Mindy Giberstone

maybe the new emphasis to stop kids bullying eachother will have an impact later in life. It doesn’t make sense that it’s wrong to cyber bully your classmate, but you can graduate and spew toxic speech in the name of political freedom.

Persistence. It might take time until someone is ready to hear what you are saying. Plus you can improve the pitch over time, so maybe the second or 3rd time you’ve brought up a subject, you get better at explaining its benefits.
Seeking buy-in of other interested parties or stakeholders.
If possible show ROI – it’s hard to argue with savings.

Isn’t the real story that the top 10% have a larger portion of their income from stocks/bonds and can take better advantage of capital gains/losses relief built into the tax codes? While middle classes may have some investments, their main income is salary. A small percent of investment income won’t be enough to lower your average tax rate into…[Read more]

I applaud Virginia for giving back to employees. Managers (or non-represented employees) in many state have had their wages frozen for 5+ years, while represented employees got their contractual increases. Younger staff are starting to flee to get pay raises, leaving an older workforce behind. This could soon lead to serious knowledge transfer…[Read more]

What about the need for reliable electricity? My friends in Bethesda didn’t get power back until Wednesday.
Its time someone looked at modernizing the grid.

Instead of engaging IT in complex query and report writing, we do simply gross queries and then manipulate the data in Excel with vlook-ups, pivot tables, etc. Saves a lot of time on 1-off data requests and you don’t spend days working out complicated joins or views or such.(Can you tell I’m not in IT?)

Cool reuse, but we use them so the empties can be returned for recycling.

I agree that the focus of discussions is very heavily tilted toward Federal procurement. Beyond that, this isn’t a place to share specs, or the source for our beloved regulations and procedures. I come to GovLoop for more general management type discussions.

Maybe the Boss should be publicly thanked for the friends work by the other departments. Maybe this can lead to growth and development for both parties.

Next generation laptops – souped up Airs?

Aren’t Congressional staffers a form of ‘federal’ employee? Congress wouldn’t dare make fun of its own staff – they are too necessary.

Reward can also be cross training (or exposure) with another area of your agency or Dept. People want to know more about how the system works as a whole and sometimes, a couple of hours with another team that you only tangentially work with can make a big impression.

Depending on the OS used, even new users need to have their print driver modified when they inherit a wiped PC. If IT support has not bought in to setting up the drivers correctly, you are back to manually setting duplex. Myth #1 (simply pushing the settings) is truly a myth in my experience.

help people buy, pay, track expenses

We all have our pet peeves, but I try to put this in perspective. I now save my “This isn’t English” for when I can’t understand what someone is trying to say, not typos or poor grammar. I know that I can just as easily be the culprit of a poorly worded email or text.
Also, some of us are dyslexic and really count on spell check and auto-fill to…[Read more]