Employee Engagement Tips Archives

Becoming a Better Finance Manager: What to Do and What Not to Do

Everyone has room for improvement at work. This includes your role as a finance manager.

Becoming a better finance manager elevates your team’s performance. Your employees likely will stay engaged longer, perform better, and remain with your organization longer.

As a result, you must do what you can to become a better finance manager. The following tips can help.

Becoming a Better Finance Manager

Do: Remain Accessible

Make yourself available to your employees. Encourage them to talk with you about their needs and concerns.

Being accessible shows you value and respect your team. It also improves employee engagement, productivity, and morale.

Don’t: Micromanage

Your role is not to perform your employees’ work. This means you do not need to hover while your team members complete their tasks.

Keep in mind you hired the best talent and trust them to effectively complete their work. You are there to provide guidance, supervision, and mentorship. This includes giving your team the necessary resources, letting them work, and being available for questions and support.

Do: Provide Feedback

Regularly give each employee constructive feedback. Include what they are doing well, what they can do better, and specific ways they can improve.

Constructive feedback builds trust and respect among your employees. It also improves employee engagement, performance, and retention.

Don’t: Shame Your Employees

Publicly embarrassing your employees does not establish your authority. Rather, it undermines your credibility and turns your team against you.

Instead, privately suggest methods to improve an employee’s performance. Use the discussion to empower your team member with specific steps to more effectively perform their work.

Do: Celebrate Accomplishments

Acknowledge when your employees reach a target, finish a project, or attain a goal. Include what each team member accomplished, the steps they took, and their impact on the organization.

You may want to send your employee a congratulatory email or take your team to lunch. Also, let other managers, supervisors, and leaders know of your employee’s or team’s success. Plus, provide a bonus, raise, or promotion when appropriate.

Celebrating employee accomplishments encourages your team to repeat the behaviors that led to the results. This elevates employee engagement, performance, and job satisfaction.

Don’t: Ignore Your Employees’ Skill Development

Employee skill development is imperative for career progression. Not having opportunities for professional development means your team members cannot move up within the organization. Lack of advancement encourages your employees to look for jobs elsewhere.

Instead, delegate tasks to your employees to promote their skill development. Also, offer stretch assignments, job shadowing, and cross-training opportunities. Plus, let your team members lead meetings and represent the company at industry events. These actions promote employee longevity with your company.

Effective Leadership Means Hiring the Best

Understanding what to do and what not to do as a finance manager makes you a more effective leader. The more your employees feel valued and respected, the longer they will stay engaged, perform their best, and remain with your organization.

Free up the time needed to manage your team by making Casey Accounting & Finance Resources part of your recruiting process. Get started today.

The Importance of Flexible Scheduling and How to Make It Work for Your Business

Companies that offer flexible schedules help accommodate their employees’ different lifestyles. This is becoming increasingly important as a method to attract quality accounting and finance candidates. Because more job seekers want control over their work-life integration, your team should be able to set their own work hours. Fortunately, implementation can be accomplished in a few steps.

Discover some benefits of offering a flexible schedule and how to implement it for your accounting and finance team.

Increased Work-Life Integration

Your team members appreciate being able to schedule their work around their personal lives. They can participate in their children’s school activities, run errands, and take care of household responsibilities while fitting in their work. This helps reduce stress and the potential for burnout.

Enhanced Engagement

Employees who work flexible hours remain engaged longer in their work. They feel highly respected and empowered by their manager. As a result, the staff tends to miss fewer days of work, stay focused longer, and accomplish more each day.

Greater Productivity

The ability to set their work hours lets your team members get more done each day. They can work during the times they are most focused and productive. Your employees’ energy levels and concentration levels should be high, allowing more tasks to get finished.

Stronger Employee Retention

Because employees prefer greater control over their time, they appreciate having a flexible schedule. This increases the likelihood of staying with their employer long-term. The longer you keep your staff, the lower your recruitment, onboarding, and training costs.

