With the kids off school and Easter egg hunts to organise, it’s easy for work-based tasks to go off trail during the Easter holidays. Working flexibly and remotely can give your team’s productivity levels a much-needed boost during Easter. As can having access to high-speed Wi-Fi and other quality office infrastructure.
Don’t let the fun and distraction of Eastertime have negative repercussions on your business with the following five ways to remain productive at working during the Easter break.
The benefits of ergonomic office furniture have long been realised and documented. ‘Sitting comfortably’ can improve productiveness by as much as 11%. By contrast, an uncomfortable office can be damaging to our health and wellbeing. Though ergonomic workspace is becoming increasingly innovative.
From standing up to work, to have a ‘third place’ to relax, take a look at the following ergonomic office innovations we can’t afford to ignore.
Networking continues to be an effective way for people to make essential contacts and grow their business. With the recent and future networking trends incorporating more and more technological advancements, the process is becoming more focused and more rewarding than ever before.
To take advantage of this networking evolution, discerning networkers will need to keep their finger on the pulse of the latest networking trends, so here are a few of the hottest trends which will continue to grow in popularity throughout the remainder of 2018.
Scheduling Apps
Heading to an industry summit without a strategy can lead to a lot of wasted time and some missed opportunities, so using one of the best scheduling apps on the market is the best way to maximise your time while networking. You need to know who you want to meet and what you want to achieve at an event, so use an app like DigiPulse to schedule meetings with those people days or even weeks ahead of the event.
The current trend is use multiple apps, so use a scheduler like that mentioned above along with the Tinder-style GripApp, which can help you schedule meetings with suitable people on the fly.
Target Research
To take full advantage of networking in 2018, you should do your research before rolling up to the event, so you know exactly who you want to talk to. In the past, networking also had the potential to be something of an awkward affair, forcing you to strike up conversations with random people you didn’t know while essentially trying to get them do you a favour. You might even invest valuable time building up a rapport with someone only to discover they can’t actually help in the way you ideally want.
Using business-focused social media such as LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator can help you identify key contacts in your field, so you know exactly who you want to invest your time with. To maximise your time with them, use a social listening tool such as Brandwatch to get an understanding of a company’s recent press statements and social media activity before you meet their representative.
Event Hosting
There is no need to hang around waiting for one of the big industry summits as it is easier than ever to host your own networking event. It doesn’t have to be a huge affair, but if you can interest enough parties to attend, then you can create your own hub of creative activity wherever you want, especially with the amount of shared office spaces and conference rooms available for hire these days.
What is crucial about hosting your own networking event is keeping everyone engaged in the networking process. You want them entertained and this can happen in a variety of ways such as with activities or shared food. Wearable gamification technology (like Klik) can also help people connect and enjoy exploring the possibility of working together or sharing ideas.
If your business can benefit from serviced offices or professional meeting rooms for conferences that are compatible with the very latest smart technology, contact WorkWell via the website’s enquiry form or call our friendly team on 0113 385 4480
We all want a more professional-looking business, but we don’t always have the funds to heighten the professionalism of our commercial ventures. Fortunately, boosting the credibility of your business doesn’t need to be as costly as you may think.
Help is at hand with these cost-effective tips to make your business look more professional overnight.
Ensure your business has a dedicated phone number.
Rather than merging your business and personal calls into one mobile phone, get a phone with its own number that is solely for business purposes. That way, you won’t run the risk of answering the phone in an unprofessional manner.
You can place your business telephone number on all marketing channels, including your website, the business emails you send, on your business cards and your social media platforms. This consistency will give your business a boost in the professionalism stakes.
Get a website
From marketing to a global audience to letting your target audience find you, not to mention helping you look significantly more digitally savvy and professional, the commercial benefits of having a website and active online presence are prolific.
Despite the huge gains of having a website, a surprisingly large proportion of businesses in Britain still don’t have a website. Figures released by the ONS in 2016 found that only half of all businesses in the UK had a website.
Having a website that maps out your products or services, the location of your business, your company’s news and customer testimonials, is a simple and cost-effective way to make your business be seen in a significantly more professional almost overnight.
Flash the business cards.
Business cards have long been an incredibly easy and effective way to put your business in the right hands. Not only will these simple and inexpensive marketing assets ensure important clients, customers, prospective leads, and contractors have your contact details at hand in one place, but they will make you and your business look considerably more professional.
