Eva Rykr » Business

Holiday Gift Ideas for the Office

Eva Rykr — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 16:09:08 +0000

Now that Thanksgiving is over, the holiday shopping season has officially begun. But deciding what to buy for all those close to you can be downright paralyzing with all the choices that are out there. It can be even more difficult to shop for those we know professionally but maybe we don’t know so well personally. Here is a starting point for brainstorming your holiday gift list:

For Your Employees

One of my favorite gift ideas for an employee is to give a business book. The trick is to personalize your selection so that the person will want to read the book you choose.

For the aspiring leader: The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership: Follow Them and People Will Follow You
For the people person: Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose
For the brainy one: How We Decide
For the over-achiever: Outliers
For the creative: Made to Stick
For the newly promoted: The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels
For any manager: Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High
For the team leader: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable

For more books like this, check out the 800-CEO-READ and the Amazon.com best-seller lists.

For Your Boss

It can be difficult to decide what an appropriate present is for the boss. How much do you spend? Do you let others know? Moreover, it can alienate co-workers if they were not planning to purchase a gift. One way to get around all this is to do a group gift from the team.

For example, you can make a gift basket. You the organizer will handle purchasing the basket and taking care of assembling it, while the others on the team each bring one or two items to put in the basket. This is especially appreciated when the boss has a family with whom he or she can share the items in the basket.

Just a few of the things ideal for a gift basket:

Wine
Wine Stopper
Decorative Napkins
Candles
Chocolate
Candy Canes
Ornaments
Gift Card
Fruit
Coasters
Coffee

For Your Clients

The holiday season is a good time to not only show appreciation, but also to remind your clients why they do business with you. You can gift items that will help your client further their agenda and their business. You can also gift items that will keep your company and your brand at the forefront of their mind. Or ideally, both.

If you have just a few clients, you’ll want to personalize the gift – the aforementioned gift basket, something that relates to their hobby, or a ticket to their favorite sports team event. But if you have more than a handful of clients, such an approach may not be worth your time or money. Instead, you can give something with a personalized feel, but a wholesale price tag. My favorite website for mass-produced branded items is Branders.com. Here are a few items from their site that I love and almost anyone can use:

What are you giving this year? What are you hoping to receive?

This post was originally published on the Intuit QuickBase Team Leadership Blog.

Thanksgiving Spirit at the Office

Eva Rykr — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 16:03:30 +0000

This Thanksgiving I am making three desserts – a chocolate chip pumpkin cheesecake, layere d pumpk in cheesecake brownies, and white chocolate peanut butter oatmeal cookies. While I do love to bake, this is above and beyond even for me. It’s in the spirit of the season – and judging by the empty shelves and long checkout lines at the store, I am not alone. Think about that – and consider all the work that goes into preparing a Thanksgiving dinner. Is there any way to replicate this productivity and motivation in our professional work? There just might be. Dissecting the situation, we have three elements:

Public Recognition

We want the fruits of our labor to be enjoyed. As any bachelor(ette) with takeout numbers on speed dial knows, cooking for one is no fun. But when Thanksgiving rolls around, nearly everyone has something to contribute, secretly hoping to hear that their dish was the favorite. We put in just a little more effort when there is an opportunity to be praised and recognized for it.

Reciprocity

When someone does something genuinely nice for us, we are driven to do something nice in return. The majority of us would feel a tinge of guilt if we didn’t at least bring a bottle of wine to the family who is hosting the turkey dinner. But the principle of reciprocity goes beyond guilt and keeping score – those who give freely tend to receive even more in return.

Tradition

Host a barbecue last minute, and you’ll likely have guests bringing cups, napkins, or chips. But with tradition comes expectations, and the predictability of the holiday allows for preparation.

So there you have it. To replicate the merry motivation of the Thanksgiving season, make an effort to:

Praise good work and do it often.
Celebrate successes and show gratitude to everyone who was involved.
Make big projects visible and contributions recognizable.
Make it known up front that there is potential for praise and recognition.
When you have down-time or a slow week, actively seek out colleagues you can help.
Be generous with your assistance and willingness to collaborate.
Don’t expect anything in return for your ‘favors.’
Set your own traditions – is there one season or month that is busier than most at your office?
Make expectations known clearly, preferably by example.
Make sure that the workflow is as predictable as possible.

Note that this post was originally published on the Intuit QuickBase Team Leadership blog last year. I will not be making the layered cheesecake brownies this year — they weren’t so good. Cheesecake and cookies were fantastic and can be expected this year again

HEROes and Innovation: Is Your Company Ready?

Eva Rykr — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 11:07:16 +0000

Previously, I wrote a blog post on how to identify your company’s HEROes and how to manage your company’s HEROes. As a quick recap, HEROes are Highly Empowered and Resourceful Operatives; employees who feel empowered to solve customer problems by acting resourcefully, including using any type of technology necessary, whether it is currently sanctioned by the company or not. But no matter how talented or motivated they are, HEROes can’t successfully act alone. Today’s post focus is how to analyze your company’s readiness for HEROes.

As reported in the chapter-article, Is Your Company Ready for HEROes?, Forrester Research conducted a survey 4,364 information workers in U.S. companies which asked two questions: Do you feel empowered? Do you act resourceful? The results of the survey showed four distinct groups of employees, across various organizations:

Disenfranchised Employees: 34% try to just do their jobs; very little drive for innovation.
Rogue Employees: 14% attempt to find creative solutions; lack company support.
Locked-Down Employees: 34% feel empowered; limited by a lack of technology resources.
HERO Employees: 21% use new technologies and feel that the company supports them; results in technology innovation.

