Our previous blog focused on company culture as well as the effect it could have on your brand. Your company’s culture, positive or negative, shows up in your brands reputation. We discussed how to evaluate the cultural health of your organization, but how do you give your company a cultural facelift?

If you have determined that the culture of your company needs some adjusting or refreshing, there are a few questions you will want to think about first:

• What qualities do you value that you would like to show up in your company’s culture? Respect, acceptance, creativity, fun, etc.?
• How can you mirror you company values in its culture?
• How is information distributed to employees? Are they left in the dark frequently?
• How are employees currently rewarded? 
• Does everybody in the company feel listened to? If not, how could you improve this?

These might lead you to more questions. Consider having a brainstorming session with your employees to determine the right solutions for your company. Here are several ideas we came up with:

Suggestion/Thought box – Enabling people to anonymously share their thoughts or opinions about the day to day in the office can lead to a more open feeling in the company. These concerns can be brought up in company meetings if they pertain to everyone.

Empower employees – Give people ownership over their jobs by treating them like peers as opposed to peons. You can achieve this by being more transparent; don’t just communicate when you have successes, tell them when things aren’t going flawlessly. It will create a team full of mutual support.

Flexible hours – Giving people some flexibility to get their work done exhibits confidence. Trusting them to regulate themselves will cause them to respect you more.

Dress code – Have a more relaxed dress code. It’s remarkable what allowing people to express themselves can do for a company’s culture. Think about themed days: silly hat day, Hawaiian shirt day, or anything that gets people thinking creatively and brings smiles to the day.

Celebrate – You are all part of the same company and hopefully share the same goals. Celebrate this by having a monthly movie day, a team outing after work, or a lunch time game day – something fun that gets the group doing something with each other.

Below is a variety of things that real companies have done to incorporate some fun to their culture:

• Spontaneous Nerf gun wars
• Painting inspirational quotes on the walls
• Hitting a loud gong when there is a success to let the whole company know
• Foosball tournaments
• Lunchtime Yoga
• Lunchtime Crafting Club
• Monday Mad Libs, whoever wishes to contribute, does, and then the completed Mad Lib is emailed to the company

Strategy is typically at the forefront of a company’s focus. Strategy is not the only thing that makes a company prosperous. Culture also plays a vital role. The culture of your company impacts your branding, your marketing success, and daily operations, all of which have an effect on how the world sees your company. The logos of brands like Apple, Google, and Starbucks are recognizable not only because they appear to be everywhere, but also these businesses have strong cultures that shine through their employees, storefronts, and logos. These positive, strong cultures all begin within the walls of their offices.

Why Culture is so Important

If people work in a place where they feel ownership, pride, and empowerment they will put their hearts into the work they do. They will take more risks and be more willing to think outside of the box. A healthy culture fosters creativity and innovative thinking. When people feel like they are being stifled by their work or they have no control over their tasks, they will do the work assigned to them with no additional effort. This can not only lead to a sad individual but a sad environment where every task put toward your brand is given the minimum level of effort. Instead, you want a vibrant and alive environment so your brand sticks out from the rest. Nurturing a healthy culture is the responsibility of everyone in the company, from the CEO to HR to the receptionist.

Below are just a few of the advantages of fostering a healthy culture.

• Focus – Keeping employees dedicated to the same goal helps a company run with efficiency. Getting people to care about the goal comes with having a healthy focus. If your employees feel like they are a significant part of attaining that goal they will be more likely to push themselves. When individuals feel like they have no effect on the main goal, they loose focus, and can become cynical.

• Cohesion – The foundation of cohesion is strong communication between associates, whether they are dealing with successes or roadblocks. Strong communication strengthens teamwork and makes operations run more smoothly. In a workplace with an unhealthy culture, people could be nervous to offer feedback about problems that arise or might not care enough to act quickly when issues do arise.

• Motivation – A enthusiastic workforce gets things done. That might seem obvious, but companies that don’t pay attention to the health of their culture could be suffering when it comes to productivity. Being motivated to work hard is a trait that should be present in every person in the company if the culture is healthy.

Measuring the Cultural Health of Your Company

Cultural health ought to be assessed regularly. So how do you measure the cultural health of a company? First, look at how people are supervised, are they just given a task with no input or do they have some control over their jobs? Are repetitive tasks distributed so everyone has the opportunity to be challenged? While a few people may never be happy, if you discover the overwhelming consensus to be poor it may be time for you to look at making a few adjustments to how the business is run to improve the culture and the overall health of the company. Visit again soon to find out some tips on creating a positive work environment.

You launched your own catering business because you love to cook. You went into the bakery business to sell pastries and cupcakes. You didn’t open your own landscaping company because you love paperwork. Yet to be a successful small business owner, you can’t ignore the financial side of your business, and this means that you have to make sure that you accurately invoice your clients. Neglecting to invoice your customers can leave you with a serious cash flow problem, one that, if left unchecked, could put you out of business.

