Business Finance Tips

Culture shock is the symptom of living or working with a very different environment from your own. If you are from countries outside the Arab world, experiencing culture shock when you go there is common for their very different culture. However, lessening this symptom is possible.

Before heading to an Arab country, you should do some research on the destination. The Arab world is commonly frequented by expatriates from all over the world, so you can check out blogs of expatriates living in Arab to pick up the observations and experience of day-to-day living that those bloggers have made. Do also get the contact information of your country’s embassy so that you will know where to turn to for help; plus, you can attain lists of business networks, chambers of commerce, and other organizations so you will not be too lost when you get there.

You can also take steps to understand the culture by watching Arabic movies downloads. Find for movies that portray the culture in Arab countries and observe their behavior. There are many Arabic movies downloads online so you can expand your observations over a couple of movies.

When you are in Arab, there are a number of social rules you should abide to. Especially if you are from the US or a European country, you will need to behave differently. The general etiquette to follow, for one, is no kissing or holding hands are allowed, and you must not drink alcohol in public. You should not be rude or harsh, and you will need to be polite and modest in everything you do. Then, depending on which country you are in, the rest of the way you should behave depends on where you are at.

In the UAE like Dubai and Abu Dhabi, people are actually quite liberal in people’s attitudes, but one should still watch their behavior, sticking to the general social rules as mentioned. In Dubai, the presence of foreigners is very common so it is alright to wear your usual clothes when you venture the town; however, you should still be decent as a sign of respect towards the culture.

As for places like Saudi Arabia, the moral codes are very much stringent, and there are religious police who ensures that both citizens and visitors follow their codes. For example, women should not socialize in public with a man of no blood relations or not their husband. Furthermore, women will need to wear an abaya, which is a black cover, over her clothes, and her head and face should also be covered. Even if they want to go out, women will need to be escorted by a male, and they cannot they meet with other female companions for shopping or a chat in a coffee bar. Driving and swimming is also forbidden among women. However, within private homes of expat communities, expats are able to live comfortably as they like.

If you’re a presenter who wants to deliver your material by webinar, the secret is to forget you’re doing a webinar, and structure it just like any other program. There’s nothing magical about the webinar format. It’s just another medium for delivering your presentation. You prepare the content just the way you would any other presentation, and you deliver it in (broadly) the same way.

Let’s look at some of these options.

Keynote presentation

If you give keynote presentations, design your webinar as a keynote-style presentation, with the aim of changing their attitudes or shifting their beliefs. It will probably run for 45-60 minutes, with you doing most of the talking, and perhaps a brief Q&A session towards the end.

Be careful with trying to adapt a keynote presentation to the webinar format. Webinar audiences expect high content. Some keynote presentations are very light on content, which can be acceptable in a conference room. But on a webinar, your audience can’t see you, can’t see each other, won’t speak up as readily, and won’t do interactive exercises unless there’s a very clear point to them. In general, you can’t rely on the energy and “showiness” of a face-to-face presentation.

Training session

If you’re a trainer, your job is much easier. The webinar format is ideally suited for transferring skills and knowledge through education and instruction, provided the teaching doesn’t depend on the participants actually being in the same room.

If you offer your webinar as a training session, you’ll be teaching them skills. It might be about an hour long, with a handout they download in advance, and exercises they complete during the session. You’ll still do most of the talking, but you might have more than one opportunity for them to ask you questions, and you’ll allow more time for questions.

Broadly speaking, you take the material you typically deliver in a face-to-face training session and adapt it for delivering by webinar. You can still use slides, handouts, workbooks, asking questions, asking for a show of hands, and even initiate group discussion.

Training course

The next logical step is to present a multi-stage training course. If you can do one webinar well, it’s only a small step to present material as a series of webinars. Rather than a one-off event, you present the training in smaller chunks, perhaps with “homework” between each session.

Even if you’re not doing training this way in your face-to-face presentations, consider how you could do that using webinars. Webinars lend themselves well to this sequence, because they have such a low overhead. Some of your material might be better delivered as a course, but it might have been too difficult to run a face-to-face event each time.

Interview experts

Webinars allow you to bring in other experts for your audience. Although you can do this in face-to-face presentations as well, that is rare – perhaps because presenters think they themselves need to be the only expert in the room, and their credibility would be diminished if somebody else was also delivering material! For some reason, interviewing experts by webinar doesn’t have the same stigma. In fact, if some people attend your webinars regularly, they will appreciate hearing from your guest presenters as well.

