How advantageous is it to increase your people skills? People skills can be defined by a broad collection of attitudes, thought processes, and levels of awareness, which allow you to relate well to others. In business, having great people skills is tremendously important.

People skills closely relate to business topics and training can improve upon those areas such as business leadership skills training, negotiation skills training, and training for sales. The world of business is full of relationships, and learning to form good relationships with the help of people skills will only serve to your benefit. Read the following four tips to help improve the way you relate to others.

Active Listening

It is highly important for others to be heard.  Active listening is the process of presenting occasional and one-line summaries of what the speaker is saying.  The process lets the speaker know you are listening and you understand their message.  Active listening is advantageous for both parties.  Imagine being a new employee taking directions from a boss.  Anxiety or nervousness may influence the new worker’s ability to listen to directions, yet participating in active listening would prompt the worker to concentrate on the boss’ message, reinforcing the worker’s memory and letting the boss know the worker clearly understands.

Smiling is Okay

How serious are you about business?  Could it be detrimental to be too serious?  It can be possible to be successful and jovial at the same time.  Many people who find themselves in a business leadership position struggle with implementing humor because humor has the reputation of being antithetical to business.  Proponents of enhancing people skills would suggest that smiling is okay.  Of course, it is expected to maintain professionalism at all times during the course of the business day, yet a professional can be successful and enjoy humor.  Sometimes, success is facilitated by humor due to a businessperson’s charismatic personality.

Empathize

When we have a remote sense of what others are experiencing, we are sympathizing, but we are empathizing when we can truly relate to the experience of others.  It is a great advancement in increasing your people skills when you can learn to put your self in another’s position or see things from their perspective.  Oftentimes, people may not relate or cannot remedy a situation because they do not attempt to place themselves in the other person’s position.  Empathizing increases awareness and can benefit business by helping people relate and inspiring workers to see various perspectives.

No Negativity

‘No negativity’ sounds cliche and obvious, yet maintaining a positive mindset is something to be conscious about each business day.  Some business people repeat mantras or slogans throughout the day to help them maintain their positivity.  Negativity has a bad influence on many business aspects such as negotiation skills, strategic selling, and people skills.  It is important to distinguish negativity from being critical.  The latter is needed in order to make business decisions, yet negativity is never ‘needed’ in business.  Keeping a positive mindset improves morale and inspires others to seek you for input and advice.

Read More

Marketing via Facebook, Twitter Yields Results for Some, Others Say It’s Overrated; ‘Hype Right Now Exceeds the Reality’

By SARAH E. NEEDLEMAN

Last year, Jackie Siddall described in a blog post how a message she received on Twitter prompted her to buy a folding kayak for around $1,900.

The vessel was one of about just 600 sold in 2009 by Folbot Inc., a small retailer in Charleston, S.C. “You can’t buy that exposure,” says the firm’s co-owner, David AvRutick, who claims the incident speaks to the value of using marketing with social media.

But Mr. AvRutick’s experience may be the exception, rather than the norm. In its short lifetime, social media—services like Facebook and Twitter—have become popular marketing tools for small firms due to the low cost and easy-to-use format. Some entrepreneurs say they’re highly effective, but new evidence suggests otherwise.

“The hype right now exceeds the reality,” says Larry Chiagouris, professor of marketing at Pace University’s Lubin School of Business.

Last year, social-media adoption by businesses with fewer than 100 employees doubled to 24% from 12%, says a survey released in January of 2,000 U.S. entrepreneurs from the University of Maryland’s Smith School of Business and Network Solutions LLC, a Web-services provider in Herndon, Va.

Meanwhile, a separate survey of 500 U.S. small-business owners from the same sponsors found that just 22% made a profit last year from promoting their firms on social media, while 53% said they broke even. What’s more, 19% said they actually lost money due to their social-media initiatives.

“It could harm you if you end up inadvertently saying something stupid, offensive or even grammatically incorrect,” says Mr. Chiagouris.

A business owner’s time and energy spent on social-media marketing—Folbot’s Mr. AvRutick says he dedicates about an hour a day—could also go to waste. Fifty percent of the latter survey’s respondents say it requires more effort than expected.

To gain positive results, entrepreneurs need to regularly interact with consumers through these sites and not simply create static profiles, says Jacob Morgan, co-owner of Chess Media Group Corp., a consulting firm in San Francisco that specializes in social media.

Some small businesses opt to hire outside firms to handle their social-media marketing or advise them on the best ways to use it, but such services can cost hundreds of dollars a month.

