The Rise of Wellness Benefits at Work

Here’s a troubling paradox: people are more health-conscious now than they’ve ever been, but the rate of lifestyle disease is rising alarmingly.

According to WHO, 17.7 million people died in 2015 from cardiovascular disease. Other conditions that are all too familiar are diabetes, high blood pressure, pneumonia, cancer, obesity, and malnutrition.

Even though the Philippines ranks 161 out of 224 countries based on life expectancy, we’re up at #11 for hypertension and we have the greatest number of breast cancer cases out of 197 countries.

While there has been an improvement in medical facilities and health awareness over the past few decades, the state of our healthcare isn’t that good. A single medical consultation comes at a steep price, and millions of people lack the financial resources to pay for medicine or even necessary hospital procedures such as life-saving operations.

Healthcare is expensive–and it gets worse when you have a chronic disease that requires regular treatment. This alone explains why the most sought after company benefit is medical insurance, which shoulders the costs up to a certain amount (e.g. P200,000).

Wellne

Health insurance has been around for a while, but employers all over the world are already venturing into more extensive wellness benefits–think exercise classes at work, healthy lunches, and gym memberships alongside your usual salary.

This is probably the result of a paradigm shift. A century ago, acute diseases such as typhoid were the main cause of death.

But now that medicine has progressed enough to combat them and extend our lifespan all the way to old age, the next challenge is chronic disease–and we can’t exactly treat them with drugs alone because they stem from complex causes and are hugely influenced by lifestyle and nutrition.

In order to ward off chronic diseases, people are becoming conscious that they should be mindful of their health.

Parallel to this is the evolution of HR and a thrust towards a more humane workplace. Companies are starting to see employees are more than cogs in a well-oiled machine.

Why Businesses Should Care

From a business perspective, they have good cause to care about their employees’ wellbeing and happiness. Healthier employees means more productivity and more KPIs obtained, leading to a win-win situation for everyone.

Because so much time is spent at work every day–nine hours, usually– there’s usually a negative impact on health: sleep deprivation, stress, the hassles of commuting, eyestrain, back pain from sitting for too long, fatigue. Mindful wellness policies or programs in the company can alleviate these, or at least make employees more aware of how they can take care of their health.

But it isn’t exactly a surprising trend. Even outside the workplace, fitness and nutrition are catching on, with shops selling organic food and fitness centers popping up everywhere.

However, rather than a sign that we’re becoming healthier, perhaps it’s only a counter-reaction to how much more hazardous the world is becoming. We’re eating more sweets and processed food than any of our ancestors ever did, and we’re much more stressed and sedentary than ever before, to name a few cases.

Final Thoughts

In recognition of this, the government has passed bills such as Department Order 178-17 (bans forcing women to wear high heels to work), the Mental Health Bill of 2017 (provides free mental health services to the public), and Department Order 184 (requires regular standing breaks for employees).

Because these have only been passed recently, the effects aren’t widespread yet, but the push towards employee health–and wellness benefits at work–is unlikely to die down soon.

The post The Rise of Wellness Benefits at Work appeared first on Sprout.

source https://sprout.ph/blog/the-rise-of-wellness-benefits-at-work/

How to Brainstorm the Right Way

The next time you need a killer idea, don’t dive straight into your usual brainstorming session.

Let’s assume the likely: you’ve got a team of bright, capable people.

When tackling problems together or drawing up a new strategy, the protocol—ingrained by years of school projects and not-so-different work projects—is to huddle together in a meeting room, throw out ideas on the spot, and emerge enlightened with the ultimate plan that will save the day, powered by the combined creative juices of the entire team.

It has the ring of common sense.

But it’s also a myth.

As the Story Goes

Brainstorming has existed for as long as people could talk civilly to each other, although it only emerged as a formal practice in the 1940s, thanks to an advertising executive named Alex Osborn.

He set it running with two principles: defer judgment (avoid rejecting your coworker’s idea right away, no matter how far-fetched or unreasonable) and reach for quantity (the more ideas, the better).    

To a certain extent, this does accord with what we know about creativity. The main point of these two principles is to shush the inner critic.

By prioritizing quantity over quality, you become free to come up with more out-of-the-box ideas. And when your ideas collide with that of other people’s, maybe they’ll combine into an innovative hybrid.

The studies say that brainstorming as we know it doesn’t work that well, though. A 1958 Yale study came up with the baffling finding that male students who worked by themselves solved twice as many puzzles as their peers in groups.

Solitude seems to be a necessary element for creativity, which seems to spring up more often when we’re alone rather than when we’re yelling enthusiastically at each other.

Creative geniuses like Albert Einstein and Picasso spent a great deal of time daydreaming on their own. “Without solitude, no great work is possible,” Picasso quipped.

The Pitfalls of Brainstorming

There are numerous reasons for this, with the biggest culprit being the unconscious tendency towards groupthink. Members in a group feel subconsciously pressured to go along with the dominant idea, and the thrust is towards narrowing down—honing in on a specific train of thought rather than genuinely considering multiple alternatives.

Compared to when you have to figure out everything by yourself, you also feel less compelled to contribute. There are, what, four or more other people with you? If you don’t have that great insight, it’s not too worrying—maybe they’ll get it.

On top of this, the first ideas tossed out are extremely crucial because they set the direction of the conversation. And the first ideas are rarely ever brilliant. They’re safe and err on the side of the obvious—people are testing the waters, and they’re wary of appearing stupid or invoking dead silence.

There’s a distinct bias towards being loud and vocal. Ideas that get endorsed the most enthusiastically may win out—and annoyingly, being bombarded with other people’s ideas can stifle rather than stimulate your own.

Another interesting finding is that criticism isn’t all bad—when it’s channeled into constructive debate. According to a study by Nemeth, groups that debated—thus breaking the principle of deferring judgment—came up with 20% more ideas.

Getting someone to challenge your idea can actually be fruitful because you get to elaborate on it—and the sparks of argument, more than simple acceptance, can give rise to more insights.

The Right Way to Brainstorm

As pointed out by Art Markan, brainstorming still does have its place: it’s primarily useful for convergent thinking—taking an existing set of ideas and filtering them, sorting out which can be the most useful. To harness its full power, it’s suggested that the actual idea generation be done on an individual basis.

Rather than lunging into full-blown debate right away, let everyone write down their ideas first, or come to the meeting with a list already prepared. Because the mind needs to incubate for a while before spitting out creativity, it might be better to give people a few days to prepare their list.

Curiously, the groupthink effect of brainstorming dissipates when done digitally—in other words, when people aren’t talking to each other face-to-face. In this case, the more people involved, the better.

You can see this in online forums, and replicate the effect by logging down everyone’s ideas and inspiration and putting them in a shared folder that can be viewed anytime by the team.

Conclusion

Creativity can be flighty and elusive—the Ancient Greeks chalked it up to Muses who could come and go on their own whims, and whom you had to court and not displease.

While you can’t control when exactly that flash of insight will strike, you can cajole it to visit more often by setting the right conditions. For groups, this means thinking both on your own and together: cultivate your own ideas first, then bring them to the table—and don’t give in to the noise.

The post How to Brainstorm the Right Way appeared first on Sprout.

source https://sprout.ph/blog/how-to-brainstorm-the-right-way/

A Quick Guide to 13th Month Pay

What is 13th month pay?

The 13th month pay is a mandatory benefit provided to employees pursuant to Presidential Decree No. 851, which requires employers to grant 13th month pay to all its rank and file employees.

Who is supposed to receive 13th month pay?

All employers in the private sector are required to give 13th month pay to rank-and-file employees who have worked for at least one month during the calendar year, regardless of resignation or termination.

