“An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest” – Benjamin Franklin

According to the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD), companies with better training investments enjoy a 24% higher profit margin.

Keep this statistic at the forefront and consider the benefits you will obtain if employee development didn’t stop once the training period was over.

Employee development, implemented via an employee development plan, gives an organization the means to continually invest in their employees so they bloom in their role. 🌺

Employee development looks to improve employee skills, knowledge, and experience to meet their professional and personal goals. An employee development plan is the set of actions guiding the employee to meet these goals, with back-and-forth collaboration between the employee and the manager.

The research division of Miller Helman Group found that investing as little as $500 in employee development yielded a 46.1% employee performance increase. It is reasons like this that we at Process Street take employee development seriously.

In this article, you will learn what an employee development plan is and how top CEOs use employee development to succeed in their role. On that note, we will also provide you with our free Employee Development Plan Template to help you get started.

Sound good?

Click on the relevant subheader below to jump to your section of choice. Alternatively, scroll and learn all we have to say in terms of employee development.

• Employee Development Plan Template
• What is an employee development plan? Professional vs employee development
• Employee development in action: Rose Marcario, CEO of Patagonia
• Employee development plan benefits
• What should an employee development plan include?

Ready to nurture your best team? Let’s get started!

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This is a guest post by Adela Belin, a content marketer, and blogger at Writers Per Hour. She is passionate about sharing stories with the hope to make a difference in people’s lives and contribute to their personal and professional growth.

After hundreds of applications, weeding out the good from the bad, and a series of interviews, you’ve finally found the right candidate for the role – you extend the offer, initiate the paperwork and that’s it, your work here is done.

But is it?

If your company’s recruitment process is as simple as the above, then you’re missing out on an important step – onboarding.

Neglecting your employee onboarding processes is something you cannot afford to do, especially in a remote set up.

“Employee onboarding, also known as new-employee orientation or assimilation, is the process by which an organization assimilates its new employees.” – SHRM, Managing the Employee Onboarding and Assimilation Process

In this Process Street article, we take a deep dive into a specific type of onboarding process. We will explain how you can perfect your remote onboarding process, wherein a new hire undergoes a set of formal meetings, briefings, socialization, training, and a series of other coordinated activities to get familiar with the remote job role, responsibilities, and overall company culture.

Having an effective employee onboarding process builds loyalty and engagement, improves productivity, and delivers a positive work experience. With that said, you can see how taking the time to perfect your onboarding processes is vital to nurture talent within your remote team.

If you’d rather skip ahead, just click on the relevant subheaders below. Alternatively, scroll down to read all we have to say regarding remote onboarding processes.

• Remote onboarding process: An employee onboarding checklist
• The importance of onboarding for a remote team
• Why you should use a process for remote employee onboarding
• How to onboard your remote employees
• Workflow automation: Use Process Street to automation your remote employee onboarding processes

Let’s get started!
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Following a pre-planned meeting agenda can decrease meeting time by 80%.

Despite this, less than half (37%) of U.S. meetings follow a set agenda.

Why, when the time savings of doing so are substantial? When time = money, it doesn’t take a genius to visualize the knock-on effects this has to an organization’s bottom-line.

Using a Meeting Minutes Template will establish processes to clearly define and set the meeting agenda before the meeting has begun, saving you both time and money.

In addition, a Meeting Minutes Template offers legal protection, provides meeting structure, documents state ownership, drives action, serves as a reference point, helps avoid repetition, and offers a platform for open communication.

Sounds good right?

So good that the content creation team here at Process Street give you this comprehensive guide, so you can effectively record meeting minutes in your business and line of work. You are provided with our free Meeting Minutes Template, to be used in conjunction with 3 more top meeting process templates.

Click on the relevant subheader below to hop to that section. Alternatively, read all to discover our secrets for how you can become a pro meetings note taker 🤓.

• Meeting Minutes Template
• What meeting minutes are, how to take them, and why they’re important
• How to take effective meeting minutes (using Process Street)
• Use Process Street to perfect your meeting processes

Let’s get stuck in!
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How do you feel about your life?

A deep question to kick-off this article, especially considering we hardly know each other. However, when it comes to self-care and designing a self-care plan, it is a question of great significance.

According to the 2018 Organization for Economic Cooperations and Development (OECD) report, 18% of U.S. citizens live in relative income poverty, despite a general trend of citizens working longer and longer hours. In addition, factors such as housing affordability, household wealth, and overcrowding rate are showing signs of consistent deterioration.

It doesn’t take an expert to infer that these trends aren’t improving the average life-quality. As such, the 2019 World Happiness Report ranked the U.S. 19th, a decline from previous surveys.

To jump to the point, over the past ~10 years, U.S. citizens have become less, and less happy.

