November, 2019

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Your Personal and Professional Brand Matters

Office Dynamics

Successful businesses around the world spend enormous amounts of time and money developing a brand that sets them apart and tells their story. Their marketing departments consider every little detail, from logos to font style, from signature colors to tone of communication. Employees forget that developing a personal brand is just as vital for them and requires just as much thought and consideration.

Promotion 248
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The Assistant growth mindset

Practically Perfect PA

How do you feel when someone gives you feedback at work? Are you open to feedback, or do you feel defensive? What happens when you have challenges at work? Do you face them head-on, or do you avoid the situation? As Assistants, we often come up against misconceptions about the role. How do you feel […].

UPS 214
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53 Million Americans are part of the Low Wage Workforce

Small Business Labs

Brookings' Meet the Low Wage Workforce reports that 53 million Americans, or about 44% of all workers aged 18-64, have low-wage jobs. According to Brookings, the national average for a low-wage job is one that pays $16.03 per hour or less.  The low-wage level is adjusted using city-level cost of living data.  For example, a job paying $20.02 in high-cost San Jose, California is considered low wage while one paying $13 in low-cost areas of the country isn't.

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How to Use Downtime at Work Productively

Eat Your Career

As we head into the dreary winter months, I am reminded of the seasonality of business. In most organizations, there is a natural ebb and flow that occurs. Things get predictably busy at certain times of the year, just as things get predictably slow at other times. For my business, the month of December is always blessedly slow—and I like to take advantage.

Mentoring 197
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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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Quick Tips for Businesses Installing Solar Panels

Eco-Office Gals

Business owners are always looking for new ways to go green and reduce their carbon footprint. Adding solar panels to your facility — provided you work in an area that gets plenty of usable sunlight — can help to offset energy costs and reduce CO2 emissions. If you’re considering adding solar to your business, here are a few quick tips to make the process a little easier.

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Telephone Screening and Etiquette Skills for Administrative Assistants

Office Dynamics

Top-notch telephone screening and etiquette skills are paramount regardless of industry, company size, or geographic location. Their importance hasn’t diminished in our modern world of text messages, e-mails, and online chats. What exactly am I talking about? Necessary telephone skills for assistants include how to answer the phone, take accurate messages, carefully screen calls, protect corporate and personal information, seamlessly transfer callers, use a polite and proper tone of voice, and k

Etiquette 250
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Top 10 to-do apps for Assistants

Practically Perfect PA

We all know how hard it is keeping on top of the never-ending to-do list every Assistant and their Executive seem to have. The work can be relentless but don’t fear; there are lots of fantastic apps available that can help you manage your to-do list. Tracking your tasks doesn’t need to be a complicated […].

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California's New Gig Law, AB5, Ignores the Growing Role of Remote Work

Small Business Labs

Business Insider's California is attempting a massive labor experiment that could grow into a disaster for millions of workers outlines some of the many problems with California's new AB5 worker classification law. It's written by a self-employed multimedia journalist based in Los Angeles. He describes a key issue as: "I have an independent business, I don't get paid vacations, and I have to cover my own health insurance.

Policies 190
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You Should Be Downsizing Your Images

Tips From T. Marie

Business today is image driven. Photos are key in social media posts, blog posts and for product sales. Smart phones have made taking these needed photos easy, however often the size of these photos is well beyond what is needed. Using images with a large file size can slow down your website dramatically. Sites like Etsy for selling product often have size limits.

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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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7 Tips to Help Overcome Procrastination

Ian's Messy Desk

The post 7 Tips to Help Overcome Procrastination appeared first on Ian's Messy Desk. I was planning to write this post last week, but I put it off. Okay, now that the obligatory bad joke is out of the way, we can look at another internal time waster, procrastination. We all put things off. We hope to avoid tasks that are boring, difficult, unpleasant, etc.

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Does Your Workplace Have Unconscious Biases?

On The Job

It’s estimated there are more than 150 identified types of unconscious bias. These types range from the natural tendency to surround ourselves with others who are similar to us to forming assumptions and stereotypes about others. In the workplace, this has become a cause for concern as employers worry that such biases can lead to multiple problems – problems such as poor hiring decisions, a lack of innovation or discrimination.

Forms 130
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SURROUND yourself with a team of experts to make you and your organization SHINE!

Office Dynamics

A meeting planner by MY definition is the go-to person within an organization – be it corporate, association or otherwise – charged with the responsibility of planning and executing a meeting or special event. Not all people who plan meetings are “meeting planners,” nor do all meeting planners start out their careers as meeting planners. I for one started out on a clerical/administrative career path with absolutely no knowledge at the time that a career in meeting planning even existed (and at t

Suppliers 226
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How to show empathy with even the most annoying person!

