Our last blog centered around company culture as well as the effect it could have on your brand. Your company’s culture, good or bad, shows up in your brands reputation. We talked about ways to measure the cultural health of your organization, but exactly how do you give your company a cultural transformation?

The first step is to ask yourself a few questions to get a sense of the “feel” you would like your business to have:

• What traits do you want your company’s environment to embody? Originality, respectfulness, acceptance, fun, etc.
• How can you mirror you company values in the culture?
• How is information distributed to employees? Are they left in the dark frequently?
• Do you reward employees and in what ways? 
• Does everybody in the company feel heard? If not, how could you improve this?

These should lead you to more questions. Consider having a brainstorming session with your employees to determine the right answers for your company. Below are some ideas we came up with:

Suggestion/Thought box – This is an easy way to allow people to share thoughts and opinions about the current events within the company. The employee could choose to make the suggestion anonymous or not, and any suggestions or concerns could be addressed in monthly company gatherings.

Empower employees – Give people control over their jobs by treating them like peers rather than peons. You can accomplish this by being more transparent; don’t just communicate when you have successes, let them know when things aren’t going flawlessly. It will create a team full of mutual support.

Flexible hours – You hired your employees because you have confidence in them to do their job. Permitting them to have relatively flexible hours shows you trust them to get their work done well and on time. The respect you give them will be reflected in the respect they give you.

Dress code – Today it is unusual that people are required to don suits and ties on a regular basis.  Giving employees freedom to express themselves using their wardrobe is a simple strategy to make them feel accepted for who they are. To take this one step further, think about themed days: silly hat day, bright clothing day, 80’s day, etc. It’s astounding how beneficial self-expression can be.

Celebrate – Your organization is the sum of everybody in it. Celebrate your team with group activities.  For example, cater lunch for everyone, have a movie or game day, or just throw a party. This can produce more cohesion in your team and promote collaboration.

Here are some things companies have done to give their culture a fun edge:

• Spontaneous Nerf gun wars
• Painting inspirational quotes on the walls
• Hitting a loud gong when there is a success to let the whole company know
• Foosball tournaments
• Lunchtime Yoga
• Lunchtime Crafting Club
• Monday Mad Libs, whoever wishes to contribute, does, and then the completed Mad Lib is emailed to the company

Strategy is typically at the forefront of a company’s focus. Strategy is not the only thing which makes a company successful. Culture also plays an important role. The culture of your company impacts your branding, your marketing success, and daily operations, all of which have an effect on how the world sees your organization. The logos of brands like Apple, Google, and Starbucks are recognizable not only because they appear to be everywhere, but also these companies have strong cultures that shine through their employees, storefronts, and logos. These positive, strong cultures all begin within the walls of their offices.

Why Culture is so Important

A healthy office culture fosters creative thinking. When employees like the place they work and feel like they are part of the team it can make them challenge themselves in innovative ways. In a workplace in which people feel invisible or stifled they’ll often do the bare minimum required. It is part of human nature to want to feel appreciated and important. A business is made of its people so whatever mindset prevails will show up in your brand and the merchandise and service you provide. In the end, taking care of the culture of your workplace is everyone’s duty from the CEO to HR.

If you are not yet convinced, here are some of the obvious benefits of promoting a healthy culture.

• Focus – Keeping employees dedicated to the same goal helps a business run with efficiency. Getting people to care about the goal comes with having a healthy focus. If your employees feel like they are an important part of attaining that goal they’ll be more likely to push themselves. When people feel like they have no effect on the main goal, they loose focus, and can become cynical.

• Cohesion – For a team to have cohesion they should have strong communication. Companies with a healthy culture find that the communication of both success and failure happens more often and more quickly.

• Motivation – A enthusiastic workforce gets things done. That might seem apparent, but companies that don’t pay attention to the health of their culture could be suffering with regards to productivity. Being motivated to work hard is a trait that should be present in every individual in the company if the culture is healthy.

Measuring the Cultural Health of Your Company

This can be a difficult step but should be examined several times a year. One of the primary steps is to look at how individuals are managed, how tasks are given out, and do people have some say in what they’re doing? Of course you might find some people who’ll never be happy, but if the general opinion is unfavorable, start thinking about making a few changes for the healthy of your business. Check back soon for some tips on transforming your company’s culture for the better.

Chances are you started your company because you love what you do. You opened your doors because you have a solid product that you believe in.  You probably did not start a business because your paperwork abilities were unmatched.  Paperwork is an essential and necessary evil for any business owner and accurate invoicing cannot be ignored. We all need cash flow to keep our businesses adrift, so utilizing a good invoicing system can help us keep cash in the bank and our clients happy!

Invoicing help online

Using an online invoicing service is a viable option for business owners who require a quicker, more reliable way, and often-automatic means to invoice their clients. There are a multitude of available online options to choose from that can take that tiresome task of paperwork off your plate. Below we’ll examine just 3 of the possibilities available:

A free but powerful invoicing service

Sometimes the word “free” is synonymous with “not very good.” Fortunately, that is not the case with the free system, BillingBoss. Appropriate for most small businesses that want to automatically invoice customers on a monthly basis and periodic once-off invoicing, BillingBoss packs a huge punch at no cost!

