Three Great New Websites

Recently, one of my colleagues came across 3 great new websites. New to us at least. They are:

 

* Opensiteexplorer.org This provides pretty much everything you want to know about your website and your competitors in terms of google ranking, authority and linking. It's easy to use and it's the sort of thing you just want to keep playing with when you should be at the tea table and your food's going cold.

 

* Beatthebrochure.com - it claims to give you the lowest holiday prices guaranteed - and my first experiments with it returned impressive results.

 

* Mysupermarket.co.uk compares the prices for you of thousands of items across six of the main supermarkets. I guess it's best if you have a one off big purchase to make and want to know who is doing it cheapest. The test I did on a litre of Smirnoff vodka told me that I'd save a fuller £10 by going to Tesco over Sainsburys.

 

How did we ever manage to survive before the Internet?

At the moment, we are currently busy with our upcoming event. It is the Annual Review of Employment Law 2012 (La Mon).

Invest NI Seminar

One of my colleagues attended an Invest NI seminar on 26th of June 2012 and picked up the following key points.



In relation to organizations:

1. When you don't know what you don't know an opportunity is lost. Therefore, benchmarking in organizations is critical.

2. Those organizations that export generally are better managed.

3. The higher the level of perceived competetion in an organization, the greater efficiency in that company.

4. Great organizations give people early experience of leadership.

5. Great organizations build leadership in as many places as possible.

At the moment we’re all working hard on our big event coming up soon. This is the Essentials of Employment Law

David Meade's Insights

A colleague of mine attended a course two weeks ago hosted by David Meade. She got 5 helpful important points from the conference:

1.       Power of positive thinking – being told you are terrible at something will make you worse at the task, being told you are good (even when you are not) will make you perform better as you believe you are good at the task (research carried out by team of ballet dancers who were asked to play basketball. They were then randomly selected and told some were good and some were terrible at playing – even if they were really good. The ones who were told they were great outperformed the ones who had been told they were terrible).
2.       Awareness – when given a task be aware of the other things going on around you. It is amazing how you can miss the most obvious thing because you are so busy focussing on the task in hand. 
3.       Know when to take a risk – David Meade relayed the story of how he took the chance and left his University job to start a career doing Mentalist TV work. On his first appearance on the Stephen Nolan radio show, he was expected to be “car crash radio”. His determination and desire to succeed proved otherwise.


As always we're busy devising more employment law seminars

Employee Management

Our CEO has been researching staff engagement recently and has come up with the following conclusions:

1. One of the most effective strategy to impact engagement across an organization: Start at the top

• It will be an uphill battle for everyone if your most senior teams are not true believers of the power engagement.

2. Define and refine your culture to engage: Keep your “culture to engage” in the front of employees’ and managers’ minds.

•  Make “culture,” “engagement,” and similar subjects frequent items for discussion.

3. Spot an Engaged Employee, engaged employees are:Authentic

• Employees who are themselves are more effective in the workplace.

4. One of the most important rules of Employee Engagement: Rules are meant to be broken.

•  Sometimes, you may find that it is necessary to break a rule to easily proved extraordinary service or just to make things work as they should.

5. Engage remote teams: Use web cams

•  An inexpensive web cam can be tied to your Instant Messenger. It is a great way to humanize people who are just names on a "cc" list.

We're currently re-working how we market our employment law email service

Change Management Issues

At the moment the company is researching change management issues and have discovered a lot of mistakes that caused failure. We noted five common mistakes:

Mistake #1: Not enough leadership - several leaders focus too much on management and too little on leadership.

Mistake #2: Lack of communication - change management communications need to be targeted to each segment of the workforce. It should be delivered in a two-way fashion that allows people to make sense of the change subjectively.

Mistake #3: Ignoring current corporate culture - when people in an organization realize and recognize that their current organizational culture needs to transform to support the organization’s success and progress, Mistake 3change can occur.

Mistake #4: Not envolving the employees - leaders must actively involve the people most affected by the change in its implementation. This will help ensure employees at all levels of the organization embrace the proposed changes.

Mistake #5: Lack of skills and resources - change does not happen through goals and exhortation alone. Like any business operation, It also calls for the right skills and resources, Organizations often simply fail to commit the necessary time, people, and resources to making change work. Paradoxically, successful behavior change often demands the very skills the change Is trying to create.


We're currently busy marketing our training centre for Northern Ireland

Young Leaders Conference

The same colleague of mine attended another course last week. It was about young leaders and gleaned 5 key learning points:

The Young Leaders Conference was also one of the coursed I attended to two weeks ago. It was all worth it and I learned the following important points:

1.       Make a decision and stick to it – even if you know it will mean people may dislike you for it. If it needs to be done, stick to the decision and carry it through.

2.       Taking risks – a good leader should not be afraid to take risks – whether they be good or bad.

3.       Vision was again reiterated at this course, the importance of sharing the vision.

4.       Power of psychology/ persuasion. Think about how you put a suggestion forward. Say for example you have 5 ideas and there is one in particular you would like the person to choose. Place it at number 3 in the list. Research shows that the choice at number 3 is most likely to be chosen as by then the person feels they know what you are talking about and are drawn to number 3. If you have 4 ideas, still put it at number 3 and if you have 3 ideas, make up a first or fourth and place it again at number 3. (David Meade)

5.       Don’t hide away from the bad stuff – don’t bury your head in the sand and pretend it will go away when there are problems, deal with them head on even if you know the outcome could mean change.

We're currently busy marketing our Inhouse Training for Northern Ireland

Common Purpose - Passion and Resonance

Passion and Resonance was the second topic discussion in the course, "Common Purpose" which one of my colleagues attended to last week. She got some helpful learning points from the discussion:

• "Without passion, you don't have energy; without energy, you have nothing. Nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion" ~ Donald Trump

          Communicating a business’ passion:

-          How is it we want staff to communicate?

-          Think about the content, be creative.

-          Engage in conversation with our customers through our website/ Twitter/ Facebook

-          Be strong, honest, true and accurate

• "Passion and purpose go hand in hand. When you discover your purpose, you will normally find it’s something you’re tremendously passionate about" ~ Steve Pavlina

• "Nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion" ~Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

We're currently busy marketing our interview rooms for Northern Ireland