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Communication Key to a Better Work Environment Everyone knows the story of A Christmas Carole. On Christmas Eve, poor Bob Cratchit, who is working late again, spends his day working up the courage to ask his boss, Mr. Scrooge, if he can have Christmas Day off from work to spend with his family. When he finally does get up the nerve to ask, Mr. Scrooge lets forth a tirade over lazy people using Christmas as an excuse to have a day a off from work. This fictional story unfortunately rings true for a lot of people who have to work up the courage to ask for things from their employers. An employee who has to feel about their employer the way Bob Cratchit felt about Mr. Scrooge is not a very happy and productive employee. To get the most of out of your workers, you have to create a much more hospitable working environment. To create a better working environment, keeping the lines of communication open is absolutely crucial. How does communication work in your office? Do you get the impression that everyone is walking around on eggshells around you? While this kind of fear from your employees may be good for your ego in some senses, it is really bad for your business. When your employees don’t feel like they can talk to you, you will lose control over what is going on with your business. You may be the boss, but your employees are the ones who are actually on the front lines. To know what is really going on out there, you need your employees to communicate honestly with you. If they feel that you are unapproachable, they will hide problems and concerns from you, and you won’t be able to act to fix them. You can’t expect to run your business with half of the information about what is actually going on, and so your business will suffer for your “mean boss” routine. There are still other problems with creating an office environment in which your employees feel like you are unapproachable. In general, there will be a dark cloud over the office when you are around. The stress will keep employee morale low, and employees with low morale are employees with low productivity. Besides, who wants to work hard for someone they cannot approach or who doesn’t show they any respect? Shutting down those lines of communication will definitely affect your bottom line as employees “phone it in” because they don’t feel invested in making your business a success. If you want a better working environment, you have to improve the lines of communication. If there has been a communication breakdown in the past, take the time to address it with your staff. If you staff is small, talk to them each one on one, letting them know that your door is always open and that you want more regular communication with them. If you have a larger staff, schedule a meeting to address the issue. Weekly office meetings are a great way to keep communication channels open and swap ideas in the office environment. If weekly meetings are not feasible, find some way of touching base with your staff on a regular basis, either through weekly emails or a weekly newsletter. Also, you should encourage your staff to communicate with each other. Sharing information among the staff is a great way to generate fresh ideas and fresh approaches to problems. If your office is suffering from a communication problem, make nipping it in the bud a priority. The pay off will be more productive workers and a whole lot less stress. Who knew work could actually be a pleasant place to be?

Free Webhosting Resources for the Intrepid Net Newbie Web hosting is the new, big invention for anybody and anyone. Web hosting, having a web page on the Internet is not only a thing of big company and computer hobbyists anymore; it belongs to many parts of life nowadays. Whether it is a private page for family members and friends or open to everybody, many people aspire to have their own web page. Having an own web page can cost money and since money is something that everybody is short of nowadays, saving money and still having a own web page is the way to go. There are many resources on the Internet that can help one to a free web page. Some of the bigger web-hosting providers offer free limited size web pages to any private party. These pages are financed in several ways. One is through he bigger companies that pay for their pages and this service is such a small off spin that it can be fit in the budget. Another big way, the one that many free Internet and homepage providers offer is built in advertisement. The web page essentially has a header. In this header, different advertisements roll across. This way, the web hosting is paid by whoever is advertising on the web page. These wonderful free online web page providers also offer quick and easy software to create a web page. The days when one had to know how to program a web page in HTML is over. Hyper Text only needs to be known by serious web page designers who work to create the homepages of companies and sports giants. For the everyday homepage with a few links, using one of the built in software can create a few pictures, some text and some other fun gadgets. These programs are usually available on the main page of the web hosting provider and do not have to be downloaded. They run on the server. This software also come with easy getting started guides so that even the person who knows not much about web pages, but a little bit about the PC can create a web page. Web pages for the general public are getting more and more popular. Some companies that are looking for young and innovative employees will actually expect you to have an e-portfolio, a résumé or a good online web page. They judge by these e-portfolios. So when someone decides to tackle his or her first own web page it is important to think about the content first. One never knows who might actually be checking out the web page. Displaying Photos from old drinking parties might not be the best choice, while a résumé and work or private accomplishments might be the better choice. To find one of the free web hosting resource sites, anybody can just type free web pages or home pages or web hosting into anyone of the popular Internet search engine and a dozen different offers will pop up on the screen. By the way, if one does not want to use a provider that displays advertisement on the web page, a tech savvy person is able to use his or her own PC as a server if it is connected to the internet. There are programs out there, that will turn a PC into a Server and this web hosting resource is just as free as the online offers from big companies, but it has the advantage that it is free of any annoying advertisements. Whichever version is chosen, it is always important to be careful on the Internet. There are fraudulent pages, viruses and more that can take the fun out of web hosting and the first own web page. Always checking for the credentials of a web page is one safe way to stay clear of danger on the Internet.

