With all the rugby matches and related activities, is everyone clear about the possible extra workloads imposed from staff “rugby commitments” and increasing numbers of potential customers up to and just after the RWC Final on Sunday 23 October?

During these few special weeks it is vital that lines of communication are open and clear. Having an appropriate policy and procedures in place ensures that everyone knows what is expected of them.

Employment agreements are the foundation of all employment relationships and employers and employees should first look to these for rules around leave and the management of problems.

It is likely that staff will be taking annual leave and unpaid leave and even “sick leave” during this period, and given that employees will be planning to go to games or possibly acting as rugby volunteers, it is important that management is clear about employment rules and regulations, while being as understanding as possible to prevent misunderstandings and conflict. Having flexible working hours can help in this situation.

While losing staff to volunteer work can be inconvenient, consider it as opportunity for them to develop their skills while increasing your business profile. Also, you should also check what your policy is on watching games on the internet / television or listening to the radio during work hours. Show a little ‘give-and-take’ in this regard; increased employee satisfaction leads to better productivity!

Consider taking our full day course on The Human Resource Life Cycle or half day course on Resolving Tricky Employment Problems to learn more about employment relations regulations.

Be flexible, honest and fair when altering staff breaks around important matches, and the way you respond (both positively and negatively) to requests for time off. You can pick up many tips and techniques about how to relate assertively with your staff over these issues by attending our half day Communication and Assertiveness course.

As an employee make sure you plan leave in advance and by negotiation with your employer, and organise your work schedule where possible so that your employer and other employees are clear about when you will and won’t be at work. Our half day Time and Stress Management course can help you and your colleagues to prioritise and plan your tasks around RWC events.

During the excitement immediately before, during, and especially in a celebratory mood after matches it can be all too easy for staff to be inattentive at work, and this can easily lead to work place accidents. Staff should be extra vigilant, not just when operating dangerous machinery, but also when adhering to standard safety and security procedures.

This would be a good time to review your Health and Safety procedures and familiarise all of your staff with it.

You can learn more about procedures, policies and other aspects of occupational Health and Safety by attending our Health and Safety Representative training which comes in 4 modules of half a day each.

In summary, with all employees and employers acting in good faith and giving each other a little extra leeway during the Rugby World Cup, a good time should be had by all (as long as the All Blacks don’t lose the final!)

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For further information, phone Cait on 09 476 4912 or click on the links above.

For a full list of upcoming courses, please download our course schedule for your region.

To book a course, ring Cait or book online.

Greg Umbers

Have you ever struggled vertically lining up entries in a Word Processor document? Does thinking about columns lead to visions of army regiments and long cues to Rolling Stones concerts? Fear not, a solution is at hand…

How do you place text or numbers into columns?

For many of us we instinctively reach for the spacebar and pad out each item so that they line up into columns. Why is this a bad idea?

For starters, it’s laborious and time consuming. What if we want to move a column along a bit, or change the spacing between columns? That’s a lot of deleting and inserting spaces.

In the old days, using spaces or a single fixed tab on a (non-electronic) type writer did not present problems, because:

a)    You did not have any other choice

b)    All characters had the same width

Boosting your IT skills will lead to immediate increases in your business productivity

Nowadays there exists a myriad of fonts, and only certain ones will come installed with a particular operating system. Somebody else reading your document on another computer will not necessarily have the same font that the document was written in. Their software will substitute the font for the nearest matching font on their computer, but this new font may have a different character width which will result in a lot of crooked columns.

Using Tabs

In word processor applications, the tab key typically moves the cursor to the next tab stop. Tab stops can be set for a selected number of rows or a whole document. Besides the default left aligning tab stops, you can also set them to be centre aligning and right aligning, the latter being appropriate for arranging a column of numbers, for example. You can even set a decimal centred tab stop for numbers that have differing amounts of decimal points.

While this is a significant advance on using spaces for alignment, and columns can be moved or spaced apart by simply moving tab stops, using columns has advantages…

Columns

Formatting a word processing page into columns has the benefit of automatically having the number, width and interspacing of columns already set up. Furthermore, text that spills over a column will automatically wrap to the next line within the column. However, in most word processor programs it is difficult to align entries in different columns on the same page. Therefore consider using…

Tables

Apart from being able to very easily change column widths and row heights, have text automatically wrap within a cell of the table, horizontally align columns and vertically align rows, and align entries in different columns, you can also move rows up or down in your table, sort them, keep a row as a heading row at the top of each page, and format the borders and background colours in a table.

