Halal Catering And Corporate Events

Regardless of the nature of your event, food is first is the list. The venue may not be as important, just as long as people can use the necessary facilities such as parking, toilets, waiting area, chairs and tables and carpets. But when it comes to food, nothing is more important.

Some corporate events are for small numbers. We managers of events have to be aware of the attendance and have to know peoples choices of food. I am talking here about board meetings or panel meetings. If you are having an annual general meeting, film premiere, product launch, shareholders meeting, product information day or any other kind of event, then the stakes are higher. You may be offering hundreds of food options, but if your guest is unable to eat meat due to faith requirements, then they will only be able to eat the vegetable dishes. If your guests are of the Hindu or Muslim faith, then halal catering is a good option giving a large range of food choices.

Halal catering in corporate events are just perfect to cater for the Muslim faith clients. If you have a garden party, then a halal BBQ will be just perfect for your Muslim guests. In many corporate events I have witnesses a halal corner of food counters serving only halal dishes with the guarantee halal certificate displayed. It is very useful and enjoyable to have this halal corner, and it satisfies customers, clients and guests alike. Muslim faith guests will feel they are very much welcomed and part of the event, know they can pick up almost anything from the plate and enjoy it as much as anyone else around the table.

Nowadays most commercial or corporate events covered by Muslim caterers are not only for Muslim guests, since many people love Indian curry and rice, daal, biryani, chicken curry and naan, samos with mint sauce, pakora with yogurt, chutney and papadum. These are so popular at corporate events now that they will often turn the event into an Indian themed event, with the waiters dressed in traditional clothes and the decor altered, to no huge expense.

If you are attending a corporate event, then don't take a sandwich with you. In fact you might not need dinner later because you will be full of very satisfying Indian Halal food.

Corporate Entertainment and Team Building

Corporate entertainment offers its members the feel of something that they have never done or long forgotten. Corporate entertainment is now an extensively used term and it includes team building, sports hospitality, conferences, entertaining clients, and company fun days. For any business, it is important to gain new customers, keep and develop existing relationships or inspire or reward its workforce. Corporate entertainment events, a form of team building exercise, are a pleasant way by which communication skills and cooperative work abilities can be improved.

Corporate entertainment and team building reduces stress and gives a well-deserved break from the office. There are many structured activities, indoor and outdoor, that are entertaining and targeted towards creating the essential requirements of fruitful work relationships. Through these activities, members can practice brainstorming, collaboration, creativity, trust, and feedback. Most activities focus on areas like organizational development, problem solving, and conflict resolution. These activities enhance leadership, interpersonal, presentation, and negotiation skills of the team members.

Corporate team building entertainments can include ropes courses, culinary school, treasure hunts, sporting events, simple games, and much more. All these activities are designed to promote critical thinking and problem solving skills, improve good communication and group relations, and show each person?s skill to add to the greater whole.

The advantages of corporate entertainment are many. The team members get a chance to know each other in a different setting. They enjoy some funny and successful experiences together that would help relieve tension and build mutual appreciation and understanding. The advantages are intended to last beyond the day, to improve morale and collaboration at the workplace as well.

To be effective, corporate entertainment should be exciting, bonding experiences that can be enjoyed by all members while holding clear focus and staying true to the organization's goals. While planning or choosing a corporate entertainment, try to plan the event at an off-site setting. Professionals who specialize in corporate entertainment and team building would be able to provide numerous valuable fun activities to enhance a particular team?s performance.

Event Planning Checklist

Being in charge of planning your companies next corporate event can be a daunting task, not to mention put untold pressures on your shoulders. It is very important to have a event planning checklist so that your event can go off without a hitch.

One of the first steps is to start gathering data on all of the details that you hope to accomplish. One of the first forms of information that you will need is the number of guests that will be in attendance. To allow yourself to get a more accurate count, think about sending out RSVP invitations well in advance.

Will there be food served at your event, and will it be a sit down type dinner or more of a buffet style type of food service. Will there be any events that will take place.. (ie. bands, themes, or presentations).

Once the pertinent data is collected, it will allow you to move forward with the party planning process. After gathering the data the next step is to create a event planning checklist, that you will be able to review on a regular basis and check things off as they are accomplished.

Being in charge of planning you need to make it a point to keep in constant contact with your vendors, such as catering, photographers, service staff, florists and entertainment. The characteristics of a good planner is a person who excels at their profession and understands what it means to be a team leader.

The next thing to think about when planning for the big event is a location, depending on the number of guests that you will have will determine where the event will be held. Some common choices for corporate events are hotel ballrooms, resorts, restaurants, or large event tents. One important thing when choosing your location is to always estimate up on the number of guests, it is much better to be too big than too small.

