Employees are without a question of a doubt your greatest advantage over your competition. There are certain methods to attract, grow and hold onto top performers. By building a powerful culture of engagement, you can promote pride, real commitment from employees and a solid foundation for bottom-line growth.

•    It is important to work out why employees come and why they stay. If you treat talented people badly, they will not have a reason to stay. The secret is to connect with people. A culture of commitment inculcates and socialises your employees with a real commitment to your business.
•    Instill a feeling of pride in your employees.
•    People have a natural desire to contribute and to be part of something important and worthwhile. They need to engage in something that is extraordinary, and something they can be proud of. Individuals have the need to do this in an environment that is both respected and respectable.
•    Enable your employees to be all they can be for both themselves and for the business.
•    Create an atmosphere for your employees to work in that will enable each individual employee’s preferred self to materialise at the workplace through an arrangement and equilibrium of the employee’s personal talents and requirements with organisational goals in mind.
•    There is a distinct difference between management and leadership. Executives need to look for leadership attributes in their staff, and start to focus both time and money on those who have a natural ability and interest to lead.
•    Individuals can be trained to be managers but true and talented leaders are born and not made. Nurture these qualities for the best results.
•    Giving employees the right tools and resources are essential for their development.
•    Demanding contribution and being worthy of receiving contribution is important and in doing so indicates to your employees that their efforts are important to the big picture.
•    Always applaud effort and always reward contribution.
•    Building a workplace on a foundation of respect will reap the rewards from your employees.

People in positions of power have to always tell the truth. By being open and honest at all times you will gain the trust and the respect of your employees and you can be certain that what your staff knows will be the truth.

Without a voice that vocalizes professionalism, confidence and friendliness your message will simply fall on deaf ears.

Your voice counts for 38% of every message that is communicated and body language makes up 55% and words make only about 7% of the message that needs to be communicated.

Public figures use the power of the voice to charm millions of individuals across the globe. A couple of excellent examples are Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey and even Nelson Mandela. All three examples have a unique ability to make individuals feel as if they are being spoken to personally and directly. Leaders spend at least 80% of their time communicating with other individuals from clients to staff, the media, partner, staff and more.

The mark of an excellent leader is to make a person feel as if he or she is the most important person in the room.

The voice has become more important than ever before because there is so much competition out there such as Facebook, Twitter, Cellpones email instant messaging and more. With everyone trying to get your attention you have to work ten times harder to ensure you are not ignored.

That is the key for entrepreneurs particularly the ones that are just starting out and have nothing more to go on than brilliant communication skills.

By improving your voice, you will improve your prospects.

Make the right choices and moves early in the introductory phase of your company. Although outsourcing is popular in the business world, companies should rather use selling partners only if and when there are obvious rewards and cost-benefits in this approach. During the start-up stage of the business, smart companies look at depending on selling partners or create their own in-house sales teams. If they do decide to go for the in-house option they will focus their attention to sizing them flawlessly for the task.

As the company or business grows and develops, sales in the company takes on a more dominant role, and a completely different position.
The question is when a decision is to be made exactly to put a stronger sales force into action.

Once the company has established itself and becomes stronger, the focus shifts and the sales force develops into a more efficient business incorporating the services of accounts managers and further allocation of the sales team takes on a more important role. This in effect would have metamorphosed into a more cost-effective exercise, as less expensive sales people would then be employed, such as telesales people and sales assistants.

If and when companies go into a decline situation the automatic reaction is to decrease the size of the sales team.

The secret is getting the size of the sales force just right. Many sales leaders take advantage of temporary declines to get rid of mediocrity in their sales teams, so that once the business and turnaround begins, they would be in a stronger position to hire better caliber sales people.

Your staff will have the competitive edge if they have the right tools to keep them that way. Your staff needs to be flexible and mobile, having instant access to any and all information and communications tools at any time and from any location.

•    The Siemens OpenScape Office will improve and increase productivity and will permit interaction that is instantaneous with partners, suppliers, clients and colleagues.
•    OpenScape Office has been designed particularly with this in mind.
•    Small to medium businesses are the ones that will benefit best with this system.
•    On offer through the OpenScape Office incorporates voice and discussion capability, voice mail, messaging, mobility and a multimedia call centre and incidence status purpose delivering UC capabilities to the small to medium business user in the most complete user-friendly and flexible manner possible.
Here are a couple of attractive features offered
•    There is a selection of nine presence status indicators
•    Easy access to important contacts
•    Easy access to all personal contacts, both internally and externally
•    There is one number and it is independent of the device

External savings of up to 90% are made implementing the system. Internet-based communication is able to reduce call charges up to 30%.
If you are an SME and are looking at ways to cut costs while increasing productivity, you would do well to investigate the Siemens OpenScape Office system for your business.

Generally speaking, the features of VoIP phones follow those of Skype, Google Voice and other PC-based phone services. Netbooks and smartphones will become the dominant interfaces as well as iPhone, Android and the BlackBerry which are capable of VoIP performance

The overall hardware may look like a telephone or mobile phone. A VoIP phone has the following hardware components.

• Speaker/ear phone and microphone
• Key pad/touch pad to enter phone number and text (not used for ATA’s)
• Display hardware to feedback user input and show caller-id/messages (not used for ATAs).
• General purpose processor (GPP) to process application messages.
• A voice engine or a digital signal processor to process RTP messages.
• ADC and DAC converters which will convert voice to digital data and vice versa.
• Ethernet or wireless network to send and receive messages on data network.
• An Ethernet port for a PC which allows your computer and phone to share one data connection, routed through the phone and to the computer.
• Power source – a battery or DC source.