A concerning trend that diminishes societal resilience to crises, as we witnessed with COVID-19.

Something needs to be done!

Swinging for change to steer those depressing trends around, the team here at Process Street have created quality, effective and actionable free self-care resources, ready for you to hop in and use right away.

Use our self-care checklists as part of your own personal self-care journey, or distribute these checklists throughout your team to create strong, employee-focused organizational support.

These resources are carefully crafted, drawing from novel and up-to-date research into human happiness, indicating the best habits and self-care behaviors you should adopt for a better quality of life. Check out our Daily Self-Care Checklist below for a taster.

Click here to access our Daily Self-Care Checklist!

Click on the links provided below to jump to the relevant template.

• Daily Self-Care Checklist
• Annual Self-Care Planner
• Morning Routine Checklist
• Evening Routine Checklist
• Tony Robbins: Morning Routine
• Achieving a Work-Life Balance
• Backpacking Checklist
• Camping Checklist
• Travel Checklist
• Big Personality Test (Structure Template)
• DISC Assessment (Structure Template)
• Budget Template
• Daily Budget Template
• Daily Routine Checklist
• Daily Schedule Template
• Fitness Planner
• Lisa A. Romano: Overcoming Negative Self-Talk
• Self-Evaluation Performance Review Template
• SMART Goal Setting Checklist
• Weekly Meal Planner
• Work Anxiety Resolution Checklist
• KonMari Checklist

To begin this article, we will explain what a self-care plan is and the perks that come from having one. We will explain how you can design a personal and printable self-care plan that will give you benefits such as improved productivity, enhanced self-esteem, better physical and emotional health, and all-in-all a better life quality.

There is nothing to lose, so what are you waiting for?

Click on the relevant subheader below to jump to that section. Alternatively, scroll down to find out how you can be happier and improve your wellbeing.

• Self-care plan: What it is and why it is important
• 22 free self-care checklists
• Use Process Street to devise an effective, personal, and printable self-care plan

Let’s set a new trend, for a happier and healthier society.
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Studies show great employee onboarding improves employee retention by 82%. When considering the average cost of replacing an employee is ~$30,000, you will recognize how vital good onboarding processes are.

Despite this, 88% of organizations don’t onboard well. This is a major problem burning holes in a lot of pockets and a reason why sales onboarding is so important.

In this Process Street article, you’ll learn what sales onboarding is and the benefits good onboarding brings to a business. You will find out key skills to be identified and nurtured during the sales onboarding process before being granted access to Process Street’s Sales Onboarding Checklist for free. This checklist is uniquely designed to help you develop effective sales onboarding processes.

This article has been written to assist in the creation of a leading sales team. To do that we give you our top 11 template resources. You can click on the links below to be directed to these templates, or scroll down to find out more.

1. Sales Onboarding Checklist
2. Diversity Hiring Process
3. Ari Meisel’s How to Streamline the Hiring Process Guide
4. Code of Conduct Policy Adherence Process
5. Employee Background Check
6. Employee Developmental Plan Template
7. Employee Satisfaction Survey
8. Performance Management
9. Performance Review Template
10. Training Plan Template
11. Sales Manager Job Description Template

Click on the relevant subheader below to jump to the section of choice. Or, as recommended, scroll down to read all we have to say regarding sales onboarding.

• What is onboarding (in the context of sales)?
• Case studies: Companies with the best onboarding programs
• Use Process Street for your sales onboarding (& more)!

Let’s get started, shall we?
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Lunch was over.

I was walking back to our senior common room with my friends. When we reached Foundation House, we found all of the students and teachers standing outside while the fire brigade trailed in.

There was no smoke or visible flames but I saw three friends that we’d left in the common room off to one side of the car park looking sheepish.

Turns out that they’d managed to make a pseudo-napalm launcher out of a tube of Pringles, a rubber band, spray deodorant, a lighter, and a supply of biro casings.

My friends were smart but, as you might’ve guessed, had no common sense.

Whether you have students setting off fire alarms with molten flaming plastic or have a much larger accident, it’s important to know that your safety measures are up to standard.

$25 billion in damages were caused by fire in 2018 in the US alone, which should tell you how vital it is to catch fires and deal with them early before they need additional help to contain.

That’s why fire extinguisher inspections are so important.

In this post I’ll cover:

• What is a fire extinguisher inspection?
• How often do fire extinguishers need inspecting?
• Who can inspect fire extinguishers?
• Perform free monthly inspections with Process Street

You’ll also get access to Process Street’s free Fire Extinguisher Inspection Checklist in the very next section of this article!

