Taking good care of your data is vital, especially personal data about individuals. Personal data belonging to individuals and held by organisations in the European Union (EU) are currently protected by the Data Protection (DPA) laws, which regulate what people can and cannot do with that data. That all changes on 25th May 2018.

We all know the feeling of having too much to do, with too little time to do it. A looming deadline, where if work had been planned and executed perfectly, it would be no problem. But those of us who are prone to procrastination know that this rarely happens. Instead of spending 3 weeks finishing a task, we instead spend 3 nights (the last ones!) doing the same work.

It’s easy to find articles about the employer/employee relationship. With a few keystrokes and a couple of clicks, you can quickly find information about dealing with difficult employees, encouraging exceptional employees, rewarding hard-working employees, and the best ways to get rid of the worst employees.

Do you have a ‘to-do’ list? Most of us do. We have a long list of tasks we need to do. Many of us need to delegate tasks to other people too. Back in the day, your whole team would be sitting just outside your office, ready to answer questions about what tasks they were doing and how far they had progressed.

This quote from Dave Barry is several years old, but is just as relevant today as when he wrote it: ‘If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be meetings’.

In our previous piece on recognising the online collaboration software you need, we discussed the importance of its intuitiveness and the ability to customise it to suit your team to ensure total adoption throughout the team. We also looked at who might be using it and the need to be able to create and assign permissions for different types of user whether staff, partners or clients.

If your organisation already has a method that is working well, it makes sense to find a collaboration tool that will accommodate that method. Why invent the wheel if you have happy, motivated teams that are performing well?

Imagine that you’re part of a new product rollout for the next big thing that’s finally going to put your company on the map. Your engineers are in Brighton, your marketing team is in Edinburgh, and most of your design team is all the way in San Francisco.

Once upon a time, your secretary or PA would be sitting just outside your office, ready to run errands, get your tea, collect your dry cleaning etc. She (and it was usually a ‘she’) would manage your diary, do your filing and a million and one different little tasks to free you to do the ‘big stuff’, like strategy and meeting important customers.

Does your team collaborate on document creation and share dozens of files a day? Do your teams have daily face-to-face meetings? Or do team members make use of the simply-yell-down-the-hall-and-through-the-kitchen method of communication when they need to raise an issue?