Workplace Organization
How taking lunch feeds employee productivity
Why do 27% of North Americans forfeit their lunch break?
The answer is not that employees are not given one, but rather that they electively choose to take a shorter lunch or work through it completely. By law, all North American companies are required to allot a lunchtime break for their employees, but only one-third of them are taking this opportunity to recharge. Working through lunch, staying at your desk browsing the Internet, or cutting your break short to get back to work sooner all have a direct correlation to lower engagement and productivity!We feel the effects of working relentlessly with no breaks as fatigue, increased stress, and difficulty focusing. Consider this: ten million working days a year are lost due to work-related stress.
In 2015, only 1 in 5 office employees reported taking an actual lunch away from their desk¹. A workforce that is suffering from these symptoms is undoubtedly going to be less productive.If the point of taking a lunch break is to reset and come back to work more focused, we should all be taking full advantage.
Surveys have found that the top reasons expressed by employees for not taking advantage of lunch breaks are:
- Having too much work
- Stress
- Workplace culture
- Wanting to appear hard-working to management
In the moment, choosing to continue working seems more productive: we don’t lose our train of thought and the additional work time makes us feel we’re completing our tasks more quickly. Unfortunately, this is an oversight. We don’t see the long-term and more intrinsic effects of this choice.
Kimberly Lesbach, a management professor at UC-Davis specializing in psychology of the workplace, noted that “never taking a break from very careful thought-work actually reduces your ability to be creative².” It’s not just creativity that is affected; psychologist Dr. Janet Scarborough Civitelli says that overall marginal returns are reduced when our brains are required to exert continuous pressure during long shifts. Walking in a quiet park, going for a lunch-time workout or reading a book - anything to divert your mind from its point of focus for 8 hours a day will noticeably increase your ability to engage back in the office.
The recommended approach to decreasing sick days as an employer is to encourage a healthy lifestyle. This means: A higher percentage of employees utilizing their lunch break equals a lower percentage of disengagement and sick days. While implementing breaks throughout the day grants the opportunity to reset one’s mind, encouraging staff to take advantage of their lunch will have the same effect and more.
Time to leave the office and exercise, have a nutritious lunch, or possibly run some errands effectively minimizes stress, increases cognitive function, and just plain makes your staff happy!
As the employer, there are a few different approaches to increasing your workforce lunch-time takers.
First, lead by example. If employees see you taking a full lunch break, exercising, or meditating, the will likely feel more comfortable doing the same.
Second, actively vocalize to your staff that it is encouraged to take their lunch breaks and do whatever they feel will help them relax and reset. You could even provide healthy snacks or reading materials to entice employees away from their digital screens.
Lastly, ensure that your company culture is pro-breaks. Taking 20-minute breaks to practice meditation or mindfulness - even just from your seat - is a proven way to help relax and focus. Staff should take a few minutes to get up, stretch, have a glass of water or a cup of tea a few times a day. This isn’t wasted time, this is invested time.
Book a demo with Qarrot to learn how recognition can boost productivity (without sacrificing your lunch break!)
Resources
- Peoplematters - How Infeedo is Utilizing AI to Interpret Employees Emotions
- Realbusiness.co - The Importance for Staff to Take Lunch Breaks
- Lifehack.org - The Importance of Breaks at Work
- Psychologytoday.com - Why and How You Should Take Breaks at Work
- Smallbusiness.chron.com - The Importance of Employee Breaks
Work first, interview later
What Staffup Weekends Can Teach Us About Better Recruitment
The internet provides us with endless articles on the art of the interview:
- Dress according to the vibe of the office
- Mirror your interviewer’s body language
- Be engaged and ask questions
- Don’t mention an interest you have in something that no one else in the office can appreciate—Wait, what?
This last one may seem a bit ridiculous, but it’s true.
Multiple studies have shown us that traditional hiring practices put too much weight on an applicant’s academic pedigree, pre-formulated answers to rigorous questioning, and whether the individual “fits” with the company. Why is this? Human nature.
