f you are in human resources, and you want to give your employees a voice, to really let them know that their opinions matter, there are several things you can do, according to business analyst Sherry Benjamins.

One is to have gatherings similar to town hall meetings where employees can communicate with each other and give their opinions to company leaders. One company followed up on these town halls by creating a website where employees could access the company’s business strategy and give their input.

Employees also need to be kept informed, especially during a downturn. They need to know what is happening and how the business intends to confront it. Without this, information is replaced by rumor.

Another way to emphasize employee involvement is by setting goals each quarter with employee input. They don’t have to be huge goals.

Recognition programs are also important to show workers that they are valued. Managers should be educated on how to recognize employees. Also, investing in employee training shows that they are valued within the company.

Another small way to show appreciation to employees is with a simple, handwritten  thank you note. It may seem a bit old fashioned today, but this seemingly minor courtesy can go a long way toward making employees feel valued.

Also, employees should be given the chance to tackle problems that face the business. This could be done by setting up teams with workers from different departments. You could post the problem to be solved on the company Intranet and then ask for volunteers. The team’s solutions could be advertised at a company-wide meeting. And if the team comes up with a good solution to the problem and is supported with solid analysis, it should be implemented.

Another way to show that you value your employees is by looking after their health and wellness. You can do this by setting up a wellness committee made up of volunteer employees. They can research healthcare plans that address wellness issues and even set up wellness activities.

Another way of showing how important your employees are to the company is by keeping them up to date on career opportunities at the firm. The company can provide information on career paths at the business, and an online job posting network. The company can offer career coaching to employees using mentors.

Want some more tips on how motivate regular as well as temporary employees? Contact Bayside Solutions. We’ve been recruiting great workers for some of San Francisco’s best employers since 2001 so you may count on the fact that we know a thing or two about employee motivation. Contact us today!

Small steps are being taken to further protect people and the environment through construction and design.

On March 28, 2012, the 2012 International Green Construction Code (IgCC) was released and will increase the energy efficiency of structures, while providing government direction and oversight of green design and construction. The International Code Council (ICC) applauded the new model code, as it serves as an important new policy option for state and local governments looking to codify green building practice.

Brendan Owens, vice president of LEED Technical Development, USGBC said, “The IgCC and Standard 189.1 draw from more than a decade of national and regional leadership programs that road-tested green building practices, methods and materials,”

“These pioneering efforts broke important new ground that has enabled the IgCC to mainstream green building practices that were previously considered innovative in a foundation intended for minimum code language.”

The 2012 IgCC, which incorporates the 2011 version of Standard 189.1 as an optional path to compliance, offers a new code baseline that can be tailored by state and local governments to share many of the benefits of green buildings with the millions of buildings that are designed, constructed and renovated to meet minimum code, whether or not they are engaged in the LEED program.

“The IgCC published today was developed during the last three years with input from code and construction industry professionals, environmental organizations, policy makers and the public,” said Richard P. Weiland, CEO of the ICC that developed the new code. “Our community was diligent in developing a code that is not only adoptable, usable and enforceable, but also flexible and adaptable. We expect this new model code, like the family of other ICC Codes, to be adopted across the country and used globally.

LEED is the world’s foremost program for the design, construction, maintenance and operations of green buildings. More than 45,000 projects are currently participating in the commercial and institutional LEED rating systems, comprising 8.4 billion square feet of construction space in all 50 states and 120 countries. In addition, nearly 19,000 residential units have been certified under the LEED for Homes rating system, with over 75,500 more homes registered.

And if you’re looking for top employees to work on your green construction and design projects, please visit the Bayside Solutions website today.

We’ve all heard the term “going green” in the public conscience as we try to make carbon footprints more familiar in our vernacular.

But we can only do so much by being mindful enough to throw our discarded paper into a separate bin.

Larger, upscale projects need to be mindful, too. And this is why you need to consider LEED Greenbuilding when you need green building design, construction, operations and maintenance solutions.

