3 Steps to Building Your Own Innovation Machine (Part 3)
Here comes another question – how can we better learn from the experience we get? Eric Ries, already mentioned above, uses an efficient way to tackle problems. I am talking about root-cause analysis or “five whys.” Imagine that the problem you’ve faced has the same structure as a Russian doll. The “root cause” of it is hidden inside, and you have to remove several layers to get to it. Just as you take one doll out of another, you ask a question “Why did this happen?” five times. Each response takes you one layer deeper to the problem cause. The technique is quite easy, but when practiced regularly, it gives you a lot of great insights about what needs adjustment in your company. One of such insights is that there is always a process/human issue behind every technical one. For example, imagine that you increase the investment in advertising, but the return from it is not proportional. Why did that happen? It seems that the quality of leads dropped. Why did that happen? Because we didn’t have a quick feedback loop between the money put into advertising and the output from advertising that we get. Why didn’t we have that feedback loop? Because we didn’t know how to properly score leads. Why didn’t we properly score leads? Because no one did statistical data analysis. Why didn’t we mine the data? Because the process didn’t allocate time for someone to periodically mine the data. The next step of implementing root-cause analysis is to make a proportional investment to correct each level of the problem. It helps you to avoid both ignoring and over-reacting to a minor problem. In the case above, the decisions could be to allocate some time for data mining, to score the leads, to feed that data back to analytics, and to adjust advertising campaigns based on that. You address the problem on all levels with an incremental improvement. Every time you face a problem, you make an effort to improve the company at multiple levels with small steps. If the problem is more complex than you thought, it will keep occurring, and every time it reoccurs, you will make an incremental improvement, until it is finally solved. This way, you invest your time and money only into the part of your business that needs it the most. “Lean startups” are lean. You can see that this method combines learning and doing, continuously changing your company as you learn. This fits perfectly in the frame of continuous learning. To close, I also want to mention the importance of your own unique vision for the product. I don’t mean to suggest that the shortest way to success is to simply follow every customer’s request. Those requests will often pull the company in different directions, and you don’t want to be doing Brownian motion. This is where the art mixes with the science and produces brilliant results. What about your professional experience? How do you normally deal with failures in your business?
3 Steps to Building Your Own Innovation Machine (Part 2)
John Wanamaker, considered by some to be the father of modern advertising, once said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is, I don’t know which half.” By using carefully designed experiments, you can do a better job than Wanamaker. For example, all professional advertisers today know about conversion tracking and A/B testing. These are basic tools of the trade for specialists in marketing or advertising that enable them to evaluate the effect of every small change in banner ads, landing pages and e-mails. But this kind of testing can only answer tactical questions and normally doesn’t affect business strategy. Is it possible to make the whole business structure respond to this type of feedback? "Lean startups," a term popularized by Eric Ries, are particularly successful at doing this. The main idea of a “lean startup” is to deploy a minimum viable product and test it as soon as possible. In today’s software world, it’s possible to release software updates several times a day, continuously getting feedback on every 20 new lines of code and aligning the direction of the product. This way, “lean startups” meet customers’ needs much faster than big companies, like Microsoft, which have a multi-year release cycle. In fact, staying in contact with customers throughout the creation of a product is the only way to make something they will actually use. This is especially true for the new companies coming up with new products. They always have to act in an unknown environment, relying only on their hypotheses. “No business plan survives first contact with a customer,” says Steve Blank, well known in the start-up community as the father of Customer Development theory. Our assumptions about what our customers need are no more than assumptions before we actually talk to customers and test the assumptions. Thanks to Web technologies, getting closer to customers has become a lot easier. We can regularly receive their feedback, without even getting out of the room. Still, don’t get too comfortable, since the dry bits, numbers and characters, while easy to aggregate, are often superfluous. So, at least initially, it’s very important to get out of your office and speak directly to your customers, person-to-person. You will see your product in a way you’ve never seen it before. But this will be no more than a set of interesting facts without taking the next step – learning from the feedback you got and aligning your product vision and business strategy according to it. I will speak about this in the last post of this series.
