How analytics will impact the future of work

Remote work was already increasing year on year before the pandemic, and it is now estimated that nearly 20% of the global workforce work remotely on a full time basis. The pandemic shifted our work paradigm tremendously and quickly, even companies who didn’t believe in any benefits of remote working had no choice but to embrace remote working. So how do you collaborate effectively as a remote team and how do you build a strong remote team culture?.

For many organizations, having to adjust so quickly to a different way of working presented new opportunities and provided a silver lining during difficult and unprecedented times.

Many organizations discovered that remote working wasn’t scary.

Many organizations discovered that remote working increased productivity.

Many organizations discovered that although remote team communication can present challenges, it isn’t a blocker to success.

Whether you’re an employer thinking about maintaining a remote working strategy, whether you are considering remote team communication as part of a hybrid working model or whether you are a team manager with a remote team, there’s a lot you can learn about how to create a strong remote team culture. In this article we will explore remote team communication strategies and share tips to improve remote team culture.

A virtual work life can be hard to manage. Achieving a healthy work-life balance is essential.

Part of finding a good balance is to address the problem of virtual meeting overload. By reducing meeting overload, you'll be able to manage your time better and avoid the stress of remote meetings.

In this article, we'll take a look at some ways to overcome meeting overload and virtual meeting fatigue. Hopefully, these tips can help you ensure a more productive and balanced team meeting culture.

Developing a successful 1 on 1 meeting can be challenging. In many cases, it's not enough to just set aside a time for a 1:1 meeting.

The employee needs to feel heard and valued. A good way to do this is by adding points to an agenda that reflect their priorities and areas of improvement.

There are many ways to structure a one to one meeting, and each employee's goals and objectives will vary from position to position.

The one to one meetings are impacted by the remote format and the way how we can build a rapport over a video call.

Try to stay clear away from the common pitfalls regarding lack of body language, and facial expressions.

The amount of startups that transition to scaleup is smaller than you may first think. Startup failure rates remain high, depending on which stats you look at, CB Insights suggest 9 out 10 startups fail and Startup Genome suggests that 74% of failures are directly linked to premature scaling.

So how do you identify the scaleup signals and make the right decisions to avoid the premature scaling trap. Let's start by asking yourself:

• Do you have the right people doing the right things?
• Is your customer base growing organically?
• Can you accurately predict your revenue?
• Is your profit increasing faster than your costs?

If the answer to these questions is “yes”, then you are probably ready to scale your business, and by reading this article you will discover scaleup challenges and how to overcome them.

What is the difference between a startup and a scaleup?

Scaling invites a whole host of newfound issues to overcome; from people management to processes and systems, from culture to team communication and effective collaboration. Being aware of these potential hurdles can smooth the way for transitioning from a startup to scaleup.

It is probably worth touching on the definitions of a startup and a scaleup.

Definition of a startup - The term startup refers to a company in the first stages of operations. Startups are founded by one or more entrepreneurs who want to develop a product or service for which they believe there is demand.

Definition of a scaleup - The term is less defined and somewhat subjective, but in general, the term scaleup is defined by team or revenue growth of more than 20% per year, for a minimum of three years.

So let's take a look at some of the common challenges transitioning from startup to scaleup...

Sales and marketing alignment is a common challenge for high growth companies, when sales and marketing teams aren’t aligned it impacts productivity and impacts competitive advantage.

One way or another, your sales and marketing teams share the same goal of driving revenue, educating clients and improving the overall customer experience, so it is business critical that your teams are aligned.

Arguably, improving sales and marketing team alignment is one of largest opportunities to increase business performance. This is why we built HubSpot analytics directly into our Flowtrace platform.

It is also arguable, that when sales and marketing teams align, then other teams become better aligned around shared team objectives and goals.

In this article we are going to use the example of a high growth tech company using Hubspot, Slack, Google and Jira as their core communication tools between Sales, Marketing and Product teams.