What is LEED Greenbuilding? Well, LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. LEED looks to achieve the highest standard in the key areas of human and environmental health while optimizing construction, operation, and maintenance solutions.

LEED looks to achieve sustainability in their approach to building or innovating buildings. Sustaining sites means discouraging building on previously undeveloped land and seeks to control or minimize the buildings impact on the ecosystem it revolves around. According to Science Daily, there are a reported 37 environmental impacts that happen around most building developments.

LEED also looks to be more aware of water conservation through the use of higher efficiency appliances and fixtures. LEED also manages the amount of waste that accumulates during the construction and operation phases. The challenges of energy conservation and waste management are met head on when dealing with this group.

What makes LEED above and beyond the call of duty is that they’re committed to educating on energy efficiency best practices. They know that living green has the best results when green features are used optimally.

Using LEED isn’t a niche thing, either. Public and privately-owned businesses has worked with LEED in creating an efficient and innovative space for themselves. Government and non-government agencies has used them. LEED has operated in over 120 different countries around the world!

Want to know more about LEED or about how to get an environmentally conscious project off the ground? Contact the green technology experts at Bayside Solutions today!

No one, with the exception of despots and tyrants, enjoys having to fire an employee. But terminations are a fact of life for any manager or supervisor.

Read below for seven tips on how to let someone go with grace and professionalism:

1. Give the person at least one more chance. Unless the person has been caught stealing, or otherwise has committed an infraction that warrants automatic termination, sit down with the employee, let him or her know of your concerns and let the person know that you will give him or her a set amount of time to improve, or you will have to terminate.
2. Better still, when someone is underperforming, you should aim to speak with the employee as soon as you notice such a pattern. Sit with the person and professionally and congenially say you’ve noticed a decline or steady erosion in performance, an increase in tardiness, etc. Ask if there’s anything that’s bothering the employee either at home or at work (if it’s a personal matter, tread very carefully). As you listen, let the employee know you understand there always are challenges in any aspect of life, but that the person was hired to perform a certain task or complete a certain project and that you will help him or her improve performance. Give a deadline as to when improvement must be seen.
3. If you do decide to terminate, aim not to have the termination meeting in your office. Instead, pick a more neutral spot such as a conference room.
4. Don’t dither. Get right down to business and let the person know that you’ve decided to terminate his or her employment.
5. Show empathy but remember that you are not the individual’s comforter. That role belongs to family members. Show compassion, but don’t act as a shoulder to cry on.
6. Especially since the person has been given warning (see steps 1 and 2 above), don’t enter into a discussion with the employee about what he or she can do better in order to keep the job. Don’t yell, cry, or pound your fist.
7. It’s definitely OK to be sympathetic and offer the employee resources to help with finding a new job. This can be especially helpful if the employee is losing the position due to a layoff rather than being terminated for cause.

Using Bayside Solutions to bring on temporary staff means you never have to fire them…they’re our employees, not yours! If a worker isn’t meeting your expectations, let us know and we’ll replace him or her quickly, sometimes as quickly as the very next day. Learn more about our staffing solutions for San Francisco-area companies by contacting us today!

Multitasking – in which we work on two tasks at the same time – is the norm in today’s workplace.

Many experts believe humans aren’t really cut out to multitask. Trying to do two things “at once” means we do neither well and experts recommend that we do just one thing at a time.

But it is possible to do two things at once, so long as the tasks don’t use the same brain functions (think folding the laundry while listening to music).

Yet most work tasks are more complicated than laundry folding.

Below are some tips on how to improve your multitasking skills (or, at least, mitigating the poor effects multitasking can wreak on the finished results).

