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Volume 10, Issue 1      In This Issue:   A frank talk with you, boss   Health care: Human resources targets your family   Sharpening your skills: Managing the economic crisis   Holding on to top talent   Resolving employee complaints before they hit the internet   [Meetings] A little less conversation   How to get people to change   Lessons from a blue-collar millionaire   You've been yelped   30 tips for using social media in your business   The 5 worst interview questions & what to ask instead   Checking up on sick workers: The 6 do's and don'ts   Office etiquette essentials   Harnessing the power of the self-fulfilling prophecy   Must-have iPhone travel apps   The shadowy science of sex addiction If you enjoy this newsletter, read more in our Archive and Explore more Topics and Events or Share this Newsletter: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn | A frank talk with you, boss The annual review you would like to give to your boss... Bad Bosses: What Kind Are You? Slide Show: Why and how you should fix your shortcomings The Disposable Worker Temp jobs may save or ruin your company. Know how to keep productivity up. You're a bad manager who's driving us nuts, and here's what those of us who report to you want to tell you—whether you like it or not. Welcome! I'm so glad you made it. Make yourself comfortable. You're probably wondering why I invited you. You're in for a treat. You see, this is your annual review, the one your boss never gave you, the one that really matters. Don't get up. This isn't going on your permanent record. It's just between us, one professional to another. In reality, I guess you could call this an intervention. As with any wake up call, I'm doing this because I like you. You have so many gifts. But you've lost your way. And frankly, you're doing more harm than good these days. This is going to be hard to hear, but I'll say it anyway:... Read the article     Back to top                   Health care: Human resources targets your family A cash incentive for family members to join the healthy habits bandwagon, but it is not always legal for HR to meddle. HR has yanked the junk food and badgered you to get healthy. Now it's eyeing your spouse and children. The health nags in human resources have exhausted every possible idea to goad you into good health. At several large corporations, they've realized it's no use turning employees into vegan hardbodies if their dependents—also on the company health insurance plan—are gorging on trans fats and becoming regulars at doctors' offices. That's why the next front in the Wellness Wars is not about you. It's about your husband, your wife, and your kids. While most big companies already have employee wellness programs, the newest trend is expanding those efforts to include dependents,... Read the article     Back to top                   Sharpening your skills: Managing the economic crisis A series of questions about improving business skills in a crisis and the HBS Working Knowledge articles that answer them: Sharpening Your Skills dives into the HBS Working Knowledge archives to bring together articles on ways to improve your business skills. Questions to be Answered: How do I lead in a crisis? What roles does the Board play? What are the emotional needs of people who lay off fellow employees? What do companies lose when they cut corporate giving?... Read the article     Back to top                   Holding on to top talent Retain your top talent with incentives that are opportunities in tough times; such as offering new benefits, skills, challenges and more… For some, the recession has faded in the wake of recovery plans, but for many organizations and their employees, the view ahead is still one tough slog. It's far too early to dream about constructing your ideal job, says the zeitgeist: Survival trumps career development. Yet that's precisely the kind of thinking that will cause talented workers to tune out, turn off and, as soon as the economy picks up, take a hike. In addition to waiting out the "bad times," at some companies top talent may be working for a brand they are no longer proud of, one that has been tarnished in the public image. It's hard for companies to attract and retain top talent when their reputations are under siege. According to research on top talent by the Center for Work-Life Policy (CWLP) released in fall 2009, this Great Recession has been accompanied by plummeting employee morale. Rates of engagement — measured as the percentage of employees willing to go the extra mile for the company — have fallen 12 to 24 percent, depending on sector, over the past 18 months. Further, the research revealed the No. 1 reason — far outstripping compensation and recognition — that talented people love their jobs is the availability of stimulating and challenging assignments. This finding is backed up by... Read the article     Back to top                   Resolving employee complaints before they hit the internet Help employees deal with problems in the work place before they go public on the web with these simple tools. These days, some of the most respected businesses in the world are finding themselves pilloried on the Internet by their own employees. Websites such as Glassdoor.com carry posts calling one Fortune 500 "the most abusive company I ever worked for," and another a place where workers will be "kicked like a dog." Hundreds of other companies are being skewered in the same way. The question, of course, is what to do about it. It's more than a matter of damage control. Trying to repair the harm to internal morale, recruitment efforts, and corporate reputations after the fact is not as effective as preventing the damage in the first place. That is especially true because the practice of airing dirty corporate laundry online isn't