3 Steps to Building Your Own Innovation Machine (Part 1)
Recently, I read an interesting book by Peter Sims, “Little Bets,” which brings up a really important question: can failure, in fact, take us further than success? The answer is: yes, if we know how to deal with it. While interviewing the executives at Amazon, General Motors and Google, as well as successful musicians, architects and comedians, Sims discovered one thing they had in common. All of them used the same approach of relentlessly “making little bets” to test their new ideas, even if they were not sure about their success. Most of these bets ended up as failures, but five or six out of 100 turned out to be the breakthroughs. According to Sims, in most cases, there’s no mysterious genius behind the great achievement, but perseverance and the willingness to take small risks. In this series of posts, I’ll analyze how failures nurture success and describe how learning through failures can help you develop your business into a real innovation machine. Through hardship to the stars! Low-cost experimentation The idea of “successful failure” is familiar to many successful software entrepreneurs. For instance, Randy Komisar names “the culture of constructive failure” as the main reason that Silicon Valley became the world’s innovation center. In his “Getting to plan B” framework, Komisar suggests including in the business plan the ability to quickly adjust it. All plans have assumptions, and Komisar’s idea is to focus on the most risky assumptions first and devise your work in a way to test your risky hypothesis in the market as soon as physically possible. Businesses can hardly afford big failures financially, so the key is finding a way to minimize the cost of experimentation. Getting feedback as fast as possible can save you a lot of time and money you could otherwise lose by going in the wrong direction. That sounds obvious, so obvious that you might be tricked into thinking that you are already doing your best job there. Sometimes it’s the case, but oftentimes some thinking out of the box can help you save a lot of effort and money. For example, in the software business, a traditional approach is to develop the software and then try to sell it. An approach in the spirit of Komisar’s ideas would be to create a quick prototype, a mock demo, or a simple “slideware” and sell a contract with an advance delivery date. That’s, of course, if your biggest risk is market adoption. If you can’t sell it because nobody needs it, well, you’ve just saved a lot of money on developing software that nobody needs. Some people are defensive and want to buy more time to tweak their solutions before presenting those solutions to the real world. This big bet works for a selected few visionaries, and the media is always quick to highlight those stories. But the truth of the world (at least in the eyes of Peters Sims, Randy Komisar and yours sincerely) is that in most cases, you’ll get much further with small bets, fast feedback and applying your boldness to facing a failure, rather than to doubling the failing bets. To be continued…
Who Buys the Cake? Tackling Gender Inequality in the Workplace
The past 18 months of increased remote work have made us all question what we want from our office culture – from whether a commute is really necessary to whether the "increased productivity" it creates is actually just a facade. After all, as The Washington Post reports, up to 80% of US workers are as productive (if not more productive) when they work from home. This period has also made us question whether some aspects of ‘office culture’ can actually be quite detrimental to equality in the workplace. One of those aspects is the arbitrary division of certain tasks by gender that often go unrewarded. A recent article by Nieman Labs explained it is not your female colleagues’ job to buy you cake. Let us explain. In your office, who tends to organize the leaving cards, the birthday cakes, or even the Secret Santa? As the Harvard Business Review outlines, unfortunately, these tend to be carried out by women, and are what they call “non-promotable tasks.” Not only are women more likely to volunteer for these kinds of tasks, but they are also more likely to be asked to do them, and to say yes when asked. As this report details, taking these tasks on (and indeed, saying no to them) tends to have a negative impact on their career prospects, and ultimately, increase gender inequality in the workplace. And as one study published in the American Sociological Review found, although women are more likely to be described as "helpful" or "community-oriented" in their performance evaluations, this was not associated with receiving the highest performance rating (for men or women). The simple solution? These tasks need to be divided at a management level, or as Niemen Labs puts it, “managers buy the cakes.” So, why can gender roles in the workplace be so detrimental? This expectation at work is especially detrimental when you account for what sociologists refer to as “the second shift” of extra household duties that many working women must complete after work each day. As a recent article by Vox explains, although women may be more likely to want to work from home than men, they have a harder time doing so. Women (and especially mothers) working from home tend to report higher rates of stress, depression, and hours clocked. “In other words, women need more flexible work arrangements, because women have more to do.” Of course, not eradicating supposed gender roles at work can also have a negative impact on men. One of these destructive gender stereotypes is that men should prioritize work over family. As Thekla Morgenroth, a research fellow in Social and Organisational