From Corporate - Edition #11

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This week we’re forgetting the organization for a second to focus on something even more important: the employees within.

Underneath every great Google or Facebook, lies a whole bunch of people who need regular food, water, and wellbeing checks to ensure they can do the best job within their power. That’s right, nurturing happy, healthy and fulfilled employees is a full-time job and one we want to help with in this week’s roundup. From preventing burnout to the importance of seating plans, here are your top stories.

Are your team struggling?

How do you tell if your team is burned out? Ideally, we'd recognize the signs of approaching burnout, long before our team members are actually burned out. Unfortunately, it doesn't always happen that way. This guide helps you to recognize the signs of burnout, with a few ways to help managers deal with them, like switching up daily tasks and setting "cut off" points in the evening.

Quitting by any other name

Is it time we re-energized our view of what "quitting" means? Aytekin Tank, Founder of JotForm, thinks so. In this piece he discussed why we're conditioned to view quitting in a negative light, when actually it just means ending one project and starting another. How passion and happiness should both be contributing factors to sticking around, and how to know when you've reached a ceiling.

Somewhere between productivity and burnout

What really lies beneath a productive workplace? According to this thought-piece, it isn’t working more hours or trying desperately to be more productive. Instead, it’s scheduling “digital downtime” and true holidays, where you completely switch off. In a time when many of us feel like we worship work, the real question might be: how do you switch off from religion?

The culture question

Workplace culture is more than just foosball tables and dogs (although both of those are well-received at ScreenCloud). It's all about the values, actions and beliefs of a workplace. Putting those all together means assessing how you create team bonding activities, company processes and your workplace setup. Luckily, we put all of those areas together in one handy guide.

The trouble with high-performance teams

We all want to work in a high-performance culture with people that inspire us and make us better. But as HR guru Patty McCord discusses in this podcast episode, there’s a downside that comes with that. Like having to fire people who were a big part of setting up the company, or getting rid of people who won’t fit with the next stage of growth, even though they’re still “high performing”. And apparently, that’s okay.

Who do you sit with?

A 2017 study found that working in the same room as people who are internally driven can help improve our own attitudes and that when we’re around demotivated people, our own motivations wanders. Which means hiring the right people, with the right attitude, has never been more important

The art of collaboration

According to a new study, groups that collaborate intermittently as well as working on their own, are able to come up with the best solutions. In a world where communication tools such as Slack keep us “always on” and connected to our colleagues, this suggests that being in constant contact is not always the key to success.

Good vs great employees

There are certain characteristics and behaviors that great employees have in common, all of which affect your current employee productivity rate (that’s your revenue divided by employee number). In this guide, ScreenCloud CEO Mark discusses the 10 characteristics of great employees to look out for, or to build into your own skillset.

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