All human beings are subject to unconscious biases, which can result in certain applicants being passed by for a role they may be well-suited for. Generalizations often play a role in forming our biases. For example, we may perceive that someone with certain interests will be a better fit within our team or that an Ivy-league education correlates to a stronger skill set.
Companies around the world are noticing the effect of biases within flawed hiring processes: Its effect on employee turnover and the costs of hiring and training is significant. In 2012, consulting firm Leadership IQ revealed that from 20,000 new hires, 46% of them had failed within 18 months. In 2013, Google also discovered the inconsistency between acing interviews and job performance:
“We looked at tens of thousands of interviews, and everyone who had done the interviews and what they scored the candidate, and how that person ultimately performed in their job. We found zero relationships. It’s a complete random mess.”
— Laszlo Bock, Senior Vice President for Google’s People Operations
How do we combat biases that we aren’t consciously unaware of? What can we do differently?
Enter Staffup Weekends
Brooke Allen launched Staffup Weekends with the hope that the event might help companies hire in a less biased, more effective and more humane way. Allen advocates that the solution to hiring resides in a call-to-adventure, not an advertisement: Bring together all job-seekers for a hands-on, skill-testing weekend so they can show their skills, not just talk about them.
At the end of the 48-hour adventure, not all who first walked through the doors will remain. Many simply can’t hack it: their degrees, the name of their university, and their extra-curricular interests won’t help them conceptualize and complete the project. Those who do have the opportunity to present the product of their weekend efforts in small teams to potential hiring managers in the room.
For hiring managers, this is a chance to see what a person can do, how they think, what their work style, strengths, and weaknesses are, without anyone having to convince them. Instead of talking about their qualifications, the applicants demonstrate them firsthand! The weekends also allow recruiters to scope out candidates at a fraction of the cost of traditional recruiting.
“The fact that people stayed for 48 hours to work on something put them head and shoulders above the thousands of applications we receive because the participants are people who show up and see things through.”
— Chris Nicholson, Head of communications and Recruitment for FutureAdvisor
At this point, the idea of Staffup Weekends is new and not commonly used, but there is a lesson from innovative hiring practices here: “Seeing is believing.”
This is good news for you and your potential hire: You get to see that your candidate is capable of what their resume boasts they can do, and your new employee feels confident stepping in to work on their first day because they know you already believe in them and value their skills.
If employee engagement is heavily based on keeping your team feeling valued, this shift in hiring strategies is gold. Think of the energy your recruits are bringing into the company! Gone is the pressure to prove themselves and, in its place, is an invaluable confidence knowing they bring something needed to the team.
That sense of value is going to translate into greater creativity, better communication, and higher work quality earlier on.
This shift in hiring practices could be a platform for initiating powerful relationships between companies and their employees. You no longer need to wait for your recruits to start work to confirm that they can deliver or work well with your staff: find a way, whether it be through a Staffup Weekend, or another hands-on approach, to put applicant skills to the test. Get to know them, chat with them, work alongside them, and be more confident in your recruiting process than ever before.
Effortless onboarding is just one way Qarrot can streamline your recognition process - book your free demo here!
Resources
What startups can teach big business about efficient use of talent
“…how startups attack problems and mobilize talent make them unique.”
— Forbes
Beyond the trendy work spaces, quirky perks, and flexible work hours, startups have something big businesses lack: an extremely efficient use of their talent.
Because of their small size and tight budgets, startups rely on innovative, passionate, and focused employees to push their business to new heights. Not only is there an expectation of collaboration and creativity, the testing-out of new work strategies and constant self-analysis means efficiency is always being pursued.
Many big companies can learn from this.
Regardless of the size of your company, actively supporting employee autonomy and idea sharing will result in a workforce that is both accountable and creative. It’s time to take a queue from your startup next door - commit to hiring the right kind of talent and gain the know-how to build an open and trusting workplace culture!
It starts with the talent
In a startup, smaller teams place a huge emphasis on hiring the right person. New hires need to mesh well with the current team, have diverse capabilities, and bring in a self-starter attitude. If the applicant isn’t as passionate about the company’s objectives as the rest of the team, it may not be the right fit. Passionate people are accountable, are more focused, and aren’t afraid to push beyond what they know, making them versatile assets to the company.
