Corporate Culture Archives - Page 2 of 2

Essential Questions to Ask During a C-Level interview

By Angelica RainsCareer Guidance, Corporate Culture, Hiring Strategies, Interviews, Leadership

A structured approach that focuses on research, networking, reference development, and rehearsal is the key to more successful C-level interviews. There are some differences in preparing for a C-level interview versus an entry-level one. In addition to showing your knowledge, skills, and experience, communicate your leadership style. Asking intelligent questions can also make you stand out. Executive recruiters recommend these, along with a few other tips.

What trends are you following that could influence this organization’s goals and priorities?
If I am hired as your executive assistant, what do you see as the most significant challenges in working to fulfill the goals of this organization?
What are some significant milestones that will be used to evaluate my performance?
Can you describe the work culture and environment here?
What are some of this company’s most significant achievements recently?
What leadership style wouldn’t be conducive to this company?
What would the typical workday be like for an executive assistant here?
What communication tools, professional development, etc., are available to employees?

Although this certainly isn’t a comprehensive list, it does represent some thoughtful questions that will help gain helpful insight regarding the expectations of these high-level positions. It’s a red flag when candidates don’t have any questions during an interview.

Research Industry Trends

Another effective way to connect with an interviewer and show that you are prepared to meet their organizational needs is by researching emerging trends from around the industry. Candidates are always encouraged to review annual reports, news articles, and videos when meeting with a hiring manager. Knowing about trends can also help you answer probing questions like why you want to work in this industry.

Reference Development

C-suite candidates have to be very selective when providing suitable references. Although any former colleague might work for an entry-level job, considerations need to be respected and relevant for executive-level managers. Only use people who can constructively describe your work ethic, leadership characteristics, strengths, and ability to work under pressure.

Although it’s still important to highlight your skills and experience, asking essential questions during a C-level interview is the best way to learn if it’s the right fit for you. Researching industry trends can help you create solid queries and respond to them intelligibly. Finally, focus on providing only trusted references you know could handle open-ended questions about your leadership qualifications.

August 25, 2021

Adapting to Executives Facing Upcoming Retirement

By Angelica RainsCareer Guidance, Corporate Culture, Leadership

Retirement is something that impacts small, mid-size, and big businesses alike. It can be difficult for some leaders to give up control over something they’ve worked so hard to build. Approximately 12 million Baby Boomers also happen to be executives and business owners, and most of them will be eligible for retirement in the foreseeable future. Yet, close to half of CEOs still don’t have transition plans for when they leave. Below are some potential exit strategies that can help businesses maintain value and adapt to executives facing retirement.

Develop a Plan

Perhaps this is the best advice that executive recruiters can offer to owners and leaders considering retirement. Rather than continue working in the business, start working on it by focusing on other responsibilities that can help grow it, like marketing. The decision to either sell the business or transfer ownership to current employees gets more accessible when the right employees are hired and appropriately trained. Then, organizations should model a plan similar to this for managing the wave of retiring workers.

Decide organizational goals. Surveys and focus groups are effective ways to discover what the needs of employees and the company are.
Determine what you want from employees. Do you want to promote internally for C-suite positions or recruit external candidates? Even though external candidates tend to have more experience, employment data suggests that they are more likely to be fired than those hired from within.
Aggressively promote the succession plan. Ensure that employees understand eligibility by holding educational meetings.

Recruit Successors Earlier

It’s easier for organizations to prepare for retirements than other forms of turnover because they can usually predict the who and when. Multilevel succession plans can help small businesses develop talent to hedge against executives retiring. Alternatively, companies can partner with C-level recruiters to hire a successor as soon as possible to shadow the outgoing executive and gain knowledge transfer.

To Retire or Not to Retire

For those executives unsure if now is the right time to exit the workforce, some red flags can help. For instance, retirement might be the best option if you’re not passionate about what you’re doing or don’t feel challenged anymore. Other people opt for retirement for personal reasons such as health, family obligations, etc. Some industries are evolving so rapidly that businesses could benefit from fresh leadership.