The following is a list of employers who are not required to give 13th month pay under PD 851:

• Government
• Employers already giving their employees 13th month pay or its equivalent
• Employers of household helpers and persons in the personal service of another
• Employers of those who are paid on commission, boundary, or task basis, and those who are paid a fixed amount for specific work

13th month pay should be given on or before December 24. Alternatively, it can be given in two batches: one half before the school year starts, and the remaining half before December 24.

What happens when employers don’t comply?

As proof of having handed out 13th month pay, employers have to submit compliance reports to DOLE on or before January 15 of the succeeding year.

Employees who don’t receive their rightful 13th month pay can file a formal complaint and even sue in court.

How do you compute it?

To calculate 13th month pay, get your basic salary for the entire calendar year and divide it by twelve.

For example, if your total basic salary is P50,000:

P50,000 / 12 = P4166.67

If you don’t know your total basic salary, you can come up with an approximation by taking your basic salary per month, multiply by how many months you’ve been working in the company, and divide by 12. So if your basic salary is P10,000 per month and you’ve been in the company for 3 months:

P10,000 * 3 months / 12 =  P2500

Getting the correct amount can be a source of confusion, mostly because people aren’t sure about what basic salary consists of. According to PD 851, basic salary consists of “all renumerations or earnings paid by an employer for services rendered.” However, it doesn’t include:

• Cost-of-living allowance
• Profit-sharing payments
• Cash equivalent of unused leave and vacation credits
• Overtime pay
• Premium pay
• Night shift differential
• Holiday pay
• Other allowances and monetary benefits that aren’t considered part of the basic salary

This graphic from the National Wage and Productivity Commission gives an example of how to compute for basic salary:

Based on the graphic, leaves without pay, undertime, and tardiness have a negative effect on your basic salary (and thus your 13th month pay); maternity leave benefits are also not included.

On the bright side, taxes are not deducted from 13th month pay, unless it goes past P82,000.  

Isn’t this the same as Christmas bonus?

Nope—13th month pay is mandatory, but employers can choose whether to give Christmas bonus or not. Additionally, Christmas bonus can be handed out anytime—there’s no strict deadline. It’s possible for (lucky) employees to get both 13th month pay and Christmas bonus.

The post A Quick Guide to 13th Month Pay appeared first on Sprout.

source https://sprout.ph/blog/a-quick-guide-to-13th-month-pay/

Redesigning Your Office for Extroverts and Introverts

Cubicles were the norm before. Now, it’s open-plan offices.

Neither is a perfect solution. Designing an office that’s conducive to everyone’s productivity is a daunting task in itself because people have different preferences.

A key personality trait that has been given a lot of attention recently is introversion-extroversion, which impacts job fit, preferred environment, and even working style.

Despite common usage, it’s not black-and-white. Introversion-extroversion is more like a spectrum—which side of the scale you lie on determines which one you are, regardless of whether you’re near the middle or at the far end.

Introversion and Extroversion                                     

We’re not quite using the terms correctly, though. Being an extrovert doesn’t necessarily mean you’re loud, noisy, or talkative, and being introverted isn’t about being shy and quiet.

The actual distinguishing factor is what gives you energy: if you get energy from being alone, then you’re an introvert, but if you’re energized by being around people, you’re an extrovert. This means that extroverts actually get drained when they have to spend too much time alone, while introverts can only handle being around other people for so long.

Delving deeper into that, introverts are much more sensitive to stimuli—what excites an extrovert might overwhelm an introvert. Cue the lemon test: if you squeeze a lemon on people’s tongues, introverts will salivate more than extroverts.

Accurate statistics can be hard to obtain, but it’s safe to say that a significant chunk of the population belongs to each group. This means that if you want a more productive workforce, then you have to cater to the needs of both—and a crucial part of this can be reconfiguring your office to be more accommodating and pleasant to work in.

What This Means For the Office

For introverts, it’d be great if you could have places in your office where they can work in solitude if they want to. Even though most companies are converting to open-space offices now, there are studies that say that these might be more distracting than collaborative.

Introverts naturally prefer having a lot of quiet time to think, and might get stressed if they get a seat right next to the door or have to deal with frequent interruptions. Another way that they establish boundaries is putting on earphones to block out noise.

On the other hand, extroverts probably feel uncomfortable when forced to stay inside a cubicle the whole day. Because interacting with other people gets their energy levels up, it’s second nature for them to engage in conversation and banter with coworkers, and they’d be happy to have a space where they can easily reach out to other people.

Unlike introverts who get their best ideas when thinking through something on their own, extroverts tend to come up with insights when talking to others.

Compromising

But regardless of whether they’re introverted or extroverted, people still need both privacy and socializing. The best office design, then, would have different rooms that cater to both of these needs.

This makes sense when you consider that the ideal workspace may also vary per department—teams such as sales need space to interact, while product-oriented teams like design and development require solitude for deep work.

The solution to this would be an office with open-plan rooms, but also with plenty of comfortable nooks and quiet spaces, as well as meeting rooms where people can gather. People generally feel happier when they can choose where to work: give people their own desks, yes, but let them have the freedom to move around and work wherever they want in the office.

It may seem like a lot effort to customize your office with introversion-extroversion in mind, but consider that employees will be spending most of their day inside your office. Physical environment will definitely have a huge impact on their productivity, and you’d rather get it right at once rather than having to remodel or redesign when feedback streams in.   

The post Redesigning Your Office for Extroverts and Introverts appeared first on Sprout.

source https://sprout.ph/blog/redesigning-office-extroverts-introverts/

Why Employee Freedom Leads to a Better Workplace

It’s counter-intuitive, but increased employee freedom can boost productivity.

Managers can be reluctant to turn over more control to their employees. This was observed by Lisa Gill, who narrated her conversation with a team of managers.

They were trying to decide on how they were going to give rewards to employees. When Lisa suggested asking the employees themselves, the managers turned down the idea.

Outdated Assumptions

The assumption is that having a strict business structure yields the best results: if everyone follows instructions by seasoned managers, then everything should go according to plan.

This harkens back to the Industrial Age, where factory workers had very specific and routine tasks—so mechanical that it was practically impossible for them to make a mistake, or let slip any semblance of individuality.

As long as the managers focus on strategizing and giving clear instructions, and the employees follow, top-down, the expected results should materialize.

The Industrial Age began centuries ago—1700s, to be specific—and it’s an understatement to say that it’s outdated.

It’s Crazier Today

Because of the digital revolution–driven mainly by the Internet—how we’re doing business is changing. Tech startups, which are at the forefront of the disruption, are treating their employees differently, and they’re far from falling apart. They’re thriving.

They give their employees much more breathing room: unlimited holiday allowance, radical 6-hour days rather than the standard 9-to-5, the capacity to work remotely. Some of them even encourage employees to pursue side projects in the office—that’s how Google’s immensely useful Gmail and AdSense came about.

But surprisingly, this strategy was effective even in the 1980s. Chuck Blakeman’s interesting book (with the attention-catching title of “Why Employees Are Always a Bad Idea”) mentions a pickle factory that veered away from the traditional cog-in-the-system model.

As the story goes, the managers gave the pickle workers goals and told them to innovate on their own—they can do whatever they want, as long as they reach the goals. The entire company’s performance actually went up because the workers were able to improve the process with their own ideas.

The Psychology Behind It

Telling people what to do crushes their intrinsic motivation. The equation goes like this: being independent—and making their own decisions—is a major contributor to employee satisfaction, which naturally boosts productivity.

This goes hand-in-hand having an internal locus of control, which simply means that people feel in control of their own lives and take responsibility for their actions. Rather than blindly going about a task, they own up to it, want to get better at it, and are more willing to handle it themselves if something goes wrong.  

Run Your Own Experiments

To try this out in company, you don’t have to go to extremes all at once—take small measures and note how it affects people.

Maybe you can make working hours a little more flexible, or allow work-from-home days once a month, or even letting different employees run meetings so they can step forward and express their ideas—you might be surprised by what you discover.

