Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Employee Newsletter

Employee Newsletter

If you have a larger business, you may want to consider putting out an employee newsletter at least once a week. This can contain almost anything you want, and you can even ask your employees to contribute if you want to do so. You can make it all about business, or you can add some personal touches as well. This might be a great way to keep your company feeling like one big family instead of a bunch of people who may know very little about each other.

One great thing about an employee newsletter is that you can minimize how many memos you have to send out. If something in no urgent, you can save it for the employee newsletter. These can go out via email, and most companies prefer to do it this way. You can send it out to any branch offices you may have, and you can also send it rather fast to any employees who may be traveling for business reasons. It is also a great way for those on vacation or leave to keep up with what is going on.

You may want to have one employee in charge of the employee newsletter, and you can decide what you want it to be, and then put the information in their hands each week to get it done. You may also want to ask department heads to forward things to you that they might want to have included in the employee newsletter so that everyone has a spot to put important information that might affect the entire company and how things are done. Things like schedules for computer repairs or upgrades can be included so no one is caught unaware.

You may also want to add some personal touches to your employee newsletter. Things like birthdays, anniversaries, births, and other special moments can be listed. This gives employees a chance to get to know one another as people and not just coworkers. Sometimes this helps tremendously with inter office politics and helps everyone see each other as real people rather than just a name on an email. You can do what is best for your company, of course, but the reasons for having an employee newsletter already outnumber the reasons not to. Just make sure you keep an eye on it so it does not turn into something other than what you envisioned in the first place.

Internet Fraud

Everyone has heard of the Nigerian Internet scam where someone posing as a high member of a foreign government tries to defraud naïve people over the e-mail. Few people, however, realize the extent of Internet fraud. It goes far beyond the scam e-mails that you see in your inbox every day, far beyond the Internet viruses that you are warned about in the news. Basically, fraud on the Internet is a multibillion dollar business. Back in the day, Internet hacking used to be something done by young men as a way to prove their online abilities. They would hack into a system just to show off to their friends. Although sometimes they would crash systems doing this, in general they did very little damage. It was just a game for them, and although it was a game that governments and businesses hated, it didn't do very much damage to them.

Today, Internet fraud can take many different forms. Nowadays, most people are smart enough not to get scammed over the e-mail, but nonetheless the same people get ripped off over eBay all the time. There are Internet dating scams, online auction scams, spoofing, phishing – you name it and someone has probably already ripped someone off with it. Sometimes, an Internet scam means that you lose a few thousand dollars. Usually, you can recover from something like this and get back on your feet. Sometimes, however, Internet fraud is much worse than this. People have their identity stolen over the Internet every day.

One of my friends had his identity stolen. He didn't have any kind of identity protection, and he wasn't using a secure, encrypted system. Basically, he did everything wrong in the way most of us do everything wrong. Like most people, he didn't worry about it until it was too late. Because of that, he had thousands of dollars of property charged in his name. It ruined his credit and nearly bankrupted him.

Although he eventually recovered from Internet fraud,his experience should be a lesson to all of us. He was not even able to successfully sue the people who scammed them. They had excellent lawyers working for them, and were able to cover their tracks too well. Basically, he had to eat some of the losses and go on with his life. If he had taken a few simple steps for some Internet fraud prevention, however, things would have been much different. It would've been a lot easier for him.