We live in a time of great workplace transformation: employees are working from home more than ever now due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Remote work is no longer the exception, it’s the new paradigm. It isn’t the future of the office; it’s the here and now. So, why are companies closing their office doors and shifting their operations online? Because employees prefer it. Countless studies demonstrate the benefits of remote work: employees are happier, healthier, and more engaged in their work at home. They are 20 percent more productive and nearly twice as likely to work beyond 40 hours a week, a ..read more

Your communication strategy has a measurable impact on productivity. Do you have a plan for improvement in place? It’s easy to pay lip service to the importance of employee communication. The C-level suite and department heads can preach the virtues of keeping teams aligned with little effort, but eventually every organization faces the same question: is your company actually improving its communication strategy? If you’re struggling to come up with a solid answer, it might be time to find a solution. Why? Bettering your company’s communication leads to higher productivity, lower turnover ..read more

If your company’s still scaling, there’s a good chance you’ve read Scaling Up, by Verne Harnish, and you are interested in mastering the Rockefeller habits. More than 40,000 business leaders have reportedly relied on it to grow their businesses, and with good reason. This book is one of this century’s most important for startups, CEOs and entrepreneurs. About 145 pages into Verne Harnish’s popular book is a checklist of everyday functions that should be on autopilot: [Source: Gazelles.com] This checklist is where the concepts in Harnish’s book really become actionable. The theory is that ..read more

The saying “quality over quantity” holds in many facets of life—so why not use this mindset to plan productive meetings? If you read our post on the psychology of routine meetings, you know the difference between meetings that make teams more efficient and ones that aren’t truly essential. In this post, we’ll look at three key areas where social science can help us reinvent meetings to focus on quality, enabling teams to get the most out of productive meetings that are really, truly needed: Attendees: When two heads are worse than one Duration: Why less is more Time of day: How later can be b ..read more

Do you want to get more done in less time? Are you looking for new ways to improve work performance and reach actionable goals faster? These five unconventional methods may not be the first ideas that come to mind, but they definitely work. 1. Skip the afternoon coffee. And try matcha green tea in its place. Adopters of the beverage swear by its powerful antioxidant properties and ability to boost energy and metabolism without causing caffeine-induced jitters. 2. Leave your mornings wide open. Think you work best at night? Think again. Behavioral scientists claim we all have a two-hou ..read more

Which would you prefer? An employee who spends 60 hours a week at the office? Or someone who works smarter: accomplishing the same amount of work in just 30 hours? You’d go with the latter, right? When people can achieve goals faster, there’s more time to brainstorm big ideas and go after loftier goals with a productive team of happy employees. So why do American employers still reward long hours and expect 24/7 access? Despite proof that shorter work days can lead to better service, many U.S. businesses still measure success by time spent at the office.  Here’s what one productivity expe ..read more

Do you want to make your team more efficient and run productive meetings? Are you looking for easy ways to generate more revenue for your business? Have you evaluated your team meeting cost yet? Making the best of the time people spend in meetings is one of the most important things you can do to build productive teams and increase revenue potential. Studies show that U.S. businesses lose $37 billion a year to unnecessary meetings. One analysis showed how a weekly meeting drained a company of 300,000 work hours a year. Another outlined how easy it would be for the average big business to waste ..read more

Let’s talk about how to increase productivity. Specifically, what science says about it. We were curious to see what research has revealed about the constant quest to get more done and decided to do a little digging. Turns out, we humans are hardwired to develop certain habits that can quietly sabotage our own brains’ productivity potential. Can these habits be overcome? Certainly. Will it be easy? Not always. Where do you start? You’ll have to first understand how they develop in the first place. Here’s what research says are the biggest detriments to productivity: First, there’s procrastin ..read more

Wondering how to hold your daily scrum? What tool should you use? What method should you follow? There are a lot of options on the market; from email and messaging to video, and in-person meetings. Along with these options, you can find tools that are free, paid, or used for other needs in your business. Most importantly though, you need a daily scrum process that works for your team. This post will be a comparison of tools available to help you figure out what method and features you need to be most effective. Try Jell for Asynchronous Daily Standups Automated Daily Standup & Check-In ..read more

Confession time: I made a mistake—one that I’ve been working to correct. I’m hoping that sharing my missteps in building company culture will help save some of you from having to learn the same lessons the hard way. More specifically, my failure to define the culture that I wanted at my last startup from day one. It wasn’t that the team wasn’t engaged or enjoying the work. We were getting a lot done and were relatively in sync most days. But it wasn’t easy to describe the “why” behind the work we do. And the problem became immediately clear when we started hiring quickly. After hearing that a ..read more