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Is It Time to Upgrade Your Office Setup?

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article | Is It Time to Upgrade Your Office Setup?

Whether it’s a home office or the top floor of the tallest building downtown, upgrading your office space can transform your business’ productivity more than you might expect. While you might have a sleek and stylish office already, it can always be better. Upgrading your office could spark increased creativity, satisfaction, and a feeling that you and your employees can get this done, whatever this might be.

But where do you fall behind when trying to upgrade your office? There are so many things to consider, from the equipment you use to your surroundings. Here are some tips on what to consider upgrading your office setup and reaping the benefits.

The Equipment

Whether it’s your computer, office chair, desk, printer, or even desk toys, upgrading the equipment in your office can make everything run smoothly. If you’re looking for increased comfort, investing in better ergonomic chairs for you and your employees will prevent the back stains and complaints. Likewise, company-provided laptops will make it easier for everyone to complete work from home.

When upgrading your office chairs, you have many options available. For instance, many modern office chairs are popular because they have ergonomic, aesthetic designs. They’re usually made of metal and leather for durability and longevity. For instance, Steelcase office chairs and other ergonomic chairs have either aluminum or platinum base with steel adjustable armrests, leather backing, and seating. They deliver full support for different body sizes and shapes, providing a perfect fit.

As mentioned, you may also want to upgrade your office desks. Office desks come in different designs. You might want to install standing desks, like adjustable height desks, to promote your employees’ comfort. This type of desk is adjustable to prevent unhealthy, prolonged sitting. Furthermore, you can install corner desks to use office space efficiently.

In addition, a vital factor to consider when upgrading your office desk is the surface material. Whether you prefer one with some storage drawers below or a desk to securely hold your desktop computer, the material reflects how the desk feels and looks in the office.

There are too many businesses that rely on old equipment because they don’t feel it’s worth upgrading it. But outdated equipment can ruin productivity and lead to nothing but frustration for your staff. If you’re looking for a happy office with top morale, the best place to start by investing in shiny new toys for them to play with.

The Systems

Network systems are something you must keep up to date, as this ensures that you can keep your data and information safe from hackers and similar security threats. Investing in robust Network Cabling Services will make this a reality and also mean that you have a system you can rely on.

It might also be worth thinking about upgrading the operating systems that your company uses. While most people will use Windows 10 or macOS 10.15, company computers seem, curiously, stuck in the past, with some machines still running Vista. While this could be considered more secure than others, it also cannot handle the programs that could be beneficial for your business, so even jumping up to the next generation would make a huge difference.

The Energy

Being energy efficient is a significant thing in the modern business world, and it doesn’t matter if you work from home or run a large office, you want to do everything you can to save money on your energy bills.

Upgrading from your existing, migraine-inducing fluorescent lights for something more comfortable on the eyes is the first step. Still, you can also consider looking for a way to bring more natural light into the office. It is, however, unlikely that you’ll be able to replace windows outright. Even so, you can think about rearranging the office layout to make the most of the light and space available.

The Surroundings

No one wants to sit in a dull and study office, but while you don’t want to fill it with too many distractions, such as a ping pong table or something similar, it doesn’t mean you can’t still have fun with the overall design of the office.

Everything from employee artwork to house plants dotted around will create an atmosphere that you and your employees will be glad to work in. It will provide a sense of personality to the office’s overall style and design, and make it a place where you and your staff will feel comfortable, relaxed, and ready to get on with the day.

The Policies

If you’ve not already noticed, the professional world is changing. Companies are embracing the opportunities of working remotely, allowing flexible hours, as well as outsourcing tasks that will help others free up their time so they can perform better.

It could be that it’s time for your office to update its policies and see the benefits that doing so can bring. Studies show that flexible working can increase employee productivity, despite some believing the contrary. This will only prove beneficial to your business and the morale of everyone in the office.

Space to Breathe

Not every office needs to be a painfully minimalist adventure in subtlety. You can use it to reflect your company and your employees. The days of the stuffy office are long, long gone, now it’s all about personality and oomph to motivate and drive employees, even if the only employee is yourself. Whether you are upgrading your office systems or its surroundings, there is always something that you can explore to boost your satisfaction, security, and quality of service.

Does Your Company Website Look Professional?

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Company Website|Does Your Company Website Look Professional?It’s important that your company website gives off a professional feel. Consumers are unlikely to trust you if your website feels amateurish or overly informal. To help your company look professional, here are a few steps that you can take.

Use suitable fonts and colors

Kaleidoscopic colors and kooky fonts should be avoided – unless you’re promoting a fun or wacky product. Stick to formal easy-to-read fonts and keep to no more than three main colors (one of these colors should reflect your brand). Serpstat offers a great guide on choosing fonts and colors when designing a site.

