Servant leaders prioritize the needs of other stakeholders—customers, shareholders, and direct reports—over their own. When it comes to hiring and employee development, this management approach focuses on maximizing the abilities, potential, and wellbeing of direct reports.

How does a management philosophy focused on service to others lead to economic growth and improved productivity? By focusing on increasing value for all stakeholders, servant leaders create a culture that fosters happier and more highly motivated employees and more satisfied and evangelical customers.

Foundations of Servant Leadership

Following a decades-long career in management with AT&T, author Robert Greenleaf introduced the servant leader as manager in his 1970 essay “The Servant as Leader” where he argued that some of the most effective business leaders intuitively employed this stakeholder-focused practice to nurture successful teams and organizations.

This ran counter to the more established management theories of the day, which often claimed that the best way to build a successful business was to hire executives whose personal ambitions would motivate them to demand higher levels of productivity from their employees. In contrast, Greenleaf argued that the best business leaders he had worked with had been generous mentors motivated more by external values, such as customer value or ethical business practice, than by personal gain.

The five habits below highlight some of the key traits of servant leaders. By developing these management strategies, you can leverage some of the most useful aspects of servant leadership to strengthen your team’s cohesion, help your employees reach their fullest potential, and accomplish your business goals.

1. Focus on Persuasion and Buy-in

A servant leader doesn’t rely on their hierarchical position to motivate their team or issue commands. Instead, they elicit input, empowering their direct reports to make decisions and take risks when appropriate, and use persuasion to create buy in on teamwide actions.

To achieve this, servant leaders tend to be excellent communicators who know how to use to help make the technical accessible for customers and C-suite priorities tangible to customer-facing and in-the-trenches employees.

2. Prioritize Stakeholders

As a manager, servant leaders are power sharers rather than power holders. They tend to favor decentralized organizational structure over highly hierarchical teams. Their main aim as supervisors is to nurture the talents and leadership potential of colleagues and direct reports. When these leaders work in sales or product development they are apt to encourage a customer-first approach in their employees and look for this quality in their hiring. They pay attention to how they communicate these values, underscoring a team approach by using “we” and “us” rather than “you” and “me.”

3. Promote Employee Wellbeing

Business owners and executives who adhere to servant leadership principles invest in initiatives designed to promote employee wellbeing and workplace wellness, such as paid time off (PTO), robust health benefits, and access to employee assistance programs (EAP). Middle managers may not have as much power to implement these policies, but they can advocate for them. In the meantime, they maximize the tools they do have to support their direct reports through crisis and encourage self-care.

A servant leader can be particularly effective in fortifying the resiliency of organizations and those who work for them during times of crisis. There are significant overlaps between crisis management best practices and stakeholder-focused leadership.

4. Serve as an Ally

As workforce managers, leaders who practice servant leadership see their role as nurturing rather than transactional. For this reason, they are likely to meet one-on-one with employees more often than other leaders, and to spend those meetings focusing on the employees’ goals, capabilities, and challenges. In response, they are likely to invest in upskilling to ensure employees have the skills they need to advance and reach their full potential.

These leaders often serve as mentors, sponsors, and allies to those in the workforce who have traditionally faced challenges. For example, a servant leader might be particularly attuned to advancing the career of an employee who is the first in their family to graduate from college and attain, and therefore need to navigate, a professional role and career path. Similarly, they might be more likely than other managers to want to contribute to their company’s diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.

5. Elicit Ample Employee Feedback

Once you’ve started employing these practices, you can use frequent employee feedback via anonymous surveys to learn what is working and where you need to improve your approach. You can also use in-person feedback to drive collaboration, innovation, and risk-taking.

When Servant Leadership Make Sense—and When It Doesn’t

Organizations with community-focused missions, such as medical technology, and customer-focused sectors like retail are natural candidates for a service management approach. But not all fields lend themselves to this management style. For example, a servant leader might tend to be less effective than a leader with a more direct approach in a high-stakes situation that calls for quick decision making. Emergency rooms and battlefields come to mind.

These leaders also need to be cautious that their tendency to protect their direct reports from outside criticism isn’t preventing their team members from the learning and growth that comes from accountability. Most managers will need to combine a servant approach with leadership styles and management approaches to meet all the expectations of their leadership role.

For example, a revered doctor may serve as a servant leader, exemplifying patient care and helping medical students and junior staff learn how to implement best practices in both the technical aspects of medicine and bedside manner. But that same leader may need to periodically exercise a more direct style to direct her team to implement an emergency procedure where seconds count.

But in most environments, the approach can be effective, and if you happen to be a manager with excellent listening skills, a high level of empathy, and a desire to help others reach their potential, adopting a service management style may prove to be transformative for your organization.

Learn More About Effective Leadership and Management Best Practices

Now that you understand how servant leadership improves employee performance and boosts retention rates, learn about other strategies than can help you grow your business, such as the latest hiring news and management how-tos.

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Types of Work Presentations

Giving a presentation is a great way to model public speaking best practices for your staff. Here’s how to handle some common public speaking scenarios.

You Have to Deliver Bad News

You may need to meet with your employees to let them know that profits are down, or that an ongoing crisis has come to light that might affect the company’s bottom line. You may even need to deliver the bad news that raises are on hold or layoffs are eminent.

