Less is more

Lunch & Learn: The growing risk of e-mail and blog mis-use

For today's employers proper employee use of e-mail, message boards, media-sharing Web sites and blogs is becoming increasingly important. Yesterday, Kelly Savage of Sedgwick Detert Moran & Arnold LLP discussed the growing risk of e-mail and blog mis-use with our lunch & learn attendees and offerred advice on implementing a successful electronic communication security policy to prevent the devastating consequences associated with employee abuse of of these and other electronic forms of communication.

Kelly represents clients in the pharmaceutical, manufacturing, transportation, computer, real estate and insurance industries and has almost a decade of experience counseling and defending companies in state and federal court at both the court and appellate level. Her presentation included polls that showed lunch & learn attendees experiencing e-mail and blog mis-use issues at their companies with the same frequency as the surveys Kelly was referencing. As many as one in three employers say they have investigated a suspected leak of confidential proprietary information in the last year, and 27.6 percent of employers surveyed have terminated an employee for violating e-mail policies.

With the issue clearly significant and growing, Kelly outlined an effective security policy to help address the issues. She also offerred to provide a sample security policy to any company who may need it as a reference point. You can contact Kelly at kelly.savage@sdma.com.

Also, check out Kelly's slides from the presentation:

Download Lunch_and_Learn_Email_Blog_Misuse

Join us for our upcoming free lunch & learn session!

Working together effectively: Using DiSC to help teams collaborate (on Thursday, December 11th, 2008 from 12:00 noon to 12:45 pm Pacific Time)

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Our lunch & learn program description and registration

Get your brown bag lunch (or snack) ready, and join us online every Thursday at 12:00 noon Pacific Time for 45 minutes to learn the latest and most innovative tips and techniques for individual and team productivity, and get the latest updates about important workplace and productivity issues.

Review program and register for our lunch & learn webinars

Upcoming Lunch & Learn Webinar on the Growing Risk of E-mail and Blog Mis-use

Proper employee use of e-mail, message boards, media-sharing Web sites and blogs is of critical importance to today’s employers. According to various surveys, as many as one in three employers say they have investigated a suspected leak of confidential proprietary information in the last year. Moreover, 27.6% of employers surveyed have terminated an employee for violating e-mail policies.

When employees misuse e-mail, message boards, and blogs in the workplace, it raises a host of security and liability issues. Employers must take steps to reduce the risks associated with employee-misuse of electronic communications to protect the assets of the business. This week's webinar will focus on creating and implementing a successful electronic communication security policy to prevent the devastating consequences associated with employee abuse of e-mail and other electronic forms of communication.

Join us for lunch and to learn more about the topic!

The growing risk of e-mail and blog mis-use (Thursday December 4th, 2008 from 12:00 noon to 12:45 pm Pacific Time)

Register for The growing risk of e-mail and blog mis-use lunch & learn webinar

Our lunch & learn program description and registration

Get your brown bag lunch (or snack) ready, and join us online every Thursday at 12:00 noon Pacific Time for 45 minutes to learn the latest and most innovative tips and techniques for individual and team productivity, and get the latest updates about important workplace and productivity issues.

Review program and register for our lunch & learn webinars

Lunch & Learn: Social Networking in Action

Social networks are communities of people who share interests and activities and are interested in exploring these interests and activities with others. Social networking has become a phenomenon and went beyond the social aspect to become an integral part of business, especially as the lines between personal and business lives continues to blur.

In this lunch & learn webinar session, our guest speaker Jason Alba, CEO and creator of JibberJobber.com, author of “I’m on LinkedIn – Now What???” and co-author of “I’m on Facebook – Now What???”, gave us an overview of social networking, and explored its business applications, and the reasons why business professionals and businesses of all sizes needs to get engaged in this field. Jason  also compared some of the popular platforms (like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter) and provided some valuable live demonstrations and useful tips.

The slides from the session: Download 3_social_network_slides_model.pdf

Our upcoming session and registration

Managing Across Time Zones—taking productivity globally (on Thursday September 25, 2008 from 12:00 noon to 12:45 pm Pacific Time)

Register for Managing Across Time Zones

Our lunch & learn program description and registration

Get your brown bag lunch (or snack) ready, and join us online every Thursday at 12:00 noon Pacific Time for 45 minutes to learn the latest and most innovative tips and techniques for individual and team productivity, and get the latest updates about important workplace and productivity issues.

Review program and register for our lunch & learn webinars

How do you engage your team members when you implement collaboration tools such as blogs, wikis, Microsoft SharePoint and the like?

Here is a summary of the suggestions offered from users and experts in the field on the best way to implement collaboration tools and engage the target audiences:

·        Make it easy and convenient for team members to use the tools to do small but important tasks. For example, checking a blog for information, or publishing an update on a specific item to a blog (rather than using email). 

