Have You Been Appreciated Lately? Six Steps to Make Yourself and Others Feel Better at Work

Six steps for giving the best incentive staff can get while at the same time making you feel good!

Pitfalls of Casual Friday

This article discusses how sometimes Casual Friday may be taken a little too far.

Employee Communication Surveys: Seven Tips For Successful Design and Implementation

Surveying employees is an effective first step in fixing communication problems in an organization. Even if there are no obvious problems, surveys can help get an organization to the next level of performance. Here are seven useful tips for getting the most impact from your next communication survey.

Stopping the Runaway Train in Triplicate

Communication is the key to survival and change. And the key to that communication is trust. We need to know that our ideas will be listened to and be taken seriously. And we need to know that our comments, when given in good faith, will be free from retribution and rancor.

Employee Communication: The Secret to Business Success

Business surveys consistently show us that poor workplace communication is a major source of employee dissatisfaction. The repercussions of this include not just low employee morale. Employee productivity suffers, along with a range of other business performance indicators. Are you looking in the right places in fixing your organization’s communication problems?

The 7 Rules of Upward Communication

As more and more organizations rely on their teams to manage themselves, so the need for upward communications becomes ever more crucial. This article gives you 7 rules to follow when reporting upwards.

Are Smileys Appropriate in Professional Emails?

When email first began, users discovered a problem. Concise statements and words on a computer monitor didn't communicate emotion or intent very well...

Oh, By The Way, FYI, and Other Messages of Great Importance

Sometimes information doesn't get passed along. Sometimes it's tacked on as an afterthought. Sometimes it's as though the information doesn't really matter at all. And, sometimes it's a gender problem.

Easy Ways To Get Your Web Site Noticed by Search Engines

Get Search Engines to Notice your web sites. Learn from this article how easy it is to get search Engines to notice your web site. Read this article and get the search Engines to place your site on the first page!

How to Increase Productivity When Managing Multiple Disciplines

If your computer is infected with a virus you might have to restore your data at one moment in time. This is like going back in time. Time you could have spend on production. There are other incidents that require you to go back from where you came from. A nuisance if your time is limited...

Thinking Through Problem Solving

Problems lurk everywhere: under that stack of papers on your desk, in the unreturned phone call, within the carelessly worded email zipped off before its writer begins a long afternoon commute. Valarie Washington will teach you to diffuse potential problem bombs by thinking differently about problem solving.

How to Communicate After the Merger/Downsize

Communication is a key component of organizational effectiveness. By sending messages from one individual, group, or organization to another, the information conveyed is meant to influence, persuade, and motivate others' attitudes and behaviors.

Motivation Equation and Orientation

When we break motivation down to its most fundamental level, it’s either inspiration-oriented or desperation-oriented. Whatever action we take, we are moving either toward something we favor or away from something we disfavor. The majority of the world uses desperation as a motivator. Desperation is like a cattle prod forcing you to move forward and take action. You can motivate anyone on your team with desperation. The problem is that motivation spurred by desperation does not last. When desperation is the motivator, sales reps are in an “away from” mentality. This kind of motivation is fleeting, arising only when threat, fear or discomfort is present. If you want motivation to last, you need to rely on inspiration. When your team is motivated by inspiration, they’re moving of their own initiative because they want to and are excited to, rather than because they are being forced to. Motivation becomes long term when it taps into a person’s inner recesses.