Blogs

Articles and blog of Note – February 2016

Three themes stood out over the past few weeks: the obvious one of new year’s resolutions and predictions; our skill or lack of it with the English language and of course the Court of Human Rights ruling in favour of an employer who monitored an employee’s personal emails.

2016 predictions and resolutions

1. Set goals rather than resolutions.  Did you set yourself up for failure just a week into the new year by setting a series of new year’s resolutions which within a week you had broken?  Well it turns out that it is better to establish some SMART goals against which we can monitor our progress. It’s never too late to re-calibrate and set new goals.
2. Ten goals for the IT department for 2016. The technology press abounded with hot tips.  This was not so much about what the future would look like, but how you can change hearts and mind during 2016 to really exploit the power of IT to improve performance.
3. Cyber crime predictions for 2016. There is little doubt that cyber crime will continue to rise in the foreseeable future and that the cyber criminals may continue to have the upper hand, but maybe not for ever.  This article underlines the need to be forever vigilant especially using mobile devices.

How clearly do you communicate?

1. The corporate guff awards for 2015.  As always perhaps the funniest article of the month, when FT Assistant Editor Lucy Kellaway hands out her awards for the biggest load of waffle written over the past twelve month. It’s worth the time to set up a free FT.com account just to access her Guffipedia.    There are wonderful phrases like ‘We will deepen our leadership of food-to-go’, meaning make better value sandwiches.
2. English deficit causes more harm than the digital divide.  A controversial article by Michael Shapinker again in the FT about the impact of the lack of good skills in English can harm the economy.
3. Do you write email pearls or lead balloons? In keeping with the above two articles, a Mesmo Consultancy blog on using good email etiquette to send the right message right first time rather than writing an email which might just start another email media disaster.

Monitoring employee’s personal emails

1. Are you stealing the company’s broadband? Recently the European Court of Human Rights ruled against an employee who protested that his company was monitoring his use of the company’s email system for his personal use.  A Mesmo consultancy blog on the pros and cons of this ruling and implications for the future of both corporate email etiquette and email overload.

Tags: corporate email etiquette, corporate email overload, cyber crime, Lucy Kellaway, Mesmo Consultancy, SMART goals

Comments are closed.