Protecting data is crucial for any business, and it can also have a positive impact on culture. When employees feel that their data is being protected, they are more likely to trust their employer and feel valued.
Protecting data is crucial for businesses and has numerous benefits that positively impact both employees and the company’s overall success. In addition to increasing trust and value felt by employees, robust data protection policies can lead to improved productivity and reduced risk of breaches.
When businesses safeguard sensitive information, they can provide a secure environment for employees to work in, which can boost morale and ultimately lead to increased efficiency. Additionally, having reliable data protection measures in place can help prevent costly breaches and other security incidents, saving the company both time and money. Overall, prioritizing data protection is not only a responsible business practice but also a wise investment in the company’s long-term success.
Improving Culture
Here are some ways data protection can improve the business culture:
1. Build trust: By implementing strong data protection policies and procedures, businesses can demonstrate to their employees that they take privacy seriously. This can help build trust and loyalty among employees, leading to a more positive work environment.
2. Encourage transparency: When businesses are transparent about their data protection practices, it can encourage employees to be more open and honest about their work. This can lead to better communication and collaboration, improving overall corporate culture.
3. Foster responsibility: Businesses can create a sense of ownership and accountability by empowering employees to take responsibility for data protection. This can lead to a more responsible and ethical corporate culture.
4. Accurate and compassionate recording: This is particularly important when writing about other people. Communicating compassionately about others and recording that accurately can be difficult. But once mastered, can enhance a positive working environment and culture.
4. Enhance security: By implementing strong data protection measures, businesses can enhance overall security and reduce the risk of data breaches. This can create a sense of employee safety and security, improving corporate culture.
5. Promote compliance: When businesses comply with data protection regulations and standards, it can create a culture of compliance and ethics. This can lead to a more positive and productive work environment.
Final note
Data protection can have a positive impact on corporate culture. By building trust, encouraging transparency, fostering responsibility, enhancing security, and promoting compliance, businesses can create a culture that values privacy and ethics.
I have been reviewing our company’s data protection policies and amended the style and language that I use to make it even less jargon. We must always ensure the safety and privacy of our customers’ information. We should consider implementing more robust security measures and regularly updating our policies to stay current with new regulations or threats.
It’s also essential that all employees are adequately trained on these policies to prevent any accidental breaches. If you would like to know more about how we can support your business through a health check, implementation or training, then book a free discovery call here.
Let’s work together to ensure the highest level of data protection for our customers.
When it comes to the Microsoft 365 landscape, everyone has their go-to favourites. Many of us tend to stick with them. But do you know all the apps, including the ‘lesser-known’ ones?
They are familiar, easy to use and integrate perfectly with the other 365 apps we use. So why would we want to changehow we work and organiseg tasks that work so well?
The answer might lie in the wide range of lesser-known 365 apps and features we haven’t yet tried. They might have the potential to make life even better! This is the third and final blog in the series. Click here to read apps for remote working or more that make a difference.
Here are just a few of them and the different aspects of your business they can help:
Customer Management
If you aren’t giving your customers the best experience possible, you risk losing them to a business.
Fortunately, a handy duo of Microsoft 365 apps can make a difference in your customer relationship management.
People
People is the address book that can be created and shared across the business. It can incorporate room bookings, external and internal contacts, and groups.
Bookings
If your business relies on appointments, then Bookings can be a lifeline. It is a web-based booking calendar that can be embedded into existing websites and shared via links or social media.
Bookings integrate with other 365 apps, such as Outlook, to send reminders and is even available as a feature within Teams. This allows users to create new calendars, assign staff and manage appointments in one convenient space.
Lists & Forms
Organisations are increasingly reaching out to customers and colleagues. Whether it be through a checklists or forms. This can be as part of the qualities that businesses strive for in a world.
Lists
Lists help us stay on track and get things done. Don’t be fooled by the name, it is not a to-do list, but rather a checklist. It is available as both a mobile and web-based app. This ensure users have everything they need at their fingertips, wherever they are.
Lists are intelligent and highly flexible and can easily be created and embedded into Teams channels with templates for every conceivable requirement. It does come with some templates which include issue tracker, employee onboarding, work progress tracker and even a content scheduler.
Forms
Forms are elegant and straightforward; it allows users to reach out to anyone on any device or browser for customer feedback, test knowledge, or evaluate learning.
The forms themselves can be highly customised, and integration with SharePoint lists and PowerApps can create incredibly rich and highly automated surveys, polls or quizzes with security and compliance built-in as standard.
File storage & Collaboration
OneDrive and SharePoint
As so much of the business world is working outside of their offices, the need to organise, store and share files and access them on a range of devices has never been greater for many businesses that use OneDrive. This solution works well for many and comes with a range of benefits.
