Medication Shop

This article relates to the Job Security competency, commonly evaluated in employee satisfaction surveys. This competency evaluates how your employees view their job security within your organization. In today’s often volatile or contingent labor market, it’s crucial to understand the level of security your employees feel about maintaining their jobs. Studies show that employees who do not feel secure in their jobs are less likely to be committed to best assisting customers. Evaluating this competency can be especially useful if your organization has suffered recent layoffs or firings.

This short narrative, The Responsibility for Job Security, is part of AlphaMeasure’s compilation, Tales from the Corporate Frontlines. It tells the story of two employees with two completely different ideas of what to expect from their company in terms of employment security.

Anonymous Submission:

Our company had just finished the second round of layoffs in a single year. The mood throughout the building was depressing. Several of the affected employees were long timers. I knew them well, had partied with them on social occasions and played with them on the company softball team.

I decided to visit them, to say goodbye and good luck. Not a happy task, but one that I felt compelled to do out of a sense of loyalty, and a small amount of survivor guilt.

First, I headed for Mike’s office. I noticed that he was packing. He leaned over a box, staring silently at the contents. He looked up at me with sorrow, fear, and confusion. As I stood next to him, Mike told me how shocked he was that he’d been chosen. Always a model employee, with tons of knowledge and talent, he never thought this would happen. He wasn’t bitter or angry, but couldn’t help asking himself what he’d done wrong.

I didn’t know what to say, except that I was sure there was nothing – these things had to be random…conversation got awkward, and I wished him luck and moved on.

When I reached Rick’s office, things looked different. His personal belongings were already packed. He smiled at me and asked if I had time to sit. I offered my regrets. Rick looked at me, clear-eyed and calm. He told me that it was okay, really. One door closes, another opens. The world and its economy are changing so quickly…how can any job last forever?

Rick wasn’t afraid, he told me, because he was confident in the skills he’d built while working at the company. He’d received plenty of training. Rick had been promoted twice, and he’d completed his degree using the company paid tuition assistance program. He felt confident that his next career move would be a step up. He understood that the layoff was not his fault; it was merely an unavoidable business decision. He appreciated all the support and security the company had provided for ten years, and used it to build his confidence in his own abilities.

I left Rick’s office deep in thought about my own future. I realized that the responsibility for creating job security lies not only with the company. It’s up to us as employees, as well, to build confidence to help deal with the changing realities of the modern workplace.

This article may be reprinted, provided it is published in its entirety, includes the author bio information, and all links remain active.

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© 2005 AlphaMeasure, Inc. – All Rights Reserved
This article may be reprinted, provided it is published in its entirety, includes
the author bio information, and all links remain active.
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Measure. Report. Improve your organization with AlphaMeasure employee surveys.

Josh Greenberg is President of AlphaMeasure, Inc.

AlphaMeasure provides organizations of all sizes a powerful web based method for measuring employee satisfaction, determining employee engagement, and increasing employee retention.

Launch your employee satisfaction survey with AlphaMeasure.

Large trampolines can be exceedingly entertaining in addition to being able to keep your children immersed & entertained for quite a few hours. Various trampolines are not only ideal for teenagers, as they can additionally be bought by older people as an aerobic drill in addition as a means for toning & building up numerous muscles all at the same time. For that reason a trampoline has so much to offer yearly for all the family and for this reason it is of no astonishment that trampolines are such an admired toy throughout the summer months.

The vital consideration when buying a big trampoline is to make sure it’s apt for both the age and ability of the people who will likely to be using it, be it the teenagers’ or the adults.

A further thing to make not of is for sure going to be the position of the kids’ trampoline. Various trampolines nowadays can consume up a substantial amount of garden space especially as you will require about 3 feet of grass approximately around the outer surface of the trampoline in order for the youngsters to get off in one piece if they indivertibly plunge off. Click here to find the best deals on buying outdoor toys with Toy-Shopper.co.uk.

