Corporate Intranet

Companies normally turn to team building, training, arguments, and many more techniques in attempt to resolve internal conflict.

However, people make decisions based on judgment. How will this benefit me? Am I wasting my time? Why am I being sucked into doing someone else’s job?

There are many principles as to how decisions are made and what motivates people. However, by having a clear understanding of how the business process is supposed to flow within an organization greatly diminishes staff placing the responsibility on someone else.

You may find your team frustrated and complaining. You may experience an increase in project delays. Sometimes upper management feels they need to dictate to colleagues “how things should be,” but this management style only creates barriers from receiving honest insight from your colleagues and increases defensiveness. Creating a system that allows colleagues to pose “solutions” with their team will instill a behavior that allows them to continuously strive to find the best ways to work together.

Business Rule Tip!

a) If you have an intranet system or an internal blog, create a folder where everyone is allowed to contribute “solutions.” Anytime someone has a complaint or wants to criticize how things are done, they should pose a “solution” to proactively show an alternative way to deal with the issue. Encourage your team to provide useful suggestions on ways to improve “our” company efficiencies and an overall smoother operation. Important to explain how each suggestion must have a purpose, focus and clear communication as to the “why” and “what” you are trying to accomplish. This will increase “buy in” and prevent staff from taking these new suggestions personally. Please note: It is very important for senior managers to review these suggestions on a bi-weekly or monthly basis to enforce policies. If months pass before decisions are made, suggestions will decrease, while frustration increases.

Analyzing said suggestions from your colleagues will help to reveal “real problems”, and most likely reasonable solutions to those problems.

I have a question for you: how many times does upper management make decisions without asking those who are involved in the day-to-day activities? Fixes made without asking those who are involved will negatively affect other processes further down the project cycle.

Business Rule Tip!

It is important to understand how each process affects another function within the work environment. Learning “Process Mapping” will help you to see how one activity affects another and reveal where there are areas of opportunity for process improvement. By demonstrating to your team how each activity supports the other, colleagues will begin to understand how each player contributes to the team as a whole.

The work environment is a GROUP effort. By cultivating this change in thinking amongst your players, they will better understand how their strengths benefit others. By creating a supportive network, colleagues will understand who to go to for help. By maximizing each other’s strengths, the synergy amongst all will allow the company to propel forward.

Business Rule Tip!

Build Trust. By creating an environment where each individual understands they are all part of a team and helping one another professionally, trust occurs. Reach out to others when asked for guidance. Practice good communication. When conflict occurs, teams who have trust tend to quickly overcome conflicts in order to move on with business goals.

Compassion, respect, and patience breeds response. Relating to each other’s unique qualities and job positions during high levels of stress will create quicker turn around on your business goals. An interesting article that reinforces this methodology is called: The Power of Nice.

It has become a trend to use intranet applications and software in organizations of all sizes. Intranet applications serve as an internal website or a portal for the employees and people associated with the organization. An intranet application or an intranet software as it may be called sometimes, basically is deployed and access through local area network.

Before looking at intranet applications, let us first try to understand what basically an intranet is. A private network of computers that is used to share information or resources primarily constitutes an intranet. Applications use internet protocols (TCP/IP) and network connection to operate. Intranet applications and other required intranet software are installed on the central computer which acts as an intranet web server. The intranet application can then be accessed from other individual computers in the network, which act as clients.

Developing intranet software needs some important considerations:

The scope of intranet application and the number of users accessing it
Hardware and software that will support the intranet software depending on the scope and users
Setting up web servers, client machines and installing applications/software on each individual computer as required.
Designing the intranet applications modules and pages as required.
Deciding on the access rights of the users and testing the intranet application as required.

Intranet applications are used in many ways across organizations and have proved to be beneficial tool:

Employees involve in forum and online discussions, there by increasing interaction and sharing of knowledge
Intranet applications help in managing and publishing of processes documents and other documentation across all relevant employees and hence effectively facilitate better knowledge management
Since common information like policies and notifications about the organization are shared across all the employees through a common platform, intranet software helps in promoting corporate culture
Intranet software is also widely used to exchange various tools and applications like CRM tools, project management utilities, sales data, and so on
Intranet application also allows the organizations to have other relevant information like industry news, media news, press releases, and other events

Intranet software needs to be designed not only from a functional point of view but also from usability and aesthetics aspect. Also other important aspect about intranet applications is about security. Since much of confidential data would exist on the intranet, it is important that no unauthorized user accesses within or outside the organization. Intranet software also needs to be constantly monitored for any downtimes and rectified immediately on basis of usability. There may be good amount of advantages and threats for any intranet application. However, it certainly serves as an important tool for many organizations and will be continued to be used in the future.

Decisions? Decisions? What decisions? I just want to write policies and procedures. Policies and procedures writers are results-oriented individuals and they are hankering to start the fun stuff, the writing stuff. Unfortunately, they cannot just write unless the company wants policies and procedures that do not work and that do not reflect the opinions and ideas of the targeted audiences of the policies and procedures. There is so much more to just writing.

Develop a Strategy First

A game plan must be developed that addresses more than fifteen decisions about setting up a system of policies and procedures. The end result of these decisions is a Procedure on the subject of Procedures. This document can then be used to guide the research, writing, reviewing, approving, communicating, training, improving, and revising of policies and procedures. The decisions also address the numbering system, the writing format, and the reporting relationships. This document can become known as the Procedure on Procedures. This procedure is the first and the most important procedure in the policies and procedures system

Pivotal Policy and Procedure Decisions to Make

What is the justification for the system of policies and procedures? Do you even have one?
Who manages the policies and procedures department? Who sponsors and funds the program?
How is the policies and procedures department set up? Who manages it? To whom does it report to and why?
What are the qualifications of the policies and procedures writer? Analyst? Manager?
How will ideas for new, or revised, policies and procedures be submitted?
Will the policies and procedures documents be printed and contained in hard copy binders or will they placed on the Intranet?
Will you incorporate a policy statement within the body of the procedural statements or will the policy statements be placed into a separate document and/or binders?
What is the numbering system for the policy and procedure documents?
Who will decide on the content? A cross-functional team? A general team? Or you? Will you be the primary person recommending the content of policies and procedures for approval?
What is the writing format, or the sequence in which content will be put forth that is logical and easy to read?
Who reviews the policies and procedures? A review team? A committee?
Who approves the policies and procedures?
Who distributes the policies and procedures? And in what formats? Hard copy, network, or Intranet, or all three?
Who communicates the policies and procedures?
Who trains and/or mentors the targeted audience?
Who audits the policies and procedures? And how often?
Who monitors the policies and procedures to assure they are always up-to-date? Who revises the policies and procedures?
Who recommends improvements to the policy and procedure content?

These decisions are the primary decisions that must be made before the policies and procedures writers start the process. There may be more decisions to make but I doubt there will be less. The document should incorporate all of these decisions as this document should become the bible for writing and justifying policies and procedures going forward. Without these decisions at least discussed, you are more than likely going to have to rework some of the policies and procedures if, and when, the decisions are finalized.

An Easy Way to Get These Decisions Reviewed and Approved Quickly

The policies and procedures writer, or writers, can team together and create the Procedure on Procedures document and include your recommended answer to each of these decisions. The decisions can become sections within the procedure, e.g., Policy and Procedure Review Process, Numbering System, Writing Format, Distribution, Communication, and so on. Now the draft procedure can be submitted to top management for review and approval. This method can cut weeks, if not months, off the decision process. After all, most policies and procedures are written by policies and procedures writers in advance of review and approval and everything they write represents their recommendations.

An efficient workforce holds the key to success for any business enterprise. Whether you run a small set up or a Fortune 500 business, your employees are an asset determining the success of all your endeavours. For the small scale enterprises, the importance of valuing human resource cannot be stressed enough. Most multinational firms have had a humble beginning and within a short span of time achieved high return on investment (ROI) owing to the pivotal role played by the workforce. Business owners are also aware that in present times it has become extremely important to motivate the workforce to achieve the desired results. This in turn has led to the growing popularity of intranets.

Intranet is an internal networking and communication tool that enables a firm to integrate its operations and bring employees closer. In present times, the intranet has become a well known tool for exchanging ideas and receiving regular feedback from the employees. This medium has helped the HR department in catering to the varied requirements of the employees in an effective manner. For example, by including the referral policy in their intranet, a number of firms have cut down on expenses associated with recruitment procedure. This has played a huge role in aiding smaller firms that have faced budgetary constraints in recent times.

In wake of the financial turmoil in the market due to the economic slowdown, a growing number of small and medium enterprises are taking a keen interest in intranet which has proven its effectiveness in ensuring optimum utilisation of resources. Moreover, it has helped the managers to identify interest areas of the associates and assign work accordingly. Due to these factors, it can be concluded that in the intranet will gain momentum in the years to come.

The Accountability/Alignment Process: Three Steps to an Accountable Organization

Generating genuine accountability and functional alignment into your workplace cannot be left to vague ambitions and abstract statements. Well designed processes must be embedded into the heart of an organization to ensure that each employee's goals and expectations are clearly defined and that the resources to bring about specific measurable results are in place.

In our recent book, Aligned Like a Laser, we outline an effective three step process for ensuring managers and employees are mutually accountable and that the entire organization is aligned toward specific goals.

The Accountability/Alignment process has three fundamental steps:

(1) Accountability
(2) Alignment
(3) and Achievement

These steps shape the essential foundation for the practice of accountability and workplace alignment.

----

Step 1: Accountability

Accountability is articulated through a document called an Accountability Agreement. This document forms a context for success by making each individual's contribution visible within the organization. It is a brief - 2 to 3 page - overview of the outcomes that an individual is promising to deliver which also outlines the support and resources that he or she needs from others in order to achieve these results.

