Posts

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?

Cloud-Storage

Where your documents are stored in the cloud is more important than you might think

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We perhaps all take for granted our use of the hardware and software, data centres and communications networks that power modern business.

But differences in the laws in Europe and the USA are becoming an increasing cause for concern across the EU.

It is all about who controls the data.

Europe is heavily dependent on US firms for cloud services.

There are laws in the EU (GDPR) and UK to protect the privacy of data. But in the USA, the intelligence and law-enforcement services broad powers to access data.

At the moment Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft and Google have a 65% share of the world cloud market between them.

But there are moves afoot to create what is being called Europe’s first “sovereign hyperscale cloud” thanks to €15m in seed funding and plans to build eight data centres in Europe in the next five years.

This will be managed by a Stockholm based company called Evroc.

There are 377 organisations participating in the Gaia-X project, which aims to join up cloud service providers in a federated system, so data can move between them while data owners remain in control.

Watch this space….

Measuring-Productivity

Measuring productivity and why it is important

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In the current difficult economic climate how well a business is performing may be crucial to survival.

Measuring its productivity is therefore important.

Productivity is the measure of production against efficiency, and it is especially important in an era of remote or flexible working patterns.

According to Opus Energy, 86% of UK SMEs believe productivity is an issue, yet one in five (22%) businesses are not measuring productivity at all.

Measuring productivity is not a straightforward calculation of the numbers of items produced, the cost of production and the number of staff producing the item. That may be relatively straightforward for the manufacture of a product.

However, as an example, “One hour spent on the phone resolving a query from an unhappy customer could be worth a lot more than one new sales call. Why? An unhappy customer can do more damage to your business.

The key to measuring productivity is to set a number of benchmarks against which performance can be assessed.

This includes identifying expected work outputs for each position, defining and measuring tasks not hours worked, setting clear goals for staff and placing values on the quality of work.

There is a useful guide to assessing productivity for SMEs here.