likely to go away. Like sites that rate products, politicians, professors, hotels, charities, and so many other facets of our lives, these online forums can be expected to spread and morph. More outlets such as IHateDell.net, which has a section for employees to air grievances, are sure to emerge. The focus for employers, then, should be on identifying potential sources of employee dissatisfaction and resolving them before they escalate into embarrassing diatribes about abusive managers and impossible work demands anyone can read with the click of a mouse. After all, if you're hearing about problems in your work environment on the Web before uncovering and addressing them internally, something is amiss. Managers, trainers, and HR personnel should continually... Read the article     Back to top                   [Meetings] A little less conversation Don’t waste time overcommunicating, it cuts productivity and costs money. Keep teams small for more efficiency. Have you ever invited employees to a meeting just so they wouldn't feel left out? If so, you may be an overcommunicator. When was the last time you scheduled a meeting and invited eight people instead of the three people who really needed to be there simply because you didn't want anyone to feel left out? When was the last time you sent a companywide e-mail that said something like, "Hey, attention coffee drinkers: If you finish the pot, make another!" even though there is actually only one person who violates this rule (and she's your co-founder)? When was the last time you... These are symptoms of a common illness: too much communication. Now, we all know that communication is very important, and that many organizational problems are caused by a failure to communicate. Most people try to solve this problem by increasing the amount of communication: cc'ing everybody on an e-mail, having long meetings and inviting the whole staff, and asking for everyone's two cents before implementing a decision. But communications costs add up faster than you think,... Read the article     Back to top                   How to get people to change Positive feelings and feedback go a long way to increasing productivity and employee retention. Authors Chip Heath and Dan Heath discuss their new book on change management. Forget PowerPoint. If you want to influence employee or customer behavior, charts and data typically won't cut it, say Chip and Dan Heath, authors of the 2007 bestseller Made to Stick and the new Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard. In Switch, the Heath brothers explore ways to manage big changes in life and in business. "Change is hard, because we're schizophrenic," says Chip, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford's Graduate School of Business. (Dan is a senior fellow at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business.) "Part of us may want to change, but part of us has this emotional connection to the way that we've always done things." In researching their new book, the Heaths consulted experts on subjects as diverse as how to diet and how to change society. "Time and again, we found the same principles coming up, whether it was individual change or organizational change or societal change," says Chip. Those principles, he says, involve... Read the article     Back to top                   Lessons from a blue-collar millionaire Build a positive and inclusive culture that educates your workers so you can trust them to do their best: 10 key ingredients When Nick Sarillo launched his pizza business, he had one goal in mind: to create a corporate culture unlike any he had seen. It's Takeout Tuesday at Nick's Pizza & Pub, and the air is thick with the smells of hot pizza crust, peppers, onions, and cheese. Eighteen young men and women -- most of them high school age -- form an assembly line between a row of worktables and a long bank of pizza ovens. The kids laugh and shout, even as they focus intently on their tasks. Nick Sarillo, 47, stands halfway down the assembly line, holding a giant wooden pizza board. As the company's founder and CEO, he doesn't usually work the pizza line anymore. But he is happy to lend a hand when he can, and the kitchen crew needs all the help it can get on Tuesdays, thanks to a program Sarillo launched in March 2009 in response to the recession. A sign in the lobby explains the logic behind the policy:... Read the article     Back to top                   You've been yelped A resourceful pair create a dot com company for customer reviews that becomes a source of agony for small companies and entrepreneurs. Yelp, the rambunctious and burgeoning customer-review website, can make or break a small business. It can also drive a business owner slightly insane. On October 30, 2009, Diane Goodman logged on to Yelp.com. Like many business owners in cities across the country, Goodman had lately developed a small obsession with the website, which allows customers to publish critiques of local businesses. She had been visiting her company's Yelp page every day to see what her customers had written about her bookstore. Goodman found reading Yelp reviews to be emotionally wrenching -- but she also couldn't look away... Read the article     Back to top                   30 tips for using social media in your business An array of social media tips helps you build your business with some simple but effective techniques. 6 Social Networking Faux Pas Slide Show: The dos and don’ts of social media use Wading into the fast-moving flow of social media can be daunting to a small business owner with very little time on his hands. Here's Inc.'s comprehensive social media cheat sheet for the time-strapped entrepreneur. 