6 Benefits of Ongoing Employee Development
In many organizations, work is pretty consistent and predictable: go into the office, perform your tasks, and go home. Many people spend years doing their jobs without much advancement or ongoing career development.
How to Know Who Has the Right Skills for the Job
Hiring is a deeply imperfect process that probably has as many misses as hits. You’ve probably seen it in action: a new hire looks perfect on the paper and interviews well but has mediocre performance or clashes with co-workers constantly. Finding the person with the right skills is hard, but there are ways to pick more of the right candidates for a job.
7 Ways to Keep Your Employees Engaged All Year Round
When your employees are directly and fully engaged, you will notice that their morale and overall level of job satisfaction are high. They are motivated to work harder and smarter for your company, and the result is high productivity and perhaps less employee turnover.
Lean Start-Up and Digital Skills: Are They Enough?
If you’re like a lot of people, your company is trying to drive innovation internally, with a workforce that wasn't really hired for that. It's a tough nut to crack, and the very reason we started Swarm Vision.
Do Open-Concept Offices Promote Innovation?
Do open-concept offices live up to their hype when it comes to encouraging innovation and collaboration? Or do they hinder productivity by sacrificing privacy - and in some cases, comfort? Let’s take a look at the pros and cons.
How Idea Implementation is Like Legislating
In a recent audit of site content on InnovationManagement.se, site publishers noticed that although there is a great deal of information about how to architect and run idea management programs, there isn’t a whole lot of information about how to implement ideas.
How do We Nurture Innovators?
More and more companies are looking to understand and identify innovation talent. Why? Because if companies understand how to encourage original thought and reward innovation efforts, they’re more likely to stay relevant and at the top of their game. Not to mention that they’re far more likely to attract and retain top talent that is interested in working for a company that is forward-thinking and rewards creative effort.
Mastering Global Innovation through Multicultural Collaboration
We live in an increasingly multicultural and networked world where innovation has the potential to transform lives from Austria to Zimbabwe. Leaders and teams are facing changing customer needs across cultures and geographies. If you’re responsible for international products, services, projects, or programs, how are you facilitating innovation and collaboration around the world?
Can Everyone Be Innovative?
Innovation is an integral part of many organizations today, and for good reason: it helps companies stay agile, relevant, and evolving. However, innovation is often difficult to achieve—or is even met with resistance.
A Commitment to Diversity is a Commitment to Innovation
The more you allow disparate ideas to mingle and collide, the more you maximize your chances for true innovative thought to emerge. Learn all of this and more in a complimentary white paper about why innovators want to nurture workforce diversity.
Do Your Employees Need Passion?
If you’ve ever written a job description that calls for passionate, hard-working candidates, did you ever stop to think about what that means? Sure, having engaged and loyal employees is the ultimate goal of any company, but the word “passion” is loaded.
Are Legacy Approaches to Talent Inhibiting Your Innovation Efforts?
The legacy approach to talent selection involves matching education, length of experience and functional skills to the role. All of this makes sense as a baseline, and for well-established professions. But, we argue, selecting talent for innovation requires a whole new approach. Companies must recognize specific innovation skills that drive business outcomes. Yet today, most lack the tools to do so.
How Innovation Fuels a Sense of Purpose in the Workplace
Drawing a connection between innovation and workplace purpose often eludes companies looking to hire the best people for their teams. Let’s take a look at what needs to happen to make this possible.
You’re Stifling Innovation, And You Don’t Even Know It
It is a common belief that encouraging creativity will lead to higher levels of innovation. In actuality, most organizations already have the creative ideas they need. But they are missing or outright rejecting them, and they don’t even realize they’re doing it.
5 Strategies for More Effective Employee Onboarding
Over 69 percent of employees are still employed by a company three years after they start if they receive great onboarding. While training for job-specific skills should be part of an onboarding program, it is important that the program helps create connections between new employees and mentors, communicates the company's mission and core values and allows managers to make wise use of their time when bringing a new employee onboard.
HR Improvements that Can Build a Better Company
The role of HR has evolved significantly over the years. In the past, HR was focused only on hiring and making sure paychecks were sent to the right employees. Today, HR plays a much broader role in the strategic goals of a company. These following improvements can help your HR department meet your company goals.
Optimizing Meetings to Maximize Individual Brainstorming Time
Are you overwhelmed by unnecessary meetings? We’ve all been there: one more meeting, and you feel like you’re going to scream. You’ve been trying to make some real progress on your creative project, but the constant meetings have really been cutting into your individual brainstorming time. If you feel like the number of meetings you’ve been attending is cutting into your productivity, you’re not imagining it.
Struggling with Company Culture? Here are 3 Ways to Improve Your Work Environment
Company culture is an extremely important component of a healthy business. Culture serves as the personality of the organization and has a huge impact on the company's reputation with both internal employees and externally with customers and clients. In addition, workplace culture can influence an employee's productivity and results. Companies who focus on building a positive culture will reap the benefits of a motivated and high-achieving workforce as employees will feel much more contented and connected at work.
Leaders Should Listen More and Talk Less
Want to improve your leadership skills? Well, you can start by talking less and listening more. While your oratory skills may impress some, your ability to listen will impress even more. Great leaders understand the importance of surrendering the floor. Unfortunately, most leaders choose to dominate the conversation with rhetoric and fail to engage in proper communication, which requires listening.
How Neuroscience is Supporting Innovative Corporations
Progressive business leaders are building innovative actions, climates and ultimately cultures that align with “brain-friendly” science. In this article we outline some steps that you can take to support this kind of innovative organization.
Learning to Communicate With Difficult Co-Workers
No matter where you work, there's always some difficult co-workers you're going to have to deal with. Instead of wishing the situation away, which never works, it's time to learn how to perfect your skills for dealing with them.
Deciphering Innovator Archetypes with Tamara Kleinberg of LaunchStreet
In this episode we are joined by Tamara Kleinberg, serial innovator, keynote speaker, creator the Innovation Quotient Edge (IQE) Assessment and founder of LaunchStreet, a leading platform for individuals and organisations seeking to innovate. A few topics covered include lessons Tamara has learnt throughout her 20-year career advising companies such as Disney, General Mills, RICOH, P&G, J&J on how to create innovative cultures; why she so firmly believes that everyone has the possibility to be an innovator and the implications of this for leadership in large, established organisations; and walking through Tamara’s IQE Assessment the only tool designed to decipher a person’s natural innovative strengths and create the right environment for them to thrive.
5 Ways to Use Technology to Improve Employee Engagement, Collaboration and Retention
In today’s workplace, technological innovation is key to retaining your best talent. From telecommuting, to growth and career development, to improved communication and collaboration, and beyond, there are myriad ways you can keep your employees happy and productive.
Managing Fundraising Innovation: the Dangers of the ‘Echo-Chamber’
This case study explores the results of an innovation research process undertaken by Oxfam, which compared internal feedback vs. general public feedback to identical sets of ideas. In comparing responses between these two audiences, Oxfam discovered an immediate and obvious divide between their staff’s opinions about which fundraising ideas would perform the best, versus what the general public preferred - an important lesson about avoiding the bubble of the echo chamber.