For Chris Lindland, owner of Cordarounds.com, an online clothing retailer in San Francisco, converting consumers into customers using social media has required a “patient investment.”

“My business has been visited millions of times, but I haven’t made millions of sales,” says Mr. Lindland, whose four-person staff spends up to 90 minutes a day managing Cordarounds’s accounts on Twitter and Facebook. “People have told me they finally got around to buying from my business after reading about it on social media two years ago.”

Some entrepreneurs say they’ve found early indicators that their social-media efforts are paying off.

“The people coming from social media have been buying,” says Stephen Bailey, who oversees social-media and other marketing initiatives for John Fluevog Boots & Shoes Ltd., a footwear and accessories retailer in Vancouver with about 100 employees.

As evidence, Mr. Bailey points to a 40% increase in online sales in 2009—the first full year the company engaged consistently in social-media marketing—compared with 2008 when it was just getting started. He says he can draw a correlation between those figures and social media by looking at traffic to the company’s Web site from Twitter using Hootsuite, a free Twitter-management service from Invoke Media Inc. Other free services that track Web traffic from social-media sites include Google Analytics, CoTweet and Lodgy.

“The second we started using social media, it became one of the biggest drivers of traffic outside of search engines,” says Mr. Bailey, adding that his research shows these visitors spend as much time on Fluevog.com as those who come from other online destinations. The company doesn’t invest in paid advertising on social media, he adds.

Other business owners are soliciting customer feedback and monitoring what’s being said about their firms to determine the impact of sites like Facebook and Twitter on consumers’ buying decisions.

Mr. AvRutick says he regularly searches Twitter for tweets that mention kayaking and then sends messages to the people who wrote them. He connected with Ms. Siddall, the blogger who credited Twitter for exposing her to Folbot, after she posted a tweet that mentioned she wanted a kayak.

Ms. Siddall, a 37-year-old senior designer for Idea Couture Inc., a creative-marketing agency in Toronto, says she was unaware that folding kayaks even existed until she heard from Mr. AvRutick. She spent the next few months researching different brands, which included perusing a networking forum on Folbot’s Web site about kayaking.

Ms. Siddall says she later asked Mr. AvRutick via Twitter if he would send her some photos of her folding kayak being made, and he provided about 20. After it arrived, she says she decided to write a blog post about the whole experience.

“I didn’t find the same level of information or communication online from the other brands,” she says.

Write to Sarah E. Needleman at sarah.needleman@wsj.com

Read More

Three Best Ways to Catch an Employee Thief |Wall Street Journal|By SARAH E. NEEDLEMAN

If your small business can’t afford external auditors, security cameras or other resources for spotting employee fraud, consider doing some detective work of your own. The effort could save your firm from a significant financial loss or worse—failure.

After all, a single heist could be fatal for a small business, says Richard Hollinger, a professor of criminology at the University of Florida. Small firms typically don’t have

the financial resources to fall back on that large organizations have, he explains. (See related story, Business Owners Get Burned by Sticky Fingers.)

Employee fraud can take place right under a business owner’s nose. According to the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, an anti-fraud trade group in Austin, Texas, such activities occur on average for as long as two years before the victim organization catches on.

The phone keeps ringing. Some corrupt workers will instruct friends to repeatedly call a business and ask if the owner is on site until the answer is no, says Mark R. Doyle, chief executive of Jack L. Hayes International Inc., a provider of workplace crime-prevention services in Wesley Chapel, Fla. Once they hear those “magic” words, the friend knows it’s safe to come by and swipe merchandise under the rogue employee’s watch, he explains.

The math doesn’t add up. Two years ago, ReShonda Young noticed a subordinate at her father’s transportation company, Alpha Express LLC, had turned in a weekly time sheet with more hours than he could’ve possibly worked. That prompted Ms. Young, a manager at the Waterloo, Iowa, company, to investigate further and she discovered that the employee had been stretching his hours for months, initially to a less-noticeable extent. “I guess it got to be a little easy,” she says. Now all supervisors must review and sign workers’ time cards before they can be processed, says Ms. Young.

Money problems surface. Financial pressures are a key motivator of occupational fraud, the ACFE reports. For this reason, business owners should take note of any excessive complaining by a worker about money burdens. And if such a person’s lifestyle suddenly improves dramatically, this could signal he or she has their hand in the company’s cookie jar.

