SkyWater Blog

If you are a leader in your organization or a manager of a team, there is a very good chance that your employees are more stressed out over the events of 2020 than they're admitting to you. Racial inequality, the pandemic, contentious presidential election, financial gaps between classes, the pressures of parenting, navigating education offerings, the list goes on. 2020 brought many challenges and placed them in the center of our living rooms.

It goes without saying that 2020 was tremendously unique year. Through it all, we've done our best to broadcast the industry trends that we have been able to observe through our access to the job market in the industries we serve. Recently, we shared the single biggest hiring mistake we've seen in 2020, which speaks to a trend we saw of companies freezing their hiring of key leadership roles out of caution. 

Over the past several years, the concept of “Employee Engagement” – and the practice of using surveys to measure it – has attracted a lot of attention among managers and the HR leadership who support them.  It’s also generated a great deal of confusion.  What is employee engagement?  Isn’t it just a new name for employee satisfaction?  We keep surveying them but nothing ever changes… why bother?

In my last blog post, I talked about employee engagement and how some of the most successful organizations have been able to boost employee engagement, even during uncertain times of change.  Your organization may be experiencing a healthy level of employee engagement, but you also may have a few bright stars who have begun to become disengaged. If that is the case, how do you recognize the signs, and what can be done?

Even when we do notice an employee beginning to disengage, we’re often tempted to bury our heads in the sand, hoping it’s just a bumpy phase that will smooth itself out.

SkyWater Search Partners has been recognized by Forbes Magazine as a Top Executive Recruiting Firm in its 2020 ranking of America’s Best Executive Recruiting Firms. Compiled by analytics firm Statista, this year’s Forbes rankings were based on a survey of more than 18,000 participants. While thousands of firms across the country were considered for inclusion, SkyWater Search Partners was one of only 200 firms that made the list, including only 3 in Minnesota.

One short year ago, we published our “Earth Day Workplace Challenge.” We were feeling pretty celebratory because we’d made several Earth-friendly changes to our workplace and our workday habits and we were excited to share them.

Tips and Tales From Our Own Experience with Managing During Coronavirus

Whether you felt ready or not, here you go: you’re now the leader of a 100% remote team.

Even under normal circumstances, going totally remote is very different than managing a department in a shared workspace – even if you’re used to supervising occasional or part-time telecommuters.

Whether you’re an experienced telecommuter, or this is the first time you’ve ever set up a virtual work station, the truth is: nobody has worked from home like this before.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been tapping into our favorite resources, gathering up some of the best tips we can find on how to survive – and thrive – during quarantine-forced telecommuting. We’ve found a lot of solid advice out there from very seasoned, highly successful professionals who have been doing this for years. These are people who know all the tricks for staying productive, engaged, and happy as full-time telecommuters.

And Why Eliminating Them Might Be Even Worse

A few years ago, a number of large, highly respected employers, including Cargill, Microsoft, and The Gap made headlines when they decided to do away with their annual employee performance reviews and ratings.  Since then, a growing number of organizations have followed suit.