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i-anand-mishra · 5 years

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Money Making Small Business Ideas for Womens at Home

Whether you're a stay at home business ideas for moms, housewives, entrepreneur, or just want to work for yourself instead of someone else, starting a small business can be the answer you're looking for. We've gathered together some of the best small business ideas for women that require nothing more than your own talents and passions.

Women have many talents that they can tap into, especially moms and housewife who need to be creative on the go with their kids and home running tasks. How do you know which of these talents will make the best work at home ideas for moms? We need to first ask the questions “What are you most passionate about? and “What are you good at?” Choosing a business idea works best when its something that you really enjoy doing and do well.

For example, are you really good at organizing events or planning? You could make a business helping people organize their events, parties, or just their lives. Maybe you are great at giving advice and tutorials? Become a blogger and get paid for your knowledge!

Many of these options are great business ideas for housewives and make great work from home business ideas for moms. They can pay well and will give you that freedom you want to spend more time with your family and do more in general. Let's get started!

Suggested Read: Five Stages of Negotiation - From Preparation to Agreement

Top Small Business Ideas for Womens At Home

Blogging

It may not sound like something that you can easily make money doing, but blogging really pays off. Blogging is one of the best business ideas for moms because you get to work on your own schedule. It not only brings in a decent amount of money, but it also lets you help others. Even better, you don't need to spend any money to get yourself going. There are many blog sites, like WordPress, where you can create your blog for free. You just need to keep in mind that it can take some time to start earning a lot. There are many guides online that will show you how to create a blog that is successful.

Affiliate Marketing

This is linked to blogging and is what makes the money for most bloggers. The way it works is simple. You write blogs about different services or products that you recommend to your reader base with links to that service or product. For example, you can be an affiliate on Amazon. When you sign up as an affiliate you get a unique link to use in your blog for that product. When people click that link and buy through it, you earn money in the form of a commission!

Freelance Writer

Aside from blogging, those who love to write can earn money as a freelance writer. You can start out by joining some freelance writer sites, where you choose the articles you want to write and get paid for it. It may be small amounts at first, but you can quickly build a client base. You can also create a free website or advertise your service on social media with your rates.

Proofreader

For those who have an eye for the little details, proofreading for others is another of the great work at home ideas for moms. If grammar errors and misspellings make you cringe, this is a good job for you. Many blogging sites and article writers rely on proofreaders. If you have ever seen some of the glaring errors left on news sites and the like, you know that proofreaders are needed.

Read Also: Anand Mishra’s Success Story – A Motivation for All Aspiring Entrepreneurs

Bookkeeping

As a housewife or stay at home mom, you are probably the one who does all of the budgeting. Why not put that skill to use to make some extra cash? Bookkeeping as a service doesn't require you to have previous experience either. You can help teach people the art of creative budgeting.

Life Coaching

If you like to help change lives and can inspire people, why not become a life coach? You can set your own hours and rates, and do either one on one coaching or group coaching.

Thrift Shop Flipper

This is a great choice as a business idea for housewives who love visiting thrift stores and flea markets. You can easily buy items at a real bargain, upscale them, fix them, and then sell them for a profit on sites like eBay and Etsy. You would be surprised how many people have made a real business out of this.

Drop Shipping Shop

If selling products is something you would like to do but you don't have the space to keep inventory or run around to the post office, using a drop shipping company can be the answer for you. You can create your online shop, sell those third-party products, and they will do the shipping for you. What you make in profit depends on what you are charged by the drop shipping company and how much you sell the item for. For example, a drop ship company may charge you $1.50 for an item, and you sell it on for $ 5.00. That's a profit of $3.50 on one item. Do this with loads of items and you have yourself a profitable little online shop.

Transcription

Companies will hire people to listen to audio files and transcribe them into a document for them. You get busy managers, audio and video bloggers, all of who need someone to write down their thoughts in a coherent document file for them. If you have a good ear for this, it could be one of the best small business ideas for women meant for you.

Virtual Assistant

For those stay at home moms who have a knack for a variety of things, a virtual assistant may be the perfect startup business for you. Skills like managing social media, tutoring, writing, graphic designing, researching, editing, data entry...the list goes on! People often need assistance with these things and it can all be done from home.

Amazon Seller

Amazon has an FBA program that lets you sell through them. If you have a gift for finding bargains at physical shops, you can use Amazon's FBA program to resell these at a higher cost. It's a lot like flea market flipping.