Contrary to what managers might fear, giving employees more freedom won’t turn them into a bunch of lazy slackers who won’t do the job once you turn your back. It will definitely lead to more risk-taking and creativity—and potentially more mistakes.

But as Dan Levin, COO of Box, says: “Mistakes are a cost, but speed is a benefit. It’s critical to understand that at some point in your efforts to minimize mistakes, you’re going to lose out on maximizing workplace productivity and efficiency.”

The post Why Employee Freedom Leads to a Better Workplace appeared first on Sprout.

source https://sprout.ph/blog/why-employee-freedom-leads-to-a-better-workplace/

The Top Recruitment Metrics You Should Be Tracking

It’s been said that data rules the world–and even human-centric fields such as HR are being disrupted.

While HR will always be the province of flesh-and-blood human beings, there’s been a thrust for the past few years towards a data-driven practice. A key part of this is using specific metrics to objectively evaluate how well you’re doing. Take this further, and you get detailed graphs and algorithms that spit out surprising insights.

People can get a little too enthusiastic about metrics, though—you can list down at least ten for recruitment alone. Trying to keep track of all these will lead to too many data points and muddled thinking, and you can become obsessed with tracking instead of committing to action.

To avoid getting overwhelmed, focus on these top recruitment metrics first:

Source of Hire

Where do candidates come from?

The options here are limitless: social media, the company website, referrals. To a certain extent, getting a great candidate depends on putting the job post out there and having it reach as many potentially interested as possible—giving you more options.

Try to measure how many people come from each source. You can then channel your resources more into the higher-yield channels, while focusing less on those that don’t attract as much.

Consider, too, the quality of candidates—a few well-qualified candidates is better than a hundred mediocre ones.

Offer Acceptance Rate

How often do people accept your job offer?

The answer to this is a percentage: number of acceptances divided by number of candidates given a job offer. Scoring low means that most of your candidates didn’t take you up on your job offer.

That’s a red flag—if they’d gone through your complete round of interviews, why wouldn’t they want to join your company? Maybe the pay is too low, or the benefits aren’t good enough.

What’s challenging about this is that candidates are rarely honest when you ask them why they turned it down. It might also imply a bad candidate experience—maybe they were genuinely looking forward to being part of your company, but the interview made them change their minds.

Time to Fill an Opening

How long does it take to hire a candidate?

Time isn’t the only variable, but in general, the more quickly you fill up a position, the better. When a job opening is left vacant, the involved team has to shoulder the extra work, which adds to their baggage and lessens productivity.

On average, though, it’s probably going to take more than a month to find someone new.

Time to fill is related to offer acceptance rate. No matter how efficient you are with gathering and interviewing candidate, progress will remain stalled if nobody accepts your offer.

Job still untaken after two months? That’s a call for you to reexamine your recruitment process and wonder if you’re simply not looking in the right places, if your standards are too high, or if your employer branding can use some work.

Turnover Rate

How many of your new hires quit even before a year?

A major concern in HR is trimming down the costs. HR can take up as much as 30% of a company’s expenses—and turnover adds to that cost.

It’s inconvenient when employees quit early, even before their probation ends. You have to go through the entire hiring process all over again—not to mention deal with the negative returns from another round of training.

The level of a recruiter’s success isn’t gauged by the offer acceptance rate alone. You’d have to look beyond that to the long-term result: will the new hire actually stay in the company? Moreover, if turnover does occur, is it because the employee quit on his own, or he got fired?

Quality of Hire

How good is the new employee that you hired?

Hand-in-hand with turnover rate is quality of hire—and you should never compromise quality. The ideal situation is hiring someone quickly, and getting that person to do well. However, if you focus on hiring quickly alone, you run the risk of getting someone who won’t perform well.

Quality of hire is mainly based on performance rating, which is judged against a set of KPIs specific to the position. This is usually measured after a year.

The best success you can have as a hiring manager is to find someone who can transform the company for the better. In line with this, there’s something called the Success Ratio, which compares the number of high-performing hires with the total number of new hires.

Bonus: Cost of Hire

What resources do you invest in hiring an employee?

This metric comes into play when you’re doing your budgeting. It’s usually an eye-opener—chances are, your estimate will be quite off the mark!

While you’re probably going to focus on monetary cost when filling out your spreadsheet, you also have to consider the other kinds of costs, such as the time you invested into interviewing.

Check out this graphic from Beamery for a breakdown of the costs you will inevitably encounter when hiring:

The post The Top Recruitment Metrics You Should Be Tracking appeared first on Sprout.

source https://sprout.ph/blog/the-top-recruitment-metrics-you-should-be-tracking/

Get a Mentor to Fast-Track Your Growth

What makes millennials stay at a job?

Higher pay, perhaps, or more flexibility, or neat perks such as ping-pong tables and gym memberships. All of these are fair guesses, but you probably wouldn’t expect that they also prioritize getting a mentor.

To be fair, mentorship has always been valued. Even in the Middle Ages, people would learn their trade by joining a guild—and would apprentice under a master until they rise up the ranks themselves. This style of learning corresponds more closely to internships or job-shadowing, but it’s far different from what happens in schools, where we sit as part of an indistinct crowd and listen passively as a professor lectures.

An alternative is online education, which gives more freedom to the individual. You can find information online on practically any topic and choose how little or how much you want to learn, effectively cobbling together your own curriculum.

However, it still doesn’t quite compare with having a physically present mentor or teacher who can guide you through the various stages of your growth.

Incorporating a mentorship culture into your company can reduce turnovers. A key reason why people quit is a sense of stagnancy, and mentorship prevents that. When managers also actively take on the role of mentor to their team, it opens up communication and can lead to better teamwork.

A mentorship culture is characterized by sharing knowledge openly—and the beauty of this is that you can go beyond the usual top-down model and make it an equal exchange, such that the mentor also learns from the mentee.

A mentor is much better than Google

The most outright reason for getting a mentor is knowledge. And not just any knowledge, either—it’s real-life, practical knowledge, distilled in someone who has already gone where you want to go. Of course you can read textbooks and watch videos, but getting it straight from a mentor is invaluable.

This is especially true if your mentor is a master in his field. You can pick his brain, indulge your curiosity by asking questions, and get advice that you won’t find anywhere else, lighting up the way for you to achieve your own goals.   

A mentor can give smart criticism

To improve, you need to put in your hours—but blind practice will just leave you spinning your wheels. You need feedback to clarify your direction and point out your weak spots.

There are multiple ways to get feedback, but a mentor with an observant eye can isolate what exactly you’re doing wrong—and be completely unbiased and honest about it.

Feedback has also been shown to play a role in employee engagement. The more you act on feedback, the faster you can make progress.

A mentor can expand your world socially

One major difference between a mentor and a traditional teacher is that teachers can be much more distant, especially if you only interact with them in the context of a class.

Mentors—because of the increased closeness of one-on-one interactions—are more likely to become friends and confidants. There’s a certain warmth in relationship between mentor and mentee–psychological safety is a defining feature, and you can even say that your mentor is personally invested in your growth.

Beyond this, a mentor can also introduce you to her circles, so that you get to know her friends and business partners.

It’s not that one-sided

All of this sounds peachy—and seems to give much more benefits to the mentee rather than the mentor, who will at most get paid for it or gain a sense of fulfillment.

If you’re on the mentee side, though, it’s not exactly light. While there are formal mentorship programs—and your manager can be your mentor by default—more often than not you have to look for a mentor yourself. And once you do find someone, you have to put in good effort and be receptive to criticism.

Still, it pays off a lot: the right mentor will definitely put you on the fast track to growth.

The post Get a Mentor to Fast-Track Your Growth appeared first on Sprout.

source https://sprout.ph/blog/get-a-mentor-to-fast-track-your-growth/

The Proper Way to Reject a Job Candidate

Rejecting a job candidate can get awkward—and yet it’s an unavoidable part of recruitment. Open positions, especially when advertised online, can get hundreds, if not thousands of applicants.

