Cubicles are a great way to define a workspace. They can provide workers with privacy and designated space to focus. To make sure cubicle space is both comfortable and functional, consider adding some of these extras.
Multiple Monitors
The addition of an extra monitor or two can make it much easier for your employees to handle multi-step processes. While multitasking isn’t much of a time-saver, many workers find that having a spreadsheet open on one monitor makes the task of populating a report template much more efficient. For employees who need to communicate with clients in real time the ability to move from conversation to comments on a second screen greatly increases productivity.
Standing Desks
Sitting for long periods of time is hard on your spine. Over time, too much sitting can increase the risk of obesity and back problems. Installing standing desks can help your employees build core strength while increasing their focus on their tasks. Consider installing a desktop lift that can be easily elevated by the employee so they can move from a standing to a seated project as needed.
Decorations
Employees should be able to display a few personal items within sight of their monitors. Pictures of their loved ones can easily go on a bookshelf or a corner of the desktop. While the employee’s space shouldn’t be cluttered, the addition of personal items can brighten a long workday and lift the spirits of a dedicated employee. Experts would advise you to consider the benefits of workspace decorating. Of course, nothing should extend above the height of the cubicle wall or impede the ability of the employee to get work done.
Plants
The addition of a green plant can add a touch of home to a cubicle. A green, leafy plant such as sansevieria, also called snake plant, can actually freshen the air in the office. Even better, the snake plant can flourish under fluorescent lighting. To avoid allergies and discomfort, ask employees to avoid flowering plants. Make sure that plant pots are required to include a drip tray to avoid water damage to desks and carpets.
Cubicles are supposed to be uniform, but this can make the office space a bit bland. It’s a good idea to keep things energized and welcoming. The addition of personal items and plants can brighten the space for all employees and encourage personal connections and a culture of being inclusive.
The nature of communication within businesses has seen great changes in recent years. Through the internet and other digital connections, you can pass information to your employees within seconds. However, fast communication is not a guarantee that your workers will see or respond to the communication. The best way to communicate with your staff depends on your resources, employee location, and privacy concerns.
Consider Cost
Depending on the number of remote employees you have, the least expensive form of communication may be a face-to-face meeting. Many businesses start the day with a daily briefing of different departments or staff groups. These types of meetings can be helpful in ensuring people have received important information for the day. However, once the workday begins, there may be other communication needs. Email is still a low-end expense, but it is often so frequently used that important communication may never be seen. Shortly after your email arrives, it is pushed down by other pressing messages. Saving money does not matter when your messages get lost in employee inboxes. If you want communication that is more direct or more private, you will have to invest more in your systems. A virtual private network can enhance security, but working with one is an added cost. A third-party communication system can help establish message priority, but it is also a financial investment.
Where Are My Employees?
While the daily meeting can still be helpful, it is a product of a different era when employees were all onsite. Nearly 3 billion people worldwide are deskless workers, making communication via email less optimal for disseminating information. Remote workers may need company-issued phones for receiving information through text or instant message. You also need to consider how remote employees can participate in meetings. This could involve a simple remote connection or a virtual meeting room.
How Important is the Information?
Another important consideration is the value of the information that is being sent back and forth. Sending out a set of weekly goals is most likely an operation with low-security needs. However, if sensitive content is routinely part of communications, you need to think about data safety. In this case, you want to create connections that have higher security protocols like password protection and encryption.
Poor communication costs businesses a great deal of money every year in both time and profit. Companies of every size need to have a communication plan in place. When you think intentionally about how to share information, you will improve the performance of your business.
For a profitable business, your income has to be greater than your expenses. While it is critical to work to increase your income, it is also important to find ways to streamline your costs. Waste in the workplace is often a silent expense. Yet, those lost minutes or unnecessary expenses add up over time, eating into your profits.
Hire Carefully
When you hire a new employee, there are many upfront costs. It takes some time and training before you receive the full benefit of that new person. If that employee requires more training than you expected or doesn’t have the right skillset, the cost of bringing him or her up to speed can become wasteful. Consider using skills tests and strong behavioral interview questions to make certain that new candidates are honest about their skill levels.
It is also important to find people with the right personality for your workplace. If you are in a market space that promotes creative thinking, someone who spends time doing some daydreaming may be an asset. If you are in manufacturing, that same person will cost you money in lost time and slowed production.
Quality Control
When an unusable product rolls off your assembly line, you are looking at waste in the manufacturing process. Employees may have to spend time disassembling the item or simply throw it away. It’s not enough to check for quality once a product is complete; you need to adopt a process that prioritizes catching mistakes early on.