Tutor

Another of the good business ideas for moms is being a tutor. What are you good at doing that you can teach others? It can be anything from helping kids with homework to teaching someone how to knit. A lot of teaching can now be done online too, so if you are knowledgeable in a particular subject, put that knowledge to use for you. Some of the inline teaching sites may require you to have had previous teaching or tutoring experience.

Childcare

If your passion involves looking after children, why not consider running your own childcare service. It not only makes you money, but it also helps your kids learn to socialize as well. You do need to check whether you need any licensing in your area and make sure your home owner's insurance endorses childcare to do this but it can be a very rewarding business.

Photographer

Are you the family photographer that has a gift for catching amazing pictures? Put that skill to use! Most already have a decent camera they can use already. You can offer to take family portrait photos as a service or take pictures for companies, such as real estate agents. Your pictures can even be uploaded to stock photography sites where you get paid when someone downloads your image.

This is just a small list of some of the small business ideas for women who have kids, are housewives, or just want to work from home. They aren't too hard to get started and they tap into skills you already are good at. So sit down with a pen and paper, make a list of your talents, and see what you can do with them!

#business ideas for moms #business ideas for housewives

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i-anand-mishra · 5 years

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#anand mishra ceo #anand mishra entrepreneur #anand mishra star infranet

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i-anand-mishra · 5 years

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Guide to the Qualities of an Effective Leader

Is leadership a skill? Qualities of an Effective Leader are the topic of thousands of books, instructional videos, and blog posts. It's clearly a topic that interests people, and if you've looked into it even a little, you've probably noticed a trend in articles with titles like The Top 10 Qualities of a Great Leader or How to Become a Better Leader Overnight. In these cut-and-paste articles you'll tend to see the same pieces of advice about what is an effective leader: be a confident, delegate, communicate well, inspire your employees, and be positive.

That's all sort of obvious, isn't it?

Not to mention the fact that these are all qualities of a good leader which would benefit anyone, not just someone in a managerial or leadership position? Strangely, there are two qualities you tend not to see mentioned in these kinds of pieces, both of which are integral to the success of any leader in almost any position. These are qualities of an effective leader, not a good one, not a great one.

These qualities are dedication and goal orientation.

These two good leadership qualities work hand in hand—they sound similar, but they're quite different. Let's talk a moment about each.

Goal Orientation

“Goal-oriented” is part of the qualities of a leader listed on just about every resume out there. People think it sounds nice and that hiring managers like to hear it. The reality is that the term is so overused that most of the time it just ends up getting glossed over, similar to other cliches like being a “people person.” A fact is, most people are not goal oriented. How many people of character have you known who have some big dream or goal, but it's always on the back burner and they never seem to get around to it? Or business people—who most likely had “goal oriented” on their resume—really never go the extra mile to work, get things done sluggishly, and really can't wait to get home, crack open a beer, and watch the game?

Conversely, have you ever encountered someone who seems to get a lot done in a short amount of time? Or someone who seems to always be focused on their goals—and they tend to achieve them, including the education necessary?

These people are goal oriented.

And they are rare.

Being goal-oriented means that you'll do whatever it takes to achieve a goal. Note that this is a quality, not a skill or a mindset. Despite the rarity of this quality, it can be fostered and developed in yourself over time, which we'll discuss in a moment.

It's also important to remember that the goal part of being goal oriented doesn't necessarily have to be a huge goal, like becoming a millionaire or inventing a perpetual motion the machine. If you're working as the manager at McDonald's you could be more goal-oriented than, say, an executive at a Fortune 500 company (probably not, but it is possible).

Being goal-oriented simply means that you know what you want and you aren't going to stop at anything to get it—even if that's to serve the best Big Mac.

Read Also: Touching The Peak: Anand Mishra, Founder, And CEO Of Star Infranet

You might be scoffing. “Who cares about flipping burgers—I want to get a promotion at work by making my team work more productively.”

No matter what your goal is, you have to know what it is and not stop. Maybe the person flipping burgers at the fast food joint wants to learn everything they can about the business, use their minimum wage to put themselves through college to get a business degree, and open up their own franchise and own one or two or twenty McDonald's someday.

If you don't have an ultimate goal that determines where you're going and why you will never become goal oriented. And no, “being a better leader” isn't a goal—it's a means to an end. What's your end?