The first point of contact tends to be through email: instead of a face, all you have to judge with are portfolios and CVs. As candidates get filtered through rounds of interviews, they become more emotionally invested in their application.

The loss hits hard when one’s nearly at the finish line—fully qualified, but beaten out by someone more exceptional.

The effect on candidate experience

With the volume of applications sent out to HR, it’s understandable that straight-out not replying has become a norm. No email one week after the interview? That’s assumed to be a clear sign that you’re not in the running anymore.

However, it isn’t very considerate or polite—and it can be harmful to your employer branding. In fact, more than 40% of applicants who don’t get a return email swear that they’ll never apply to that company again.

Being left hanging can lead to a terrible candidate experience, which you wouldn’t want to risk. Word-of-mouth gets around pretty fast, especially when posted online, and a negative review on social media or on job forums like Glassdoor can convince people to not apply in the first place.

Aim for closure

Even if you’re swamped with applications, though, consider how much effort every candidate has to put out. Beyond emailing their CV, they also need to write a cover letter, answer any exam screenings, and attend interviews.

Wherever they are in the application process, they’re still investing time and energy into it—and it’s worth respecting that, even if they don’t make it to the end.

First off, once a candidate has been rejected, it’s best to inform them right away. Don’t leave them hanging. This especially applies to applicants who have gotten through several rounds of interviews already. In this case, you can call them over the phone to tell them personally.

The usual protocol, though, is to send a rejection email. You can definitely use a template, but add a slight personal touch by tailor-fitting it for the candidate’s name and position.

If you feel like going the extra mile, you can also explain in polite terms why you didn’t get them—maybe you wanted someone with more years of experience, or they didn’t pass the screening exam. If you’re planning to keep their file for future openings, then be honest about that.

Rejection can be touchy, so try to have a kind and supportive tone while remaining concise. Finally, thank them for applying.

Rejection done right: Hootsuite

For an example of a well-done rejection letter, check out Hootsuite’s. They actually did a full-blown case study of their candidate experience, from editing their job description to sending out surveys.

The thought-provoking question that they explored was: what if companies offered more than closure? More than informing the candidate that they weren’t accepted for the position, Hootsuite’s template encourages them to check out the company’s new job openings from time to time.

Impressively, half of the template consists of helpful resources to help applicants with their job search, including interview follow-up tips and developing personal brand. This makes Hootsuite stand out from the vast crowd of companies that don’t even bother to reply to their candidates—and the magic is that even rejected applicants are left with a warm, positive impression.

The post The Proper Way to Reject a Job Candidate appeared first on Sprout.

source https://sprout.ph/blog/the-proper-way-to-reject-a-job-candidate/

Behind the Scenes: Sprout’s Implementation Process

Celebrating Halloween at Sprout

Why Your Performance Reviews Aren’t Working

Hardly anybody looks forward to a performance review—and this applies to both employees and managers alike.

Performance reviews typically take place every year or every six months. The manager writes out a report about the employee’s good points and shortcomings and sits down with the employee for a one-on-one.

Scoresheets with hard ratings may be involved, as well as self-evaluations. The purpose of a performance review is to enlighten the employee about how he’s doing, and hopefully nudge him towards improvement.

It sounds great—except that performance reviews rarely live up to their promise and tend to reek more of compliance than genuine coaching.

The downside of performance reviews

For one, managers find performance reviews unpleasant. Aside from having to cite hard evidence for every point that they raise, they have to play along with the role that a performance review automatically assigns them—that of a higher authority passing down judgment.

This lends a defensive air to the entire meeting. Employees might feel attacked by helpful criticism, and managers might get evasive and avoidant, choosing to state only the positive.

An overwhelming 95% of employees don’t see performance reviews as helpful. In fact, research says that they “produce an extremely low percentage of top performers.”

Opt for regular feedback

Instead of conducting only a performance review—with all the hefty paperwork—you can opt to give regular feedback instead—say, once a month instead of every year. For employees to stay motivated with their work, they need to have some way to assess how they’re doing.

The more immediate the feedback, the better. If you only put in your observations on their performance once a year, it ceases to be relevant. Employees want to take action now, and they’d rather focus on the most pressing issues.

With that said, you need to be specific. Instead of saying that someone has no sense of urgency, point out a situation where they exemplified this, and give concrete advice for how they can improve.

Foster psychological safety

Aside from the frequency, the main difference between a performance review and optimized feedback is psychological safety. A performance review lacks psychological safety, in that it makes employees ill at ease.

Feedback is more of a two-way discussion, where the manager adopts a friendly, conversational tone and hones in on behavior that can be changed rather than throwing accusations at the other person. There’s a difference between saying “You’re a disorganized person” and “You usually miss deadlines, and we’d like to work on that”—the second one is more constructive and non-judgmental.

Such a setting allows the employee to speak up, too, and to state her opinion, to give a context for her actions. By putting both manager and employee on equal ground as conversational partners, camaraderie is established, and employees become more receptive to advice.

Conclusion

Organizational structure is shifting. Traditionally, managers and employees lie on a strict vertical hierarchy, with a utilitarian relationship: managers make the top-level decisions, and employees follow without questioning.

Now, though, work is evolving to be more humane and less bureaucratic. Companies are factoring in employee experience, acknowledging that individual happiness affects productivity.

More than labor that produces money for survival, work is being rebranded into the pursuit of purpose, and part of this approach is training managers to be concerned about the growth—rather than merely the performance—of their employees.

Performance reviews might still be useful for capturing the big picture, but if you’re aiming for raw improvement, then regular feedback is the way to go.

The post Why Your Performance Reviews Aren’t Working appeared first on Sprout.

source https://sprout.ph/blog/5184/

Common Video Interview Mistakes (and How to Avoid Them)

Interviews are generally tough, but video interviews set the bar higher.

Not only do you have to navigate the mind game of fielding the interviewer’s lethal questions, you also have to deal with other variables such as how awkward your face looks on that webcam and asking your housemates to get off Youtube and Netflix for a bit.

Research suggests that video interviews tend to be a lose-lose situation compared to in-person ones: candidates via video seem less appealing, and interviewees come off as colder and more unreliable.

The compromise of video interviews

It’s a side effect of essentially reducing the world into a two-dimensional copy. Rather than seeing the person in the flesh, taking in the entirety of body language from head to toe, even reaching out to shake hands, you only have a moving image of the person’s face—and that detracts a little from the humanity of it.

Still, though, video interviews have become an indispensable tool in a recruiter’s kit for conquering the world. There’s no other alternative if recruiters are looking for employees around the globe (or even several hours away).

For interviewees, it’s more convenient—you can be in PJs and, after ten minutes, have your much-awaited interview in the comfort of your home, traffic from hell sidestepped.  

The price of convenience, though, is greater potential for embarrassment. And failing your application. These are common video interview mistakes:

Technical difficulties

This is the worst possible mistake that you can make because you won’t even get to the first question. Maybe your internet is too choppy and the video doesn’t work at all, or you can’t figure out how to turn on your webcam last minute.

To avoid this, check the equipment a few days before—and get earphones so your voice won’t come out all fuzzy. A common app for video calls is Skype, which conveniently allows you to make a test call. Guard your internet too, at all costs—risking it in a coffee shop isn’t a good idea.

Uncooperative environment

Here’s another reason not to do it in a coffee shop. As the star in your video interview, you need the right backdrop to pull it off.

Having people pop in and out behind you is extremely distracting, not to mention that all of the noise will filter through. Video interviews should always be done in a controlled environment, ideally in a room where you’re alone.

When doing your test call, scout for the perfect angle. Do you have a concert poster tacked up on the wall? Move your device to hide it; be mindful of the view.

