Improve Work Podcast
Here you’ll find free resources to level up your leadership role and build a motivated team.
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In this episode of the Improve Work Podcast, we gain insights into team leadership in tech startups from Corey Spitzer.
Corey is a Fractional CTO who helps tech startups manage their technical projects and navigate challenges such as technology strategy, hiring, pricing, and more. With over 20 years of experience in software engineering and 10 years in the tech startup environment, Corey offers us valuable perspectives on leading teams of engineers.
Key points of this episode include:
🔸 How to assign tasks efficiently and handle situations where not all team members are on board with the decisions made in this regard
🔸 Causes of underperformance and how to address them
🔸 Factors that drive motivation in a technical team
🔸 Disagreements between departments and how empathy and respect can foster understanding and collaboration
In this episode we’ll gain insights from Chris Dyer on how to approach different types of tough conversations and the various behaviours of the people involved in them.
Chris Dyer is an expert in company culture and remote work, a best-selling author, and a speaker. He has managed thousands of people in his CEO positions, and his companies have been recognized as some of the best places to work.
Watch and listen to this episode to get guidance on how to be a leader for yourself and your team members from the business coach, Heidi Schalk.
Heidi helps women navigate the early stages of their online businesses and supports them as they develop to thrive on their journeys. She is also an author, speaker, and the host of the Be S.H.E. Podcast.
Obtain reference points to improve the hiring process and gather relevant data.
The hiring process is a series of steps designed to recruit and select candidates for a specific job position.
All steps are important, and the success of hiring depends on how well this process is designed and conducted.
It’s like an instrument itself. If, for example, you have a low-quality phone, the overall experience with that phone will not be satisfying. You can’t expect to hire great people for your company if the instrument you use doesn’t have the necessary components to achieve that.
In this episode, we’ll gain insights on the challenges of remote work and how to overcome them from Florian Jacques, the Co-founder & CEO of Midstay. He is constantly in touch with companies with remote employees and due to that, he has valuable knowledge and experiences to share with us. He also has a remote team himself, which makes him even more aware of the challenges that come with this.
His company offers exciting team retreats, in various beautiful locations, to companies with remote employees to help them come together and accomplish different goals, such as team building, celebration or learning and development.
When you ask for feedback from an employee with the purpose of finding out that person’s motivational drivers, you’ll identify only that particular person’s motivational drivers. And this is all you need to improve or maintain that specific person’s level of motivation over time. Statistics results can’t do that. Not all employees are motivated by the same things.
In this episode you’ll get practical advice on how to attract and retain amazing employees from Wendy Sellers, also known as “The HR Lady®”.
Wendy is an HR Consultant, trainer, and author. She has over 25 years of experience in the HR field, in many areas such as operations, downsizing, change management, corporate culture, remote and in-person workplaces, coaching, and leadership development.
In today’s episode, I have the pleasure of speaking with Kendall Wallace, the founder and lead facilitator at Executive Offsites.
We’ll get to know her journey to start and build a successful business that helps companies to improve employee engagement and satisfaction through memorable offsite events. Her team-building events impacted over 1,000 individuals, across 75 groups, transforming workplace communication and relationships.
Then, we’ll delve into examples of mistakes companies make that demoralize and demotivate employees, and possible solutions to repair those mistakes.
Watch an introduction to Improve Work’s upcoming online course: How To Hire Candidates Motivated By Your Job Offers
Increase Employee Engagement And Performance By Setting Motivational Goals
Goals serve as a roadmap for employees, providing direction and purpose in their role. When employees have clear goals, they are more likely to be engaged, focused, and committed to achieving results. Furthermore, goals create a sense of accountability, encouraging employees to take ownership of their work and performance.
What is your perspective on who is responsible for ensuring employee motivation?
Opinions about this topic can vary, which is why the goal of this episode is to show you the advantages that come with taking full ownership of this.
Why are the company’s values important for business success? A company’s values are not just a set of words on a wall; they are a strategic tool that influences every aspect of the organization. KEY POINTS:
- How a company forms, maintains and transforms its values
- How the company’s values impact its success
- How low or poorly upheld values can harm the business
Workplace Equity: Challenges And Solutions. Why equity is necessary and how to reduce reduce perceptions of unfairness.
KEY POINTS:
- Why workplace equity is important: how it affects the workplace
- Equity Theory – employees’ inputs and outputs, when equity and inequity is perceived, how employees resolve tensions produces by inequities
- How a company can reduce the employees’ perceptions of inequity
- Situations in which inequities in payment can occur
- Research about equity in the workplace
Explore how stereotypes are formed, their possible impact, and how we can prevent them.
Key Points:
- How stereotypes are formed
- Attribution process
- Different types of stereotypes that can occur in the workplace and their possible impact
- How stereotype can be prevented
What can you do when an employee doesn’t do things as you expect them to do?
This type of situation can generate frustration and if it’s repeated, can affect your business results. In this blog post you’ll find some proactive steps you can take to improve employee output and performance.