Each row and column intersection is called a cell. You can change the alignment and padding (internal spacing) of individual cells as well as for columns, rows, and in fact whole tables. The two kinds of lines you will see around the cells of tables are:

a)    Borders, which are seen when you print the document. You can change the border, thickness, colour and style, and you can delete or hide them.

b)    Gridlines – these show you where your margins are. They don’t print, but show you where the rows, columns and whole table are, so you know where to type your text

Whichever method you use, only use the spacebar to separate words like computer and literate!

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If you would like to test your IT nous, why not try our free multichoice quizzes for Word and Excel. You can also do a full range of half day or full day courses in Microsoft Office applications with RMC.

For further information, phone Cait on 09 476 4912 or click on the links above.

For a full list of upcoming courses, please download our course schedule for your region.

To book a course, ring Cait or book online.

Greg Umbers

Teams that are committed and who share common goals will more often than not demonstrate greater productivity than a group of disparate individuals who simply blithely follow the leader or ‘watch the clock’.

So what makes dynamic teams tick?

Whenever a bunch of people get together to work collaboratively, there will always be a stormy period where individuals are unsure of their roles and are ‘sussing each other out’.

This is where good interpersonal skills, a supportive atmosphere and the ability to communicate, especially to listen to each other, are invaluable. Members of the team should be capable of giving feedback constructively and viewing constructive feedback as an opportunity to learn.

Criticise ideas, not people!

As the team develops and roles become more clearly defined, members should be able to take an active role in team planning so that every member feels that they are collectively contributing to the group’s (and hopefully their own) goals.

If the right team elements are in place, the group will share a common vision that includes long term goals and aspirations, and a clear picture of how they would like to see their team in say 3, 5 or even 10 years time.

If a cooperative spirit pervades the team, with secure, confident and motivated individuals, then procedures and processes, roles and responsibilities, and especially goals and priorities should all be crystal clear. Hopefully your dream team will then develop into a team that not only dreams, but attaches a plan and a timeline to each of their dreams!

Richardson Management Consultants Ltd offers a half day course that explores team development and maintenance in more detail.

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For further information, phone Cait on 09 476 4912 or click on the link above.

To book a course, ring Cait or book online.

For a full list of upcoming courses, please download our course schedule for your region.

Greg Umbers

With the exponentially growing amount of information hitting our desks, both in paper and electronic form, it is vital that we learn efficient ways to deal with it all.

One of the leading time-wasting sins many of us commit is to reread incoming material several times over an extended period before it is dealt with.

An effective way to reduce the mound of paper in our in-tray is to stop being precious about its contents. For many of us, childhood visits to the library have instilled a reverence for books and magazines (or at least fear of parental rage on discovering pictures of Goofy scrawled over loaned copied of National Geographic).

Fear not – arm yourself with a biro and a highlight marker and go to war!

In the case of regular mail and printouts of emails, documents etc, highlight any dates indicating when they are due to be processed. While you are at it, highlight any key words and any parties the item relates to.

Now, take out your biro and write on the top first page of each item any important information that was not covered during the highlighting stage. In this way, the document can be rapidly scanned from now on and should not need to be reread.

If the item can be dealt with or forwarded on / delegated to somebody immediately, do it straight away. If that is not possible, place it in your pending-tray. Under no circumstance place it back in your in-tray – the objective is to keep this tray empty as quickly and often as possible.

If the items are not important or urgent, don’t be afraid to bin them straight away. However, keep all binned items for a couple of days before taking them out to the trash or shredding them – I have had to root around for a crumpled paper document on the odd occasion! The important thing is to eliminate the ‘just in case’ mentality which clogs your in-tray.

In the case of valued articles in newspapers, trade journals, magazines, etc, either rip out the relevant pages or, if this is not possible, photocopy the articles and feel free to scrawl over them.

The above suggestions also pertain to electronic information. For your in-box, read your email program’s in-box.  Documents such as MS Word documents and Excel spreadsheets can be electronically highlighted and commented, and in MS Outlook you can drag emails to your Task folder where you can highlight words, assign due dates, reminders and so forth.

Precious paper documents can also be scanned and dealt with as above.

To learn more about task management and time-saving tips, check out our Time and Stress Management course.

Greg Umbers

Knowing which fonts to use for any written material that will be displayed in print, on a monitor, or on both, are critical for both legibility and readability.

A font is a collection of numbers, symbols, and characters. A font describes a certain typeface, along with other qualities, such as size, spacing, and pitch (a measurement of the number of characters that fit in a horizontal inch). Pitch is generally used to measure monospaced fonts.

There are currently over 100,000 digital fonts out there, and the collection is growing all the time!
Typefaces can be broadly placed into 5 major categories: Serif, Sans-serif, Cursive, Fantasy, and Monospaced.

Serifs are semi-structural details on the ends of some of the strokes that make up letters and symbols. Sans-serif fonts lack these structural details (sans = ‘without’ in French).

