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Archive for the ‘Employee Productivity’ Category

March recommended reading

29 Mar

How to Hate Your Job (or 16 Things Not to Do)

From Reading For Your Success: “I didn’t know what to do so I listened to everyone else. I found a ‘good job’ at what I later discovered was ‘a big dumb company‘. I was ecstatic. A real job that everyone could be proud of. Awesome. The excitement lasted all of about 16 days.”

Read the rest of How to Hate Your Job (or 16 Things Not to Do)

Drawing in PowerPoint 101

From PowerPoint Ninja: “I view drawing in PowerPoint as a last resort when you can’t find an appropriate photo or clip art graphic. If I can customize an existing clip art image, I’m going to go that route before I embark down the path of drawing something in PowerPoint for a couple of reasons.”

Continue reading Drawing in PowerPoint 101

Your Emails are Too Long

From Zen Habits: “One of the worst problems I’ve seen when people send me emails is amazingly common: they’re way too long.

Here’s a rule: a long email is never necessary. Never.”

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80 Ways to Steal Valuable Minutes for Your Work Day

From OPEN Forum: “We’re all too busy. We’re living and working in an age with countless online and offline inputs, leaving little time for us. If you’re anything like me, you wish there were another couple of hours in every work day. Or at least a few clones of myself to do things like email and laundry.

I’ve asked some of the top small business and productivity bloggers and consultants to share some of their best tips on how they add more time to their days. They’ve got some excellent advice, and each unique to their industry and talents.”

Read 80 Ways to Steal Valuable Minutes for Your Work Day

 
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Posted in Achieve Success, Employee Productivity, Office Software, Presentation Power, Recommended Reading, Time Management

 

4 ways to increase your productivity at work

24 Mar

a series of green traffic lights

Albert Einstein defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again, yet expecting different results.”  If you want to improve your work productivity, something has to change.  Sure, you could just work more hours.  But that only lasts a little while until you get burned out and hate your work.  Consider these four ways to increase your productivity at work without working longer hours.  You may even be able to cut back your hours once you’re achieving more!

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Posted in Employee Productivity, Strengths & Weaknesses

 

February recommended reading

27 Feb

books and binders in a bookcase

Recommended reading for February

How to Be a Great Storyteller and Win Over Any Audience

From The Corner Office by Steve Tobak: “It’s hard to imagine your career going anywhere if you can’t tell a story. Whether it’s an investor pitch to a VC, an ‘about us’ to a potential customer, justifying your group’s existence to management, or an ‘about me’ in an interview, your success in business is all about effective storytelling.”

Learn How to Be a Great Storyteller and Win Over Any Audience

Bridging the Trust Gap within a Group

From Leadership Strategies: “When it comes to teams, there is one thing that can change everything.  It’s a necessary ingredient for transitioning a group of individuals into a genuine team.  It’s trust.”

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Motivation Made Simple

From The Management Experts: “If you’re a manager then you’ve been told at least once that you have to ‘motivate your people.’ But how do you do that? Start by making a change in your head.”

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Don’t Collaborate?

From Leadership Freak: “Most organizations bow down to the value of collaboration. Today, I’m shooting the sacred cow. Collaboration isn’t always useful or necessary. Furthermore, collaboration can be cumbersome and ineffective.”

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Posted in Employee Productivity, Get Motivated, Good Manager, Presentation Power, Recommended Reading, Team Building

 

January recommended reading

20 Jan

Why Your Business Needs a Big Idea

From Gallo Communications: “As small businesses around the country plan for 2011, many are focused on simply surviving. What’s lost is the big idea. Your business needs a moon shot goal that will fuel its journey for the next decade and inspire your employees, your partners, and you.”

Read the rest of Why Your Business Needs a Big Idea

How to Conquer Your Fear and Self-Doubt

From The Corner Office by Steve Tobak: “Whether you suffer from an irrational fear of public speaking, are plagued by enormous stress at work, live in mortal terror of screwing up or getting fired, or, more to the point, are a highly competent and accomplished professional who, deep inside, suffers from debilitating doubts and fears, there are three things you all have in common…”

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Email Etiquette for the Super-Busy

From The 99%: “It’s time for a more mindful approach [to email], one that fully embraces a “less is more” strategy. To help you get started, we’ve assembled a cheat sheet of our email best practices. And, trust us, it’s not just about being more polite, it’s about being more efficient and getting the responses you need.”