The Top Virtually Bug-free Free Email Services on the Net Virtually bug-free e-mail services are available actually from several places. Many of these service providers are big names, known by many, especially Internet users. The difference between the different e-mail providers lies in several things. These differences include but are not limited to plenty storage space, effective spam filtering, a fast user-friendly interface, desktop e-mail program access and much more. Currently in the United States and the rest of the world, the best offer for free e-mail comes from Gmail. Gmail is part of the Google business enterprise (the search engine most of us know) and offers the most features and storage space for their users for free. With virtually unlimited storage capacity for e-mails, a user never has to delete any e-mails of the server and can collect all the messages. Gmail offers a simple user-friendly interface, which also includes an excellent search function that lets a user find messages instantly and precisely. Another great feature of gmail is the POP and IMAP access features. This gives the user the possibility to download the e-mail from the server with any e-mail program that the user generally would use. The program can then also automatically download the e-mails into the program ready for the user to read. Gmail is funded by displaying advertising next to the e-mails read. Next on the worldwide list would be GMX, a German provider that offers many of the features gmail offers, but with limited storage space. This program also has the POP feature and can therefore be used in conjunction with any of the common available PC e-mail programs. Right after gmail it is one of the most reliable e-mail services, but unfortunately they discontinued the English user face and only offer a German version now. Thereafter on the top free e-mail services providers is AIM Mail. It is the free web-based service from AOL. Like gmail it offers virtually unlimited online storage, excellent spam protection and a simple, easy to use interface. Unfortunately, AIM Mail lacks proper productivity, such things as labels, smart folders and message threading is not available. AIM Mail also offers a very functional POP and IMAP access. Yahoo! Mail would be the next e-mail service that should be mentioned on the list of the top virtually bug-free services on the Internet. Yahoo also offers virtually unlimited storage space for e-mails and a few other nice features, such as Short message services for texting to friends and family, instant-messaging features for the internet and up to date news feeds. What Yahoo! mail lacks is a really good spam filter. It offers a spam filter, but it is not effective enough. Also nice to have would be labeling options as well as smart folders. The Yahoo! Interface is just as easy and user-friendly as the other providers and fairly reliable. To complete the list we need to mention the following three services, Inbox.com, FastMail and Hotmail. Inbox.com offers e-mail users 5 GB of free space to store e-mail online. Despite the limited space, this service is outstanding due to its high-speed accessibility. Web access and POP access are very fast and even the search functions are faster than with most other services on the market. The drawbacks of Inbox.com are the missing IMAP access, only POP is provided and the organizing of mail is slightly unorganized due to missing smartfolder technology. FastMail on the other hand offers users only IMAP. It has many useful features and has one of the best web-based e-mail interfaces. It also generally displays fewer ads then the other services do. And lastly, Live Hotmail should be mentioned here, since most PC users that have a Windows based operating system will have heard of hotmail. This program offers 5 GB of storage for e-mails online. It has a fast search option, a solid security feature and the interface is as easy as the ones users are used to on their desktop. Even though security is great, the spam filter is not quite as effective as some of the other e-mail providers. Also missing with this provider is the POP and IMAP access as well as smartfolders and other great e-mail organizing features.