Male or female employees

This maybe not be politically correct subject, but I want to share my experience working with both male and female employees, keep sexism out, this is purely practical approach.

I haven’t worked in a diverse office environment such the one I am working in now. I have noticed few significant differences when it comes to male and female employees.

I will not say who is better, but I will list areas where I noticed these differences:

1-Attention to details
2-Good listeners
3-Willing to take responsibility
4-Loyalty
5-Fast learner
6-Making suggestion
7-Out spoken

These are the areas where I noticed some significant differences between the genders.

Templates from Microsoft for your small business

I am not a big fan of Microsoft office, but Microsoft owns the world as my professor used to say. Microsoft website is full of productivity tools that are available for free.

There are plenty of templates ready for use by small business owners, below is only a small list of what you can find at Microsoft site:

Business plan for startup business
Bank loan request for small business
Projected balance sheet
Personal financial statement
Four-year profit projection
Start-up expenses
Opening day balance sheet
Financial history and ratios
12 month profit and loss projection
12 month sales forecast
Competitive analysis

You can download these templates and many more at:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/templates/default.aspx

How to discipline your employees

Employees-management conflict is a complicated and delicate issue. Concerned managers always try to find ways to strike a fair balance between giving employees their full rights but at the same time not losing their authority as managers.

I had a recent incident with one of my employees, I am his direct manager and I try to be to him as a mentor more than a manager, I was shocked when I ordered him to perform a task and his reply was “it can wait till the next week”, his answer really made me re-think my entire relation with my staff.

On my first day on my new consulting job, I have made it clear to my staff, most of them recent graduates, that I will adhere to an open door policy with them and they will get my full support in any efforts they take to gain more experience.

I will continue the open door policy with my staff but at the same time I will have a meeting with this one employee who failed to follow his manager’s order. In the meeting I will make it very clear that he has not respected his superiors and his action will have consequences. I will temporarily relief him from some of the responsibilities I gave him until I feel he is ready again to act in a responsible manner.

The use of abbreviations in business communications

Clear communication is one of the vital elements of successful business management. Traveling and working in few countries, I have seen first hand how the use of abbreviations could lead to a big mis-understanding.

I have seen the use of “u r” which means “you are” in formal business communications, when I started my current consulting job, I would see the abbreviation ‘RP”, in many of my company’s formal letters and no where it was explained what “ RP” stands for, it stand for “resident permit.”.

We are living in a very diverse world, and the wide spread of communications made it easy for businesses to communicate world wide, but that doesn’t not mean that abbreviations used by you locally would be understood by people in another country.

When is comes to important business communication, spell the words out, don’t use abbreviations unless there were for abbreviations that understood and are officially used world wide like WWW, which stands for world wide web or abbreviations that pertain to a certain profession.

Smart management not cheap management

As business managers, we all care about reducing costs and maximizing profit, we look for ways to acquire assets at the lowest possible cost. One of my clients who I do consulting work for have the habit of buying used supplies including computers. He gives me a lot of work trying to fix his network that runs on old used computers. I asked him many times why he keeps buying old computers while by spending few hundreds extra dollars he can get himself new computers? He said “I run an insurance company and most of the time my staff uses the computers only to fill forms online, I don’t need new computers with extra features that I will never use.”

I understand his reasoning, but I also understand that old machines will keep breaking and his maintenance bill will keep going up.

This client has many offices that I do network and computer maintenance work for, so one day I told him “lets start buying new computers for one of your offices and see how this will reduce your maintenance cost”, he agreed and we got new computers for that particular office, and the results amazed him, his maintenance and network support calls for that office went to almost zero, and he was able to recover the cost of the new computers from the saving he made by not losing work hours due to network down time and not having to pay for network troubleshooting.

At my current consulting job, we have the same problem, some off brand computers that breaks every few days and not reliable web hosting company for our e-mail services. Now again, I am starting to clean up this company and show the management how they can save by investing in good equipment and reliable services, even if the cost is bit high, but it will pay-off later.

Rising Oil prices and cost management

The continues hike in oil prices is not going to stop anytime soon, if your business is directly affected by oil price fluctuations, it would be a wise decision to plan your budget around higher oil prices.