• Understand that our ability to multitask does decrease with age. People in their early 20s can multitask with less adverse effect than those older. In fact, our ability to multitask declines precipitously between the relatively young ages of 20 and 30!
• Multitasking skills do seem to improve with practice.
• Be careful about trying to multitask on undertakings that use the same type of brain functions, such as texting while reading an e-mail, for example.
• Using willpower alone to meet the barrage of distractions – and opportunities to multitask – is well nigh impossible today. For example, it’s incredibly more interesting to read a favorite blog or website “while” writing a business report than to write the report “uninterrupted” for an hour or so. So work with human nature and consider disabling the Internet while you’re writing that report (perform all Web-based research before sitting down to write).
• Experts also recommend setting a timer of some sort. A good period of working could be, for example, 25 minutes, in which you do nothing but the task before you. Take a short 5-10 minute break after 25 minutes (walk around, check e-mail, check for phone texts, etc.) and then set the timer for another 25-minute über-focused work session.

If you’re a San Francisco-area company needs skilled and reliable professionals for temporary and direct-hire assignments, call the staffing professionals at Bayside Solutions. We look forward to hearing from you!

Most IT professionals didn’t have to worry about finding work during the recession. And if follow these 7 tips, you’ll never be without a job, no matter what the future holds.

1) Know your business

You may be your organization’s most talented developer or dedicated systems administrator. But if you don’t know what the business is selling or what service it’s providing, you’re not indispensable. Don’t look at things from strictly an IT perspective, but make sure you understand how your job relates to the business world around you.

2) Watch the bottom line

Your job isn’t just about systems, software or machines. It’s about helping your organization use technology to trim costs and increase efficiency. IT professionals need to focus on areas that either drive down costs, such as virtualization, cloud computing and converged networking, or on areas that help to generate revenue, such as social media, mobile marketing and SEO.

3) Get your head in the cloud

With so many traditional IT functions moving to the cloud, your company may no longer need you to flip switches, connect cables, or troubleshoot machines. But they’ll still need someone who can tell them what services are available, which ones are worth looking at and which ones they should avoid. And they’ll require people with expertise in managing a catalog of cloud services, handling subscribers, brokering agreements with cloud providers and intervening when problems arise.

4) Broaden your horizons

Besides maintaining mastery of your own tech domain, expand your skill set to include other areas of expertise. If a crisis arises in one of those areas—and the person responsible for handling it isn’t available—you may be able to step in and save the day. Plus, an employee who has more than one area of expertise is more valuable when a department is downsizing.

5) Be a translator.

Want to facilitate communication between IT and the business side, as well as earn a little goodwill in the process? Teach your co-workers to speak geek. Start a series of casual teaching sessions where you bring less savvy coworkers up to speed about the latest in tech. You can become the go-to guy for upper management when they need something technical explained.

6) Deal with data.

If your business users aren’t drowning in information now, they will be soon. Taming the data deluge will make you invaluable to any organization. IT people who can make sense of business data, safely store it, categorize it, retrieve it, and especially analyze it are highly valuable.

7) Make a name for yourself. The more people who know and rely on you—especially outside your department or organization—the harder it is to fire you. Look for projects and opportunities that cut across departments, because this builds your internal network — thus making you more valuable to the company.

And if you’re ready to practice those habits in a new and exciting position in the Bay Area, contact Bayside Solutions today!

For many employees, compliance training is a necessary evil, something that you just need to grit your teeth over and get through. And for the most part, that attitude carries over into outcomes – compliance programs generally are not very effective when it comes to time, money and results.

Businesses spend a lot of money on these programs. In 2010, for example, companies spent more than $170 billion on worker training and development programs, about 10 percent of which was for compliance training.

So, given that compliance training as it currently is organized could use a shot in the arm, what can be done to improve it?

The first thing to look at is the content. Does the material covered apply to real situations, real responsibilities and risks that people actually face on the job, rather than just a general overview of abstract concepts and generalities?

If workers need to learn straightforward facts and figures as part of the training, the information should be made available in written form, whether online or as a hard copy. There also should be some way for the workers to confirm that they have received the information, as well as follow up to the initial learning, with periodic reminders. Workers also should be able to ask questions and get answers. Doing this will help employees to better absorb the information, because it will make the training more of an ongoing enterprise rather than just a one-time data dump.

Any individual training session should revolve around only a few key themes or ideas, rather than introducing a laundry list of items. Also, the classes should give the workers the opportunity to put the learning into practice, through some type of simulation or role playing, for example, so that they can put their knowledge to use, further helping them absorb the information.

