Managing Low Employee Morale

First, let's put "low morale" in realistically practical terms: Low morale = people not positively engaged with their work. There are a few typical types of "low morale" employees.

Passionately Destructive – eradicate immediately and stop the bleeding; fire these people (terrorists) 

Actively Repelled – determine source of their anger; look for themes in their specifically cited examples, as these examples will rarely paint a picture of the entire problem. 

Passively Disengaged – as manager, look to your own reaction to their feelings; incredulity is likely to be met with opposing incredulity by your employee. A manager's responding with helplessness will result in employees also feeling helpless. Ardent determination on the manager's part will be met with either similar determination, or your perception of reality will be rejected by your employees, and you will lose further credibility. 

Keys to managing employee morale are to first and foremost understand yourself, and secondly, you must understand your employees, and what motivates them. Are they positive motivated people, who are driven by goals, success, and achievements? Or are the negatively motivated people, those who are motivated by fear of being fired, of not being able to pay their energy bills, of being disappointing their family/friends? 

Learn about yourself and about what motivates your employees (along with discovering the roots of their discontent), and manage/motivate accordingly.

Apps - making $$$

With the explosion of Smartphones, many companies are trying to cash in on creating and selling Apps. Many companies are splitting revenues with Smartphone companies 70% - 30%. For example, T-Pain has his own app (that gives its users the "T-Pain Autotone vocal sound"), so when a customer purchases one through his iPhone, the money is split 70/30 between the two. The possibilities are as limitless as when the internet first gained speed - clever apps can be made about almost anything. I personally would love an app to tell me exactly where I parked my car, especially for times in New Orleans or other big cities with big parking lots.

Some companies are experiencing problems with the purchasing experience. Clients typically purchase apps on a whim, impulse type buys. So if the process is not completely painless, many consumers will not follow through with the purchasing process. Android, for example, is experiencing tremendous problems because their customers are fed up with the fragmentation purchasing process. It's simply not seamless and painless enough for many of the Verizon customers.

Being a new user to the iPhone, i have found purchasing apps to be as painless and seamless as could be expected, and it was easy to learn to use.

In a strategy to make money off the apps, but being concerned about setting price levels, many companies offer "freemium" apps - basic functions are provided, and free to download, but customers are bombarded with annoying ads and prompts, in an attempt to annoy them to the point of purchasing the full version, for $2 - $5.

Companies' goal should be to keep the time period minimum, painless, and seamless, nothaving to leave the "app" itself. Purchase, download intall, and get on with your life.

Is Microsoft Kinect Racist

Microsoft's new gaming console - a response to its competitor, Nintendo's, Wii - "Kinect" has had a few operating problems that have resulted in recent accusations of racism. Basically, Microsoft Kinect has a login feature when initially turning the system on, that "recognizes" you, through the system's built in camera.

For example, if you are playing a season in NFL Madden 2011, instead of manually logging into your account which has your season saved on it, simply by turning the Kinect on, its camera is designed to "recognize" you and log you in automatically, saving you time and effort.

However, apparently the Kinect has had recent troubles recognizing dark skinned individuals. This lead to accusations of the designers purposefully programming the game console to not recognize individuals or certain ethnicity or skin tone.

The real problem is that Kinect's camera has failed to operate consistently in different levels of lighting. One reporter for CIO experimented with the inconsistent Kinect camera, and discovered that it only successfully recognized him 1/3 of the time.

Perhaps Microsoft should consider outsourcing the camera design to a company who's core competency is in the camera industry, to clean up these problems, especially since the camera recognition feature is something that is supposed to differentiate the Kinect gaming system from the Wii. Maybe it will also put the racism rumors to rest - as absued as they appear to be.