Software For Management

Occupational health and safety is a significant concern for every workplace.  This entails all areas of health and safety in an office, with a special focus on preventing hazards and injuries.  Possible hazards of a workplace can include cancers, accidents, musculoskeletal diseases, respiratory diseases, hearing loss, circulatory diseases, stress related disorders and communicable diseases.

Office or work ergonomics is a particular concern for employees who work with computers.  We all know computers help to make our daily lives much easier, but they can also cause serious discomfort and pain.  Failure to see the early warning signs of these problems can even lead to injuries harm

Three of the main office ergonomic concerns are lighting, ventilation and muscle soreness.  Bright lighting or light sources that cause glares on a computer screen can lead to eye strain or headaches, and may cause the person to move into an unnatural posture. Do what you can to minimize glare from overhead lights, desk lamps or windows.  In some cases , turning a desk in one direction or another can solve the problem.

Set up your office layout to maintain the proportionate air circulation for every worker .  Try to keep any employee from sitting directly under a heating or air vent where air will flow directly on top of that person.

Muscle fatigue is one of the most common work related injuries in an workplace setting.  These injuries result from prolonged periods of repetitive tasks or static posture, including typing or viewing a monitor without changing position.  Repetitive tasks may cause localized discomfort, while static posture will cause neck and shoulder pain .

Luckily, there are easy solutions to office ergonomics problems.  Here is a breakdown of the easiest  ways to make your office an better environment to work

• Encourage your employees to vary their tasks.  This gives their muscles ample time to recover and eliminate overuse.
• Make it simple for your employees to change their working postures.  The easiest way to do this is through adjustable furniture.  Employees will be able to move their chairs and work different muscle groups.  Remember, ergonomic seating should allow a comfortable working posture with natural joint alignment from head to toe.
• Work areas should be extensive enough to allow employees to alternate hands they use to handle a mouse.  This will allow the tendons and muscles in one hand to rest while the other controls the mouse movements.  Employees can reduce their dependency on a mouse entirely by using keyboard shortcuts whenever possible.  Shortcuts including “Ctrl + S” to save, “Ctrl + P” to print, “Ctrl + C” to copy and “Ctrl + V” to paste.  This will reduce the amount of strain that is put on the tendons and muscles which control a mouse.
• If an employee is assigned a job which involves repeated tasks or static posture, make sure that person takes breaks during the day.  This will increase circulation and give the muscles time to rest and recover.
• Try to intermingle computer tasks with non-computer tasks.  Encourage employees to move different parts of their bodies throughout the day to use different muscle groups.

The best way to keep your office safe is to make sure your employees know the possible problems they can encounter .  Knowledge is the best way to prevent injury.  If you explain why you are enforcing break times and encouraging them to use keyboard shortcuts, employees will be more likely to follow the suggestions. A little attention and education can go a long way toward eliminating hazards and injuries in the workplace .

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When most people decide to attend a business networking event , it is often with mixed thoughts . Yes, they want to network and catch more sales . But 99 percent of them are worried they’re going to have to start being , well, pushy.

I’ve got good news. If you’re a decent  person who doesn’t want to be pushy then that’s the best start to your career as a networker. That’s because networking isn’t about probing for sales from the start . It’s about getting people to know you, like you and trust you.

Remember that people like to do business with people they like . The rest can come later…once that relationship has been built . If you think about the people you do business with, or whom you recommend to others, it’s plausible they are not the people  who foist themselves on you. It’ll be people you like, people you’ve been aware of for a while. People who, when the need arises, you’re pleased to recommend because you like and trust them.

Newsflash: this is how the world works. It’s all networking is.

People love to be in the know and get a huge buzz from recommending “their” people to others. How many times have you heard somebody say “I’ve got a fabulous mechanic”? Or, “you’re disappointed with you accountant? I know someone who’s just gone out on his own and he’s a top bloke”.

Those kinds of recommendations  are brilliant, but they don’t come as a result of selling  yourself hard to strangers. Building up that kind of trust takes time and multiple encounters.

So next time you’re about to go to a networking event, or you’re logging onto LinkedIn, or someone asks you what you do at a party , there’s no need to worry  and back away into your shell. Get your brave up and concentrate on being yourself and learning more about the people you’re mixing with. That’s what good networking is all about.

