January, 2017

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How can assistants add value in the workplace?

Practically Perfect PA

Firstly, happy New Year! Last year was a mixed bag wasn’t it?! I hope you all had a lovely break and are looking forward to the year ahead. As usual, we have a packed schedule for 2017, starting with the Assist Conference in February. Today I am writing about one of the key themes for this year’s conference – using your tool kits to add value within your organisation.

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The Rise of Solopreneur Manufacturing Companies

Small Business Labs

The Wall Street Journal's Big Growth in Tiny Businesses nicely covers a trend we'e been following for years - the growth of solopreneur, non-employer manufacturing businesses. Key quote: "The number of businesses classified as manufacturers with no employees has been rising steadily since the depths of the recession. The tiny operations often make food, craft beer, toiletries or other niche products.

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From Possibility to Reality

Office Dynamics

This past October, I was honored to be part of the 2016 Office Dynamics International Conference, The Revolutionary Assistant. If you had asked me several years ago if it were possible to pull off a 400-person think tank, I’m not sure how I would have responded. Happily, I believe in exploration thinking, so today, I can say, “Absolutely!” And here’s why.

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Better Eco Friendly Choices for Your Business in 2017

Eco-Office Gals

Making your business more eco-friendly (green) is a wise move to make. By doing so you’re doing your bit towards cleaning up the environment, while also helping your company’s bottom line because going green saves money. Running a green business also helps you stand out as an environmental conscious entrepreneur. Here are eco-friendly choices you should make for your business in 2017: Reduce energy usage in the office.

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SME Relationships: Proven Solutions for Seamless Collaboration and Success

Speaker: Tim Buteyn, President of ThinkingKap Learning Solutions

💢 Do you find yourself stuck in never-ending review cycles? Are you wondering if your Subject Matter Expert actually got that last review request? Are you having trouble trying to decipher impractical or conflicting feedback? 💢 If any of these scenarios sounds familiar, you may benefit from a crash course on managing SME relationships!

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Why It's Time to Stop Suffering in Your Job

On The Job

There you sit, at the pinnacle of your profession. Successful, well-respected, making good money. It took lots of hard work, a little bit of luck and many personal sacrifices. Still, it was worth it. Wasn’t it? Unfortunately, many people in this exact position are saying “no.” They’re not doing something they like, they’re not happy, they’re not able to say they like what they’ve done with their life.

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More Trending

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Tech of the week: TransferWise

Practically Perfect PA

What is TransferWise. TransferWise is an online money transfer service. It allows users to move foreign money from one bank account to another while avoiding high bank fees. What does it do? Using peer to peer technology, TransferWise is 8 times cheaper than transfering money via a traditional bank. If someone wants to change pounds to euros, the technology will match someone who wants to transfer euros to pounds.

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Book Review: The Gig Economy

Small Business Labs

The holidays were quite hectic this year. But we were able to carve out some time and read  The Gig Economy: The Complete Guide to Getting Better Work, Taking More Time Off, and Financing the Life You Want.   And we're glad we did. The book provides a wealth of excellent "how to" advice on succeeding at independent work. The author, Diane Mulcahy, is a Senior Fellow at the Kauffman Foundation and an Adjunct Lecturer at Babson College where she teaches an MBA course on the

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Space clearing expert Karen Kingston on clutter

Clutter Coach

by I heard Karen Kingston, author of Creating Sacred Space with Feng Shui, speak at a NAPO conference years ago. I was familiar with her work, but hadn’t read her book so I went and bought it after the conference. . Although she’s not an organizer, her work ties in quite well with organizing. One of the skills she practices is space clearing, which means cleaning out stagnant energy and replacing it with new vital energy.

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Extenders:The new term for the gatekeepers of the office

The Office Professionals Place

I recently had the pleasure of serving as one of the MCs at the latest Q1 Productions Executive Leadership Support Forum at the Hotel Chicago. During a panel discussion with an executive and his assistant, he mentioned that assistants extend themselves in many ways. For example, helping clients and customers by either providing a service directly or finding someone who can if it not within their power to help.

