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Wednesday, December 28, 2016

The Hidden Benefits of Giving Recognition Instead of Receiving It

By  Gary Beckstrand, Vice President at O.C. Tanner

The benefits of feeling appreciated and recognized at work are routinely examined in studies, but it’s not often that people examine how recognizing employees affects the giver. Is there more to be gained from recognition than just receiving it?

Recently, my company, O.C. Tanner, conducted a survey of more than 3,400 working professionals from countries around the world to explore how giving recognition in the workplace impacts the giver and, in turn, overall company culture—specifically from an employee’s perspective.

Millennials Love It

We found that employees who frequently give recognition feel more confident and are more driven and dedicated to the success of their organization. This is especially true of millennial workers. According to our survey, four out of five employees say that recognizing someone else¹s achievements makes them want to work harder, and millennials said this most often. Although it has been reported that millennials crave instant recognition for themselves, 85 percent of millennials also feed off of recognizing others.

Those Who Recognize Do Better Work 

What’s more, people who give recognition are more motivated in their jobs, are more confident in what they produce, and feel like they do better work. From our findings, 90 percent of employees who said they ‘always’ give recognition to employees feel that their work in the past 12 months has represented significant innovations when compared to the norm. The percentage goes down as frequency of giving goes down.

Still, People Are Hesitant 

Some people don’t give recognition because they don’t feel they’re in a position to do so in their office. The study also found that one in five employees don’t feel empowered to give recognition at work. Management can address this hesitation by promoting a culture that encourages recognition from every employee, regardless of position or tenure.

Although frontline employees may feel like it’s not their place to give recognition, it’s in an organization’s best interest to do what it can to dispel that perception. Encouraging cross-level recognition doesn’t require large expenditures—team members can simply tell their coworkers that they recognize and appreciate their work.

Promoting Giving 

Changing the focus from receiving to giving recognition may actually enhance employee engagement and an elevated workplace culture faster. Individuals are likely to have fewer opportunities to receive recognition than they do to give recognition. In other words, an employee does not have to wait to receive in order to gain all the benefits of recognition. It may indeed, be better to give than to receive.

The gains of giving recognition are clear, and organizations should reevaluate how they can better nurture a culture that fosters recognition, not just for the recipients’ sake, but also for those giving it.

Wednesday, December 21, 2016

How the Gender Pay Gap Impacts Business Performance

By Jade Makana, Director of Content at PayScale

The good news is that PayScale’s most recent gender wage research found that the pay gap between men and women is shrinking. The bad news is these improvements are miniscule.

The Data Doesn't Lie

The uncontrolled pay gap—which looks at the median salary for all men and women, regardless of job type or worker seniority—showed that in 2015, women made 74 cents for every dollar earned by men. This year, women made 76 cents when compared to each dollar a man earned. Additionally, when the data controls for factors like job title, job level, years of experience and other important influencers of wages, women now make 98 cents for every dollar earned by men, as opposed to 97 cents last year.

Although the difference in wages may sound small (i.e. why squabble over a few pennies?), it all adds up. For a man making $50k a year, the gap means a woman will make one $1k less annually for the same job. Or for a man making $100k per year, a woman will earn $2k a year less. And unfortunately, it's not even worth comparing jobs for men and women earning $200k per year because there are so few women in this wage bracket.

The gender data goes on to tell a deeper, more concerning story. Men aren’t just getting more pay—they are also getting more promotions and advanced titles. In fact, men are 85 percent more likely than women to be a vice president or executive by their mid-career and 171 percent more likely than a female to hold such a position late in their career. So, men are not only earning more pay, but also experiencing higher levels of autonomy, power, and decision-making, all of which negatively impact women’s engagement and earning potential in the workplace.

Why It Matters

Why should this matter to business owners? Because we’ve learned that greater gender diversity actually correlates to better business performance. A McKinsey study titled "Women Matter: Gender Diversity, a Corporate Performance Driver," found that companies with a higher proportion of women in leadership positions had stronger financial performances. More specifically, companies with a greater proportion of female leaders saw a 48 percent higher operating profit, a 10 percent higher return on equity (ROE), and a 1.7 percent growth in stock price.