Seven Elements of an Accountability Agreement:

(1) Business Focus Statement

(2) Operational Accountabilities

(3) Leadership Accountabilities

(4) Support Requirements

(5) Goals

(6) Sustainment Plan

(7) Positive Consequences

----

Step 2: Alignment

Alignment requires a constructive business dialogue focused on end results. After completing Accountability Agreements, a workgroup negotiates responsibilities and forms an understanding of each member's contribution to the team.

The alignment process involves resolving gaps and overlaps in the team's accountabilities, and it ensures that each member agrees to provide the critical support needed to fulfil the team's purpose.

Alignment clarifies the practice of accountability; it focuses energy and eliminates distractions across the entire organization. It also provides a renewed sense of confidence and interdependence based on a publicly declared promise to deliver business results.

----

Step 3: Achievement

The Accountability/Alignment process brings immediate results, but lasting achievement is gained through maintaining the discipline fostered by the process.
There are several ways to ensure that Accountability/Alignment brings long term achievement.

Keep Accountability Agreements Visible

Post progress reports in prominent locations.
Provide a forum for people to comment on progress.

Put Accountability Agreements Online

A company's intranet can provide easy access to all Accountability Agreements.
Or, use our Align Online tool. Visit http://www.alignonline.com for more information.

Model Accountability

Leaders must set an example and share Accountability Agreements widely.
Also, references should be made to Accountability Agreements in reports and presentations.

Synchronize the Process

Link accountability to related processes such as goal setting and performance management.
Use accountability to prevent duplication of effort.

Ensure Business Results

Accountability is not about shifting blame; it embraces a process of mutual support and learning to ensure that goals are achieved.
Accountability Agreements can be modified according to past lessons and to better adhere to new circumstances.

----

The Accountable Workplace

The alignment process legitimizes raising difficult conversations, creates a positive context for resolving disagreements, and builds an environment of mutual support. Improving an organization can be a gamble, yet successful organizational effectiveness initiatives have proven to be invaluable relative to the time invested. The Accountability/Alignment process can revitalize a workplace, focus attention on shared goals, and sustain a new way of working across an organization.

------

At a time when many companies are scaling down their marketing budgets, big design firms are finding it harder to win new clients and projects. Things maybe tough for the larger design firms, but the situation could be ideal for freelancers and other smaller boutique operations that can operate virtually.

One obvious advantage that full-service design companies have over independent freelancers is access to a wide range of creative and technical resources. So how can the individual compete with multi-skilled consultancies? The answer is to form a Virtual Team using a product that provides collaboration software that gets everybody on the Same-Page.

By joining forces with other freelancers who offer complementary skills, you'll be able to offer a more complete range of services to your clients and prospective customers. One person on their own can't hope to compete with a full-service agency on price alone, no matter how tight budgets are. If a freelancer can't meet a project's business objectives, he isn't going to win the contract. Partnering with other freelancer makes you look more credible and professional, especially if the client is aware they'll only be paying for a specific service from the specialist. Clients are increasingly wary of design agencies offering services they'll never use and feel that they are paying for them through high ticket fees.

Here, then, are some tips for partnering with other freelancers and successfully running a joint project:

Recruit or be recruited

Both actually. You don't need to wait for a new project before sounding out potential partners. Bookmark the sites of potential partners. Register your details with freelance and recruitment directories, offer details of your services you. You never know if someone else is out there looking for the skills you have to offer. Use these same directories to search for complementary freelancers when you need additional help.

Instinct + Think = Partner

Visit your potential partner's website and review his portfolio. When considering a particular individual, follow your instinct - if you have any doubts about working with someone, chances are it won't work out. Check out the clients listed on the website. How did the client enjoy working with your potential partner. Check on their references.

Put everything in writing

Bearing in mind that this team of freelancers may only exist for one project, each individual should have their own contract. Don't make the mistake of being responsible for paying the team. Contracts and invoices should go direct to the client. You are not an employer so it's up to everyone to make sure they get paid, not you. If you do decide to bundle invoice you are entitled to charge a markup (15 to 20% depending on industry) for your efforts.

Avoid confusing the client

Don't allow your team to start emailing files to the client. A client may not understand what each person does. It makes sense to use a collaboration website with project management tools. Same-Page.com offers a highly customizable workspace where you can focus the team. Make a list of the project contacts readily available, create calendars and provide a centralize email notifications system.

Co-ordinating a team

Usually the person who builds the team is the one who should lead the project. Sometimes a client will approach the freelancer with a project in mind, recognising that at least the majority of it can be produced by a lead freelancer. Using a project management tool like TaskTracker allows the efforts of the team to be funneled through a lead project manager. Assigning task and letting team members know that co-workers are depending on their reporting each completed task is a priority. Deploy an issue management system for dealing with project interruptions.

Frequent communication

Use a hybrid intranet / extranet solutionto keep stakeholders informed all the time - that means everyone who has any involvement including the client as well as all creative and technical suppliers. Details of all developments should be passed by the email system to everyone involved.

Break it up into small pieces

Turn a large project into several smaller ones. This makes it easier to manage by assigning each task to the team member whose responsibility it is.

All this advice requires you to use some project management skills on a day to day basis. But it's all possible if you plan carefully and use common sense.

Just remember, for your team to be effective everyone needs to get on the Same Page!

Ecommerce can be a puzzling subject and many of us need a little help decoding it. So here are a few every day E-commerce jargon explained for the lay man:

Immerce

Immerce is the new expression being used for commerce that is done completely over the Internet.

Merchant Status

Merchant Status is attained, when the merchant rents or buys special software that is used to process the transaction. Depending on the bank and the type of business that you are operating, you may need to purchase or rent a hardware known as a processing terminal.

Merchant Account

A merchant account is obtained only after you successfully attain merchant status. A Merchant Account basically is a link between a business and a merchant bank which allows the merchant to accept credit card payments from customers.

Internet Merchant Account

This account permits the receiving of credit cards online. Transactions are processed online, in real time. If the card is approved, the customer and the merchant are both notified and the sale goes through.

Merchant Brokers

These are brokers that help in setting up credit card accounts for online businesses. They charge a setup fee and lease or sell the software and hardware as required. If getting a merchant account through a traditional bank is proving to be trouble some, merchant brokers are an option.

Extranet

Extranet is an extension of a corporate intranet. It joins the internal network of a company with the intranets of its customers and suppliers. This networking makes it possible to create e-commerce applications that link all parts of a business.

Soft Goods & Hard Goods

Soft goods are items which exist virtually or electronically for example e-books, or music files, that are downloaded. Hard Goods are items that exist in reality, for example books or cds.

Electronic Cash or E-cash

This is cash issued by the bank in the form of numbers. E-cash is anonymous and reusable. Unlike credit card transactions, the identity of the shopper is not known to the merchant.

Electronic Checks

The E-check is a message that contains all of the information that is found on an ordinary cheque, but it is signed digitally, or indorsed and is transmitted electronically by email, fax or phone.The digital signature is encoded by encrypting with the customer's secret key.

Electronic Wallet

Electronic Wallets store your credit card numbers on your hard drive in an encrypted form. Customers initiate a credit card payment via a secure transaction enabled by the electronic wallet company's server.

Telephone Billing Systems

Telephone transactions allow the customer to purchase an item or service, and the amount will be billed to his or her telephone bill.

Micro transactions or Micro payments

Micro transactions are transactions of tiny amounts, only some cents or dollars, normally made in order to download or access graphics, games, and information.

Disintermediation

Disintermediation is the method of evading retail channels or mail order houses and selling directly to the customer.

Commerce Service Providers (CSP)

CSPs are business web sites that provide ecommerce solutions.

High Risk Processors

High risk processors or brokers are financial institutions or companies that that issue merchant status accounts to high risk businesses.