You may fear that delivering negative information about your company’s performance will cost you top performers. But waiting until bad news trickles through the ranks is likely to drive even more defections. Instead, embrace transparency by delivering bad news as quickly and clearly as you can. Show empathy, focus on your core values, and give your audience time to process the news. End with positive information, even if it’s simply that you will be providing severance and laid off workers.

You Get to Deliver Good News

This is every manager’s favorite type of work presentation—getting to announce that:

• A new product has been developed and growth is expected.
• Sales are strong and revenue is up.
• You’re expanding operations and adding staff.
• Raises and bonuses are coming soon.

Onboarding and New Employee Orientation

When the boss welcomes new hires onboard and makes the company’s core values clear, it can help cement engagement in a way that feels personal and positive. Team leaders, department heads, even top-level company leaders can share:

• Your company’s history and legacy
• Key aspects of your company culture
• Overall mission and core values
• Recent achievements and current goals
• A description of your organizational structure along with an up-to-date org chart.

Upskilling and Course Correction

On the-job-training can help you fill key openings with internal candidates and show that you are invested in your employees’ success. There are a number of ways to provide upskilling to your workforce, including having managers deliver seminars to employees.

Another scenario where hearing directly from the boss can be effective is when your company is adopting a new strategy or making a course correction. This might include informing your staff about:

• A new management or leadership structure.
• A major shift in offerings or product line.
• A new sales or marketing strategy.

In-person vs. Remote Presentations

Some work presentation best practices are constant, whether you’re delivering information to employees in person or online. However, each environment has its own variables to take into consideration.

In-person Presentation Best Practices

• Check out the room where you will be giving the presentation ahead of time.
• Practice with the equipment, if possible.
• Memorize your opening and closing lines so you can make eye contact as you deliver them.

Online Presentation Best Practices

• Check the lighting. Check your image on the screen before you go live to make sure that your face isn’t in shadow. You may need to close the shades or set up the screen in a different part of the room.
• Curate the background. Stand or sit in front of an attractive design element, such as a bookshelf or work of art.
• Plug your laptop directly into your modem to secure the strongest signal possible.
• Appoint someone to monitor the chat, so you can focus on the information you need to share.

5 Tips That Can Improve Any Presentation

1. Think About Your Audience

Effective management communication drives employee engagement by focusing on how the information you are sharing affects your workforce. For example, if you are sharing good news about company revenue, be sure you explain how an uptick in earnings will benefit it.

• Keep it simple. The longer and more complicated you make your presentation, the less your audience is likely to retain. Don’t jam too much information onto each presentation slide. Keep the type large and legible, with plenty of white space. You can always follow up with more details later.
• Use visual elements. Incorporate graphs, charts, and videos, as well as interactive elements such as multiple-choice questions at the end of each section.
• Speak slowly and take breaks. Nerves tend to make people speak more quickly, so keep reminding yourself to speak slowly. During your work presentation, pause from time to time to check in with your audience and make sure they are keeping up.
• Avoid jargon. Use conversational language and active verbs. Yes, you can use some sector-specific terms with a specialized professional audience, but don’t let it get out of hand—no alphabet soup!

2. Write a Strong Script

You don’t want to read word-for-word from a script, but you should plan out what you will say by creating a detailed outline or storyboard.

3. Make a Good Start

Grab your audience’s attention by asking a question or sharing an anecdote. Your introduction should also set the expectation for the rest of your presentation: how long it will last, what will be covered, and how will it be formatted.

4. Tell a Good Story

Consider presenting the information you want to convey in the form of a narrative arc with a beginning, middle, and end, keeping in mind the elements of good storytelling, including:

• A protagonist or hero. This might be a customer or client, a member of your staff, someone from your audience, or you.
• An inciting incident. This is an event that takes place early in your story that sets your protagonist on their quest.
• Challenges and obstacles. These are the problems that stand between your hero and their goals.
• Turning point and resolution. Your protagonist has reached a turning point once they’ve found a successful resolution to their primary obstacle.

5. End Strong

When we listen to a speech, it’s often the final words spoken that remain in our minds days later. Make sure your presentation’s key takeaways appear in your final slide. Better yet, end with a call to action.

If you want to end with a question-and-answer period, don’t ask, “Do you have any questions?” Instead, ask, “What questions do you have?” Or even, “I’ll take a maximum of two questions from each audience member” (and then allow more if there’s time).

Humor and Even Errors Can Work to Your Advantage

There’s no such thing as a perfectly delivered presentation. Errors and technical issues are inevitable. But, as the boss, you can leverage your mistakes into opportunities to bond with your staff.

Small gaffes can provide opportunities to employ self-deprecating humor and underscore that in your workplace, care and effort are expected, but perfection is seldom in the cards (or slides)—even when the boss is the one whose work is on display.

You’ve Mastered the Work Presentation. Now Learn About More Management Best Practices

Now that you know how to deliver a perfectly polished work presentation to your employees, get more management how-tos, exclusive hiring news, and expert advice from Monster.

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Yet, 36 percent of employees report that they are not aware of any avenues for providing feedback to their employers. Using a variety of employee feedback collection methods is an effective way to show how much you value your workers’ input.

Benefits of Employee Feedback

The best employee feedback programs drive organizational development and improvement. Frontline employees often have a better sense of what customers want from your services and products. You never know when an employee in your midst is sitting on a great idea that could lead to improved efficiency or a great new idea for product development⁠ — unless you ask them.

To foster an environment where employees feel safe giving you their honest feedback, you need to assure them that their feedback will be considered and acted upon. One of the best ways to convince your workforce of your commitment to employee feedback is to share the data you derive from all methods of employee data collection with them.