It’s also useful to keep in mind that many trampolines will demand to be installed on even ground otherwise the strength & well-being of the garden trampoline can be seriously affected. With this in mind, quite a few trenches may need to be produced in order for the bouncy trampoline to stand-up right.

A wedding is one of life’s most momentous events, and that means making your wedding scrapbook can be an intimidating prospect.

Here are some tips to help you get going:

– Figure out the details ahead of time.

Making some decisions as to the theme and color scheme of the album will save you time and money.

First, you’ll need to decide whether this album will cover your entire wedding celebration – from engagement through honeymoon – or will you focus on just the wedding day itself? If you decide on the latter, you might want to choose a 6×6 or 8×8 album project for the bridal shower, bachelorette party, honeymoon, etc.

Next, you’ll want to choose a color scheme. The most popular choice is to work with your wedding colors. Consider setting off these wedding colors (or other colors you choose) by pairing them with a classic black or white cardstock background. I love the look of black-on-white in wedding albums. I also love mulberry flowers, ribbons, vellum and fabric. Deep reds and pinks accents are gorgeous, too, for simple embellishments.

Remember that elegance and simplicity tend to go hand in hand. The wedding scrapbooks that stand the test of time are timeless and classic.

You’ll also want to look at some simple wedding scrapbook layout samples or sketches of completed albums so you can see what kind of supplies you’ll need. At the very least, you’ll want to know how many pages the finished album will be before you go to the scrapbook store. The more detailed your plan, the less money you’re likely to spend.

– Go through your photos and memorabilia

For me, scrapbooking is about telling the stories of our lives, so I love to work with the photographs that really tell a story. You’ll want to choose only the best and most interesting photographs for your wedding scrapbook album. (The posed portrait-type photos can be framed and sent to family members.) Store the remainder of the photos in a companion photo album. Remember, simple is elegant.
It’s also a good idea to work with duplicates of your priceless wedding photos. You may find that you want to work with these photos again in the future, and you’re certain to feel more of a creative license if you know that the originals and intact and safe.

Memorabilia. I tend to go easy on memorabilia…maybe keeping the majority of it in a memento box along with my companion photo album and scrapbook, because I don’t like to detract from the story of the album.

Memorabilia you might want to include (either directly on the page or in a special pocket):

- Wedding and shower invitations

- Fabric from your dress or bridesmaid dress

- Receipts

- Honeymoon plane tickets

- Place cards

- Bridal registry

- Shower gift lists

- Napkins

Make a simple checklist of the kinds of things you’d like to include, but trust your inner artist to take the reins and let the story unfold.

– Don’t forget the journaling

The most powerful journaling comes not from the 5 w’s (who, what, where, when, and why) – but from the 5 senses. Specific details are more memorable and intriguing than generalities and the best way to vividly remember your wedding day is to focus on each of your senses. What do you remember seeing, hearing, thinking, feeling, tasting? How did you feel as you were standing at the altar? How did your wedding cake taste? What was the weather like? What stands out as the visual symbol of your day?

Ask the wedding party to contribute their thoughts via journaling, too. Ask for specific memories…”the most memorable part of my day was…” Coach guests and members of your bridal party to use their five senses, too.

Another trick that creates more powerful journaling is to start with a blank page and write “I remember” at the top. Now, simply reflect on the day of your wedding and let your hand move across the page. If you get stuck, write “I remember” again and keep writing. Your goal is simply to keep the pen moving across the page, without crossing anything out or stopping to think too much. Aim to complete two to three pages, and you’ll be amazed by the flood of memories this technique release – even if your wedding wasn’t in the recent past. These methods can create very emotion-filled journaling, so consider keeping private journaling tucked away in journaling pockets.

– Assembling the Scrapbook

Start the album with a dedication page. Tell why you created the album and a few details on why your wedding was such an important day in your life.
It’s a good idea, in wedding scrapbooks particularly, to avoid overly trendy design techniques. I’ve talked to more than one scrapbooker who now regrets cutting her priceless wedding photos into silhouettes or cutesy shapes. A wedding scrapbook is timeless, so – again – simple is most likely better. A simple design also tends to better draw attention to the photos and journaling – your personal love story.

