In order for your business to succeed, the people involved with the company must be motivated to see it succeed. As the business owner, you obviously have a vested interest in your company, so you will do whatever you can to expand your brand presence and improve your bottom line, but what about all of the other people involved in the process? Does Julie in accounting or Tim in sales as motivated and driven as you are to see your company succeed?

Speaking from my own personal experience, I found that I became very disengaged with some jobs when I felt that I was not being rewarded for my hard work. When employees are paid an hourly wage or a set salary, the paycheque every two weeks will look exactly the same whether they put in 110 percent or just 10 percent. It is important that you ensure your employees feel valued and appreciated.

This doesn’t necessarily have to take on the form of a monetary reward, like performance bonuses of some kind, but there has to be something there that makes them WANT to work harder, smarter, and more efficiently for you. Perhaps a friendly competition in which the top performer, based on a quantitative measure of your choosing, can earn an extra day off or the first pick of the litter when new supplies come in through the door. It’s really up to you.

One strategy that can be quite effective, when implemented correctly, is employee profit sharing. In this way, each and employee will have a vested interest in the success and profitability of the company. If the company makes money, they make money. This way, everyone can understand their contribution to the system and be rewarded appropriately.

What do you do to ensure that your employees stay engaged, motivated, and interested?

Last week we talked about how, in jQuery, you reference an object and then build off of it in a “tree”-type fashion. This week we’ll be talking about branching off of the reference.

Once you have something referenced, you can then follow it with a period, and the name of a function you want to execute on the object. Now, some of these functions accept regular attributes, which you can specify within parenthesis. However, some functions also allow you to create a function as one of the attributes. This allows you to execute other Javascript or jQuery commands within the function applied to the referenced object. This is known as binding a function.

A good example of a function that allows you to bind a function to it is ready(). This function will execute the bound function within when the document object model is ready to be manipulated (before images have loaded, which is a key difference from Javascript’s onload. The ready() function is most commonly used on the root document of the page.

Let’s take a look at an example of the ready() function.

[code language="js"]$(document).ready( function() {
alert("The DOM is ready to be manipulated.");
} );[/code]

This bit of script would throw up an alert box as soon as the DOM is ready. Notice how we just create a name-less function within the ready() function. Quotes are not necessary around document, because it isn’t technically an element.

Some functions may also pass attributes to the bound function, which you can reference during the creation of the function, then use those attributes within the function itself. Next week we’ll be going over something closely related to binding function, but with a key difference, callbacks.

You want small? It doesn’t get much smaller than this.

For the busy travelling executive, space inside that briefcase is at an absolute premium. There’s got to be enough room there for a laptop, a power supply, a few USB drives, and so much more. A full sized desktop mouse just won’t do and Targus recognizes this need. That’s why the company has created the remarkably tiny Targus Ultra Mini Retractable Optical Mouse.

Also available as part of the Targus Netbook Accessory Kit, this tiny mouse is not wireless. Instead, it features a retractable USB cable that’s about as thin as a sheet of paper. By having a retractable cable, this mouse will offer better battery life than its wireless counterparts. When you’re on the go, battery life (for both the mouse and the laptop) is very important!

Despite being about the same size as two of your fingers, the Ultra Mini Retractable Optical Mouse comes with the usual pair of mouse buttons, as well as a scroll wheel. It looks like it could be uncomfortable for extended use, but you’d be surprised. I have one myself and my hand doesn’t cramp up as much as you thought it would.

The tiny Targus optical mouse is listed at $24.99 on the Targus USA website.