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By Tim Madden

“Toxic” has become an increasingly popular term to describe anything that could be psychologically unhealthy for us or encourage negative patterns. Unfortunately, this word is particularly applicable to the workplace. If business owners and managers aren’t careful, the organization and work culture they worked hard to build could spiral into the kinds of conditions that make their employees dread turning up to work every day.

Yet precisely because owners tend to be proud of their companies, they can be blinded from what’s really happening on the ground. If you’re asking yourself the difficult questions, you’re already doing better than most, but here are a few top signs of a toxic workplace and what you should do about them.

Signs of a toxic workplace
Spotting the signs of a toxic workplace is tough when you’re observing from up above and not down below — especially when so many of them are subjective and about how people feel rather more concrete metrics. Possessing good emotional intelligence helps with this, but here are a few more signs to look out for.

Incentives to stay in the office

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by Ben M. Bensaou

Offering employees the tools and motivation to create ideas is the key to an innovative organisation.

A manufacturer of the fabric used to reinforce car tyres might not seem an obvious source of innovation inspiration. But in just a few years, Kordsa, a part of the Turkish industrial conglomerate Sabanc? Group, transformed itself from a price-driven maker of commodity products into a provider of innovative solutions to clients across multiple industries.

While there are many reasons for Kordsa’s remarkable success, the process began with senior executives giving permission to everyone in the organisation to innovate.

Of course, most organisations recognise the importance of encouraging innovation. Good ideas can streamline production processes, help save money and open up potential new markets. Yet despite the compelling evidence, it’s not always obvious what steps are needed to integrate innovative practices and thinking across an organisation.

A blueprint for innovation

Based on over twenty years of researching, teaching and consulting for some of the world’s leading companies, I’ve attempted to address that shortfall. In my book Built to Innovate, I aim to map out a proven system for building constant innovation into your company’s DNA. I explain that there are three key processes necessary to build what I term an Innovation Engine into any organisation: Creation, Integration and Reframing. Continue reading →

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BY HILMON SOREY

Building and retaining a strong sales team is fundamental for revenue growth. Since attraction, retention, and growth are keys to consistently high-performing teams, we developed the easy-to-follow T.E.A.M. (Talent, Engage, Accelerate, Mastery) framework to drive your team’s growth strategy.

TALENT

Your talent strategy must be rock solid to build a team that consistently achieves its goals. A company’s talent acquisition strategy is the foundation for building a successful team. Resist the desire to over-engineer onboarding programs if your talent acquisition strategy is not consistently delivering top candidates – who are the right candidates for the open role within your organization, not just the best possible candidate available (who everyone else is likely also recruiting).

Building a winning sales team requires identifying the specific competencies your salespeople need to excel. A candidate doesn’t need to possess every competency when hired, since you should have a training program in place to help fill the gap between where the person is today and where he or she needs to be to consistently perform at the desired level. Continue reading →

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by Nancy Howard

Having a team get together can be effective to an extent, but without regular team building activities for remote teams implemented into your strategy, your employees’ productivity might decrease significantly. Hence, finding the best team building activities for remote employees that work best for your case is crucial for the success of your company. Here are some team building activities you can do to improve your remote team productivity.

Why Is Team Building Important?

Communication is one of the most important factors of a company’s success because communication is what makes your team work together coordinating their efforts. And, in turn, proper communication can build your team and improve your employees’ productivity. By having your employees work better together, you can expect more creativity, increased sales and conversions, better organization and planning and so on.

#1 Virtual Team Meetings

First of all, there are the obvious virtual team meetings. These are a must for any kind of remote team because they help you discuss everything with your teammates almost as if the meeting was being held face-to-face. To make your virtual team meetings more productive, make sure to:

• Plan everything beforehand. Write down all the points you want to discuss to make sure no topic gets forgotten or overlooked.
• Communicate the time to everyone. You don’t want half of the team to be late to the discussion.
• Check all the tech for possible issues. Moreover, ask everyone else to check their own tech to prevent possible interruptions.

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By: Abbie Buck

These four strategies can boost diversity in your organization and in your executive ranks, this Silicon Valley CHRO writes.

Less than half of all startups in the United States have at least one woman in the C-suite or on the board of directors, according to Silicon Valley Bank’s 2020 gender gap report. That’s not just disappointing progress, it’s also bad business, as research has shown that companies with more female executives are more likely to outperform less diverse companies, McKinsey reports.

The causes of this lack of diversity are varied and complicated, and the pandemic ismaking it worse by pushing many women out of the workforce due to childcare demands. It’s a complicated problem, but the path toward remedying the situation doesn’t have to be.

At Collective Health, our C-suite is 43% female and our workforce is 53% female. Because we are a health tech company working to provide frictionless healthcare benefits, it’s imperative that our workforce reflects the population we serve and that our leadership reflects both. Our work is at its best only through hiring, retaining and promoting a diverse set of perspectives so that we may better serve our customers.

Sadly, this is not the case at many companies. Even those that have diverse workforces too often have a lack of diversity in senior leadership. Progress in the latter area has been especially slow. More than a third of the companies in a McKinsey recent survey have no women at all on their executive teams.

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