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Employee Retention 101

November 3, 2009 By

According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, the best way to keep your top executives is to make it easier for them to leave.

When the economy rebounds, if your employees aren’t happy, they will leave.

That’s right — offer them challenges, enhance their skills, expand their networks.

Perhaps that would have made perfect sense 30 years ago, when taking a job often meant staying with a company for the duration of your career. But today, when job-hopping is standard and one-company careers are a relic, grooming employees just doesn’t seem prudent.

But it is, and even more so in an economic recession. (When the economy rebounds, if your employees aren’t happy, they will leave.) Consider the article’s points, and apply them to employees at any career stage, from entry-level to C-suite. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Rants, Training Tagged With: , ,

Legacy Inefficiency, or A Different Smart Phone Debate

October 1, 2009 By

The Wall Street Journal never fails to address topics that seem obscure but are awfully relevant to current affairs. This time the paper turns its attention to the growing battle over keyboard layout due to the proliferation of full-keyboard smart phones.

It’s QWERTY versus Dvorak and the fight is getting ugly.

It’s QWERTY versus Dvorak and the fight is getting ugly. That is, as ugly as a keyboard layout melee can get.

A little background: The first typewriter’s keyboard was arranged in alphabetical order, which proved to be poor design when two keys near each other were pressed in succession. The keys would jam. So inventor Christopher Sholes shuffled the letters around, placing the most commonly used keys away from each other. Thus, the QWERTY keyboard was born.

But there’s another keyboard layout, the Dvorak, which is not widely used. The Dvorak has been around since the 1930s, when an efficiency-minded inventor named August Dvorak placed the most commonly used letters, like vowels, on the “home row” (on a QWERTY, the home row starts with ASDF… and ends at single and double quotes). [Read more...]

Filed Under: Mobile Devices, Rants Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Why Cutting the IT Budget Fails

September 29, 2009 By

Recently, I was reading our customer comments and one in particular caused me to pause: The customer stated that he didn’t know Outlook personal folders could fill up.

I thought to myself, “Where do you think all that mail goes? The great .pst in the sky?”

I thought to myself, “Where do you think all that mail goes? The great .pst in the sky?”

That was the bad-mannered former software consultant in me, and I quickly reminded myself everyone has their own areas of expertise — some technical, some not.

Case in point: I know someone who is a carpenter and general contractor. He had very little formal education; most of it has been on-the-job. If you need to know what kind of wood something is made of — whether it’s a common type like Spanish cedar or an exotic species such as Bubinga (African rosewood) — he’ll tell you in a second. That’s his specialty, and he knows it well.

But when he tries to work with document templates and database files for his business, he’s not so nimble. For that, he brings in help. [Read more...]

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Setting Aside Help Desk Stereotypes

September 2, 2009 By

Help desk techs are geeks who use jargon to make themselves feel superior, and delight in torturing users with basic computer skills. Customers who call help desks are governed by superstition, are unable to understand basic logic, and think that computers will take over the world some day. [Read more...]

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