Turn to Multidimensional Employees for Identifying New Business Models

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StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article |New Business Models|Turn to Multidimensional Employees for Identifying New Business ModelsCompanies can find untapped value in their employees when working to solve current challenges presented by the coronavirus pandemic. This involves utilizing a Make Your Case initiative that allows employees to apply their unused skillsets and connections in opening up new ways for their companies to operate.

Surprisingly, employers don’t often care to know about or think to utilize the stockpile of unused resources their employees bring. They tend to view skills outside of their employees’ job descriptions as irrelevant to the scope of normal business operations. It’s possible that employers simply don’t see the value that such extraneous abilities or connections can generate.

But given the shockwaves reverberating from the market disruption that’s taking place, many normal business models are no longer operational, and new models must emerge. Companies would benefit from turning to the untapped expertise of their multidimensional employees for new ideas through Make Your Case solutions to the rising challenges.

For example, in this unprecedented shelter-in-place environment, consider the value inherent in the information sharing taking place through social media. Networks of people are utilizing their own knowledge and past experiences to advise others on meeting the challenge of remaining isolated in their homes. People share their experiences of living through hurricanes, surviving in post-war Kosovo, and living in a remote outpost in Alaska, for example, as tried-and-true ideas for working and remaining connected in difficult circumstances. The social media forum is a plethora of innovative solutions not only for connecting with co-workers and customers while sheltering in the place, but also remaining socially connected — think virtual happy hours.

Compare the diverse and innovative social media postings with some of the messaging coming from companies during this pandemic. The emails and posts coming from the business sector lack variety, color and the ability to engage. Companies regularly communicate that they are aware of the hardships to customers, vendors and employees during this time. Yet, besides possible changes in delivery methods or product discounts, the companies’ information lacks flavor and innovation.

Yet many of the same people with clever ideas on social media also work for companies who could use some creativity to their approach. These very people have experience in dealing with work disruptions or isolation, and they’ve accumulated amazing personal, social, and professional capital that can be utilized by their companies in their organizational recalibration.

Companies often acknowledge the importance of diversity. Yet, they tend to overlook opportunities to explore the diversity of experiences and interests that employees bring beyond their work responsibilities. But involving more diverse ideas will help in responding to this crisis. Companies will benefit from understanding that the diversity of multidimensional employees’ perspectives can be of enormous value to them.

In Make Your Case initiatives, companies invite employees to utilize their multidimensional core and contribute their original perspectives on challenges that the company currently faces. The process is similar to design thinking, with a different emphasis for idea creation. Instead of brainstorming a creative new idea, employees reference their multidimensional experiences outside of work and employ them in a proposed solution.

The Make Your Case process involves:

1. Outline the idea. Employees initially summarize their idea through the filter of the company’s case challenge to ensure their understanding of the challenge and its context. Make Your Case company reviewers make sure the idea is grounded in the appropriate context before inviting authors to continue.

2. Describe applicability of the solution. The authors illustrate their idea with a personal story of how the solution worked in other settings. As their ideas come from outside the work setting, it’s important to treat the Make Your Case solution as a proposal that may need more specifics.

3. Share ideas for implementation. Using what they know of the company, the authors indicate which parts of their proposed solution can be implemented immediately, and which will need additional resources. Company reviewers who are now vested in the idea will likely help facilitate finding resources and funding to expedite implementation of the solution.

4. Fine-tune specifics. Together with company reviewers, the authors tailor specifics of their solution to the company challenge. This includes providing an action plan of how the solution will be carried out.

Make Your Case initiatives engage employees by inviting them to demonstrate their unique multidimensional cores. By providing their innovative solutions and helping to implement them in a way that addresses a pressing challenge, employees are given an opportunity to craft their own edge within the company.

The company benefits from a pipeline of solutions that have been tested in other contexts and tailored to the reality of this particular challenge.

About the Author

Julia Ivy, PhD Psych, PhD Mgmt, is a strategy and international business executive professor and faculty director at Northeastern University. Her area of expertise is in bridging strategy and psychology in the concept of personal strategy. In addition to her academic work, she acts as an executive coach for those facing the “What’s next?” challenge. Her new book is Crafting Your Edge for Today’s Job Market: Using the BE-EDGE Method for Consulting Cases and Capstone Projects (Emerald Publishing, Oct. 7, 2019). Learn more at be-edge.com.

