8 Ways to Manage Stress in the Workplace

Pressure situations are present during both good and bad economic times. However, when times are tough the situations can be magnified. Problems at home can directly influence issues in the workplace. It is important as a manager to recognize that your team might have outside stressors affecting their job performance. It is your job to create an environment that reduces stress and promotes engagement. In a workplace environment like this, employees will be more apt to reach their full potential and drive results. Here are 8 tips to help you and your team control stress and worry in tough situations:

1. Live in a compartment of the present.
The professional with a commitment to service seals off each interaction with a customer so that negative experiences don’t poison future interactions. Don’t allow past successes or failures or future anticipated success or difficulties influence your current performance. When it comes to customer service, live in the moment.

2. Don’t fuss about trifles.
A "trifle" is something that is insignificant in comparison to other things in your life. When you focus on trifles, you lose perspective. Keep the big picture in mind. Doing so will help you objectively sort out the small stuff from the important issues.


3. Cooperate with the inevitable.
Realize when your situation is inevitable. If you can learn to recognize situations where you have no control, you can gain some control over the emotional aspects of the situation. By cooperating with the outcome, you are making a conscious choice about how to respond to an inevitable situation.

4. Decide just how much anxiety a situation is worth and refuse to give it any more of your energy.
Once you make this decision, it is easier to find ways you can improve on the situation or let it go and move on.

5. Create happiness for others.
This principle appeals to your nobler motives. It is difficult to sustain a negative attitude when you are doing something good or helpful for someone else. Simply put: Doing good for others makes you feel better.

6. Expect ingratitude.
In your job, you provide many diverse services. When you do so, you probably expect in return some signal of gratitude for your assistance. This expectation is rarely met. If you do receive heartfelt thanks from someone, you should count yourself lucky; you are dealing with a grateful person. Most people are simply not accustomed to being grateful, even when you provide them with excellent service. You shouldn’t let ingratitude deter you from providing top-quality service.

7. Put enthusiasm into your work.
Enthusiasm is the positive energy and sustained effort that keeps you driving toward your goals. Making a decision to have a positive outlook can be critical in enjoying your job and working with your internal and external customers.

8. Do the very best you can.
It can be difficult to deal with criticism, especially if you feel it is undeserved or if it hurts your self-esteem. One way to put criticism in perspective is to ask yourself if you are doing the very best you can with what you know and are able to do. If you are, then you can avoid taking the criticism personally. If there is room for improvement in your performance, you can look at the criticism objectively and take responsibility for improving your performance.

Employee Engagement Study & How to Motivate Employees

4 Ways to Reduce Turnover & Build Employee Engagement

In this ever-changing business climate, employee retention and longevity is not what it used to be. The evidence would indicate that a large number of employees in today’s workforce will change jobs every two years. In the first 10 years of their career, many younger workers may have as many as 8 jobs. So, what can businesses do to retain top talent? Engaging employees is key. A recent survey of almost 90,000 workers in 19 countries, conducted by consulting firm Towers Perrin, revealed that about 50% of engaged employees say they have no plans to leave their company.

We recognize that most professionals will consider changing companies for additional work experience. I believe there are certain steps businesses can take to keep employees engaged and evoke loyalty in order to cultivate strong talent.

The pursuit of professional bliss is a lifelong journey. Businesses in today’s market must provide their staff with opportunities to grow in their current positions, as well as experience various fields of work. Additionally, engaging the ‘hearts and minds’ of employees through sincere appreciation, rewarding accomplishments and encouraging ideas, enables them to feel engaged in their company’s initiatives. This connection to the company provides employees with a sense of commitment making it less likely that they will leave.

Here are some suggestions when considering programs focused on engaging employees and developing high potential talent:

Support employees in building strong skill sets

Top talent is often hired to support a project or strategic initiative. At the point employees believe the project is losing visibility or their learning curve is slowing, they begin to consider leaving the project, the department or the organization. By supporting employees in building both technical abilities and transferable skills (communication, confidence, leadership, and people skills) an organization can demonstrate their interest in the professional development of their employees. A more holistic approach to employee development is a key first step in employee engagement.

Prepare employees for, and support them during, times of transition

Individuals face transition in both their personal and professional life. Starting a new job, taking on a new role, moving to a new location are all times when the transition can overwhelm an employee. By helping employees prepare for job and role transitions, supporting them during the transition, and then recognizing their successes in the new situation, organizations can create a connection with employees that strengthens their engagement with the team and their willingness to help others during their times of transition.

