Have you ever wondered why many “managers” do not get the most out of their employees?  The answer is simpler than you think.
As a leader in an organization, your utmost responsibility is to provide your employees with a working environment that positively charged with motivation. Yet most managers do not particularly recognize this simple duty.   Many managers tend to be promoted to a supervisory role due to their technical competence rather than people-management skills.  As such, managers’ influence on the workforce is not always positive. The solution to this is in a few good words— literally speaking!

Performance within groups typically does not just happen.

For a group to really perform well, it needs practice. The group needs to understand the best way to organize itself for performance.

This concept is commonly understood by sports teams and the military. They clearly see the need to give groups opportunities to practice. Boot Camp for the military and pre-season workouts for sports teams are the norm.

It’s interesting to note in business that there is far less interest or appreciation of group development and the need for practice. Team practice, for the most part, is not factored into the business or corporate world. We form groups in business and march them into the corporate battle zone expecting them to perform and when they fail we are surprised.

Let’s face it. The economy is still a mess and people aren’t finding jobs fast enough.

Given this fact, there are a lot of people looking to place the blame for these developments. And has been the case for the last several years, many are focusing on employment screening and background checks. I won’t say that all who oppose background check are flat out wrong in every instance, but all too frequently they rely on myths, misconceptions and urban legends to support their arguments.

Here is my list of the most commonly held misconceptions about employment background checks:

A new generation without an official moniker and relatively unknown to the larger corporate society of the United States is trudging through the American education system just like millions of others before them, and they are just starting to think about what they want to do with their lives.

There’s a famous story from the early days of the space race.

President John F. Kennedy was visiting NASA headquarters for the first time, in 1961. While touring the facility, he introduced himself to a janitor who was mopping the floor and asked him what he did at NASA. The janitor replied, “I’m helping put a man on the moon!”

Spend time up front to nail the right hires, and build a strong, cohesive team.

Hiring is hard, regardless of your industry or the surplus of candidates in the job market these days. In 7.5 years in business at Metal Mafia, I have hired a lot of great people for my team--but I have also hired many more who were not the right fit. Somewhere after the fifth or sixth bad choice, I decided I must be doing something wrong in the hiring process and tried to figure out how I could recruit and hire more accurately.

Here's what I learned and how I modified our hiring process:

There’s no denying that employee engagement has become one of the HR buzz words of our time.

Simple exercise for team building.

It uses questions from a Mensa quiz to illustrate the point that a team’s collective wisdom is always greater than any individual team member’s.

To get started, see how many of these questions you can answer individually. According to Mensa, if you can figure out 23 of these, you qualify for “genius” status.

(I’ve filled in the first one for you—check the bottom of this post for the complete answer key when you are done.)

Resumes are the currency of recruiting. Job sites, recruiters, and hiring managers all require them and use them to screen both prospects and candidates in or out.

Because at least early on, resumes are the sole determinant as to whether a candidate moves forward or not in the hiring process, it’s important to understand their strengths and weaknesses. essential part of the candidate assessment process. The premise of this article is that if you are going to continue to rely so heavily on resumes, everyone involved needs to be aware of each and every one of the many weaknesses and problems associated with using them.

First, payroll services as we think of it, is not just having someone print checks for you or setup a payroll system, it’s about having pre-identified workers put on someone else’s payroll – as employees.