Tag Archives: Diagnose

How Do You Rebuild Company Morale? Six Suggestions

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Situation: A CEO has regular lunches with staff to foster communications and sharing of information. In recent months, few employees have been attending these lunches. Also, she has noticed a negative tone beginning to pervade the office, though the situation seems to improve when the CEO is present. How would you address this situation? How do you rebuild company morale?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • The immediate priority is to correctly diagnose the problem. Is this a question of the CEO’s energy or the team’s awareness of plans for the company? Or is there something else going on of which the CEO is unaware?
  • Meet with employees. Have open and frank discussions with them about the future of the company.
  • Meet with the most valuable employees first. Share hopes and vision for the business. Express appreciation for their contributions and discuss plans for their continued growth. Next, ask open-ended questions about the company and seek their input on how to improve it. Listen to what they have to say.
  • Next are borderline employees. Again, share the vision and appreciate their past and current contributions, but be honest about expectations for performance. Then ask the same open-ended questions that you asked the first group and listen.
  • For underperforming employees, again appreciate past and current contributions, but be clear that unless they substantially improve performance, future employment isn’t guaranteed. Ask the same open-ended questions that you asked the other groups and listen.
  • Be patient. Don’t try to develop all the answers immediately. Listen and learn what drives employees – particularly keepers. Involve them in developing programs to drive the future.

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How Do You Outsource IT? Seven Suggestions

Situation: Fast growing companies often find it difficult to scale internal IT management to keep pace with database (dB) growth. There are typically 1-3 people in charge of dB management in a small to medium-sized business. Crisis hits when there is an abrupt system shutdown for up to 48 hours and a significant disruption to company operations. How can this be avoided? How do you outsource IT?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • The difficulty is that small infrastructure teams often don’t have the range of skills to diagnose dB issues. Calling Oracle, SAP, etc. for assistance gets expensive fast.
  • One option is to outsource business intelligence and dB management to a specialist. Quality offshore resources exist that can take over support of company business information (BI) and dB management, offering a full suite of services from anti-virus to preventative diagnosis of subtle misalignments.
  • For example, InstaDB replicates the dB in a remote data center so that they can monitor the system for errors, develop solutions, and remotely resolves errors with no interruption to users.
  • In addition, some outsourced specialists include calls to Oracle, SAP and so forth as necessary to resolve problems at no cost to the client.
  • In a pilot study in a company with 5 servers, the offshore outsource partner provided a full suite of services and was able to increase uptime from 95-97% on a daily basis to 99.97%. This level of performance should be the goal.
  • Your outsource provider should have 24/7/365 support services.
  • Your provider should provide you with a service-level agreement (SLA) prioritizing issues so that the most critical issues are resolved fastest.

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