Which Incentives Would Employees Choose If They Could

Which Incentives Would Employees Choose If They Could From free gourmet food and bring in your pet day, to napping pods and haircuts on site; companies like Google offer a variety of incentives and benefits to employees. Unsurprisingly, Google hold a rating of  4.4/5  on Glassdoor, with  92% of its employees  stating that they would recommend the company to a friend. Many organisations struggle with attracting and retaining suitable staff. With the nature of todays  competitive job market, companies have to pull out all the stops in order to attract the highest calibre candidates. Shai Aharony, Managing Director of Reboot Online  says: I think its important to offer incentives and benefits to employees to show them you appreciate their work. I like to keep my staff on their toes; maintaining the thirst to learn and achieve, while ensuring there is never a dull moment. I take my staff boxing training with an ex-European champion every Friday, even giving them the chance to “hit the boss”, which has proven popular! I recently organised a competition; the prize being a flying lesson. I noticed the difference it made with motivation levels and when meeting targets. Reboot  conducted a survey of 1,200 marketing professionals on the benefits they are being offered at work  and what  their top 3 work benefits would be, if they could choose. 66% stated their company offers some form of benefits/ incentives. 70% of employees say it makes  a difference to their motivation at work, and job retention. 25% would take one job over another because it offers more/ better incentives. The most popular benefits were related to job progression and flexible hours, with the provision of training wanted by 60% of respondents, followed by flexi-time (58%) and more holiday allowance (55%). A wide range of unconventional incentives are being increasingly offered: the scrapping of work hours was offered to a meagre 1% flexi-time was reportedly offered to  16% respondents 4% are  provided  health care on-site 3% are allowed time off for volunteering 15% are provided a staff holiday, 10% are offered adrenaline fuelled activities 5% offer unlimited alcohol on Fridays Charlotte Billington, is a career coach and author of the book What to do next. She says: Sometimes the little things make all the difference. Fresh coffee, drinks after work, gifts on birthdays my old company made a real effort with all of those and it made a difference. We were also offered a half Friday every 6 weeks. Some companies may not be able to but think about what would make a difference to you. Put yourself in others shoes. I would also suggest asking around, if you can, to what perks and incentives would be of interest to your employers. Perhaps a few ideas could be put forward and you can then decide what is possible. Can you combine an activity or team building day with some perks? A day trip somewhere nice or a working lunch or dinner that both employer and employee can benefit from? Beth Leslie, is a  professional career advice and lifestyle writer for Inspiring Interns. She  says: When it comes to work perks, it can seem farcical to point out the obvious: they make employees happy. But, as good bosses know, happy employees work harder, stay longer, and are more productive overall. Millennials, who are constantly assailed by media claims that they are ‘lazy’ or ‘entitled’, tend to be particularly receptive to work perks precisely because they indicate that both they and their contributions are valued. At the end of the day, our job consumes an awful lot of our time and effort, and it’s important to our morale to feel that our company appreciates that. Allowing staff to work flexibly in ways that suits them, or rewarding them for high performances, are cheap, easy ways for companies to incentivise their employees to be the best workers they can be. Getting the right incentives or perks for your staff can also help you attract the right talent. What you can afford in terms of value for money and the ROI you get for it is something you will have to weigh up. Countless studies have shown that the benefits of offering good staff incentives will always reap good rewards in the long run as long as you offer what employees actually want, not what you think looks good on paper.

