Category: Organizational Culture

10 Ways to Use Cloverleaf in the New Decade- Keep your People on Fire

Reading Time: 4 minutesWhen the new year comes around, your people will likely come back to the office with plans, goals, exciting stories, and a momentum that is so important to keep alive as the following months near. Here are 10 ways that we can help you achieve this in the new year. 1. Resolve old conflict. You’ve heard the phrase, new year, new me. Well, since you’re still you, why not say new year, better me! And how better to achieve this than resolving old conflict that was brewing with the end-of-the-year anxiety and rush. If you still feel a negative energy lingering into January, learn how to deal with conflict in the office so that everyone starts out ready for whatever comes their way. 2. ARRANGE A VIRTUAL HAPPY HOUR If your team is used to meeting for post-work drinks or even a coffee break on a weekly or monthly basis, this is another activity that translates well to the virtual space. Make sure that you set a suitable cap on small groups to avoid the experience being overwhelming; 10 is ideal, although 20 is workable. Get team members to bring a drink to enjoy, and pre-plan discussion points or just let the conversation flow as you would normally. Being able to sit back and trust employees to gel in this context is one of the key leadership qualities you should foster. 3. PLAY ONLINE GAMES TOGETHER Gaming may not be everyone’s favorite pastime, but there are lots of multiplayer experiences that are great for team bonding. Fostering cohesion in this way can even be one of the pros of telecommuting that would not necessarily apply to the office. In terms of the team-building games themselves, popular options include the trivia-based JackBox.tv titles and the Scrabble-inspired Words With Friends. 4. SET AN ICEBREAKER CHALLENGE Activities that engage remote workers’ brains are the best to pursue, so establishing a hypothetical scenario and asking people how they would cope can spark a lot of fun and debate. A fun icebreaker question is to ask team members to think which 3 items they would take to a desert island to survive after being stranded on a limited list. This icebreaker will get people talking and stimulate their imagination. 5. RUN A BOOK CLUB Whether or not a book club is already part of your team’s activity schedule, this works well for remote working as it does when face-to-face meetings are possible. Be sure to choose books that are accessible, enjoyable, and interesting. Length also matters, so avoid picking “War and Peace” unless you want to spend weeks waiting for everyone to finish and meet up. 6. SET FITNESS GOALS Working remotely can reduce the amount of physical activity that team members get each day, so you can capitalize on this by getting remote employees to choose their own fitness goals and aim to complete them together as constructive teamwork. Be sure that this is handled sensitively and do not put undue pressure on a member of your team for whom fitness and exercise may not come easily. 7. ENCOURAGE NON-WORK-RELATED TALKS While virtual meetings and conference calls are all well and good, sometimes it’s nice to talk about things other than work without being scrutinized by lots of other people in real-time. To that end, partner people in small groups with one another and ask them to become pen pals, corresponding via email about their days and boosting each other’s morale through this online team building. 8. GET CRAFTY When working remotely, team members may have more time on their hands freed up by not needing to commute daily. This can make completing craft projects together an entertaining option for team-building events. Whether you decide to take up pottery, woodwork, knitting, or any other craft-related hobby, doing this while chatting with colleagues on Zoom can eradicate feelings of isolation in a fun way. 9. TAKE HOME TOURS As team members may well live long distances from one another, a remote working scenario could be the ideal opportunity to let them show off their abodes and also display a bit more of their personality to their remote team members. Each member can be given the chance to show everyone around their home, either in real-time or by filming clips and editing them together. 10. SHARE PERSONAL PHOTOS Seeing pictures of someone as a baby or from their youth can be a fun way to engage with others in a work environment. Get team members to send you photos of them in their youth, collate them all together and then share them with the rest of the team in a video chat, then get attendees to guess the identity of each pic. Read more about virtual team-building ideas here. Most importantly, listen to each member of your team and work out which team-building activities for remote teams will best suit their personalities and needs. Being responsive and open to feedback is the best way to improve your management of virtual offices.

