Setting Non-Negotiable Staff StandardsWritten by Noel Peebles
SETTING NON-NEGOTIABLE STAFF STANDARDS By Noel Peebles When a person seeks employment with your company, he or she is basically saying, “I want to work for your company.” What this really means is “I will give up doing whatever I please, show up for work and behave way you want me to behave, so long as you pay me in exchange.” Now, that gives you employer, opportunity to set some standards of behavior that are non-negotiable. That doesn’t mean you are taking away any creativity from your employees. After all, it is important for staff members to have some flexibility and to project their own personality into their job. With that said; it is also a good idea for employer to be inflexible with some things. In other words set non-negotiable standards. This is no different from every day life. Society has rules. Imagine, for example, if there were no road signs or laws to guide us on how to behave. Imagine if there were no rules in sport… it would be a shambles, right? The truth is, most of us like to know our boundaries, because that way we know what we can and can’t do. If we break law we get fined or arrested. If we don’t play fairly in sport we get penalized in some way. We are use to non-negotiable standards. Why should it be any different when running a business? It shouldn’t! To run smoothly, every business needs rules and policy. Although staff members may not always agree with policy, they can and usually will comply. I will give you a couple of examples of what I mean - When I ran my retail stores I had a staff uniform designed. Staff members were required to wear uniform – that was non-negotiable. However, it wasn’t quite like being in military. There were various acceptable combinations, so staff could adjust uniform to suit their own personality. Here’s deal: It was a non-negotiable standard that staff members were required to wear uniform. Furthermore, it needed to be within agreed guidelines using any one of approved combinations. Anything else was unacceptable. Now, that's not unreasonable. Another example was handling of money. Banknotes were required to be put into cash registers in correct compartments and all facing in same direction. I had worked out that it took same amount of time, to put money away in a tidy order, as it did to shove it in any old way. This kept cash registers tidy and made counting money much easier. This was another non-negotiable standard that worked well.
| | How to run an e-commerce business on $30.00 per yearWritten by Paul Holstein
Lots of people dream of owning a small business and working for themselves. Usually they get discouraged by high cost of starting a business. However, in today's economy, you don't need a lot of money to start an e-commerce business. In fact, all you need is $30.00To run a professional, successful e-commerce business on Internet, you need 9 things: 1) A top level domain 2) Web Hosting (with no 3rd party ads) 3) FTP access to your web host 4) E-mail 5) E-commerce hosting (shopping cart) 6) Ability to accept major credit cards 7) A product or service to sell 8) Web Content 9) Traffic to your web site All of these usually cost money. However, if you've got time and energy, you can do it all for only $30.00 per year. This article will explain everything you need to setup your e-commerce business for price of a dinner for two at an inexpensive restaurant. So skip your next meal and put this plan into action. It will be good for your health and your financial health. Let's get started. First, you will need to register a top-level domain. This can be tricky. However, if you throw in enough dashes in your domain, you should be able to find a name relatively simply. For instance, if you'd like to have a domain called fleacontrol.com, you'll find domain is already taken. However, if you try flea-control.com, you may find name is available. Now here is a real surprise, all else being equal, flea-control.com is a better name to use than fleacontrol.com. That's because your two words in your URL will be searchable and will be included in list of key words for your web site. Think about it, no one searches for fleacontrol on Google. However, they may search for "flea control" So how do you find a name. You go to https://secure.arishost.com/join/affiliate.cgi?af_id=1488 and do a search. ArisHost will tell you if your name is available. Once you have found a name, you then need to register that name and find a company to host your content. Now is time to get out that $30.00. The cheapest way I have found to register a domain and get web hosting and get FTP access and get e-mail is through https://secure.arishost.com/join/affiliate.cgi?af_id=1488 They charge only $30.00 for all of that. It is best deal I've found on net. They also have world class support for their sites and can even do web development for under $10.00 per hour. If someone can find a better deal than that, please let me know. OK, we are half way done. Now you need an e-commerce hosting solution. Unless you are prepared to write your own shopping cart software, you will need some way to capture all sales on your web site, add up totals for each product purchased, compute sales tax and shipping, obtain payment information, and finally get that information back to you so you can do something about it. Here's good news, you can do all of that for free. All you have to do is sign up for a free shopping cart at Mal's e-commerce. Here is link: http://www.mals-e.com/ Mal's offers a very simple and powerful e-commerce solution for free. That's right, it's free. They do have a premium option which lets you link to your merchant account, but for your brand new site, you probably won't need premium features for at least 6 months to a year.
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