Efficiency is great, but it should never come at the cost of boundaries. A perfect example of this is your work email address. It might be easy to use it to subscribe to an online service, like Netflix, but this is far from the best idea. Let’s take a look at why it might be a bad idea to breach these boundaries between your personal life and your work life, and why it might have lasting consequences.
Shadow IT is a considerable problem for businesses that rely on IT in their operations. Let’s take a quick look at what shadow IT really is and how it can impact your business. We’ll also discuss ways you can avoid it.
When you’re in the thick of the workday, you’re likely to miss a notification, especially with so much media playing all at the same time. To make sure that your notification sounds don’t get drowned out by your other applications, we’ve put together a tip on how you can adjust the volume levels of your individual applications in Windows 10.
Remote work has thrown a wrench into the operations of countless businesses around the world, some more than others. While some employees have been able to adapt and make the most of the circumstances, workers with children at home might find themselves questioning their line of work or considering a change in careers.
Many businesses rely to some degree on Microsoft Word as their word processor of choice. Considering this, it seemed fitting to go over some of the productivity-supporting features that Word has to offer.
If your business utilizes Microsoft Word in any way, shape, or form, there’s a good chance that you aren’t using it to its full capabilities. Let’s go over just a few of the features that the software offers that can assist you in excelling (whoops… wrong Office application) in your day-to-day responsibilities, and how to put them to use.
After 2020, it is understandable that many businesses would be seeking out a way to recoup a lot of the expenses and losses that the year’s events likely incurred upon them. This has led many to turn to their IT investments as the sacrificial lamb. While we are undeniably biased, we would argue that there are better ways to streamline your business’ expenses in terms of its IT than to simply cut them outright.
When reviewing their inventory, many businesses forget to consider one of their most used, most important resources: their technology. Let’s go over a few reasons that your business’ technology inventory needs to be tracked—and what goes into properly doing so.
I think most business owners would be kind of surprised to find out that the biggest threat to their business wasn’t hackers or natural disasters, it was coming from the same people they depend on the most: their employees.
Microsoft PowerPoint is an extremely effective visual tool for helping to get a message across. Oftentimes, however, a video clip can be even more effective at driving home a point or summarizing a topic than a presentation. Of course, you don’t necessarily have to choose between one or the other. Let’s go over how you can embed a YouTube video directly into a presentation built in Microsoft PowerPoint.
2020 is finally coming to a close. It has been an extraordinarily long year for most small businesses. Even if yours hasn’t seen a lot of the financial problems that thousands of businesses are seeing, you've definitely had to make some major adjustments that often come with additional cost. Through it all, one part of your business has been a rock, your people.
As much as we all rely on emails throughout the workday, they can be an intense pain to manage, which only makes it a hassle to deal with and can actively make it less useful for your users. We want to help you avoid this outcome, so we’re sharing a few tips to make the management of your email that much more effective.
Data is one of the most valuable assets there is today, which is why any business should consider its security a prerogative. This can admittedly be a lot, which is why we’ve taken the liberty of preparing a few tips to help you get started on the right path. These may also help those in the middle of the process who need a little reminder.
Remote collaboration, especially online meetings, have recently surged in popularity amongst businesses. However, as this has happened, many new adopters have gotten the impression that they just can’t accomplish as much as they could otherwise. To help readjust this perspective, we wanted to share a few productivity tips to apply to your next remote (or even in-person) meeting.
Business reopening is proving to be relatively difficult as COVID-19 isn’t going away. To ensure the health of your staff, while still reopening your business to create revenue, you will need to carefully weigh all your operational decisions. Today, we have outlined some best practices in which to do so.
Imagine for a minute that you work in a small factory or machine shop. Some wind comes through and drops a 200-year-old maple tree through the roof onto the machines that you use to create your product. The devastation is total. If you have a second factory built to scale from the first, you could just ship your workers over to that one and keep productivity high. Chances are, however, there is no second factory. Your business is done until you can get the situation fixed. It could take days, weeks, or even months to get your business back on track; and if the stats are any indication, it probably won’t.
Hope can be a big part of a person’s notion to start their own business. Needless to say that entrepreneurial hope doesn’t always consider that there will be a global pandemic that grinds the operational effectiveness that you’ve spent years building to a halt. Hope does, however, play a big part in the creation of a business continuity plan. Today, we’ll briefly discuss why you should never lose hope and how being prepared stems from the same notion as starting a business.
Video conferencing is a crucial technology for businesses, especially now. Although, while it has the benefits of accessibility, it certainly is a different animal than your run-of-the-mill in-person meeting… as due to this, it has a challenge that an in-person meeting does not. Let’s go over what this challenge is, and how to overcome it.