Remote Teams Trust: From a Distance and Through Technology

Reading Time: 2 minutesImagine sitting at home or in a coffee shop behind a screen all day and being included on emails with your team. This would likely feel normal if you knew the other teammates on the email, but what if you are a completely remote worker? How do you build a foundation of trust when you are only virtually communicating with your team? TRUST: WHY IS IT IMPORTANT?  One thing we know about remote and distributed teams is that connection is the key to performance. Trust is an essential building block of group cohesion (Sarker, Valachich, & Sarker, 2003), and trust is required for team success (Handy, 1995). Without trust, your team’s productivity will decline. Distrustful teammates may feel the need to excessively monitor each other’s work or even work in isolation without collaboration (Al-Ani, & Redmiles, 2009), and we know that collaboration is of paramount importance in virtual teams. Want to know how you can foster trust in your team and empower your employees to do their best work together? Keep reading!  HOW TO BUILD TRUST Foster a culture of trust (McManus & Mosca, 2015)! A great place to start is by understanding what motivates behaviors and cultural preferences. Our CulturePulse and Motivating Values assessments can provide you with a bird’s eye view of those, and you can use the results of these assessments to understand what your team is motivated by and how they prefer to fit into a team. This allows a mutual understanding, respect, and awareness of each other, and from there you will have a better idea of how to work with each other. “Building a culture of trust requires commitment from the top down” (McManus & Mosca, 2015). This means that, as a team leader, you should “practice what you preach” by modeling a culture of trust to your employees through your words and actions. Self-disclosure helps build trust (Ma, Lim Mingjie, & Naaman, 2017), and one way Cloverleaf can help you self-disclose who you really are is through your profile — it is a wealth of information about your strengths, preferences, and what makes you YOU! Invite teammates to explore the platform and learn more about what makes you tick.  Transparency and honesty not only shows that you are open to discussion, but also that you want a strong foundation of truth. A way to build trust in your team is through effective communication and information sharing (McManus & Mosca, 2015). These qualities are all evident through the Cloverleaf Calendar Integration. The events on your Google or Microsoft calendar are pulled into Cloverleaf and presented for the day with the event, the people you are meeting with, and (if they have a Cloverleaf account) a coaching insight about them. This feature is available to EVERYONE who uses Cloverleaf in a team! Another way to promote information sharing among team members is to encourage employees to use their email insights every day. These email insights provide information about teammates’ strengths and preferences — promote a culture of transparency and trust. Even though some of your remote or distributed team members may have never met, they can still get to know each other as people and build relationships! Learn more about the Cloverleaf integrations here to have a more engaged and cohesive team.

distributed team management

8 Tips For Successful Distributed Team Management

Reading Time: 9 minutesMaintaining a work-life balance can be hard for people who deal with long commutes and extended hours at work. They’re trying to stay productive during standard working time, which aren’t always the best hours for them. Remote work is becoming increasingly popular as an option, with many employees seeking out this perk of working from home or from anywhere in the world. A report by Flexjobs found that 74 percent of respondents believe that flexible working options, like remote work, are the “new normal” for employees in the modern business world. Upwork’s Future Workplace Report has found that 69 percent of managers in younger generations, like Millennials, have team members who are working remotely. Managing a distributed team requires a much different approach from leading people that you see in person every day. Here are eight new tips to help set yourself and your team up for success. 1. USE A SOLUTION THAT PROVIDES TEAM INSIGHTS  Many of the opportunities to learn more about your employees are less readily available when you’re working in a distributed or remote team. It’s best to leverage the right technology and tools to create these opportunities in a digital medium so that you can get valuable insights into how remote team members from different parts of the world work together, and how your employees can improve. Cloverleaf is an essential tool in managing a distributed and partially remote team. This new platform can help you know the personalities and strengths of the remote workers you manage from afar. You can use these management tools to learn about your remote worker’s motivations, work styles, preferences, and other essential details, and there’s one key feature that sets Cloverleaf apart from similar platforms. Every remote team member receives insights from each other directly to their inbox. You’re getting a virtual run-in at the coffee station right in your email. learn more 2. USE COMMUNICATION TOOLS THAT SUPPORT COLLABORATION AND CONNECTION The right real-time communication tools are the lifeblood that makes remote work possible. Since you can’t casually drop by someone’s desk throughout the day, you need ways to help team discussions feel natural and easy to use. Many organizations with a distributed or partially remote team like Slack or similar chat platforms. Here are a few key features and characteristics that you should look for when selecting the right tools that make the most sense for your distributed team: Multiple channels: When your company tries to have a single channel for everything going on in remote teams, it can quickly become cluttered and hard to follow. You’re trying to improve communication for those working remotely, keep track of available multi-channel configurations. At the very least, you’ll want to keep a work-related channel and an off-topic channel for video meetings or a virtual get together. The Off-topic chat provides your team with a way to spend time with one another and grow their interpersonal relationships. It’s a great way to blow off steam during difficult deadlines, share non-work-related messages, and get insight into every member’s personalities. Text, voice, and video chat: Text isn’t always the ideal medium when you need to share ideas and information. Sometimes you can deliver a clear explanation faster through voice chat or need a meeting set up in video chat. When you have all of these options in a single communications tool, you keep them straightforward to use. Compare that to having separate software for each type of chat, which can get complicated rather quickly. That kind of setup also discourages people from using the tools that they have available to them. One-on-one messaging: Private messaging tools are best for conversations that aren’t appropriate for the group channel. Sometimes people want to share what they feel or they have questions and concerns that are better addressed privately. Private messaging tools can allow for quick and anonymous conflict resolution. Ad-hoc channels: You don’t always need an official chat channel for a particular project or conversation, but it would help to separate out that discussion from the rest of the chat. Being able to create channels on the fly makes it possible to have these spontaneous group performance conversations without being disruptive to the rest of the team’s communication. GIF and emoji support: Text often fails to show the emotional tone of a person’s message. It’s easy for employees to take things the wrong way or to assume a meaning that was not actually intended. Emojis and GIFs are great ways for employees to add the appropriate tone, and they’re often a hallmark of the off-topic channel. When you keep visual media available for online discussions, you create more opportunities for people to connect, show off personalities, and express how they feel. Keep note of a clear GIF and emoji usage policy in place so that they are used in ways that are not inappropriate in a work environment. Third-party plugins and integration: It’s rare to find a good communications platform that has everything you need out of the box. When it integrates with the third-party tools that you’re already using, or it has support for plugins that are created for various use cases, you can customize your chat experience in the exact way your distributed team needs. Robust search tools: Most of your team communication takes place through this type of platform. Make sure you know that the search tools are up to the task so that important messages are not lost in the shuffle. File upload support: If you’re going to have a central location for most of your distributed team’s company activities, then it may help to know which tools can upload and share files through this platform. 3. ARRANGE FOR IN-PERSON TIME THROUGH TEAM RETREATS Your team may be too far-flung to arrange for weekly in-person office meetings to touch base with one another, but team retreats offer a valuable way to learn more about your people and reward them for a job well done. Typically, these retreats are done

