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/

The 3 Kinds of Burnout–and How to Cope

Feeling demotivated or tired on some days at work is normal–nobody can be revved up all the time.

However, it’s a red flag when this stretches out for a while and you’re already spiraling to the edge of your physical and emotional limits. This leads to burnout, which makes it practically impossible to work or even be productive.

Burnout is more than exhaustion. It plays out over a long time, building up day after day until you can’t ignore it anymore.

There isn’t a clear-cut way of noticing it in other people, either–somebody experiencing burnout can lash out a burst of anger, or be extremely sluggish and refuse to show up to work.

To give you a more nuanced picture, psychologists have observed three different kinds of burnout:

Frenetic

This is probably the most common image of burnout: someone drowning in piles of paperwork, chugging down entire jugs of coffee and staring blearily through sleep-deprived, bloodshot eyes. To make it worse, more tasks are coming in than can be finished.

Simply put, you’re about to crack because you can’t handle how much you need to do. The usual coping mechanism for this is ranting about your work and even about your company–stress gets displaced into anger, and your blood pressure reaches boiling point.

Don’t do everything.

If it’s becoming too much, learn to say no. Don’t hesitate to tell your manager, or at least explain that you might need more time or some breathing room. Alternatively, consider whether you’re putting too much pressure on yourself–maybe you can delegate to other employees.

Pace yourself.

Time management will serve as your anchor. Put everything down in a to-do list so you can free up your mind from having to juggle everything, then arrange them by priority and focus on the highest first. If possible, plan out the top three tasks you’ll accomplish the night before.

Underchallenged

This is the opposite of the first type. There isn’t enough stimulation. Employees are frustrated because of lack of challenge, and they don’t perceive their work as rewarding and meaningful.

Instead of throwing themselves into it, they avoid their work and dissociate from it, leading to procrastination and mediocre performance. They’ve lost their intrinsic motivation–and this leads to boredom and cynicism, and an increasing sense of alienation from their work.

Venture out of your comfort zone.

Try to see if you can take on new projects and opportunities, or propose a creative way of doing your job. You might have fallen into a rut–and the way out is to shake things up, whether by taking on a different role or upping the difficulty level.

Remember your why.

Committing to anything long-term won’t work if you rely only on extrinsic motivation such as your paycheck. Look at the bigger picture–imagine your clients, and what you’re contributing to their lives with your job. Additionally, how does your job improve your own skills? Reconnect with the passion or interest that you felt when you applied.

Worn-out

Worn-out employees are very much interested in achieving their work goals–except that they feel they can’t do it. Whether out of perfectionism, fear of failure, or lack of self-confidence, they find their tasks daunting and are prone to giving up.

Rather than anger or boredom, the dominant emotions experienced by the first two types, worn-out employees are plagued by anxiety and are prone to work paralysis.

Go step by step.

To avoid getting overwhelmed, focus on one step at a time. Instead of seeing an enormous project that you need to pull off or else, start with the smallest actions and give yourself a pat on the back for every task that you check off. Once you ease back on the pressure, you can relax and get more done.

Calm down.

When it’s all getting too much, take a few minutes off and just breathe. Clear your mind and notice what’s in your immediate surroundings–or close your eyes and recenter yourself. In as short as a few minutes, a mindful break like this can reduce your anxiety so you can get a better perspective.

 

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source https://sprout.ph/blog/the-3-kinds-of-burnout-and-how-to-cope/

Get into the Flow State to Produce Your Best Work

Some work days drag by. The tasks ahead of you are monumental, you keep staring out the window, and time trickles past slowly.

But there are those lovely days when you’re in the zone, completely wrapped up in what you’re doing, and before you know it, you’re done–and it’s exhilarating.

The latter is called being in the state of flow, and it’s said to be “the most desirable state on earth.”

The flow state of mind

Like a stream that flows effortlessly downhill, you encounter no friction or resistance when you’re in a state of flow. You lose sense of time, such that you can keep on going and realize–with a jolt of surprise–that hours have passed. 

It’s also characterized by a lack of self-consciousness: you’re so concentrated on a specific task that you forget about yourself.

Not only does it leave us feeling good, it’s also essential for our wellbeing–and for our productivity. Do anything creative–cooking, painting, programming–and you’ll notice that you gradually slide into flow.

To use the example of writing, the most frustrating moments would be when you can’t even get a sentence out. Or you keep on deleting what you’ve written, because your inner critic is wailing loudly.