Happy New Year! As tradition dictates that we all select a resolution to improve ourselves for the coming year, why not do the same for your business and its operations? For our first tip of the year, we’re sharing how to come up with resolutions that could help you start off this year on the right footing.
Your business relies on its servers in order to function - which makes it incredibly important that these servers are sufficiently protected. There are a few practices that you can put into place that will help you to secure your server room. Let’s work our way from the inside out as we review them.
Let’s face it - you’d be hard-pressed at this point to find someone who wasn’t fairly confident about their use of email in the office. However, the way they are currently using their email may not be the most efficient. This week, we’re focusing our tips on how to better use your email.
Businesses rely on a lot of different software solutions to complete their processes. Many are based on a given business’ industry, but there are a few types that every business should involve in their operations. Let’s review what they are, and how they can be beneficial to you.
The Windows operating system has quite a few shortcuts baked in, each offering a user quicker access to the utility they are seeking out. It may sound crazy, but using these keyboard shortcuts can actually eliminate the eight days the average employee accumulates every year by just moving their hand from their keyboard to their mouse.
When discussing the practice of monitoring solutions to prevent threats, it isn’t uncommon for many businesses to put these concerns on the back burner. However, every so often, an example comes around to help inspire businesses to take their monitoring seriously. This time, the example was the arrest of 24 spammers in October for scamming American citizens by impersonating Microsoft support staff members.
Being in business today means that you have a lot on your plate, it’s as simple as that. Yet, with so many tasks piling up, it can be challenging to prioritize them all so you can figure out where to start. Below, we go over some strategies you can use to make sense out of all the tasks you have on your day and reach a point of productivity.
While email remains an important facet of professional business communications, the instant message is of rising importance in office environments everywhere. While any one of many factors may contribute to this shift, it provides those businesses that adopt it great advantages to their internal processes, and might even aid in their cybersecurity.
Business owners that regard employee engagement as an unimportant aspect of managing a business are sorely mistaken. There are few things more crucial to the success of a business than keeping employees happy and fulfilled. Yet, even if businesses have only the best intentions and want to improve employee engagement, few actually manage to do so.
April 1st is a day for jokes and laughter. Therefore, we thought we’d lighten the mood and consult the funniest and the furriest CEO we know for computer advice; that’s right, Old Spice’s wolf-dog hybrid, Mr. Wolfdog!
We live in an age where productivity is at its peak, but as you might be aware, this often leads to a stressful work environment where anything less than your best can be considered slacking. You might have several tasks that need to be completed today, but we’re sure you can take the time to read this blog about giving yourself a break once in awhile. You might find that breaks are absolutely crucial to both your creative and physical well being.
Until we’ve reached a day where wires are obsolete and every device connects wirelessly to its needed network, wires and cables will always be an integral part of your company’s IT infrastructure. Since you’re stuck having to deal with wires, you might as well know how to effectively manage your cables so that they’re not slowing you down.
Imagine getting back on the plane home and remembering that you have to go back to work in less than twelve hours. It might feel draining and just plain awful, but you might be relieved to know you’re not alone. Returning from a vacation doesn’t have to be as painful as it sounds. In fact, it can be easy if you approach it the right way.
With each new generation comes a new group of workers, and attracting good, quality help can be difficult. Even if you can find good help, it can be a challenge to keep. A study at Cornell University has proven that workplace flexibility can greatly improve the odds of finding good employees - and keeping them around.
What separates the average PC user from the IT technician who routinely takes care of your technology issues? In essence, the only difference is the amount of technical training. Our years of technical expertise have given us the ability to diagnose and resolve varieties of problems, but we don’t hold our knowledge close to the chest. Rather, we want to share it with you.
If you feel like you’re having trouble communicating with your team, it’s probably because you are. In fact, it may be because you’re communicating with them the wrong way. By overhauling the way you approach small talk and office chit-chat, you can improve office intercommunication and your own public image.
If you asked any of your employees whether they would prefer to work at home or in the office, we think it’s a safe bet that they would answer “at home.” Working remotely has several well-known benefits, including less commuting expenses, spare office space, and increased employee satisfaction. Despite these advantages, many employers are hesitant to let their staff work from home. Why is this the case?
How do you feel while you’re reading this article? Are you straining your eyes just to see the screen? Does your back feel like it has a knot in it? Is carpal tunnel destroying the nerves in your wrist? If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, it’s probably time to look into switching up your workstation.
