Did you know that highly engaged employees are more than twice as productive, yet 70% of American workers are not engaged at work? Several polls confirm this testament to the importance of great hr processes.

You can greatly improve employee engagement by developing and maintaining the right company culture.

Company culture drives employee motivation and behavior. Maintaining the right company culture leads to higher performance and more loyal employees, bad company culture does the opposite.

Let’s take a look at how you can adapt your hr processes to create a workplace where employees thrive, care and take pride in their work.

Refine Company Culture

You can’t develop a good company culture without a well-thought-out structure and end goal.

Start with alignment. Gather management to define company culture. When you have a clear idea of your ideal company culture, assess out how it fits your business strategies, and how well employees think it matches their experience in the workplace.

Adjust and make plans to fix any misalignments. Make sure the leadership’s picture of company culture mirrors how the employees really see it. Otherwise, your management is leading in blindness and unable to make optimal decisions, and your workers feel mistreated and ignored.

Learn from your employees and adapt your hr processes, because the company will only go as far as the workers take it.

Hiring and Training

Handle prospects and new recruits as people, not just labor. Imagine them with the group, and their relation to your company culture. Are they a good fit? Make company culture part of the hiring process and bring new employees smoothly into the community.

Activity doesn’t equal results. The position you’re offering is more than an activity. Focus on results, what this person will achieve for the company. Both in their immediate tasks and as a part of your team with a mission.

Using perks for motivation is inefficient if you haven’t established perks that are tailored to your workforce’s needs and wants. Hear them out, adjust as needed, and save money by cutting out unwanted perks.

Keep employees happy to keep them motivated and efficient. Satisfied employees will spread a good reputation for your business. Fewer employees quit, more people seek employment with your business. Thus you’ve made future hr processes more efficient.

Ensure an environment of happiness and you maintain motivation, independence, trust and belief in the company.

Eliminating Clashes

Carefully assign leaders with a clear sense of direction for the team, project, and company culture. Choose ones that care and take pride in their work.

Think of what state of mind you want your workers to maintain, and pick leaders that brilliantly represent it.

Remember that high-performers easily lose motivation. Don’t keep them thinking they’re doing more work with more accountability and less help without due compensation.

Ensure that great work is recognized and rewarded to prevent animosity between workers, and inspire more workers to strive for higher performance.

More Tips on HR Processes and Much More

Rafferty Pendery is a tech entrepreneur, VC and International speaker whose companies have worked with major brands like Hilton, HP and Time Warner.

On this blog, you’ll find lots of great information for entrepreneurs and business executives.

If you have any questions about this information, send a message here.

According to the Harvard Business Review, the ability to inspire and motivate others is the most important skill for leaders and managers at every level.

In order to do that, you’ll need to be able to captivate your audience and inject energy into it. In this article, we’ll tell you exactly how to do that.

Read on to find out how to improve your inspirational speaking skills.

How to Improve Your Inspirational Speaking

1. Know Your Message

In order for your public speaking to have an impact, it needs to have a clear message. If you’re not sure what that is yet, it’s time to get brainstorming.

If there’s one thing that you want people to take away from your speech, what is it? Once you define what that message is, you can work on delivering it in the most effective way possible.

2. Practice Improvising

When you’re trying to give a compelling speech, reading off a script or reeling off memorized lines just won’t do.

There will inevitably be moments when your mind goes blank or a wrench is thrown into the works, sending you off your usual course. When that happens, you’ll need to come up with something on the spot.

This requires improvisational skills.

Hone your improv skills, and you won’t have to worry about being caught off-guard. One great way to do this is by trying out some stand-up comedy.

It can even make you a better leader!

If you can handle hecklers, you can handle anything. Besides, it helps to get all the extra stage practice you can, no matter what you’re doing while you’re up there.

3. Be Passionate

Your audience won’t believe your words unless you do. That’s why passion is important for public speaking.

Emotion is what will make your speech captivating, drawing people in so that they hang on your every word. It could come through in body language, tone or just quality of storytelling.

However you do it, make sure it’s authentic.