Your wedding scrapbook will be one of the most albums in your home. Enjoy the process of creating it!

Susie Cortright is the founder of Momscape.com, where you can find more resources on creating a wedding scrapbook as well as more free scrapbooking ideas. Visit her site today and get a subscription to her Scrapbooking Ideas newsletter for free: http://www.momscape.com/subscribe.htm

After the settling down of the dot-com bubble, sanity checks
have brought realistic expectations to the fore. Initially,
a backlash was seen, forecasting the doom of the Internet.
Finally, merits have made the Internet gain its rightful
place. In breakthroughs that show the promise of e-commerce
wasn’t all smoke and mirrors, four dot-coms recently
reported their first quarterly profits. The list of the
Internet’s publicly held moneymakers includes eBay Inc.,
Amazon.com Inc., Yahoo! Inc., Overture Services Inc.,
Expedia Inc., FindWhat.com Inc. and E-Trade Group Inc.
Several privately owned dot-coms, including search engines
Google and DealTime, say they have been making money, too.

In 2001, the last full year where numbers are available, the
Department of Commerce broke out e-commerce sales versus
total U.S retail sales which revealed the $3.16 trillion
retail industry saw a total of $37.7 billion in sales take
place online — comprising 1.2 percent of the total. This
year e-commerce is tracking about the same. Through the
third quarter, the last full quarter where numbers are
available, total retail sales were $856 billion versus $11
billion in e-commerce, about a 1.3 percent share.

There were big gains made in Home and Garden, a 78 percent
increase; Furniture and Appliances, a 75 percent increase;
and Toy shopping online with a 61 percent increase in the
year 2002. There is no doubt that online shopping is
growing.

Nielsen//NetRatings found that more than 35.5 million U.S.
Internet users made shopping trips to virtual department
store sites during the week ending November 3, 2002 – that’s
a 20 percent increase from the week ending October 20 and
roughly 14 million more than almost the same time period in
2001.

There is a growing tendency amongst Internet users to pay
for valuable content online. There are many reasons for
this. First, only a few websites operated by big companies
can afford to provide valuable content without being
compensated. The rest of us can’t be so generous. And trying
to recapture our expenses by selling advertising on our
websites has failed to pay the bills. Online advertising and
click-through rates are on the decline.

Second, many people are now more than willing to pay to
receive quality services and products even if they were
offered for free earlier. Several paid content websites have
already proven this unmistakable trend. The discerning buyer
values his/her time as also the quality of information or
service and is willing to pay for it.

However, not all products can be sold on the Internet. Some
products may be better suited for online sales than others;
others simply will not work on this new commercial medium.
According to an Ernst and Young study, the most popular
online purchases are computer related products (40%), books
(20%), travel (16%), clothing (10%), recorded music (6%),
subscriptions (6%), gifts (5%) and investments (4%).

Businesses offering paid services have also prospered
enormously. The top three categories (Business
Content/Investment, Entertainment/Lifestyles and
Personals/Dating) accounted for 62% of all paid content
revenues in the first three quarters of 2002. The total
market for paid online content in the U.S. grew to $361.4
million for the quarter, a 14 percent gain over the previous
quarter and a 105.3 percent gain over Q3 2001. An
interesting statistic put forward by this report is that 85%
of money spent by U.S. Consumers for online content goes to
the top 50 sites in most of the categories.

The graph below (Top 3 Content Categories) is indicative of
this change.

In terms of “stickiness” of different categories, Business
sites – especially finance and investment rank the highest.
In other words, users are more likely to spend longer time
surfing through a business website compared to other
categories. This study was conducted by Nielsen//NetRatings.
The table below shows the most addictive web categories for
2002.

[Category/Time per person(hr:min:sec)/Audience]
Business – Finance and Investment/0:21:33/51,586
General News/0:15:47/64,822
Entertainment/0:14:32/45,922

Source: Nielsen//NetRatings

According to the above figures a person spends about 22
minutes on a finance website on an average.

