Keeping employees engaged in tough times

In September 2009 edition of the Baseline Magazine, an article by Corinne Bernstein reviews the key attributes of how the best-of-the-best companies keep their employees engaged, especially when in tough times, which are:

• A compelling, positive vision with clear goals: essential for increasing morale, motivation and productivity.
• Communication—the right stuff at the right time: encourage employees to express opinions, and managers relay the organization’s perspective in a timely manner.
• Select the right people for the right job: hire the most qualified candidates for jobs, and promote qualified, well-trained people into management positions.
• Remember that we’re on the same team: value team work within and across departments.
• Cool stuff—continuous improvement and innovation: encourage and recognize employees to improve quality by creating new products, processes or services.
• Recognize and reward excellent performance: appropriately reward the highest achievers.
• Accountability counts: clearly define what is expected from employees, providing feedback on their performance and holding team members accountable to performance standards.
• Every employee learns and grows: provide good training programs that are relevant to both the workers’ and the organization’s success.
• Problems are no problem: identifies and handles problems early on.
• It’s all about the customer: place a high value on exceeding customer expectations.
  

If you are interested to read the full article, you can click here to download the softcopy version of Baselin Magazine September 2009 Edition. It is in Page 12.

UBS Price and Earnings Report 2009

The renowned global financial services firm UBS has just released their "Price and Earnings 2009 - A comparison of purchasing power around the globe" report, covering their studies on living cost (including prices for 122 type of goods & services), as well as wages, working hours & taxes for 14 professions in 73 cities worldwide. Since 1971, UBS conducts this survey covering more than 30,000 individual data points at the interval of every 3 years.

The result reviews that:

• Oslo, Zurich, Copenhagen, Geneva, Tokyo and New York are the world's most expensive cities based on a standardized basket of 122 goods and services, while Kuala Lumpur, Manila, Delhi and Mumbai cost the least.
• When rent prices are factored into the equation, New York, Oslo, Geneva and Tokyo emerge as especially pricey places to live.
• Employees in Zurich and Geneva have the highest net wages in the world. By contrast, the average employee in Delhi, Manila, Jakarta and Mumbai earns less than 6.66% or 1/15 of Swiss hourly wages after taxes.
• An average wage-earner in Zurich and New York can buy an Apple iPod nano with 8GB storage after 9 hours (or 1 working day) of work. At the other end of the spectrum, workers in Mumbai, need to work 20 working days – roughly the equivalent of one month's salary – to purchase the same.
• People work an average of 1,902 hours per year in the surveyed cities but they work much longer in Asian and Middle Eastern cities, averaging 2,119 and 2,063 hours per year respectively.
• People in Cairo and Seoul work the longest – roughly 600 hours more per year than their peers in Western Europe. People in Lyon and Paris, by contrast, spend the least amount of time at work.
• Japan and Switzerland has the highest food price.
• Nowhere in the world is clothing cheaper than in Kuala Lumpur and Manila.
• Hotels most expensive in Tokyo and Paris.
• The costliest places for city break are Tokyo, London and Doha while the cheapest are Mexico City, Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta.
• Crisis-driven currency fluctuations cause shifts in the rankings from last survey (year 2006).

Beside the Apple iPod nano, price of McDonald's Big Mac, 1kg bread and 1kg rice are also benchmarked for the purchasing power in the cities (refer to Page 11 of the report).

Wages and working hours are benchmarked among the following professions:

• Car mechanic
• Building labourer
• Skilled industrial worker
• Factory worker
• Engineer
• Department head
• Product manager
• Primary school teacher
• Bus driver
• Cook
• Personal assistant
• Sales assistant
• Call center agent
• Bank credit officer

Click here to download the full UBS Price and Earnings Report 2009.

You might also be interested to read about:

Mercer Worldwide Cost of Living Survey 2009

Using GMapTool to combine multiple maps into one mapset file for Garmin GPS

We mentioned earlier that Garmin GPS navigator supports several mapset files. That should be enough for normal users.

Saving different map into different mapset file also makes it easy to replace the map to newer version in the future, as well as convenient to remove a single map from the GPS storage.

However, if you have a lot of map that you want to load into your GPS, or you want to store all the maps into SD card which supports only a single gmapsupp.img in it, you might need to combine (join) the maps into one mapset file by using specific software tool. GMapTool is one of the powerful tool which allow you to join and/or split maps in mapset file.

You can visit this webpage to download GMapTool. It supports multiple platform:

• Windows - GUI and command line
• Linux - command line
• Mac OS X - command line
  
  
  

By using the GUI interface of GMapTool, it is pretty simple to combine the mapsets.

Firstly, store all the mapset files you wish to combine in different filename in your PC. It is recommended to store them in the same folder/directory.

Under the Files section of GMapTool, select the maps you want to combine by clicking on Add Files (to select one file at one time) or Add Directories (to select all *.img files in the directory). Note that you can always remove any file in the listing by selecting it and press the Delete button of your keyboard.

When you are done with the mapset selection, continue to the Join section.

Specify the Output File, and key-in the Mapset name of your file to be created. This mapset name will be displayed under each of the map name when you list your maps in Map Info function of your Garmin GPS.

Click the Join all button, and the combined mapset will be created. You can then copy the new mapset file to your Garmin's internal storage or SD card.

Note that if any of the maps in your mapset file is locked by vendor, you still need the 25 bytes unlock key stored in a *.unl file in the same folder and with the same name as the mapset file where the locked map is stored in. To unlock 2 maps inside the mapset file, put both the keys inside the *.unl file one after another, without space (the file size will be 50 bytes then).

To get rid of the hassle, you might want to use another tool called Garmin Unlocker to permanently unlock the maps before combining them with GMapTool.

You might probably be interested to also read about:

• Using GMapTool with cGPSmapper to convert finalized gmapsupp.img back to MapSource maps
• Fixed GMapTool problem regarding "Multiple products in img, creating TDB aborted"