Collaboration is as important as ever, if not more so, to businesses of any size… and with so much work today being done digitally, this collaboration needs to be reliable. Add in the fact that so many people work remotely as often as they do, and it should be clear that all businesses need a means of securely collaborating as part of their successful operations.
If there’s one thing that helps businesses establish consistent policies and strategy, it’s a good framework. You can use a framework for anything, including network security. Today, we want to walk you through the cybersecurity protection standards as they are outlined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology so you can better protect your business.
Cybersecurity has to be a big deal for any business that uses IT, and today, who doesn’t? When your employees don’t follow cybersecurity rules, it can put your business in danger, like getting hacked or losing money. The first step is to figure out why employees aren’t following the rules. This could happen because they don’t know the rules, haven’t been trained enough, or think the rules are too hard or take too much time.
No matter your industry, size, or business model, satisfying your customers is crucial. Your business' survival depends on your ability to do this effectively.
To achieve this, it is essential to leverage every opportunity to deliver for your audience. One way to do this is through modern business technology, such as customer relationship management (CRM). Let's explore what a CRM is and why it's beneficial.
Today, IT is important for many things. It's not just a small part of a company… but how deeply is IT woven into modern workplace culture? Let's delve into how technology and culture coalesce in today's businesses.
Every organization faces operational challenges at some point. Numerous factors can lead to downtime, making a comprehensive data backup plan essential. This month's newsletter dives into the concept of business continuity and underscores the pivotal role of data backup within it.
Change is inevitable, especially in the dynamic world of business, where it is the driving force behind growth and innovation. Yet managing change can be a daunting task. It requires strategic planning, effective communication, and strong leadership.
This is where change management optimization comes into play. It's about refining your approach to change, making it more efficient and successful… particularly when it involves your IT and related processes.
Mindset is important regardless of what someone is doing, but it plays an especially important part in the workplace. This only becomes more true when that workplace is distributed, and work is actually done in the worker’s home.
Let’s go into the kind of perspective you want to encourage in your team as they utilize remote work.
The cloud is a remarkable innovation that businesses of all industries and sizes can utilize to scale growth and operations. How you use the cloud, though, will change depending on your company's specific pain points and requirements. How can you invest in a cloud solution that ticks all your boxes? It starts with assessing whether you want to utilize a public, private, or hybrid cloud infrastructure.
A trained and engaged workforce is going to put you well ahead of the majority of your competition, and technology goes a long way toward making this goal a reality. With the right technology in place, your business and its employees can be productive and engaged even while working remotely. It all starts with increasing access to tools while building a company culture that can withstand the pressures of remote work.
You might hear us discuss the benefits of “proactive IT maintenance” all the time, but what does the word “proactive” really mean for technology management? Today, we want to demystify some of the jargon surrounding proactive IT and show you just how great of a value proposition it really is.
We work with quite a few businesses, but one is a lot more remote than the rest of them. We wanted to share a story that one of our more discreet client organizations told us after we helped them resolve a particular challenge. Don’t worry, we asked, and sharing this won’t land us on the naughty list.
Delegation is something that you, as the leader of your organization, need to master in order to get the most efficiency out of yourself and your team. There are various ways to handle delegation, all with their strengths and flaws. We’re here today to help you figure out your own personal management style and how technology can help you carry it out.
Lately, we’ve spent some time examining the phenomenon known as procrastination and where it comes from. To close the book on the subject, we wanted to go over how you and your team might be able to procrastinate less moving forward so that your business might get more done.
For the past few weeks, we have been looking at the idea of procrastination and how it manifests in individuals to directly impact your business. Today, we want to take a closer look at how you can put a halt to procrastination in the short term, as well as how you can further these tactics to create real change over time. We’ll begin with the short-term solutions.
We started a series on procrastination last week and how you might address it within yourself and your business. Last time, we covered topics like how procrastination shows up in everyday work, so now we are continuing the conversation by helping you identify how you can address it.
If you have a to-do list a mile long, then you’ll need to develop a system to place priority on what truly matters and what could be put off until a bit later. Thankfully, you don’t have to develop a system from scratch, as one of the more interesting methods for tackling your to-do list has already been developed and inspired by a 1950s speech: the Eisenhower Matrix.
Procrastination is one of the banes of any productive employee, and as such, it’s worth examining why procrastination surfaces and what you can do about it. In this series of blogs, we’re going to take a deeper dive into procrastination, with this week focusing on the concept of procrastination and what might cause it.
It isn’t uncommon to hear about how much working from home has environmental benefits—and on its face, this claim makes a lot of sense. We did have to wonder, however, how much greener remote work really is—if at all.
Let’s go into why the question of whether remote work is the environmentally friendly option isn’t as clear-cut as you might expect.
Managing money is important in every aspect of life. For the small business, it is typically a matter of maneuvering available cash around to make it work best for the organization’s needs. Today, there are plenty of options a business can choose from that can transfer resources that traditionally were typically acquired through major capital expenses and make them operational expenses, allowing your business to do more.
Collaboration is a key part of effective business processes. Nowadays, there are many, many technologies available to facilitate the level of collaboration that today’s organizations strive for. Let’s explore some of the options you have to implement technology that inspires your team to work as one, cohesive unit and accomplish your shared goals.