Dressing inappropriately

Observe the general rule of interviews here: wear what you would wear if it were in person, whether that’s a blazer or slacks.

A temptation is to only dress appropriately from your waist up, such as having a formal top on but wearing shorts below. Because the camera’s only from your shoulders to your face, you can get away with this, right? Well, yeah, almost always—unless you have to stand up.

Notice, too, how colors play out on screen. Avoid black or white, which can come off as too strong on the screen.

Coming off as flat

Think of yourself as a theater actor. Because the audience can be as far as thousands of feet away, actors exaggerate their movements. The subtlety of cinema—a slight crinkling of the brow, a half-smile—doesn’t apply here.

Similarly, with video interviews, make a conscious effort to smile, and try to be more animated with your facial expressions, as most of your body language will be centered on your face.

To offset the flattening effect of video, exude more warmth than usual. Remember that eye contact is made by gazing straight at the camera rather than your interviewer’s face on the screen.

The post Common Video Interview Mistakes (and How to Avoid Them) appeared first on Sprout.

source https://sprout.ph/blog/common-video-interview-mistakes/

Sprout CEO Patrick Gentry Wins Founder of the Year Award

Patrick Gentry, the CEO of Sprout Solutions, won as Founder of the Year at the Philippine Rice Bowl Awards, which was held on Oct. 25 at ASPACE Greenbelt.

Rice Bowl Awards

The Philippines Rice Bowl Awards is one circuit of the larger ASEAN Rice Bowl Awards. True to its name, the Rice Bowl Awards brings together ten Southeast Asian countries (Malaysia, Laos, Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, Myanmar, Singapore, Brunei, Vietnam, and Cambodia) to celebrate entrepreneurship and innovation.

Rice is a staple food in Asia; an overflowing bowl of rice serves as a symbol of abundance that nourishes at the most basic level. Likewise, startups are the rice bowl that feeds the Southeast Asian economy, ensuring that it flourishes and grows.

The Rice Bowl Awards gives recognition to outstanding members of the startup scene, with multiple categories such as Best Social Impact Startup, Best Coworking Space, and Best Newcomer.

Patrick Gentry as Founder of the Year

The Founder of the Year is the only individual award category, drawing from diverse criteria such as personal leadership, sales growth, fundraising, and product innovation.

With Patrick at the helm, 2017 has been a great year for Sprout. From a one-man team in 2015, Sprout now has around 80 employees, servicing more than 200 local and international companies. It also holds learning events regularly and maintains a community of HR innovators.

Aside from constantly improving its products, Sprout HR and Sprout Payroll, it’s poised to launch Sprout Recruit, an Applicant Tracking System, by the end of the year.    

Other Founder of the Year winners are Sabrina Marie Cruz and Rafael Francisco Daez from Seabiscuit, which produces videos specializing in food, travel, and culture; and Eugene Jose Arboleda from Taxumo, which allows freelancers and entrepreneurs to conveniently file their taxes online.

They will be representing the Philippines as Founder of the Year finalists at the ASEAN Rice Bowl Awards in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia on December 13.

The post Sprout CEO Patrick Gentry Wins Founder of the Year Award appeared first on Sprout.

source https://sprout.ph/blog/sprout-ceo-patrick-gentry-wins-founder-of-the-year-award/

How to Calculate Holiday Pay in the Philippines

There’s a joke going around that you should plan your vacation this November rather than on Christmas–and no wonder, because we have a grand total of five non-working days and one holiday coming up, all falling on weekdays!

Here’s the full list:

• October 31, 2017 (Tuesday) – Additional Special (Non-Working) Day
• November 1, 2017 (Wednesday) – All Saints’ Day
• November 13-15, 2017 (Monday to Wednesday)* – Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Summit
• November 30, 2017 (Thursday) – Bonifacio Day

*Even though it wasn’t present in the original declaration of holidays and non-working days for 2017, DOLE declared Nov. 13 to 15 as special non-working days in certain areas (Metro Manila, Bulacan, Pampanga).

Out of these, only Nov. 30 (Bonifacio Day) is a holiday; the rest are non-working days. If you’re wondering about the schedule for Christmas, you can check out our coverage of all the 2017 holidays here.

Holidays vs. Special Non-Working Days

It seems like a relaxed month ahead–or hectic, if you’re grappling with shorter deadlines. Out-of-town trips aside, you might also be wondering what’ll happen to your holiday pay. Do you still get your regular salary even if you don’t show up for work, or do you get nothing? What if, dedicated employee that you are, you decide to head to the office anyway?

To answer these questions, we have to differentiate between holidays and non-working days. As explained in our blog post about overtime pay, holidays tend to be more fixed–you’ll encounter them year after year–while special non-working days are usually declared by the government.

Holidays thus have more weight behind them. You still get paid 100% of your salary even if you don’t go to work on a holiday; for special non-working days, though, you pretty much don’t get paid. Overtime rates also vary: working on a holiday pays more than working on a special non-working day.

Holiday and Non-Working Day Pay Rules

If your head’s swimming, here’s a helpful infographic from the Gov.ph Twitter that explains the pay rule differences:

The post How to Calculate Holiday Pay in the Philippines appeared first on Sprout.

source https://sprout.ph/blog/how-to-calculate-holiday-pay-in-the-philippines/

How to Plan Your Office Christmas Party

Christmas is coming up—radios are blasting holiday playlists, malls are stringing up decorations, and everyone’s making plans for the end of the year! In the office, you know what this means: a company-wide Christmas party, before employees can pack up their bags.

Two months is hardly too early to start planning for your Christmas party. With all the variables that you have to consider and inconsistencies like people backing out at the last minute, can get dizzying. But don’t despair—there’s a systematic way to do it, and all the hard work will be worth it in the end.

Find out the budget

Your budget will act as the frame that you’ll design your party around. A lower budget would call for a simpler party, perhaps with more activities squeezed in, while a higher budget allows you to book a swankier venue or invite entertainment from outside. When planning, though, leave aside some part of your budget for emergencies—you don’t want to run out.

Get your expectations right

Talk to your boss or company head about what kind of party they’d want, and ask for the input of the organizer team; you can also have your officemates answer a poll. Will it be set in the daytime or evening? To prevent disastrous changes, the concept should be finalized before execution begins.

Pick the date and venue early

Reserving venues can be highly competitive—some companies start looking six months before! Since office Christmas parties more or less happen at the same time, don’t be surprised if your first choice isn’t available anymore. Picking a venue means setting the date, too. Because your coworkers might be buying vacation tickets already, get the date out as soon as possible so they can mark it on their calendars.

Make it fun

Once you have the venue settled, you can think about what’s actually going to be in the party. Food, definitely—don’t underestimate how much food can affect people’s moods! Consider if you have coworkers with specific diets or allergies, and plan accordingly. If you have leftover budget, you can add office party games, music, entertainment (even performers!), freebies, or cocktails.

Have a Plan B and a Plan C

Never assume that everything will go perfectly. There are hundreds of things that can go wrong: the caterer might be late, it might rain hard, more people might show up than RSVP-ed. To save yourself from the stress, expect it already—have alternatives at hand. It helps, too, to schedule early and double-check by asking for confirmation.

Consider making it more than a Christmas party

For one, there’s the tricky aspect of religious and cultural difference—not everyone celebrates Christmas. Another point is that it takes place at the end of the year, and can double as a recognition event. Aside from gift-giving and having a good time together, you can repurpose the Christmas party to be about company bonding: awarding certificates to employees who did well, recounting your milestones for the year, and so on.

Ask for feedback

Beyond asking your employees directly (and looking out for hearsay), a more accurate way of getting feedback would be sending out online forms after the event. Aside from ratings, include space for them to write down their opinions. This will let you see what worked and what didn’t. Even if you won’t be planning the party next year, you can pass on what you’ve learned so the team for next year can do even better.

