Health and safety essentials every office needs

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StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article |Health and Safety|Health and safety essentials every office needsAs workers slowly begin to return to offices across the country, now is the opportune moment to ensure your office has all the health and safety essentials it needs to not only comply with the law, but also to help create a positive workspace for employees.

Fire safety equipment

It doesn’t matter what sector or industry your business is in; you need a fire extinguisher. In an office setting, a 2kg Co2 fire extinguisher and a 6-liter water fire extinguisher will cover multiple fire risks. They should be positioned close to the main fire hazards and readily available and visible.

Similarly, fire alarms and smoke detectors can quite literally save lives by providing an early warning of a potential fire. By installing a fire alarm or smoke detector, you are allowing more time for an orderly evacuation and the opportunity to tackle the fire before it gets bigger and more dangerous.

First Aid equipment

First Aid kits are vital for any office, allowing for quick treatment of minor injuries by a trained First Aider. It’s important employees know where to find the First Aid kit, and that stock is regularly maintained. From having enough bandages and band-aids, to essential protective equipment like disposable gloves and antiseptic wipes, regular stock takes of the First Aid kit can provide peace of mind to all employees – and reduce the risk of litigation should the worse happen.

Ergonomic equipment

There are more and more studies that demonstrate increased and chronic back pain in office workers as a result of hours spent sitting at poorly positioned desks and screens. If you consider the length of time your employees spend working and sitting at their desks, then it’s obviously essential that where and how they work doesn’t cause them any discomfort or pain.

Investing in ergonomic equipment like chairs and movable desks will not only improve employee morale, but you’ll see an increase in productivity too.

General maintenance

Slips, trips, and falls account for the majority of workplace incidents and can easily be avoided. Slips occur when there is a lack of friction between a person’s feet and the floor they are standing and walking on. They are typically caused by spillages, wet floors, and unsecured floor mats. Reduce the risk of slips by using signage, non-slip floors, and ensuring any mats or carpets are secure.

Similarly, trips and falls occur because of trailing wires, objects left lying around, and misplaced footing. Ensuring items are tidied away and walkways are clear will reduce the possibility of trips, while well lit areas and marked stairs will limit falls.

Easy Initiatives to Improve Your Office’s Morale

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StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article |Office Morale|Easy Initiatives to Improve Your Office’s MoraleA happy office is more likely to be productive and cohesive as a team. Therefore, it is important that you as an employer or manager are always searching for ways to boost morale in the workplace. Here are some of the easiest ways for you to give a boost to your team.

Take Their Ideas on Board

One of the first things you should do is consider taking on the suggestions your employees might be able to suggest. There are so many ideas that they might have that could slip past you. One person can only come up with so many ideas, whereas a group working together might be able to come up with some fresh ideas.

What’s more, it will give you some great ways to connect with your workers. There are so many ways that you can make them feel more involved in how the office is run, and this is a quick and easy way to do so. Why not bring up this topic at the next time meeting? Even a quick brainstorm session of just five minutes could unlock some brilliant ideas that could quickly be introduced to the company soon.

Add a Benefits Program

Many employees want a lot more than just a simple pay cheque and holiday allowance. Things like gym memberships, help with travel, and many other discounts are all greatly appreciated as part of a payment package from a company.

Using a software like the employee benefits platform by Zest Benefits means that you will have access to a wide variety of different benefits that you could use to improve your employees’ experiences at work. Placing it all in one easy-to-manage piece of software should not impact on the amount of admin work that such a program might otherwise add. It should be a straightforward and easy task to make it part of your admin tasks and company operations.

Organise Out-of-Office Activities

One of the easiest ways to improve relationships around the office is to encourage them in a non-workplace environment. If team members can build some sort of rapport with one another, they will be better attuned to each other’s needs. They might be able to better avoid conflicts and reach agreements within the office overall.

There are lots of little things you can think about doing if you want to encourage some interactions outside of work. Why not start small with something like a few drinks or a meal after the day is done on Friday? If you have a bigger team, you could think about starting a sports team or some other group that might want to get together regularly. You could even just arrange a team-building day with some fun activities that could bring you all together. No matter what, there will be something that could appeal to your whole team and help them bond a little better. A team that works well together will hopefully be happier overall.

Think Up Some Ways to Boost Morale Now

There are so many little things that you can do to try to improve your morale around the office. Make sure you speak to your employees to get an idea about where they think improvements can be made, as they are the ones who will most likely be impacted by any changes that are made. Whether you are trying to spend more time together as colleagues or whether you are introducing something new to the business such as small benefits, there are plenty of ways for you to boost the mood in the office. Start searching for a way to improve the vibes now.

