Tag: Productivity

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Getting Your Employees to Stop Looking at Cat Photos: A Preliminary Overview

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Bored employees are very seldom productive employees. A business whose employees are passionate and excited about the company’s mission is likely to get more work done in a typical day than a company whose employees require an hourly trip to the coffee shop just to stay awake. While technology has delivered productivity tools to keep employees on task and blocking tools to keep them off Facebook and Reddit, an employee who is determined to look at cute cat pictures during work hours is going to find a way to do so. How can IT manage the influx of personal use of company technology?

Salary.com’s Time at Work Study in 2014 found the following:

89% of employees waste at least 30 minutes a day

53% believed that time “wasted” promotes greater overall productivity

27% of employers block non work-related websites

Here are 3 ways IT can work to rein in personal use at work:

Optimize your BYOD policy. Can bringing a personal device to work help to reduce personal usage? Counterintuitively, yes! Working on a device that you know and love is a lot easier than working on one that’s been randomly assigned to you. The policy also has to take into account compatibility and accessibility by device type and security parameters. By ensuring your BYOD policy is flexible with changing technology, it promotes acceptance by employees.

Conduct productivity reviews. By partnering with Human Resources and other departments, you can evaluate the role of technology across your company. If technology is not being used as it should, you may uncover opportunities to have it work for your employees to grow your business.

Bring people together. IT can work to bring people together. For example, unified communication systems help to contain access and flow, while being open to new ways we share information. If personal use is found to be a way to break up the monotony of work, maybe we can use unified communication tools to bring people together to get excited about work.

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5 Hacks To Boost Productivity In The Office Space

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The average rate of productivity in the workplace is said to have improved slightly in the past year, according to the Department of Labor (DoL). However, many organizations are still challenged in this area. For instance, another survey by Salary.com found that 89 percent of employees waste time each day, with some losing at least 30 minutes by doing non-related work tasks.
When it comes to increasing worker efficiency, several factors from health and sleep patterns to office design and desk plants have been said to influence it. Year over year though, a few hacks have continued to prove effective in boosting office productivity.
1. Take Control of Technology
Several studies have shown that technology can boost worker productivity, but only when used effectively. One example of effective technology usage is to save time. For example, implementing wireless presentation software can open up time that was once wasted on setting up meetings, implementing digital signage that sends your conference room calendar to all of your interactive displays can help increase meeting room attendance, and using video conferencing can save you from traveling across the globe.
The key is to guide and control how certain technologies are used to create engagement and avoid distraction. For example, online collaboration tools allow workers to share, proofread, and edit projects in real-time from anywhere, accelerating the entire process. However, relying on them too much or using them unnecessarily can decrease efficiency. Organizations need to find the balance that works best for them.
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2. Set Performance Goals and Track them  
One basic factor that can hurt productivity is that employees simply don’t know what is expected from them. When organizations give their employees specific, clear and realistic goals, it can help boost motivation and competition. This is especially true when individuals are rewarded or recognized publicly for meeting and exceeding goals. In fact, not recognizing achievement is the number one reason that people leave their jobs. Companies can even increase engagement by tracking and gamifying performance milestones. Several online applications and programs like GamEffective can help track productivity and transform it into a game or employee engagement tools like OfficeVibe, that can engage your employees in less than 5 minutes a month.
3. Measure Productivity Consistently
Every business is unique, which means that not every productivity tool or policy will produce substantial results. This is one reason why establishing a consistent method of measurement is essential.
Another, perhaps more important reason, is that it creates the opportunity for company leaders to give employees meaningful feedback and to receive feedback from them. Measuring efficiency in your office should be designed in a way that helps employees grow personally and professionally.
4. Let them Work from Home, Occasionally
The Harvard Business Review published results from a study on Chinese travel company, Ctrip’s remote workers. The company compared the efficiency of employees allowed to work from home to in-office employees for a nine month period. It found that the at-home workers made 13.5 percent more calls per week on average than their in-office counterparts.
The study claimed that giving employees a break from the daily monotony of their workstations, meeting rooms, and huddle spaces can actually boost happiness and productivity. It wasn’t that the at-home group worked harder than the on-site one. It was all about having flexibility. Maintaining a healthy balance between on-site and remote options can increase overall performance.
Employees are the driving force behind every organization’s success. With so many devices and gadgets, they can easily lose focus and fall behind. Organizations that take control of their office environment and engage workers are the ones that will maintain increased productivity and growth year after year.

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Best Collaboration Tools to Increase Team Productivity