Dedication

Think of dedication like the fuel behind being goal oriented. You might know what your goals are, and dedication is how you'll get there. Dedication is hard to pin down because it takes so many different forms—it might be as simple as waking up in the morning and being on time. It might involve putting in a few extra hours of work every day so that over time you can achieve your goals—and understanding that not all goals can be accomplished overnight.

Dedication is the ability to stay a course of weeks, months, and years. It's easy to get discouraged for many people—you've seen it time and time again. A friend or family member gets very interested in something, maybe it's a new business idea, a hobby, or even setting up a garden in their back yard. They're great at it... for a while. At some point no matter how goal-oriented they appeared to be in the beginning, they didn't have the dedication to pull through and make their goal materialize in the real world.

Tying it all Together

When you combine dedication and goal orientation, you become an unstoppable force. Goal orientation keeps you on track and knowing where you need to go, and dedication is the fuel that powers you along the way. They're fine qualities to have by themselves, but in tandem, they're very effective for whatever you're trying to do—including becoming a better leader.

When you've got your goals in line and the motivation to keep slogging away toward them—no matter how tough it gets—you'll naturally become better at all of those qualities we discussed in the beginning of this piece from the cookie-cutter articles and books. The two qualities of dedication and goal orientation are a means of aligning your every move with the same strategy. So when something needs to be delegated, you'll delegate it. When something needs to be communicated well to your team or employees, you'll do exactly that—you'll find that it all becomes quite natural and obvious once you've successfully developed these two qualities.

How to Foster Goal Orientation and Dedication

Make no mistake about it, dedication and goal orientation are not inborn qualities. While it may seem as though the Steve Jobs of the world are born with these qualities and thus naturally have an edge over the little people, it just isn't so.

Goal orientation is easier to train yourself into recognizing and executing than dedication. How you decide what your ultimate goal is, that's a process that everyone responds to a little differently. You might need to sit down and write out a list, or you might know the answer immediately. Whatever it is, chunk it down into smaller goals that all point in the same direction. Everything you do (within the context of work and leading) should help you get closer to that goal, whether it's a big step like a promotion or a tiny baby step like telling your assistant to make copies.

Goal orientation is more about an idea than an action. Dedication is harder to incorporate consistently into your daily life—the key word there being consistent. If you've ever found yourself highly motivated and dedicated before but petered out after a week or two, there's one of two problems happening: one, your goal orientation is off point (e.g., you're working toward something you don't actually want), or two, you simply haven't developed the “muscle” of dedication enough.

And make no mistake about it, dedication is absolutely like a muscle in many ways. It gets easier over time—the more you commit to something and the harder you work not to abandon the goal or settle for less, the easier dedication becomes. After a while, you don't feel like you're “acting dedicated,” you're just acting like you. At that point, you've become a dedicated, goal oriented person.

Final Thoughts

The concepts of dedication and goal orientation are so important to leadership because they act as the foundation for everything else. Communication skills become easy when you know that in order to reach your goal you have to get an idea across to someone clearly. Delegation becomes a no-brainer when you need to free up time and energy to do the things you need to handle yourself. Inspiring your employees or teammates comes along with the territory because people naturally gravitate toward others that are driven and hardworking—they'll be impressed by your energy and want to help.

And confidence? Well, you'll have that in spades.

All of these other qualities that people talk about in conjunction with leadership are important for sure, but it's always been strikingly obvious that the basics of what pushes a person to achieve more, to go further, and to attain their dreams are always suspiciously omitted. Think about the successful people you know in your life—why are they successful? Is it because they're great communicators? Is it because they're great at inspiring their teammates? Those things have probably played a part in their success, but at the end of the day, it's probably because, at the core of their very being, they've developed both determination and goal orientation. And so can you—if you want it badly enough.

#how to become a better leader #qualities of a leader #good leadership skills #good leadership qualities

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i-anand-mishra · 5 years

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About Improving Work Efficiency at Workplace

You may not need to worry if you’re reading this, though, as we are bringing a few great ways to improve efficiency at work right from productivity experts.

Employees not being as productive as they should or not working hard enough may make it difficult for a business to grow. It’s one of the biggest challenges business owners come across, and if they are not experienced enough dealing with such issues, they may have a hard time tackling this issue successfully.

Get to the root of the problem

There may be a variety of reasons your employees are not performing as productively as you expect them to. Surprisingly, however, the first thing you would want to think about is whether your expectations are too high? This is common with many new business owners as they expect their employees to work as hard as themselves, which is, in all honesty, expecting a bit too much of them.

