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Working From Home in the Era of COVID-19

As various cities and states introduce orders to work from home, more and more people are doing so for the first time. For those of you lucky enough to do so, there are some simple things you can do to maintain normalcy, reduce stress, and enjoy it, even if this continues for more and more weeks. I say “lucky enough to do so”, because there are plenty of people who don’t even have a job right now.

I’ve spent almost half my career as a consultant working from home or client’s spaces, and quickly learned that there are three key things that can make all the difference in how to maintain productivity and and how to “stop working” when my day was done:

Separate personal from work space

You now have that once-dreamed-of option to sit on the couch all comfy and work, don’t. That comfort doesn’t last very long once you are bent over, tapping away on a laptop on a coffee table. The body position is much worse than even the worst office furniture. There’s also a secondary effect that will creep in over multiple days: your work is now invading your curl-up-on-the-couch comfort spot.

Carving out a work space is key for this. If you have the option of a separate room with a table or desk, great. If you’re in a small NYC apartment, working from the dining table or some other table in a corner is a good option. For the duration, keep this space only for work. If it’s the dinner table, don’t eat there, except for “lunch at your desk”. If you use your laptop for personal and work now, move it to and from the work space when you are “at work” vs. “at home”.

Maintaining this separation of spaces helps you to keep focus during work and also put work away when you are done.

Keep a routine; keep a schedule

It may seem like a dream to work in your pajamas, and go for it for the novelty (for a couple of days), but this will come back to haunt you if it goes on for long. I keep seeing “For those who need to know, it’s Wednesday” social media posts, when it has maybe been a week of shutdowns. If people are losing track of days this quickly, it’s a sign of lost time due to loss of routine.

Keep your routines. Get up, shower, groom, and dress for work to walk into your “work space” on time and ready to work. Sure, you can now have “casual Mondays” as often as “casual Fridays”, but just dressing for work helps put you in the mindset to focus and work. Stepping into your “work space” on time and ready to go will help you also keep work from bleeding over into your personal space and time.

If you maintain a routine, you will find you can be far more productive in the work time than you may have ever been in the office with its constant interruptions. If so, feel free to have a full two hour lunch as part of the routine, where you leave your “work space”, have lunch, engage with friends on social media, exercise, or just watch movie. But when that time is done, go back to your work space ready for the afternoon.

If you do find your productivity is much higher than when you were in the office, save that for discussions with your employer about work-from-home options when we return to the office life after this current time.

Exercise

Most of the “stay-at-home” orders in cities and states do not prevent you from ever leaving your home. Being outside is important for health, so add outdoor activities to your routine. This is not a recommendation to go around spending a lot of time with people or touching everything. Maintain distance, avoid touching things you don’t absolutely need to, and wash your hands the moment you return. Also, regularly clean doorknobs, light switches, handles on cabinets, your laptop and phone, etc. since you will likely touch these before you have washed your hands at some point.

Overall, be cautious but try to maintain normalcy as much as possible. I wish you all the best and we will get through this together.

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Why meetings suck… but they don’t have to

There are many different types and styles of meetings but they all serve one single purpose: focused communication.

Unfortunately, every type and style of meeting loses either “focus” or “communication” (or both) at least 30% of the time. Most struggle to keep it from going off the rails 50% of the time. That’s why meetings in general fail, are incomplete, often boring, and occasionally totally disruptive to an otherwise highly productive day.