Use high quality images

It’s important that any images you use are high quality. If you use photographs of you or your products, make sure that they are taken by a professional photographer or someone that knows what they’re doing. Avoid using generic stock images – you don’t want customers to have seen the same image on someone else’s site. Images should ideally be large. Be wary of high resolution images as they may slow your site down.

Avoid generic templates

If your website was built using WordPress, make sure that you’re not using a basic template, otherwise your site will look identical to a hundred others out there. It’s worth playing around with themes and paying for WordPress plug-ins such as Elementor Pro in order to give your website a unique feel. Alternatively, you could pay a website designer to build a site for you from scratch.

Add a favicon

Favicons are small images that display on your browser’s tabs. Uploading a favicon is a small way to make your website feel more professional. This could be your company logo or a symbol that you think sums up your business. There are tools online that can help you create a favicon.

Make sure that it’s mobile-friendly

Most modern sites are mobile-compatible, but not all sites are necessarily mobile friendly. When people visit your site on a mobile device, ideally you want them to be sent to a mobile-friendly version. This should contain larger fonts and call-to-action buttons that are big enough to be tapped with a finger. Consider paying a developer to create a mobile-friendly version of your site if you don’t have one (or design a responsive site that adapts to all devices).

Keep it simple

A professional website doesn’t need to be complicated. In fact, too many flashy animations, auto-play videos and pop-ups could slow down your site and generally annoy visitors. Focus on creating a website that is easy to navigate with clear call to action buttons telling people how to get in touch or buy your product. Avoid large walls of text and try to break up information into concise chunks, while answering questions that customers are likely to have such as ‘who are we?’ and ‘why choose us?’. If visitors can easily get to the information that they need, they’re more likely to convert to customers – flashy sites that take ages to load and complicated check-out processes will drive people away.

How to Run a Business from Home

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Run a Business from Home|How to Run a Business from HomeThe idea of starting a business is something that appeals to a lot of people, but there are some restrictions that might stop them from going forward with their dream. One of these is that they feel the need to have an office or business premises away from home. Although this will be true of cafes, restaurants, retail stores and the like, there are many other businesses which you can start and run successfully from home.

If this ideal appeals to you and you want to use your home to run a business from, there are things you will need to consider and put in place to be productive and successful. Read on to find out what some of them are.

Have a Dedicated Office Space

It may not be possible if you live in a small apartment, or if you share your home with lots of other people, but if you can find a space to use solely as an office you will find that working from home is much easier.

This could be a guest bedroom, for example, or a playroom that the kids no longer use. You could extend up into the attic or use the basement. You might even have a custom-made building put up in your backyard.

Although this might been like a lot of trouble and expense to go to if you could simply work at the kitchen table or in your bedroom on a makeshift desk, it will help you be more productive, and ultimately more successful, if you have somewhere you can call your own. You won’t have to keep moving your work so that other people can use the space and you can effectively shut everything away at the end of the day, offering a better work life balance.

Have a Special Phone Line

People will want to be able to get in touch with you and that means an email address and a phone number. An email address is simple to set up and can be done in minutes for free. The phone number, however, is slightly different. You could give your cell number, and although this is perfectly fine, it can be seen as a little unprofessional. You could give your home number, but what if someone else needs to use the phone, or what if someone else answers it and has no idea what the person calling needs or wants? This will also look unprofessional.

The ideal solution is to have a virtual phone line set up. This will give a landline number for customers to call and it can be diverted to your cell so that you know to answer in a professional manner. There are different plans at virtualhostedpbx.net to look at and you should be able to find something that suits you and your business in terms of budget and ease of use.

Be Organized

Organization is key in any business, but perhaps even more so when you work from home. It can get very confusing when you have your work and personal life mixing so closely, so you need to be extremely organized, allowing time for work and time for home life. Have a schedule in place and try to stick to it as much as you can. This will help you stay happy and keep you productive, too.

The Importance of Lifelong Learning for Professional Development

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StrategyDriven Professional Development Article |Lifelong Learning|The Importance of Lifelong Learning for Professional DevelopmentWhat do the likes of Michelangelo, Gandhi and Eleanor Roosevelt have in common? They have all advocated the importance of fostering a love of learning and continuous personal growth. These values are synonymous with the idea of lifelong learning, which is the ongoing process of pursuing knowledge, be it for personal or professional reasons.

Without really thinking about it, most people believe that their education is over when they graduate from high school or university. However, formal schooling is only fundamental. There are countless opportunities beyond it to further your knowledge in a specific field.

While that happens to everyone all the time, lifelong learning involves actively maintaining a focus on learning and development. In doing so, you can make leaps and bounds in your career. It can even help you finally start a business and is instrumental in building a company that flourishes in today’s unforgiving economy.

To drive the point home, let’s take a closer look at the importance of lifelong learning for professional development.

Employability

A quality valued by all employers is the desire to learn and develop, often called a growth mindset.
By demonstrating this, you show that you’re willing to go the extra mile and continuously make an effort to become better at what you do. Employees with this ability are most likely to move up the ranks and achieve the most in their respective fields.

