by Staff Writer In order to keep up with momentum, high-growth companies are consistently expanding their workforces – in the private sector alone, job creation has been on the rise for seven straight years.
But adding new headcount isn’t a guarantee your growing needs will be met. The speed at which businesses run today requires new employees to hit the ground running. Unfortunately, onboarding processes — the mechanisms through which new employees learn the skills, cultural norms, and other requirements they need to succeed — can often be lacking. In one recent study, more than three quarters of HR leaders reported that onboarding processes are underutilized at their companies. In the long term, successful onboarding helps to drive employee engagement and job satisfaction. But more immediately, having a well-designed onboarding process ensures that new employees have all the tools and knowledge they need to succeed — and to succeed fast. Here are five ways to accelerate new employee productivity and make the most out of new talent. by Stephen Danos When leaders move with speed, whether in decision-making or in running efficient meetings, the benefits can spread throughout an entire organization.
Studies show that leaders ranked in the top 10 percent based on their leadership speed see positive results in the attitudes of their direct reports — 63 percent of whom say they would do everything possible to make their company successful. That’s according to the book Speed: How Leaders Accelerate Successful Execution, in which the authors propose that there is no statistical downside to speed, as long as leaders take the time to periodically pause and reassess whether their efforts are aligned to their organization's overall strategy. Business leaders who avoid these five common pitfalls can motivate their teams to execute more quickly — and at a higher level. by David Lotz Everyone has heard the saying, “If only I had one more hour in the day.” Often we’re the ones saying it. Those of us with full lives know the value of an hour, and are always looking for ways to make the most of our time. Well, I’m excited to share a story with you about how I spent five minutes over the summer setting up Smartsheet automated actions and how doing so has saved me an hour each workday since. A Manual Process Keeps Me Up At Nightby Stephen Branstetter I covet more time: more time for important work, more time with my spouse and kids, more time with friends, more time to work out and get healthy.
I used to hate creating weekly status reports. While important, they felt like a waste of time. Often, my status reports were simply a manual process of collecting data that already exists elsewhere mixed with tracking down people for further clarification. So I started playing around with ways to simplify the process and save time using Smartsheet. Automated actions are simple solutions that save me and my team time, reduce the number of status meetings, create more consistency in the frequency of our reports, and improve data quality. And these benefits free us up to focus on more rewarding projects and less on manual, repetitive tasks. by Stephen Danos How often do you make bad decisions? According to a McKinsey & Company survey, 72 percent of senior-level leaders believe that bad decisions are “about as frequent as good ones” — par for the course across their organization. As a company grows, apparently so does the potential cost of poor decision making. At the enterprise level, these undesired outcomes tend to stem from problems caused by increased organizational complexity, murky accountability, and an overabundance of data that cause decision makers to suffer from analysis paralysis.
Getting on the path to better decision making starts with recognizing and addressing these challenges — often with the help of the right enterprise-grade work-execution tool. by Staff Writer It’s estimated that the average adult makes 35,000 decisions a day. Though many of these may seem inconsequential, making the right call at work can be a fraught prospect. If you feel like you’re under pressure to make business decisions faster than ever before, you’re not alone. According to a Harvard Business Review report, 65 percent of managers say they face shrinking decision-making windows. And once a decision is made, three-quarters say they’re on the hook to achieve results in less time.
There’s good reason for businesses to push for speedy decision making. In a review of traits linked to organizational health, McKinsey researchers found that the majority of businesses that measured high for agility also ranked within the top quartile of overall business health. Agility is defined as speed of decision-making combined with stability, or having clear operating goals and metrics. So how can organizations make faster decisions more easily? Start by letting go of these three things that can get in the way of moving fast. by Stephen Danos Today, business leaders have a lot to consider when making decisions: performance analytics and other data coming in from a multitude of sources, resource and budget run rates, and much more. The faster a leader can reach the best decisions based on the best intel, the faster teams can carry out strategies, provide competitive value, and delight customers. Given the stakes, refining your decision-making process is well worth the effort, but to get the process right may require a few false starts and iterations. It will also help if your team can adopt an agile mindset, so they can take small steps in the right direction, giving you test-and-learn insights to make decision-making processes more efficient and swift.
While there’s no quick fix, here are five things leaders can do to speed up decision making — and how Smartsheet can set teams up for repeatable success. |
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