The battle for smartphone supremacy has reached new heights in recent months, with industry heavyweights Apple and Google leading the charge over long-time mobile powerhouses like Research in Motion and Windows.
Get the low-down on the brief, but constantly developing, history of the smartphone market in this month’s Business English News lesson. We feature lots of great vocabulary for talking about mobile communication, sales and technology. Use the links below to access the free transcript and quizzes for this lesson.
What’s the difference between a good meeting and a bad meeting? An effective business english meeting and one in which people talk but nothing really gets done? In many cases, the difference is in the person running the meeting. Whether he or she is the regular chairperson or a facilitator brought in from the outside, that person needs to make sure the meeting meets its objectives.
So how can you do that? How can you make meetings work? That’s what we’re looking at in this series. And the skills and techniques we’re demonstrating are useful not just for meetings. They can also be applied to all types of group discussions.
Today, we’re going to learn how to encourage quiet people, push for clarity, avoid committing to a position, conduct satisfaction checks, and praise good work. We’ll rejoin Tony, Annette, and Jake as they discuss solutions to a problem in their company. The meeting is being run by Liz, who has been brought in from another department to make sure the meeting is effective.
Listening Questions
1. What does Jake think is one of the basic problems?
2. Why doesn’t Liz want to give her opinion?
3. What are they going to talk about next?
This is the first of a two-part Business English Pod lesson on making the most of your business english meetings.
Today’s lesson is officially our 200th BEP episode and this week we’ll also be rolling past 30 Million downloads. So a hearty thanks to every one of you for helping us reach this amazing milestone. It’s been a fantastic journey and we’re looking forward to the next 200. If you’d like to share in the celebration, please think about rating or commenting on our podcast page in iTunes.
This week also sees the roll out of our Course Builder app for premium members. You can check out the video on the website to see just how easy it is to build a personalized course with Course Builder.
So, have you ever announced a meeting and seen people roll their eyes? “Oh no, not another meeting,” they seem to be saying. But every organization needs meetings. They are important when we need to discuss an issue, share information, plan, or make decisions. The problem is that not every meeting is an effective meeting. In fact, there are some good reasons why a lot of people consider meetings a waste of time.
So the question is: how can you run a meeting that people come out of feeling positive? How can we make the most of our meetings?
Running a good meeting requires both leadership and tact. You need to guide the group towards its goals and keep the meeting on track. Today we’ll talk about how you can do this. We’ll look at how to keep the discussion moving and how to focus on the issues, rather than on people or items that aren’t on the agenda.
In this lesson, we’ll listen in on a meeting at a company that is dealing with unhappy staff. Tony, Annette, and Jake are managers, and they’re trying to figure out exactly what the problem is. The meeting is being run by Liz, who has been brought in from another department to help out. You will hear Liz use several techniques to keep the meeting on track.
Listening Questions
1. What is the purpose of this meeting?
2. What does Jake say is an important issue?
3. Why does Annette think the employee surveys are not useful?
Introducing Course Builder: search, select & save lessons into your own personalized course.
With hundreds of lessons on BEP to choose from, Course Builder provides a quick and easy way for members to organise the resources into courses based on their preferences and needs. Users can search for lessons by topic or custom search queries and select individual lessons they want to study. These lesson can then be dragged into your preferred order and saved as a course which is exclusively available to you and easily accessible from the Course Builder page.
We’ve been looking at how to deal with problem people. These are the people in your office that drive you nuts because they’re so difficult to get along with. Last week we talked about how to deal with specific incidents. Today, we’re talking about ongoing issues.
This is about the constant thorn in your side, whether it’s your colleague, your boss, or the IT guy that gets annoyed every time you ask for some information. In extreme cases, these people can make you dread going to work each day. So how can we deal with them?
Discussion Questions
1. Have you had to deal with a co-worker who caused you continual problems?
2. At what point do you think you should involve a supervisor when you have a problem with a colleague or co-worker?
3. Do you naturally discuss problems openly or do you tend to keep things in?