Work on branding your business
For businesses of all sizes and sectors, branding is one of their most powerful tools. Brand marketing essentially refers to various components that help build a business’s identity, such as its logo, slogan, colours, symbols and culture.
Working on the colour, design, ethos and message of your brand will create an effective and cohesive identity for your business, making it not only more instantly recognisable but also more professional.
Have a professional address.
The location of your business speaks volumes about how others perceive your company. Put simply, having a business address in a ‘professional’ location, such as a credible business park in a big city, will go a long way in projecting your business in a more professional light.
Have a virtual office.
One of the easiest, quickest and most cost-effective ways to help make your business look more professional practically overnight is to get a registered business address, your business phone line, and have a receptionist answer your calls and deal with your post, at a virtual office.
At WorkWell, you can give your business an instant boost in the professionalism stakes by getting a registered address at our premier serviced office space. Rather than having to worry about being interrupted by calls and answering your phone in an unprofessional manner, WorkWell will have all your calls answered within three rings.
To find out more about how you can be efficient, reliable, switched on, and, above all, professional with a virtual office at WorkWell, contact our friendly team today.
In March of this year, businesses across the globe were thrown into a new way of working. Many who had never even considered remote working before were forced into sending their staff, who were able to, home to work for the foreseeable, many pushing it through without a plan or strategy in place and therefore no metrics to measure its success.
Nurturing an environment where teams feel comfortable talking about and supporting their own wellbeing, both mental and physical, is a key part of developing an effective and resilient team.
As teams continue to adapt to different ways of working, building strong foundations for workplace wellbeing will encourage a supportive, connected and collaborative environment where teams can thrive.
Here are five tips to help you get started on how to actively support your team’s wellbeing:
1. Promote a good work-life balance
Members should encourage taking breaks between work. Within the working day, it can be easy to slip into a cycle of working and forgetting to take breaks away from the desk. Members at WorkWell benefit from exclusive access to the grounds surrounding the offices, and what better way to spend your lunch break or a phone call than in the fresh air and making the most of nature around us. It’s important you look after your own well-being so you can also be there to support your team.
2. Regular team check-ins
Have regular check-ins with colleagues to gauge how they’re feeling, and be sure to share how you are doing too. Whether it’s a virtual conversation or escaping the office for a more private option using a bookable space at WorkWell or pods, make sure these regular check-ins are scheduled to monitor stress and how you can support your teams.
3. Consider your work environment
The environment plays an important part in attracting, retaining, and promoting a healthy workforce. WorkWell provides a carefully designed space to maximise team potential for both collaborative and independent working. Consider how you use your working space. Does it offer a blend of focus and collaboration, comfort, and inspiration to boost the outcomes of your team?
4. Introduce a wellness plan
Open communication is a huge factor in promoting well-being in the workplace. It’s not always about practical elements – giving someone a safe space to open up about how they’re feeling can go a long way in developing a stronger team. This can be implemented through wellness plans, which are designed on an individual basis to understand any challenges or considerations for colleagues. They can be kept up to date by colleagues as part of 1-1s, and having them integrated in your team’s processes shows the value placed on your team’s wellbeing, working with individuals to develop them, while creating a safe environment for growth and learning.
5. Adopt a mindfulness approach
According to a study carried out by Be Mindful, mindfulness is proven to improve mental wellbeing. A technique which promotes calmness, a practice of staying present in the moment, with greater focus on any current task. Mindfulness can be a conscious practice through pausing and deep breathing, or alternatively, can be done during everyday moments, such as making a cup of coffee or waiting for your document to print. Bringing your attention to the present moment helps with concentration, managing stress levels and means you can make more informed and strategic decisions.
How are you currently working with your teams to support wellbeing in the workplace? Share your suggestions with the WorkWell team over on LinkedIn, Twitter or Instagram.
The workspace has evolved in line with the evolution of work and the workforce. Good understanding of the evolution of work, worker and workspace will help in defining the workspace strategy for any organisation. These three elements constitute the work environment.
Here we explain the relationship between these elements and how they influence the development of work environment.
Work
An idea that is familiar, but at best still abstract to all of us, can be better defined by understanding what it used to be in the past, what it is now and what it will be in the future. Exploring these questions will help us better understand the evolution of work.
This evolution can be defined in four industrial revolutions and the workspace revolution can be mapped to these four revolutions.