I’m not talking about conferences and large events here; there’s an entire industry that covers those. We’re talking about the most common meetings in office settings:

  • “Info dump” to prevent cross-departmental silos and get everyone on the same page
  • Project meetings (this includes agile and scrums)
  • Client meetings (Sales/PR/Customer Support)
  • Team Meetings (separate from “project meetings”, these are usually about resource allocations across multiple projects)
  • 1:1 or boss:team “reviews” or “touch bases”
  • Conferences and Events (Not going into these here as there’s a whole industry around this)

Main Reasons Meetings Lose Focus or Fail in Communication:

  • Time: The length of the meeting and/or the start time
  • Investment: Lack of preparation, no key topic(s), the meeting is set at a regular recurring time but not needed; there’s no purpose for this time
  • No focus to begin with: No agenda, no key topic(s), no prep done, no expectations, or everyone starts while looking at their phones, laptop, email, etc.
  • Poor communication: Going into tangents, info that is irrelevant for the people present, info that could be conveyed by a checklist or some other quick report
  • Low energy: To start/timing, using up the allocated time just to fill it even after all the needed communication has finished, or everyone arrives tired
  • Disruptions in the meeting: A/V or tech issues, late arrivals, or people “stepping out”

Reviewing responses from multiple surveys, several core recurring problems stand out and all have fairly simple solutions.

Time:

Start time is a crucial factor in meetings. How often do your meetings actually start on time? Not starting on time creates a traffic jam of cascading effects, from causing people to be late for other meetings to disruptions or having to “catch up” late arrivals whose input is critical. If the meeting starts on time, it will usually end early.

Picking the right start time is just as important. You generally don’t want to set a meeting as the very first thing of the day. Many people will be late and most will show up mentally unprepared and unfocused. This sets a low level of anxiety in the room right at the start.

Immediately after lunch can also be problematic. Most people can arrive to it on time but basic biology and digestion makes people bleary and lose focus quickly.

If you do need to have a meeting as the first thing each day or immediately after lunch, add some physicality to start. A lesson from direct sales teams which have “first thing” meetings; they use these as motivational cheering sessions to get them warmed up for a sales day. Adding a quick stretch, breathing exercise, and/or ice-breaker/game-like component as the first 1-2 minutes can help wake people up and get them focused. These same techniques can help overcome post-lunch bleariness.

Start meetings on time, no matter what and hold a hard end time. Establishing this trend will be difficult, but the result will always be far more focused meetings. Don’t go back to “catch people up”.

Even if the meeting is highly productive and there are more questions or needed communication, end on time. It is far better to have a productive meeting that needs more follow up than to have one that causes a disruption in the rest of the day. Record your meetings if the info is necessary for people who aren’t there, show up late, or have to leave early. I recommend recording them anyway, for an archive of info and as a way to handle the follow up efficiently.

Preparation:

Preparation is critical, and this doesn’t mean just whoever is leading the meeting. Whoever is leading the meeting does need to have at least two things walking into the meeting, often better completed long before the meeting occurs:

  1. Agenda and/or key topic(s)
  2. Expectations

If there’s a reason to meet, spell it out. What’s the purpose? What goal is to be achieved by the end of the meeting? If the topic(s) and/or goal(s) can’t be identified well before meeting, there’s zero purpose in even having a meeting except to waste time. Spelling out the reason for the meeting and expectations for the results of the meeting ahead of time can also help clarify who should be in the room. Most of the time, not everyone invited should show up. Sometimes, a better delegate can be sent instead. Someone with zero input (and for whom the info is irrelevant) doesn’t need to be there at all. Preparation of a clear agenda and expectations helps everyone identify who really needs to be present.

The leader of the meeting must check A/V and tech to be used ahead of time with enough time to make changes. No A/V or tech? Check the meeting room for appropriate seating, temperature, no loud noises, etc. These are all things that can derail a meeting from even happening.

During the meeting, the leader needs to make sure that any discussions, Q&A, etc. don’t get off topic or into the weeds and lose the focus of the rest of the attendees. Make a note of any point where a deeper discussion between a smaller subset of attendees needs to happen, roll that into the meeting follow up, and get everyone back on track.

Attendees need to also be prepared. They need to read the agenda ahead of time and make sure they have all relevant materials, info, or questions with them when walking into the meeting.