However, when you get rid of this self-consciousness–when you stop filtering and second-guessing yourself–that’s when you actually produce paragraph after paragraph.

Disengagement: a chronic workplace problem

Flow is the antithesis of a leading problem in the workplace: disengagement (and, consequently, boredom). Disengagement takes its toll on performance and is one of the reasons why people quit.

Boosting employee engagement has become a hot topic, given that companies with engaged employees earn at least twice as much revenue. Disengaged employees rarely ever experience flow in their work, struggling with every part of the process and maybe even resorting to procrastination.

Finding flow

Out of the nine conditions needed to trigger flow, here are three that fall under our control:

“There is a balance between challenges and skills”

To trigger a state of flow, there’s a delicate balance to be played in terms of your comfort zone. Stay too long in your comfort zone, and you become bored and stagnant.

But despite all the proclamations to venture outside your comfort zone, you have to make sure you’re not straying too far, either–get too uncomfortable, and you’ll spiral into anxiety and distress. In other words, you’ll thrive in the middle ground between too easy and too challenging–something that pushes you to grow without overwhelming you.

“Clear goals with immediate feedback”

This is consistent with deliberate practice, which is key to achieving mastery. Deliberate practice means focusing on a certain aspect of your performance and working towards improving it–say, doing specific piano drills rather than playing songs aimlessly.

Setting specific goals can go a long way towards engagement. You should have a clear picture of what you want to achieve as well as a way of receiving immediate feedback, whether from a mentor or based on metrics. In this way, you’re aware of what you need to improve on and can target that right after.

“Distractions are excluded from consciousness”

Getting into a state of flow takes time, with research saying that people take from 5 to 20 minutes to focus. During the first part of your task, your attention might wander, but you need to keep at it long enough.

Don’t allow yourself to be distracted–try to clear your space of clutter (unless you’re the rare kind of person who thrives in chaos) and minimize distractions, from social media notifications to phones ringing.

When you’re interrupted, it’ll take a while again to find flow. While focusing might not come naturally because we’re often short-circuiting our attention spans, we get better at it with practice.

Conclusion

Being in flow is similar to staying in the present moment, except that your energy is directed towards accomplishing a certain task. Flow can definitely be elusive. We can’t control it, but we can definitely create conditions that are optimal for it–and train our minds to concentrate rather than being distracted.

The post Get into the Flow State to Produce Your Best Work appeared first on Sprout.

source https://sprout.ph/blog/get-into-the-flow-state-to-produce-your-best-work/

Agile: Failing Fast the Right Way

Facebook’s motto was “Move fast and break things” before it got tempered into “Move fast with stable infrastructure” in 2014.

Either way, it exemplifies the Agile mindset, which prioritizes adapting to change–and there’s plenty of change nowadays, such that it’s impossible to have project plans carved in stone.

Facebook embraces this, and so do other tech companies. You’d need it, in an industry where you can overthrow the competition from the comfort of your bedroom with countless lines of code.

Linear doesn’t work

Programmers and product leads talk about the Agile methodology, with terms cryptic to outsiders such as “sprint,” “kanban,” and, quite puzzlingly, “Scrum master.” Concisely put, the Agile methodology is a style of project management that started out in software development–but it got picked up so well that it’s wandered over to other departments and even to entire organizations.

As the story goes, it was formed by 17 people up in a mountain ski resort–and to make it definite, they crafted a manifesto.

This was born out of frustration. Software development, for all that it seems to be done by a bunch of people typing away on keyboards, is a beast, especially if it’s a huge project.

The traditional way of doing it–the waterfall model–made sense, to be fair. You talk to the clients, you design, you create the software, you test for feedback–and then you have a readily shippable product, all in one go: a clean, linear process.

But you’re building with code, not with bricks. Imagine putting in all that hard work, and the client throws it back in your face because it’s not quite what they imagined it to be. Or plans change halfway through and you have to scrap everything.

Fail fast, the right way

The Agile method was devised as a solution to this. Instead of trying to do it all at once, you work in iterations.

A common way of implementing this is by doing sprints around two weeks long, after which you should have a product that’s presentable to the client. You then gather feedback about this, coordinating closely with the client and reflecting on how you can improve the next sprint. After this, the cycle starts all over again.

This allows for adaptability–you won’t freak out if you have to change anything because you can work on it in your next sprint. As the manifesto says, the priority is “to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.”

