While 52% of senior managers feel the annual engagement survey is an accurate assessment, 48% of employees do not. Factor in that 1/4 of managers think the surveys are pointless and you have a problem.

Annual surveys encompass such a long period of time that it becomes difficult to accurately measure which initiatives have been effective and which are not. 

In addition, it limits the ability to make changes to engagement and motivation policies as they need to happen and before it’s too late to correct any potential damage. 

An employee pulse survey is useful as a tool for monitoring engagement, but it can also be applied to other situations. A pulse survey might be used to evaluate new procedures, strategies, and business practices to measure their effectiveness. 

Paired with annual surveys, the pulse survey is a powerful tool that can keep your goals targeted and productive. 

This post for Process Street will cover everything you need to know about employee pulse surveys – and provide a template you can start using immediately with your free Process Street account.

• Employee Pulse Survey template
• What’s the difference between a pulse survey & an engagement survey?
• Pulse survey best practices
• Optimize employee engagement with this free pulse survey template

Let’s dive in!

Continue Reading

Perhaps you’ve heard about The Great Resignation, the record number of employees quitting their jobs. In September of 2021, 4.4 million Americans quit their jobs. Each industry has experienced a varying level of employees leaving their positions, though certain ones, like the foodservice industry, were particularly hard hit.

In this post for Process Street, We’ll explore this phenomenon affecting the working world and look at some ways your business can continue to onboard top talent despite the shortages of workers. 

• The Great Resignation: Causes & effects
• How companies can win the talent war

Continue Reading

Employee churn costs about $60,000 per employee, without taking into consideration the indirect costs such as lost business, lower morale, lost productivity, and the time and resources spent on candidate selection before hiring someone.

As a manager, preventing that from happening should be one of your top priorities. You can’t have a productive, successful team if you’re always training new members. 

This Process Street post will cover why churn happens — specifically among Millennials and Gen Z in the post-pandemic job market — and what you can do to prevent it. 

• Are we heading towards the Great Regret?
• Employee churn: Prevention is better than a cure
• Improve recruitment & prevent churn with process automation

Let’s get started.

Continue Reading

When thinking of the world’s most popular brands, which ones come to mind? In Forbes’ annual list of the World’s Most Valuable Brands, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and (META) Facebook are identified as some of the top-performing companies, with earnings being a key indicator of their success.

But while revenue may be a significant proof point of industry viability, how you approach your customer experience is another metric that gauges the future prosperity of a business. And one that has an equally significant say in how your business fares in the future.  

In Aircall’s report, Putting Your Customer First, we found that more than 50% of customers stopped supporting a business after a poor customer experience. This shows just how impactful a negative customer experience can be, undoing potentially years of customer loyalty in a single interaction. 

On the flip side, though, a positive customer experience can make a profound impression on people and go a long way to securing brand loyalty in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

Either way, customer experience and going all out to impress your audience is one area you cannot afford to neglect. 

To make sure your strategy is as impactful as possible, this Process Street post will cover these five tried-and-tested ways to improve your customer experience below: 

• Be responsive to customer needs
• Provide multiple communication channels
• Follow up with your customers
• Value customer insights – good & bad
• Promote customer testimonials
• Perfecting your customer-first strategy

Continue Reading

Without a well-structured policy, lack of engagement and motivation can slowly eat away and undermine your company and your workforce unnoticed until it’s too late. 

So, let’s talk about why engagement and motivation are so important and how to implement good policies without utterly alienating your workforce. Here at Process Street, that’s just the sort of thing we do best. 

Check it out:

• Are employee engagement & motivation the same thing?
• Deloitte’s 5 Elements That Drive Engagement
• The Zinger Pyramid of Employee Engagement Actions
• The Aon Hewitt Employee Engagement Model
• Using modern process management to build effective policies

Let’s dive in!

Continue Reading

If you’ve been looking at ways to make your content delivery processes more efficient, you’re not alone.

There are tons of articles on content creation, even more on creative processes, but hardly any articles focused on improving content processes.

This article is all about addressing that imbalance, and getting your content systems coordinated to improve your team’s content efficiency, quality, and delivery. 

By the end, we want to share the exact process we used to:

• Drop our delivery time for content upload by 50%
• Increase our team productivity by 35%
• Improve client satisfaction by 20%
• Enlarge work capacity by 15%

It’s one thing to tinker around the edges, making small improvements here and there. It’s another to re-think and radically change the way you deliver your content. Developing your small business mindset and continuously evaluating your processes are the key to improving your overall content marketing efforts this year.

This article will walk you through every step we took to do that using Process Street’s automated workflows.

• Rethink your delivery process: Give your content marketing a workout
• Content marketing delivery: How we broke the system
• The right tool for the job: How do I get my processes in line?
• How did this one process impact our productivity?
• The future is processes: Cut out distractions and do what you love

⚙️ If you just came for the template, go ahead and nab it here.

Click here to add this workflow to your free Process Street account!

Let’s get to it!

Continue Reading

“Where do you see yourself in five years?”

We’ve all heard this question before in interviews. It’s one that most people (myself included) aren’t particularly fond of.

The reason – if we’re being wholly and truly honest with ourselves – is because of the answer: I don’t know. You know it. I know it. The person asking you the question knows it.

Still, we like to pretend we do. To do this, we need to plan. To make a plan, we need to know where we want to go, or at least a general direction we intend to go in. Coincidentally, that’s exactly what this Process Street post is about. Who’d have thought, right?

Let’s talk about career progression plans: who needs them, who makes them, and where to even start. I even built a solid template you can use to get started – and you know I make the best templates around.

