With remote and hybrid work environments on the rise, just about every professional out there needs a home office. With this, when setting up your home office, you must consider office layout as a crucial factor. The layout of your office space will massively impact productivity, as layout impacts ergonomics substantially.
Continue reading “Productivity Hacks To Stay On Schedule When Working From Home”
If you are stuck in a job that you do not enjoy or is not providing you with the financial rewards that you want, then it is a good time to consider a change of career. You spend a huge amount of your life in work, so if you are unhappy in your job, you should try and work out a plan to find a career that will give you more satisfaction.
Continue reading “How to Change Career When You’ve No Idea What to Do Next”Most business owners don’t put that much thought into their employee car park. After all, they’ve got more important things to worry about and they don’t want to add the car park to their long list of stuff they need to juggle. But if you run your own business, it might be worth putting more thought into your car park.
Anybody that has worked somewhere with a poorly designed car park already knows that it can be quite a contentious issue among employees. People get frustrated when they can’t find a spot and it can lead to strained relationships in the office, which is the last thing you want.
There are safety issues to consider as well because a poorly designed car park can lead to an increased risk of accidents. If employees are injured on the property because you didn’t put the right safety measures in place, you could find yourself in serious trouble (see this page for some practical safety solutions for your business). So, if you think that the employee car park doesn’t really matter, think again. Here’s how you can make yours safer and more efficient.
Lighting is so important in your employee car park because in the winter when it’s dark and you have a lot of employees leaving the office at the same time, things can quickly get dangerous. Low visibility is a common cause of accidents, so you need to make sure that you get plenty of lighting out there. One reason that businesses don’t have adequate lighting in their car park is that they worry about the cost. You can get around that if you use these solar LED street light fixtures instead of traditional street lights. They work off solar power, so they won’t cost you a penny and you still have the lighting you need to keep people safe.
Business owners spend a lot of time thinking about how their office layout could be more efficient, but have you ever thought the same about your car park? If your car park is laid out in the wrong way, you will get a lot of congestion, which is frustrating for you and your employees. If the layout means that people have to keep crossing in front of traffic, you also increase the risk of an accident. If possible, a one-way system can help to improve congestion and you should create separate pedestrian areas so people don’t need to walk directly across the car park.
This is something that people don’t consider, but it’s important. If your business is in a good location, people from outside the company might try to use the car park. This causes a lot of issues because your employees arrive and find that there are not enough spaces left for them. The best way to prevent this is to install CCTV cameras around your office. This helps you improve security and you can see whether anybody is using your car park without permission. If you put up some signs making it clear that only employees can use the car park and there is CCTV in place, you should deter anybody from doing it in the first place.
Making these changes to your car park will improve safety and help to avoid any arguments about parking.
You might have begun your business as a one-person operation, but once success comes your way, you’ll soon find that it can be highly beneficial to bring other people on board to your team. However, it’s not as if this is just a matter of hiring a person to do a job, and letting them get on with it. As soon as you bring your first employee on board, you’ll find yourself in the role of ‘manager,’ and that’s not always as straightforward as newcomers to the game would like it to be. By the time you have a team of employees, you’ll need to work hard to ensure that things run smoothly. Below, we take a look at a few useful tips that’ll make managing your team more straightforward.
Hire Competent People
You’ll find it infinitely easier to manage your team of employees if they’re high-quality to begin with. It’s like cooking: you’ll make a much nicer meal if you’re using fresh, quality ingredients, rather than whatever has been left on the shelf. So before you do anything, take a look at your hiring process, and see how set up it is to bring excellent staff on board. Many new employers end up hurting themselves by writing job descriptions that only appeal to the bottom of the barrel candidates. Improve your hiring process, hire better staff, and make things easier for yourself.
And People You Like
You’ll fundamentally have a professional relationship with your staff, but it is important that you get along with them, and especially so if you’re a small team. That’s why it’s important to look beyond the CV, and think about how you will click with the other person. You’re going to be working closely with them each day; it’ll help considerably if you don’t have to overlook their personality just to get your job done. Of course, this doesn’t mean figuring out if you have the capacity to be best friends with them — it’s just about listening to any instincts that tell you that you might find them annoying.