Were nearing the end of email, maybe

Were nearing the end of email, maybe The vast majority of electronic communication today is via social media, according to Paul Greenberg, a relationship management consultant. At first I didnt believe it. But then I thought about the viral nature of communication via social networks, and the statistic started to make sense. So, I have been thinking for a while that I need to stop using email, but I was never sure my hunch was right. Finally, through the process of deciding to put photos of my kids on my blog, I realized that email is now old-fashioned. Heres why: 1. Email is inefficient. Email is one-to-one communication and social networks one-to-many communication. (Heres a good link about that.) If you have something meaningful or thoughtful to say, why not say it to many people? It would mean that more people share ideas and more people understand your way of thinking. Also, there are so many pieces of our life that we tell at different times to different people. Why not just say it once? We all have email overload: we parse our messages into 40 one-to-one messages instead of just a single one-to-many message. Email is also an inefficient way to hone your writing skills. A Stanford study shows that people develop better writing in social media than in the classroom. In the classroom you write for a single reader, the teacher, who is a captive audienceits her job to read your writing. But in social media, you have to persuade a group of readers to accept your way of thinking, and you have to be interesting. So you will get better and better at your jobwhich is, for all of us on some level, communicatingif you use social media instead of email. 2. The intimacy of email is overrated. If you want intimate communication, send a handwritten letter. I receive one of these almost every week, so I know the custom is not dead. And I pay attention to them much more than email. The act of seeing someones handwriting is intimate because handwriting reveals so much about a person. Email is not intimate. Its a workplace tool, and its also a pile of junk were always trying to get to the bottom of. Most of the information you send via email is for work, (which is the premise of Seth Godins recent advice about using email). Email is not a good tool for ideas. Its a good tool for sniggling details. You dont want to spend your life in the irrelevant details of mundane tasks. So the fewer emails you send, the more time you spend in the realm of either execution or ideasmore powerful than details. Execution happens outside of email, and ideas should happen in groupswhich means social networks. 3. Your privacy is overrated. First of all, you dont have a lot of privacy. You are getting everything online for free, and in exchange you are letting someone sell your data. You dont have enough money or enough time in your life to use the Internet in a way that does not invade your privacy. But, so what? The value of your privacy is very little in the age of transparency and authenticity. Privacy is almost always a way of hiding things that dont need hiding. In social media, the relevant parts of you will fall to the relevant places, which is why you can be your true self wherever you go, and its okay that you dont have privacy. Your employer is not interested in your profile on Facebook because it doesnt reveal anything about how you perform at workit reveals what youre like at a party. Employers will read the parts of you that are professional, and friends will read your personal announcements. So this is why Im comfortable posting photos of my kids here. I used to worry that it would invade my kids privacy. But Im realizing now that privacy wont matter when my kids are growing up. When I interviewed media theorist Rebecca Blood, she said that kids today already manage their online lives like they are Hollywood celebrities and therefore their parents cannot guild them about privacy online. If this is what were doing now, I can only imagine how little privacy will matter ten years from now. Also, one of the great things about social media is that it gives voices to groups that have hereto-with been without one. Like the experience of parenting. Sally Mann was called a pornographer when she published her stunning photos of her kids. Today, mommy bloggers publish these sort of photos (though admittedly not as stunning) every day. Also, I am struck by this post on the blog Peaches Coconuts. Debroah writes about struggling to get through the week when her partner is out of town on business. And she says she doesnt over-schedule her kids so they will go to Harvard. She over-schedules them so she can get through the day. And, she notes that her kids are not going to get into Harvard anyway, she can already tell. Many people would say, What will the kids say when they read this? But you know what? If we dont write about our kids we cannot write about our experience parenting. Its like when women first wrote about orgasms. Im sure people said, What will your husband think? Who benefitted from the conversation? Everyone, right? Good orgasms make good sex for everyone. And good parenting makes better lives for everyone. And transparency trumps privacy every time. So put your ideas in social media, not email. So, heres my contribution to a more transparent conversation about what life is really like at the intersection of work and life: a photo of my son. I think it should be titled Breaking from Work to Eat Lunch with Superman:

Simple Snapshot The Freebie Photo Resume Template

Simple Snapshot â€" The Freebie Photo Resume Template Simple Snapshot â€" The Freebie Photo Resume Template If your resume was nothing more than a place to list your credentials, the document wouldn’t be important at all for decision makers.But somehow they still rely a lot on it. What to know why? Because they view resumes as part of the person’s personal brand. Your resume should communicate your personality, talents, and your field. And that’s exactly what this template does amazingly well.This free resume template features attractive, blue headings and subheadings. We have stuck with a more traditional color and font for readability. An attractive graph allows you to create a visual representation of your skills and experience.As always, this template may be downloaded on demand at no cost to you. Feel free to customize it using MS Word. For a bit extra, you can include a killer cover letter, complimenting your resume.Did you know theres a premium version of this template too? It features a two page design, a matching cover letter template, plus another sweet perk. Go check it out! File size: 131 KB Format: .doc Downloaded 69,498 times License: Free, personal use only. Please read the license terms for resources. Download previous article Discover How to Nail Your Next Job Interview next article Professional Resume Template Freebie Sleek and Simple you might also likeFine Balance â€" A Creative and Professional Resume Template

