However, the skills required to work in a virtual environment differ somewhat from that of a worker in a more traditional environment. The skills listed below may assist human resource professionals in the recruitment, assessment, and selection of effective virtualteam members.



1. Proficiency with technical tools and electronic etiquette:

• e-mail;
• collaborative software systems;
• Internet;
• Intranet;
• destop videoconferencing sytems;
• non-desktop videoconferencing sytems;
• teleconferencing.

2. Ability to form team relationships quickly and effectively:

• entering new teams via introduction of self, asking questions to help the team get organized, and showing interest in others;
• quickly ascertaining other team members’ preferred work styles and adapting their own accordingly;
• being aware of one’s interpersonal style and planning experiences which lead to improvement;

3. Ability to communicate in a virtual environment:

• command of written communication skills for utilization via e-mail and collaborative software systems;
• communicating effectively via videoconferencing for team meetings;
• making formal presentations through videoconferencing;
• managing guidelines about when to see people face-to-face,
• when to send them email vs. voicemail messages, and when to avoid them altogether.

4. Ability to access, analyze, and manage data.



5. Project management capabilities:

• planning and organizing individual work to correspond to team schedules;
• developing and using methods to report progress and problems;
• monitoring and controlling costs;
• taking actions to get back on track;
• documenting and sharing individual learnings.

this is just snipet
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“Are holidays batch processing?”

Something about how we spend time at work and how we take time off reminds me of non-lean operations. We work 70 hour weeks for months at a time. Then we take most of a week to do no work. We recover our energies and go back at it again. Isn’t this like running machines until they break down because we are too busy to do preventive maintenance? Or is it like building up inventory so we can take it easy as we wait for the downstream process to catch up? Idling a production line as a result of overproduction?



We take time off in batches partly because economic order quantities. The distance and therefore time and cost to take a holiday requires a certain length of stay in most cases. It wouldn’t make sense to take a day to travel and another day to travel back if you weren’t spending at least 2 days in between to relax. There is set up time to pack, travel, unpack, pack and travel back (with some holiday activity in between the unpack, pack). Would there be a benefit to smaller lot size vacations of more frequent, small trips?



read this beautiful blog post here

TeamWork

How do we get total involvement from our people in the good things? Here are 8 ways:

1. Teams. People work better when working close to other people. We are social animals who thrive on communication and cooperation. A practical first step to total involvement is to start small and local. It may be too much to expect one thousand people to all agree and engage fully in a common goal right away, but we can achieve this in the short term with groups of five to ten fairly easily. Encouragement aids engagement, as peer recognition for accomplishment is as important if not more important than monetary or other extrinsic rewards in the long run.



2. Uniforms. Simplifying and standardizing how we present ourselves not only removes superficial differences that distract us from what we have in common, but also remind us that we are coming to work for a reason. Just as personal protection equipment is necessary for working with machinery, diving gear is necessary for diving and lab coats are needed in the lab, a basic uniform helps people be mindful that they are choosing to be involved in whatever they are doing.

In fact there may even be health benefits to wearing uniforms. A number of recent studies showing that the way we think about how old or young we are has actual physical benefits. One study mentioned in a Newsweek article titled Just Say No to Aging? extended the research to people who wear uniforms:

Most people try to dress appropriately for their age, so clothing in effect becomes a cue for ingrained attitudes about age. But what if this cue disappeared? Langer decided to study people who routinely wear uniforms as part of their work life, and compare them with people who dress in street clothes. She found that people who wear uniforms missed fewer days owing to illness or injury, had fewer doctors’ visits and hospitalizations, and had fewer chronic diseases–even though they all had the same socioeconomic status.

3. Stand up meetings. Successful teams form the habit of meeting to review the game plan before the start of the day and review it at least once during or near the end of the day. This speeds up communication, nips any problems in the bud and reinforces the goal of the shared work of the team. The team meeting is the most basic act of total involvement. Any organization claiming to aim for total involvement or to practice lean must have teams that hold regular brief meetings.

….

read this really good article here

The accident happened due to a concurrence of circumstances and an accumulation of human errors escalating to a disastrous 583 casualties.

A few of those circumstances and/or causes were:

* Stressors: fog and drizzle (limited sight of 1000 to 3000 feet), pilots were stressed out because both Boeing 747’s were (inconveniently) diverted to Tenerife instead of their original destination, Las Palmas. They couldn’t go there because of a bomb alarm, causing serious delays.
* Human error: due to the limited vision, the PanAm reaches the junction too late causing them to remain on the runway (too long).
* Technical problems: part of the lighting (center line) wasn’t ready yet and they were experiencing radio interference.
Authority: the KLM captain was (internationally) known for being ‘the exemplary pilot’ of KLM. He was a pilot and a flight instructor at the same time and KLM used him in advertising.

Read more here