5 Tactics For Maximizing Business Productivity

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StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article |Business Productivity|5 Tactics For Maximizing Business ProductivityDisaster! That is what happens when a business is unproductive. This is because whatever product or service your business outputs takes money to create. Therefore, if you are doing this in an inefficiently, it will be costing you money, the very lifeblood of your company. With that in mind, it’s crucial that you maximize the productivity of your company. A topic you can find out more about in the post below.

Improve employee wellbeing

Now, you may expect an article all about boosting productivity to take about rationalization and process flows, and that is to come, but your employee’s wellbeing and happiness is essential here too. The reason being that morale is crucial to maintain a high level of productivity, as well as to avoid slow down when valued staff leave.

To that end, it’s essential that you care, not only about the work your employees do but their wellbeing as well. Luckily there are some relatively small changes you can make in your business to improve wellbeing that will allow you to reap the associated reward in productivity.

The first is to offer flexible working hours and locations, something that can help your staff achieve a better work-life balance, and so be more productive and motivated when they are working.

Additionally, instituting a wellbeing program in work can have a significant effect. Of course, the exact form of these will differ from one workspace to another, but many companies find that providing exercise classes, meditation sessions, and even healthy snacks to be very useful in upping morale.

Deal with issues before they become problems

Next, if you want to boost productivity in your business, you need to change the way that your entire company operates. In fact, you need to move from being reactive when problems occur to being proactive instead.

This means that you need to put systems in place that monitor what is happening in your business, and will pick up any issues that have the potential to become something more damaging. The idea being that you can then deal with and resolve them before they ever blow up to be a significant obstacle. Then you can avoid downtime and the bottlenecking of tasks that are associated with a major crisis.

In fact, this is a philosophy that you can use across many different aspects of your business to improve productivity. One example of this being managed IT services.

Of course, you may be asking what is managed IT services, and how can they help my business be more productive? Well, don’t panic because it’s actually a straightforward question to answer. Managed IT services are where you outsource your IT provision to an organization that takes over the proactive monitoring side of things for you. Something that can help your business because it means a vast reduction in network downtime and the associated hold-ups in working, communications, and even hits on your website. Thus ensuring maximum productivity.

Automate

Another way that you can maximize your business’s productive it to take a long hard look at the type of tasks that your employees do day in day out. In fact, when you do, so it’s likely that you will find many repetitive jobs that are done over and over again, and it is with these that you can begum automating things.

Yes, that right, you can easily free up your workers to focus on more important things, by automating some of the most basic tasks that need to be done in your business. Something that should help to improve productivity because you have more person-power to give to the jobs that genuinely need it.

In fact, automation can be done in a range of situation from the factory floor, to the stockroom, and even in the office with specialized software. Something that makes it a fanatics way of maximizing your company’s productivity.

Minimize distractions / maximize focus

Of course, we humans don’t do as well as physical robots or AI at being 100% focused all the time. In fact, focus and being distracted from it can be a major issue in many businesses that contributes to time wasted and reduced productivity. That is why it’s crucial that you change the way your organization deals with these opposing forces.

Now, to do this, it is essential to acknowledge that as humans, we need distraction as well as focus to work efficiently and retain the quality of the work we are producing. With that in mind, encouraging a time-batching system like the Pomodoro Method can be incredibly helpful, as they allow for small restorative distraction breaks, but also keep most people on task for the majority of the time.

However, that doesn’t mean that unnecessary distraction cannot be abolished, and in particular constant email access and use can be a real time and focus drain in the office. Something that may mean scheduling emails time into the am and pm is a much better way of managing such a task and so boosting productivity.

StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article |Business Productivity|5 Tactics For Maximizing Business ProductivityReview Processes

Finally, when it comes to maximizing productivity, reviewing and improving the processes that you use in your business is always helpful. The idea here being to remove any redundant actions and so streamline what you are doing.

Of course, this is often easiest to do when it comes to things like a production line of the factory floor, but that doesn’t mean that you can take a rationalized perspective to other business related tasks as well. In fact, it is entirely possible to make things more efficient in places like the office or even a store by realizing what time is being wasted and changing things to rectify this.

In particular, an example of this that nearly every type of business can benefit from is to reduce the volume and frequency of meetings that they have. In fact, instead of spending days rushing from one meeting to another, it can work well to hold a short stand up briefing at the beginning of the day. This being something that will save time, and prevent distraction from the critical tasks in hand and so maximize productivity in your business.

