Making the Best of Interviews
By Robert Parkinson
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By Robert Parkinson
By Robert Parkinson, Founder of RMG Selection
Manager, a sacred word in business which has connotations of hope and trust, is a very serious job title in the West, where the average age of managers is between 30 and 40 years old. The development of the Internet has changed some traditional industries dramatically in recent years. A senior manager in logistics might be good at managing the whole business process, but does he have any idea about operating a modern overseas warehouse? That is probably an area where his strengths are useless. Nowadays, more of the bright and talented young employees who have required knowledge and skills are promoted to be managers. But excellent as many young leaders are, they usually face a lot of challenges during the first big step up in their career. This article explores some of the pitfalls they may face and suggests some of the better ways of dealing with difficult situations.
Differences in behaviour, before and after promotion:
The purpose of promotion is to recognise an employee’s good performance at work. A young salesman, for instance, can be promoted to be a sales manager who is responsible for the performance of five sales people because of his amazing likability. Clients want to give them business and colleagues enjoy having them as a friend.
However, that doesn’t mean they are the perfect choice for a managerial role. If they used to show up 30 minutes late to work every other day and skulked away once in a while, neither had any negative impact on their sales figures, but it may mean they are not best suited for a managerial position. What do you think team members will do if they see their leader is late for work every day? Naturally they will follow! Therefore, a big difference young managers must make is to correct their own shortcomings and work on being a good example for team members. That is the basis of your credibility!
Dealing with your peers:
The major challenge for many young leaders is the changein relationship with their peer groups. Some think the shoe fits them quite well hence they tend to differentiate from their peers. However, others believe that not losing friendship with their peers is the priority.
Managers should be aware that they are responsible for the performance of others and try to develop a serious working relationship with their peers without letting it affect friendships.
Managinng the unmanageable:
Every manager at some point in their career has the unenviable task of having to deal with the “unmanageable” My advice for young managers is to find out, first and the foremost, why is this team member difficult to manage.
Listen to them! Team management is about communication. If a member of the team doesn’t listen to you and follow your plans, instead of complaining to a senior manager, you should at least try to listen to them first. Listen to their feedback on your plan and also listen to the plan they come up with. A good leader is not one who excels at everything but someone that excels at making the best use of others.
Building personal confidence:
Another problem that young managers face is self-doubt. The voice of doubt normally starts when you have to deal with senior team members. The volume then keeps going up until it plagues your mind. The solution is very simple â stop it!
Focus on the positive sides of decisions that you make. The second step is to balance the negative sides. Thirdly, take time to rest outside of work. Go out with your friends to grab a drink or have a nice dinner. Anything that makes you happy is good for your confidence. The last step is to visit/call someone who can offer good advice. They can be your coaches, mentors, managers etc.
Your first few important decisions are probably made during this process. But that’s OK confidence building doesn’t happen all at once. Understanding this process will help young managers build up confidence gradually. In the meantime, be open to mistakes! It will help you grow as a manager.
Learning to say “no”:
Saying “no” to team members can be difficult. Some ask for casual leave and others ask too many questions. The key is all about the language. In other words, it’s not what you say but how you say it. Most young leaders are afraid to reject their team members because they do not want to damage the relationship. But this is the wrong way to go.
Think about the impact on other team members that watch you agree with everyone’s requests. They might think that you are a nice and easy-going person, but they may also regard you as a weak manager. Learn to reject unnecessary requests with kindness. Either a small talk or a mocking joke can easily let employees know that what they request is not appropriate.
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By Robert Parkinson, CEO & Founder RMG Selection
If you find employees are working listlessly in the beginning of the New Year, instead of snapping at them to work hard you had better find out the real motivator to them. According to the latest employee enjoyment level survey conducted by RMG Selection, a positive and healthy working environment has become the primary factor that can guarantee employees’ enjoyment at work. There is no surprise that working atmosphere already outranked the position of benefits welfare and incentives in the fun factor list. In the Talent Flow Survey 2013 (TFS2), another annual talent report conducted by RMG, the importance of benefits and incentives are in the first place of employee’s consideration. Therefore, it is time for employers and HR managers to think about how to improve the fun side of work.
