Tag: Performance

Guest Post: 7 Reasons You Need To Survey Your Employees

If you own your own business, or you manage a team of people, your days are probably filled with meetings, mountains of paperwork and trying to keep on top of your email inbox. However, if you’re responsible for a team of employees, you have a responsibility to be a good manager. You not only need to demonstrate strong leadership skills, you need to be able to track their progress, set goals and help them develop.

But how can you do that when you’re completely snowed under? Well believe it or not and employee survey is a perfect way of measuring your employees’ happiness and how they view you as their manager.

Not convinced? Well here are seven reasons why you need to regularly survey your employees.

1. You Measure Morale. By surveying your employees the first benefit you get is that you will be measuring their morale. If you have unhappy workers, you have an unproductive workforce – plain and simple. If you can measure their morale and identify the reasons why John from accounts is feeling down, you can put measures in place to improve his morale and boost his productivity.

2. You Measure Passion. On top of measuring morale, an employee survey will measure passion. Every business wants a passionate workforce which cares about its goals and objectives – whether it’s a private company out to make money or a local government organisation providing housing. If you don’t have a workforce committed to your goals you don’t have much to go on.

3. You Measure Sentiment. Employee surveys, if conducted anonymously can reveal a great deal about how your workforce feels about your business itself. Do they think you’re heading in the right direction? Do they feel your goals are realistic? Do they think they are working for a business which cares for them? By asking questions like this you could unearth some hard truths which may be hard to take at first but will be beneficial for you in the long-run

4. You Can Make More Money. This might be fourth on this list, but it’s certainly no less important. Employee surveys can actually help you to make you more money. Why? Because if your employees feel that they are listened to, that their opinions are respected, that you are a manager who cares about them and that they are working for a caring company they will be more motivated to turn up to work and perform. If you’re all about the bottom line it’s proven that more passion = more sales = more turnover.

5. You Can Save Money. Even if you’re not in the business to make money, all employee surveys can help you to save money. How? Well if your employees are asked about their welfare, their aims and their goals and monitored on their performance, they will be more likely to stay at your organisation. If someone feels like they have room to progress through promotion and identified development opportunities they won’t be hunting job websites to look for the first chance to escape. This will save you on recruiting costs and the costs through time of reading CVs and conducting interviews. When it’s put like that you can save quite a bit of money!

6. You Measure Performance. After all the interpersonal and business benefits of employee surveys, another key reason is that you can measure an employee’s performance. Anonymous employee surveys, such as 360 feedback, are a way for organisations to find out how colleagues perceive their workmates without fear of being identified. This gives an accurate reflection of your workforce’s performance, and lets you set individual goals to work on. This will not only help you track their progress it can help identify certain weak areas or parts of their jobs they need to work on

7. You Find Out About Your Management Quality! A final benefit of employee surveys is that, as a manager, you can find out about you. Think about it, if you were to ask your team for what they honestly thought about your management style do you think they’d give you an honest answer to your face? By using 360 feedback you can find out precisely what your team thinks about your leadership and management style. You may not like the results, but if it identifies some areas for you to improve on you’ll benefit your business no end.

Author Bio: ETS plc provides 360 degree feedback surveys for businesses. For more information about how 360 feedback can help your business, please see the website.

May 6, 2012
7 Reasons Ireland Didn’t Beat England At Cricket Yesterday
If you’re a cricket lover, or if you’re following the Cricket World Cup (which isn’t really cricket) and you’re English, you might be happily going about your March 2^nd business right now vaguely aware that you seem to have had some sort of strange and improbable nightmare last night. And you’re right. It is still Wednesday and you’ve had a bit of a funny dream. I know I have. Here are seven reasons why.

This didn't happen. You dreamt this.

1.  It’s Too Conflicting. The English, as popular opinion would have it, love an underdog. And it’s true, we do. There’s nothing that the English like to do more than cheer on plucky minnows. We love to see Italy do well in the Six Nations; we love to see Scotland do well at football; we love to see Malta do well at absolutely bloody everything and, had Ireland been playing any other nation yesterday (except Malta), we would have been cheering them on with cries of “Play up, Ireland” and “Hurrah for the Patricks”. But they weren’t playing anyone else. They were playing us. And we were the overdog. This was somewhat conflicting. Because it was nice to see the plucky Irish do well during the cricket, it was heart-warming even, and to someone who fancies that he has some modicum of appreciation for the game, it was enjoyable. But then it slowly began to look like they might actually beat us and suddenly the thin veneer of being a fair-minded Englishman that appreciates a fine performance (even by an opponent) began to dissipate and I realised that I wasn’t quite the sporting chap I imagine myself to be. I discovered that I am, in fact, the sort of Englishman who would happily don a pith helmet and mow down colonials with a Gatling gun if it meant a victory in war or sport for dear old Blighty. No one needs to find that out about themselves when they’re trying to enjoy the cricket. I started the match as a good, upright, moral chap and finished it as a cruel, bloodthirsty, avaricious monster. Albeit one with a nice hat. But this can’t really have happened, because I’m certain that, at heart, I’m a thoroughly nice chap.

