May 2016

Tina Hawkins, chief employee communication enthusiast at Yarber Creative, has great insights into the difference between cultivating engagement through action and communicating with employees about the action. I talked with her further about the most effective ways to communicate about engagement actions, and she had some helpful tips to share. First of all, it takes several communications before employees are

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Great employee engagement tools go beyond a simple survey. Great tools help you communicate and learn how to boost drivers of engagement. They’re dynamic — they change and grow with your organization and employees. Picking great engagement tools and technology, however, can be a challenge. I talked to human resources technology adviser George Larocque of #HRWins recently to get some insight on how to pick the

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I’ve talked a lot about the importance of employee communication when it comes to engagement. Being transparent and honest when communicating with employees is so important — they know when you’re not being straight with them. But when I recently talked to Tina Hawkins, chief employee communication enthusiast at Yarber Creative, she warned against organizations communicating about engagement in the

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This is an excerpt of a post that originally appeared on SmartBrief’s Smart Blog on Leadership on April 20, 2016 An employee-engagement plan isn’t something you can create once and follow, to the letter, forever. As business goals and employee demographics change, engagement initiatives need periodic tweaks and improvements. I’ve seen many business leaders get stuck and frustrated because their

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Talmetrix is on a mission to recognize companies and leaders that achieve high performance through engaged cultures. We’re spotlighting companies where employees are proud to work and are doing great things, but their stories might not make headlines. Great cultures and employee engagement aren’t built on crazy perks, but in the way people work, the type of people hired and

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How are you doing with your engagement resolutions this year? We’re almost halfway done with 2016, which is a good time to check in on our employee engagement trend predictions and see how things are coming along. At the end of last year, we hoped the annual review would become a relic and that recognition would be key to retention,

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Social feedback can be a powerful tool when it comes to improving engagement — but it can also be tricky. It involves curating, analyzing and ranking suggestions from employees, gathered from listening sessions, open-ended survey questions, online comments, or upvoted/downvoted ideas on an internal web page. Treat social feedback like an especially sharp chisel — use it to shape some

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You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink — and in some ways, that applies to employee engagement as well. After all the surveys, communication, action plans and changes, what moves the needle on engagement the most is decisions made by individual employees. Employees play a vital role in their own engagement, and it’s vital

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This is a question the Talmetrix team hears a lot: How often should we survey employees? Some leaders assume that more surveys are always better. But that’s not necessarily true. It can be exhilarating to get previously unseen insights into how your employees feel about working at your organization and to make the changes that will help them grow and

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Most surveys work best when the questions are paired with a range of answers. But there’s definitely a place in an engagement initiative for social feedback. Social feedback is an art: Handled well, it can provide clear and helpful clues for steering your engagement efforts. Handled poorly, it can end up wasting time and resources. If you want to add

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Putting together a scientifically sound survey and then digging into the data is the backbone of a good employee engagement program. But, it’s possible to survey employees too much. To dig into the science of survey frequency, I talked to David Youssefnia, Ph.D., president and founder of Critical Metrics, and one of Talmetrix’s advisers. When you fly, stay at a

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