March 2010

Work life balance has been a movement over the last 25 years. With corporate downsizing, increased competition, increased responsibilities and organizations trying to achieve more with less, the employees are feeling the crunch. Employees are the ones carrying the burden of getting it done. Feeling the pressure to keep their job and climb the corporate [...]

Having a well thought out and planned customer service strategy is critical to the development of a strong service culture. Organizations need to incorporate customer service into their business goals and those strategies should be incorporated into employee goals to help the organization reach their corporate objectives. So what are the 7 steps to developing [...]

Flowcharting is one of the Seven Management Tools for Quality Management. Flowcharting is typically used to map a process flow showing the beginning of a process, decision points and the end of the process. Steps to creating a flowchart 1.  Identify Steps to the Process The first step in creating a flow chart is to [...]

Having a good understanding of one of your core customer groups, your employees, is an important aspect of accomplishing business goals and achieving your strategic plan.  There are many vendors who can help develop and implement an employee satisfaction survey process which includes assessing the corporate climate, understanding employee needs and analyzing feedback. Employee Satisfaction Survey [...]

Understanding your customer’s experience is a fundamental aspect of business growth.  Assessing your customer needs and expectations is part of managing customer satisfaction.  There are several ways to obtain customer feedback – focus groups, customer satisfaction surveys and text analytics.  But the main goal of a customer comment card process is to capture the customer experience [...]

For anyone who has opinions and thoughts about our tax system and the IRS, here is a chance to voice your opinion! The IRS is looking for volunteers to serve on the Taxpayer Advocacy Panel (TAP).  The panel will be an advisory committee made up of taxpayers who help identify issues and offer ideas to [...]

Many organizations have been in a “wait and see” mode for hiring employees since the economic downturn of late 2008. For those businesses who think it might be time to open the doors for hiring new employees, this is good news! According to the IRS, a new tax benefit went into effect March 18, 2010 [...]

Many organizations provide paid time off benefits for their employees.  Being paid when not working is a great employee benefit (just ask anyone who works in the trades, like a carpenter, cement finisher, brick layer, etc.) and should be appreciated by employees. Paid time off benefits can be packaged in any number of ways.  The [...]

How to Confront Negative Employee Behaviors

I had a manager call me today and tell me her part-time employee, who works approximately 15 hours a week, decided to stay home this week since her kids were on spring break.  The manager was upset because the employee did not call or notify her that she was taking the week off.  She asked me [...]

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Customer Service as a System

Have you ever interacted with an organization that the service could not be any better in one area and could not be any worse in another?  How can there be such a cultural disconnect in the service that is provided? Every interaction a customer has with an organization is an opportunity to win or lose [...]

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7 Ways to Reduce Health Care Costs

Any organization that provides health care coverage for its employees has felt the sting of rising health care costs. Depending on the size of the organization and the census of employees, those annual increases can be very high. I’ve been in organizations that increases have been as low as 5% and as high as 20% [...]

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Business Decision Making Process

Budgeting and allocating resources can be a very challenging task.  There are any number of things that compete for budgeted dollars.  This can sometimes be overwhelming and difficult to prioritize.  Because of this, having a good prioritization model for business decision making can take some of the guesswork out of such decisions. Department managers often get requests [...]

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