10 Employee Engagement Ideas that Boost Satisfaction

10 Employee Engagement Ideas to Boost Retention & Job Satisfaction

Reading Time: 5 minutesDo you know those days at work that feel fun, when you’re doing work you really enjoy? You probably want your people to feel the same way, but how do you know if they do? According to Gallup® “Nearly 85% of employees worldwide are still not engaged or are actively disengaged at work, despite more effort from companies.” Employee engagement metrics like these reveal how vital it is for managers to adjust their strategies and make employee engagement a priority. Engaged employees are less likely to look for positions at other companies, will recommend the company as a great place to work, and often have a sense of pride about being involved in the organization. If this sounds interesting, keep reading for 10 employee engagement initiatives that will lead to an improved employee experience that leads to increased productivity, growth, resiliency, and happier employees. 1: PROVIDING MULTIPLE EMPLOYEE FEEDBACK CHANNELS Employee engagement surveys say that employees want to feel heard, so make it easy for them to leave feedback and get in touch with you. Also, offer multiple feedback channels, including an anonymous option. As part of your performance management efforts, be responsive by going through this feedback and decide when it makes sense for the organization and your team. Always be authentic and transparent with your team so they feel comfortable coming to you when they need to have a conversation. 2: RESPONDING SUBSTANTIVELY TO COMMENTS ABOUT COMPANY CULTURE Have you ever been in a workplace that feels toxic? Did you really want to be there? Probably not. It’s vital to create a culture that promotes fairness, civility, and inclusiveness for employees from the start of the hiring process, through onboarding, promotions, and moving through the ranks. Misaligned company culture can create an environment that’s counterproductive to what you’re aiming for, which is high employee engagement. Whether the issues are very evident or very subtle, they may impact your team. When you can’t change the whole company culture, personalize a team culture that works best for your people. 3. PERFORMING EXIT INTERVIEWS While current employees may shy away from fully open and honest feedback, exit interviews with an employee leaving for another company may be able to help you measure employee engagement and identify existing problems. It’s important to identify any gaps and common trends in the feedback to learn and implement how to engage your people best and reduce employee turnover. 4. USING A COACHING TOOL TO KEEP EMPLOYEES ENGAGED Imagine having a coaching tool that fits effortlessly into your team’s workflow and can help you drive your employee engagement initiative. Cloverleaf does just that. You can visualize your team on the Team Dashboard to get a quick view of everyone involved in engagement efforts. Automated Coaching™ and personalized tips go straight to your team’s inboxes, providing employee engagement ideas ranging from simple reminders of each employee’s birthday to strategies to improve the work environment. 5. ENCOURAGE AND ORGANIZE VOLUNTEERING OPPORTUNITIES Some employees donate their time and money to causes outside of work, so why not offer opportunities to express that altruistic spirit together with their co-workers? Opportunities to volunteer for a good cause are effective employee engagement activities, promoting team building and encouraging employees to think of the company as giving. They can demonstrate company values and follow through on the company’s mission statement. Partner with local businesses to show the community what your company stands for. Empower employees to propose volunteer activities and win back disengaged employees by helping them support causes that they believe in. 6. KEEP TECHNOLOGY AND TOOLS MODERN AND EFFECTIVE Do your employees have computers that take way too long to boot up, struggle to load essential software, and email systems that lose important messages? If this is true employee performance will decline, and new employees struggle with glitchy hardware and software. It’s hard to keep employees engaged when they’re working with old, slow, or insufficient tools, so empower them with the right ones. Use technology to engage remote employees, create a collaborative office environment, and encourage cross-team communication. Make Technology a Team Effort Talk to your team about the way they work and the problems with their current tools. Employee job satisfaction will go up when they have solutions that support their business processes and work efficiently. When your organization chooses new software and tools, make sure to ask the end-users of these solutions which features are must-have first to avoid problems later. 7. INVEST IN YOUR EMPLOYEES Investing in professional development for your employees will make them feel valued, improving happiness and health. Invest in both professional and personal development by promoting healthy work-life balance. Allow employees opportunities for remote work and flexible office hours, particularly if they are facing problems in their personal lives, raising a family, or investing in their career by taking time for training and education. 