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Tag Archives: Email

The Grade Negotiation Season

21 Wednesday May 2014

Posted by Paul Kiser in About Reno, College, Communication, Education, Ethics, Generational, Higher Education, Internet, Opinion, Pride, Public Image, Public Relations, Respect, Universities

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college credit, Email, financial aid, grade point average, Grades, negotiation, professors, semester, student loans

Spring brings forth the failures as well as the flowers

Spring brings forth the failures as well as the flowers

Most people don’t realize that we are in a new season. It happens twice a year at the end of a semester when college professors are bombarded with emails from their students trying to beg, borrow, or steal a few points for a higher grade. It should be noted that the majority of these emails are not coming the students who attended class, turned in assignments on time, and studied for the tests. No, these are the students that missed class, turned in assignments late, and had a party to go to rather than study.

The emails are typically as follows:

Hi,

Could u look @my grade. I need 2 have a c n u’re clas or i lose my finansal aide. i was sure i had a c n u’re class.

Rach

The student often assumes that the professor knows in which class the student was enrolled, and writes as if she or he is texting a friend. The student probably knows that they didn’t deserve a “C” in the class; however, they hope that the professor will feel sorry for them and bump them up. Usually, nothing changes, but the student can say to her or his parents that they were sure they had a “C” in the class and that they even complained to the professor, but he or she wouldn’t change it.

For the professor, these emails take pointless hours of time to review the scores, confirm the grade, and respond. It turns the end of the semester into a circus where all the clowns come out of the woodwork after being absent most of the semester.

There is nothing wrong with a student questioning their grade; however, if a student is at the borderline of losing her or his financial aid, and/or falling below the required grade average for enrollment, the problem is not about one grade, but the overall performance in all classes.

Sadly, professors are not allowed to offer an appropriate response such as:

Rachel Smith
Student
ENG 203 – Writing For Business

Dear Rachel:

Thank you for your email. Your grade is based on your participation in my class and reflects the work you performed. The “D’ you received is not only correct, it is generous. I’m pleased to see that a student like yourself will no longer be offered financial aid, so that a better quality of student can now be a recipient.

I wish you well on your future in the world of menial labor for which you may or may not be qualified.

Sincerely,

Edward Terrell
Professor
University of  Higher Education

 

10 Things To Decline From An Employer

09 Monday Dec 2013

Posted by Paul Kiser in Business, Communication, Customer Relations, Customer Service, Employee Retention, Ethics, Health, Honor, Human Resources, Information Technology, Internet, Management Practices, Pride, Privacy, Public Relations, Re-Imagine!, Relationships, Respect, Social Interactive Media (SIM), Social Media Relations, Technology, Tom Peters

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Affordable Care Act, benefits, company car, company cell phone, company email, Email, employment agreement, employment contract, free speech, Heath Benefits, Intellectual property, NDA, Non-compete, Pay for Performance, retirement benefits

No longer can anyone expect to build a lifelong career with one organization, nor is that considered healthy for the individual or the company. A person is now his or her own commodity. He or she must expect to build their own skills and reputation as an individual on the open market rather than as corporate employee number 8675309.

In this Brave New Working World a person should be prepared to say ‘no’ to antiquated elements of 20th Century employment, not only because they are inappropriate, but because they indicate that employer is unaware of their failure to be competitive in the 21st Century. Benefits and perks that were meant to tie a person to one organization no longer make sense in a world where ‘permanent employee’ has been replaced by ‘contract labor.’

Here are ten employment offers and requests that should be declined from an employer and cause you to re-evaluate your working relationship with a company:

No. 10 – Retirement Benefits
It should be obvious that any company offering retirement benefits either does not understand today’s working world or is trying to offer something that they know you will never receive. Better to have the money now and invest than pretend you’ll still be with the company when you retire.

The Company Email is always the company's to give or take away

The company giveth and taketh away access to your email

No. 9 – The Company Email Account
You many have to use the company email when corresponding with others in the company, but always ask yourself, “If the company decided to lay me off today and they ended my access to my email account, what information would I lose?” What about that email from the senior executive that ordered you to overcharge your customer? Every email sent to your company email account should be forwarded to a private account and blind copy any company emails you send to your private account. This protects you and the company from the unethical corporate manager.

