Welcome to the fixth and final part of the Hermes Technologies Ltd. Business 2.0 series, where we explain this new philosophy for doing business. In this post I’ll explain how a Business 2.0 company must ensure its employees have a lifelong commitment to increasing theirproductivity and improving their work processes.
Lifehacking – an obsession with improving productivity
A movement, known as “Lifehacking”, has sprung up across the Internet over the last decade. Disciples, known as “life hackers” (or more playfully, “ninjas”) have a near fanatical obsession with increasing their own productivity, organisation and work processes. The core idea is to get more done in less time. In my experience, the difference between the output of a worker who practices life hacking versus one who doesn’t can be the equivalent of the difference between a mini cooper and an actual car.
The most common topics for life hackers are inbox management systems, ways to maximise attention span, ways to eliminate procrastination, ways to beat writer’s block, which is to stay organised, and ways to automate and you repeated process. In this blog you can read about my ideas as a dedicated live hacker.
The advantage of creating a culture of lifehacking: efficiency
In business, the company which uses it resources most effectively will win the competitive process. If one company is filled with life hackers, working at five times the efficiency of normal workers (a realistic expectation in my experience) then a normal Business 1.0 company will have a very hard time competing.
Reusable systems for getting stuff done
Like hackers like to reusable build systems for getting various things done. For any task which they do with regularity life hackers analyse what has worked for them in the past and what hasn’t and then use this experience to build a system to apply to the task in future. In designing these systems inspiration can often taken from other life hackers who share their experiences.There are many blogs across the Internet dedicated to sharing lifehacking tips and techniques, the two best being 43 folders.com, lifehacker.org
A Lifehacker’s system can always be improved
A lifehacker never feels that they have found the perfect system — they always are on the lookout for ways to tweak the current system either by learning from past experience, experimenting or incorporating new ideas or technology.
Example of a lifehacking system: Inbox Zero
A good example of a lifehack I use is Inbox zero, a philosophy from dealing with bulging e-mail inboxes. Many modern information workers find their e-mail inboxes to be sources of great consternation. Dealing with e-mail takes more and more time out of the working day, leaving less time to actually get work done. In addition it can be a source of great guilt as many friendly e-mails from friends or co-workers are left without response for days, months or even years
The Inbox Zero philosophy for dealing with email says:
1.E-mail should only be checked manually once an hour, rather than automatically every minute with on screen alerts and sounds signally new email arrival. The reasoning for only manually checking once an hour is that instantaneous e-mail alerts disrupts your work process slowing you down, most often over something trivial. The cost to your momentum and attention span is not worth the value in having the information an hour earlier and so instead email is checked efficiently, once an hour.
2. Despite our use of the word “check” in the previous paragraph, you actually should never just “check” your e-mail – you should always process it instead. It is a waste of time to just read an e-mail and then go back to work. You should instead take one of five actions:
- Delete the email, getting it out of your life and conscience straight away (the preferred action), Respond to it in (under 5 lines if possible),
- Delegate it to another worker,
- Defer is to a time when information you need to deal with it properly;or
- Act on it right away (e.g. an e-mail asking you to do a certain project right now).
The reasoning behind this is that “checking” email is a form of procrastination. In reality there is always a decision to be made about what action to take. With Inbox Zero you take this action right away instead of leaving it until later, allowing your inbox to overflow
Welcome to the fourth part of the Hermes Technologies Business 2.0 series where we explain how we are adopting a whole new model of doing business. In this post we explain the advantages of not having an office and utilizing a global workforce.
1. Office not required
In business 2.0, there is no need for company to have an office, especially at first when funds are low. Employees can work together from their homes, collaborating on the Internet.
Advantages to not requiring an office:
A. The cost of finding, negotiating, renting and maintaining an office is done away with.
As commercial property is outside the expertise of most businesses this allows business 2.0 companies to focus on their core business activities rather than running around trying to find office space, light bulbs, cleaners etc.
Me (w/laptop) and John (w/ armchair) busy working from our home office
B. Each employee saves time they would otherwise spend commuting.
In situations were one is self-employed this saved time equates to money and leads to a competitive advantage. It is not unreasonable for managers to require workers to put in a little bit of extra hours into the work considering they have saved quite a lot of time by not having to commute.
C. You can recruit from anywhere in the world rather than being limited to the talent available in your locality.
With increasing specialisation it can be hard to find someone with the appropriate skills in your neighbourhood and so, in the business 1.0 world you may have to settle for a less skilled employee. With Business 2.0, however, you can find the specialist you need by choosing from the enormous global marketplace and thus your chances of finding someone with the appropriate skills are greatly increased.
There can also be cost advantages to this. Business owners can take account of international salary differences or currency fluctuations to minimize the cost of employment. For our HiredHelp.ie website, which at this point in time is still in development, we took advantage of the very weak Sterling to hire an exceedingly talented programmer at a greatly reduced price.
Reservations about supervising employees when they’re working remotely?
Managers may fear that there is no way to tell whether an hourly wage employee is doing what they’re paid to be doing or is wasting time. This supervision problem is met by the use of a number of online tools.
