Management Training

It’s not quite clear to me why it took a recession for organizations to rid their staffs of employees who weren’t pulling their weight. Finally, the air is being let out of this balloon—and you probably knew which people your organization needed and which it didn’t, way before the economy turned south.

The federal labor law can be a trap for the unwary—even for nonunion employers. Even if your employees don’t belong to a union, the National Labor Relations Act applies to you. For example, the National Labor Relations Board recently announced that a nonunionized employer will pay $900,000 to two fired employees to settle charges that it violated the NLRA.

With everything on your radar during the workday, it’s easy to forget about employee morale. But keeping the team engaged isn’t something that can be ignored or postponed. To keep morale on your radar, be aware of some of the common management mistakes that undermine it. Here are nine main deflators of employee morale, plus tips on avoiding them:

Linda recently wrote on our Admin Pro Forum, “I recently took a job where I supervise three administrative assistants. I work directly on a daily basis with one admin ... but I don’t have daily contact with the other two admins, because they are in different parts of the building. How do I supervise the other two and complete their performance evaluations?”

Thousands of people deliver Power-Point presentations each day, and most could sharpen their message if the slides were less distracting. Here are some techniques and guidelines to do that:

What should you do about a co-worker who takes advantage of a boss-less office? How do you bring this to your boss’s attention without appearing like a troublemaker? Here are some ideas for addressing a co-worker’s slacker behavior:

Henkel North America throws itself a big birthday party every year, inviting employees to participate in activities that don’t cost them or the organization much money. Each Henkel site in North America celebrates the organization’s Sept. 25, 1876, founding with Henkel Day.

You can’t predict the behavior of your employees, clients and all their associates. You can’t anticipate every possible danger. But the law dictates that you, as the employer, have a “duty of care” to keep all individuals in your workplace safe from dangers you can reasonably anticipate. To do that, you need to evaluate potential dangers and formulate an appropriate action plan.

Signing a contract is always a hair-raising and nervous experience. But signing a hotel, convention center or other facility's standard contract for your company could damage your organization's financial well being. To protect yourself, ask to review the standard contract, but consider that as only a starting point.

The concept of the “complete leader” who has it all figured out is finally bowing before the sheer complexity of modern problems. After working with hundreds of people who struggled under the old myth, researchers at the MIT Sloan School of Management and MIT Leadership Center have come up with a new theory: distributed leadership.