Volume 2005, Issue 2
June 21, 2005

Working in IIa

[updated Working in IIa contacts list]

IIa Announces Employee Awards Program

With the beginning of a new fiscal year just days away, IIa announces its formal employee awards program. Formal awards were started last year when seven individuals or teams each received $2,000 awards for their outstanding performance. The program has been expanded and formalized. Beginning in the new fiscal year (July 1, 2005), employees will be eligible for monetary awards and other recognitions to reward individual and team excellence in support IIa's core values. The program includes the following three categories of awards:

a. Achievement Awards—significant monetary recognition of an individual or team contribution to the company. Employees will be asked to submit nominations for this award based on criteria that will be established each year. An announcement about the criteria and the format for submitting nominations will be made in July. The company will designate a pool of money at the beginning of each fiscal year for allocation throughout the year.

b. Special Recognition—to highlight and recognize individual and team efforts of IIa personnel. These recognitions will include a personal letter of commendation from IIa’s president, and may be accompanied by a certificate, plaque, or small monetary awards. Employees will be encouraged throughout the year to nominate colleagues, or teams of colleagues, for this recognition.

c. Project Awards—Each project unit will be allocated an amount annually for plaques, special award parties, or other selected activities to reward group or individual successes

The awards program will be coordinated by the awards committee, which will be made up of one senior executive and four at-large members who will be drawn from the corporate office and project sites. A representative of IIa's corporate communications department will participate as an ad hoc member. Members of the committee who developed the program will serve for the first year. Pat Powell, senior vice president, will head the committee, joined by June Crowe and Shelaine Curd-Hetrick. Susanne Dupes will serve as the ad hoc member. Two additional members are needed from the project sites. If you are interested in participating on the committee, contact Pat Powell. This is an excellent way for you to be more involved in the company and to show your dedication to IIa's corporate values.

Committee membership will rotate, with staggered terms for all members. Members cannot serve on the committee for more than two consecutive terms. Because the awards program is tied to IIa's fiscal year, committee members will serve from July 1 until the following June 30.

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Take a Look at Your 401(k)

From IIa Human Resources

Two investment issues that all participants need to be aware of:

1. Some employees’ risk tolerance is extremely low, and they have chosen to invest the majority of their retirement money in the Schwab Retirement Money Market fund. The thinking is that in the Money Market Fund their investment will earn a stable but lower percentage, and that this fund cannot lose money. It is true that the fund earns a fixed but low rate, but please be aware that the Schwab Retirement Money Market Fund is assessed with investment fees just like all the other investment options. We encourage all participants with a low tolerance for risk, to consider the MetLife Stable Value as an alternative investment. IIa selected this fund as part of our plan portfolio to offer another stable fund, but one that offers considerably higher returns than the Schwab Retirement Money Market fund.
   
   For example, this recently added MetLife Stable Value Fund credited a fixed 4.70% for the first quarter of 2005. For the second quarter, it is crediting 4.85%. As a comparison, the Schwab Money Market yielded 1.5% for the first quarter this year.
   
2. On the heels of the well-publicized mutual fund market-timing scandal, many fund companies have instituted a redemption fee for short-term fund redemption, or sells. The timeframe for these redemption charge ranges from 7 days to as long as 6 months. The fee can be as much as 2%. All participants should be cautioned against trading in and out of funds, but to date, PIMCO Funds are the only ones in our portfolio that charge a fee if money into that fund is ordered sold within fewer than 7 days of entry.

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Blogging, What is That Anyway?

They were blogging at the most recent national political conventions. The major news organizations, and some of the local ones, have blogs (or web logs), as do many of the professional associations out there. There are lots of new terms being added to everyday language--blogs, wikis, podcasts, RSS (Really Simple Syndication) at a fairly rapid pace.

Blogging basically started in 1994 (according to Wired magazine) as online diaries of a personal nature on peoples' websites. Many of you with teenagers may hear about them talk about their online journals, which are in fact blogs. In the period since their inception, blogs have grown to be the latest media tool...citizen journalists is what you may hear bloggers called these days. Actor Jeff Bridges and writer Dave Barry have blogs, as does weatherman Al Roker. There are blogs on just about any topic you can imagine. Information Today has the Library Stuff blog, there's the Leaky Cauldron blog about Harry Potter books. There are parenting blogs, sports blogs, Iraqi war blogs, and Star Wars blogs (Master Yoda's Blog: Use the Force on you do not make me).

We recently took a quick poll of IIa employees to see how and if we have become involved in the blogosphere. The results were interesting. Of the 42 employees who responded to the poll, only nine actually read blogs, either regularly or intermittently. A number of respondents indicated that they are prohibited from reading such content on the work e-mail. Of the nine who do read blogs, only three use any sort of "aggregator" such as an RSS feed that basically pulls the headlines of the blog into a single page for scanning. The others blog readers go directly to the blog pages. Some of the blogs specifically mentioned by those who read them are the blogs from major news organizations (NPR, MSNBC, ESPN, BusinessWeek, etc.), technology information (Slashdot and Microsoft), and information science (Peter Suber’s open access, searchenginewatch.com, the AFRL blog, Librarians’ Index to the Internet, and ResearchBuzz).

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The Telephone Doctor's Five Forbidden Phrases

The Telephone Doctor came to call in Oak Ridge recently. Nancy Friedman, aka The Telephone Doctor, is all about customer service. What she had to offer was very enlightening. First up...the five forbidden phrases. See how many of them you use during the course of a day, or week, or...

1. "I don't know."
2. "I (or we) can't."
3. "Hang on a second, I'll be right back."
4. "You have to..."
5. "No...."

Let's look at these individually.

"I don't know," sounds like a negative response, even though you are just trying to be honest. It just stops right there and doesn't indicate you plan to take any further action. Even if you go to "I don't know, but..." nobody hears past the comma. Instead, Friedman suggests putting on a more positive spin, such as "Gee, that's a very good question. Let me check." Makes the listener think they asked a smart question, and immediately let's them know you'll be taking action on their behalf.

"I/we can't." Again, this puts the negative right up front and shuts the caller out. Maybe you really can't do what the customer asks because of prohibitive laws. In that case, and only if you have exhausted all alternatives, tell the customer in a more positive way, for example, "I wish we could, but that isn't an option we have because we are restricted by lay." Maybe the thing they need would be difficult due to policies, so you want to tell the customer " what we can do for you is...."

"Hang on a second, I'll be right back." Yeah, right. According to Friedman, being put on hold is the number one frustration of customers. Think how you react to that phrase when someone hits you with it. You are suddenly forced into limbo, possibly against your will. Who knows how long it took you to get to that point in your phone call, so the last thing you want is to hang up and start over. So how do we avoid putting our customers in limbo? We ask their permission, "Are you able to hold?" or, if you know it's going to take a few minutes to get the answer, say so and offer to get back to them, "This will take me longer than I care to keep you holding. Can I get back to you?"

"You have to..." This is a negative because it puts the responsibility to solve the problem on the customer. Instead, be clear that this is a partnership, and explore what "we need to do" to help the customer.

And finally, starting your sentences with "No.." It's the ultimate negative. People don't listen any further. Always be thinking instead about how to make your message a positive one. To cure yourself and your colleagues of this one, Friedman suggests playing "The NO Game." Here's how it works...people can ask anyone, anything, at any time. The responder may NOT answer with the word "No" at the beginning of the sentence...or it will cost them. At Friedman's office...it's a quarter every time someone violates that rule.

Nancy Friedman is a speaker at association and corporate meetings and is the author of five best-selling books. More information is available at www.telephonedoctor.com.

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