Why Its Time for Your Recruiting Process to GO LEAN

Why Its Time for Your Recruiting Process to GO LEAN Recruitment marketing has reached an apex of sorts. More than one person has mentioned the shift from search to predictive sourcing in the last few months and I happen to think they are right on the money. Today large companies are focusing their talent acquisition budgets in content marketing, and candidate research and nurturing. That may mean that some of the long-held concepts about being a social recruiter are changing and traditional methods of convince and convert (candidates) are coming back into vogue (not that they every REALLY left). This is mirrored in consumer marketing as inbound marketing something coined by the folks over at Hubspot and a term coming increasingly important for recruitment marketers and recruiters themselves to consider. As we apply this to the enterprise, we need to consider the goals of larger corporations. SMBs may not have to form a global reach (although that too, is changing rapidly) and focus on brand awareness and simply being found. Large enterprises, on the other hand have a significant marketing base from which to pull and often are focused more on brand differentiation since the large company with no competitors is a rare animal indeed. As most big corps are, the enterprise is focused on return on investment and attempting to reach more peoplefaster. This is less to optimize their budget and more to support a large talent acquisition team. One of the reasons we celebrate large companies that have lean processes built into their marketing and talent acquisition efforts is because its so rare a thing. Its a tough nut to crack to change the approval process, particularly when multiple people are involved. So in order to really take advantage of the precepts of content and inbound marketing in the recruiting process, companies NEED to implement lean processes in order to quickly move their initiatives through multiple levels. How do you do THAT? As recruiters, weve all seen lean processes applied in departments all around us, but rarely has the concept of moving candidates and hiring managers more efficiently through the sourcing, recruiting and hiring process been more important. While we wont get into all the reasons the way we work is changing, the simple fact is, it IS changing and our processes must be altered to change with it. If your average employee is predicted to stay on the job 2 years, its flat out inefficient to take 45-90 to hire and take that person onboard. Before the last few years and the consumerization of enterprise tools took hold (think Box.net, Dropbox, Skype, Google Docs, Evernote etc.) recruiting teams faced serious barriers to going lean: The tools we had for finding candidates were pretty inefficient themselves. If you werent of the generation of ringing phones and 35 index cards, you were drowning in a deluge of unqualified spray and pray resumes. From job fairs to newspaper ads and cluttered job boards and resume databases, everything started off useful and was quickly overrun by misuse. The seclusion from marketing and sales (two departments FAR more aligned with recruiting than the typical dance partner HR) made it so many developments in these areas took a while to resonate in talent acquisition. However, recruiters and sourcers no longer have these issues. The tools available to help marketers are cheap or free and intuitive to boot! Not to mention the flurry of innovation that has taken place around sourcing and recruiting tools over the last 3-4 years. While many are waiting on the sidelines to see which of the new products will last the decade, smarter enterprise recruiters are jumping in with both feet, quickly testing and discarding or keeping the tools that work for their organization. So we have the tools, what we need is a process. Lean process management is the same whether you apply it in programming, engineering, marketing or recruiting. Develop a repeatable process. Creating a simple process that is available and doable for every member of your TA team is paramount. Why? Because the process will be turned on its head if it cant be repeated and implemented like a mantra. The steps should include: planning, execution, adjustment, and alignment. By creating a plan for the beginning of campaigns (as opposed to requirements or searches) you shift the focus from search something that many tools do for you now, to attract a proactive way of reaching out specifically to qualified candidates in a timely, efficient manner. Gradually improving this process over time, allow you to optimize the tools you use and free your people up to handle the convince and convert process, something recruiters are great at. How will this improve your recruitment function? Automating sourcing and search (either with technology or a solid process) will avoid wasted time. New tools that specifically analyze the bottlenecks and breakdowns within your tools or processes can be used to quickly identify and fix issues. Candidates that go through your process will enjoy it, whether they are hired or not. People naturally seek out boundaries and parameters. Once your process is solid, there is no reason not to use it to enhance candidate communications and your career site. Instant ability to solve problems when they arise rather than waste valuable time trying to pinpoint the issue. Any recruiting team that decided to implement lean processes in their recruitment marketing and recruitment function will benefits not only from the process itself but from the resulting impact on additional processes, outsourced services (think RPO) and technology within their talent acquisition function moving forward. Image: Shutterstock

These are the workplace perks that people actually want - Debut

These are the workplace perks that people actually want - Debut All of us here, were sure, are responsible, career-driven go-getters. But a small part of us has dreamt of sipping on a free cocktail, turning to a colleague and saying Ah, the perks of the job. You know, just like they do in the movies. It doesnt always go that way though. Lets talk some truths about workplace perks. Why do companies give out perks? The thing is, workplace perks have increasingly become less of a bonus and more of a necessity to lure top talent to a company. Its not the be-all and end-all, sure. But if an employer cant throw down with the likes of Apple and Google when it comes to company culture, thats a huge deal-breaker these days. See, the idea is to create better workplace engagement. The more engaged you are at work, the better you work. Companies dont mind shelling out for the extra bit of productivity, especially for millennials supposedly the least engaged generation in work right now. Weve got it good over here at Debut HQ. Were signed up to Perkbox and the fine people at WeWork look after us with free beer, coffee, biscuits and table tennis(!). Wed say that helps us do our jobs just fine.  ?? Elsewhere though, which of the many workplace perks out there do workers like the most? Which ones are not as useful? And which ones do most wish they had? Insurance company Towergate has come up with some answers. The most (and least) engaging workplace perks The research conducted by Towergate showed that the most popular perk had nothing to do with free stuff. The most popular was flexible working arrangements with 73% of working people surveyed feeling that flexibility was one of the most important factors. Perks coming straight after that on the wishlist were a company pension and and increase in basic salary. Unsurprisingly, financial compensation perks like these increased engagement the most with 40% of workers saying it would work for them. Among the least engaging perks were on-site gyms, which only 28% of workers actually used, free snacks and table footballs tables (but table tennis is okay, right?) You can check out the full graphic, courtesy of Towergate, below. What kind of perks would draw you to a career, if any? Tweet us and let us know! GIFs via Giphy Download the Debut app and get Talent-Spotted by amazing graduate employers! Connect with Debut on Facebook and Twitter