Read Also: Anand Mishra: The Man Behind The Successful Star Infranet

If your expectations are fair enough, however, you may want to monitor the work environment and find out what exactly it is that’s preventing your employees from being productive enough. Is it procrastination? If yes, getting some cool business productivity tools may be an ideal solution.

Is it that some employees are just not interested in the tasks they are made to work on? Consider replacing it with something they are more interested in.

You see, there may be a solution to every type of problem, but you need to identify the problem first in order to be able to deal with it effectively.

Allow employees to focus better

Many times, business owners and managers make their employees work on many different things at the same time. This often results in them losing their focus, and not being able to complete one or more of the tasks on time.

Over time, this affects their overall productivity big time, especially when they are again made to work on a single big task in a focused way.

So unless it’s really required, you may want to let your employees work on a few regular tasks at a time instead of trying to make them do a bit of everything. This may help ensure a better level of productivity, while they will also get much better at that particular task over time.

Teach employees how to prioritize better

One of the most effective ways of dealing with procrastination and lack of productivity better is to learn to prioritize things. And it’s very likely that some of your employees are not being much productive due to having problems with prioritizing their tasks effectively.

So make sure you have a session specifically dedicated to teaching your employees how to prioritize things better. If you manage to make your employees learn the importance of prioritizing, you may see an instant boost in worker productivity at your workplace right after the conclusion of the session.

Ensure the desks are clean and organized

As simple as it may sound, a cluttered desk at work can be a big hurdle when trying to be productive. So when employing ways to increase productivity at work, make sure one of the things you do is making your employees keep the desk clean and organized.

You may want to make them do it at least once a week so that they are working in a clean and organized environment and not a messy, clutter one. This alone may make them feel much more motivated to work in a more productive manner.

Encourage your employees to meditate

This is something that may come off as a bit unusual. However, meditation has proven to be one of the most effective tools for fighting procrastination and a lack of productivity.

So there’s certainly no harm in encouraging your employees to meditate for at least 10 to 15 minutes every day. If you think that they are not likely to do it when being at home, you may even want to keep a weekly meditation session at work.

This is especially if you’re not having much luck with any of the other methods we just walked you through. Meditation can naturally make a person feel more motivated and energetic, which can then easily translate into a much higher level of work productivity.

#efficiency at workplace #work efficiency #increase efficiency

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i-anand-mishra · 5 years

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How to Have a Productive Day?

Most of us struggle with having a productive day big time, and could certainly do with knowing a thing or two that can boost our concentration, focus and of course, productivity.

So without further ado, let’s talk about a few simple things that have been proven to be highly effective ways of being more productive and having better control over yourself.

Avoiding Electronics Until Breakfast

Most of us have a habit of diving straight into electronic stuff the moment we wake up. And it’s one of the hidden reasons for our productivity taking a hit.

Checking your emails, Facebook feed, Twitter feed, or even text messages is a very poor way to start the day. It takes away a very precious part of your morning, which sets a very negative tone for the rest of your day.

Instead, avoiding the use of any electronics when you wake up and doing some meditation and/or exercise, or even just exploring the nature outside can help you feel very positive and energetic. This can obviously lead to a significant boost to your productivity.

Read Also: Anand Mishra's Story of Touching the Peak

And if you manage to stay off electronics until at least breakfast, you will have better control over yourself to avoid succumbing to distractions you would keep facing later in the day. This alone would help you get a lot of extra time out of your day, which is essentially bonus time, as you would hardly have to put in any extra effort to achieve it.

Set Achievable and Relevant Goals for the Day

The fact that goal-setting can go a long way in helping you have a productive day is backed by some reliable research and evidence. When you give your brain some concrete goals and clear instructions to follow, it will be able to perform much better than if it just works aimlessly.

Having specific and achievable goals helps you have much better control over things, as well as instills a sense of confidence in you. It also arouses a sense of urgency that calls for something to be completed within a specified period of time or risk failing.

This simple trick will work wonders at being able to avoid distractions and getting things done in a timely, organized manner. However, something to keep in mind here is that your goals should be something that you can break down into easy steps.

If you have a goal like “I want to write an article today,” it will not trigger any of the things we mentioned above. In fact, it can actually lead to effects opposite to the benefits that goal-setting offers. That said, you would instead want to re-phrase this goal into something along the lines of “I will complete this article today by writing five sections for it while making sure that I don’t spend more than an hour on each of them.”

Cleaning Your Workspace

Well, we just talked about a couple things that you need to do as “preparation” for your day, but now comes the real, “action” part. And when it comes to work, your workspace is obviously where you will spend most of your day.

