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How Your Career Type Affects Job Satisfaction…and Other Surprising Engagement Influencers

by Angie Knowles, Research | Posted:2/3/2012 3:32:38 PM | 0 comments

How Your Career Type Affects Job Satisfaction - ECO Canada

While this has been said before, it bears repeating: employee engagement is absolutely essential to the long-term success of a company. For employers, enthusiastic and motivated staff are the ultimate enablers of innovative thinking, effective problem solving and outstanding client service. As a result, high engagement rates in an organization translate into enhanced productivity, reduced employee turnover, increased revenue and greater client satisfaction.

For professionals, being engaged in your work is integral to career success. Feeling motivated to do more than what is normally required, believing that your contribution is valued and being willing to recommend your employer are all aspects of engagement that pay big dividends in professional growth.

Engagement is also inextricably linked to general career enjoyment. At the end of the day, who wouldn’t want to work in a setting where you feel encouraged, stimulated and valued?

6 Reasons Your Employees Don’t Like You

by Julie Checknita, Employer Services | Posted:2/1/2012 4:34:30 PM | 0 comments

Reasons your employee don't like you

The top reason employees leave organizations is due to poor relationships with their direct supervisor. This fact has been documented in articles so often that it’s becoming a cliché: people don’t leave organizations they leave managers.

The average organization is losing up to 7% of its annual sales due to poor leadership. That’s over $1 million per year for an organization with $15 million or more in annual sales. And yet many organizations still fail to provide comprehensive management/leadership training, particularly to newly promoted or first time managers.

This lack of training may help explain why 40 percent of new management hires fail within their first 18 months.

Another blog recently published on Forbes.com offered managers insight on other reasons employees may not be satisfied with their performance. Here are the highlights from the article and comments section:

Are Green Jobs “Better” Jobs?

by Angie Knowles, Research | Posted:1/27/2012 1:57:14 PM | 0 comments

This is a huge debate about green careers second only to the controversy of whether the implementation of environmental policies leads to net job growth. On one side of the spectrum, a recent study published by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives suggests that jobs in emerging green industries do not necessarily guarantee an improvement over the status quo.

In a media release about the report, “new production in renewable industries such as wind and solar is more labour-intensive than in existing electricity production. But these jobs tend to be poorly paid and temporary, mainly because electricity generation is shifting to the private sector, rather than occurring in public utilities.”

Yet from a contrasting perspective, other research has found that environment-related work offers several advantages over employment in traditional sectors, including strong future growth prospects and higher median salaries.

Click on the green jobs infographic below from Jobvine Jobs for an interesting summary of this viewpoint:

Why you Should be Hiring for Attitude

by Julie Checknita, Employer Services | Posted:1/25/2012 12:31:46 PM | 0 comments

Hire for Attitude

Attracting and retaining top talent is both a priority and a challenge for many environmental managers. With 46% of new hires failing within the first 18 months, managers need to determine how to hire the right candidates who will stick around and perform. Without these key people to execute key strategies, problems such as decreased productivity, low staff morale, underachieving on corporate objectives and costly turnover, can and will occur. While there are an abundance of articles discussing the benefits of hiring for cultural fit, there is new research that suggests that it just may be more important to hire for attitude.

In an interview published on Forbes.com, Mark Murphy, founder and CEO of Leadership IQ, discussed why so many new hires fail within the first year and a half and why hiring for attitude can prevent this in the ever changing hiring landscape.

by Angie Knowles, Research | Posted:1/20/2012 5:06:45 PM | 0 comments

Our Top 10 Biggest Hits - ECO Canada

Over the years, ECO Canada’s blogs have featured a wide range of expert tips and tricks on everything from writing a custom résumé for the environmental sector, to retaining your organization’s top talent and identifying the emerging skills requirements of Canada’s green economy.

Amongst all these posts, several have stood out as page view superstars. The insider career advice from these articles really clicked with job-seekers, job-keepers and employers—so much so that several of the posts in the list below continue to generate views nearly two years from when they were originally posted.

Without further ado, here are the top 10 all in one place:

by Julie Checknita, Employer Services | Posted:1/18/2012 4:28:43 PM | 0 comments

Recruitment

A recent blog titled “Why I Won’t Hire You” offered professionals on the job hunt a fresh and blunt perspective on what makes an applicant stand out—and most importantly what makes a recruiter toss an application in the recycle bin.

As I read through the comments following the article, I soon realized that job seeking professionals had a few tidbits of candid advice of their own for recruiters and HR professionals.

Here are a few highlights from each perspective:

Why I won’t hire you...