Contractor Selling

A Non-Litigious Holiday Party

By Elizabeth R. Ison, Esq.

With another holiday season approaching, companies nationwide are busy planning parties. Holiday socials are longstanding company traditions to thank employees and celebrate annual accomplishments. They can also be a breeding ground for employer liability — especially when alcohol is served.

A 2000 survey conducted by Vault.com found that 44% of employers had to reprimand an employee for behavior at a company holiday party. A 2010 poll by HR firm Adecco corroborate these findings: 40% of people surveyed saw or suffered a major indiscretion at a work-sponsored holiday event and 14% knew someone who was fired for bad behavior at a company holiday party.

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It’s Just Around The Corner

It’s already that time of year again.  You can hear the music playing when you’re out shopping.  Neighbors are starting to decorate their homes before it gets too cold to get up on their ladder. It seems like it gets earlier and earlier every year.  The last thing anybody wants to be accused of is being called a Scrooge. Keeping that in mind, the top question we get asked every year at this time is, “What should I give my employees for a Christmas bonus?”

It is very hard for me to answer this question because the truth is…I love Christmas!  Or at least I love the idea of Christmas and the feeling you get when giving to someone else.  So it’s even harder for me to say that the days of giving Christmas bonuses are over.  You shouldn’t be giving your employees a Christmas bonus.

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Multi-tasking Friend or Foe?

It really bothers me when I hear people say that they are good multitaskers.  I hear this all the time, especially when I am interviewing perspective employees.  How could everyone be good at multitasking?  I’m not, and I consider myself to be an intelligent person. So needless to say, I was quite thrilled when I found out that new research had shown that our brains were not meant to do more than two things at a time — and certainly not with any real efficiency.  This past week, I did a little research on the productivity of multitasking and found I was not alone in my beliefs. I discovered several interesting studies that backed up what I had already suspected.

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Talk About Procrastinating

Two weeks until my sister’s wedding, and I hadn’t had my bridesmaid dress altered yet.  I admit that I am a procrastinator, but this was ridiculous even for me.

To be honest, I was not looking forward to wearing the dress. Don’t get me wrong, it was a beautiful dress.  It was long, a flowing, raspberry-colored gown with a strapless bodice and a few rhinestones adorning the middle that connected two ends to a sheer piece of material that bustled around the back of the dress.  It was gorgeous on the model wearing it online.  Once I tried it on, though, I quickly realized that a strapless dress was not meant for my body type and thus the reason I was not looking forward to wearing the dress.  And now we were only two weeks away from the wedding day, and I needed a miracle worker.

I decided to ask a friend for a referral. She had lived in the area all her life and quickly recommended a woman on 12^th street in Paso Robles.  Joe and I drove over to the shop first thing in the morning only to be greeted by a sign saying they were not open until 11am.  “OK,” I said. “We’ll come back at lunch.”

At lunch time, Joe drove me to the shop again and dropped me off in front of the store while he went to find a parking space.  I quickly walked inside with my dress hanging from my arms to find a young woman at her sewing machine while an elderly woman appeared from behind a curtain and greeted me with a coarse and irritated, “Can I help you?”

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Last month, from my home in Templeton, Calif., I planned a wedding shower for my sister and future brother-in-law, who live in the Chicagoland area. As I started to make all the necessary phone calls to find a venue, caterer, flowers and so on, I quickly realized that even in a down economy, some companies just never get it when it comes to providing good service.  Had the word service become generic like Kleenex or Jell-O?

I called various  companies and explained  this was the first wedding shower I had ever planned for my one and only baby sister, that I wanted it to be very special and, well, perfect.

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Addition by Subtraction

I recently spent a rainy Saturday afternoon watching a show called “Hoarding: Buried Alive.”  I really didn’t have time to sit and watch TV but I couldn’t stop watching.  Once I was able to get a peak into what looked like your everyday average person’s home I found I needed to see more, like watching a train wreck. 

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Using A Map To Get Around

One of my favorite pastimes is traveling.  It doesn’t matter where, I just like to get out of the house and explore new places.  As a little girl, my mom would pack some snacks, gather my brother and sister and hop in the car and head off while my dad sat in the navigator seat with his oversized  Rand McNally map in hand.

We took many trips over the years, exploring all corners of the country, sometimes more than once.  We’ve traveled out east along the coast visiting the Nation’s Capital, the Big Apple and Niagara Falls. We’ve been out west stopping to see the Corn Palace, Wal-Drug, Mount Rushmore and Yellowstone National Park. We drove through the Redwoods (literally through a redwood tree) and down the coast to Big Sur. We saw Hoover Dam, the Grand Canyon and a re-enactment of the OK Corral in Tombstone, AZ.  I’ve been to Disneyland and Disney World many times over, all along my dad carrying his trusty map.

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What Does Tentative Mean?

Once in a while there’s a subject that crosses the boundaries between sales and customer service that Joe and I fight over who actually get’s to blog about it.  Today I won.

We are busy people, as I am sure the rest of you are too.  We have been so busy around here lately that we decided we needed an extra set of hands to help with some of the daily chores and hired a woman from My Girl Friday.  Colette.  She’s awesome!

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A Business Organizational Chart

If you are tired of parts not being ordered, customers not being called, or bills not being paid on time, or the daily “finger pointing” that goes on when you address these issues with your employees, then now is the time to create an organizational chart.   Whether you draw it out on paper or purchase an organizational software program to do it for you, creating a business organizational chart is the first step of seven in this eight- part series to organizing your service contracting office, once and for all.

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