The benefit of running an annual employee survey has for a long time been widely accepted but many organizations have been put off by the amount of effort that is required.Many organizations who have bit the bullet and conducted their own internal employee satisfaction surveys have often relied on word-processors to allow them to design and compile a survey, then gone through the effort of printing and distributing the survey and spent time chasing and collecting the completed surveys and then even more time transferring the survey response information into a meaningful management report.Fortunately with the introduction of the Internet and hosted survey websites like www.surveygalaxy.com what was once a time consuming, resource hungry, long winded and cumbersome process is now slick, quick and easy.This document provides a step by step guide to help implement a survey that will bring considerable benefits to any organization.Step 1 - Identifying The NeedThe reasons an organization would need a survey are as wide and they are long. Listed here are a few of the common reason why employee satisfaction surveys are conducted. Event DrivenIf your organization is about to embark, or is going through, a change management program employee surveys can assist in managing the change, measuring the effectiveness of the change, help to deliver a 'message' and gather valuable feedback throughout the change cycle.For organizations that are experiencing rapid growth employee surveys can monitor internal communications and management structures to ensure that employees are aware of their reporting and management responsibilities.Where an organization is suffering from poor moral brought on by either internal or external influences an employee survey can be used to identify the specific concerns of employees so those concerns can be properly addressed. Where there is an increase in turnover of staff employee surveys can help an organization identify the underlying cause of employee unrest and through their findings help find solutions. PeriodicallyAs part of a periodic assessment, surveys will help an organization review their personnel and monitor on an individual level job satisfaction, training and career development. Employee surveys also offer senior management the opportunity to look at the soft underbelly of their organization to confirm that their 'top down' view of the organization matches the reality and 'bottom up' perspective. With the help of employee surveys an organization can establish good employer/employee communication that will in turn bring both direct and indirect benefits. Step 2 - Management Buy-InManagement buy-in is always desirable for any initiative and many will argue that it is essential to ensure a successful employee survey, however, in some instances the findings of an employee survey can lead to kick-starting a management that has grown complacent and detached from their employees. Some organization may be fortunate in that the senior management recognize and drive the need for employee surveys, while in others the management may need to first be convinced of the direct and indirect benefits an employee survey will bring. The level of management commitment to an employee survey will have some bearing on the nature of the survey and to some extent will help determine what questions are to be asked and the manner they are asked. A management that is supportive of the initiative may require feedback on specific areas of the business or they may give the go ahead because they feel confident that the results will only confirm that the level of employee satisfaction throughout the organization is high. In nearly all cases it is good practice to at least try and get management to buy-in to the employee survey from the very start as they have a lot to gain and are in a position to effect any change that is later identified as being required. Step 3 - Designing The SurveyDesigning a good survey will take some time and effort but by following the basics of survey design and concentrating on the 'need to know' questions and removing the 'nice to know' a survey will rapidly take shape. Determining the exact questions that should be asked will be entirely dependent on the individual organization, its structure and the previously identified primary need and objectives of the employee survey. When considering what questions to ask consideration should be given to how the results are to be analyzed. For example there may be a desire to ask for individual comments but these types of answer formats can be very time consuming and cumbersome to analyze and should therefore be avoided or used sparingly. With online surveys it is generally better to do a few smaller surveys than one very long survey as the longer the survey the higher the drop out rate will be. Step 4 - Proof Reading And TestingGrammar, Spelling And ClarityBefore publishing the survey make a careful check for spelling and typing mistakes and incorrect grammar. If available it is always better to have someone who has not been involved in designing the survey to proof read the survey with clean eyes, if no one is available try to take a break before checking through the survey again. Say What You Mean And Mean What You SayWhen checking the survey you need to consider the survey from the viewpoint of the respondent, you may know what you mean by each question but will the questions be clear to the employee? Allow The Employee To Answer TruthfullyFor closed questions where the employee will be required to choose from a number of available responses have you allowed the employee to answer accurately? Make use of responses like 'Don't know', 'No comment' or 'Not Applicable' where you have made the question mandatory but the employee may not be able to answer. Consider allowing the employee to include an 'Other' answer but also appreciate that 'Other' answers will add to the complexity when analyzing the survey results. Don't Require A Response To Questions That May Not Have OneCheck that for any questions that you have made mandatory you do require an answer, for example open questions such as asking for additional comments should not be mandatory unless you definitely require the respondent to write a comment. Check You Will Be Able To Analyze The DataCheck through the survey again but this time looking at how the results of the survey will be analyzed. Consider how you are likely to want to analyze the survey data, have you asked the right questions to be able to perform detailed analysis? For example if you wanted to view the detailed response data from the perspective of the different genders, or maybe departments, check you have asked the employee to indicate their own gender and/or department. Don't Ask Anymore Questions Than You Need ToConsider all the questions in the survey and look for questions that are not 'need to know'. Test The Link And Try Completing The SurveyPublish the survey and then send the survey's link to a number of people who will be willing to test the survey. By completing the survey yourself you will get a feel for how the respondent will view the survey. From your own and others feedback stop and make adjustments to the survey as required. Repeat this process until you are happy with the survey. Check The DataTake time to view the online summary results of the test data and confirm that the data is being collected in a manner that can be properly analyzed and that will give meaningful results.
Step 5 - Promoting And Deploying The SurveyWhere all or the majority of employees have access to the internet or company intranet deploying the online survey is as easy that ABC, either via email or by establishing a link to the survey from your own website or Intranet.Where there are some or many employees that do not have direct access to the internet there are a number of alternatives that can be used from issuing the survey in printed form, providing a shared terminal or giving them an incentive to complete the survey at home. Anonymous Responses?There is a choice to allow all surveys to be completed anonymously. Allowing a survey to be anonymous may encourage employees to speak their minds enabling the survey to provide 'a warts and all' report, in turn giving management an opportunity to address underlying problems before they become serious. However, allowing anonymous comments also allows employees to be more cavalier and flippant with their responses. Some organizations would therefore only want to consider comments where employees are prepared to stand by their convictions and that will also provide an opportunity to follow up the specific concerns of individual employees. The decision to allow anonymous responses or not will, among other factors, be down to the individual organization, the specific nature of the survey, the surrounding circumstances, the management style and the existing employer/employee relationship.
Step 6 - Monitoring The SurveyWhile the survey is in progress you will be able to view the summary results online and also monitor in real-time the number of surveys that have been both started and completed. If after a few days the number of completed surveys falls short of the expected target it is advisable to send periodic reminders to employees asking them to complete the survey. Step 7 - Analyzing The ResultsThere are no hard and fast rules for analyzing the data. Much depends on the individual survey, the questions asked and the number of responses. Most surveys will benefit from many of the results being displayed in graphical as well as tabular form. When first analyzing survey data often a number of 'headline' results will immediately stand out that will provide you with a general overview and, providing the right questions have been asked, give you an instant assessment of the mood throughout the organization as a whole. Where the results give areas of concern a more detailed analysis may be advisable. For example if employees were asked if they felt the organization provided equal opportunities to both genders and 25% gave a negative response it would be useful to know the gender split of the organization and also to look at what the gender split was of the 25% that answered negatively. Was the negative view shared by employees of both genders, evenly spread throughout the organization, or of a particular gender from a particular department? There is a method of reporting that presents the result data in tabular and/or graphical form allowing those who are interested in the results to view the raw data. Often used as a compliment to the first, another method is to interpret the results and provide an analysis of the data and offer a view as to what the meaning is behind the results, what circumstances may have contributed to the results being as they are and, where the results indicate a negative, what initiatives could be taken. Such analysis if done by a single individual is likely to be very personal, if done by a committee it is still likely to be objective and therefore open to interpretation. Step 8 - Further ActionProbably the most important step is the last. An employee survey will either confirm that the perfect organization exists or it will highlight areas that are less than perfect by identifying individual and common concerns. It may be that further more detailed surveys are required that target specific areas. For example the survey may reveal that employees working in a particular department are collectively unhappy, but the reasons for their dissatisfaction may not be clear. A smaller, specifically targeted follow-up survey may help reveal the root causes. When employee surveys are periodically run an organization that has taken steps to address issues will see their efforts reflected in subsequent survey responses. Almost all organizations have some problems and it helps an organization's moral to see that a channel is available that will allow problems to be highlighted, addressed and resolved. Summary These guidelines are intended to help an organization conduct successful employee satisfaction surveys, they are however, only a guide. Each organization is different in style and structure and the organizations 'personality' will go someway to influencing the tone and nature of the survey and organizations will have many different circumstances and primary reasons for conducting a survey. By utilizing existing technology and conducting surveys online you are now able to monitor the heart beat of an organization, quickly, easily and, by using websites like Survey Galaxy, at minimal cost.

Once you've done your research and decided that buying a franchise is the business opportunity for you, you will, of course, have to select the one in which you want to invest. Your choice will undoubtedly be based on many criteria, not the least of which is potential for profitability.

There are many resources available to help a potential franchisee choose the franchise that is the best fit for him.

For example, entrepreneur.com ranks them annually in their Franchise 500 list. Entrepreneur.com judges all companies-regardless of size-on the same criteria. Objective and quantifiable data are used to assign each company a cumulative score, and the companies earning the highest scores then become the Franchise 500 list.

Some of the factors considered include: financial strength and stability, growth rate and size of the company, number of years in business as well as number of years franchising, start-up costs, litigations, percentage of terminations and whether a company provides financing. All of the financial data considered is audited by an independent CPA to ensure accuracy.

The top ten of this year's Franchise 500 included companies such as The UPS Store/Mail Boxes Etc. This is the largest franchisor of retail shipping, postal and business service centers in the world.

UPS acquired Mail Boxes Etc., Inc. in 2001, and in 2003 the two companies introduced The UPS Store. This company has enjoyed massive growth that included 500 new locations in the first year alone. By 2004, the company had over 5,000 locations. The UPS Store/Mail Boxes Etc. has been designated as the number one franchise opportunity in the postal and business services category of the Franchise 500 for 16 consecutive years.

Another ranked list of them is The Franchise 50 Awards. This list is compiled by the Franchis Business Review, which is a national market research firm that conducts independent surveys measuring the satisfaction of franchisees. Since profitability is a major factor in whether or not you'll be satisfied with them, The Franchise 50 Awards list is also a good tool to use in your decision-making process.

Included in The Franchise 50 Awards top ten for 2007 were companies such as FASTSIGNS, Synergy HomeCare, 1-800-GOT-JUNK?, i9 Sports and CertaPro Painters. The Franchise Business Review also ranks these in 16 different industry categories. For example, earning top honors in the automotive category was Matco Tools.

FASTSIGNS

This company provides custom signs, graphics, banners, trade show exhibits and vehicle graphics using the best computer technology available. FASTSIGNS boasts nearly 500 locations worldwide, and they are continuing to grow. The average per store gross sales reported in FASTSIGNS' 2006 UFOC was $620,000.

Synergy HomeCare

With more than 34 million people over the age of 65 currently residing in the U.S., the demand for non-medical, in-home care is at an all-time high.

Synergy HomeCare provides comprehensive training for new franchisees to ensure success in this rapidly growing industry. New franchisees in this company are each assigned a start-up representative to guide them through the start-up process. A pre-class workbook is provided to assist them in completing the research necessary to successfully operate in their local areas. After this is completed, new ones attend a five-day training program at Synergy HomeCare's corporate headquarters.

Synergy HomeCare also provides ongoing support to their franchisees in these additional areas: staffing, marketing, software and intranet.

1-800-GOT-JUNK?

This junk removal franchise has grown by over 500 percent in the past three years. This is a young company that is poised to dominate a newly developed niche market.

This company is actively seeking franchisees who will adapt well to its "work hard, play hard" corporate culture. Ideal candidates should be aggressive, results-oriented people who are excited about long-term growth and who exhibit strong leadership capabilities.

i9 Sports

i9 Sports operates youth sports leagues, camps and after-school programs for children ages 3-14.

