women ceo

Women Taking a Stand to Move Up Managerial Chain

In September 2020, Citigroup bank appointed a female CEO. Why is this big news? Because in doing so, the firm became the first big Wall Street bank to do so. Barriers are being broken down by female trailblazers in all walks of society and even traditionally masculine environments are being transformed into more balanced ones where everyone, regardless of their gender, has an equal chance at success.

Gender pay disparities have been a long-time concern, but as female empowerment inspires a generation, who are the people that are shaping the businesses of the future? Here we delve into three areas of society that women are transforming – the boardroom, sport, and social media.

The boardroom

Historically, the boardroom has been a man’s playground. The imbalance between men and women in higher-paid jobs brings the issue into focus when you consider that only five CEOs in FTSE 100 groups are female. Less than one in three FTSE 100 board members are women. Between the FTSE 100 in the UK and S&P 500 in the USA, only 30 CEOs are women. According to the Conversation, one of the reasons for this is that the attributes of a leader – such as dominance, aggression, and ambition – are usually stereotyped as attributes of men and not women. Worse yet, for a woman that does display dominance, aggression, and ambition, she is often unfairly dismissed as being bossy, hysterical, and idealistic instead.

The disparity between men and women in business was noted by the government, and in 2016 it launched the Hampton-Alexander review, which resulted in recommendations for FTSE 350 companies to improve the representation of women on the boards and in leadership positions.

Four years on and female CEOs on the FTSE 100 are making history. One of the current female CEOs is Liv Garfield, who runs Severn Trent. She had been a CEO of a company before, and at 44 she is the youngest CEO on the FTSE 100. Another of those five women is Carolyn McCall, the CEO of ITV. When she was appointed in 2018, she was the first female CEO the group had ever had.

In 2020 the UK placed 21st on the Global Gender Gap Index, which is quite near the top, showing that the UK isn’t the best but is making positive steps. For comparison, the USA placed 58th and Ireland placed 7th, showing that there is still work to be done in the UK in order to follow Ireland’s example.

Williams’ serving up an ace

The field of play is not somewhere that has always sent the right messages for women. Over the last 15 years though, athletics tracks, tennis courts, and football pitches have become the arenas for women to own the conversation. While FIFA Women’s World Cup winner Megan Rapinoe made the headlines for her Twitter exchanges with US President Donald Trump, it is the tennis stars of Billie-Jean King and Williams sisters Venus and Serena that helped to lay the foundations for our stars of tomorrow.

A self-proclaimed women’s rights activist, King founded the Women’s Tennis Association in 1971 and paved the way for Venus and Serena to pick up the mantle. And with 30 Grand Slam singles titles to their names, the duo have carried the torch since. Both women have become role models, not only for their tennis skills, but also in management.

Although Venus is not quite ready to discard her trainers and racket just yet, her fashion-forward activewear range, EleVen, goes from strength to strength. Serena is as equally adept off the court as she is on it, with a venture capital firm and direct-to-consumer fashion brand among her business portfolios.

Breaking from tradition

Every generation breeds a new talent pool and new methods of entrepreneurialism are opening up avenues to success that previous generations could not tap into. The rise of social media and its business opportunities is allowing teens to break from tradition and become societal influencers. What may have started out as a few selfies among friends has quickly become a winning formula for monetary gain.

There’s money to be made on social media, and lots of it. Teenager Olivia Evi Plant has thousands of followers on Instagram and recently revealed that she earned AUS$30,000 in one year while still attending school. Snapping up and promoting free hair and beauty products, she has put the groundwork in for a winning business model.

One TikTok star has taken her exploits from the video streaming app to the big screen. Addison Rae Easterling has clocked up 60 million followers and according to Forbes Magazine, has amassed US$5 million through various endorsements during the last 12 months. Such has been Easterling’s success that she has now been cast for a remake of 1999 teen comedy She’s All That.

The future

There is light in the future and addressing the unfair gender imbalance across UK business is on the British Government’s radar. In 2019 the government stated that half of all FTSE 100 executive-level appointments in the next year must be women in order to achieve a target of 33 per cent for all female representation across boards in the index. This goal was met in February.

Whether we look at sport, business, or digital channels, it’s clear that women are rising to the top and setting the standard for the women of tomorrow. A change is coming. The future projections look positive and the only way is up.

team building

How to Support Your Employees’ Mental Health with Team Building

By Helen Williams, a digital content writer and regular contributor to Elvetham Hotel’s blog and other travel & lifestyle publications.

According to research published by The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), almost one third of employees have experienced issues with mental health at work. The prevalence of this problem makes it clear that employers need to do as much as they can to support their employees. This is not only due to a duty of care, but also for the benefit of the business. It’s said that every unhappy employee can cost a company around £16,000 every year, due to loss of productivity.

There are a number of ways in which the workplace can support employees’ mental health. In addition to offering help when a person is going through a difficult time, in the form of flexibility or access to support networks, other things can be done pre-emptively. Team building exercises are one such idea. Team building helps to create an efficient, collaborative atmosphere in the workplace, and it can install a valuable sense of camaraderie among colleagues. This goes a long way toward supporting mental health.

How team building supports mental health

Considering how much time a full-time employee spends at work, it’s not surprising that to maintain good mental health they should enjoy being there. Unhappy employees will find that spending eight hours a day in an environment which causes them discontent or distress, is severely detrimental to their wellbeing.

To ensure this is not the case, or indeed to rectify an existing problem, employers need to consider how they can turn their workplace into a positive and productive environment.