This means that data needs to be collected in ways that allow for easy-to-understand reporting on results, for example, you’re more likely to be alerted to potential problems and learn of possible workplace improvements if you provide a variety of employee feedback collection methods throughout the year.

Avenues to Report Potential Wrongdoing

The best work environments stay that way by providing employees with ways to report wrongdoing. This includes providing opportunities to alert leadership about issues ranging from unethical business practices to failures on issues like diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) or gender-based harassment, which data suggests affects at least 50 percent of women in the workplace during any given year.

An effective whistleblower policy should include several ways for employees to come forward when they fear that something damaging is going on within your organization, including anonymous avenues to express concern. Another great way to take the internal pulse of your organization is to establish employee resource groups (ERGs). Also, referred to as affinity groups, these collections of employees meet independent of leadership to address crucial issues, such as wellness or DEI. ERGs are often tasked with collecting feedback from coworkers and presenting it to senior leadership.

Employee Feedback Collection Methods

New Employee Surveys

Early encouragement to give candid feedback sets the tone for newly hired employees, dispelling any hint that yours is a workplace that operates in secrecy, but rather one that encourages candor, transparency, and the open exchange of ideas without fear of penalty.

New employees have a unique vantage point within your company because they are less enmeshed in the culture and more likely to see things early on in their tenure that they would be likely to miss or take for granted once they become more integrated into your way of doing things.

Pulse Surveys

One increasingly popular employee feedback collection method is pulse surveys, frequent short surveys typically on targeted topics. You can promote them as a way to break up the workday. Their frequency helps to foster a culture of feedback and reinforces your commitment to hearing from workers at all levels. You can also track how employee viewpoints on key issues evolve over time and share your findings with employees in newsletters and on your workplace website.

One-on-One Manager Meetings

Results from these employee feedback collection methods are likely to be more qualitative and narrative than quantitative, but you can still integrate yes-no and ranked answer questions into documentation for these meetings that will allow you to gather quantifiable data that can be analyzed across departments and over time to look for patterns and track feedback.

In addition to performance reviews, encourage managers to hold brief weekly or biweekly check-ins with their direct reports, where, in addition to determining status on work projects, they make sure to ask about issues of wellness and engagement.

Employee Suggestions

Consider installing a prominent tab on your intranet to remind employees that they can make suggestions at any time. You may even want to work with IT to allow employees the option of either sending an anonymous suggestion or taking full credit for their ideas. Or you can go the more traditional route of placing boxes at multiple locations throughout your workplace, with plenty of pens and notepads nearby.

Management Surveys

Make it clear to your management ranks that feedback is essential. This includes gathering feedback from across various management levels and assuring managers that this feedback will be seriously considered by senior leadership. Make sure that a key member of your leadership team takes ownership of gathering and acting on feedback to signal the importance of these initiatives at every level of your organization.

Stay and Exit Interviews

As disappointing as it is to learn that a valued employee is considering an offer from another employer, these situations can also present an opportunity for implementing candid, useful employee feedback collection methods.

When top performers express a desire to leave your company, set up stay interviews. Ask if there is anything you can provide that might make them consider remaining. You can also schedule stay interviews for long-valued employees to learn what aspects of your workplace are keeping them there, as well as any changes they’d like to see implemented to head them off from ever wanting to walk out the door.

If they cannot be persuaded to stay, these stay interviews can evolve into exit interviews and thus opportunities to speak candidly about elements of your workplace that might be improved upon for your remaining employees and future hires.

Learn How to Act on Employee Feedback to Improve Hiring and Retention

Once you institute a variety of employee feedback collection methods, learn more about how to implement the latest hiring and management methods to optimize your retention and recruitment strategies.

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Research indicates that structure is critical to your bottom line and your talent acquisition and retention efforts. Organizations with clearly defined structures outperform those that don’t across a variety of indicators, including return on investment, sales, revenue, and productivity.

What Is Organizational Structure and Why Is It Important?

All organizations and teams have a structure, whether they know it or not. How job functions and chains of authority are defined and set up in relation to one another make up your organization’s structure. Whether it’s top-down with highly centralized, formally defined chains of management, or more informal and decentralized with autonomous personnel each in charge of their own projects, it’s critical that your division of labor and chain of command be clearly understood by all contributors.

Companies with well-defined organizational structures tend to benefit from better cross-department communication and higher rates of efficiency and overall productivity. With fewer people uncertain about what their role entails and who they need to consult with when something goes wrong, operations run more smoothly.

The Hallmarks of Effective Structure

Which structure you choose is far less important than whether you choose one that makes the most sense for your company’s particular goals, workforce, size and scope, and industry or sector.

An effective organizational structure needs to be:

• Responsive to changes in technology, the marketplace, and within your industry or sector.
• Adaptable to changes in strategy or direction within your organization, such as those required when you develop a whole new product line or change your sales or distribution model.
• Well matched to your company’s values, mission, and workforce.

There is no one-size-fits-all structure that delivers optimum results for every business in every sector. Instead, management experts emphasize that your structure should be carefully considered, well planned, and clearly communicated across all levels of your workforce. It’s also important to keep in mind that your structure may need to be revised or even entirely replaced as your business grows from a small startup to a midsized competitor to a large-scale employer.

The following five structures are among the most popular.