Some managers will periodically walk through the entire manufacturing process looking for wasted motion and stations with the highest possibility of mistakes. By getting feedback from employees, they are able to improve each step. After revamping the process, they will walk the line again looking for new issues. Over time, the process improves, increasing manufacturing rates and minimizing waste.
Schedule for Productivity
Many businesses still base their workday on an eight-hour period with a few breaks along the way. More recently, businesses have discovered the power of more flexible schedules. The traditional, nine-to-five model produces a productive morning with decreasing productivity through the afternoon.
By breaking up the day in different ways, it is possible to have a more constant level of productivity throughout the day. For example, the period after lunch is often a time of low energy. Encouraging your employees to use half an hour of that time for creative projects or continuing education can set up higher productivity for the rest of the afternoon.
Removing waste from your business is a constant process and there is no one-size-fits-all method. As workplace dynamics change, you will have to constantly reassess the systems you’ve put in place. However, by paying attention to waste, you are increasing the profit margins for your business.
Sometimes you need a bit of guidance to understand what works and what doesn’t work when it comes to increasing productivity. Consider enrolling in our Coaching Program to enhance your leadership skills as a business owner.
In today’s competitive workplace, it is more important than ever to retain quality employees. Reducing the turnover rate at your place of business should be one of your key initiatives if you want to remain competitive and continue to grow your organization. Here are three ways that you can reduce your employee turnover rates so that your business flourishes.
Offer Greater Benefits
Keeping your compensation and benefits current as measured against today’s standards is essential when retaining employees is your goal. Do your research to find out what the competitors are offering their staff for benefits and do your best to match or exceed that package. For many employees, a comprehensive benefits package may be even more enticing than a bump in salary. In addition to the standard features such as medical insurance and 401K matching programs, be sure to consider extras such as vision coverage and life insurance. By thinking outside of the box, you can beef up your benefits offerings without it hurting your bottom line. The key is to find the things that employees really want and value.
Employee Health Programs
In addition to standard benefits programs, you can sweeten the deal by offering employee health programs. According to experts fitness programs increase employee loyalty and boost overall job satisfaction. Programs that reward employees for the number of steps that they take in a day are especially popular now that so many people have built-in fitness trackers on their smartphone or smartwatch. Competitions are a fun way to encourage good health while also building team camaraderie. Another popular benefit is to offer your employees a paid gym membership or to pay for wellness programs that visit your company onsite to reach your staff members.
Offer Flexibility
Today’s modern workforce puts a high premium on flexibility and happy life and work-balance. Offering flexible work schedules is a great way to increase employee satisfaction and motivate them to stay with the company. If you are not offering your employees the ability to create their own schedule and to work from home occasionally, they may leave you for a company that gives them this flexibility.
A strong economy means that workers will continue to look at other places to boost their careers. Employing these initiatives will slow the revolving door at your company and put you in a better position to succeed.
Need help improving company culture? Click here to schedule a chat with our professional executive coach!
A leader without education is often using instinct to make decisions. While this can be effective, a leader with education is much more likely to make good decisions for the company and its stakeholders. However, don’t jump up and sign up for your MBA just yet! I think that leaders should learn critical thinking skills, advanced/specialized industry knowledge, emotional intelligence, and technical skills because each of these skills will benefit the person learning them and the organization they work for. You can learn most, if not all of these things, outside of a college or university.
Critical Thinking Skills
A leader in any field would benefit from strong critical thinking skills because they have been shown to improve a person’s ability to problem-solve. Since every person will deal with problems, these skills can be used to benefit an individual learning the skills as well as the organization they work for. Learning can foster critical thinking skills if it encourages the learner to think about why a topic is important rather than learning facts about the topic. Not sure where to start to enhance these skills? Try our On The Job Activity Builder.
Advanced Knowledge
An advanced degree provides more specialized education in a specific discipline. For example, if a business leader obtains a degree in psychology, it is more likely they will understand how the mind works. They can use this knowledge to motivate employees more effectively and build better relationships with clients rather than theoretical knowledge. Another example is a leader obtaining a degree in finance or business. Rather than buying heedlessly during a bull market or panicking during a bear market, a leader with a degree in finance will understand that these are trends and can change at any moment.
Emotional Intelligence
Building emotional intelligence is something that leaders can learn to do. As mentioned, some leaders might have an instinctual understanding of emotional intelligence, but building emotional intelligence can help leaders consider their feelings. This pause can allow the leader to move past their emotions rather than make a hasty or wrong decision because of them. Emotional intelligence can also be tied to critical thinking because a leader can learn why they are experiencing that emotion. Need more help? Get your EQ tested by a pro!
