A recent study shows that a lot of bosses aren’t doing a very good job of listening to their employees. In these difficult economic times your small business might not be able to hand out cash bonuses or pay increases, but you can pay more attention to what your employees are saying. It’s bound to be good for businesses.

Survey Results: The more powerful you are, the more difficult it may be to listen to your employees. That’s the conclusion from research conducted by Kelly See, an assistant professor of management and organization at New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business, along with colleagues from Lehigh and Duke Universities. More than 200 business graduate students were asked to remember scenarios where they felt helpless or where they had power over people and resources. People who recalled times when they felt powerful were less likely to listen to advice. See says, “It’s important to surround yourself with people who are going to disagree with you and to remind you that you’re not always right. Leaders should seek as many opinions as they can get, and they should force themselves to listen to those opinions.” To read more, check out the November issue of Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.

Benefits of Listening to Employees: In a knowledge-based workplace, you want to take advantage of the experience and insights of the people on your payroll. If employees feel valued, they’re likely to be more satisfied and productive. Employee feedback may also help you to avoid costly mistakes.

Strategies for Getting and Implementing Employee Feedback:

Adjust Your Mindset. Once you recognize the bias that feelings of power can create, you can try to compensate for the effect. It’s good to feel confident but you don’t want to alienate people and disregard valuable input.

Take a Survey. Ask your employees what matters to them. These days, flexible hours and educational opportunities may help to make pay freezes and smaller work forces more tolerable.

Engage Everyone in Brainstorming. Encourage employees at all levels to contribute ideas on how to cut costs, get more customers, improve working conditions and drive growth. Schedule retreats or set aside time in staff meetings. Create an online suggestion box.
Let Employees Know How Their Feedback is Being Used. Employees will feel more motivated if they know their efforts produce results. When you make an organizational change, explain how employee input factored into the decision.

Show your employees you care this holiday season and throughout the year. With everyone trying to do more with less, listening to your employees will empower them to contribute more to the bottom line while boosting everyone’s morale.

Having the right skills, the right experience and the right qualifications are all important in finding your dream job. But, there is one key element of the application process that is all too often overlooked: presentation.

It all starts with your cover letter and CV. The content is, of course, important but the layout, formatting and font are also key. At this stage of the process more applicants are weeded out than at any other stage so you should be doing everything you can to get yourself noticed.

CVs can be difficult to lay out in a way that is practical but also looks professional and presentable so starting with CV templates, which are available for free online, can be a huge help. Some reports suggest that a recruiter will only spend 15 seconds reading a CV on their first look, so during this stage a CV that looks good is extremely important.

Presentation is important throughout the entire application process, particularly when you have your interview. What you wear will depend on the job you’re applying for but, as a rule of thumb, you should always dress smartly. It may sound obvious but pressing your clothes will help to create a smarter look. You can’t go wrong with a simple, neat suit.

A recruiter sorting through responses to a newspaper ad will have hundreds of CVs and cover letters to whittle down to just a handful of applicants, so presenting yourself well can help to separate you from everyone else.

[image via bigburpsx3 on flickr]

Ideas are great but they have to be marketable if you want to make a living off of them. If you’re a small business owner who wants to expand your products and services or you’re looking to start a new small business you can avoid some expensive mistakes through the power of crowdsourcing. These are three sites where entrepreneurs can get feedback and assistance for $10 or less.

Quirky (http://www.quirky.com/): Quirky is a social product development company. For just $10 you can submit an idea that will immediately go live on the site, which has over 100,000 members. Your idea stays posted for 30 days while people vote and give you feedback. Meanwhile, Quirky staff monitor the most popular ideas and choose two each week for potential development. If your idea gets chosen you earn a “perpetual royalty.” If not, you still get great analytics. Quirky’s track record is very impressive. Since 2009, they’ve helped to develop over 200 products and their retail partners include Bed, Bath & Beyond, Office Max, Toys “R” Us and Barnes & Noble. Their most successful product, Pivot Power, has earned its inventor over $100,000. It’s a rotating power strip that accommodates the bulky power bricks at the end of the plugs for many devices.

GeniusCrowds (http://www.geniuscrowds.com/ ): GeniusCrowds is a community for creating products people want to see in stores. You can submit product ideas for free. The community reviews all the ideas and votes for their favorites. Then, expert panels including GeniusCrowds staff, retailers and manufacturers conduct their own review and select contenders. If your idea gets deemed one of their “genius products,” they build it and you earn royalties. Their Exclusive Product Development Agreement states that you’ll be paid a direct 25%s share of royalties. Even if you don’t get that far, you can earn gift cards just for being a crowd favorite.

Kickstarter (http://www.kickstarter.com/): Kickstarter is a funding platform for inventors, artists and other creative types. The emphasis is on creative projects and no money changes hands until a project is fully funded. The most common projects are $5,000 or less so people use it to test concepts or conditionally sell stuff without risk. It’s free to use. You submit a project and within about two days you get a response from a team member to let you know if it meets the guidelines. The key to success is to offer products, benefits and experiences that will motivate people to fund your idea.

Maybe you’ll become the next Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg or maybe you’ll design a new product that becomes your next best seller. Either way, crowdsourcing provides valuable feedback at little cost.