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When I present to organisations one of the things that I always hear is people say “Oh my goodness, if only I’d known that a day, a week, a month ago. Sometimes we do things the long way. And we do things the long way for number of reasons. The first reason might be maybe when we first started in our role somebody showed us how to do the process and we just followed it rote. So we just followed the same processes but we don’t actually know why we’re doing them, we just do them because that’s what we’ve …

Ever been stuck in a rut? Finding yourself doing the same thing every day, knowing there must be a better way but having no time to consider other options or dismissing doing something different because the current process works? Stress and frustration are prevalent in today’s business world. According to a survey by Australian Heath insurance provider Medibank Private (The Cost of Workplace Stress) it’s costing the Australian businesses $14.81 billion a year. I presented some programs recently in the Cook Islands. I was demonstrating how to quickly create a graph when I heard one of the participants audibly gasp …

When I began working, people starting in an organisation used to go through an induction process. For larger organisations an induction was often a whole or half day. For small organisations it’s was as simple as a quick walk around the building and maybe shadowing a colleague for a day or more. However many organisations are actually skipping the induction process entirely. Purely because they so busy they need to get new staff started. The problem occurs further down the track when someone does the ‘wrong’ thing. Maybe it that they haven’t used the organisational branding in a Word document …

I wanted to share some quick tips to help you get in control of your email in preparation for going on annual leave. Whilst most people are familiar with out of office feature in email programs, here are a couple of ideas to ‘educate’ those who email you before you go on leave and create expectations that won’t leave you returning to work and spending hours catching up. 1. Email Footers About six weeks out from annual leave I create an email footer to start educating the people I send and receive email from that I will be away. The …

This time of year, many organizations go through the process of recruiting graduates or new starters in preparation for the new year. The challenge for those interviewing is that the knowledge of new starters is subjective. Unless your organisation ‘tests’ the skill level of candidates in some way, you assume their knowledge of everyday programs such as Word & Excel is at the ‘level’ they tell you. I am often called in to organisations to work one on one with new starters or graduates who indicated their skills were at an intermediate or advanced level, but when they actually start …

I recently spent time working with organizations in the beautiful Cook Islands helping them increase productivity and performance with Microsoft Office products. Many thought their skills were quite high but one of the realizations for many was the fact they didn’t know what they didn’t know. I regularly present at conferences, events and professional development days and am always surprised when someone comes up afterwards and tells me they thought they were and advanced user of applications but the attending the session made them realize that their assumption was less based on their true skills and more based on beliefs. …

I wanted to share with you my technology tip for the day. One of the best things you can do to save yourself time and frustration, and it might just be simple, is to close your email down when you’re not working on it. So when you’re not sending or receiving emails shut it down. What this enables you to do is focus on what is it that you need to do rather than be distracted by other people’s priorities. The University of London found that every time you are interrupted it can take up to 20 minutes for you …

I often have clients to say to me, it’s better if I do it myself rather than give it to one of my team to fix. But, just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. Whilst it’s common sense, we often forget that if you consider your salary and what it equates to on an hourly rate basis to complete a task, you might find your getting paid $100/hr to do a $10/hr job. Delegating to others where possible can reduce your workload and may also provide your team member with a rewarding professional development opportunity (providing you really do …

When I first start speaking with groups of people I was often asked “tell me everything I need to know about Excel” I have a bit of a chuckle every time I hear this. A lot of people think it’s about the volume of things you know about an Excel that will automatically make you more productive Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, if you want to be more productive sometimes it is better to go back to the basics. What are some of the common things that you’re no longer doing, or that you’d forgotten about …