The 4 Rules of Efficient Commercial Interior Design

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StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article | The 4 Rules of Efficient Commercial Interior DesignInterior design, whether commercial or residential, is a science, but this is even more so when we’re talking about commercial interior design. There’s an added element of shopper and worker psychology that gets thrown in. Colors have to be enticing for patrons, and even encourage them to commit certain actions. Decor also has to be functional for the staff. So much more has to be taken into consideration and owners need to understand what truly constitutes good and efficient commercial interior before they get started. Here are some of the principles of good interior design for businesses.

Versatility

One of the most important things for a commercial space is versatility. Restaurants often have an open floor design for this reason. You never know what could happen and when you could have to reconfigure the whole area. You might want to bring new elements in or experiment. You might also want to be able to use the space for different purposes. For instance, a restaurant might want to be able to transform into an event venue or change the configuration of tables for live entertainment.

Not only that, but spaces need to be easily upgradeable as well. You want to be able to keep the design current without changing basic parameters like your brand’s color palette, for instance.

Tech Conscious

You also have to think about technology and how to facilitate access to it. Power outlets come to mind. You want as many as you can and not always in the obvious spots. If all the outlets are near walls, then you won’t be able to install consoles or work stations in the middle of the room. This is where covered floor outlets could come in handy. You should also pay special attention to things such as overhead media, television, telephones, and computer networking.

Make Room for Personalized Spaces

For spaces like hotels, for instance, it’s essential that you can create spaces where patrons will feel cocooned. Hotels, especially busy ones, can feel impersonal at times. You want guests to be able to retreat and give them a choice of environments.

And this is where residential and commercial interior design services differ. They will go a step further than simply crafting spaces for you. They can also create bespoke furniture that will make these spaces stand out and offer the exact level of comfort that you need. Commercial design services will be able to customize spaces even more and give them a look unique to your brand.

Safety

Safety should also play an essential role in any form of interior design, but this is even more important for commercial design. First, you have to abide by certain regulations. You also have to deal with the real possibility of injuries and legal action. However, the most important is your moral responsibility to the people who will be using this building, whether it’s your employees or patrons.

These are the most important principles of sound commercial interior design. Make sure to find a team that will be able to align with your vision and help you make better choices in terms of both looks and functionality.

Common Productivity Errors When Managing Remote Teams

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StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article |Productivity|Common Productivity Errors When Managing Remote TeamsTime is money. Or, to put it more accurately, how you use your time is money. And that’s as true for you as it is for every member of your team. Particularly in the current climate. Even in the best of times, every day is a battle for productivity, the wring the most out of every day, optimize output and ensure that your overhead costs (including the costs associated with your personnel) are maintaining an optimal ROI. In the current climate, however, maintaining and managing productivity has taken on a whole new level of importance.

After all, this is one of the most economically and commercially challenging times in recent history. Businesses of all shapes and sizes have had to implement radical operational changes almost overnight, or risk losing ground to competitors with potentially fatal consequences. Every customer and every sale seems harder won than ever, and your competitors are snapping at your heels more voraciously than ever before as they try to engage customers who have become increasingly loath to spend.

You’re likely still adjusting to managing your team remotely. And as a leader, it’s up to you to ensure that you get the most out of each and every one of them. That means avoiding these all-too-commonly made mistakes…

Assuming that productivity isn’t your responsibility

Your employees need to take responsibility for their own productivity, right? Your job is to oversee and facilitate, not to babysit and cajole? This mentality, while understandable, is an oversimplification that can cause serious lapses in productivity and profitability.

Yes, employees need to be accountable for their own productivity. But it’s your responsibility to provide a technological and operational infrastructure that allows them to get the most out of every day. And to give them support and guidance when they struggle with this.

Failing to use the right communications tools

Speaking of technological infrastructures, you’ve likely had to make some changes to yours in order to maintain connectivity and communications. Yet, while improved technologies have made it easier for teams to communicate, failing to use the right tools (or failing to use their full gamut of capabilities) can be damaging to your productivity and your ROI. The right tools can reduce misunderstandings, facilitate collaboration and multitasking and help to maintain social cohesion among your employees. Which brings us to…

Neglecting the importance of socialization

Your employees miss one another! They miss the sense of camaraderie they shared. The feeling of working together to achieve shared goals, and the sense of buzz and excitement that pervaded in your physical workplace. And while it’s easy to dismiss social cohesion as a by-product of a productive working environment, it’s actually the engine that drives it! Which is why it’s important for leaders and entrepreneurs to set time aside for social activities, even if necessity dictates that they’re carried out remotely. This link has some great ideas for remote activities for teams.

