Business Management | BizSieve.com

How Waste Management Jobs Can Help Redesign the Energy Use of a Business

How companies manage waste is a core element of their entitlement to the ISO 14001 mark, which signifies a commitment to the development and maintenance of sustainable working processes. Waste management jobs are therefore a key part of the business’ ability to become consistently environmentally aware – a fact that bleeds over both into that business’ CSR and overall sustainability quotient.

The management of waste is a far more pressing problem than most readers would probably believe. Landfill sites, never much vaunted in the first place thanks to their unsightly nature, their ability to harbour serious diseases, and their potential production of noxious or toxic gases, are running out – and so with nowhere left to put the refuse we accrete, we’re having to start thinking of other means of dealing with the issue.

Waste management jobs are largely focused on getting as much of a company’s rubbish as possible either reused, recycled or turned into energy. Where none of these options are possible, the waste must be compacted to the smallest possible size – which is either done through incineration or through physical compaction.

Incineration must be properly managed in order for it to be both effective and environmentally sound. Obviously a by-product of waste management jobs in which incineration is a common practice, gas and ash both present pollution hazards – though properly managed they may also be used to provide various forms of energy, for example through heat or pressure.

Waste management where incineration is a legal requirement (crematoria, for example) comes with a whole load of subsidiary concerns. High temperature gas management is a skilled activity in its own right, requiring the design of a system capable of filtering hot gas to remove all contaminants before it finally passes into the air.

Waste management jobs require highly qualified and experienced candidates, who are able to determine the particular waste management needs of their industries and businesses. Every sector has its own materials and waste producing processes – so every waste manager must be capable of approaching the waste problem from a practical as well as a theoretical standpoint. It’s only by creating waste management procedures that answer the needs of the business as well as those of the law that any real progress can be made.

Waste management jobs are therefore carried out in concert with other environmental professionals – particularly ecologists, who are able to advise about the environmental impacts of different kinds of waste managing.

Part of the waste manager’s job, in concert with these other professionals, is to understand the potentials of the waste itself – both good and bad. Good waste potential includes the possibility that it may be turned into energy, or that it may be recycled and used in future manufacturing. Bad potential includes the possibility of lasting damage through “hard to kill” substances – like some aggressive dioxins, for instance, which can have serious consequences of the environment and which may be created as a by-product of trying to manage the waste in the first place.

About the Author: Lisa jane is a freelance copywriter and environmentalist. He’s currently working with Ends Job Search promoting a variety of jobs including waste management jobs and specialist jobs in the conservation sector.

5 Tips for Small Business HR Outsourcing

In a bad economy, companies are turning to a variety of money-saving methods. From cutting a few days out of the work week, to eliminating positions, many companies are in a tough position. If you can’t cut down your work week or eliminate a position all together, however, it would be wise to consider HR outsourcing.

Not only does outsourcing your HR team result in one less in-house employee, it takes the stress of workers compensation, health insurance, payroll and tax filing off of your hands. According to CPEHR.com, “In place of current management, the HRO firm takes over some of the cumbersome administrative functions relating to employment.”

To make the most of this cost effective service, consider the following tips.

Set Goals

When you’re outsourcing an in-house position, it’s important that it’s making a difference for your company. The only way to measure that is to benchmark the progress by setting goals. Goal setting is valuable in any business setting as it increases productivity and purpose. In outsourcing, however, it’s an effective way to keep all your teams working together.

For the company: One of the benefits of outsourcing HR is cost savings in insurance, lawsuits and recruiting. Set savings related goals to be sure you’re getting the most ROI.
For your HR team: With your HR employees out of house, you want to be sure they are staying on track. Set up goals for the week, month or quarter.

Maintain Open Communication

When you can’t have a department meeting or quick chat in passing, it’s critical that you make communication a priority. Outsourcing-Center.com suggests, “… It is important to merge them through open, honest communication steeped in realistic expectations around how things are going to work.” Be sure to utilize various forms of communication to make it effective:

Set an email checking schedule to ensure emails are being received and read.
Set up phone meetings; weekly, daily, whatever you need to stay on the same page.
Utilize new technology such as video chat to maintain a face to face relationship.

Have a Team

Although you should be wise to choose an HRO company that you trust, it’s important that you have an in-house team working closely with your far-away employees. For important projects, having in-house hands involved can ensure that the job is on track and in line with your over-all goals for the company as a whole, not just the HR department. Thus, choosing the right team will be crucial.

Include one member of each department involved; IT, Accounting, etc.
Choose employees that will work well together. For an important project, you want your employees, in-house and outsourced, to be productive and open.
Only include your outsourced HR employee when necessary, as a significant benefit is allowing them to focus strictly on HR without being pulled into side jobs and projects within the office.

