Maintain Your Privacy
The cute photo of your dog in the living room window—the one that you snapped with your iPhone as you left the house and posted online with the caption “Rex is sad I’m going to be gone all day”—not only told the world how much Rex loves you, but also where you live and that you won’t be home for awhile. And you probably didn’t even know it! GPS-equipped smartphones and digital cameras often embed geotags in photos and videos that can tell viewers exactly where they were taken, potentially compromising the safety and privacy of unknowing photographers. Fortunately, disabling the geotag function is possible, and websites such as ICanStalkU.com give step-by-step instructions on how to do so. Log on to learn how to keep your gadget from inadvertently giving out sensitive information.
I Take That BACK!
We’ve all experienced that moment of panic after hitting the “send” button on an email. That harsh reply to a friend or mistaken letter of resignation to your boss are messages you might wish you could take back. Luckily, if you’re a Gmail user, you can! The feature, called Undo Send, doesn’t actually remove an email from its recipient’s inbox; instead, it delays sending the email for about 30 seconds, giving you an opportunity to change your mind.
To enable this feature, log into your Gmail account and click on “Settings” in the top right corner. Then click on “Labs” and scroll down until you see “Undo Send.” Click on “Enable” and then be sure to “Save Changes.” If you go back to your “Settings” page, you’ll find a dropdown menu next to the Undo Send feature that allows you to select how long Gmail will hold your messages before sending them.
Source: cnn.com
Helping Employees to Help Themselves
by Katie Jones, MSW
“Self-respect is the cornerstone of all virtue.” —John Herschel
As employees, we work to feed our families, serve a need in the community and help our companies prosper. We aim for self-respect in our jobs and self-determination in our community, and ultimately, we follow the direction of company leaders in an effort to achieve the greater good.
As supervisors, we are expected to do the same, to succeed as we perform our duties so that we can support ourselves, our community and our company. But what happens when our most important resources—our human resources—start to break down? How do we, as individuals, supervisors and business leaders, support the wellness of our workforce, ourselves included? What are we like when our organizations are healthy, our workplace supports wellness and our productivity is high? Can imagining these optimal characteristics help make it happen?
The Wellness Recovery Action Plan (WRAP) is a tool created to help individuals and organizations maintain their wellness, proactively. In these uncertain economic times, building internal resilience can help us navigate these choppy waters and keep us from drowning in the stress that constant change and strain can bring. Originally developed for people in recovery from emotional and mental health problems, WRAP is now successfully being used with a host of target populations, including veterans readjusting to civilian life, breast cancer survivors managing their recovery, mothers during the postpartum period and retirees adjusting to life outside the office. Employers and employees can utilize its salient principles in order to reduce absenteeism, increase productivity and improve employee/employer relations.
Employees begin by identifying what each individual does in order to stay productive and focused while at work. These Wellness Strategies, such as making daily to-do lists, taking brief walks during lunch breaks or spending a few moments a day in quiet reflection, can boost morale and allow individuals to create a personalized “wellness toolbox.” The beauty of WRAP is that it is not prescriptive, but rather limitless in how each person can implement the tools, with the inherent philosophy, “to each his own.”
Employers are encouraged to educate employees about the resources available to them, such as health and mental health benefits, as well as community resources such as hotlines, websites, online databases and the like. Lunchtime wellness seminars, stress management webinars and teambuilding activities that stress wellness and healthy lifestyles can offer choices for how each employee can find their wellness niche. To learn more about WRAP, visit copelandcenter.com. For a free wellness consultation for your workplace, call (309) 339-9211. iBi
How Not to Talk to Reporters
Have you ever been interviewed by a reporter? Were you unsure of what to do or say? Marsha Friedman, a 20-year veteran of the public relations industry and CEO of a national PR firm, gives the following tips on how to give the worst print interview ever. Take her advice if you really want to blow it, or avoid it if you’d rather save yourself the embarrassment.
- Don’t focus on the interview. Talk about whatever pops into your head. Make as much nervous small talk as possible, it’s not like they’re a media professional on a deadline. They’d rather talk to you about anything other than the reason you’re being interviewed.
- Preparation, shmeparation. Journalists get a kick out of people who are not prepared. They completely understand when you don’t know anything about them or their writing. The only way to score more points is to tell them you’ve read their stuff and often think they don’t have a clue what they’re writing about.
- Schedules are for wimps. Don’t worry about being on time. Be VERY late, especially if you are actually meeting in person. Journalists don’t like being in the office, so the longer you keep them out, the better they’ll like you. And try to have the meeting as far away from their office as possible.
- Trash talk is gold. There is nothing more fun than shooting off your mouth about the competition to a reporter, and then watching the sparks fly in the morning when the paper hits the streets. Your attorney will love you for it, because the fees you pay him to defend you in the business defamation lawsuit your competitor files are finally going to make him enough money to buy that new boat.
- Lie, and then lie about lying. Nothing will get you more ink than if you lie, because reporters are pretty good at discovering the truth. The bigger the lie, the better, because then you get the news coverage hat trick—the original story, the follow-up when they expose your lie, and the news conference where you admit the truth. iBi