1. Offer a peek behind the scenes. Offering a sneak preview of new products, services, or features online can help build demand and provide critical feedback to help smooth the launch. For instance,... Read the article     Back to top                   The 5 worst interview questions & what to ask instead Find out more in your employee interviews by asking for descriptions and explanations. The interview remains a hiring manager’s most effective tool for evaluating job candidates. Unfortunately, managers too often rely on a list of standard interview questions for which most applicants have canned responses. The message: Ask generic questions and you’ll get generic answers. Here are five common questions to avoid, according to an OfficeTeam report, as well as suggestions for more productive queries that will help you make the correct hiring choice:... Read the article     Back to top                   Checking up on sick workers: The 6 do's and don'ts When checking up on sick workers avoid discrimination, harassment claims, and unnecessarily damaged morale. You probably don’t check up on most employees who call in sick because they do it infrequently and most likely are being truthful. However, every organization has its share of workers who abuse sick-leave policies. About one-third of U.S. employees (32%) called in sick when they really weren’t in 2009, according to CareerBuilder’s annual absenteeism survey of 4,700 workers. Most employers take excuses at face value, but 29% of the 3,100 employers surveyed by CareerBuilder said they’ve checked up on an employee who called in sick. The tactics among those who check:... Read the article     Back to top                   Office etiquette essentials Bring back good manners or risk losing employees and profit! In Pictures: How To Annoy Your Co-Workers Without Really Trying Avoid these habits to avoid annoying your co-workers… How to stop bad manners from ruining your relationships at work. Taken individually these infractions seem minor: You forget to put your cellphone on vibrate, and suddenly "Disco Inferno" is blaring through the conference room. You order a pastrami sandwich for lunch, unaware that a cubicle wall away your co-workers are gagging from the smell. You let your eyes swerve to your computer screen while a junior associate tells you about her relationship problems. While these might seem like small slips, they can create deep resentments between co-workers. "It's like a marriage. It's the little things that get under your skin and mount up after awhile," says Jacqueline Whitmore, founder of EtiquetteExpert.com and author of Business Class. Christine Pearson, professor of management at Thunderbird School of Global Management in Glendale, Ariz. and coauthor of The Cost of Bad Behavior, says 96% of Americans report experiencing rudeness at work, and 48% say they are treated uncivilly at least once a week. This kind of manners meltdown can have a direct affect on the bottom line... Read the article     Back to top                   Harnessing the power of the self-fulfilling prophecy As a leader you can help create a broader vision for your employees and raise them to new levels. Good leaders do so in three ways. Prophets are people who see into the future, predicting things that will be though the present gives no clue of them. They foretell of ordinary shepherd boys assuming the thrones of emperors; they foresee the blooming of barren lands to feed fertile civilizations. They conjure a vision of the future from nothingness in a way that seems almost to be magic. In the professional world, true leaders come close to being prophets. They make the most of self-fulfilling prophecies, as I wrote in my last column, "When Believing It So Makes It So." They realize that setting high expectations for their people can create self-fulfilling prophecies, leading those expectations to come true. When people adjust their self-expectations and their behaviors to rise to the expectations of their leaders, they raise the bar for themselves. They achieve... Read the article     Back to top                   Must-have iPhone travel apps Four fun apps for anyone on the go for under $1.00 each! Road warriors should get ahead with these Apple services. At last count, there are more than 106,000 active iPhone apps ready for download (according to 148Apps.biz, a site that monitors Apple's candy store). You can track your diet, scan barcodes while you shop and even hear your own voice in Auto-Tune. While the utility of some apps may be questionable, the App Store's wealth can turn your iPhone into a handy travel device. Some of the most well-known travel-friendly apps include:... [But of course, since there's more to travel than airplanes and Rupees, we rounded up four less-known apps for those on the go--all less than a buck to download...] Read the article     Back to top                   The shadowy science of sex addiction Medical research and theories about sex addiction as a disease. Tiger Woods' philandering has talking heads talking about compulsive sex. But research on sex addiction is fuzzy. Nobody really knows for sure--though you can certainly get treated for sex addiction if you think you have it. Last year, X-Files and Californication star David Duchovny checked into rehab for sexual addiction. After a string of women went public with claims they were mistresses of golfer Tiger Woods (the best-paid athlete on the planet and a married man), it took only days for talking heads to speculate that Woods might be an addict and need rehab. The idea of sex as a drug is deeply seductive to journalists and reality TV producers. But the idea of being addicted to sex is actually quite controversial. No such diagnosis is even recognized in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), psychiatry's Bible. The DSM-IV assiduously avoids the word "addiction," preferring to talk about dependence, withdrawal and compulsion. A new condition, called... 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