Many businesses, especially small businesses, may psychologically, get affected by hearing the news of higher oil prices and start to worry about their bottom line.

But as a business you got to look at your numbers. As a consultant who uses the internet and the phones extensively in his work, I saw a sharp decline in my communications bill, from almost $1000 a month to below $100 a month, that’s 90% decrease in cost.

This is only one example of how costs are dropping for other services. Having your employees work remotely from home is another example of cost saving method you can utilize, by having your employees work from home, you can cut on many types of costs associated with the office environment such as (office rent, utilities bills, commuting time, etc.)

The costs of few commodities may be rising, but the overall cost of doing business is dropping.

Fleet management tips needed

At my current job, I am facing a bit of a challenge managing our company’s fleet of about 70 cars. I have searched the internet for good fleet management software and I found few good software but I am not sure about the quality of these software.

Does anyone know of a good fleet management software?

Challenges that we are facing with our fleet of cars:

1- Rental history
2- Accident history
3- Maintenance history
4- Mileage
5- Cost of ownership
6- Warranty information
7- Checkout and check records

Of course we have some type of records for our fleet, but I like to have a complete control of our fleet where no part of fleet management is over looked.

Does anyone know of good software for fleet management and also any tips in this subject are welcome

Domain name ownership rights

In my last post, I talked about the problem facing my company regarding our domain name, basically, some IT guy who worked with our company as IT consultant decided to register our company domain under his name, and now he is black mailing us, asking us to pay him money in order for him to release the domain to us.

This case got me thinking about the latest development in this field, what the law says about domain names? Are they protected by any copy rights? If the company business name is officially registered with the local chamber of commerce or the local court, would that automatically give them the rights over companyname.com domain name?

We all heard in the early ages of the internet about how big corporations would pay millions for domain names; Is there any development on the legal side of this issue?

How can we re-claim our domain name?

I have a legal question concerning the ownership of a domain name.

While back our company setup e-mail accounts and registered its domain name. The person who did the accounts setup and domain registration was an IT consultant who was hired by some of our company’s managers, at that time, no one at the company new much about domain name registrations or about IT in general.

Now when I was trying to setup our company’s website I found out that the IT consultant registered the domain name under his own company name and not our company name. When I contacted the IT consultant and asked him how come he registered the domain name under his own company name and not under ours, he said “no one at your company cared”, and when I asked him to release the domain name to us, he sent me a long bill and said he wont transfer the domain to us unless we pay our bills. Keep in mind he is still hosting our e-mail accounts and we work with very big government agencies and for security and confidentiality, our e-mail accounts must be hosted under our own company name.

My questions are:
1- Are there any laws that regulate these matters?
2- We have proof that we have paid him for his services. Will that bind him to release the domain to us, will the domain reseller take this as a proof that the domain belongs to us?
3- He is hosting our company’s e-mail accounts up to this moment, and we use them daily, will the domain reseller or domain registrar take this as a proof that we are paying this IT consultant and he actually took advantage of our company’s staff members not being IT savvy and registered the ownership of the Domain and the e-mail accounts under his name?
4- The last thing I may add, I have asked this IT consultant “Are you trying to make money out of us by trying to sell to us our own domain name? and his answer was “YES.”

Nano and cutting costs

The introduction of “Nano”, the cheapest car in the world by the Indian Giant Tata, recived many welcomes and it also created many concerns by the environmentalists.
The supporters of the project see it as a mean of providing a cheap car for the masses, just as Henry Ford did with his T-model, and the environmentalists see it as a new pollutant, especially in the crowded roads of India.

As a manager, who is always looking for tips for better management ideas, I find the Nano project is an example of practical and futuristic thinking. The Nano car has no air-conditioning nor it has power windows, it’s a small car, and has less horse power, but it has a price tag that many Indian consumers can afford. India’s roads are filled with two wheels motor bikes and three wheels (rickshaws), and Nano will be a great alternative for the owners of these vehicles.

By eliminating few extra items form its Nano Model, Tata made a great car that is affordable by the masses not only in India, but around the world.

As far as the environmentalists concerns, well, the new Nano has no air-conditioning, so it well produce less gases and the Indian roads and the roads of many countries around the world are filled with cheap transportations vehicles and the Nano will only by a sophisticated replacement.