4. Adapt to Your Audience

Your inspirational speaking approach should differ depending on the type of audience receiving it. You can’t talk to every group of people in the same way.

Try your best to get to know as much as you can about your audience before an event. The more you know, the more you’ll be able to gear your speech towards their tastes, wants and needs.

That way, they’ll be able to relate to what you’re saying, and your words will have a bigger impact.

Be Better at Business

With these tips, you can become a great public speaker. As well as improving your business and making you a better leader, it could also turn into a lucrative side gig. If you’re really good, you could even become a professional inspirational speaker.

Work hard enough, and you’ll find that people will come to you, offering to pay you to speak at their events.

To find out more, read our post on 5 tips on becoming a paid international speaker.

A study by Search Engine Watch proves that being the top search result will lead to more clickthroughs by 53%.

SEO (search engine optimization) is your ticket to boosting traffic to your website. People often choose the first result they see, which means learning how to increase your Google ranking is imperative to creating a successful website.

There are some techniques a small business owner can do to increase traffic numbers. However, hiring an SEO specialist can eliminate the stress associated with building a ranking on your own.

Read on to learn why an SEO specialist shapes the way traffic flows to your website.

1. Hiring an SEO Specialist is Better Than Doing It on Your Own

A website is only one aspect of your much larger business structure. Why not save yourself all the time it takes to craft your SEO ranking by hiring a professional?

The intelligent SEO specialist you hire will understand SEO inside and out. He or she is an expert in the field of online SEO and will know exactly how to factor in the right keywords to make sure your website is in the top search results.

As a business owner, you can hire an expert in SEO to help you out so you can focus your attention on other important operations to keep your business running smoothly. Generating sales leads will be a no-brainer once a trained expert collaborates with your business to increase your SEO rank.

2. See Better Traffic Results with Help From a Professional

Do you think your current website is not reaching out to the right audience?

By hiring a specialist, he or she can determine who your target audience is and how to attract them to click on your website search link. If your page is now ranked on the first few pages of a Google search, an expert can make adjustments to improving the ranking.

SEO tactics, such as choosing the right keywords to implement into your content, have resulted in high success rates. Convert leads into loyal customers by learning from a well-informed SEO specialist.

3. Avoid Black Hat Methods to Cheat Your Way to the Top

One final way that hiring extra help to boost your SEO rank with a specialist is to avoid making costly mistakes.

Black hat techniques are when illegal methods are used to boost the ranking of your site. Avoiding this path is something an SEO expert can ensure happens.

Keyword stuffing and spam-commenting are two black hat techniques that will make Google quickly push your website down the list.

Talk to your SEO consultant to discuss what techniques he or she will use to promote your website so these harmful tactics are not involved.

I’m Rafferty Pendery, a Tech Entrepreneur who has already helped thousands of businesses flourish through successful expansion strategies and social media campaigns.

Leaving me a message is a great way to easily reach out and learn more about the services I can provide your business today.

There are many ways to grow your business. Most of them involve doing what you can to sell more and earn more money in the process.

However, some business growth methods involve not gathering more, but giving things away. Things like your time, energy, and money can greatly benefit the people around you when shared.

It may seem counter-intuitive, but giving back can actually help to grow your business. There are many ways to give back to your community as a business, and not all of them involve donating money.

There is a lot you can do to get involved, and doing so will prove to be a very wise business decision for several reasons. If you’re wondering how giving back to the community can actually be fruitful for your business, read on.

Improve Your Reputation in the Community

Getting involved with the local community is one of the best things you can do for your business. When people in the area associate your company name with altruism and volunteer work, they will have positive feelings toward your brand.

When the day comes that your customer needs your services and they must decide between you and the competition, you want to make sure you’ve left a good taste in their mouth.

In addition, there may be a large demographic in your community that needs help, whether it’s the school system or animal shelters. If your company is the one that comes to the rescue, you will be highly regarded by everyone affected.

If you become known as the company that’s always there in times of trouble, you will come to earn the respect and admiration of many potential customers.