8. RECOGNIZE YOUR EMPLOYEES! Provide recognition for what your employees achieve, from extraordinary efforts to everyday personal celebrations. These are drivers of employee engagement that will help develop self-esteem and well-being. You can set up an employee of the month award or create category-specific options for your team members. Try to make awards personalized and unique for your team so you build a sense of team identity. You can offer perks, such as gifts or additional paid time off, to engage employees to put in more effort without creating an overly competitive environment among employees. 9. CREATE AN EMPLOYEE MENTORING SYSTEM When a new employee is onboarded, they get up to speed on business processes and other basics, but new employees have to pick up on skills and knowledge that go beyond the job description. An employee mentoring system could match up each new employee with an engaged employee who has experience. Different employees have different learning styles, so be sure each mentor is a good match. Reward employees who are successful mentors with pathways to senior leadership positions. Encourage employees to share knowledge and support one another by creating an open office space. Incorporate mentorship

cloverleaf avatar

Why the Name “Cloverleaf”?

Reading Time: 3 minutesI often get asked – “Why the name Cloverleaf?” After all, there are a lot of clover-related company names – heck, we didn’t even get the dot com for this name. It boils down to the simple concept and vision of what Cloverleaf would become in those early days. For those of you that have previously founded a company you understand that there is often a weird phase at the beginning where you just have an idea or concept but you don’t have a name or brand. It is as if you had a child and had to wait until he/she could walk before naming the child.  When Cloverleaf was in that weird in-between stage we would often describe our idea by drawing a Venn diagram with three overlapping circles.  These circles represented three important concepts of how we, as individuals, do work. Each circle represented what we believed were really important pieces to align to do our best work. Let’s look at each in a little more detail: Proficiency – in the early days we called this skill but eventually settled on an alliteration that eventually became known as the 3 Ps. When we looked across the landscape of talent tools (from talent acquisition to performance management) we saw that most focused almost exclusively on skill. We felt skill was obviously important and is often the price of admission but rather than stopping there we knew there were real differentiators that weren’t used. Whether by choice or not, we felt like this was a real miss in the talent management space. Personality – the set of behaviors that were either used to process information or how others perceived your actions. We debated whether we should use this word (remember the 3 Ps?) since what we really cared about was behaviors and personality often left people thinking about the “Which Star Wars character are you?” tests that have become the hallmark of social media. Even today we work hard to avoid using the word personality in our marketing and in our product. Regardless of the word, what we cared about was shedding light on our behaviors and how those would likely impact our performance with others. Preference – again, we debated what word to use. Ultimately we wanted a measure that could shed light on culture. But culture is such a loaded word. Everyone has a different way of thinking about what constitutes culture. Ultimately we give organizations several ways to assess this for their teams or organizations. We offer values-based assessments and work style preference assessments to provide insight into culture. Next, we believe there is an important intersection of these elements that come together not just for the individual but for collections of people that form teams and organizations. This acts as an almost three-dimensional model that can provide tremendous insight into now only how individuals can do their best work but how they can do their best work with the people they are working with. Another way to think about how these three things work in conjunction to grow your potential is to think of behaviors (personality) as the outcome of your skills or knowledge (proficiency) that is influenced by your beliefs or values (preferences). You can get more knowledge or develop your skills and that will impact your behaviors and that is where much of corporate development dollars are spent. Values are less changing but are important factors in decision-making. And these can change over time but are less volatile over time. As an example, if you get married and have kids your values may shift and what motivates you changes, perhaps slowly at first but maybe more pronounced over time.  So it is important to know all three aspects of the Cloverleaf to be able to effectively modify performance over time. Now that you know the background on the three leaves of the Cloverleaf logo, you may be asking why not a fourth leaf, and to that I reply – the fourth leaf is luck and you don’t need to be lucky to do great work. HUMAN SKILL PROGRAMS ARE HITTING LIMITATIONS…​ 5 THINGS THIS FREE RESOURCE WILL TEACH YOU Close the widening gap between learning and on-the-job application Overcome the tension of pausing productivity for development opportunities Integrate learning so it is actually in the flow of work The evolution of human skill development What Automated Coaching™ is and how it works.

