Use These 8 Tips to Increase Your Confidence at Work – Dr. Floyd Williams

Regardless of position and tenure in a company nearly everyone will face a stressful situation at some point in time at their job. When these situations occur, confidence can take a significant blow or lack thereof can prevent you from handling the situation in the best way possible. These eight tips can help increase and maintain your confidence at work – no matter the situation.

Stay focused

Workplace politics and gossip can create poor productivity and a toxic work environment. By avoiding participating in gossip and complaining, it is easier to remain focused and on task. Focusing on what you need to get done each day helps you stay on top of your game and stay away from negative influences.

Identify strengths and weaknesses

A key part of becoming more confident at work is through reflecting on what performance areas are particularly strong or weak. Determining and recognizing strengths allow individuals to better harness those skills and improve their performance.

Consult others

Input from a trusted colleague, supervisor, or mentor can be a good way to identify strengths and re-calibrate goals. By having open and candid discussion both confidence and productivity will benefit.

Have self confidence

A positive self view can be critical to the perception of other individuals. Individuals who believe they will succeed are more likely to find success through perseverance and hard work.

Celebrate success

When something has been completed successfully, recording and monitoring that success can serve as a reminder to individuals struggling with confidence. Notes like to-do lists and any congratulatory memos are an easy way to celebrate success at work.

Seek challenges

Finding and conquering new and challenging tasks can also help increase confidence. Although failure may occur when trying a new challenge often the experience and effort alone provides a rewarding sense of accomplishment. Learning a new skill or attempting a project outside of what is familiar can create growth and personal progress.

Maintain a positive attitude

Individuals who display a positive attitude are resilient and optimistic in the face of change. This mindset can help frame things in a more hopeful way, and may instill a positive outlook in coworkers as well.

Seek to understand

Understanding that colleagues and management are human and may react negatively due to emotions or stress is important. By recognizing this fact, individuals may find that criticism and workplace disagreements are easier to move past.

With increased confidence comes increased productivity and improved mood. By maximizing skills and working toward building confidence, both an individual’s job and personal satisfaction will benefit.

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Get Rid of These Misconceptions About Diversity At Your Business – Dr. Floyd Williams

There has been much support and plenty of numbers to show that the notion of diversity improving business and bringing in greater profit is generally accurate. Diversity in the workplace can certainly have its benefits, but it does not always guarantee that your business’s bottom line will increase. This issue is because there are various misconceptions surrounding diversity, and here are some that you should do away with. If you want to increase diversity and truly benefit your company, learn to move past misconceptions about diversity and truly invest in the diversity that benefits your people and your company.

Confusing “hiring for skills” with diversity

Hiring for skills is a concept that many businesses, unfortunately, do not understand. When you hire someone based on their skills, this decision means you are hiring based on their ability to do their job effectively. Instead of evaluating if they possess these necessary skills, many employers like to look at their education history or see if they have worked for well-known companies. If you take the time to look at a candidate’s resume beyond whatever credentials they may have, you will have a wider range of candidates to choose from. Having qualifications are far from a bad thing, but it should not be the only determining factor, as the practical side of the job at hand should be taken into consideration. Avoid being biased toward potential employers who have interned at larger companies or graduated from fancier schools; that does not always mean they’ll be the best at the job.

Lowering the standard through diversity

Here is the bottom line when it comes to hiring employees; if you have the qualifications, and if it can be shown that you can do your job, you will not have a hard time finding employment. Yet, there is an underlying belief that hiring people of color or those who do not have an Ivy League background means that a company’s standard is lowered. Businesses do not hire just anyone or lower their standards to become more “diverse”. We can only understand so much through our own unique spheres of influences. Skilled and intelligent people exist from all walks of life and come from all backgrounds. A company’s standard is not lowered because of that fact.

Technical skills are the most important

Skill level and diversity are mere distractions many like to talk about in terms of hiring candidates. The unwillingness to receive constructive criticism, not being motivated, and having a poor attitude has been found frequently to be the main reasons why candidates fail at their jobs. Technical skills are important, but they are not the one determining factor that determines one’s worth. It’s important to evaluate candidates of all backgrounds and take the time to get to know them instead of making decisions based on surface characteristics.

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The Power of Positivity In The Workplace

The workplace can often be a place with heavy emotions and low engagement. This issue is because workers may come in every day and perform the same mundane tasks day after day where the only end game is getting a paycheck at the end of the week. However, there is great power in remaining positive in a workplace environment. If you are still in doubt, here are some ways that remaining positive will effectively improve performance.