Gender equity also impacts employee engagement and retention for both genders. PayScale research found that when employees believe their employer is taking no action to address gender inequity, 71 percent of women and 74 percent of men said they plan to find a new job within six months. Gender equity is becoming an urgent business matter because employers understand that it impacts retention of top talent, overall business performance, and—ultimately—the bottom line.

Taking Action

While most organizations do not intentionally discriminate against women, gender equity—like most pay inequity—tends to happen when you’re not looking. The good news is the proliferation of salary data available to employers makes it easier to know how gender pay at their company stacks up.

The first step in addressing the issue is to conduct an audit so that managers and HR leaders can understand whether any female employees are taking home a smaller paycheck for the same work. Then pay practices and compensation can be adjusted to achieve equity across the company.
It’s also vital to discuss the steps being taken to address inequity with your employees, as it is almost as important as the process itself. Both men and women want to work for a company that shares their values on fair and equitable pay. But if you don’t let employees know what you’re doing to eliminate the gender gap, it can be as damaging as doing nothing at all.


Jade Makana is Director of Content at PayScale. She provides resources to help organizations understand the value of developing strategic compensation programs to improve their business performance. For more information, visit www.payscale.com

Tuesday, December 20, 2016

Tools Every Talent Acquisition Team Needs to Manage the Hiring Process

By Dan Bartfield, co-founder and president of Yello

A streamlined hiring process provides a clear view into the organization and enables recruiters to identify a candidate’s ability to succeed. However, a lack of necessary tools can result in recruiters wasting time—chasing down hiring managers, coordinating schedules and collecting feedback. In order to extend offers to top talent, it’s important to ensure that tools are in place to manage the hiring experience most effectively. As HR departments finalize their budgets for 2017 and evaluate which tools to implement, here are four categories that should be top-of-mind.

Talent Relationship Management

Conversations are happening within a wide pool of candidates across different media, and a talent relationship management (TRM) system can help track engagement, maintain strong relationships with an organization’s talent community and hire the most qualified candidates. Recruitment is a game of speed, and hiring teams can’t afford to be bogged down by clunky systems or to waste time combing through resumes. A TRM combines the functionality of multiple systems to ensure visibility and collaboration among all stakeholders by easily providing, updating, and sharing candidate data. This technology can help talent acquisition teams source directly from a passive candidate pipeline, manage the end-to-end candidate journey in a centralized location, track every candidate touch point, and automate follow-up communication.

Scheduling

Between the screening process, attending recruiting events, and moving candidates through the pipeline, time is a valuable commodity in talent acquisition. Scheduling software streamlines recruiters’ workloads, which allows for greater flexibility, automated administrative functions, and improved efficiency.

Whether you're scheduling interviews in advance, on-the-go, or via candidate self-scheduling, scheduling software ensures that interview scheduling is optimized for all participants. In-person, pre-recorded, and live video interview capabilities enable recruiters to schedule the right type of interviews ,alleviating scheduling conflicts and minimizing travel costs.

Video interviewing

Incorporating video interviewing into the talent acquisition toolkit can save the team from hours of candidate sourcing and screening, reduce the risk of losing top talent to quicker moving companies, and significantly save on the costs of flying in candidates for interviews. Teams can lessen the time investment and scheduling complications associated with phone screens by vetting candidates using pre-recorded video interviewing. Video interviews are an efficient way for recruiters to quickly compare and contrast candidates without delaying the hiring timeline. Phone screens are minimized, time-to-hire is reduced and scheduling changes are easily accommodated.

Evaluation management

Every interview workflow should include online and mobile evaluations to reduce the amount of time required to collect interviewer feedback. Delays in interviewer feedback can result in losing candidates to faster moving companies. Evaluation management software increases productivity by automating evaluation requests as soon as an interview is complete and decreasing the time required from employees to provide feedback on interviewees. Bottlenecks in the hiring pipeline result from manual and/or inefficient processes. Evaluation management software that includes standardized interview and evaluation questions protects against groupthink and removes hiring obstacles.


Dan Bartfield is the co-founder and president of Yello,which provides recruitment technology solutions.