2.  The Irish Don’t Even Play Cricket. I know about Irish sport; I’ve seen it. There are essentially three major sports there. They play football, like we do, but with muddier pitches. They play rugby, like we do, but with muddier pitches. And they play Gaelic-bloody-hurleyball-thing – a sport I once saw on Channel Four at three o’clock one morning in 1997 – which is essentially a mass-brawl in the mud which may or may not have sticks and a ball. And a net.   None of those things even remotely resemble cricket, which is a game played in England, where children are given bats, balls and club ties at birth and spend almost every minute of every childhood summer – except when they are reluctantly dragged away to a tartan picnic blanket and force-fed cucumber sandwiches, orange squash and those Mr Kipling cakes that resemble gaudily coloured plasticine and make your teeth hurt – playing the game of cricket. And then when we grow up many of us carry on doing exactly the same thing, but with Pimm’s instead of the squash and if we’re very lucky, picnic sex. Though the infernal sodding cakes are still there. We have cricket, if not in our blood, then certainly in our souls and in our psyche, it’s a part of our national identity. We are prepared to play cricket from birth, it shouldn’t be possible to just to turn up with a horse and beat us at it. Which is good, because it didn’t happen.

3.  There Was A Horse. I’m not going to knock Kevin O’Brien’s knock*. What he did yesterday was superb. He went out to bat and did what every young boy (and grown man and woman and just about everyone who’s ever had any sporting ambition/interest/has even seen a blade of grass) has ever dreamed of doing: He took a game by the scruff of the neck and improbably – almost impossibly – won it single-handedly, against the odds. It was amazing. He was magnificent. Unlike Irish people, however, I have seen Kevin O’Brien play before, and I know this. He’s essentially a lumbering big, ginger horse in a cricket uniform. Of course he’s going to be able to slog the ball around on a flat pitch, he could probably hit balls to the moon. What we needed to counteract him was a backfiring car. They always put horses off what they’re doing, I’ve seen black and white films and read Edwardian novels, and I know of what I speak. It’s just not possible that England’s enormous – and legendarily meticulous – backroom staff consisting of hordes of people with laptops that studied P.E. at university didn’t consider this tactic, not possible at all. As the saying goes: If you fail to prepare, you prepare to get spanked around the ground by a big ginger man-horse. And that’s what happened…er…didn’t happen.

4.  It Isn’t Mathematically Possible. The Ireland cricket team represents both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. So England were playing two countries out there yesterday, and you might think that would put England (us) at a disadvantage but wait! The acronym ECB is short for The England and Wales (and some South Africans) Cricket Board, so Irelands two nations were in fact playing our three nations, all of whom are individually better at cricket than them. It’s not mathematically possible that they should have won, or geographically or historically. It’s just not possible at all, so it can’t have happened.

5.  Available Talent. That Ireland don’t have any sort of cricketing pedigree is self-evident. But that’s not to say that Ireland is completely lacking any cricketing talent. That would be crass and simplistic. Because there is Irish cricketing talent out there. For there is a man born in Dublin who would get into just about any one day cricket team in the world; a man who won three senior cup titles for Catholic University School; a man who has a ODI batting average of 38.03; a man whose batting shimmers with inventiveness and audacity; a man whose bold stroke-play and natural ease with a bat is admired the world over. And that Irishman’s name is Eoin Morgan and he plays for fecking England!!!! Their best player doesn’t even play for them! He plays for us, so they can’t have won at all.