How would you feel if you turned up  to make the first presentation for a new key-account client without having done any preparation? Anxious, nervous, self-conscious, exposed? How would you react to one of your team members if you found out that’s how they’d turned up to their first meeting? So I’m sure you’ll agree when suggested that to get the best out of any situation you need to do some preparation and planning.

Dont make the mistake as well of signing up to online business networking sites and not preparing yourself. Sites such as Linkedin require suitable planning as you are exposing yourself to millions of potential clients. Get the best linkedin training you can as well as business networking training to ensure you maximise your business potential.

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While Business Planning  and writing a business plan may be a heavy task, especially to do it well, it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t do it. Its benefits far outbalance its challenges. However, if you have a good Business Planning Process, then the difficulty of the planning task is mitigated and often minimized.

Business Planning is the Hard Part…

If the Business Planning Process is Comprehensive and well executed, then the Planning Process itself will often be much harder than the actual running of the business.  Wouldn’t you like to get the hard part of running the Business out of the way upfront?  Wouldn’t you want to vouch the absolute best chance to succeed with your business?  Wouldn’t you want to be exceedingly profitable verses marginally profitable?  Of course you would.  But to do so takes a lot of hard work, making the intangible (i.e. an idea, a new project, a new business venture), tangible.

Borrowing from the success of others in creating and expanding successful companies, can really give you a leg up in the difficult Process of converting the unknown into an executable, successful venture.  This is why I wrote a Business Plan Book as it takes a lot of that guesswork out of the Business Planning Process, giving the business proprietor years of experience in not just building successful plans but actually implementing those plans into successful companies.  A good business plan book simplifies the complicated Business Planning Process into uncomplicated, easy to understand steps, which will build on one another into the construction blocks of a successful business.

Knowledge and Know-How…

Good Business Planning comes from lots of hands on experience. Overcome that experience factor by utilizing an existing and proven Business Planning Process originated by someone who has plenty of business planning and consulting experience. Why reinvent the wheel when you can use successful business planning systems already in place? The internet offers a ton of them, pick out wisely and find one from someone who has plenty of actual business planning experience. Or better yet, hire an experienced business adviser and planner to help you develop a good business plan by following a solid planning process.

specify the Unknown…

Without a good business plan in place, you are just throwing darts at a board with your eyes closed.  A good Business Planning Process defines the unknown into an executable plan.  Otherwise, you are simply guessing.  Business is hard enough- take the mystery out of it.  It is exceedingly hard to define the unknown without a system in place to work toward known opportunities, threats, competitors, marketplace changes, market variables, business models and so on.  An effective Planning Process embraces the unknown and creates the future- a future of probable success.

Inexactitude is a Guarantee in Business…

Not everything can be predicted.  However, by having a system in place to deal with this inexactness allows you to more effectively address challenges that come up.  Inexactitude costs your business money.  An effective Business Plan puts systems in place within your Company to quickly deal with the unexpected occurrences, minimizing your “learning curve” expenditures.  Additionally, a Business Plan can test the virtue of a Strategic maneuver or Program to deal with a potential problem before implementation, again, minimizing your learning curve resourcefulness allocation.  A good business plan process or business plan workbook will help you effectively deal with the unpredictability of a business and the inexactness inherent in business development.

About the Author

This article is written by Frank Goley, business consultant and business planner for ABC Business Consulting. Frank is an expert in writing, developing and implementing business plans, business turnaround plans, business funding plans, marketing plans, strategic plans and web marketing plans. Frank offers comprehensive business consulting, business coaching, business turnaround consulting, and web seo, web development and web marketing consulting to small and medium size companies.. Frank is author of the business plan book, The Comprehensive Business Plan Workbook – A Step by Step Guide to Effective Business Planning, and he has over 40 published articles on business success strategies. He also writes the Business Success Strategies blog.

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I’d like to share another thought about the role of comfort at work and in business.  I keep being struck with how often it functions in an orthogonal, if not opposing manner to working strategically and winning at the game of business. Hmm… first sentence and I already wrote that to nicely. How about saying it this way: “Be very careful about doing or supporting others doing what’s comfortable… check that it really is aligned with working, managing strategically, with the end goal in mind… otherwise it may mean you or they will not survive.”

Performance improvement starts with effective systems designed to help your people perform better and at optimum efficiency to obtain growth and progress vital to the continued growth of the organization. Employees need clearly defined goals along with constant feedback in order to do a better job.

