career and job

Selasa, 26 Oktober 2010

How To Increase Productivity In The Office

By Alan Cassidy




Companies lose millions of dollars because of poor employee productivity. Man power is very important in the success of a company. If employees are unproductive, work outputs are lessened.

Here are some tips on how to increase productivity in the office:

Tip 1: Allot at least 10 minutes of your time in the morning to answer important e-mail. Personal messages should be answered right after work. Lessen the amount of time you spend on networking sites. Most companies block networking sites to increase productivity.

Tip 2: The company should provide ergonomic office chairs to employees. Since employees are expected to render about 8 hours of work daily, they spend most of their time seated in the office chair. This leads to the development of back pain and stiff muscles. According to studies, ergonomic chairs improve circulation of blood and lessen the appearance of body pains. Employees feel more invigorated while working. Moreover, they also feel more energized in completing the tasks for the day.

Look for an ergonomic chair with casters. The casters make mobility easier. It will allow the employee to transfer from one computer terminal to another without standing and walking to the area all the time.

Tip 3: Tasks have to be divided. While most employees are willing to work extra hours to complete tasks, frequently rendering overtime causes feelings of depression and chronic fatigue. Divide the tasks and make sure work tasks can be done competently by one person. Encourage team work in the office.

Tip 4: Employees should get enough sleep. The body also needs to recuperate after the previous ordeals it has gone through. A person who frequently lacks sleep has trouble concentrating on specific tasks. Memory loss and short attention span are just some of the effects of lack of sleep.

Tip 5: Some companies give free vitamin C supplements to employees especially during cold season. Vitamin C helps improve energy levels. This vitamin also improves immune functions so employees are less likely to call in sick.

Tip 6: Offer incentives especially when employees have exceeded performance expectations. Employees get motivated when there are rewards for their hard work or extra work. They also become more loyal. They grumble less and they tend to harness their skills willingly if there are incentives offered.

Tip 7: Facilitate seminars or skill calibration talks to harness the skills of employees. This will also freshen up their minds and allow them to set new goals for themselves.


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Easy Tips to Increase Your Productivity Levels

By Kent Swigg




We all know that time is available in limited quantity for everybody. There is so much work in our lives, that it is difficult to find time for everything. One way to overcome this problem is to increase productivity so that we are able to get more work completed in less time. This is one of the best ways of solving the problem of limited time.

This article deals with techniques to increase your productivity. When you focus on becoming more productive, you can get a lot of work done and surge ahead of your competitors. When you become more productive, you can enjoy a more fulfilling life. You will be able to add more value to your life. You can be of great benefit to your company as well as to the whole society. So let us discuss a few practical tips in this regard.

How to Increase Productivity:

1. Clear the clutter - Clutter is one of the biggest obstacles to being productive. So you need to remove unwanted distractions and clutter from your life, specially when you are working on an important project. One of the areas of your life where you can begin clearing clutter is your inbox. Delete unwanted emails as soon as they arrive in your inbox.

2. Take the first step - Whenever you find yourself procrastinating on anything, just take the first step. Begin the work and do it for a few minutes. Most of the times, you will not want to stop in the middle and will usually continue till the end. The first step is probably the most difficult one to take, so force yourself to take that step without much delay if you want to be super productive at work.

3. Begin with the most important tasks - If there are so many things on your to-do list, you should try to begin your day with the most important one. At the beginning of the day, you will feel active and full of energy and enthusiasm. So make use of this to get the most important tasks finished as soon as possible. It will help in easing the pressure off your shoulders for the rest of the day.

4. Simplify tasks - If any task seems difficult for you, then you need to break it down. Breaking it into smaller steps or chunks will make it seem less burdensome for you. Then you can easily and quickly finish off each smaller chunk. Within no time, the whole task can be finished even though it was looking too difficult when you first started it. This again is one of the most important secrets of being highly productive.

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Get Organised, Easily

By Taff Nelson




When it comes to organisation, according to recent studies, women have men beat easily, at least when it comes in relation to work. Men are more likely to get behind with their work, run late for their appointments, or miss their appointments all together. And according to the same study, this last of organisational skills has cost at least 1 man in every 20, at least one promotion in their life.