If you are a large business, you have many advantages. With a bigger name and opportunities for employees to earn promotions and pay raises, you could simply watch for the cream of the crop up-and-comers and make an offer to pull them onto your team. But that’s not always the best strategy. Finding candidates with a passion for your business and an openness to work across a range of responsibilities with a deep sense of accountability may be the better approach. But finding the ‘right’ hire often takes time and isn’t always easy when so many candidates apply for an open position. Patience and persistence are often required.
Once you have these gems in your ranks, make sure you keep them. Establishing a culture where employees feel valued because they can see they are personally responsible for organisational success is something startups excel at.
Give your employees autonomy and space to create!
Startups exist because someone took a risk.
Big businesses can become rigid, choosing the safe option and calculating everything to the point of restriction. Startups often don’t have the data to validate their ideas, so taking risks becomes a necessity. Calculated risks are the product of creative employees seeking out new ways of doing things, working on solutions to big problems, or spotting a gap in the market and taking the dive to fill it.
New ideas can be brought to life on a regular basis by putting a bit of backing behind the right area: make creativity a focus. From sales to product development to customer service, encourage your employees to propose new ideas and take risks! Startups are not afraid to fail; from the little things like allowing employees to try their own work methods to the large-scale endeavours like conceptualizing and launching a new product, these sparks of innovation are the blood of the business.
“While large companies can’t necessarily pivot or introduce new services with the same ease of a startup, they can research new developments in the field, encourage an active research and development department, develop rapid prototyping methodologies, and pilot proof-of-concepts and minimal viable products.”
— Microventures
As your team starts to share their findings and inventions, give them space to pursue the work autonomously. Often in startups, employees are expected to work on side projects with minimum supervision; there are simply not enough resources to have constant managerial staff hovering over everyone’s shoulders. But, this works because employees feel like they are making a significant contribution to the company and are trusted to do so on their own. Autonomy and trust are huge motivators. Combine that with listening to their ideas and you have the recipe to a seriously productive workforce.But we know that too much of a good thing can lead to problems. Inefficiencies can multiply when there is an absence of structure and focus on the overall objectives of the company. Again, do like startups and continually self-evaluate to ensure that your team or organization is on track.
Encourage Adaptability
Startups are masters at continually assessing themselves as individuals and as an organisation to see where improvements can be made. As unexpected shifts in your marketplace arise, how do you respond? Just because what you are doing now has worked in the past, doesn’t mean it will benefit you forever. Don’t let the comfortable place you are sitting in be an excuse not to experiment. Do and be better.Startups constantly test, assess the data, and adjust. This mindset can be adopted by your business and keep you competing with companies of all sizes.Keeping creativity and adaptability momentum year-round is simpler than you think. Organize brainstorming sessions for your departments, assign team leaders to head and oversee projects, and have informal self-analysis exercises to keep everyone looking for ways to be better, faster, and more efficient.You may be the big guy in town, but you can think like the little guy.
Take a tour of Qarrot and see for yourself how powerful recognition can be!
Resources
Is stress affecting your workplace?
Is stress affecting your work? Or perhaps you’re seeing warning signs that others in your workplace may be buckling under the pressure of too much stress?
In many work environments, being busy and under pressure is a sign of importance and stress is all too often worn as a badge honor. For this reason, many workers are often reluctant to let others know they’re stressed or suffering from the pressure. However, if you’re feeling too much stress, it not only affects you, but it can impact others around you as well as your company.
Here’s why:
Eustress, which experts define as “good stress,” helps to keep you motivated, focused, and push you through some challenging projects. On the other hand, distress can be crippling.
Distress is an overload of Eustress, where the good stress stacks up to become more than you can cope with.
So, what are the signs that your Eustress has tipped over into the danger zone?
You might notice symptoms manifesting in your emotions, behavior, thoughts, or physical wellness. For the sake of your long-term mental and physical health and for that of your employees’, it’s important to notice signs of high-stress levels as soon as possible.
