Small Business Tips and Ideas - BizSieve.com

Is a Company Softball Team A Good Idea?

If most of us are honest with ourselves, we’d much rather be out with our friends having fun than at work. Even when we like our coworkers, it’s preferable to meet outside of the confines of work. While it’s true that coworkers sometimes find time to hang out away from the office, it’s hard to get everyone together at once. Many companies, however, have solved this issue by starting company softball teams. Workers all over the country get a kick out of participating in these “leagues,” but it’s important to remember that, with everything in life, a little bad always comes with the good.

Benefits of Company Softball Leagues

1) Morale Some benefits of hosting or being involved in a company softball league are rather obvious. Most people would automatically, and correctly, assume that this practice can increase worker morale. Additionally, a great deal of good publicity can come when the surrounding public recognizes that the company is engaged in enjoyable events. Honestly, who wouldn’t want to frequent an organization that takes the time in life to have fun?

2) Networking There are, however, a few lesser known benefits that those involved in a softball league can gain. For instance, these gatherings are a great way for employees to meet others to whom they’ve yet to be introduced. Knowing more people in the company is a quick way to get called on for special projects and even potential promotions.

3) Teamwork Additionally, the company will also benefit because the games will strengthen the relationships between workers and increase their ability to work together. This is really a priceless benefit when it comes to team and worker productivity. Some of the benefits for the employees, however, are even more important than they could imagine.

4) Performer Rewards Employees who choose to participate will also see benefits if the company ever falls onto difficult times. If employers have to choose a few specific people to let go, they’re much less likely to lay off those who actively made an effort to be part of the company’s social network.

Disadvantages of Company Softball Leagues

1) Behavior Issues Sadly, there are going to be some disadvantages related to company softball leagues, but most of these issues are related to mistakes and outright misbehavior by those in attendance. Bad sportsmanship, for instance, can ruin the entire atmosphere of the day and turn a fun event into a serious issue. Even worse, if the general public sees an employee act out of line, it will reflect badly on the entire company.

2) Injuries It’s also a problem when employees become injured during these games. A bit of unfair play or a simple misstep on the field can lead to a serious injury. This is bad for the employee, but it can also be detrimental for the company. Asking a Calabasas or a Charlotte personal injury attorney, you’ll find that laws governing work-related injuries not really “work-related” are complex, and this can lead to serious legal issues for the employer and their injured worker.

3) Compensation Disputes The bigger problem for an employee will arise after they’re injured at the game. They are often entitled to one form of compensation or another, but considering the fact that the injury didn’t actually happen during the course of one’s work duties, it’s likely that an employer will want to avoid paying extensive benefits. This makes it likely that an injured worker will want to get an injury attorney.

It’s a great thing for coworkers to come together and enjoy each other through a bit of outside-of-work competition. Even with the potential hazards of hosting a company softball team, the act itself carries numerous benefits which usually outweigh the potential risks. It’s simply important to have a few ground rules laid out, including sportsmanship and safety issues, to ensure that a company softball game is an enjoyable success.

A recreational athlete, Ann Bailey posts these notes to encourage company team sports, for benefit to both the business and the employee. Working to protect the rights of clients in injury cases, the Charlotte personal injury attorney group, Auger & Auger Attorneys at Law, advises both business owners and workers in all aspects of resolving compensation issues in company sports incidents.

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cgabc/6046619514/

Entertainment Ideas For Corporate Events

If you’re hosting a corporate event in the near future, you may be feeling the pressure of having to be responsible for everyone having fun. If you’re looking for entertainment ideas, though, you’ve come to the right place. Following a few of these tips will guarantee that your event isn’t flat and that everyone’s having a great time with each other. You want to promote conversation and fun, and these ideas should help you do just that.

1- Leave the Office Behind

This one is pretty self-explanatory. Instead of hosting your event at the office, why not make the event fun by taking the party somewhere fun? You could go to a bowling alley or a local bar so that you can play a couple of games and have a few drinks while you spend time together, which will really help people relax and have fun.

2- Hire a Comedian

If you are staying back at the office, consider bringing some entertainment straight to you. Everyone likes comedy, but you just have to make sure that the comedian you hire has appropriate material that isn’t going to offend anyone in the office. Check out the comic’s act beforehand to make sure that it’s appropriate and then bring him or her in on the night of the event for lots of laughs and fun!

3- Music Always Helps

Live music is always great for helping people relax and filling any awkward silences in conversation. For higher-class events, you can hire a string quartet; but for lower-key affairs there’s nothing wrong with hiring a local cover band. Cover bands are great because they play songs that everyone already knows and loves and the music will really help everyone loosen up and give them something to talk about.