When it comes to your desk working area, this reveals massive amounts about your personality, and whether you're an organised or disorganised individual. If your desk looks similar to a bomb site, with bits of paper and pens scattered all over it, you can't possible be working efficiently, you need some organisation. Start by creating two piles of this clutter, to keep or to bin. File away whatever falls under the 'to keep' category, and shred or throw away whatever falls into the 'to bin' category. Also, if you have an item of paper work which can easily be accessed another way (an email for example), bin it.

At the start of every day, create a to do list. If possible, write up your to do list each morning on a white board which is next to your desk, and simply cross through them or tick them off as you complete each task. This gives you a great sense of accomplishment as you mark your progress through the day, and is a clear indication to those around you how hard you've been working.

Allocate a specific period of time for yourself each day. A time where you cannot be disturbed, by anyone, no matter the reason. This time is to be used for major projects, where any distraction could completely through you off course from what it is you want to achieve. If you work in a busy office environment, this isn't always so easy, so place a 'do not disturb' sign on your door, and turn off you mobile phone, and close down your email application. Do this at the same time each day, and eventually those around you will get the message that this is you're 'me' time. If you still get disturbed during this time, politely let them know that you don't want to be bothered at this time in the future.

Lastly, we all get overloaded with work at one point or another, and in these times it's important to delegate your workload. If you need to complete work by a certain time and you feel as if you're in over your head, with no chance of successfully completing it by the specified period, delegate it and notify your boss. It's of vital importance that you do this straight away, rather than later on when it could possible be too late.

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How To Stay Focused - Your Calendar Is A Great Resource

By Helen Raptoplous





I am a big advocate for a detailed calendar. I prefer a desk calendar to one that is online, but either one will work. Your calendar will tell the truth about what is important to you and what you most want to accomplish. How you block out your time and what you do with that amount of time is very critical to your success. If you are not making the progress you expect or you are not accomplishing what you know you are capable of, then take a peek at your calendar. In solid print you will see how you are using, or abusing your greatest resource of time.

Time is our greatest resource as well as the great equalizer among all of us. It is one thing to have time and another to use it well and productively. Distractions will test us day in and day out. Those distractions are the great challenge that separates those who are stuck from those who are moving forward. We will all find distractions to be a challenge, some more then others, but it is a skill we must master because how we use out time is of great strategic importance.

You will want to align your goals and priorities with how you consistently spend your time. You will block out space in your calendar to focus on the things that will move you forward each day. Time allocation is something to asses each week to see where and how you can make improvements. Your time is of great value. This is your time to accomplish whatever you set out to achieve for yourself. Use your calender to make constant commitments to your success and then follow through.


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Seven Tips For Handling Stress At Work

By Paul Fischer




We have all had those moments at work that overwhelm us. You know that feeling. The one that sends a surge of nervous tension up your spine and the only thing preventing you from "Going Postal" on your coworker is the Happy Hour on the horizon.
The stress of these demanding and harsh economic times has been slowly eating at us and leaving us frazzled more than ever. It is how you handle and deal with stress that makes the difference to you maintaining your composure, professionalism, and respect with others.
Below are some easy to implement stress management approaches:
  1. Shut Your Door. If you don't have a door, close your eyes and take three super deep breaths through your nose and exhaling in a long powerful blow out of your mouth. While you are doing the latter, concentrate on a happy memory or a pleasant vision of the future.
  2. Clean Desktop Daily. Make sure at the end of the day that your desk is clean and orderly. It will give you a positive feeling as you walk through the door the next morning.
  3. Exercise. Stand-up and take a brisk one minute walk around the office. If you can get away with it, make it outside as well.
  4. Excuse Me. If you feel yourself about ready to go into a profanity laced tirade, simply excuse yourself to get a class of water or take a restroom break.
  5. Break Time. Be sure to take your scheduled work breaks. There has been a lot of research on this topic and they all agree, even a brief rest will ease stress.
  6. Be Punctual. Unless you have a very good reason to put in constant overtime, starting and leaving on time prevents the overworked syndrome.
  7. Eat Healthy. Make sure you get the prescribed dosage of vitamins and minerals that includes plenty of seafood and green vegetables.
Over an extended amount of time, pressure results in tense muscles and rapid heart rate with long term effects such as high blood pressure, weakened immune system, and depression. In fact the famed Framingham Heart Study showed that not taking regular vacations leads to heart disease and heart attacks risk that is 36% in men and 50% in women.

Yoga on the beach sounds pretty relaxing to me.