Your Brain Just Isn’t The Same
One of the first things to go when we are experiencing high-stress levels is our cognitive functioning. If you find you are experiencing abnormal anxious thoughts, an inability to concentrate, or are having trouble remembering things, your body is likely responding to stress.
Emotional Slump
Your coworkers may notice emotional irregularities before you clue into them, but it likely won’t take long for you to ask yourself, “what’s going on with me?”Emotional symptoms can include feeling depressed, irritable, lonely, pessimistic, or anxious. In the office, these intrinsic shifts will quickly affect the way you carry yourself, interact with others, and the quality of your work.
Bad Habits Creep Into Your Routine
Last week, you were a healthy, responsible creature of habit with a great diet and regular workout routine. This week, you couldn’t be more different.Stress hits our eating habits hard. For some, stress may result in a loss of appetite while for others the release of cortisol produces intense cravings for anything fatty or full of sugar and salt. Your use of alcohol and cigarettes may also increase as your body attempts to relax.Sleep and work habits fall victim to stress too; Sleeping too much or too little and uncharacteristic procrastination are indicators of a body and mind being plagued by stress.
You’re Crashing
Numerous studies have shown that stress has a strong correlation to health problems like obesity, depression, and asthma - to name a few. Hopefully, you will notice the more immediate symptoms and avoid these serious health conditions.
Many people report having aches and pain throughout their bodies, often followed by catching a cold or the flu. With or without a cold, you may see other cold-like symptoms emerge like dizziness, nausea, a loss of sex drive, diarrhea, constipation, and chest pain.The perceived magnitude of the events stressing you out is not a reliable indicator of how stressed you actually are - your body can react just as strongly to an argument with a co-worker as if you’re facing a true life-or-death situation.
Choosing to push through stress, regarding it as a temporary state that you will leave behind in a week or so, is not an advisable choice of action. The more your emergency stress system is activated, the easier it becomes to trigger and the harder it becomes to shut off.
Conclusion
The real key to minimizing the impacts of stress is to catch it at its initiation and examine what you could be doing differently to help out your body and mind. A full day at the spa may have you on a cloud for a few hours, but come Monday - when you are back to your everyday routine- your triggers will be waiting for you.
Take some time to research techniques for stress prevention and management that you can use inside and outside the office. You may find breathing exercises, meditation, or a lunch-hour workout does wonders for providing mental space and inner calmness.
If you manage employees, be sure to check-in regularly with them about their stress levels. Remember that recognizing your staff for their hard work helps them feel valued and can infuse them with positivity and appreciation. You may also consider programs to promote recognition and wellness in order to boost overall morale.
Many organizations are getting an immediate ROI from investments in these types of programs in the form of a happier, healthier and more productive workforce.
Let Qarrot take the guesswork out of employee recognition for your team - book your free demo today!
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How to provide a welcoming employee onboarding
“If you want people to perform well, you have to get them off to a good start. That’s kind of obvious, isn’t it?”
— Dick Grote, author of How to Be Good at Performance Appraisals
After a lengthy search, you’ve finally found the perfect candidate to fill that open position on your team. Congratulations, but your job isn’t finished yet! The next crucial step is to properly welcome your new hire with a well thought-out onboarding effort.
Getting your new employee operating with maximum efficiency and effectiveness relies on a comprehensive onboarding process. In our view, a plan that goes beyond the usual formalities of corporate values, compliance, and org structure to include a fun and meaningful introduction to company culture, opportunities to meet and socialize with team members, and a few short-term goals to focus on while coming up to speed, can go a long way to engaging your new hire quickly.
Human Resource managers often refer to the four aspects of new employee onboarding as The Four C’s: compliance, clarification, culture, and connection - all of which are important. Yet, too often an onboarding plan can become bogged down with “compliance”. Sitting in a boardroom with pamphlets of information, your new-hire is left with an unexciting, solitary first experience.
As you plan out your onboarding process, don’t forget to schedule time for “connection.” Taking a few extra measures to ensure an employee feels accepted and at ease with the organizational culture of the company will go a long way to integrating them within your team.