Pre-Industrial
Industrial
Cognitive
Cyber – Physical
In the preindustrial economy, work was synonymous with craftsmanship, the creation of products or the delivery of complete outcomes. The craftsman is entirely responsible for the end-to-end process of delivering a product or outcome — a carpenter, for example, would do everything from taking measurements, getting the wood, to making the final adjustments in the finished set of furniture.
The industrial revolution changed this conception of work, as industrialists realised that products could be manufactured faster and cheaper, if end-to-end processes were converted into repeatable tasks in which workers (and, later, machines) could specialise in. The notion of a “job” became that of a collection of tasks, not necessarily related to each other, rather than an integrated set of actions that delivered a complete product or outcome.
With the onset of rapid cognitive revolution, work has once again been redefined to create valuable human-machine collaborations, shifting our understanding of work from task completion to problem-solving and managing human relationships. This approach changed the way we organise tasks into jobs.
With the advancement made in technical innovations, we are moving towards a cyber-physical revolution aided by Artificial Intelligence and robotics. This approach is leading to more proactive management and providing differences in experience by finding the challenges before it evolves. This is changing the workforce of the future and the requirements for the future workforce.
The functions and the linked outcomes form the basis for defining work style
Based on the analysis of the previous three revolutions there are common trends and characteristics that are common that links work, worker, and workspace.
Worker or workforce
Demographics have changed over the last few years with a collectively older and more diverse workforce. The very social contract between employers and employees has altered dramatically as well. Organisations now have a broad continuum of options for finding workers, from hiring traditional full-time employees to availing themselves of managed services and outsourcing, independent contractors, gig workers, and crowdsourcing.
Alternative workers are growing in number; currently, 35 percent of the workforce is in supplemental, temporary, project, or contract-based work. This percentage is growing as well — for example, freelance workforce is growing faster than the total workforce, up 10 percent compared to three percent of all employees.
As the “who” and the “what” of work shifts, so does the workplace. Where once physical proximity was required for people to get work done, the advent of digital communication, collaboration platforms, and digital reality technologies, along with societal and marketplace changes, have allowed for and created the opportunity for more distributed teams.
Organisations are now able to orchestrate a range of options as they reimagine workplaces, from the more traditional collocated workplaces to those that are completely distributed and dependent on virtual interactions.
Employers should not only consider how roles are crafted when pairing humans with machines, but also the arrangement of their human workforce and what type(s) of employment are best suited to obtain the creativity, passion, and skill sets needed for the work at hand. Orchestrating this complex use of different workforce segments will require new models. It could fundamentally change our view of the employee life cycle from the traditional “attract, develop, and retain” model to one where the key questions are how organisations should access, curate, and engage workforces of all types.
Access. How to tap into capabilities and skills across the enterprise and the broader ecosystem? This includes sourcing from internal and external talent marketplaces, leveraging and mobilizing on- and off talent
Curate. How to provide employees — ecosystem talent — and teams with the broadest and most meaningful range of development? This includes work experiences that are integrated into the flow of their work, careers, and personal lives.
Engage. How to interact with and support the workforces, business teams, and partners to build compelling relationships? This includes multidirectional careers in, across, and outside of the enterprise; and for business leaders and teams, providing insights to improve productivity and impact while taking advantage of new ways of teaming and working.
According to the World Economic Forum, the division of labour between people and machines is expected to continue to shift toward machines, especially for repetitive and routine tasks. That could eliminate upward of 14 percent and disrupt 32 percent of today’s jobs, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OCED).
Understanding work style and work functions forms basis for designing organisational workforce.
Workspace: Rethinking Where Work Gets Done
The three core considerations for defining future workspace are:
Changing the physical workplace should not be seen simply as an opportunity to increase efficiency or to reduce real estate costs. Workplace culture is highly connected to both innovation and business results, and as teams become more distributed, organisations might need to rethink how they foster both culture and team connections.
Workspace requirements are linked with the five organisational growth stages, i.e. Creativity, Direction, Delegation, Coordination & Collaboration.
Work style evolution:
From hierarchies to a more flattened structure
From fixed working hours to flexible working hours
From hoarded information to shared information
From fear-based leadership to empowering and inspiring
From on-premises to the cloud
From email as primary form of communication to being a secondary form of communication
From climbing the corporate ladder to creating the ladder
From siloed and fragmented to connected and engaged
From working at the office to working anywhere
To maximise the organisational output, it is important to design a workspace that caters for work style, functions and workforce requirements.