a group of people are standing far away from the camera and are backlit by the rising sun

4 Benefits of Shared Experiences In The Workplace

Reading Time: 3 minutesHave you ever sat next to someone in a gate at the airport without speaking … then a delay is announced with the possibility of cancellation and suddenly your whole section of the gate is navigating the trials of air travel together? You just had a shared experience. Crazy how the relationship leaps from the “Can I use the outlet next to you to charge my phone?”, to running through the airport together to get the next best flight. Sharing experiences make people a team. At Cloverleaf, we are all about taking a group of people and making them into a true team. While we do this through Automated Coaching™, we wholeheartedly believe that shared experiences are an amazing way to increase team effectiveness.  4 Effective Ways To Create Shared Experiences With Your Teammates At Work 1 – Rush through the team development stages, (fancy way of saying: “you’ll have no choice but to get to know each other better”) Part of the way teams can become more effective is  “rushing” the different stages of becoming a team. Tuckman’s Model of Team Development has four stages that teams go through: Forming – Newly formed team, beginning to work through goals, expectations and the tasks at hand Storming – When team members begin to voice their opinions, push boundaries and experience conflict as power is assigned Norming – team members take responsibility and have a shared sense of ownership group goals Performing – roles are clearly established and team is achieving their common goals by autonomous work The quicker that working together and spending time together gets a team through these phases, the quicker a team is at their peak productivity levels in the “Performing” stage. *This is also a cycle that can be started over, but once again, the faster you can move through stages – the quicker you are back to a productive state. 2 – Create Memories Together In this thesis, which talks about transactive memory, the more time you spend together, the more easily a pair or group of people is able to recognize each person’s unique abilities and natural strengths. While this process eventually happens when working with a team regardless, sharing experiences speeds up the process. As you are learning about each other’s uniqueness you are increasing your social and emotional intelligence as team, something that HBR has written on many times including this article.   Aside from fancy science-y talk, shared memories simply gives a team a common experience to look back on and share together. There even becomes shared words and language that gets associated with the experience and memory. This can be especially helpful for remote organizations that typically only communicate online. Most articles on remote teams like this one, explain how it is best to get together in person periodically to help the team take shape and work best together. 3- Increase Trust To Make Feedback Easier Jumping into giving and receiving feedback as a team is hard when you’ve only been in the “work” environment. Trust is something that takes time, and certainly a certain base level of a relationship. This HBR article discusses exactly that, along with other ways to build a feedback-rich culture. 4 – Sharing an experience means a better experience It’s been proven that sharing an experience amplifies the emotions related to that experience. Why not elevate your senses AND associate an awesome experience with your co-workers with sharing positive experiences.  Don’t believe us? Here is a study that proves this very thing (Hint: They find that chocolate tastes better when tasting with others). HUMAN SKILL PROGRAMS ARE HITTING LIMITATIONS…​ 5 THINGS THIS FREE RESOURCE WILL TEACH YOU Close the widening gap between learning and on-the-job application Overcome the tension of pausing productivity for development opportunities Integrate learning so it is actually in the flow of work The evolution of human skill development What Automated Coaching™ is and how it works.