No. 8 – The Company Car
When I was growing up my uncle worked for an oil tool business and he had a company car. I thought that was the coolest perk in the world. While it is a rare perk in today’s world, it should be declined in most situations. The problem with the full-time company car is that it becomes a liability if a better employment opportunity arises. Suddenly you’re faced with buying a new car in order to accept a better job.

The company cell phone comes with chains attached

The company cell phone comes with chains attached

No. 7 – The Company Cell Phone
Many people fail to realize what a company cell phone represents. It is a chain that ties the employee to the employer 24/7/365. A boss may hesitate to call a private cell phone, but have no problem calling the phone they are paying for at 3 AM. Many jobs require an employee to be accessible, but you are better off with your own phone than be indentured by a company cell phone.

No. 6 – Giving Your Employer Your Social Media Passwords
There are questions as to whether it is legal for an employer to demand an employee’s passwords to his or her Facebook, Twitter, and other Social Media passwords. The bottom line is that you do not want to work for a company that wants this level of control on your life. It will only go downhill from there.

No 5 – Restricting Free Speech (The NDA)
In an exercise with students in a graduate program, I purchased the fictional company they worked for and I was interviewing them to determine who to keep and who to let go. As part of this exercise I gave each of them an outrageous NDA contract (see Kco NDA) to sign. In almost every case, the Master’s program students signed it, most without question.

A company’s has a right to protect its reputation, but employers should be under the burden to gain the loyalty, trust, and respect of their employees so that they would not dream of talking smack about their workplace. If an employee is ready to bad mouth the source of their income then either the employer hired the wrong person, or the employer has failed to treat their employee as an important asset. In either case, it is the employer, not the employee who shoulders the burden of the failure.

No. 4 – Intellectual Property
If you have been consigned to produce something tangible for someone, then you have agreed to surrender it once it has been created and delivered; however, many companies are claiming ownership of any work done by an employee as their own intellectual property. Nothing could be more disrespectful to a human than to treat them as a machine that is only useful as a tree from which they pick and enjoy the fruit. A business that values their team would never have to be concerned about the issue of intellectual property because each team member’s work would be a source of pride and celebration. The important element in any organization is the person who creates the work, not the work itself.

Before you sign away your right to maintain ownership of your work you should ask if you want your give away your legacy of achievement to those who didn’t do the work?

The Affordable Care Act is emancipation for the worker

The Affordable Care Act is emancipation for the worker

No. 3 – Health Benefits
America has millions of people who continue to work for an employer primarily because they need or want the health insurance offered by the company. As an employer do you want people to only be working for you because of the health benefit perk?

The biggest impact that the Affordable Care Act will have on America is to free people to work for people they want to work for, not those who have the critical health care benefit he or she needs.

No. 2 – Pay For Performance
When someone attempts to quantify a job or project they sacrifice common sense for greed. The need to meet the measured goals forces an employee to ignore important aspects of work that can’t be measured or quantified. Pay For Performance assumes the Ends always justifies the Means, which is rarely true in the business world, despite what greedy executives and investors think. Almost always customer satisfaction is at risk under Pay For Performance standards because a customers true satisfaction cannot be measured by questionnaires, surveys, nor sales. In every case the wise employee will figure out how to exploit the system and defeat the true purpose of the evaluation tool.

Pay For Performance systems are lose-lose scenarios for everyone and a company that relies on them does not understand how to truly motivate and reward its team; therefore, you should avoid the trap they are setting for you, your customers, and themselves.

No. 1 – The NCA
The non-compete agreement or NCA is the one indicator that proves only fools work for the employer, and there are plenty of fools out there. You shouldn’t be one of them. 

An NCA basically eviscerates your career by not allowing you to continue working if you leave the current company. In today’s world that can be a death sentence. Your skills and experience are laid to waste by an NCA and you should never agree to it, nor should you consider working for someone who asks you to sign one.

