How to host a meeting from your computer

During the frenzied end of the year activities, there can be a lot on your plate, but you still need to get everyone together to make decisions. What's the best way to get the team together without trying to find a miracle hour where everyone is available? I found this great tool through my class's e-book called Padlet. This is a free online tool available here.  If you use some of the advanced tools or want to do frequent bulletin boards, you will need to choose the subscription service.

What does this tool do?  It is an online bulletin board that can be shared with other users.  This creates an online collaboration space that users can post and edit different items all from one spot.  Users can visit it when they have time and add items or edit them.

What's great about this tool is how intuitive the set up is and how easy it is for other user's to share it.  You could post excel graphs, spreadsheets, word files, videos, and even do doodles right in the program.  This tool is even a great place to use to organize all of your own thoughts on a project into one single location with the ability to switch between files quickly.  

So the next time you are playing the "when can we actually have this meeting?" game, I suggest you give this easy tool a try.  There is password protection available, or you can make the board able to be viewed by the public.  IF you are working on a group project in class, start with setting up a padlet and allow the other members of the group to post items as they finish so everyone's progress can be viewed real time.

This is a fun tool with lots of possibilities.  Please give it a try!  

Tell me how you really feel!

This week I would love to share a great new tool I was shown how to use during one of my college classes.  I am very excited to show a survey from Survey Monkey!  This is a great tool that uses all kinds of social media to gather responses.

Evaluation, prior to, during, or after a process is so important.  Last semester I took Evaluating training and one of the key things we looked at was sometimes anonymous surveys are important.  While making an anonymous web based survey used to require the employ of a computer programmer, now you can use the Survey Monkey tool to make one.

Create your own user feedback survey
I created the questions after creating a free account.  There are some paid functions, which I did not use.  I would advise you to remove a logo if it auto adds it, as it did for me.  This is a paid feature and while it does make the survey look more professional, it is not necessary to send out a basic evaluation.

In my other class, instructional technologies, I just taught a cooking class called Healthy Swaps.  I made the survey embedded above as what I would use as a Level One evaluation that I could send my students if it was a real class.  Survey Monkey allowed me to pick how I wanted the responses to be recorded and even evaluated if my survey was too long.

Please give this program a try!  It can be an important tool in your performance metrics.

Making the Connection

For the last two years, I have been utilizing my employer's tuition assistance program to go back to school with the goal of changing careers.  I feel very lucky to have the job that I have, but I would like to be able to grow and do other things.  The main focus of my education has been to work towards a position in performance improvement, or performance analysis, my passion.

With this specific goal in mind, it's important to make connections with both future employers and other people in the field.  I have already created a career development plan, however I am severely lacking in professional connects with where I am headed for the future.  These connections are so important.  Not only can a network of people help share information about openings but can give much needed advice.

What's a great way to make these connections?  Programs like LinkedIn have changed social media into a workhorse for the modern professional.  LinkedIn has many tools to help recruiters and help applicants find each other.

In your profile, you can set up different skill sets.  This task is very easy and creates a powerful tool for helping future bosses search for the right person.  It's a great way to make your skills very marketable.  LinkedIn has a nearly endless list of skills, so it's important to choose the right ones.

I recommend making an initial list of 5, then going back and adding more.  Try looking at job postings that you are interested in and remembering which skills are listed that you already have and go back and add these to your profile.  This will help attract the kind of connections you are really looking for.

If you have not already, go make a profile on LinkedIn.  It's super easy, and can help make the professional world bigger and smaller at the same time.  The hardest part is taking a picture.  I spent 30 minutes trying to find a basic background and picking out an outfit, but you can skip that step to start with.

You have Messages!

I have posted a video for how to make navigation form in Access a couple of posts ago.  I use Access for much of my shared data entry type procedures.  There are some basic and easy ways to use this program, but to really use a lot of the great features, there is almost an endless amount of options you can use with both Macros and VBD coding to customize your Access database.

Often times you will create a database, but you will be handing off the reins to different users for data entry. Good database design involves helping users that you may not be training yourself, on how to enter data into your system.  To make sure users get the information when they need it, you can create message box pop ups to help users understand more about what they need to do. 

On the last database I created, I made a message box that appears when a user selected a certain type of error in the system for receiving.  The message lets the user know the next steps.  Learning how to do this process involved some trial and error.  Since then, I have found the wonder of Youtube videos to help me learn how to do the process.  I can't stress enough how great of a tool Youtube videos are for finding ways to use more of Access great features. 

