Workers spend a lot of time toggling between apps and websites to do their jobs. But how often do they really do this, and how much times does it really take up? The authors studied 20 teams, totaling 137 users, across three Fortune 500 companies for up to five weeks. They found workers toggled roughly 1,200 times each day, which adds up to just under four hours each week reorienting themselves after toggling — roughly 9% of their time at work. While many companies may write this off as the...| Harvard Business Review
Managers are often at a loss as to how to effectively motivate uninspired employees. Research indicates that managers first should identify the reason for an employee’s lack of motivation before applying a targeted strategy. These reasons fall into four categories called motivation traps. Namely, these are values mismatch, lack of self-efficacy, disruptive emotions, and attribution errors. Each of these four traps has distinct causes and comes with specific strategies to release an employee...| Harvard Business Review
Since the pandemic, executives have had to rethink their work-from-home policies to better support their companies’ bottom line. Recent research conducted in a real company showed that employees who worked from home two days a week experienced higher satisfaction and lower attrition rates compared with their colleagues who worked from the office. This reduction in turnover saved millions of dollars in recruiting and training costs, thereby increasing profits for the company. Business leader...| Harvard Business Review
Like many other companies, Deloitte realized that its system for evaluating the work of employees—and then training them, promoting them, and paying them accordingly—was increasingly out of step with its objectives. It searched for something nimbler, real-time, and more individualized—something squarely focused on fueling performance in the future rather than assessing it in the past. The new system will have no cascading objectives, no once-a-year reviews, and no 360-degree-feedback to...| Harvard Business Review
Reprint: R0707J Popular lore tells us that genius is born, not made. Scientific research, on the other hand, reveals that true expertise is mainly the product of years of intense practice and dedicated coaching. Ordinary practice is not enough: To reach elite levels of performance, you need to constantly push yourself beyond your abilities and comfort level. Such discipline is the key to becoming an expert in all domains, including management and leadership. Those are the conclusions reached ...| Harvard Business Review
It’s performance review season, and you know the drill. Drag each of your direct reports into a conference room for a one-on-one, hand them an official-looking document, and then start in with the same, tired conversation. Say some positive things about what the employee is good at, then some unpleasant things about what he’s not […]| Harvard Business Review
Hated by bosses and subordinates alike, traditional performance appraisals have been abandoned by more than a third of U.S. companies. The annual review’s biggest limitation, the authors argue, is its emphasis on holding employees accountable for what they did last year, at the expense of improving performance now and in the future. That’s why many organizations are moving to more-frequent, development-focused conversations between managers and employees. The authors explain how performan...| Harvard Business Review
Why are consumers increasingly dissatisfied with the quality of help they get from customer service departments? The authors’ surveys and interviews with contact center personnel worldwide suggest that companies don’t hire the right people as frontline reps, nor do they equip them to handle the increasingly complex challenges that come with the job. Every rep can be classified as one of seven types, say the authors. Supportive “Empathizers” constitute the largest group, and managers p...| Harvard Business Review
What exactly is psychological safety? It’s a term that’s used a lot but is often misunderstood. In this piece, the author answers the following questions with input from Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, who coined the phrase “team psychological safety”: 1) What is psychological safety? 2) Why is psychological safety important? 3) How has the idea evolved? 4) How do you know if your team has it? 5) How do you create psychological safety? 6) What are common misconceptions?| Harvard Business Review