A strong succession plan is the best way for businesses to overcome the wave of retiring executives. It should combine transparent retirement policies and internal successor development programs. Otherwise, recruiters are yet another valuable resource that can help you adapt.

August 18, 2021

Why Managers Should Never Eat Alone

By Angelica RainsCareer Guidance, Corporate Culture, Leadership

As a leader, you want your employees to know that you value their opinions and see them as people. One of the easiest ways to demonstrate this is to have lunch with them regularly. Managers who eat with their team members receive various potential benefits, such as higher employee retention and improved performance. Lunchtime is also one of the best times to build your network. This is especially true in the C-suite, where relationship-building is extremely important.

Improve Retention

Not liking their manager is one of the most common reasons people quit jobs. Taking the time to talk with your employees and demonstrate you empathize with them and care about their success will instantly make you a likable leader. This is why you should never eat alone. Eating lunch with your team members is an excellent opportunity to socialize with them and get to know them on a more personal level. Build a connection with your team so they will want to work for you.

Improve Team Performance

Employees who feel a connection to their team and to their managers are more driven to succeed. When team members eat alongside their managers, they feel seen. By connecting with your team on their level and in an informal setting, you will build trust and loyalty. Eating lunch as a group makes sure everyone feels included, which makes people want to do better and contribute to the group’s success.

Build Your Network

Eating lunch with others is also a great way to grow your professional network. Networking is most successful when it is based on authentic relationship building and isn’t just networking for the sake of networking. Most networking nowadays has moved online, yet nothing is as powerful as face-to-face conversations. When you eat together, you form relationships built on genuine camaraderie and respect. The relationships you create at the lunch table are much more meaningful than ones limited to online communication.

Enhance Your Mood

Another reason you should never eat alone is that it is simply more enjoyable to eat in the company of others. Eating in a large group enhances mood and makes people feel happier. If you always eat alone, you may eventually start to feel lonely and excluded. Even managers need to take a break from constantly thinking about work. Lunch breaks are a chance to give your brain a rest from work stress and to let loose. This can be a lifesaver when it comes to mental health.

While many managers are in the habit of eating lunch alone, a lot of good can come from making a point never to eat alone. On the one hand, this habit will help you build a connection with your team, improving employee retention and team performance. On the other hand, it can help you grow your network while enhancing your mood and reducing stress.

August 11, 2021

Your Company Culture Impacts Employee Well-Being

By Angelica RainsCareer Guidance, Corporate Culture

A company’s culture affects the stress levels of its employees. It also influences employee engagement and satisfaction. With this in mind, an organization’s culture can lead to changes in your team members’ mental and physical health.

How Company Culture Affects Well-Being

What creates a toxic company culture? Low compensation, poor management, ineffective leadership, understaffing, and conflict among team members are just a few things that can create a negative company culture. One thing all of these factors have in common is they cause unnecessary stress to employees. Constant work stress can lead to mental health problems, such as depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, and insomnia. Stress can also have physical symptoms like frequent headaches and stomachaches. In contrast, company cultures that prioritize work-life balance policies, anti-bullying policies, mindfulness programs, and other policies and programs that target stress can positively affect its employees’ mental and physical well-being.

What Benefits Come from a Culture of Well-Being

Promoting the mental and physical well-being of your team members can come with many essential benefits. Employees who are healthy work more productively:

They take fewer sick days.
They focus better.
They have more motivation.

A culture of well-being sees higher team participation, higher rates of retention, widespread support systems between peers, and more. Ultimately, when a company bolsters the mental health of its employees, the company shows its employees that it supports them and values them as people while enabling them to engage in their work and motivating them to perform at their highest capacity. This improved productivity has additional benefits to the organization, such as higher profits and better business outcomes.