Also, the learning should receive reinforcement with follow-up notices, where key ideas are repeated and emphasized, so that the learning becomes a continual process. These reminders will help to prevent employees from falling back into old habits.

Bayside Solutions has been helping Bay Area companies find great temporary, temp-to-hire and direct-hire employees since 2001 and we look forward helping your firm in 2012 and beyond. Contact us today!

In the four years of its existence, The Scientist’s annual Top 10 Innovations contest has showcased some of the coolest life science tools to emerge in the previous year. This year’s list is no exception.

1. Pocket Microscope

Diagnosing malaria or other blood-borne illnesses used to require analyzing cell slides under a light microscope—which can be difficult to find in impoverished, remote locations. Enter LUCAS (Lensless, Ultra-wide-field Cell monitoring Array platform based on Shadow imaging), an easy-to-use, pocket-size holographic microscope that weighs less than 50g, uses inexpensive, off-the-shelf parts, and can be attached to a cell phone’s camera, making it ideal for diagnosing disease in isolated, developing countries.

2. All Around the Mouse

This past September, Bioscan introduced BioFLECT, the first 360-degree optical imager, which uses a rotating ring of 48 detectors to generate a full 3-D scan of fluorescent markers.

3. PCR in a Pouch

The FilmArray system was designed to make pathogen detection simple, accurate, and fast. Because there are multiple nested PCR reactions within each FilmArray pouch, one run can detect all of these pathogens, and others, at a cost of less than $150. Plus, the FilmArray reaction does not require a trained technician and only takes an hour rather than the 5–6 hours needed for a traditional, real-time PCR reaction.

4. Single-Cell Mass Cytometry

Designed by Scott Tanner, chief technology officer of DVS Sciences, CyTOF is a mass spectrometer that can feed researchers data about molecules within and on the surface of individual cells, revealing not only the cell’s identity but also some of its functions.

5. Illuminating Microscopy

Nikon incorporated SIM technology into its flagship inverted microscope to produce the N-SIM Super Resolution Microscope—one of the fastest and most powerful high-resolution optical microscopes on the market. The N-SIM microscope can achieve a spatial resolution between 85 and 110 nm and a temporal resolution of 600 milliseconds per frame.

6. DNA Deluge

RainDance Technologies’ ThunderStorm System for DNA sequencing is the newest iteration of the company’s popular next-generation RDT1000 model. While other PCR enrichment systems allow researchers to process fewer than 100 gene regions, the ThunderStorm allows researchers to sequence up to 20,000 regions per sample.

7. Mini MRI

Thanks to Aspect Imaging’s M2 Compact MRI System, all you need is about one square meter of space and $500,000. Having its own lead-lined housing means the M2 can be used in a standard laboratory and avoids the credit card–erasing, watch-destroying, and medical instrument–damaging effects of large-scale MRI machines.

8. The Circadian Watch

The Dimesimeter may offer researchers insights into how disrupting circadian rhythms affects human physiology, behavior and disease. Developed by scientists at the Lighting Research Center at RPI, the battery-powered, dime-sized Dimesimeter contains optical sensors and accelerometers that measure both the light exposure and activity of the person wearing it.

9. One-Step Sample Prep

To prepare material for analysis by mass spectrometry, chemist Akos Vertes of GWU developed Protea Biosciences, Inc.’s LAESI (Laser Ablation Electrospray Ionization) DP-1000 System, which can handle any type of biological sample that contains water—either naturally, as in animal or plant tissues, or water added by the experimenter.

10. Super-Resolution Solution

The new Leica SR GSD microscopy system illuminates only a few random molecules in the field of view at a time, taking a picture, and then repeating the process thousands of times until all the molecules have been illuminated and imaged.

What’s that old saying? “Work would be great except for the people”?

Sadly, that phrase is too true too often: co-workers really can make one’s work life miserable.

If you’re stuck in a cubicle farm or facility with a “bad” co-worker, read below for some tips on how to cope.

