Regional Employees use work hours to surf Job Sites
Bayt.com, the Middle East’s number one job site, has released the results of an online poll exploring people’s behaviour in the workplace. The results showed that employees in the region spend increasing amounts of time browsing the Internet, many of them looking for other job opportunities.
Conducted on the Bayt.com homepage throughout October, the poll attracted over 4,000 respondents, who answered four basic questions regarding their workplace habits. When asked what they where doing when they weren’t being productive at work, almost 50 per cent of respondents said they were looking for another job, while 24.5 per cent spent their time browsing the Internet.
The Importance of Business Networking
Networking is an invaluable business skill and a critical component in any professional’s toolkit for career success. The ability to communicate effectively, build and nurture winning relationships and expand a network is absolutely essential in today’s business world for career advancement. Whether you are looking for a job or not, it is always important to be adding to your personal network and fostering existing contacts with the goal of constantly being in touch with key decision-makers and people with influence within your industry and out.
So what is networking? Networking is the process of leveraging your existing contact base of family, friends, professional colleagues and other acquaintances to generate other contacts. It is about constructing an ever-expanding set of contacts and gradually building genuine, mutually beneficial relationships with these people with the goal of advancing your career interests while simultaneously assisting others in advancing theirs.
And what are the benefits? Key benefits of networking include but are not limited to:-
Are Your Employees Engaged?
We’ve all heard the joke about the top-ranking employer who is asked how many people work for him and replies “about a third of them”. Then there is the Murphy’s Law that states “you are always doing something marginal when the boss drops by your desk” and the standard company posters that read “the beatings will continue till morale improves” and “I have plenty of talent, motivation and vision. I just don’t care”. Jokes aside, employee engagement is a hot topic in today’s workplace and leading organizations recognize the vested interest they have in actively measuring, monitoring and maximizing the level of engagement amongst their employees and ensuring their workforce is indeed optimally engaged.
The Towers Perrin Global Workforce Study, the largest of its kind, conducted in May and June 2007 and released in October showed that just 21% of employees surveyed around the world are engaged in their work while 38% are either disenchanted or disengaged and the remaining 41% are only partly engaged. Obviously employees are not exerting their full discretionary effort to meet their companies’ goals and agendas and there is a significant reservoir of untapped potential, a gap which Towers Perrin has labeled the “engagement gap”.