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Elevating the Virtual Interviewing Experience

Sharing your authentic self in a virtual interview can be an unwanted challenge. How do you break through the digital barrier when conducting a virtual interview and share your exceptional self? Think in unconventional ways to elevate the virtual interviewing experience.

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How to Keep Your Job When You've Got Fickle Customers

On The Job

As companies invest more in the customer experience , there is some concern about whether such a commitment will be enough to retain increasingly fickle customers who are constantly being wooed by competitors. A study of 2,000 U.S. consumers by Accenture, for example, shows that 40% were willing to change their brand loyalty for at least one reason, such as: The customer could receive discounts or coupons via the retailer’s social media channels. (18%) Google Wallet or other form of mobile payme

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Video Budgeting and Spending Tip

Andrea Kalli

Video Budgeting & Spending. Video Tip: Not all videos have to be big production deals with big price tags. Actually, most don’t. I think not a lot of people realize that. Most of your videos can be simple with a little editing, strategically placed branding elements, and call-to-action. Save your $$ for high promotional video projects where ROI is high.

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Why It’s A Good Thing To Delete Your Subscribers

Office Organization Success

Over the past few weeks I’ve been going through my subscriber database and cleaning it up — deleting subscribers, products, and autoresponders. I ended up deleting over 3,000 subscribers! While that might sound a little scary (after all, why would I want to delete subscribers that I’ve worked so hard to get?) it’s actually a very good exercise to do.

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Is Social Video the Next Big Thing?

Small Business Labs

BI Intelligence , one of our favorite analyst groups, has a fascinating presentation on online social video being "the next big thing" Because they are a paid subscription site, we can't link to the presentation.  But we can provide the highlights. These are: Traditional TV is Declining While the New Online Networks are Booming. We won't bother with the charts showing the decline of traditional TV, but it's happening.

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Mandatory COVID Vaccination Policy Template

New vaccine mandates and testing policies will affect employers with more than 100 workers. Get Paycor’s free, customizable vaccination policy template to communicate critical details and new requirements to your employees. Get Paycor’s Template today!

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Executives and Assistants Working in Partnership — The Magic Formula

Office Dynamics

The most important team in the workplace is that of the executive and his or her administrative assistant. Just think about it…. they work together more closely than any other team; the assistant is responsible for running her executive’s life in addition to her own job; most executives rely heavily on their executive assistant to get the job done, be the gatekeeper, information flow manager, department liaison, decision maker, sounding board, organizer and Chief of Everything Officer.

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Podcast 040: Pump your decision making muscles

Clutter Coach

by Subscribe: iTunes ⋅ Stitcher ⋅ Soundcloud ⋅ YouTube ⋅ Google Play. You can leave a review here! In this episode, I’ll talk about how you can improve your decision making skill. Hint: it’s like a muscle, the more you use it, the stronger it gets. Here are some highlights: But what if I get it wrong? I need to know more first.

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2 Ways to Get More Done Starting Right Now

On The Job

There's a lot of distracting stuff going on in the world today. It can be difficult to concentrate on work when your co-workers are loudly discussing the latest political news or your email box is filling up with urgent messages from political groups. But your job is important because without it you can't pay your bills. That's why you have to find a way during the workday to turn off such distractions and quiet the turmoil so you can do your job.

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Lioness Magazine publishes my article on Business-to-Business Videos

Andrea Kalli

January is really shaping up! Publisher, Lioness Magazine , picked up my article – “ How To Use Video To Drive Business–To-Business Sales ”, at – [link]. A few key points about the article are: Before you create content, define your purpose or your message. The video purpose drives the script, tone, tempo, style, call-to-action, and more. You have to know the reason you’re creating the video before you even start.

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Is Training the Right Solution?

Speaker: Tim Buteyn

Let's set the scene: you’ve identified a critical performance gap in your organization and need to close that gap. A colleague suggests training, but you suspect there’s something going on that training can’t address. How can you determine if training is the right solution before you commit your budget and resources to a new training program? In this webinar, you will learn how to determine if training is the right solution using the Behavior Engineering Model.