Starting a New Business is Easier Than Ever, But it Still Needs Work

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StrategyDriven Starting Your Business Article |Starting a New Business|Starting a New Business is Easier Than Ever, But it Still Needs WorkIf you are serious about wanting to launch a brand new business, there are a lot of things you can do to help you achieve this. Try to do as much as possible to help you improve and assess the different elements of the business, and try to look at the best ways of achieving this. There are so many factors that play a role in helping with this, and it is something you need to work on as much as possible.

Try to come up with ideas that are going to allow you to launch a business with the highest possible level of success. This is something that plays a massive part in helping you improve the process and launch a company that is going to hit the ground running. These are some of the key things to consider and work on when you want to launch your first business and make sure it is successful.

Create a Strong Business Plan

Creating a strong business plan is one of the most important elements of starting a brand new business. You need a sense of direction and a map for where your business is going to go, and a business plan is one of the best ways of being able to achieve this. You have to do as much as possible to make sure you have the strongest and most detailed business plan possible, as this is something that will help to give you a business blueprint.

Start Small and Look to Expand

You are going to have to do as much as you possibly can to try to develop a strong business when you first launch. This means you should look at how you can start small and work on making the business better and building up toward growing the brand. This is something you are going to need to work on as much as possible. Expanding and growing the business as much as possible is so important, and this is something you have to focus on right now.

Make Sure You Have Great IT Support

As a business, it is important for you to ensure you work on the best possible way of supporting yourself as a company. One of the best ways of being able to achieve this is to hire the right IT support company to help take charge of your company when it’s on a digital platform. You should visit this website for more information about how you can find the perfect IT support to help look after your business as much as possible.

Stand Out from the Competition

Something else you need to make sure you get right as a new business is to stand out from the competition. This is something you need to work on as soon as you can, and there are a lot of things you might consider doing if you are serious about achieving the right success and having this success over your rivals.

These are some of the key things you are going to need to look for and consider when it comes to improving the business and making the most of it. You are going to have to consider exactly what is involved when it comes time to launch a company in the right sort of way. If you can follow these ideas, there will be so much more you can accomplish as a new business owner.

3 Back End Web Design Mistakes That Are Ruining Your Business Site

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Back End Web Design|3 Back End Web Design Mistakes That Are Ruining Your Business SiteWhen designing a business website, it is important that you get all of the front end aspects right. Things like navigation and the overall aesthetic, for example, are incredibly important because they impact the way that users view your business and a poorly designed website will not convert. However, it is important that you don’t neglect all of the back end web design elements as well. Even though these may not seem as important, mistakes with the background design of the website can cause you some serious problems. These are some of the biggest back end web design mistakes that you need to avoid.

Poor Hosting

Hosting your site in the right place is absolutely vital, and if you do not have enough server space to accommodate the number of visitors that your site gets, it will run incredibly slowly. Poor hosting services also increase the chance of errors and site crashes, which lose you money as well. There is nothing more frustrating than a slow website or a site that keeps crashing, and potential customers won’t stick around and wait for pages to load, they will just give up and go elsewhere. It’s vital that you find a reliable hosting service for your website so you can be sure that it is always running smoothly.

Lack of On Page Optimization

When Google is trying to rank websites and decide who gets the number one spot, it takes a lot of different factors into account. If you are going to consistently rank well you need an on page optimization strategy in place. Things like titles and keywords in your content are important, but you also need to manage a lot of back end things like meta tags, URL structure, and meta descriptions. If you are unsure about how to manage these things, you should call in a company like Integrity Marketing to help you develop a strategy. Carefully crafted content will help to rank fairly well, but if you want to hit the top spot, you need to consider all of the back end elements of on page optimization as well.

Not Optimizing For Mobile

Over 50 percent of all web traffic comes from mobile devices and that figure is only going to get larger in the coming years. When people are searching for a business, they are more likely to take out their phone than they are to open a laptop, which is why optimizing for mobile is so important. If you only design a single version of your site and it is optimized for a computer or laptop, it will not run well on a mobile device. Users will soon become frustrated and give up, so you need to create a specific mobile version of the website as well. When you are choosing a web designer, make sure that you find one that has good experience creating mobile websites. You could also consider developing your own app if you want to improve the experience for mobile users even more.

