Working with a team, big or small, can be a lot of fun. Of course, this can lead to disaster if your productivity begins to slip. Just because you are working with others does not mean that you should be passing off your work. Along with this, you need to make sure that you never fade into the background. For a team to be successful, no matter what the project, everybody needs to do their part and pull their weight.
Here are five tips for staying productive when working with a team:
1. Know your role. Before you ever get started every team member will probably be assigned a particular responsibility. You need to know your role and take it very seriously. This goes along with doing your part. If you concentrate on your part of the job everything else will begin to fall into place. This subject has already been debated in a recent post and we have seen how one can improve team performance by simply knowing its role.
2. Do not be afraid to ask team members for help. Many people think that this is a sign of weakness – nothing could be further from the truth. It often times takes help from another to not only complete your job, but to stay productive while doing so.
Continue reading ‘Staying Productive when working with a Team’
Winter holidays are coming and people start to spend more and more time searching for Christmas presents for their friends and families. “Avoid the Christmas crowds and do your Christmas shopping from home this year!” this is how most online shopping sites ads sound like. And this wouldn’t be a bad thing at all if we wouldn’t consider the CareerBuilder survey which concluded that more than half of employees who have Internet access at work say they will shop for holiday gifts from the office.
While online shopping may be far more efficient than braving the crowds at lunch hour or after work time, employee online shopping at work can compromise both security and productivity. There are two issues that both the employees and the employers have to be aware of for the good running of the company. Continue reading ‘Half of employees will do holiday shopping at work’
So, you have the luxury of working from home? Many people who are self-employed work from the comfort of their home, day after day. The same holds true for some professionals, such as salesmen. While this is a huge benefit in many ways, ask anybody who has ever worked from home and they will tell you that it can be difficult to stay productive.
Here are four productivity tips aimed to help work at home professionals to achieve efficiency in their home office:
1. Have a to-do list. This is far and away the best way to stay productive. If your to-do list shows you what need to be done you can make sure that you move through it from start to finish, no matter what comes up. Be sure to include all important tasks on your list, ranked out from top to bottom based on which ones are most important.
Continue reading ‘Productivity Tips for Work at Home Professionals’
Everybody gets sick – there is no way around this. At some point in time you will be under the weather. Unfortunately, this does not always mean that you will be able to stay in bed until you feel better. Some people have to go to work no matter how they feel. In this case, you need to make sure you stay productive. After all, you don’t want to waste an entire day sitting at your desk, staring into space.
Here are four tips for staying productive even when you are ill:
1. Pace yourself. The last thing you want to do is go all out and make yourself feel worse as the day goes on. Have a schedule of things that need to get done, and then work through them one thing at a time. This will help to keep you on track despite the fact that you are feeling ill. Continue reading ‘How to stay productive even when you are ill’
“Nobody’s perfect, but a team can be 
”. Because this is my favorite saying about teamwork and because this is perfectly true, I was thinking to provide it more attention.
Let’s take a quick view over the teamwork definition (provided by Wikipedia): “Teamwork is a joint action by two or more people, in which each person contributes with different skills and express his or her individual interests and opinions to the unity and efficiency of the group in order to achieve common goals”.
The fact that every human being is unique is a well known fact. Every employee has its personality, has specific skills and has always something new to learn. Let’s face it: nobody’s perfect and nobody knows everything. Continue reading ‘Improve team performance by simply knowing your role’
1. Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence wins championships. (Michael Jordan)
2. Teamwork divides the task and multiplies the success. (Author Unknown)
3. The nice thing about teamwork is that you always have others on your side. (Margaret Carty)
4. No one can whistle a symphony. It takes a whole orchestra to play it. (H.E. Luccock)
5. Coming together is a beginning.
Keeping together is progress.
Working together is success. (Henry Ford)
Continue reading ‘10 Quotes and Sayings about Teamwork’
Everyone has faced at least once a difficult boss and maybe, some of you were able to pass over or to manage the situation while others felt frustrated, insignificant and maltreated. I think it is important to know how to deal with a situation like this even if sometimes you have your part of fault.
Here are some tips that might help you to get over difficult situations:
1. Don’t yell and overreact. It’s enough that one person is yelling in a confrontation. If there are two persons, yelling, then there is no way to remediate the situation or to understand with each other. No matter how bad the situation is, keep your voice down and calm. The chances to solve the problem will increase significantly.
2. Listen and then explain. Just wait for the other person to tell all the problems, and only after he/she finishes the complain, you can start explaining your point of view. Otherwise you will jump into conclusions too fast and there are chances to waste a lot of time trying to solve a problem you do not know exactly (or to solve only one part of that problem). Continue reading ‘How to deal a conflict situation with your boss’
A few months ago we have discussed about the signs of a workaholic. A list of 10 signs was provided in order for everybody to check and review their work addiction. Now, that we have discovered ourselves and we have learned that being a workaholic is not the greatest method to get the best of our life, it’s time to get to action. Here are some tips that will help everybody to stop being work addicted:
- Learn to prioritize tasks. Admit it that not all the tasks have the same importance and not all of them are the most urgent. There are tasks that can be done tomorrow too and nobody will be affected by this.
- Schedule your work day and stop working after a certain hour (5 or 6 p.m. for example). Inform everybody you are in contact with at work about this and ask them not to call you after this time. Learn to leave the office once the clock hits this time. You’re done for the day and the rest can wait until tomorrow. Continue reading ‘9 tips to stop being a workaholic’
Lunch break is personal time, so, stop what you’re doing and listen!
Statistics show that 45% of the American workers are taking shorter and/or fewer lunch breaks than they did a year ago. Many employees are also skipping lunch to reduce expenses while more than a third pass on the mid-day lunch break because of increasing workload.
We are all too busy these days and taking a leisurely lunch is seen like a waste of precious time. Also, we are working hard, sacrificing the lunch break and eating junk food at our desk because the idea that we could get out of work at a reasonable hour enjoys us. This extra time could allow us to spend some quality time with our families and friends and more than that could help us avoid the rush hour.
Whatever the reason for doing it, this has to stop. Continue reading ‘Lunch break and productivity’
Defeat is not something you should be scared of. It happens even to the best of us and we should see in it a new start, new opportunities and a lot of challenge. Believe me, being defeated is more then just slant your head and accepting the humiliation. It is about being strong, accepting the facts with pride and showing up your competitors some fair play.
So accepting defeat involves a couple of aspects both related to your behavior and inside feelings.
Trying to understand these facts must be more or less difficult for some of us, depending on our character. For example, I was the kind of person that was getting out of the way if there was a failure instead of a success. This is the first mistake someone could do because in this way you will never be able to straight things up, you will loose the self-confidence but will also make the others stop putting hopes in you. At one point, you must be able to watch things from outside and realized that this behavior is making things even worst and that being defeated is not such a big deal. The major actions and consequences come only after the failure. So here are some tips that can be followed in case of defeat: Continue reading ‘How to accept defeat’
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