Investment:

The attendees need to be ready to participate, not just sit in the room and half-listen to others drone on. If they are not going to participate and actively receive information, they don’t need to be there. This includes turning off phones, shutting down chat/collaboration tools, closing email, and not doing other work on a laptop while the meeting is going on. If they have to step out mid-way, then the meeting is poorly scheduled, too long, or they don’t really need to be there in the first place.

Attendees all need to participate, even if that participation is just active listening. The purpose of a meeting is to make sure information is being communicated effectively, which means participants learning info they can’t easily get elsewhere, with some Q&A for clarification. Having people’s attention is the core purpose of the meeting, so starting with and keeping that attention is key. This leads us to the last main point:

Meetings involve skills; skills need training:

Too often, all the bad habits of meetings are learned traits. These are not taught or trained, but learned by most of us who first attended meetings as lower-level personnel and never got training in meeting management, public speaking, or even “active listening”. We learned from others who learned from others, all in a bad copy of a copy cascade, and none of whom ever had appropriate training. The result of a lack of training is always inefficiency and meetings falling into that 30-50% waste statistic.

Meeting Management:

Specialized training exists for “scrum masters” and most other types of meeting leaders, but too few companies invest in this training unless really pressed to do so. Take a little time to get your meeting leaders trained. Most core meeting management techniques can be trained in a couple of hours with some backup materials, but require an ongoing participatory training, which means support and feedback until the skills fully develop.

Skills involved include: building a core agenda, keeping participants focused, and having a clear follow up.

Public Speaking:

A majority of people feel uncomfortable speaking in public, especially as the size of the group and anonymity of the attendees grows. Yet this is a skill that is fairly easily learned. Toastmasters has been around for a long time to help people learn the specific skills of presentation and to make presenting in public comfortable. Find a local group and join. Employers: encourage your employees to participate and help them by making sure they have the work-time to participate.

Active Listening:

It may sound a bit hippie-dippy or “new agey”, but active listening is a skill. It involves: bringing your full focus to whatever information is being communicated, techniques of short-hand note taking, listening completely without interruption, asking the right questions for clarification, and actively participating in a conversation. This usually also means shutting up (both physically and keeping internal side-thoughts from stealing your focus).

Now for the confession: do I use all these skills and keep all my meetings fully effective? Absolutely not. I’ve been the main reason some meetings went off the rails, but when I take just a little time ahead and truly focus before going into a meeting, it is almost always a success.

It’s the new year, so the time for resolutions; realistic ones that I can keep. Mine is to always do the prep for meetings, whether I’m leading them or just participating. Will you make the same commitment?

If you or your team would like assistance with meeting skills training, please Contact Us. No matter what, add it as a business resolution to “do meetings better”.

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You’re Using Email Wrong: Marketing

Wrapping up this year and looking into 2020, when we will be over 25 years in the digital universe, it’s well past time to take a look at the oldest electronic marketing tool: email. The sheer volume of email is soul-crushing to the best of us, even when we knowingly choose to “subscribe” to lists and updates.

In our personal lives, many of us have multiple email addresses, including “burner phone” or “trash” email addresses we use only because some website requires an email address to set up a login/password. We’ll use those addresses and never even check the inboxes, assuming it’s all spam. We’ll have a separate email address for bank, financial, and “important” info, to keep it as clean of spam as possible, and maybe another one just for friends and family.

Then of course, there’s your business email address, but unless you are also on the receiving end of some general info@ or sales@ address, you only have one in your work setting. One single email address to be used for setting up various website, app, and saas login/passwords. One single email for all important product tracking and newsletters. One single email for all customer and b2b communications, and that one also gets the inevitable spam.

That one email address is inundated daily from everywhere, and critical customer/b2b communications are getting buried under connected Twitter or LinkedIn notifications, newsletters, and product update announcements from software you’re using or event invitations from organizations you do business with.