1. Hierarchical Organizational Structure

This is the most prevalent structure and likely the one you are most familiar with, featuring a single individual, usually a CEO or president at the top, supported by a small number of C-suite executives at the next level with increasing numbers of individuals at each layer of descending authority. Sometimes referred to as a line structure, it works well for large companies that rely on a high level of centralized authority.

Typically, everyone knows where they fit in and what their responsibilities are in this type of structure. They also have a clear path ahead of them if they want to move up the chain of command, which can be a very effective motivator for many employees. At the same time, this type of org chart can lead to high levels of bureaucracy slowing decision-making and responsiveness, and even hindering innovation.

2. Divisional Structures

Organizations that utilize divisional organization models are highly siloed with each business unit within a larger company controlling resources and determining management priorities with little coordination with other units. Sometimes referred to as multidivisional (or M-Form), this type of structure often includes duplication of functions across divisions with each unit having its own dedicated marketing and sales teams, IT department, HR, and so forth.

Whether the divisions are organized by market sector, product line, or geographic region, arranging business hierarchies this way allows business units that reside within large corporations to be more adaptable than they might be if they had to wait for the go-ahead on every decision from powerful centralized stakeholders. It can also encourage healthy competition between divisions, prompting optimal performance from each.

3. Functional Organization

While the first two business configurations tend to be found at large companies, a functional organizational structure can be very effective for mid-sized companies. Though it is still top-down, management roles and department affiliation in a functionally aligned company are divided by job type, professional specialization, or role within the lifecycle of the business’s production and sales process.

This role-based composition makes sense for highly technical firms or for business endeavors that require a diverse range of highly trained professionals. However, as with a divisional model, functional teams can become siloed and even negatively competitive when it comes to securing resources. You may need to work hard with this type of structure to encourage cross-functional and interdepartmental cooperation and collegiality.

4. Team-based Structures

This type of workplace configuration has become increasingly popular over the past few decades, as more companies have come to recognize the value of diverse perspectives when it comes to problem-solving. A team approach often brings together small groups of specialists with professional backgrounds to develop new products, propose management solutions, or devise ways to capitalize on the opportunities presented by new technology. Though these teams are often led by a team leader, point person, or project manager, they tend to function collaboratively, with even junior members of the team being encouraged to bring new ideas to the table.

Many of today’s team-based practices have been influenced by the 2001 Agile Manifesto, a document assembled by a group of engineers urging a departure from more traditional, bureaucracy-heavy organizational principles in favor of a smaller, swifter, problem-focused approach to product development. The Agile management movement has led to the proliferation of team-based, project-focused business practice, as well the development of highly prevalent software, such as Scrum and Slack, designed with Agile principles in mind.

5. Flat or Horizontal Organizations

Flat or horizontal structures work well at small companies and startups, since these businesses don’t typically tend to have, nor do they need, multiple management levels. This structure is usually comprised of a founder at the top and a team of specialists around them who tend to have equal authority, at least initially.

The flexibility and intimacy of this structure can lead to rapid growth, at least at first. But as your enterprise grows it can become chaotic and you may need to consider adopting one of the more formal organization models.

Choose the Structure That’s Right for You and Learn How to Build Your Ideal Team

Now that you’ve learned the fundamentals of organizational structure, let Monster show you how to tackle all your management and hiring challenges with expert advice, helpful how-tos, and the latest HR and management news.

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It’s likely that you are already employing an ethical framework to guide your decision-making when it comes to issues such as privacy, fair play, pricing, negotiations and dealmaking, and more — whether you’re doing so consciously or not. But it’s worth thinking through your code of conduct more formally and considering, what your ethics are and why are they so important?

What Are Business Ethics?

The field of ethics as it relates to business consists of commonly held values and practices shared by people and organizations that are engaged in commerce. Ethical business practices tend to address common dilemmas and controversial subjects that arise in the course of professional endeavors.

In many instances, we can rely on the law to guide our conduct, but not always. “Legal” is not the same thing as “ethical,” after all. This means that as an employer and as an individual, you need to reflect on your core values and operate from a set of guidelines that will make up the ethical framework, or code of conduct, for you and your employees. The ethical framework you select should underscore your organization’s mission and core values.

Corporate governance, board and trustee behavior, fiduciary responsibilities, and employee management practices are all located on this spectrum. Once you’ve determined the business ethics that will guide your business, it can be used by everyone within your company to help guide how they treat their colleagues, your customers, and your competitors, partners, and vendors.

• Within a company culture, ethics constitute accountability and trust.
• Between businesses, they assure honesty and fairness in deal-making.
• For consumers, they help create a sense of trust that enhances the brand.

Ethics Within Company Culture

Increased investor awareness on environmental, social, and political issues puts reputations at stake, in both the financial markets and the marketplace, so it’s important to hear and respond to those voices. However, ethics within the work environment can be just as complex.

How do you apply consistent business ethics within your workplace and across your workforce? Start by focusing on creating an ethical workplace, starting with hiring the right talent. Integrity, honesty, and follow-through are all qualities to look for when hiring.

Employees follow business ethics when their company clearly demonstrates their importance. Treating your employees fairly goes a long way toward encouraging them to in turn treat customers, vendors and business partners, and one another with the same consideration.