Another important aspect of event planning is the food and beverages. Will you need to hire a caterer. If it is a smaller event you could possibly get away with preparing the food yourself, although if you are the chief planner it might be better to outsource this job. Buffets are always a big hit with a medium sized crowd, and sit down dinners with service staff make for an elegant feel.

Another aspect of the party planning process is entertainment. There are many types of entertainment to consider for your corporate event such as magicians, jugglers, hypnotists or live bands. The look and feel of what type of atmosphere you are trying to create can make a big determination on what type of entertainment you select.

Great planning and preparation is the key to a event that will be a success, however ensuring that you have addressed every aspect of the planning process can be an exhausting task. To keep yourself from overlooking anything it is important that you prepare a good event planning checklist.

As always there will be things that will go wrong, although unless you tell anyone your guests will probably never even notice, do not stress about it, and just mark it off as a lesson learned. Have fun and enjoy the benefits of all of your hard work, and know that your guests will walk away having a great time and lasting memories of an event that was well executed.

The CEO's Guide To Succession Planning - Managing Risk & Ensuring Business Continuity

Introduction

Once reserved for the upper echelons of senior management, and often viewed as replacement planning should catastrophe strike, today's succession planning is being redefined. The discipline has broadened in both breadth and scope to become a central component of board-level strategy.

Succession planning focuses on managing risk and ensuring continuity across all levels of the organization - risk of untimely departures of critical personnel, risk of retirees taking their skills and knowledge with them and leaving nothing behind, and risk of losing high value employees to competitors. It does so by helping your business leaders to identify top performers within the organization, create dynamic "talent pools" of this critical talent that other leaders can leverage, and prepare and develop these high performing employees for future roles.

If this was easy, everyone would be doing it. The problem that exists today is that succession planning is barely automated, let alone optimized. This CEO guide provides five key tips for jump starting your succession planning efforts.

1. Automate and Reduce Costs

Today's succession planning efforts are characterized by fragmented, inconsistent, paper-based processes. Indeed, 67% of companies are still primarily paper-based, according to a global survey conducted by SumTotal.

Conventionally, business and HR leaders will spend weeks or even months manually scouring different parts of the organization for information needed to build lists and pools of nominees and successors for specific job families or positions. The information required to generate the lists often includes self assessments, past performance appraisals (often paper-based), and 360 feedback. After a lengthy period of information gathering and aggregation followed by manual analysis (e.g., nine-box, gap analysis), the results are printed and collated into large three-ring binders for use in executive planning meetings. This time-consuming, inefficient, and costly process is still commonplace today.

To effectively transform succession planning from a manual, paper-based process to one that is systematic and technology-enabled, CEOs must focus on laying a solid foundation supported by strong executive leadership.

Program & Process Foundation

• Establish dedicated management function (e.g., program management office) with CEO-sponsored executive leader or council (with senior representation from line-of-business, geography, and corporate HR)


• Define core succession process along with key constituents and tasks at each step of the process; Clearly articulate touch points to other business processes (e.g., performance management, career development)


• Understand implications of change with emphasis on managers & employees


• Align program with broader business strategy


• Determine initial scope (e.g., enterprise-wide, divisional)


• Define processes independent of technology

Technology Foundation

• Must support and enable key processes


• Must integrate learning and development


• Must link seamlessly to other business processes, especially performance management


• Must be flexible and configurable to meet unique needs


• Must centralize and consolidate key information and data


• Must be easy for managers and employees to use

2. Drive Succession Planning Deeper into Your Organization

Many CEOs still view succession planning as replacement planning to designate successors in the event of a catastrophe befalling senior company leaders. Indeed, succession planning penetrates only the highest levels of the organizational hierarchy, according to survey data. Only 35% of companies currently focus their succession planning efforts on most critical roles within the organization.

Yet a most dramatic transformation is underway: 65% of the organizations surveyed plan to extend succession planning to all critical positions within the two years. Applying succession planning beyond the top layers of management is critical to retaining high performers across all levels of the organization and mitigating the risk of untimely departures of personnel in high-value positions.

The key to extending succession planning into the organization is to provide career development planning to employees. Indeed, fully 97% of business and HR leaders believe that a systematic career development process positively impacts employee retention and engagement. These leaders also believe that providing career advancement opportunities as well as dedicated development planning to employees are the two most important mechanisms for retaining high performers.

Retaining existing employees not only has the potential to minimize the effects of talent shortages, it also provides significant and tangible cost savings (since replacement costs range from 100%-150% of the salary for a departing employee).

