An alarming proportion of people spend a lot of time reacting to events rather than working to a plan and picking off priorities.

This method of working (if it can be called a method!) is disruptive, demoralising, wastes time and causes stress.

In the ever-changing workplace, it is important to keep on top of trends, if you are going to attract good people to your business and get them to stay.

When Forbes.com carried out a poll about the most annoying business jargon, one of the contenders was “Thinking outside the box”. An astute reader voted and left the comment “Forget the box, just think”.

One common factor for virtually all of us is that we all want to be treated fairly. Failure to treat people fairly at work has a long-term effect on them and leads to a breakdown of trust.

A survey of HR professionals by HR.BLR.com revealed the following facts about performance appraisals:

We have all seen examples of managers that do not perform very well and the impact that this has – whether this be in our own workplace or as customers of other businesses.

Most people appreciate that whilst you should look carefully at your business to see whether you need to take any corrective action, you will only be successful if you have a positive and enthusiastic outlook.

When you read about successful people, whether it be in business, sport, science, arts or academia, they share three common factors.

Whatever your business does, the key to success (and the biggest variable) is the performance of the people that work in the business.

If you are going to get good performance you must have six key things in place:

The secret to success in business, whether you are an employer or an employee is to get the best possible match between what the organisation needs and what the employee can provide.

In a recent survey* it was revealed that there are six main reasons that people change jobs:

There are 5 million businesses in the UK and the majority of them strive to do a good job for their customers. So do the majority of the people who work for them.
It is a fact of life, however, that a lot of people do not feel valued by their company ...

Most people think of the Pareto Principle as the 80:20 rule and for many things it is a great rule of thumb in your business and personal life.
For example, 80% of your sales come from 20% of your sales staff; 80% of your revenue comes from the top 20% of your customers.

The extraordinary news about Volkswagen looks set to unfold over a period of weeks and months, but already it looks like a complex picture.

If you are a Leader, you should concentrate on the “big picture” and the long term. By the very nature of your role, however, you cannot spend all of your time doing that. In between times, you will be carrying out a management role that must produce six vital outcomes:

In January 2014, Sharp Visual published a survey of office workers in six European countries about the way that presentations are conducted at meetings. The survey revealed that 43% of attendees think that content is boring and 40% of presenters do not enjoy it because "they find it hard to keep an audience interested". One in ten people admitted to having fallen asleep during presentations.

I have yet to hear anybody call themselves a Human Resource so why should an HR Department think of them in this way? Each of us is a person, which means that the term “personnel” has much more relevance than “HR”.

According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the term “Human Resources” was first used in a business context in 1961, although some business commentators believe that HR could be traced back to the earlier part of the twentieth century.

Almost everybody that you meet will say something like “there aren’t enough hours in the day”. Even high-achievers that get through an amazing amount of work are hungry to achieve more.

For the majority of people, there is a constant battle to remain organised. Interestingly, the increased availability of technology which enables us to get more done, more quickly and wherever we want to work, has done little to stem the feeling that there is too much to do because this technology has raised expectations about how much we should pack into a day.

There is nothing new in time management and getting organised. Everybody knows what to do; they merely lack the discipline to do it.

Too many businesses make managing people too complex. The process of so-called “HR” is full of jargon confusion, which often puts a barrier between people that work in the business and those responsible for managing them.

Even the name of the department HR – Human Resources – is wrong. Nobody ever refers to themselves as a human resource; they are people! It is well to keep this simple thought in mind when you are involved in the day to day management of a business.

An employer-employee relationship is both a financial and a social contract. All employers rely on the skills and endeavour of their employees, who are prepared to give up their time and energy in order that they can earn a living. Effective employer/employee relationships are those which are based upon both the spirit as well as the letter of the employment contract.

Successful businesses understand that being a good employer does not cost any money, which means that you can be a good employer during difficult economic times as well as in a boom. In fact, being a good employer saves money because it reduces ‘churn’ and avoids the need to replace people, which wastes time and money.