Productivity Bulletin: 11/28/2014

Photo: Tim Parkinson, Flickr

Happy Black Friday readers – go buy something and help the economy, but when you are done – here is something educational. 

  • Increase employee satisfaction by recognizing hard work

    The obvious first two incentives are monetary and paid time off. These are also some of the most expensive for the company and usually are reserved for the highest achievers on a managerial or sales force, or are distributed evenly across a company that is showing stellar lateral performance. While this kind of incentive is great at riling up a storm on the sales floor or in the bullpen: if a company uses this too much, it could suffer huge financial loss after a while…

    http://www.business2community.com/sales-management/increase-employee-satisfaction-recognizing-hard-work-01068379

  • Productive people never have “free time”

    Productive people are never “free.” They don’t have 15 minutes on their lunch break to “have a quick call.” They don’t “kill time”—a terrible phrase. You can always put a window of time to good use if you work for it. Productive people schedule their priorities—not always their time, but always their priorities. When they don’t have something to do, they find something to do.

    http://lifehacker.com/productive-people-are-never-free-1661375021

  • Kick @$$ at work:
    This isn’t the best example in the article, but it is something to consider and reflect upon (seriously, read this article):

    Remember names: At one job interview, the interviewer introduced himself and then announced that he was going to ‘ask me a bunch of tough technical questions.’ He did and I aced it. I was thrilled with my performance. He then announced that he had one more question for me. My smug self thought, ‘Throw it at me! I just killed all the other ones. Here is what it was:
    What is my name?
    I didn’t have a clue what his name was and felt like a complete idiot.

    http://www.1500days.com/how-to-kick-ass-at-work/