Is there a right and wrong way to give?

Tue, 02/28/2012 - 14:13 • Categories: Giving, Holidays, Tech-Tav Technical Writing Blog • by Miriam

As we approach the heavy season of corporate gifts in Israel, I thought it was a good time to talk about employee gift baskets. So what is your answer? Yes or no?  

With most things, if you ask two people you can end up with three different opinions. In this case, I think the answers you’ll get from staff if you ask them will surprise you.   

Tech-Tav technical writer James Kilner finishing the 2011 Jerusalem MarathonAs we head into the gift package season, most chocolates and wines barely last long enough to avoid leaving a bitter or sour taste in the mouth. When the junk food or weird condiments are finished, the gift was nice, but the cash was probably misdirected. Do employees really appreciate gift packages from their companies? Is it silly in this age - when we all know better employee health is better for everyone - to be giving people junk food as a company activity? If not, what else can we do as executives to reward or gift our employees and staff without throwing good money out the window?

0 Comments

The marshmallow fluff of good management

Thu, 02/23/2012 - 14:57 • Categories: Management tips, Tech-Tav Technical Writing Blog • by Miriam

As I was thinking about team motivation over the last few days, my 4-year-old daughter came to me with really sticky fingers and started a long treatise on why “sticky” is so hard to deal with. Suddenly, I realized that there was a brilliant management lesson right in front of me. Management and communication are usually a lot more like marshmallow fluff than we want them to be. Communication between team members, and especially between managers and employees, is normally sticky, tricky and hard to fix once broken. Looking back over relationships and projects that have not gone the way I wanted, the problems could usually be boiled down to the communication side of things.

In response to my Fixing Stupid blogs, many people have been writing to tell me that their managers don’t know how to communicate with them and wondering how to improve the situation. They claim their managers don’t appreciate, don’t understand and don’t express themselves well. But as technical communication leaders, the thing we should be really good at is communication. How and why can so many of us be failing so badly at our professional calling of being professional communicators with management responsibilities?

I think the easy answer is that explaining a process or a procedure on paper is a lot different than dealing with an employee, their work habits or the communication that surrounds employee management. That might all be true, but frankly that’s not the whole story.

0 Comments

Seize the Day

Sun, 02/12/2012 - 13:02 • Categories: Appreciation, Tech-Tav Technical Writing Blog, Top 10 • by Miriam

I was just about to dive into my normal Saturday night routine with the kids, when suddenly my husband appeared with tears in his eyes. He choked on the words as he told me that our totally healthy, beautiful 3-month-old nephew, Shilo Eliezer of blessed memory, had died in his sleep that morning. The funeral would be in a few hours.

This weekend, as the rockets from Gaza began landing in Southern Israel again and my family experienced this tremendous loss, I felt the need to express my sadness and anger at death. This weeks’ blog was supposed to be about things I would tell my 25-year-old entrepreneurial self. I finished it already in my mind, just had not typed it out (one handed typing on a smart phone with a sick kid sleeping on me was not happening). After thinking about the things I wanted to tell my entrepreneurial self, I thought again about the things I needed to tell my regular old self. The things I forget as I hurry through life. The things we all could use a reminder about every now and again.

A post related to technical documentation/management will fill this space next week, but in the meantime, thanks for reading and allowing me to grieve and express in such a public way. 

These are the 10 life lessons I especially need to tell myself tonight. I hope you also find them useful.

1. There is actually no such thing as a deadline. Well, there is, and it is called DEATH. Otherwise, the date is an arbitrary line in the sand that someone - somewhere - drew for something. There is always a little bit more time or someone else in the project, thing, event, occasion, episode, document, deliverable or whatever it is that can or will be moved. Do not run your life on DEADlines, rather on LIFElines. If you are a boss, make sure the people who work for you can enjoy life around the schedules you give them. If not, be prepared to rearrange. People have lives to live in addition to their jobs.

0 Comments

Fixing Stupid - Part 2

Mon, 02/06/2012 - 13:37 • Categories: Management, Tech-Tav Technical Writing Blog • by Miriam

Are you stuck with a stupid boss or a boss that makes stupid decisions? Maybe I can help.

In Israel, where there seems to still be a tremendous lack of professional management experience, technical writers are often managed by self-made managers or R&D people with no formal management experience and little or no experience managing technical writers or technical writing teams. What that means is that they might know how to program in X or Y language, or run an Agile process, but they know next to nothing about managing people and even less about how to control their own tempers. There’s no excuse for managers who blow their top and take out their misguided anger on undeserving employees.  But unfortunately, it happens all too often.  Let me give you some insights that might help the next time this situation arises.

0 Comments

Search