I Done This Support - Author Articles - Page 2 of 47

Written Communication Channels at Work – Where Your Intranet Fits

December 19, 2019 by I Done This Support Leave a Comment

This is a guest post from Lisa Banks, an expert in workplace communication and writer at content marketing agency Animalz.

Good communication is vital to a productive, healthy workplace. But where that communication takes place — the channel or medium used to convey the message — can make a big difference in how successful it is.

Written communication channels have risen to the forefront in recent years. Many people now prefer written communication over phone calls and would rather read an email than have a meeting. And thanks to technology, there are more tools available now than ever before that let you tap out a message to your co-worker without having to get together in person or on the phone.

But the plethora of tools have also complicated the choices we must make when choosing the right communication channel. With teams moving to instant messaging, social intranets, and even texting as a way to communicate, the written communication channel alone brings a multitude of decisions: Should I text Sharon about this? Should I try her on Slack first? Do I need to also follow up with email? What happened to that document where we discussed this same topic last week…?

It’s as important as ever to match the message to the medium. So, how does your team know which written channel to use when they have something to say? And how does your intranet fit into the mix?

This Deli Makes $50 Million a Year By Staying Small

December 13, 2019 by I Done This Support 2 Comments

It’s crazy to discover there’s a deli that makes $50 million dollars a year. It’s stranger still how they’ve managed to accomplish it. Most restaurants grow their revenue by opening more locations and eventually developing a franchise model like Subway. You sell more and more sandwiches as you open more and more stores. The problem is scale — maintaining quality over a massive empire is much harder than over a single shop. Your restaurant becomes more about volume than great food and remarkable service. Zingerman’s, a deli based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, faced this fork in the road: open more locations or face continually stagnating revenue growth. Instead of choosing the conventional franchise path, they blazed their own trail.

Jeff Bezos’s Peculiar Management Tool for Self-Discipline at Amazon Meetings

May 31, 2019 by I Done This Support 6 Comments

We originally published this piece in 2017. Two years later, we added fresh advice for managers.

The modern workplace’s vogue is informal information exchange. We sit in open floor plan offices so that we can spontaneously collide, chat, and collaborate. An office setup for generating ideas can be fizzy and energizing, though when sparks aren’t flying, the colliding can be noisy and distracting.

Jeff Bezos takes a totally different approach to management at Amazon meetings — far from that madding crowd. He has a contrarian management technique that’s peculiarly old school — write it down.

[Image via Forbes]

In senior executive meetings at Amazon, before any conversation or discussion begins, everyone sits for 30 minutes in total silence, carefully reading six-page printed memos. Reading together in the meeting guarantees everyone’s undivided attention to the issues at hand, but the real magic happens before the meeting ever starts. It happens when the author is writing the memo.

95% of Managers Follow an Outdated Theory of Motivation

April 24, 2019 by I Done This Support 52 Comments

This post was originally published in 2014. It has been revamped with additional research and advice for managers in 2019.

Photo by Alex Kotliarskyi on Unsplash

What, by a long shot, is the most important motivator for employees at work? Is it money, pressure, or praise?

Typically, managers believe the idea that pressure makes diamonds. The thinking is that if you want exceptional performance, you align employee objectives with end-of-year bonuses for hitting certain milestones and then employees will turn up their work ethic to reach them.

Long-held conventional wisdom on management dies hard. That’s because it’s based on gut instinct and superstition — and managerial understanding of motivation is no different. A massive 95% of managers are wrong about what the most powerful motivator is for employees at work.

Not only that, they’re thinking about employee motivation fundamentally wrong.

12 Startup Leaders on What They Love about Their Company Cultures

September 19, 2017 by I Done This Support Leave a Comment

Startup founders begin with building new products and end up building new companies. Ultimately, some of the most successful companies not only reinvent a product or market, they change the way people work in a way that’s reflective of what they value most, and that’s embodied in their company culture.

To find out how startup leaders think about building companies that they themselves enjoy working in, we surveyed the founders of some of the most innovative startups out there to ask them one simple question:

What do you value most about your company culture, and what’s one important way that you contribute to it?

We received some amazing, proud and insightful responses from startup founders personally, another individual within the company who was eager to chip in, and the PR or marketing team.

How to Focus on the Magic Even When Scaling Up

April 10, 2017 by I Done This Support Leave a Comment

Onfleet Product Design and Strategy Director Ivan Tolmachev (right) discusses a prototype with Vice President of Sales Andrew Travis.

Teams of all sizes struggle with their processes at some point in their lifetime. If you’re a startup, one of the your advantages is how quickly you can move in a space where the big boys take a while. But what happens when your team is in transition mode and needs to keep scaling up as quickly as it did in the beginning? And how do you this in a design capacity?

The State of Human Resources (Before I Done This)

March 27, 2017 by I Done This Support Leave a Comment

Human resources needs a swift kick in the butt. I say this based on experience — I’ve done a lot of back-office work while running TypeFrag, Carbonmade and other companies. I’ve set up and managed payroll, benefits, and on-boarding of employees more often than I care to remember. It’s always a painful process that you put off to the last minute because you just don’t want to deal with it.

Remote employees feel closer when you can offer them perks.

Last-Minute Checklist for Productive Startup Launches

March 13, 2017 by I Done This Support Leave a Comment

Last-minute checklist for startups As I got ready to launch GetDelight, my team and I created a last minute list of things we had left to do — we put it on GitHub and checked things off when completed.

How to Make Your Company Email Totally Transparent

February 16, 2017 by I Done This Support Leave a Comment

team-email

This is a guest post by Mathilde Collin from Front. Be sure to check out the Front Blog for more tips on managing team emails.

Transparency helps you move fast. Information isn’t siloed — it’s all readily available for the taking. You don’t need to ask questions, forward information about a customer, or attend a meeting to know what’s going on. Instead, anyone can get access to the information they need without having to jump through hoops to get it.

However, extending this transparency to email is tricky. It was initially designed for 1:1 conversation but has been adapted to team use over time. You can loop in the people you need on a single email with BCC or CC, but it’s hard to make email efficiently accessible to an entire team. At the same time, within every inbox is a goldmine of customer interactions, company history, and internal discussions — so not sharing that is depriving your team of valuable information.

Thanks to new tools, automation, and a bit of organization, you can turn your outdated email inbox into a fully transparent platform that will serve as a resource for your entire team. Here’s how to do that in three steps.

How to Use an Amazon Echo for Your Startup Office

July 26, 2016 by I Done This Support 1 Comment

This week’s post is a guest article by Vinay Patankar, CEO and co-founder of Process Street.

If you’re running a startup, you can use every little bit of help you can get.

But to justify an administrative assistant or office manager, you’ll probably need to have raised a big seed round of over $1 million or have bootstrapped your company past 10 employees. Otherwise, that extra help getting stuff done is just a luxury you can’t quite afford yet.

Enter Alexa via the Amazon Echo. In the same way Alexa can help you and your family out around the home, it can also make your office and your startup just that little bit easier to manage, so that you can keep your sanity and focus on what’s important.

To get the most out of Alexa, you’ll need to set her up specifically for the office. Here’s how.