Public relations firm P.J. Inc. provided a gem of an example on what not to do during a video conference. Picture this: a video screen divided into four equal parts (a la Hollywood Squares), with people in each part.

The YouTube clip then shows a young woman in the top left corner removing her bra — without removing her blouse. While the woman is removing her undergarments, the video expertly captures the expressions and responses of her colleagues, which vary from nervous laughter to an older man in the top right corner barking out: “Somebody get Morgan on the phone.”

To view the clip in its entirety, click here.

Luckily, ooVoo, A Web cam and video conferencing company, offers a complete list of etiquette rules for virtual meetings including:

• Pick a facilitator to help manage any over-exuberant participants, and
• Ask permission if you wish to record a video chat (privacy is expected until consent is given otherwise).

Here is the complete list of ooVoo’s etiquette tips.

There’s no shortage of theories on when the economy will turn around. Here are 15 of the wackiest signals out there.

Indicator #1: Keenland, KY Horse Sales

What better way to gauge how the mega-rich are spending than to see who’s buying thoroughbreds? This small town outside of Lexington has a combination race track and sales company, which makes it the perfect place to track this activity.

Indicator #2: Online Dating

Tight times translate into boom times for Internet dating services, as people are looking for someone to forget the tough times with. Match.com’s second busiest weekend ever? When the stock market bottomed out last fall.

Indicator #3:  Alligator Population

Louisiana has more of them than usual  — 100,000 to be specific, all living at the Savoie’s Alligator Farm. Normally the farm sells gator hides to luxury designers. But they haven’t sold a single one since last November.

Indicator #4: Wandering Eyes

Not only do more single people look for new love in tight economic times — so do the married ones! That’s why more of them, specifically bankers and other financial pros, are hooking up on this British “married dating site.”

Indicator #5: Underwear

This theory has been embraced by former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan. Because few folks see men’s underwear, it’s one of the first purchases to go on hold. Tough times = skivvies sales slump. When sales pick up, so do our economic prospects.

Indicator #6: Eye Makeup

In the past, this was known as the “Lipstick Indicator”: Because it’s a cheap “luxury,” women tend to buy more lipstick during recession. That’s not the case this go-around: Lipstick sales are actually down 11%. But it may have been replaced by another cosmetic: eyeliner. Eyeliner (and eye makeup as a whole) is experiencing a boom. (That American Idol runner-up is probably accounting for at least 1% of it!)

Indicator #7: Greener Thumbs

There are now 43 million gardeners in the U.S. — a 19% uptick over last year. And more than half of those folks are looking to grow their own produce in an attempt to shrink their grocery bills.

Indicator #8:  Sleeplessness

You’re not the only one losing sleep about the state of the economy. One in three Americans say they can’t sleep because they’re worried about their finances. Interestingly, the same percentage of people who say they tossed and turned at night worrying (10%) is the exact same percentage as those out of work.

Indicator #9: Packed Movie Theaters

Even at $10 a ticket, it’s relatively cheap entertainment. That’s probably why movie ticket sales have been up in each of the last five recession years.

Indicator #10: Lagging Luggage Sales

When people aren’t traveling (for business or pleasure), they don’t invest in new luggage. Merrill Lynch has been tracking this indicator: Sales are down 35% — very close to what they were in 2001.

Indicator #11: Ditched Dry Cleaning

Men aren’t buying new underwear during this recession, and it turns out they’re not washing them either! OK, in all fairness, most men don’t ship their underwear to the dry cleaner. But they’re not sending their shirts or suits there either. The dry cleaning industry reports that customers are coming in less frequently and letting their clothes sit longer before picking them up.

Indicator #12:  Mucho Mosquitoes in Maricopa

Blame it on the lousy housing market! As more homes sit abandoned or foreclosed, more swimming pools in Maricopa, AZ, sit stagnant. And that means a breeding ground for mosquitoes. County crews have already treated more than 4,000 “green pools” this year. That’s reason enough to make people itchy for recovery.

