Stay Organized Whenever Possible

Any business owner receives countless emails on a daily basis, and when they all collect in one place, they can quickly become overwhelming. The issue with this is that, when you have to focus on too many messages at once, it’s more likely that you’ll miss important messages, focus on the wrong tasks, or even respond to messages thinking they are different ones, creating some messy confusion. If you can’t determine what’s important in your inbox, how can you even be productive? We recommend placing filters on your inbox so that you can determine a message’s importance, sender, topic, and even more to navigate and sort your inbox in the most efficient way possible.

Allocate Time to Your Inbox

You should always set aside a specific amount of time every day to deal with the emails you receive. If you don’t, chances are that you will get sidetracked by a task and possibly miss out on responding to important emails. One thing to keep in mind when considering how quickly you should respond to emails is that messages that are the most important aren’t going to come in your email inbox. The ones that are critical will likely come in other forms, such as someone within your organization knocking on the door or giving you a phone call to make the issue known.

Use Alternative Communication Methods

If you find yourself stuck with a perpetually full inbox, perhaps you could benefit from sending or receiving fewer messages. If the message is short or a simple notification, perhaps it would be better to use alternative means of communication, such as an instant message. This is particularly great, as it cuts down on the back and forth required for a quick conversation, as well as takes the urgency out of a situation.

Make a Quick Phone Call

Sometimes a matter is too important to leave to an email. In cases like this, making a phone call is the most prudent. Furthermore, meeting in person can take this advantage one step further, as you eliminate the possibility of intent being misconstrued altogether, making it much easier to be as clear as possible.

To learn more about how you can eliminate the pains of email, reach out to us at (604) 513-9428.

Method One: Clarify Roles

One of the first things that you should do is to ensure that everyone knows exactly what their role is with no misunderstandings. This will assist in establishing processes in which certain team members have a clear sense of what they are responsible for, and how that ties into the larger goal.

There are a few direct benefits that this transparency with your team can bring. First, you can give your team ample feedback into their performance and assign them new challenges and objectives to accomplish. Secondly, you can empower your team members to approach these objectives - all benefitting the same end goal - in their own way. By giving them this power over their own process, you encourage them to take ownership over their work and the end result.

I don’t know about you, but I’d rather produce something good if my name was going to be associated with it, if my contributions could be traced back to me.

Method Two: Praise the Team

One of the biggest obstacles to true teamwork is the ego. To avoid creating interpersonal tensions amongst your team through your praise, try praising the team as a unit. While giving one member of your team the spotlight can easily make the other members more jealous than anything else, focusing that spotlight on the team as a whole will help to improve the collaborative efforts of the team. You can always praise that team member in a one-on-one conversation.

There is one caveat to this: while you shouldn’t single out a team member in public, you should make sure that all work done within the team remains transparent. This visibility will help to discourage team members from slacking off and piggybacking on their coworkers, keeping everyone accountable for their share of the work.

Method Three: Encourage Staff Socialization

In order for your workforce to act as a team, they will need to see themselves as a team. This can be accomplished in a few ways.

The real key is to ensure that your staff is frequently spending time as a group.

In an operational sense, team meetings can be invaluable, so long as they also remain productive. Not only can these meetings provide your team with valuable facetime with one another, you can focus on your business’ strategy by analyzing your staff’s status reports side-by-side.

On the more casual side of things, there are a few ways that you can draw your employees closer together. Social activities can help to build camaraderie and friendly relationships. While it might seem corny, ice breakers can be a good way to get your team to open up to one another and, well, break the ice between coworkers. Otherwise, lunches or an after-work meetup for happy hour can help your team see each other as something other than just coworkers, but as friends. Even if nobody finds their “best friend forever”, your team will at least know each other better, allowing them to work together more effectively.

Method Four: Leverage Technology

Finally, if your team is going to act like a team, they’re going to need the tools that enable them to do so. This is what makes collaboration solutions so critical to the modern business. With the right solutions, your team can work cooperatively regardless of where they are, sharing and editing files together.

Of course, not every team member will need to see the same documents, based on their role, which is where the capability to assign network and file access permissions come into play. With these permissions, you can ensure that each team member can locate and access the files they need to be productive and contribute to the greater goals of the group.

Coleman Technologies can help you implement these technologies to support your other team-building endeavors - as well as the success of your business as a whole. To learn what else we have to offer, give us a call at (604) 513-9428.

The Development of the PDF
The PDF is best known for promoting the sharing of information as it was created. A PDF looks the same whether it is in digital format or if it is printed to paper, no matter what OS is being used. Before this format was created, sharing information between the two was extremely difficult, but in 1990, Adobe co-founder John Warnock wrote a paper titled A Camelot Project, in which he described the limitations of sharing information. He would go on to found Team Camelot, the group of software developers that created the PDF, a file that can be universally shared across all computing platforms.

At first, however, it held very little utility as users had to purchase Adobe Acrobat in order to use the file type. Team Camelot, however, built additional functionality as the Internet got more popular, and as its utility increased, it was eventually adopted by the International Organization for Standardization and opened up to the masses.

Advantages of the PDF
Nowadays, there are multiple types of PDFs, and their utility is tied to their makeup. The types are as follows:

• Digitally Created PDFs - PDF files created in a digital environment, whatever that environment might be (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Android, etc.). These PDFs are fully customizable and editable.
• Scanned PDFs - A Scanned PDF is effectively an image of a document. They are not inherently customizable, but there is software that can be utilized to change that.
• Searchable PDFs - Thanks to Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software adding an editable text layer to an image layer, a PDF becomes searchable. This process enables greater interaction with PDFs like this. In a document management system, many document scanners come with the kind of software users need to convert a scanned PDF into a searchable PDF. As such, it is a core component of a paperless office.

PDFs have shown to be extraordinarily useful for businesses. They are convenient to use, universally compatible, and can be extremely secure.

For more great technology information, return to our blog regularly.