How to Maximize Your Team’s Performance When Working from Home

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StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article |Team Performance|How to Maximize Your Team’s Performance When Working from HomeHow can you make sure your team continues to perform while working from home?

This is a question many leaders have had to ask in recent times, and it’s an area that can make a big difference to your business performance. If you can get your team working at 100% while at home, then it’s going to benefit everyone.

Make a Plan & Create a Good Working Environment

If your team is going to work coherently when working from home, then everyone has to be on the same page. They have to understand the requirements, the goals they need to be working towards, and how you plan to achieve them.

You want to make the transition between office based, and work from home as easy as possible, so it’s important to decide on the procedures that are going to help you achieve this.

It can be difficult for people to adapt to working from home. It’s a different environment that presents different challenges, and you need to be able to help your team with this.

Give people guidance on how to set up a good working environment within their homes and make sure they have the resources to get the most out of their time. Office spaces have been optimized over many years to provide the best environment to work in, so it’s natural you will need to take time to figure out how to get the most out of people working from home.

Ensure You Have the Right IT Solutions & Focus on Security

You’ve got to have the right IT set up that allows you to work to the best of your ability. If you’re not using the right cloud software, or you don’t have a good internet connection, or any number of issues, then it can seriously impact your ability to function as part of a team.

This is where it’s important to be working with a good IT solutions company such as VentureNet to help make sure there’s a smooth transition between office and home-based work.

Security should be paramount for any business, and having staff members working from home presents different challenges in this area.

While your office environment should be optimized to maximize security, when people work from home, they can potentially be accessing important information with a lower level of security. Again, it’s important to work with your IT solutions company to make sure you’ve got the protocols in place that protect your business.

Remember : Balance Is Key

One of the difficulties with work from home is that it can completely change the balance people have between their personal life and their work life. The line becomes blurred, and this can be difficult to manage.
If your team is going to perform to the best of its ability though, people need to be able to make that distinction between work life and personal life. Rest is a key component of productivity, so make sure you’re giving your team plenty of help in this area and encourage them to maintain a healthy balance.

5 Secrets to Building an Effective Team Strategy

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StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article |Team Strategy|5 Secrets to Building an Effective Team StrategyDoes your business have a team strategy? How engaged are your employees? A recent study found that 70 percent of U.S. workers are not engaged at work!

What can you do to strengthen your team? It all starts with team training and creating a culture of caring and pride in your company. Keep reading to see how you can create an effective team strategy.

1. Establish Leadership

Before you can build a team, establish proper leadership. This person sets the tone for the entire group, so you need to make sure you and your managers establish trust with all team members. The leader needs to be loyal, trustworthy, empowered, and have integrity, or else the team will not follow.

Employees need to trust their judgment. You also need to be transparent to build trust with your employees. Employees should be able to work effectively whenever management is not around because they know and trust the direction of leadership.

2. Have Core Ideas

You need to clearly define and also communicate your company’s values, mission, and vision. It is essential to get employee buy-in and alignment.

This helps empower your employees, so they know what to do when faced with a decision.

Let’s say you pride your company on delivering products on time. If an employee is faced with a decision, they know that they should come up with a solution that ties into this mission and delivers a product in a timely manner, even if it is an excavation project.

3. Establish Relationships With All Employees

It’s important to learn more about each team member. What are their skillsets? Likes or dislikes? And what motivates your employees?

Answering these questions is valuable knowledge and it lets you match each employee with the right role. You can set up employee training to help team members reach their goals. This will help increase production along with job satisfaction.
Include your employees in decision-making when possible. You should also give your team open-ended projects instead of telling them what to do. You may find a better solution, and you should also encourage cooperation and the development of problem-solving skills.

4. Foster Teamwork and Team Strategy

When you establish relations with your employees, it’s time to have them work together. Encourage employees to share information with the organization and amongst themselves. This means you also have to communicate more with your team.
This is more than just holding meetings and saying you have an open door policy. You need to be honest and communicate with your team. You can also offer assistance if needed and ask about each team member’s work.

5. Adapt and Learn

High-performance teams usually don’t get stuck in stagnant work processes. They are able to spot and stop potential errors before they happen. This means you have to be willing to adapt.

You should encourage experiments with your team and not be afraid to try new ways. Listen to your team. They may have good ideas to help you move forward.

Execute Team Training Today

Ready to implement a team strategy? You can. Listen to your employees and create an honest, open working relationship.
Set the stage for how you want your employees to act by showing effective leadership to gain your team’s trust. Set some training goals, so your team can continue to learn and adapt.

Looking for more ideas? Keep checking out our site for more effective leadership advice and learn more strategies to drive your business forward.