Does your company invest in professional development for its employees? If not, now is a great time to reconsider. Investing in the professional growth of your employees has many benefits that more than justify any associated costs. In this post, we’ll look at five different reasons managers should make skill development a priority.

If you've ever left the Portland area to live where English wasn't the main spoken language—or even lived in a neighborhood of Portland where English was less common—you know the challenge non-native English speakers face daily. Even people with impeccable language skills must process many cultural, contextual, and idiomatic elements of the workplace while also doing whatever work you hired them to do.

The United States gains a lot of strength from being a place where people from anywhere can find their place and succeed. If your workplace has hired non-native English speakers, you must make an effort to promote strong communication between colleagues of different backgrounds. You may also need to account for more considerable language barriers, such as when coworkers or employees do their work well but with intermediate English language proficiency, resulting in misunderstandings.

By improving office communication and helping everyone get on the same page, you can make your workplace a safe and prosperous environment for native and non-native English speakers.

Different people use different methods to resolve conflict, and most people have one or more natural, preferred conflict resolution strategies that they use regularly. It is possible to scientifically measure an individual's inclinations toward specific conflict resolution strategies. In this article, we will discuss the five different categories of conflict resolution from the Thomas-Kilmann model, as well as their advantages and disadvantages.

Whether it’s a dispute with a coworker or disagreement with a supervisor, the workplace is fraught with conflicts, disputes, and disagreements that have to be ironed out one way or the other. And as much as we try to avoid conflict - or even ignore those that exist - at some point everyone will need to employ some kind of conflict resolution skills to cope with workplace disagreements.

Does your company invest in professional development for its employees? Have you thought about it? Maybe you should. Investing in the professional growth of your employees has many benefits that more than justify any associated costs. In this post we’ll look at the seven different reasons managers should make employee skill development a priority.

When a key employee is promoted or leaves their position for any reason, a business needs to have a dependable, knowledgeable employee that can take their place. Even so, many businesses do not have a procedure in place to formally handle these types of large personnel changes. However, succession planning can be key to smooth transitions while capturing certain benefits and avoiding pitfalls such as the cost of turnover that results from any large or small personnel changes.

When hiring your first employee as a small business owner, it is important that you find someone who fits your business’s culture. Your  employee is the first person you trust to support your mission and the first person who acts as a voice for your company. To continue growing, recruit and retain an employee who has the right talents to help your business succeed.

As an employer, you can better understand your employees’ traits and roles within your organization by using personality tests. Personality tests can be extremely valuable to all employers across many different industries and organizations.

The world is globalizing at an increasing rate, and trends don’t show signs of this slowing down any time soon. Here in the United States, we’re increasingly becoming a more diverse nation with every business industry consisting of a large variety of people from different cultures, life experiences, family types, generations, and more. This is why the ability to work across technologies, borders and cultures has become so important.

The Holidays are such an important time of year for small businesses. For many, especially in retail, the Holidays may make or break the entire financial year. Craft fairs and holiday markets have become popular among both consumers and small businesses during this time. But are businesses doing all they can to maximize their retail sales from holiday markets?