In traditional printing, seriffed fonts are used for body text because they are considered easier to read than sans-serif fonts. Sans-serif fonts are more often used in headlines, headings, and shorter pieces of text and subject matter requiring a more casual feel than the formal look of seriffed types.

While in print seriffed fonts are considered more readable, sans-serif is considered more legible on computer screens. For this reason the majority of web pages employ sans-serif type.
Some examples of serif fonts are old style typefaces such as Adobe Jenson (Venetian), Garamond, Bembo, Goudy Old Style, and Palatino, common transitional typefaces such as Times Roman and Baskerville, and modern typefaces such as Bodoni, Didot, Century Schoolbook and Computer Modern.

Arial, Verdana, Helvetica and Trebuchet MS are just some examples of sans-serif fonts.

Cursive fonts like French Script look like handwriting and are useful for representing signatures, for example.

Fantasy fonts are only limited by your imagination. Typically you would use them on informal invitations such as a Christmas party invite.

Monospaced fonts such as Courier New use an equal width for every character (such as an m and an i). The typewriter and early computer printers produced this type of print.

To learn more about typography and how to layout written material for business, why not check out our Written Word in Business course.

Greg Umbers

Dealing appropriately with unhappy customers is very important and requires a consistent method of conflict resolution.

You should attempt to control and diffuse the situation by behaving professionally and by staying calm. It is important to show the customer that you understand their emotional state and the situation. Apply empathy and active listening.

Make the transition from dealing with emotions to dealing with the actual problem. Get and give information, suggest possibilities, be helpful, and offer choices.

Some tips on dealing with unhappy customers (and others!) are:

• Use the customer’s name as early as possible, and give them yours; this helps both parties see each other as real people, and as unique individuals.
• Do not repeat any ‘hot’ words that the customer may use in the heat of the moment.
• Rather than going head-to-head with the customer, allow the customer some time to vent their frustration. Afterwards, you can use acknowledgment techniques to prove that you are paying attention, then refocus and problem-solve as the person begins to calm down.
• Use empathy statements to show the customer that you understand their emotional state, and that you also understand why the individual is upset.
• Use cooperative language that suggests that you are willing to consider the other person’s position. Don’t blame anybody, and allow the customer to save face. Show the customer that you are not uninterested and uncaring, but rather are trying to work with them to help deal with the problem, or make the best of a bad situation.

Three key requirements that a customer wants are help, choices and acknowledgement. Even if you can’t solve their entire problem, if they see you making a genuine effort on their behalf, they are much less likely to be hostile towards you personally.

Finally, control the situation by using self-control: identify your triggers, slow down your responses, and put yourself in their shoes.

To find out more on this topic, our Conflict Resolution and Cutting Edge Customer Service courses could both be of interest.

Whether an organisation is a large corporate or a relatively small not-for-profit trust, basic elements of succession planning must exist or it will suffer badly in the event of a sudden unexpected departure or extended absence of a key staff member.

The degree of succession planning management an organisation adopts can range from simple strategies for filling particular vacancies to comprehensive workforce development and the creation of an elastic-team of well trained and multi-skilled staff.

Basic to good succession planning is having clearly established and understood organisational values.  These values keep the focus on the skill set and type of replacement required regardless of whether the replacement comes through internal promotion or through external recruitment.

Identifying workforce developmental needs, especially in context to organisational values and objectives, is a major part of succession management and these should ideally align with personal development goals outlined in individual staff performance appraisals.

There is a definite need for all involved in succession management to clearly understand the actual work and complexities of staff roles and the corresponding descriptions to be accurate and up-to-date.  Summaries of task lists detailing what is done (and when): daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually, as well as details of critical relationships, where things are kept and a calendar showing important review/renewal dates will all help keep the “show on the road” if there’s a sudden departure.

Weighing up whether replacement should come through promotion or through an external recruitment depends very much on the resources your organisation may already have developed.  It may well pay to look widely through existing staff as filling a position can often be more accurately achieved through an assessment of internal candidates you know well rather than from an external source.

An organisation doesn’t train its staff for them to up and leave and join the competition, and succession planning systems, staff development, performance appraisals and remuneration must all link. If you promote people without the skill development they may well not thank you and on the other hand, if you tell staff they are doing well and increase their pay yet don’t promote them they may not believe you.

Download a Succession Plan template and other free management tools.

Our latest OSH management tool will help you make a quick and easy evaluation of your existing health and safety management system and identify its strengths and weaknesses.

All you need to do is score your organisation against 20 statements.

We have a range of upcoming OSH training courses – view our regional training course schedules for further details.