If your guest is already a skilled presenter, they can simply treat the webinar just like any other training webinar. However, you might also have the situation where your guest is an expert, but not a skilled presenter. In that case, you don’t want to force them to make a presentation. Instead, run it as a one-to-one interview, with the audience silently “eavesdropping” on your conversation.

Panel Interview

The next logical step is to interview a panel of experts. If you have experience in this area already, again a webinar is an effective medium for conducting your interviews.

Even with a panel of experts, you can add visuals to enhance the experience for the audience. Of course, the larger the panel the more difficult it is to manage this, so plan it carefully. For example, you might decide only you show visuals – a particular Web page or document, for example – and then call on the panel to comment on it.

Facilitation

If you’re a facilitator rather than a trainer, you can still use a webinar to host your presentation. The key difference here is it’s your job to create the right environment for discussion among the participants, rather than being the expert with the presentation. So you set the scene, and then open the webinar for the audience to do most of the talking (with your guidance, of course).

Coaching and mentoring

So far we’ve talked about webinars as being for group presentations. But there’s no reason you can’t use them for one-on-one presentations as well – in particular, coaching, mentoring or consulting. If you run a webinar as a coaching session, you’ll be asking lots of questions and giving the client more time to answer them. So you might ask a question, and then give the client time to answer it.

If you’re conducting mentoring sessions by webinar, you’ll combine the training and coaching modes – that is, a mix of teaching and asking, with some time for you to speak and some time for them to interact with you and with each other.

Presenting remotely

Finally, one other use of webinar technology is for you to make a presentation remotely (in other words, when you’re not physically present). The audience might be gathered in a room, but you make your presentation from elsewhere.

You might have seen this already in the form of videoconferencing, where a speaker is “beamed in” to a conference or meeting. That is still an option, of course, but it has some drawbacks: It can be expensive, it might require special equipment at both ends, it needs a fast Internet connection, and the audio and visuals don’t always synchronise correctly.

Doing it by webinar is far easier, and often more effective. It doesn’t require as much Internet bandwidth, it doesn’t need any special equipment at your end, and you can show a slide presentation as well.

Every business must take the right steps to cultivate the culture it desires. The culture is the single greatest force that affects your employees. You want all employees to convey the feelings and attitudes that best support your company’s goals. No matter how many employees you have, you want all of them to project the coherent company culture that you want customers, vendors, and others to perceive about your company.

Your corporate culture does not relate directly or exclusively to your profit margin. Rather, it relates to the emotional health and well-being of your employees which is closely related to your profit margin. Be sure your employees get the right training to do their job well and to grow professionally. Be sure that the work pace is sustainable and will result in good quality. Always show employees that you appreciate their contributions and reward special achievements.

You can gauge the health or your corporate culture by observing your employees. You want to hear laughter in the office, and you want employees to be focused. If you notice the absentee rate increasing or employees taking longer lunches and breaks, it may mean that your corporate culture needs to be revisited. On a regular basis, have lunch or coffee with different employees and ask them to discuss their concerns and make suggestions.

To really show your employees that you care more about them than profit, schedule a social event during work hours.

Jo Ann Joy, Esq., MBA, CEO
Copyright 2006 Indigo Business Solutions. All rights reserved.

Christmas is upon us again. Let’s set aside the snow for a second (if only such a thing was literally possible, perhaps the queues outside St Pancras station wouldn’t be so long) and focus on an omnipresent festive problem: drunk people getting into cars.

Now, I know that drunken drivers are a massive social problem. As the phrase goes, ‘if you’re driving, don’t drink, if you’re drinking, don’t drive.’

Alcohol flows like, well, wine, at Christmas, what with the endless rounds of work parties, not to mention people trying to numb the endless tedium of small talk with relatives by throwing gallons of the stuff down their throat.

That is all well and good, and very enjoyable. But of course there is a serious note to this article. A vast amount of drivers are still under the impression that drink-driving is okay. Common attitudes seem to be:

‘I only had a couple’

‘I’m only going down the road’

‘I have a high tolerance/I don’t feel drunk’

‘I’ve been doing it for years’

‘I’ve had a coffee/I’ve had a meal’

These are all, frankly, gibberish. Yes, there is a drink/drive limit, which implies that it is possible to have a drink and still drive legally. This can’t be denied.

