Whether you’re just starting your home business or you’ve already taken the plunge and are starting to work with your business idea, you and you alone are in charge of creating your own livelihood. Put simply, if you aren’t productive, you don’t make money. End of story.

One of the main reasons that people are drawn to a home business is the thought of having flexible hours and being your own boss. Being without a schedule or routine is often a strange and uncomfortable feeling for many new home business owners. You have to create office hours and stick to them. Tell your family and friends when your business hours are and ask them to treat that schedule just as they did when you worked at a job. They will take your home business seriously when they know that you are dedicated to working at and growing your business.

If you work at home with children, then some distractions will be unavoidable and part of the beauty of a home business, but others such as phone calls from your sister or visits from your best friend during your office hours are really only taking you away from your ability to be productive and earn money.

Every business needs to have a plan, even the smallest of setups. Very many new home business owners tend to neglect the simple productivity skill of goal setting. If you have no idea what you’re going to do next, and just work on a wing and a prayer, then you’ll find yourself spinning wheels and decreasing your productivity. Set short-term goals along with your long-term ones so that you can mark out each day’s tasks. Your short-term goals should also help you achieve your long-term goal.

One final simple step that every home business owner should take daily is to remember to have fun. Avoid being stressed about your home-based business – the reason why you got into it in the first place is because you wanted to be free from the regular troubles of your previous job. Meet each day and objective as positively as you can, and before long you will achieve the level of success you desire from your home business.

One of the toughest and most challenging situations people face when going about their day is how to stick to their schedule when they are constantly being interrupted. A client has a crisis, co-workers are in a jam, your boss is breathing down your neck, a friend calls… there are many sorts of interruptions anyone can face on any given day.

The solution is extremely simple and equally powerful – schedule time for interruption. That’s right, just as you would schedule a meeting with a customer or event with your boss, scheduling a specific time in your day for interruptions is a technique that our students nationwide continually tell us is one of the most powerful time management tips they have ever used.

There are two components. First, as you are planning your day or week, allot a certain amount of time for the sole purpose of dealing with ‘other people’s emergencies.’ What normally happens when someone calls or comes running into your office with something that they need your immediate help with? You drop whatever you are in the middle of and rush to their attention. Rebounding from all your interruptions!

You have a specific time predetermined in your day that you are available for ‘scheduled interruptions.’ In the long run, your boss with be impressed that you are getting more done, you will have more quality time to prevent most of your clients’ crises, and your coworkers will learn that you are not at their beck and call.

A frequent question people ask is, “how much interruption time do I need to schedule and when should I schedule it?” If you are the manager of a large group of people, you are going to have more people knocking on your door for help with their challenges than if you are just getting started with a company. Most people find that right before or after lunch makes sense, as that is an easy breaking time in the middle of the day.

Technology helps us get in touch–and it prevents us from being in touch. It helps us save time–and makes us waste time. People struggling to be understood. Interpersonal conflicts are rampant, and listening seems to be a lost art.

As people over-depend on technology, these communication challenges become more difficult. It’s one thing to rely on email to keep in contact with people in another country, but it’s quite a different thing to rely email to keep in contact with your coworker sitting in the cubicle next to you.

We often hear people say they spend over two hours a day reading and responding to email messages. And that’s just the average email user; some people receive as many as 100-150 email messages a day. Since over ninety percent of the impact of a message is non-verbal (eye-contact, gestures, posture, voice, etc.), that leaves only a 10 percent probability you will be truly understood when you use email. Since people have a hard time expressing themselves, they may tend to manipulate, lie, or keep quiet rather than communicate directly. It’s easier to lie while hiding behind a computer screen. It’s easier to reject someone using email rather than looking them in the eye.

This could be the beginning of a new management craze — MBE (Management By Email), the over-reliance on email when other channels (methods) would be more appropriate. Complex and highly personal information, as illustrated above, is not well-suited for email. There’s too much room for error, hurt feelings, guess-work and misunderstanding.

Email is a wonderful channel for impersonal and simple information. It works well for organizing large groups of people to come together for a common cause. Also, for following-up, email is fabulous. Sending emails to a large group is a fast, easy, and cost-effective way to follow-up with simple, impersonal information. Email is the best channel for this task.

On the flip side, there are numerous stories where email was the channel of choice and misunderstandings were the norm.

If the message you are sending in anything but simple and impersonal, then email is not the best channel to use. A face-to-face interaction or a telephone conversation would be much better.

Seth Godin has written of “Lazy People in a Hurry,” nailing this cryptic thinking process. “Lazy, as in not willing to do the work to create long-term benefits. Lazy as in not willing to read the instructions, follow the manual, do all the steps, invest the time in the research” says Godin. They act busy, but never actually too busy to tell anyone who will listen. These people consistently appear to be in the middle of a project, seldom concluding anything or creating a stir. It amazes me how people think that they are actually saving even a bit of time by rejecting a proposal or discarding a new idea for the sake of busy-ness. One simple, new idea might open new markets, drastically enable a company to dominate their industry and incredibly increase its bottom line. Imagine the salary and career options available to the employee who successfully presents such revolutionary new, market-changing ideas to the board.

