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Don’t Forget to Thank Remote Team Members

Dawn Foster — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 13:59:28 +0000

Too often, out of sight can mean out of mind when you have team members spread out in various offices around the world. Even those of us with the best intentions sometimes forget to thank people or recognize them for doing great work. It’s easy to forget when we get busy, but it’s too important to neglect, especially when you’re talking about your remote employees. It only takes a minute to say “thank you” or “well done,” and here are some ideas for how you can fit recognition into your regular work routines.

Immediate recognition. Try to get in the habit of immediately recognizing people when they do good work or provide you with some extra help (Georgina suggested some ways to show recognition and praise here). A quick reply with genuine appreciation for doing a great job is a good place to start, and you can do this over email, instant messaging, phone or with a handwritten note. Be as specific as possible when you thank someone, and include something about why you appreciated their work. Just replying with “Thank you” is nice, but it isn’t very personal and can sometimes seem insincere.
Set reminders. I know this sounds over the top, but it can help to set a reminder on your calendar every day or once a week to spend just five minutes thinking about your team and their work. This gives you time to reflect on how people are doing and remind you to recognize good work. On the flip side, it also gives you time to think about how you can provide helpful feedback for employees who might not quite be on the right track with a project.
Staff meetings. I once had a manager who built time into her staff meetings where team members were encouraged to thank other members who had done something particularly awesome that week. This is a good way to make sure recognition isn’t just coming from the manager. Staff meetings are also a great place to provide public recognition or awards for employees, so don’t forget to think about recognition when putting together staff agendas.
Rewards. Don’t forget to go beyond a simple verbal “thank you” when someone does something truly outstanding. A gift certificate or small bonus in addition to some public recognition are great ways to reward a team or individual for a job well done. For remote employees, make sure that you think carefully about rewards, since even gift certificates for major online retailers, like Amazon.com, can’t always be used in every country. This is where getting to know your team members’ preferences can really help, and giving a gift certificate to a favorite restaurant can be a really personal way to recognize someone.
Celebrations. Most teams try to get everyone together in person at least occasionally. If you can time those meetings to occur shortly after some big milestone for the team (a big release or deliverable), you can use this valuable in person time to celebrate both team accomplishments and provide individual recognition in person. However, recognition is best when made as close as possible to the work being completed, so don’t withhold recognition until you meet in person.

What are your tips for recognizing remote employees?

Photo by Steven Depolo used under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

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Dragons and Dictation Software: How the Failure Continues

Liam Cassidy — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 17:30:12 +0000

In late November, Gear Diary ran a short video sneak-peek of Dragon Dictation for the iPhone, an app that, like its big brother Mac and PC counterparts, converts spoken words into written text. The teaser video begins with the words “An app that will transform your iPhone usage.”

It’s now available in the iTunes Store, and for a limited time, it’s free. But don’t rush to download it just yet. While this is not a review of the Dragon Dictation app, it is a cautionary tale to be skeptical of the hype. Because, unless you already have a very specific need for speech-to-text technology (subscription required), this app fails where all dictation software has failed before.

A Quick Recap

In the early 90′s people started taking dictation software seriously, and developers dreamed of a not-too-distant Star Trek-inspired world in which our primary method of interaction with our computers would be via the spoken word. Not just stilted single-word utterances either, but fluid, organic sentences. Natural speech, they like to call it.

It all sounds fantastic. But the hardware was a long-time coming. Processors were underpowered. Microphones were too low-fidelity for dictation software to do its job reliably.

Image courtesy of SummerRain812 on Flickr

Sadly, higher quality microphones tend to be prohibitively expensive or must be strapped to the head during use. (Not exactly user-friendly.) In any case, even when speech recognition and dictation works well, it’s a control mechanism most of us find horribly uncomfortable.

What do I mean by that? If you’ve never tried dictating an email, letter, article or essay, go do it right now. I guarantee you’ll be returning to the keyboard in next to no time.

Dictation tools still require you to explicitly dictate punctuation (an awkward skill to master). The fact is, until computers really are as smart as those in Star Trek, the biggest problem with dictation software is not with the software at all, but with you, the user. You see, you need to be carefully re-trained not only in how you go about the task of ‘writing,’ but also in how you control your computer. It’s deliciously ironic that, after a while spent training yourself to speak the right words, the right way, at the right speed and with the right tone of voice, you sound more like a robot than your computer ever could.

Challenges

No one writes an essay or lengthy document knowing in advance exactly the words they will use and in precisely what order. If you’re anything like me, you write a few lines here, an edit there, a quick jump back to the beginning to add something you forgot… Writing is a creative process that requires a lot of flexibility.

Just try moving your carat around a page using only your voice, and you soon realise that in the time it took to navigate successfully to that one particular spot on the page, you could have reached for the mouse, clicked, made your edit, completed your sentence and wandered off to watch last night’s episode of Stargate Universe.

Dragon Dictation is nothing special unless you already have a very specific need for such software, like I said at the start of this ranticle (a portmanteau of ‘rant’ and ‘article’ I suspect would take an eternity to type using dictation software).

The problems with dictation technologies can’t be blamed on Dragon Dictation; rather, they belong to those human interface challenges that are the product of our bias towards using our hands for most activities. If your hands and arms work sufficiently well, you’ll just prefer a mouse or keyboard.