But did you know that simply keeping your workspace clean can improve your productivity and focus significantly? Yes, particular research has proved that people who worked in a clean workspace ended up out-performing those that worked in a cluttered workspace.

A cluttered workspace is usually a cause of distractions, which are obviously the last thing you would want to have when you’re trying to be productive.

No Email Until You’re Done with the Big Tasks

Perhaps the best advice you could be given when trying to have a productive day is to get right to the big, most challenging tasks of the day as soon as your workday starts. The idea behind this approach is that the biggest and most challenging tasks are usually the biggest cause of your procrastination, and they also keep getting harder to finish as the day progresses.

So what you instead do is get right to these tasks that demand the most concentration, and until you’re done with them, you stay off email as well. Why not email though, you may ask?

It’s simply because email can be a big distraction in itself, and is generally also a procrastination tool, so it’s best to not bother with it until at least you’re done with three of the biggest tasks you’re supposed to finish on that particular day.

#ways to increase productivity #how can i be more productive #productivity tips for work #become more productive

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How to Manage Difficult Employees Who Produce Great Work

Managing Difficult Employees- When coworkers are put together and asked to work and cooperate with one another, there will always be issues that arise. Personality types clash and coworkers won’t always see eye to eye on everything. These people are being asked to work with one another, day in and day out, so it’s important to understand how to manage these situations when they come up. This is a key component in developing management skills.

There are many approaches that you can take to help manage and diffuse workplace conflicts, but things can get more complicated when you have other factors involved, such as different seniority levels among battling employees, different positions, and different skill sets. Things can get really messy if the difficult employee is also your best employee. Below, we will talk about how you can go about managing difficult staff members when they happen to also produce great work.

Suggested Read: Five Stages of Negotiation

What to Do When One Employee Is Difficult

One of the key components of becoming a manager is learning about dealing with difficult employees on an individual level. When a staff member starts to create friction in the workplace, the most important thing to do is to not overreact. Everyone will have a bad day once in a while. In most cases, small conflicts will blow over and resolve themselves. Intruding on these problems may only magnify an issue that doesn’t need to be addressed at all.

If, however, a pattern of this type of behavior is established, that is when some type of intervention is required. In these instances, it is the job of manager and team leader to identify patterns of disruptive behavior and work towards putting an end to it.

Placing Expectations On The Employee

There are different ways to deal with employees like this. There should be an expectation placed on the employee to be able to listen to criticism and work towards creating and maintain a disruptive-free environment. If they are not able to make the changes that are needed to maintain harmony in the workplace, the best course of action may be to remove them from the equation entirely.

What to Do When That Employee Is Your Best Employee

This is simple so far, but what happens when they are not able to adapt to change, but their skills are invaluable to the company? This creates a whole new set of problems that are going to be a lot more difficult to deal with than simply letting the employee go.

Read Also: Star Infranet CEO Anand Mishra Embraces New Challenges in Web Development

When you are in this type of situation, there are two things that you have to balance against one another: You have to treat them differently and maintain a fair work environment.

This is a difficult tightrope to walk. If you are too blatant with it, other employees will pick up on that and it will increase conflicts in the workplace. If you don’t do enough to diffuse the situation, employees may become frustrated with the lack of involvement. Again, this can affect the workplace negatively in a variety of ways.

Giving Them Special Treatment

You won’t be able to get away with treating this type of employee the same way you treat anyone else. These types of employees will usually demand special attention and treatment one way or another. Certain employees respond better to individualized attention and they will resist being treated the same as anyone else.

If you can show them that the skill set that they bring to the company is valuable, they will likely be more willing to cooperate with their coworkers and it can make them more receptive to what you are asking them to do.

The dangers of this are that the other employees may see that they are receiving special treatment. This can cause further resentment, and it may even accelerate the problem.

Understanding the Risks of Special Treatment

When you give an employee special treatment, it tends to have a negative impact on the rest of your staff. This is magnified when that special treatment is given to a problematic employee. Other employees will view this as their company rewarding one of their coworkers for acting out and causing problems.

This will create resentment among coworkers and it could lead to bigger issues down the road. This is why the decision to give focused treatment to problem employees may not be such a good idea after all.

What We Recommend

When you find yourself in a situation like this, we think it is best to take a cautious approach towards the problematic employee. Take them aside and try to find out why they are causing the disruptions and what you can do to remedy it.