This franchise has a low start-up cost in addition to classroom training and a franchise support coach. Those in this system enjoy the freedom of dictating their own working schedules because these businesses are operated directly from their homes.

Each franchisee is granted an exclusive territory to maximize the potential for long-term growth in this huge market. Organized sports are played by over 100 million Americans, but many are disappointed in the poorly organized sports programs available to them locally. This offers a great opportunity to meet a community need.

CertaPro Painters

Home services is a $100 billion a year industry, and this franchise offers you the opportunity to be part of that industry by providing both residential and commercial customers with full service painting. CertaPro also offers specialty painting services such as faux finishes.

CertaPro has been in business since 1992, and they offer a comprehensive initial training program. This company also encourages and facilitates strong interaction between them through a national convention, regional meetings and business planning groups.

Matco Tools

This manufactures and distributes professional automotive equipment, tools and toolboxes. Their product catalogue boasts over 13,000 items including hand tools, power tools, diagnostics, tool storage, heavy-duty tools, shop equipment and OEM-specified service tools. The product offering is updated on a continual basis to ensure availability of the latest tools.

This differs from others you may have researched because there are no franchise fees, ongoing royalties or advertising fees. Starting the business does not require the purchase of expensive real estate, and you won't need to hire any employees.

Matco Tools offers start-up financing through an in-house department as part of a comprehensive support system that includes: Matco Distributor Business System (MDBS), Matco Customer Service Support Team, Matco Distributor Advisory Council (MDAC), national advertising and racing support.

Final Comments

So, you can see just by this very short list that the possibilities with franchising are virtually limitless. There are many franchises that are consistently outperforming the rest in terms of profitability and satisfaction, and you can use the tools discussed in this article to find out which ones they are.

All that's left is for you to decide which franchise is the best match to your personal business style.

A common complaint among small business owners is the failure of employees to complete their time sheets. The employees typically have a strong start but fail to their enter time for the entire week. This can be frustrating for the business owner who has to use valuable time playing catch up with the employees while they try to complete these time sheets so the employee can be paid on time.

Educate, Reward, and Consequence Model

Consequence - If you are having similar issues, you must first generate a plan to see why this problem is happening. Do your employees realize the importance of completely filling out their time sheets and consequences of not doing this? Do you have consequences for incomplete time entry?

Establish and communicate consequences for delayed or incomplete time entry. Make sure these consequences are included in the employee handbook or company intranet for reference.

Educate - Once you understand why the problem is happening, you can educate the employees on the proper time completion procedure. Once they are educated and aware of the consequences, you can jumpstart reward part of this model.

Survey your employees to see why they are turning in the time sheets late. Use the surveys to develop a plan to educate them the importance of on time completion and the consequences of incomplete time sheets.

Reward - Create a weekly game or contest around this time sheet completion learning process for all employees. Draw names each week from a pool of people who correctly entered their timesheets correctly. I've seen prizes range from a half day off to a gift certificate for dinner at a fancy local restaurant.

Sounds childish, but this works. This technique re-trains the employees during this contest or trial period so that when this phase was over, they will continue to enter their time properly.

Onboarding a new employee is often myopically defined as quickening a new employee to effectiveness. While this achieves a particular objective of a strategic onboarding process for many companies, it falls short of a complete definition and leaves managers of human capital with a goal so vague as to nearly render it useless (how fast is quick, and what is effective?) Furthermore, quickening effectiveness for many employers in blue collar industries is such a trivial endeavor that instituting an initiative to quicken new employee effectiveness might not make sense (a furniture mover's path to effectiveness might be measured in minutes). On the other hand, all employers share the compliance, paperwork, and logistics burdens associated with new employees, regardless of the blue-shading of their industry.

In Employee Onboarding; An HR Technology Seeking a Definition we define two approaches to onboarding. Transactional Onboarding utilizes the automation of the onboarding business process to transition a new employee into their new role; automating the federal W-4, I-9, and state tax forms are examples of business rules and forms best automated through transactional onboarding. Return on investment is realized through making the process more efficient, eliminating costs in handling forms and data, eliminating latency and errors in data, and minimizing risk in the compliance-sensitive area of hiring. Transactional onboarding's value is objectively measurable and is of value to any employer; particularly so for employers with compounding factors such as high turnover or regulated industries; one can think of transactional onboarding as the science of onboarding.

We defined Acculturation Onboarding, or simply Acculturation, as quickening the new employee to effectiveness. Acculturation is sometimes also known as socialization, and is touted by many vendors as the singular approach to onboarding, despite the fact that acculturation is appropriate to a subset of employers who might be interested in a strategic onboarding initiative. Return on investment for acculturation is realized through earlier and more rapid productivity of the new employee and improved long term employee satisfaction and retention. Acculturation's value is subjectively measurable and is valuable to employers with high costs associated with recruiting and retaining employees, typically those in more professional roles in the organization; it is this subjectivity that is the Achilles Heel of acculturation onboarding. If transactional onboarding is the science of onboarding, acculturation is the art of onboarding.

While it's obvious that value from transactional onboarding can be achieved through investing in a system that is flexible enough to meet the organization's unique process and compliance requirements, it may be less obvious whether the same system, or any single system, can accomplish the value objectives of an acculturation approach. So how could an organization in need of acculturation take a systems approach to automation?

Let's take a simple A to B viewpoint to the acculturation system question. Point A is the candidate who has just accepted the offer, and point B is the fully productive and contented employee. Transactional onboarding resides as a sliver of a process just as the candidate begins following the path to point B, albeit an intensive process that is laden with risk. The objective of an acculturation system is to shorten the path-the length of time to get-from A to B for all new employees, encompassing the transactional onboarding event at the onset, while maximizing the level of satisfaction of the new employee (contentedness) once they reach point B. It's easy to see why the return on investment in an acculturation system is a subjective measurement, as the objective is peppered with challenges to measurement. What is meant by fully productive? How do you determine when someone achieves full productivity? How do you account for differing times to productivity due to varying complexity of roles? What is considered a good time to productivity, and how do you help employees who are not meeting expectations? How does the organization know (objectively) it is making improvements to the time to productivity? What is employee contentedness and how do you measure it?

Our recommended approach to implementing an acculturation system that meets the stated objective and answers these questions is based on three tenets: measure, engage, and immerse. All three should be considered when implementing a strategic acculturation process, and if executed properly, the subjectivity Achilles Heel of acculturation onboarding can be minimized.

Measure

Determining the resulting value, and therefore the return on investment, of any technology initiative requires the ability to establish incremental objectives and measure their achievement. Few onboarding systems that take an acculturation or socialization stance provide the means to measure their own effectiveness, yet practically all of them cite Aberdeen Group's estimates on the potential cost savings of automating onboarding. This is akin to a car salesman assuring a buyer their new car will save fuel costs but not citing what kind of gas mileage the car gets or even whether the mileage can be measured. Hence our first recommendation to implementing an acculturation system is to establish how the system will set objectives and how those objectives are measured.

An acculturation system should allow the organization to establish specific objectives that collectively measure productivity, or should be able to recognize those objectives established in complimentary systems such as learning and competency management systems. The objectives could be events that are either incomplete or completed, or they may be tasks that can be completed in degrees or stages. Objectives might be achievable in any order, but some objectives may be dependent on the prior completion of others. Individual objectives should be scored and weighted with respect to an overall Acculturation Index (AI), which we recommend be calculated on a percentage scale (the weighting and calculation of an acculturation index will be the topic of a future article). Examining the AI for a specific individual would indicate how far along the A to B path the new employee is, and analysis of composites of the AI's of multiple employees from one period of time against another will provide insight into how the company is influencing-positively or negatively-the effectiveness of acculturation onboarding.

Another interesting analysis of the acculturation index would illustrate the constantly increasing index over time for either a single employee or a composite of employees. A rapid increase in the acculturation index, followed by gradual increase, would indicate that the majority of acculturation objectives are achieved within the first 3 days, while a gentler increase of the index indicates a more gradual achievement of acculturation objectives. Neither outcome may be more correct than the other, but correlated with less than desirable outcomes, the method of engaging the employee, which will be discussed shortly, should be reconsidered.

There are three types of acculturation objectives: competency objectives, social objectives, and satisfaction objectives. Competency objectives, such as completion of assessments that demonstrate proficiency in skills associated with the employee's position, are excellent candidates to extract from learning or competency management systems. Social objectives-such as completion of a profile on the company's social network, connecting to contacts or "friends" in the network, and participating in the company's collaboration tools and wikis-may pose a greater challenge in collecting due to the diversity of data sources. Satisfaction objectives, or measurements regarding the employee's contentedness with their new job, are most likely to be collected from directly querying employees, coworkers, and supervisors using a survey or data collection tool.

Acculturation objectives should also be defined according to the organization's structure. Company wide objectives include those that apply to all employees, such as passing the company's network security policy exam, creating a company social network profile, and indicating satisfaction regarding the company's group health benefits. Departmental or business unit objectives provide greater specialization, such as passing the IT department's help desk usage test, or publishing a technical post on the engineering wiki. Specific skills associated with the position, inherited from the job description, represent the most specific objectives, and if measured through the use of a competency assessment system represent the most objective measurements of productivity in the AI and should be weighted accordingly. Finally, objectives might be established for the specific individual assuming the role, particularly if the individual needs remediation in certain skills. A good implementation of an acculturation system would allow for the assumption of the majority of acculturation objectives for individuals based on the position, job, and organization structure (location, business unit, department, division, etc.), including company wide objectives, and allowing for the dynamic specification of objectives specific to the individual; otherwise, the burden of establishing objectives for each new hire would hinder the consistent application of acculturation objectives.

