Preparing Presentations – It’s the start that stops most people

25 January 2012

Presentation ideas to keep your audience awake

Over 20% of people identify themselves as chronic procrastinators. We put off doing things we don’t like, or find uncomfortable. Preparing a presentation is a good example of this. Our mind goes blank when looking for presentation ideas and the pressure builds. In the end, we quickly throw lists of bullet points on to our [...]

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How effective is your performance feedback?

19 January 2012

Performance feedback

Many managers are not very skilled at giving effective performance feedback, and often either seek to avoid giving any feedback, or save it all up to be given in some performance feedback bubble (often called an annual/quarterly review).
Discussing our F3 model in previous blog posts (what is performance management? 1, 2 and 3) we have [...]

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Customer Service: little things really matter

10 January 2012

screws TN

I heard the knock on the door and knew that it had finally arrived: later than I had hoped, but still within the time range promised. I happily signed to accept the package and went off to look at my new toy – a shiny new flat screen TV that my wife and I decided [...]

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What is a customer worth to you?

4 January 2012

what is a customer worth?

The start of a New Year causes many people to reassess things that are important to them before making decisions about their priorities and plans for the coming year. Many businesses take the same approach at their year end.
‘What is a customer worth to you’ is a really fundamental question to ask of your business [...]

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Strategies for employee engagement

21 December 2011

The key to long term success

Focusing effort and directing employees towards achieving the goals of the organisation is shown to improve performance. However, in isolation, this can result in people simply feeling pressured to achieve results or alienated from the organisation and prone to negativity. Companies need to devise a strategy for investing in their people in order to create [...]

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When is it OK to mislead customers?

14 December 2011

Customer Services

Listening to the radio in the car, I heard the presenter say ‘people are very quick to be enraged nowadays’. He was referring to a news story from the BBC apologising for misleading their customers over a sequence shown in the Frozen Planet series.  The programme, mostly shot in the frozen Arctic, contained some wonderful [...]

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Barriers to Employee Engagement

13 December 2011

Most business founders do not set out to create unengaged company cultures. But a lack of deliberate attention paid to culture can have detrimental results.
A business that is growing very quickly will often find employees who join the company early develop a fierce loyalty to the founder – entrepreneurs tend to be big personalities. The [...]

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What is employee engagement?

6 December 2011

Welcome Peter Quintana – our first guest blogger with a short series on:
Employee Engagement
Recent research from Cranfield University has shown that introducing HR, management and leadership practices such as those inherent in the Investors in People programme, can lead to increased financial success, increasing levels of trust, co-operation and engagement of employees, increased flexibility of [...]

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Crouch, Touch, Pause, Engage

1 December 2011

Rugby-Ball

Isn’t it funny where you can get inspiration from? Sometimes it can be from seemingly unrelated issues. In fact it is a well know creativity strategy to use ideas from unusual or unexpected sources – but perhaps more on that in a future blog post; back to the matter in hand – presentation.

Crouch, Touch, Pause, [...]

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How employee engagement links to deficit reduction.

23 November 2011

Fat cat TN

Ask anyone for their view on bankers and the banking industry these days, and you are likely to get a fairly hostile reaction. Many countries, companies and individuals are mired in debt and cannot seem to agree on a way forward. The media has focused much attention and blame on the banking sector for causing [...]

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