Indicator #13: Romance Reading on the Rise

If Match.com doesn’t make a love connection, there’s always some steamy reading. Romance novel publisher extraordinaire Harlequin is experiencing a massive spike in sales since times got tough: 32% in 2008 and still climbing. Keep an eye on bookstore shelves. When copies start piling up, better days may be here.

Indicator #14:  Plastic Surgery Plummets

Tough to justify that liposuction when your retirement savings are half of what they used to be! Perhaps that’s why eye makeup sales are booming — no one’s getting those eye lifts at the plastic surgeon anymore.

Indicator #15: Latvian Hookers

This may not be the most “scientific” of the indicators, even by these standards. But a capital markets blogger tracks the going rates for practitioners of the world’s oldest profession in one of the toughest economies on the planet. The current outlook? Bleak — the prostitution industry is being hit hard.

Japan’s Canon, Inc., wants its employees to do their part in helping the nation by leaving work early to go home and procreate.

The country’s 1.34 birthrate is far below the 2.0 needed to hold the population at an even rate, so executives are sending employees home to give them more family time and inflate those numbers.

One stat to note: Japan’s population is shrinking and aging faster than any other country because of employees’ notorious 12-hour workdays.

Even though Canon is sending its workforce home early twice a week, on average, those employees are still putting up numbers well over a 9-to-5 pace.

Here’s some of the most common workplace dysfunctions — and what to do about ‘em.

Conflict: Zero teamwork because employees are at odds. Instead of a cohesive unit working together, you’re stuck with a group of individuals — with conflicting ideas about how things should be done.
Cure: Have the direct supervisor get together with all conflicting staffers, find the root of the problem and what it will take to solve the problem. Be sure to land a commitment to resolve the problem and spell out what the consequences will be if the resolution doesn’t happen.

Conflict: Undercutting company programs and initiatives in private — after publicly endorsing them. Everyone knows this staffer: He or she is the most vocal proponent of an idea at the weekly meeting. Then, lo and behold, this person is going around the office trashing the idea.
Cure: The best way to fix this is by getting others on board to what is and what isn’t accepted. Let staffers know that dissenting opinions are welcome during the decision-making process, but after the decision is made undercutting will not be tolerated.

Conflict: Pot-stirring, chaos-starting staffers. These employees love drama and are very crafty at finding ways to get people to mix it up in the office.
Cure: This behavior can be catastrophic to the morale and productivity of your office. So the best defense is a zero tolerance policy with greater negative consequences.

And while air conditioning is probably the first thing that comes to mind when it comes to sky-high electricity bills, keep this in mind: Lighting makes up at least 30% of companies’ average energy costs.

Good news: One simple move — no major changes or “green” initiatives required — can go a long way toward reducing your total energy costs.

The move: adopting a company-wide “light-out policy.” With this, companies keep their lights off throughout the building(s), and employees turn them on only when light is needed.

If you’re not doing this already, it’s worth a shot — one study states that companies using this tactic can enjoy up to 46% in energy savings.

With savings like those, any CFO can enjoy the benefits of a comfortably air-conditioned office.

Like everyone else, small businesses seem to have caught the social networking bug. And because smaller firms thrive on intimate relationships with their customers, these sites can be an invaluable tool for growth.

So how are smaller firms using social networks? According to a recent study by AMI-Partners, the most prevalent uses include responding to customer questions, networking and reference/education purposes.

Check out the full breakdown in the chart below:

On the other end of the spectrum, most companies’ employees have an online presence of their own — and their online opinions may be damaging your reputation. If your firm hasn’t adopted a formal online posting policy yet, it made be a good idea to get together with HR and talk about putting one together in the near future.

We all know what the No. 1 motivator is. (And no one believes those surveys that say people aren’t in it for the money.) Here’s the next best thing you can do to motivate folks.