4- Competition in the Park

If you can’t make it to the bowling alley but still want to get out of the office, perhaps you could go to a local park for a game of softball or soccer. Competition is good for team building as well as being a lot of fun, and you can ensure that the physical activity will wake everyone up and get them laughing and talking as you present a great picnic lunch for them afterwards.

5- Spend the Day Volunteering

Another great excuse to get outside and put some physical work in is volunteering. You can team up with local charities and help build a house, feed the homeless, or a variety of other similar activities. Volunteering is also really great for team building and helps your employees develop a sense of pride about themselves, each other and the company.

So there you have it, five ideas that should make your corporate event unforgettable. Not every party has to be spent with all your employees gathered awkwardly around the punch bowl, after all. The goal of these event ideas is to get people moving and talking; to help them feel comfortable and to encourage networking and non-work related socialization, and you can rest assured that they do just that.

About the Author: William is currently blogging for a new jersey corporate events venue. When he is not blogging, he enjoys helping people plan their events and make it as fun as possible.

One For All, And All For The Good Of The Company

When is a company free from employee risk? If you answered anything other than “never,” then you need to think again. Employees present a challenge from the second they begin their careers with your company, and this challenge stays with them until they leave. As an employer, you must do everything within your power to ensure that everyone is treated equally and with respect. Smart employers know that deviating from this philosophy leads to potentially crushing legal action, and they take special care to avoid this road. The following outlines some of the areas in which unfair employee practices can lead to troubling situations.

HR: The Beginning

Right from the start, you need to ensure that your hiring process applies equally to everyone, regardless of age, race, gender or other classifications. Anyone who applies to your company should meet a streamlined, tier-based process that takes a blind eye to discriminating factors. By using a standardized process, you ensure that someone gets eliminated based on merit rather than potentially litigious factors.

Salary

Once you hire, make sure that your salary offering meets competitive rates while staying fair across the board. If you must offer more compensation for hiring someone from an opposing business to entice them to your company, then offer it as a bonus sign-on incentive based on experience rather than other unfair qualifications.

Training & Learning the Ropes

When acclimating to a new work environment, people may feel isolated as a new person. This could lead to potentially threatening behavior and reports. Eliminate this risk by ensuring that employees are treated fairly throughout the entire onboarding and training processes. As with the hiring process, streamline your training and onboarding by providing detailed handbooks at the outset and asking new hires to learn the ropes during off-times. This will allow them to receive paid training without the stress of adjusting to a new social order simultaneously. Ensure that each new hire receives a checklist of tasks and that the supervisor discusses the policies in detail, which will allow a new employee to ask questions in confidence. The same holds true for training. You should always conduct a regulated training process to ensure that every employee who works in the same position receives the same training. This will lead to better productivity and improved morale.

Evaluations

In order to eliminate charges of unjust promotions or raises, you should have a system in place to gauge employee work performance. This system should be designed in an unbiased way and should match the goals of your organization. That way, when you evaluate your employees, everyone receives a rating based on objective measures rather than subjective feelings.

Discipline

Because you will have a standard system for employee evaluations, discipline will not be cause for legal action. Employees may try to argue that a supervisor is singling them out, but if you have a set standard for counseling, then you have nothing to fear. Bias plays no part in a formalized discipline system. Make sure to involve several managers in the process, as claims of bias are weakened when the proof comes from different, objective sources.

Black and White

What’s the point of having a printed handbook if no one will adhere to its rules? Your business should run on the principle that what’s printed applies universally to everyone, even in tough situations or rare occurrences. For this reason, if your HR staff allows special circumstances to slip through the cracks or fails to uphold the handbook to the letter, then you need to have a serious discussion with them. You cannot be impartial and allow some to get away with things while others follow the rules. Your handbook should be considered the final word on every situation.

Benefits of HRIS & PEO

A human resource information system (HRIS) or professional employer organization (PEO) can further help you to eliminate employee risk in extreme or especially threatening situations. Sometimes, despite standardized procedures, employees make outlandish claims that could cost a company serious trouble. An HR person might know what to do but be momentarily distracted by the severity of the claim. In these cases, having an HRIS or PEO can alleviate some of the burden and allow the HR department to perform its job efficiently and effectively.

About the Author: Rebecca Whiteside. Read more on The Human Resources Blog.

7 Tips For Business Forecasting

Business forecasting is a dynamic part of your business strategy that are done to anticipate the future development of the organization and predict the trends and sales patterns. There are a variety of business forecasting software tools to forecast sales, social network traffic, production etc. Business forecasting is very important for every business in today’s world to analyze the success or failure of a business. Here in this article we will help with 7 useful hints for accurate business forecasting .

