Best Corporate Practices 2008

businessweek.com: "Sometimes the difference between the best and worst company policies comes down to one thing: trust. Learn how to use it..."

This is an interesting article. The best stuff is in the 'slideshow' that covers "The 10 Best Corporate Practices, 2008 - A lot of these good ideas have been around for a while. It's time for employers to put them into practice before they lose their best workers..." Here's a summary of the 10 trends:

1. A Real Vacation Policy
2. Spot Bonuses
3. Instant Seniority
4. Community at Work
5. Pooled Sick-Time Banks
6. Customized Benefit Plans
7. Peer Mentoring
8. A Room of Her Own
9. Flex Time and Flex Place
10. Word of Mouth Recruiting

Read the full article...

Apply the 80/20 Principle with The FreelanceSwitch Client Analyser

Freelance switch has just added a cool new online tool called the "Client Analyser". It is based on the 80/20 or Pareto Principle:

"The way it works is that you put in your clients, answer some questions about them and then it lines up the data into tables, showing you where the results are coming from so you can compare and contrast them. The more clients you add, the better it works.

You should note, it’s not meant to be a very serious tool, more just a lightweight look at some of your client list. If you put in the minimum 8 clients and just guess values you can go through in about 10 minutes or so, and longer for more clients and more precision..."

Freelancers can also use Coworkers.com Reviews to rate and compare their various client contacts. The more data that can be gathered about a client portfolio, the more meaningful the insight.

Fat staff eat into profits

Well, no big surprise here, but it turns out that overweight employees are much more (twice) as likely to make workers' comp claims...

Overweight workers cost their bosses more in injury claims than their lean colleagues, suggests a study that found the heaviest employees had twice the rate of workers' compensation claims as their fit co-workers...

Of course this puts "gravitationally challenged" folks in a negative light, but one could spin it the other way. After all, a large part of the reason that we are an obese society is that most of us sit in a chair all day and barely move more than our fingers. Most employers also do very little to encourage active lifestyles outside of work. It's clearly in a company's best interest to be proactive about the health of its employees. Yet most don't seem to be able to put two and two together.