MSPNetworks Blog

In any business, the capacity to collaborate is critical to success. In order to do so most optimally, it helps to carry out a few preliminary and overarching practices. Let’s go over a few such practices to help bring your team’s collaborative activities together.

Make Your Expectations Clear

In simple terms, you should make sure your team knows what you want them to be doing. Set the prerogative for your team in no uncertain terms. Emphasizing the focus you want them to commit to teamwork and designing your workplace processes around this goal will ensure they know how they are to proceed.

Equip Your Team with the Right Tools

In addition to making it clear what you want your team to do, it is important that they have the technology needed to do so effectively. Various platforms and standalone software solutions exist that make this cooperation far more easy to accomplish. Acquiring and training your teams to fully utilize these tools will only make it easier for collaboration to make its way into their processes.

Use Various Methods to Collaborate

Speaking of tools, having a variety available for your team’s use—especially those that feature different modes of communication—also makes it more convenient for them to do so. With that kind of accessibility, collaboration can become a more natural reaction to workplace needs.

Understand and Appreciate the Hurdles Your Team Will Face

Finally, you need to take a moment to acknowledge that the adoption process may not go smoothly. Old habits are tough to break, after all, and a lot of people are finding normal work processes more challenging to get through. “Zoom fatigue” is now a recognized thing as well, so accepting whatever feedback (yes, even some complaints) they have to offer will show them that their thoughts matter.

We Can Ensure that Your Team Has the Means to Collaborate

Reach out to our team to find out how we can equip your team with the tools they need. Give us a call at (516) 403-9001 today.

The past several years have brought about a shift in the workforce, and it’s not one that anyone could have seen coming. More people than ever before are leaving their jobs. How can you keep your employees engaged so they have a minimal chance of leaving their position within your company?

Here are some tips you can use to keep your employees from participating in “The Great Resignation.”

What is Driving The Great Resignation?

Several different contributing factors are involved, the result being 47.8 million voluntary job vacancies in 2021 alone. This was the highest number recorded since 2001, and according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2022 will likely not be any better. In February alone, there were 4.4 million resignations in the United States.

This trend is not exclusive to the States, either. The social media posts about people quitting their jobs with the highest levels of engagement are from all over the world.

But Why Are People Quitting?

Some people who are leaving their positions joined during the pandemic, where remote work policies were in place and the people involved–those in the Gen Z age group, for example–are not interested in a commute to the office. On a similar note, many parents, some of them new, are finding that the time spent at home while working remotely helps tremendously to balance their home life responsibilities.

In fact, some are leaving their positions because they are being urged to return to the office, something which is simply not preferable for some workers. In this case, the needs of workers are being sidelined by companies’ needs to control their workforce. This has ultimately led to workers making sacrifices in their flexibilities and pay just to remain in a remote work environment.

Other reasons to leave might include poor workplace interactions and a lack of work/life boundaries. The Great Resignation has forced many people to look at their own priorities and to shift their focus to things that matter most in their lives, and work does not seem to be among them.

How Can I Avoid Losing People?

Simply put, you can do a lot of good by acknowledging that remote work is a possibility for your workforce, and it will do a lot to aid in employee retention. This will be particularly helpful to keep employees on both the younger and the older sides of the spectrum. You might even consider offering hybrid options if you can’t bring yourself to commit wholeheartedly to remote work options.

MSPNetworks can help you implement the technology needed to aid in this shift. To learn more, reach out to us at (516) 403-9001.

Considering what the past year has been like, the idea that workplace burnout has been a hot topic isn’t all that surprising—even though less time has been spent in many offices than almost any other time to date. Regardless, burnout simply isn’t an office issue, meaning that remote workers are still susceptible to its ill effects.

This isn’t something that you want to encourage, so let’s go over what constitutes burnout and how to identify and address it for the benefit and betterment of your team.

What is Burnout?

Let’s face facts—most people that read this blog will have likely felt burnout for themselves at some time or another. Having said that, many likely underestimate the full experience that burnout can bring.

Most probably understand the all-encompassing tiredness that burnout is commonly associated with, both mentally and physically, but this state can also have additional impacts. Burnout also tends to make people feel apathetic and cynical, and it can lead to impaired motivation, lessened self-confidence, and other negative attributes.

When these outcomes come together, it can encourage the development of toxic workplace conditions that—if not avoided entirely—need to be addressed and resolved. To do that, you need to be able to spot burnout as it happens.

Spotting Burnout Amongst Your Team

If you hope to have any chance of catching burnout, you need to have a good awareness of your team members’ (and your own) mental state. Dedicating a few moments to brief self-evaluation to help identify the triggers that dictate how you are engaged (and likewise disengaged) in your work can make a huge difference over time.

