Happy Pancake Day, what will you be putting on yours?

By: Appetite21 Feb 12, 09:42 AM

Pancakes are so famous they even have their own day!

Pancake Day also known as Shrove Tuesday in Britain. Pancake Day is the day before Ash Wednesday and the start of Lent. 'Shrove' - as in Shrove Tuesday - stems from old English word 'shrive', meaning 'confess all sins'. It is called Pancake Day because it is the day traditionally for using up any stocks of milk, butter and eggs in the storeroom cupboard which were forbidden during the abstinence of Lent. 

Here at Appetite we are incredibly generous people. Not only can we help feed your brain but we can also help you fuel your body with a simple pancake recipe.  So get your eggs, milk and flour at the ready, stock up on the lemon, sugar and Nutella and get your frying pan or griddle out!

Basic Pancake Recipe

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Achieve a winning workforce during Olympic fever

By: Appetite20 Feb 12, 03:23 PM

It's been seven years since it was first announced that the Olympics was coming to the UK. After all the hype, excitement and planning on the Olympics will finally roll into London town on the 27th July.

Yet alongside the fun and games, the prestige of the UK holding court to this global event, comes the disruption the games are going to cause.  Every day the media brings new reports not only of the transport and road chaos, but of the impact the games could have on business and the effect on workplace productivity.

For businesses this brings additional pressures over what can, for many, be an already stretched summer period. Increased journey times for employees, additional requests for leave for those lucky enough to have secured tickets; and a predicted dramatic increase in the number of absentees and late- comers. 

Over the last few weeks there has been an increase in the media of organisations' trialing remote working.  On the 8^th Feb 02'’s 12,000 workforce trailed remote working to assess the impact of how the company would cope if staff were unable to reach the office.

As a training consultancy we always advocate & embrace the use of technologies that are available to help organisations’ to work smarter and stay connected with those team members who are working remotely from the main office base.  Here at Appetite we enable our own employees to ensure they can work remotely as and when required.

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Roses are Red Violets are Blue

By: Appetite13 Feb 12, 01:48 PM

Training shouldn't be a one off event, but all year through

It’s that time of year, when the shops are full of chocolates packaged as red heart, balloons shaped like hearts and stuffed animals holding hearts. Yes tomorrow is February the 14^thand Valentine’s Day. Valentine’s Day receives mixed reviews. Many people love (he he) Valentine’s Day while the same amount of people see it as a way for Hallmark to make lots of money and a day of disappointment.  I remember working in an office where there was a constant stream of floral arrangements arriving, from the single red rose to the full works, with teddy bears, chocolates, and roses galore. 

It appeared from the response of the women receiving the gift and the position it had on their desk, pride of place or shoved off to the side, that the size of the arrangement was an indicator of how much their partners had spent and therefore, thought of them.  It raises the question:

If you really love someone, should you wait until Valentine’s Day to show them that you love them?

The same is true of the people you employ.  Training shouldn’t be to mark one specific event but continuously shown to demonstrate commitment and belief in your teams and how much you think of them.  Individuals need ongoing training to help them become more effective and take on bigger and more significant challenges.  More than this they need help learning new skills as the nature of their work – and of your organisation – changes. Too often, companies limit training and development to new hires and to people moving into new roles. This is a mistake, because ongoing training helps people adjust to changing job requirements. It also creates a pool of qualified and available people, who are ready to step into new roles as your organization needs them. This process helps you develop a more effective, efficient, productive, and motivated workforce. Done properly, this will ensure that you achieve your objectives and improve your competitive position.

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Brave New Work - The Office of the Future

By: Appetite11 Feb 12, 03:43 PM

We love technology and how it can make the workplace work smarter and not harder.

Check out this fab article from CNN on their vision of the workplace of the Future and the emerging technologies that may shape our future and the way some of us will do business.  Office windows that turn into media screens, don't you just want it now! The best thing, thing, this technology is literally only less than 10 years away.

http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2012/technology/1201/gallery.office-future.fortune/

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Shrink your inbox - weigh in and get started

By: Appetite23 Jan 12, 01:15 PM

Email. It's quickly becoming the bane of our lives, both professionally and personally. In fact recent surveys show that the average employee will spend about 41% of their time on email. With one new email arriving roughly every nine minutes its little wonder many professionals feel email just adds to the stress of the day.

23-27th January is the 5th International "Clean out your Inbox week" and you can get back on track.

An inbox crammed with emails is incredibly stressful and I should know I had 8,000 of them.  If like me you sign up to every service known to man, it creates more and more junk in your inbox. Each email was like a monkey on my back, albeit an incredibly small one.  Before you know it, you can become overloaded.  So as it’s the start of a New Year my resolution was to sort out my inbox If one of your new year's resolutions—or goals at least—is to keep a tidier inbox, get started now by archiving those old messages you know you'll never get around to.  Here are some reasons why you should, how it will increase your productivity and tips on how to do it!

1. Zero it. Keep your inbox to an absolute minimum. If you can’t action the email straight away after reading it, place a follow up flag with a reminder.  Delete any attached files from the inbox and save the file to the network drive. This way you won’t have emails languishing in your inbox forgotten and adding volume to your inbox.
2. Get your subject line right.  If your subject line is clear then this will help to reduce the amount of emails that you receive back.  It will also ensure that any emails you send to others make sense and can be actioned quickly by those who receive them.
3. Don’t be an email slave.  Put aside dedicated time every time to review your inbox.  In doing so gives you time and energy to focus on the other tasks.
4. CC or not to CC.  This is much overused and the cause of so much extra email traffic within our inboxes. Think carefully before adding someone in as a cc.  Do they really need to be part of the email?  Be respectful of your colleagues’ time.
5. Short and sweet.  Keep your emails short and only describe the action required. How often have you heard someone complaining about the number of emails they have in their inbox? The more emails that stack up, the more stressed we get. When you notice an email chain starting to get longer and longer, cut it off and try having a conversation with the people in another format. If they’re co-workers, have a meeting. If they’re friends, pick up the phone or put it in a word document.  I know, radical eh?  Less stress means improved performance and lets you focus on the things that really need your attention.
6. Archiving.  Put in a place a simple folder structure to help you store and retrieve reference emails quickly.  This will not only help save time in filing but also in retrieving.
7. Filter it.  Who are you kidding? If you haven’t read theemails in your inbox, you’re never going to read them. No matter what email service you use there are features to filter out messages.   Do yourself a favor and spend an hour on setting up filters to get junk out of your inbox
8. Connectivity is not necessarily productivity.  With so many of us having mail enabled phones, there is often pressure to reply to emails out with working hours.  Leave the decisions to the morning when you will be more productive after a night’s sleep.
9.  Be ruthless and unsubscribe from all those unwanted email newsletters.  The unsubscribe link can be hard to find and is often at the very bottom.

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