May 22, 2013
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Gabor Holch
Busy people take pride in making every minute count. Our calendars are full of back-to-back tasks and appointments, and thanks to smart phones our schedules follow us everywhere. Does this mean that we get no breaks?
In fact, people will need breaks – that is a fact of life. If we get no breaks, we will take them anyway. Some of our best ideas come during breaks. On the other hand, breaks can spin out of control and interfere with productivity. That doesn’t have to be that way.
Gabor Holch
People and companies start discovering that an office is not always the best place for work. On one hand, social and creative people feel stuck in an office environment, especially if it is a phalanx of tiny work stations. On the other, empty offices and work stations are on the ready for employees who never turn up, because they work at client sites, run from meeting to meeting or spend their lives in planes and airports.
Telecommuting (working from a chosen location such as home or a cafe) seems to be the solution. In some of the most developed economies of the world, close to a third of people work wherever they want to. But there are a couple of essentials to consider before a company can switch to a new way of working.
If done properly, a flexible work arrangement can make miracles to productivity, cost-efficiency and morale. Based on simple guidelines of corporate strategy building, here are the basic decisions to make before your company can take a leap into the future of employment.
Gabor Holch
“They are neither listening nor contributing – they are just playing with their phones!” This complaint did not come from a school teacher, but from a top-level executive at a Fortune 500 firm who attended one of our communication courses.
15 years ago a boring meeting was full of long and uncomfortable silences. Today, you hardly notice the lack of ideas. The comfortable clicking of keyboards can make us forget when the meeting is a complete time-waster.
Here is how smart phones can make your meetings more stupid.
Obsession with control, office politics and unnecessary procedures are some of the most hateful things in a work environment, according to the hundreds of interviews we have conducted. They are also the most destructive to personal and organizational efficiency. We have recently found a great article on the Gallup Management Journal, which traces all of them back to one basic source: Fear.
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Question: “Is a leader’s storytelling skill an important tool for motivating and creating change in an organization?” (Kenneth, Executive Director in the medical industry, USA)
Answer, Gabor Holch:
“Storytelling is one of the most powerful ways to transfer experience. However, there are limitations to it;
Both of these limitations can be overcome with a bit of effort. A brief assessment or an hour of a chat with a professional will help the leader find its focus and personal communication style. As a result, storytelling will become an amazingly efficient and, very importantly, inexpensive tool to improve efficiency.
Do you have a question about leadership, business strategy or communication? Share it with us and we will share our experience of more than a 100 consulting projects worldwide.
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Creating, confirming and changing appointments is one of those tasks that leaders happily delegate to an assistant or office manager as soon as they can. After all, schedules involve a lot of detailed work that many leaders do not have the patience to do. So they let someone else do their appointments: So far so good…
However, delegating this task is also one of the top sources of confusion. If the leader and the scheduler do not work together efficiently, they easily enter the vicious circle of constantly scheduling and re-scheduling appointments and deadlines. The smaller problem can be frustration and low efficiency The bigger ones include late fees, cancelled flight tickets that cannot be reimbursed and even lost production costs.
Should leaders delegate their scheduling work at all? There are a number of good reasons why they should.
More time to lead: Delegating schedules frees up considerable time for leadership work such as strategic planning, improving teamwork and business development.
[event_signup display_till="Mar 18, 2011" event_date="Mar 18, 2011 9 am-5 pm" venue= "Central Shanghai (details will follow)" charge="RMB 1,700" event_name="Time Management Skills for Admin"]
The hard and efficient work of Assistants, Secretaries, Office Managers is the secret force behind the success of efficient leaders.
If you have ever worked together with a forgetful administrator, you know how much damage can come from low efficiency in such a position. Missed appointments, clients arriving in empty offices, faxes drifting without destination and many more.
Administrative efficiency is one of the keys to the success of your organization.
At an intensive one-day seminar, Campanile Consulting shares the experience of over 100 administrative staff from Fortune 500 companies, multinationals and SMEs.
The participants of the course will be office management and admin staff from different industries and company sizes.
In an intensive and interactive learning environment, they will learn, role-play and exchange ideas about: [Read more...]
