What's New?

Home-Based Collaboration Centers - The Perfect Trend for Business Centers

In an increasingly mobile world, a number of major Fortune 500 companies are literally expanding their workspace outside the office walls. More and more organizations have been adapting "alternative workplace strategies" at an accelerated rate in the last five years.

According to a survey conducted by CoreNet, 86% of respondents report having some kind of flexible workspace program with 40% of those starting five or more years ago. This trend will gain strength over the next three years.

It is unlikely that the whole world will be telecommuting in the next five years. Corporate offices in the future will have a higher percentage of workers who spend daytime hours working from home. However, regular meetings among staff will still need to be scheduled once a week. Many corporate organizations now utilize "home-based collaboration centers," whereby employees can meet on neutral ground between their homes and offices.

This trend is perfect for your center and will drive meeting room revenue as well as other center services. All you have to do is contact the major companies in your market and let them know about your "home-based collaboration center."

Masters of the Academy

Introducing CDR-DATA Corporation

This edition of the Academic is brought to you by CDR-DATA Corporation. CDR-DATA's team has consistently delivered proven products and services that provide answers to management's questions on telecommunications usage and allocation. CDR-Data has gained its market share by consistently delivering high quality and flexible solutions to each and every client. Their goal is to provide you with the additional resources you need to win, without you having to overextend your current staff. They partner with centers to tailor and implement successful long-term strategies, providing communications accounting reporting that best supports your business and tactical goals.

They specialize in gathering telecommunications data from a disparate group of sources and delivering it in a common and easy-to-understand format so that centers can effectively manage their telecommunications and personnel resources. To learn more, visit www.cdrdata.com or call them at +1 (626) 791.9700.

Training that Works

A New Trend in An Old Friend – The Value of Coaching

Today's employers cannot simply flash money to entice their team to work harder. However, the current cutbacks in the workplace shed new light on coaching as an effective team engagement and development tool.

In fact, most team members welcome being challenged and guided by their coaches. Coaching is the act of helping someone determine how to best achieve personal goals, build professional skills and expertise, and meet the goals of the center.

Team members appreciate when coaches push them to work beyond daily expectations. Stretch assignments are welcomed in a tumultuous workplace climate. Individuals who are coached to think beyond their normal boundaries are the very ones who can turn companies around in this type of marketplace.

Team members need guided independent work and honest dialogue from their manager and coach. Some of the best attributes of effective coaching is informal interactions, guidance, and direction between managers and their direct reports.

A manager acting as a coach can acknowledge that her team members are worried, create a forum for addressing concerns, and then direct them back to the business at hand.

For a full discussion on how you can become an effective manager and coach to your team members, contact us today.

Case Study

Tweeting Out

Twitter is a free micro-blogging service. Users sign up, create profiles, and begin sending short messages, known as "tweets," about who they are and what they are doing.

A growing number of companies use Twitter to foster communication among employees and customers. Southwest Airlines tweets first time customers with the message, "Hope you enjoyed your first-ever Southwest flight! Can't wait to see you onboard again."

Compared to instant messaging, which requires you to address people individually, Twitter broadcasts to a person's entire group of followers. People who use it to get expert advice on the fly say it usually returns results immediately.

Many experts predict that micro-messaging will be as common as email in a few years, and may replace email for certain kinds of information, such as client and customer relations.

Another popular use of Twitter is building professional networks. Start today and begin using Twitter to get to know other professionals, post regular updates about your work, get help from other experts, and attract followers of your own. Don't forget to tweet your clients and thank them for a recent meeting room booking or completed center service project.

Focus On...

Building Trust through Conflict

Ironically, you have an opportunity to take a relationship to a higher level of trust after a conflict situation. Think of a time when your car had to be returned to your dealer for repair. You may have felt frustrated and annoyed by the situation, but if your auto dealer handled the situation successfully, you are more likely to choose that dealer over another in the future because you trust that they will come through for you, even if there is an issue. To rise to that level of trust in conflict situations, you must be able to:

Adapt
Nothing is more irritating than being in conflict with another person who is rigidly adhering to their set of rules and who is unwilling to adapt to a particular situation. Be willing to look at the situation objectively and let go of resentment, bias, and inflexible thinking.

Keep the Relationship Warm
Just because you are coming from opposite viewpoints, you don't have to treat each other coldly or rudely. That only deepens the resentment in a conflict situation. Try to continue to connect on a human level with the other person.

Listen to Values
Sometimes a conflict situation gets bogged down in petty details. If you can focus and look for shared values, you can often find a way to resolve the conflict.

Act on What You Hear
If another person has an issue with you and feels strongly enough about it to express it, it is your responsibility as a professional to act on that communication. When you do so, you show your good faith in trying to bring the conflict to a mutually acceptable resolution.

Follow Up
You can't simply walk away from a conflict situation and expect that everything will resolve itself. People need time to cool off and process solutions, but you should always follow up with the other person and check to see that you have moved beyond the conflict in your relationship.

Be Willing to Change Yourself
How can you expect another person to change if you can't change yourself? Someone once said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, but expecting different results. To put the conflict behind you permanently, you have to demonstrate that you are doing your best to change.

Insider Tips

Social Net-What?

Elites know that effective networking today is about quickly cutting through the clutter and creating meaningful online and offline connections, relationships, and rapport – the kind that enables the giving and receiving of trust.

However, most people tie networking to their job search, networking only when they are pursuing their next career move. People, especially Americans, tend to be very reactive. Most only use networking when they have a problem and need to fix it.

The Elites view it as an evolving process that they want to do well in, so they foster relationships with others.

Networking today is more challenging and more complex than in the past because there are more relationships to manage and put into context and more unwanted emails and requests to answer. Truly effective networking requires more than "connections" or "friends" - it requires sorting through the clutter and focusing on the mutually beneficial relationships.

Relationships are becoming more important and professionals need to realize that they need social networking sites to build and foster those relationships.

Good networking skills can be learned by anyone at any stage in their career. We need to lose the idea that networking is throwing your business card out there, being part of an online community, or spending time at a meet-and-greet. Networking is a two-way street. It's about reaching out to help other people. There is nothing worse than someone who is reaching out in a superficial way to only reap the benefits.

For more Insider Tips, visit the Academy site to access the Training Bytes section.