There are few phrases that strike more fear in employee’s hearts than the dreaded words... “company retreat.”
Runners-up: “performance review,” “pay freeze,” and “Donna from accounting is selling Pampered Chef again.”
Oh, it didn’t always used to be that way. The concept of a company retreat didn’t even exist back when the very first office-workers gathered around the very first watercooler, and there’s good reason for that: bosses back then didn’t care about boosting employee morale or fostering workplace creativity. You came to work, you put in 16 quality hours, and you were damn grateful for the privilege. Also, if you’ve ever seen an episode of Mad Men, you know that there was absolutely no need for retreats in those days. Who wants to go off-site when you can drink and smoke and be unethical in the comfort of your own office?
Ignoring for a moment the blatant sexism, bigotry, and very serious human resources violations, morale was at an all-time high! (For ...
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Recruiting new hires can be a little bit like having a crack at three wishes from the genie’s lamp:
you have to prioritize your desires, you have to weigh your options, and—above all—you have
to be careful what you wish for.
Perhaps you should have been more explicit when you said you wanted sales reps to be aggressive and cold-blooded.
A successful hiring process is an art, and one that too many companies neglect to fully develop
before diving into the world of applications and interviews. If the process is too sluggish, you
might lose a great candidate. If the process is too rushed, you might end up making a mistake of
epic proportions.
But how do you know if you’re crummy at hiring? Look for these signs that something might be wrong:
1. You or other interviewers blank on the candidate’s name.
Look: you’re preparing to talk to someone who might be entrusted with part of the day-to-day operations of your company – take a few minutes to commit his or her name ...
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Web 2.0 gave us social media, expanding the information superhighway into a two-way street. We can make our own content, share it with friends, and make a site without being able to spell HTML. It’s arguably the most revolutionary development in the history of mankind; I don’t say that lightly. But we aren’t entrepreneurs because we’re happy with the status quo. Oh, no -- we must endlessly debate what’s next with Dewey Decimal-like complexity.
So what is Web 3.0, and who the heck decides these things? The mobile web? Cloud computing? A revolutionary platform for sharing Lolcats? No, no one, no, and despite our many wishes to the contrary, no. It’s you.
Web 3.0 is a maturation from social; a cultural shift as much as a technological one. Our social existence is integrating completely with the web. It’s as different from social media as the automobile was to the train. Look at it this way: we strive to be unique, to differentiate ourselves from everyone else. But with ...
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