Many executives are beginning to recognize the engagement power of a smooth, organized cultural integration. Some companies are going so far as to send over the benefits information and an employee handbook ahead of a new-hire’s first day.
Before your new-hire even arrives in the office, you can set up some activities and surprises to make him feel welcome and express everyone’s excitement at him joining the team. Make things personal by having a small gift, decorating his desk, or getting the whole team to greet him when he first arrives. Within the onboarding plan, organize for him to buddy-up with other members of the team. Here, he can shadow colleagues, learn more about how the company works, and make connections with co-workers.
Once in the office, be sure to not only review your new hire’s core job responsibilities, but to discuss the company’s strategy and how his role fits into the overall picture. Ideally, focus on a few short-term tasks or responsibilities rather than jumping into too many different divergent tasks all at once. And frequently check-in over the first couple of months – don’t assume that your new hire remembers everyone or everything he’s learning right off the bat! In meetings and within projects, encourage questions and solicit his input - making him feel comfortable contributing now will solidify his ease at doing so throughout his employment with the company.
Onboarding is an ongoing process, so look for ways to fold your new-hire into the culture of the office in the weeks to come - looking beyond that first 24 hours. Does your company organize events? It could be a team lunch or maybe the company softball game, but he should be invited!
Another way to continue the trajectory of cultural integration and company familiarization is by assigning a mentor. A mentor can touch base with the new-hire in scheduled meetings or maybe a company funded lunch date. Never underestimate the power of peer-to-peer learning and communication.
This gives him a safe place to direct questions and a starting point from which to build those interpersonal relationships!
The most important thing to remember with onboarding is don’t wing it. Even if you have just 30 minutes to sit down and plan out your new-hire’s first 24 hours, you are doing yourself and your company a huge favour. Optimally, think about how you want your employee’s first 90 days to go: What will his training look like? Who will he connect with? How can you make him feel a part of the team from the get go?
Your effort to improve employee engagement and consequently, employee productivity, should start from Day 1, it just takes a little bit of effort.
On the hunt for more ways to engage your team from every corner? Qarrot might just be what you're looking for!
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Boosting productivity through workplace wellness
Just think of how many hours a day you spend in the office...
It would be naive to think that the environment we spend most of our day in doesn’t affect our mood or health. To that end, the space employees live, breath, and work in can either support engagement levels or erode them.
If your office is plagued by gossip, high-stress levels, and limited opportunity for physical activity, know that your employees and your business are suffering. On the other hand, when our place of work promotes and enables healthy routines and positive interactions, we perform astronomically better.
But supporting your employees’ wellbeing doesn’t have to be complicated or costly. Below, we review some simple ways in which you can help your staff achieve a healthier and more productive workday.
Well-rested employees are more productive
This one is a no brainer. Sleep-deprived employees are not going to operate at peak performance levels. As a manager, you can play a role by monitoring how much time an employee is putting in and managing workloads.
This is not to say you should discourage your employees from taking on extra work or reaching out to fulfill tasks outside their job description. Rather, you must find the balance.
Workloads, new projects, and priority jobs can be shared amongst multiple employees to avoid one over-worked team member. If you notice employees putting in extra hours every night, let them know you appreciate their work and give them a morning off to catch up on their rest.
Not only will your team members be more awake and engaged, but also they are likely to stay healthier and have fewer sick days!
It’s a win-win all around.
Get up, get moving
Employees absolutely need to have the opportunity to get up and move. Sitting for long stretches of time zaps energy, engagement levels, and overall employee health along with it.
Your company’s productivity isn’t the only thing taking a hit. 70% of all healthcare spending can be attributed to lifestyle choices meaning insurance premiums are likely steadily increasing while your employees stay seated.
If the physical environment your team spends the majority of time in promotes healthy habits, you can effectively counteract rising insurance costs.¹ This could be as brief as a ten minute stretching or walking break all the way to company-wide fitness classes.