3. Establish Dynamic Talent Pools to Improve Pipeline Visibility

Centralized talent pools provide CEOs with global visibility into their talent pipeline and overall organization bench strength. They provide a mechanism for ensuring that the organization's future staffing plans are adequate, thereby reducing risk and ensuring continuity. To be truly effective, talent pools need to be dynamic in nature. For instance, if an employee is terminated, that person should be automatically removed from existing successor pools. Alternatively, if an employee closes a key skill or certification gap that had previously kept her from being considered as a successor, the pool should be updated appropriately. Talent pools that are inaccessible or not up-to-date are of little use to decision makers.

A key element of making talent pools accessible is in-depth searching for talent exploration. A talent pool is not much good if managers cannot easily view, track, update, and search for potential successors. Dynamic talent pools should take the guess work out of succession planning by aligning employee assessments, competencies, development plans, and learning programs. Proactive system monitoring ensures that as employees learn and grow, talent pools are dynamically updated to reflect the changes. It is this element in particular - supported by robust reporting and analytic capabilities - that helps CEOs make more objective staffing decisions and better plan for future staffing needs.

4. Promote Talent Mobility to Retain High Performers

Industry analyst firm Bersin & Associates defines talent mobility as "a dynamic internal process for moving talent from role to role - at the leadership, professional and operational levels." The company further states that "the ability to move talent to where it is needed and by when it is needed will be essential for building an adaptable and enduring organization."[1]

Talent mobility is:

• A business strategy that facilitates organizational agility and flexibility


• A mechanism for acquiring and retaining high performing and potential talent


• A recruiting philosophy that favors internal sourcing over costly external hiring


• A method for aligning organizational and individual needs through development


• A proactive and ongoing approach to succession planning rather than a reactive approach

A systematic talent mobility strategy enables business leaders to more effectively acquire, align, develop, engage, and retain high performing talent by implementing a consistent, repeatable, and global process for talent rotation. Without a cohesive talent mobility strategy, CEOs face several risks:

• Focus on costly external recruiting vs. internal sourcing


• Wrong hires (cost can be 3-5x person's salary)


• Increased high performer churn


• Reduced employee engagement


• Reduced flexibility as business conditions change

CEOs should consider the following integrated processes - and a complete technology platform to support them - to promote and enable talent mobility:

• Current workforce analysis:Includes detailed talent profiles, employee summaries, organization charts, competencies, and job profiles.


• Talent needs assessment: Assess employees on key areas of leadership potential, job performance, and risk of leaving.


• Future needs analysis:Development-centric succession planning to create and manage dynamic, fully-populated talent pools.

5. Integrate Succession Planning to Broader Business Processes

Succession planning is not a silo. It implicitly relies on other talent processes and data, especially assessments that provide a performance and competency baseline. Yet unlike a performance management process, which can be executed in a relatively self-contained fashion (assuming it has access to core employee data), the same is not true for succession planning.

Succession planning requires foundational data (e.g., competencies, job profiles, talent profiles, and employee records) and inputs (e.g., appraisals, feedback). Outputs include nominee pools, successor pools, development/learning plans, and reports. To facilitate the level of integration required to get succession planning right, a single, natively-integrated technology platform that centralizes key talent processes and information is required. With this single platform, the time to develop succession plans can easily be reduced from weeks or months to mere hours. The benefits can be significant: reduce costs, reallocate personnel from tactical activities to more strategic endeavors, and mitigate the risk of untimely departures of essential personnel.

Additionally, a single technology platform promotes the linkage of learning and career development to succession planning. By bridging these processes, nominees who are not ready for advancement can be assigned detailed development plans that guide them to improve the competencies and skills required for new job positions. Learning paths and specific courses can be established for employees to facilitate their career growth. By providing learning opportunities and development plans to employees, CEOs can take a more active role in promoting employee growth, retention, and engagement.

Finally, with a single system of record, reporting and analysis is vastly improved, since all relevant talent data resides within a single data structure. Strategic cross-functional metrics can be readily established (e.g., measure the impact of learning and development programs on performance). Reporting and analysis are key to the CEO's success in managing employee resources and implementing strategies that support corporate objectives and initiatives.

Conclusion

Organizations can realize significant efficiency gains and cost savings by moving from a manual, paper-based succession process to one that is fully technology-enabled. The shift to a single technology platform facilitates extending succession planning deeper into the organization, since a well-architected solution seamlessly links succession to career development and learning. A complete platform improves senior management's global visibility into the talent pipeline and bench strength, and promoting talent mobility to retain high performers becomes a viable engagement strategy. Succession planning, done correctly, is all about process and supporting technology integration. Without integration, succession planning becomes just another organizational silo.

Endnotes

[1]Lamoureux, Kim. "Talent Mobility: A New Standard of Endurance." Bersin & Associates, November 30, 2009.