Note that this distribution is not equal across all companies and all industries. Some companies will have mostly disenfranchised employees while others will see much more than 21% of its workforce comprised of HEROes. The categorization is relevant and useful, however. The authors of the aforementioned article posit that you can encourage HERO employees at your organization by increasing levels of encouragement, guidance, and resources.

Encouragement

Companies must take the first step and provide encouragement in order for workers to feel empowered. Without this encouragement (explicit or implicit), by default the company has disenfranchised employees and an organization that is lacking in innovation. Take a look at the company culture. Examine the management processes. Are they structured in a way that allows for HEROes to bring innovations to the table? What changes need to be made? How can these changes be implemented and communicated to create that encouraging and empowering environment? Note that culture change can take time.

Guidance

Once the culture of the company is conducive to empowered employees, there is still some risk of chaos, mismanagement of HEROes, or missed opportunities. Management should not only provide encouragement, but also give guidance by communicating strategic imperatives and channeling half-baked ideas toward something more feasible. Without this support, the company is left with rogue employees who are motivated to find innovative and creative solutions for the customers, but are turned away or remain unsuccessful in doing so over time. Over time, these rogue employees either become disenfranchised… or they find a new company that supports their talents.

Resources

HEROes need access to technology—technology like QuickBase or other easy-to-use web database software that allows for collaboration and experimentation without causing excessive frustration. Without adequate resources, the company has empowered employees who are limited by the technology. Ask: does the technology available make work easier? Is the IT department viewed as an obstacle to innovation or a partnership that leads to opportunity?

This post was originally published on the Intuit QuickBase Team Leadership blog.

How to Manage Your HEROes

Eva Rykr — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 17:03:30 +0000

In my last blog post, I defined the term HEROes (highly empowered resourceful operatives) and I wrote about how you can identify who your current HEROes are as well as create an environment which encourages new ones to action. As a quick recap, HEROes are your employees who go above and beyond the standard protocols to do their jobs, and this sometimes means taking initiative to use technologies that have not yet been introduced to your company through your IT department. Today I want to write about how to best manage HEROes. There is a fine line to walk between empowering front-line innovation and minimizing risk and chaos.

In some cultures, this unsanctioned use of outside technology is frowned-upon. But this will no longer be good enough. In others, especially service-oriented businesses, HEROes and the solutions they find and implement are key to success. Technological innovations are occurring exponentially, and most of us can’t keep up, let alone foresee how to harness them for process improvements in our business. So a lot of this improvisation by HEROes is happening in real time. The customer has an issue, and the employee is empowered to resolve it. Thus the first step in managing HEROes effectively is to indeed remember that you want to encourage this behavior and that it is good for the business.

Encouraging HEROes While Minimizing Chaos

First and foremost, innovations must benefit the business.
Encourage initiative; create a forum for innovators’ ideas to be heard.
Don’t squash half-baked ideas; involve others to improve the idea instead.
Create guidelines and limits for when to involve others.
Provide strategic direction where the company and customer needs exist.
At the same time, remember that HEROes may have unique insight into customer needs.
Steer managers, executives, and the IT department to be more open-minded.
Document how unsanctioned technology was used to assist a customer.
Look for patterns that can help your business create, improve, or scale up a new process.
Learn from failures; celebrate, publicize, reward, and build on successes.
Create case studies from both successes and failures that can become the basis for training.

This post was originally published on the Intuit QuickBase Team Leadership Blog.

How to Identify Your Company HEROes

Eva Rykr — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 16:59:24 +0000

New technologies that can help companies be more effective, productive, and efficient are being created every day. This is faster than most companies can evaluate and implement them. But while companies may be slow to innovate, a highly select few of your employees are not. Ted Schadler and Josh Bernoff (authors of Empowered: Unleash your employees, energize your customers, and transform your business) have coined a new term: HEROes. This is an acronym for Highly Empowered and Resourceful Operatives.

“HEROes are those employees who feel empowered to solve customer problems and act resourcefully by using whatever technology they need to use… individuals harnessing readily available social, mobile, video, and cloud technology to solve customer and business problems,” is how he defines HEROes in the Harvard Business Review blog post, IT in the Age of the Empowered Employee.

HEROes are a competitive advantage for their companies. According to the authors’ research on the issue, HEROes comprise 20% of the U.S. information workforce. These employees are using free or relatively low-cost third-party technologies–such as QuickBase, Google Docs, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Ning, and others that have not been officially endorsed by their company IT department–to make the customer experience better. They may also download software to make their job easier (such as video editing tools) or use their own mobile devices for work purposes when it is more convenient.

How to Identify Current and Potential HEROes

Know that they exist in your company. According to the book, “one in three of your information workers already use easily accessible technologies that your company does not sanction.”
Employees who have and use their Twitter account.
They have been with the company long enough to fully understand the company and its customers’ needs.
They are new enough to the company that they are not entrenched in current procedures or mindsets.
They come up with refreshing ideas to solve problems that have continually plagued your organization.
Look outside of IT. Technologies and services that enable HEROes are designed for business users who are not necessarily technical. Where you find your HEROes may surprise you.

How to Create an Environment that Encourages HEROes

Encourage the use of social media technologies during and after work. A personal use of technology can spark an innovative business idea.
Communicate current business needs or dilemmas; but don’t provide insight on how to solve them. Providing less guidance often frees people to think outside the box.
Reward successes with useful gadgets (iPhone, tablet PC, new software).

In my next blog post, I will throw around a few ideas on how to manage HEROes without dimming their spark but also without allowing operational chaos.

This post was originally posted on the Intuit QuickBase Team Leadership blog.