The post How to Plan Your Office Christmas Party appeared first on Sprout.

source https://sprout.ph/blog/how-to-plan-your-office-christmas-party/

What Prolonged Sitting Does to Your Body

The Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE), in a bid to counter the negative effects of sitting at work, released a list of health standards that companies will be required to follow, starting in November 2017. You can check out the details of their Department Order 184 here.

Heading the list is allowing workers to have five-minute standing breaks every two hours. The rest include promoting awareness about what sedentary work does for your health, organizing after-work activities like calisthenics and dance lessons, and even tweaking work tasks to allow for more diversity of movement.  These standards extend to all workers who spend a lot of time sitting at work–those in desk jobs, toll booths, and the like.

This is an interesting break from how work has traditionally been done. Whether in the factories from centuries ago or our modern-day office cubicles, it has always been taken for granted that employees can stay in one place for the entire duration of their work shift.

Sitting is perceived as more humane than standing or engaging in manual labor. After all, employees are comfortable–it’s difficult to complain about sitting.

The Problem of Prolonged Sitting

However, recent studies have revealed surprising statistics about how sitting too much is quite literally killing us–not to mention staring at phone and computer screens for hours. Compared to our ancestors, we have become alarmingly sedentary.

Fitness was mandatory for them. They had to chase and hunt down animals to survive, while we can refuse to budge from our sofas and still get food conveniently packaged and delivered to where we are. It’s not just work, either–we sit for pretty much everything, from meals to long commutes.

Lest you underestimate the risk–which is extreme enough for our government to have taken notice–prolonged sitting makes you twice as likely to die. You become 90% more prone to type 2 diabetes, and it also spikes your risk for cancer and cardiovascular diseases.

The World Health Organization further states that being sedentary is the top four risk factor for deaths globally, leading to 3.2 million deaths every year.

To make it worse, you can’t offset this with intense physical activity. So even if you have a gruelling gym session lined up afterwards or you make sure to go jogging every night, it doesn’t undo the damage that prolonged sitting wreaks on your body.

Biologically speaking, we weren’t designed for this: the human body is meant to move around. When we oppose that by being sedentary–not just sitting, but staying in one position for too long–our metabolism slows, blood sugar increases, and fat builds up: the recipe for chronic disease, which medicine is still struggling to cure.

What You Can Do

So are you doomed to a much shorter lifespan because you have a desk job? Well, not quite–if you take measures to counteract it. Despite the prevalence of standing desks, going the other extreme and standing the entire time isn’t the solution–that would still count as sedentary, and might cause additional pain. Instead, go for diversity of movement.

A formula that you can follow without attracting too much attention is to stand up every 30 minutes. This is based on findings about how the people with the lowest mortality risk confined their sitting time to less than 30 minutes.

For a more sophisticated guideline, get some cardio activity in: still block out a 30-minute time frame, but now you sit for only 20 minutes, stand for eight, and exercise (Jumping Jacks, anyone?) for two minutes.

Although you might curse this as way too distracting–how will you ever get your work done if you can’t sit still?–people who have tried it report that they feel much more refreshed afterwards and can better plow through their tasks, essentially doing more in less time.

The post What Prolonged Sitting Does to Your Body appeared first on Sprout.

source https://sprout.ph/blog/what-prolonged-sitting-does-to-your-body/

Why People Operations is the New HR

The term “Human Resources” is more than a hundred years old (coined in 1893, to be exact).

It’s amazing that, despite all of the crazy changes that took place in the 20th century–from bloody wars to the rise of the information economy–the term has managed to stay intact, still boldly emblazoned on office doors and printed into people’s self-descriptions.

However, its age is starting to show. It implies that employees are resources to be used for the betterment of the company–not far removed from the fax machine or cold, hard cash. That was perhaps the worldview of 1893, but it no longer holds up in the present.

The Rebranding of HR

Following in Google’s footsteps, the HR title is being revamped into “People Operations,” or “People Ops” for short. Notice the shift from “resources” to “people”–and the more proactive word “operations,” hinting that it’s the duty of HR to mobilize people and motivate them to produce the best work possible.

A key change is that HR isn’t as obsessed with rules and compliance anymore–their job is so much more than keeping employees in line and ensuring error-free paperwork. Millennials are starting to dominate the workplace, and in the war for talent, HR always has to be several steps ahead, capable of adjusting as necessary.

What HR at Google Teaches Us

A major thrust in transitioning to People Ops is the call for evidence-based HR. At its heart, HR deals with people, and people will always be complex and three-dimensional: average behavior can be predicted, but never how each individual will react. Empathy, emotional intelligence, and other soft skills are definitely a must.

But isn’t an either-or. Bringing data into the equation, right alongside empathy, will serve to empower HR. People Operations was born in Google, and Google knows data better than any other company in the world: through people analytics and rigorous problem-solving, a “science” for HR can be developed, where we can identify and leverage what works to yield maximum results.

The Agile Way

Because this means being willing to change your approach based on the data, Agile HR is necessary. If HR is to attract and retain top talent, it has to be very aware of its employer branding–to get innovate employees, HR has to be innovative itself, from onboarding to employee training.

A frequent point of stuckness is technology. Despite the availability of software to automate tedious tasks such as payroll and timekeeping, many HR departments still choose to do it manually, resulting in a massive loss of time, energy, and profit. Openness to technology is necessary–not only HR software, but also social media, project management apps like Slack, and more.

Nobody Knows Your People Better

Finally, HR’s role as a strategist should be honored. By not including HR in the creation of their overall strategy, companies limit their perspective and miss out on employee insights.

HR has the best bird’s eye view of the organization, with the potential to form an accurate synthesis of what’s going on at all levels. Rather than having a hierarchical relationship, HR and management should collaborate–HR should be backed by executive power if it is to implement company-wide changes.

Conclusion

There’s a lot of excitement happening right now. If you’re in HR, this is possibly the best time ever to be in the field! Beyond being in charge of payroll and benefits, HR is evolving into a role that demands innovation and strategic thinking, and its primary challenge is cultivating the potential in employees.

This mindset shift is represented by its new name, “People Operations.” As Lazlo Bock from Google says, People Operations gets things done; it revolutionizes the company from the bottom-up, starting with teams and inviduals.

The post Why People Operations is the New HR appeared first on Sprout.

source https://sprout.ph/blog/why-people-operations-is-the-new-hr/

Write Every Day for Motivation and Creativity

There are apps for everything–for booking meetings, for having a virtual chat with your officemate who’s only a few seats away, even for identifying what song is playing in the background.

Phones and laptops, then, are indispensable in the office. If you had to take notes, though, using an old-fashioned pen, your hand would likely stutter.

In the abundance of keyboards and touch screens, pen and paper seem archaic, the remnants of another time. Slower, too, and messier–why resort to deciphering your chicken-feet scribbles when you can have it neatly encoded, preserved, and ready for copy-paste?

But writing by hand isn’t dead

And for good reason–it’s way better for creativity than typing. Writing by hand stimulates various areas of the brain, and studies prove that students remember the contents of a lecture better when they write it down by hand rather than typing it out on a laptop.

For all our modernity, physical journals remain in demand–putting away your devices and writing your thoughts down on the page is incredibly therapeutic. It also allows for more self-expression: typewritten letters look the same, but a filled-up notebook can contain doodles, scribbles, all sorts of personal  touches.

Even though you might consider Evernote, Google Calendar, and Notepad as your lifeline, bringing a notebook to work and taking the time to write there can supercharge your creativity and momentum.

Turn it into a commonplace book

If you save articles for later reading, collect quotes on your phone, or like taking photos of interesting things, you already have an intuitive idea of what a commonplace book is.