Your email marketing:

There is an entire industry of marketers all arguing about email and how to make it better, so I’m not going to waste any time on getting into that other than to ask everyone to really concentrate on marketing and for my personal request of: please just tone it down and make it cleaner, more streamlined for the reader.

If you would like help with evaluating your marketing and recommendations, Contact Us.

Managing the overstuffed business email inbox:

In a previous post (“You’re Using Email Wrong: Managing Your Inbox“), I covered a general overview of keeping your inbox clean, but let’s get more specific about how to manage the b2b and product/software emails that you are receiving.

Filters:

Automations are key to helping clean all this up. You can use native and plug-in rules and filters for specific FROM addresses and/or domains that can siphon off priority product updates and announcements to an “Important” sub-folder that keeps your main inbox clean and pushes the priority of reading these up compared to the general “Newsletters” sub-folder recommended in the previous post.

If you are getting spammed from a website domain you have a login set up under, take the 30 seconds of time to “unsubscribe” from their marketing. The marketing “unsub” is even easier in the era of GDPR. You could also mark it as “junk” in your email, but remember that transactional emails (like a “reset my password” or receipt of purchase) will also end up in your junk folder if you do this.

Business Alias Account

Another viable option is to add a gmail, mail.com, outlook live, protonmail, or similar free online address to use for filtering expected spam when signing up on websites, downloading white papers, etc. You can always log into that product’s (or service’s) account later and update the email address to your primary business email if you decide to start receiving their updates.

If you have an agreeable IT provider for your business email, they can always set up two accounts for everyone, but be sure to have a clear policy in place on which email is linked to internal office infrastructure, and which is to be used for external purposes.

I realize this last recommendation is likely to enrage some marketers, but it’s simple: don’t waste your messaging on people who don’t want your pitch, just your content.

As always, please feel free to Contact Us if you would like to receive this as a training or if you would like us to evaluate your business processes and systems.

Or, you can always go to nsbinsights.com. On the main page, you will be prompted to enter your email address and sign up for updates. 😉

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You’re Using Email Wrong: Managing Your Inbox

How many people can open their email right now and see more than 10 unread emails sitting in their inbox? 50? 100 or multiple hundreds?

For those happy with fewer than 50: How many have more than 10 emails in your inbox that have already been opened and read? 20… 50… 100… 1,000+? How many have an empty inbox with no unread emails? I do.

My current mailbox: Empty inbox with no unread emails except junk

Additional Questions:

  • How many people have sub-folders under your inbox? How many of those sub-folders have sub-folders? Multiple chains of sub-folders under sub-folders under sub-folders…
  • How many receive newsletters daily or weekly? How many of those newsletters do you actually read?
  • In Outlook, how many use the “Tasks” flags? Those who use these: how many have more than 10 tasks that are not completed? How many have 1 or more that is over a month past due? 6 months? A year?

Let’s look at your actual physical mailbox in comparison:

When you go to your physical mailbox, how often do you: open it, flip through the various pieces of mail, open a couple and peek inside at the bills or letters and then just shove everything back into the mailbox and walk away? You don’t; no one does. We do one of several things with the contents and leave that mailbox empty for the next day’s mail. Why would we treat our virtual mailbox any differently?

Leaving emails in your inbox in various states of reading, responses, sub-folders, and general chaos adds just another level of stress in the background. This background noise just adds more tension in your personal work space.

How to Deal With Your Inbox – the 4 Cs:

  1. Complete it
  2. Clean it
  3. Calendar it
  4. Cowork it

Let’s break these down:

Complete it: When you first read an email, does it involve a request for information or action that you can tackle in less than 15 min? Do it now, get it done, and archive the email removing it from your inbox as completed.

Clean it: Is it junk, spam, unnecessary info, or even useful info, but requires no follow up from you? Then read as much as you need and get rid of it.