Significance of Event Catering Companies

Catering forms an important part of any event whether it is a corporate event, gallery opening, wedding party, book signing, seminar, rehearsal dinner or any other event. Organizing a successful event requires plenty of time, dedication and hard work. Whether a person plans to host an outdoor event or an indoor event, he or she needs to choose the best possible catering services.

There are a large number of catering companies which have been helping individuals in organizing professional events as per their necessity and budget. Important role played by the catering companies for arranging successful events include:

Food and beverage services

No event would be complete without the availability of excellent food and drinks. This is one of the major services offered by the catering companies. They provide variety of food and drink options as per the demand and nature of event taking place. Apart from providing different food options, they also take care of preparation, presentation and delivery of food. Food is presented in an attractive manner so as to create a better impression on guests.

Event planning services

This is another major service offered by the catering companies these days. Appropriate event planning is necessary for smooth running of events. The process involves a number of essential steps starting from event site selection and reservation, budgeting, date selection to transportation and parking arrangements. The services are offered as per the individual preferences and requirements.

Decoration services

Catering today not only covers food and drinks but also involves decoration of events in a way to make guests feel happy and satisfied. Decorations, great music, and a striking venue setting add more value and charm to any event.

Thus, it becomes clear that the catering companies play an increasingly important role from beginning to the ending of the event.

Event Planning - Is Event Planning Industry Likely To Flourish?

Today the event planning industry has extremely outgrown and people can find many different posts in this area. This is one of a modern concept because only some couple of years ago, people was not aware of it. If someone had to arrange a party or corporate business meeting back then, they had to arrange everything themselves. Beginning from deciding the place to the food items on the menu, they had to take every decision. Some people might enjoy organizing their parties on their own, however it is a very difficult and lengthy process and you are not certain whether you can please your guests for not. Moreover, now people have become so busy with their difficult professional and family lives that it has become impossible for them to arrange any type of event.

This is the part where an event planner plays its role. They can make your event come alive and last forever. Event planners are professional people who know very well how to make an event successful because they take their jobs very seriously. Once you will handle the task of arranging any type of occasion, you will become highly relieved because they will transform your event into what you only dreamt.

This is the reason why everyone appreciates event planners so much. They have all the required resources that can make the arrangements quicker, they have all the latest information on what decorations are in right now and what are out and whatever budget you will provide to them, they will make the best out of it. Ordinary people do not have all this information, if they even try to find all this about event planning it will take a lot of time and they will never be satisfied.

Now there are different institutions that are offering courses and certifications related to event planning. People who have interest in this business, when acquire these programs then they become more skillful and hard working. Their roots become strong and they perform their tasks like nobody else.

Therefore, the event planning industry is definitely flourishing. We can see many famous event planning businesses that are making profit in millions and there are many more that are that are expanding. So if you have also decided to pursue career in this path or start up your own event planning business, then it is a very wise decision and by working hard you will gain a lot of benefits.

Event Registration - Vital for the Success of Events

Almost all organizations dream of maximizing their event registrations. However, not all dreams come true, especially if you don't have a user-friendly registration process. Many a times, people get confused regarding some sections that need to be filled out when signing up for a meeting or a seminar. They are seen looking for the concerned personnel from the organization to clear their doubts. Moreover, event organizers often find it difficult to manage registrations for a large scale events and handling hundreds of forms that get submitted on a daily basis. An online registration software can help you to address these problems in a much easier and quicker fashion.

Online registration software is available 24x7 on the internet. No installation or downloading of software is required for using such a solution. No plug-ins is to be inserted as well. Event planners need to create an event website to start marketing and promoting their occasion to the target audience. The integrated registration solution can be used instantly to create registration forms. Event organizers can even customize the forms to give it a look and feel as that of their professional business website.

Your target audience can find such a Cloud-based solution highly beneficial in terms of saving their time and costs of travelling long distances to complete the registration process. People can simply log onto the event website and open the sign up forms to quickly start typing their personal details. Online forms don't leave any room for typos or misspelled words. Anything and everything can be done on the internet with the usage of a computer, keypad, and the mouse.

The Cloud-based registration system can additionally be used for promotional purposes. You can post the registration link on your social media website pages as well as on your blog and wikis to attract user/reader attention. Moreover, you can email the link to all your present and potential customers or attendees to let them finish off registering their names in a virtual environment.

Online registration process can be better administered. Event planners can add multiple instructions on the forms to guide the registrants throughout the process. For example, if a registrant has some problem understanding a specific section/field on the form, he or she can quickly refer to the instruction given on each form to smoothly progress ahead with the registration process.

Thus, from conferences, seminars to soccer matches and corporate parties, an online registration solution can help you address the most important aspects of an event in an easy and convenient manner in comparison to its manual, offline version.