SCW Blog

There are a lot of words that a business owner doesn’t like to hear. One of the worst? Downtime. While this word may seem essentially harmless at first glance, it signifies a much larger range of issues. Here, we’ll examine how to calculate the impact of a downtime event.

Work isn’t always great, and it can be stressful to boot. Distractions certainly don’t help, as they can complicate your schedule and get in the way of responsibilities. With the right strategies on your side, you could potentially eliminate some of this stress. Here are some of the ways you can do so.

When you consider your business’ strengths, you might feel the need to focus on quantifiable aspects that can be defined with numbers. There are some competitive advantages to this, but it’s especially important to keep in mind that perhaps the most important quantifiable strength you have is your ability to sustain a positive company culture.

The average business has a lot that management needs to keep an eye on. Closely monitoring some aspects of yours can help you to secure it, while promoting your productivity. Let’s review a few of these aspects to help you direct your attention to the important facets of your operations.

For the business owner, it can sometimes be a struggle to find the right talent to fit in with your existing staff. Today, more individuals are forgoing the stability of a full-time job and contracting their expertise out as a service. With the amount of freelancers growing by the day, we’ll take a peek at the Gig Economy (as it’s called) and how it has become the new normal.

Have you ever heard someone refer to an activity as “yak shaving?” Also known as “bikeshedding,” this is effectively a way to describe a specific kind of procrastination. For this week’s tip, we’ll explore how a freshly barbered yak relates to your business’ productivity, and how to keep you and your employees on the right track.

Depending on what your preferences are for a productivity suite, you might find that the conventional options are slightly less optimal for your needs. Google’s G-Suite solution for businesses can offer your organization a great way to access common applications for a multitude of purposes.

Communications can be difficult to manage, especially in today’s business world where workers are more mobile with more devices than ever before. How can you make sure your business’ infrastructure is prepared for the new developments in modern technology solutions? You can start by making sure your team is equipped with the applications and devices they need to stay in touch during the workday.

If there’s a single concept that modern businesses are being built around, that concept would have to be collaboration. Group effort and communication are increasingly central to the workflows of today - but there is more to collaboration than just these features. Here, we’ll review what the term collaboration really means, and how it can be leveraged in all its forms.

Service offerings for business technology are kind of tricky to approach for administrators--especially if they have gotten by just fine without implementing new technology for the past few years. We want you to ask yourself if you are absolutely certain that the solutions aren’t needed by your business. You might find that you actually do need them.

Of all reasons that a business doesn’t leverage IT, the one that makes the least sense to me has to be their size. There’s just a reluctance to adopt more than what - for whatever reason - is “enough” for a business of their capacity.

There are quite a few factors that can lead to boosted productivity, but unfortunately, the opposite is also true. Your business’ productivity can be hampered by a variety of issues. Below, we’ll review some sources of productivity deficits, and how these deficits can be eliminated.

You’d be hard-pressed to find a better productivity device than a smartphone, but the fact remains that while it’s a great tool to get more work done, its nature as a communication device makes it a prime target for wasting time. We’ll discuss some of the best ways your organization can take advantage of mobile technology while still remaining as productive as possible with it.

Communication is a crucial part of any business, which means that a business will require the tools that allow it to communicate effectively. There are many solutions designed to fulfill that precise need with assorted features and functions. One of these tools is Microsoft Teams. Let’s review some of what it has to offer a business user.

It’s safe to say that most businesses today rely on the Internet, as do most of the humans who work at them. Therefore, when the cable suddenly goes out and their connection is lost, many employees may find themselves struggling with a downtime incident. There can be many causes to a lost Internet connection, with just as many ways to identify and resolve it.

Email has been one of the primary correspondence methods for businesses for several years. In addition to communicating with your team, clients, and peers, emails also bring you the latest blog in a subscription, or sales and marketing messages from prospective vendors. With dozens of emails flowing in throughout your day, emails can become a distraction that results in a significant loss of productivity. These three tips can help you cut down on time that you waste when compulsively checking your emails.

Problem solving is a major aspect of managing a company, as well as managing pretty much all other aspects of life. The key to successful problem solving is having a plan and taking it one step at a time. For this week’s tip, we’ll look at a popular problem solving plan developed by the UK’s Behavioral Insights Team. It’s a plan so simple that anyone can do it!

How much thought have you put into the layout of your office space? The fact of the matter is that every piece of furniture, equipment, and even the floor plan, all communicate the values of your business, and can also hinder or improve your company’s goals and productivity levels. It’s as if your office has its own ecology.

As almost everyone has found out, political tension in much of the Western world has led to some pretty remarkable situations to unfold over the past year. From the controversial Brexit vote, to the election of Donald Trump as the United States’ 45th President, many people have been sucked into political turmoil inside their workplaces; and, it’s costing employers billions.