Those who earnestly desire to escape the trap of busy-ness must learn the importance and critical nature of each of the following required skills: Prioritize every task. Make bold, timely decisions. Stay focused, keeping distractions at a distance.

As manager of your own time, never deal with the same subject matter more than once. Make confident decisions based upon the facts and consequences as you understand them. Learn to act immediately upon your decisions. Never second guess yourself. Make note of the results your decisions and resultant actions have brought about, making necessary strategic adjustments and course corrections where needed. Trust your own judgment. Keep focused. Do not allow other people or circumstances to distract you from your purpose, especially those “lazy people in a hurry.”

Time-management, decision-making skills and the ability to act quickly are the emerging currencies of the future. Opportunity waits for no one and richly rewards the decisive.

There are so many excuses we create in order to delay or defer acting on our plans to achieve success.

We procrastinate because we convince ourselves that: It can’t get done, I don’t have enough time, I have too much to do already, I’m short on money so now isn’t a good time, My dog’s sick so I’m not in the mood to start anything right now, I’m not smart enough, I’m not qualified…, on and on, blah, blah, blah. Did you ever break up the word ‘rationalize’? The ability to ‘ration lies’ to ourselves. We feed ourselves small doses of lies every day; to the point where we convince ourselves not to ACT.

Once a student asked a question about how to network into a job outside his current area of concentration. I responded by asking him what were some of the obstacles stopping him. He responded with a litany of excuses of why he wasn’t able to do it (offices are not in the same building, hard to get a hold of people, it’s a big company, etc). But each excuse, as I bluntly pointed out to him, was just that, an excuse. These were inconveniences, NOT obstacles. Huge difference!

You see none of his excuses for networking and meeting people outside his group were valid. I’ve concluded that dreams don’t dissipate over night. The reason many people will never achieve their goals or realize their dreams is because they ‘rationalize’ them away, bit-by-bit, day-by-day, week-by-week and so on. So my question to you is this, “What have you been ‘rationalizing’ away?” “What dreams or goals have you been deferring, waiting for the right moment or timing?

Take action…don’t rationalize your success away! Remember, success happens for a reason.

Whether an organization is a small scale industry located in one county or a multi-faceted organization spread across continents, some amount of money will be spent annually implementing and fostering team building strategies in order to achieve a number of desired goals. To understand these issues much more thoroughly, we have to understand what team building is all about.

By definition you could say team building is about fostering a number of activities and strategies which are designed to bolster the relationship between team members and open up channels of communication and effectiveness in the workplace. Team building activities may include anything from sporting events between employees to seminars at the office or even other less common ideas which some team building experts are known to have come up with.

The whole idea is to use these processes to achieve bonding between team members and increase the effectiveness of the relationships they have with each other.

Team building ideas need not be expensive but rather than do the hard work of trying to discern what their employees need, most companies are just content to outsource the work to self-proclaimed gurus who charge exorbitantly and whose methods yield little results. In order to achieve effective team building between members, the company management must make sure that any idea of activity suggested should focus on specific aspects that tend to deal with the foundations necessary for team building to occur, without this, all the efforts made and money spent will be nothing more than a waste of money.

The first phase of arriving at effective team building ideas is to do some research on the currents state of the teams in your organization. You need to identify the issues which are a problem and how to eliminate these issues while looking at their sources of strength and maximizing the effects of these sources of strength.

No one should be billing themselves as stupid. After all you are operating in a high-paced world, handling multiple demands on your time, and still producing good work. Yet if you are operating in this mode and are feeling stressed and unproductive because your to do list and daily stacks keep growing, then you may really be stupid.

If you are, chances are that is the reason you are having to cope with stress each day. An increased pace at work along with new technology demands that you have a method for integrating changes.

As I assess office productivity, I might find that one person is using four or five different systems to manage their daily tasks. The end result is that, with multiple systems, none of them works.

Your productivity system can be paper-based or electronic-based. Deciding which depends on both your comfort level with electronics and the format of the information that is coming into your work area.

Are you writing everything down and committing to a location and time? Do you not leave work without having cleared your desk? Does your office reflect your work quality?
You cannot afford to retain the same processes you made use of years ago with the increasing workloads that you have to manage. If you proceed with the same routines, the end result is that lack of productivity and stress.

Learn the tools and techniques for good time management that will make you efficient and productive-and let you go home on time each evening with a cleared desk.

Metrics are applied in all areas of business operations. There are productivity metrics, sales performance metrics, and others. Metric process research not only analyzes the current situation but also analyzes what other things must be done to align organizational routines with general goals and objectives.

Even with clearly defined outputs, measuring organizational or individual performance is not that easy unless the organization regularly practice assessment of accomplishments based on plans; in which case, no prolonged and far-ranging research is needed to gather and analyze data and render sound judgment. Even relatively current data need to be collected, collated, interpreted, and coherently presented, which means that research is still being employed to measure performance. Also, with this type of metric process, limitations in plans, activities, and even in the metrics themselves are easier detected and addressed.

