This week we celebrated our Digital Marketing Manager, Kim’s, birthday! I am reminded every time we celebrate a birthday here at the ‘ville of how important and EASY it is to make our co-workers feel the love on their special day. Here are your quick ABCs for how to make your next employee’s or co-worker’s birthday sing! We've got a list A-Z to help you make workplace birthdays a blast for everyone:

It's 8:55 am, I have a 9 am deadline, and all I have to do is press print...then BAM! It happens. Everything is still... My computer is frozen. I say a prayer that I hit save, or somehow the computer will recover all of my files. I know the next step is the classic CTRL+ALT+DELETE... Nope. It's time to restart. We've all been there! Luckily we have a great IT staff at the 'ville, and I have learned to not freak out..too much, because they can fix it!

At 11:30 on the Sunday night before last, I stepped off a plane after a whirlwind weekend in New York City. Then, just four days later, my parents pulled in my driveway and I hopped in their car for a road trip to Iowa. Talk about two ends of the spectrum: sky-high buildings, swarming streets, and foreign accents were replaced with top hat-high corn, long stretches of desolation, and mid-western drawls. Now I’m back at work trying to make sense of it all.

July is one of my favorite months of the year, and it's literally disappearing in a blink of an eye! I keep finding myself thinking that my boys are going to be back in school before I know it. My oldest, Jackson, is going into 6th grade and my youngest, Michael, is going to be a big first grader. It's beyond my comprehension!

The dog days are over! That is, if you strategically saved a stash of your PTO for the summer months (AKA: When everybody wants to be outdoors enjoying the sun instead of looking at it from thier desk.) But, if you didn’t, and your employees are in the same boat, you’re in luck. I’ve come up with a handful of ideas to keep you and your team productive when the struggle is real and the drag between the 4^th and Labor Day feels like an eternity. We all know the importance of employee engagement and employee motivation, so I’ll get right to it: