If you’ve already turned the Bublé up to eleven and started adding mince pies to your shopping basket, there’s no need to hold back – you are definitely not alone. As it turns out, the majority of us have already begun to embrace the festive season.

Organisational Fit is about aligning your company values with the personal values of your employees. Getting it right has been shown to improve job satisfaction and reduce employee turnover.

Given a choice of office perks, what would your employees put top of their Christmas list? Vacation time? A bonus? We investigate this and provide you with some ideas based on actual academic theory instead.

A pat on the back is easily doled out. But giving meaningful, timely and motivating recognition to your employees takes some thought. It’s worth making the effort: a 2015 study showed that praising your employees’ strengths is many times more effective in driving engagement than trying to correct weaknesses.

Frederick Herzberg developed one of the best-known theories of people management. Motivated by his interest in mental health, the American psychologist carried out an influential study into employees’ attitudes to their jobs.

Introducing Peakon Actions. Close your feedback loop, log your initiatives and track their impact on your organisation’s culture.

Watching your employees grow and develop is a great feeling, perhaps even better than the thrill of learning a new skill yourself. Once they gain experience and start progressing within your organisation, they’ll only be looking up.

We can’t all be lifesavers or world leaders, but we all need to feel like we have Meaningful Work. From the CEO to the new trainee, having a sense of being valuable motivates us to give our best effort, so how can we make sure our teams find their work meaningful?

Meet Mary Parker Follett, a key contributor to group dynamics theory and “The Mother of Modern Management”. Once rejected by male-only Harvard, she later became a business advisor to President Theodore Roosevelt. Truly a woman “far ahead of her time.”

Autonomy is freedom. It’s independence. It’s when you throw away the Lego instructions and still build something that resembles a spaceship. It’s also one of the toughest things to get right as a manager.

A sense of accomplishment is a lovely thing, and it’s also crucial for a productive workplace. Remove that glowing feeling and things start to unravel pretty quickly. So, how can we help employees gain a sense of accomplishment?

Abraham Maslow is “The Father of Humanistic Psychology”. His influential theories on motivation caused some of the biggest changes in management practices during the late 20th century.