The next step in building this kind of ethical culture is to create an ethics program. A complete program should touch on all business functions, from operations and human resources to marketing. Integrate your ethics program with business operations to make ethics part of the workflow. Your business ethics program should:

• Define the program’s mandate
• Monitor and mitigate risk
• Establish written policies and procedures
• Create a process for addressing allegations of misconduct
• Provide training and communications
• Reinforce behavioral expectations

Companies often look to management and employees to report any incidences of malfeasance they observe or experience. However, barriers within the company culture, such as fear of retaliation, may prevent this. Work toward improving transparency by reinforcing the idea that reporting misconduct is beneficial to the company and acknowledging whistleblowers’ courage.

Ethics Between Businesses

Business is often seen as a win-at-all-cost endeavor, but if you are interested in establishing your brand as a trusted leader in your sector or within your community over the long term, this attitude can be detrimental. This is especially true when it comes to dealings with other businesses.

Whether you are making a deal with a business partner, interacting with a competitor, or negotiating with a vendor, your company’s reputation can be strengthened if you operate in good faith. Though unethical businesses do on occasion thrive for a short while, the most ethical enterprises tend to flourish more consistently over time.

When it comes to deal-making, impeccable etiquette, integrity, and a respectful attitude toward the other party are more likely to yield a favorable outcome for all parties than duplicity. When negotiating on a joint endeavor, this might mean refraining from overpromising or holding back information that the other party might need to make an informed decision. This can also mean abiding by confidentiality agreements.

Ethics in the Consumer Marketplace

Today’s consumers are savvier than ever, especially when it comes to monitoring the ethical behavior of their favorite brands. Making poor ethical decisions or becoming enmeshed in scandal can cost you loyal customers and make it a lot harder to attract new ones. Consumer (and job seeker) scrutiny often goes beyond mere integrity, to include working conditions, environmental impact, and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

To be successful in a marketplace where information about your company’s ethical shortcomings is just an internet search away, you need to commit to truth in advertising and marketing, transparency about costs and fees, and a real connection with the consumer.

But your reputational risk goes beyond the realm of bad choices. For example, a company using poor customer privacy procedures and protections might fall prey to a data breach, which can lead in turn to a significant loss of customers, erosion of trust, less competitive hires, and share price declines. This means that merely avoiding bad behavior may not be enough. Depending on the size of your operation, your ethical obligation toward your customer base may necessitate allocating appropriate investments to guard against the actions of bad actors outside your company, as well as within.

Assessing Your Ethics Policies

The final stage in implementing an effective set of guidelines for business ethics within your organization is to employ a benchmarking tool to determine where you are excelling and where you are falling short. From there, you can make the necessary adjustments to continue improving upon your ethical framework and enhancing the positive image it will undoubtedly earn you.

Put Your Business Ethics Knowledge Into Practice to Enhance Hiring and Profits

Learn how to cultivate an ethical environment and workflow, increase employee satisfaction, and bring your company into compliance with expert advice, useful how-tos, and the latest management and hiring news. Let Monster show you how to successfully and effectively lead your team.

Legal Disclaimer: This article is not intended as a substitute for professional legal advice. Always seek the professional advice of an attorney regarding any legal questions you may have.

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The main challenges are establishing a strong company culture and working relationships, while collaborating effectively. The main benefits include greater productivity from home for some employees, a better work-life balance, and increased employee happiness in general. Also, since many job searchers value remote work, it can help you recruit top candidates and expand your candidate pool.

If you implement these best practices for managing a hybrid team, you’re likely to increase employee morale, performance, and retention, making your business more successful.

Prioritize Professional Development

It’s imperative to make sure remote and office employees have the same career advancement opportunities. Some managers might invest more in office employees because they see them in person regularly, but for a hybrid model to work it needs to be equitable—otherwise, remote workers might become demotivated and eventually quit.

Fortunately, all of your professional development initiatives can be done virtually. For example, you can encourage managers to set weekly one-on-one meetings, establish clear goals and objectives for all their direct reports, and have quarterly performance reviews so employees receive the feedback and guidance they need to be promoted.

Similarly, you can still provide hard and soft skill training sessions and mentorship programs virtually. Ensure that everyone has access to any other initiatives like “lunch and learns” or professional development stipends.

Adapt Your Company

Job searchers and employees want to work at a company with a strong company culture. Having strong working relationships improves retention and employee engagement, but it can be harder to build and maintain work relationships when people aren’t chatting in the office, grabbing lunch, or participating in the company softball league.

You may still want to have some in-person events, but also host virtual team-bonding events and encourage your Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) to do the same so your entire hybrid workforce can benefit. The members of your hybrid team are likely to be more engaged, motivated, and collaborative when they have shared goals and objectives and feel appreciated.

Another way to help all your employees feel like part of a cohesive team is to host quarterly town hall meetings. Use these virtual meetings to review what the team achieved the previous quarter, discuss goals and objectives for the next, and acknowledge teams and individual employees for their performance.

Focus on Communication

It’s important to focus on clear communication so both your remote and office employees are on the same page. Decide which collaboration tools to use and when to use instant messaging, email, calls, or video. Additionally, you may want to require everyone to use file-sharing tools and have a way to join any meeting remotely.

Encourage each team to have weekly meetings to discuss projects, goals and objectives, and team and individual accomplishments. Avoid miscommunications by asking managers to have project kick-off meetings, clear project guidelines, action items, and deadlines.

Set a Schedule

Depending on your remote work policies, you might have employees working in different time zones. It can be helpful for your team members to have a public calendar and set working hours so coworkers know when they are available.

One of the benefits of having a hybrid workforce is an improved work-life balance, especially if your company has a flextime policy. However, many employees work longer hours, including nights and weekends, because it can be difficult to set boundaries when your kitchen table doubles as your desk.