It should be obvious that an integration strategy is critical to an acculturation system, as the sources of acculturation objectives are myriad. Furthermore, to facilitate the reporting, analysis, and data mining critical for measurement and continual process refinement, the destination data storage should be dimensional in nature versus transactional. Considered together, these observations strongly imply that a true business intelligence approach, specifically the regular construction of an acculturation data mart, should be a component of the acculturation system. Incorporated with the company's business activity monitoring (BAM) and business rules engine (BRE) strategies would serve not only the purpose of reporting and analysis of acculturation onboarding, but might also provide a data source for certain acculturation objectives that might be detected through the BAM or BRE systems.

Defining the acculturation objectives and establishing how they are to be evaluated defines a clear A-to-B path to productivity for new employees; engaging the employee is how the organization aids the new employee in achieving their acculturation objectives and optimizes the acculturation process.

Engage

While most new employees, excited by their new jobs, may proactively proceed from point A to B, we recommend the organization assume a more active approach to encouraging the new employee's progress toward productivity rather than a passive approach. The goal of an active approach to acculturation is engagement. Using an actively engaging acculturation onboarding process, the organization can more easily make adjustments to the process, and (assuming a good implementation of measurement of objectives) rapidly evaluate the effectiveness of the changes. Furthermore, those employees who aren't proactive in their own acculturation may respond better to active engagement (proactive employees will respond well in the acculturation process regardless of whether it is active or passive).

The best implementation of an actively engaging acculturation onboarding system can take inspiration from suggestive selling techniques. The content for engagement-that is, what is being sold-are the acculturation objectives that the system has established for the employee. In other words, the employee should be actively encouraged by the system to achieve their objectives. The typical venues for active engagement include tasks assigned and emails sent, both of which are readily implemented by business process management (BPM) systems.

The engagement process must be intelligent enough to suggest acculturation objectives in a logical order. For example, the objective of connecting with fellow employees on the corporate social network should be encouraged and promoted to the employee by the system only after the employee has completed their own profile on the social network. Likewise, the system should be intelligent enough to alter the priority of promoting objectives during the employee's path from A to B as conditions affecting the objectives change; for example, if the employee demonstrates significant interest in participating in the company's social network and less interest in creating a blog, then the system should promote objectives associated with the social network more aggressively than the objective to create a blog.

A system that implements active engagement does not preclude interpersonal engagement, and in fact should promote it. While interpersonal engagement objectives could obviously be promoted to the new employee through promotion of objectives such as connecting to employees with similar interests and backgrounds (similar to the "people you may know" feature of Facebook), suggestions and tasks generated by an active engagement system could be targeted at others in the organization; sending an email to the new employee's coworkers on their first day of work suggesting that they introduce themselves, or posting a "spotlight" feature of the employee's newly created profile page on the company intranet are examples. Interacting with a mentoring system to select and assign a mentor is another example, and could also strengthen the interaction of a formal mentor program to acculturation objectives and measurements.

Engaging the new employee through the A-to-B acculturation process through an active approach optimizes the acculturation process, and should result in the employee not only achieving their acculturation objectives, but should also result in the employee being fully immersed in the company's culture.

Immerse

Active engagement of the employee along the A to B path to productivity should ideally be conducted in an environment that concludes (point B) with the employee fully immersed in the company's employee communications strategy. In other words, engaging an employee to achieve acculturation objectives is best conducted within the company's employee communications portal, as it is achieving the universal objective of acculturation which is to introduce and immerse the employee into that strategy. The communications strategy might be a dedicated product specifically designed for fostering employee communications, or has been pointed out, it can be the company's intranet, which today is increasingly Microsoft SharePoint

Many onboarding systems purporting a socialization technique attempt to accomplish acculturation objectives through the introduction of a dedicated onboarding portal. While this approach might be effective in the delivery of content of interest to a new employee, it is akin to introducing an outward facing point C on the A to B path, and does not serve to immerse the employee in the strategic employee communications platform. Furthermore, delivery of content of interest to a new employee can easily be accomplished in strategic communications and portal platforms, such as SharePoint, so any potential benefit is negated. The final nail in the coffin of a dedicated onboarding portal might come from the objections (of both HR and IT) to maintaining yet another portal in addition to the employee communications platform, the company's intranet, employee and benefits self service, and potentially others.

Inspiration for the concept of immersion might be drawn from the field of education. A student on their first day at a new school is quickly ushered through the necessary paperwork in the principle's office (transactional onboarding), then taken directly to their classroom where they are introduced to their teacher and classmates. Over the ensuing days, the student is socialized in situ through engagement of the teacher and fellow students, while at the same time the teacher observes (measures) the students acculturation progress and makes any necessary adjustments to the process to optimize time to productivity (such as suggesting friends or activities for the new student). Failure to immerse a new employee in the A to B path to productivity is as undesirable as putting the new student in a separate classroom surrounded only by material and information describing how great a school they are attending.

Summary & Recommendations

Too many socializing onboarding systems today fall short of their ability to provide a system that measurably and predictably achieves their purported goals and allows organizations to continually improve their acculturation process through cycles of adjustments and evaluating results. While these failures may be due in part to the complex nature of collecting data to calculate an acculturation index, we believe it is also because acculturation systems don't properly balance the aspects of measuring individual and aggregated progress against acculturation objectives, actively engaging new employees through the acculturation process, and immersing the new employee in the organization's strategic communications platform. Organizations seeking to reap the benefits of quickening employees to effectiveness while maximizing the new employee's satisfaction (and longevity as a result) would be well advised to construct an acculturation system that measures, engages, and immerses.

Recommendations:

1. Determine if an acculturation onboarding approach is needed; all companies benefit from transactional onboarding, not all companies benefit from acculturation.

2. Approach acculturation as an A-to-B path to productivity, with the principle business goal being to minimize this path (quicken time to productivity) while maximizing employee satisfaction.

3. Work to eliminate subjectivity in the system's value through an acculturation approach that includes measuring, engaging, and immersing candidates in the acculturation process.

4. Establish acculturation objectives that can be measured and scored, regardless of their source systems, and that contribute to an overall acculturation index that indicates progress along the A to B path.

5. Use an appropriate mix of competency objectives, social objectives, and satisfaction objectives that make sense for your particular organization's acculturation goals.

6. Collect and analyze Acculturation Index (AI) data to determine how to make improvements to the acculturation process, creating a closed-loop system to improving the process.

7. Define objectives at all organizational levels of the business to ensure consistency, but retain the flexibility to establish objectives specific to individuals if necessary.

8. Acquire or build a system that is highly flexible in regards to integration.

9. Actively engage employees in the acculturation process using methods similar to suggestive selling.

10. Active engagement should be intelligent enough to adapt to an individual's unique path to productivity.

11. Active engagement should encourage and promote interpersonal activity, not only with the new employee but also with coworkers.

12. The acculturation platform should immerse the new employees in the organization's strategic communications platform, not in an outward facing dedicated onboarding portal.

References:

1 - Ros, C and Torrence, J: " Employee Onboarding: an HR Technology Seeking a Definition", 2008

2 - Aberdeen Group: "All Aboard: Effective Onboarding Techniques and Strategies", January 2008

3 - Hayden, Jeff, "Using Microsoft SharePoint for Acculturation Onboarding", 2008

Drive on a country road at night without your headlights and you will surely run off the road and hurt yourself. Manage your business without a robust two-way (up and down the command chain) information flow and you risk the same results. Running blind - in the dark or without information - is a formula for disaster.

Today, employees are the eyes and ears of all businesses. Employees connect with customers; these customers tell employees critical things about products, services, competition, needs and values. When information moves easily, there is a constant dialog "up" from employees and "down" from management. Both sides are sharing information to respond to changes, to take advantage of opportunities and to solve issues. Interrupt this critical pipeline and both sides work in the dark; performance suffers, employee and customer loyalty decreases and results suffer.

Our world has changed. In our early years, we lived in an agrarian age where we hunted, gathered and tamed the land by planting. Information movement then was marginally important. We progressed to replacing man and animals with machinery in the industrial age where horsepower replaced muscle power. As we moved from making food to making things, information flow increased in importance but mostly in one direction - from management to employees. Today, horsepower has given way to brainpower as we have moved to a new intellectual or information age. Much of manufacturing has moved offshore; it has been replaced by our intellectual service economy. In this economy, information is power; information drives knowledge and knowledge drives performance. Today, organizations succeed or fail in their ability to quickly move, share, assess and use information.

Our fast-paced world requires a robust two-way (up and down the command chain) approach to information movement. Management must share the business mission, issues, challenges and meaningful information with employees to help them feel connected, involved and competent. Employees must share what they see in their daily roles to keep management informed about customers, competition, working conditions, opportunities, problems and other things that can impact business. Though both parties know this, few do it well. Managements, stuck in industrial age thinking, selectively share information with employees. Employees respond by limiting their contribution and observations. The performance power of today's workforce is in the thinking in each employee. When not encouraged, valued or supported, this important asset becomes valueless.

Today's economy requires quality information to make successful and fast decisions to stay competitive and successful. Organizations with managements that openly share what they know, details of the business, successes and challenges earn greater loyalty and greater contribution from their employees. They invite employees to share what they know, think and value. They encourage a powerful two-way exchange.

Managements that make decisions in isolation (without sharing information or accessing the collective genius of its workforce), run the risk of making shortsighted and ill-informed decisions. They also fail to activate the thinking, trust and loyalty of their employees who need direction, context and support to maximize their performance. These employees disengage and stop all meaningful upward information flow. In today's information rich age, this alienates an organization from its customers and workforce.