·        Start small by engaging those team members that have a natural tendency to collaborate and are good early adopters. Form a tiger team and do a pilot project. You can work the kinks out before a larger roll out. It is easier to get additional team members to adapt once there is initial success.

·        Create a short collaborative project to evaluate certain tools (or have one person do an evaluation) and share the pros and cons of each tool with the rest of the team. Then the team can determine which tool is going to be the most productive to the whole group.

·        Make it fun and exciting too! Someone suggested running contests over SharePoint (scavenger hunts) or posting helpful notes that will get people thinking more and more about the value of the tool and its use for different projects.

·        Have an official cut-off date for when an old system is no longer available for use. This should be a far off date that is easy to remember (like at the turn of the fiscal year the new system comes online). This lets people know that they have a deadline to learn the new system.

·        The primary factor that enables adoption of a collaboration tool: A new project with no "incumbent" technology or process to change. So pick a new project, and work with the project team to select a tool for the project.

·        Find an executive sponsor who sees the benefits of the collaboration tool, and its impact on productivity and the ability to meet the key business objectives, and get their support in making the tool an important part of conducting business.

·        Provide the team with mini-training sessions, both formal and informal. A lot resistance to adoption has to do with the unknown and fears of wasting time. If you help your team overcome these fears, you are likely to get a much higher level of engagement.

·        Overall, the collaboration platforms should be a productivity tool, not a burden. The tool should make some important aspect of one’s job easier. Whether that is something as simple as submitting a ticket to the IT department, or viewing HR announcements, it has to be sold to the user base as something that will improve daily work life.

·        Also, at the end of the day, a tool has to be useful for the intended purpose. We too often see people thinking of all these tools as interchangeable, but blogs are more of a one-to-many tool as compared to wikis that are better at capturing widely held knowledge, which is different from SharePoint, which is much better at organizing document-focused work, e.g., word processing documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, with collaboration more often in a supporting role.

Sign up for the special "collaboration" bundle--Effective meetings, blogs, wikis, SharePoint ($35.00 special)

The collaboration bundle in March 2008 includes the three workshops listed below, and can be purchased online at:

-------------> Register online now ($35 special expires on 3/10)

• Workshop 1: Microsoft SharePoint Techniques (Tuesday March 11, 2008 from 9:30 AM - 11:30 AM PST)
• Workshop 2: Effective Meetings--Offline & Online (Tuesday March 18, 2008 from 9:30 AM - 11:30 AM PST)
• Workshop 3: Emerging Collaboration Technologies--blog, wikis, and Microsoft SharePoint (Wednesday March 26, 2008 from 8:00 AM - 12:00 PM PST)

They are made available for a nominal registration fee of $35.00 (this includes all three workshops). This is a special one time offer and seats are limited. You can order up to 10 seats.

Once you place your order, and receive the confirmation e-mail, please forward the confirmation e-mail you receive to training@people-onthego.com indicating which of the three workshops you would like to attend, and also the names and e-mails of the additional participants, and which workshops each participant would like to attend--if you order more than one seat. As a result, you and the other participants will each receive their individual login information for the desired workshops (for the web and phone conference).

-------------> Register online now ($35.00 special expires on 3/10)

PS: Please note that these workshops are also availale as corporate workshops. Feel free to e-mail us at training@people-onthego.com if you have questions, or if you would like to discuss bringing the workshops to your team.

We look forward to your participation!

How can a blog be useful internally in an organization? Question and answer from the GABA panel at SAP last night

It was quite an interesting panel last night which dealt with the topics of e-mail comunication and blogs, their benefits, as well as the risks and costs associated with their usage. One of the questions that I was aksed related to how can a blog be useful internally in an organization. Here are the examples I provided:

1. People who are subject matter experts can better share their knowledge through blogs, instead of answering questions by e-mail (and answering the same questions over and over again, and having this valuable knowledge scattered in mailboxes throughout the organization), the blog makes this knowledge reacheable and usable

2. People who are in touch with the external audiences (perfoming customer-facing activities such as sales, marketing, business development, and customer service) can share their experiences with the rest of the organizations via blogs.

3. Blog can also be used by the thought leaders and management to impact the culture. If we want a customer service oriented culture, we need to evangelize it, and blogs can be an important part of this effort.

A lot more can be said about this topic, so feel free to add your comments.

How can a blog be used in training?

One of the topics we discussed at the ASTD SIG meeting tonight was "how can blogs be used in training." And some of the ideas that were presented were:

• Provide tips and techniques about the subject matter
• Answering frequently asked questions
• Providing updates about related training events
• Get feedback from participants about their training needs
• Engage the learners ahead of time with discussions and pre-work
• Create a community around the subject matter to encourrage informal learning

Another way to express these purposes:

      Inform * Educate * Motivate * Engage * Create Culture

And your ideas are welcome. Feel free to add comments, or e-mail me with more thoughts.