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How Transparent Is Your Workplace?

You want your workplace to be like this bubble.

Transparency is one of those things that’s crucial to becoming a human-centric business. I’ve previously outlined the importance of building a work environment that encourages the kind of social behaviors that are key to an adaptive workplace, and transparency is crucial to at least two of them.

The decision making lever, for instance, relies upon a transparent approach to how decisions are made. It requires making clear and visible the thinking and rationale behind strategies, plans, and metrics, with an ideal scenario seeing employees contributing fully to all three.

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Trust and Openness Are Key to Innovation

Would you trust your team members in this scenario? Well, metaphorically speaking, you'd better if you want to be innovative.

Innovation thrives on openness. While it’s common to think that innovation largely consists of revolutionary breakthroughs, in reality, it is much more common for it to be a slow and iterative process of gradual improvements and remixing of existing technologies in new and novel ways. 

You may also like:  How to Shift Your Internal Culture Towards Innovation

As such, being open with your own insights, and others doing likewise, is crucial to the innovation process.

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The Top Drivers of Employee Engagement

These women certainly look engaged on the job.

 (Could employee engagement be the key to customer happiness and business success? According to a recent study by the Harvard Business Review, they are directly linked as engagement performance indicators.

However, the study found that only 24 percent of respondents said their employees were engaged even though 71 percent rank employee engagement as very important to achieving organizational success.

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Employee Engagement Is *Not* HR’s Job

If only employee engagement could be solved with a ring...

I just came across a wonderful post from the Harvard Business Review on not only how to keep employees happy but also engaged in their work (because let's be honest, they really are an extension of the same thing).

As I'm sure most of you reading this are aware, keeping employees engaged in their work is a worldwide challenge for many businesses. There are, however, many ways to fix this challenge and improve productivity across the entire company.

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The Importance of Empathy in the Workplace

If we want to build the best teams possible at work, we've got to learn some empathy.

The definition of 'empathy' is apparently more complex than I thought. However, in the context of the workplace, I believe the following suits best:

Empathy is the power of understanding and imaginatively entering into another person’s feelings.

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How to Create Content That Converts

In the immortal words of Cuba Gooding Jr., show me the content!

In today’s global marketplace, you need a web presence to survive, but that’s not all. If you want to set yourself apart, you absolutely need to create engaging content. Content marketing has been around for quite some time, but in a day and age where we grab our phones or tablets every time we need an answer to a question or curiosity, it’s even more useful than ever.

When you create useful, relevant content for your audience, they’ll come to think of you as an expert and thought leader in your field, and they’ll keep coming back to you whenever they need information in your area. This is a great start, but it’s not enough to convert your viewers and readers into customers on its own.

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Putting the Power of Positivity to Work at Work

There's no reason happiness has to be confined to after work hours.

Positive Psychology is a growing area of interest for many professionals. Its focus is on improving a person’s wellbeing and their sense of personal happiness.

It started as a focus of development in the field of psychology by Dr. Martin Seligman. He made a call to arms to help arm people with the skills to live a more positive life, and for professionals in the field to help people move away from a focus on what’s going wrong to a focus on what’s going well.

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Your Boss’ Opinion of You Really Does Matter

Eliza from My Fair Lady is a classic representation of the Pygmalion effect. 
Photo Credit Wikimedia Commons

The Pygmalion effect is one of the more fascinating aspects of psychology, and should be one of the most understood aspects of modern management. It suggests that our performances can be directly influenced by the perceptions of our bosses. So if they think you’re going to be great, and act as though you’re going to be great, then the chances are, you will be great.

There has been no shortage of evidence to support this hypothesis, but one more will certainly do no harm. It comes from a Chinese study into teaching at a couple of universities in southern China.

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Middle Managers, the Flow of Ideas, and Innovation

It really does take a village, not just upper management.

Few people in an organization have been the focus of so much attention in innovation circles as middle managers. Depending on your point of view, they are seen as either an essential conduit by which information flows, or a barrier to the spread of ideas and knowledge.

Indeed, it’s a topic I myself touched upon when I looked at some new research from Wharton’s Ethan Mollick on the topic. Mollick suggested that middle managers are especially important in industries that require innovative employees such as biotech, computing, and media.

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How to Install an SSL Certificate on IBM Domino

IBM Domino, formally known as Lotus Domino, is a web-server and an advanced product of the IBM server. This web-server is widely used for hosting several social business applications and enterprise-level e-mail collaboration. It is considered to be a low-cost solution to enhance productivity and speed up the operations.

Installing an SSL Certificate on the IBM Domino (Lotus Domino) Web Server

After completing the check-out process for the SSL certificate, you will receive an e-mail attached with a *.zip file from your certification authority. This file comprises of primary, intermediate, and root certificates. You need to download and extract this *.zip file on your IBM Dominoserver directory where you intend to store all your certificates.