“The issues most people struggle with have little to do with our ability to do the work,” says Quint Studer, author of The Great Employee Handbook: Making Work and Life Better. “It’s all the things that happen around the work. … It’s whether we make life easier for our co-workers or more difficult.” He offers these four workplace secrets:
Bosses aren’t the only ones who can provide feedback to employees. Giving negative feedback requires you to counsel and criticize in a way that alerts a co-worker to where the problem lies and what must be done to solve it. Follow this seven-step method:
Opening your email inbox to find a message criticizing your work is bad enough. But it’s even worse when you notice that your boss was cc’d on the message. An administrative professional recently encountered this situation and wrote about it on our online forum.
To get Swedish commuters to take the stairs instead of the escalator at a metro stop, they turned the staircase into a giant keyboard, complete with sound. How can you use the same approach to change people’s behavior at work?
Networking may seem like a mysterious skill that’s beyond your grasp, but actually, it’s as simple as this Golden Rule: Always offer to help, and never expect anything in return. Three ways the rule works:
Research shows that people take longer to reply to voice messages than other types of communication. Even getting a voice message heard is a challenge. So what can you do to ensure that people respond to a message you leave them? Try these tips:
Are you “smothering” perfectly good verbs? Example: You turn “decide” into a noun, making it “decision.” Then you need to use “decision” as a verb, so you write, “make a decision”—forgetting that you could simply use “decide.”
It pays to be a good politician, according to a new survey by Robert Half. Workers were asked, “In your opinion, what effect, if any, does involvement in office politics have on one’s career?” Their responses:
Phil, an administrative assistant, recently lamented that his efforts to improve his boss’s communication were going unheeded. But perhaps it’s not what Phil’s boss wants from Phil. When someone hands you his work to look over, first determine what he wants in return.
In business writing, bullet points often replace regular old paragraphs, with good reason: Readers can scan them faster. Stick to these standards for using bullets effectively:
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