Some employees may work through their usual commute time, send off a few emails late at night, or feel like they need to be available if they’re working different hours than most of the team because of time zones or flexible schedules. Encourage your team to only work during their off-hours when it’s necessary, because employee burnout can decrease productivity, performance, and retention.

Need More Help With Your Hybrid Workforce?

There’s no one-size-fits-all model when it comes to the hybrid structure that works best for your company — and plenty of lessons to be learned along the way. If you want to jump-start the learning curve, Monster has expert resources to build a remote workforce that fits your needs. Find out more today.

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To help employers navigate the shifting currents, we’ve pinpointed five trends that are likely here to stay. Understanding which recent shifts represent long-term trends in the workplace should help you adapt.

Embracing these five workforce trends and incorporating them into your organization will increase your chances of attracting the best possible candidates in a competitive hiring market where human capital has become a vital component to growing your business:

1. Expand remote work options
2. Offer ongoing training and upskilling
3. Embrace automation while cultivating collaboration
4. Use workflow tools and processes
5. Prioritize a culture of diversity, equity, and inclusion

1. Expand Remote Options to Broaden Your Reach

Employers and job applicants agree that remote work is not just some passing fad, according to Monster’s “Future of Work” report, but is actually one of the most important workforce trends of the 21st century. Analysis of job listings and searches revealed that “remote” and “work from home” were some of the most popular keyword searches conducted by Monster job seekers. Recruitment strategies will need to anticipate this expectation to attract top talent.

Employers forced to quickly ramp up remote work have been pleasantly surprised to find that worker productivity is not negatively affected. As a result, at least 25 percent of workers are expected to work remotely in the near future, with an even greater number working hybrid schedules that include at least some days working off-site. This could lead to radical reductions in office space by as much as 30 percent and parallel savings in rent and other expenses.

If the remote work trend continues at its current trajectory, hiring managers and recruiters will need to expand virtual hiring and onboarding practices. Meanwhile, the success of virtual meetings, client pitches, and conferences may lead to a radical decrease in business travel.

2. Offer Ongoing Training and Upskilling

Even during upticks in unemployment, 80 percent of employers say they cannot find qualified applicants for open positions. Many of these employers expect the skills gap to only get worse as automation reduces the number of manufacturing jobs that require physical and mechanical skills, and jobs that require increased training, education, and complex technical skills increase.

Employers will need to recognize that the workforce will require much more fluidity than it has in the past. Hiring managers will need to embrace workforce trends that focus less on specified skills and more on candidate potential. With workers likely to shift occupations and sectors multiple times across the span of their working lives, hiring managers will have to become more adept at spotting transferrable skills and potential for growth.

Most importantly, employers will need to take on the role of educator, investing in upskilling resources, including self-guided training programs that allow workers to attain the skills needed for each new role as the workplace evolves. Large employers, including Walmart, Amazon, and IBM, are already incorporating retraining and skills building for employees into their business strategies.

3. Embrace Automation and Cultivate Collaboration

Ecommerce has driven a rapid acceleration of the rate at which employers are transitioning to automation and artificial intelligence (AI). As a result, industries like manufacturing, warehousing, and shipping are likely to experience long-term net losses for low-wage jobs for years, even decades, to come. In addition, as remote interfacing and online shopping increase, the need for on-site retail and administrative personnel will also experience dramatic drops.

Workforce trends are already pointing to less reliance on workers with industry-specific technical and mechanical skills. However, the need for employees with critical thinking, problem solving, interpersonal, and communication skills will increase. This means the discarded workers of yesterday are in fact a valuable potential resource.

This shift will require recruiters and hiring managers to spot transferrable skills as they evaluate applicants. Employers, in turn, will need to offer higher wages to attract them and upskilling resources to help workers transition and fill the gaps.

4. Improve Your Process With Workflow Tools

Employers once thought advancing technology would lead to a more specialized and siloed workplace. In fact, the opposite is true. Technology has increased collaboration. Much of this is likely due to Agile management, a team-based project management and product development philosophy based on the 2001 Agile Manifesto.

Today, thanks to popular Agile-influenced tools like Scrum, Confluence, and Trello, team-focused, task-centered management dominates workflow. By providing multiple convenient channels for communication, from filesharing and direct messaging, to team chats and video conferencing, popular productivity platforms like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Flock help employees feel engaged, seen, and connected.

Workplace engagement tools also tend to make employees feel more invested in the success of their team, as well as the projects and products they work on. Efficiency tracking tools mean good workers are less likely to be rewarded based on how consistently they show up, and more likely to be recognized for the quantity and quality of the work they contribute to their team’s—and their employer’s—success.

5. Prioritize a Culture of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

First, the good news: A growing number of employers recognize the importance of increasing their diversity efforts. The bad news: applicants outpace employers when it comes to how much emphasis should be placed on fostering an inclusive workspace—by a lot.

Surveys have shown that roughly half of employers were working to make recruitment practices more inclusive. In contrast, an overwhelming majority of job seekers stated that a focus on diversity is an important factor when choosing a new employer. A majority even indicated they would turn down an offer from an employer that did not value inclusion.

These numbers are likely to become even more dramatic as the next generation enters the workforce. The most successful employers are likely to be those that understand two key facts about this and other dynamic workforce trends:

• The next wave of entry-level workers will be the most highly educated and technologically skilled the workplace has ever seen.
• New entrants into the job market will be the most culturally and ethnically diverse generation to enter the U.S. job market to date.