It also encourages failure–the good kind. Agile gives enough leeway for experimentation and lets you detect errors early before they even make it to your client. With each sprint, you get an even more refined product.

However, if dealing with ambiguity is a strong point, it can also be a weakness. You can only get estimates, not strict deadlines. Plans are prone to revisions, which might be frustrating for some, and documentation tends to be thrown to the side and ignored for a less formal approach.

Conclusion

More than a methodology, Agile is a mindset–and you can definitely apply it to areas beyond software development.

At Sprout, for example, we’re applying Agile to HR. Businesses all over are starting to pick up on the idea of quick prototypes, especially when they’re just starting out–before they make heavy investments, they validate their core idea with a minimum viable product and test it out on people.

Agile does involve moving fast and breaking a lot of things, but the more things you break, the more you get to fix–and this creates a solid foundation. “Move fast with stable infrastructure,” indeed.

The post Agile: Failing Fast the Right Way appeared first on Sprout.

source https://sprout.ph/blog/agile-failing-fast-the-right-way/

5 Tricky Interview Questions that Recruiters Love

Job interviews are nerve-wracking–until they aren’t. As anyone who’s marathoned through job interviews would know, there’s always room for surprise, but eventually, a certain predictability sets in.

The same questions keep popping up, maybe with slightly different phrasing. And it’s not even about a specific industry or position. There are so-called universal questions that you’d be well-advised to draft your answers to before, especially if they’re the tricky sort where your brain goes blank right after.

Rather than focus on more obscure examples such as Cisco’s “What kind of tree would you be?” and Trader Joe’s “What would you do if you found a penguin in the freezer?”, we’ve compiled five more common but equally tough questions that recruiters just love:

“Tell me more about yourself.”

If you had to answer this with zero preparation, you’d freeze up–how are you supposed to summarize the person that you are in a few sentences? More often than not, this is the classic opening of job interviews.

One path would be to look down at your CV and explain what’s in there, except in first-person, sentence format. Another would be to throw it out altogether and branch off on a tangent about how you love capoeira or binge on sushi. Both are wrong on their own.

This question can be rephrased as “What’s your elevator pitch?” Weave a story, two minutes max, of why you’d be perfect for the role–and you can bring up hobbies, too, but find a way to relate them to the job.

“What’s your greatest weakness?”

You’re supposed to look and act your best on interviews–and this question trips that up because you’re supposed to reveal where you’re weak.

Don’t go with non-answers such as “I’m too organized and I work well beyond hours” or “I’m too much of a perfectionist.” Nobody’s going to believe that, and your interviewer is going to peg you as someone inauthentic.

The key is to be honest by revealing a genuine flaw of yours, but emphasize how you’ve been trying to improve it and how you’re going to take this into account in your new role.

“What’s your greatest achievement?”

Beyond checking out how good you are, recruiters also use this to detect whether your values align with the company’s. Achievement is a broad term, and what you say reflects your mindset–citing a moment when you helped someone has a different ring to being proud that you beat out everyone.

As with all of the other questions, what’s crucial here is the storytelling. Lay out the context, explain what you were aiming for and how you did it, and back up with numbers and metrics if possible.

“Where do you see yourself X years from now?”

The future is unpredictable. But to say flat out that you have completely no idea wouldn’t be a good move.

Companies would want you to stay if they hire you, so try to describe a future that’s consistent with the role you’re applying for. If you’re aiming to be a designer, don’t say that you see yourself eventually as a stand-up comedian. You don’t have to be too specific, though–nobody can predict the future.

Another response to steer clear of, even if it’s true, is admitting that you eventually plan to be an entrepreneur–admirable on its own, but not for companies looking to hire long-term.

“How did you handle conflict with a teammate?”

Compared to its more conditional cousin (“How would you handle conflict?”), questions that refer to past experience can be more informative for recruiters because they reveal what you actually do, rather than what you think you’d do.

Important points to address would be what started the conflict in the first place, the root cause of the conflict (e.g. difference in values, miscommunication), and, finally, how you were able to resolve it.

Aside from testing how you work with people, this also showcases your communication skills. Make sure to end it on a positive note and detail how you were able to learn from it.

The post 5 Tricky Interview Questions that Recruiters Love appeared first on Sprout.

source https://sprout.ph/blog/5-tricky-interview-questions-that-recruiters-love/