1. Act fast. Don’t tolerate the bad behavior hoping it will go away on its own. Chances are, the poor behavior will get worse if ignored. By not speaking up when someone bullies you, you’re tacitly giving the individual permission to continue
2. Some people don’t take criticism well. They don’t understand that suggestions on how to do something better or requests to get work done by deadline, etc.  aren’t personal attacks, but professional and business critiques to improve  performance. Such individuals may take professional critiques as personal attacks and lash out.
3. If the problem with your co-worker is that he or she can’t do all the tasks assigned well, offer to split duties, if possible, with both of you taking on tasks each of you does best. Yes, this may mean more work for you, but you can let your superiors know that you’re taking on more responsibility (without denigrating your co-worker) and a promotion and/or raise could result!
4. Try to resolve your differences without the help of your manager or the human resources department first. If the two of you still can’t come to some sort of professional workplace collaboration and if the bad behavior persists, bring it up to your boss and then to HR (in case the boss can’t or won’t help).
5. Keep the conflict private as much as possible. Don’t kvetch in meetings or to co-workers: you’ll be seen as a whiner instead of justifiably aggrieved.

If you’re in the market for some new co-workers, contact one of our recruiters. Bayside Solutions can help provide you with opportunities to work with some of the Bay Area’s top employers. Contact us today!

To help keep our clients and employees abreast of happenings in the industries we serve, Bayside Solutions occasionally highlights important exhibitions, meetings and other events.

WINDPOWER 2012 is the largest annual wind-focused exhibition in the world, set to feature more than 1,000 exhibitors including leaders in the wind industry. It’s the place to see products and services, learn industry brand names, network with leading decision makers, and generate numerous high-quality business leads.

WINDPOWER reflect the American Wind Energy Association’s (AWEA’s) efforts to push forward wind energy industry policy, regulatory, and business development objectives.

Entrepreneur and philanthropist Ted Turner will kick off the Opening Session, after which the conference will offer 16 specialized, market-specific tracks to address various aspects of today’s wind energy:

1. Market Update Track

Offers insights into upcoming demand opportunities for wind and relative market competitiveness,.

2. Project Development Track

Focuses on how developers are responding to market constraints in order to boost public enthusiasm and investor confidence in the wind industry

3. Transmission Track

Explores the various connectivity research challenges and techniques, as wind becomes a more viable, reliable and competitive national energy source.

4. Resource Assessment Track

Provides a comprehensive look at some of the wind resource assessment field’s hottest and most widely discussed topics.

5. Community & Distributed Wind Track

Discussions will address the future potential of, and economic value in, community and distributed wind.

6. Finance Track

Takes an in-depth look at various financial factors affecting the wind industry.

7. Siting Track

Offers policy, biological, and market experts who will delve into various issues that affect siting.

8. Utility Track

Provides important information on utility efforts to bring higher levels of wind power to their systems, state regulatory regimes and their impact on long-term contracts between wind developers and energy suppliers.

9. Supply Chain Track

Explores how to lower the installed cost of wind energy in the U.S. through the use of efficient and innovative transportation, logistics, and construction systems.

10. Turbine Design Track

Explores the structural performances and evolving advancements of wind turbine designs.

11. Turbine Track

Industry experts will recap 2011 and forecast 2012 market conditions.

12. Turbine Performance Track

Provides greater understanding into the many components of turbine reliability and power curve measurements.

13. Offshore Track

Delves into a wide array of topics including how shortening timelines can reduce costs and incentivize the market, innovative advancements in the configuration of floating offshore wind turbines, and current and future research applications.

14. Wind Deployment Track

Covers several emerging applications and issues concerning the wind power workforce.

15. Integration Track

Takes a dynamic approach to exploring the scientific and economic frameworks of wind integration and forecasting techniques.

16. Academic Track

Dedicated to promoting the work being done by the academic community in support of wind energy.

Bayside Technology is proud to support wind energy and other green energy projects. Want to know more about how we can help you find a job or personnel? Contact us today!