With so many people currently feeling a loss of control over many aspects of their life, such stresses need to be kept under control in the office environment. One way to accomplish this is to establish some consistent and predictable routines to be followed in the office, emphasizing control, and decreasing the potency of employee burnout.

Resolving Burnout

Finally, one of the biggest key points to preventing the ill effects of burnout is the importance of taking a step away from it all—particularly when you don’t seem to have any time to waste.

While the human brain is a shockingly complex and capable construct, it does have its limits. Like anything else, it just isn’t built to support 100 percent efficiency, and forcing it will work out about as well as it sounds like it would. Giving yourself some respite in the form of some time off—even a few moments of it during the workday—can help prevent burnout from taking hold. 

On an organizational level, incentivized collaboration and other support incorporated into the workday can help prevent burnout even further.

MSPNetworks can help you where this comes into play. By giving your team the tools necessary to cultivate a cohesive and collaborative environment, we can help reduce the factors that contribute to burnout in general. Find out more by giving us a call at (516) 403-9001 today.

If your business is like most, you and your team likely rely on a schedule to keep your processes moving along efficiently… while also ensuring that everyone has something to work on at any time. However, this is often easier said than done, which is why there are now cloud-based software options that make your scheduling efforts a little smarter.

Let’s take a few moments to discuss what smart scheduling is, and how you and your team can make the most of it.

What is Smart Scheduling?

Technically speaking, smart scheduling is a specific kind of software intended for use within industries that serve consumers with fluctuating demands and that are strongly influenced by different events that may line up with their operations. For instance, ice cream parlors do FAR better in the warmer months, and anyone who has worked in retail can appreciate how much different the holiday season is from the rest of the year. Smart scheduling solutions help to automate the process of scheduling a team to best fit the business’ need, taking these fluctuations into account.

However, if we look to smart scheduling as a process, rather than as a technology, it suddenly becomes far more applicable to all industries. After all, every industry—and individual business—has those external factors that can and do impact their operations.

Smart scheduling is simply the consideration of anticipated demand and adjusting employee hours and responsibilities to match. It’s knowing that the factory next door is going on lunch break in a moment, and ensuring that there’s an employee at each station of the fast food franchise so that the sudden influx of orders can be filled as quickly as possible.

It’s predicting the most likely scenarios and preparing your business appropriately.

How to Smarten Up Your Scheduling Process

Whether or not you’re using a smart scheduling solution, there are some basic tenets that you can follow to ensure that your business (including the employees that work there) is operating at a sustainable maximum output.

1. Define Your Schedule

Take all of the data that you have, concerning your schedule, and bring it all together. This will make it much easier to balance availability to the workload at any given point. For example: if a large project is coming up, but a holiday is as well, it may make sense to take any employees currently assigned to smaller, less-critical projects and delegate them to tasks on the larger one so it can get done. This makes everyone’s goals clear, which can help motivate your team to accomplish them.

2. Be Open to Communication

Regardless of your industry, communication is an indispensable part of your operations each day. Make sure that your schedule clearly (emphasis on the word clearly) defines where people are supposed to be, when, and what they are to accomplish in that given time. This includes those employees who have indicated that they are not available for a period. Failing to apply that information into your schedule will only cause complications and potentially leave you understaffed for what you planned to do. On the other hand, incorporating these considerations into your scheduling will lead to your staff feeling empowered, while reducing the number of unforeseen absences and tardiness.

3. Implement a Scheduling Platform

Many different software titles now exist that make scheduling your employees a lot easier, whether that means defining the hours they are to come in or assigning the tasks they are expected to tackle throughout the workday. Finding one that fits your needs and implementing it will make the entire process much easier for you and your team alike.

MSPNetworks can help you out with this aspect, as well as any other of your IT needs. To learn more about the solutions we have to offer, reach out to us by calling (516) 403-9001.

Worldwide, we’re a good few months into dealing with the coronavirus pandemic, with many nonessential businesses shutting their doors for the time being. Even those industries that can’t just stop their operations are seeking alternatives, leading many to turn to implementing as much of a remote workforce as possible. Many still have questions about doing so, however, so we want to do our best to help answer some of the common questions these business people might ask about remote work.

So, this is really happening, isn’t it?

It sure is. When people are at least strongly encouraged to remain at home (with it becoming enforceable by law in some places if symptoms reveal themselves) and keep even their family members at a distance, you know we aren’t in a great situation.

It also doesn’t help that there are countless organizations and businesses of all shapes and sizes making the effort to implement remote working practices and strategies. It’s a bit of a mess, but it’ll help to “flatten the curve”--basically, help to make sure we don’t exceed the number of simultaneous, hospital-needed infections that our current systems can support. This will help keep the worst-case scenario more manageable to deal with.

Is remote work really worth all the effort?