Your office space, however, doesn’t necessarily have to house the treadmills and weights: 51% of employers today are looking to launch wellness initiative programs to improve workforce health.² According to a 2016 SHRM survey, creating a culture that promotes wellness and/or providing incentives for healthy behaviour both ranked as top effective strategies for healthcare cost management.³
Gossip is never good
Negative talk and gossip spread like wildfire.
It only takes one grumpy or naturally negative employee to set off a string of unproductive, demoralizing conversations that put a black cloud over everyone’s day.
Preventing toxic talk begins with upper-level staff. The leaders in your organization should embody the attitude and behaviours you want to see in everyone. If employees see their manager gossiping in the lunchroom, they are likely to fall into the same habit.
Once it exists, the only way to stop workplace gossip is to tackle it head-on. Although confronting the source of the problem may feel a bit awkward, addressing the individual(s) will allow you to make them aware of the big-picture implications of their actions.⁴
This conversation should always be done privately in person and never through an email or instant messenger.
If the office morale is suffering and you can’t quite determine why, it may be time to initiate a program that recognizes individuals for demonstrating positive behaviours.
Peer-to-peer recognition programs, in particular, can be an effective tool for promoting healthier attitudes and behaviours throughout the organization.
Everybody appreciates snacks
We're not saying feed the whole office lunch every day, but a snack bar with healthy food options is guaranteed to put some pep in your employees’ step.
Company-provided snacks let your employees know that the organization is thinking about their needs. But providing healthy food options is particularly powerful.
Vending machines are too often filled with foods that often lead to sugar crashes and sluggishness. Your healthy snack options will literally energize your employees’ bodies. Healthy options are a great supplement to promoting physical activity, supporting long-term employee health and lower insurance premiums.
Another option is to organize a bi-weekly or monthly lunch date with your team where everyone goes out or eats in together. Have your whole team schedule it in so it becomes a mandatory group affair. This will give everyone a chance to unwind, bond, and socialize!
While in-office gyms can be expensive undertakings for smaller businesses, there is a number of options for any organization to promote employee wellness, both physically and mentally. Simply starting by recognizing and rewarding the behaviours that lead to the wellness outcomes you want to achieve is a great way of building a healthier, more productive workforce.
Curious if your team could benefit from peer-to-peer recognition? Reach out to us, we would love to chat!
- ¹ SRFM - Employee Benefits: Benefits of a Healthy Workplace
- ² Zanebenefits Blog - Do Wellness Programs Really- Reduce Health Insurance Costs
- ³ SHRM 2024 Employee Benefits Survey Overview
- ⁴ Inc.com - Marcel Schwantes: If You Do These Things You Qualify As a Gossiper
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Going green one pen at a time: how to be an eco-friendly business
Warming oceans, dwindling ice caps, and noticeable shifts in weather patterns… are you concerned?
Although Global warming is on everyone’s mind these days, Canadians and Americans are not pulling their weight in the global effort to save the planet. In fact, Canadians rank in last place for municipal waste contribution out of 17 developed countries with the USA not much farther ahead!
Both consumers and businesses need to adapt. They say old habits die hard, so do your part by starting with the little changes that you can make right now. Reducing your footprint on the environment is not only possible, it's urgent.
And hey, its not bad for your bottom line either! Green business practices can improve your ROI by significantly reducing the cost of office supplies and energy consumption.
Little Things Make a Difference
- Switch out those pens that end up in a landfill for refillable ones! Just think of how many pens one person goes through in a year…
- Look for companies that make products out of reused materials. Did you know you can get paper clips made from post-consumer metals? Well, now you do.
- No. More. Rubber. Bands.
- You’ve heard it so many times, but we have to say it again: Recycle. Even if it’s just a general recycling box in the staffroom or one for paper by the printer - it makes a difference.
- Make the leap and become a paperless office. Millennials grew up on computers and probably won’t miss it and you’ll earn points with consumers by being so green!
- If you absolutely can’t say goodbye to paper, use recycled paper. Or, save paper by not printing whenever possible and practice double sided printing when do you.
- We would never say stop drinking coffee…but think about all those filters you throw out! Thank goodness for recycled paper coffee filters. We promise you can’t taste the difference.