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44 Actions You Can Take Now to Boost Your Energy

From Michael Hyatt: “Recently, just for the fun of it, I started making a list of all the things that energize me. I started out with a list of 10. Then it grew to 20, 30, then 40, and now, 44. But I am certain I have only just begun.”

Read 44 Actions You Can Take Now to Boost Your Energy

Richard St. John’s 8 secrets of success

A short video from TED: “Why do people succeed? Is it because they’re smart? Or are they just lucky? Neither. Analyst Richard St. John condenses years of interviews into an unmissable 3-minute slideshow on the real secrets of success.”

Watch Richard St. John’s 8 secrets of success

Overcoming the Fear of Change

From the Gallup Management Journal: “For more than 20 years, David Jones has consulted with some of America’s biggest companies — including Ameritrade, Bon Secours Health System, and Blue Cross/Blue Shield — introducing and directing change. Assessing the potential of a change is one of the hardest, and most important, parts of a leader’s job, says Jones.”

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Posted in Achieve Success, Employee Productivity, Leadership Skills, Recommended Reading

 

Investing in team building pays off

07 Oct

 

Business people talking to each other

Photo by University of Exeter

 

Let me tell you a story about two teams I worked on.  Both teams were made up of a few analysts from across the company.  Both teams were given the same goal: improve a few templates that the analysts used in their work.  Ultimately, one team was much more productive than the other. Read the rest of this entry »

 
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Posted in Achieve Success, Employee Productivity, Leadership Skills, Team Building

 

Two tricks to eliminate distractions and get more time

11 Aug

Admit it.  There are days when you could get so much more done at work if you could just eliminate the distractions around you.  By “distractions,” I mean people.  Wouldn’t it be great if you could just eliminate your co-workers?  I don’t mean going postal and getting rid of them permanently.  HR frowns on that, and it doesn’t look good on your performance review.

Sometimes your day at work is full of people distracting you from your important tasks:

  • The co-worker who wants to chat for hours about what everyone did last weekend.  Or what they plan to do next weekend.
  • The team in the next row is having a party to say goodbye to a teammate.
  • Your best friend at work is yelling on the phone to her deaf grandmother.
  • There’s a meeting going on in the bullpen where you sit.
  • Your boss likes to check his voicemail on the speaker phone.
  • Somebody just told a joke at the other end of the building, and that guy with the megaphone laugh is cracking up.

Just think about all the work you could produce if these distractions weren’t there.  While you can’t magically remove them from you, you can do the next best thing.  You can remove you from them.  Either leave your desk or leave the building to eliminate people distractions and get more time for yourself.

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Posted in Employee Productivity, Time Management

 

Eliminate these three distractions to get more done

05 Aug

Picture yourself at work.  You’re at your desk with a fresh cup of coffee, ready to tackle a vital task.  This is important work that will make you, your boss, and your company look good.

Just as you’re getting into the flow, an email pops up.  You glance at it, realize it’s not important, and get back to – then another email comes in.  You want to serve your customers, so you type a quick reply.  Then someone instant messages you.  While you’re IMing, you need to look up something on the web.

Hours later, you’re still emailing, chatting, and surfing.  Your vital task?  Barely started.

Shun these three common distractions at work, and you’ll get more important work done. Read the rest of this entry »

 
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Posted in Employee Productivity, Time Management

 

Use your prime time effectively

24 Jul

What if I told you there’s a simple way to be more productive at work?  A way that takes just a few minutes to learn.  A way with zero overhead, so you can just do it every day.  Are you interested?

The way is to use your prime time more effectively.  Identify your prime time of the day, and then invest that time by working on your vital and toughest tasks.  You’ll achieve more of what matters.  If you like the results you get, you can even extend your prime time hours. Read the rest of this entry »

 
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Posted in Employee Productivity, Time Management

 

Is e-learning the right solution?

09 Jul

The purpose of training and learning is to improve performance at work.  Before you even consider e-learning, determine if any training will solve your problem.  Training can’t help when the low performance is caused by a lack of motivation.  It also can’t help when people don’t have the tools and resources the need to do their work.  Training can improve low performance only when it is caused by a lack of knowledge or skills.

Once you figure out that training will solve your performance problem, you can evaluate if e-learning is the right type of training for your situation. Read the rest of this entry »

 
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Posted in Employee Productivity