  • Junk/Spam: mark it as such so it prevents future mail from this sender
  • Unnecessary info: glance through, but hard delete as you don’t need to keep it for any reason
  • Useful info, but no follow up needed: read and archive it, in case you want to refer back to it in the future

Calendar it: Will it take more than 15 min to follow up on a request for information or action? Put it on your calendar for a later date/time, so you can carve out an appropriate amount of time to deal with it. Inform stakeholders about the time that you will follow up. Setting these expectations is important. Most people are fine with a delayed response as long as you set an expectation on when you will deal with their request. You want to make sure that you can get a response or follow up back to them earlier than the expectation you set, so set the expectation on response later than the time you have set aside on the calendar for yourself.

Another key on this is to “put it on your calendar” rather than using the “task flags”. There are multiple reasons to do this, particularly to set aside a portion of your own time on a future time/date that won’t be overtaken by daily needs. It also blocks off the time on your calendar to prevent co-workers from picking that time for a meeting. Task flags have due dates, but don’t actually set aside the time on your calendar on a particular day to actually spend on the follow up.

Setting follow up time on your calendar is key to making sure you have time allocated and far more useful than “Task flags”

Cowork it: Will it take more than 15 min AND needs someone else’s input or actions? Put it on your calendar as a meeting with the person or people who need to be involved. If this doesn’t need to be an actual meeting, make a note in the meeting invite as “get this done or info back to me by this date/time, so we don’t need to meet.”

Still send a message back to the stakeholders letting them know when to expect a response. Make sure to include those delegated on that message, either CC’d and introduced, or BCC’d so they know what expectations you have set with the stakeholder. Communication and clear expectations always are key.

Avoiding the chaos of sub-folders:

For those of you with sub-folders, and sub-folders of other sub-folders: How much time do you spend on sorting and “filing” each email you receive under the right sub-folder? How many times have you come across something that would fit under multiple sub-folders and have to decide which one is the right one to file it under? How often do you actually go back and open up a single sub-folder to find an old email you filed away?

It often takes 5-10 seconds per email to “file” each away under the right sub-folder. Compare the time used on this to using advanced search tools to find an older email maybe once a week or once a month. That search time is usually less than 30 seconds. Basic math: 100 emails per day being filed away at 10 sec. each is 1,000 seconds per day, 5,000 sec. per week; that equals well over an hour a week wasted on just filing something away under the “right sub-folder” so that you can maybe save a few seconds once per week or month later finding it. This is a total waste of your time.

In past decades, email software had limited search features and putting things under sub-folders was key to being able to ever find them again without wasting a large amount of time in the search. But those are old systems from well over 20 years ago. Modern email platforms all have advanced search features with simple click+find searches on TO, FROM, SUBJECT, HAS ATTACHMENTS, etc. including full text searches of not only the messages, but even attachments.

Certain sub-folders DO have a use, but these are to help keep your inbox clean. For example, you can use automations to move newsletters directly out of you inbox and into a “Newsletters” sub-folder, since you can peruse that at your will, but it will keep the inbox clean and not bury important emails from customers/b2b underneath a pile of newsletters. The comparison with your real mailbox is that pile of New Yorker, Islands, or Food + Wine magazines you stack up as you get home with the intention of maybe reading them someday (though you probably just recycle them at the end of the month). You certainly don’t mix personal mail or bills into that mix; that’s how you end up missing something important.

Having a “Personal” sub-folder is also useful to separate out general work emails from those that involve information from HR, payroll, your insurance, or employee record like evaluations. These are emails that you will want to take with you when you leave the office and having an automation on this sub-folder to forward these to your personal email can help you prevent losing information on payroll or health benefits, etc. when you no longer work at that company.

Use Automations:

Most email platforms come with various automations and there are plenty of 3rd party plug-ins that can be added to every platform. Automations can help move, flag, and manage email flowing into your inbox to save you time and keep customer and b2b communications in the forefront. Some tools and plug-ins can tie into project management or customer service/marketing platforms for better management and relations on those platforms, but the simplest automations are just rules that help separate out things like daily or weekly informational newsletters from emails that require more immediate attention, like customer/b2b emails.