Foster a sense of ownership within employees

The old encouragement to "act like you own it" is good advice. The challenge is making the adage practical. It is difficult to build a sense of ownership when the plans, activities, and details are dictated to you. Managers need to find ways to actively engage employees in contributing ideas to plans, activities, and outcomes. The more employees share in the rewards of success and are supported in turning failures into learning and growth opportunities, the more they can build a sense of ownership for their projects and become fully engaged in providing successful outcomes consistently.

Help employees see the link between current efforts and future opportunities

When employees view their efforts as a disconnected series of activities it is easy to begin looking for other opportunities where their work can be more meaningful. If employees are engaged in seemingly insignificant tasks then their manager must either consider if those tasks are still critical to the process or they must clearly explain to the employee how their work supports positive results of a more strategic nature. Providing employees with a clear line of sight between their work and the larger initiatives of the organization is a solid method of engaging employees and retaining top talent.

4 Ways to Use Technology to Engage -- Not Distract -- Employees

Like money and power, technology can be used for good -- or for evil. In the case of your employees, it can be a wonderful tool for engagement or an effective source of distraction. The first thing you should consider before introducing any form of technology into your office, whether it be inter-office websites, PowerPoint presentations, or Twitter accounts, is what purpose it will serve. Ask yourself this question and have employees do the same. "This question keeps awareness levels high and encourages employees to use technology wisely. When we consider what the technology is to accomplish, we keep it in check so that it doesn't rule us," says executive coach Stephanie Somanchi. Once you decide to incorporate a piece of digital media into your team’s operations, here’s how to make it work for -- not against -- you.
 
Form a unified front
Whether or not you draw up a formal online "code of conduct", employees need to have clear direction as to how to best represent the company online. "Establish clear social media policies based around exercising good judgment not through [a threat of] withdrawal of access. First and foremost, the priority should be to support the company and to follow through and complete projects and assignments on a timely basis. Second, to maintain absolute and undivided discretion regarding company policy and initiatives," notes Roy Cohen, author of The Wall Street Professional’s Survival Guide. Time limits are a particularly important topic to address. For instance, how long is too long before responding to an email? How much time should an employee spend on Twitter a day?
 
Use tech for a purpose
Help focus your employees by not only laying out ground rules for usage, but encouraging them to participate in professional groups on Twitter and its counterparts. "Many professional associations host daily industry discussions on their Facebook pages, and Twitter chats on a number of topics from leadership, career management, and specific business sectors. Technology and social media can be used to engage with new contacts that could benefit the organization, as well as new ideas and trends that might not be apparent internally," says consultant Tracy Brisson, founder of The Opportunities Project. The key is guiding employees in a way that increases engagement in their work, instead of offering them up a nice distraction from their day.
 
Urge people to keep things short and simple
Whether emailing, instant messaging or Tweeting, digital communications are meant to be succinct. Encourage your employees to keep their online communications to the point, for maximum effectiveness and to prevent them from becoming a time suck. "When you communicate too much, what you say simply loses its meaning. It’s smart policy to be selective when deciding to correspond via email or text, as it gives your words more weight," says Gary Malin, president of the Citi Habitats real estate firm in New York City.
 
Encourage people to interact face-to-face
Technology shouldn’t replace in-person or over-the-phone interactions. Emailing hides subtleties in tone and message that can only be revealed using your voice and facial expressions. "All of these nuances are lost when using email and many other technologies to communicate. If you read the written word, there is always room for misunderstanding the message. At Citi Habitats, we try to use a mix of old and new when it comes to communicating with our employees and clients," says Malin.
 
Heed these tips and soon technology will be helping -- not hurting -- employee engagement at your office.

Reinforcing Progress: How to Build Sustainable Success

One of the biggest fallacies managers hold on to is the assumption that if people know the best way to do something, they will do it. As a leader, it is important to always remember that people don't do what they know is best; they do what they have always done. For successful leaders, initial success is only the beginning. It is a leader's job to reinforce success so that it can become a sustainable norm.

Reinforcement is one the most crucial elements of the coaching process. As a leader, when you reach success, you must use your own success as a model for reinforcement with your team.

You have to first experience success before you can reinforce it. This means when you teach a new skill, you must provide the employee the empowerment to go get results and succeed. By providing an environment that tolerates risk and failure, you will empower your team to continually push for greater success.

Creating an environment that accepts intelligent risk-taking and some failure is only part of the process to building sustainable success. You must also provide the right feedback and make sure that you are constantly following up. The follow-up and feedback will allow you monitor progress and maintain accountability, while also identifying additional coaching opportunities.