Psychology at the University of Exeter, told the BBC: “Men who do take parental leave can therefore face backlash and be seen as weak, lacking work commitment and so on, which can result in consequences at work such as being demoted or not taken seriously. Men are, of course, aware of these potential consequences, and this could definitely contribute to them deciding against taking parental leave even if it's offered.” How do we tackle that? Sarah Forbes, a researcher at Birmingham University Business School, suggests visible “fatherhood champions” at companies, both to inspire fathers to take leave and improve their knowledge of leave provisions. Calculating the cost of gender inequality in the workplace Unfortunately, the nature of discrimination tends to be cross-sectional, meaning that Black women don’t just have to contend with gender discrimination at work; they also may experience racial discrimination. For example, The Guardian reports that Black women in the US have to work 19 months to earn what white men earn in one year. In fact, Black women are only paid 63c to every dollar that non-Hispanic white men earn, equating to a potential loss of $946,000 over a lifetime. To combat this, the report iterates performing regular pay audits and creating a plan to address significant pay gaps for employees with similar roles and experience but who may differ only by race or gender. Building equality and inclusivity into workplace language There are other powerful ways we can target gender inequality in the workplace for a better division of what The Financial Times calls ‘office housework.’ One of these is the role of language and how gender-coded language can affect employees. According to the BBC, as we tend to associate particular language and behaviors with particular genders (‘agentic’ with male and ‘communal’ with female), using this language in job advertisements can put off great candidates from applying for particular roles. John Fiset, of Canada’s Saint Mary’s University, shares an example of the two from actual job posts: Communal: “We’ll support you with the tools and resources you need to reach new milestones as you help our customers reach theirs.” Agentic: “Tell us your story. Don’t go unnoticed. Explain why you’re a winning candidate.” It’s a simple adjustment to make but a powerful one. One so powerful that behavioral designer Kat Matfield created an online tool called Gender Decoder so you can check your job descriptions for subtle gender bias. What each person can do to tackle gender inequality in the workplace Each day, there are simple steps each of us can take to strive for better equality in the workplace. These include (but are not limited to): End imposter syndrome: Have direct conversations with employees about perceived inadequacies and what you can do about them, have empathy and share your own experiences. Take time to understand the biases that women (particularly women of color) may encounter and see what you can do to tackle these. Be an ally for female employees: Share your time generously with female colleagues and be available for impromptu support. Ensure you make an effort to share their wins and to be heard in meetings. Finally, make an effort to ensure office housework is evenly distributed and normalize saying “no” if not. As our workplaces evolve post-pandemic, it’s time to leave antiquated ideas of gender roles behind and promote equal pay, less burnout, and equal time with our children. It is the perfect opportunity to do what we can to tackle gender inequality in the workplace once and for all.
7 Ways Employers Can Support Working Parents, Including Childcare and Hybrid Working
Being a working parent has always come with challenges: time spent working in an office is time spent away from raising children. If you get called into a meeting, you might have to skip your child’s drama performance; if you have to work late, you might miss tucking your kid in before bed. As we ease out of the pandemic, now is the time to consider ways employers can support working parents better. As women began entering the workforce generations ago, children often became ‘latchkey’ kids from a fairly young age if one of their parents wasn’t able to take care of them before returning from work. In recent times, though, parents have relied heavily on daycare, grandparents and relatives, after-school programs or sports, or full-time nannies to take care of children while they work. Before the pandemic, most working parents were expected to be in an office full-time. This meant that many parents had to coordinate dropping kids to school, bringing them to doctor’s appointments, cheering them on at the soccer field, or watching them in the school play — all while making it to the office on time. For parents who needed to commute, kids might be dropped to daycare at the crack of dawn and not picked up until suppertime. The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a significant increase in flexibility for many working parents, thanks in large part to the rise of hybrid working. Many working parents are now able to drop their kids to school or make it to performances or appointments because flexible remote working has become normalized. However, hybrid working isn’t a solution in itself. Workplaces and employers need to support working parents in a more holistic fashion, from offering childcare subsidies as an employee benefit to creating programs that help employees feel a stronger sense of belonging at work. What does the current childcare landscape look like for working parents? Before the pandemic caused a seismic shift in the way we work, finding, scheduling, organizing, and even affording suitable childcare was difficult for many working parents. If kids