Maintaining rigid working hours

Structure is important. It helps members of your team to compartmentalize their time and their thoughts. It allows them to distinguish between “home mode” and “work mode” when working remotely and prevent team members from pushing themselves too hard, stretching themselves too thin and burning out. Nonetheless, that doesn’t mean that rigid working hours must (or should) need to be enforced.

Indeed, maintaining the same 9 to 5 working day could actually be counterproductive to remote employees. According to a 2020 study, a 94% majority of respondents said that they would benefit from increased work flexibility. Most commonly cited benefits included improved mental health / stress management, better ability to manage their home and personal commitments and happier working days.

A little flexibility can go a long way in keeping your team happy, healthy and a peak productivity.

Failing to recognize and celebrate employee achievements

Finally, it can be very challenging to keep your team motivated when they’re working remotely. Working from home means having to contend with a range of distractions from the urgency of housework to the allure of daytime TV. And when employees don’t feel engaged in their work, it’s very difficult to remain motivated. Especially when you’re not on-site to guide and support them.

The good news, however, is that recognition from leaders and peers alike can go a long way in facilitating engagement and motivation. There are a wealth of employee recognition apps which work just like social media platforms. Through them you can recognize, share and celebrate employee achievements. Not only does this help to engage employees, it also helps to build a greater sense of social cohesion amongst your team.

A Guide To Keeping Your Employees Happy, Safe & Fulfilled

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StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article |Managing Your People|A Guide To Keeping Your Employees Happy, Safe & FulfilledSomething that should be clear when you are looking after any business is just how important the employees are. Without them there, there is nothing that could be done in the company, and you would soon find that it all falls apart. And yet, so many employers fail to really take stock in this way or to fully appreciate the power and importance of their staff, and this can lead to a business which is not moving in the right direction – or, just as bad, not moving in any direction at all.

There are three basic things that you need to be aware of and focus on in order to keep your employees in tact as a force in your business. Firstly, you need to make sure that they are happy to work there, with all that it entails. Secondly, you must ensure that their workplace is safe and that they are safe on the job. Lastly, you should help them in whatever way you can to keep them fulfilled and fully enjoy their work in the deepest sense, day after day. In this article, we will look at each of these in turn, and discuss what you might need to do to ensure that you are making the most of them. As long as you follow this advice, there is no doubt that you will end up with staff who are happy, safe and fulfilled – and who are therefore much more valuable to you, in turn.

Happy

Keeping your employees happy might seem like something that is out of your control. After all, they are ultimately responsible for their own happiness, and you might not even feel that it is something you need to concern yourself with. However, the truth is that you do have something of a responsibility in this area, and you should at the very least ensure that you are not doing anything to decrease their overall happiness or make their efforts to be happy any harder for them. This is something you can take on as a manager, and it will make you one of the better managers and leaders out there, so it’s worth thinking about. What exactly can you do, however, to ensure that you are actually going to help keep your employees happy along the way while they work for you?

First of all, you should aim to treat them like people as best as you can. It can often happen in offices in particular that staff get slightly and subtly downtrodden, until eventually the relationship between people is much worse than it should really be. You should aim to avoid this particular catastrophe at all costs, and the way to do that is to ensure that you are treating your employees as the people that they are, day after day, without fail. Saying hello, having polite informal conversations, and just generally respecting the human being that they are are all important towards ensuring that your employees can feel respected in the workplace, and that they can continue to feel like a real person, and not just another cog in the machine. Of course, there will be times of stress when everyone has to buckle down and be a little more like a machine, but generally you can always find time for this kind of genuine human interaction – and if you can’t find time for it ever, something is wrong somewhere.

StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article |Managing Your People|A Guide To Keeping Your Employees Happy, Safe & FulfilledBut being happy goes beyond that, and you also need to make sure that you are providing some of the basic facilities that everyone needs at work. There are many of these which are legally necessary, of course, such as having bathrooms and break rooms. But as ever, you should make sure that you are going above and beyond these things, so that you know that you are actually providing everything that you can be in order to have happy employees. The break room should be free of anything which is likely to remind them of work – instead, it should be a safe separate place, and you should also allow your employees to go elsewhere for their breaks, of course, as it is their own time. This stuff is basic, but you also need to make sure that you are offering the right amount of break time, something which a lot of employers do get wrong from time to time.

All in all, keeping your employees happy means that you need to find a way to ensure that they are going to get what they deserve in their work and in the workplace. If you are keeping anything from them, they will inevitably end up feeling not happy, but a little disjointed instead. This is essential, so be sure not to overlook it.

StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article |Managing Your People|A Guide To Keeping Your Employees Happy, Safe & FulfilledSafe

All employers know that safety is one of those legal and moral responsibilities which you need to take care of. You will need to take this very seriously, too, as it is the kind of thing that can quickly land you in some deep personal and professional trouble if you get it wrong. But that is not the main reason to be concerned about safety in the workplace. The main reason, of course, is that it is important for your staff, and that is what you need to focus on first and foremost. Whenever you are thinking about the safety in your business, you need to make sure that you are doing whatever is right by your employees firstly – as long as you do that, you should end up with the kind of safety that is actually going to work in the way it needs to. So what should be your primary concerns when it comes to keeping people safe at work?

First up, make sure that the office itself is safe. There are as lot of things you need to do here. You might want to have security installed, including a security team and cameras if necessary, to ensure that no intruders can get in. You will also need to have structural analysis of the building done every six months or so to make sure that there is nothing structurally wrong with it which could end up causing problems for anyone later on. Again, in order to ensure that the place can be kept safe, you will need to make sure that you are focused on having the essential in place in case of an emergency. That means knowing how many fire extinguishers, where they should be put, smoke alarms and the same, and ensuring that you have carried out a fire risk assessment every six months, with a clear plan for evacuation on the wall in every major area of the company.

Once the office is as safe as you can possibly hope for, you will need to think about keeping people personally safe. You need to have one person in a team who is first aid trained, and that should include someone who has been trained in CPR through the AHA instructor network. There should also be a fire safety marshal who can direct people out when there are drills or, of course, real fires. In order to really keep people safe, you will also need to think about training them regularly in their own safety concerns and responsibilities. The more you do that, the more likely it is that they will continue to be safe on the whole.

StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article |Managing Your People|A Guide To Keeping Your Employees Happy, Safe & FulfilledAs you can see, there is a lot involved to keeping people safe, but it is necessary to do so if you want to make sure that they are truly enjoying their work. Alone, however, happiness and safety are not enough. You also need to make sure that your people are fulfilled. And this is something that is much harder than the last two put together.

Fulfilled

What does it mean to be actively fulfilled in a job? Probably, this has slightly different meanings for everyone, but you need to make sure that you are at least doing something in order to help your employees get there, whatever it might mean for them. Actually, there are a few factors which we might say are going to be especially common amongst employees, and as long as you are paying respect to these things you should find that you have a workplace full of basically fulfilled people. So what should you be trying to do to make that happen?

Generally, your staff will be fulfilled if you make a point of making it clear to them how needed they are, what their place is in the grand scheme of the business, and why it matters so much. You should aim to remind them of their importance, as well as giving them the right level of responsibility for it, and more and more as you trust them more. This alone is most of the work of making the job fulfilling for them, but you should also make sure that you speak with them regularly, and do whatever you can to make their work as fulfilling as possible, in whatever way they feel is necessary for them as an individual.

Common Violations of Employment Law You Need to Know

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StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article | Entrepreneurship | Overtime | Common Violations of Employment Law You Need to KnowSeveral people in the United States have fair and excellent employers. However, we have some employers who violate the rights of their workers every single day. Some of them include break and rest violations and underpayment. In such a case, you have to know your rights and find a good employment lawyer to help you out.

Some employment law violations are common in the United States. The first one is failing to pay for overtime workers. These laws vary from one state to another but The Sattiraju Law Firm, P.C. can help you calculate your overtime hours and seek compensation. You are entitled to overtime pay unless you meet the set overtime exemptions. Some employers pay for overtime, but the amount of money they give is far much lower than what is legally acceptable. In such a case, you will need a highly skilled wage and hour dispute lawyer to help you out.

As an employee, you may also get compensation for not taking a non-paid meal period or any other rest breaks that you need to have legally. Some states expect employers to pay their workers extra for these services. If your employer frequently expects you to skip an unpaid meal or rest breaks, you must look for the help of wage and dispute hour attorneys to guide you. The Sattiraju Law Firm, P.C will make sure that you get full compensation for the working hours.

The other employment law violation takes place when employers classify statutory as ‘independent contractors.’ It will deny the worker several rights that he should be receiving like overtime, minimum wage, and other protections that the federal and state law provides. Some employers miscalculate the overtime amount genuinely. It can be a well-planned move that the employer uses to increase his profitability. You can clear out this issue by using a reputable employment law attorney. These legal experts will help you to determine whether your employer has misclassified you under the independent contractors.

You may also be entitled to some meal times and rest breaks that your employer doesn’t provide. Some of them may also fail to provide vocational pay and hence the employee will take home far less than what they deserve while the employee is benefiting unjustly. If you suspect that the employer is violating your rights, it is wise to seek legal help.

The incidences of violating the rights of workers in the United States are prevalent. However, some of them are not known because employees don’t know their rights. The cases range from miscalculating the status of employees to denying workers overtime pay. You may end up with more extended working hours, fewer breaks, and less income than is legally acceptable.

