Improve Business Performance

As a manager, one of your myriad duties is the professional development of your employees. Mentoring your employees helps them perform better, improves morale, and can help your business succeed. Most employees yearn to grow their skills with the aid of a knowledgeable, more senior member of their team. Want to take a more active role in mentoring your staff?

Try these tips:

Buddy up. Consider it a kind of matchmaking — send your staffers and more senior members, or mentors, off to discuss past experiences and future goals over lunch or coffee. Pairing those who have fewer years in the business with those who’ve got a wealth of proven experience is a great way to get a fresh exchange of ideas flowing. These pairings needn’t be exactly in line along the hierarchy; all that’s important is that the two parties can learn something from one another. It's also a good idea to take personalities into account, if possible, in matching employees with mentors.

Listen Openly. For one-on-one conversations between junior and senior staffers, encourage both parties to abandon their preconceptions. Instead of “right” or “wrong” ways of meeting challenges, encourage them to approach problems or projects by finding ways that work to replace ways that don’t. Neutralizing this language promotes an open dialogue in which both parties' ideas are equally valid. This parity will encourage the conversation to move freely and ensure that both the senior and junior staffer emerge with new ideas.

Think Strategically. One of the best by-products of mentoring is the slew of novel approaches it can engender. Once your staffers have met to discuss their professional goals and new methods of achieving them, be open to applying these ideas. They may not always work, but with patience and perseverance on all sides, successes will be achieved and staffers will see that their mentoring conversations produce tangible, actionable results that enhance their performance.

While mentoring may seem at first to be a one-way street, benefiting the recipient of the mentoring, it invigorates everyone involved. Mentors are stimulated by the active need for their skills, while they can learn from the junior employee, who brings a fresh outlook and new ideas to what might feel like old hat for the senior staffer. Mentoring can boost communication, inject new ideas into old formulas, and promote a satisfying, more open work environment — all of which benefits your bottom line.

Balance Work and Life or Else!

Q: What does it mean to have work/life balance?

A: This is a very personal thing and it is different for everyone. Generally speaking, having a good work/life balance means that your actions and priorities are aligned in a way that is taking care of what is really important to you.

One of the main implications of being out of balance, however you define it, is that you neglect other areas of your life; family, health, etc. are often some of the first. When you become so addicted to only dealing with your urgent tasks you don’t think there is time for the non-urgent. You think that there will be time to deal with them later. But often, when you ask people what they feel is most important in their life, things they really want to accomplish, they are things that take time and long-term investment. By the time these things become urgent, it’s often too late to affect them.

You have to decide what is important.

What do you really want to be and do with your life. What is your mission? What do you want people to say about you 30 or 40 years from now? Then, look at what is being asked of you and see if those things are a part of your life’s important goals. If not, smile and say “no.” If you’ve really decided what is important, you can become an agent in helping the people you work with, your family, friends and boss, know and understand your top priorities. This takes courage. It means you have to stand up for what you feel is important and help others understand why.

There are no quick-fixes to achieving work/life balance.

Your priorities may change as your circumstances change. Thus, I invite you to consider the things that you value most and allow those to serve as the foundation. Then commit to consistently re-evaluate your current priorities, given your current circumstances and based on what you have identified as your core values. It takes courage, but remember not to trade in what you want most, for what you want now.

Get lost on your desktop

With all the discussion about productivity, it made me think about whether I do what I can to ensure I am as productive as I should be.

This lead me onto thinking about the things that divert my attention away from my task in-hand, such as loud music, interruptions and wallpapers. So I came to wonder whether your desktop wallpaper (being the thing you see everytime you get a glimpse of your desktop) could aid you in your productivity.

I believe that having a wallpaper that I choose helps me to concentrate. I am the kind of person where I can work for hours without stopping, skipping meals, and becoming so totally absorbed in what I am doing to forget the outside world even exists. When I burn through that period, I am usually tired, not in the physical sense, and need a break. Staring into my desktop wallpaper relaxes me and gets me prepared to concentrate again, sort of like a good massage will help an athlete for the next game.

Does your wallpaper help you concentrate? If you need a minute to think maybe you can get lost in your desktop wallpaper too. A good place to find some interesting wallpaper is http://www.deviantart.com. Find what you need and let your mind relax a bit before tackling that next task.

You may find that you will become more productive if you take a minute to relax.

Fun at Work and Productivity

We've all heard the maxim "work hard, play hard" applied to workplaces. Often times the whole "play hard" thing is a bit of a red herring. But what is the value of fun in the workplace anyway?

Research has linked fun and employee satisfaction to higher productivity and even higher profits.* Not only this, but I've seen workplace fun contribute to retention. Departments that have fun together can be hard places to leave behind, and they tend to retain their best employees.

What can you do as a manager to bring some fun in? Chances are you won't need to do much other than let others spark it, but here are some ideas.

- Capitalize on your hobbies. I enjoy poetry, so I hosted lunchtime poetry readings at one of my companies. People enjoyed it, but perhaps poetry isn't your thing and movies are? Can you do a departmental film festival during lunch over a period of a few weeks? Be creative.

- Be spontaneous and quick. You don't need three hours to have some fun. Jump on an idea and then jump back to work.

- Go back to your childhood. When was the last time you blew bubbles? Had a sack race? Filled out a Mad Lib? You'll be surprised how much people enjoy a few moments of silliness, no matter how upright they are the other 99% of the time.

- Make it Educational. One client of mine asked two of her supervisors (who were often perceived as quite serious) to put on a skit about customer service for the departmental meeting. One of the managers came dressed like a grumpy old woman and played the part of "fussy customer" while the other demonstrated a slew of customer service techniques. The employees laughed until their sides hurt at the sight of their manager as "fussy customer" and learned a great deal about customer service too.

So, what can you do to embrace a little fun and increase employee satisfaction? Jot down a few ideas. Who knows? Perhaps it's just what the doctor ordered.