Maintaining accountability is key when building sustainable success. Remember that employees often want to go back to their old practices, so making employees accountable for their work is critical. When you do see an accountability issue, handle it immediately. Whether it is due to nonperformance or a mistake, continue to coach through this process.

Building sustainable success requires a leader to be trusting, ready to provide feedback, and prepared to engage in coaching at all times. It is a time-consuming process that requires round-the-clock care. There is a very large time commitment upfront to ensure acceptance and accountability, but after you've put in the time, you will have employees who understand not only how to succeed, but how to do it over and over again.

Performance Reviews: A Leader's Guide to Performance Reviews

Performance reviews are an event to dread for some managers. For others, they are an important tool to boost performance, evaluate employee engagement, and determine yearly progress. To conduct a proper performance review, you should dedicate time and effort to ensure that your review is accurate, fair, and productive. There are numerous other considerations to take into account when conducting reviews. This article will focus on some techniques you can use to make a performance review an opportunity for growth and understanding rather than an obligation to human resources.

Prepare
Spend time preparing the assessment. Make sure you collect the proper data to support your points, and send over the assessment to the appraise before the meeting.

Positive
Focus on positives first. As a manager, it is important to spotlight successes and celebrate them. Your focus on success sets the stage for the rest of the review and helps build a reservoir of goodwill.

Coach
The performance review should be an opportunity to coach rather than to judge. A leader coaches first and foremost. Provide constructive feedback, and coach employees through growth opportunities. Make sure when you provide coaching on mistakes or improvement areas that you try to depersonalize the mistakes and let the other person save face. Only when you focus on the mistake itself can you coach through the issue.

Moving Forward
There is always room for improvement and growth, even with the best employees. Provide a clear expectation and develop a mutual plan for improvement. Revise the current standards, and update for the planned improvements.

The Close
End on a positive note. Make sure there is mutual agreement on a development plan, and give the individual a big image to live up to.

Energizing Yourself for Change

One of the challenging results of organizational change is that it can leave you feeling fatigued. All of your efforts are focused on new tasks, responsibilities, and relationships. Because of this, you need to look for strategies to maintain and even increase your personal energy during times of change.

Create a Vision
Nothing is more personally motivating than creating a compelling vision. Visualize yourself succeeding as a result of the change. Imagine the benefits of growing as a result of the change -- creating new opportunities, building a more exciting and dynamic future, and opening up new opportunities for success.

List Opportunities
What are the opportunities presented by the change? Make a list of all the ways that you can grow, add new skills, meet influential people, and add valuable experience to your resumes.

Create Networks
It's difficult to create energy in a vacuum. Most people need the stimulation of other individuals and their ideas, input, feedback, and support. Times of change offer an opportunity to add to the network of people who understand you, believe in you, and are willing to help you move forward.

Build Bridges
Organizational change normally involves the establishment of new relationships. Sometimes you resist these new relationships, especially if it involves a new supervisor or a perceived loss of your authority. Instead of retreating from the new relationship, draw energy from it by embracing it and building bridges between yourself and people you encounter. Meeting new people is usually highly energizing because it gives you the opportunity to find commonalities in your values and goals and in the creativity of collaboration

Leadership Styles & Tendencies

When we interact with someone whose leadership style is similar to our own, communication is relatively easy. However, when we work with people whose leadership style is different from our own, communication and cooperation can be challenging. Dale Carnegie said the most important element of working with different leadership styles is flexibility -- our willingness and ability to see things from another person's point of view. So how do we determine our own leadership style, and more important, how do we work effectively with others who have a different style?

No single leadership style is superior to the others. Effective leaders must find ways to work with all styles and accentuate the positive traits in others, while minimizing the challenges associated with the different styles.

The four main leadership styles are:

Visionary. Individuals with Visionary leadership style are comfortable with creative thinking, brainstorming, and asking open-ended questions. They are intuitive in their decision-making, preferring to base action plans on people, creative ideas, and opinions rather than on facts and analysis. They enjoy fast-paced environments, emotional discussions, and energetic people. They do not respond well to being bogged down with details, statistics, and minutiae.

Achiever. Individuals with the Achiever leadership style are results-driven and most comfortable taking a direct, no-nonsense approach to decision-making and interpersonal relationships. They view situations as challenges to be resolved and want to get things done as quickly and directly as possible. They are demanding of themselves and have high expectations of others. They do not respond well to speculation, wasting time, or getting "too personal."

Facilitator. Individuals with the Facilitator leadership style value relationships, dedication, and loyalty. They are motivated by a cooperative and supportive work environment that values teamwork. They thrive on encouragement and assistance, preferring a person-centered style over a strictly fact-based, "get down to business" approach. They do not respond well to being rushed or threatened.

