“Consistently sharing good—and bad—news with staff members builds an atmosphere of trust and can forestall potential miscommunication on business issues,” said Diane Domeyer, executive director of OfficeTeam. “People often fear the worst when they have limited information.”

Employees and managers agree on one thing: A lack of open, honest communication takes a heavy toll on morale.

Fifty-two percent of executives and 30 percent of workers gave that response when surveyed about factors that negatively affect workplace mood. Failing to recognize employee achievements was the second most common answer among both groups.

The research was conducted in June using a survey instrument created by the Menlo Park, Calif., firm OfficeTeam, the world’s largest temporary staffing service for administrative professionals: Survey respondents were 150 executives with the nation’s 1,000 largest companies, and 571 men and women, all 18 years of age or older, and employed.

“Consistently sharing good—and bad—news with staff members builds an atmosphere of trust and can forestall potential miscommunication on business issues,” said Diane Domeyer, executive director of OfficeTeam. “People often fear the worst when they have limited information.”
http://www.officeteam.com/PressRoom?LOBName=OT

Dress code: a hobgoblin of productivity?

Does dress code impact company success?

An interesting question, given that 90 percent of U.S. office workers dress business casual at least once a week. Results of a survey of 100 corporate executives conducted by business professor Steven Norton of IU South Bend and Timothy Franz of St. John Fisher College are published in this month’s edition of Journal of American Academy of Business, Cambridge.

“Overall, employees in our sample who prefer a more formal dress policy and wear more formal clothes themselves report that they commit more time to work, see the organization as fairer, are more conscientious, have higher job satisfaction and have more supervisory responsibility. Employees who work under a more formal dress policy report that they are more conscientious,” they write. “It is possible that a major impact of dress policy on organizations is due to self-selection of employees. That is, employees who prefer a particular mode of dress are more likely to accept a job offer from an organization which allows that mode.”
http://www.jaabc.com/journalv5n2preview.html

Rewarding failure has its own rewards, says University of Michigan researcher

Rewarding employees who repeatedly try new things and fail actually leads to more innovation and bigger successes, according to a recent University of Michigan study. Innovation is a kind of Holy Grail for management, but when organizations are inconsistent in their support for experimentation or scrutinize workers too closely, they actually inhibit innovation, the research found. To survive, organizations need to experiment constantly with new ideas and not get stuck doing the same old routine, said Fiona Lee, a psychology and business professor who studies organizational behavior. “We’ve been looking at why some people experiment and others don’t. We find that when managers send mixed messages, people get scared and actually stop trying out new ideas.” Her research found that close and constant evaluation designed to expose failures actually inhibits creativity, making people reluctant to admit mistakes and less likely to experiment or take risks. This was true even when top management explicitly encouraged people to experiment.
http://www.umich.edu/news/index.html?Releases/2004/Jul04/r072104a