6.  The Reaction. Do you know what the reaction in England to the Irish victory was last night? From people that don’t follow cricket as closely as you or I, people with children and lives and things, people that the news was only slowly filtering to by yesterday evening? The ones that I spoke to all reacted in exactly the same way with the same question. They asked, “Do the Irish even have a cricket team?” Every last one of them asked this. And in Ireland, I have no doubt that they were all asking, “Do we even have a cricket team?” I had to explain this defeat to a Frenchman last night – A MAN FROM FRANCE – and do you know what his first question was? I’ll tell you. It was, “Do ze Irish even ‘ave a cricket team?”   I can’t begin to tell you how painful this conversation was. It was several minutes before I was able to turn the conversation to the efficacy of the Maginot Line. Several long minutes. Anyway, the upshot of all this is that we were playing a team yesterday that doesn’t exist. And they beat us.

7.  It’s So Weird I Can Only Have Dreamt It. I won’t bore you with all of the details, but it’s fair to say that yesterday was a fairly strange day for me. Here are just some of the things that actually happened to me:
- I purchased Vaseline for my cat.
- I discussed the Ashes with a Frenchman.
- I witnessed a man request “A pint of the lager you have that’s most like Stella” at a bar.
- An Irish team that doesn’t exist beat England at Cricket with an orange horse.
So there you go. All of the available evidence is there and it points to only one thing: That yesterday was a really weird dream that didn’t actually happen. Any moment now I’m going to wake up and it’ll be March 2^nd again and at some point later on today I’m going to listen to England thump Ireland at cricket. It’s going to be great. I can’t wait.

*That’s the first knock-knock joke we’ve ever done at 7 Reasons.**

**The second one will be better.
March 3, 2011
7 Reasons We’re Delighted By This 7 Reasons Analysis

This morning I was completely devoid of inspiration. Initially I was going to attack a 10 year-old girl. Not literally obviously. I wasn’t bored. And it would be wrong. I mean literately. I was going to question why the girl – whose design has been chosen as the emblem for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee – couldn’t be bothered to use a ruler. Or indeed colour between lines. But as I was writing, I felt a deep sense of shame. It is not in my nature to pick on 10 year-old girls, so I stopped. Instead I googled ‘7 Reasons’ and, lo, what did I find? This beautiful analysis of all that is good about 7 Reasons. I was delighted. Here’s why:

1. Backed By FIRA. It’s news to us, but we are delighted to be backed by the capital city of Santorini. And, having looked it up on wikipedia, we are pleased to say that we reciprocate. Go to FIRA. You’ll love it. Especially the Santorini Archeological Museum.

2. Exceptional Performance. It is highly unlikely that this refers to our web hosts so we can only assume it is a compliment aimed at the robotic manner in which both of us knock out 7 Reasons posts day after day after day. We are just short of 500 posts now, or 3,500 reasons if you prefer. Quite an achievement given that one of us thought we’d struggle to get past 14. (Reasons).

3. Experts That Live And Breathe Furniture. Okay, so the use of the word ‘experts’ my have been somewhat over the top, but we happily accept that the 7 Reasons sofa is a thing of beauty. And this is not by luck, but by design. We took great care when sawing the original sofas in half and even more care when we staple-gunned the two required halves together. The fact that it has lasted eighteen months is testament to our expertise. In fact the only thing we bemoan is the number of lemons that keep falling down the back of the cushions. Along with the cat.

4. Understanding & Insights. I am a little surprised this isn’t Reason One. After all, understanding the world around us and providing insight into a variety of topics is our bread and butter. Without this attitude you wouldn’t now be the proud owner of an orange door, you’d probably still be thinking about dating a polar bear and you’d own The American on DVD.

5. Leading Edge Infrastructure. This is very much Marc’s domain so he deserves the applause. From day one he has only been too happy to tinker with the back-end of stuff and he has done a marvelous job. The fact that none of you (or I) have ever noticed any improvements just goes to show how deep into the back-end Marc has gone. The result is a thing of beauty. When it works.

6. UK & Eire Coverage. We are glad this impresses people and it vindicates our original decision. Jon was very keen to prevent anyone outside of the British Isles having the ability to read the British humour website, but Marc muttered something about ‘impossible to do’, ‘xenophobia’ and ‘write about cricket and we’ll get loads of India-based readers’. That was enough. The website has always had Eire coverage. And the rest of the World too.

7. Partnership Approach. One of the seven reasons that 7 Reasons continues to astound the internet is because of this thing they call a partnership. When one of us can’t be bothered to write anything, we don’t. Instead we watch the football knowing the other will eventually crack around 5pm and rapidly write something about winning a country. It’s probably a flawed plan, but it works. For me.

February 21, 2011