For more about performance improvement, see http://www.performancesolutionstech.com/category/leading-performance-improvement/page/2/.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GufMa-J8cI&feature=related

Not being successful, in this case in completing projects, seems to inspire longer hours, more meetings, rationalizations… all sorts of things, maybe anything but a change in process. Changing how we communicate and collaborate with the team improves accountability and saves time…so projects can be completed on time.

Needed is a performance management tool that enables you to manage performance at the:
1. Business (including Strategic Plan and BI) level, at the
2. Project level (screenshot below), and at the
3. Individual, human resource level… all within one application.

I’d like to share another thought about the role of comfort in business.  I’m often struck with how often it functions in an orthogonal, if not opposing, manner to working strategically and winning at the game of business. Hm… first sentence and I already wrote that to nicely. How about saying it this way: “Be very careful about doing, or supporting others doing what’s comfortable… check that it really is aligned with working, managing strategically, with the end goal in mind… otherwise it may mean you or they will not survive.”

For a similar perspective, check out Alan Webber’s book, Rules of Thumb: 52 Truths for Winning at Business without Losing Your Self.  It seems that when we lose the sense of being in touch with survival needs, we get feeling insulated, we rationalize not needing to adapt, not needing to respond, not needing to take the extra steps.

This last week I was peering at a man’s face, as his body lay crumpled on the street, his eye fixed wide open, someone feeling for his pulse, someone else calling 911.  He had walked across a busy highway at night, instead of walking the extra 50 feet down to the light ahead of us.  He didn’t survive, but he did what was comfortable… until it suddenly wasn’t.

I worked with customers from two different governments this week.  Both are slow to get even basic strategy tracking and resulting action plans implemented.  Both would be dead on the street if they had to face a car bearing down on them.

So ask yourself this: How nimble is your business, how much does doing what’s strategic, what ensures survivability, rank over comfort?

Bottom Line:

Staying in touch with the need to survive is a great antidote to over-emphasizing comfort in how we engage in life at work.  In fact, losing touch with survival needs makes us all too complacent, protective and non-adaptive in a world that often rewards the one who adapts the quickest. Be aware of the role of comfort in your work style and the work style of those around you.

I have been swamped with a large international project for the past few months, and blogging as well as a few other things, have all had to take a back seat. One thing I have been interested in writing about it seeing how people manage and translate information into a preferred work style.

In the past I’ve talked about how important follow-up is to the employee feedback and review process.  In fact, it’s possibly more important than most of the review.  Without a follow-up process, the value of the review quickly evaporates.  Today, I just wanted to share a quick thought as it applies to performance management.

If you think about it, follow-up is critical to employee reviews, but it’s equally as important to strategic planning and performance management. Follow-up, buttressed by some type of assessment or measuring process is key to anything we expend significant resources on to produce a change .  That’s true whether the follow-up is a general assessment of “What worked” and “What didn’t”, or if it is tied to specific outcome metrics (ex. Improve % of customer retension, increase % of website activity, etc.)

Stephen Gill, in an earlier blob – Describes an apt metaphor, characterizing our approach to measuring the impact of training and other “improvement” activities to playing golf in the dark – can’t accurately tell where the pin is, don’t know how close the ball you hit is to the pin and after while, you don’t care…  http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/2653383/39418883

I see that regularly in training efforts.  And on a broader scale, the analogy of investments in business and performance improvement look like playing golf without a clear assessment of the changes we make in swing or clubs.  Instead, we approach our efforts more along these lines: As long as we are still on the fairway and the game is still ongoing… we keep playing, and hoping for the best.

If there’s money in the bank, we keep playing.  Actually as the game rolls on, whether there’s more or less money in the bank, we in fact do develop theories about what “made the difference.”  The conclusions usually aren’t based on measurements, but on a perceptually based (not fact based, but much much less work to construct) opinions.

This puts us at risk to look like the story of the blind men describing the elephant by their immediate experience.  Notice how strongly we all react to others having conclusions that aren’t fact based… the conflict over the health care bill being one good example.  Assessment, and the facts that come out of it, can save you time and money, not to mention face.

Bottom Line:

Performance Management needs follow-up, which needs metrics in the worst way, otherwise it’s subject to false conclusions based on perceptions rather than facts, inactivity or just expensive, poor return on investments in “performance enhancing” activities.

Do yourself a favor, limit the performance investments to what you’re willing to invest in following-up and I bet you’ll like the results.