Many, many businesses have inventory that needs to be managed, and an equal number of those know all too well how much of a headache managing it can be. Fortunately, modern information technology provides integrated tools that can make this process far, far easier.
It’s never a good time to deal with budget cuts, and unfortunately, due to its large costs and investments, technology management, maintenance, and infrastructure are often a victim of them. Let’s go over how you can lessen or mitigate the hit you take when dealing with an IT budget cut.
Technology is not cheap, especially not business technology that has features that the average user might not find much value in. To help you keep your business from investing in the wrong solutions or spending unnecessary capital on solutions you won’t find useful, we’ve put together some of the common places where businesses like yours might accidentally waste hard-earned funds.
The telephone cemented itself as a valuable tool of business long ago, but the ways that businesses use these devices have changed over the years. Thanks to advancements in technology, telephones can still be used by businesses even today, albeit with some modern adjustments to stay competitive and useful. One of these telephony solutions is Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP for short.
In today's digital world, SMBs need to establish a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy to protect themselves from a range of potential threats. Whether it's a small business with a handful of employees or a large corporation with thousands of workers, every organization is vulnerable to cyberattacks. That’s worth stressing because so many business owners think they are immune simply because of the size of their organization.
The idea of hot desking, or foregoing the traditional assigned workstation office organization method, is increasing in popularity, and for good reason. There might be several pros and cons to it, but people are generally finding that the benefits outweigh the costs. Let’s go over how you can implement hot desking to save money and improve operations.
Business can get stressful. Not only for the people tasked with managing an organization, but for the workforce as a whole. Fortunately, businesses are identifying that technology can go a long way toward making all this work less stressful. Let’s go through some of the innovative technology that is being used to keep employees engaged.
When it comes to your network and its security, you cannot give all of your users access to all of your assets. It’s just not a good practice, and doing so can potentially put your resources at risk. Let’s discuss how network segmentation can make a world of difference for the integrity of your network and the data found on it.
With 2023 sneaking up on us, you’ll need to consider the many challenges that businesses will face as we move into the new year. Many of these challenges can be remedied simply by implementing the right technology solutions, too!
Love it or hate it, remote work is here to stay—particularly now that many people have experienced it for themselves and have no intention of giving it up. However, many employers are going to want their employees back in the office to some degree. How can a balance be struck between these two sides? We posit that a hybrid work environment will play a role.
With plenty of benefits to be had from both in-house and remote operations, many companies have been working to take advantage of a hybrid approach to business. While this approach has proven greatly beneficial to businesses in assorted ways, there are a few drawbacks that need to be addressed. One major one: a lack of inclusivity.
There are struggles that the workplace inherently presents to most people (whether that workplace is in the traditional office space or in the home) that can lead to the too-familiar-to-some feelings of burnout. As these struggles aren’t likely going to go away at any point (never mind anytime soon), it is important that you have strategies to help minimize their impacts.
In today’s age of remote and hybrid operations, engaging your employees has never been more important. People want to feel like they belong, like they are connected to their coworkers and colleagues. What can you do to encourage this type of connectedness that might not always be so easy when your workforce is scattered about?
After this prolonged pandemic, remote work has established itself as a key component of many organizations’ operational policies and infrastructures. However, it has added new levels of complexity that make managing a workforce more important than ever. Let’s discuss some ways management can improve the work experience for remote employees.
While it can be too easy to assume that specialized software, like customer relationship management (CRM) software is reserved exclusively for massive companies, there are a lot of benefits that small businesses can see from using it. Let’s take a look at some of these benefits now.
The pandemic has brought about a change in the way that businesses operate. While companies may have once been limited to getting work done in the workplace, there has been a shift in the opposite direction with many companies retaining remote employees or keeping certain remote workplace policies in place even now. What is the difference between remote and hybrid options, and how do you determine which is best for your company?
The modern cyberthreat landscape is nothing to be trifled with, so it makes sense that as threats grow more powerful, so too do the solutions used to address them. Nowadays, there is a practice that is designed to address just how serious the threat of cybersecurity is: zero-trust IT. Let’s discuss these policies and how you might put them in place.
How effective is your cybersecurity? It seems like a simple question, but no less important to consider and determine as the answer could be the difference between a prevented breach and a successful one. In order to keep track of your business’ cybersecurity preparedness, it is important that you regularly evaluate it. Let’s go through the essential steps to performing such an evaluation.
You might think that remote work for specific positions is taking off, and while this is true for some, it’s not necessarily the case for all. Knowledge workers, for example, are seeing fewer and fewer new job postings, as evidenced by a report from Braintrust. This report analyzed 150,000 new job postings and had some surprising results on the remote work front.
Let me ask you a question: if you haven’t already gone back to the office full-time, are you looking forward to the opportunity? Research has shown that your answer probably depends quite strongly on whether you are the boss or the employee. Let’s explore this phenomenon.
Many critics of a shorter work week believe that cutting the number of hours worked throughout the workday or work week could potentially lead to a decrease in productivity, but a new study from Iceland suggests that this simply is not reality. This study suggests that productivity should no longer be a cause for concern when it comes to a shorter work week, as its astounding results show what really happens when you reduce the number of hours worked without reducing pay.
