Work Life
Be Creative With Your Benefits Package
Think staff benefits and tight budget always conflict?
Not necessarily. Further, to remain competitive in today's employment environment, you must think of how you can offer your staff the most comprehensive benefits package in the most unique fashion.
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Become a Great Boss
You have a great team in place. From top to bottom, they're consistent, diligent and motivated. But there's one catch: No matter how well they perform time after time, you simply can't leave them alone to do what they already know how to do exceedingly well.
Call it micro-management, call it meddling. But a boss who can't or won't allow staffers to function on their own can be a crippling handicap. Not only can that meddling strangle morale, it may send those who find it especially intrusive scrambling for another employer.
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Celebrating Diversity
As organizations seek to increase profitability in an ever-competitive environment, they are becoming more open to exploring diversity matters as a means to reduce staffing and training costs, increase marketing opportunities, and create a workplace conducive to higher productivity and teamwork. This articles provides a great introduction into the world of workplace diversity.
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Confronting Negativity in the Workplace
Do you know someone who whines, yells, or makes sarcastic comments about your organization? Someone who takes out frustrations on others, is angry or hostile, resists change, spreads rumors, or blames others for their mistakes? According to Gary Topchik, a consultant specializing in management and leadership development, these behaviors are all different ways of expressing workplace negativity. In his article, "Purging Workplace Negativity," Topchik reveals several types of negativists and shares how their attitudes affect others.
Topchik provides several strategies for addressing negativity in the workplace, from simple confrontation techniques that managers can use to ways you can turn negative situations into positive ones. He also explores underlying organizational conditions that contribute to workplace negativity.
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Create a Winning Team
Whatever the industry, its great leaders share basic qualities. In his book, Think Like a Champion: Building Success One Victory at a Time, Denver Broncos coach Mike Shanahan shares his insight into the principles of creating a winning team on, or in, any field
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Create a Winning Work Culture
If you are to make your staff to think better of themselves, the work environment must be friendly instead of hostile, open instead of closed, supportive instead of discouraging, relaxing instead of rigid, inclusive instead of divisive -- all the best thinking that books on leadership and empowerment expose.
But it must be more than that.
If you want ideas to flourish, the work environment must be fun.
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Getting People to Attend Your Meetings
We have all been there. You build a great training session based on the expressed needs of your audience. You then circulate the agenda with a sign-up form. Lots of folks sign up. Then ---- there are a lot of "no shows." What happens between the time these folks sign up for the training and the actual day of training?
Many of our Intermediaries have asked for suggestions on how to encourage attendance follow-through and how to decrease "no shows." While the following suggestions have been made by a number of our Intermediaries, these are terrific recommendations for any organization.
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Influencing Your Boss
Knowledge is, of course, a valuable tool. Using knowledge effectively, so that it makes a difference, is really where the importance lies. Marshall Goldsmith refers to this utilization as influencing up when it is used to bring ideas to an organization's upper levels.
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Making Staff Diversity a Priority (10/12/05)
As the concept of diversity grows and evolves, many nonprofits are taking steps to make diversity part of their institutional culture. Many larger organizations are establishing a diversity officer, sometimes as part of other responsibilities and sometimes as a separate position.
Motivating Your Staff With Change
Change can be disconcerting in any organization, but change is very often necessary. In his book Mission-Based Marketing, Peter C. Brinckerhoff suggests changes that organizations can make to refresh themselves without causing widespread alarm.
He emphasizes that not all of these changes should come at once, and he does not advocate change just to stir things up. He distinguishes between changes with low impact and those with high impact.
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Three Winning Organizational Changes
Three winning organizational changes that you can make -- right now -- to improve the self-esteem and success of your team.
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Titles Don't Make Leaders
All of the talk about "leadership" often ignores the fact that leadership is powerful at any and all levels -- and that you do not need to be heading up an organization to be an effective leader.
Some of the most effective people that I know are in roles that are not supervisory. But they can move teams and individuals better than some (most) managers -– precisely because they know when it's appropriate to lead and when it's appropriate to follow. Many so-called "leaders" have not mastered this! How would you respond?
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