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The way we work has changed in recent years. The individual contribution used to outweigh group efforts. Now, we’re seeing work assignments become project-based and requiring teams to complete tasks. In response, an increasing number of tools are on the market to help streamline processes, promote communication and transparency and to make sure everyone is working with purpose and focus.
Some of the best tools are for communication. Others are for knowledge management and transfer. Many work for project management.
For Presentations:
• Ubiq. Wireless presentations made easy with instant access to your meet’s Hive, central access point. It connects people using multiple device types to a presentation where they can share content through a data encrypted, secure system dedicated for your meeting. The added bonus will come in the form of remote presentations, which will open, yet secured access to those beyond the Hive in virtual locations.
• Canva. Presentations and other communication assets may require visual content. Canva is a free, online graphic design tool to create posters, infographics, email templates and more! As a collaborative tool, you can share your design with team members to work together, make changes/edits and gather feedback.
• Mural.ly. Mural.ly is a cloud-based whiteboard application, great for brainstorming sessions. Using virtual whiteboards, called “Murals,” you can invite team members to draw and type onto your board to gather ideas, map out workflows and more. Collaborate in real-time and visually track activity as your project evolves.
For Project Management:
• Asana. Designed to support teams through web and mobile applications, Asana is communication and project management tool that works to keep teams organized and promote open communication. It includes a multitude of features, like interactive checklists, to ensure teams remain on task and rely less on email, where things can get confused or lost.
• Trello. Trello is a card-based project management program. Its application focuses on the use of cards, which work great for online brainstorming sessions. Ideal for content and editorial development, users can pitch ideas, assign tasks, leave notes and visualize progress as cards are being worked.
• TeamWork. This project management system supports file transfers, task assignments and status updates. In addition, TeamWork promotes communication with each task having its own discussion board. It’s user-friendly where both the project owner and the end-user can assign, edit and update tasks based on security settings.
For Communication/Social Media:
• Skype. When Skype was launched in August 2013, it took the telecommunication world by storm. Being able to make calls over an Internet brought people together across country borders and oceans. It’s still relevant and significant to how we do business today. With easy to use software, chats and free audio and video calls to other Skype users are simple. Need to direct dial someone, Skype offers great rates for pennies per minute. Communication provides immediate access with cost savings.
• Yammer. Yammer turns your company’s internal communications into an enterprise social network. Employees access the network through their work email address to communicate with others by departments, groups and interest. Stay on top of projects, understand strategies and break down silos across the organization. Internal communication is no longer just receiving memos through email. It’s now about having actual dialogue amongst colleagues online.
• HipChat. This internal communication tool integrates chat, video and file sharing all within your organization. Set in the cloud, employees can engage in private/group chats, videos and screen sharing from remote locations. It works on a chat room platform, which allows full chat histories to be saved and referenced. We’ve been using HipChat for over a year now, and we communicate over HipChat more frequently than email!
Many of these tools integrate with other applications and can be used across multiple devices. Some have apps for smartphone and tablet available with data being saved and shared on the cloud. It makes collaboration easier to accomplish without having to have everyone in the same room at the same time.

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Meeting Rooms & Huddle Spaces: 5 Basic Ways To Optimize Them

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Stepping inside a meeting room can feel a lot like stepping inside a black hole: Once you’ve moved beyond the event horizon (i.e. the conference room door), the possibility of escaping within a human lifetime can seem extremely remote. Even huddle spaces — the meeting room’s younger, less time-draining sibling — have a well-documented tendency to hold whoever steps inside them captive for extremely long durations against their will.
But contrary to popular opinion, it is at least theoretically possible for groups of people to set foot inside meeting rooms or huddle spaces and re-emerge within just 30 minutes. Here are 4 ways to help accomplish this: 

  1. Create a To-Do List. A to-do list will help you keep track of the meeting. Being able to check off tasks can help to build motivation and to maintain your focus. Our recommendation would be to create your to-do list for all meetings so you know actually what needs to be done for each person of the team. It’ll give you the opportunity to evaluate your performance and make adjustments in your meeting approach. It will also prepare you for what’s to come.
  2. Time Your Agenda. Your to-do list can help promote time management – which you will know what to speed up and what to slow down. Use your calendar, like Google or Outlook, to send out the agenda prior to the meeting. With Ubiq, you can send your calendar to your conference room TV or interactive displays prior to the meeting to make such that all of the attendees are on the same page. Reserve time to dedicate to projects and tasks, while setting your own expectations for timely completion.
  1. Set Yourself as “Do Not Disturb.” Many of us still get emails, and instant messages during meeting time. The reason for this is because we feel that we can do multiple things at once including replying back to emails or instant messages, and feel the need to reply back. The truth is that many emails can wait, and setting yourself as do not disturb can be a lot more efficient during meetings. Recently, I was in making a wireless presentation during a meeting. However, while I was making a wireless presentation, there were notifications that popped up from my email and instant messaging. One of the emails that I received was from my sister asking me what to eat for dinner. If I set myself as do not disturb, those wouldn’t pop up. Additionally, I would avoid the embarrassment of people reading my emails or messages.
  2. Delegate, When Necessary. It doesn’t hurt to ask for support of others when you need it. That’s the whole point of meetings. Discuss all the problems and best practices with your team. That way, everyone can benefit and sharing stories make meetings go a bit more bearable. When you want to achieve all your goals in meetings, delegate tasks to your peers or have shared tasks. Discussing key problems and delegation can help achieve goals in meetings and create more wins to the team.
  3. Implement a Wireless Presentation System. Every meeting in which users are forced to connect their laptops to the TV or projector with wires or adapters inevitably goes 15 minutes over schedule due to connectivity problems. By investing in a wireless presentation system that allows users to connect their laptop to any audio visual setup regardless of its video outputs, all of this wasted time can easily be avoided.

With fewer distractions and proper delegation of work, you can give proper attention in meetings, which leads to an increase in teamwork and productivity. The challenge comes in how you manage our time and efforts independently and collaboratively. These tips should set you on the right path to getting the most out of your meeting rooms and huddle spaces.
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