However, SharePoint is a cloud-based service for any sized business that takes file storage, secure access, and collaboration to another level. SharePoint allows users to create entire sites and provides access to vital company information safely and compliantly.
SharePoint is one of the leading Intranet solutions for business, one on which many of the top companies already rely upon.
Note Taking
Nearly everyone relies on notes at some time or another. What better way to jot down reminders, tasks for the day or important information we might need later? OneNote is, for many, the ideal way to organise notes, translate text and share them when needed, but there is another option with just as much potential.
Whiteboard
Sharing thoughts, ideas, and brainstorming are crucial aspects of a successful business; Whiteboard enables a simple, no-nonsense interface. It is ideal for mobile devices and tablets, allowing users to share sticky notes, drawings, images or pasted text with a simple link.
As with so many of the apps in the Microsoft 365 environment, Whiteboard’s strength is integration. For example, as a part of Teams, it can be invaluable, a benefit that other whiteboard-style apps don’t have.
Visio
It is one of those apps that doesn’t quite fit anywhere. Visio is a great app for creating those visual maps, flowcharts, process maps etc. This used to be an app outside of 365 and an additional cost but has been brought into the fold and is now part of the suite. Visio has lots of templates to get you started, or you can start from scratch.
Following on from our recent look at the sheer range of applications for business within the Microsoft 365 environment, we will continue by looking at some of the household names. The apps that everyone will be familiar with, along with one or two of the fascinating supporting cast. The little-known ones you might not know as well but which can help your business perform at its best.
Office staple apps
Word and Excel combined to form the backbone of most people’s needs when it comes to Microsoft Office. They are familiar, comfortable and intuitive to use. However, they can still surprise us occasionally.
Many users don’t realise that Word can be a powerhouse tool for collaboration. The Co-Authoring feature allows users to work on documents stored in SharePoint or Onedrive with anyone, anywhere. Simply by clicking on the share icon and adding the email addresses of the people they want to work with, users can collaborate on documents in real time.
Without a doubt, Excel is the ‘go-to’ app for anyone working with spreadsheets.
The ‘smart lookup’ function is just one of Microsoft 365 features. Right-clicking on word and selecting the smart lookup function launches Bing. Bing then searchs the internet for information on whatever is highlighted.
Communication apps
Microsoft 365 has a range of inter-connecting communication apps; Teams, Outlook and Yammer to name the essentials.
Outlook has everything we need to do business. Most things can be done from your inbox simply by selecting the drop-down menu in the Outlook inbox. From there, contacts can be added, appointments scheduled, and emails assigned to specific days just by dragging them onto the calendar icon.
Yammer is, for many, the ideal way to add private, secure social media to their business. Users can connect, engage and share thoughts and ideas across their business. Therefore, staying informed and creating a sense of community and sharing resources or simply saying thanks.
Think of it as similar to your business’ own private Twitter network.
Discovery
Delve is accessed through a browser. It’s a cloud-based platform ideal for remote working across an array of devices and forms a valuable hub for users and colleagues. Invaluable for files, collaboration or even enterprise networking.
Delve can fill the user’s space with things they might find helpful. It also allows users to search and choose their content. Delve keeps those things private by default, only sharing the desired content and resources.
Tracking user data and overseeing efficiency and productivity are vital parts of a successful team. MyAnalytics gives a detailed overview of the time spent performing different tasks, hours worked, and things such as attending meetings or working late.
Reports and dashboards give essential insights into business processes, team configurations and business productivity with a powerful automation tool helping to place focus right where it’s needed.
Presentations
Teaching, making compelling proposals and pitching ideas are all possible with PowerPoint, with rich presentations that look great with little need for expertise or specialised knowledge. Users even have the potential to add audio to slides, such as voiceovers, effects or soundtracks.
Sway is a niche app for many, but it allows users to create content-rich, visually appealing designs for reports, web pages and newsletters. Content can be dragged in from various sources, and users can even add forms, slideshows or image stacks for viewers to click through like a retro photo pile.
Sharing video content safely and securely for learning, presenting, and meetings is easy with Stream. It has the potential to become an organisation’s very own video hub. At a time when so many rely on remote solutions, Stream is one of the most useful.
To discover how you could utilise Microsoft better in your business, why not book a slot for a free discussion with me here?
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With so much of the business world working remotely now and probably beyond the foreseeable future, some things have become more challenging.
One of the most obvious is the challenge companies have faced in ensuring their teams have all the hardware they need to work effectively from home. The second is ensuring they are up to speed on using the apps and services that make up the software side of things too.
Many of us are familiar with Microsoft 365 and aware of the benefits the right features can deliver. As a consultant and ex-virtual assistant, I am well used to collaborating with teams off-site. I have been using various tools within the 365 environment for a long time.