Given the current situation, it is more or less the best way for essential businesses to do what they can to help minimize the spread of COVID-19 while still providing their necessary services. As states across the country have suspended on-site operations, businesses that can operate remotely can continue to do so, allowing their employees to continue supporting their families and making this shutdown much easier to sustain for a prolonged period of time.

Business recovery statistics being what they are, 40 percent of businesses that shut down in the face of any disaster never reopen, and of those that do, 25 percent of them fail within a year. Furthermore, overall trends show that 90 percent of businesses last less than two years after a disaster has struck. 

So if remaining open in some form helps you avoid becoming one of these data points, remote work is definitely worth it.

What are some of the biggest concerns and challenges?

Of course, there are plenty of obstacles that you will face, starting with your own hang-ups. We’ll get more into these shortly, but we may as well address some of the other, more external challenges now. 

You may be surprised to find out how many of your employees may initially resist the idea of adding remote work capabilities, as the structure of the workplace and the way they communicate will have to change. Anyone in a management position in your organization may be particularly resistant, as it may seem to them that you are removing the point of their title. 

Some employees may also not have the resources at home to effectively do their job, just in terms of equipment. Even if the willingness to work is there, it becomes exponentially more difficult to perform if lacking the technology to do so. 

Are my employees actually going to do their jobs from home?

More than likely, yes. We’ll get into this more below, but chances are a good employee will continue to take their work seriously. With so much of the workforce being unemployed right now, individuals are probably feeling the pressure. They don’t need that pressure from their employers or managers. If you feel like you have certain individuals that aren’t pulling their weight, it’s probably likely that they weren’t pulling their weight under less trying times.

As a manager or small business owner, it is your responsibility to check in and tackle the challenges of remote work with your staff.

Okay, so what do I need to do to avoid these challenges?

As an employer, there are a few steps you can take.

Provide the Equipment and Infrastructure

In order to permit remote capabilities and other collaborative necessities, your employees will need a reliable means to perform their work-related duties, while at the same time maintaining the security of your infrastructure and its data.

There are a few different ways that this can be accomplished. If they use a laptop in the office, rather than a desktop, their laptop can simply be brought home (assuming it has been equipped with the necessary security features and identify verification requirements) for work to be done on it. Otherwise, secure remote access tools can be used from their approved personal workstations in order to effectively complete their tasks.

The cloud also enables many of these capabilities, as an employee could use their credentials to access data from a cloud storage solution, and use a cloud-based application to complete their tasks from their approved personal device.

Maintain and Update Processes

If you have processes that exist within the office, these processes (or some adaptation of them) should be in place as your employees are working remotely. Don’t cancel meetings because a remote worker is involved--figure out a way to tie them in and incorporate them into your proceedings as usual. If your current processes aren’t a good fit, see what needs to be done to tailor them to be.

It may also help your out-of-office employees stay engaged if you start a new process of reaching out to them directly to check in with them, whether it happens individually, as a group, or some combination of the two. This leads us to our next recommended step...

Insist on Inclusive Communication

As we have established, it is fairly common for remote workers to start to feel isolated and dissociated from their coworkers without sufficient involvement with their activities. Make sure all of your employees know about (and are using) the communication tools available to them during this time. If you have generally strict guidelines for their use, you may even consider temporarily lifting these restrictions and allowing your employees to use them for an increased amount of non-work-related communication with their cohorts. This will help to keep your team working cohesively, despite the distance.

Trust Your Employees

On the topic, don’t assume that your employees need to be babysat in order to effectively work from home. While many employers and managers may assume the opposite, most workers can perform just as well in their home as they could coming into the office itself… if not overwork to accomplish just that much more at home. Unless you have a reason to distrust a member of your staff and are working to address that, make sure that your team doesn’t have to jump through any more extra hoops than are necessary to complete their responsibilities from home. Work with them to make it happen.

What should I tell my employees to do?

When discussing all of this with your team, we recommend that you do the following:

Encourage They Form Habits

Schedules, rituals, whatever they want to call them, set patterns of behavior can help make their transition to remote work easier on them while improving their productivity as they do so. Encouraging a “new normal” for them will be best for the time being, and in trying times, some level of predictability is a welcome thing.

Socialize and Collaborate with Coworkers

As we discussed before, one of the biggest threats that remote workers face is a feeling of isolation, which can have significant influence on their personal lives and professional performance. Keeping your coworkers involved with one another’s work and digitally connected can help counter these feelings.

Insist on Being Involved

Remind your employees that, even as the boss, you are part of the team as well. Reach out to your team members on an individual basis and check in personally if that’s an option for you. Showing that you care may not help the situation much, but it is so much better than doing nothing. A little support can go a surprisingly long way.

In the meantime, MSPNetworks is always here to help support you as your remote team works to keep your business operational. For any IT assistance or collaboration recommendations, don’t hesitate to give us a call at (516) 403-9001.