Build A Loyal Customer Base by Giving Back to the Community

There are many ways that giving back to the community is a powerful business tool, and the loyalty you’ll win in the process is no exception.

Some people may come to you — and you alone — for business after you have helped them out. For example, sponsoring a children’s baseball league may earn you the unyielding loyalty of all the parents on the team.

Other ways of giving back to the community also nurture loyalty and appreciation. Mentoring budding entrepreneurs for a few hours a week can make a big impact. Donating items to an organization in need will also inspire those who see your good deed to express their gratitude by becoming a customer.

Improve Company Culture

Having your company volunteer as a team is a great way to motivate and inspire your employees. Working together on a collaborative effort for the greater good will boost company morale overall, and that’s always good for the bottom line.

When getting a group of employees to help out, you may want to offer the opportunity to volunteer during work hours. Or, you could offer it as a more fulfilling alternative to meeting for happy hour drinks.

Either way, when your employees feel good about your vision and mission, they’ll feel good about working for you. You will receive the best work possible when you have earned the trust and respect of those you employ.

What happens when you talk?

Are you able to captivate your audience no matter who is listening?

Are you the type of person who has an incredible story to share and you enjoy helping people?

If you have interesting and inspiring stories along with the “gift of gab”, becoming an international speaker might be the right move for you.

Keep reading to find out how to get it done.

The Route to Becoming an International Speaker

1. Solve Their Problem

This is where the whole process starts. Look at people like Tony Robbins and Dave Ramsey. They had a problem. They fixed it. Now they’re both helping other people with their problems and making a fortune while doing so.

Ask yourself, “What problem do entrepreneurs and business owners have that I can help them fix?”

An even better question: “What problem will they pay to have fixed?”

People who own their own businesses are go-getters. If they can solve their own problems, they want to. Sometimes, there just isn’t any information out there.

You need to have that information.

2. Learn the Language

If you would like to become an international speaker, you need to accept the fact that not everyone speaks your native tongue. English is used as a second language twice as often as it’s used as a native one.

For maximum success as a public speaker, focus on becoming fluent in Arabic, Mandarin, and/or Hindi. These three languages combine to increase your potential reach by nearly two billion people.

3. Tech Up

Once you’ve started, you’re going to likely stay on the go. You’ll probably have a small team constantly needing to exchange information with you.

Immerse yourself in the tech world. It will make your life easier.

This includes everything from leveraging social media to utilizing the newest types of communication software. Having a Gmail account is probably not going to be enough.

4. Make Them Laugh

Entrepreneurs and small business owners are stressed out. They have come to you with a severe problem and are paying a lot of money to have it sorted out via your speech.

With all of that tension in the room, you can use humor to cut through it. This will help you connect with your audience, grab their attention, and help them relax.

Use a funny personal story that relates to your speech to maximize the efficiency of the joke. It could be something that affects business owners all over the world. Or it could be about your first experience in their country.

Just make sure it isn’t offensive and keep it relevant.

5. Establish a Brand

In many ways, business is its own form of communication. Don’t underestimate the value of creating your brand.

When you become an international speaker, you should learn to rely on your brand. No two languages are quite the same and often things get lost in translation.

Your brand can say everything that it needs to about what you have to offer without a word. It can also help create a level of emotional trust and authority that cannot be misconstrued in translation.

Wrapping It Up

While these are five awesome tips that can help get you started and you should be thinking about them, there is no way that we can squeeze every piece of need to know information into one blog post.

I’m Rafferty Pendery, I’m an international speaker who has helped thousands of businesses over the years. I can help you, too. Contact me today.

“Should I hire independent contractors?”

It’s a hand-wringer for many business managers. It might come up as your business experiences a sudden surge, or when the chance to bid on a huge contract presents itself.

The independent workforce now makes up over 40% of US workers, so there may be no better time to tap into that resource. But is it right for you?

While we can’t answer that question outright, we can give you the tools to understand why hiring independent contractors could be a real benefit to your company.

Give yourself flexibility

Everybody wants to be able to do everything in today’s commercial marketplace.

Partly that’s because we all want to be ready to respond to the latest changes in our industry. That could be anything from developing technology to a social media trend.