Sometimes you will find that their demands are unreasonable, or they just have the type of personality that will always invite conflict. There is a point where you have to be able to decide if they are worth keeping around or not.

We recommend giving them individualized attention and monitoring their reactions to it closely to see if that extra attention is working at all. The aim here is to show the employee that they are important to the company with the hopes of them repaying that in the form of increased cooperation. If you find that it is not making a difference and the employee is continuing to cause disruptions, you should begin looking for other solutions.

These alternative solutions may include changing the position of that employee or separating them from their coworkers. Moving them to a different department will allow you to keep them employed within your company while hopefully removing the disruptions that they have been creating.

If All Else Fails, Are They Worth It?

The ability to complete work at a high level is just one of the many factors that should be expected from a good employee. If they are not able to adjust and compromise, we would argue that they cannot be considered a great employee, even if their work comes out perfect.

Consider this before you decide to take on the risks that come with giving a troubled employee special treatment. Even though they produce great work, they may still have an overall negative impact on your company.

#developing management skills #dealing with difficult employees

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13 Employee Engagement Activities for a Better Work Environment

We've chosen the top 13 employee engagement activities that will not only bring them in-line with your company's values and goals but enhance their own sense of well-being, to create the best team possible. As an employer, you want to create a work environment that is optimal for all of the members of your company. If you want your employees to give their best and be willing to offer your company more of their potential and capabilities, you need to create a workplace approach through using employee engagement practices.

What Employee Engagement Activities Mean For Employees

The right kind of employee engagement activities means, as an employee, you get up looking forward to work, you know what you are working on, and you have some ideas of your own to share with your team. You understand your role in the workplace and have a sense of purpose, which nurtures a sense of well-being, as well as your skills and abilities.

See Also: Seeing Personal and Professional Development as They Really Are!

What Employee Engagement Activities Mean For Employers

As an employer, using employee engagement activities promotes a level of trust, respect, and positive attitudes. All of this works to improve your business. You want your employees to feel a sense of pride in their work and the company they work for. This encourages workers to go that extra mile for the company and customers.

How to Get Employees Engaged

One thing to consider, before you start planning how to get employees engaged, is that its a mindset. If you want results, you need to first look at the “why” when you plan events and activities. You need to see your employees as real individuals who have aspirations, ideas, and challenges both in and out of the workplace. Employees are not a means to an end result; they are a strong resource that you need to nurture.

We know it can be a challenge coming up with innovative employee engagement ideas, but the effort will be well worth it in the end. You can't go into it half-heartedly. You will need to monitor the impact of each activity to find employee engagement programs & activities that work best. The following are some of the top employee engagement strategy ideas.

Top 13 Employee Engagement Programs & Activities That Work

1) Get your employees involved in the planning process

If you want your team to feel like a team, get them involved in the company planning process. Every quarter or six months have a meeting where you present the company's most important issues and what is being done to resolve them. Ask them for ideas about planning ahead, reviewing any new opportunities, or how to improve the company's business strategy.

Read Also: Star Infranet Founded by Anand Mishra Revolutionizes Indian IT Industry

Why this works: You are promoting transparency in the company and offering your employees strategic insights into how things are being managed in the company. This fosters a sense of loyalty and builds a pipeline leadership that is prepared.

2) Share Knowledge

Did you know that one of the biggest expenses linked to high employee turnover rates is the loss of information that is essential to running things? By having a knowledge sharing system in place you can help lessen the impact of information loss. It also makes a great engagement driver for new employees.

Why it works: Creating a good mentorship program, where you are pairing up a newcomer with an experienced employee, along with a template program for learning, will give newcomers room to test their own methods of learning.

3) Create A Sharing Space

Sharing knowledge is one of the best employee engagement ideas, and creating a knowledge sharing space can nurture this even more. Quite often, teams will be so focused on their own projects that they lose track of what is going on elsewhere in the company. Every month or two have an open sharing space that allows each team to give updates on their progress and any key learning points. Make sure to keep it creative so it doesn't turn into a boring mandatory meeting people dread. Have a theme each meeting, or make it a special lunch engagement where you order food in.

Why this works: Having teams know what is happening will help them to evolve more quickly, and the shared knowledge and learning experiences can help other teams who may be stuck.

4) Promote Group Collaboration

If you are looking for innovative employee engagement ideas that encourage teamwork, why not try a plant seed race? Get a pack of seed for a plant that will bear fruit or flowers and sow them all at the same time, in the same way. Pass the seed trays out to your employees to nurture. The first team or individual whose plant bears fruit or a flower first is the winner.

