Beyond the normal competencies that every business seeks to improve year-over-year – such as growing sales leads and conversions, increasing efficiency, reducing costs and minimizing waste – forward-thinking companies should focus on the up-and-coming core values of today’s marketplace. Those include being more trustworthy, transparent, ethical, collaborative and mindful of its employee needs. Companies that improve these are destined to be more successful in 2014.
However, of those five goals, being mindful of employee needs is the one that is least likely to be addressed in any real, tangible way by most companies. While being mindful of employees’ needs is an honorable goal in theory, it is a tall order. What does it mean to be ‘mindful of employee needs’? What does that look like in practice? How does that translate into actual HR rules and practices? It can mean many different things to business owners and leaders, and even more to the employees themselves. That makes it hard to qualify or quantify, and even harder to achieve. But make no mistake that being mindful of employee needs does impact the bottom line. A company is only as good as its people. For businesses, keeping teams moving forward together in harmony is the difference between succeeding and failing. The most successful businesses are the ones that work the hardest to please their employees. So what should companies that want to be mindful of their employees do? Continue reading