Write to Sarah E. Needleman at sarah.needleman@wsj.com

Watch Sarah Needleman video

Read More

How to Manage Multiple Business Locations | Inc |By Darren Dahl | Mar 4, 2010

Thomas Friedman was onto something when he wrote his book, The World is Flat. Companies increasingly feel the need to expand their reach into new markets—both domestically and internationally—from a very early age.

One direct result of this expansion is that you may now be forced to manage multiple locations and oversee employees in distant offices—a fact that can cause quite a few challenges and headaches, says Eric Bloom, president of Manager Mechanics, a management-training firm based in Ashland, Massachusetts.

“No matter how widespread your organization becomes, you need to work hard to retain team cohesion and the philosophy that everyone is on the same team regardless of where they work,” he says.

Dig Deeper: Why You Should Expand

Managing Multiple Locations: 6 Challenges

1. Out-of-site-out-of-mind syndrome. When things get busy at your primary location, it can be hard to give your employees based at other locations the time they deserve.

2. Loss of spontaneous communications. Because you do not see your employees in the hallway or at meetings, there is very little natural or unplanned communication.

3. Attenuated logistics. Anything that cannot be sent electronically, must be mailed, which causes time delays and increased effort.

4. Complicated work assignments. It is harder to perform certain types of jobs or collaborate on them when employees are based in remote locations

5. Lack of team cohesiveness. Your team members will not know each other as well. This can easily lead to an “us-versus-them” mentality.

6. Concerns over general supervision. If you have a remote office that clients visit, it’s virtually impossible to see if your employees are arriving on time, working appropriate business hours or wearing proper business attire.

To tackle these and other challenges, then, organizational leaders need to focus on three key areas: systems, technology, and communication.

Managing Multiple Locations: Put Systems in Place

The old adage is that systems run businesses, and people run systems. “You must have systems in place to be able to standardize the quality of your communications, products and results,” says Bert Martinez, founder of Bert Martinez Communications, a business training and communications company with multiple locations. “Systems will allow you to duplicate offices and grow faster with reduce training times and supervision.”

The key is to establish clear responsibilities, boundaries, and authority, says Ann Latham, president of Uncommon Clarity, an organizational-behavior consulting firm in Easthampton, Massachusetts. “Vague responsibilities create the proverbial cracks into which everything drops,” she says. Muddy boundaries create disasters ranging from personnel problems to legal ones while insufficient authority can become a source of delay and demotivation. “An employee with everything needed to exercise good judgment except either the authority or sense of responsibility to do so is worth little,” says Lantham.

The point, then, is to make each employee’s responsibilities clear through an organizational structure combined with a system that measures each and every employee, and holds everyone accountable for delivering on their work responsibilities regardless of where they are based.

Dig Deeper: Building Systems to Manage Your Business

Managing Multiple Locations: Adopt New Technology

With the advent of the Internet, and the prolific surge in the number of collaborative tools that have spawned from it, technology has become an integral part of the backbone for any far-flung organization, says Bloom, particularly because it can help your organization cut down on business travel expenses.

While many organizations rely on custom-built software platforms and intranets as collaborative platforms, some of the most commonly-used tools by small businesses in particular are also either free, cheap or available as a software-as-a-service, which means you can access these tools over the web for a monthly fee. Some of the best and cost-effective options include:

• Google Documents, Gmail and Calendar for internal training and communication.
• Basecamp: An popular project management tool.
• Facebook : The now ubiquitous social networking tool is just as useful for business as it is for personal applications.
• Skype: The surge in VOIP technology and software means that you can communicate with remote employees cheaply and effectively.
• Salesforce.com: One of the most popular tools around, Salesforce.com allows remote sales team to collaborate in real-time on maintaining your company’s sales pipeline.

A new wrinkle in terms of technology is that many firms have begun to equip all of their employees with smart phones such as the iPhone as a way to enable them to access any web-based technology regardless of where they are, including many new applications.

Dig Deeper: The Latest Small Business Technology News

Managing Multiple Locations: Focus on Communication

Systems are a must, technology is important tool however, none of these will work with out real communication, says Martinez. “Communication is the key to collaboration with your offices, coworkers, and clients,” he says. If you neglect this aspect of running your business, you do so at your own risk, particularly in a business with multiple locations. That’s why Martinez also makes having his employees have time face-to-face a priority by having his offices take turns hosting each other once a year to enable communication between people on all levels.

