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As any manager who has tried it can tell you, onboarding new employees remotely is a challenge. And a bad onboarding experience can have long-lasting negative fallout. Writing in the Harvard Business Review, James M. Citrin and Darleen DeRosa, co-authors of Leading From a Distance:  Practical Lessons for Virtual Success, offer recommendations for companies large and small who want to make onboarding strategies succeed. 

1. Get off to a fast start: Create a plan to mitigate first-day nerves and allow new employees to feel welcome and gain confidence. Appoint a dedicated onboarding liaison, and try to set up their technology ahead of time to minimize breakdowns. 
2. Establish Strong Relationships Across the Organization:  Virtual settings make spontaneous relationship-building less likely. Be proactive about setting up a mix of formal and informal one-on-one interactions between the new hire and colleagues.  Some companies set up a “shadow week” in which the new hire attends a wide variety of team and stakeholder group meetings.
3. Explain the company culture and how work gets done: Make unspoken assumptions explicit. Spend more time than you generally would in a face-to-face environment talking about what is typical and atypical across various cultural dimensions. Create the space for your new colleagues to ask about the way things are done.
4. Set clear expectations and connect the individual’s role to company mission and vision:  A new hire should have a clear picture of what success looks like for the first 100 days and beyond.  Then they can prioritize and accomplish some quick wins that create a strong foundation and build momentum for future success

Did you onboard remotely, and what was your greatest challenge? To join the conversation, click "comments" above. We would love to hear about your experiences!

As the pandemic lingers and economic insecurity looms, stress and uncertainly are pervasive in the workforce. Since uncertain environments make people more likely to engage in uncivil, and disrespectful communication—rudeness is on the rise, and so are its repercussions

According to Shannon G. Taylor and Lauren R. Locklear, writing in the Sloan Management Review, “Employees who experience incivility at work perform worse in their jobs, are less helpful to colleagues, and are more likely to steal from their employer. Rudeness also hurts employee retention and the bottom line. According to one estimate, handling a single incident of rudeness can cost an organization more than $25,000.” So what should managers be doing to keep rudeness from begetting more rudeness in a vicious cycle?

• Develop strong, shared expectations for appropriate behavior. Provide a strong example with your own behavior, encouraging employees to take cues from you. Be sure to define not only what positive behavior looks like, but also which negative behaviors are unacceptable. Company policies against incivility are most effective when managers clearly define what bad behavior entails. 

• Provide targeted training. To reduce uncivil behavior and its impact on employee turnover, offer training for teams struggling with a communication deficiency you’ve identified: A lack of active listening, or difficulty giving and receiving feedback. Improving these communication practices helps employees better understand their colleagues, so they can recognize and respond to one another’s needs. 
• Encourage gratitude and appreciation. Regularly encourage employees to thank and acknowledge each other. Make this real by showing them how to build expressions of gratitude into your team’s day-to-day work. For example, start meetings by asking each person to share something they appreciate about a colleague.

Have you experienced rudeness at work, and is your organization doing enough to mitigate it? To join the conversation, click "comments" above. 

  Listening to your employees and incorporating their feedback is important to you and to the culture of your organization. But sending out an employee survey once a year is not sufficient, says Carrie McKeegan, CEO and Cofounder of Greenback Expat Tax Services -- especially among remote teams who find it harder to build relationships. Collecting feedback on an ongoing basis will allow you to address roadblocks head-on, encourage creativity and collaboration, and drive innovation. Here are things you can do:
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• Ask “how are you?”  Don’t let remote work make you eliminate pleasantries like, “How was your weekend?” Alternatively, do a temperature check by asking "What's the most important thing you're workingon this week?" or "How are you feeling about reaching your goals?"
• Open Up:  A culture of candor has to start from the top. That means being vulnerable enough to share your human side. By setting an example, you show it's okay for your team to share their struggles and challenges with you in return.
• Do Quarterly Check-ins:  The relationship between supervisor and employee plays a critical role in retention. Quarterly check-ins expose hidden issues and give team members a safe space to express needs, concerns, and ideas.  
• Listen, Don’t Defend: Faced with constructive criticism, just listen. Focus on clarifying questions that help you understand the employees’ perspective.
• Act on Feedback:  Actions speak louder than words. You don’t need to incorporate every piece of advice, but do recognize each contribution and share with your team how you intend to use their input. This type of transparency strengthens trust and encourages future feedback. 
  
  

Is your remote team giving you frequent and honest feedback, and if not, what can you do to improve matters? To join the conversation, click "comments" above. We'd love to hear your feedack. 