As a worker, you need to know your rights and seek professional assistance to defend you when there is the need. It will lead to a fair working environment that will see employees working safely and securely. You have to make sure that you are receiving adequate compensation depending on the services that you offer to the company.

6 Tips for Building High-Performance Teams

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StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article |High Performance Team|6 Tips for Building High-Performance TeamsIf you’ve been to any management seminar in the last few years, you may have heard the term “high-performance team” thrown around. But what exactly IS a high-performance team and why do you need one in your office?

While there’s no formal mandate to say exactly what a high-performance team is, it’s clear when you’re in one because everyone works together better. And, it’s clear when you’re not in one because everything is a struggle.

Creating a High-Performance Team

Creating a high-performance team doesn’t happen by chance; it involves hard work and picking the right people, even when you can’t always know that you’ve selected the right ones. It means looking at the leadership structure of the team with open eyes and being honest with your team about the style you want to work with.

Inspirational speaker and author of Leaders Eat Last, Simon Sinek, is famous for saying “people don’t wake up in the morning wanting to be managed”, and that couldn’t be more true for high-performance teams. Getting the top-down leadership right to begin with makes a huge difference.

What else can we do to encourage high performance out of our teams and turn a mediocre team into an incredible one? We have six tips that every potential high-performance team should follow.

Building Your High-Performance Team

1 Work With Personalities and Personal Strengths

The very first thing you must make sure of when building your high-performance team — or if you’re looking to turn around an under-performing team — is that you work with the personalities and the personal strengths of the people you have, not against them.

Personalities are a funny thing. Many of us have done the Myers-Briggs 16 personalities tests, which give an interesting insight into our personalities, but there are many more. Psychologists mostly agree that there are five personality traits, known as ‘the big five’. These are conscientiousness, openness, neuroticism, extroversion and agreeableness. Understanding how your team scores individually will allow you to see who will work properly together, as well as who won’t, and what tasks they will perform well on.

For example, someone who is high in openness is generally high in creativity, and someone who is low in agreeableness will probably be very detail orientated, but less creative. Knowing who scores highly and in what area will allow you to make sure the tasks are divided properly between the team members.

2. Collaboration and Communication

Good collaboration and communication for your team are vital, especially when it comes to project management and remote teams.

Remote teams, perhaps more so than those in an office setting, need to have open lines of communication. Whether that means you use a tool for keeping track of tasks, like Trello for example, or a tool for managing feedback from clients, or even a tool for managing your day-to-day collaborative calendars, getting the communication right is absolutely vital.

Open communication allows everyone to know where they are, what they are doing and who is doing what. It removes that “what is she doing?” or “why has he done this in that way?” line of questioning and speeds things up.

3. Rewards

Great teams need great rewards, whether that’s pizza on a Friday, a team building day every 12 weeks, or even just a congratulations where it’s required.

Building team morale helps when things are tough. For example, if teams know they are appreciated, they are likely to be higher in morale and happier to work harder. Be warned though, if a team feels like their reward is just a gimmick, like free pizza on a Friday, then it will backfire on you.

Your team is human, after all, and needs real responses to real-world problems, not fake gimmicks to trick them into working.

4. Risks

Risk-taking comes easier to some than to others. It’s usually easier for creative types to take risks than those who may be more logical, but taking risks as a team can pay off in the long run.

If you give your team the room to take calculated risks and to grow in confidence, it will pay back in dividends.

5. Personal Development

Personal development comes in all forms, but studies have shown that life-long learners make for happier employees and, as we all know, happier employees make for better team members.

There are not many people in high-performance roles who will be happy to plod along year after year without the investment they are due. It’s time to take this commitment further and really invest in your team.

Workplace coaching is great for this, and getting in an accredited coach to work with your team and instill a coaching culture in your workforce can make a huge difference to your whole team’s attitude.

6. Weed Out the Rot

This last tip is possibly one of the most important of all: it’s time to weed out the rot.

Everyone knows what this means, and everyone has worked with that colleague who just brings nothing to the table. They’re that colleague who is sullen and angry about everything; they are cynical and they can bring everyone’s mood down. Essentially, they are the rot that will set in and destroy a team.

Before you work on trying to find a way to get rid of this team member, try to figure out why they are like that. Of course, many people will be cynical and angry just because they are in the building, and it can’t be disregarded that some people just hate their jobs. But for some people, it is because they aren’t being challenged or supported enough.

If your company has a strong hierarchical structure, doesn’t support employees particularly well, has a lot of gossip and office politics, and doesn’t push people to better themselves, this can create resentment and low mood in employees, leading them to become angry and cynical and not productive.

High-performance teams are made up of all sorts of people and need a diverse range of thinkers to really achieve their goals. What kind of team will you build?