What You Can Do to Foster a Culture of Well-Being

If, as an organization, you want to foster a culture of well-being, the first step is to evaluate your company’s current culture. It’s helpful if you have a comprehensive understanding of how your company’s policies, practices, values, and interactions positively and negatively impact the well-being of your team. The best way to accomplish this is to listen to your employees. By having conversations with individual team members, conducting anonymous surveys, and seeking honest feedback, you can develop a clear picture of how supportive the work environment is. As you assess your organization’s culture, consider factors like compensation, workload, vacation time, and leadership. These all significantly affect stress levels. The next step is to develop policies and programs for your organization specifically designed to improve employee well-being. It is crucial to involve employees in the process. You will ensure the programs accurately reflect the team’s needs and give them the sense of inclusion they need to feel supported. To foster a culture of well-being, incorporate more opportunities for socialization and team bonding. Socializing enhances mood and decreases stress.

In recent years, work cultures have become increasingly stressful as people have started working longer hours and seeing their work-life balance decrease. Companies have begun to realize that company culture can have a significant impact on the well-being of their employees. Cultivating a culture of well-being can reduce the stress of your team members while improving retention, employee satisfaction, and productivity.

August 4, 2021

Tips for Managing the Executive Onboarding Journey

By Angelica RainsCareer Guidance, Corporate Culture, Hiring Strategies, Leadership

You may be surprised to learn that many executives in the United States don’t undergo formal onboarding when they begin a job. This lack of support may explain why 40% of new leaders leave within the first two years of starting a new job. These tips can help improve the executive onboarding journey.

Communication about Roles and Expectations

New hires are unlikely to succeed without clear and transparent expectations. While new leaders need to understand their responsibilities clearly, they especially need to know what to expect from their team members, peers, and mentors. Once hired, leaders will have to meet and interact with many new people. The more they know about all these individuals, the better off they are. Communicating these expectations allows hires to prepare, making good impressions early on, and starting on the right foot.

Education about Company Goals and Values

One of the main reasons so many leaders struggles when they start a new job is that they don’t know enough about its goals and values. An effective onboarding strategy for leaders will allow hires to gain in-depth knowledge about what is important to the company. This will help the hire feel more connected to the organization and give them a sense of purpose.

Education about Internal Processes

Even if they held a similar position at a different company, your organization’s internal process might differ drastically from what the new hire is used to. This is one reason starting a new job in a position of leadership can be overwhelming. As you develop your onboarding strategy, make sure to identify key aspects of your company’s internal process that new hires will benefit from knowing about. It is also important to check in with new hires regularly to make sure they are not confused about any internal process. Regular check-ins are crucial in monitoring how well hires adjust to their new work environment.

Integration into the Management Team

One of the hardest aspects of starting a new job is integrating into the team. This can be even harder at the executive level because the team is smaller. Team building activities are a key part of any executive onboarding strategy. The new hire needs chances to socialize with other executives and start to build a relationship with them. This will allow the team to develop mutual trust, which is of great importance at the executive level. Any person in a leadership position who feels like an outsider will not stay long, so integration into the management team has to be a top priority for new hires.

Beginning a job as part of the C-suite isn’t easy. New hires are given a lot of responsibility early on and have to adjust to a new culture, new company processes, new team members, and so much more. Moreover, many don’t receive a real onboarding experience. To improve the chances that a hire will succeed as an executive, communicate clear expectations, educate them about company goals and internal processes, and integrate them into the management team early on in the process.

July 28, 2021

DEI Initiatives that Have Been Making a Difference

By Angelica RainsCareer Guidance, Corporate Culture, Industry Trends

As is common in much of the corporate world, C-level support has historically lacked diversity and inclusion. As social awareness has increased in recent years, many organizations have taken actions that have made a real difference in making the C-suite more equitable.

Compile and Analyze Data

When it comes to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, knowledge is power. A company can’t improve its diversity and inclusivity without first understanding how diverse the organization is in practice. One of the most important initiatives one can take is collecting data that can be analyzed continuously. See how the composition of your team compares to other companies in your industry and the overall labor force. Pay close attention to key diversity categories, such as age, ability, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, generation, learning styles, race, language is spoken, etc. By collecting data and comparing it to other companies and your own organizational goals, you will be able to identify problem areas and hold yourself accountable for the goals you set

Identify Problems and Set Clear Goals

By collecting lots of data, you will have the resources you need to identify where you fall short as an organization in diversity and inclusion. Look beyond simple statistics to examine how diverse groups are represented within specific departments and job titles. For example, even if fifty percent of your employees are female, your organization isn’t inclusive if men fill all the leadership positions. In addition, survey individual employees to see if they feel their work environment is inclusive. This can help you identify less obvious problem areas. Once you identify specific problems within your organization that hold you back from being inclusive, you can begin to set goals. Identify what needs to change and develop an action-based plan to move your company to where it needs to be. The plan should address aspects of the organization like hiring practices, job descriptions, company culture, and company policies.