When it comes to productivity, security and user-friendliness, here are some of the best ‘once used, forever relied upon’ 365 applications that empower users to work safely and securely from home.
Microsoft 365 OneNote
OneNote is a personal information management application with all the functionality you need at your fingertips (or stylus). You can organise notes exactly how you need to, share them and sync them with other devices.
OneNote even has the valuable ability to translate text. The Translate feature has the potential to be incredibly useful for businesses in multilingual markets.
Microsoft 365 OneDrive
As compliance laws around data become more robust and the need for remote access grows, OneDrive delivers a secure, effective solution that works.
With an impressive amount of cloud-based storage available on 365, OneDrive provides users all the space they’ll ever need to store and share files and collaborate with the people they need to, even on mobile devices.
Files are synced in real-time, and thanks to features such as SSL encryption and Personal Vault. You can rest assured they are always safe. Users can set up password protection for shared files and folders and, if any account is compromised, there is a restore option to roll back the entire drive to any previous date within the last thirty days.
Microsoft 365 Teams
Teams have become a vital part of the 365 environments in a world where many are now working remotely. Much like its competitors, such as Zoom and Hangouts, it has gone from occasional use to essential business tools in recent times.
One-on-one conversations, group messages, video and audio calls are all vital features of Teams, along with game-changing integration into other 365 applications such as Word, Outlook and SharePoint.
Microsoft 365 Planner
Managing teams and projects can prove impossible when the team itself is spread far and wide. Planner delivers a centralised hub for every one of them; to share files safely, make plans, oversee progress and assign and organise tasks to other users.
The big selling point of Planner over similar task management apps is 365 integration. Microsoft 365 Planner has all the efficiency for which the 365 ecosystem is well known and works together with other 365 features like Outlook, SharePoint and Teams.
Its interface is intuitive and paired back but still shows all the information users need on projects completed and those in progress.
Microsoft 365 To Do
Task management and productivity are both significant parts of keeping professional and personal lives balanced and organised. Microsoft 365 To Do is a simple app designed to make both easier and merge them if needed.
Available for Windows, Mac, iOS and Android, To Do helps users monitor outstanding tasks and tick them off when needed. It’s also cloud-based and conveniently synched on any connected device.
To Do focuses on the individual user; tasks can be arranged into handy lists or grouped to be completed simultaneously. The useful ‘My Day’ function allows users to focus on essential tasks on any pre-determined day.
To Do also integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Planner to keep users up to date on tasks or events they are a part of. It has the potential to organise both personal and professional tasks in one incredibly convenient place.
If you are thinking about ways to empower your team to work safer and more efficiently off-site, or if you want to learn more about the right Microsoft 365 tools for you, why not book a slot for a free discussion with me here.
Running a business in today’s world can seem to some like an endless battle to keep things afloat. Markets change, customer habits evolve, and goalposts shift regularly.
It is worth seeking every bit of help you can get, and the good news is, it’s all out there just waiting to make life a little easier; to save you precious time, resources and money.
If you can identify those areas where a little extra help could make all the difference…
Finance software
A common issue for small to medium enterprises is the occasional need for specialised financial know-how. There are accounting software packages out there, such as Quickbooks or Xero, that can solve that problem. They allow you to customise invoices, accept payments, manage tax and run payroll through a simple interface.
Users can also file VAT directly to HMRC in the UK, saving around 8 hours per month and a lot of stress.
Customer Relationship Management
CRM software can handle sales and marketing with a level of efficiency that a small business might struggle to match otherwise. The automation that CRM brings to the table can help a business manage interaction with customers and potential customers, plan and manage marketing and make the most of sales opportunities.
CRM can give businesses a new level of automation and a real advantage over their competitors.
Microsoft Office
It is much more than Word, Outlook and Excel. Throw in calendars for diary management, Teams for remote working and other lesser-known apps such as MileIQ for tracking expenses, To Do for comprehensive task management and Bookings for any business relying on appointments, to name just a few.
Office is packed full of potential for every business, which takes the time to really get the most out of it.
Social media
An engaging, authoritative presence on sites such as Twitter, Facebook or Instagram can do so much to earn authority and drive people to a company’s site or services, yet how many neglect it when things get busy elsewhere?
Automation is one possible answer. Social media management tools such as SocialBee and PromoRepublic let users plan content and publish it at a time of their choosing.
Blogs
A website can benefit massively from a blog. It can be a place to showcase new products and services, identify an audience’s problems and provide solutions. Blogs are also the perfect tool to drive people to your e-commerce pages and help you climb the search engine rankings.
