When you’ve made a mistake . . .
Thanks to our increasingly online (and visible) lives, it’s more important than ever to know how to apologize well. When you wrong someone—a colleague or a customer—apologize by doing three things:
Category: Workplace Etiquette
Lead co-workers to clean up their acts
Messy co-workers can make you feel like you’re living in a college dorm. What do you do when others don’t clean up after themselves? You could turn cleaning up into a game. Two suggestions from Get-It-Done-Guy Stever Robbins:
8 ways to restore civility at work
If you’ve ever been hung up on or interrupted, you’ve been the victim of a loss of civility in the workplace. Bring back courtesy and build a kinder workplace with tips from Tom Terez of WorkplaceNow.com:
8 tips for holiday gift-giving at work
Perfume? Too personal. Coffee maker? Too expensive (unless it’s a group gift). The rules for gift-giving at work, in those offices that swap presents, are fairly straightforward. Here’s advice from experts:
Group gift-giving at work
When a group of co-workers chip in to buy a gift for a colleague, should they allow noncontributors to sign the card, as well? Or should they leave the gift shirkers out in the cold? An office coordinator in Florida posed this etiquette question to us recently.
1-Minute Strategies: Oct. ’11
What helped clinch this year’s OfficeTeam Administrative Excellence Award for Deborah Carter? … Perk up your daily emails with MeebleMail … Double-check your work. A survey by Accountemps shows that “lack of attention to detail/sloppy work” is the No. 1 pet peeve of CFOs …
Email faux pas can do serious damage to your career
Maria had been emailing back and forth with a colleague all day about a work issue, when she finally decided to cc the boss. It felt like the right thing to do. But that’s not how it turned out. Instead, it came back to bite her. How to avoid cc’ing up and other email faux pas:
Invitation to punch up e-vites
Think beyond Evite with these three digital greeting-card sites: Paperless Post, Pingg and Punchbowl.
Losing it … again
Nearly six in 10 Americans (56%) say they have lost their temper due to poor service. Unfortunately, rudeness runs rampant in today’s society, which means it’s even more appreciated by others when you show courtesy, patience and problem-solving ability.
Take steps to make a ‘newbie’ welcome
“The first day of work,” says an administrative assistant on her blog, “is like the first day of school … overwhelming.” You have to make new friends, learn the new rules, get to know a new teacher. Welcome a newbie with these tactics: