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Make It Effective… Improve Communication Within Your Organization!
Think about your family, organizations you volunteer with, the company you work for. How would you rate communication in each of these groups? Do the members of each of these groups communicate effectively with each other, or is something lacking?

We learn to communicate from a very early age, learning to listen and speak as an infant and later on learning to read and write. However, even though we learn to communicate very early in our lives, many people have difficulty communicating effectively.

As an HR professional, one of the complaints I hear most often from employees and leadership within organizations is that there is a lack of effective communication. This lack of communication in the workplace often leads to added stress and tension among employees, loss of productivity, a decrease in employee morale, and turnover.
- Businesses with effective communication are 50% more likely to have lower employee turnover. (ClearCompany)
- 33% of employees said a lack of open, honest communication has the most negative impact on employee morale (HerdWisdom)
- Miscommunication costs even smaller companies of 100 employees an average of $420,000 annually. (Top Ten Email Blunders that Cost Companies Money, Deborah Hamilton)
So how can you improve communication within your organization?
1. Keep employees informed. Make sure employees know what is going on in the organization. If your company just made a major policy change or won a new client contract, make sure your employees know. Send out a communication to all employees, have managers announce it during team meetings, or post it in the employee break room.
2. Provide training to your leadership. Good communication starts from the top. If your leaders aren’t effective communicators, that will trickle down to the rest of your employees. Make sure leaders have the training and tools needed to communicate effectively.
3. Listen to and address employee concerns. If employees come to you with concerns about communication, take those concerns seriously and address them. Whether the concern is regarding a single employee or a department, determine how you as a leader can help improve communications.
4. Remember, it’s not always what you say but how you say it. Communication involves a lot more than just what you say. Body language and tone play an important part as well. So be sure you’re conveying the message you intend to convey through your body language and tone.
5. Use the appropriate method of communication. Make sure you’re using the appropriate method of communication to get your message across. Is the message best communicated via email, phone, or in person? This may vary depending on what message your conveying as well as who your audience is.
For information on Communication Training, as well as other training topics we offer, click here.
March 13, 2018
3 Things to Consider Before Your Employee Rewards System Goes Bad
She looks like a precious angel doesn’t she? They both do, actually, but that’s my three year old, loving on my niece before her baptism. Picture perfect.

Flash forward to lunch after the baptism at my brother and sister-in-law’s home. My husband and I refused to make a special lunch for our kids, telling them that could eat what was prepared. Beef tenderloin, homemade rolls, green bean and roasted potatoes. For this 30 something, the lunch was a major treat. For a three year old, who just wants a peanut butter and jelly, not so much.

But, if we had possibly succeeded for a split second in parenting by not giving in to our kids’ desires, we failed with our motivation tactic to get her to eat it (which we do quite often). We provided a carrot or should I say, ice cream and cookies. If you eat what’s on your plate, we told her, you can have dessert.

She fought us on it, tried to negotiate with us on it, and tried to hold out longer than we could. But we stuck to it, and she eventually brought her plate to me clean.

“Can I have my ice cream and cookie now?” she asked. She looked about as precious of an angel asking this as she did in the picture.

Fooled me.

A few minutes later, my brother’s good friend comes in with handful of small pieces of beef tenderloin in his hand and throws it away.

“I found this under the baby bouncer,” he said. “Did someone drop it?”

Angel turned devil. She had hidden her food, not eaten it. And downed her ice cream and cookie in record time less she be found out.

Total backfire.

Are you incentivizing bad behavior with your employee rewards system?

How many times have the rewards and recognition programs at your company backfired?

At the least, they just don’t motivate people towards the results you are trying to achieve.

At the most, it causea people to lie and cheat. Three year olds do it for ice cream and cookies. Teachers and educational leaders have been known to do it achieve bonuses and improved reputation. Just ask Atlanta.

So before you go incentivizing certain behaviors at your company, think first about the following:

1. Do you really need an extrinsic reward to motivate behavior? In most cases, intrinsic motivators- things that are naturally satisfying to someone- instead of a extrinsic motivation- things that people do to receive a reward or to avoid punishment- are better long term motivators. The best way to do this is to link employees to a bigger purpose and mission and hire people that naturally link their purpose to the organization’s. A really good example of this can be found in Adam Grant’s study related to call center employees. (If you’d rather skip the scholarly journal article and get right to the point, The New York Times Magazine article sums it up well or grab a copy of Grant’s book, Give and Take.)

