Year: 2017

There will always be times when your employees need their spirits lifted. Whether they’ve been working really hard and are feeling run down or have been discouraged by some recent news, a lull in employee morale won’t do anything good for productivity. If your employees need some encouragement to do the job well, here are five ideas you could use.

Give Them Purpose

It’s easy to start feeling like your contributions don’t matter when you’re part of a large team. But, each and every member of a team is important. Sometimes, people need reminding of that. It can help to show your employees specific examples of what their contributions have achieved. Seeing the results of their hard work is a great way of encouraging them to keep going. For example, a customer service assistant may want to see the great feedback given from a customer they dealt with.

Always Reward Your Employees

For the most part, praise from an employer is enough to get an employee through a working day. However, being rewarded for a good job done will get far better results. Whether it’s treating a specific team to lunch or buying each and every employee online lottery tickets, rewarding hard work is a great way of telling your employees how proud you are of what they have achieved. Receiving a reward can make an employee reevaluate their attitude and reflect on the work they’ve done.

Be Flexible

There’s more emphasis than ever on flexibility in the workplace. No employee wants to be scared of approaching their boss when they desperately need time off. An understanding employer makes life much easier for employees. While you shouldn’t allow employees to walk all over you, there will be times when certain individuals need a little more flexibility, perhaps because of a family emergency. Employers need to maintain a content workforce. If employees know they won’t be chastised for having to put other aspects of their lives first, they’ll be more inclined to relax and work well.

Mix It Up

Do you usually have your staff meeting every Friday at 9am? Cancel it. Not only will it be a huge relief to most members of staff but it’s also different from the norm. Although routine is reliable and productive, it can also be downright boring and depressing. A bit of spontaneity in the office could be exactly what your workers need to sit up and take notice.

Healthy Competition

Sometimes, workers just need a bit of motivation to boost their morale. Nothing creates motivation like a healthy competition. How about starting a company football match and dividing the staff into two teams? The winners get to double their lunch break time. Or, why not get involved with an actual competitor? Create a team of your own and play against another business. It’s a great way of renewing determination in employees and restoring the need to beat the competition.

Boosting morale isn’t always easy, but when you need to, think about making the workplace into an environment everyone can enjoy.

If you’ve been running an online retail store or estore for a while, you’ve probably spent a fair bit of time and money making sure it’s secure. You’ve also probably worked your backside off trying to get any share of the market in this saturated world of online sales. If you’ve got great marketing skills, then you might be thinking about where your next product line is coming from. You understand your customer base, and you know what they’re looking for. So where can you find it?

Invent It

Tech savvy entrepreneurs know that new innovations and gadgets can create entirely new markets. If you’re struggling to be heard (or found), then maybe it’s time you thought about creating the products you know your customers will love. You can guarantee your own quality. You’ll know the product inside out. You’re perfectly placed to undertake all the research and development. So what’s stopping you?

The Idea

Creative people often have dozens of good ideas. What you need to do is narrow that down to the one great idea you can develop and turn into a real-life product. Be wary of how you do this. You need to make sure you’re offline, or you’re on a secure intranet or network. The last thing you want is someone stealing your ideas. Worse still, they might wait until you’ve done all the development first!

The Tech and Support You Need

Next, you need some third party support you can trust. Just getting your printed circuit boards designed is going to take time and a good CAD system that’s secure. If you look at websites like altium.com, you can find out more about how the big companies tackle this in their R&D stages. As a smaller enterprise, you might be slower too. You need the time and the tools to refine your product ideas and create the tech that will work.

Getting Ready To Test

Testing is another phase of manufacture that can be high-risk if left unsecured. You should also integrate some marketing tests at the same time to check customers actually understand what your product is about. Think about your POS and consider where social media campaigns can work to generate hype and excitement. Focus groups are best here, but if your testing circuits and networks, you need to monitor your equipment and outputs.

Launching

Before the big day, you are going to have to release some newsworthy PR about your new product. There is no hiding it now. Of course, once it is announced, it is technically safe. However, you need to be absolutely certain it’s not vulnerable. Hackers can and will get into any connected system, especially if you’re planning to profit from what you’ve built! Make sure there are fail safes against any direct invasion too. You can’t afford for your new product to become dangerous in any way.

Security is a big deal in product development. Make sure you can close the gates on any vulnerabilities. So what’s your big idea?

For many years now, the internet has opened us up to a wide range of possibilities, with the power to be able to do pretty much anything from anywhere you feel like, it can be easy to forget about making sure that you’re safe online.