Greg Umbers

Have you ever wondered who is visiting your website, where they are browsing from, how long they are staying at particular pages and so forth? Google provides a free comprehensive solution.

Google Analytics (GA) is a service that generates detailed statistics about website visitors. It can track visitors from all referrers, including search engines, display advertising, pay-per-click networks, email marketing and even links within PDF documents.

GA is the most widely used website statistics service, currently in use at around three fifths of the 10,000 most popular websites, and is aimed at marketers and ‘end-users’ rather than techies.

Poor performing pages can be identified and visitor stats can be obtained, such as where they came from (referrers), how long they stayed and their geographical position. GA also provides more advanced features, including custom visitor segmentation.

Together with Google AdWords, users can review online campaigns by tracking landing page quality and conversions (goals). Goals might include sales, lead generation, viewing a specific page, or downloading a particular file. Marketers can determine which ads are performing and which are not, providing the information to optimise or cull campaigns.

GA is implemented by including a hidden snippet of tracking code, written in JavaScript, that the user adds onto every page of their website. This code acts as a beacon, collecting private visitor data and sending it back to Google data collection servers for processing.

Cookies are also stored on each visitor’s computer. These are used to store anonymous information such as whether the visitor has been to the site before (new or returning visitor), what is the timestamp of the current visit and what was the referrer site or campaign the visitor came from e.g. search engine, keywords, banner, email etc.

Screenshot from Google Analytics interface

GA’s interface initially shows high level dashboard-type data for the casual user, but more in-depth data can be viewed further into the report set.

Limitations

Although affecting only a small percentage of visits, the following limitations exist:

• Some users do not have Javascript-enabled/capable browsers or turn this feature off.
• Because GA uses a page tagging technique to collect visitor information via a combination of JavaScript and cookies, it has limitations with websites browsed from mobile phones. This is due to the fact that only the latest phones are currently able to run JavaScript or set cookies (Smart phones and PDAs).
• Privacy networks like Tor will mask the user’s actual location and present inaccurate geographical data.
• Many ad filtering programs and extensions (such as Firefox’s Adblock and NoScript) can block Google Analytic’s tracking code. This prevents some traffic and users from being tracked, and leads to holes in the collected data.

However, a more significant problem comes from users deleting or blocking GA cookies, which means data cannot be collected. Website users should therefore ensure best practice policies are upheld on their web site, including being transparent in what visitor data is collected and how it is used. This information is usually placed within a privacy policy statement page.

Matt Parry

Performance management when well executed can be a great tool for optimising your workforce. However, in a few organisations one can observe areas where systems failed to work very well or where a new method of implementation simply didn’t catch on. So what are the pitfalls and how to avoid them?

Some organisations still use paper systems, whereas others are beginning to take on new software based models. Whether you are a smaller organisation starting out on a paper based model or have budget to invest in a new software system, the following pointers may still be of use:

As in any change process communication is paramount. Avoid planning it all secretly from HR and then launching it wholesale on the organisation. Keeping your managers informed – eliciting communication about what end features they would like to see will help get their buy in to what kind of system to adopt.

Keep it relatively simple and bring about change slowly.

Organisations need time to digest change.  Just because there happen to be drop down menus available on a computer based system, it doesn’t mean they all have to be used!  Similarly, if using paper based system you don’t have to produce something the size of a book for each staff member’s appraisal.
Understand the Change Management process and start by setting small achievable targets in implementing any new system.

A key part of successful performance management is to link it to objectives; business and managerial as well as personal objectives all play a part.  The performance appraisal needs to have true meaning and have a means of accurate and fair measurement.  Metrics will include skills, competencies, goals, and outcomes for both the team and the individual.

Ideally the metrics above should link with an employee’s Role Description.  There should be a direct correlation between what is expected, understood and agreed upon at the outset of employment or beginning of review period.  Re-working an entire organisation’s Role Descriptions into a format that has parallels with metrics used in an appraisal is a sizeable challenge and can take a very long time but in the end it is a very worthwhile task.

Simply doing reviews robotically and implementing a new system won’t bring about the desired changes a CEO or Board may wish to see in overall organisational performance.  A shift in culture of an organisation may well be needed for new systems to work.  The executives and managers may need to understand it is not just a “workforce” they are trying to get results from but rather that the whole organisation is made of unique contributors.  Improving results involves recognizing strengths and investing in weaknesses.  Managers will need to understand the value of each individual.

Managers often need training and support to help implement organisation changes or they may likely abandon them.  During appraisals managers need to act more as mentors, coaches and teachers as well as be encouraged to tolerate their own staff conducting reviews back on them.  Manager training and development for those who lack skills and find the conversational aspects of appraisals difficult may be necessary.