Practically Perfect PA

Assistants have buckets full of empathy; you wouldn’t be in the job if you didn’t. What I find is that empathy can often be taken advantage of by people who don’t respect what we do – be it, that colleague who wants your time or that Executive who doesn’t understand your role. Empathy can quickly […].

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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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Renewable Energy to Pass Coal for U.S. Electricity Generation in 2021

Small Business Labs

According to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) , renewable energy sources will pass coal in terms of U.S. electricity generation in 2021. As their chart below shows, each of the sources will produce around 800 billion kilowatts of electricity in 2021. Included in the IEEFA's definition of renewables are utility-scale biomass, geothermal, hydropower, solar and wind, plus small-scale solar.   The fastest-growing of these sources by far are wind and s

2021 143
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5 Ways to Keep Your Home Business Fresh

Tips From T. Marie

There’s nothing worse than biting into a stale carrot. You know what I mean, I’m sure you’ve grabbed a carrot stick off from a vegetable platter expecting that crisp snap as you bit into it but instead got a rubbery, orange something. Now the carrot doesn’t necessarily taste bad, but just the consistency is enough to turn you off from the veggie platter altogether, isn’t it?

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Learn to Say “No”

Ian's Messy Desk

The post Learn to Say “No” appeared first on Ian's Messy Desk. There was a time when I would say yes to everything. Not because I thought I had the ability to do it all, but because I felt I looked lazy if I wasn’t doing something all the time. I had to learn to say no. There was also an issue of how to handle things … Continue reading Learn to Say “No” → You just finished reading Learn to Say "No" !

Learning 114
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You Need This to Be Happier and More Successful at Work

On The Job

More employers are beginning to focus on "emotional intelligence" when making new hires and when deciding who is ready to be promoted. Emotional intelligence is often described as an ability to be empathetic to others, to understand their emotions -- and your own emotions -- and how to best deal with them in the workplace. But emotional intelligence isn't easy for everyone, and some may believe that when they need it they can just Google it and figure it out.

Google 106
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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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7 Ways Executives Can Improve Communicating with Their Assistants

Office Dynamics

I have been fortunate to gain a three-dimensional view of communication between executives and assistants: I was an assistant for 20 years thus understanding what I needed from my executive so I could be effective. I worked with a variety of managers and executives, each with different personalities and communication styles. Since 1990, I have been the CEO of my own company and have worked with several of my own assistants.

Email 222
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Five alternatives to Skype

Practically Perfect PA

How often do you organise a video conference for your Executive or team on Skype? If you are using Microsoft Office, it is probably quite often. Well, today, I thought I would share with you the top five alternative video conferencing platforms that are available online. If you don’t have internal video conferencing software or […].

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Scientific American's Top Emerging Technologies of 2019

Small Business Labs

Scientific American's describes their Top 10 Emerging Technologies Of 2019 as "World-changing technologies that are poised to rattle the status quo."  Key article quote on the technologies: One day soon an emerging technology highlighted in this report will allow you to virtually teleport to a distant site and actually feel the handshakes and hugs of fellow cyber travelers.

2019 143
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Coffee Break: November Wordsearch

Tips From T. Marie

It’s time for another coffee break. Here’s your wordsearch for November. Please upgrade your browser to improve your experience. Select Level: {{ currentLevel.width }}x{{ currentLevel.height }} {{ level.width }}x{{ level.height }} {{cell.letter}} {{word}} × Congratulations! You solved the November Wordsearch.

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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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8 Common Time Wasters

Ian's Messy Desk

The post 8 Common Time Wasters appeared first on Ian's Messy Desk. Over the years, I’ve posted some thoughts on behaviours and practices that can get in the way of our productivity. To help bring some of these forwarded, this post will link to past articles, as well as adding some new material on common time-wasters. I’ve broken these time-wasters into two groups.

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Podcast 132: Decision controls

Clutter Coach

by Listen or subscribe here: iTunes ? Stitcher ?. Soundcloud ? YouTube ? Google Play ? iHeartRadio You can leave a review here! This is podcast 132 and it’s about decision controls. This episode is sponsored by Clean Email, the answer to email inbox overload. I’ve written about ways to clear out that clutter, but you can save time by using the Clean Email app.

Email 100
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Does Word Order Matter? Think “Short to Long”

Office Dynamics

When polishing your sentences, pay attention to the nuances of word order. To my eye (and ear), placing “short” before “long” works best. This applies to both sentences and lists. Here’s a simple example: “He was well respected and loved in the academic community.” I changed it to: “He was loved and well respected in the academic community.”. Because “loved” is 5 letters and “well respected” is 13, it makes for a smoother read if the longer phrase follows the shorter word.

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Diversity is not inclusion

Practically Perfect PA

“If you do not understand the benefits of difference, you will always align yourself to your similarities, and in doing so, you will miss out on the beauty that variety brings to the table.” This is a quote I came up with while deepening my knowledge in this interesting subject of diversity and inclusion. This […].

UPS 159
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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