The Disposable Worker Temp jobs may save or ruin your company. Know how to keep productivity up.
You're a bad manager who's driving us nuts, and here's what those of us who report to you want to tell you—whether you like it or not.
Welcome! I'm so glad you made it. Make yourself comfortable. You're probably wondering why I invited you. You're in for a treat. You see, this is your annual review, the one your boss never gave you, the one that really matters.
Don't get up. This isn't going on your permanent record. It's just between us, one professional to another. In reality, I guess you could call this an intervention. As with any wake up call, I'm doing this because I like you. You have so many gifts. But you've lost your way. And frankly, you're doing more
harm than good these days. This is going to be hard to hear, but I'll say it anyway:...
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As the Great Recession continues to abate, there are signals companies finally are shrugging off the siege mentality of 2009 and cautiously looking ahead for opportunities to cultivate markets with new products and services.
According to a McKinsey global survey (Economic Conditions Snapshot, December 2009: McKinsey Global Survey results, McKinseyQuarterly.com), executives are looking for external funding and actively returning to planning medium- and long-term initiatives. This is in stark contrast to the "cut-and-cover" tactics
of the last two years. What do these hopeful signs mean for sales teams working with these companies? One implication is that it is also time for sales teams to switch gears. Calling on customers can be more rewarding and productive for everyone if sales teams are in touch with what customers want from them as they
plan for growth. So, what exactly do customers want from the sales relationship as signs of growth return? A recent study conducted for an industrial distributor (C-Lens Index, Redacted Proprietary Report, Singularity Group, Inc.,
January 2010) provides some answers. Distributors and dealers were asked to rate...
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Making a good second impression Often times the purchase is the first impression, and customer support or the sales team makes the second impression. Make sure the second impression is a good one.
I ran a business in England owned by BellSouth Corporation for two years. We were a cellular service provider that sold wireless telephone handsets and airtime service. Once a week, I visited our customer care center and met with Colin, the director of the center. It was always fascinating to me that Colin
could never remember my name. No matter how many times I corrected him, he called me "Ian."
I walked into his office every Wednesday at 9 a.m. and said, "Good morning, Colin!" He always appeared startled as he looked up from his computer and simply muttered, "Ian." "No, it's Dan," I replied routinely. After this interaction, I sat down and we reviewed the incoming call statistics, the types of problems
customers were experiencing and what had been done to resolve the issues. Colin was very good at his job, striving to achieve 100 percent customer satisfaction. He was diligent at ensuring that his representatives were well trained, had the tools they needed to achieve their goals, and felt empowered to solve customer
problems. [Colin told us the customer's first impression at the point of purchase was simply that they would be able to make phone calls. After all, a phone is a phone is a phone. After receiving their somewhat-confusing first bill or after experiencing dropped calls, however, customers often called in quite
upset. It was this call from the customer to the customer care center that represented our opportunity to make a good second impression...]
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As companies search for more productive and cost effective ways of getting work accomplished, there has been an explosion of virtual work and project teams.
As a result, it has become imperative for people to learn how to work together across boundaries of space, time, and yes, cultures. Driven by the need to leverage expertise located in different parts of the organization, companies are increasingly reliant on geographically dispersed virtual teams to plan, make
decisions, and take action on critical business issues. When such teams function at optimal levels of productivity and efficiency, they are a source of competitive advantage for their companies, bringing together a variety of different perspectives and experiences that have high value for innovation and
problem solving. On the other hand, teams working remotely face unique challenges in communicating and collaborating efficiently and productively. Research conducted by Wilson Learning a few years ago highlights this problem. Our research showed the most productive teams are those with a high level of
diversity and high levels of communication skills. However, if the communication skills are lacking, the highly diverse teams are the lowest performing teams. Thus effective teamwork and communication skills for virtual teams are even more important than for other teams. You can't walk down the hall or into the next
cubicle to discuss a problem if some people are in New York and others are in Santa Cruz, CA, or even Bangladore, India. As a result, without critical skill-sets, virtual teams will fail to fully engage team members, establish clear goals and standards, and establish the processes necessary to get things
done. Here is a "Top Ten" list of strategies that will help your virtual teams perform at the highest level and take full advantage of members' varying skills, knowledge, and capabilities...
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Lessons from a blue-collar millionaire Build a positive and inclusive culture that educates your workers so you can trust them to do their best: 10 key ingredients
When Nick Sarillo launched his pizza business, he had one goal in mind: to create a corporate culture unlike any he had seen.
