All Communications Articles
  • Employers are using severance packages to protect their brands

    Terri Williams Business Management, Services & Risk Management

    The employee experience has typically included the recruitment and hiring process, onboarding, and how workers are treated on a day-to-day basis. However, the employee experience has now evolved to also include how companies handle severance and workforce transition. According to a recent report, 44% of all companies surveyed now offer some form of severance benefits to all employees, not just senior managers. These are some of the trends pertaining severance and transition.

  • The 6-month association checkup

    Bob Harris and Laura Crowther Association Management

    Six-month checkups are common in healthcare. They work to prevent disease and analyze progress. Associations can benefit from a similar six-month checkup. At the Coastal Carolinas Association of Realtors (CCAR), the board decided to focus on accountability and advancement of the strategic plan we drafted every few years. The strategy used to formulate the plan is modeled after the Japanese concept of Kaizen, meaning "continuous improvement."

  • Popular European RV website launches in the US

    Dave G. Houser Recreation & Leisure

    Following its successful introduction in Europe in 2015, CaraMaps, a French collaborative website and mobile app dedicated to RVers, has come to the United States. Already serving nearly 250,000 travelers in six European countries with a free database of more than 60,000 locations (campgrounds, parking and service areas, tourist offices, etc.), CaraMaps is confident that its slick, intuitive online directory will find acceptance in the vastly larger U.S. market, which is 9 million RV owners strong.

  • Why PIPs should be a manager’s favorite tool

    Catherine Iste Business Management, Services & Risk Management

    Performance improvement plans (PIPs) are these amazing little forms that can pave a smoother path to professional growth or termination. They can end bad behavior and create positive new habits. Unfortunately, they require a few things of which we do not often have enough: time, patience and focus. Here are a few reasons why PIPs should be a manager’s favorite tool and how they should be used.

  • Pivot! How to take your marketing in a new direction

    Brie Ragland Marketing

    In an iconic scene from the show "Friends," Ross has purchased a brand-new couch, but decides to deliver it to his apartment himself, instead of paying the outrageous delivery fee the store charges. As he waits for help from his friends, he sketches a plan for easy movement up his apartment's stairway. To the characters' chagrin, the couch doesn’t fit up the stairs the way Ross originally planned in his drawing. Thinking on his feet, Ross "pivots" to a new plan…and the hilarity ensues. So, how can you apply this strategy to your own company? Well, no executive wants to admit his/her marketing efforts are failing, but when the numbers tell a story so grim even Phoebe Buffay couldn't put a good spin on it, it's time to pivot.

  • Find something more important than your passion

    Catherine Iste Business Management, Services & Risk Management

    It turns out that trying to find our passion may be a futile search. For those of us who believe a passion is something we have and just need to discover, we may be setting ourselves up to fail. Researchers at Stanford and Yale found that those of us who believe passions can be found also tend to believe that once we find our passion, it will provide us with limitless motivation. Unfortunately, this means we may bounce from one thing to another, because as soon as the activity becomes difficult or unmotivating, we tend to believe it is because it is not our passion.

  • 2019: The year of patient health record breaches

    Scott E. Rupp Healthcare Administration

    Patient health record breaches are on a big rise this year, doubling last year's figures. About 32 million patient records have already been breached during the first half of 2019, twice as many as the total for all of 2018, according to the 2019 Mid-Year Breach Barometer Report from IT security firm Protenus. Current numbers for the first half of the year also point to the fact that there were 285 total breaches reported between January and June. Surprisingly and shockingly, since 2016, not a day has gone by without a breach.

  • Beating age discrimination just got harder

    Patrick Gleeson Law Enforcement, Defense & Security

    Fighting age discrimination in employment was never easy. Perhaps the most important obstacle is that age discrimination isn’t easy to prove. Historically, when age discrimination in employment suits do go to trial, they’ve been decided overwhelmingly in favor of corporate America and against workers — about 99% of the time. As daunting as this sounds, recent significant appellate court decisions will almost certainly tilt the playing field even further toward corporate America and away from an increasing number of aging workers.

  • A look at NEC’s enterprise solutions for hospitality businesses

    Linchi Kwok Science & Technology

    I recently met with the hospitality team of NEC Global Enterprise Solutions at NEC Corporation's headquarters in Tokyo. The team gave me a brief introduction of what services NEC provides and a tour of the NEC Future Creation Hub, an interactive showroom for the company’s latest tech products. The trip to NEC's headquarters was, in fact, a follow-up visit after I met with the company’s hospitality team at HITEC 2019 in Minneapolis in June. After getting a sneak peek of what NEC offers, I wonder whether tech firms or hospitality companies are the force that drives the transformation of the industry.

  • Dealing with negativity on social media — and in life

    Mashaal Ryan Mental Healthcare

    No one truly wants to deal with negativity. But that doesn't change the fact that negativity is everywhere, especially with social media connecting people more than ever before. When you see a negative comment, review, post, text message, email or any other type of communication, science tells us that it actually does damage our brain. The toxic energy that comes from others can create an adverse reaction in our consciousness. So, what do we do?