundary of the project. Is the organisation of transport to take staff to the blood bank within scope? Or, should staff make their own way there? Deciding what’s in or out of scope will determine the amount of work which needs performing.

Understand who the stakeholders are, what they expect to be delivered and enlist their support. Once you’ve defined the scope and objectives, get the stakeholders to review and agree to them.

Define the deliverables

You must define what will be delivered by the project. If your project is an advertising campaign for a new chocolate bar, then one deliverable might be the artwork for an advertisement. So, decide what tangible things will be delivered and document them in enough detail to enable someone else to produce them correctly and effectively.Key stakeholders must review the definition of deliverables and must agree they accurately reflect what must be delivered.

Project planning

Planning requires that the project manager decides which people, resources and budget are required to complete the project.You must define what activities are required to produce the deliverables using techniques such as Work Breakdown Structures. You must estimate the time and effort required for each activity, dependencies between activities and decide a realistic schedule to complete them. Involve the project team in estimating how long activities will take. Set milestones which indicate critical dates during the project. Write this into the project plan. Get the key stakeholders to review and agree to the plan.

Communication

Project plans are useless unless they’ve been communicated effectively to the project team. Every team member needs to know their responsibilities. I once worked on a project where the project manager sat in his office surrounded by huge paper schedules. The problem was, nobody on his team knew what the tasks and milestones were because he hadn’t shared the plan with them. The project hit all kinds of problems with people doing activities which they deemed important rather than doing the activities assigned by the project manager.

Tracking and reporting project progress

Once your project is underway you must monitor and compare the actual progress with the planned progress. You will need progress reports from project team members. You should record variations between the actual and planned cost, schedule and scope. You should report variations to your manager and key stakeholders and take corrective actions if variations get too large.You can adjust the plan in many ways to get the project back on track but you will always end up juggling cost, scope and schedule. If the project manager changes one of these, then one or both of the other elements will inevitably need changing. It is juggling these three elements – known as the project triangle – that typically causes a project manager the most headaches!

Change management

Stakeholders often change their mind about what must be delivered. Sometimes the business environment changes after the project starts, so assumptions made at the beginning of the project may no longer be valid. This often means the scope or deliverables of the project need changing. If a project manager accepted all changes into the project, the project would inevitably go over budget, be late and might never be completed.By managing changes, the project manager can make decisions about whether or not to incorporate the changes immediately or in the future, or to reject them. This increases the chances of project success because the project manager controls how the changes are incorporated, can allocate resources accordingly and can plan when and how the changes are made. Not managing changes effectively is often a reason why projects fail.

Risk management

Risks are events which can adversely affect the successful outcome of the project. I’ve worked on projects where risks have included: staff lacking the technical skills to perform the work, hardware not being delivered on time, the control room at risk of flooding and many others. Risks will vary for each project but the main risks to a project must be identified as soon as possible. Plans must be made to avoid the risk, or, if the risk cannot be avoided, to mitigate the risk to lessen its impact if it occurs. This is known as risk management.You don’t manage all risks because there could be too many and not all risks have the same impact. So, identify all risks, estimate the likelihood of each risk occurring (1 = not likely, 2 = maybe likely, 3 = very likely). Estimate its impact on the project (1 – low, 2 – medium, 3 – high), then multiply the two numbers together to give the risk factor. High risk factors indicate the severest risks. Manage the ten with the highest risk factors. Constantly review risks and lookout for new ones since they have a habit of occurring at any moment.

Not managing risks effectively is a common reason why projects fail.

Need of time management training.

So little time so much to do, a line that sounds all too familiar for almost everyone whether you are an employee or a housewife. It gives you the feeling to add more hours in the day just so you can accomplish everything. Can time really be managed when you can’t control its movement? Time management training is more of being able to manage the time that you actually have; the ability to make the most out of your time or your day. It is not just about having a day-to-day plan, time management training lets you learn the ability to prioritize things and be able to maximize time to improve productivity whether at work or at home. 

If you are still wondering what you need time management training for, below are the things considered to be a waste of your precious time. 
� No set daily plan 
� Poor setting of priorities 
� Phone calls 
� Doing things simultaneously. It may seem like the best thing to do but you might just end up not being able to finish anything by attempting to do things all at the same time. 
� Poor task delegation. There are some tasks that can be given to other people. Give yourself a break and give other people a chance to settle things. 
� Cluttered desk. Having a disorganized desk is already stressful especially when you can’t find what you are looking for. Clean desk saves you a lot of time and visual stress. 
� Procrastination. You know you lack time, don’t waste it by doing nothing. 

Once you undergo time management training, you will have a totally different outlook on how you work and on how you spend your day. Time management training will give you basic steps on how to combat time stealers. 
� Clear your desk. Clear your mind Philosophy. 
� Have a daily plan and incorporate your daily priorities and objectives. 
� Stick to deadlines so you won’t have to adjust everything. 
� No procrastination 
� Do not entertain non-important calls. If you must, make phone calls very brief. 
� Delegate tasks 
� Perform the most difficult job when you are at your best. 
� Learn how to say no to tasks that you think will accumulate too much of your time. 
� Give yourself a time to take a breather especially when you feel you are not functioning well enough to perform. You might just ruin your work more. By taking breaks, you also avoid stress to come over you. Stress is not a time-killer but a mind-killer.