KEY POINTS:
1. Communicate Again Your Expectations And Verify If These Were Understood
2. Check If They Have Objections Related To What Is Expected From Them
3. Asses Whether The Employee Has The Necessary Competencies To Complete Those Tasks
4. Determine If They Have The Required Resources To Fulfil The Expectations
5. Identify Other Possible Reasons
As a business owner, as your team grows larger, you may decide to appoint certain members as leaders for other team members. Perhaps you have already made such decisions. This kind of decision deserves your full attention because it has multiple effects.
Companies have different ways of organizing and running meetings with their employees. Running efficient and effective work meetings can help increase engagement and productivity of your employees.
KEY POINTS:
1. Who can organize work meetings in a company
2. How to decide who should participate in a meeting
3. How to prepare for the work meeting
4. To what aspects to pay attention during the meeting
5. Actions to be taken after the work meeting
KEY POINTS:
- Three most common situations when employees’ roles have to be clarified – when the company has a new member, when employees work together on projects or in teams, and when an employee has a new role in the company.
- How the employees contribute to defining their roles in the company
- Why it’s important to clarify your team members’ roles
- How you can clarify your employees’ roles
Projecting our thoughts, beliefs, feelings, or traits onto others can greatly influence how we perceive people and situations. In the workplace, this bias manifests in various ways, generating different consequences for employee relationships, decision-making processes, motivation, the work environment, and overall company culture.
KEY POINTS:
1. What is projection bias
2. What forms projection bias can take at work
3. How we can overcome projection biases
4. How projection bias can be used by others in our disadvantage
Understanding the distinction between employee motivation and personal motivation is crucial for businesses seeking to create a motivated workforce. While personal motivation is the responsibility of each individual, employee motivation relies on various tools and factors provided by the employer to drive performance and job satisfaction. Get KEY INSIGHTS for actionable employee motivational strategies.
KEY POINTS:
1. How the concept of professional career changed
2. Why it’s beneficial for a company to offer development opportunities to its employees
3. What are the disadvantages of the companies that don’t offer development opportunities for their employees in a planned manner
4. What mindset might hold you back from investing in your employees development
Do you currently have a remote team or are you considering offering remote work options to your employees? The ‘’game and the play rules’’ are different than those of office work. By gaining a thorough understanding of the pros and cons of remote work, you’ll be able to leverage its advantages and proactively address any potential drawbacks.
KEY POINTS:
Remote work effects on:
1. Company’s Cost
2. Productivity
3. Employee well-being
4. Employees relationships and company’s culture
5. Employee retention
6. Talent pool
Change is inevitable. How can we handle it effectively?
Key Points:
1. Why change is different in a company than at personal level.
2. What are some top reasons why people don’t like changes.
3. How does the company’s culture influences the employees’ attitudes toward change.
4. What are the most common situations in which change happens – internal factors and external factors.
5. Guidelines about the change process.
6. Guidelines about the people involved or impacted by the change.
Key Points Of This Episode:
1. Why effective communication is important and how it impacts the company
2. Best Practices for effective communication
3. Communication barriers
How a company organizes its employees’ work, plays an important role in the results it achieves. Sometimes teamwork brings more satisfactions and results and other times, individual work is more beneficial. Learn how to use the advantages of these two types of work and how to avoid their disadvantages.
Key Points:
- The unique characteristics that differentiate teamwork from individual work
- For which types of tasks teamwork is more suitable and for which tasks individual work is more adequate
- The possible advantages and disadvantages of teamwork
- The possible advantages and disadvantages of individual work
- The situations in which employees have to collaborate to each other but they don’t work together in a team
Do you want to increase your employees’ performances and you wonder how employee motivation affects performance? This episode covers this.
Key Points:
1. How a motivated employee behaves
2. When an employee has a high performance
3. What other factors influence the employee performance
4. Three typical situations in which an employee can be and how his/her motivation impacts his/her performance
Key Points:
1. The employee perspective on the business goals and interests
2. The employer perspective on the business goals and interests
3. How to align the employee’s personal goals with the business goals and interests
In this episode you’ll find information about why norms are important, how to maintain your company norms and how to overcome different challenges that come with them.
Key Points:
1. Why are the company norms important
2. What is a norm
3. Two types of norms: written or formal norms, and unwritten or informal norms
4. Challenges that a company can encounter with its norms
5. How a company maintain its norms
6. How to handle situations in which employees comply with different norms for external reasons
7. What happens when people have inner conflicts caused by the fact that they have to behave in a way that is not aligned with their values and beliefs
8. How to introduce new norms in the company
In this episode you’ll learn about:
1. Some typical situations in which conflicts can occur between employees
2. How you can approach conflicts between employees – 7 steps explained through a case study
3. How you can use conflicts to improve your company’s processes and practices
Find out what are some typical situations that lead to low quality work of your employees and how you can intervene to overcome them.