I have linked the video below that will help you learn how to put in message box.  Please watch it, but also use this as a jumping off part to use more of what Access can do.

Making a Statement

While Metrics make my heart go pitter patter, I have to admit, they are not everyone's cup of tea.  It unlikely that very many people will be excited by a 100+ report on an organization's performance.  However, recording performance is not very effective if no one reads it. 

So, how do you make looking at reports more appealing?  Enter my friend, the infographic.  Infographics can help in a variety of different ways.  First, they help create context.  It's very hard to look at a large list of numbers and know how they compare.  Making a visual gives quick understanding and will be a lot easier to get the people who need to look at the numbers, look at the numbers.

Next, it's unlikely in today's busy world that someone is going to have time to sit down and read a novel on performance.  Making information faster to digest will make it more likely the reader will make it to the end.  Most will not even start if confronted with solid text and pages of table.

It can be hard to take the time after spending hours and hours gathering data to make it look attractive.  However, there has been a large proliferation of inforgraphic programs that are web based that do not take a graphic's art degree or a significant investment in time.  I tried out Piktochart and found it very easy to use.  It certainly makes a better report front page than anything I could have made in Word with the same amount of time.

Just look at it...

It's so much more inviting than a plain white background word document.  It certainly has a leg up on the clasic APA title page.  I invite you to give Piktochart a try.  It's a fun program and may even get more people to read your hard work!

Not an All Access Pass

I spend a lot of time creating metrics that measure our performance.  An important part of that task is looking at data and how it's entered.  Awhile back we had a log that was created in Excel that would show which items we had received and when.  At first, using Excel seemed to work ok.  However, there were some significant problems.

1.)Multiple users could not log on at once.  We would spend the afternoon calling each other to find out who had the spreadsheet open and have to ask people to close it.  If someone left on vacation or was sick and had the spreadsheet open, it meant we either had to create a new copy or wait until that person got back.  Not a great way to do work.

2.)Data integrity became questionable...fast.  We had people who did not understand how to appropriately sort data try to look for a name, and only sort with the name field.  Pretty soon we had no idea which line belonged to which.  We could no longer have an confidence in recorded issues being listed on the correct record.

With these issues, my management asked me for some ideas.  We did not have any funding, and what I was going to create needed to be user friendly and was going to be created by me, who is not a programmer.  A large stack of Access books later and a 30+ hours of youtube videos later, I built our group an Access database that has managed a lot of our issues.

The video linked below shows one of the first actions I took with our brand new database, and that was to create form entry and to hide the data sheets from view.  This is not the database I created, but is similar in design.  I hope this helps get you started if you decide to start using Access for data entry.

Say Um....

Back in 2007, my sister and I loved reading books and blogs by our favorite author, The Yarn Harlot.  She loved to knit, and I loved to spin.  We decided to start a yarn and fiber business and we created a Podcast called The Sassy Sheep.  At this time, podcasts had just become popular.  Finding new content was pretty challenging.  We listened to a lot of other podcasts to learn about trends, and sometimes this would give us a direction to go in. However, we enjoyed our sessions the best when we got to do interviews.

One interview sticks out the most in our minds and changed how to did business.  We had been dying yarn in the microwave.  You need heat to set acid dyes.  It is a very cumbersome way to dye and it took us an entire day to make ten skeins of yarn.  There is quite a famous dyer of yarn in Montana called Mountain Colors and they actually decided to let my sister and I interview them and tour their facility. 

These ladies are some of the most amazing women I have ever met.  They decided to create their business model to allow other women to be able to love working and still have time for their family.  They created an environment that allowed for completely flexible hours and even found ways to have tasks that people who worked from home could do.  There was a set of workers that would pick up the just dyed yarn, dry it in their homes and package it for sale.  I watched a large group of very busy people focused on work, but every single person had the most amazing smile on their face.  This company was important to them. 

My poor sister always had to do the audio editing whenever we were done.  Normally, she would drag her feet.  Until you do editing of your audio, you will never know how many times you repeat words and phrases.  One time she called me after a particularly wandering podcast and informed me I had "um" over 40 times.  I am not sure that I will ever make another podcast, and am almost certain the ones we made have been lost to the internet forever, but the chance to meet the ladies and other people while doing was a life changing event.  Meeting people who know the industry and can act as mentors can completely change your perspective and outlook.