Every business wants to be more productive. Improving organizational productivity and increasing team productivity drives efficiency, and ultimately determines the success of the organization.

In this article we will look at 5 essential habits which are traits of effective teamwork and high levels of organizational productivity.

1. Deep Work Routine
2. Productive Meeting Culture
3. Better Organizational Alignment
4. Identify and Break Down Information Silos
5. Strategic Decision Making

A recent study by Hubspot revealed that low productivity costs employers around USD 1.8 billion dollars annually.

 

But this doesn’t really scratch the surface, the actual impact of low productivity becomes much greater when you also combine factors such as poor quality and unproductive meetings, lack of deep work time, poor team communication, slow decision making, information silos and poor cross-functional alignment.

 

Whether your organization has adopted full remote working or you are implementing a hybrid working strategy, our 5 essential habits of teamwork and organizational productivity will keep your business on track and provide better business outcomes.

How do you prevent employee burnout? Improve hybrid team collaboration? Measure and benchmark employee deep work time?

The answer: Decision Intelligence

Over the years, business decision making has evolved into a continuous, comprehensive process, more recently this process is being improved with data-driven technology empowering companies to make faster and more accurate decisions.

In this article we will explore how decision intelligence and team productivity analytics go a long way to keeping your business in check and improving your bottom line.

Since Covid-19 first emerged, organisations have faced a barrage of new challenges. From hybrid workplace transformation to increasing levels of employee disengagement.

This begs the question: Can decision intelligence provide the solution?

Let’s find out...

Every day organizations face an increasing number of different challenges, from the 'Digital Future of Work' to ‘The Great Resignation’, from how the ‘Metaverse’ will impact businesses to how to improve ‘Engagement for employees’ and the benefits 'People analytics’ to how to manage 'Workplace culture change' effectively.

Research suggests that these challenges, whether they current or future thinking for your business, aren’t going away anytime soon. With the rise of the borderless economy and the future work, companies need to be more agile than ever before, more employees now desire remote or hybrid workplace opportunities meaning companies need to ensure that teams can work together productively and efficiently from anywhere and at any time.

To encourage collaboration among teams in different locations, organizations need to provide employees with the right tools so they can communicate efficient and collaborate effectively.

Deep Work vs Shallow work, how can you identify symptoms of shallow work and create a deep work routine to increase productivity, let's take look by asking ourselves a few quick questions first...

How many times per day do you check your inbox?

How many pointless meetings have you attended in the last month?

How many chat notifications have you received in the past hour?

How long did it take you to get focused again on important work after a distraction or interruption?

Workplace distractions statistics show that with the rise of digital technology, remote and hybrid working; productivity is suffering and burn out is on the rise.

Research also shows that most employees and teams get their best work done during ‘deep work time’. In this article we will cover 7 common symptoms of shallow work and take an extended view on 5 strategies to improve deep work time:

1. PRIORITIZE DEEP WORK TASKS AND OBJECTIVES

2. MAKE SURE YOUR PROJECT TASK HANDOVER IS FLUID

3. SCHEDULE DEEP WORK TIME ON MOST IMPORTANT TASKS WHEN YOU FEEL ENERGIZED 

4. TURN OFF NOTIFICATIONS WHEN YOU ARE IN YOUR DEEP WORK SCHEDULE

5. ASK FOR HELP WHEN YOU NEED IT

Every day during any given work week, we are continually bombarded with notifications and unproductive interruptions. In this article we will explore how leaders can help to make workplace and team productivity more efficient and effective.

First off, if you’ve never thought “what is the difference between team efficiency and team effectiveness", you’re not alone.

You will find in most organisations across the globe, efficiency and effectiveness are used out of context, with many mangers using one term to explain the other.

However, actually understanding the difference between team efficiency and team effectiveness can help your teams get work done faster.

Peter Drucker, in his book, The Effective Executive, probably gives one the best and clearest explanations between the difference in efficiency and effectiveness

“Efficiency is doing things right, Effectiveness is doing the right thing.”