- Investigate what products are being used to clean your office. Eco-friendly cleaning supplies not only smell fresh but will actually leave your work space just as clean and less toxic.
- Turn off lights and computers when they are not in use. It will save you money on energy bills and decrease the overall power consumption being used by hosting servers.
- On that topic, make your website hosting green!
We know change is hard, so even if you can implement one thing from this list, at least it’s a start.
This short list reflects some of the easiest eco-friendly changes you can make. If you are ready to commit to change on an even grander scale, check out how other companies have gone totally green.
If you can’t get on board the ‘save the planet’ train, think about it this way: waste is waste, and waste means you are throwing away money.
Not only is physical waste adding up in dollars, but your company’s costs incurred by paying for health insurance and employee sick days are affected too; A healthier workplace can result in up to a 20 percent decrease in sick days taken by employees.
Whatever your reasons for going green, both the world and your bottom line will thank you.Wondering how to motivate greener behaviors in the work-place?
Contact us to learn more about connecting employee engagement to your drive to become more environmentally-friendly.
Recognizing a job well done is small gesture that can drive big results - book your free trial with Qarrot today!
The three people your startup can't live without
Why do 50% of startups fail after 5 years? What is happening within these companies, that after ten years, only 30% are still active?
The reasons for failure can be many, but a key building block for success is finding the right team.
Startups are small - very small. The foundations and fuel of the company are almost entirely derived from the skills of the team behind it. Because generous budgets are a luxury startups do not often enjoy, the available resources are limited to what your small group of ambitious visionaries is bringing to the table.
Everyone in your ranks should be a bit of a workhorse. In a startup, being driven, self-motivated, and passionate are essential. Each one of you would never say no to a task considered too small because you all know that every job is equally critical to the company’s success.
Because these qualities are a given, let’s look at the three people you absolutely need to find for your company.
The Visionary
This is usually the founder or CEO of the company, but the qualities would be equally as beneficial coming from any employee!
A visionary sees the big picture and empowers everyone around them to help build their dreams. Charisma comes naturally to a visionary, who is so impassioned by their ideas that they could get you excited about any new project.
Within the company, the visionary encourages all team members to share their ideas as well. While cultivating a work place culture of open communication and collaboration, they also reach out beyond the company to make connections and establish relationships with investors and partners.
A visionary brings an optimism that will keep you all encouraged through the bumps and hurtles which will inevitably come your way. Just make sure they aren’t too impulsive—a little self-restraint and level-headedness are definitely assets.
The Structure Giver
The Yin to the visionary’s Yang, a structure giver is the person who gives shape to ideas. This person sees the vision and identifies the steps needed to get there.
Defining roles, outlining goals, and monitoring performance fall under this team member’s to-do list.
When looking for the right person to fill this role, you want someone who is reliable, organized, inventive, and being a penny pincher also doesn’t hurt. However, for all of their type A personality traits, they are still adaptable. The structure giver within a startup must always maintain a certain malleability—listening to others, staying approachable, and communicating effectively will ensure the company functions as a democracy, not a dictatorship.
The People Person
You are all working very hard, but please, for your own sake don’t forget you are human beings! Putting your heads down and grinding the days out may be productive for a while, but it will inevitably tire everyone out.
Having someone on your team that is naturally a social butterfly and morale booster will keep the positivity alive. You can usually identify the talkative trait in a face to face interview very quickly, but it's not just about being chatty.
This person should be highly perceptive and able to shift their perspective at key moments. They know when a night out for drinks is needed or if the appropriate solution is to offer a helping hand to a stressed out co-worker. They are the consummate listener and mediator: when someone opens up about a problem, they know how to respond and find a solution.
Think of your people person as your HR department, but because you’re a startup, less of a department and more an invaluable force of positive, compassionate energy.
As you sift through resumes hunting for that perfect combination of dreamer and doer, take a moment to reflect on why these applicants are attracted to working for you. Yes, startups are exciting and offer a chance for rapid personal growth and innovation, but they are also agile, fast-paced, and demanding. Many hopefuls are not aware of how vastly different the attitude and skills needed in this environment are from those in a much larger and more stable organization.
