One Up Solutions Northwest Blog

Remote work offers numerous benefits for both your employees and your business, provided you can overcome the challenges associated with implementing it. One such challenge is productivity, something which employees might struggle with while working remotely. Here are four ways your average remote employee might be challenged by their remote work in terms of productivity.

Effective time management is crucial for productivity and achieving your goals. Unfortunately, it’s not always easy to be efficient. In today’s blog, we offer three very useful tips to improve your own professional efficiency.

Nowadays, companies grapple with a myriad of ethical challenges, necessitating responsible decision-making to keep the data they store secure. Some decisions that are made straddle the ethical line of right and wrong. Let’s take a look at five uses of technology that are controversial.

Technology is becoming a standard tool used by nearly every organization. Learning how to adjust and do things better allows any organization to maximize productivity. In doing so, it creates the environment needed to become a more successful business. But, can innovation actually be a productivity killer? This month, we look at how innovating may not always be the best way to get your business to go where you want it to go.

Chances are, your and your employees’ lives are fully permeated with technology, from the very start of the day to the moment you close your eyes to sleep in the evening. That’s just how the world works nowadays, but there is evidence that this permeation of tech can have some adverse effects on us all. That’s why, as odd as it may sound coming from an IT provider, you may want to occasionally take a moment to step away from technology.

When you consider your business’ investments, you probably think about things like the hardware your team uses and the software this hardware supports. You might think about the furniture you’ve purchased to outfit your office. However, one often overlooked—but incredibly important—element that needs some level of investment is your employee satisfaction.

Productivity is always a primary focus for a business today, which makes any effort to improve it a welcome one. We wanted to take a moment and introduce you to a simple concept to make it easier to develop productive habits: something called habit stacking.

As the boss, you’re in a position to offload many of your business’ responsibilities to your employees. That’s more or less why you have employees in the first place. However, there’s more than one way that you can delegate tasks, depending on your personal style of management and the work style of each of your employees.

AI is everywhere, and it is becoming a huge benefit for growing small businesses. Unfortunately, a lot of business decision-makers don’t know where to start. Most AI for businesses is used inside applications you use daily. Microsoft has dedicated itself to improving its products with the use of AI. One of their ventures is to add AI to their Microsoft 365 productivity suite and so they have introduced Copilot, their effort to do just that.

So, at this point, we’ve talked about what productivity is, how it can be measured, and how to protect it from what could potentially impact it negatively. To bring this brief series to a close, let’s talk about the things you can do to maximize it as much as possible for your business’ benefit.

We recently started to pick apart the concept of procrastination as a means of understanding it better, and potentially, getting better at not doing it. Last time, we touched on a few ways that procrastination can potentially manifest, so it only made sense to us that we would continue pulling that thread and try to help you identify how you tend to procrastinate more specifically.

Over the past several weeks, we’ve been picking apart procrastination as a concept and how it tends to manifest. To wrap up our discussion, we wanted to share a few ways that you might be able to greatly reduce your and your team’s tendencies to procrastinate so that more can be accomplished.

Having data redundancy is something that sounds like a bad thing. After all, redundancy is typically viewed as a reason for inefficiency. In the case of having your data and computing environments backed up, you are trying to build redundancy. Today, let’s take a look at some situations that a business can run into should they neglect to have a proper backup.

Business is filled with all types of relationships, and some of them are very challenging. Consider for a minute how challenging some of the interactions you have with customers are; or some of the vendor conversations that happen; or some of the give-and-take you get from your employees. Sometimes it is hard to believe that without these people, your business would be a complete flop. This month, we break down how sometimes the relationships you forge in business are the key to things breaking your business’ way.

Productivity has been, is now, and likely will forever be heralded as one of the preeminent goals for any business. As such, it makes sense to understand as much as we can about it. To do so, we’ll be examining a different aspect of productivity for the next few weeks.

First up: what is productivity, in the first place?

We’ve been spending the past few weeks examining productivity and how to optimize it, and today, we felt it was necessary to address the issues that could throw the proverbial wrench into the works. 

Don’t worry, though, we’re also going to touch on how you can avoid and/or mitigate the issues that might threaten your productivity.

There’s no denying that productivity is one of the primary goals of any business nowadays, with countless examinations into the concept of productivity, theories on how to maximize it, and methods to promote it in the workplace. Today, we wanted to take one of these theories and explore it so that you can perhaps capitalize on it yourself.

Do you have a file or folder on your PC that you always seem to access, yet you have to dig through countless folders or files in your organizational hierarchy to find it? Windows makes it simple to add a new shortcut to your PC. Here’s how you can make a shortcut to a file, folder, or program on your Windows computer.

AI has been a hot topic in recent months and years, which only makes sense. Not only has it been used in more public applications, but it has also caused a bit of controversy as it seems to “compete” with people. Back in September, art made by using an artificially intelligent platform caused a stir by winning an art competition, and workplace fears of a computer taking one’s job have seemingly become more well-founded than ever.

Remote work on a widespread scale was introduced in less-than-optimal circumstances, but that doesn’t mean that today’s businesses shouldn’t use it to their full advantage. Let’s discuss the situation at hand, more specifically, a few ways you and your organization can support your team as they work remotely.