With the increase of fraud and identity theft, hackers are thriving because many people around the world fail to ensure that they’re safe online. Sometimes, something as simple as not logging out of your Facebook account can give a hacker an opportunity to access many other aspects of your life and ruin them. Why do they do this? It’s usually with the hope of gaining information like your card details so they can take your money, but some hackers simply do it for ‘fun’. This article is going to give you some tips on how you can stay safe online.

1. Always logout of accounts even if it’s something as simple as a social media account. Once a hacker knows who you are they can do further digging and gain information on you.
2. Consider buying data protection for your systems so that you can rest assured that hackers can’t access your information. This is achieved by creating further obstacles for hackers to overcome, and being able to detect when something is out of the ordinary.
3. Be wary when using public WiFi. Many hackers gain access to people’s bank accounts by simply creating a ‘middle man’ when people are using internet banking through public WiFi. They do this by putting a page in front of the user that looks like what they were expecting, now all the user has to do is enter details and the hackers have full access to their accounts. If you need to check your bank, do it using a secured connection to prevent the chance of being hacked.
4. Create passwords that don’t make sense. Rather than using your dog’s name, try a series of symbols and letters (in upper and lower case) so that it’s harder for hackers to penetrate. Another good piece of advice when creating a password is to use a word twice because hackers’ systems wouldn’t detect that. For example, using ‘puppydogdog%£$$’ would be much safer than simply using ‘puppydog’.
5. Use a password protected router at home and work so that all of your information is encrypted. The more passwords the better.
6. Be careful with what links you’re clicking on when you’re browsing the internet. Links that you see on social media might not be safe and even a short period of time on that website could give hackers all of the access that they need to your information.
7. Always look for the green lock symbol within your browser to be able to identify if the website is safe. If you can’t see the lock, get off that webpage.

Apply these seven steps to your browsing routine and you will be able to protect yourself from fraud and identity theft! Stay safe on the internet!

Left brain or right brain? It’s a question that seems to be forced on us all the time as if making a binary choice between the world of tech, data and coding and the more creative career options out there is all we can do. But increasingly these days, people are looking to combine their interest in the arts with the possibilities of a technology-led career, and the choice certainly doesn’t have to be either/or. In fact, the point where creativity and logic meet can be startlingly inspiring. If you’re looking to combine the two areas, here’s just a flavour of the kind of arenas you could be operating in –  and who knows where you might be in ten years time:

Digital Product Design

An eye for technology and processes combined with ergonomics and splash of creative flair could well lead you down the path of product design. From web apps to digital products to physical objects out in the world, like cereal packaging design, you’ll need to drive projects with a vision that combines technical know-how with computer-aided design and a knowledge of aesthetics and what has consumer appeal. Knowing how things work and being able to apply that to a host of applications and products is a highly marketable skill. Familiarise yourself with multi-variate testing, graphic mock-ups, wireframing and site mapping to really understand your niche.

User Experience

Closely related, UX is big business these days, from disruptive start-ups to blue chips, as everyone competes for our shrinking online attention spans. UX articulates the emotional response of a consumer to site design and seeks to continuously optimise these in a relentless march down the sales tunnel to conversion nirvana. Constructing the architecture of a successful app or website is as much art as it is alchemy – there’s a ton of insight to be found in analytics, but a lot of subjectivity in design that leaves room for creative souls. From streamlining purchasing processes to creating branding guidelines, the scope of the work is highly varied.

Big Data Analytics

With data mountains stacking up around us all the time, and companies pushing to collect more and more information, there are heaps of untapped data lying around with companies desperate to analyse consumer behaviour and monetise it. It might be Machiavellian, but if you’re a bit of an armchair psychologist, such untapped access to behavioural analytics can be a playground. Defining user profiles, spotting macro and micro trends and translating them into workable strategies requires a keen eye for statistics, but also a massive dash of creative intuition to make the leap into saleable insight. Plus, the depiction of big data can literally be an art form if you’re feeling exceptionally creative…

Digital Animator

Web developers can use their coding magic to turn static designs into fully functioning realities, and creative problem solving and thinking outside of the box are skills in definite demand when it comes to this profession. There are opportunities to develop custom animations all round, and web development is definitely a skill best learned on the job. In fact, coding can be entirely self-taught, and can then lead you down the path of creating animations for other sites as a source of freelance work.

So there you have it – left and right brain, not destined to be mortal enemies after all, but creating viable and profitable careers paths in the brave new world.