Data affirms that the most profitable companies are those with diverse leadership teams. Embracing diversity in practice and communicating your commitment to it as a core value in your branding will help you build a competitive workforce—and grow your bottom line.

Leverage These Workforce Trends and Seize the Future

Knowledge is power when it comes to the hiring strategies you’ll need to make sure your company is keeping up with the trends that will define the future workforce. Monster’s free ebook, Hiring Emerging Talent: Can Gen Z Save The Workforce? can help you get there with expert advice, as well as the latest data and insights from our research into Gen Z job candidates.

The post Prepare Your Business for These Key Workforce Trends appeared first on Monster.com.

When you’re going through a crisis, you probably don’t want to spend time researching how to manage during a crisis. We’ve got you covered. Here’s what you need to know.

Types of Crisis

The most common types of crisis you may face as a business owner are:

• Natural disasters: floods, fires, hurricanes, tornados, etc.
• Technical crises: data breach, website outage, ransomware attack, stolen source code, power outages, etc.
• Business crises: layoffs, reorganization, lawsuits, damaged reputation, supply chain issues, lack of funding, declining revenue, product recall, employee strike, etc.
• Violent crises: robbery, looting, shooting, bomb threat, etc.
• Health crises: workplace injuries, heart attacks, public health emergencies, hazardous material spills

Top Crisis Management Strategies

The tactics you use to handle each crisis will differ. You’d respond to a data breach differently than a natural disaster that requires you to evacuate the office for a set time, for example. However, the core crisis management tenants are the same. These tips will help you lead your team through whatever crisis you’re facing:

1. Create a Plan

Your first step is to work with your executive team to create a plan for handling the crisis. If there is a natural disaster or public health emergency, your plan may be to have employees work from home until they’re able to return to the office. In that case, you may need to make sure your team members have the necessary technology to work from home and create guidelines for working remotely. If revenue is low, the plan might be to implement measures to reduce costs and, if necessary, to lay off or furlough employees.

2. Share Your Plan

Your next step is to tell the entire team about the crisis and your plan. If possible, brief the team in person or on video chat instead of sending an email because it feels more personal. Leave time for team members to ask questions and get clarifications. Be as open as possible so people don’t speculate and share inaccurate information.

If there is an emergency, such as a fire or violent attack, consider using an emergency notification system so your employees get text message and email notifications instantly. It’s helpful to run employee trainings so your team knows how to respond to crises such as fires, violent attacks, and workplace injuries.

Keep your team updated as the crisis unfolds. If the plan changes, notify your team as soon as possible. This essential crisis management technique will make your team feel reassured because they know they will stay informed.

3. Provide Resources

Depending on the crisis, different resources may be helpful such as:

• Counseling: If your insurance plan offers an Employee Assistance Program (EAP), remind your team members that the resource is available. If you don’t have an EAP, consider bringing in on-site counselors for a short time.
• Personal days: If you don’t already, you may want to offer personal days in addition to sick and vacation days. Personal days can be used for doctor’s appointments, caregiving, family emergencies, and other reasons someone might have to take off work last minute. If it makes sense given the crisis, consider offering additional personal days.
• Outplacement services: If you need to lay off employees, consider offering outplacement services so your former employees can get help landing a new job.

4. Be Compassionate

Compassion goes a long way during a crisis. In addition to providing resources, it’s helpful to:

• Show appreciation: Celebrate individual, departmental, and team accomplishments.
• Host one-on-one meetings: If they aren’t already, ask managers to conduct one-on-one meetings with their direct reports to offer individualized support.
• Flexible work policies: Depending on the crisis, it can be beneficial to promote work-life balance by offering flextime, remote work, a compressed work week, backup childcare, and other flexible work policies.
• Get employee feedback: Find out if there are more crisis management suggestions by asking your employees for feedback on how you’re handling the crisis. They may share feedback that you can act on to increase retention.

Implement More Management Best Practices

These crisis management strategies will help you increase employee morale and engagement during a difficult time, making it easier for you to weather a crisis. Learn more ways to strengthen your business by acting on expert hiring and management advice from Monster.

The post Crisis Management for Team Leaders appeared first on Monster.com.

Assuming you agree to provide one, the next step is writing the letter. Format and style can vary, depending on your intended reader and purpose, but the following suggestions will help you craft a winning letter of recommendation.

Before You Start 

If someone for whom you wouldn’t necessarily vouch asks for a letter of recommendation, it’s okay to politely decline the request. You want your words to mean something, so the lack of authenticity in a recommendation letter not only hurts your own credibility, but it may not come across as genuine.

Also, before you begin writing, ask the person requesting the letter about specific submission guidelines. In most cases, the subject of your letter won’t see it before you send it along to the recipient, so you want to get it right. Additionally, you wouldn’t want to accidentally disqualify someone because you sent it as PDF when the instructions say it needs to be mailed to a physical address.

If the letter is for a job application, then ask the subject for a detailed job description. This will help you fine-tune your letter to match the skills, experience, and personality the employer seeks.