Work Environment
It is a culmination of work function, work style, work force and workspace. All designed to maximise team and business output, maintain organisational health by optimising resources.
In our next blog we will talk about how work, workforce evolution helps in identifying the factors that influence workspace.
One of the biggest challenges when it comes to working remotely, which we’ve encountered, is keeping connected to your team as well as engagement. Without face-to-face contact on a daily basis, employees can often feel disengaged as they are cut off from the day-to-day rhythm of business and one step removed from your company culture and goals.
We’re all human, which means we thrive on human interaction, which is one of the key things we miss when working from home. This can in turn impact company culture. With that in mind then, how can we ensure your teams are getting what they need in order to remain engaged and continue to produce their best work during this period.
To help keep your team motivated and engaged while working remotely, we’ve put together our top 5 tips:
1. Stay connected
When working remotely, technology is key. Keeping open and effective communication channels are so important when managing a team remotely, and using communications platforms such as Teams, Zoom, Asana etc. are effective ways to maintain that connection, while effectively managing remotely the delivery of tasks, even if you’re not in the same room.
Be sure to also utilise your video conferencing options in order to keep that face-to-face interaction and collaboration that would potentially be affected when working from home if not managed correctly. Emails and phone calls are all well and good but having the ability to see your team while you’re discussing business topics can help your team feel more present in the office environment and allows you to get a better sense of engagement through body language.
And in terms of timing for these calls, we’re not saying you have to be checking in every hour but arranging team meetings perhaps daily is a good way to ensure everyone is aligned before the start of the working day.
2. Give employees the tools needed to do their job
A key factor in ensuring your team feels engaged is empowering them to do their best work no matter where they are. By utilising the right tools and technology you can keep your team productive, connected and centred while also aligning their work life balance.
Utilising technology and specialist tools, such as laptops, mobile phone, online servers to access documents, also allow more flexibility for, your team, which in turn can make a positive impact on their productivity and engagement.
Where you need to be careful is in setting boundaries for your communication tools, ensuring that your teams work-life balance remains intact despite being at home. It’s important to ensure just because your team are working from home that their work doesn’t unintentionally impact and bleed into every aspect of their life.
3. Keep focus on the company culture and promote when/where you can
Maintaining your company culture when your team isn’t in the office can be challenging. As it’s not possible to carry about the same team building and collaborative activities sometimes connections with team members can be lost.
One way to maintain your company culture while your team is working remotely is by being as open and honest with your team as possible, keep your team updated on what’s going on and ensure they don’t feel like things are being hidden from them. It’s vital to keep everyone informed both on the good news and the bad news.
It’s also important to show that you trust your team to get on with things. A number of studies have shown that employees who feel trusted are much more likely to have high levels of motivation and positivity too. According to a study by Queens School of Business and by the Gallup Organization, disengaged workers had 37% higher absenteeism, 49% more accidents, and 60% more errors and defects.
And where you can, maintain a sense of togetherness, even if that is virtual. Activities such as online team socials, virtual quizzes are a great way to achieve this.
4. Ensure team cohesiveness by blending hybrid options
Giving your team choice in where they work is key to keeping them engaged. Going forward, adopting a hybrid model gives your team the flexibility to choose where, when and how they work. For many businesses offering “hybridity” can provide a great way of maximising productivity and flexibility while empowering your team with and meeting the needs of your business.
Though a hybrid option can only work if all of the above are in place. For now, businesses who can are working from home, which in turn removes the element of choice, but once you’ve nailed the remote team engagement, employing a hybrid working strategy is the best way to empower your team and managers and ensure they remain productive and engaged, working in a way that they choose.
5. Be flexible
Try not to be too prescriptive with your day. While you may need some structure and set times for team meetings and collaborative sessions, ensure you’re giving your team the flexibility in how they carry out the rest of their work this includes the solutions you offer them.
At WorkWell our aim to create outstanding workspace solutions that allow our clients to attract, retain and promote the best teams for their business by providing a solution that can be configured to meet exactly what your business needs and your core objectives. Offices that not only offer an outstanding environment, but also hassle-free management, allowing you to focus on growing and developing your business.
For more tips and advice, sign up to our blog below.
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