Hiring independent contractors is a great way to add that flexibility to your organization. With traditional employees, your ability to capitalize on situations is limited by the skill set of your employees and the long lead-times involved in the hiring process.

You could hire new employees, sure, but then who’s to say their skills will remain relevant to you over time?

Independent contractors are also great for managing changing business needs. You can bring on a retinue of contractors to cope with high volumes of work or a particular project without needing to find a niche for them when the work reduces back to normal levels or the project comes to an end.

Save on expenses

It’s no secret that regular employees come with a lot of requirements and expenses employers must meet or incur.

Among the considerations for a company hiring employees are:

• Providing space for employees to work. This will include health & safety considerations as well as comfort.
• HR support to deal with parental needs, ambitious or underperforming employees, requirements to show continued professional development, and other personal and interpersonal issues such as stress and disputes.
• Benefits such as health insurance, pension etc.
• Continued payment for employees outside of a usual working pattern, such as long-term sickness and parental needs.
• Compensation in the event of accident or injury
• Meeting travel and training expenses

All of these add up to a lot of expense for an employer. And that’s fine if you’re investing in your company’s future and trying to build a skilled in-house team.

But you don’t always need that. By hiring independent contractors, you can bypass a lot of these expenses while still completing work.

Independent contractors may have a higher payment per hour, but when you factor in the extra investment of time and money into regular employees, the savings soon become obvious.

You can hire independent contractors fully-trained without any of the other financial obligations to your company except their salary.

Protect your company

As we’ve covered, regular employees can need a lot of maintenance to keep them happy. What happens when the employer/employee relationship breaks down?

Lawsuits can be devastating for a company. By hiring independent contractors, you can insulate yourself from this risk.

Contractors aren’t your direct employees, so you don’t have the same legal responsibilities for them as you would a regular employee.

Here’s a selection of rights held by regular employees that you won’t have to worry about when hiring independent contractors:

• Right to form a union
• Right to sick or parental leave
• Protection from employment discrimination (except racial discrimination)
• Right to minimum wage and increased overtime payment

So hiring independent contractors can ensure your core business doesn’t become eclipsed by legal issues and expensive payouts in the event of a dispute.

Anything that allows you to focus on what you do well gives you an advantage over competitors distracted by other issues.

There are some legalities you’ll need to keep in mind. Your written contract will need to be smart to set the terms of employment. You’ll also need to consider things like the question of what happens to intellectual property created by independent contractors.

Recruit quickly

Recruitment can be a hellish process for all involved.

Timescales are long. Even after posting a job ad, you’ll often have set a closing deadline and be unable to advance before then. Following which you need to go through the lengthy and time-consuming process of interviewing candidates.

It can often take a least a month before the candidate is able to come and work for you.

And this all supposes you’ve found the right candidate and that the hiring won’t turn out to be a mistake. It’s also pretty common for new employees to change their minds and jump ship within weeks.

In some cases, you can go through all this for just a single employee.

By contrast, hiring independent contractors lets you get boots on the ground quickly. You can mass-hire, skip interviews (even if you conduct a less intensive skills check), and deploy within weeks rather than months.

Being able to deploy workers so quickly could be the difference between winning or losing a contract, or delivering a project to budget.

It can also allow you to manage harmful backlogs.

Expand your scope by hiring independent contractors

Depending on the nature of your industry, you may find that hiring more employees isn’t the best way to scale up your business. The extra overheads of regular employees may keep your company at a certain size.

Hiring independent contractors can be an effective way to break through that ceiling. You can effectively inflate the size of your workforce and the size of your company.

Knowing you can bring in independent contractors to cover more ambitious work gives you a realistic way to beat your competitors without taking dangerous risks.

Independent contractors may help you punch above your weight in your chosen industry. You may even find they help you snowball to the point where you can afford to invest in more regular employees.

So next time you see an uptick in your work or need to meet the requirements of a project, consider hiring independent contractors and feel the benefits.

For more business tips, follow my blog or head on over to my Contact Page if you need to get in touch!