The Petraeus Lesson: Use Your REAL Name

16 Friday Nov 2012

Posted by Paul Kiser in Aging, Branding, Business, Communication, Ethics, Generational, Honor, Information Technology, Internet, Lessons of Life, Pride, Privacy, Public Relations, Respect, Social Interactive Media (SIM), Social Media Relations

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David Pertraeus, Email, private life, Public Image, public life

David Petraeus knows about public image, but he believed an alias online was not public

Men my age have been taught the we should have two personalities. There is the ‘professional’ persona that we wear in our public/business life, then there’s the ‘real’ personality that we only show when we are off the stage. That worked when there was a clear division between public and private life. For most of my life I knew that the person I knew at work was not the same as the person who was in the backyard with a beer in his hand.

A baseball cap and polo shirt don’t mask the person, why would an email alias?

The Internet changed all that, but somehow older men didn’t get the memo. When we found out we could create an email account like ‘secretagent007’, ‘mysteryman’, ‘mrinvisible’, etc., we really believed we could say anything we want, do anything we wanted without anyone knowing who we really were. I admit, it is a seductive concept that our professional/public persona could remain unknown online, but the fact is that anything we say or do online is recorded in history and will always be attached to us. 

The Petraeus Lesson is simply this: USE YOUR REAL NAME EVERY TIME  EVERYWHERE. Don’t allow yourself to be sucked in that YOU are smarter than every one of the 7,079,446,910 people on Earth. Never, ever, ever log on, create an email, or register for a social media site using a false name. If you have an email that doesn’t use your real name then get rid of it and get another one. This is 2012, and you need to know that what you say and do online is public. Period.

I know we older, white males were raised to believe in two personas, but it is a myth that we need to get over. It’s not a privacy issue, it’s a ‘am-I-smart-or-am-I-stupid’ issue.

The Quality of Relationships and Social Interactive Media

17 Monday May 2010

Posted by Paul Kiser in 2020 Enterprise Technologies, Communication, Information Technology, Lessons of Life, Membership Retention, Public Relations, Re-Imagine!, Rotary, Social Interactive Media (SIM), Social Media Relations

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Bloggers, Blogging, Blogs, Communication, Connections, Email, Facebook, Friends, Friendship, Human Interaction, LinkedIn, New Business World, Public Relations, Quality of Relationships, Rotarians, Rotary, Social Interaction, Social Media, Social Networking, Twitter, Value-added

Paul Kiser - CEO of Enterprise Technologies, inc.

by Paul Kiser

Do you love me?….Do you like me?….Do you loath me? What is the quality of our relationship?

There are some people who claim that Social Media tools like Facebook and Twitter cheapen relationships. I don’t agree. Social Interactive Media almost always increase the quantity of our relationships, but does that mean the quality of relationships is reduced?

To me that is similar to saying that because a person belongs to a Rotary club it reduces the quality of his or her relationships because they are using up their allotment of friendship in one place or that children in a family of five are not as loved as the only child in a family of three. The logic makes no sense.

A blog that decries the impact of Social Media on our relationships, combined with another blog by Carola Valdez regarding love and relationships have me thinking about the quality of relationships and the impact of tools like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

(Read Carola’s Blog here – note that it’s in Spanish)

I see this issue as two intertwined subjects, which are relationships and communication. A relationship describes the connection between two people and communication maintains the connection. I divide the concept of relationship into three parts that all work together to determine the bond or quality of a relationship.

Relationships Part One: Core Reactionary Characteristics (CRC)
I believe that every person has relationship ‘DNA’ . It is the combination of our inherent personality, our experiences from past relationships, and a third factor that reacts to the stimulus (or ‘chemistry, if you will) between two people. I term this set of responsive behaviors the Core Reactionary Characteristics (or CRC). I use the analogy of DNA because genes are able to attach or connect with certain genes but not to other genes in the DNA strand, which is similar to our ability to ‘click’ or not with someone else.

Social Media makes us aware of how connected we are to each other

Relationships Part Two: Environmental Factors
Just because we feel comfortable connecting with someone doesn’t mean we will become close friends. It is a combination of the old nature/nurture influences that seem to guide relationships. We may have a great ‘chemistry’ with someone, but it is our environment that controls the depth of the relationship. I like the example given in the lyrics of Alanis Morissette’s song, ‘Ironic’.

“It’s meeting the man of my dreams, and then meeting his beautiful wife.”

