Salary negotiation (asking for a salary increase, a pay rise, or simply more money) affects everyone from time to time. Salary negotiation can be difficult, and many people handle it poorly, causing frustration and ill-feeling. There are constructive ways to approach salary negotiation, and techniques to achieve good outcomes. If you are a manager, you will need to handle salary negotiation positively. If you encourage people to adopt a constructive approach to salary negotiation, you will help to minimise upset and to achieve a positive outcome. As a manager dealing with salary negotiation or a pay increase request, it's important to encourage a grown-up, objective, emotionally mature approach. These ideas and techniques will help achieve this whether you are giving or receiving the salary increase request. There is no 'proper' or standard way to ask for a raise or salary increase. It's not something that people are trained to do, and little is written about it. People use various approaches: they can write; discuss informally; discuss with colleagues and hope the boss gets to hear; they drop hints to test the water; they ask the boss politely; demand firmly; go over the boss's head, or maybe even threaten to resign, secure another job ...

Taking minutes of meetings need not be intimidating and for many secretaries is a staple part of the job. What follows is designed to offer a few pointers to effective minute taking: Ensure that all of the essential elements are noted, such as date and time, nature of meeting, name of the organization, venue, name of the chair or facilitator, main topics and the time of adjournment. For formal and corporate meetings include approval of previous minutes, and all resolutions. Prepare an outline based on the agenda ahead of time, and leave plenty of white space for notes. By having the topics already written down, you can jump right on to a new topic without pause. Prepare a list of expected attendees and check off the names as people enter the room. Or, you can pass around an attendance sheet for everyone to sign as the meeting starts. To be sure about who said what, make a map of the seating arrangement, and make sure to ask for introductions of unfamiliar people. Note who arrives late or leaves early so that these people can be briefed on what they missed. Don't make the mistake of recording every single comment. Concentrate on getting the gist of ...

Be prepared to make drastic changes. Be creative to find and introduce different ways of doing things. Manage your emails and phone calls - don't let them manage you. Ideally check at planned times, and avoid continuous notification of incoming emails. The more senior you are the more selective you need to be about when to be available to receive phone calls. Try to minimise the time that you are available to take unplanned phone calls, unless you are in a customer-facing, reactive role (customers can be internal too), and even if you are customer-facing, you must plan some time-slots when you are not available, or you'll never get anything important and pro-active done. Challenge your own tendency to say 'yes' without scrutinising the request - start asking and probing what's involved - find out what the real expectations and needs are. Really think about how you currently spend your time. If you don't know, keep a time log for a few days to find out. Knowing exactly what's wrong is the first step to improving it. Challenge anything that could be wasting time and effort, particularly habitual tasks, meetings and reports where responsibility is inherited or handed down from above. Don't be ...