Ideas for Improving Company Culture: Part 2

February 3rd, 2012

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

Positive Effects of a Healthy Company Culture: Part 1

February 1st, 2012

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.

Simplify Online Invoicing with These Services

January 27th, 2012

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.

Microsoft steps up to take part in the war against cyber crimes

January 25th, 2012

Cyber crimes happen everyday, and everyday IT security companies track and record details around these attacks. Microsoft is upping its game and launching a real-time threat feed so that its fellow partners can study existing threats it finds and learn the best steps to proactively take against them.

Microsoft presently has a process set up to take down dangerous botnets. Microsoft “swallows” the botnets and lets them infect accounts that are highly controlled by Microsoft’s team. Once the botnets infect the accounts, Microsoft learns the way they work and eliminates them as a threat.

Microsoft can now collect threat information and share it with ISPs, government agencies, private companies, and CERTs. The impact of such a move by Microsoft could be significant. Analysts point out that while a real-time threat feed won’t lower the amount of attacks, it will help information security specialists react to these threats faster. This might limit the amount of damage brought on by these attacks.

Another great result a real-time threat feed could have is an increase in overall information sharing between IT security companies. For too long IT companies have been hesitant to share threat information for the fear that it could fuel more attacks. Most experts say this an unsupported fear.  The cyber criminal “community” has already been sharing and gaining knowledge from each other.  It’s only logical therefore that IT security professional share as much information as possible to fight the seemingly endless barrage of new cyber threats.

Let’s hope that security professionals soon understand that sharing information is more valuable than secrecy. And let’s hope that Microsoft’s move is a first step in this change of attitude.

Going Green: Energy Monitoring

January 25th, 2012

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.

 

Is the Cloud Secure? Part 2

January 20th, 2012

The cloud can be a blessing for small business owners fighting through tough economic times. Rather than purchasing costly enterprise software, business owners can save their dollars by accessing powerful computing programs in the cloud, from high-end word processors and project-management tools to spreadsheets and Photoshop alternatives. But, the cloud isn’t perfect, particularly when it comes to security issues. Entrepreneurs must be aware that their documents, presentations, and marketing materials can be damaged when they’re stored in the cloud.

Password issues

One of the biggest security issues when dealing with the cloud is password protection. This is also one of the greatest security issues outside of the cloud.

You should always carefully select passwords to your projects stored in the cloud. The more complicated your passwords are the more difficult they are to guess. A great way to accomplish this is to use a combination of numbers and letters in your passwords. Also, you shouldn’t share these passwords with many people.

Hacker alert

Hackers, malware, and spyware remain serious issues for cloud environments, just like they are problems that business owners face when logging onto their personal computers everyday. The thing that makes this particularly scary is that individual business owners have little control over how secure cloud services are. The big names — companies like Microsoft and Google — must provide their own security for the data that business owners store in the cloud.

Common sense protection

Protecting yourself from theft in the cloud can be as simple as applying some common sense practices.

First, owners should consider what sort of information they are storing in the cloud. The most sensitive data, data that could damage a company if it is lost or stolen, may not be suitable for cloud storage. Instead, this data may be better preserved on a business owner’s individual computing system and reliably backed up.

Secondly, before giving every employee free access to cloud-stored data, think carefully about which employees actually needs access to that information. People are often careful about protecting their laptops and desktop computers from prying eyes; this attitude should be applied to the cloud as well.

Security in the Cloud: Part 1

January 18th, 2012

There are numerous benefits to cloud computing. Backing up important data makes it easily accessible to everyone in your company and frees up space on your servers. You almost certainly have several questions about cloud security and might be pondering if cloud security will protect your client’s data and adhere to HIPAA, PCI or Sarbanes-Oxley regulations.

It can be difficult to tell if your cloud storage solution follows these requirements, as many don’t specify in their privacy policies. To help you navigate these difficult waters, let’s consider this topic in depth below.

Compliance

Cloud security has become an important issue recently, as increasing numbers of companies turn to online storage solutions, looking for greater simplicity, scalability and affordability. However the cost in both money and reputation for improper handling of customer data can be extremely high indeed. If your organization should comply to key regulations associated with patient privacy (HIPAA), credit card security (PCI) or the finance-sector strictures of Sarbanes-Oxley, it can be hard to find out if a service complies with these important restrictions.

Who is responsible

Who’s shoulders does the responsibility fall on? There is no law requiring that cloud service providers disclose the level of security they maintain. While they probably do have a respectable amount of safety protocols set up, the safest option is to take their privacy policy at face value. In this case, if you wish to stay in compliance with HIPAA, PCI or Sarbanes-Oxley, cloud computing may not be for you. That said, if your industry doesn’t require tight regulations, then you could make use of the benefits cloud-computing offers. 

Currently there is no law in place that requires a company to divulge this information. Cloud computing services can save your business money while boosting efficiency, but they could also risk noncompliance with privacy laws. This leaves the risk on your shoulders and it is up to you to weigh the benefits and threats for yourself. The topic of cloud security will probably be one of much debate in coming years. At the moment, the right road to travel is the the one that best meets your company’s specific needs.

Do Not Let a Disaster Take Your Company Down

January 13th, 2012

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.

Microsoft Delivers 7 Fixes in January Security Update

January 13th, 2012

Of the promised, and delivered, seven security updates only one has been deemed “critical,” and the rest were as “important.” The critical fix, bulletin MS12-004, addresses two issues in Windows Media Player that could allow an intruder to carry out a remote code execution attack if a specially designed media file were to be downloaded and opened.

Media players are a favored target of a process called fuzzing: the process of throwing the kitchen sink at an application to find where it breaks.”

Microsoft’s first important item of the month, bulletin MS12-001, is noteworthy for being classified as a “Security Features Bypass”, which represents a first for a Microsoft bulletin. This item blocks a reported problem in which an outsider could bypass the SafeSEH features in Microsoft C++ .NET. If exploited, the flaw could allow an attacker to bypass security protocols and load harmful code on a machine.

Many third-party security experts, including Joshua Talbot, a security intelligence manager at Symantec Security Response, believe that this important item should be put at the top of IT’s “to-do” list.

“Although only rated important, we actually picked the Assembly Execution Vulnerability as the most severe issue this month,” said Talbot. “The vulnerability is due to an oversight that allows an attacker to run malware as soon as a user opens a Word or PowerPoint file. E-mail attachments will probably be the most common attack method in which this vulnerability is exploited.”

Another notable bulletin this month includes a fix for a Secure Socket Layer (SSL) 3.0 and Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.0. flaw (bulletin MS12-006) that could be exploited with a toolkit called BEAST, which was demonstrated last September. According to those demonstrating the flaw, an attacker could have malicious code uploaded and executed on a computer within 10 minutes.

Three of the four remaining important bulletins target two remote code execution vulnerabilities and one elevation of privilege flaw in Windows, while the final bulletin deals with an information disclosure issue in Microsoft’s Anti-Cross Site Scripting (AntiXSS) Library.

With the arrival of Patch Tuesday, it is also a good time to remind many who might have missed it over the holidays of the out-of-band patch released by Microsoft on Dec. 29. This bulletin addressed three issues with Microsoft’s framework for ASP.NET.

If you need help with any of these issued, give us a call at the number listed on this site.

Segway Celebrates 10th Anniversary

January 11th, 2012

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.