Top 5 Job Description Mistakes

As the new year approaches, business owners may be looking into or getting ready to hire new staff to start in 2010. It is important when advertising an open position that you have the correct job descriptions so the applicants you receive have the correct skill set that you’re looking for. It is important to make sure your job descriptions are in alignment with your business strategy to ensure your business success.

TAB-Certified Facilitator and coach, Blair Koch, discusses on her blog, Alone at the Top, the top 5 job descriptions mistakes.

“Job descriptions—just the thought brings tears to your eyes. Yet job descriptions are central to hiring, compensation, and appraisal (not to mention avoiding lawsuits). Today, BLR editors reveal the top 5 mistakes managers make with job descriptions.”

Read more…

Rewarding Your Employees During the Holidays

The holiday season is just around the corner and business owners may be wondering if and or how they’re going to be able to give their employee a holiday bonus. With the tough economy , budgets are low and there may not be funds to give employees what they are used to around the holiday season. This is a time where owners need to be creative and use some of their best business ideas on their employees.

Although you may not have the budget to hand out your normal holiday gifts and bonuses, there are other options available to reward your employees for their hard work through the year.

• Provide extra vacation time—allow employees to take an extra vacation day or two around the holidays
  
• Have a holiday party—pick an afternoon where you can close your business early to have a holiday party
  
• Provide your employees with an afternoon of service—a great example of this would be having a massage therapist come in and have your employees enjoy a free massage
  
• Gift cards—in a tough economy it’s always nice to have necessity items covered. Giving your employees gas or grocery gift cards is a great idea
  
• Pay a bill—help your employees out by paying a bill for each of them. You can set a limit on the amount that will be paid

Although it may be hard to find the budget for holiday rewards, it is important to give your employees something. It will help boost morale and will give your employees motivation to keep working hard into the next year.

Changing the Bad Customer’s Perspective

Not only should it be a goal of the business owner’s to keep their customers happy, it is crucial to ensure business success. Problem customers not only create a problem for the business owner/manager to deal with when the problem occurs, but they can also create a larger problem by spreading a bad word to other current/potential customers and clients about your business. We all know it’s important to keep the customer happy but how do you turn an angry customer into an advocate for your business?

In a post on their blog, Chief Executive Boards gives seven ways to turn what could be a problem customer into a customer who will spread a good word about your business.

“Most organizations hate handling customer complaints, partially because they're not very good at it. In fact, customer complaints are an opportunity to do either of two things -- convince the customer that his complaint is justified, and that you're even worse at what you do than he already thought, or turn the customer into a raving fan. Unfortunately, poor training and human nature conspire so you rarely accomplish the latter.”

Read more…

Using Meta-Data to Help Your SEO Efforts

As a business owner, it is crucial that the content of your Web site is the best it can be. Make sure you make it clear what exactly your business does, what products and services you offer, list your contact information, etc. By providing pertinent information on your site, you are helping promote your company and get your brand out in the market. Having the above information can help when potential clients are searching the internet for a new product or service but you can, and should, take your efforts another step to help with your search engine optimization.

In a post called, SEO For Small Business Executives: Understanding The Magic Of Meta-Data, posted on HubSpot, you can find information on what Meta-Data is and how to use Meta-Data in your SEO efforts.

“I’ve been using an internally developed tool called WebSite Grader to look at the current “status” of a website and how it scores (on a relative basis) to other small business websites. (Warning: The tool is still in alpheta – somewhere between alpha and beta, so please be forgiving if you decide to try it out). It takes about a minute to process a website, but provides a ton of useful information. For now, the tool is completely free and doesn’t require registration or an email address.”

Read More…

Practicing the Art of Leadership

Leadership is crucial in order to ensure the success of a business. With the economy taking a downturn, strong, strategic leadership was and is even more crucial for businesses. Without good leadership, crucial issues may not get addressed, employees won’t have direction know where to focus their efforts to help the company’s success and in some of the worst cases a company may end up closing their doors.

As mentioned in Putting the Art of Leadership into Practice on the Harvard Business Blog, there is a difference of practicing leadership and then putting the art of leadership into practice—many people may not be doing both.

“For the past ten months or so, I have had the privilege of traveling around North America speaking about what it takes to lead in hard times. Sometimes I joke that if I knew "hard times" would be so popular a topic I would have thought of it sooner; I guess I just needed the economy to cooperate.”

Read more…