Recommendation Letter Best Practices

Regardless of the recipient and purpose of the letter, the following tips are considered best practices:

• Use a business letter format: This is a formal letter, so take the time to follow the correct format for a business letter.
• Describe your relationship: Be sure to describe how you know the person up front, such as “I directly managed Jose” or “Rebecca worked in the same department as me for seven years.”
• Be specific about key traits: Don’t be vague, but rather focus on one or two key traits about the person. Give examples of how these traits impacted your company and how they relate to the job for which they’re applying.
• Stay positive: This may seem obvious but adding a little emphasis, such as “I give Pat my absolute highest recommendation,” can help them stand out from the crowd.
• Provide your contact information — The recipient may want to follow up with you, so make sure you provide an email address or phone number where you can be reached. Be sure to include your title if you’re writing the letter in your professional capacity.

Format Guidelines

Remember to make your recommendation letter more formal than the everyday emails you send. That means having some structure and avoiding the use of slang or shorthand. Online templates can be useful, at least to help you get started.

Here is a section-by-section breakdown to help guide your letter:

1. Salutation: Start with “Dear Ms. Smith” or (if you don’t know the name of the recipient) “To Whom it May Concern” or “Dear Hiring Manager.”
2. First paragraph: This is where you explain how you know the person and why they’ve asked you to write the letter.
3. Second paragraph: Here’s where you get specific about why you’re recommending them (why they’re qualified, what they’re capable of contributing, what their skillset includes, etc.). You may need more than one paragraph for this.
4. Summary: Here, you’ll wrap up the letter with a conclusive statement, including a sentence stating that you “highly recommend” the person or give them your “highest recommendation.”
5. Conclusion: This may be just one sentence, but you’ll want to offer the opportunity for them to contact you if they have further questions and include your contact information.

A letter of recommendation is a nice tribute to a parting employee, but it is also a reflection of your company. When you write a letter for a former employee, you’re showing that your company not only hires top quality workers, it also invests in their individual development. Who knows, it may inspire the employee to come back — or maybe the manager on the receiving end is eyeing a new position. In other words, think about recommendation letters as just one more tool in your recruiting efforts.

Hire Employees You’ll be Happy to Recommend With Help From Monster

If you’re writing a recommendation letter, formatting matters. You want to present your former employee in the best light possible, so how you write and organize your letter makes all the difference. Make sure you put the same care and attention to detail into your recruitment process. Sign up for Monster Hiring Solutions and you’ll get expert recruiting and management strategies sent right to your inbox.

The post Recommendation Letter Template appeared first on Monster.com.

So, how can you attract magnetic leaders to your organization? Effective leadership hiring takes some effort, but the results can be the boost you need to take your business to the next level. Below, Roberta Matuson, author and president of Matuson Consulting, provides some ideas to get you started, including employer branding, leadership training and recruiting strategies.

Showcase your organization

Magnetic leaders — those whose leadership style draws people in and inspires them to do their best work — are in high demand. This means they can be fairly selective when deciding where to work.

So, the last thing you want to be when looking to attract and hire those inspiring leaders (or any talent for that matter) is an invisible, boring company. You’ll have a hard time attracting great leaders to your organization if they have no idea who you are. You need a strong employer brand that will pull those leaders towards you. Here are four ways to bolster your employer brand, quickly increase your company’s visibility and improve your leadership hiring.

1. Refresh your company website. Whether we like it or not, image is important. The first thing candidates do these days is check out a company’s website, and you’ll have an extremely difficult time pulling in a great leader if your site appears old and outdated. Leaders will quickly move on to other sites if it appears that your business isn’t investing in itself.

2. Create a blog on your website that paints a picture of what it’s like to work for your organization. Highlight some of the interesting projects your organization is working on and include photos of the team in action. Get your CEO on camera and post videos of them speaking from the heart.

3. Share your company’s viewpoint. In her book, The Magnetic Leader, Matuson writes about how Ray Pawlicki, former CIO for Biogen, spoke everywhere he could. This included association meetings, conferences and clubs on college campuses. It didn’t take long before magnetic leaders started reaching out to Pawlicki to ask him for a job.

4. Spread the news. Send out press releases whenever impressive leaders join your organization. This will send a signal to others that your organization is moving into a new league.

Assess your current leaders

It’s no secret that great people want to work with other great people. If you want to improve your leadership hiring and raise the bar of your current group of leaders, you’ll need to assess your current team.

Identify areas where further development may increase your leaders’ abilities. You can then choose from an array of employee development options such as onsite training, online courses and executive coaching.

It also may be time to clear the deck. Remove leaders who simply occupy space. Once you’ve made room in your organization, look to curate a team of “A players.” Once you’ve been able to recruit one or two highly regarded leaders, others will follow.

Review your compensation and benefits package

Some people will tell you that money doesn’t matter. Those people usually have more money than they know what to do with. Money matters.

Inspiring leaders are considered top talent, and if you want top talent, then you need to be prepared to pay for it. A competitive benefits package will be necessary. One way to determine the going rate is by looking at salary surveys. However, especially when unemployment is low, you should also look at what applicants are currently asking for in terms of compensation and benefits.

The investment needed to assemble a team of successful and magnetic leaders will have an ROM (return on magnetism). A team of irresistible leaders will attract a higher quality workforce, more customers and more profits. And who doesn’t want that?

Consult the experts to improve your leadership hiring

Recruiting, hiring, and retaining great leaders can work wonders for your business. But it’s an ongoing endeavor that requires regular attention and effort. Sign up for Monster Hiring Solutions to receive expert recruiting advice and the latest hiring trends. Your bottom line and your workforce will be better for it.

The post Strategies for better leadership hiring appeared first on Monster.com.