Software Tools
You’ll soon find that managing involves much more than just telling your team members what to do, and then basking in all their hard work. Having employees means taking on a lot of additional tasks, such as payroll, scheduling, and so on. Running a business means juggling so many different tasks, not forgetting the HR department, which is why many business owners turn to outsourcing this via companies like Gusto (click here for gusto pricing). You can make handling these tasks much more straightforward by getting the right software tools. For example, there is software that allows you to easily track employee hours, which can help considerably when it comes to payroll processing. Downloading the tools that you need will take some of the stress out of managing a team, and also free up your time, so you can focus on the tasks that’ll help to push your business forward.
Team Building
Studies have shown that productivity goes up when people like their work colleagues and their office environment. But really, this is something that you could have guessed without a study saying that it’s the case. You can just feel that there’s a good atmosphere in the office when colleagues like each other. Plus, if people are friendly with one another, there’ll be reduced risk of disagreements and arguments from occurring. If you’ve hired well, then you should have a team of staff who are ready to be friends — but it won’t happen automatically. You’ll need to create the settings that allow people to get to know one another. One option is to host afterwork drinks on Friday evenings, or you could organise a team building trip somewhere fun (such as paintballing or go-karting).
Keep Things Tight
It’s important to remember that it’s not as if you need to hire for every task that has to be taken care of. Indeed, it’s recommended that you don’t do this, since the more staff you bring on board, the more complicated things will become. It’ll be much better if you only hire for the absolute essential tasks, and then outsource the ones that you only require essentially. For example, you probably don’t need a full-time marketing employee, so instead, you can outsource the task to a third-party company.
Give and Receive
Finally, remember that you can make things more straightforward by simply being fair with your staff. You can ask for the world from your employees if you’re also willing to give them the world. This will help prevent resentment from creeping in, which can have a hugely detrimental impact on the overall atmosphere and productivity in the office.
As someone who works from home, I’d be the first to say that there are a lot of pros to the arrangement. I get to work in a familiar environment, Maureen the Pup doesn’t have to be left by herself and I get to dictate my own hours (and eat lunch whenever I want!). However, there are also downsides, and it can be difficult to create separation between home and work life – I say this as I sit here typing on a Sunday afternoon, between cooking dinner and doing loads of laundry!
There are, however, ways to ensure that work and home don’t bleed together – here are a few of them:
This might seem counterproductive if you want the freedom of self-employment, but there are lots of small office spaces where you can work, distraction free, which don’t cost a fortune. Click Offices London guide can help you to find serviced office space in the City, which will fit your budget and help you to look more professional to your clients.
I’m very guilty of taking work at a moments notice, which means working at times when I should be with family. Set yourself hours in which you’ll accept work and don’t do anything outside of this. You could even set yourself an out of hours notification for your emails so that clients won’t expect to hear back from you until the next day. It can be daunting, thinking about losing work, but setting parameters like this is good for everyone.
For those of us with work phones, consider implementing a ‘no phone’ policy at home. There’s nothing worse than a fun time with the family being spoilt by a call from work about something that could wait till Monday. Of course, there are some exceptions to this but in most cases, the job can wait till you’re on the clock.
If you have others that work with or for you, make sure to assign a reasonable amount of tasks to them, instead of trying to do everything yourself. Give your assistant or team members tasks that are lower on your priority list, but that you can trust them to accomplish. You may also think about assigning tasks or activities that will build and enhance their skills.
If you’d like to separate your work relationships from your personal ones, it’s a good idea to keep them separate online as well. The easiest way to avoid overlap is to use different social networking sites for different purposes. For example, Twitter and LinkedIn are excellent tools for developing your professional network, whereas Facebook is often better suited to sharing photos and news with your family and close friends. If your business page is linked to your profile, there’s temptation to answer questions doing downtime, but you should try to keep notifications off at weekends, at the very least.