However, the problems with this attitude are that it can lead to complacency. As well as this, nobody knows precisely how each drink affects them. Even one drink still has an effect on the driver, even if it is still within legally permissible parameters.

It is easier just to apply the well-known maxim, ‘Don’t drink and drive’ in an absolute manner. If you know you are driving, stick to the Coke. What is the point in only having one beer anyway? It won’t exactly unlock a great night.

As if this wasn’t bad enough, on top of all this, new research by insurers swiftcover.com suggests that drunken passengers are almost as dangerous as their counterparts behind the wheel.

They estimate that around 750,000 car crashes over the festive period will be due to sozzled revelers distracting whoever it is that is driving them home, so many people will be injured in a road accident as a result. Among the primary causes of distraction are:

The passenger being sick

The passenger singing loudly

The passenger turning up the radio to apocalyptic levels

The passenger yanking the handbrake

The passenger tugging the steering wheel

All of them together

So if you’re a responsible designated driver this Christmas, keep yourself safe from the perils of plastered passengers. Put them in the back and stick on Radio 4 or Classic FM. With any luck, they’ll go to sleep.

It might just save your life.

Right from creation, man, more than any other creature, has maintained his distinctiveness through his ability to keep records of events affecting his existence by simply writing such down in report form. This practice took a deepened dimension following man’s capacity to form organizations, thereby underscoring the importance of report writing in modern society for purposeful human interactions.

Without report writing, owners of organizations, manager of industries and individuals for that matter would have found it increasingly difficult if not impossible to carry out assigned tasks; perform their duties and run their concerns satisfactorily. Indeed, report writing is a functional requirement in the day-to-day running of any human endeavour.

Admittedly, it is from the practice of report writing that valuable records of corporate entities/organisations are maintained; departmental activities are monitored; important decisions/policies affecting the lives of organizations and people are taken as well as the rules and regulations governing the behaviours of individuals within organizations are also formulated and enforced.

What Is A Report?

A report refers to a document, which provides an account of something witnessed or examined, or of work carried-out or of an investigation together with conclusions arrived at as a result of the investigation.

Why Have A Report?

Reports may be written for many reasons, for example they may intend to:

(i) Inform

(ii) Recommend

(iii) Motivate

(iv) Prompt or play a part in debate

(V) Persuade

(vi) Impress

(Vii) Record

(viii) Reinforce or build existing situations or beliefs

(ix) Instruct

In addition, they may have more complex objectives such as changing people’s attitudes or used to do a number of things simultaneously for one group of people and others for different groups.

Types Of Reports

Generally, reports can be classified according to their content, periodicity, length or form as follows:

. Oral Reports

. Written Reports

. Regular Reports

.Ad Hoc Reports

.Short or Long Reports

. Narrative Reports

. Eye witness Reports

. Technical Reports

. Feasibility or Progress Reports

. Visitation Reports

Qualities Of A Report

In writing a report, what is aimed at is a structured document where facts are set out clearly so that arguments flow naturally to the conclusions reached. A good report should highlight some basic characteristics such as:

1. It has to be in writing, oral or by convention

2. It is meant to produce decisions or actions

3. It has to be factual, convincing and unbiased

4. The language, tone, and choice of words must be clear, appropriate, precise, simple and unambiguous.

5. It must be well-planned, well paragraphed, sequential in presentation, logical and unified in thought as well as being lucid in reading.

6. It must be purposeful, result-oriented, clear in its direction and mush as possible be concise without rambling or delving into extraneous matters.

7. It must be a complete document, which does not call on the reader to make other reading or references in order to understand any point being made in the said report.

8. It should deal with a specific problem and one problem only in order for it to be coherent and be able to look at the problem in all its ramifications.

Report Format

Reports can be presented in either of the following forms:

1. Letter Form

2. Memo Form

3. Fill-in-Form

4. Schematic Presentation

5. Many-page Document

6. Mixed Form

Structure Of report

(a) Title

(b) Addressee

(c) Date

(d) Introduction

(e) Terms of Reference

(f) Procedure

(g) Findings

(h) Conclusions

(i) Recommendations

(j) Name and Writer

Finally, a fill-in-form report may not have more than five of these parts whereas the many-page form report, which is in a book form, can have all the parts stated above.