Your Productivity is Tied to How Happy Your Team Is

The best thing you can do for your employees is provide a good work experience, but what do we mean when we say this? In essence, you spend a lot of time trying to find the best fit for your organization, so you want to invest a solid amount of effort into making sure they stick around. This goes beyond compensation; you should consider the following for your business’ work experience.

Employee Turnover is Expensive You know that hiring and training employees is costly, and it goes beyond just their initial low level of productivity. Onboarding new talent can cost anywhere between 1-1.5 times the position’s salary for someone who has been at your business for five years. This number only increases as the responsibilities do; that’s a lot of investment for someone who could jump ship at any moment. Here’s How to Foster a Solid Work Experience Your mission is simple: keep your employees from jumping ship. Unfortunately, it’s not nearly as simple as we make it out to be, as there are countless variables that can be considered for retaining employees. You can start by just making their experiences with your business more meaningful. Here are a couple of ways to do this: Follow Through on Your Mission Employees don’t like when things swing too far in one direction without any explanation or notice. Some of the issues employees might have is hiring/firing people, operational changes, and policies or procedures that are either undercooked or underenforced. These are all organizational issues and should be treated as such. Take a moment to think about your company’s long-term goals and stick to them. Don’t change them too much, unless the market forces you to do so, and your employees should see that you are trying to make the most out of their valuable skills and time. Care What Others Say People value when their voices are heard. You can preemptively solve a lot of problems simply by listening to your employees and addressing their concerns as appropriate. Plus, people like to be involved and to know that their feedback is helpful for the future of the organization, so if you show them that their presence matters, they will be more likely to stick around to see how they can change things for the better. Encourage Social Activity A little social activity and camaraderie-building in the office can go a long way toward people being happy and comfortable with their workplace. People spend most of their waking hours in the workplace, which is a sobering fact in and of itself, so your employees should at least get to know and enjoy being around each other to at least an acceptable level. Better work relations means better collaboration and more productivity, after all.

Today’s Businesses Shouldn’t Go Without a VPN

Let me ask you a question: how do you balance the prevalence of remote work with the fact that a lot of company resources should only be stored on-site? A VPN—or virtual private network—provides the answer for many businesses. Let’s examine what a VPN actually is, and how it helps to protect your business’ data as you access it from outside of your business’ secure network.

So, What is a VPN? In simple terms, a VPN is a dedicated network connection specifically configured to send and receive data securely. This means that, since you don’t want your business’ data visible to the world, it is critical such a connection is used when your team is remotely accessing your local network. By putting a VPN in place, you can ensure that your entire organization has access to a secure connection that will connect them to whatever data they are authorized to access. How Does a VPN Work? The key to a VPN’s inherent security is the encryption that is applied to your data as it is in transit. By encrypting the data as it travels, all a snooping hacker will be able to see is a jumbled mess, protecting your information. The VPN even hides your location, giving our hypothetical hacker effectively nothing to work with. Why Do You Need a VPN? It all comes down to trust, and the lack of it that you should have for public Wi-Fi connections. While undeniably intended to be convenient, public hotspots like those you’d find in an airport or your favorite coffee place just aren’t nearly secure enough to entrust your data to. Using a VPN allows you to take advantage of this convenience without this otherwise deal-breaking security tradeoff influencing your business. Your data is more than information, after all—it’s what keeps your business going. As such, losing it or having it compromised could mean you could potentially lose your business. Planning ahead can help prevent this, especially with the help of Net It On, LLC and our team of IT pros. We’ll set you up with a VPN and the rest of the technology needed to enable secure and productive work wherever you may be.

Tip of the Week: Adding a Web Shortcut to Your Desktop

Keyboard shortcuts are great ways to make your workday just a little more efficient without much effort. Did you know that you can make a keyboard shortcut on your Windows computer that can direct you to a specific webpage? Let’s go over how you can make it happen.

There are a couple of ways you can make your keyboard Internet shortcut. Manually To manually make your keyboard Internet shortcut, right-click on your desktop and select New > Shortcut. When the dialog box opens, type the website URL in the box that appears, then select Next. You’ll then be prompted to give your new shortcut a name. Once you’re ready, click Finish. Your new icon will appear on your desktop. Now, when you right-click it, you can select Properties to see information about the shortcut. From here, you can change the URL, assign a shortcut key, and change the icon. Click in the Shortcut key box, then type the key you would like to use for your new shortcut. The key combination will then appear in the box. Click-and-Drag To save yourself a step, you can simply click-and-drag the shortcut’s URL to your desktop to make the shortcut a bit faster and more easily. This also assigns your shortcut a name in the form of the website page’s name. From here, you can right-click the shortcut, select Properties, and see the same information that you could see in the above step. And that’s all there is to it! Now you can make custom keyboard shortcuts for your favorite websites. Alternatively, you could just use bookmarks in your browser, but the more tools you have at your disposal, the better.