Many enterprises are currently beginning to create Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) programs within their organizations. These programs allow employees to use their personal devices for work activities, further allowing them to be more productive from anywhere with an internet connection. These devices include mobile tablets, smart phones and laptops. Although expanding programs have really been lead by an increased demand from employees, the businesses see huge benefits as well. These benefits include increases in worker productivity, increased revenue and happier employees. Forrester conducted a survey recently to find out just how effective BYOD programs are within organizations. The statistics may surprise you. The study found that 70% of employees that use a tablet for work selected the tablet themselves. 67% of employees that use smart phones for work selected these smart phones themselves. Lastly, 46% of employees that use laptops for work selected the laptops themselves. Moreover, these devices were not purchased by the company; they were an employee expense. One may think that employees would be opposed to purchasing their own equipment, but another study conducted by Good Technology found that employees are happy to buy their own equipment. The reasoning is that employees can use devices they … Continue reading →

Telecommuting is quickly becoming the way of doing business. With technological advances, such as the expanded availability of the internet and communication software such as Rendezvous, employees can work from home. This can save corporations from needing to invest in large real estate offices, and employees can have a more balanced home-life. But what are the challenges to telecommuting? With the rapid expansion of telecommuting, challenges have arisen faster than companies are prepared to deal with them. Some of these challenges include potential security breaches, employee productivity and social isolation. One of the most serious problems that have arisen with telecommuting is the potential for confidential information to be compromised. If an employee is at a public location with Wi-Fi and they open sensitive information while there, the information can be compromised. The same issue exists if they do not have a secure network at home. A study in 2008 found that only 20% of companies took precautionary measures to keep sensitive information secure. Today, however, companies have begun realizing the severity of this matter and often if employees handle confidential information, they must have specific software installed on their home computers to keep the information secure. They also may … Continue reading →

Sometimes, when you are striving for more efficiency within your own organization, it’s a good idea to take a step sideways and look at the way other businesses operate. If you regularly organize business meetings, for example, consider the way airlines and hotels work. They both use something called yield management. In the airline industry it is used to adjust the prices of seats on planes according to demand. In the hotel world, it is used extensively to automatically assign the best price to a hotel room, depending on the hotel’s occupancy level. The last time you used an internet booking agency to get a four-star hotel room at a two-star price, you were using yield management without even knowing it. Hotels have large rooms and small rooms, some have more facilities than others. Just like meeting rooms. For hotels, balancing available space against revenue is all about juggling types of rooms, their facilities and their prices to ensure that rooms are filled at prices that are beneficial to guests and hoteliers alike. Do you begin to see the connection between the way hotel rooms and meeting rooms are booked and used? And if you are wondering how to make … Continue reading →

Recent advancements in technology have changed the way business is done today. Incredible software programs, such as Rendezvous Enterprise, allow for things such as video conferencing, appointment booking and AV from anywhere in the world with an internet connection. With this, today there are virtual programs for nearly every industry. We are thus seeing an army of professionals, such as lawyers, writers, architects, graphic designers, etc. all working from home. How do businesses feel about this shift? The topic of telecommuting has become a huge controversy within the corporate world. Decisions must be made as to whether or not employees will be allowed to work from home, and really, what the best business strategy is for each company. On one side of the coin, companies can save money if they can reduce office space and encourage employees to work from home. The other side of the coin poses the potential for employees to slack off without a boss physically overseeing them daily. With this, how can a company create a team environment without a centrally-located team? Although this debate is just beginning to catch wind, some companies have begun taking their stances. Yahoo is at the forefront of the opposing … Continue reading →

Are the business meetings you attend truly productive? If not, why not? It’s undoubtedly true that, today, we organize and attend more meetings in a working day than ever before. But there are good meetings and bad meetings. The success or failure of any meeting is largely down to human behavior and how it impacts on the way a meeting is organized and run. A successful meeting is not merely a success in itself, but equally in the way it is organized to impact most favourably on a company’s bottom line. A badly organized meeting can lower productivity. Do it right and improvements will be made to any organization. Much of it comes down to those behavior trends and their impact, what we might call the psychology of meetings. It’s about understanding, first and foremost if a meeting is really necessary. Booking early, but not indiscriminately, helps to ensure the right room is used for every meeting, that small meetings don’t end up in big spaces, or that facilities such as AV, video conferencing and catering don’t go to waste. It’s about balancing the use of internal against external space, about making sure that facilities managers know when a meeting … Continue reading →

Where do you stand on meetings? Here are two lines of thought. 1. Meetings are a necessity. They bring teams together, find ways of clearing obstacles, provide a forum for discussing complaints, discuss the way forward on current projects and generally deal with work-related goals. 2. Meetings are unnecessary. They are a waste of time and energy, interrupt workflow, have a negative effect on those forced to attend and can result in frustration and reduced productivity. Love them or loath them, we can’t get away from the fact that we organise and attend more meetings today than was ever the case in the past. The trick is to arrange the right kind of meeting, in the right place at the right time. There is a line of thought that says that, if you have a meeting coming up, try an experiment – cancel it and see what happens. It is possible that giving your workforce more uninterrupted time might actually increase productivity. But don’t let’s be too negative about this. The majority of meetings are both necessary and useful. Handle them right and improvements to any organisation or business will occur gradually, one meeting at time. To address these issues … Continue reading →