There’s no real secret to what gets — and keeps — people excited about their jobs. Let them tell you.

Managers continue to get surprised during exit interviews when they find out why people are really leaving. More often than not, it’s several little things that add up and ultimately drive someone to another job.

Even if they’re not leaving, an unmotivated employee is an unproductive one … and, worse, one who could poison co-workers against your organization.

Zero in on the best way to ask

There are plenty of ways to find out what really makes people come to work every morning. Two strategies:

• Address it one-on-one. Performance reviews are a great time to talk about what makes specific staffers tick. But if you put people on the spot, they may just throw out an answer that’s the first thing that pops into their head, or something that just happens to be on their mind at that moment. Instead, think about asking employees to come into his or her review with a list of what motivates him or her personally and (if possible) what could be done at the company to address that. That forces some quality thought and gets people talking solutions instead of just raising problems.
• Solicit suggestions. A suggestion box or survey is another way to solicit ideas on what will make folks more motivated. And since those options tend to be anonymous, people will speak their minds. But be prepared: You may have to weed through a lot of out-there suggestions (the downside of anonymity) to nab a couple of usable nuggets.

Consider the audience

Your organization may have the best maternity benefits around. But if your department (or company) is full of unmarried 20-somethings and Baby Boomers, that won’t give you much of a lift morale-wise.

Take a look at your team and the perks your company currently offers. How well do they match with your existing demographics?

Even if you can’t introduce new benefits now, you can certainly play up the ones that are most beneficial to the people in your group.

Follow through

Be prepared: If you’re going to ask people what motivates them, you’re going to have to be willing to follow up with folks about it.

If people feel you took interest in helping to make their jobs more satisfying but then did nothing with the info, you’ll have more of a morale problem than you had before you asked!

Of course, the key is to manage expectations from the start: Letting people think you can put a four-day workweek in place and then all you can deliver is pizza day on Fridays, you’re going to have a problem on your hands.

A new report issued last week by the security pros at Secure Enterprise 2.0 found that cybercriminals and online mischief makers are stepping up their attacks on social networking sites, which they see as fertile ground for hijacking users and re-directing them to bogus sites.

As the use of social networking skyrockets, it’s no wonder that malicious techs have directed their attention at these sites.

More users equals more potential victims, so popularity is sure to make these sites the targets of nefarious folks.

But more interesting in the report is the fact that by far the most frequent outcome is the leakage of sensitive information — likely information that should never have been posted to the site in the first place.

And for that, you can blame dumb users.

When we say dumb, we’re not accusing users of being mentally incompetent. We’re using dumb in the ignorant sense — dumb in the sense that they don’t understand the technology they are using and how what they are posting or their identity can be easily stolen.

Some facts from the report following trends in the targeting of Web 2.0 sites during Q1 of 2009:

• Web 2.0 services and sites lead the list with highest number of all recorded incidents (21%).
• Most popular attack vectors exploiting Web 2.0 features are SQL injection (21% of attacks) and authentication abuse (18%). A new emerging threat is Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF) that currently ranks as the 6th most popular attack vector with 8% of the reported attacks.
• Leakage of sensitive information remains the most common outcome of Web hacks (29%), while disinformation follows with 26%, mostly due to hacking of online identities of celebrities.

If users in your organization are spending time on social networking sites, now might be a good time to educate them on the dangers they’ll find there.

Posting any information about your company or organization can lead to big trouble if a user’s online identity is stolen. Be sure to warn them that whether they’re using social networking sites for pleasure or business, there’s a risk to their activity that can impact them personally and professionally.

It’s not surprising companies are struggling with major morale issues these days. Most folks are facing huge personal financial pressures and few companies are heaping big (or any) raises at all.

That may not change anytime soon. So how to you get and keep employees energized about doing their jobs?