Many SME’s rely on freelance writers and virtual assistants to keep their websites full of engaging and meaningful content then utilise the services of tools such as Missinglettr to create up to a year’s worth of social posts from a single blog piece.
An easy and effective way to direct traffic to your site while you might be busy doing other things.
Planning software
When looking at planning software we need to think of a few things
It’s usability
The interface
Integrations
Cost and value for money
The key features you are looking for are
planning and scheduling
task dependencies
Project timelines, calendar views and roadmaps
Task management
Collaorations and communication feeatures
Budget planning and tracking (by project)
Client portal
It really depends on what the needs of the business are; do you want an all-in-one team tool or just a planning/task tool.
The list is endless in this section. Some of the big names have used the planning software as the base for their collaboration and ‘all on platforms’. These include; Avaza, Click-up, Flowlu, Monday.com, Plutio.
But if you are looking just for a planning tool then you also have Microsoft Planner, Asana, Trello. Microsoft planner can be used on it’s own or inlcuded in Teams to be a collabortive tool.
Instant chat
We are now all familiar with tools such as Microsoft Teams, Google Hangouts and Zoom; these tools have gone from occasional use to vital business tools in under a year. It is also worth bearing in mind that tools such as WhatsApp have an engaged user base in the region of 1.5 billion users; that is quite a bit of potential for any business.
But there are the chat / pop-ups on your website, such as Birdseed.io
Websites and Graphic design
Every business with an online presence relies on the quality of its website to match the quality of its products and services. Still, is it necessary to invest (often heavily) in a specialist web designer?
Sites such as Wix and WordPress give users all the templates, tools and simple interfaces they need to create eye-catching, quality-hosted websites for a much more modest annual investment.
They also offer to work with their teams to build better sites and make the most of the SEO tools on offer.
Summary
There is no list or set of tools that will fit every business out there. The collection of tools we use and how we use them can be as individual as the business.
But, as a business evolves, so do the tools. It is essential to audit the business as a whole to see what is being used. It is not uncommon to find indiidual department using different providers for the same tool, e.g. Mailerlite and Mailchimp. This risks duplication of data, and an increased risk to data breaches. But there is also an increas in costs.
*Please note that by clicking on a link from this page, you will be sent directly to the product’s website, where we may earn a small affiliate commission for any purchases you make. Check out the resources page for more details.
It is always good to look to the past and present to plan for the future. Using this information, we can put in place plans and goals for the coming year, along with the actions needed to fulfil them in a rapidly changing world. With that in mind, December is Write a Business Plan Month.
It is an excellent opportunity to reflect on the past year, plan for the year ahead, and try to future-proof our businesses. In the last five years, businesses have had to deal with so many different issues; some that could have been planned for (BREXIT), some that were never anticipated (COVID).
The New Year is an excellent time for businesses;
to review what worked and what could be improved
What processes may be streamlined
look at different ways to operate,
React and adapt to change as standard.
Business planning and strategies must be even more effective if the visions and goals for the year ahead are to be reached. But business planning is not all about what we want from our business and where we want it to be in 12 months. We must look at what is happening around us that may impact or influence them.
Tools for business planning
The positive news is that the last few years have shown us how reactive and adaptable we can be when things go unstable; we can excel at thinking outside of the box to withstand everything a tumultuous year has thrown at us.
PESTLE
PESTLE is an acronym for a great strategic planning tool that looks externally and how It can impact the business
P: Political
E: Economic
S: Social
T: Technology
L: Legal
E: Environmental
Things that we may include;
Possible interest rates rise
Fuel costs
Changes in legislation, including data protection
inflation rates
Political instability
Highlighting the issues can help assist complete the SWOT.
SWOT
The SWOT looks at internal Strengths and weaknesses and external Opportunities and Threats. It can be carried out for a business or a project and can be seen by many as an essential strategic tool.
Internal factors include personnel, finance, services/manufacturing capabilities, and the marketing 4Ps (product, price, place and promotion). The PESTLE above is a great place to start when looking at external factors.
Business Canvas Model
The business canvas model is a strategic management tool that allows you to describe how a business intends to make money. It explains who your customer base is, how you deliver value to them, and the related details of financing. And the business model canvas lets you define these different components on a single page.
Building in Adaptability with a Consultant
As many businesses look to future-proof their operations in the short to mid-term, versatility and flexibility will be common factors. It makes sound business sense to look externally to help get a fresh perspective. It is no coincidence that in recent times, outsourcing and freelancing have seen exponential rises in popularity as organisations seek lean, efficient solutions that don’t cost more than they need to…
Visions and goals for the year ahead
If you are planning for 2023, why not get in touch to learn more about how we can support you and your business to plan to achieve future compliance and growth?
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