These common back end mistakes can seriously impact the effectiveness of your website, so it is important that you avoid them.

Cloud Computing for Dummies

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article | Cloud Computing for DummiesMost everyone these days has heard of the computer cloud, but many don’t really understand what it is or what it does. Let’s take a look at how the cloud got its name and then discuss the basics of how it works.

How Did the Computer Cloud Get Its Name?

There are several different stories surrounding the origins of the name, among them:

  1. The cloud has long been a symbol of the Internet. Essentially, “in the cloud” for many years has referred to the software or other platforms on the Internet.
  2. For decades, engineers have drawn networking diagrams that pictured the cloud to represent the internal structure of a large network of computers and storage devices “out there”.
  3. A cloud was also used in diagrams to represent a network with endpoints connected by a data path.

So How Does Cloud Computing Work?

The cloud is not one entity, but rather it’s a huge system of servers, all around the world, that are connected to work together as one networked ecosystem. The servers can be designed to do a number of different things. Some of the main applications include:

  • Storing data – Businesses use the cloud to safely store data. The information can then be accessed with a password from any computer that has an Internet connection.
  • Delivering content – The content can include streaming services, software and social media platforms. Any computer or other Internet-accessible device can stream or download this content, provided proper password codes are entered.

What Are the Advantages of the Cloud For Businesses?

Businesses see many advantages of using the cloud to store data. Instead of bogging down the servers on location, the data is stored off-site, freeing up valuable storage on the company’s servers. This can save a lot of money in the long run. IUVO Technology states that the Federal government’s departments have saved upwards of 25-50% on the IT budget by moving data to the cloud.

Your company’s data is also much safer in the cloud. Because it is backed up, the chances of losing your data are very low. The information is usually encrypted as well, which makes it secure against cyber attacks. IT Services Boston are available to help you migrate your data to the cloud in the safest way possible.

Working with a trained professional to move your business data to the cloud will ensure that you find the right services at the right cost to keep your company safe and working at maximum capacity.

Temporary lockdown: What to do if your business has been hit by coronavirus

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StrategyDriven Tactical Execution and Managing Your Business Article |Coronavirus Lockdown|Temporary lockdown: What to do if your business has been hit by coronavirusAs we all know, the world is coming to something of a halt courtesy of the recent coronavirus outbreak.
To say that it is unprecedented would be an understatement of the highest regard. Many countries have insisted that businesses have to be shut down and for the economy as a whole, this has monumental repercussions.

For self-employed individuals, this is a scary time. It’s going to be difficult, and for the time being at least not many people are going to hold many answers. Sure, the government might be pledging various support packages, but it remains to be seen what sort of difference this will make.

Bearing this in mind, today’s article takes a look at three areas which you should be considering if your business is bracing itself for a lockdown (or has already). Again, it might be of little consolation for the time being, but by keeping an eye on these areas it might do your chances of prevailing out of the other side of coronavirus the world of good.

Consider your storage options

Like it or not, this might be a time where you have to close your main premises. Some companies will decide to do this to cut costs, while others might decide that they just aren’t getting the footfall to merit staying open.

However, if you sell tangible products, you still need somewhere to store items. This is where you need to research storage units, or alternative smaller office space, as your business gets through this period. Both of these solutions can save you money in the short-term.

Be as flexible as you can with your employees

As we keep being told, this is going to be an almightily tough time for everyone in the world. Jobs will be lost, and some people really will be struggling to financially survive.

This is where you need to offer as much flex to your employees as possible. Granted, you can’t put the future of your business at risk and there will be times where tough decisions have to be made, but whenever possible try and add a degree of flexibility with your workers. It might be offering them the chance to take unpaid leave now, or even take their annual leave. Some people will realize the difficult positions that businesses are currently in and will accept these decisions, if they at least know in the back of their mind that they will have a job waiting for them when this crisis is over.

Communicate to customers whenever possible

We’ve entered an era into the unknown; nobody has ever experienced this before and it means a lot of issues are up in the air.

This is the time where communication is key. We’ve gone past the stage where we can stay quiet and hope for the best, customers will want updates as to where your business stands on the virus. This will largely depend on the nature of the industry you are involved in. For some, it might be the occasional email about stock levels, while for others it might be reassurance about the steps you are taking to minimize the risk of the virus spreading. Either way, communication is key during this period – people still need to know that your business is operating.