When a company does not make a practice of frequent assessment activities, full-blown research assumes great importance, but usually at a stage when problems are more noticeable, as in falling sales or decreasing employee productivity. Research in this case is more involved and deeper. Aside from the difficulty of developing and maintaining a metric process that supplies timely data to managers for sound decision making, the formulation of metrics must be consistent with resources and the business climate in the first place. Research is part and parcel of the metric process. It plays a vital role in ensuring relevancy of metrics and metrics processes. A company can probably just adopt a metric process adopted by other organizations but certain things must be considered before implementing such a move. In-depth research should be conducted to determine whether the process will fit existing organizational structures and culture and determine what changes can be introduced either to the structure or to the metrics process.

Employees acquire approximately 80 percent of their work-related knowledge and skills on the job. One of the most common and least expensive methods of training and development is OJT. In today’s economy it is tempting to reduce costs by cutting back on formal training and rely on shadow training (unstructured OJT). However, shadow training is one of the least effective and most costly forms of training. Shadow training is typically unstructured and inconsistent, and is typically not results oriented or performance based.

Formalized OJT is based on the assumption that new employees lack certain skills and the goal of the OJT program is to instill these skills. It is a training method that uses a systems approach. When used wisely and appropriately, formalized OJT programs can be as effective as many off-the-job training methods. A formalized OJT program can help organizations in many ways.

Many organizations take a “hit or miss” approach to on the job training. Someone determines that they need training and management reacts by implementing training with out analyzing the need for training. Management must take a close look at the business need for training. The next step is to select and properly train your OJT Trainers. Trainers should be proficient in the Four-Step method of training and how to apply adult learning theory.

Once you have properly trained your trainers, you need to involve them in developing the training materials needed to support the OJT program. Modifying lesson materials, however, must be controlled otherwise your formal program will disintegrate before your eyes. This review must include management, supervision, Training/HR Dept, and the trainers.

In today’s economy and transitioning workforce, organizations are faced with the continuous need for developing, maintaining, and expanding the knowledge and skills of their workforce. Organizations are impacted by a diverse workforce, rapidly changing technology, and increased global competitiveness, To meet these changing dynamics companies are turning to increased multi-skilled positions, high performance work teams, process re-engineering, and pay for performance, This has created the need for a training methodology that effectively transfers skill and knowledge in a cost effective manner and that can be easily implemented on-the-job. The obvious answer is a formalized OJT program geared to performance improvement and worker competence.

If you run a successful business you may have wondered what you are going to do when the time comes for you to voluntarily or involuntarily retire – thus ensuring your business survives and flourishes. Succession planning is important if you want your business to continue after you are gone.

There are a few steps you can take to make the process easier.

(1.) It is never too early to start planning for retirement which includes planning for your business. One of the most important things you can do when you begin succession planning is to obtain an accurate valuation of your business and keep it updated. Knowing your businesses worth will protect your business in the event you must sell or pass it to your heirs unexpectedly. When the time comes for you to retire, already knowing the value of your business will make selling it (or passing it down to family) that much easier.

(2.) It is also important to identify who will be responsible for the succession of your business and to determine who has the skills to effectively run your business. The person you want as the new owner may not have the necessary skills to successfully run your business in which case you would have to assign someone else as the manager in charge of business operations. Remember to prepare your successor by providing training, hands-on experience, support and coaching. Tip: Hire a professional HR firm to handle this as it provides a good ‘arms length’ argument should you need one.

(3.) Because business succession impacts not only you and your successor, but your employees as well, it is important to address any concerns they may have during your planning. It is important to reassure employees their position with the company is safe, or if it will be changing it is important to be open and honest from the beginning. Remember open communication and transparency is key to company survival.

(4.) Even the best laid plans may not always work, so ensure you plan for contingencies – develop a ‘Plan B’. For instance, if you plan to leave your business to a family member, what happens if they are unable to inherit it because of death or decide they do not want to run the business?

You need time, careful thought and patience to work through a succession plan. Last piece of advise – consult with the appropriate experts with respect to your succession planning: your tax adviser/accountant, your banker, your Human Resources expert… they will help the company to not only to survive but thrive and you can ride into the sunset, guilt-free and comfortably!

About the Author: Fernie Black is one of the founding partners at HR-Fusion, specializing in outsourced recruitment, selection and hiring. HR-Fusion works with clients on a retained basis.

This dynamic Human Resources (HR) consulting firm focuses on strategic business and organizational development through HR delivery and training. The integrated team approach and ‘full service’ philosophy makes HR-Fusion a reliable resource and valuable business partner when you need professional HR support.

HR-Fusion’s Hamilton, Ontario location is uniquely positioned to provide services to Brantford, Burlington, Oakville, and the surrounding Niagara region. HR requirements outside the immediate geographic area are handled through the HR-Fusion partner network and provides coast to coast coverage as required.

Visit http://www.HR-Fusion.ca/HR_Articles for more articles like this…