Creating An Excellent Company Culture

As humans, we value experiences. This has increased when it comes to the workforce. Instead of focusing on excelling at a job, people are wanting more and more a sense of purpose and greater life experience. In Mark Newman’s article, Why Coaching is the New Currency in Hiring, Newman addresses this. He writes, “When evaluating a job opportunity, [people] strategically weigh their opportunity to learn or gain a unique experience as much as they weigh their compensation and benefits package.” Newman argues that most employers haven’t connected these dots. The people you are looking to hire don’t just want a job. They want to learn and experience more of life through the job. “Experiences are trumping titles and millennials are prioritizing learning over a ‘successful career’. Bottom line – today’s talent wants coaching.” Why you should focus on coaching. Newman lists two reasons why you employers need to focus and invest in coaching:

1. It connects your company culture to current talent’s priorities.

“Talented people want to work within a culture where they are encouraged to learn from both failure or success as long as it results in progress. It’s simple – remove fear of failure, and people will unleash their creativity.” This is genius. In general, we as a society are afraid of failing. But if workplaces encouraged some failure in order to learn and grow, this would change everything about a company’s culture.

2. It makes your time spent with your brand a better investment.

“...accept that talent is fluid and choose to become a magnet for perpetual learners...” Especially if the world is increasing in percentage of freelance workers, this will be a better use of your time.  Find Mark: Twitter LinkedIn

2 . These 6 Tech Companies Are Recruiting Moms Who Left the Workplace

There is an increasing effort to help caregivers return to full-time employment. Here are the six companies who recently have made changes to their company to do this:

1. GoDaddy
2. Coursera
3. Instacart
4. Zendesk
5. Demandbase
6. CloudFlare

All of these companies announced that they will soon offer “returnships” for mid-career professionals who “want to get back to the workplace after taking time off to care for a child, parent, or other loved one.”  Many women who list ‘family responsibilities’ as the reason they left the workforce, say they would “consider returning to the workforce if a job allowed for flexible hours or let them work from home.” These return programs involve an 18 week internship, with no promise of full-time employment, but they surely will reintroduce these professionals to the working world. When one takes a break from the workforce, you inevitably move backward. If you return, most likely you’ll need to work your way back up to former positions and pay. But these programs will make that all easier. Find Claire Zillman: Twitter

3 . Five Ways Technology Is Impacting HR For The Better

In this digital age, many human resources tasks are done with technology. Things that formerly took humans to do, and took a lot of time, are done quickly and not even done by us. While this might scare some people’s job security, there are many benefits. Because of technology, HR teams “are now able to recruit and track data far more quickly and efficiently than ever before.” Here are five technological advances specifically benefitting HR teams:

1. Digital Interviews Save Time and Money
2. Everyone Can Connect Through Social Media
3. Paper Records Are Now Digital
4. More Focus Can Be Placed On Relationship Building. This is huge and creates a company culture that will leave a legacy.
5. Geographical Boundaries are Limited

4 . Employee Loyalty Is The New NPS

Net Promoter Score is a way for companies to measure customer loyalty. In Steffen Maier’s article, he suggests using this same system to gauge employee loyalty. It is conducted in the same way, asking simple survey questions. Except you’re asking a different question. Instead of “Would you recommend  our company?” you ask, “How likely is it that you would recommend this company as a place to work?”  Maier writes that “Loyalty is not simply how long an employee has been with your company, but how committed they are to your company’s success.” To keep up with this, HR teams can send out regular surveys to employees, asking how likely they would recommend your company as a good place to work. This needs to be done. Three reasons why it’s important:

1. Attracting and retaining employees
2. Company image
3. Customer satisfaction

Sending these anonymous surveys and analyzing their results may not seem like a big deal, especially since one question is asked. But the answer will say a lot about your company and employees attitude towards it.

5 . How to Increase Innovation in the Workplace

One of the challenges that companies face is how to continue growing while maintaining their innovative, startup, experimental edge. Author Matias Rodsevich writes, “Startups have less decision-makers making it easier to take the risks needed to remain as innovative as possible. As these companies start to grow, they often experience a downturn in innovation as management layers increase.” How can we find a good balance? Some suggestions:

• Create a culture where risk-taking is encouraged. This takes us back to the first article regarding abandoning the fear of failure. Encourage employees to try new things and challenge themselves.
• Increase learning agility. After new things have been tried, and experiences have been had, teach employees to be reflective and learn from every experience. Take feedback, and implement new ideas.
• Creating cross-functional teams.