There are a lot of people talking about how to help employees have fun at work. It is so important to talk about fun at work is simply because most of us spend more than ten hours in the office. Based on the latest survey result, 31.6 percent of participants’ fun time at work is about two to four hours. To bring that to the next level, employers should specifically work on improving the working atmosphere. To achieve this, we must figure out what are specific work are included in improving working atmosphere. In this regard, I would like to share a few tips.
First of all, nothing is of enjoyment and satisfaction if it is in an awful mess. Imagine you are working in an office with filthy carpets, stripped wall skin, dusty window-blinds, withered plants and flowers, scattered files and paper on tables and chairs every day. Are you going to enjoy yourself in such an environment? The answer is obvious for most people. Everyone likes a clean and tidy working place. A bad physical working environment often exerts negative influence on employees’ mood work, which make it absolutely not fun to be at work. One of my favorite emails is the regular tidy day email from the administration. In my company, a biweekly office cleaning day is a whole company “event”. While sorting out documents and cleaning table, employees talk and laugh with one another. If they enjoy working for a tidy office, I do not see why you should not you plan and organize it?
The second suggestion on improving the company atmosphere is to ask each team leader to hold regular team lunches. Due to the different job content, not all employees in a team have quality time to talk and share opinions together. By organizing a weekly or bi-weekly team lunch, preferably set the time on Friday when everyone is a bit relaxed, team leaders can help enhance the chemistry among all team members. Atmosphere is not just about the physical working environment. The people who they work with matter, too. However, the concern to employers might be the cost, in fact I suggest employers not to make the team lunch a paid-by-company meal. It is alright to make it a go Dutch meal for employees. By suggesting privately to all team leaders that they can have better team work if they try regular team lunch, they will organize and summon team members for the sake of the team.
Another piece of advice is to take care of employees’ birthday. Birthday is a very important moment to every individual. There is not much real care for employees if the birthday celebration is only prepared for the big boss. It does not take ages to prepare for a birthday celebration. Send birthday wishes and order birthday cakes are both simple ways to help employees enjoy working in a company. In some companies, I heard employees are given some money or shopping coupons as birthday gifts from the company. Money can be a gift if the operation cost allows the company to do so, but it is absolutely not the best gift in the world. To make a birthday celebration more effective than ritual, beautiful flowers or bottles of champagne might be better choices.
My fourth suggestion for employers to think about is to set up a board on the wall for employees to share their “big moments” in life. I know this might sound a bit personally, but the impact of such board cannot be underestimated. Some employees do not feel interesting at work, probably because there is not much to talk with other colleagues. However, the situation can be changed with a public show-board. For instance, by inviting employees to share family photos to win a family dinner in a decent restaurant, you will get employees who are active and interested in this. You can select the funny and nice photos to post them on the board. The next day when employees see a board that is full of interesting pictures, what do you think they will do? They will laugh and talk with each other! To give you a specific example, if you post photo of an employee with her cute baby girl in a nice park, others who are parents might want to chat with her about babies during breaks. The set-up of the board is an icebreaker. This is particularly useful for large size companies.
The fifth tip on improving working atmosphere is to engage employees in meaningful and positive team building events. Instead of organizing a dinner party or a club night, I suggest employers should try some “healthy events. I mean team building events where employees can experience something useful for work and they can have fun at the same time. An outdoor development training program or a room escape can be very helpful for employees to understand teamwork and cooperation. By organizing such outing activities, the chemistry among all team members will certainly be in a positive vibe.
The final piece has something to do with the end of the year meeting. A lot of companies give out small gifts to employees. The specific gift you pick shall be very meaningful for every employee. If it is just a random notebook from a stationary shop, nobody will be impressed by that. However, if it is something interesting and closely related to the company culture, I suppose most employees will enjoy the gift. For instance, I once learnt an interesting annual gift from a friend who works in a gaming company. The company made a very good game about fish in that year. To remind everyone of what they had gone through that year, they received the company-designed fish cushions (fish from the game) with each employee’s work span in the company. My friend still has that fish in his house. To give you another example from my company’s annual meeting, this year we gave a self-designed calendar with photos of every team and outing events. The purpose, of course, is to remind every colleague the fun moment in the company. Before summary 2014 with your personal opinions, ask from a receptionist to a regional manager about how they think of the working atmosphere in the company. Once you figure what are the satisfied and unsatisfied parts, it is not so difficult to make a working atmosphere improving plan in 2015!
