Whether you’re a manager or a team member, those mandatory once-a-week meetings can often feel more like a painful lecture. They often go something like this: boss walks in, rattles off the list of problems that people have been having this week, asks for suggestions on how to fix them, gives his or her own ideas, and then concludes the meeting with a half-hearted “get back to work everybody!” The only problem is, people’s problem solving skills aren’t usually at their peak right after they’ve been chastised for the previous half hour. If you’re the one being unwillingly subjected to these types of meetings, there’s not much you can do. If you’re the boss and the meetings are painful even for you, here are a couple of tips to make progress meetings more productive for everyone involved.
1. Open with the positives. Instead of launching right in to your spiel about what’s been going wrong this week, start by dishing out praise where it’s deserved. This will get your meeting off on the right foot, and it boosts employee morale to praise their accomplishments in a public setting.
2. Focus on broad problems. Before the meeting, sit down and think about what problems you could discuss on an individual or small-group level. Skip these in the meeting – it will make the meeting go faster and you won’t loose the attention of the rest of the group while you’re focusing on a problem that just affects a couple of people. You’ll also avoid having to criticize individuals in front of the rest of the office, which will help with morale.
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As everyone who has been cruelly thrust from their cushy college schedule (four months of break a year!) into the real world (you want all eight days off for Chanukah? Really?) knows, there’s no worse feeling than being told you have to work over the holidays. Instead of spending all your time at the office dreaming of the moment you can go home and dig in to the leftover eggnog, focus on the little-sung pros of working over the holiday season.
This is a delicate topic, one that isn’t frequently discussed in public forums, but it is incredibly important in the lives of millions of workers around the globe.
There is always a chain of command at work, a lineage of authority to which you belong as soon as you sign a contract and take your place in the workforce of a particular company or institution. The degree to which you thrive in your new work environment will depend in no small part on how well you fit in and make positive contributions to that chain. However, disrupt it, and you could be looking at a swift and not altogether happy send-off to another job or the unemployment line.
It seems a no brainer that when you go to work you are going to be working with other people. We all know this, but for many, working with people just means being around people while you work. For others, and these people are more successful, working with others also means collaborating.
You more than like your job. Some even say you are crazy about it. You’ve been there for a couple of years, and you’re a trusted, dependable employee. But even you have begun to admit that you feel a little like you’ve gotten in a bit of a rut. Maybe you haven’t yet received the raise or promotion you thought should have come your way by now. Well, time to get more proactive.
People who are successful at work do things a little differently than people who are less successful. Wouldn’t it be helpful to be especially observant of the successful ones and note how they do what they do? Well, read on.
Like your teeth, your hands, your eyes and your tie, your shoes say a lot about the kind of person and worker you are. Look down. Do you see a broken shoelace with a clumsy knot tied in it to keep it in service? Well, that could say you’re industrious. To someone else, it could say that you’re sloppy and cheap. How much do new shoelaces cost?
This is the most delicate of questions and possible situations at the workplace. Indeed, when do you seek counseling, how do you arrive at that conclusion, and then how do you carry it out?
Most people have done it, and many have regretted it. When you cuss at work, you are stepping outside the box, and that is always dangerous in American office life. In this environment, employers and workers are encouraged to adopt personas that often have little to do with the real people they’re masking. In the office, you represent the company, and the company doesn’t use profanity. At the same time, most people do cuss, so you have a built-in conflict.