Involve Leadership and Management

Leaders who have decision-making power must be involved in any effective DEI strategy. You must also involve line managers from the beginning of the process. Without the help of leadership, there is no way to make real changes in hiring practices and company policies. Involving line managers is also important because they have a better understanding of what the company’s day-to-day culture looks like and can help ensure that the DEI goals the organization set match up with the reality of the workplace.

Consider Technology and Its Biases

Technology is one area that diversity committees often overlook. For example, the technology used to hire candidates and evaluate employee performance can rely on data biased against specific minority groups. This bias can range from steering job ads toward certain candidates to flagging candidates for word choice. Thus, it is important to regularly assess the technology used in your hiring and evaluation processes to ensure they do not affect anyone group in an inequitable or discriminatory way. Data, questions, and criteria used to evaluate candidates and employees should be fair and should use measures that are relevant indicators of performance for a given role.

Many companies are actively working on improving the diversity, inclusivity, and equity of their organizations. Strategies that focus on collecting and analyzing diversity metrics, setting clear and measurable goals, involving leadership and line manager, and cutting out biases and technology can make a real difference in improving the inclusivity of your organization.

July 21, 2021

Company Culture, Hybrid Work Environment

Maintain Company Culture in a Hybrid Work Environment

By Angelica RainsCareer Guidance, Corporate Culture, Industry Trends

Many organizations transitioned to alternative working arrangements during the pandemic to reduce the number of people in the office and meet social distancing requirements. Hybrid workplace models continue to trend as some high-profile companies announced that they would be allowing employees to work wherever they want. From employee safety to increased productivity, there are plenty of advantages associated with hybrid work environments. But, if work models like this are left unchecked, they present some unique challenges too. For instance, more companies are struggling to maintain employee morale because they feel disconnected from their colleagues and their purpose. Employee burnout is becoming more prevalent as a result. Fortunately, it’s still possible to maintain company culture in a hybrid work environment with these tips.

Promote a Sense of Shared Purpose

A common concern among many remote employees is the lack of teamwork and shared energy toward overall goals. Business leaders can help their teams overcome this by having regular discussions about shared purpose and how both individual and team contributions are connected to the success of a project. Hybrid workforces need frequent reminders concerning mutual dependencies while avoiding the temptation to micromanage. Instead, leaders should provide remote employees with the right tools and information required to complete work assignments. A sense of shared purpose can still be communicated through email, texts, video conferencing, etc.

Hold Employees Accountable for Results

One of the best ways to remind employees that their work matters is to hold them accountable even when working outside of the traditional office setting. It’s important to remind people that their work matters regardless of where it’s being done. The most successful hybrid work environments will have a good balance of empathetic management and accountability.

Manage Conflict Productively

It can be challenging to interpret people’s emotions during video calls, leading to even more conflict among remote employees. Disagreements are bound to happen in any work environment, but if leaders are proactive about keeping them respectful, then it helps create a positive work culture. Leaders today should encourage differences of opinions and have some standard operating procedures in place for conflicts.

Keep the Lines of Communication Open

Transparent, open communication is the key to maintaining a positive hybrid work environment. Since some employees miss out on the latest updates, leaders have to focus more on keeping everybody in the loop by sending out regular newsletters, updating social media accounts, sharing industry trends, etc.

Successful hybrid work models can require fine-tuning along the way. But, if you’re proactive about promoting a sense of shared purpose, managing conflict productively, and holding employees accountable, then a positive culture is inevitable.

July 14, 2021