Management Training

The recession put tremendous pressure on companies to explore ways to reduce costs—and IT expenses are no exception. Fortunately, there are now attractive alternatives for small and midsize businesses (SMBs) to significantly reduce their IT budgets while simultaneously improving the uptime, effectiveness and satisfaction of their investments in computers and technology.

Are you maximizing all that your BlackBerry offers to simplify your life? Here are 10 shortcuts: 1. Create the @ symbol and the dot when typing e-mail addresses by clicking the space bar. 2. To end a sentence with a period and a space and then capitalize the next word, click the space bar twice at the end of a sentence. 3. Capitalize a letter by holding it down ...

Unplanned absences can disrupt even the best-run workplaces. Of course, you don’t want truly sick employees to come to work if they have some contagious illness. Nor do you want to discourage employees from taking legitimate FMLA leave. Your challenge as an employer: Craft and enforce an attendance policy that allows or even encourages legitimate sick leave use while discouraging abuse.

In the downturn, productivity is everything. Small business owners are turning to creative solutions for making conference-room time productive. Here are three examples from “Boring Meetings? Get Out the Water Guns”:

Job postings go up … they come down. They go up … they come down. It all seems quite normal. That is, unless a job posting is pulled down to avoid a specific type of candidate. As this new case shows, you can’t delist a job or try to hide the position when you don’t like who applies. Peek-a-boo, the court will catch you!

If you’ve been a fan of Executive Leadership, you know that leadership lessons may come from anywhere. Steve Cody, a public relations consultant who blogs as The Repman, says he’s learned five things about leadership from practicing stand-up comedy.

Employers that want to avoid paying overtime to white-collar workers often invoke the Fair Labor Standards Act’s administrative exemption. For the administrative exemption to be legitimate, all of the following must be true:

Without knowing it, you may be saying things that make you sound less leader-like. Here, courtesy of the editors at Reader’s Digest and Business Management Daily, are some tips that can help you come across better:

Question:  “I am a young, ambitious employee in a large agency where many people spend their time doing anything but work. They play computer games, surf the web, take smoke breaks, read the paper, discuss TV shows, gossip about celebrities, manage their finances, and plan vacations. When these lazy co-workers try to give me their assigned tasks, I always reply courteously by saying, “Just OK it with the manager, then I’ll be glad to help you.”  So far, our boss hasn’t given me any of their work. Because my goal is to get into management, I can’t decide whether to officially report this widespread abuse of time. Doing so could either demonstrate my initiative and dedication or mark me as a whistle-blower and kill my chances for advancement.” — Hard Worker

When it comes to employment lawsuits, HR is a lot like flying an airplane: The most risky parts of the trip are at the takeoff (hiring) and the landing (dismissal). With hiring, you can limit the employment-law risks by following the legally safe steps and training supervisors to do the same.