The author is Robert Parkinson, CEO & Founder of RMG Selection, a leading recruitment firm in Asia.
Read the original article here : btianjin.cn/150207
From an employer’s perspective, the incentive of an outstanding performance review has the potential to motivate. On the other hand, some employers use the other side of the coin-punishment. Unfortunately this usually yields poor results, and if you are about to disappoint and demotivate employees by decreasing salaries or berating them, I suggest you reconsider.
Let me start with a question for employers. Have you listened to employees who give reasons or excuses for not finishing their work properly? Most employers reply with a positive answer. However, by “listen” what I mean is not that you are taking phone calls, reading emails, or dealing with other work at the same time. We are talking about a serious performance review, and without contributing time and effort to employees, employers can hardly help them.
There are generally two types of employees who have difficulty in reaching a key performance index. The first has lazy genes coded into his DNA, while the other is the kind who is generally not clear about how to efficiently and effectively finish tasks at work. With my experience in meeting thousands of candidates and interviewees, the majority of employees belong to this second class. Employees in this group might think that they know how to finish their work properly, but in fact, they simply do not know any better or efficient ways to finish tasks. When you discover employees cannot reach targets due to a lack of efficiency, it is not too late to help solve the problem with employees, and I have summarized five typical flaws regarding employees’ daily working habits.
It is often the case that employees are assigned with many tasks at the beginning of the week. Some employees are well regulated in arranging assignments. However, a large number of employees have no clue which task they should start with. In this regard, it is important to introduce employees to the Pareto Principle, which is widely known as the Principle of 80/20. Ask employees to highlight those 20% of tasks which will be the most effective. Instead of directly telling employees which tasks to do, help them think for themselves. Management experience tells us people who focus on the 20% end up with much more efficient results compared to those who randomly start working.
The second problem lies in time management, which is closely related to the first problem. A lot of employees have difficulty in arranging their time and workload because they do not fully understand urgency and importance. It is possible employees cannot differentiate which tasks are important and worthy of their time. Helping employees see how they spend their time and which tasks are worth spending time on will help them become more efficient.
Another common problem is that of “afternoon farmers”, which represents those who have difficulty in overcoming procrastination. Employers might need to be extra careful with this type of employee, as chronic time-wasters may be more trouble than they’re worth and need termination. On the other hand, if you simply find employees are addicted to social media during work hours, as many young people are, then simply communicating expectations with them can often solve the problem.
“If in doubt, send it out” is a popular saying among employees in my company. I believe in the recruitment business it works well to send out candidate resumes, even when there are concerns or doubts, as opposed to wrestling with one resume for hours on end. We have limited time at work. Spending three hours thinking about various possibilities does not yield efficiency or results. When faced with a troublesome task, the key to the solution is quick action.
The last problem generally exists among young people. Inspired by the“exciting” and “legendary” stories of Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerburg, Steve Jobs, Jack Ma and so forth, many seem to misunderstand these pioneers’ sense of creation and innovation. Some even bring this type of spirit to their own work. Some young employees cannot get along well with other team members. Others are rather difficult because they do not listen to the experiences of their managers. Employers with entrepreneurial spirits like employees with creativity and innovation, but not those with stubborn attitudes. But try putting yourself in these young employees’ shoes. Often you can win sincere admiration and respect from them and then they are the most easy-to-manage employees in the company. There are any number of reasons for a poor performance review. In short, before getting angry with inefficient employees, you should look to discover the reasons behind this inefficiency. Helping employees is much more appreciated than criticizing or screaming at them.
The author is Robert Parkinson, CEO & Founder of RMG
Read the orginal article:btianjin.cn/150107