Invoicing help online

Using a web-based invoicing service is a possible option for business owners who need a quicker, more dependable way, and often-automatic means to invoice their clients. You can find a multitude of available online options to choose from that can take that wearisome task of paperwork off your plate. Below we’ll take a look at just 3 of the solutions available:

A free but powerful invoicing service

First, let’s look at a zero cost system: BillingBoss. Obviously its biggest advantage is that it is 100% free, but that doesn’t mean it’s not impressive. Most small businesses will be happy with BillingBoss’s capacity to automatically invoice customers on a monthly basis and send once-off invoices for more infrequent clients.

A power tool

AcceptPay from American Express is without a doubt for the power user. For only $30 a month, users of AcceptPay can connect with QuickBooks, collect online payments from clients, and set up a wide array of customizable automatic invoices. It seems a fairly small price to pay for such a impressive tool.

Invoicing for the tech-savvy

If you’d like more control over your online invoicing, you might consider downloading BambooInvoice. This is another free service. What sets it apart, though, is that small business owners host it on their own servers, not in the cloud. Since it is an open source program, tech-savvy entrepreneurs can personalize it to fit their business’s specific needs.

The best news for business owners is that these services are just a small sample of the many online invoicing services available, many of them free or low-cost. Those business owners who wish to quickly gain control over their invoicing process should check them out.

Cyber crimes happen daily, and everyday IT security companies track and record data around these attacks. Microsoft is upping its game and launching a real-time threat feed so that its fellow partners can study existing threats it finds and learn the best steps to proactively take against them.

Microsoft presently has a process set up to take down harmful botnets. Microsoft “swallows” the botnets and lets them infect accounts that are highly controlled by Microsoft’s team. After the botnets infect the accounts, Microsoft learns the way they work and removes them as a threat.

This collected information is now given to ISPs, private and government organizations, & CERTs. While real-time data may not decrease the number of attacks by malicious code, the impact of sharing this data will most likely be quite extraordinary. IT security companies should be able to respond more quickly to these threats and thus be able to reduce the level of damage they can cause.

Even more importantly than a reduction in damage, a live threat feed could mean that the IT security industry as a whole will begin to share more information.  It’s been a long-standing belief that sharing validated threat data may lead to copycat attacks. However, this is not a valid concern. Cyber criminals have already been sharing secrets and ways to get around security systems. It only makes sense for the IT security industry to be sharing their knowledge of how to fight these cyber criminals.

Let’s hope that security professionals soon realize that sharing information is more valuable than secrecy. And let’s hope that Microsoft’s move is a first step in this change of attitude.

Many small business owners have employed the cloud during these tough economic times. Business owners can save money by using programs within the cloud, from Photoshop alternatives to project-management tools. Nevertheless, the cloud can be a bit questionable when it comes to security. Documents stored in the cloud can be compromised or damaged.

Password issues

One of the biggest security issues when dealing with the cloud is password protection. This is also one of the biggest security issues outside of the cloud.

Selecting a hard to guess password for data and information in the cloud is a simple way for business owners to protect themselves. Creating a password that has both numbers and letters, and when possible, special characters. Another consideration for business owners is who should have access to these passwords. The more people that have access to passwords the more at risk the data is.

Hacker alert

Hackers, malware, and spyware remain serious issues for cloud environments, just as they are problems that business owners face when logging onto their personal computers everyday. The thing that makes this especially scary is that individual business owners have little control over how secure cloud services are. The big names — companies like Microsoft and Google — must provide their own security for the material that business owners store in the cloud.

Common sense protection

There are a couple common-sense practices that can help protect small business owners who choose to store information in the cloud.

First, sensitive data is probably not the best thing to store in the cloud. If your data is so sensitive that a compromise on its security could spell the collapse of your business, consider saving it on a physical computing system and apply a secure back up process that is more controllable.

Secondly, be careful about who is allowed access to the data stored in the cloud. It seems obvious that business owners protect their laptops and desktops with passwords. The same should be applied to the cloud.

There are lots of advantages to cloud computing. Backing up important data makes it readily available to everyone in your company and frees up space on your servers. You almost certainly have several questions about cloud security and may be pondering if cloud security will protect your client’s data and comply with HIPAA, PCI or Sarbanes-Oxley regulations.

Is your cloud storage solution following these requirements? If they don’t specify it in their privacy policies, it can be hard to tell. Let’s explore this further below.

Compliance

Cloud security has become an important issue recently, as more and more companies turn to online storage solutions, seeking greater simplicity, scalability and affordability. However the cost in both money and reputation for poor handling of customer data can be very high indeed. If your business should comply to key regulations associated with patient privacy (HIPAA), credit card security (PCI) or the finance-sector strictures of Sarbanes-Oxley, it can be hard to find out if a service complies with these important restrictions.

