With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/325830
32 BCBusiness july 2014 illustration: graham roumieu 1. Keep jelly of the month Club certifi- cates on hand for all of those bonuses you won't be giving out this year. 2. When face-to-face seems too excruciating, fire off an email padded with emoji. 3. Don't ruin someone's Friday by telling them they didn't get the promo- tion—tell them on monday when they're already miserable. 4. never deliver bad news before restaurants begin serving alcohol. 5. bring cookie platters to downer meetings. because that will make up for asking staff to work over weekends or take unpaid time off. 6. Consider creating a dedicated "employee transition room." Word will get around and soon the room will do the talking for you. v i s u a l l e a r n i n g How to Deliver Bad News Questions of interpretation are murky in these early days, says Bennett, but on the question of intent, Industry Canada has made an attempt at clarification: "What they said was pretty vague but it was along the lines of, take a look at the email and take a look at the content, look at the links that are in it and try to determine from that whether one of the main purposes of the email is to encourage the recipient to participate in a commercial activity. And if that's the case then it's considered to be spam." There are, of course, exceptions. If the recipient exchanged business cards with you before you sent them a message, that would likely be considered implied consent to receive such messages. Similarly, if the person had joined your social network by "liking" or "following" you, or even if they had posted their email address on a website, according to the law they would have no one but themselves to blame for receiving electronic commercial messages. Here's the catch-22: you need to secure consent before you send a message that might be deemed commercial in intent, but by the time the law takes effect it's too late to ask for that consent. "That's the thing that's going to blow people away," comments Bennett. "You can't send that email unless you have consent... but sending a request for consent by email is also considered to be spam, so you can't do that either when the law kicks in." • 1 2 3 4 5 6 sourCe: government of Canada Top four global spam-source countries 17.2% 9.2% 8.0% 4.7% 60.9% other p030-037-Intel_july.indd 32 2014-05-29 10:14 AM