Entries by Ross

Winter cold, heating bills and your business

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Winter cold, heating bills and your business. Given the currently still increasing UK inflation rate, the latest UK budget has put even more pressure on businesses, with changes to the living wage, a reduced energy price cap, increased to employers’ NI contributions adding to the pressure on businesses. the path of inflation going forward is […]

A Good Night’s Sleep is essential

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A Good Night’s Sleep is essential There is always too much to think about and to do when you’re a small trader  running your own business, so a good night’s sleep is essential. But too many of us find ourselves lying in bed wakeful with so many thoughts running through our heads. Almost three quarters […]

Is the pace of change in AI contributing to worker burnout?

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Is the pace of change in AI contributing to worker burnout? One business owner has reported that asking employees to use the AI language tool has created stress and tension rather than increasing productivity. Staff reported that tasks were in fact taking longer as they had to create a brief and prompts for ChatGPT, while […]

Work from home or back to the office?

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Work from home or back to the office? The jury’s still out. A couple of years ago remote working, introduced during the Covid pandemic, was being hailed as a welcome and permanent change. But since then some of its advocates have backtracked. Most recently, Amazon has decreed that its employees return to the office effective […]

Self storage can cut your business costs

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Self storage can cut your business costs Office rents have been rising and adding to business costs. One way to cut down the amount of space your business needs is to use self storage. You can rent a small space to keep office records that must be kept but are not in use every day. […]

Could a regular day of downtime make you more productive?

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Could a regular day of downtime make you more productive? Many UK adults spend an average of five hours a day looking at screens, sometimes more if they are at work. However, a new event, called the Offline Club carried out a a 24-hour digital detox. One participant, aged 33, had calculated that between working […]

Improving work meetings

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Improving work meetings No-one denies that work meetings whether in person or online are sometimes necessary. Elon Musk once said that “excessive meetings are the blight of big companies and almost always get worse over time”. One global study has found that 72% of work meetings are ineffective. Brain activity drops when in a Zoom […]

Back to planet Earth?

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Back-to-planet-EarthBack to planet Earth? There is a growing trend among businesses to leave cloud storage in favour of using locally based hardware data centres. The reason is chiefly the cost largely because the storage space is rented from a cloud storage provider. One US company quoted a boost in annual profits of £790,000 after leaving […]

Why doesn’t the construction industry make more use of technology?

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Building techniques have not changed much since the early 1900s. The actual construction of buildings still relies heavily on manual labour. However, there have been technological advances that the industry could benefit from. Among them are 3D printing. It can be used for extruding concrete or other materials to build up the walls of a […]

A voluntary AI safety code – is it enough?

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At least 16 companies have signed up to voluntary artificial intelligence safety standards introduced at the Bletchley Park summit. They include companies from China and the UAE. The signatories have committed to voluntarily “work toward” information sharing, “invest” in cybersecurity and “prioritise” research into societal risks. However, the standards have faced criticism for lacking teeth […]