Not-for-profit managers… Men work as hard as women… How to avoid email disasters…

Managers working not for profit

Not all business is done for personal gain. MBAs Without Borders is a non-profit organisation that sends business professionals to assist non-government organisations in developing nations, reports Trendhunter.com.

MBAs Without Borders sends business volunteers from around the world to provide short-term businesses assistance to businesses and NGOs in Mexico, Haiti, Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Vietnam and Poland. The MBAs Without Borders website features networking opportunities, job postings, project lists and most of the features you would hope to see from such an organisation.

MBAs from Canada, the US, Europe and Australia are invited to volunteer in developing countries to help develop businesses and not-for-profits. The site claims that, as of April, $105,900 has been contributed by partners and donors in 2007.

Men work just as hard as women

It is a truth universally accepted that women work harder than men. After all, they do the second shift at home. Wrong, says a new study reported in Slate.com.

The online magazine reports that three economists, Michael Burda of Humboldt University in Berlin, Daniel Hamermesh of the University of Texas, and Philippe Weil of the Free University of Brussels, have analysed data from surveys in 25 countries that ask people how they spend their time.

Some of the countries are rich (such as the United States and Germany), some are poor (Benin and Madagascar), and some are in the middle (Hungary, Mexico, and Slovenia). The people surveyed were asked to fill in diaries indicating how they spend each segment of their day.

The results let men of the hook – somewhat.

Throughout the world, men spend more time on market work, while women spend more time on homework. In rich countries, men average 5.2 hours of market work a day and 2.7 hours of homework each day, while women average 3.4 hours of market work and 4.5 hours of homework per day. Adding these up, both men and women work an average of 7.9 hours a day.

(The averages sound low because they include weekends and are based on a sample of adults that included stay-at-home parents as well as working ones, and other adults.)

But in poor countries, women do work harder. And the gap widens as the country gets poorer. In Benin, Madagascar, and South Africa, which have per capita incomes of less than $10,000 a year, women work one to two hours more each day than men.

Five ways to avoid email disaster

It’s already difficult to imagine how the business world operated before email. There is no doubt email can be a wonderful aid to productivity but, equally, the wrong email sent to the wrong person can be an unmitigated disaster. Check out Inc.com’s tips for avoiding email catastrophe:

Check before you click: Simple and effective – always double-check who you’re sending the email to before you send it. Is there any single thing that has caused more embarrassment in this world than accidental use of the Reply All button?

Anonymity no longer exists: In the online world, information on just about everything can be obtained by those who know how. So before you send of that blazing email using your anonymous ‘angryman66@hotmail.com’ email, stop, think – and don’t.

Urgent means urgent: There’s nothing worse than accidentally deleting or just losing an important email. One way to avoid this is to flag email as Urgent or High Priority. But that only works if you keep your power dry – marking every second email urgent is a recipe for having your truly urgent emails ignored.

Virus warning: Your business can be vulnerable to litigation if an email sent by an employee contains a virus that causes damage to the person who receives it. Diminish the risk by including a virus warning and disclaimer at the bottom of your email.

Don’t send anything raunchy: Another basic but important rule. Sending something dodgy to a list of people you don’t know well is a recipe for disaster. And never, ever send anything questionable from work. To do otherwise means harassment claims or black marks for breaching email policies are a near certainty.