7. Why is the importance of corporate culture growing nowadays?

This sense of being "in it" together and driven by the same basic goals creates an atmosphere of teamwork. Inevitably, success will follow for the company whose culture is based on fair expectations for every level of corporate officers and employees.

When a potential client, customer or consumer walks into a company that lacks a strong culture, the vibe may seem muddled. For example, if a front desk receptionist is in jeans and a t-shirt, chewing gum and laying back in her chair texting on a cell phone, the immediate assumption is that the atmosphere is not professional.

The condition of a building, the rooms within the facility and even the colors of the walls and overall cleanliness of a building help to contribute to the mood, or culture, of a corporation.

Clean, bright paint with soothing decor and a pleasant smell give the employee a positive place to look forward to clocking in to each morning. The culture and aura of a building's physical qualities directly affects the moods of the people within it. If a corporation hires a cleaning company for overall cleaning, such as vacuuming, dusting and vacuum upkeep, and employees are expected to keep their own work ares clean, distractions will be kept to a minimum.

When a company's corporate culture is that of a positive, uplifting sense of group morale and teamwork with a common purpose and goals, employees are more likely to stay with that company over the long run.The partnership built between employees and management becomes one that exceeds simply obtaining a paycheck and getting by. Instead, the company values the employee, the employees value each other, and the employees are driven to "give back" to the company through their hard work.

8. What types of meetings do you know?

There are different types of meetings. Each type requires a different structures and supports a different number of participants. For instance, a status (feedforward) meeting has no limit to the number of participants while a decision-making meeting produces results faster with a small number of participants.

If you want to help your teams have more effective meetings, set the participants expectations about the meeting by stating in the agenda –

• the purpose of the meeting.

• the type of meeting

The typical meeting types are:

• problem-solving

• decision-making

• planning

• feedforward (status reporting and new information presentations)

• feedback (reacting and evaluating )

• combination meetings

For instance, the agenda states that you will be a participant in a problem-solving meeting to scale the application so it supports 500 simultaneous users. That description makes it crystal clear what you are there to do. And after you participate in a number of the same type of meetings, you will know that meeting’s structure and your role.

Although it’s in the list, I don’t like combination meetings. Participants, in my experience, aren’t as focused in a combination meeting; thus the results are poor. If you insist on combination meetings, I suggest your break them into segments of different meeting types. Despite segmentation, time management for a combination meeting is more difficult than a single type of meeting because you have more than one purpose to achieve.

If you want to save yourself and your teammates time and effort, propose to management that the purpose, type, and agenda of a meeting be clearly stated in the scheduling request for every meeting.

Go the extra mile. Find out how participants rate the value of the meeting. Use that feedback to constantly adapt the design of the meeting to produce greater value.