Outsourcing your HR employee or team will be cost effective for any sized business. By taking HR duties out of the office, you’re reducing your costs and risks involved. Be sure that you’re making the most of these services with goal setting, communication, and team work.

About the Author: Jessica Sanders is an avid small business writer touching on topics that range from social media to business management. She is a professional blogger and web content writer for ResourceNation.com.

Benefits of Hiring Business Consultants

Every decision in your business is very important and it has its pros and cons. While you are finalising any business decision, you need to be certain that it has more pros than cons. Quite often this judgement can go wrong and you may end up making wrong decisions. This is where professional business consultants come into the picture. You may scoff at the idea of hiring a business consultant, but only when you hire one, you will realise that it is a cost-efficient decision.

There are many benefits of hiring a professional business consultant and this article will help you familiarise with these benefits. Business consultants provide services such as business strategy planning, market and demand forecasting, litigation support, policy analysis and consulting and many more. Let us now understand how your business can benefit through these services.

Strategic planning: This is the first and the most important task of a professional business consultant. It deals with understanding your business, identifying the problems and seeking the opportunities. A professional business consultant will strategise a plan for your business that will lead to your company’s success. They will also help you identify the products and services, which will help your business flourish in the long run.

Marketing campaigns: Professional business consultants are not only helpful for mapping out business plans, but also help run successful marketing campaigns. They create entire marketing campaigns, which includes editing, graphic designing and copy writing.

Business check-up: Business consultants conduct regular business check-ups, which help to identify the health of your organisation. This is also useful to assess the strengths and weaknesses of your business and work upon the strengths.

Cost efficiency: Hiring a professional business consultant will give you the greatest ‘bang for your buck.’ They will provide you with business advice for all areas of your business and manage everything with utmost perfection.

Save time and utilise it efficiently: When you hire a business consultant, a great amount of burden will be off your shoulders. Thus, you will have plenty of time to devote to other aspects of business. You can focus on product development, improvising employee relations and providing employee training.

After hiring a professional business consultant, at the end of the day, you will be more relaxed because your business will be safely placed in the able hands of an experienced individual. Business consultants help to alleviate some of the stress that business owners face on a daily basis. All businesses, big and small, regardless of the product or service they provide, will most certainly benefit from hiring a professional business consultant. In today’s fast pacing business world, a business consultant is an important need for every organisation to ensure that all tasks are accomplished successfully.

Surprise Management: Diversify to Weather Tough Times

Today’s businesses have used Change Management and Risk Management with varying degrees of success. While these strategies can help companies prepare for an unknown future, they fall just short of accomplishing the strategic goals that 21st century companies need if they are to keep pace with rapidly changing market conditions. What will it take to fill the gaps in these two theories? Surprise Management.

Background

We all know how disconcerting change can be. And when we add surprise to the equation, we face a huge organizational challenge. Uncertainty, unpredictability, and our all-too-human inability to dictate outcomes are facts of life that organizations must address if they are to thrive.

The natural fear of uncertainty often leads organizations to implement uncertainty-reduction (or risk-management) measures—and hence the development of Risk Management theory. Many have tried to eliminate “the surprise factor”—with varying degrees of success. One method that’s been suggested for eliminating surprise is to anticipate surprises before they happen and take appropriate steps to minimize their occurrence—certainly a commendable goal. Yet, a surprise by its very nature cannot be foreseen. (Otherwise it wouldn’t be a surprise.)

A more realistic way of phrasing the above goal might be to say that reducing surprise involves an attempt to predict what could go wrong (i.e. to project risk) and put in place preventive measures against these potential problem occurrences—measures which not only minimize the overall number of occurrences but also reduce the number that are actually surprises. It is only in this sense that Risk Management can “eliminate the surprise factor.” While it would be impossible to anticipate the surprises themselves, this thorough projection of future possibilities would undoubtedly help eliminate some surprises, simply because the organization would now be aware that these eventualities could potentially occur. Yet, the success of this approach in managing surprise is limited.

In contrast, Change Management, by providing both managers and workers with the tools they need to handle the reality of change across a rapidly evolving business landscape—and perhaps equipping them for various specific future eventualities—can at least help an organization prepare for surprises, if not reduce the frequency of their occurrence.

Surprise Management: A More Comprehensive and More Flexible Approach

Surprise Management—a concept which is thoroughly analyzed in a 2005 article in the British Journal of Management, “Surprises in Management and Organization: Concept, Sources and A Typology”—presents the rationale for addressing unwelcome (and perhaps even welcome) surprises through the concept of diversification (despite the authors’ non-use of that specific term).

