Your 26-year-old co-worker doesn’t want to wait until her annual review to find out how she’s doing at work. She wants to know now. Gen Y employees want more feedback, more often, than previous generations. They’ll seek it from their immediate boss, as well as others. If you’re not comfortable with or accustomed to offering feedback, heed these tips:

Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft chief executive, says that he and Bill Gates used to like meetings where the presenter took the long and winding road—or where a presenter describes his winding path of exploration and his ultimate conclusion. Now, though, Ballmer feels the practice is inefficient. He espouses a different approach to meetings.

You schedule a meeting, then hear of a last-minute schedule conflict. A round of rescheduling e-mails only leads to confusion. Locations change, people forget to show up ... the list of common problems goes on. But if you’re a Microsoft Outlook (2002/2003) user, you can rely on Group Schedule to check schedules, fill out meeting requests and send group e-mails.

A resolution is a formal way of saying what your group is going to do, or what its position is. The format is: title and number, "whereas" clauses and "resolved" clauses. Here's the protocol and some formatting tips ...

A recent study says that 40% of managers are considered “bad bosses” by their employees. Yet most managers assume that their relationships with their employees are running smoothly. Obviously, some of those bosses are wrong … and that can create major problems for a business. Here are seven common employee complaints about management, plus ways managers can silence them.

Q. A question has come up in our office about the use of two spaces after a period between sentences. I was taught in my business and typing courses to use two spaces. Has the protocol changed? Is it now one space?

Sometimes saying “yes” to a co-worker’s request for help is unavoidable. But don’t let such requests spin your schedule out of control. Here’s how to help a co-worker without making your own productivity suffer:

Q. How should I address a woman who uses two last names, such as "Geneva Besmer Silverstone"? By her maiden name, her surname or both?

With benefits election open-enrollment season looming at organizations across the country, here are 10 ways you can do a better job of communicating with your organization’s employees. None of them costs a fortune. All can help increase employee participation in your benefits program.

“It’s one thing to keep a crowd engaged for two minutes, but two hours—or more—requires a different set of techniques,” says communications coach Carmine Gallo in BusinessWeek. So if you’re preparing a PowerPoint presentation, remember Gallo’s rules for keeping an audience captivated:

What's the proper procedure for a group of business people approaching a closed door? ... Should I tip when picking up a carryout order for the office? ... How can I compliment a co-worker who recently lost a lot of weight without offending her?

You may have noticed more people than usual lurking outside your executive’s door. That’s because economic fears are prompting more employees to eavesdrop and gossip about what might happen next at their workplaces...

Showing consideration for your co-workers isn't merely polite. Those surveyed for the staffing firm Office Angels said they're more likely to help considerate co-workers, and that those colleagues are more deserving of promotion than annoying office mates. What are the top irritating behaviors?

Like everyone else, we’ve been battered by the recession. We’ve started to turn things around, but our employees are pretty beat up by a tough business environment and a couple of layoffs we’ve had to do. Morale is poor. The general feeling is that we’re paddling like mad just to stay in the same place. Any ideas for inexpensive but meaningful ways to show staff that we appreciate their hard work and sacrifice during hard times?—Steve T., North Carolina

We’ve all been put in situations where opinionated people force us to talk about something that we don’t care to discuss. What do you say in these awkward, challenging moments that allows you to speak your truth, yet leave another’s respect intact? Try out the following techniques:

Workers can feel left behind when some employees are “allowed” to work from home, while they are firmly planted at the office. “The co-worker who has to stay behind has to get over that, as much as a manager has to get over the idea that the only way to manage is by ‘face time,’” says Rose Stanley, an employee benefits specialist with WorldatWork.

Attitudes have changed for the better in many offices, where the fear of layoffs still runs high. But what happens when employees become so busy kissing up to the boss that they stop pulling their weight at work? How are you supposed to deal with a kiss-up, do-nothing co-worker?

Meetings can be brutally boring. They can be too frequent, too long and too unproductive. You may think you can’t do anything to make a meeting more efficient and results-oriented—you aren’t the person leading it, right? But Amy Henderson, Henderson Training Inc., believes you can do a lot to influence a meeting.

If you’ve ever wanted to be the next Arianna Huffington, your dream has never been more within reach. “This is the perfect venue to share your expertise and elevate your visibility to a whole new level,” says Scott Ginsberg, author of Stick Yourself Out There. Follow these steps for blogging brilliance:

You’ve been hearing a lot about creating value at work, especially lately, right? Being an intrapreneur is one way to do it. Intrapreneurs create a new process, product or service where they currently work. It’s like being an entrepreneur, but without venturing off to start your own business. It’s what Google famously allowed its employees time to do.

Take this quiz to double-check your business writing skills. Can you spot the grammar and writing errors in the following five sentences?

How many times have you come up with a more efficient way to accomplish something and wished you could quickly share it with co-workers? You can with collaborative tech tools, says Richard Laermer, media consultant and author of Punk Marketing.

Who hasn't started writing a thank-you or condolence note, only to encounter "the big um" after the first sentence? "The big um is when you get your first couple of words out and wonder, 'What's next?'" says Angela Ensminger, co-author of On a Personal Note: A Guide to Writing Notes with Style. "That blank paper is very intimidating." Great personal notes come from taking these five steps:

With the diminishing time and attention you have to communicate, it’s a good idea to tighten your communications and say everything that needs to be said in half the words. With thought and discipline, you can do great things in small spaces. Here are some tips from Brady Dennis, who as a reporter at the St. Petersburg Times wrote a series of profiles in just 300 words apiece.

Give those URLs a trim ... Show your e-mail skills by avoiding supersize attachments ... Use the subject line to identify different categories of e-mail ... Feel more rejuvenated after a summer vacation by coming home on a Saturday ...