Improve your work

Remaining positive makes you a better worker.  You may not realize it, but your mindset is an important thing to carry with you every time you clock into work. If you are looking to simply do the bare minimum, treat other workers as if they are just spokes on the wheel and not motivate yourself, performance will decline. The key is not to simply come into the workplace with a positive mindset, but to maintain it throughout the day. That can be a challenge in of itself, especially if you have a stressful job, but it can be done if you visualize yourself doing that. Simply tell yourself that today is going to be a good day, and you will find that your performance drastically increases.

Influence others

The power of positivity transfers over to those around you. Sometimes, all people need is for someone to show them the way. You can be that beacon that leads them to be positive as well. If someone can look at you and wonder why they can be positive under certain circumstances, there will be a chain reaction within them and they will ask the same questions about themselves. Once more and more people observe this attitude, overall morale will increase and the business will profit off of the increased production of the company. This result all started because you took the initiative to be positive.

Helps become a regular mindset

Arguably the most important thing that you should take from the potent power of positivity is that purposefully focusing on positivity in the workplace can lead to a complete shift in mindset. Nothing will matter if your positive attitude lasts for only one shift or for a couple of hours. Once you have that positive flame burning, don’t let it die out! You may be going through things in your personal life, but if you look at the good side of things, the workplace will transform.

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How to Encourage Employees to Talk to You

For many employees, it can seem difficult to approach people in management positions with concerns. However, communication is vitally important in any workplace. If you want your company and yourself to truly thrive, you need to encourage employees to speak with you or someone else about their concerns or suggestions for the job. It’s also beneficial to create an openness in the office that makes it easier for employees to talk to you about more general topics, like how their job is going, their hobbies, or anything else. The better the communication within an office, the easier it is to prevent issues from occurring; you want to find any way possible to improve the business.

Have an open door policy

A great policy to keep in place is an open door policy. Having set office hours where employees can come talk to you and ask questions or talk about something at the company can help with office communication immensely. Many workers may feel that you’re inaccessible, so providing a time for them to simply get to know people in management encourages them to talk to you and other administration.

Share about yourself

The best way to encourage employees to talk to you is to share about yourself. Talk about your career and how you’ve gotten to where you are, challenges you’ve faced, and even a little personal information. The more you show yourself to be a regular person, the easier it’ll be for employees to speak with you.

Make sure criticism is constructive

If you’ve been trying your best efforts to encourage employees to talk to you, but feel like they are not, consider how you provide feedback and your own communication style. You may be giving criticism that isn’t constructive or delivering what you think is helpful advice in a way that alienates employees. Make sure you’re communicating in a positive and constructive way if you want your employees to do the same and talk to you.

Allow anonymous feedback

While your ultimate goal may be to have employees openly confide in you, a first step to take would be allowing anonymous feedback. Giving your employees a way to provide honest feedback is a great step to showing that you’re open to hearing their opinions and want to change the company for the better. As they begin to trust the process, they’ll be more willing to talk directly to you.

Be transparent

Finally, a major pitfall that many companies stumble into is not being transparent enough with their employees. Even when a business feels that they are giving employees enough information, too often employees do not feel the same way. Make sure to keep employees updated about changes and the reasons behind them. Also, allow for questions so there’s no confusion or miscommunication.

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5 Tips for Improving Affinity Groups

Affinity groups are a great tool, but many companies may not have the resources to actually support a group underrepresented within the company. Affinity groups can be highly beneficial to employees and lead to great employee satisfaction. Instead of shelving the idea and leaving it to die, here are some ideas on how on to develop affinity groups using a bit of innovation and outside-the-box thinking.

Redefine the group

Instead of focusing on a narrow subset of people where there may not be enough of that certain group working at the company to form a busy and functional group, it would be wise to create a less specific definition of the group in order to include more people. Now, instead of a small group without much activity there will be an effort to find topics that are more in common with a wide variety of groups and people. Instead of focusing on a narrow demographic and limiting the number of people that can participate, everyone has to work together to find a common denominator. This can apply to many different attributes.

Find a friend

Instead of looking inwards, how about looking outwards? By finding similar organizations, there is not only networking in play but a greater share of power now that more people are involved. Finding organizations within your city is a great way to help underrepresented groups of employees find others to connect with and possibly bring more employees to your company to create more diversity.

Focus on finding new leaders

Every cause needs an advocate, and focusing on looking for leaders who will advocate underrepresented groups in your business is an important part of any endeavor. By finding someone important that can speak up on behalf of others, people’s voices will be heard. Not only that, but there is now a direct leader that helps streamline any ideas the group has so the objectives are clearly defined and organized to try and achieve. There is someone available for feedback and for advice to help out all employees of the business.

Focus on the good things

Through these types of affinity groups, alternate solutions may be found to problems that have not yet been solved. It is important to work on finding these solutions so your employees see the value in creating and cultivating affinity groups. After all, not much matters if a certain endeavor does not show its value. A combination of these tactics can help bring people into the fold and create results that would benefit everyone, not just a certain group.

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