Why this works: It gets groups to work together while also sharing in the responsibility of caring for their plant. It works best when plants are given to teams, groups, or departments.

5) Financial Transparency

If you want to build trust in your company, give them monthly or quarterly updates of the company's financial statements. You can show them how all of their efforts have helped, as well as set strong objectives for the next few months. This will help everyone get involved in meeting these objectives.

Why this works: It not only builds a level of trust between your company and its employees. It also gives them a sense of responsibility for the company's success.

6) Make New Opportunities Exciting

When new opportunities for advancement open up you should let your employees know. Communicating these on a regular basis, and making the opportunities exciting will have them looking forward to what comes next, as well as gives them something to strive towards.

Why this works: If you have exciting opportunities to offer your employees, chances are they will choose to stay rather than be poached by other companies.

7) Learning Opportunities

Nothing makes a worker feel worse about them than not being able to grow their skills. This is why it's important that have opportunities for development and knowledge. Did you know that one of the top reasons employees quit their jobs is due to a lack of learning prospects?

It's important to assess the preferences and needs of your employees and set-up classes or learning time. If you are wondering how to get employees engaged and motivated to learn, make it rewarding by giving them a reward for passing their class.

Why this works: By investing time and resources into their learning, you are giving them the skills to do a better job.

8) Healthy Competition

As an employer, promoting the benefits of a healthy lifestyle and over well-being is important. A fun way that you can do this is by having a company sports or Olympics day. This gets everyone involved and lets them get to know each other in a non-work environment. It also gets those desk-bound employees up and moving.

Why this works: Its a great opportunity for people with the same interests to connect in a positive way.

9) Get Them On-Board

On boarding is an essential way for new employees to assimilate and learn information about your company. It can also be a bit mind-numbing and nerve-wracking for some if done in the wrong way. Try making the onboard experience fun. Take boring company information and turn it into trivia in a way that gets them using systems and tools. You can even bring inexperienced employees that have been with the company for a while give answers for newcomer queries

Why this works: Making the experience fun can help retain information, and using older employees helps them and the newcomers get to know each other better.

10) Create A Newsletter Or Magazine

A really good way to keep your employees in the loop is to have an employee focuses newsletter or magazine. Add fun columns, opportunities, news, featured stories, and even an employee of the month. You can do this as an online magazine monthly or a printed quarterly one.

Why this works: It keeps everyone well informed of what's happening in the company and gets them involved in the creative process.

11) Giving Back To The Community

If you want to create a positive mental attitude in the workplace, which is a big part of employee engagement practices, getting your company involved in a charity or social initiative is a great idea.

Have everyone give ideas for a cause that they want to support and makes sure its something personal that counts for them. Whether its time of money that is being donated, it gives a sense of accomplishment and gets everyone working towards a mutual goal.

Why this works: Giving back to one's community or a good cause not only creates that positive mental attitude, it fosters loyalty and pride in one's company.

12) Have a TEDx-like Event

TEDx is a series of events where speakers and groups come together to share knowledge, innovated ideas, and plans that focus on moving society forward. So why not create your own similar event? You can have guest speakers, motivational coaches, sessions of sharing experiences and learning. Its something that you can even incorporate into another main event you are doing.

Why this works: It brings people from different areas of the business together, gives them a chance to learn, pick the brains of experts in the field, and share innovative ideas of their own.

13) Creativity Challenges

For something a bit lighter, why not have a creativity challenge using something like LEGO, or Play-Doh to boost employee engagement? Give different teams an opportunity to create the most innovative sculpture based on the theme of the week. Or you could let them choose. At the end of the competition (whether it lasts a day or a week) you can their fellow co-workers judge the pieces and give out a prize to the winners.

Why this works: During the creation phase, it gets groups to share ideas, get advice, and improve on their designs, opening up discussions that can be quite fun.

Make Employee Engagement Activities Happen

You need to be committed to taking action where employee engagement activities are concerned, not just wait for them to happen on their own. If you want to benefit from all that employee engagement has to offer, then you need to commit to taking action. This means making sure that all of your employees understand the vision of the company, its strategies, the direction its taking, as well as their own individual roles that help achieve those goals.