Let’s get started.
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This is a guest post by Derek Jones from Deputy, a global workforce management platform for employee scheduling, timesheets, and communication. With a focus on Emerging Retail, Derek helps business owners and workforce leaders simplify employment law compliance, keep labor costs in line, and build award-winning workplaces. Derek has over 16 years’ experience in delivering data-driven sales and marketing strategies to SaaS companies like MarketSource and Griswold Home Care.

One of the many factors that can help guarantee the success and growth of a business today is employee performance.

Most organizations know this. Therefore, they want employees that are as efficient as possible. However, that is easier said than done, especially in industries where activities often run at odd hours or even 24/7.

For such industries (like healthcare, hospitality, and retail in particular), one of the most important things they’ll need to manage is shift work scheduling.

Through optimization, the task of scheduling shift work will have a structure to minimizes employee burnout and improve overall performance.

Employees that work in an enabling environment have a higher chance to properly complete all important tasks – on schedule.

In view of that, in this Process Street article, we will:

• Discuss some of the issues and challenges that surround shift work.
• Take a look at up-to-date research regarding employee performance.
• Summarize 3 shift-work goals you can incorporate to optimize your shift work schedule.
• Give top tips on shift work scheduling to maximize employee productivity and retention.

Click on the relevant subheaders below to jump to that section, alternatively scroll down to read all, and find out how you can optimize your shift work schedules today!

• Schedule optimization: Using BPM in shift work
• Shift work scheduling: The top 3 shift work issues
• How do common shift work issues impact employee performance?
• Schedule optimization: 3 goals to optimize your shift schedule
• Shift work scheduling: Scheduling tips and tricks for shift work

Let’s jump right to it!
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The global economic cost of anxiety and depression is $1 trillion per year.

That is a substantial cost to an issue that is predominantly ignored.

1 in 5 adults in the U.S. will experience a mental health issue each year, with 1 in 6.8 people experiencing mental health problems in the workplace on a weekly timescale.

Work anxiety is one such mental health condition which evokes a sizable economic cost from lowered employee wellbeing and sick leave.

In this Process Street article we explain what work anxiety is – and in that sense, anxiety in general. We then provide information on how you can take action on anxiety from a personal level and at a company-wide level.

Click on the relevant subheaders below to jump to that section. Alternatively, scroll down and read all we have to say.

• Work anxiety: Mental Health Risk Assessment
• Work Anxiety: Anxious meaning
• Anxiety explained: Understanding anxiety and the biological causes
• Work anxiety: Take action on anxiety, what you can do as an individual
• Work anxiety: Take action on anxiety, what you can do as a company
• Work anxiety: Take action with Process Street

Capes at the ready, let’s conquer workplace anxiety!
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There are countless ways employees can be thrown off their A-game – from anxiety to altercations at work, pandemics to problems at home.

But how can employers improve the mental, emotional, and physical well-being of their staff?

By implementing an employee assistance program (EAP).

According to the International Employee Assistance Professionals Association, 97% of U.S. companies with over 5,000 employees already have an EAP program in place. Small and midsize businesses realize the huge benefits of EAP programs too, as 75% of businesses with 250 – 1,000 employees also make use of EAP programs.

Hasn’t your business instigated an EAP program already?

If not, it’s about time you thought about it.

By reading this post, you’ll understand what exactly an EAP program is, the history of it, why it’s beneficial for employers and employees alike, and even gain access to EAP templates created by Process Street. Make your way through the following sections to get clued-up:

• What is an employee assistance program (EAP)?
• The history of the employee assistance program
• Employee assistance program benefits
• Process Street’s EAP program templates
• Use Process Street to ensure your workforce are safe, secure, and stable

If you’re in a rush, here are the links to the free EAP templates:

• Critical Incident Stress Management Checklist
• Achieving Work-Life Balance Checklist
• Work Anxiety Resolution Checklist
• Daily Schedule Template
• Office Conflict Resolution Checklist
• Lisa A. Romano: Overcoming Negative Self-Talk
• Mental Health Risk Assessment Checklist
• SMART Goal Setting Checklist
• Records Disposal Checklist

There’s a lot at stake, so let’s get started with the rest of the post. ⏳

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Can you prove your team’s performance?

How do you know for certain that nothing is being missed?

The answer is simple; you perform an internal audit.

We here at Process Street know how difficult it can be to keep track of your internal workings. Short of documenting and tracking everything (which can be a hassle) it’s easy to lose track of the risks posed to your organization.

That’s ignoring how hard it can be to track whether your teams are performing their duties correctly.

That’s why this post will dive into everything you need to know about internal audits. These are practices that let you get an objective assessment of various elements of your company, such as this ISO 9001 process.

We’ll cover:

• What is an internal audit?
• Types of audits
• Benefits of internal audits
• Internal auditing examples
• Use Process Street to run your internal audits

Let’s dive in.
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