A power tool

Next let’s examine AcceptPay. Developed and run by American Express, AcceptPay is a very powerful service that connects with QuickBooks, enables online payments, and has a wider array of invoicing options. At the fairly low monthly price of $30, this is a great option for those companies that want a more robust service.

Invoicing for the tech-savvy

Lastly we’ll look at the most customizable option of the bunch, BambooInvoice. This open source program is hosted on your own servers and can be easily customized for your business’ needs. So if you require more control and are somewhat tech-savvy, BambooInvoice might be your best choice.

These are just a few of the available options online. Most services are free or exceptionally cost-effective. If you need to take the reigns on your invoicing process, consider using an online solution.

Becoming greener is on many people’s agendas these days.
Whether the intention is to save money or reduce the impact to the environment, this is true not just for individuals, but many high-tech companies as well. A necessity to understanding how to conserve energy is becoming aware of the aspects of your home or business that consume the most energy.

At the CEATEC conference this month in Japan, Toshiba and Intel announced a few of their upcoming plans to better allow companies to keep track of their energy usage. In this “Green Age,” it’s no surprise to see major players in the technology world coming forward with big developments that allow more regulation and monitoring of the amount of energy being used. Here are some of the ecologically-forward changes and additions these two companies announced they will be implementing in 2012.

Intel

PC users will be able to monitor the energy consumption of their PC with the application Intel has developed. With an easy to read dashboard where the data is organized and displayed in graphs, charts, and statistics, you will be able to much more easily see how your computer is using energy.

Toshiba

You may have read that Toshiba recently acquired Landish Gyr, a company that specializes in smart-meter tech, Toshiba is utilizing this as part of a “smart home” offering. This will allow individuals to more easily monitor the energy consumption throughout their homes. They are also developing cloud technology for a number of verticals, including city infrastructure and health companies.

Japanese technology companies are currently highly dedicated to monitoring energy consumption. That being said, it is interesting that many companies in the US are pulling away from this. Microsoft and Google are just two examples. Microsoft announced in June that they are discontinuing their energy-monitoring service called Hohm. While Google announced it is taking a break from the green game by shutting down Google
Powermeter.

Will the green technology world head in the direction of energy monitoring or something else entirely? If you have any speculation or ideas on the direction this may take; please share them with us.

Disasters can happen to any organization and they come in many forms and severities. They can be everything from a natural disaster, to a well-meaning employee accidently downloading a destructive virus, to something essential getting mistakenly deleted. These what-ifs can keep you up at night, so for your own reassurance develop a disaster recovery plan.

Decide What’s Important

First off, figure out what data is the most essential to get your company back up and running. What information needs to be backed up and saved and what can you afford to lose? This will help you determine what you need to back up. Choosing an online provider or storing your data in the cloud can be the best way to ensure you can access your data quickly.

Make a Plan

The second step is deciding the steps that must be taken to get your company back on its feet as quickly as possible. Think about the worst possible scenario and how to recover from that. Which systems must be recovered first and what technology will be required to do this?

Know Your Workflows

I’m sure you have the big picture of your company processes, but how about all the day-to-day processes that you don’t have memorized? Ask your employees to document their workflows and the actual tasks they preform. By doing this, if something does happen, anyone can pick up where they left off and nothing gets looked over.

Decide Who is in Charge

Depending on the kind of disaster you go through, your employees could panic.  Before this happens, select one levelheaded person in the organization to be “in charge” of the disaster recovery plan. They should know the plan as well as you do and possibly have helped you create it. This is the person you turn to for execution of the plan, so that you can be the strong leader your employees need at a time such as this.

People often think disasters can’t happen to them, but we never know what could happen in the future! So it’s important to have a plan in place just in case. This will help put you and your employees at ease.

The name Segway is synonymous with tech failure. After all, inventor Dean Kamen once thought that his two-wheeled scooters would become an alternative to cars. He pictured a future in which people buzzed to the supermarket, library, or work on their Segway PT scooters.

That vision hasn’t quite come to fruition and it’s pretty rare that you see someone utilizing a Segway. They are still around and have recently celebrated their 10th anniversary. So while they may be termed a tech failure, they’re still alive and kicking.

How do they work though? Below we’ll examine the tech powering the Segway.

Powering the Segway

Each Segway PT is powered by electric motors which are, in turn, fueled by phosphate-based lithium-ion batteries. Segway owners can charge these batteries by plugging their Segways into common household electrical sockets. The device doesn’t fall over thanks to its two computers loaded with proprietary software, pair of tilt sensors, and five gyroscopic sensors.

Making the Segway Move

The sensors register when the user shifts their body weight to switch the direction and speed of movement. Put simply, when you want to go forward at a quicker pace, you would pull the handlebars closer to the body and lean forward slightly. The Segway’s present top speed is 12.5 mph and is ideal for areas with plenty of wide, flat sidewalk space.

Lowered Expectations

The hype was pretty big around the Segway when it was first announced, but it never quite lived up to it all.  Some even predicted that the Segway would become more popular than the Internet overall!

In the 10 years since its release, the Segway has not completely failed, but its strange overall look and goofy riding style has made it nearly impossible to reach its expected level of success.