For what it’s worth (even though I did promise this was not a review) Dragon Dictate has some noteworthy limitations; Dictation has to occur in short bursts of 20-30 seconds, which will swiftly become a nuisance if you happen to speak s-l-o-w-l-y. There’s no realtime visual feedback, so you can’t tell whether the speech-to-text conversion was successful until after you’ve finished dictating. Most importantly, the Dragon Dictate app doesn’t itself perform the speech-to-text conversion; those short 20-odd seconds of speech are recorded by the iPhone and transferred via the web to a server which does all the real work, sending the text results back to your iPhone. So not only is there an unavoidable processing delay, but you also have to be online to use it in the first place.

So, is this really the app that’s going to transform how you use your iPhone? If you constantly use Voice Control then perhaps you’ll love it. But for everyone else, this is likely one of those apps left to gather virtual dust, another victim of the harsh reality of current voice-interaction technologies.

I look forward to a Star Trek future in which we all talk to our computers and receive intelligent, useful responses. But don’t forget that the crew of the Starship Enterprise does the bulk of their computer work with their hands. (And it’s all dignified tapping and swiping, mind you, not comically-impractical Minority Report arm-waving!)

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Apple Finally Making the iPhone a Good Listener

Darrell Etherington — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 20:00:08 +0000

Some might see it as allowing room for third-party developers to take over and implement some clever solutions of their own, but I think Apple left some features off of the iPhone either out of laziness, time constraints, or because they were saving punches for later rounds (i.e. iPhone 3.0). One of those features, which almost every other phone has, dumb and smart alike, is voice recognition and control. Without a third-party solution like Say Who? installed, my iPhone is deaf to my pleas to “Call Parents,” for instance.

According to recent findings reported by Ars Technica, upcoming iPhone software will likely support voice recognition and feedback. So not only will you be able to talk to your phone, but it will talk back to you, probably via something along the same lines as the new iPod Shuffle’s VoiceOver features. The new voice software goes by the codename “Jibbler.”

What is clear is that the Jibbler tech is tied to the springboard, and appears to involve a call-and-response set of functions that will let you issue short commands to the iPhone that produce feedback in return. I can’t imagine doing so in anything other than my terrific Patrick Stewart impression voice.

Expect voice features with the iPhone to go above and beyond the function we’ve seen from other phones, or from third-party apps so far. Hopefully we’ll at least see Maps and Address Book integration, though with the introduction of Spotlight in iPhone OS 3.0, we might also see the entire phone become voice-searchable.

I’m just hoping these features aren’t limited to the new version of the iPhone coming in June, even though I’ll probably cave and upgrade the week after its release anyway.

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2008 Best App Ever Awards: Your Vote Counts!

Bob Rudis — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 14:00:55 +0000

iPhone news and review site 148apps.com has announced the launch of Best App Ever, a new site which allows you to nominate your favorite apps and games in any one of thirty categories.

Most Innovative App – The most innovative app on the iPhone OS platform
Most Useful App – The app you just can’t live without
Best Free or Ad Supported App – The best free or ad-supported application – must currently be free in the US App Store
Best 99 Cent App – The ‘I can’t believe this only cost $.99′ app – must currently cost $0.99 in the US App Store
Best iPhone WOW App – The app makes your friends jealous (and want to buy an iPhone)
Best Productivity Enhancer – The app that helps you get it done in half the time
Best Productivity Killer – The app that prevents you from getting it done
Best Feel Like A Local App – The app that helps the traveler find the local hot spots
Best Outdoor Use App – The app that enhances travel, outdoor exploration or transit use
Best Musical Instrument App – The app that turns the iPhone into a musical instrument, and you into a rock star
Best Social Networking App – The app that keeps you connected on the road
Best Photography App – The app that turns iPhone photography into masterpieces
Best Kid Distraction App – The app that keeps your kids happy (for a minute)
Most Creative Use of iPhone Hardware – The app that does things with the iPhone hardware that the Apple would never have dreamed of
Best Use of Location Services – The app that uses the core location services in new and innovative ways
Most Original User Interface – The app that redefines interface design
Best User Interface – The app with the best user interface in an application or game
Most Innovative Game – The game that has shown the greatest innovation on the platform
Best Original Game – The best game that is original on the iPhone platform
Best Game Port – The best game adapted from another platform or system
Best Casual Game – The game that is easy to pick up and play while you wait for your coffee to brew
Best Long-Play Game – The game that sucks you and won’t let you go until your battery dies
Best Free or Ad Supported Game – The best free or ad-supported game – must currently be free in the US App Store
Best 99 Cent Game – The ‘I can’t believe this only cost $.99′ app – must currently cost $0.99 in the US App Store
Best Game Graphics – The game with the killer graphics
Best Game Controls – The game with the best use of the iPhone hardware for a game controller
Best Arcade Game – The game that rocks the arcade or action genre
Best Puzzle Game – The game that makes puzzles exciting again
Best Traditional Game – The game that celebrates tradition — card, board, casino, etc.
Best Racing Game – The game that gets your adrenaline pumping
Best Kids Game – The game or educational app you want your kid to play
Best Strategy Game – The game that keeps you one step ahead
Best Word Game – The game that lets you exercise your vocabulary

You can submit your nominations at the Best App Ever main site by clicking on the category and entering the information for the application. On December 31 the nominees for all categories will be posted and polls will open. The winners will be announced on January 7, 2009 at Macworld Expo.

This is a great opportunity to give your favorite iPhone developers a chance at some additional recognition for a job well done.

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