The Advantages of Internal Newsletter – A Handout

An internal newsletter targets company employees as its main audience. The periodically published newsletter is expected to talk about the employees and their achievements mainly. Birth/marriage/work/etc anniversaries relating to employees should be brought to notice through internal newsletter with colorful visuals accompanied by flowery text. Every newsletter carries the messages of company CEO/MD/etc targeting employees, company growth, and market conditions, which educate employees and give them a broader outlook about where their company stands in the present competitive market. No matter what, an internal newsletter surely serves the company in integrating employees of all roles and ranks like a united family.

All the events, small or big, that happen in the company can be highlighted through newsletters. The underlying idea of "United, we can achieve anything and everything" can be propagated using newsletter as a medium. You can conduct instant polls to know the pulse of the employees about any critical issue and publish the same in the newsletter so that all the employees could come to know the opinion of their colleagues. If you are a knowledge-based company, you can use Newsletter to drive a reading campaign among the employees.

These kinds of campaigns help employees to educate themselves about new concepts, issues, policies, etc, relating to their domain and allow them to use their newly found knowledge to design and implement new processes that can help the company to save redundant costs in the long run.

So many things happen in the daily professional life of an employee.

While solving the unexpected issues under tremendous deadline pressures, the employee uses his/her little grey cells at lightening speed and uses the hidden knowledge base acquired through in-depth practical experience gained so far. Problem solving is important but sharing others how s/he solved the problem is "more important" from the company point of view. This kind of sharing helps the company to reduce the redundant efforts in solving the similar kind of problems in future. Moreover, the company's internal newsletter is the only tool through which employees can share their unique personal work life experiences.

In summary, an internal newsletter acts as glue that binds the company with its employees by sharing their unique experiences, knowledge base, and talent. Just imagine if you can make this medium little bit interactive that forces the employee to contribute something for the newsletter, whenever it is published. By publishing the contributions of an employee along with his/her visual, the company is doing nothing but respecting the employee and at the same time letting him/her know that s/he is the valuable source for the company. This kind of appreciation and publicity makes an employee proud and increases his/her sense of belongingness to the company. This kind of belongingness in turn helps the company in retaining the crucial talent, which it requires in this heavily competitive world.

Writing Release Notes Proving to be an Enigma

Products are updated by their manufacturers following the market demands of the customers. After every updation, the manufacturer releases the new version of the product along with a Release Notes. This Release Notes talks about so many things about the product in terms of defects/bugs, enhancements, changes made to the existing features, etc. And every manufacturer tries to give precise and correct information in the Release Notes. Since there is no universal format about how to write the Release Notes, every company follows its own standards in presenting the content and layout design.

All over the world, there is a convention among the Release Notes documenters that the Release Notes should be written in Present Tense. But at the same time, all companies don't follow this rule religiously. Again, there is no consensus about how much content should be provided to the reader of the Release Notes relating to a particular topic. In companies, this decision is always taken by the Documentation Head in a subjective way. That means, whatever goes as part of the content to the reader, depends on the wish of the Documentation Head. Nobody is quite sure about the content aspect. Some companies try to write the Release Notes as a mini-guide but a few others go for providing conceptual outline for the changes done along with respective guide links, where the new content in detail has been updated. Reader can click the guide links and read the content in detail, if s/he wants. < /P>

A few documenters debate about which tense should be used in Release Notes. As per them, if you are writing the Release Notes about a defect, then the problem part should be written in Past tense and the Solution should be written in the Present Tense. But, all over the world, documenters insist on writing all the Release Notes in Present Tense. A few others write in whatever tense they feel convenient; these guys argument is that they are mainly targeting the reader understanding aspect. Therefore, the stress is not upon the tense and sentence structure part but on the readability part.

In summary, how to write a proper Release Notes is proving to be a mystery for the new writer. Since the writer's content is always at the mercy of the Content Reviewer, there is much not scope on the part of the writer regarding how much content should be provided to the reader. Unfortunately, there is not much content available in the Net relating to the Release Notes.

Rule Creation

Sticking to said rules is one thing and creating new rules is altogether a different job. It is not possible for a person, who is a strict follower of existing rules, to think creatively and design new rules. His /her mind is already disciplined to follow those existing rules and creating something new is treated as a crime. Nevertheless, rule-benders exist everywhere. These guys /gals always are in a lookout for excuses so that they do not follow the said rules. If they are successful, then they feel that they have achieved victory.

Rule creation is an interesting job compared to following the existing rules in a disciplined manner. During rules creation, one has to think about all the target audiences and their psychologies. Everything has to be taken into consideration; otherwise it will be difficult to make people to follow the created rules. On the whole, the created rule should provide leverage to the follower and should not take way the mostly guarded personal space of the follower. Any rule which does not follow these rules will be broken by the followers no matter what how much good it does for them, if followed.

