Business Management
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There are many words you can use to describe a March blizzard – convenient is not one of them.
Work can be stressful enough without waking up hours early to shovel, scrape your car, start it up and slowly roll your ice box to work. Some days, making it to work is more work than working. That’s not only a mouthful, but truly unfortunate. Of course, this is a help article - so there is a better way.
Affordable technology has made physical offices virtually obsolete (please excuse the pun). With the emergence of telecommuting (fancy-speak for working from home), it’s easy to ensure your employees can work productively from home when weather, health or family circumstances require so.
The added benefits of telecommuting include minimized infrastructure costs, reduced employee travel costs and lower overall levels of pollution – there’s nothing wrong with any of those!
Here are some ways to help the adoption of a telecommuting program run smoothly:
Change your thinking – To get the most out of telecommuting, your management style needs to adapt with your technology. It is imperative to think in terms of results, meaning what your employees accomplish is priority one, not where or how they do it.
Set up remote network access – Storing files on individual computer hard drives hampers productivity, as important files are only available on that specific computer. Instead, invest in online storage space and store all of your business files on a secured web-based network. This way, all employees can access company files from any computer, anywhere, anytime, as long as they have a user name, password and internet connection. Whether you’re stuck at home in a snowstorm, travelling across the Australian outback on a kangaroo or riding Splash Mountain at Disney World, you can still get your work done.
Laptops for everyone – Laptops are more affordable and powerful than ever, so don’t think of them as secondary computers. Buy your team laptops and get them into the habit of taking them home in the evenings and with them on business trips, external meetings etc. There should be no expectation of constant after-hours work, just the confidence that if work needs to get done it doesn’t have to wait until morning. On that same note, purchase comfortable, solid carrying cases to increase travel comfort and protect your technology.
Facilitate online communication – Phones and email are great, but using an online chat service like Google Chat can often be more effective. In non-urgent situations, it’s faster and more convenient to instant message another employee than pick up the phone or send an email and wait for a reply. Even if you aren’t looking to institute a work from home program, this is a great business option.
Home office in a bag – I’ve covered the tech issues involved with telecommuting, now I’ll cover the other issue – home offices. When your employees start work and you hand them a beautiful laptop case, make sure there are pens, notepads, staples and whatever else they need to be productive. The cost is low and well worth it in the long run.
Whether you’re low on office space, you have employees who would appreciate the convenience of working from home or you just want to prepare for the next big storm, telecommuting is an effective way to reduce office stress and increase productivity.
If you have any other tips on how to set up a work from home program, send me an email at
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- we love suggestions.
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Create your own ergonomic workplace.
Different tasks will require different approaches to making your work station more ergonomic. Following are the top-five things you can do in an office environment and the top-five things you can do in a production environment* to make your workstation more ergonomic. Click on the print icon to post around your office, in the lunch room and on your workplace safety bulletin board.
Office Top-Five:
Make sure your chair is the proper height: Standing in front of the chair, adjust the height so the highest point of the seat, (when in the horizontal position), is just below the knee cap. More ...
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Rockefeller Habits help with organizational alignment and focus.
In his book, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits: What You Must Do to Increase the Value of Your Fast-Growth Firm, author Verne Harnish provides entrepreneurs with clear and practical tools for back-to-basics growth.
In chapter 5, Mastering Organizational Alignment and Focus, Harnish emphasizes the need for managers to identify the five most important priorities, both for themselves and their employees, in order to keep a company growing.
"It's critical that everyone in the organization determine his or her own Top 5 priorities, aligning them with the company's, and creating the activity clarity that's crucial for top performance," Harnish writes (p. 53).
Once everyone is aware of the company's top-five priorities, and has identified what their own top-five priorities are in line with the company's, the next step is to identify a Top 1 of 5 for the short term.
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Blue Ocean Strategy helps entrepreneurs identify new ways of doing business.
Many businesses in today's market are functioning in an environment pundits refer to as the Red Ocean Strategy. The analogy serves to invoke images of a pool of sharks all fighting over the same lunch offerings, the result being that a lot of sharks are getting a little lunch rather than any one shark getting the five-course meal, creating a red pool in the process.
The theory is that many business owners, represented in this context as the sharks, are all going after the same customer, or the object of the sharks' desires, rather than developing a business strategy that competes on more than price and feature lists.
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Creating new demand in a demanding world.
Both in their book and on their website, Blue Ocean Strategy authors W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne argue that theirs is a strategy that helps business owners make their competition "irrelevant" by identifying a previously non-existing demand and creating an increase in value for both the company and its customers.
Based on more than 15 years' research and including references to 150 companies they've identified as having implemented a blue ocean strategy, Kim and Mauborgne argue that future successful companies need to create increased value for both the company and the customer. Their argument is based, according to their press summary, on six principles: reconstruct market boundaries, focus on the big picture, reach beyond existing demand, get the strategic sequence right, overcome organizational hurdles, and build execution into strategy.
Using their analysis of [yellow tail] wine as an example, Kim and Mauborgne say a blue ocean strategy can be created in four steps:
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