Analyzer. Individuals with the Analyzer leadership style value systematic, formal approaches to problem solving and decision-making. They are more at ease with facts and figures than with opinions and emotions, and they are likely to be reserved and businesslike rather than warm and expressive. They do not respond well to aggressiveness or carelessness.

Rather than imposing our leadership style on others, we must think through our actions beforehand so that we can approach others in a manner that helps them feel comfortable.

Some key guidelines include:

Focus on outcomes- Focusing on outcomes rather than on personalities frees us up to appreciate the differences in others and the strengths they possess as team members.

Adjust our expectations- Others may do things differently than we do, and our way is not automatically better. We must let go of any selfish motives and adjust our expectations of the other person accordingly.

Go the extra mile- We cannot simply wait and hope other people will change their style. Chances are that they won't. To help bridge the gap between leadership styles, we must be willing to go further than the other person.

Presenting to Inform

The most common type of business presentation is the presentation to inform. Every week in our careers, perhaps even every day, we listen to presenters give us information ranging from status reports, to procedural guidelines, to policy changes. For many of us, the majority of the presentations that we give fall into this category, in one way or another.

Some individuals are very competent in giving clear presentations to inform. We leave the presentation with a clear understanding of the message, the desired end result, and key points that we need to remember. On the other hand, many presentations to inform are disorganized and hard to follow. We leave with only a vague idea of the point of the presentation.

Successful presentations should have a clear message, an engaged audience, and all relevant points should be covered.

The structure in presenting to inform should adhere to the following steps:

Opening: Statement of Topic

This statement should be brief and clear. It leaves no question in the listeners' minds as to the topic of the presentation. This is especially true when the presentation is part of a longer series of presentations, such as a staff meeting or full-day training.

    

State Key Message: Desired End Result

This statement should give the audience a clear picture of the main message of your presentation. It is simple, direct, and tells the audience where you are going with this information. It should answer this question in your audience's mind: "Why should I listen to this presentation?"

    

Key Points and Results:

These points should be stated in straightforward language. They clearly express the result of taking the recommended action. In general, the fewer words, the better when stating our key points and results.

    

Closing: Restate Key Message and Desired End Result

To emphasize the key message of your presentation to inform, summarize by restating the key message or the desired end result of your presentation. This leaves your listeners with a message that they will remember long after the presentation.

5 Secrets To Be Successful In Business

Successful business professionals share common work principles - principles that help place them in the top 5% of their industry. Understanding these common work principles can and will boost your success no matter what field you are in.

5 Secrets Every Business Professional Needs To Know:

Tip #1: Focus On Service - Customer service is critically important to successful business professionals. They respond to clients, whether they are external or internal, in a timely manner and exceed their expectations. In addition, they perform follow-up customer satisfaction surveys to make sure that their customer service is exceptional.

Tip #2: Build Strong Relationships (Internal And External) - Building strong business relationships in and out of your organization is the strength of any successful professional. Developing meaningful and long-lasting relationships will help retain existing clients - clients that become valuable referral sources.

Tip #3: Always Look Ahead - The business landscape has changed dramatically in the past 5 years. Recognizing how an industry is changing and growing keeps the successful business professional ahead of the game. Although you want to embrace technology to streamline your processes, do not forget the personal touch when doing things. Remember, people do business with people.

Tip #4: Take Advantage Of Today's Technology - The successful business professional knows how to apply the latest technology in order to increase efficiency and productivity. This can include smart phone for instant e-mail responses, call forwarding features on your phone, having the newest laptop computer and the use of the latest software programs - technology to help people stay connected, so professionals can work faster and smarter.

Tip #5: Make More "Oh, By The Way" Calls - Sending out a letter or a one-off e-mail to a client, past client or prospect just does not cut it anymore, for people are doing more work with fewer resources.  If you want to become more successful in sales, it is important to follow-up with an "Oh, by the way" call.  What is an "Oh, by the way" call?  It is a follow-up call that opens up with saying, "Oh, by the way, did you get my letter on x, y and z?" This is a great way to get the person talking about things from their end and to possibly generate a sales opportunity.

Executive Summary: Follow these 5 tips and you will also be at the top of your field. Remember, good customer service, whether it is exceeding expectations, promptly responding to clients or a personal touch to communications, can take you straight to the top of your industry. Also, be aware of the changes in your industry and make use of the latest technologies in order to increase efficiency and productive. Lastly, do not forget to make the "Oh, by the way" calls after a marketing campaign has been sent out.