Inflation-Rising

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 unusually uncertain and Bank of England officials, who decide whether to raise or cut interest rates, are divided.

Four of the nine-strong Monetary Policy committee on Tuesday said it was not clear whether prices rises will accelerate or slow in the coming months. Much depends, as numerous members of the Bank of England have suggested, on the pass through of Budget measures into prices and wages.

Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey reiterated earlier in the week that future interest rate falls would be “gradual”.

But concentrating on productivity for yourself or employees is even harder when you are cold.

Is adequate heating something you can’t afford to restrict if you want to keep your business productive?

 

Good-Night-Sleep

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 of people in the UK (71%) don’t get the recommended 7-9 hours of sleep per night, according to a study, external last year by insurance group Direct Line. It found that one in seven were getting less than five hours.

Sleep issues can be caused by a wide variety of factors, including stress, shift work and caffeine or alcohol consumption.

A lack of sleep plays a role in high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, and even mental health problems, according to the UK Health Security Agency, external (which was previously called Public Health England).

And that spills over to the economy. One report says that sleep deprivation costs the UK up to £40bn a year in lost productivity., external

So what can you do to ensure you get a good rest so your brain is firing on all cylinders during the working day?

Rather than sleeping pills why not try the phenomenon of sleep stories – which are soothing tales provided via apps and podcasts.

Try a google to find out more.

Worker-Burnout

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 also having to double check its output for inaccuracies, of which there were many.

Also, every time the platform updated they had to learn its new features, which also took extra time.

The business owner in question said: “There’s an overflow of AI tools in the market, and no single tool solves multiple problems. As a result, I constantly needed to keep tabs on multiple AI tools to execute tasks, which became more of a mess. It was hard to track which tool was supposed to do what, and I started getting utterly frustrated”.

In freelancer platform Upwork’s survey of 2,500 knowledge workers in the US, UK, Australia and Canada 61% of people believe that using AI at work will increase their chances of experiencing burnout.

A management professor at the University of California in Los Angeles, commented: “Using multiple apps requires additional time to learn them and switch between them, and this lost time is painful because we are so sensitive to wasted time.”

Clearly AI use is not going to go away, but it needs to be used judiciously and selectively.

Working-from-home

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 from January 2, 2025.

However, since the UK election and a new party in power workers’ rights have come to the forefront with a new act passed to give workers more protection though some measures will be out for consultation for some time.

Recent research by VirginMedia O2 has found that a minority – four in 10 firms – demand staff are at their desks five days a week.

Obviously, for some firms remote working is not an option, such as for factory workers and train drivers.

But there are plenty of other areas such as IT where remote working is a viable option.

What do you think?

Have your views changed in the last couple of years?

Self-Storage

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.

You can use it to store stock for when you need it rather than having it all on-site.

You can even use self storage for some small businesses such as a bicycle workshop, or other small-scale business.

It is relatively cheaper than having like a retail store to just do this sort of work.

If you can’t work from home, but don’t want to rent expensive town centre office space, using a storage unit to work in could be the answer.

Digital-Detox

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 behind a desk all day and coming home to watch TV and “doomscroll” on social media, he can spend up to 14 hours a day looking at a screen.

The Offline Club held its first in-person “digital detox hangout” in Amsterdam in February. In the months since, the company has already expanded into Paris, Dubai and London.

Ilya Kneppelhout, the co-founder of the Offline Club, said people have been surprised at how just a few hours offline “made them feel so much less stressed and more connected to themselves and to others”.

Would a day free of screens refresh you and make you more productive?

Group-Work-Meeting

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 meeting, according to Yale university research.

However, using AI has improved things somewhat.

It means transcribing the meeting for you, suggesting questions you might want to ask, summarising the meeting in point form, reminding you of who else is present.

It is argued that the use of AI will make meetings much more productive as people will be much netter informed before they attend, which should speed things up and focus them.

It is also speculated that AI can be used to moderate meetings and provide feedback.

Microsoft’s Ms Jaime Teevan is convinced that AI will help to improve meetings. “It can help people feel less overwhelmed, it can help them get started and check things off their list. And it can help spark ideas, seeing things in news ways and getting support there.”

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 cloud-based storage.

But it is also about reliability: If a major data centre goes down, large parts of the web can go offline.

There may also be security concerns when using a cloud-based service which can be crucial to a company wanting to store sensitive information and protect it from competitors.

There is an initial outlay in buying the storage hardware, but if it is then shared with other businesses some of the costs can be recouped in rent.

It has been argued that using the cloud is faster, but that is only likely to be an issue for a huge multinational business.

The lesson is clear for smaller businesses; Do the research and find the most efficient, secure and cost-effective way to store your data.

Construction-Crane

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 house.

However, 3D printing of homes tends to be expensive, to have extremely thick walls, and are hard to construct on anything other than an open, flat site.

Modular construction is another innovative technology where parts of the building are manufactured in a factory then transported to the site and lifted into place.

Neither option has really taken off according to the UK Home Builders Federation.

Problems with planning policy delays are apparently part of the problem.

Developers need a certain amount of confidence that they’ll be able to sell their houses quickly once complete, and often need to alter plans as a project continues as the market changes.

AI-Safety-Code

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 due to their voluntary nature.

Speaking at a follow-up to the Bletchley Park event in Seoul, The UK’s technology secretary, Michelle Donovan, said the Seoul event “really does build on the work that we did at Bletchley”.

While it is good that there are now standards to be worked towards, Fran Bennett, the interim director of the Ada Lovelace Institute., has warned that while they remain voluntary  there is a risk that many companies will ignore them.

“It’s great to be thinking about safety and establishing norms, but now you need some teeth to it: you need regulation, and you need some institutions which are able to draw the line from the perspective of the people affected, not of the companies building the things, she said.”

There is no doubts that the launch of ChatGPT has stimulated what has been called an “arms Race” in AI.

“There are just not enough people who “understand how to make these systems, how to make them really perform, and how to solve some of the challenges going forward,” says Andrew Rogoyski, director of innovation at the Surrey Institute for People-Centred AI at the University of Surrey.