It’s a place where you dump snippets, excerpts, reflections, and all sorts of odds-and-ends you’ve gleaned from the world around you. As opposed to a journal, which is more introspective and centered on exploring yourself, a commonplace book looks outward.

It’s backed up by the greats, too–Charles Darwin, Marcus Aurelius, Julius Caesar, and for closer contemporaries, Bill Gates and Ryan Holiday. Around four hundred years ago, Oxford and Harvard students were required to keep a commonplace book–it was a sign of culture and education.

In the modern context, it offers a place for ideas to cross-pollinate, perfect for when you’re brainstorming or you’re writing an essay where you have to connect the dots.

Produce ten ideas every day

This comes from James Altucher, entrepreneur extraordinaire: to become an idea machine, write down ten ideas every day. The first few ideas will pop naturally into your head, but the lower you go down the list, the more you’ll be straining your brain.

Being an idea machine is worth developing because it gives you super-adaptability. Whatever the situation, however knotty the problem is, you’ll be primed to think of unconventional ways to get around it. You can also vary the list–perhaps today it’s about business ideas, and the next day about recipes involving broccoli.

Most of the ideas might be crappy and quite impractical, but it’s guaranteed that at least a few of those will be diamonds in the rough–and might even lead to a complete business plan once you flesh it out.

People who’ve tried it were skeptical at first–especially since it takes twenty minutes tops. After they’ve soldiered through it, though, they were delighted by the results–mainly an increased ability to create opportunity and the silencing of their inner critic. 

Write and rewrite your most important goals

Aside from getting your creative juices flowing, writing can help you zero in on your goals. When you write down your goals–not just once, but regularly–you’re 42% more likely to achieve them.

Instead of keeping your goals in your imagination, writing them brings them down to earth, so to speak, and makes them more concrete and immediate. This also brings them to the forefront of your mind, so it’s nearly impossible to forget–and you’ll naturally take more action day after day.

Brian Tracy adds a twist to this regular goal-setting practice. Write down your ten most important goals, but don’t copy the list from yesterday.

Surprisingly, what you deem most important won’t stay the same day after day, no matter how long-term you’re thinking. This weeds out your superficial goals–do this for a month, and you’ll gain better clarity on what you really want to achieve.

The post Write Every Day for Motivation and Creativity appeared first on Sprout.

source https://sprout.ph/blog/write-every-day-for-motivation-and-creativity/

Hack for Innovative HR: A/B Testing

The difference between doing an experiment and just trying something out is that experiments are backed up by data. If you come up with insights after, they didn’t appear out of nowhere. You can point to solid numbers, and confidently state that it’s not a fluke–your audience can replicate it and get the same results.

Experiments belonged originally science–until we filched them and started applying them everywhere because they’ve been so effective. Lifestyle experiments aside, a less personal–and more business-minded–outgrowth of this is A/B testing.

You have two versions, and you’re not sure which is better. Instead of crossing your fingers and picking one blindly in the hopes that it’ll be a hit, you seek out the answer in the real world. You give out both versions to different groups of people. Whichever gets higher performance based on your metrics, that’s what you go with.

The nitty-gritty of A/B testing

Because we’re not operating in a laboratory, A/B testing isn’t as clean as scientific experiments. It breaks the rule of keeping conditions perfectly constant–for one, people in each group are different.

To compensate for this, you test out changes little by little. Instead of examining two totally revamped designs of your website, experiment first with the position of a button, or different fonts. Don’t underestimate the power of small details–you’d be surprised at how a slight change can affect people psychologically.

Beyond UX designers, A/B testing is also a favorite of marketers. With email campaigns, they can test out several email titles–and they don’t even have to do this manually anymore because there are online apps and software that automate this.

By using A/B testing, you can be sure that your approach is based on evidence and that you’re getting somewhere. Sony applied it on its homepage checkout page, and purchases went up by 20%; Upworthy, the popular video website, reached its viral status with the help of consistent testing down to the smallest detail. You can adopt it for practically anything, from your morning exercise routine to your houseplants–and yes, this includes HR.

A/B testing for HR

The term “data-driven HR” is becoming a buzzword, but you don’t need to grab a data scientist or worry about monitoring your employees 24/7. Instead, to get started, you can perform A/B experiments on your own. Here are some ideas:

Job titles and descriptions

Recruiters are getting more and more creative with their job titles, coming up with cool names such as “Director of Storytelling” and even “Chief Robot Whisperer.” People can decide whether or not to read the description based on the job title, so come up with a compelling one!

You can do A/B testing by posting separate versions on Facebook groups (while accounting for differences in the groups themselves), or by putting up the first version on a job search website, compiling results, then editing it into the second version.

Training programs

When teaching your employees a new skill, you might not be sure what the best way is to do it–should you do an online course split into modules, give weekly workshops, or coordinate team sessions? Just because you’ve always done training a certain way doesn’t mean it gives the best results.

Experiment with various methods and check how much people actually learn after; you can also get their verbal feedback. An optimized training program can make a huge difference–not only does your company productivity increase, employees also get the firsthand sense that they’re making great progress.

Getting feedback

It’s underrated–at the company’s own peril–but you should definitely ask for your employees’ insights and opinions. The more pairs of eyes you have scrutinizing your organization from the inside, the better. If you confine feedback only to management, you get locked into a very specific perspective.

Like training programs, there’s no one way to get feedback. What you have to be concerned about is giving people the space to be honest while motivating them to be thoughtful with their responses, not just shading circles haphazardly on a bothersome form.  

The post Hack for Innovative HR: A/B Testing appeared first on Sprout.

source https://sprout.ph/blog/hack-for-innovative-hr-ab-testing/

Tips for Handling Night Shifts

Working at night is going against the grain.

The conventional notion of a full-time job is that it’s from 9 AM to 6 PM; a night shift flips that, so you’re burning the midnight oil. When the sun’s peeking out, instead of snoozing your alarm clock, you’re getting into bed and preparing for sleep.

However, it’s a common arrangement taken up by thousands of Filipinos, from call center agents to remote workers to doctors.

Logically, there shouldn’t be any problem. You’re working the same number of hours as in daytime, so it should be a matter of adjusting your sleeping patterns–like travelling to another continent, experiencing jetlag at first, then slowly getting used to it.

The human body keeps its own time, though. People have something called an internal body clock, which wakes them up and triggers them to fall asleep during certain times of the day. This is synchronized with your environment–sunlight, to be specific.

If we don’t seem like we’re following this–all-nighters, parties until 6 AM, sleeping in until afternoon–that’s mostly because we’re bombarded by artificial light from fluorescent bulbs and our gadgets. Try to spend your evening in only candlelight, and you’ll naturally fall asleep early.

Here are a few tips to make it easier to adjust to a night shift:

Take advantage of light

Because our body clock is based on light, controlling our exposure to it can help us fall asleep or stay awake accordingly.

When you’re going home from your night shift, get some shut-eye before it gets too sunny–you can even wear sunglasses or block it out with dark curtains in your room. This also applies to artificial light: the more you use your phone or laptop, the harder it’ll be to sleep.

On the other hand, the opposite applies when you’re hard at work. Your workspace should be brightly lit–avoid dim lighting if possible–and you can even invest in light sources that imitate sunlight.

Prioritize sleep

The importance of sleep is frequently underestimated. Not getting your full 7 or 8 hours of sleep can lead to a lot of complications, from short-term fatigue to a weaker immune system to increased weight. In fact, if you sleep for less than 6 hours two weeks straight, you’re as conscious as a drunk person.

Night shifts pose an additional challenge to sleeping–not just because of your natural body clock, but also because it’s tempting to go out during the day. To maintain discipline, keep a regular schedule of sleeping: go to bed the same time every day.   

Use coffee and other stimulants in moderation

Don’t overdo the coffee. It gives you a kick that won’t have you slumping over your desk, but taper it off  when you’re reaching the latter half of your shift–unless you want to get jittery and anxious when you should be winding down.