#employee engagement practices #employee engagement strategy ideas #how to get employees engaged

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i-anand-mishra · 5 years

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Five Stages of Negotiation - From Preparation to Agreement

Negotiation require methodology. The expert negotiator invests more time in preparing a negotiation than an average one, and that’s why he takes the time to think in advance a set of arguments with which to defend his position and downplay his concerns and expectations.

Basic Negotiation Skills Exercises

Negotiation is a skill that comes handy in almost any life situation. You negotiate when you are trying to motivate your son to do his homework. You negotiate when you and your friends are deciding on whose turn is it to be in charge of the grill on your next gathering. And you even negotiate with yourself when you are saying “no” to that piece of cake on a Monday because you are on a diet and you are supposed to eat perfectly clean up to Saturday.

Suggested Read: KPI Digital Marketing: Which ones should you track?

But even though negotiation is ubiquitous, in this article we’ll focus on it from a business point of view. Without a doubt, being a skilled negotiator can be a very valuable asset in many business situations so putting in work to improve negotiation skills can’t be underestimated

The Five Stages of Negotiation

1- Preparation:

Without preparation, there’s no result. Preparation increases your flexibility, imposes rigor and forces you to follow certain automatic patterns, or basic negotiation skills, that get better with time and practice.

The more automatic patterns you have at your disposal, the more ready you’ll be to face the many unforeseen events so typical of negotiations. In this stage, you need to define and note down which are the points that need to be discussed, the milestones you want to reach in the negotiation, the concessions you are willing to make and the limits below which you are not willing to go.

Read Also: Anand Mishra Is A Motivation For All Aspiring Entrepreneurs

Key questions to ask during the preparation stage:

What do you need from the other part? In which order of priority?

Being a good negotiation involves good preparation and practicing negotiation skills exercises. How do you plan to prepare yourself for the negotiation at hand? What’s the minimal amount of time that you need to devote to this particular negotiation?

Are you B.A.T.N.A calibrated? (B.A.T.N.A stands for Best Alternative to Negotiate an Agreement)

2- Exploration:

This stage involves researching, exploring and establishing a dialogue with the other part, so it can be considered part of the pre-negotiation process. Because in order to propose (stage number 3) your first need to know what the other part wants.

The dialogue and the meetings will allow finding the common ground between both of you and uncover what matters most to each part as well as discover the motivations or inhibitions of the parts involved.

I- Calibrate your B.A.T.N.A:

Once you have determined your B.A.T.N.A during the preparation stage and you RP (Reserve Price) you have all you need to know which is the lowest offer you can accept in the negotiation. In the exploration stage, you need to find out which is the highest price you think you could get and find out the RP of the other part.

II- Calculate the RP of the other part.

3- Proposal:

A proposal is a provisional offer that one of the parts makes. The proposal gives an answer to the following question: What does the other part want and in which order of priority?

Creating an anchor (price) in the initial proposal is useful for finding out the BATNA of the counterpart, setting the negotiation rhythm and building a foundation for the next rounds of negotiation. If this wasn’t the case, because the anchor is below or above the RP, then the correct answer is to counterbalance its influence with an aggressive counter proposal and pointing out the need to work together to close the distance in the negotiation.

The negotiation progresses when both parts exchange realistic proposals and it stagnates if what is being exchanged are arguments, opinions, and emotions instead.

4- Exchange:

This is a key moment in the negotiation, where it is of utmost important being able to listen and interpret every word the other part says in order to detect flexibility or weakness.

There is always a need for hiding behind any proposal. Concessions are a tool to close the gap between us and the other part and it’s only possible to negotiate if concessions are made.

In the exchange, the rule of thumb is asking before giving. Conditions before offers.

Every word said during a negotiation has a why, and the data they reveal can be either conscious or unconscious.

At this stage, a negotiator must always be taking into account the following:

Review of the milestones reached in each of the stages.

Highlighting the points in common between both parts.

If there is still a considerable gap between the parts, it is important to point out the common ground, no matter how insignificant it still seems to be.

Avoid reaching isolated agreements. Always take into account all the petitions of the other part in order to evaluate their priorities.

Realize that there is a correlation between a high aspiration level and a good result.

In other words, if you ask for more from the get-go, it’s very likely that you’ll end up with more.

5- Agreement:

The goal of every negotiation is to close a deal. The negotiation goes on until the very last second before an agreement is reached.

Written agreements usually reduce the risks. In any negotiation that involves plenty of data and specifications, it is crucial to put into the paper the most important points discussed until the definite documents arrive.

#negotiation skills exercises #pre negotiation process #basic negotiation skills #improve negotiation skills

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