Every business owner should be aware that business forecasting alone cannot guarantee success for your business, but it guides you in the right direction and with your own efforts you have to be prepared for success or failure. One of the main advantages of business forecasting is that it allows to make proper decisions and enables the management to alter the business operation at the right time to make profits. Let us now see the 7 tips for business forecasting.

Tips #1 Know your baseline

Before doing business forecasting for your business in the future, you have to take analyze the current situation. Then you have to record the information like variable expenses, gross margin, interest rates, fixed expenses and operating profit margin. These records of information will help you determine whether your forecasting is realistic or not. Let us consider for example, if your margin jumps up significantly, then you may need to reconsider the assumptions made by you are reasonable or not.

Tips # 2 Analyze Multiple Scenarios

After you’re done with your baselines, you need be ready to calculate your forecast. In this process, you need to determine how much you expect sell and how it will cost you in the given year. In this step you have to keep track of scenarios like staffing levels, advertising, price points and marketing.

Tips # 3 Develop a flexible process

Most of the business organizations make mistakes by just looking at the sales history. So, it’s very important to develop a flexible process as it impossible to perform a single test to track the sales system, product delivery and customer history etc.

Tips # 4 Don’t involve to be too complicated

In business forecasting, you should not involve in a complicated process. Since business forecasting involves a lot of mathematical calculations.

Tips # 5 Use business forecasting softwares

To simplify your business forecasting process you can make use of business marketing softwares available in the market. Since business forecasting software can quickly and easily run the various forecasting models for you.

Tips # 6 Time series Analysis

In time series analysis of business forecasting, to judge the future operation you have to take the historical data and put it into a statistical generator. Since if there is any disruption in the supply chain, it could reduce the sales.

Tips # 7 Budget

Whenever the company begins to slow down, you need to adjust the budget with new data. This adjustment can helpful for your future operations.

The above business forecasting tips will help you determine the future growth of your business and help you to make a good profit.

About the Author: Freddy is a passionate business blogger and works as a provider of cashflow forecast software.

A Day in The Life of a Wall Street Trader

If you’re interested in becoming a Wall Street trader, get ready for an action-packed career that’s full of ups and downs. The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics says that the job outlook is set to grow by about 15% through the year 2020, which is about as fast as average. Also, although the median salary is just over $70,000 per year, there are significant fluctuations depending on individual success and general market conditions. Keep reading to learn more about what you might do during a typical day of trading on Wall Street.

Getting Ready for the Day

Because you may be trading in international markets, expect to be an early riser, ready to sit at a desk on the trading floor by about 6:30 every morning. On your way to work, you might use a tablet device or smartphone to read the latest versions of financial newspapers, but as soon as the commute is over, it’s time to hit the trading floor.

What Does a Trading Floor Look Like?

If you’ve ever seen news coverage of the trading floor, your impression might be that it’s all about people yelling at each other and hoping that the markets close in a favorable way. Although these high-pressure trading floors do exist, most of them are more low-key. While working as a trader, you’ll probably notice that most trading floors are big rooms filled with rows of long desks.

Watching the Markets

Traders from the same group often sit near each other and spend their time gazing at monitors that chronicle what the markets are doing. Some traders have several monitors so they can minimize the time spent switching between different windows. As you sit down at your desk, you may have five or more monitors to watch throughout the day.

Besides keeping an eye on the monitors that broadcast news about the markets, you’ll also probably access a financial information service called Bloomberg. It’ll tell you about any stocks you’re interested in via real-time information. The prices for securities changes by the second, but Bloomberg has features that allow you to look at how stocks in certain sectors are performing. That’s particularly useful if you’re a trader who specializes in certain industries like technology or energy.

Making the Trades

Some Wall Street traders deal with hundreds of individual stocks on a daily basis. To make things easier, you’ll use a specially designed platform that allows you to place orders quickly and also look at how pending orders are progressing.

What About Breaks?

Most successful Wall Street traders go to great lengths to make sure they don’t miss any important happenings. This means limiting your bathroom breaks so they’re as short as possible and also having lunch brought to your desk by a secretary, so you can wolf it down while still staying informed of developments.

The Close of the Day

Monitoring the markets is a constant necessity, and even if you see some gains, it’s often hard to relax, due to a slight paranoia that things could change in an instant. Around 5 o’clock, your day on the trading floor is done, but if you’re serious about staying competitive, you’ll continue expanding your knowledge about the financial industry even during off-hours.

As you prepare dinner and get ready for bed, any bits of free time might be filled with the same kind of analysis you started your day with and got engrossed in all day on the trading floor, only so you can feel informed when you wake up and do it all over again.

About the Author: Author Jena Daniels blogs for business sites. Interested in combining your interest in trading with a successful business? One option to prepare for your career is to get an mba degree online from Pepperdine.