Additional Top Talent

Offering a flexible schedule encourages the best job seekers to want to work for you. Because many candidates find this perk even more attractive than salary and benefits, you may be able to save money in these areas. You also could attract more applicants than your competitors who do not offer flexible work hours.

Fill Your Team’s Needs

Ask your staff what their interest and needs are for working flexible hours. Find out whether they can effectively function as a team and what would have to happen to make it work. Make sure that your employees would be available when needed for meetings, client discussions, and other responsibilities.

Create a Policy

Develop written rules about flexible scheduling requirements. This may involve having to be at the office or available by phone during certain times. Include how communication with staff will occur when they are not in the office. Make sure the policy is detailed, clear, and non-discriminatory.

Need Top Accounting & Finance Talent?

Implementing a flexible schedule for your accounting and finance team provides many benefits. Productivity, engagement, and work-life integration should increase. This can attract the best candidates and lead to greater employee retention.

When you need to add the best talent to your team, reach out to Casey Accounting & Finance Resources. We have the candidates you need to fulfill your business goals.

Management Tips to Ensure Your Team is Actively Engaged

The level of engagement an employee has demonstrated how committed they are to your company and its success. It also shows how motivated and emotionally invested they are in their work. An employee must be motivated to work toward a goal in line with its vision and committed to the same values as the organization to remain engaged. As a result, the higher employee engagement is, the greater your company’s success. This is why you must work to maintain engagement among your team members.

Implement these tips to ensure your accounting and finance team remains engaged in their work.

Get to Know Your Employees

Learn all you can about your team members. For instance, find out about their families, hobbies, and interests. Also, discover what motivates them to perform their best. Additionally, ask what keeps them invested in the company’s future. Plus, uncover how they’d like to expand the business and increase its success. Use this knowledge to create a positive, productive work environment.

Set Goals

Create individual and team goals that are both challenging and realistic. This provides a sense of direction for what needs to be done and where your team members should focus their energy. Be sure to include milestones along the way to measure both progress and success.

Offer Growth Opportunities

Provide opportunities for professional growth. For instance, create stretch assignments that increase team members’ skill sets. Also, encourage your staff to develop and implement ideas to increase efficiency within the department. Plus, offer additional training and coaching in line with promotions.

Maintain Communication

Keep the lines of communication open with your team. For instance, encourage open discussion about problems as they come up. Work together to find solutions. Also, ask for employee feedback to improve your performance. Additionally, keep your staff updated on company news and developments.

Promote Autonomy

Let your teamwork as independently as possible. This shows you trust them to complete their tasks without being watched over. Ensure you clearly communicate what needs to be done and make yourself available to answer questions. Also, regularly check in on your team’s progress to see how they’re doing and provide feedback. Plus, encourage them to learn from their mistakes and do better next time.

Recognize Achievements

Acknowledge individual and team accomplishments. For instance, thank your team members for their efforts. Also, point out how individual contributions led up to a finished product. Provide monetary rewards for major achievements.

Hire Engaged Accounting & Finance Professionals

The promotion of employee engagement is one key to your accounting and finance team’s success. Engaged team members produce at higher levels and remain with your company longer. Setting goals, maintaining communication, and promoting autonomy are three ways to encourage engagement.

When you need to add engaged professionals to your team, partner with Casey Accounting & Finance Resources, we provide high-performance candidates who will make strong contributions to your company. Find out more today.

Recognizing Mistakes Can Positively Impact Employee Performance

Employees make mistakes from time to time. Perhaps they don’t clearly understand what you want them to do. Maybe they didn’t thoroughly consider all the information or potential results before making a decision. When mistakes occur, it’s your managerial duty to decide how to handle the situation. You need to take steps that involve the employee’s input for finding a solution and creating lasting change in their behavior.

Follow these suggestions to effectively talk about employee mistakes and improve performance.

Ask Questions

Come up with questions aimed at changing future behavior. For instance, “If we did this project again, what could we do differently to change the results?” Or, “How could I have better supported you and your team?” Ask the employee to get back with you the next day with their thoughts. This encourages them to focus on finding solutions rather than a new job.