A great place to start, in this respect, is encouraging staff to socialise and collaborate. This is because, knowing you’re a valuable member of a team and getting along with colleagues is vital when it comes to feeling positive about work.  To help engender this kind of atmosphere, the management team should introduce a range of team building mechanisms.

A strong team will lead to a sense of worth in an employee, which in turn will cause them to take more pride in, and get more satisfaction out of their work. These elements combined will lead to better mental health.

Social relationships and mental health

With a solid team usually comes good social relationships, which are known to be significantly beneficial for mental health. A study carried out by the Economic and Social Research Council has revealed that the feeling of social isolation is a big trigger for mental illness, and that people who have no friends experience more problems with their mental health.

Social relationships are often formed in the workplace, which is why employers should try to facilitate them in the form of team building exercises. Such activities in their very nature are designed to stimulate the blossoming of relationships and bonds.

Team building ideas for the workplace

There are all sorts of team building exercises out there to consider to help create a warm work environment full of hardworking and positive staff. Whether you need ‘get to know you’ style activities for newly formed teams, or trust exercises to help bring people together, consider the benefits of the following ideas.

Problem Solving

An effective way to stimulate improved communication and listening between colleagues is to arrange for them to take part in problem-solving exercises. These could include:

  • Scavenger hunts
  • Escape room
  • Murder mystery games

Team building activities such as these will encourage your teams to get to know each other, and will help even the most timid staff member gain confidence.

Physical Challenges

Another kind of team building technique is to have staff take part in physical challenges that demand collaboration. These could be anything that involves having all team members voice their opinions to get things done;

  • Assault courses
  • Geese herding
  • Raft building
  • Survival island games

What skills do team building exercises promote?

In addition to supporting the mental health of employees, team building exercises have many other benefits that are useful at work. You can look forward to happier, healthier staff, as well as a refreshed team that knows how to communicate, innovate, and trust each other. Skills you can expect to develop with team building exercises include:

  • Improved collaboration
  • Lateral thinking
  • Better communication
  • People skills
  • Trust
  • Efficiency

Teams in a workplace usually comprise of different types of people, who might not ordinarily be friends had they not met at work. It’s true that some of the most valuable social relationships are built through employment, so anything an employer can do to stimulate this will have significant advantages. Not only will it bring a team of people close together, it will indirectly support the mental wellbeing of staff.

SEO image

Top CEO in SEO

Actor turned entrepreneur turned influential CEO, Joe Sernio has had a journey that many people would find extraordinary. For the last ten years, Mr Sernio has found himself at the head of one of the most exceptional firms offering a unique and optimized web and SEO strategy for businesses and franchises: Shoreline Media Marketing. As the company celebrates its tenth anniversary, we at CEO Monthly take the time to reflect on what makes Mr Sernio one of the finest CEOs in the SEO business this year.

As the world becomes increasingly digital, and reliant on digital media to help engineer success for businesses and franchises everywhere, the need for optimized websites and digital marketing content is more prevalent than ever before. However, the need was perhaps not as great ten years ago, when Shoreline Media Marketing was founded by actor-turned- entrepreneur Joe Sernio. Mr Sernio displayed exceptional vision to see where the world was heading and founded his company in 2010. He recognised that businesses work hard to get where they are, and it was time that digital marketing companies did the same for their clients. Thus, Shoreline Media Marketing was born.

Now celebrating its tenth anniversary of being in business, Shoreline Media Marketing creates online optimization plans based on each business, and their unique structure. The ultimate goal of most businesses and franchises in the world today is growth, and that can be achieved to exceptional effect with the help of search engine optimization and strategies. Over the least ten years, Shoreline Media Marketing has helped clients to grow their online presence in ways that have proven to be hugely beneficial to the business as a whole.

Mr Sernio’s insight and leadership has allowed Shoreline Media Marketing to position itself as one of the finest, industry-leading businesses working in digital marketing and search engine optimization strategies today. The tight-knit and knowledgeable team that Mr Sernio has surrounded himself with strive to customize plans for each individual client’s particular audience, no matter what size or sector the company in question is. It can be pretty confusing for a new business owner to grasp the complexity of everything involved in web optimization and search engine optimization. That is where the expertise from Shoreline Media Marketing comes in.

From paid digital marketing, such as Google Adwords and Bing Ads, to social media and organic search engine optimization, there is no shortage to the wisdom and knowledge that Mr Sernio and his team can impart upon clients. A key part of the excellence that Shoreline Media Marketing offers is that every employee understands how daunting the whole process can be for those who are new to it. Mr Sernio has cultivated an atmosphere and an ethos of quality over quantity. Everybody strives to build relationships over partnerships. The company was built on a foundation of honesty, quality, and trust, and it has never wavered from those principles.

Perhaps nowhere is there a clearer example of how exceptionally well Mr Sernio has performed as CEO of Shoreline Media Marketing than in the number of awards and top rankings the company has received over the last five years. It has consistently been ranked amongst the top SEO agencies in the country by UpCity and TopSEOs, and it has also won awards for being the Best SEO Agency and Best Web Firm in 2016, 2017, and 2018.

Many businesses today will tell you that leads are vital to their business and the success of it. Whether those leads translate into actionable transactions, however, is where a great many organizations can struggle to stay afloat amongst the competition. Through careful brand management, exceptional digital marketing, and superb social media management, Shoreline Media Marketing can take those leads and transform them into something more. With proven and award-winning strategies, and an exceptional leader in the form of Mr Sernio, Shoreline Media Marketing has become a force to be reckoned with in an industry that is only going to grow more popular and necessary over time.