were sick or a childcare worker didn’t show, parents were left trying to pick up the pieces — and still make it to the office. With the pandemic-induced shift to remote working, previous childcare conundrums paled in comparison to working at home with no childcare at all. Many parents were expected to keep productivity up while somehow overseeing remote learning for multiple children and keeping them occupied throughout the day without so much as a playdate. Needless to say, that situation was untenable for many working parents, leading 40% of working parents to make changes to their jobs and 17% of women to leave work altogether. The attrition due to the pressures on working mothers in the COVID-19 era isn’t over, though, because according to a study on Women in the Workplace by McKinsey, “as many as two million women are considering leaving the workforce.” Why should bringing women back into the workforce matter for businesses? Getting women back into the workforce is key to a strong economic recovery in the aftermath of the pandemic, according to the U.S. Labor Secretary, Marty Walsh. “We need to make sure if we're going to have a strong recovery — a strong, equitable recovery — we need to get women back into the workforce,” Walsh explained. Walsh further commented that childcare remains a critical factor in ensuring that women can indeed return to the workforce and affect change in the greater economy. As offices reopen and working parents are making decisions about how they plan to return post-pandemic, many parents favor hybrid working to accommodate their needs in taking care of their children. In a study of 1,000 randomly selected working parents in the UK, “76% of all mothers and 73% of fathers surveyed wanted to work flexibly to spend more time with children.” Only 16% of those surveyed expressed an interest in working from the office full-time, due to the flexibility that the hybrid model provides for working parents. What can businesses do to help parents in the workplace? Workplaces have clear incentives to actively help working parents, in particular working mothers — both to create a diverse employee panel and to contribute to the overall economic recovery. As offices reopen and employers look to attract and retain highly skilled talent, here are some initiatives they can undertake to assist working parents. Offer hybrid working options: Hybrid working options give parents the flexibility to drop kids to school and daycare, pick them up, or take care of children who are sick. Hybrid working also eliminates commuting time for working parents on the days they work remotely, giving them additional time with their families. Wrike, as a Citrix company, has offered employees the option to avail of their choice of full-time office, full-time remote, or hybrid working scenarios. Create programs for employees that enhance their sense of belonging in the workplace: Working parents can often feel isolated as employees, struggling with responsibilities that they aren’t typically encouraged to share with others. Programs like a company parents group chat or coffee chat on Zoom can create a stronger attachment to the workplace, making it more likely that those employees will continue their employment at their company. Provide a childcare subsidy to employees: Just like healthcare has become an important item in a list of company benefits, childcare subsidies are likely to become increasingly enticing to potential and current employees who have children or are considering having children in the future. Offer on-site childcare options: Large companies sometimes have the ability to provide on-site childcare to their employees in an effort to lessen the burden on working parents who might otherwise not be able to see their children for many hours at a time. On-site childcare options mean that employees are able to see their children during their lunch breaks and commute with them rather than only see them when they pick them up from daycare. Help employees access employee assistance programs: Company employee assistance programs (EAPs) are often designed to help employees with tricky issues such as finding childcare or a realtor. However, some EAPs aren’t exactly user-friendly, and busy working parents might find them difficult to access. Helping employees access the help in EAPs can increase the rate at which they’re utilized. Encourage all employees to maximize work-life balance: Some benefits may carry a stigma that keeps working parents from taking advantage of them. For instance, encouraging all employees (not just parents) to use all of their vacation days will de-stigmatize that practice and help working parents spend more time with their families. Likewise, encouraging all employees to avail of flexible scheduling or hybrid working will reassure working parents that this benefit isn’t frowned upon. Create a parent support forum: Providing opportunities for parents to support each other is a free way of assisting working parents. Employers can create a forum where parents can share babysitter or daycare recommendations (if many employees are in the same geographic area) or offer hand-me-downs to fellow team members when their children outgrow them. Employers can and should support working parents as the global workforce eases slowly out of the pandemic into what will be the new normal. Elements that were incorporated into daily work during the pandemic, like remote and hybrid working options as well as robust employee assistance programs, can continue to help ease the burden on working moms and dads in the future. These kinds of improvements to the workplace will help increase the likelihood that parents will be able to continue to thrive in their employment as well as at home.
