Staying Mobile – Advice For Running A Company On The Move

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Many people start online businesses these days. That allows you to stay mobile and travel around the country or the world while you make money. Of course, there are issues that can arise when you don’t work from a fixed address. You’ll find some excellent tips and tricks on this page that should help you to avoid any problems. At the end of the day, you just need to make sure you can access information, accept payments, and converse with customers. Don’t worry too much about the costs involved because prices have come down a lot during the last few years. If you’re smart, you can do all that without spending a fortune or breaking the bank,

Ensure you have mobile payment solutions

There is no getting away from the fact that you will require a mobile payment processor if you plan to travel. You never know when you might meet someone and sell a product or service. So, you need a tool that will facilitate those transactions. Thankfully, there are many solutions available on the market today. So, you just have to research the most popular ones and make an assessment. Also, those packages will enable you to accept payments via the telephone regardless of where you are in the world. In most instances, you will pay a monthly fee for the service. Some providers will also take a commission from your transactions. However, that’s nearly always lower than 2%.

Store all important documents in the cloud

You never know when you will need to access important documents and files. While you can keep some of them on your laptop, you don’t want to clog it up. So, it makes sense to invest in a high-end cloud storage solution. You can then access everything you might require with the click of a button. You just need a WiFi connection and the passwords to gain entry. That should mean you never arrive for a meeting unprepared again. If you forget something, you can get it up on your screen in a matter of seconds. Best of all? Cloud storage providers spend millions on creating the most secure systems possible. That means you don’t have to worry about hackers stealing your information.

Use online live chat to communicate with customers

There will come the point when you need to talk to customers and clients. Perhaps they have a complaint or issue? Maybe they want to ask questions about a new product or service? Either way, online live chat solutions are the answer. There are many different platforms available on the market right now. In most instances, you just need to ask your web developers to add the feature to your website. That way, any visitors can contact you in real time. That should mean you don’t miss out on any sales because they won’t look at alternative sellers. If you can deal with their issue fast, the chances of them spending money will increase.

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You should now have all the information you need to make a success of your mobile business. The internet means anyone can start a company without requiring a physical address. It’s a fantastic revelation for those who enjoy more freedom in their lives. So, make sure you put that information to good use and leave no stone unturned. Good luck with that!

The Cost Of Not Training Your Employees Will Shock You!

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So many business owners and managers do not value the importance of training their employees. Yet, if you gave them a choice of getting in a car with someone who had passed their test or someone who hadn’t passed their test, they would take the former no matter what the cost difference was. It is madness, even though the principals are the same.

But let’s change it around a bit. Let’s say you gave them the option of hiring a qualified employee or someone with no qualifications. The answer would be the qualified candidate. So why not offer training to staff that would make them more qualified, and better able to do the job? We live in a world that changes seven days a week due to new technologies and updated strategies and advanced methods, which is why we need to focus on new training.

But if that isn’t enough to convince you, hopefully, these points will be:

Training Boosts Efficiency

The more trained someone is to do their job the more efficient they will be. It is simple math. You see, if someone isn’t as well trained to do their job, it is going to take longer for them to complete the tasks at hand and time is indeed money. That is why it is imperative you look at training as profit; after all, the two go hand in hand.

Training Creates Specialists

It is all well and good employing a workforce of factotum employees, but it will stop you from progressing as a business and see you lose ground to your competitors. If, however, you spend time and money on creating a workforce that has training specialist areas, you will see your business economy boom. It could be that you provide injection molding training to your production workforce while concentrating on sales technique training on those that bring in new business and train your HR staff on compliance training to ensure they operate within the regulations of your industry. All of these will streamline your business and expand your profit margins.

Training Encourages Happiness

The worst thing for a company’s productivity is low morale, and low morale comes from unhappiness, which comes from employees who feel undervalued and inadequate. The feeling of being an underachiever niggles away at even the most confident of people. That is where training comes in. If people feel as though they are advancing their own personal skill base, talents and abilities, they will see value in themselves that will be reflected in their work. That is a win for you and them.