Are you a good listener? When we pose this question to people in our learning events, most rate themselves as “above average” (a mathematical impossibility). When we ask what good listening consists of, the most common themes are:  not interrupting, letting others know you are listening by using nonverbal encouragers  (“uh-huh”, “mmm-hmm”) and paraphrasing, by repeating back what the other person has said. 
 
However, new research, conducted by Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman of the Zenger/Folkman Leadership Development Group, suggests that these behaviors fall far short of describing great listening skills.

Their four main findings:

1. Good listeners are not always silent when others talk.  They periodically ask questions that prompt discovery and insight. Good listening is more of a two-way dialogue than speaker vs. listener.
   
   
2. Good listening includes interactions that build the speaker’s self-esteem. “Good listening was characterized by the creation of a safe environment in which issues and differences could be discussed openly. Good listeners made the other person feel supported and conveyed confidence in them.”
   
   
3. Good listening is a cooperative conversation. Good listeners may challenge assumptions and disagree, “but the person being listened to feels the listener is trying to help, not wanting to win an argument.”
   
   
4. Good listeners can make suggestions.  Good listening invariably included some feedback provided in a way others would accept and that opened up alternative paths to consider.

 
Not every conversation requires the highest levels of listening, but many conversations would benefit from greater focus and from the intention to listen interactively.
 
As a listener have you engaged in any of these practices? What else has worked for you? To join the conversation, click "comments" above.  We would love to hear your feedback.

Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin notes that people would come from far and wide to hear Abe Lincoln speak, even when he was simply a prairie lawyer. From his “stage” atop a tree stump, Lincoln “could simultaneously educate, entertain, and move his audiences,” she writes.  Although times have changed, human nature has not, and Lincoln’s speaking techniques are as compelling as ever.
 
Writing In The Harvard Business Review, Harvard instructor and communication author Carmine Gallo credits Lincoln’s gift for storytelling as key to his ability to captivate audiences. She goes on to enumerate some key differences between mere “presenters” and compelling storytellers.

• Presenters open PowerPoint; storytellers craft a narrative:  A bulleted list is not a story. The latter is a connected series of events, with a theme, attention-grabbing moments, heroes, and a satisfying conclusion. “Nicely designed slides cannot compensate for a poorly structured story.”
• Presenters dump data; storytellers humanize it:  Data is abstract until it’s put into context that people can understand. And people can understand people. The next time you have large datasets to present, add a face to the statistics.
• Presenters are predictable; storytellers surprise. Most PowerPoints are predictable, hence boring. Stories have twists, turns, and elements of surprise. The human brain loves novelty and perks up when we detect something that breaks a pattern.
• Presenters use text; storytellers love pictures:  If you want to engage an audience, build a presentation that favors pictures to complement the story you tell. Researchers have found that an audience will recall about 10% of the content if they simply hear information. But due to the “picture superiority effect,” if they hear information and see a picture, they’ll retain 65%.

 
What might you do to add elements of great storytelling to your next presentation? To join the conversation, click "comments" above.  We would love to hear from you.

Is it acceptable to let go of the pressure to participate in back-and-forth work-related conversations? Cal Newport, computer science professor and author of A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload, suggests practicing messaging “triage.”
 
In a recent paper, researchers concluded that constantly attending to emails, texts, Slack messages, and Zoom requests can lead to cognitive overload that “may result in ineffective information processing, confusion, loss of control, psychological stress — or even an increase of depressive symptoms.” When we practice triage, we make practical real-time decisions about which messages warrant an instantaneous response, which we need to think about before answering, and which aren’t really worth our attention.
 
Triaging may feel uncomfortable at first, but you can start small by cutting back on reply pleasantries like “thanks for the update” and “hope you are well”…which might be considered communication clutter. As Newport argues, “In the context of digital communication, the sender often prefers avoiding the receipt of additional messages when possible.”
 
If you don’t reply immediately to a message during your downtime or vacation or even when you are just preoccupied or exhausted, Erica Dhawan, author of Digital Body Language, says, “Don’t apologize. Just reply when you can. Or don’t.” Still feel uncomfortable? Daniel Post Senning of the Emily Post Institute, which offers etiquette advice, says, “You have to be a civil and decent person, but you don’t have to give your time and attention to everyone who asks for it.”
 
Do you ever choose to ignore work-related messages and what are your criteria for doing so? Have there been repercussions? To join the conversation, click "comments" above (just below the picture).  We’d love to hear your feedback!