Other tips for fostering communication between your employees based in the office and elsewhere include:

1. Establish full team weekly staff meetings via phone or webinar to get your whole group together.

2. If possible, have web cams so your team members can see each other.

3. Make each physical site responsible for a specific type of work, rather then assign random tasks associated with a central project.

4. When doable, have the CEO or management members personally visit each remote site on a scheduled basis, every month, for instance.

5. Establish weekly phone-based staff meetings individually with each remote group so that each physical location will get time with top management.

6. If possible, get your whole group together once or twice a year for staff meetings, brainstorming and team building.

Dig Deeper: How to Improve Your Communications Skills

Managing Multiple Locations: The Global Workforce

Managing multiple locations across the U.S. is hard enough. But when you add a new sales office or manufacturing plant overseas, says Bloom, you can actually run into a host of new challenges associated with cross-cultural communication that include:

1. Time zones. There is limited or no overlap in the standard workday.

2. Language. Even if everyone has a common language, English for example, differences in accents, language fluency, and the use of slang expressions can make communication extremely difficult, particularly on conference calls and speakerphones.

3. Social norms. Cultural differences from country to country can accidentally cause tension, embarrassment, and miscommunication.

3. Holiday schedules. Scheduled meetings, reporting deadlines, cash flows and standard business processes can be derailed or delayed based on local holiday schedules.

4. Technical connectivity. Not all countries have high-speed connectivity at all locations.

5. Labor laws. Laws regarding hiring, employee termination, hours worked, layoffs, sexual harassment differ from country to country.

6. Business-related laws, ethics, and practices. Business is conducted very differently from country to country.

7. Personal-privacy laws. In European Union member states, the laws regarding the personal use, storage, and transport of personal information are quite stringent compared with those in the U.S.

Dig Deeper: Building the Best Virtual Workforce

Managing Multiple Locations: Adapting to Different Cultures

Bloom suggests tackling these challenges by considering the following tips:

1. Find one key contact in each country that is very knowledgeable in local customs, business practices, and laws.

2. Learn to pronounce people’s names correctly.

3. Gain a basic understanding of country politics and current events.

4. Know the names of your managers and leaders in those countries and pronounce their names correctly.

5. Find ways to take advantage of the time zone differences.

6. Be respectful of the differences between people and cultures.

The bottom line in managing multiple locations, says Martinez, is to help make everyone in your company feel motivated and part of the team, regardless of where they do their work. “When your people feel good and that they matter, they will perform better,” he says.

Dig Deeper: How to Be a Lead Teams in Emerging Markets

Managing Multiple Locations: Additional Resources

Corporate Agility: A Revolutionary New Model for Competing in a Flat World, by Charles Grantham, James P. Ware and Cory Williamson (AMACOM, 2007.) This book will show you how to get your company to embrace new technology, understand the ever-changing workforce, and rethink the way you structure work environments to deal with the global economy.

Competing in a Flat World: Building Enterprises for a Borderless World, by Victor K. Fung, William K. Fung and Yoram (Jerry) Wind (Wharton School Publishing, 2007.) A book filled with solid tips to create a flexible organization capable of competing anywhere.

The Facility Management Handbook, by David G. Cotts Kathy O. Roper and Richard P. Payant (AMACOM, 2009.)
A great reference guide for understanding and implementing best practices for the modern workplace.

Incoming search terms:

• multi location team
• how to manage multi country team
• how to manage two locations
• multi country business management
• multiple time zone challenges
• team building multiple locations
• tips for managing multiple locations

Read More

Lost and Found Tourist Treasures by Liz Behler | AOL Travel

While traveling, vacationers typically gather more than just memories—snow globes, seashells, stacks of refrigerator magnets—but what about the things they leave behind? While many travelers believe their lost belongings are doomed to fade into a black hole, never to be heard from again, some are reunited with their possessions in unusual and inspiring ways.

Just this past February, we heard about a Spanish fisherman who netted a camera dropped off a cruise ship sailing near Ireland over two years earlier. The camera no longer worked, but the memory card inside was still filled with pictures (ever lost or found a camera? Check out I Found Your Camera, a blog that aims to reunite people with their memories). Miracles like this happen more often than you might think. Below are two tales of travelers who lost everything, only to be reunited later, and the story of one man on a mission to connect travelers with missing items. If you have a miraculous lost and found story of your own, tell us about it at TravelComments@aol.com.