• Career progression facts & fictions
• The 6 steps of career planning
• The (free!) Career Progression Plan Template
• Where do you see yourself in 5 years?

⚙️ If you just came for the template, click here to see it.

Click here to add this workflow to your free Process Street account!

Okay, then. Let’s get to work.

Continue Reading

Grace Lau is the Director of Growth Content at Dialpad, an AI-powered cloud communication platform and one of the industry’s top cloud PBX solutions for better and easier team collaboration. She has over 10 years of experience in content writing and strategy. Currently, she is responsible for leading branded and editorial content strategies, partnering with SEO and Ops teams to build and nurture content. You can find her on LinkedIn.

Ikigai, which means “a reason for being”, is a Japanese word that has gently risen to the forefront of the business world, like a whale coming up to greet the dawn. It is a welcome wave of thoughtfulness and quiet in the face of a usually loud, blustering, profit-at-all-costs model.

The Ikigai concept beckons to us, asking us to consider the question: What do I get up for in the mornings? For most of us, the answer is not “money”.

Money, for most people, is a means to an end. If you ask people at the end of their lives what they wish they could have done differently, the answers are not usually “I wish I’d made more money”. They’re along the lines of “I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends”.

Heart matters, both in our personal lives and in business. It seems a bit short-sighted to assume otherwise or to see business as totally apart from our personal values. The industrial revolution saw people exchanging their labor for money and becoming increasingly alienated from the joys of pouring their hearts into their creative endeavors and trade. They became cogs in the wheel of the factory that is capitalism.

We still have a top-down structure in many work environments today, but some companies have begun to embrace a horizontal knowledge approach, where managers and employees are on the same level and treated as equals. The more we learn about what makes employees happy, hopefully, the more we will move towards those models, of which the Ikigai concept is a prime example.

While ikigai is generally applied to finding purpose in your personal life, this Process Street post will look at how the same 4 concepts can be applied to your business as well:

• Ikigai for business: The need for meaning & purpose at work
• Ikigai business concept #1: How are you helping the world?
• Ikigai business concept #2: What lights your fire?
• Ikigai business concept #3: What are you good at?
• Ikigai business concept #4: How can you generate profit?
• Look inwards for your purpose – even in business

Make sure you’re sitting comfortably. Let’s begin.
Continue Reading

I’ll be honest: Before I was assigned to write this post, I had no idea what the term “reboarding” meant.

As it turns out, I actually did – I just didn’t have a word for it.

Reboarding is what you do when an employee comes back after an extended absence (12 weeks or more), changes role due to promotion or restructuring, or your company undergoes pretty much any major change where employees will need to adapt to new policies, procedures, and processes.

I know what you’re thinking. Reboarding. Onboarding. It’s all the same thing, right? How complicated can it be?

But reboarding is not the same as onboarding.

They’re both equally important and similar in a number of ways, but the structure, focus, and obstacles of each will be very different.

For example, everyone knows new employees need some sort of onboarding process. Not nearly as many realize that reboarding is:

1. Something that needs to happen for even the most experienced employee;
2. Something that needs to happen even if the employee is returning to the same role;
3. Even a thing managers should do.

Seriously. You know what it’s like coming back from just a couple weeks of vacation. Loads to catch up on, overflowing messages, sometimes new people you’ve never seen before but everyone is already best friends with.

If things can change that much in 3 weeks, how much do you think they’ll change in 3 months?

Yeah. That’s what I thought.

So in this Process Street post, let’s look into exactly what you need to do to make this whole return-to-work thing easier. And don’t worry – I’ve broken it down to just 5 things, so for once you won’t have to slog through one 4,000 words just to get to the good stuff. My editor’s happy about that, too.

These are the things you need to know:

• When reboarding happens
• Essentials for reboarding your employees
• Prioritizing organizational culture during the reboarding process

Let’s get you up to speed, yeah?
Continue Reading

Jenna Bunnell is the Senior Manager for Content Marketing at Dialpad, an AI-incorporated cloud-hosted unified communications and call center IVR systems that provide valuable call details for business owners and sales representatives. She is driven and passionate about communicating a brand’s design sensibility and visualizing how content can be presented in creative and comprehensive ways. Find her on LinkedIn.

Personal user manuals are indispensable tools when it comes to working with new employees and perfecting your new employee onboarding process.

They are written guides that explain to others how best to work with you. They can either be targeted towards people working under you or people working with you.

Personal user manuals are full of information for other employees. They promote team collaboration by making others aware of your personal working style, and allowing them to work best with this.

They’re simple to write and maintain, and their purpose is to help you avoid giving multiple inductions to various new employees.

Having a written document is also useful as it’s information that your employees can come back to time and again—as opposed to a spoken induction when things can be easily forgotten.

If you’re working in a team that extends across multiple countries, there’s no need to plan multiple inductions to fit into everyone’s schedule. A personal user manual can be used instead, saving time, and allowing effective collaboration regardless of different time zones.

You may well be wondering: How on Earth do I get started with such an undertaking? Well, here are some steps you can take to create and maintain a solid personal user manual.

This post for Process Street will outline the 10 focus areas to include in your personal user manual:

• Choose a format for your personal user manual
• Personal user manual 101: Introduce yourself
• Outline your expectations of your team as a manager
• How to work with me: The essentials
• Scheduling: When are you accessible?
• What’s your working style?
• Troubleshooting your new manager
• Your user manual isn’t all about you
• Conflict resolution and you: Everything you need to know
• Personal user manual: The next iteration
• Check that your personal user manual works

Off we go!
Continue Reading