Technical Skills
Every leader needs to know technical skills related to the business or organization they are a part of. For example, a project leader may need to know technical skills such as how to code, even the basic level of coding necessary for HTML. That same leader could benefit from learning project planning or scheduling. On the other hand, a data entry manager should have a firm grasp on technical skills, such as email, statistical analysis, and numeracy.
Education can make a vast difference for any person in a leadership position. By learning these things, a person can lead a team more effectively. Learning and practicing emotional intelligence will allow a leader to make rational decisions rather than being led by ego or emotion. More education can allow a leader to focus on what is essential, whether that means developing a top-notch team of employees or accruing wealth for a company. By attaining a higher level of education, leaders will be able to solve problems effectively while avoiding pitfalls.
Saving time is one of the few things that seem very elusive to business owners. While most business owners understand the concept of saving time, the actual process of where they can save time and how to do it is where they need help the most. In this piece, we’re going to show you eight ways to save time and put your business on autopilot. It might be easier than you think and you may have already had some of these pieces in place, but here you learn how they all can interact with each other to create a seamless business that allows you to do what you love.
Hire Competent Employees
In the early 2000s, there was a book released by Tim Ferriss called The 4-Hour Work Week. It set the business world ablaze with the idea that you could use a virtual assistant to help do almost any task and only have to work directly in your company or business for four hours a week. While the author did acknowledge that this process may not work for every type of leader across all business industries, it did open up the eyes of executives and CEOs into what they could better delegate and to whom. When you have the right staff supporting you, it will put your business on a path to growth with ease. Employees who are well-versed in their specific role of support and are competent in the processes that they follow in order to achieve the results of the business are worth their weight in gold. Not only will these employees help your business succeed, but they will also find ways to be more efficient and put daily processes that are repetitive on autopilot, saving the entire company and team both time and money. These are the people that you need to attract and retain.
Improve Training
This is a pivotal part of your business’s process that should be automated in order to efficiently train new employees or train current employees on new systems, products, or services. And according to Jolt, when you automate the training process, you’re able to effortlessly train more than one person at a time. This works well because if anyone has any questions, they can ask their colleagues to get clarification before needing to take that question to any of the higher-ups. A lot of times simple questions can be clarified by conversation. If you need help overhauling your training, there are some awesome companies that can provide help, including Phoenix Leadership Solutions.
Build a Loyal Customer Base
Experienced seven-figure business owner, Amy Porterfield, says often that your money is where your mailing list is. Whether you are a brick-and-mortar company or an online business, building a consistent and loyal customer base is key to being able to save time in your business. Customers return to brands that they’ve worked with and trust. According to Smile.io, when a customer has purchased from you three times, they are 54 percent more likely to purchase from you continuously after that point. When you consistently communicate with customers, especially those who’ve already purchased from you, you are increasing the ability for your business to announce a new product or service and have people snapping it up right away.
Use Marketing Tools
This is one of the easiest tasks to put on autopilot in your business and it will not only save you time, but it will also save your team time. When you sit down with your marketing team, see where they can automate tasks that they do on a daily or weekly basis. For managing the social media presence of your business, use a scheduling tool like Later or Tailwind to post your content without anyone having to be tied to their computer. While they aren’t yet mobile, my favorite social media tool, by far, is PromoRepublic. For customer relationship management, marketing tools like Mailchimp let you automate the process of sending out messages to your customers by email. Sit down with your marketing and content team to plan out the month or quarter and have them input your promotional material into an email sequence that will be sent according to the schedule that your marketing department sets. The key here is collaborations. Your marketing people are professionals just like you. Be sure to listen to what they say and implement it.
Use CRM Tools
Just like you should be automating your social media and email marketing, you should also be utilizing client resource management tools to automate the follow-up process of customers or clients who have expressed interest in working with your business. There are a number of CRM tools available to your business. The key is finding one that can grow with the changes in technology and the way that people prefer to respond and interact with your business. For example, one thing you need in a CRM is text messaging capability. This feature is important because it helps you follow up with your potential clients. Because text messaging has become so common, many customers read and respond to business messages that they get by way of text. One study shows that 85 percent of the time clients prefer to get a text from a business for follow up.
Schedule IT Audits
With the increase in data breaches and hackers trying to gain access to the internal workings of your business, IT audits should be a regular thing that is scheduled for your business. Straight Edge IT points out that letting other people manage your IT issues allows you to focus on the parts of your business you know best. Schedule your backups and also pre-schedule your hardware IT appointments. Then, set your reminders in your phone or calendar so you’re not in the middle of a major project when IT support shows up. You don’t have to be present for the IT audit and you can even ask to have the report sent to you via email so that you can review it on your own time and message back the support person any questions you may have later.