It's Takeout Tuesday at Nick's Pizza & Pub, and the air is thick with the smells of hot pizza crust, peppers, onions, and cheese. Eighteen young men and women -- most of them high school age -- form an assembly line between a row of worktables and a long bank of pizza ovens. The kids laugh and shout, even
as they focus intently on their tasks. Nick Sarillo, 47, stands halfway down the assembly line, holding a giant wooden pizza board. As the company's founder and CEO, he doesn't usually work the pizza line anymore. But he is happy to lend a hand when he can, and the kitchen crew needs all the help it
can get on Tuesdays, thanks to a program Sarillo launched in March 2009 in response to the recession. A sign in the lobby explains the logic behind the policy:...
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How to get people to change Positive feelings and feedback go a long way to increasing productivity and employee retention.
[Meetings] A little less conversation Don’t waste time overcommunicating, it cuts productivity and costs money. Keep teams small for more efficiency.
Authors Chip Heath and Dan Heath discuss their new book on change management. Forget PowerPoint. If you want to influence employee or customer behavior, charts and data typically won't cut it, say Chip and Dan Heath, authors of the 2007 bestseller Made to Stick and the new Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard. In Switch, the Heath brothers explore ways to
manage big changes in life and in business. "Change is hard, because we're schizophrenic," says Chip, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford's Graduate School of Business. (Dan is a senior fellow at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business.) "Part of us may want to change, but
part of us has this emotional connection to the way that we've always done things." In researching their new book, the Heaths consulted experts on subjects as diverse as how to diet and how to change society. "Time and again, we found the same principles coming up, whether it was individual change or
organizational change or societal change," says Chip. Those principles, he says, involve...
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You've been yelped A resourceful pair create a dot com company for customer reviews that becomes a source of agony for small companies and entrepreneurs.
Wading into the fast-moving flow of social media can be daunting to a small business owner with very little time on his hands. Here's Inc.'s comprehensive social media cheat sheet for the time-strapped entrepreneur.
1. Offer a peek behind the scenes.
Offering a sneak preview of new products, services, or features online can help build demand and provide critical feedback to help smooth the launch. For instance,...
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Search engine optimization can raise your website's profile, delivering more traffic, more customers, and bigger revenues. Here's how to make the most of this essential marketing tool. Trying to improve your website's search engine ranking can seem a bit like the quest for romance. Like people looking for love, websites looking for a high search ranking can find it many different ways and with varying degrees of success. As with romance, you don't need to spend a lot of money; your intrinsic
appeal matters more than the size of your investment. And, as with love, you can't achieve a high search engine ranking once and then never worry about it again. Search engine optimization (SEO) is an ongoing effort, and the more you work at it, the better it will be. There are many things that any small
business—even one with no budget for SEO—can do to improve its search rankings. Here's a look at some of the most effective ways to raise your profile in search...
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If you are considering using your blog to boost your search engine rankings, make sure your blog supports all of the features that search engines want to see in your content, such as explicit, unique title tags and good meta description tags...
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SUMMARY: Need inspiration for your next email test? Here are five examples of successful tests shared by presenters at our recent Email Marketing Summit.
Read on for five ideas you can incorporate into your 2010 testing plans. Includes tests to help improve:
Is the day of tiny ads finally here? The Apple iPad tablet may have opened the door to an advertizing platform that has been previously ignored.
Every year around this time, a few brave forecasters declare that advertising on mobile devices is poised to become the next big thing in marketing. And every year, the results disappoint.
But this year, with technology powerhouses like Apple and Google introducing whole new mobile devices and buying up ad firms specializing in the small screen, the forecasts may finally be right. By now, the sales pitch is familiar: The mobile phone offers advertisers all the benefits of traditional Internet
ads, including the ability to track their effectiveness. And it lets marketers reach consumers on the go, on a gadget they clutch intimately. Why, then, according to Juniper Research, did worldwide spending on mobile advertising last year amount to only...
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Considering Facebook's 300 million active users, and the thousands joining every day—along with its Alexa ranking of 3 (that is, Facebook is the third most-trafficked website)—businesses really must tap into the power of this online behemoth.
Facebook offers many features for strategic networking and generating visibility for your company. Among them, Facebook fan pages are (currently) the only feature fully indexed by Google. By inserting keyword-rich text throughout your fan page and updating regularly, you can create tremendous search engine
optimization. Using Facebook's Social Ads, you can then drive targeted traffic from the entire Facebook site directly to your fan page. Once potential fans click through to your fan page, your goals are as follows:...
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With Google real-time search and sites like Facebook and Twitter continuing to grow, it's more necessary than ever to monitor your online reputation. Here are steps you can take to ensure you're viewed professionally -- and advice on what to do if you're associated with harmful content.
Several months ago when Twitter introduced its lists feature, social media consultant Allen Mireles checked to see which lists included her. "I wanted to see if the lists I was on were a reflection of how I wanted to be viewed on Twitter," she says. She found two surprises: A porn star had included her on a
list and another user listed her under "people I've seen naked"—a surprise, she says, because she had never met the person. Mireles responded immediately. First she blocked the porn star on Twitter, which automatically removed her from the list. Then she sent a direct message to the owner of the other list
and explained that she uses Twitter for business purposes and didn't think it was appropriate to include her on it. "He very kindly took me off the list and apologized, saying he had been trying to make some of his lists 'more
interesting,'" Mireles says. Joe Laratro, president of Tandem Interactive, an online marketing solutions company, experienced a similar situation...
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BlackBerry devices used to be renowned for their impressively long battery lives. But with all the features and functionalities packed into modern RIM smartphones during the past couple of years, some of that battery longevity has vanished. CIO.com's Al Sacco offers up seven advanced tips that he
regularly employs to ensure his BlackBerry keeps on ticking...and ticking and ticking.
Ever wondered why your BlackBerry seems to get different battery life than your fellow smartphone users' devices? How long your BlackBerry smartphone lasts on a single charge depends on a variety of factors. Your specific device model, size of the battery pack, whether or not your handheld uses 3G
networks, if it employs Wi-Fi and/or Bluetooth, and whether or not you're using it in a strong coverage area are just a few parts of the equation. So how do you ensure that you're using your BlackBerry battery as effectively as possible? The true key to maximizing your BlackBerry battery-life is...
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How to stop bad manners from ruining your relationships at work.
Taken individually these infractions seem minor: You forget to put your cellphone on vibrate, and suddenly "Disco Inferno" is blaring through the conference room. You order a pastrami sandwich for lunch, unaware that a cubicle wall away your co-workers are gagging from the smell. You let your
eyes swerve to your computer screen while a junior associate tells you about her relationship problems. While these might seem like small slips, they can create deep resentments between co-workers. "It's like a marriage. It's the little things that get under your skin and mount up after awhile," says
Jacqueline Whitmore, founder of EtiquetteExpert.com and author of Business Class. Christine Pearson, professor of management at Thunderbird School of Global Management in Glendale, Ariz. and coauthor of The Cost of Bad Behavior, says 96% of Americans report experiencing rudeness at work, and 48% say they
are treated uncivilly at least once a week. This kind of manners meltdown can have a direct affect on the bottom line...
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Good leaders do so in three ways.
Prophets are people who see into the future, predicting things that will be though the present gives no clue of them. They foretell of ordinary shepherd boys assuming the thrones of emperors; they foresee the blooming of barren lands to feed fertile civilizations. They conjure a vision of the future from
nothingness in a way that seems almost to be magic. In the professional world, true leaders come close to being prophets. They make the most of self-fulfilling prophecies, as I wrote in my last column, "When Believing It So Makes It So." They realize that setting high expectations for their people
can create self-fulfilling prophecies, leading those expectations to come true. When people adjust their self-expectations and their behaviors to rise to the expectations of their leaders, they raise the bar for themselves. They achieve...
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Tiger Woods' philandering has talking heads talking about compulsive sex. But research on sex addiction is fuzzy.
Nobody really knows for sure--though you can certainly get treated for sex addiction if you think you have it. Last year, X-Files and Californication star David Duchovny checked into rehab for sexual addiction. After a string of women went public with claims they were mistresses of golfer Tiger Woods (the
best-paid athlete on the planet and a married man), it took only days for talking heads to speculate that Woods might be an addict and need rehab. The idea of sex as a drug is deeply seductive to journalists and reality TV producers. But the idea of being addicted to sex is actually quite
controversial. No such diagnosis is even recognized in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), psychiatry's Bible. The DSM-IV assiduously avoids the word "addiction," preferring to talk about dependence, withdrawal and compulsion. A new condition, called...
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