Top 3 Trends Shaping Project Collaboration
Collaboration remains a hot topic because it still works. In fact our CEO recently wrote a guest post on Inc.com stating that collective wisdom, crowdsourcing, and project collaboration are essential for the growth of a business or movement today — they should be integral parts of every company's DNA in order to survive and thrive. If you look at the factors that enable collaboration to occur on a massive scale, you’ll see three main trends shaping project collaboration and driving the adoption of new tools in many organizations. Let’s take a look at these trends one by one: Trend 1: Remote Work is Rapidly Spreading Today, the fact that I can easily decide to work from home as needed is a huge change for me. Ten years ago, that would’ve been impossible with the companies I was working for and with the technology available to me. But you don't need to look back that far to notice how the times have changed. Wrike recently surveyed over 1,000 employees and discovered that 43% of them currently spend more time working remotely than they did 2-3 years ago. Moreover, 80% of respondents now deal with remote workers on a daily basis, either working with distributed colleagues, or as remote workers themselves. These figures show remote collaboration growing and infiltrating the workplace at an impressive pace. And this growth isn't exclusive to specific industries or organization sizes, either. It's becoming more and more common for every kind of business to have people collaborating across multiple locations. Trend 2: Accidental Project Managers are Multiplying Then there is the rise of the “accidental project manager” — those who must take on a project management role out of necessity. They usually lack any formal certification in PM, or may be new to established PM methodologies and practices. According to our survey on remote collaboration, 70% of accidental project managers have no special training or certificate when they take on the role. Which means, there are entire groups of people tasked with project success who may not have time for formal training. Therefore, they need to do several things quickly to hit the ground running, such as: find educational resources to their increase knowledge, adopt a more collaborative environment in order to learn from colleagues, and find the most efficient tools and technology to support that collaboration. Which brings us to cloud services... Trend 3: Collaboration is Increasingly Done via Cloud Collaboration Tools Remote teams battle challenges that co-located colleagues typically don’t have to worry about. Such challenges include inefficient coordination, reduced visibility into one another’s work, and, as a group, the inability to maintain high velocity. To combat these obstacles, the online services industry — A.K.A. cloud collaboration services — has boomed, allowing teams with remote members to continue working together efficiently. Instead of storing files in network drives that would require VPN access for remote workers, file storage services such as Dropbox or Box can be used securely. In place of lobbing different versions of a Microsoft Word document back and forth through email, Google Drive can be used. Then there are communication tools like Skype and Google Hangouts to facilitate meetings, as well as work management tools like Wrike enterprise collaboration software that help teams delegate tasks and coordinate projects both large and small. Cost-effective technology now exists that enables remote collaboration without breaking the bank. In fact, these tools are often free in their simplest versions, with tiered pricing based on an organization’s needs. Now Build a Better Team Understanding these three growing trends can help you better understand the landscape in which collaboration occurs so you can enhance the way your own organization collaborates. Now it’s your turn. What factors affect how you presently collaborate with your team? Hit the comments and share.