Training Allows Competency

The less your workforce is trained, the more mistakes they are bound to make, and mistakes cost money. It doesn’t matter if it is time, materials, injury, accident or whatever, mistakes can cost your company dear. What’s more, it runs the risk of upsetting your clients or customers. As such, it is crucial you train them regularly on new practices to ensure mistakes are kept to an absolute minimum.

What Your Team Needs Besides Money

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The monetary compensation plays a big role in retaining your best employees and giving them good reason to give their job their all. But if you believe that’s all they need, you’re going to find more people leaving the team than you would like. There are deeper needs that you and even they might not recognize at first. Neglect them for too long, however, and those will serve as the reasons you can’t retain your staff.

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Goals

Employees have responsibilities for day-to-day work in their role, and they should know that. When it seems like the day-to-day involves nothing other than just running through a workload to no aim, however, that’s when people can get frustrated. Goal setting for employees, whether it’s collaboration toward a certain goal or simply improving productivity and efficiency can give them something important. It can give them something to aim at, so they don’t just feel like they’re standing still in their job. It’s also a good way to align their goals at work with the goals of the organization.

Progress

Beyond their work goals, you should consider your employee’s personal goals a little more. If they’re looking to progress in the company, see if you can bring out that leadership material. If their job requires expertise, help them build on it with training. If they have personal projects they want to tackle, then offer them time in the office environment to work on it. Make your leadership instrumental in their personal progress.

Value

Let’s not pretend this relationship is all about what you can do for your team. Your team does plenty for you and showing that you acknowledge and value that is important. From simple thanks and an employee-of-the-month scheme to an awards dinner complete with award plaques. Showing real, verbal appreciation and offering a physical token of that appreciation shows that you truly value the team. It also gives you the opportunity to incentivize the behaviors that you consider most important in the workplace.

Cohesion

The work environment is most likely one of multiple people. Getting them cohesive and collaborative is important. Even for those like remote workers who aren’t in the physical environment. Improving the ways they communicate and organize, such as using project management tools, removes the barriers from that cohesion. You should also consider those corporate get-togethers as the opportunity to have people build rapport and relationships without the pressures of work exerting on them.

Flexibility

Speaking of those pressures, every workplace has them. But allowing a little more flexibility to your team can help them deal with said pressures a lot better. Everyone has ways that they work better. Flexibility helps them discover those ways. Whether it’s flexibility in time, location, dress code, method or otherwise. You have to think of what you can reasonably allow. Whatever you can allow, you should.

A better understanding of the human needs in your team is going to make you a better employer in every way. You’re going to retain them, keep them motivated, engaged, and even happy to work for you.

5 Signs That You’re Losing Your Grip on Your Employees

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Managing your employees can be a tough job. It’s not something that can be taught and each employee you have is a different case. Some employees might be motivated by gifts and promises of a promotion, and other employees are motivated when you criticise their work and tell them bluntly that they aren’t meeting your standards. However, there are times when our lack of care for each employee can lead to them slipping from our business, and their loyalty might slowly be fading because of it.

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Monitoring employees isn’t easy, but with the help of some software solutions, social interaction and showing genuine compassion for your workers, you can keep them from slipping away and joining a rival business and leaving you.

Do your employees show less enthusiasm?

If it feels like your employees are showing less and less enthusiasm about their jobs, then it’s a sign that the work is either far too easy for them or they are losing the motivation to work for you. One of the best ways to reinvigorate that enthusiasm is to give them a challenge. Stimulate their minds so they are more productive and prepare some more difficult work or a task that will define an outcome for the business. For example, give your marketing team some funds to host a marketing campaign or promotion, or ask your tech team with upgrading the office computers and give them a budget.

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Do your employees argue with each other?