Should you be selling a product or a service?

The Internet is primarily used to communicate, entertain,
educate and research. It is thus no wonder that
nonperishable, information-intensive products – including
computers and software, books, travel, consumer electronics,
magazine subscriptions – are the most popular online
products at present. Content-rich sites, subscription-based
sites to advertiser-supported sites focusing on a wide range
of topics, have been sprouting all over the Internet.

Services such as hotel reservation, air travel and
investments have successfully translated themselves to the
Internet.

Unique services such as Online driving schools have been
prospering. Some states in the US have set up online payment
sites for Government services. Residents of a state can log
on to a common site to pay all bills and other expenses,
such as parking tickets to the local/County courts.

However, all kinds of services cannot be run entirely on the
Internet. The Internet is less effective when face-to-face
selling is needed to close a deal. The Internet can give
lots of preliminary information that’s useful in setting the
scene for the closing. But the actual closing takes place
offline – i.e., not on the Internet.

Products can also be marketed and sold successfully on the
Internet. The kinds of products and services that sell best
on the Internet are those that take advantage of the
convenience of the Net. Remember that convenience is the
primary reason why consumers flock to the Internet in the
first place. People can shop any hour of the day at any
site. They can avoid crowded stores, irritating sales
clerks, and even avoid pickpockets.

Offbeat or unusual products and services often attract
online attention and sell strongly. You would generally not
try to sell items people can get at the corner store. Thus,
few toothbrushes are sold on the Net; the same thing with
daily food and beverage purchases. But special cheeses, rare
cigars, Turkish plates, long-aged wines, even diamonds, can
and do sell on the Net.

Most products sold by catalog and mail order also sell well
on the Net. However, people tend to buy only those products
that could be shipped at a reasonable price. Higher shipping
costs diminish the price competitiveness of online products
and turns-off a lot of potential buyers. In fact, high
shipping costs is the primary factor that discourages people
from buying online more than any other single reason. An
Ernst and Young report shows that 53 percent of online
shoppers are concerned with shipping costs that are too
high, compared to only 19 percent who are concerned with
credit cards being stolen.

As an online merchant, you have to work out the advantages
as well as disadvantages of selling either products or
services. However, in the recent past, online services have
known to flourish. Nevertheless, if you chose to sell
products you need to rethink your product offering if the
total costs of the product and the shipping are higher than
what is offered elsewhere.

Take some time to evaluate your products or services. There
is a growing market of potential customers on the Internet,
you just need to offer the products and services they are
looking for.

Warmly,

Stephen Russell

Stephen Russell hails from Georgia, plays in an up and coming rock band, and creates liveable income streams using internet marketing.

One of the biggest problems that plagues rational beings is debating on dual planes. The use of emotionally charged words invokes irrelevant images, which cloud the judgment and usually obscure any attempt to make ourselves understood.

Atlastorm has created a provocative post, in which he asserts that rape is part of the natural order of things.

On one plane, he is absolutely correct. The plane upon which humans exist side by side with everything else in the universe – neither greater than animals nor less than a supernova – is where rational thought not only fails, but is irrelevant. For, if we exist solely to march through time until our parts are recycled, what possible difference does any of it make? We are born, we breathe, eat, eliminate, procreate and expire. If that journey is interrupted by cataclysmic events, so what? We are as powerless in such a case as a beetle beneath our heel.

On the other hand …

There exists the plane where philosophers live cheek by jowl with pragmatists, idealists, fatalists and the occasional apathetic slacker. Each of these thinkers has her own ideas about the meaning of words, the relevance of justice and the price of power. Those are just three of the thousands of thought patterns impressed on the brains of thinkers and, often times in the heat of debate, those thoughts no longer line up the way they are expected.

So, when the philosopher ponders the essence of rape or, for that matter, any other reality, the need for context forces the discussion into a public forum. After all, if it were enough to merely ruminate, philosophers would never have anything to say!