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How to Become an Effective Leader in 9 Steps

By Takuya Hikichi





Building an efficient and effective team leader requires desire, tenacity, dedication and skills. If you are new to the job of leadership or are facing difficulties, then you should follow a few techniques that will make you an effective team leader.

Here are nice bullets for creating an effective leader out of you.

1. Remove discordance: Individual differences and competition can be the end of a team. To foster teamwork, do not focus on individual efforts. Instill the importance of collective effort and harmony.

2. Define objectives and responsibilities clearly: Instructions for work have to be clear and well defined. Similarly, extent of accountability of each member should be clarified. All the members should have a distinct idea of the objectives and missions of the team. Goals for each and every member should be defined in detail.

3. Accept ideas of the group: A team comprises of people from various educational, social and cultural backgrounds. This results in variance of ideas and opinions. Be open to all ideas. Encourage people to come forth with their suggestions and teach all the members to accept the opinions of others. Give due importance to all ideas.

4. Encourage discussions: Frank and honest discussions should be organized in the team. Consult the team on all matters. Discuss problems and solutions with them. Encourage them to come out with constructive suggestions and criticisms.

5. Delegate decision making powers: From time to time, in crunch situations allow the members to take and implement decisions. Guide the team but don't impose your decisions on them. Give them some space. This will develop leadership qualities.

6. Give incentives: Recognize the skills and work of the team members and offer them incentives for excellence. Discuss what incentives that the team members most feel rewarded to receive.

7. Inspire and motivate: Inspiration and motivation are the keys to a great team. Lead from the front and push the team to greater achievements. But be careful, do not try to do things yourself, each the team to do it. Remember, a team looks up to the leader for guidance; it doesn't want him to do its work.

8. Facilities for improvement: Training and developmental programs should be organized frequently. Seminars and workshops on team building will also be helpful.

9. Finally, your conduct, behavior and work ethics should demand respect and be an example to the team. This will create the necessary ambiance for an efficient and cohesive team.

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Team Building Vs Team Bonding

By Alan Hunt




Look up the word "Building" in a reputable dictionary and you'll get something like "the creation or development of something over a period of time". Try the same with the "bonding" and you'll instead be rewarded with something akin to "establish a relationship or link with someone based on shared feelings, interests, or experiences". When it comes to helping teams be more effective, they both have a part to play.

Anyone responsible for a team's performance will want to ensure that as many obstacles to it doing as well as it can in any given circumstance are removed. Indeed, they'll want to go further than that and engage the team in proactive discovery of ways in which it can become every more efficient and effective. Team bonding can help with the former; team building the latter.

The closer that team members feel to one another, the more likely they are to stick together in difficult times and the smoother than more regular days will go as well. Team bonding activities can help with this. Taking our definition at the top, a bonding session is anything that the group can do together that offers them a shared experience. Old favourites like clay pigeon shooting, karting, chocolate making and so on all fall into this category. As, for that matter, do social evenings. Yes, organising a pub crawl really can help your team members get closer together! So any and all of these types of non-work time can bond a team closer.

What they won;t do is that harder, second step. To go beyond having a shared experience and move into the realms of creating or developing great team effectiveness you need to engage in team building, not bonding. As per the definition above, building equals development. That is, the team actually improves something significantly in the way it goes about its day to day business rather than simply gets its team members closer.

To be a team building session rather than a team bonding one, the activity undertaken needs to have two defining characteristics. Firstly, the action - whatever it is - needs to be something that requires team members to work together on in some way. As a simple example, getting into a kart and hammering it around a circuit is an individual affair. On the other hand, constructing a kart that is then driven around a circuit is an entirely different matter. Designing and building a vehicle capable of being driven safely by a team member will require the whole team to work together.

Secondly and most importantly, the activity agenda needs to have time set aside to reflect on what the team or teams did and how it or they went about tackling the challenge. Indeed, if the session is all about learning how to be better as a team, you should probably set aside at least as long for the debrief session as the activity itself. People often balk at this idea. Many think that a debrief session is the price you have to pay in order to be able to enjoy the activity. My experience is that a well run, structured debrief session is not only worth its weight in gold but is enjoyed every bit as much, and often more, than the activity in the first place.

In conclusion, make sure that what you select to do on your team away day matches what you want to get out of it. If it is all about having a shared experience and bringing people together, a team bonding session is the way to go. if you want more than that and have a sustained and positive impact back at work, then go for your choice of the many team building activities on offer.


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