The importance of the festive season doesn’t stop when you enter the office. For many workers, it is a chance to spend quality time as a team and enliven their workplace. Even if you aren’t particularly fond of Christmas or any of the other holidays in the season, this time of year can present opportunities for you.

Today’s businesses face many challenges. Many are still recovering from the most recent economic downturn and trying to figure out how to deal with the changing political landscape. For many business owners and managers, the challenge is trying to retain good employees and motivate their whole staff, within budget constraints.

You may like to think that your office is working like a well-oiled machine and maybe it is. On the other hand, you might have an employee or two (or more) who might not be pulling his or her weight. It can be difficult to determine if there is an actual problem with someone’s work performance or not. Here is help for identifying employees so you can address their performance. 

Team projects are an important part of many businesses. Often multiple people with different expertise are necessary to bring a project to the best conclusion. Unfortunately, the larger the scale of a project, the more potential there is for it to experience delays. Procrastination may not be the problem, it may just be that employees are diverted due to more imminent deadlines.

In this post-recession working world, many companies are still trying to do more with few employees. This reluctance to hire more workers means that every employee may be required to do more work in the same number of days. This can make it very difficult to keep all of your projects and other work on track and on time. 

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve noticed that fitness watches are everywhere. You might even be wearing one right now – but even if you aren’t, you’ve seen them around. For health-minded people, these ingenious devices provide all kinds of useful feedback: number of steps taken, number of calories burned, number of hours slept, etc.

Whether you are working remotely or in an office, there are always times when productivity is low. Be it because the tasks in front of you are boring or because your energy is low and you just don’t have the inspiration you need.

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.

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’.