1-Minute Strategies: June ’13
Want a great experience the next time you or the boss fly? Book travel on Alaska Airlines or Southwest Airlines. The two airlines tied for the top spot in “customer experience” in an annual survey by Temkin Group, while U.S. Airways came in last.
Add “investing” to your list of skills. Unless you plan to work until you die, you need to save for retirement and learn to invest your money wisely. Get learning with sites such as Bite the Bullet Investing, Motley Fool, the American Association of Individual Investors and LearnBonds.
Keep personal and professional online networks separate. Mixing them can hurt your reputation on the job. As people interact online with connections from all aspects of their lives, they risk sharing personal information that can hurt them professionally, research by three business-school professors says.
Learn creative skills for fun and professional development from the comfort of your own home. Websites such as Lynda.com, CreativeLive, Digital-Tutors and KelbyTraining.com offer online courses on design, photography and other creative pursuits. The courses can help you adopt a hobby, get better at an existing pastime and even land a new job.
Get ready to say “yes” to napping on the job. Instead of brewing more coffee, some employers are keeping workers alert by giving them permission and a quiet place to take a nap. One New Jersey company has a napping room with a recliner that employees can sign up to use for a 20-minute snooze each day.
Try hosting your next party at the gym. To bring in more business and give people a new place to celebrate with their friends, gyms are expanding their services to include operating as party venues. “We’ve created bachelorette parties, birthday parties, college reunions and divorce parties,” said Donna Cyrus, senior vice president of programming at Crunch, a gym chain.
Bank of America turns Big Brother on its employees to learn how to make them more productive. A few years ago the bank asked about 90 of its call-center workers to wear badges with tiny sensors for a few weeks to record their movements and the tone of their conversations. It discovered that those who talked to their colleagues frequently were most productive, a discovery that prompted changes to the structure of their workday.
