The Right Career Move

When it comes to career it is up to you to create options for growth and expansion.  Here are a few helpful points:

Pick a boss, not a job.  Your boss can often be the most important factor in your success or failure.  A boss who is skeptical regarding your capabilities will not allow you to take up new challenges or conduct new experiments.  On the other hand, an easy going boss will not push you to avail opportunities to stretch yourself beyond your comfort zone. 

Before making a career move, thoroughly research the organisation you plan to join. Does it treat is employees as potential or resource?  Potential is to be tapped, while resources are to be consumed. 

Unless you passionately enjoy what you do, success will remain an illusion.  If you are passionate about marketing but you work in finance, the chances are that you will soon be at war with yourself. 

Apart from your primary passion, profession, always find avenues to create a second line of defense.  If your primary career becomes redundant, due to external factors, you will then have something to fall back upon.  So, Plan B must be in place all the time. 

Fortune favours the bold and the brave.  A certain Colonel Sanders changed his career at the age of 66 and from being a loser salesman he became an extremely successful entrepreneur. 

Why Employees Leave

Almost every company faces the problem of employee turnover and for reason that range from career development to employee friendly human resources (HR) policies, to better salaries or even a canteen which services better food. 

But if all the above are provided and the organisation continues to lose good people, it is time to have a closer look at their managers because more than any other person in an organisation, they influence whether employees leave or stay and thrive with an organisation. 

People leave managers not companies, wrote HR experts Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman in their book First Break al the Rules:  What the World’s Greatest Mangers Do Differently. 

Different managers can stress out employees in different ways, by being too controlling, to critical, too pushy and or too suspicious forgetting that workers are not fixed assets but rather free agents.

Experts believe that of all the abuses that employees might have to put up with at work, humiliation is the most intolerable.  The first time, the employee may not leave, but a thought has been planted; the second time that, they look for another job.

Even if employee stay with the job but find no redress, they will begin to show signs of passive aggression.  This could include slowing down; doing only what they are told to do and no more; omitting to give the boss crucial information.  They no longer have their heart and soul in the job and the only thing that they can think of is how to get their boss into trouble.
 
And if this goes on too long the employee will leave quite often over a trivial issue taking his or her contacts, experience and knowledge straight to the competition. 

Dealing With Noise in the Workplace

The current trend of open plan offices has altered the way we work.  For one, it has made the environment much noisier, with constantly ringing phones, noise from water cooler gossip sessions and from a variety of office machinery, such as printers and copiers.

A noisy workplace tends to increase stress levels and reduce productivity.  There are no solutions that will completely eliminate noise but there are ways to control it.  Here is how:

You cannot make the noise go away.  The best way to deal with his situation is to acknowledge the unwanted sounds and understand that you must coexist.  Acceptance can make you adjust easily. 

There will be times when you will be irritated by the increasing noise levels.  Take a break and walk away from the environment.

Talk to your line manager about the increasing noise and how it is affecting your productivity.  Doing the same with your colleagues may help.

Discourage irrelevant talk by not becoming a part of unnecessary conversations in the open office areas.

Help create a culture of acoustic courtesy by posting signs like Quiet Please, Work in Progress.

Do not hesitate to politely ask colleagues for an action that may help reduce the noise to some extent, like not to using the speaker phone or to taking their extended conversations to an office or conference room.

If all else fails, use earplugs or muffs; they can block out background noise to large extent.

Dealing With Noise in Workplace

The current trend of open plan offices has altered the way we work.  for one, it has made the environment much noisier, with constantly ringing phones, noise from water cooler gossip sessions and from a variety of office machinery, such as printers and copiers.

A noisy workplace tends to increase stress levels and reduce productivity.  There are no solutions that will completely eliminate noise but there are ways to control it.  Here is how:

You cannot make the noise go away.  The best way to deal with his situation is to acknowledge the unwanted sounds and understand that you must coexist.  Acceptance can make you adjust easily. 

There will be times when you will be irritated by the increasing noise levels.  Take a break and walk away from the environment.

Talk to your line manager about the increasing noise and how it is affecting your productivity.  Doing the same with your colleagues may help.

Discourage irrelevant talk by not becoming a part of unnecessary conversations in the open office areas.

Help create a culture of acoustic courtesy by posting signs like Quiet Please, Work in Progress.

Do not hesitate to politely ask colleagues for an action that may help reduce the noise to some extent, like not to using the speaker phone or to taking their extended conversations to an office or conference room.

If all else fails, use earplugs or muffs; they can block out background noise to large extent.

Living in the 9 to 5 Box

I remember embracing the 9 to 5 work life with soaring ambitions and an iron-clad resolve to prove myself as a committed professional.  While commitment was an inherent quality that did not require much effort so genuinely believed, efficient  time management was an art that came with time.  Six years after successfully earning the certified seal of approval from my employers in time management, I would like to share some key learning with all newbies hoping to start the year 2011 with a leap into the corporate world.

Priorities:
Learn to differentiate between work that is priority and work that can wait.  Focus first on work that is pressing and tackle it head-on.  For work that is not urgently required but is pending nonetheless, give yourself deadlines and stick to them. 

Do not procrastinate:
The more time you have, the more time you will waste.  As clichéd as it may sound, do not put off work that you can do today for tomorrow.  You never know what new tasks will come your way the next day so make your life easier by doing the maximum you can do each day. 

Get a head start:
Learn to respect time.  It is one thing to stroll in late for a meting one day, but make a practice out of it and you will lose all respect no matter how good you are at what you do. So try to get a head start each day.  Remember, staying ahead of time is the only way you can stay ahead of the game.

Get rid of the clutter:
Sometimes the smallest tasks can take the most time.  Uncluttered your mind by using the early hours of the day to get rid of the small things that are pending to allow yourself to focus on the bigger picture.

Ensure clarity of vision:
Before you step in for work, have a clear vision for each day.  Remember time is money so work out what you need to achieve each day.  The clearer you are, the more you will achieve.