第四輯? TEST 4

Make sure employees' daily efforts contribute to your company's business objectives.

The first step in unlocking your company's true potential is ensuring your employees understand how their specific job or role contributes to achieving your company's business objectives.

Establishing a formal process for creating relevant goals for each employee, and monitoring or measuring performance against a company objectives, unquestionably results in both individual and company success.

Keep in mind your success in aligning employee and company goals depends on an open and ongoing dialogue with management.

Keep employees energized and engaged.

Building a culture in which employees are energized and engaged to perform at maximum levels (and beyond) requires both strong management skills, and a consistent process for providing accurate, quality feedback.

Teamwork in the workplace is an important factor for project success. As a result, developing an effective project team is one of the primary responsibilities of a project manager.

Why is teamwork important for your project? Teamwork is important because it creates a human synergy. It amplifies the results of each member of your team such that the overall result is greater than the individual contributions made by each member.

When you take on the role of project manager it is easy to think that the work all needs to be done by you. It is true that you have a lot of responsibility to shoulder but you have to also remember that the teamwork aspect of a project is one of the most important issues of all.

There is no doubt that you can achieve a lot more if you work as a team. No matter how fast you are at doing things, you can delegate some of them to make the piece of work goes more smoothly.

Another good point to remember is that every single member of the team is going to bring different skills to the project. If you are lucky you will get a team which has a wide range of skills but even if you don't, you will still find that it is far better to encourage everyone to use their skills and gain new ones.

A lot of the time you will need to come up with creative solutions to push your project forward, and in this case the more people you have thinking about the issue the better. I have always been a fan of getting the team members together for a brainstorming session when there is a problem to solve.

It is far more enjoyable to taste project success with a team around you than to do it on your own. By sharing the success you achieve with your team members you can feel a lot more satisfaction from what you have done.

In terms of your personal development you will be delighted to feel more of a true project leader. This is an aspect of the role which can take time for new project managers to grow into. There is no real substitute for experiencing in this part of the job so you should look to get involved in leading your team confidently as soon as possible.

How does the employer train staff to ensure they have the skills, knowledge and attitudes to make them competent in the safety and health aspects of their work?

Employers must provide their employees with introductory instruction and training necessary to ensure their safety and health. There are specific training obligations for employees involved in safety consultation and safety representation processes.

Safety and health must form part of the training of all people who work at the workplace. Training helps people acquire the skills, knowledge and attitudes to make them competent in the safety and health aspects of their work. It includes formal off-the- job training instruction to individuals and groups, and on-the-job coaching and counselling.

However, trading is not a substitute for proper risk control, for example to compensate for poorly designed plant or inadequate workstations. The key to effective training is to understand the job requirements and individual abilities.

Everyone in the organization should know about the organization's Safety Statement and the philosophy underlying it and the structure and systems for delivering the policy.

Employees should also know which parts of the systems are relevant to them, to understand the major risks in the organization's activities and how they are controlled.

The key questions that an employer should ask when measuring, reviewing and auditing their safety and health performance are: Do you know how well you perform in safety and health? Are your executive board, your directors and senior management team kept informed of your safety and health performance and do you report on this performance in your annual report?

How do you know if you're meeting your own objectives and standards for safety and health? Are your controls for risks good enough? How do you know you are complying with the safety and health laws that affect your business?

Do your accident or incident investigations get to all the underlying causes - or do they stop when you find the first person that has made a mistake?

Consider the benefits and risks to your business when deciding to exhibit your product or service.

These will be different for each event; and however there can be a lot to gain from promoting your product in person with in a different environment.

Benefits trade shows are generally targeted at an industry and people involved or interested in that industry.

Exhibitions are open to a large and sometimes diverse range of audiences (usually the general public)

This provides you with a platform to promote your product and or service to a broader group that may have little or no knowledge of your products and services.

Depending on your type of business, product and market testing can be carried out at trade shows and exhibitions to gain industry or general opinion about your offering.

Being involved in a trade show or exhibition can provide you with twentieth to branch out to business-to-business trading and create a customer database from the visitors to your display booth.

Risks

It's also important to ensure that you have thoroughly researched attending a trade show or exhibition, and if you have a business adviser, discuss it with them.

There are risks involved and you need to be aware of those risks in the planning stages:

Trade shows require at least a day and probably more of your time.

Traveling to trade shows can be costly.

Display at a trade show can also be costly.

There will probably be quite a bit of competition at all shows.

Choosing the wrong trade show to exhibit your business products or services can result in displaying to the wrong audience.

Poor promotion can mean the costs of attending the trade show outweigh any revenue you gain.