2. If you think an extrinsic reward is needed, think through possible outcomes before implementation. I’m not sure if I could have found a developmentally appropriate way to intrinsically motivate my three year old to eat her food. Of course that begs the question of whether a reward is even needed or justified for getting a kid to eat. Probably not. We could have just let the hunger naturally run its course. And in many cases rewards probably aren’t needed in the workplace for a lot of things we implement a rewards system for. So, you need to think about these things before implementing:
- Is a reward even needed?
- If we don’t implement a reward or punishment, will natural rewards and/or punishment happen?
- If we don’t implement some type of reward and/or recognition will people leave?
- Does the reward motivate some but demotivate many? Google’s $1M Founder Awards are a good example of this.
- And to that point, does your reward system fit with your culture? Maybe you want to reward only those high achievers and demotivate the ones that don’t perform right out the door.
- Can you afford it?
3. Test it before rolling out a full implementation. If you decide the reward system is needed, test it on a sub-set of your employee population before rolling it out to the whole organization. Have outcomes you want to measure it against (like productivity, revenue, etc.) This requires having a control group that doesn’t get the reward structure as well. Then, you can effectively answer the questions above by having actual results to prove the need. It’s better to fail fast and fail cheap through testing than to have to recant a system after a lot of time, effort and money.

Is your reward system driving the right results?

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Experiences Over Stuff: The Better Rewards and Recognition Strategy

The Conundrum of Incentive Pay
November 14, 2017
Entrepreneurs Give Back
Many entrepreneurs find a path to entrepreneurship in their efforts to accomplish two things:
1. Find personal fulfillment and satisfaction
2. Give back to others and the communities in which they serve
And the reality of it is that, oftentimes, number one is fulfilled because number two is constantly being sought. Giving back creates the end that satisfies many other means.

We’ve featured several of these like-minded entrepreneurs over the years, and wanted to remind you of their great stories to check out as inspiration:

Ginny Pylant- Artist- Just Give it A Whirl

Ben Eubanks– HR Pro

Susan Ozier- Fitness Coach

Who inspires you to be an entrepreneur?
October 25, 2016
How Millennials Like to Work and Run
Week 4

Week 4 Mileage: 31

Long Run Distance: 13

I don’t just run to run, and I don’t just work to work.

I run for the health benefits, which is probably the most common reason cited to run, but I also run for the social camaraderie, for good conversations, and for the endorphins and productivity it produces. I’m sure there are more reasons, but for now, that will do. Oh, and because it provides good ideas for blog posts.

I work, as many primarily do, in order to provide for my family along with my husband. But I also work to try to make a difference in people’s lives, for the social interaction, and if I’m honest with myself, to try to prove or justify my worth. And it also provides for good blogging content.

In reality though, I could combine my list for running and working into one, because I talk about work when I run and a talk about running when I work. Many of the reasons overlap or are one in the same, and they all roll into how and why I do life the way I do.

I happen to, also, (just barely) be a millennial. One of the stand-out features and values you will see in the literature about my generation is the need and desire for work-life balance, or what I would prefer to call work-life integration.

In a Runner’s World article and another corresponding article in the print version of the magazine, a study about what millennial runners want emphasized the surge in millennials gravitating towards the half-marathon distance. Making up 43% of the running population, millennials run primarily as a way to stay fit, not primarily to compete, and as a way to do fun too with pre and post race parties and travel destinations. The half marathon distance is the perfect one to train well, have fun, and not let running take over your life. The Disney Princess race is cited as drawing the most attention for millennials, for all of these reasons. The article concludes by saying, “Here’s a plan for anyone who wants to train for 13.1 like a millennial- running without giving up other activities you love.”

And just like millennials don’t want to sacrifice other parts of their life in order to be able to run and race, they also don’t want to sacrifice and segregate for the sake of work.

Work isn’t and shouldn’t be stand-alone activity and running isn’t either. It’s a way to incorporate and integrate.

