Making The Most of The Holidays in IT: Page 2

• If your company gives a holiday present to employees and you have a say in the matter, consider giving something cool or productive. Something cool would be an item that is hard to find like a Nintendo Wii. The company doesn’t directly benefit from giving out games, but there could be some loyalty built up. Something productive would be an upgraded PDA or bigger flat screen monitors for everyone. It may be the case that if you give out something like an iPod, it will not be a big hit because most techies have one. Whereas if you give something that can use every day to make their jobs easier, it benefits the company and the person. Be sure to make it clear if the company owns it or if it is a personal gift, otherwise you’ll have people walking out with monitors when they leave the company.

• Test drive some software you have had your eye one. Many companies have a freeze on in December, so no new software can be deployed in production. There is however, nothing preventing you from evaluating software that doesn’t require an entire team or production resources. This is especially true if there is something you can run on your desktop or in a virtual machine. You can try out the software now and start an official evaluation next year if it is something you dig after playing with it on your own.

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• Not like you need to give out hugs to your team or your boss, but letting them know how much you appreciate their work is one of the more important year end tasks. Of course annual reviews are on most peoples mind this time of year, but keep in mind IT surveys regularly rank a show of appreciation at the top of jobs likeability criteria. Praise people for something specific, like if they stayed late one night to help another colleague complete a time critical task. If nothing specific jumps to mind, then let them know that their consistent job performance has made your job easier and helped the organization achieve goals. Of course, if you can find nothing good to say, just wish everyone happy holidays and start planning what improvements are feasible for next year.

There is one other item that everyone should do and it has nothing to do with your job or IT but it could save lives. Please make sure the batteries in your smoke detector at home are working. This is a popular time of year for house fires and there has been a recent spate of deadly fires where working smoke detectors would have saved lives. Besides, just think how hard it will be for your boss to replace a talented IT professional like you.

Happy holidays.