In summary, rules should be there and have to be followed. Creating rules is for bringing orderliness in the place wherever they are implemented. Nevertheless, rule-breakers/ benders are there everywhere and it is quite a fun to watch them doing that. However, neatly designed rules, keeping everyone in consideration, do not face resistance among the followers.

Age Vs Learning

Learning is a tough task. Depending up on your age, it becomes more difficult to learn new things. In these days, everyone needs to update their skills quite often to stay in the market. Depending on the market requirements, you are forced to sharpen your skills. Competition is everywhere. Be it getting a job or selling your product in the market, nevertheless you need to face a huge competition. Getting success is not that much easy. You need to strive hard for that. Hardworking is not the solution for today's competition. You need to be smart also. Only then, you can grasp the market. Otherwise, you will remain where you have started initially throughout your life. Irrespective of the amount of effort you put to win the competition, the market hardly allows you to grab the success easily. The only way to outdo the market is to think and do in the same way about how the market functions to o utperform you; implement the same tactics and strategies to win the market.

Getting what you want and how you want is a tough task nowadays. The competition between the grey cells has been increasing and it seems that it is going to become intense day after day. That's why you need to prepare your mindset to learn not only new skills but also improve your existing skill set. No matter what your age is, in today's market for your survival, you need to be a student throughout your life.

GUIDE WRITING FOR A LEGACY APPLICATION - TIPS

Legacy applications come with heavy baggage. The first problem is that the application is not designed as per the current standards. And there were so many chances that it was developed in a hodge-podge manner. During the initial stages, when the application has been under the process of building, documentation was not taken care of. Once the product started selling in the market, clients started asking for documentation to understand and implement the functionalities. Then, the company understands the importance of documentation and hires a few Technical Writers for Guide-writing. But here, the catch-in is that it is quite difficult at this point to gather product's process-related material because nobody knows completely about the product.

All legacy applications, which lack documentation for their critical processes, project this kind of problem to the writers. The common solution recommended for this kind of typical problem is that writers have to sit and play with the product so that they can understand the nuances of the product functionality. The second alternative is to call for a meeting with all the relevant departments including Sales, Pre-Sales, Business Analysts, and Design team and conduct a functionality walkthrough so that everyone can chip-in something about the functionality from their point of view. The third alternative is to take the help of Development team and request them to go through the code so that the functionality behind that particular feature can be understood and documented properly.

In summary, before documenting the functionality of a legacy application, it is always better if the writers take the help of all relevant departments of the company into confidence before they start working on the Guide. Always Understand, Verify and Validate (UVV) the given functionality before you start writing about it.

NET ADDICTION

Are you addicted to Net? This is high time everyone, who has been accessing Net for the past significant period of time, has to check whether they have been addicted to Net knowingly/unknowingly. Following are a few questions which help you to identify whether you are addicted to Net or not. Can you stay without getting connected for a single day? Can you stay without updating your blog for 2 hours? Can you stay silent without chatting with your friends /colleagues during a single weekday? If the answer is No to all of the preceding questions, then it can be safely assumed that you are one of those internet addicted personalities. And it is time to see your nearby psychiatrist regarding your addiction.

In most of the cases, people access Net to be in touch with their colleagues' /friends/ for official communication/ to update their notes/ etc. But, what happens here is that they get habituated to do such tasks period after period and while doing so, they unknowingly gets addicted to Net. Once addicted, they access Net to check their mails even when there is no necessity to do that. It is some sort of obsessive compulsive behavior which forces them to do such sort of things. Addicts spent most of their time browsing websites irrespective of their relevancy to their work/life. They register themselves with social networking sites and start updating their personal news so that others can read and respond. The buck does not stop here. The addiction forces them to such an extent that when they are not in a position to access the Net such as during traveling, etc, unable to resist themselves, the y try to access the Net using their Blackberries and start corresponding with their buddies online.

Life won't be same once you become a Net addict. It is better to accept that you are addicted and take help from professional psychiatrists as early as possible. One another example of Net addiction is that a few people are addicted to playing games on Net. These guys and gals are emotionally attached to the scores which they try to achieve during the play. Therefore, until they defeat the other player, who is sitting somewhere in the other part of the globe, these guys won't stop playing. Sometimes, this playing event crosses 24 hours at a stretch. This kind of continuous playing harms players physically their nerves and psychologically their mental stamina. If people follow the same kind of activities continuously religiously, then the chances of becoming Net addict are not very far.