With information, you must move it or lose it. Share it. Eliminate all the obstacles to insure an unobstructed flow. And once it flows, discuss it, invent with it, plan with it and use it. Consider these ways to improve the information flow in your organization:

Movement (down) from management:

• Define important information that can be shared with employees - this includes core values such as the vision, mission and key strategic items; performance statistics such as sales, margins, and profits; efficiency statistics such as improvements in expense captions, employee turnover statistics, and progress on strategic projects. Develop a list of meaning monthly information to be shared with employees.
• Once the content is developed, create a strong internal information sharing process - consider a company intranet, standard monthly reports, management newsletter, a letter from the CEO or other way to share critical information with all employees.

• Increase face to face time with employees to build personal contacts and to encourage employees to openly share their thoughts, suggestions and ideas. Consider a live web meeting if face to face time is not possible. Insist on and be known for candid communication; this creates trust and respect.

• Involve employees in discussions of business challenges, issues and opportunities. Require employee participation, thinking and feedback.

• Acknowledge all employee suggestions and ideas to encourage continual contribution. Publicly applaud suggestions that are implemented.

Movement (up) from employees:

• Set up a process to formally review information from management; meet monthly meeting to review and prepare employee feedback. Brainstorm, invent, create and propose responses to organizational challenges and opportunities. Present all employee responses to management.

• Require employees to submit 2 performance improvement ideas (or other type of ideas) each week to management. One idea should be based on an inside review of the organization; the other idea should be based on perspectives seen outside of the organization. These ideas should be reviewed monthly by management with proper follow up and reporting.

• Develop contact process with customers to gather customer perspectives; summarize and share these regularly with management.

• Create an employee liaison to management; this employee would summarize the emotions, feelings, observations and perspectives about the workplace and working for the organization to management.

Today, information is the key to performance and results in every organization. The more information flows, the more robust the ideas, innovations and responses are in succeeding in today's complex business environment. The most significant asset any organization has today is the collective knowledge of its employees; to activate this power source requires easy and open information movement. Managers share organizational information with employees; employees share ideas, suggestions, observations and opinions. Both are critical to stay competitive and to run a powerful business. Limit the flow from either side and the organization runs off the success road. Information is power; move it or lose it.

Are you looking for an efficient, reliable way to track your employees' time? Do employee badges and time-cards create hassles for your business? If so, it's time for you to switch to biometric time clocks. They are the time-keeping tool of the future, a replacement to the standard punch clock. Rather than having an employee punch a time sheet, they insert their hand into a reader, which recognizes their finger or hand and associates it with their employee number.

There are two types of technologies used in biometric time clocks- finger identification and hand identification. Finger identification clocks recognize an employee's finger by its ridges and valleys, but they do not store the actual fingerprint. This allows an employee to feel comfortable, knowing that their fingerprint is not being tracked or compared to other fingerprints. Hand identification clocks measure the size and shape of an employee's hand.

What are the benefits of switching to biometric time clocks?

1. Using them eliminates paper time-cards, employee badges, and all the costs associated with buying new supplies or replacing lost or stolen cards and badges.

2. They reduce the amount of time that you need to spend checking time cards and verifying that attendance information is correct.

3. They reduce the time that you need to spend calculating the hours your employees worked.

4. It also helps to eliminate mistakes when calculating hours.

5. They consolidate payroll, reducing the involvement of HR and accounting departments.

6. They prevent "buddy punching," which occurs when one employee punches another employee's time card.

Biometric time clocks are a reliable and efficient way for you to accurately keep track of your employees' time. Due to new technologies, they are surprisingly affordable and pay for themselves over time. Switching to biometric time clocks will rid you of the hassles of standard clocks and they are an easy solution to any time and attendance problems. Making the switch to them is the best way to eliminate existing time issues and prevent new issues from occurring.

Time attendance equipment is used to keep track of an employee's time in ways more sophisticated than a standard punch clock. Usually such equipment accounts for time by allowing employees to clock in and out using their thumb print or by swiping a card. More advanced equipment uses employees' retinas and palms. The time attendance systems that are currently available fall into three basic categories:

• Time clock oriented

• Computer timekeeper oriented

• Computer entry/employer oriented

Many different types of systems fall within these three categories including clock ribbons, time cards, computer clocks, electronic time clock systems, mobile time and attendance tools, biometric and proximity readers, and employee tracking software as well as many other different programs. While all the programs are different and each does have its advantages and disadvantages, all time attendance equipment serves basically the same function. The basic function of the systems is to collect information from employees as they enter and exit the office. All of the systems gather data about attendance information, maintain reports, and process information put in by a manager.

Time attendance equipment proves to be extremely helpful in companies that often have trouble keeping track of employees and resources. The systems help to manage hours in a number of fields and they can also serve as security checks. Governmental organizations as well as non-governmental organizations use attendance equipment to keep their business organized. It is most commonly used in healthcare, financial services, transportation, hospitality, manufacturing, and retail management. Time attendance equipment is helpful for companies that employ hundreds of people with varying shifts, as it also works well for companies that have to monitor break shifts.

Since there are so many different types of time attendance equipment, it is important to make sure that you know exactly what your business needs before you purchase one. The price of the system depends on the advancement of it and the features that it has. Most importantly before purchasing a system, be sure to check its functionality and reliability to be sure that you are getting the best value for your money.

Are you one of those people who can't shut down over the weekend? Or worse yet, you can't shut down during the evening? Well you are not alone. Last spring the Society of Human Resource Management completed a survey and found that 70% of employees work beyond their scheduled work hours, including weekends. Over half of these respondents did this because of their own self-limiting beliefs that they needed to be putting in the extra hours.

As Americans we pride ourselves in our work ethic. But too much of a good thing can become a bad thing.

The Cost of Working Too Much

So what's the big deal if you are working more than the people around you at work and home? Lots! The costs of not taking time off can include:

Strained personal relationships--both family and friends are impacted by the person who has become disconnected.

Health problems-when you don't take time to care for your body, many health problems can arise, beginning with sleep and weight problems. Added stress can also lead to cardiovascular and gastric problems.

Poor decisions-a higher incident of poor decisions have been reported as work hours increase.
Benefits from Taking Time Out and Time Off

A recent article in the Harvard Business Review (HBR), Making Time Off Predictable and Required by Leslie A. Perlow and Jessica L. Porter, reports on a four-year study of 12 Boston Consulting Group consulting teams. Each person on the team was required to take a predictable amount of time off during each work week. The results of this study showed that when the consultants had to work together to make sure that each team member got some time off each week, communications were enhanced and more personal information was shared, resulting in closer relationships with each other. And because the teams had to plan engagements further out in advance, clients received better services.

Not all companies are organized like Boston Consulting Group, so how can you implement a Time Out-Time Off program in your organization or in your personal life?

Steps for the Business Leader

As a business leader, your greatest resources are the people who come to work each day. Without them, there is no business. So it makes sense to encourage taking time off based on the evidence from the HBR article previously cited. Below are some ideas you can use to make sure that your team members are taking time out and time off.

1. Start tracking employee overtime and skipped vacation time. Include these measurements in employee performance feedback. Skipped vacation should be unacceptable and overtime should be discouraged.

2. When vacations are scheduled, get team members to develop a support plan for the employee who will be out to insure that the vacationing employee can fully disconnect.

3. Provide work time for employees to "sharpen their saw". Each employee will have different professional or personal development priorities for renewing themselves. Personal development may include physical, emotional, and/or spiritual activities.

4. Encourage volunteer work by providing some paid time off for employees to leave work to help with their favorite charity.

5. Build a culture of time out-time off by sharing stories with each other about the time spent not working. The sharing can be done during virtual team meetings via the company's intranet. You could even create a contest for the most interesting story shared.

Steps for the Individual

Here are some tips for you to take more time out and time off:

1. When working, take 5-minute breaks every 30-40 minutes to stretch. Get up, walk around, and drink water (an important nutrient for the brain). The change in pace will re-energize you for the next block of work time. You will find that when you make taking 5-minute breaks a habit, your productivity will increase and more than make up for these 5-minute investments.

2. Schedule personal time for your important relationships. Studies show that at least 20 minutes are needed just to maintain a relationship, with a greater amount of time needed to improve and grow a relationship.

3. Have dinner with your family. Make this the time where you share your day and learn about each other's day. One tool I use to initiate the conversation is to ask two questions:

a. "What was your "peach" of today?", and

b. "What was your "pit" of today?"

These questions are easy for children to understand and to respond.

4. Don't skip vacations. Make time to plan and prepare for vacation. And when the time comes - disconnect - no iPhones or laptops! Make sure you have someone who can back you up while you are away.

Whether you are leading an entire business, managing a team, or working on your own, the benefits of integrating a time off-time out routine are clear and the steps are not difficult. The real question to ask yourself is, why not "work less and improve your results?"

Regular communication in each phase of the Six Sigma project is of great importance to facilitate the change without much resistance. Including a communication strategy in the project charter is advisable to provide guidelines to the employees responsible for carrying out the project.

The employees will have many questions in mind when a Six Sigma project is launched in an organization. They will want to know things such as what is Six Sigma, is it suitable to their organization and what the different terminologies mean.

Further, they will want to understand what effect it will have on them, their department, the benefits to them, and their role in the project.

The answers to these questions have to be provided by project managers and Champions, using proper communication channels and tactics. The communication strategy has to be designed well in advance, when the project plan is being developed.

The Target Audience

Each employee in the organization has a different level of understanding. Depending upon the targets of the project and the people concerned, training on Six Sigma concepts and terminologies should be planned accordingly.

Some people may not be able to understand the concepts in a plain teaching session. Visual aids, such as attractive presentations, should be introduced to train staff and will also help in generating interest about the Six Sigma Implementation. Groups can be formed based on the level of understanding, and a suitable plan prepared.

Six Sigma online training is also helpful.

What to Communicate

The most important part of communication is to understand what is to be communicated. Depending upon the effect that the project will have on the target groups, Six Sigma project managers will need to decide what is to be communicated to employees.

You cannot communicate a management initiative for managers that is of no relevance to the workers group with a different process.