Many people who find themselves in a position of unemployment make the mistake of thinking that job-seeking is their only option. While helpful, just as important is using your free time to take advantage of any coaching, training or mentoring opportunities that are available to you. This can help you escape unemployment sooner.

Advancement

Employers also pay particular attention to people who have transferable skills.

For instance, let’s say two employees are potential candidates for a promotion to chief marketing officer. The one who possesses skills beyond those required in marketing such as communication, listening, creativity and problem solving, will naturally be more likely to get the job than the one who is nothing more than a marketing guru.

Lifelong learning contributes to a broader set of skills that increases your advancement opportunities. In addition, you have the ability to enter different sections within your career path, or even outside of it. This can make for a more interesting and exciting work life where you frequently enjoy new experiences.

Prospects

Not everyone is lucky enough to land their dream job after school. This can lead to an unsatisfactory and unfulfilling career, even when the pay check is more than sufficient. Lifelong learning can help alleviate the situation by equipping you with the knowledge and expertise required to enter the field you really want to work in.

Depending on how you learn, you can even obtain qualifications that are versatile in nature, meaning that your career prospects aren’t limited to a specific industry or field. This is true for many different programs, a Master’s in Business Administration (MBA) being a good example. This post from Aston University details more information about the career prospects of an MBA.

Resources
The benefits of lifelong learning for professional development are clear and simple. But what resources are available to facilitate your new pursuit of knowledge? Plenty. The following are a few to help you get started:

  • The Internet: From simple resources like blogs and discussion forums to fully-fledged online courses and programs, the internet is the ultimate resource for learning anything.
  • Mentors: Someone with knowledge and experience in a field that you’re interested in can teach you what you need to know and reveal unseen areas for improvement. They can also help you avoid the mistakes they made when they were in your position.
  • Literature and Books: Whether bought online or read at the library, traditional literature is no less relevant today than it was before the internet.
  • Internships: Any form of apprenticeship can help you learn from qualified professionals and gain valuable hands-on experience.

These are just some of the resources you can utilise to participate in lifelong learning and contribute to your professional development. Let’s end things by looking at how lifelong learning can benefit your personal life.
The great thing about learning is that it doesn’t even need to have a specific purpose, as the act can be a rewarding experience in and of itself.

Compared to passive activities like watching television or playing videogames, learning is far more rewarding and has lasting benefits. Plus, it’s guilt-free. Knowledge is and always will remain synonymous with power.

How You Can Protect Yourself as a Business Owner

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StrategyDriven Risk Management Article |Protect your Business|How You Can Protect Yourself as a Business OwnerRunning a business is challenging and can be extremely stressful at times. Many things can go wrong, from losing a client or a slump in sales to an employee threatening legal action against you. This is why you must have things put in place to protect your business and yourself as the business owner. Here are some ways that you can do this.

Insurance

Every business needs insurance, and it is illegal to being trading without it. There are many different covers you can have included in your policy, but things like errors and omissions, business interruption, general liability, and worker’s comp cover are the most common. Your insurance policy will help protect you financially and legally for things that are included in the policy. Even if you think certain events are unlikely to happen, it’s better to protect yourself against unforeseen circumstances that could potentially ruin your business.

Employment Law

If you’re going to hire employees to work for your company, which is most likely, it’s worth becoming familiar with the employment laws. It’s better than you have at least some basic understanding of what your rights are as an employer and what your obligations are to your staff. If you are struggling to comprehend the employment law, seek the advice of an attorney who can explain this to you in terms that you understand.

Accountant

Your business finances are essential. Without a healthy revenue stream coming in, your business will struggle to stay afloat and could potentially go bankrupt. It can be challenging to control your finances effectively, especially if your sales are taking a hit. However, you still need to make regular outgoing payments for this like rent on office space, employee wages, bills, and so forth. Hiring the help of a professional accountant could help you protect your business’s financial health by advising you on areas where you can save money and how to make the best reinvestments into the business. They can also monitor any suspicious activity that appears in your accounts, which could save you from legal issues and financial ruin.

Human Resources

Smaller businesses might not be able to hire a specific HR team, but every business should have an HR representative to protect both the company and the staff. HR is responsible for mediating and taking record of conversations regarding grievances in the workplace, whether that be between two staff members or an employee and the employer. They will try to resolve the issue at work to avoid it escalating to legal action; however, if this does happen, they will also be there to help with the situation along with the hired legal time.

Contracts

Finally, you should always have contracts drawn up for anyone you are doing business with. From employees to suppliers, having these contracts in place will be proof that you have agreed on specific terms of service. They will also make the other party more comfortable and hold you accountable for your end of the agreement.

You must protect yourself as a business owner. Many things could go wrong, therefore, don’t allow yourself to get caught out by not thinking about these basic things that you should have in place.