Create Scalable Systems
The key to being able to save time in your business and put it on autopilot is to create scalable systems. Before you go to automate any of your processes, have a meeting with your team and be certain that you have systems and processes in place that each person knows how they run and the steps that they take to make them work. If the answer is affirmative, then look at the process of automating your business and allowing you to free up your time.
Trust the Process
Once control is taken out of the hands of the CEO, it’s normal to get nervous and a little bit scared at how the process will go. But trusting the process can lead to success if you have the right people around you. Because you’ve met with your team, trust that the automation you’ve put in place can be supported by the systems and people that you’ve brought on board.
Allowing the tasks in your business to become more auto-piloted can be scary. Your business is important to you and it’s anxiety-inducing to think of passing off certain aspects to other people. However, doing this will let your business run smoother and get you more profits. Try the tips shared in this article and see where you and your company can go.
For more ways to make your business run smoother, read more about it here!
When it comes to business, every area matters, and saving money wherever you can is important. Business leaders ought to focus heavily on high-cost areas such as company vehicle maintenance. Continually having to repair or even replace company cars and trucks can be very expensive, to say the least. Check out this list that includes some of the best strategies to implement within your organization in order to keep your commercial vehicles running for a long time.
Maintenance
Performing routine maintenance on your company fleet can be rather expensive. New tires, oil changes, and the occasional cleaning tend to add up. However, these costs are nothing compared with having to replace those vehicles. Consequently, if you want your company cars to last you a long time, these tune-ups must be performed on at least a quarterly basis. Focus on preventative maintenance.
Safe Driving
There are many areas of a business that you can control, but one of the most difficult ones includes making sure drivers are practicing good driving habits. This is often the source of your high costs and the reason cars and trucks don’t last as long as you want them to. A great way to approach this issue is to avoid making assumptions. Bad driving habits don’t necessarily occur because drivers don’t care. Studies have shown that fatigue is a leading cause of accidents. Driving while drowsy can cause impaired vision and a decrease in cognitive functions. You can help fix this issue by looking at the hours spent driving and questioning whether you are placing too much work on your employees. Their health and safety should come first.
Purchase New Vehicles
It can be very enticing to purchase used cars and trucks for your company. Your cost could be cut in half if you choose to go down that path. However, this might not be the best route to take. You want your company vehicles to continue running for a long time, and statistics show that going with used cars won’t get you there. When seeking vehicles for your company, it is important to purchase new ones in order to ensure that you’ll get the most use out of them. Want to get the biggest bang for your buck? Go electric with Atlis Motor Vehicles.
Focusing on keeping company vehicles running for a long time is often one of the most overlooked areas of a company’s management. Business leaders should adhere to the list above in order to make sure that their resources and money aren’t wasted.
When it comes to running a successful business, the number of productive hours in a day is crucial for growth. Often times trying to dissect the issue within your company can make the problem even more complex than it should be. The fact is that fixing this issue is often simpler than one would think. Therefore, the following list includes some of the best ways to increase productivity within your business.
Have a Clear Goal
One of the most common misconceptions about a lack of productivity in the office is that employees are simply lazy. One lazy person might be possible but writing off an entire office as lazy is ridiculous. Instead, stop and ask yourself why your employees don’t seem to be motivated to work hard for you and the company. You will often find that they simply don’t have a clear goal to work toward. As a leader, it is your responsibility to communicate effectively to your employees about the goals of the company, department, and team. This should include weekly, monthly, and quarterly goals. Afterward, make sure that those goals are being looked at and updated regularly.
Involve Employees
A common cause of low productivity within an office is its own policies and procedures. You, as a business leader, must sit down and attempt to figure out what areas can be improved on or eliminate entirely. Sometimes technology can even be integrated to remove redundant tasks. When it comes to organization, employees are a valuable resource, as they are the ones who are actually participating in the workflow. Getting the input of the people who are actually doing the work is key. A great strategy to implement is a town hall meeting. This is where employees are encouraged to voice their concerns and suggestions. Your job here is to listen and act after the matter. It is important that if you do make changes based on the feedback that you receive, that you let people know what the changes are and why. Often, if you don’t let people know that you made the change based on what you heard from them, they may not connect the dots and may still feel like they weren’t listened to.