But you do know.
So now, your job is to read between the lines of their carefully crafted cover letters and to find indications of courageousness: a startup is no place for the risk-adverse.
You cannot rely on their self-describing adjectives: so they say they are innovative, but what concrete examples of creative “outside-the-box” thinking can they provide?
Lastly, when you think you really have found the right person, have your entire team interview them. A startup is no place for big egos. Put in a room with the rest of your A+ quality team, an arrogant applicant will likely let their need to be the biggest star in the room slip out.
Don’t rush into hiring someone- hold out for the person who can work with every member of your team. Your company’s life depends on it.
You know what else your startup can't live without? A full circle recognition and rewards program!
Group meetings vs the one-on-one
Meetings are a necessary part of company management but have a bad reputation for often being ineffective and time-consuming. Employees and management alike are all too aware of those meetings that run far too long and don’t accomplish their goals. Even with an agenda, group meetings can easily be thrown off track and one on ones can become one-sided lectures. As attention spans dwindle, employees disengage, and the clock ticks away valuable company time, you may think to yourself, there has got to be a better way!
Well, there is!
Group meetings and one on one sessions can be utilized strategically to achieve different results. Knowing the strengths and weaknesses of the two models will save your company time without sacrificing any of the benefits.
The Group Gathering
There will never be enough time in the day for everything on your team’s to-do list, so setting aside time specifically for a meeting guarantees you a chance to address the entire office. Now that you have this distraction-free period, how should it be used?
A group meeting can benefit your organization in several ways a one-on-one cannot. This is a chance to get everyone on the same page and foster communication, collaboration, and workplace culture.
Departments that wouldn’t regularly interact with one another and employees who work remotely and rarely make it into the office can all be called into the same room. With a group meeting, you have the ability to create an interactive environment where new perspectives, ideas, and knowledge can be shared. Something someone says or proposes may inspire a new collaboration or project, fostering an ongoing relationship beyond the boardroom.
With group meetings, watch out for the age-old problem of “too many cooks in the kitchen.” When there are multiple voices vying to share thoughts and comments, the meeting’s schedule can fall off track and that allotted thirty minutes may turn into an hour. Make sure there is a clear leader in the conversation to ensure you stay on track and cover everything on the agenda for the day. Don’t be afraid to cut a conversation short - make a note to schedule a follow-up time for those involved and move onto your next topic.
The One-On-One
The best part of a one-on-one meeting is just that: it’s one-on-one. Making time for an employee shows you care and is the optimal time to check in with that member of your staff on how they are doing in their role, their strengths, weaknesses, and what you can do to help them succeed.
This is your chance to have a personal, honest conversation. Whether it be with a new employee or someone who has been with the company for years, an individual meeting gives you both an opportunity to build a stronger relationship and trust. You can use this time to ask about anything! You may want to know about your employee’s experience with new policies the company implemented, their overall job satisfaction, or even provide feedback yourself on their job performance.
The key here is to be careful that you don’t monopolize the conversation, or you will miss out on learning more about the person in front of you.
Understanding the members of your team on a personal and professional level will help you utilize their personality and skills to their maximum potential. You are effectively assessing the parts of the whole; knowing the members of the team will give you invaluable insights on how to help the group function as a whole.
One-on-one meetings are extremely useful when time is tight. If hitting all your pertinent topics is crucial, a personal meeting will be the better option since you can manage the conversation and won’t have other voices to contend with. Also, shy employees who wouldn’t necessarily feel comfortable speaking up in front of the office will be more engaged and involved in a one-on-one.
If meetings are something you are just beginning to implement, it is important to let staff know that this is a new company-wide practice. Be clear that the intention is to help management connect the team and establish a new workplace culture; employees may feel singled out or concerned that meetings are a punishment if they are not aware of the actual reason.
Whatever meeting model you choose to use, always have clear objectives and an organized timeline going into it. There is nothing more frustrating than setting aside that invaluable time, and at the end of it realizing you haven’t accomplished what you needed to.
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