Once a discussion has reached enough thinkers, chaos perforce, ensues. In its simplest form, the chaos manifests itself as two people shouting across the chasm between the two planes.

It is tempting to prove this point by lifting portions of the debate out of context; however, it would hardly do justice to the massive amount of thinking that has already been applied on Atlastorm’s blog.
Suffice it to say that terminology has been flung around with little consensus as to meaning. This has caused a vicious circular reasoning, in which rape is defined in terms of its necessity! This is clearly an unintended error, but it is no more grievous than the repeated offense of assuming that sexual gratification is inherent in the act.

Bringing in the heavy guns of sociology to combat the weapons of science and philosophy is like placing a mirror before Socrates and demanding that he argue with himself. A proper discourse must strip away everything but the essence of the subject. The key terms must be defined and their use agreed upon by all participants. Ad hominem attacks must be avoided, as they serve only to obscure the real issue.

It may be helpful to understand each participant’s world-view and the ways in which that perspective might affect the progress of the debate.

At the end of it all, we may find that we have accomplished absolutely nothing.

Mitchell Allen is an advocate for cross-networking: synergistically linking multiple social networks in order to increase membership exposure.

He writes for fun and profit at WritingUp.com

He maintains The Vertical Blog Tunnel Network at the social network, Ryze.com.

You’re doing a sales presentation, and suddenly you look across the table and see aliens from another galaxy.

They seal your lips, so none of your eloquence can escape, and through telepathy they say:

“Listen to us sales unit. Your product sucks; it’s no different than any other. In fact, you’re lucky we don’t kick your puny butt into another dimension. Lower your prices, now. Give us the deal we want, and we’ll let you live another day, so you can swindle some other unsuspecting fools. Probe over!”

You do what any poor sap would do: you cut your commissions, your profit margins, anything, just to emerge with a sale.

You sleep like a rock that evening, and by the morning, you’re feeling like your old self, again. But as you prepare to meet your first prospect of the day, you get queasy.

What’s wrong? Normally, you’re juiced, upbeat, happy, and willing to jump into the fray.

You enter the office, sit down, and the same aliens come in.

“Just tell us your price, we have no time for foolishness.”

“Well, sure, I’ll cover that in a minute,” you say, just as they taught you when you were a rookie, in training.

“That won’t do, earth scum! Give us your best price, now!”

“Okay, okay!” Then, you amaze yourself, offering yet another bare bones deal.

You walk away, convinced the aliens are right. Your product is the same as anybody’s.

Why are your list prices so high? Doesn’t management appreciate how competitive it is out there?

What you don’t know is you’ve been brainwashed, convinced that everything is a commodity, and the only differentiator is price. This is just what clever customers want you to believe, because if you buy this, you’ll buy anything.

They’ve transformed you from a seller into a buyer, by incessantly making you doubt, until the foundation of your confidence is completely chiseled away.

You must find a way to fight back against customer brainwashing. The best way is by using affirmations.

You have to psych yourself up with statements that say, “We offer unique value,” and “Even if our prices and products are the same, I’m different, and I’m worth more!”

Fight every disparaging comment and innuendo that you hear with a counter-statement. And never let an objection go by, unanswered.

A wise sales manager told me, early in my career:

“Gary, when you’re in front of a customer only two things can happen: You’ll sell them, or they’ll sell you!”

True, and after we leave an office where aliens are entrenched, we have to re-sell ourselves, or all is lost.

Dr. Gary S. Goodman, President of Customersatisfaction.com, is a popular keynote speaker, management consultant, and seminar leader and the best-selling author of 12 books, including Reach Out & Sell Someone® and Monitoring, Measuring & Managing Customer Service. He is a frequent guest on radio and television, worldwide. A Ph.D. from USC’s Annenberg School, Gary offers programs through UCLA Extension and numerous universities, trade associations, and other organizations in the United States and abroad. He is headquartered in Glendale, California, and he can be reached at (818) 243-7338 or at: gary@customersatisfaction.com.