SCW Blog

These days, we use a lot of cloud platforms. They can enhance productivity through improving access, and they allow a business to do more with their capital. For this week’s tip, we thought we’d look at two ways the cloud can help your business excel with its newly-remote workforce.

The influence of COVID-19 has permeated through most aspects of daily life, from the way we live, communicate, work, and for many, the way we learn. As schools must remain closed for now, that is not to say that the learning process will necessarily be suspended for all. Many institutions already have the necessary tools in place to continue their students’ education in the form of remote learning, but for many, this is uncharted territory.

The rise of the remote worker was happening long before the Novel Coronavirus outbreak made it necessary. People in all manners of positions were working remotely, and succeeding in doing so. Many organizations that have embraced the remote worker have seen noteworthy rises in productivity. In fact, many organizations have seen a lot of success using predominantly remote workers. 

There are many reasons that your team may want (or need) to work from home, and there are many reasons to allow them to do so. A 2019 survey by OwlLabs indicated that 71 percent of remote workers are happy with their job (as compared to 55 percent of on-site workers); remote workers responded that they are 13   percent more likely than onsite workers to stay in their current job for five more years than onsite workers will; and when respondents claimed to be working longer than 40 hours per week, onsite workers were doing so out of necessity, while remote workers did so out of desire and enjoyment.

It’s not uncommon where a situation arises and you will find yourself working from home. To make this work, it is important that you keep a few additional issues in mind so that you can make the most of it. We have put together a few simple best practices that you should keep in mind as you operate remotely.

Many people know about Microsoft Word. In fact, it has become effectively synonymous with word processing nowadays. However, fewer likely know about the templates that Microsoft Word offers, and how they can be customized to your particular needs and preferences. This week, our tip is committed to fixing that.

Collaboration is one of those terms that has a lot of potential, but doesn’t always live up to its promise. Some employees just aren’t naturally inclined to team up on a project. All is not lost, however… there are still things you can do to help encourage cooperative work amongst your team. Let’s go over a few reliable methods to nudge your users toward effective collaboration.

Productivity: for many, it is the ultimate goal in the workplace – to not only do a task well in a set time, but to do multiple tasks equally well in the same timeframe. As this is such a popular goal, many experts and consultants have devised strategies meant to boost an employee’s productivity. For this week’s tip, we’ll review a few of these strategies so you can give them a try.

Business processes and procedures are a key component of any successful company. There are plenty of examples of businesses that have literally been built on the practices that they have implemented. We’ll go over a familiar example here, and how you can start to tighten up your own processes.

Virtual assistants are everywhere. Either a device can be controlled with them, or it has the assistant built into it natively, and they are now common in the home and the office alike. In fact, their daily use in the workplace has been predicted by Gartner to reach 25 percent by 2021.

One of the earliest memories I can remember is being relentlessly reminded “organization is the key to success”.  While it might have been a comedic expression to say while cleaning up the house, becoming a business owner has undoubtedly caused organization to become more of a strategy rather than an obsession.

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.