NSB Insights can help:

Please Contact Us for a free presentation version of this. We want to help you change your environment and culture, save time for everyone, and eliminate that “background noise” stress that comes from poor email management. We are happy to give up to a 1-hour presentation on this and other topics on managing communications, including a full Q&A and references to tools that can help you with automations.

A clean inbox is guaranteed to make you smile at least once the first time it happens. Good luck!

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You’re Using Email Wrong: Intra-Office Email

Before 10am, your inbox fills with at least 1 email per minute. Early morning meetings are dread because of the overflow of garbage emails you have to spend the next hour going through, even if the meeting you just walked out of was the rare” highly productive and motivational” type and you were inspired to jump onto those needed next steps.

By the time you’ve made it through your inbox, you’re frustrated and exhausted… and all but 1 or 2 of those pre-10am emails came from your co-workers. If this is your usual Monday, Tuesday, or everyday, you’re using email wrong as an organization.

Reasons why intra-office email is unproductive:

Inbox overload: your inbox fills with spam, customer/b2b messages, and with the addition of questions and requests by co-workers, ALL get diluted in the mix. You miss important customer/b2b requests, buried in all that other garbage, even if you have good spam filters.

Inbox fatigue: the sheer volume of emails drives you to put away email to only check it occasionally, delaying responses to everyone.

Poor threading: how many emails have been forwarded by your co-workers that are just a chain of RE: RE: RE: RE:, and now you have to scroll through repeated messages over and over to pick out any new bit of information to understand what is going on. This wastes 3-5 times the amount of your time.

CC spam: every input or reply to a chain where you are on CC is just more emails in your inbox when your input is not needed.

Accidental horror-show: when an internal communication accidentally gets shared with external customers/b2b because they were buried in the TO or CC lines and you or your co-worker didn’t realize this. This can be legally dangerous, or at least embarrassing.

Solution:

For intra-office communication, get a collaboration/work chat tool and establish a clear-cut policy that there need to be 2 separate channels for communication:

  1. Internal communication should exist solely on this collaboration/work chat platform
  2. Email should be used only for communication involving customers/b2b

Having email used only for communication involved with external customers/b2b makes sure that everyone know that customers/b2b are involved, preventing the “accidental horror-show”. It also makes email have a new priority in communication, eliminating Inbox overload and Inbox fatigue.

Internal collaboration/work chat comes with Status identifiers that allows your co-workers to know when you are available for immediate response and when you are not. These tools also have much better threading, and help eliminate or minimize CC spam, by allowing back and forth communications to be single-thread only and with alerts for when your attention or input is directly needed.

Most offices are employing some kind of Project Management platform for larger projects and productivity. This is good for those specific projects, but not for general intra-office communications.

Good tools

SlackSlack has been growing into the most commonly-used workplace collaboration and chat tool, including calls and videos for remote meetings
FleepSolid internal communication platform with threaded discussions, file sharing, etc. and has a “tasks” feature for managing requests and follow up without a full project management component
FlowdockFlowdock ties directly into email and can help separate internal chat communications from customer/b2b emails and route those into various project management platforms
StrideThis tool combines chat, file sharing, and tasks with light project management. If your office is using other Atlassian products, like Jira for project management, this is the better tool for you
Microsoft TeamsIf your office is a full “Microsoft Shop”, this is the tool for you as it fully integrates with Office 365 and OneDrive
Google HangoutsIf your office is a “Google Workplace”, this is the tool for you as it integrates with Gmail and Google Drive

*please note: the tools listed above and descriptions are only an opinion and recommendation to evaluate. This list does not imply any specific preference and NSB Insights has no partnership with any of these companies.

If your business is interested in help with finding the right solution for you, please Contact Us. We are happy to act as your “buyer’s agent” and will help find/integrate the solution you need.