Category: workplace performance

  • Stop Interrupting Employees and Let Them Work

    The main reason why people can’t get work done at work are managers and meetings. That’s Jason Fried’s take on things as he exposes it in his latest TEDx Talk. He lays out the main problems to getting work done and presents three suggestions to making work work. No Talk Thursdays: He actually suggests a…

  • Stop Recognizing People for Doing their Job

    “Is she out of her mind?”,  you ask yourself. Nope! And neither is Stephen Shapiro who wrote a great bit on How To Motivate Innovators. Stop recognizing people for doing their job. When you hire someone to work for you, it should be expected that they are competent.  When you recognize people for doing what…

  • For the Love of Meetings

    According to Ron Ashkenas, most managers actually like meetings, and he enumerates the reasons in a recent blog post entitled Why We Secretly Love Meetings. His key arguments are that: They encourage social interaction They keep everyone in the loop They often represent status He also remarks that though we all know the rules of…

  • Where and When are Productive Managers Getting Training? Not at Work Apparently.

    A recent ASTD blog post discusses the results of an ej4 study that indicates that more and more, individuals are doing their training off work hours and off site. Their statistics indicate that employees are doing more job training off-the-job and off-hours resulting in higher current productivity numbers. Supervisors in particular, are gaining job skills…

  • The Educational Value of Microblogging

    Reni Gorman points out that the use of microblogging in education is a recent area of interest compared to the uses of microblogging as a communication channel for news or marketing. In a literature review on microblogging, learning and performance in the workplace, she explains that the research around microblogging tools like Twitter is directed…

  • A Practical Guide To Implementing Professional Development

    Yesterday I blogged about the rippling impact of professional development. Today, I share with you a resource I found. This Continuing Professional Development (CPD) strategy, framework and employer’s guide is published by Skills for Care and the Children’s Workforce Development Council, and Skills for Care’s 2009 CPD case studies publication. Though it is destined to…

  • E-Learning Study Shows Rippling Impact of Professional Development

    ScienceDaily reports on Boston College researchers who engaged in large-scale randomized experiments with the purpose of studying the impact of online professional development for teachers who aimed at improving their instructional practices as well as their subject matter knowledge. In the e-Learning for Educators: Effects of Online Professional Development on Teachers and their Students study,…

  • The 21st-Century Workplace is a Cognitive Battleground. What’s Your Training Strategy?

    Ever feel completely wiped at the end of of a work day? According to Nemo Chu, a neuroscientist might offer the following explanation: The brain, despite being just ~2% of our body’s mass, actually accounts for ~20% of our body’s total energy consumption. What is 20%? To put that in perspective, that’s like having a…

  • Who Else is Working On What I’m Working On?

    Yesterday, I blogged about the use of microblogging to improve productivity in an organization. Today, I focus on microblogging to improve connectivity within an organization. In a recent blog post about using a microblogging application such as Yammer for communities of practice and knowledge management practices, Renata Gorman writes: This feeling of connectedness creates more…

  • Strategically Implementing Microblogging in your Organization To Boost Efficiency

    In a recent blog post, Harvard Business Review’s Jeanne C Meister and Karie Willyerd advocate using microblogging to enable the members of an organization to communicate and share information with one another more rapidly and efficiently than ever before. So what exactly is microblogging? It is the practice of posting very short statements, commonly 140…