Who is responsible

Cloud security is paramount when handling your sensitive data, but whose responsibility is it? Should you assume that if it is not explained in the privacy policy, that a service provider doesn’t adhere to these regulations? While this is clearly the safest option, it may leave you unable to use cloud computing at all. Many services don’t provide detailed information in their privacy rules, presumably to reduce their liability. The hope is that over time cloud storage and sharing will become better self-regulated and companies will decide to divulge their individual practices to the businesses they serve. While such self-regulation is not required at the moment, many businesses believe it is their duty to display clear warnings, outlining what they don’t provide or guarantee.

In the end, as cloud computing service providers are not required by law to be transparent about their security, the responsibility rests in your hands. If you choose to use the cloud, it’s your responsibility to pick a service provider you trust. Weigh the advantages and disadvantages and make the best decision for your business.

As a small business owner, you may have worried about all the what-ifs that come into play if a disaster were to happen. Precisely what does it mean whenever we talk about a disaster? It may mean a natural disaster destroying all your data, a simple download of a virus that corrupts your systems, or an employee accidently deleting something they shouldn’t have. Whatever happens it can be hard and cumbersome to recover from. Develop a disaster recovery plan to ensure that if the time ever comes, you have a plan in place to help you get back on your feet as quickly as possible.

Decide What’s Important

First off, consider what data is the most critical to get your company back up and running. What information has to be backed up and saved and what can you afford to lose? This will help you determine what you need to back up. Choosing an online provider or storing your data in the cloud can be the best way to make sure you can retrieve your data quickly.

Make a Plan

Your next step is to think about what steps you should take if something happens. Begin with the worst possible scenario and make a plan for that. What technology do you need if everything is destroyed, what data, and what systems have to be back up ASAP? Write down these in order of importance.

Know Your Workflows

I’m sure you have the overall picture of your company processes, but what about all the day-to-day processes that you don’t have memorized? Ask your employees to document their workflows and the actual tasks they preform. By doing this, if something does happen, anyone can pick up where they left off and nothing gets looked over.

Decide Who is in Charge

Depending on the kind of disaster you go through, your employees could panic.  Before this happens, select one levelheaded person in the company to be “in charge” of the disaster recovery plan. They should know the plan as well as you do and possibly have helped you create it. This will be the person you turn to for execution of the plan, so that you can be the strong leader your employees need at a time like this.

When we hear of disaster people often think it can’t happen to them, but we never know what is around the corner. It’s important to be prepared. Having a strong disaster recovery plan will not only make you feel more secure, but will comfort your employees as well.

The name Segway is associated with tech failure. After all, inventor Dean Kamen once believed that his two-wheeled scooters would become a substitute for cars. He pictured a future in which people buzzed to the grocery store, library, or work on their Segway PT scooters.

We are all aware that didn’t happen. The Segway is still around and it isn’t a totally uncommon site to see someone taking a Segway out for a “drive” around the block.  For a “failed” technology, that is a pretty amazing feat!

Let’s discuss how the Segway actually works though.

Powering the Segway

Electric motors fueled by phosphate-based lithium batteries power the Segway. The scooters are easily charged by just plugging them into a common electrical socket. Thanks to a combination of two computers, special software, tilt sensors, and five gyroscopic sensors the Segway remains upright and doesn’t tip over.

Making the Segway Move

The user plays the biggest role in making the Segway move. Simply by shifting your weight in the direction you want to go and moving the handlebars a little, the Segway’s sensors recognize the modification in balance point and react appropriately. The most recent version of the Segway has a top speed of 12.5 MPH. For obvious reason, it performs best on flat surfaces.

Lowered Expectations

Experts touted that the Segway would become a bigger deal that Internet. Clearly the device did not live up to that level of hype!

Of course, we all know what happened. The Segway looked odd, and people looked peculiar riding it. That was enough to prevent the Segway from taking off as its promoters predicted.

Keeping track of your business’ projects in conjunction with multiple team members all over the country can be challenging. How can a small company keep track of this, make requests from those working offsite, share current information, and documentation and also assign new tasks?

Project management solutions

Luckily, for small businesses, there are several project management solutions.  These tools can provide assistance to keep projects on course, and employees and clients connected. Here are a few of the best project management tools available:

Basecamp

This well-known project management tool has gained popularity as it is a single tool that allows businesses to manage projects, assign duties, communicate with employees, and more. It’s truly a one-stop shop! It even allows clients to evaluate and comment on their project. As well as schedule meetings and calendar events, which keeps all relevant parties on the same page.

Quickbase

From the makers of Inuit, Quickbase is pretty comparable to Basecamp with its capability to serve both large and small businesses. It features a simple and easy to use interface.

Huddle

Huddle provides more opportunities for those businesses looking for a more creative tool.  It is renowned for its live-conferencing feature.  Huddle helps keep your creative team connected at the click of a button.

Deskaway

DeskAway is a good tool for giving you an instant snapshot of the progress that’s been made on a project. After reviewing this progress, you can use DeskAway to deliver quick messages to team members to either congratulate them on their work or to ask for changes or updates. DeskAway also gives you the capability to create and post to a blog developed especially for your present project.

There are many other choices for project management tools, each with their own benefits for individual businesses. Make sure you look for the one that will help your business manage your projects and personnel the best.