When to Communicate

Everything has to be communicated at the right time for the right effect on each individual. The communication will have the desired result if it is communicated at a time when those involved are under the least external pressure.

Undertaking Six Sigma training sessions and seminars for communication has better effect than when they are performing their daily routines.

Communication Media and Tactics

Using the appropriate communication media is the key to having the perfect impact on the target audience. It also depends on the level of understanding of the individuals. Some would prefer textual communication; some would find the usage of audiovisual media better than textual communication.

To understand the general level of understanding, it is better to carry out interviews or questionnaires and make changes if necessary.

Some commonly used media for communication are:

-One to One meetings
-Presentations at staff meetings
-CEO memo to employees
-FAQ sheets
-Pamphlets explaining the basic terms
-Brown bag lunches
-Intranet postings
-Employee and Six Sigma newsletters
-E-mails
-Milestone recognition events
-Suggestion and question box
-Employee surveys and feedbacks
-Quizzes
-Posters
-Videotapes of key meetings

Keeping the momentum of the communication from Six Sigma project initiation to the last phase is important. It should be ensured that the strategy is continuously updated depending upon the success of the initial plans.

Sharing reports, survey results, financial gains are an important part to keep the interest of the staff intact throughout. Regular communication helps manage change better. A well-conceived plan starts with the first day of initiation of the project and continues through the entire life of the Six Sigma project.

Change is an ever-present component of small business ownership. The ability for small business owners to effectively manage change lays the groundwork for growth and helps build the foundation for the development of a positive corporate culture. What can small business owners do to make themselves better change leaders? What are the most important factors to consider when managing change?

Have a Plan and Take Small Steps

Change is something that your small business is sure to experience. A great way to prepare yourself to manage change as a small business owner is to develop a change plan. Take a look at all facets of your business and write a simple list of strategies that take into account possible changes in each functional area. "Build a big plan with small steps. A 'big' plan isn't an enormous impenetrable document, it is the summation of big ideas necessary to build belief and overcome inertia...it functions as an overlay across the business to keep initiatives in balance" says Philip Stanley, Founder at Minutecoach in the U.K. "For the owners, small steps mitigate risk and allow fluidity of movement. If the pace of change gets a little aggressive or laggardly, you can jiggle your blocks into a new pattern."

Communication

One of the most important components of change management is effective communication. Terri Maurer, Planning and Strategies Consultant and Owner of The Maurer Consulting Group in Cleveland Ohio believes that "communication is the key to a smooth passage of change in any organization. Getting as many people as possible into the change process, even if it involves no more than gathering input from staff through management, will do much to move the process forward." She also mentions that keeping your team "appraised of what is going on and why" should facilitate a smooth transition. "Utilize as many channels of communications as possible: face to face meetings, company memos, e-mail, newsletters, company intranet, etc."

Vijay Shah, Engineer and Operation Manager at Bauer Controls in Detroit, developed the following list of change management best practices:

Communication: Every change requires communicating the goal to all who are involved. And listening to the all who are involved
Humility - Understanding the constraint of your resources and making sure you do all in your power to accommodate.
Democratic dictatorship - As someone said, "The Roman empire was not created by committee", you need to communicate/listen but then take quick decision. It may not satisfy everyone but it will allow you to move forward knowing that you communicated with humility.
More Change Management Ideas

I will leave you with a few more ideas on change management derived from "The Biggest Mistakes in Managing Change" (Carol Kinsey Goman, Ph.D.):

Appreciate and acknowledge the importance of people in any change initiative. "Organizations don't change. People do -- or they don't." Whenever possible, include your employees in any change discussions and recognize that each person may react to a specific change differently. Let people know the reasons for change and include them in any change planning conversations.
Treat change as a "mental, emotional and physical process" as opposed to another business "event". Acknowledge the fact that change may be a very emotional process for your team.
Direct, honest communication is the best policy. Don't attempt to "protect" your employees by withholding facts about any pending changes or trying to spin doctor the details. Also be aware of communicating change in a timely fashion - people are smart and will figure out pretty quickly that something is up. If you create an information vacuum by ignoring the need to communicate changes quickly, your team will fill the vacuum with their own interpretation of the changes are taking place.
Believe in the potential of your group and their ability to embrace change and flourish. "Trust in the innate intelligence, capability, and creativity of your employees -- and people will astound you."

In our consulting we believe that we can and will find the solutions to business problems within the organization in which we work. Often we may need to bring in an outside ‘expert’ to show how others are doing work, but essentially companies have the solution at hand. It’s just not acted upon, for a variety of reasons!

Have you ever heard of the approach or tool called Amplifying the Positive Deviant, which was created by Jerry Sternin? Jerry and his wife, Monique, worked for the Save the Children Foundation in Vietnam during the 1990s. It was their job to help save starving children in the country's villages. Within six months, they adopted a radical approach to making change. Now, positive deviance is being applied around the world to change behavior in a variety of other social and organizational situations, such as the spread of AIDS in the Third World and ethnic conflicts in Africa. (To learn more about the Sternin's application, read the Fast Company December 2000 article at http://www.fastcompany.com/online/41/sternin.html)

Times of change present perfect opportunity to apply this tool. First, it's important in your role as a leader that you are clear about the, transformation, "contextual shift," culture change, or vision you are moving toward. Next you'll want to observe those "positive deviants." These are people, tools or processes in the organization that are moving in the same direction as your vision, goal, or change initiative that you are making happen.

Discover what the successful behaviors are, the mindsets, the results that support these "deviants." What is it that makes them work so well? What's in place that made these results possible? Then find ways to amplify, announce, and spread the word of their results. Best practices are an excellent opportunity to demonstrate this. Other ways to amplify these positive deviants may be stories in the company newsletter, on the intranet, on announcements to key stakeholders and customers, or even at the usual off-sites. It doesn't have to be on such a large or visible scale, as it is also effective in staff meetings and conversations with colleagues and managers. Additionally, this is a great opportunity to support and give visibility to your women colleagues.

The key is to find multiple ways to amplify the positive deviants and keep providing opportunities for others to build new behaviors, results, "context shifts" that move the organization in the desired direction. Sternin says, " ... find small, successful but 'deviant' practices that are already working in the organization and amplify them. Maybe, just maybe, the answer is already alive in the organization -- and change comes when YOU find it."

Seek them out and enjoy the ride

Introduction:

Organizational challenges and problems are often glossed over in superficial generalising terms, which are identified as "Failure Platitudes". By breaking this damaging tendency, strong guiding values can be brought into play through decisive and remedial action.

The concept of Failure Platitudes is an important one in the development of practical business ethics as it bridges between higher values, the realities of everyday organisational pressures and the decisive action which alone can deliver gainful change. Failure Platitudes - and, more precisely, their overcoming - form the melting pot in which creative corporate culture work is made possible.

Definition:

A Failure Platitude (FP) is our term for the lapse into a common banality from management speak in an effort to explain organizational difficulties, leaving the real nature, complexity and possible resolution of the problem largely unaddressed. The danger is that the common terms that may be used as Failure Platitudes do in themselves carry a legitimate general meaning. Through the use of clear examples we show how it is vital to be always persistent in drilling down towards an accurate understanding of individual situations: only then is there the potential to draw a direct link to guiding values and the knowledge from which to commit decisively to appropriate actions.

Failure Platitudes are risked when people refer to (largely unspecified problems) within their organisation, by saying something like: "It's about Leadership", or Management, or Strategy, or Communications, or Processes, or People. The FP problem occurs when identification, analysis and solution seeking doesn't move on any further. It just sits there as something along the lines of "It's about Leadership", without further description, explanation or analysis.

The essential problem of a FP as a sufficient explanation becomes manifest when you ask logical supplementary questions, such as, "If it's about Leadership, do you want more Leadership, or less Leadership?", or "Do you want Leadership that wears formal or informal clothes", or "Do you want Leadership that is developed from within, or recruited from outside?"

None of these questions is illogical in itself but together they show how utterly insufficient it is to seek clarity on and solutions to organisational problems via glib generalities.

- Failure Platitudes condemn organizations to not tackling core issues and to the failure of repeating them, often time and again over long periods. The following examples of FPs, the Issue they might reflect, the Value which needs to be embraced, and the resultant and corrective Action, are just that - they are only examples.

This is a very powerful framework to burst out of the constraints of FP-Thinking. As we shall see below, FP-Thinking, because it seeks short-cuts in hackneyed generalities, often also features FP-Transferred Thinking e.g. It is said to be "Communications" but in fact it is People issue in that demotivated and undertrained staff have become seriously disengaged from the company, their roles and any sense of productivity - they are in fact addressed by communications but they no longer listen or take significant heed.

Primary & Secondary FPs:

For ease of use, an example of FP-Thinking which is makes a direct link to the issue at hand but which leaves it woefully underspecified is referred to as a Primary FP (abbreviated to FP1). An example would be whereby members from various sections of a particular organisztion, of various different seniorities, continually bemoan "Our strategy". There is indeed a strategic issue - the organization, a foodstuff manufacturer, which specialises in the production of trans-fats increasingly reviled and rejected as cholesterol-unfriendly, has seen its sales fall relentlessly year on year. This is not just a case of the requirement of strategic adjustment - the company is inevitably heading towards oblivion on its current strategic trajectory.

A Secondary FP (more fully explicated at FP-Transferred Thinking), as per the case preceding above on Communications, is abbreviated as FP2. Thus, an FP1 is a case of under-specification, whilst an FP2 is a case of mis-specification.

Detailed Examples:

The most common FPs occur when it is said of an underspecified organisational problem that "It is about" one of the following:

Leadership
Management
Strategy
Communications
Processes
People

- Leadership is broken out at considerable length to illustrate how easily under-definition and misidentification can mask and even exacerbate organizational issues.
Management, Strategy, Communications, Processes and People are summarised to a sufficient extent to further illustrate how this terminological buck-passing and lazy labelling undermines considered reflection, problem solving through an appeal to higher values and a commitment to strong, productive actions.

