• Employee Personality Team
    Management

    5 HR Policies to Decide Before You Hire

    You’ve been running your startup or small business on your own, and it has grown enough that you now need to hire employees. Before you go down the exciting and sometimes stressful road of hiring and onboarding new people, you need to have HR policies in place. Designing HR policies isn’t easy, but with the right research and preparation, you can create solid documents that will prepare your business to have more staff members. Vacation and Time Off Your small business has lots to consider regarding vacation time. How do employees accrue it? How many days, at most, can your employees take each year? Consider whether it’s paid vacation and…

  • Work Pods Designed By Dymitr Malcew. Photo by Designmilk. License: CC BY-SA 2.0.
    Management

    You Can Say Goodbye To Open Plan – The Future Of The Office Looks Like This

    The open plan office was supposed to be the future (just like flying cars). But the more employers experimented with it, the more they realized it didn’t work. The open plan ideal is slowly but surely being supplanted by flexible working spaces that have zones for both concentration and communication. For many employers and workers, this will come as good news. For years, employees in the business of writing reports and data entry have had to listen to music to drown out the general hubbub of the office environment and get their work done. It’s a shame, and it reveals just how badly open plan office design got it wrong.…

  • Business Growth Statistics
    Management

    Scary Scaling Challenges That Could Damage Your Business

    As a promising startup, scaling up your operation should be something you are looking towards. Growth is, in the vast majority of cases, essential to your company’s survival. But it is also a serious problem, and it can pose man challenges that you need to overcome. We’re going to look at the issues that could end up causing you more harm than good unless you are meticulous in your preparation. Read on to find out more. Too fast, too soon One of the biggest issues you will encounter is moving too fast and trying to grow before you are ready. Let’s say you are manufacturing a brand new product. On…

  • Office Computers
    Management

    Ask Yourself These Questions Before Moving Into a New Office Space

    Choosing an office space is one of the most important decisions your business will make. It’ll shape what your business can do for months to come. And it’ll be the deciding factor in who you employ and how you target your clients. Thus, it’s important to get the decision right. You might think that your choice of office is reversible. If you don’t like it, you can get out of it and find another. But the commercial renting market is very different to the residential renting market. In the residential market, minimum terms can be as little as six months. In the commercial market, they’re rarely less than three years…

  • City Office Business People
    Management

    Great Ways To Save Money Without Losing Quality

    In business, it’s important to work towards ways to save money and reduce costs. You need to do this to stay competitive in an economy that is always changing and expanding. There are plenty of situations where an expensive business model could put your company in a dangerous situation. An example would be a price war. During a price war, competing businesses drop their prices in the hope of pushing one or more businesses out the market. It’s happened plenty of times. In fact, you could say that high street retailers are constantly in price wars with online alternatives like Amazon. Amazon is always offering the cheaper deal on new…

  • MacBook Tablet Advertising
    Business Tools

    BYOD Is the Hot New Business Trend, But Is it Safe?

    BYOD. It means “bring your own device” to work. Successful businesses understand the benefit of allowing for personal devices in the workplace. BYOD means businesses are spending less on hardware because the employee is providing their own. And, the Good Technology State of BYOD Report found that employees are happy to supply their own devices. This is likely due to a preference for their personal devices, which often times are actually more feature-rich compared to the lacking features of bulk equipment. Businesses that furnish equipment to their employees often have to think about budget first and features second, but BYOD eliminates this from the equation. Unfortunately, the BYOD model isn’t…

  • Apple Education
    Management

    Can Fresh Fruit At Your Desk Really Help Boost Productivity?

    We all know that we should be eating our five a day of fruit and vegetables. Some people are lucky enough to like most of the fruit and vegetables that there are available whilst others struggle as they simply don’t like them. It is important to get our daily intake though and finding out what the best fruit and vegetables are for you and what you need them for can definitely help. The team at Fruitful Office recently conducted some research which found out that eating fresh fruit at your work desk can improve your productivity and concentration by over 10%, an astonishing amount compared to not eating any. It…

  • Business Growth Staff Money
    Business Tools

    How the Right Point of Sale System Can Help Your Business Grow

    The days of point of sale systems being glorified calculators to process payment transactions and calculate tax and change are far behind us. Today, point of sale systems are sophisticated networks of hardware and software technologies—all working together to make your business more efficient and secure. Indeed, the right point of sale system can do a lot to drive the growth and success of your business. The key word in that sentence, though, is “right,” as not all point of sale technologies will be ideal for every business. Standard Features for a Quality POS Ultimately, you will have to think about the factors that make your business unique. What are…

  • Startup Meeting
    Management

    The Ultimate Guide To Starting A Business

    More and more people are turning to business as a way of life. The reasons for this are many, and it is one of the most lucrative ways to make a living. If you get all of the separate elements right, running your own business can be extremely rewarding. The rewards are not just financial, either, but of many different kinds. There is also the positive feeling that comes from having built something from the ground up. Of course, the world of business is also full of challenges and potential setbacks. The main things to remember in relation to these is that they are not necessarily an issue, as long…

  • Businessmen
    Marketing

    8 Ways to Outshine Your Competitors at Events

    The key to a successful exhibition, ultimately, is to draw crowds to your display stand. To do that, you’ll need to be able to be better than your competitors’ stands. Have you ever attended one of those events and walked past rows and rows of stands that all looked basically the same? If so, you know that in order to draw attention, you need to outshine the competition. Take a look at some ways you can do just that. 1. Don’t Shy Away from Your Brand Image Before you start getting creative, it’s important to remember not to abandon your existing identity. If you already have an established brand, prospective…

  • Warehouse Shipping Inventory
    Logistics

    Getting Your Ducks in a Row for Growth

    Every entrepreneur sets out to grow the business. More customers, more sales, higher profits. It’s a simple plan that is at the heart of capitalism, and it’s the goal of every operation. But what could happen that would make growth the worst thing that could happen to a business? Are there really circumstances where hindsight would say that a more measured pace would have been better? As it turns out, there are. But that comes with a qualifier: Growth can be bad if you aren’t prepared for it. Expansion of a business is like a fancy meal. The table has to be set before the food arrives, or else it’s a…