Here are some ideas for creating an integrated culture in the work place to help spark not only millennials’ engagement, but also your entire workforce:
- Offer and make community service opportunities a part of work.
- Set-up a mechanism for interest groups to form. Who knows, a running group may emerge.
- Offer flexibility in scheduling in order for employees to structure their day that allows for integration of other life activities.
- Larger employers offer one-stop services on-site like fitness centers, daycares, cafes and even dry cleaning and massage services on site. For more on this and how it can be justified with the business bottom line, check out Work Rules! for insights from inside Google.
- And quite simply and most importantly, hire and train leaders who are focused on seeing employees first as people, with lives in and outside of work. This promotes leaders to ask and care about people’s whole lives.
You don’t necessarily have to create a princess race to draw engagement, but all of these things, if done right, lead to more engagement in the workplace, which has been tied time and time again to better results.

What leads to more engagement for you in the workplace and in life?

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Millennials and Gen Z Prefer to Meet with Their Boss Face-to-Face
September 2, 2016
Nancy Washington Vaughn – Bio

Nancy Washington Vaughn

Nancy Washington Vaughn, Esq. SHRM-CP, PHR, President of Legal Advantage Human Resources Solutions, LLC, has more than a decade of experience advising private industry managers and government agency administrators on human resources and employment law matters. Ms. Vaughn founded Legal Advantage Human Resources, LLC in 2011 to provide clients with strategic human resources law and employment law representation and advice to enhance workplace productivity and minimize potential legal liability. Ms. Vaughn is an attorney and human resources legal advisor concentrating providing customized and quality human resources law and employment law representation and counseling to companies, non-profit entities, government agencies and educational institutions. Ms. Vaughn also drafts articles of incorporation, by-laws, and required documentation for start-up companies and non-profit entities. Additionally, Ms. Vaughn drafts, reviews, and negotiates business and employment contracts for businesses and individuals.

Ms. Vaughn has extensive experience in labor and employment law matters, including drafting and implementation of Human Resources (HR) Policies and Procedures; analyzing employment law matters governed by the Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (federal anti- discrimination/harassment employment law), the American with Disabilities Act (ADA), the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), and the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA), the Occupational Safety & Health Administration regulations (OSHA), and the Service Contract Act (SCA). Ms. Vaughn is very experienced in responding to employee complaints and grievances filed with Federal and state agencies, including union/bargaining unit members. She is highly skilled in managing, analyzing and problem-solving a wide variety of HR matters, including employee discipline, reward and recognition, employee relations issues, personal development planning, recruiting of hourly and salaried personnel, performance management, compensation and diversity and inclusion. She is an experienced negotiator in general personnel matters and collective bargaining unit/union negotiations. Ms. Vaughn routinely creates and facilitates personnel and management training seminars for companies.

Ms. Vaughn is an experienced employment law attorney and the former Director of Human Resources for an employer with approximately 1,000 employees. As an employment law attorney, she has defended clients in Federal and state administrative agency proceedings including matters before the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) and the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL). Ms. Vaughn’s legal experience includes work as an associate specializing in commercial litigation at private law firms in Atlanta, GA and Washington, DC. Additionally, her legal experience includes work as an assistant general counsel for the Tennessee Board of Regents; association general counsel at a public university in Tennessee; and a staff attorney for a U.S. Department of Defense Department of the Army Command. Additionally, Ms. Vaughn has been an adjunct professor of undergraduate courses in tort law and education law. Ms. Vaughn has personal experience as a full-time telecommuter. She is the author of Telecommuting: From Here to There; From There to Here, Legal Issues to Beware which addresses legal and policy implications associated with employee telecommuting policies. The article was published by the National Association of College & University Attorneys in NACUANOTES Vol. 8, No. 9 in 2010. Ms. Vaughn is a recipient of the Commander’s Award for Civilian Service for her commendable service and achievement as a U.S. Department of Army civilian attorney.

Ms. Vaughn has served as a District Director for the Alabama Society for Human Resources Management (SHRM) State Council and on the Tennessee Valley Chapter of SHRM Board of Directors. She is a graduate of Leadership Huntsville/Madison County’s Connect Class 12, and she is a member of many professional and civic organizations. A native of Oak Ridge, TN, Ms. Vaughn earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Communication Arts, summa cum laude, and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science, summa cum laude, from Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, TN. She earned a Doctor of Jurisprudence degree from Vanderbilt University Law School in Nashville, TN. Ms. Vaughn is licensed to practice law in Alabama, the District of Columbia, Georgia, and Tennessee. Ms. Vaughn is a certified human resources professional as recognized by the Society for Human Resource Management and the HR Certification Institute.

August 24, 2016

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