A happy employee is a more productive and content employee. So what makes an employee happy with their job? A good salary, with good benefits and a good work environment only go so far. Employees want job satisfaction, they want to feel like they are a part of something and that their contributions are appreciated. [...]
Four Essential Skills For Managers to Master
All managers can agree that many skills are needed to be an effective manager. But what skills are the most important skills that a manager needs to master? To be a more effective manager you should master four skills. Communications, motivation, building trust and leadership are critical skills for every manager. These four skills are [...]
What to Do With Under Performing Employees
Every organization has some “ducks.” Ducks are employees who have a detrimental effect on productivity. Their work is consistently substandard, they rarely meet deadlines, and their skills are out of date. They hate change, resist taking responsibility, and blame their failures on co-workers. They constantly complain about their projects, their teammates, their workloads and their [...]
How To Work Under Pressure
In the IT world working under pressure is a daily occurrence. Knowing the steps to take when faced with an issue can greatly reduce the stress of working under pressure. Deadlines, project changes, unforeseen obstacles, critical outages are only a few of the stressful issues that can arise in the IT world. We face these [...]
Why You Should Cross Train Employees
Being able to staff critical positions is important to maintaining an IT departments level of service. Vacations, sick days, family emergencies and medical leaves are but a few of the normal threats to staffing critical positions. How are these normal absences a threat to an IT department? In the same manner that retirements are a [...]
The Office Politics of Email
Email has become the de facto standard for business communications. It is on our desktop, our laptop and our phone. For this reason email has become the new form of “on the record” types of communications within organizations, thus like everything else subject to politics. Office politics within an organization seems to be an unavoidable [...]
Management Tool – Employee Performance Log (PLog) System
There are many times when a manager needs to recall facts and information about an employee. During performance reviews and dealing with disciplinary issues top the list. As a manager one tool I have found to be very useful for this task is keeping an employee performance log (PLog) for each of my reports. An [...]
The Gemba Walk – A Tool For IT Management and Leadership
A management technique known as “The Gemba Walk” is about getting managers and leadership out of their offices and into the workplace. An Information Technology department by nature is in a constant state of change. For this reason a Gemba walk is a good way for IT managers and leaders to stay in touch with [...]
Learn From Experts Jack and Suzy Welch Reality TV Style
Jack and Suzy Welsh are coauthors of the No.1 best-seller “Winning” and its companion volume, “Winning: The Answers”. Currently they write a column together on management topics for BusinessWeek Magazine. Now legendary business gurus Jack and Suzy Welch provide expert business advice to Fortune 500 executives in an all-new online business show airing today at [...]