If you feel like your employees argue with each other on a regular basis, then it’s worth monitoring them and trying to settle disputes. When employees argue with each other and no senior member of staff steps in to intervene, it can feel like their boss doesn’t care if they are at each other’s throats. You can strengthen your team with performance management services, or take them to team-building events and activity days. Your team is a vital part of your business’s success, so remember to strengthen that bond.

Do your employees look stressed out?

You should never give too much work to your employees and overwork them. A loyal employee will gladly take overtime for the extra money and the chance to help out the business they work for, but you should never abuse this kindness because overtime is additional work that they don’t have to engage in. If you start to force your employees to do overtime, then back off and give them some room. Don’t ever be a boss that pushes extra work on people, give your employees some space or else they’ll get fed up and leave.

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Do your employees call in with problems more often?

This can often be a sign of discontent with your workplace, staff members, the job or a combination of all three. While your employees are entitled to sick dates and taking breaks now and then, it should never feel like they don’t have time to work for your business or that they’re intentionally skipping dates. This might also be the sign of a lazy employee, but if they used to work hard and put in extra time, it could just be a sign that they’re growing tired of working for you. The best way to prevent this is to keep your employees motivated and make them feel like they’re part of a team that appreciates them.

Better Productivity: When Lethal Work Drives People Berserk

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In a world which demands more and more of us on both a personal and a business-based level, it’s no wonder that stress levels are so high and health issues are arising in numbers we’ve never encountered before. The problem is that we try to function into a mechanical and robotic way within business, but the machinery on which we depend is very much alive and very much human.

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Mental health care is important. That’s something we forget all too easily, and your company might be suffering because of it. Neglecting your employees is a certified way to decrease your organisation’s level of productivity, even if you don’t realise the potential for increased efficiency. Your business can be productive, but it depends on your workers being viewed as more than cogs in the system. Here’s some advice on ensuring your employees feel a little less overwhelmed by their workload and actually end up working more productively.

Value your employees.

This sentence can mean so many different things, but it all comes down to the same core piece of advice: treat your employees well, and they’ll treat the company well. It’s quite a simple technique, but it’s one which could have countless benefits for your organisation, if you truly do learn how to communicate and reward your workers.

For one, you could learn to hone in on people’s individual or collective strengths. Different people want different things from a workplace, and the sooner you realise that, the sooner you can start to make better workers of the people you employ. As an example, you could do something to which so many businesses within so many industries fall foul and stop devaluing the female employees within your organisation.

A smart machine uses its components to the best of their ability, so the machine which is your business needs to do the same. Women and men within your company may have different strengths, so utilise those skills. Workplace studies have shown male workers to be very competitively aggressive, whereas female workers often opted for collaborative and communicative approaches. Of course, some employees will always fall into one side or the other, so understand how each worker thrives within your company – or delegate that task to management.

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Play an active role in safeguarding the mental wellbeing of your employees.

Mindfulness is a technique that we should all be practicing, but I think this becomes more relevant than ever in a high-stress, fast-paced workplace. Simple meditation and breathing exercises are concepts that you could suggest to your employees, as they can calm an anxious, overactive mind.

You could also get CISM help from Health Assured, and you’ll not only be caring for your employees, but you’ll be showing them that you care about their wellbeing too. On-site counselling could completely change the mindsets of your workers. Sometimes people just need someone to talk to. Perhaps, as a business owner, you do too. Thinking of the minds of all those working within a company offers nothing but upsides, as a level business head can only be achieved through a level head in general. Remember, you hired people and not robots.

Make the workplace fun.

It’s no secret that our surroundings greatly affect our mood. The final thing I can suggest to create healthy minds is to foster them in a healthy office environment. Ditch the blindingly-bright white lighting and the dull, dreary grey that may have swept across your office. Offer something interesting (it could be something as a simple as a TV or as crazy as an ice cream stand) for employees to sink their teeth into during breaks, add a little colour to the office, and create a clear divide between work and relaxation time.