The highlight reel
It’s my first full year of blogging and it’s been fun. I’ve read lots of blogs and written my share too. This month, I decided to review my blogs written to date, and found some interesting tidbits. In my last blog of the year, I’ve round-up my top 10 favourite tips.
- Is a toxic corporate culture making you sick? Your remedy awaits in this blog. Start with a little gratitude for employee’s hard work or try designating a ‘relaxation zone’ with a foosball table – now there’s some out-of-the box thinking to re-energize your office.
- Grassroots meeting ideas for a growing company are explored in this blog. My fave tip is inviting people who actually do the work to the meeting; this seems like a trivial tip – but it’s a far too common mistake.
- Everyone makes mistakes, even seasoned project managers. The key is to learn from the mistakes. In this blog about lessons learned, my fave is: At the Lessons Learned meeting, give everybody the chance to nominate a good, a bad and an ugly fact about the project. Everybody must contribute with an idea before moving on.
- This blog about discipline brought me to a learning from Steve Jobbs – in one word: focus. Steve Jobs showed exceptional focus when he paired back his product offering so he could make the remaining products industry leaders. Focusing on just a few products is an excellent example of Jobs laser focused discipline.
- Most people can relate to having a bad boss. In this blog I explored the effects of a bad boss on the people that report to them. I don’t have a tip to share on how to avoid them, but this ‘The true cost of a bad boss’ video brought to us by One Minute MBA is a fun video with scary stats.
- Employee incentive programs at first blush sounds like a boring topic. But I found some pretty creative employers out there. Point and case => When I first read this blog about incenting employees to lose weight with $20 a month, I did a double take. To my surprise, a new Mayo Clinic study discovered that offering people a modest amount of money can actually contribute to higher weight loss. Making employee health a priority, especially via incentives seems oddly smart to me.
- When benchmarking, a simple and easy tip we practice at our office is shared in this blog. When gathering data ‘test the questionnaire for clarity’. We always do this at CornerStone Dynamics and it’s amazing how some people interpret things differently than you’d planned. It’s an easy step, but often skipped due to time pressures.
- ‘Kick-Ass Efficiency on the Keyboard’ was one of my favourite blogs of the year. It’s really quite amazing how much time you’ll save and how second nature the shortcuts will become. Try this: while browsing the web, instead of using the scroll wheel or down arrow, hit the space bar to move down the page. Then press Shift+[Space Bar] to scroll back up. Now that is cool! Try it, I promise you’ll love it.
- Because #8 above is my fave of the year, I felt it deserved two mentions. Here, at CornerStone Dynamics in all endeavors, efficiency is the name of the game! So we created our very own cheat sheet for computer shortcuts. Check it out and let me know if you have any to add.
- While researching my blog for productivity tips to survive the winter months I found a tip that I could totally relate to: An uncomfortable working condition will squelch productivity. Sitting at my desk, trying to stay warm is indeed a distraction for me. For the cold offices, a simple portable heater will make many employees jump for joy!
Have some tidbits to share from your blogs? Feel free to leave a comment below or shout out to us on Facebook or Twitter. Of course, you could always write your own blog post on the subject and share it with us… We’d love to read it!