Positive communication

It is important to note that being assertive is not about being aggressive.

Assertiveness is a form of positive communication that can be learnt and applied to all areas of your life. It is the skill of knowing and defending your rights but at the same time understanding that others have rights too.

When someone is asserting themselves their primary focus should be on reaching a joint solution, which meets the needs of both people involved. In other words ‘I’m OK and you’re OK’. It is not about getting angry or making someone bow to your demands. This type of aggressive communication is manipulative and threatening and not at all considerate of other people. Equally other non-assertive ways to communicate include passive and passive-aggressive behaviours.

We have covered how to customise your profile, how to manage your privacy settings, any new features that have been rolled out since our last post and how to delete your account. Because there's so much info we've provided a helpful contents list to help you navigate to the right section!

If you're looking to use Facebook as a marketing tool then you should come on our Social Media course. This 2-day workshop is perfect for learning how to use social media for marketing and can be booked as a package with SEO Training and Content Marketing Training. Call us on 01273 622272 to hear more about the course or to discuss your training requirements.

Update: This post has been updated to include some even newer updates recently made by Facebook.

Lean Six Sigma for knowledge workers and service processes

Do you work in a non-manufacturing group? If you are applying lean improvement methods but you don’t make goods then you probably supply a service or do “knowledge processing”. Lean thinking in these areas is often called “transactional lean”, “administrative lean”, and “lean for service”.

Non-manufacturing activities where lean methods have been used successfully include the following. You may well work in one of these areas:

• advertising
• entertainment
• financial services
• healthcare and hospitals
• hospitality and hotels
• insurance
• logistics and distribution
• marketing
• online services
• product design
• project management
• property sales
• travel and tourism
• public sector**

**the public sector (“state sector”) is 40% of the USA economy and about 50% of the UK and the EU economy.

Service industries are the largest part of Western economies

This is a table of percent of gross domestic product (GDP)

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UPDATE JULY 2014: Google has now withrawn authorship photos from SERPs. We still recommend implementing authorship as results will still have a byline and your content will rank better for your Google+ connections.

Google have just announced that they are going to start showing author information in search results. This is great for author awareness and can help Google raise the rankings of pages written by authority figures. It is also great for SEO's who are worried that al the great content they are writing is getting ripped off or assigned to the wrong author!

Even better, Google are replacing 'rel=author' and 'rel=me' tags and are instead automatically linking your Google+ profile to content you have written. All you have to do now is add the URLs of the sites you write for to your Google+ profile, and then when scanning those sites, Google will attribute any posts with your author name to you. Then when those posts appear in search results they will come with a 'Written by' box including a link to your G+ page. It should end up looking like this:

So why the need for this new change when Google first announced author tags last year?

The way we shop is changing forever due to Mobile Apps. New technology is blurring the lines between traditional bricks and mortar shopping and internet shopping and making it more important than ever for businesses to embrace the mobile revolution.  A developer last  Wednesday uploaded the one millionth mobile app to the market.

There has always been the view that internet shopping will kill off high street shops as consumers prefer the ease of browsing, comparing and paying online. If that's the case then why have eBay opened a physical store in Soho? Why do Amazon feel the need to promote a price check app by giving discounts to users who view products in real life and then buy online from Amazon? Why has Waitrose filled its shop window with QR codes for John Lewis products? What prompted Ocado to open a virtual store in a busy London shopping mall?

This week the government unveiled details of a number of proposals to shake up employment laws.

The changes are in response to the Beecroft report, released in October, which claimed that unfair dismissal rules are having a major impact on British businesses and sought to remove employee rights.

David Cameron backed the report but it met strong opposition from Lib Dems, Labour and Unions. However, Vince Cable has now announced that from April 2012 the period within which employees are not entitled to claim unfair dismissal will extend from 1 to 2 years.

He also revealed a set of proposals and reforms for consideration that will further reduce the number of unfair dismissals.

Why Are Employment Law Changes Necessary?

The number of employment tribunals has risen by 40% in the past three years, and are costing businesses a vast amount of money. By introducing these reforms, the government believes businesses will save £40 million a year.

These reforms are backed by businesses who claim that they have no power to fire employees who are under performing or 'coasting' as the report puts it. Small businesses are especially in fear of tribunals as they can be very costly. This has led to a reluctance to take on new staff as SMEs (small and medium enterprises) can't then justify sacking them if they don't work out.

However, there is opposition from Labour and Unions who believe this amounts to stripping away employee rights, will not decrease the number of tribunals and will lead to a 'hire and fire' culture.

Giving more power to SMEs could lead to more managers taking the autocratic business approach made famous by Steve Jobs and Alan Sugar, and they've done pretty well in business.

So what is the government proposing to do to employment law and how will it affect businesses and employees?

We are currently four weeks in to the second series of the BBC's Young Apprentice, a spin off of the highly popular The Apprentice. Throughout the 7 series of The Apprentice there has been a lot of discussion within the project management community over whether or not the weekly tasks are 'projects' and whether or not the contestants have the right to call themselves 'project managers'. There is a concern that using project management terminology is bringing project management into disrepute, as week in week out the contestants either make huge mistakes or get through by the skin of their teeth. All this leads to the general public thinking 'well I could do that better.'

Are the Young Apprentices Project Managers?

Health and Safety Training is vitally important for businesses to ensure they operate in a safe environment. Our IOSH Training course is accredited by the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health and is designed to minimise risk at work to avoid some of the problems in the following guest post.

How to Prevent Workplace Injury

Some of us work in professions that come with the risk of serious bodily danger.  Construction workers, deep-sea welders, and tandem skydiving instructors, for example, may risk their lives each day simply by showing up for work.  Even those that operate a vehicle (for shipping, transport, or other reasons) may be prone to automobile accidents.  But the majority of people work at jobs that are eminently safer, whether in offices or the service industry, and don’t face these same hazards.  As a result, they might not be prepared for the possible dangers lurking in their otherwise safe work environment.  So if you have an occupation that you think could not possibly bring you harm, you might want to think again.  In order to prevent workplace injury, you first need to recognize that it could happen to you.

Be Aware of Dangers

Of course, it helps to be aware of your surroundings and see the potential threat lurking in items as seemingly innocuous as, say, a keyboard, a clean floor, or a box of paper.  These three items, in fact, represent the major causes of injury in an office environment.  “A keyboard?” you may be asking yourself, “How can a keyboard be harmful?”