Sucking Black Holes

Have you ever walked into a retail store, restaurant, or even a corporate setting and experience the feeling that there is a black hole somewhere on the premises that is sucking the life out of the place? The place may be clean with new fixtures and furniture. The lighting is fine - sometimes even artistic. All the "things" in the place may be perfect. But, there's something that just doesn't make you feel welcome - something that makes you want to get in and get out. For example, there is a retail seafood store near me and I had heard they had great seafood and I decided to make my first visit.

Employee Motivation Program

Motivating the backbone of the company These myths are: a) Only you can motivate the employees: This is a very wrong concept since it is very important that the employees try to be motivated by themselves. However, you can provide them with the right kind of environment. b) Money is the most important motivator: Money is no doubt a good motivator but it is not the most important one. Each individual needs a different type of motivation and you need to understand that c) Applying same motivation idea for every employee: Do not think whatever motivates you, would motivate the other employees also.

Taking Advantage of Hotel Reservation Software

In business, one of the keys to success is satisfying your customers and this principle is nowhere more important than in the hotel business where keeping customers happy may be the difference between great success and failure. Hotel Reservation/hotel property management software is something every hotelier should take very seriously. There's certainly no point in making customers feel frustrated when trying to make a reservation. Make the process seem daunting and you're sure to lose potential customers. In the last few years, many hotels and motels around the world have successfully implemented the use of hotel reservation software or software in order to automate their reservations and maximize profits.

Improve Restaurant Service Through Balance Consistency

There are 2 words that I constantly repeat while helping restaurants to improve their dining room service; balance and consistency. Both concepts can easily be applied to restaurants where waiter performance is basically 1/2 physical abilities and 1/2 mental abilities. The physical aspects of balance is obvious; carrying/serving more than one plate at a time, carrying/serving cocktails on trays, balancing one's feet while in motion etc. For physical consistency, it amounts to not only excellent physical condition, but also the consistency of the waiter service skills and technique, or the "consistency of balancing" - if you will.

Lead, Follow, Or Get Out of the Way

This edition of Footprints and Monuments is going to be very basic in its approach, even leaning on the silly side. However, the concepts revealed should be taken seriously because of their proven effectiveness in helping you lead your organization. There is a children's nursery rhyme that goes like this: "Rub-a-dub-dub, three men in a tub, and how do you think they got there? The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, they all jumped out of a rotten potato, 'twas enough to make a man stare." First, showing my ignorance, this rhyme must have meant something to those three men (and those staring) but to me it means very little.

Terminal 5 - A Manager s Guide to Employee Engagement

One thing highlighted by the opening of Terminal 5 is employee engagement, or 'how to achieve instant employee disengagement'. This goes some way to answer the questions the public are demanding. It seems that BAA and BA put all their money on technology to create the ultimate airport experience, and maybe they assumed their people were but a small part of the system, and of lesser importance than the technology. If this is true, and all indications suggest so, it is a foolish and very costly mistake to have made. I am left aghast at BA. When are they going to get the message - great service requires individuals who care, and that requires an employer who cares about them - cares enough to make sure they feel appreciated.

10 Ways to Reward Employees

In times of a bad economy, when raises aren't as high as employees would like, and job growth opportunities might be temporarily "frozen", having a strong, effective recognition program in place can go a long way toward "tiding over" your most valuable employees. If you don't yet own the book 1001 Ways to Reward Employees, get it now (you can get it used on Amazon for around 3 bucks). This book gives several examples (1001, to be exact) of potential rewards you could implement, and a large portion of those examples are actually rewards that cost nothing, or very little. In addition to those, I thought I would share some of the rewards that have worked very effectively for me in the past.

Let Employees Work For You

Let employees work for you and not against you by taking simple steps to gain their respect and more importantly their trust. You hire people to work for you and they will if you know how to lean toward encouragement. Encourage your people to make suggestions, either through a suggestion box, a weekly or monthly meeting, or at a coffee break roundtable. If an employee makes a suggestion on how to improve the business, don't take it personally if it goes against your own thinking. Remember, nothing grows in ice. Be careful not to completely shut down an employee after making a suggestion, no matter how stupid it may sound.

Dealing With Interruptions As a Manager

When you manage people, you learn that everyone has a different idea as to what is important. You also learn that everyone battles to manage our time effectively. These two come together to form what seems like continual flow of interruptions. So how can we reduce these interruptions and still maintain the rapport with our team? First, we need to develop a method of making decisions as to what can wait and what must be done immediately. Stephen Covey introduced the idea of Urgent vs Important several years ago. His idea is that we can make decisions on how to react to these interruptions by placing each one into a box or category on this matrix.

A Practical Perspective of the Limits of Business Outsourcing

It has been taken for more than granted that globalization and outsourcing are the ways of the future and that the future is here. Yet times are changing yet again. High oil and fuel prices have seen to that. What is the rationale behind outsourcing? "Outsourcing "after all is why when you go to your local Wal-Mart store that everything is "priced so reasonable" and yet you see your neighbor's house foreclosed. It turns out that no one comes to buy pizzas, or buy other such conveniences and luxuries so your kids either cannot find the old stand by jobs, or even when they do find jobs - all that seems to be available is those "entry level " jobs at the big box stores.