With Valentine's Day and Employee Appreciation Day around the corner on March 2nd, it's a good reminder to check in on your employee engagement. Not only is an engaged culture more fun to work in, creating a culture that embodies happiness and satisfaction just makes cents! (Pun-intended.) Effective human capital practices can and will, lead to positive financial outcomes.

What is Change Management? Change management is the process of transitioning or transforming an organization. It is a management science that specializes in people behavior and organization design for the purpose of repositioning a company for product, financial, market, and competitive advantages. And repositioning a company for product, financial, market, or competitive advantage is very important work! How to Avoid Problems with Leading Change Management Processes In-House The biggest mistake I see is when conducted in-house and not by a change management professional is utilizing a one-size-fits-all change management methodology. A common miss is thinking about how change must be different for the various levels of the organization. For example, each job level should be addressed with a unique approach that is most fitting for them. Individual change management would include: The executive team needs to understand and adopt their role in change management. Mid-level management will need to generate the levers of new change and sustainability measures. And at the general employee-at-large level, change would entail engaging and internalizing the new direction/decision. You have to meet them at their level and help them understand how their role fits in with the change. A change management consultant or professional should be able to pull out their toolkit that contains creativity, flexibility, language, change management models, diagnostics and other tools to make the change management initiative successful on all levels.

Take a minute to imagine all of the different generations working together in today’s society…with so much diversity…from Traditionalists (born before 1946) to Generation Z (1997 – today) to employees from different cultures, religions, and the like. This begs the question, how can these employees work together and be successful as a team and what do we need to do as employers, to ensure these individuals all feel respected and included in their work environment?

It’s performance evaluation time, and everyone knows these conversations can sometimes be difficult. Whether you’re measuring engagement, presenting feedback, or conversing with your youngest employee, some scenarios will be new and unpredictable.

Buzzwords in business are overused to the point of becoming fads at times. We hear phrases daily such as “culture”, “engagement”, “wheelhouse”, “synergy”, “incentivizing”, “strategic”, and the list goes on and on. When these buzzwords become so common in our workplace, it shouldn’t be surprising to hear so many managers and executives misusing these terms to suit their own agendas, while confidently speaking as experts on achieving each.

Often, when an organization loses an HR Director, Benefits Manager, or HR Business Manager for whatever reason, they know that the standard two (or in some cases a bit more) week notice period won’t be enough time to make an offer to the next person to fill the role. While precious handover time slips away, the business will do its best to make a placement before the departure.