It doesn’t have to be a love relationship that is thwarted by the situational factors, but love is the type of relationship we relate to when someone wants to write a song or make a movie. The point is that if the CRC is compatible AND given the correct time, place, and freedom to explore a relationship, a deep connection (friendship and/or love) can be formed.

Relationships Part Three:  Dynamics
Finally, I think it is important to accept that relationships are dynamic, which simply means that as individuals grow and change the relationship waxes and wanes. I have a friend who had an incredibly close relationship with his wife (she passed away a couple of years ago.) On their anniversary he would say, “We’ve decided to renew our marriage for another year.” This was not meant to be as funny as most people seemed to interpret it. He truly did value the relationship and didn’t take it for granted that the marriage would be continuous. I wonder how strong all marriages would be if we knew that either party could decide not to renew the contract each year.

My point is that regardless of how strong a relationship, the fact is that two people can grow and change at different rates over time. It is rare that a relationship can maintain a high level of intensity especially if the two people are in the process of change and/or growth.

It is the combination of all three factors (CRC, Environmental Factors, and Dynamics) that determine the quality of a relationship at any given moment.

Social Media and Relationships
Social Media tools like Facebook and Twitter increase the number of people we know (quantity of relationships) but the quality of those relationships are dependent on multiple factors that have nothing to do with the tools or the media itself. In the end, the quality of the relationships are not affected positively or negatively by the quantity of relationships we have, but by the type of connection that will result of making a connection.  If anything, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter make it possible to have better quality relationships because they; 1) increase the number of potential ‘best friends’, and 2) give us better communication tools to improve the quality of our connections.

More on the role of communication later….

More blogs

  • Relationships and Thin-Slicing: Why the other person knows what you’re really thinking
  • Browser Wars: Internet Explorer losing, Google Chrome gaining ground
  • Rotary@105:  What BP Could Learn from the 1914 Rotary Code of Ethics
  • Twitter is the Thunderstorm of World Thought
  • Signs of the Times
  • Rotary Magazine Dilemma Reveals the Impact of Social Media
  • How Social Interactive Media Could Transform Higher Education
  • How to Become a Zen Master of Social Media
  • Car Dealership Re-Imagines Customer Service
  • Death of All Salesmen!
  • Aristotle’s General Rules on Social Media
  • Social Media:  What is it and Why Should You Care?
  • Social Media 2020:  Keep it Personal
  • Social Media 2020:  Who Shouldn’t Be Teaching Social Media
  • Social Media 2020:  Public Relations 2001 vs Social Media Relations 2010
  • Social Media 2020: Who Moved My Public Relations?
  • Publishing Industry to End 2012
  • Who uses Facebook, Twitter, MySpace & LinkedIn?
  • Fear of Public Relations
  • Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn…Oh My!
  • Does Anybody Really Understand PR?

Other Pages of This Blog

  • About Paul Kiser
  • Common Core: Are You a Good Switch or a Bad Switch?
  • Familius Interruptus: Lessons of a DNA Shocker
  • Moffat County, Colorado: The Story of Two Families
  • Rules on Comments
  • Six Things The United States Must Do
  • Why We Are Here: A 65-Year Historical Perspective of the United States

Paul’s Recent Blogs

  • Janet Devlin vs. Janet Devlin
  • Colorado’s 17 Dying Counties
  • Timid Democrats in Power Haunts the United States of America
  • The Betelgeuse Summer Problem
  • Moffat County Coal: Why Ignorance is Not Bliss
  • Betelgeuse is NOT Collapsing, It’s Expanding [NOTE: THIS IS IN ERROR]
  • Betelgeuse: Schrödinger’s Star

Paul Kiser’s Tweets

  • Did anyone else note that Mike Pence basically said he was not Presidential material? He's refusing to invoke the 2… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 1 week ago
  • @brianduggan I'm getting the feeling that we white people think that we can prove our white superiority by taking S… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 1 week ago
  • @AmyShiraTeitel A suggestion on your look at USSR space program: Was Yuri killed by the Kremlin? I took a stab at… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 2 weeks ago
  • @EmilyOhMy I agree, in the short term. In the long view, the number of people in the world who do things for immedi… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 1 month ago
  • @realDonaldTrump Ooops, Trump's off his meds again. 2 months ago

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