For wireless VoIP phones

• battery
• Wireless network interface controller

To Lead You Have To Have a Brave Heart

If you need the backup of your staff and your team, as a leader you will have to be pretty fearless.

Nobody likes to work for someone without a backbone. If your boss is always hovering, uncertain and unsure, wringing his or her hands, the message sent to the team or employees is not a very positive one.

What Epitomises Spirited management?

•    Obviously bravery would mean different things in diverse situations.
•    For those in small to medium enterprises, this could mean making a decision even when working in terrain you are not familiar with. When all decisions look bleak, take the one of least impact.
•    The recession had forced many business people to draw on internal resources of courage.
•    For many entrepreneurs it has left them bereft and without courage.
•    To make cuts that are necessary but are painful to execute whether it is retrenching staff or cutting the dead wood out in the form of unprofitable clients, certain actions simply cannot be avoided.
•    If you, as leader, have to move from sophisticated premises and downgrade to more a humble work space in order to save your business and jobs, then what must be done, must be done.
•    All these moves take courage.
•    It is necessary at times for your leader to invest in new business enterprises and to take these risks to grow the business.
•    Taking the bold step of hiring new staff in order to grow a business also takes a lot of spunk, especially in today’s economic climate.
•    Good leaders know how to delegate, poor leaders do not.
•    When sacrifices are made in bad financial times, top performance should never be one of them.
•    Remember that good performance should always be rewarded.
•    Good staff is one of the assets a company cannot do without.
•    Investing in your staff is always important.
•    Not all companies can reward their staff financially, but rewards that do not involve money is an excellent alternative, such as title promotions and new assignments to rejuvenate flagging spirits.

Remember that the rudiments of managing your workers don’t change just because the economy is disagreeable.

We Are All Guilty of Procrastination

Procrastination is debilitating both in the workplace as well as in one’s personal life. Procrastination is often frustrating for employers. People who admit they are chronic procrastinators find it hard to overcome this flaw.

Research has shown that people who had completed a task often forgot the fine points of the task, compared to individuals who were interrupted during a task, could remember the finer points of what they had left unfinished.

Completing a task enables the brain to get certain closure, where the task can be comfortably filed away in the mind, while unfinished tasks put the mind into a state of anxiety.

The state of anxiety will not allow the brain to rest.

Many individuals who procrastinate will find it impossible to get down and dirty to doing something. The task is often viewed as a whole and therefore is a little intimidating and far too large to tackle.

Always break the task into manageable bite-sized chunks, as this will be viewed as being more manageable.

Most of us who procrastinate find it practically impossible to get down to doing anything constructive, often because the task seems so large, but once begun it seems the rest will quite easily follow suit.

If you are an older worker and unhappy in your job the chances are that you are not alone, and this is often the cause of dragging one’s feet and procrastinating.

Take the initiative and show that you can actively support and achieve the goals of the company.
Get clever technically, too, but if you are really not happy doing what you are doing, become your own boss.

Enthusiasm is a sure fire- cure of procrastination.

Managing Your Email Cleverly

• You need not respond to every email.
• Prioritising your email is all-important, so only apply to the ones you have to.
• Lower-value emails and messages that are intended for others should be ignored.

Here are a couple of email tips that will increase productivity:

• Cheat by creating templates to help manage answers to frequent email subjects. In other words these are templates that enable you to create and use boilerplate responses to the questions and the requests to which you frequently draft identical replies on an ongoing basis.
• If you know for sure that you are never ever going to respond to an email, be honest with yourself and get it out of your sight by archiving it or simply deleting the mail.
• Write short emails and cut conversation to a minimum by responding immediately and with really short actions.
• Select the easy ones first. If you are able to reply in one or two lines, tackle the task right away. The main idea is about action.
• Shut off auto-check.

Email is a phenomenal tool and it was meant to make our lives easier in order to liberate us, but it has everyone in a tizz, as there simply is too much of it. Make this simple, and learn to manage your mail like a pro.

Getting More Out Of Your Day Is Essential

Here are an a couple of pointers so that you can get more hours out of your day by overcoming time management obstacles

• Create a time journal. For one week write down everything you do and make a note of exactly how long this takes. Include everything such as interruptions, errands, phone calls, emails, lunch, tea and coffee breaks. Write them in order.
• At the end of the week, you will be able to see exactly how much time is spent on each task.
• This will most probably be the first time in your life that you confront the chaos of your poor time-management.
• Start planning your time.
• A schedule of your day must have certain boundaries.
• This schedule is important for entrepreneurs who need to do multi-tasking.
• Entrepreneurs are often guilty of losing their balance regarding time-management, as the juggle between marketing, billable work, and admin becomes a little overwhelming.

Everyone has to deal with the unexpected

• Never fill your day to capacity; always include a couple of instant cushions should the need arise.
• If you are in a service-based industry never schedule more than three hour’s work in an  nine hour day; if your clients need instant gratification, you need to accommodate them.
• For every hour of scheduled activity try to keep the next hour open, as this will spread your availability across the day and you will still have sufficient private time in which to do work uninterrupted.

Procrastination is a biggy

• We are all guilty of procrastinating.
• If the job is too difficult, then break it into manageable bite-size pieces.
• If you loathe the task, get someone else to help if you are able to do so.

Remember that things take a long time to do. Writing and email or making a phone call could take a lot longer than you bargained for. If there is a pressing matter waiting to be done and you have not allowed enough time for that particular task, then you will simply run out of time. Learn to estimate exactly how long it will take to do certain tasks, as this will be a step in managing your time properly.