Easy ways to increase your team productivity.
The impact of open plan offices on productivity is an ongoing debate. A recent Udemy workplace distraction report1 asked respondents what employers could do to reduce distractions. All of the suggestions made by the respondents could be initiated reducing distractions and increasing focus in enabling teams to work smarter not harder without costing a fortune. 37% said providing training on time management effective meeting skills etc. would reduce distraction. Whilst this may seem like “101” that everyone should know, reality is, in the “busyness” of our day to day operations and with an overwhelming work load, we often forget about …
Don’t you get nervous?
It’s a question I’m often asked after I present at a conference or conduct an in-house professional development program for a client. Whilst I’ve been presenting or training for over 20 years, I still get butterflies in my stomach before I present. I’ve grown to understand that this Is a good thing. It means I’m excited and keen to give all that I can to my audiences to help them get more productive! What I also recognise is this it is not the same for everyone, especially if you only present once every now and then. So what I do …
I wish I’d known….
I recently shared a graphic from business management platform solution provider Domo.com that visually presented the results from it’s Data Never Sleeps 2017 findings which Forbes.com quoted as being 2.5 quintillion bites of data. One of the challenges facing anyone in a leadership role is understanding and interpreting the “big data” that technology can produce. Whilst having more information at our fingertips is often presumed to be better than less, reality is if you can’t, or don’t know how to, analyse it, it really doesn’t matter. I was doing some one on one coaching with an executive in an organisation …
Making reports easy!
With so much reporting needed today, one of the challenges can be taking data in Excel and putting it into a Word report. Using a simple copy and paste is one of the most common things we see users do. But what if you need to insert larger sections of data that are landscape mode instead of Word’s traditional format, portrait?? Section breaks in Word enable you to change the layout of the page from portrait to landscape and back to portrait again. You can potentially save yourself hours of frustration in report preparation knowing this one element of Word. …
Kairos and Chronos – How are you spending your time?
We often us the term quality time when talking about family and friends, but realistically, shouldn’t all our time be quality time? I recently read the book, Igniting your true purpose and passion by Robert Michael Fried. A specific paragraph got me thinking about two words in Greek that represent time. Not time in the traditional sense of a ticking clock, or quantitative time, referred to as Chronos, but Kairos, the Greek word for qualitive time. When working with managers and their teams, I regularly hear, we don’t have time for training/meetings/professional development [insert reason or excuse here]. In business, …
Close the Loop on Risk
CAccording to an article by fortune.com, This Is the Top Reason People Quit Their Jobs—It’s Not Money, executive job board Ladders found in a survey of 16,500 members that the two most cited reasons for people leaving a role were boredom and long hours. Boredom doesn’t just happen. It progresses over time through long hours resulting in frustration and staff “switching off” because they’ve had it. When I work with executives and their teams, one of the most common things clients say is, “we used to have someone who did that but they left.” Sometimes it isn’t until a team …
Are you a professional??
A few years ago I saw Jerry Seinfeld perform in in his home town of Manhattan. I’d seen the documentary, The Comedian on Netflix. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it as it provides an excellent insight into how, despite his professional success he is always working to make his performances better. He is known for his meticulous crafting, trialing and refining of content and I on this night, I was in awe of his ability to observe common everyday actions and activities and shine a light on them in a different way. As a professional speaker, trainer …
