Do you have a personal assistant whose abilities exceed their traditional job description? Then maybe you should offer them a seat on one of your company’s boards. That’s what a leading engineering consultancy did.

Sharon Huckstep is the PA to David Bennison, UK and Ireland managing director for URS Corporation, which has more than 50,000 employees. She has just been named PA of the Year by The Times and Hays Secretarial. Having been hired partly to raise the profile of support staff, she originally attended meetings of its business improvement board to take minutes:

But I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. In the end, it was easier to give me a seat and let me have my say because I was going to have it anyway. But I still take the minutes.

Ms Huckstep’s responsibilities have included rewriting the job descriptions of admin staff and introducing a mentoring system for other PAs. She says she has a “real business partnership” with her boss. The runners-up in the competition were also impressive, including a male PA who handled a corporate rebranding.

Do you have any tips for managing and retaining exceptionally able PAs? Please share them below.

There’s an enjoyably quirky article about multiplayer online games in the latest Harvard Business Review. The authors, professors at Stanford, MIT and North Carolina State, report on whether the likes of World of Warcraft and Everquest can teach real managers any leadership lessons. Tentatively, they conclude that the way players - often complete strangers - operate in teams during these games can be instructive:

True, leading 25 guild members in a six-hour raid on Illidan the Betrayer’s temple fortress is hardly the same as running a complex global organization. For starters, the stakes are just a bit higher in business. But don’t dismiss online games as mere play.

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The plummeting value of the US dollar has helped Atlanta to emerge as a particularly desirable location in which to hold conferences and training sessions. The city has burst into the Economist Intelligence Unit’s list of top ten destinations for business travel, occupying 6th position. Three other US cities make the list. Here is the top ten in full (the ranking relates to December 2007 and is based on cost and environmental issues such as infrastructure and culture):

1. Vancouver
2. Toronto
3. Adelaide
4. Honolulu
5. Perth
6. Atlanta
7. Auckland
8. Helsinki
9. Pittsburgh
10. Detroit

Earlier this month, I asked readers for their experiences of professional networking websites. Having used these responses to shape my questioning of bosses at LinkedIn and Xing, two huge players in this field, I’ve come to the conclusion that such sites can benefit users in two major ways - as long as they avoid two big pitfalls.

Below is a summary of these pros and cons, with input from Lars Hinrichs, the founder and chief executive of Xing, and Kevin Eyres, the European managing director of LinkedIn (as Mr Eyres is based in London, I was also able to conduct a 9-minute audio interview with him). It’s a long post but please bear with me!

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Matthew was one of my favourite colleagues. In the slightly drab office where I used to work, the arrival of young Matt at the corner of my desk usually meant the chance to relax for a moment with a frivolous comment or laconic quip.

Matt didn’t really care, you see, and there was no obvious reason why he should have. A graduate, he spent a large part of the day fetching packages from the post room and filing papers. He was underemployed. We should have seen it coming, I suppose, but one day he wasn’t there any more. Finished at 23, gone to find something better to do.

Continue reading Y’s and wherefores of a multi-generational workplace

Along with the National Health Service, the John Lewis Partnership probably represents the UK’s most durable flirtation with socialism. The department store and supermarket group is owned by its 69,000 staff, who are called partners. Today, it was announced that they would each receive a profit-sharing bonus worth 20 per cent of their salary after strong trading in 2007.

As in the rest of the retail sector, average wages are still low compared with other industries. However, personnel managers in other sectors would do well to consider the additional ways in which the group’s knowledgeable staff are rewarded and kept loyal.

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