If you’re getting unbearably drowsy, get up and take a brisk walk, or do a cardio exercise to get your blood pumping. You can also drink tea instead–since it has a lower concentration of caffeine–chew on mint, or even turn on more lights to brighten up the room.

Don’t give up on your social life

Aside from catching up with your sleep, you’ll also have to tweak your social life a bit. When you’re sleeping during the daytime and working at night, it can be hard to maintain your former social life without sacrificing your sleep.

One way to deal with this is to find other people who are also on night shifts–such as your coworkers–and make friends with them. This helps on the job because talking to your coworkers will keep you energized and alert enough to not fall asleep.

The post Tips for Handling Night Shifts appeared first on Sprout.

source https://sprout.ph/blog/tips-for-handling-night-shifts/

How Listening to Music Affects Your Work

Since the invention of earphones–or, well, headphones–we can plug into music whenever we want to. Combine this with the nearly all-inclusive library online, from Youtube playlists to Spotify recommendations, and we have access to billions of songs at any moment of our waking lives–whether we’re commuting, jogging, or even studying.

Some companies ban earphones because they’re worried that music will be distracting; some don’t, explaining that it helps their employees focus. If it’s a habit of yours to tune into music when you’re working, does it actually make you more productive, or does it slow you down?

What science says

Music’s effects on the brain have been studied extensively. There’s an entire field devoted to it: neuromusicology, which examines how music stimulates the various areas of the brain.

However, it’s far from being a black-and-white science–people have different musical preferences, and so our brains’ reactions to different kinds of music can also vary.

What they’ve discovered, though, about music and its impact on work can be boiled down to this: music stimulates us, and that can be a good thing if we’re doing repetitive tasks, or distracting if we’re problem-solving or learning something new.

Overload for your brain

When you’re trying to process new information, if you must have music at all, go with quieter, subdued music, preferably without lyrics.

Listening to music is a passive activity–you probably won’t feel like you’re going on a mental workout–but it still counts as multitasking. Instead of your brain devoting 100% of its energy to, say, solving a tricky problem, music takes up additional space.

Not only does it slow you down, it can also distort what you’re learning. Try listening to a catchy pop song when you’re trying to memorize a speech–you’re bound to have a hard time.

Additionally, your brain, smart as it is, goes into prediction mode right away, anticipating the next tune. Your best bet here would be classical, ambient, or instrumental music–or at least go with old favorites or songs that you’ve heard before.

Good for repetition

Frustrated that your preferred genre doesn’t quite fit in with the recommendation above? Before you bum out, here’s the good news:  upbeat music (pop, hip-hop, rap, or even more emotional songs) is great for repetitive tasks like encoding data or sending the same email to lots of people. These still require concentration, but less cognitive load.

Even surgeons subscribe to this: surgeries are repetitive in the sense that a certain protocol has to be followed every time, and it’s an industry habit to have music playing in the operation room to bring down the stress.

In these cases, music serves as a pick-me-up. This is rooted in how it shifts our emotional states–music that we like triggers neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin, naturally boosting our mood.

A feel-good hack would be to add an element of surprise by pressing shuffle or hunting for new songs. You can also select music meant to make you feel motivated and pumped-up. Daniel Levitin, a neuroscientist and musician, suggests doing this 10 to 15 minutes before you actually start working–so you can get the emotional high without the distraction factor.   

A welcome distraction

Beyond these two contexts, music-lovers have another reason to stick with their earphones–to cancel out noises outside. When it’s too loud around you–whether there are lots of cars honking in the background or your coworkers are having a particularly spirited conversation–your cortisol levels increase.

Cortisol corresponds to stress and leaves you more distracted and anxious. By drowning out the noises with music, the dominance shifts from cortisol to dopamine, and you’re good again.

Recommended music

Spotify’s Deep Focus Playlist

Spotify is chock-full of playlists meant to help you focus (but if you’d rather go for more energy, there are lots of choices for that, too). This playlist in particular is made up of soothing, instrumental music that can blend into the background, but also relax you when you hone in on it.

Noisli

It’s been said that people love hanging out in coffee shops because they get more work done–and this is usually attributed to ambient noise, from the gentle murmur of conversations to the gurgling of water from a stream. Check out this background noise generator, which lets you mix and match different sounds.

Brain.fm

For a fascinating intersection of neuroscience, music, and technology, head over to Brain.fm, which gives you music that alters your brainwaves on purpose. Results are supposed to show in 15 minutes tops, and you can take your pick from mental states such as focus, sleep, and calmness.

The post How Listening to Music Affects Your Work appeared first on Sprout.

source https://sprout.ph/blog/how-listening-to-music-affects-your-work/

The Risks of Scaling a Startup

Startup beginnings are the stuff of stories–a bunch of friends throwing around crazy ideas over beer, side projects that go viral unexpectedly, a rebellious lone ranger setting out to fix a long-ignored problem.

To be fair, it’s an exciting, fast-paced time. You’re fighting to survive, and you’re running almost purely on guts and adrenaline. Innovation is the focus rather than stability. It’s very hands-on–founders spend more time getting their hands dirty rather than barking orders.

If things go well, you’ll go on the rocky journey of transforming your startup into a full-blown company. But scaling poses its own risks as well. Like leveling up in a game, you have to face a whole new set of challenges–quite different from those you had to deal with before.

New employees

A lot of these risks will stem from having new people onboard. While Employee No. 1 to 5 might have gotten hired because you’d worked with them before or at least you had mutual connections, you’ll be taking in strangers eventually.

To hire right, you need to incorporate proper HR practices such as thorough interviews and assessing for culture fit. Don’t be sloppy or careless about it: who you hire matters.  

Delegation

If you’re among the first people in a startup, you’re probably going to rise to a leader role once you scale. Rather than doing everything yourself, you have to delegate and trust other people with their tasks–as well as learning how to manage.

Over the long run, this would mean adapting your managerial structure. A flat hierarchy might have been effective before when all of you fit into one room, but it’ll get messy and unruly when you’re at two hundred people.

Consistency

With delegation comes fragmentation–employees will be divided into different teams and departments, and you won’t be able to interact extensively with every single one of them anymore.

Company culture becomes an ever-major concern. If you can’t build a relationship with everyone personally, you can at least make sure that your company’s values are communicated clearly and everyone’s working well together.  

Paperwork

Ah, a dreaded consequence of scaling–piles of paperwork, from contracts to monthly government deductions. In the very first days, you could just casually split the money between yourselves.

But now you have to look into formal payroll and accounting and deal with taxes–and this will eat up your time exponentially as your company grows. The solution to this is automating rote processes as much as possible with tools such as human resource information systems or payroll software.

Direction

It’s tempting to get sidetracked when change is coming in on you from all sides and there are so many variables to keep track off. Keep coming back to the original reason–the guiding vision–for your startup.

Strive not to lose the big picture in the face of day-to-day problems: where are you going, and what should you reach for? To use a metaphor: while before you were walking by yourself, now you have to steer a huge ship.

Stability

Timing is scarily crucial. Scale too soon or too late, and your startup will crash. A key consideration is that your foundation needs to be stable. Before you can add more people, build more products, reach a wider audience, your startup should be doing well as is.

Once you scale up, existing issues will only multiply–with far larger consequences–so eliminate them ruthlessly while you’re still small.

Conclusion

Well, nobody said it was easy. The hardest test arguably lies at the start, when you’re trying to gain traction in the first place, but you still can’t rest afterwards. No matter how established you might be, you can fail quickly if you become complacent and don’t strive for relentless improvement.

All of these risks, though, are necessary growing pains. Cheers to you–because if they’re on your path, that means you’re moving forward.

The post The Risks of Scaling a Startup appeared first on Sprout.

source https://sprout.ph/blog/the-risks-of-scaling-a-startup/