In Case You Missed It: Top 5 Blog Posts of 2019

2019 was the year of the workplace. Changes in labor demand, a new focus on employee engagement, and a desire to impact business outcomes through increased employee productivity were all contributing factors to workplaces shifting priorities to individual needs.

Through revised talent management tactics like hiring for potential over skill set, nurturing strong, thriving company cultures, and empowering growth and development, companies are increasingly leveraging the power of their people in order to unlock their greatest success. How do we know? Our readers told us as much.

This year, our most-read blog posts were those that focused on management empowering the individual to see great returns. Below are Caliper’s top 5 blog posts from 2019:

#5: The Basics and Benefits of Competency-Based Training

Training and development are critical to individual success and employee productivity and the best way to cost-effectively level up your organizational skill set. Competency-based training allows individuals to follow growth plans that are suited to their unique learning needs and are tailored to specific job needs, adaptive to different learning styles and timelines, cheaper than formal learning programs, and personalized to individual ambitions and motivations. Here’s an excerpt:

Modify your training programs and modules to suit your interests, skills, and development needs… Some people are naturally more talented at specific skills than others, and that goes for how people learn new skills, too.

With competency-based training, you can customize how your team tackles training by catering your programs to meet their individual needs. Pair the training with each individual employee’s personality assessment in order to create a more effective and targeted development program.

By focusing on individual competencies, companies are able to fulfill their employees’ learning and growth objectives, while aligning their training to more strategic business outcomes. It’s a win-win.

Learn more about the Caliper Individual Developmental Guide

#4: How Promoting Employee Happiness Benefits Everyone

Company culture was big in 2019, and for good reason. Operating incomes can drop by 33% when employees show low-level engagement. A strong company culture with happy employees leads to increased employee productivity, higher retention rates, and more engagement and participation from individuals. This blog post explains how employee happiness makes an impact:

Companies that scored the highest reported nearly three times a return on assets and doubled their return on sales. Your employee experience isn’t just tied to happiness but also productivity throughout the workplace. The better the experience your employees have, the happier they become.

Adding simple changes can help employees feel like their entire life isn’t about their job… When employees aren’t having to constantly worry about work after work, it increases their drive… Having a clear break between life and work is an easy way to promote happiness.

It’s becoming more and more clear to organizations that they need to place the individual experience as a top priority.

#3: The Value of Self-Awareness at Work

Enabling happy employees isn’t just about putting a foosball table in the break room and filling a fridge with endless refreshments. Those are attractive perks to being in the office, but they aren’t the things that make employees feel fulfilled.

A good way to tap into employee productivity is by encouraging self-awareness in your leaders. Leading with self-awareness increases empathy and understanding of others’ needs — a self-aware leader is better about assessing their own needs, and those of everyone else, too. Here’s what we said on the topic earlier this year:

By bringing awareness of one’s self into the workplace, leaders are able to better identify who they are as an employee and why they work the way they do. Using this information, leaders can then play to their strengths while understanding their areas of developmental opportunity… For these reasons, employees often note a healthier work environment under such superiors. Not only are there benefits to the leader and the employees, but there is also a significant positive correlation between self-aware leaders and company performance.

Encourage your leaders to get to know themselves, their work style, strengths and weaknesses, and how they prefer to communicate. Have them ask for feedback from their teams, and reflect on how their feedback aligns with their understanding of themselves.

A self-aware leader who can examine their own tendencies and motivations has a much better chance of understanding and managing to those of the individuals on their teams.

Learn more about Caliper’s Essentials for Coaching

#2: Six Components of Self-Management

Similar to self-awareness is self-management. This, too, takes discipline and introspection, but is a more all-encompassing — often more experienced —  style of working. Self-management leads to higher productivity, engagement, and fulfillment. This post breaks down the 6 elements that most directly contribute to self-management. Those traits are:

• Composure under pressure
• Self-awareness
• An openness to change
• Professionalism
• Ownership of work
• A focus on learning

For a deeper dive into the six elements of self-management and how to coach to these individual traits and bolster your employee performance, take a look at the 3-part series we wrote this year that explores this topic in more detail.

#1: 10 Best Practices for Effective Team Building

The common thread through all of our most popular posts this year was one of employee productivity and efficiency, and our most read blog post follows suit. Workplace dynamics are changing. What was once about hierarchy and corporate ladders, is now about flattening out and increasing collaboration and cross-departmental functions. Teamwork is more important than ever. This post establishes how to create effective, well-rounded teams, while fostering relationships and team-building from within. This post reminds us:

Team effectiveness is not something you think about offhandedly in between the other stuff. It should be your focus. Projects will come and go, but the team is the engine that drives the business result. And just like engines need maintenance to run efficiently, teams need to revisit best practices to make sure effectiveness remains optimized. It is the most important investment you can make for your team.

Your employees are your most valuable asset, and we can’t envision a 2020 year that doesn’t increase its focus on these topics. To learn more about what Caliper Profile assessments can do to boost employee productivity and focus on employee growth and development, reach out to our experts to get started.