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Career Success A to Z: I Is For Initiative

Eat Your Career

This article is part of a series. Learn more about it and access links to other articles in the series here. This week, I want to talk about one of my favorite topics: Initiative. This is a critical part of being proactive—another topic I’m passionate about. In fact, my book, The Proactive Professional , discusses the importance of taking initiative in-depth, and it also addresses how to do it appropriately in the workplace.

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Accenture Says Independent Work is the Future (and Soon)

Small Business Labs

We just read Accenture's Technology Vision 2017 report  and they strongly suggest independent work is the future of work.  Key quote from their Work Force Market Place trend: In five years or less, the presumptive judgments around full-time employment and freelancers will flip completely. Compared to traditional full-time employment, talent marketplaces will provide workers with improved earning opportunities, more rewarding work, secure benefits, and respected credentials.

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10+ Lessons Learned In My 10 Years with Office Dynamics International

Office Dynamics

I woke up this morning with the strange realization that this is my very last day with Office Dynamics International. What a very weird feeling. As I write this I am feeling all the emotions. I’m remembering many of our incredible stories that we’ve collected over the last decade of partnership. Life has been filled with so much joy and with an unbalanced amount of pain.

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5 Ways to Slay Small Talk with Your Boss

Practically Perfect PA

You’ve got an event coming up and your boss suggests that you meet and travel together. You know that this is a great opportunity to have one to one time with her, but are not sure if you have anything in common. You start to imagine hours of uncomfortable silence, like a bad date, but one where you have to the see the person again. This could be the longest and most career-annihilating journey of your life.

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Revitalizing Dry Content: A Lesson in Engagement

Speaker: Tim Buteyn, President of ThinkingKap Learning Solutions

We’ve all been there. You’ve been given a pile of dry content and asked to create a compelling eLearning course. You’re determined to create something more engaging than the same old course that learners quickly click through, but how do you take this “boring” content and create something relevant and engaging? Many instructional designers will say, “Boring in means boring out.

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How to Get Colleagues to Trust You

On The Job

When you buy your popcorn at the movies, you probably don’t have more than a fleeting thought about the concession clerk, which is why such a relationship is referred to as transactional. You hand over the cash, and the clerk hands over the popcorn. It’s a transaction, and you don’t have any real investment in that relationship. But at work, you probably chit-chat with colleagues before beginning a work-related discussion.

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Millennials career advice that will help you!

Job Advice Blog

Millennials career advice that will help you does not grow on trees. Allow me to give you some advice that will help you with your career. I can guarantee you that […] The post Millennials career advice that will help you! appeared first on JTL Services Inc.

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Annotated Agenda

Laughing all the Way to Work

It is very useful to use an annotated agenda. For those who have never used one, it is simply an agenda with notes on it. For the agenda that I send to the meeting participants, I annotate it to let them know why an item is on the agenda or if there are any attachments. In my example below you will see that I put brackets around the notes and italicize them.

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Pet Tech Booming

Small Business Labs

Despite a decline in venture capital investments last year , 2016 was a record year for venture investments in pet tech startups. As the CB Insights chart below shows, the amount of venture capital investments in pet tech startups is up 4 fold over the past 5 years. As CB Insights explains in their article New Breed: Pet Tech Is Seeing Investor Interest Take Off  pet tech includes: companies whose core business is using tech-enabled solutions to serve the pet owner market.

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Brain Fog HQ: Memory Enhancement Techniques for Professional Development

Speaker: Chester Santos – Author, International Keynote Speaker, Executive Coach, Corporate Trainer, Memory Expert, U.S. Memory Champion

In October, scientists discovered that 75% of patients who experienced brain fog had a lower quality of life at work than those who did not. At best, brain fog makes you slower and less efficient. At worst, your performance and cognitive functions are impaired, resulting in memory, management, and task completion problems. In this entertaining and interactive presentation, Chester Santos, "The International Man of Memory," will assist you in developing life-changing skills that will greatly enha