Provide Feedback

Give the employee feedback about the problem. They may need more information about a situation in order to change their behavior. Use “I” statements rather than “you” statements. For instance, instead of saying, “Can I give you some feedback?” say, “Here’s my reaction.” Rather than suggesting, “Here’s what you should do,” try, “Here’s what I would do.” Instead of saying, “You should do X” when asked for advice, respond with, “What do you feel you’re struggling with, and what have you done before that worked in a similar situation?”

Use the 8D Model

For a higher-level mistake, implement the 8D Model to modify employee behavior. The D stands for discipline, meaning an area of study or influence. This model encourages the team to understand the problem and provide an answer. Begin by planning the time, people, and resources required to resolve the issue. Choose individuals with diverse skill sets and product/process knowledge. Define the who, what, where, when, why, and how of the problem. Create and implement a temporary solution to contain the issue. Use tools such as cause-and-effect diagrams to determine the root causes of the problem. Create a permanent, systemic solution that addresses the root cause. Implement the corrective actions, then verify their effectiveness. Focus on areas of the solution that need work, then modify practices, procedures, and management and operation systems to address potential issues in the future. Recognize your team’s efforts in solving the problem.

Improve Employee Performance

Your employees won’t change their ways if you simply tell them what they’re doing is wrong. You need to ask questions, provide feedback, or use another effective method to enhance employee behavior and bring about lasting change.

When you need to hire top accounting and finance professionals in Rolling Meadows, turn to Casey Accounting & Finance Resources. We match you with candidates who have the skills and experience needed to solve problems. Get in touch with us today.

Is Your Employee Engagement Hurting Your Company’s Financial Performance?

How do you know whether your employee engagement is helping or hindering your company? Setting and analyzing key performance indicators (KPIs), asking employees to fill out surveys, or implementing stack ranking may be among your solutions.

Key Performance Indicators

A KPI is a measure that reflects company success or progress in relation to a specific goal. For example, financial KPIs typically are based on elements of the income statement or balance sheet. They may report changes in sales growth by product groups, channel or customer segments or in expense categories. Revenue growth rate, net profit and return on investment are commonly used metrics for employee performance. A company needs to use non-financial KPIs as well. Non-financial KPIs are other measures used to assess activities that are important to achievement of strategic objectives. Examples include measures that relate to customer relationships, employees, operations, quality, cycle-time and the company’s supply chain. By aligning business activities and individual actions with strategic objectives, you can better determine whether employee engagement is benefitting or harming your company.

Employee-Centered Key Performance Indicators

Employee-centered KPIs, such as employee engagement, satisfaction and turnover are also important metrics. Higher employee engagement is linked to higher customer satisfaction. When employees are happy and believe in their company, it comes across in their work. For this reason, companies with high employee engagement levels outperform companies with lower engagement levels according to customer ratings. Plus, because engaged employees are motivated to achieve more, they produce more than disengaged ones. In addition, companies with employee-centered strategies are more likely to encourage innovation, autonomy and employee ownership than companies that do not implement such strategies.

Employee Surveys

To measure engagement, you may ask employees to fill out surveys. Questions may include, “How meaningful is your work?” “How much do your opinions about work matter to your manager?” Or, “Are you proud to be a member of your team?” Another approach may be analyzing engagement levels such as management quality and time investment, influence from colleagues, relationships and work schedule. The second approach is more comprehensive and likely to be answered honestly, rather than with answers employees think leaders want to hear.

Stack Ranking

Stack ranking is a system that ranks employees according to their performance. Top employees are put in line for promotions while the bottom 5-10 percent are let go. One objective is to encourage communication between managers and employees so employees know why they rank where they do and how they can improve. Employees may learn why they are not regularly being promoted or prepare to be laid off for continual poor performance.

Work With a Chicago Staffing Firm

Find engaged employees through Casey Accounting and Finance Resources, a leader in Chicago employment!