Many-to-Many Structure Flexibility vs. Stiff One-to-Many Hierarchies
Dave Prior and Bob Tarne have recently blogged about the so-called post-modern project management with a reference to Dr. Davidson Frame. Their idea is that there are lots of methodologies available, and that in real life, there can’t be just “one true way” for managing a project. Each project is unique, and each time we need to find a new way of managing and completing it, very often mixing several methods and techniques. This is the creative part of the project manager’s job. The project manager needs to be flexible and try to view his or her project from different angles to understand which methodology he or she should apply and how to use different methods together harmoniously. Here, the right tools will be a great help. Project management software should support a manager’s flexibility, giving him or her options to look at the same project from different perspectives. It’s hardly possible to have different project perspectives with traditional project management software. The reason is that this software utilizes rigid, one-to-many hierarchies of tasks that are usually designed by project managers at the very beginning of a project. Unlike traditional software, project management 2.0 tools employ many-to-many hierarchies. These tools let a project plan emerge from pieces, effectively enabling collaborative planning. They allow you to utilize a decentralized, pull-based model in planning. Many-to-many hierarchies in project management 2.0 tools also allow project managers to pick any reasonable sub-set of tasks, create a view with these tasks and share the view with someone who needs it. It is not like the all-or-nothing sharing of a file. At the end of the day, more people can collaborate and contribute to the project work. As the new tools allow team members to make changes to the initial structure simultaneously, more people can organize and reorganize their views, and more structures emerge. With project management 2.0 tools, you can start with one task, add fifteen more, organize them, add more tasks, reorganize them and repeat the process on a daily basis. When all team members walk through this process, you start to bring the power of many to work in your planning process. Many-to-many structures emerge with the help of team members’ collaboration. When seven employees share their daily to-do lists with a team leader, the team leader gets a bigger picture. When five team leaders share their teams' plans with a project manager, the picture gets even bigger. When it goes through directors and vice presidents to the CEO, the whole structure evolves from what was one task into a big ecosystem that perfectly suits the organization. This agility helps to bring iterative and incremental improvements into the project plan without giving away the control. Project managers get an opportunity to find the best way to organize their teams’ work. The project manager’s job becomes more about coordination, guidance and leadership than routine manual updates. Project management 2.0 tools with many-to-many hierarchies help to truly unleash collective intelligence in the project planning. The team (and then the whole company) becomes highly responsive to dynamic external environments. As productivity increases and red-tape drops, employees become more motivated. These positive effects come from the synergy effect of two phenomena -- emergence and collective intelligence, empowered by the project management 2.0 software and practices. In my next post, I plan to speculate about the way human brain organizes information and how this is connected with many-to-many hierarchies. This will give another angle on the subject. Until next time.
How to Meet Millennials’ Standards for Collaboration
According to a study by Aon Hewitt, nearly 50% of millennials plan to actively look for a new job in 2015. With 80 million millennials in the U.S. alone, it’s time to start strategizing around how to attract their talent, meet their needs, and keep them engaged. Global research firm Gartner found these interesting facts about the current state of the workplace: Employees are only spending about 40% of their time at their personal workstations Non-group tasks have decreased to about 20% of the working day With larger percentages of this generation joining the workforce every day, the work environment is changing. The millennial generation grew up on collaboration, and they expect that in the workplace. So if you really want to attract and tap into their talent, you’ll need to reconsider your office setup to support collaboration and creative thinking. Removing Cubicles in the Office Traditionally, employees would withdraw to their private space and work as human silos. This is the opposite of what millennials desire; they crave collaboration. And the first step to satisfying that hunger is to say “Rest In Peace” to cubicles. Interior design and research firm Knoll ran a workplace study and discovered some remarkable results after companies moved from cubicles to an open-floor design: Performance increased by an average of 440% There was a 5.5% reduction in business process time and cost When you think about it, walls physically block communication. They separate people, and they prevent teammates from conversing with one another. So why are organizations still keeping them up? Try this out for size: group desks together in pods or line them up in rows so employees are in close contact with each other. Make sure teammates can easily verbally communicate with one another without having to shout or move too far from their desks. Designate Collaboration Spaces for Work Once you’ve said goodbye to the cubicles, the next step is to create spaces that encourage casual collisions and collaboration. According to this survey by IdeaPaint, millennials reported that only 30.8% of their ideation meetings are planned. Here are four solutions that foster both spontaneous and scheduled brainstorming: Open meeting areas: Scatter tables and chairs in various spaces around the office. This allows employees to quickly gather when they need to brainstorm, instead of having to wait for a meeting room to open up. If you hang a whiteboard on a nearby wall, then you’ve got a fully functional meeting space. Break rooms: Idle chitchat around the watercooler isn’t always a time waster. In fact, the majority of watercooler conversations revolve around work. You never know when a brilliant idea will pop up. Genius bar: Meant for eating lunch or teamwork, these long stretches of counter space allow employees to just step right up to the bar and work together. It creates a more centralized space for collaboration where multiple teams can gather in one area. Meeting rooms: You obviously can’t forget to keep rooms that people can schedule for formal meetings. They’re still necessary when you need to discuss a sensitive topic or gather a large party. A Work Environment for the New Way to Work Out of respect for fellow colleagues, collaboration can’t always be done at people’s desks. So to encourage open, unbridled teamwork that appeals to the millennial generation, create these collaborative spaces so people can feel free to brainstorm and let loose their creative ideas. Create a work environment that matches the new way people are working — with spontaneous, open collaboration. Author Bio: Sabrina is a Content Marketing Specialist at TINYpulse, writing about and researching new ways to make employees happier. A Seattle native, she loves her morning (or anytime) coffee, spending her weekends on the mountains, and of course, the famous rain.