- "It's about Leadership"

Below are 7 possible and not infrequently occurring issues which might be compressed into the blanket statement "It's about Leadership". These too-broad FP usages are unpacked into a much more precise understanding and, in some illustrative cases, progressed towards resolution through Values and Actions:

The CEO is incompetent in people skills.
- The values to which this would this map, both for the Board and for senior management would be Responsibility & Care - a responsibility to raise the issue and to assist, through example and suggestion, in the improvement of interpersonal sensitivity and finesse. The Actions might include a quiet but direct talk with the Chairman, the enrolment of specialist coaching and subtle indications from senior management where improvements can be noted with pride and pleasure.

The CEO is incompetent intellectually or by major character flaw:
- The values to which this might map for the Board are Honesty & Courage. If their considered viewpoint is that the interests of the organisation are being harmed specifically by irredeemable inadequacy, their Action must be decisive and not a fudge.

The CEO is incompetent in terms of commitment to the core responsibilities of decisive leadership:
- The values to which this would map for the Board are Responsibility and Care, and for senor management would be Responsibility and Courage. The CEO may well have other compellingly attractive features and needs help and support to focus down decisively on the most pressing organizational issues. The Actions are one of supportive intervention and ongoing support, coupled with an ongoing monitoring of progress.

The CEO is surrounded by incompetent assistants:
- The values to which this would map for the CEO are Responsibility and Decisiveness, coupled with the Discernment necessary to assess how much of the issue is personal incapacity on the part of the assistants and how much they have been hamstrung by their environment. The primary Action is not a ruthless cull - it must be a thorough assessment of the training, support and role specificity. Thereafter, Actions may include anything from removal, through redeployment, restructuring or additional training and processes.

Middle Management has been severely downsized and, due to an ongoing policy of promoting factory floor overseers without up-skilling their management skills, Leadership messages are being overlooked, distorted and lost:
- the middle management is naturally more disposed towards overseeing than strategic thinking (Whilst this is still an FP1, we have chosen the example as it is moving somewhat towards the territory of an FP2: Leadership is ultimately culpable but the issues are focused immediately on Management)

The core value in recognising a FP2 is Discernment (this will always involve proportional responsibility - there is always an inter-relation of factors: the concept of FP1 & FP2, like all human science terms, is only useful as explanatory heuristic.)

Supportiveness and a genuine commitment to Community-Building are also vital from Leadership and senior management when they have a genuine commitment to taking people with them towards new learning and new attitudes. The values required from middle management under this scenario are Trust & Openness - but this can only be expected if their leaders are acting with Integrity, which in itself rests on Deserved Authority (it rapidly becomes so clear that any serious Organizational Development initiative is utterly dependent if it is float on a wide raft of higher values.)

It's a sunset industry and the company is not managing downsizing and potential innovation well:
- (FP2: Leadership is implicated but the issues begin with Strategy)

Leadership messages are condemned unclear and occasional: However, Leadership is in fact active at issuing values-driven guidance and specific policy initiatives but the use of internally-focused technology is scant and the interpersonal chain of information sharing is entirely informal and diffuse. (FP2: Leadership is not following-through on its obligations but the issue itself is also firmly located in Communications)

Customer orders are going astray or being wrongly fulfilled, suppliers are frustrated at the inconsistency of ordering and payment, overtime payments are frequently wrongly calculated - many people across the organisation are continually frustrated. The common complaint is "Leadership just haven't got a clue what they are doing!" And that's true - the Performance Management reporting system is also erratic too. (FP2: Leadership has been too complacent in tolerating poor IT systems and poor IT integration, but remedial attention must be very tightly brought to bear on Processes)

Management:

In terms of FP1s, 5 possibilities under the "It's about Management" catch-all, are: there might be too little management, badly trained management, management which is given too little direction, management which is afforded no discretionary powers, and management

In terms of FP2s, 5 possibilities for "It's about Management" are: Leadership is very poor at communicating its intentions to management, the Strategy to which management has been set to work is deeply flawed, management does attempt to oversee and direct but is greatly hampered over extended distances by poor Communications channels outside of its direct control, performance management and reported Processes imposed by central by central IT are weak and sometimes even contradictory, in People terms the organization's commitment to poor pay and poor training makes life extremely difficult for even progressive Management.

Strategy:

In terms of FP1s, 5 possibilities for unpacking "It's about Strategy" are: the strategy is ignoring new opportunities, the strategy is ignoring major changes in consumer patterns, the strategy is ignoring competitor threats, the strategy is very short term and ignoring sustainability needs, the strategy is failing to consider repeat business.

In terms of FP2s, 5 possibilities for unpacking "It's about Strategy" are: Leadership is failing abjectly to establish an optimum direction for the organization, Management is so alienated from Leadership that they are ignoring all new strategic initiatives, Communications are piecemeal and informal and an initially clear strategic message tends to get muffled, muted and often lost, Processes throughout the company are both change-resistant and frequently inconsistent and also incompatible with those of other parts of the organization, within People issues the staff have always been paid on output and not on quality so strategic initiatives on product improvement tend to fall on deaf ears.

Communications:

In terms of FP1s, 5 possibilities for "It's about Communications" are: there is no easily accessible and reliable intranet or other group emailing facility, no internal printed manuals and advisory material is produced, commitment to functional training is very low, induction of new staff is haphazard and frequently non-existent, it is the authoritarian habit to communicate mainly as complaint rather than as encouragement or guidance.

In terms of FP2s, 5 possibilities for "It's about Communications" are: Leadership are largely silent and when they make pronouncements they tend to be either weak or contradictory, Management has developed a culture of its own through being bullied by Leadership and distanced through bad Processes from staff of barking orders rather than seeking to establish trust and respect, Strategy is largely left to an end of year quantitative reporting and the organization is left largely to run itself on habit, Processes demand the signing-off of communications by several people and so bureaucratic log-jams often silence messages, the organization as a whole has been so pared to the bone that just about all People struggle to executive on their most basic tasks with next to zero time for additional inputs.

Processes:

In terms of FP1s, 5 possibilities for "It's about Processes" are: multiple IT systems and lingering manual systems fail to mesh, IT systems are functional but data input is either poorly thought out or random, far too many stages and too many people are built into the decision chain, there is a failure to consider the client/customer interface with the organisation's processes, there is a failure to extend the processes out into broader supplier and customer connectivity.

In terms of FP2s, 5 possibilities for "It's about Processes" are: Leadership fails to delegate the most simple of authority and processes become over-extended and overly slow, Management due to lack of training are unskilled in the nuances of new IT systems, Strategy suffers from being tinkered with too frequently and too prone to whim and fashion to be captured robustly, Communications of new systems and methodologies to the broader organization tend to linger at least one step behind the latest versions installed by the outsourced IT services provider.

People:

In terms of FP1s, 5 possibilities for "It's about People" are: there are too many of them, there are too few of them, they are very poorly trained, they are very poorly managed, they are poorly paid and resentful.

In terms of FP2s, 5 possibilities for "It's about People" are: Leadership has an abstract view of all junior staff as at best a cost and at worst a liability, a fearful Management imposes ever more unrealistic "stretch targets", Strategy is changed so frequently that confusion often reigns, Communications of key priorities downwards through the organisation often fails to reach frontline operatives, clumsy Processes waste large chunks of staff time.

Key Learning:

The Model for checking for and for breaking Failure Platitudes is powerful and universally applicable:

Always challenge glib explications of the location and nature of organizational issues - be explicit of the call on higher values required by all parties to the intended resolution - carry through via those values into decisive actions. This further summarises as the AIM acronym - Analyze, Idealize, Mobilize. Our notion of Analyze in this context, the relentless unpacking of FPs, is a refusal to accept the glib, superficial or habitual as sufficient explanation.

"Idealize" is deliberately provocative. To be labelled as being prone to "idealize" is frequently a criticism, an insult even. It carries in this sense a suggestion of ignoring the compromises required in life and clinging to vague dreams of an unachievable perfect world.

In the way that we use "Idealize", we mean nothing other than a direct appeal to a higher value. But this is a higher value which has already been considered as an appropriate and compelling - but ultimately practical and achievable - guiding principle of an organisation.

Just as Kurt Lewin, a key early developer of Action Learning, famously said, "There is nothing so practical as a good theory", we would contend that there is nothing as practical and productive as a good value brought into action. To Mobilize is to bring sufficient effort to bear with sufficient moral gravitas to make decisive change possible. This at-first-sight rather formulaic approach to Breaking Failure Platitudes will quickly evolve into an intuitive approach which yields equal gains in organisational productivity and human satisfaction. Valuable concepts such as trust, respect, integrity, openness, frankness, co-operation and care suddenly take their natural and explicit place centre stage within organisational relationships. The corporate culture expands its depth and power in tandem with organizational clarity and productivity.

Most of all, a rejection of Failure Platitudes allow the full-scale development of the development of the core organizational dynamic which alone can create and sustain great corporate culture - Community Contribution & Recognition. Everyone needs to feel part of a productive social unit, everyone needs to feel that she or he is playing a valuable part - and everyone needs to be recognised for their presence and contribution in multiple ways beyond the merely material.

It is fronting-up Failure Platitudes, applying an appeal to a higher value and driving through into effective action that the old distinction between organisational strategy and organizational culture is finally collapsed. No longer do have on one hand the "hard" rationalism of strategy and, on the other, the "soft" skills of human relationships and organizational development. Where AIM plants us firmly is in the productive territory of people doing great things together. Unchallenged, Failure Platitudes abandon an organization to a corporate culture of complicity in mediocrity. AIM high, however, and great things can be achieved. There is no more powerful way of making business ethics real, relevant and alive.