A Man Without A Plan(ner)

Bert Martinez lost everything on the final night of his vacation in Hawaii. After enjoying his last meal, he left the restaurant and realized he left something very important behind: his day planner. This was in the days before PDAs and Smartphones kept track of daily routines, but inside was much more than just his schedule—the planner also contained his credit cards, identification, and most importantly, his airplane ticket. Martinez raced back to the restaurant, but it was too late, the planner was gone. He had no idea what he was going to do.

The next day Martinez arrived at the airport, hoping somehow everything would turn out for the best. He tentatively approached the ticket counter and explained what had happened. The clerk asked his name, went to the back room, and miraculously returned with his day planner intact. Martinez was blown away. The clerk explained that the manager at the restaurant where he lost his planner was married to an airline employee. Once the manager saw the plane ticket tucked inside, he gave it to his wife, who brought it to the ticket counter.

A Journal is Worth Far More Than A Thousand Words

While Martinez struggled to find the practical, others, like Emily Wolman, have lost items of a more sentimental nature.

Wolman, a commissioning editor at Lonely Planet, was driving around New Zealand when she spotted a picture-perfect scene: beautiful striated rock formations with flat tops, called Pancake Rocks, stretching along the coastline. She pulled over and hopped out of the car to snap a few quick pictures. While walking back to her car only a few minutes later, she realized her backpack was missing.

“The bag contained my life—my wallet, passport, traveler’s checks, laptop, airline ticket home, and most important to me, my travel journal.”

After lingering in the area for longer than she originally planned, just hoping her bag would turn up, she decided to continue on her trip to Queenstown.

After spending a month in Queenstown, Wolman journeyed back the way she came, passing a police station in the town where her backpack was stolen. She pulled over, and thought she’d give one last try to finding her bag. She explained her situation to the policeman, who told her no bags had been turned in during the last month, but that she should come back in a day or two, just in case.

The policeman’s words ignited an ember of hope and Wolman put the brakes on her journey once again. She ventured to the station every morning, looking for word on her bag, but nothing had changed. Finally, she decided it was a lost cause. She was going to press on, but only after one more try.

Wolman stopped by the station with low expectations. She started to thank the officers, who had been kind to her during her search, when an officer suddenly reached into a cabinet and plunked her bag down on the counter. Despite being soaking wet, Wolman knew it was her long lost bag.

It seems as though Wolman’s backpack had gone on quite a journey of its own over the past month. The back-story behind the sopping wet backpack goes as follows: a father and son were fishing on a river 125 miles away when they spotted a bag floating by. They grabbed it, and upon noticing the passport inside, realized it was probably stolen. The pair took the bag to a local police station, where it was eventually reunited with Wolman.

Upon seeing her bag, she tore into it, and found it mostly intact. Her money was gone, but her passport, laptop, and airline ticket were still there, despite having some water damage. Wolman kept digging, looking for her travel journal, a green leather covered account of a yearlong journey. While the cover was warped, and the pages swollen, nearly every word was still impressed upon the page.

“I still wish I could find those two fishermen and thank them somehow.”

Reuniting and It Feels So Good

David Stone, a metal-detector enthusiast and creator of www.ilostmyjewelry.com, finds joy in reuniting others with lost possessions.

Nearly seven years ago, Stone, a former nature photographer, began scanning beaches with a metal detector as a way to relax. Among the bottle caps, old batteries, and miscellaneous coins, Stone began finding more precious items, like custom designed jewelry, platinum set diamond wedding rings, and dozens of men’s wedding bands.

Knowing many of these items had value far greater than their cost, Stone sought out to reunite them with their owners. He began contacting hotels surrounding the areas where he made his discoveries, but found most of them to be unhelpful, asking him to leave the jewelry with them in the hopes someone came looking for it.

Stone felt uncomfortable leaving such meaningful property with any hotel, knowing that many people who lost things on the beach would consider them gone forever and would not likely report them missing. He decided to take matters into his own hands and started leaving his business cards at nearby resorts, directing people who have lost items to his website. Once there people could scan through pictures of his recent finds, or submit a description of a lost item, along with a location of where it might be.

Stone has found jewelry in six different locations, ranging from Cape Cod, Massachusetts to St. Martin, and updates his website with information on his current whereabouts. He has already reunited dozens of vacationers with lost possessions, and hopes to continue helping others.

“You don’t often find people in this world who are concerned so much for others and take the time to help their sorrows,” said Lee Glowacki, who was reunited with his wedding band after Stone found it in the ocean behind a beach resort. “Thanks to David Stone a miracle has taken place.”

Photo Courtesy of David Stone

Read More