The Modern-Day Project Manager: 5 Areas of Impact & Opportunity
The pandemic has influenced how we've had to adjust our roles and responsibilities. For the modern-day project manager, this has led to five major areas of impact and opportunity: collaboration, hybrid project delivery, digital information, AI, and risk management. Read on to learn how today's project manager will have to adapt.
What Brexit May Mean for Your Business (Work Management Roundup)
Welcome back to the weekly Work Management Roundup, where we collect and curate links to articles on business, work, productivity, and careers. And what a tumultuous week it's been! One word for you: BREXIT. That's all anyone will be talking about for at least a month.
How the CIA Makes Tough Decisions & More (Work Management Roundup)
Welcome to your fresh new Friday habit, the Work Management Friday Roundup — a collection of articles we've spotted over the course of the week that will help you manage your workload, be more productive, and simply become an awesome contributor to your team. How the CIA Makes Decisions: If you're facing a tough decision, then you may need this 5-step process created by a former CIA executive who, during his career, had to make difficult recommendations on some of the biggest threats to national safety. Minimum Lovable Product: Startups take note: Instead of building the minimum VIABLE product, why not aim to build a minimum LOVABLE product? After all, investing in what customers will "love" instead of what they simply "need" makes good business sense. Dread Opening Email? If you're one of those people who dread opening their email, then you could be subscribed to way too many newsletters. Or you just might be in a destructive relationship with email as the collaboration tool you can't let go of. More must-reads: Feel Like Giving Up? Here are some things to remind yourself when you feel like giving up, by productivity author James Clear. Productivity Challenged? Read 8 tips to double your productivity and learn how to cut down the number of meetings you attend, put all your work in one place, and more. Thumbs Down to Open Offices? The open office trend seems to be reversing itself. Consider these points before planning your new office. Do You Give Good Feedback? If not, learn the art of giving feedback. Because if your team doesn’t know what you expect from them, you are unlikely to get the performance you need. Do You Need a Portable Work Desk at Home? If you work from home and you're looking for an inexpensive work table that can be put away when not in use, consider a folding table. Follow "Productivity Works!" on Flipboard Are you a Flipboard user? Then you need to follow our Productivity Works! magazine. We promise you'll love it: View my Flipboard Magazine. Top image credit: Ludovic Bertron
6 Trends Shaping the Future of Work (Infographic)
Fax machines, rolodexes, and PDAs seem like ancient history, yet just 10 years ago they were ubiquitous office tools. What surprises does the next decade hold for today’s workers? As the old adage says, the only constant is change. Set yourself up for success by keeping an eye on these 6 big trends that are defining how we’ll work in the years to come. Share this infographic with your forward-thinking friends and colleagues on social media, or by posting it on your site with this embed code: Infographic brought to you by Wrike Get ready for the future of work Thousands of you expressed your opinions on how we'll work in the coming years in our recent surveys. Download the work management and mobile productivity survey reports to find out what your peers believe are the most important changes coming to the workplace, from telework to advances in tech. Why wait for tomorrow? Boost your productivity and work results today by starting a free trial of Wrike.
Why is U.S. Productivity So Low? (Work Management Roundup)
Welcome back to the weekly Work Management Roundup, where we collect and curate the standout business-related articles of the past week or so. This time, we lead off with a shocking headline: according to government labor measurements, recent US productivity hasn't been this low since Jimmy Carter was in the Oval Office. Don't believe it? Read on.