The authors define surprise as “any event that happens unexpectedly, or any expected event that takes an unexpected turn.” The main point of the piece may be distilled into the following brief summary: Because unpredictable events and unexpected turns of events (aka, surprises) cannot be precisely controlled, a more diversified and more flexible approach is needed for an effective response.

As the authors state, “Surprises can potentially result in organizational catastrophes (e.g., Shrivastava, 1992),” and they therefore conclude that “rather than merely insisting on the prediction of surprises, organizational researchers should investigate how organizations might develop the resilience and mindfulness necessary to deal with unanticipated events.”

Surprise Management Tools

A few surprise-management strategies the authors recommend for developing such mindful resilience follow:

Bricolage (constructing a solution from whatever diverse resources may be at hand)
Improvization (“the ability to access creativity in the moment and under pressure, to resolve or direct the resolution of a situation to meet [company] objectives…”)
Distributed decision-making (a decision-making process [that is] distributed across multiple participants, each of whom contributes to the final decision by performing one or more tasks)
Minimal structuring (implementing “a set of consensual guidelines[,] agreements, [and] co-ordination devices that attempt to focus the activities of people around a common set of goals and deadlines without limiting their discretion to best decide how to reach these goals)
Dynamic adaptive capabilities (“the capacity of…institutional approaches to permit actions that are effective ‘adaptive’ responses to changing environmental circumstances”)

The above approaches combine to provide the diversified organizational response that today’s enterprises need to skillfully manage the surprises that might otherwise prove catastrophic to their successful operation—helping them not just survive, but thrive.

About the Author: Guest post contributed by Sarah Carling, on behalf of Injury-lawyers.net.au.

5 Budget Management Tips for the Small Business Owner

Running a small business means pushing your products and services against the odds created by big business and natural competition, making every dollar worth counting at every turn. Limiting overhead and increasing profits are mainstays for all businesses but their minute importance is even more pronounced for small businesses, with a single bill or lost sale potentially making the difference between success and failure.

If you’re a small business owner looking to exert greater control over your budget through new tools and ideas, consider these five budget management tips for small business owners:

1. Separate Personal and Business Finances

Separate Personal and Business Finances

Keeping the money you use for home expenses separate from that intended for business is an absolute must for long-term success. Good accounting entails knowing exactly where expenses and profits belong and mixing these different financial areas, whether on paper or only in your mind, has the potential to lead to disaster.

2. Maintain Six Months of Expenses

Maintain Six Months of Expenses

While often easier said than done, having ample cash to fall back on is of absolute importance if you intend to see your small business to long-term success. Even the most well-thought out startups require time and patience to turn a profit and having money put away for both personal and business expenses to help you through the initial tight stages will help both you and your business to remain viable from opening day onward.

3. Become a Professional Accountant

What better way is there to manage your finances accurately than by becoming a professional yourself? Small business owners in the United States are able to study for and complete the Uniform Certified Public Accountant Examination at any time, giving you the cutting-edge knowledge and tools required to take full, hands-on control over your finances, both personal and business. You’ll need to pass cpa exams in order to do that though.

4. Take Your Taxes Seriously!

Take Your Taxes Seriously!

Whether you take our advice above to consider becoming a certified public accountant or you hire an outside professional to manage your finances, be sure to take your tax returns very seriously. This challenging requirement of being self-employed is more complicated than seemingly endless tax returns; polls show that one of the biggest tax problems faced by small business owners is failure to submit returns at all. The most cited reason for non-submitted taxes is a failure by the business owner to save taxes owed throughout the year only to balk at the total amount when that lack of financial management makes paying a tax bill impossible. To avoid such problems, always be sure to calculate the taxes and other government premiums owed on a regular basis throughout the year, maintaining accounts to hold those funds until the time that they’re needed.

5. Reassess Your Finances Regularly

Reassess Your Finances Regularly

Too often small business owners find themselves needing to review their expenditures when financial difficulty presents itself, leaving months or even years of unnecessary spending in their wake. To avoid wasting even a single dollar on unneeded overhead, take the time to review the money you spend on maintaining your business and make decisions to reduce or even eliminate costs whenever possible, avoiding uncertainty in the future and helping your business to remain viable even during the tightest of times.

Conclusion

While small business management does present difficulties not typically found in the workforce, creating and sticking to a well-thought out plan is the key to maintaining your freedom from the daily grind, making it a more than worthwhile endeavor for any entrepreneur. Follow the tips laid out above, recognize and tackle the hurdles unique to your niche and give your small business your all in an effort to ensure the best possible chance of a successful financial future!

About the Author: Jessy is a small business owner working full-time in the Internet

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