Introduce Incentives
Introducing incentives in the workplace can help boost productivity. You don’t have to promise large sums of money or promotion, but you can offer smaller incentives that your employees are sure to still love. One of the best things you can offer are additional vacation days, who doesn’t love more vacation days? You could even offer longer breaks or work-from-home days. Get to know what incentives motivate your employees. Leaders should know what drives each and every person on their team.
Every business leader understands the importance of having a productive staff. However, not every leader understands how to fix this very serious issue. I recommend that business leaders take a look at list above to begin laying down the foundation of a strong and productive business.
With online communication getting even faster and technology becoming more a part of every workplace, the need for having employees all in the same place at once has dramatically diminished. If you’re looking to hire remote employees, you need to make sure you understand everything that goes into managing people who are on your team but could be located hundreds of miles away from you. This guide will give you a quick rundown about remote employees.
Will It Be Helpful?
Having remote employees just because you can might cause problems. Think about whether your business will be able to run smoothly if multiple people don’t work in the same building. You might try testing the waters by opening up a remote worker program on a temporary basis. Take note of both the positives and negatives of this experiment, and see if the positives are great enough to justify continuing and if the negatives are small or manageable enough not to be an issue.
Managing From Afar
Managing remote employees can take some getting used to, but it’s no big deal as long as you’re aware of the differences. As a manager, you should send out clear instructions to your remote employees with definitive deadlines. You also need to have guidelines in place for turning in work, which is very easy to do if you’ve set up the right collaboration tools beforehand.
The Equipment
In order to be up to speed, remote employees need to either be given the right equipment or directed about what to get. While it’s more costly to provide it yourself, it can definitely make it easier to do it that way. When giving out equipment to remote employees, you can mark them with asset tags to monitor and track them. Keep it clear that any equipment you give out is company property and that it must be treated properly as well as returned if they leave the company.
Time Zone Differences
One barrier to hiring someone to work remotely is time zone differences. Should someone live on the same coast, you’ll have similar or identical time zones. However, an employee could be going to bed when you’re waking up due to the severe difference in time zones. If you have various people on-call at various times, you can make this work, and the different time zones of your workers can be an asset. But, when posting a job listing, you should be specific about when you’ll need people to be available.
Opening the Candidate Pool
Someone could be perfect for your team but have geographic restrictions. However, this doesn’t have to mean they can’t work for you. By hiring them to work remotely, you can have them on your team even if your communication is restricted to webcams and emails. This will allow you to cast a wider net when you are recruiting top talent.
Leadership Mindset
As someone pointed out to me recently, having the right leadership mindset is critical to any remote worker program. Leaders need to understand that micromanaging and strict oversight is near impossible when you are managing someone virtually. Remote employees want to be treated fairly, just like every other employee. Having leaders who understand and accept that is important. When managing remote teams, building a culture that values trust and autonomy is extremely important.
Are you ready to step into this decade and open your organization up to have a remote workforce? If you still need some prep, that’s what we’re here for.
Having your own business might be the goal you’ve been working toward throughout your career. It could even be something that you want to try even if your resumé doesn’t show that you have the precise experience that you think you’ll need. Every first-time business owner has had to put a bit of faith in their decision. This guide will help you get your business started, regardless of your experience.
Partner With Someone Who Does
Businesses don’t get to be successful through one person’s ambition. While you might have a great idea for a business, you still need others’ input, especially from people who’ve started their own businesses or helped get businesses off the ground. Get in touch with people who you believe would understand your business and be able to help it grow. They should show their qualifications through educational credentials as well as proof of other businesses that have been successful due in part to their input.
Start a Franchise
An empire can be created through franchising, much like fast food giants have done. You can create a brand and help it spread by entrusting others with your product and its likeness. Franchises require varying amounts of cash to begin your investment. Try to keep your franchise regional when you first start and then gradually let it trickle out to other areas based on how well it’s received. You could also get started by joining an existing franchise to learn what you need to know for success. You can enjoy the independence of owning a business without having to worry about creating its infrastructure from scratch. There are many successful franchise owners that you can talk to that will tell you how they got where they are today.
Start Small
Starting any kind of business is a risk, but that risk can be reduced by starting small. You don’t need to sink unfathomable amounts of capital into a startup in an effort to prove that you’re serious about it. You don’t need a huge team, and your headquarters can be modest when you’re starting out. When things take off, you can beef up your staff and make your business’ dwellings more luxurious.
Overall, it’s good to keep your goals practical so that you don’t get in over your head. You don’t need to have mounds of experience to start a business, but you do need to realize that the less experience you have, the more careful you’ll have to be. It takes gumption to start a business, and it takes discipline to keep it going. Every day adds to your experience, and so does every challenge that you face.
