Have you ever heard of the Uncanny Valley? It’s the theory that explains why the human race tends to prefer humanoid robots, but only up to a point, after which we find them unsettling. It’s one reason why so many people found the 2019 film Cats bothersome to watch. The Uncanny Valley has also been present in film in recent years, especially when actors who have passed are recreated digitally to make an appearance, or when talent needs to look older or younger than they are.

The cloud is a great business tool and resource, enabling businesses to offset a lot of their IT workload onto these providers. If you haven’t migrated some or all of your business’ technology to take advantage of the cloud, it is certainly something to consider.

If you’re already considering it, we wanted to offer a few tips to help make the process more effective for you.

One of the primary ways that modern companies work to boost efficiency is to ease the workloads that their employees have to contend with through automation. Automating certain processes frees up the time these processes would otherwise take to devote to revenue generation. This approach has worked for decades—and today, businesses have access to more automation-focused technology than ever.

Automation has been a business buzzword for some time now, and was a key facet for many businesses remaining open through the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, it seems like there’s no reason for it not to remain in use from this point on. Let’s examine a few ways that automation can and likely will be used moving forward.

Collaboration is not just nice, it is the only way many businesses can afford to keep the lights on. Understanding that truth makes it important to find the right strategies and technologies to support your staff’s collaborative endeavors. Today, we take a look at a few options to help improve your business’ collaboration. 

As a business owner, you have a lot on your plate. Therefore, improving your productivity and streamlining how you spend your time while in the office is of paramount importance. With a simple four-step process, you can make your daily tasks so much easier to manage and, by extension, your business as a whole. Here are four tips that you can apply to your daily routine to improve your productivity during the workday.

Every business is constantly looking for a way to boost productivity, but it’s not always easy to find strategies that lead to higher yields and more profitability. Even the most sound strategy may take time to get going, and sometimes what seems to be a well-laid plan doesn’t come together. This month, we thought we would provide four tips on how to improve organizational productivity without many headaches. 

Technology is such a wonderful tool for productivity, but one thing that you need to understand is that it cannot work miracles. At the end of the day, we are all still human; distractions creep in that technology cannot prevent. Some users struggle with staying focused, which in turn leads to unproductive behaviors, all of which compounds to create wasted time and money. Let’s discuss some ways that your employees can overcome distractions in the workplace.

It is undeniable that businesses have increasingly been relying on technology. The past year has been especially digital as millions of people were working remotely. Many of these people required some type of technology support. Today, we are going to discuss how companies like ours were able to provide comprehensive IT support to so many people while they worked from home.

Some people may say that operational efficiency and productivity are only measures of how well managers are able to manage. Make no mistake about it, productivity is important to workers, too. When COVID-19 spurred lawmakers to create stay-at-home orders in March of 2020, the fear was that productivity would decrease so much that it would destroy society. This obviously didn’t happen, but there has been some ebb and flow of the productivity metrics since the beginning of the pandemic. Let’s take a look at productivity during COVID-19.

With so much time being spent in email, and Gmail holding a 33.7 percent market share, it should come as no surprise that many businesses wouldn’t mind it if a little less time were spent in Gmail if possible. As it happens, one of the most frustrating expenditures of your time—rewriting similar emails repeatedly—can be eliminated by creating Gmail templates.

The holiday season is well known as a time off from work to spend with family, but for some, it’s the busiest time of the year. Let’s get to know one such individual for a moment, and what he’s learning can make his job—and his life—much, much easier.

There are a lot of words that a business owner doesn’t like to hear. One of the worst has to be downtime as it signifies waste. This month, we’ll examine the effects of downtime and how to calculate the financial impact of a downtime event.

Microsoft Word has a lot of time-and-effort-saving capabilities baked in. For instance, did you know that you can paste the same text—down to the formatting—across numerous documents? This makes it simple to replicate text without having to fix it each time, and to make changes everywhere the text appears all at once. Let’s go over how to do so.

While email is an indispensably useful tool in the office, it can quickly become a time-sink if finding the right messages to read and respond to becomes an overbearing responsibility. Fortunately, there is a simple solution to remedy this that, after spending some time learning about the full capabilities of your email platform, can once again make your email the useful tool it is meant to be.

The improvement in technology directly contributes to the amount of productivity business sees. One place this is evident is in the way in which businesses use collaboration tools to move business forward. Let’s take a brief look at what exactly we mean by collaboration tools and how they benefit the businesses that use them. 

You can make more money, but you can’t make more time. Making the most of your time at work isn’t always easy. There are all types of unexpected distractions that take up a lot of time, so you should know what works to help you get the most out of the time you do have. Today, we present three considerations that will help you manage your time better.

Small Business During COVID-19

When the first stay-at-home order was issued in March of 2020, small business owners were less phased than their employees. Some maintained that they would defy the order because they simply didn’t think they could trust their workers to be productive at home, and some weren’t set up for the type of extended remote work. Two weeks later, however, there was a completely different song being sung. Governors were serious about closing businesses to protect the health of workers and to ensure that the healthcare facilities weren’t overrun with sick people. 

With so many things that need to be accomplished each day, it always helps to have all the information needed to complete these tasks. If a task has no context assigned to it or no insight into how to approach it, productivity and morale are going to suffer. To prevent this, you need to properly task out your team’s goals. Here, we’ve provided some practices to help.

Businesses depend on their networks to effectively complete the tasks they need to accomplish, making it critically important that the one you rely on is managed properly. Let’s go over a few tips and best practices that can help you ensure that it is.