In summary, though the technology has improved by leaps and bounds, but humans have not changed much in their mental and physical capabilities. That's why this blog suggests that it is always better to use and interact with new technologies in a limited and beneficial manner.

OLD Vs NEW WORK CULTURES

There is a lot of difference between the old and new work cultures around the globe. Today, it is easy even for a layman to judge whether a company is still following the old ways of doing things or flexible enough to understand and implement the new global work culture. Companies, which follow old work culture, follow dress code. Some go to the extent of asking their employees to wear uniforms (particularly manufacturing companies!) so that all the employees have something in common among them, which lay stress on equality and oneness.

In the recent globalization scenario, so many new domains, verticals, and industries have cropped up out of nowhere to service the global citizen in every aspect. Information Technology popularly known as IT is one of them. It has changed the global work culture scenario radically in a very short period of time (in one decade!). IT industry not only has created huge employment opportunities all around the world but it also paid the employees huge salaries to keep them in comfort and follow their own style of living.

All around the globe, IT work culture has been adjudged as the best one so far. IT companies follow flat-hierarchies, give their employees top priority, and freedom regarding their professional life. They were allowed to wear what they want and use company laptops for their personal use, along with other perks, free gifts, weekend dinners, etc. IT has changed the old work culture all around the globe. The new work culture has its own objectives and priorities, which are quite different from the old one. IT companies stress their employees only on getting given assignments done. That's it! How do you do that is not company's problem. Employees can come to office as per their own comfortable timings and stay as many hours as they want. At the end of the week, company checks whether the particular employee has completed the minimum number of work hours or not. This kind of work culture has not been imagined before 1990s.

In summary, the new world work culture gives importance to freedom and employee satisfaction unlike old work culture which gives importance to pseudo-discipline, unnecessary strictness, and mind-boggling organization hierarchies.

THE POWER OF A SUGGESTION

The power of a suggestion depends upon the receiver not on the giver. – Anonymous

In our daily life, whenever we come across people who are facing simple problems for which we know the solution, as a human being, we tend to give suggestions to the concerned person though s/he don't ask us. The solution is powerful enough to eradicate the problem. But, does the listener of the suggestion is willing to obey and implement this powerful solution? Everybody has freedom of their own and nobody can force others to listen to what they say. But at the same time, when the suggestion provided is a time-tested one and the problem-facing person is not listening to it, what else anyone can do?

Everyone can lead their life in their own way. They are the masters of their own destiny. When people want freedom in whatever they do, they are bound to follow their inner instincts rather than depending upon outsider's suggestions and ideas. Although it is better to follow your own instincts, but sometimes, it is rather better to look at other people and understand their suggestions before discarding them. This way, though you won't follow what others seem to be dictating, from your point of view, but still you can share their knowledge. Sharing knowledge is a good thing. If not here, somewhere else you can use the same idea/suggestion for betterment of your life.

In summary, this blog advocates every reader to listen to the suggestions that others give about your problems and try to understand them in terms of timing and context before you decide whether you implement the same or discard them.

TIPS FOR A NEW JOINEE

Joining a new company is easy but mingling with new colleagues is little bit difficult task for most of the employees. Every time the new joinee is supposed to interact with an existing team / group, s/he feels odd. This happens particularly if the new joinee is shy and introvert.

Every thing is new for you when you join a new company. The place where you sit, the people whom you interact, the process which you follow, etc, are all new to you. Sometimes, there are chances that you may feel lonely even if you sit in the middle of a huge crowd. And at other times, when you interact with a hard guy/gal with attitude, you really feel going back to your previous company where you were used to be the Boss for your buddies.

There are a few rules which you need to follow for smooth interactions in new places. This blog recommends a few ways, which helps you to understand, compete, and interact with unknown colleagues comfortably.

• Never try to stereotype people.
• Never comment your new colleagues though they become so closer to you in the first few days.
• Whenever others try to take advantage of your silence, excuse yourself and keep away from that place.
• If anyone tries to bully you, then just give a smile and keep yourself at ease.
• If somebody tries to interact with you, answer them politely.
• Never extend discussions.
• Never stalk at others.
• Do your work and leave the office at least for the first few months
• Never indulge in anti-company discussions.
• Never indulge in mudslinging activity.
• Take it easy, even if somebody comments you.
• Don't let others a chance to probe about you and your private matters.
• Don't let out your honest opinions about others if they are laced with negative tinge.
• Always try to praise others reasonably because that's what everybody wants to hear from others.

In summary, you need to understand that change is the only permanent thing in this world. Once you start adapting yourself to the new changes in your life, automatically new bonds will be created with your colleagues and life turns smooth as time passes by.