Here are three strategies that work best in hard times:

Strategy 1: Ask them what they want — again

Hopefully when you hired each member of your finance team, you spoke with people about their career goals and aspirations, as well as what makes them tick. That may have changed — even since their last performance review.

Now’s a great time to do a new touch-base with each staffer. What’s most important to them now? More flextime? A telecommuting option? More education? Nailing that down not only helps you pinpoint what gets each staffer going, but it sends the very important message that you and your company are interested in that individual.

Strategy 2: Make sure more work also means more responsibility

It always happens when times get tight: Companies need to do more with less, so people’s job descriptions get longer. That’s inevitable.

The real trouble comes in when staffers merely feel “dumped on.” There goes morale.

Yes, there’s extra work that has to be spread among the people there to do it. The key? Increasing people’s responsibility levels so they don’t feel like it’s grunt work. Even if you have to have Marissa take on more invoice keying, see if you can also delegate some “higher level” tasks to her. Or enlist her input on how to streamline the process. Maybe you can even make her a mentor to a more junior member of your team.

That’s a proven way to reenergize folks … for free.

Strategy 3: Offer context

Of course, you can’t make everything better. The facts are the facts and times are tough all over.

<<Previous

Top Finance Stories of 2009 (so far…)

1. 4 employees you can’t risk losing now
   
2. Layoffs: 4 ways to avoid costly retaliation
3. 9 signs your customer’s going under
4. 8 bizarre biz ideas born of this recession
5. Obama’s plan creates more jobs for Finance
6. Poisonous attitudes: Stopping it before it spreads
7. 4 types you don’t want on your staff: How to handle ’em
8. They did what? Biggest bank blunders ever
9. She makes me nuts!: Handling your office nemesis
10. 3 strategies to boost morale on the cheap

You see this person at the company coffee pot and are tempted to swear off caffeine. It’s your office nemesis, but there are ways to make working with this person more bearable.

In an ideal world you’d get along famously with everyone you interact with at your office: day in and day out, week after week, year after year.

In the real world, you probably have that one person who just rubs you the wrong way … all the time. Maybe it’s the head of IT, your company’s sales manager or even another member of your Finance team.

You can’t necessarily avoid your office “nemesis.”

But you can consider utilizing a couple of different strategies to make dealing with this person easier.

To make your interactions with this individual less of a headache, try donning one of these hats.

Hat #1: Psychologist

Touchy-feely but true: Sometimes the people that irk us most do so because we see traits in them we don’t like in ourselves.

Maybe your nemesis tends to talk over people or is quick to judge — things you’re working on yourself. So when you see that reflected in another person, it makes it tougher to swallow.

Or the converse may be true: Maybe in some ways you resent this person because he or she has mastered the traits you’re after, whether it’s patience or an easy-going management style that makes people flock to them. So the green-eyed monster may be at work.

In either case, if you can recognize that, you may have an easier time relating to this co-worker.

Hat #2: Superhero

Then again, maybe this person is just a jerk, and there will never be a meeting of the minds.

That’s fine, too.

But you’ll still have to work with him or her. Why not find a way to channel those interactions to stay sharp?

Think of Superman and Lex Luther or Batman and The Riddler. These superheroes knew their adversaries would always be there — so they used them to stay on top of their game.

Use your own work nemesis to force you to think of smarter answers and more creative solutions when you must work together.

He or she will end up making you look better!

<<Previous Next>>

Top Finance Stories of 2009 (so far…)

1. 4 employees you can’t risk losing now
   
2. Layoffs: 4 ways to avoid costly retaliation
3. 9 signs your customer’s going under
4. 8 bizarre biz ideas born of this recession
5. Obama’s plan creates more jobs for Finance
6. Poisonous attitudes: Stopping it before it spreads
7. 4 types you don’t want on your staff: How to handle ’em
8. They did what? Biggest bank blunders ever
9. She makes me nuts!: Handling your office nemesis
10. 3 strategies to boost morale on the cheap