Two we like to use are Skype and Basecamp. Requiring employees to log onto Skype when they get into work means you can see that they are starting work at the right time. Online project management tools like the excellent Basecamp allow managers to effortlessly set each employee sets of tasks (in the form of to-do lists) with each task being assigned its own due date. Employees then have a responsibility of registering a task is completed on the Basecamp system as soon as it is done. This way managers can see the approximate speed at which tasks are completed and can judge an employee’s effectiveness on this basis.
Using Basecamp to manage the Hiredhelp project
2. Employ experts from across the globe on very short-term contracts
Websites like Elance allow business owners to browse through an enormous variety of experts in different fields and then hire them on either an hourly or a fixed price basis.
A. Safety
Each service provider is reviewed on the site by other employers and so, just like in eBay, any scam providers are quickly caught and removed from the system. Additionally the use of an Escrow system (where employers lodge money into a middle bank account first and then only release the funds want the task is complete) means that The incentive to scam anyone out of their money is no longer present as it has become so difficult to do so. These measures make Elance a safe bet form of employing people.
B. Finding the right expert
To help you choose the right expert Elance offers service providers a set of tests which they can take to have their skills rated in the areas they profess expertise. You can also see a portfolio of each experts previous work and comprehensive reviews of their previous work made by previous employers. Interviews both by e-mail or by phone are also possible on the website.
C. Employ only on an ‘as-required’ basis
On Elance you can hire people for contracts worth as little as $100, very handy when you need an expert to do a small task which might take one of your employees a number of days. Being able to hire experts only when they are needed allows you to save a great deal of money since you don’t have too keep employees on the payroll in case they are needed in a pinch.
When we were creating the FindGrinds.ie website, we required some help programming the credit card processing software. I logged onto Elance and posted up a description of the work I required alongside my time frame and my approximate budget. Within 48 hours nine different experts had placed bids on the work and had gotten in contact. I then browsed through their portfolios and reviews then exchanged a number of e-mails with the most promising ones before eventually choosing the one I regarded as the best value for money.
Welcome to the third part of the Hermes Technologies Business 2.0 series in which we explain what exactly this new paradigm of doing business means. In this post I’ll explain why in the Business 2.0 world you must present yourself as a collection of people, rather than a classical corporate monolith.
Two models for doing business: the monolith and the human company
Traditional companies often adapt monolithic corporate identities. Business communications are phrased in dry, inhuman business speak. Everything is formal, everything is bland, cookie-cutter and lacking in personality and attitude.
By contrast Business 2.0 companies like to present themselves as nothing more than a collection of people, individuals were personalities and real lives, working together. Like real people they have attitudes, they have needs, they have pressing timetables and they make mistakes. By presenting your company as a collection of people you will find it far easier to deal with consumers for the simple reason that they now have a more realistic set of expectations about you.
Aspects of being a human company
1 Never claim infallibility and admit to being wrong
If you website breaks down and its users are denied service for a period of time, you should send out an e-mail apology, personally written, explaining what went wrong and what your doing to ensure won’t happen again. This is far better than a generic “services temporarily down” statement. Your customers are far more likely to forgive you and continue doing business with you rather than move elsewhere.
It’s essentially a matter of expectations: a customer expects a monolithic company to be perfect and always function — if the company breaks down for some reason it is not fulfilling their expectations of a monolith and so the customer looks elsewhere for a company that does meet their expectations. If, however, you present yourself as a collection of people then expectations will be more realistic — its acceptable to make mistakes, after all no-one is infallible. By presenting yourself this way you lower expectations to a more manageable level, an enormous advantage in customer relations.
2 Show customers the hard work you put in
When customers see you as a collection of hard working people trying to make a living by making a good product they will start rooting for you and hoping you will succeed. When this happens they are less likely to do things like illegally download or upload your software to file Business 2.0 Be a collection of people not a coroporate monolithBusharing sites. They feel bad about screwing over a couple of hard-working guys because they can see their own humanity reflected in the company. This isn’t the case with monolith companies, since people, somewhat irrationally, often assume they have unlimited resources and that no damage can be done to them by the small act of piracy.
Giving your company a human edge can also allow you to charge higher prices. I remember seeing a website in the UK for private tuition. British teachers could make themselves available to give private tuition by placing a paid advert on the website. On the pricing page the Webmaster explained that he had a disability that prevented him from working as a teacher and that his sole income was from the website. As a consumer I would certainly feel more comfortable paying what seems like a high price when I can see a real human, rather than an identity less corporation benefit.
3 Using a friendly human tone in your communications rather than business speak.
When you use simple conversational human prose rather than jargon filled, dry business speak, customers are more more likely to both read and understand your message. This saves marketing and other communication costs.
Using a human tone helps in the process of getting your customers to see you as a collection of people rather than a monolith. When they see you this way they like you more and are more tolerant of your imperfections and delays. They are less likely to get angry at you because it’s much harder to be angry at a person. It’s similar to how you can be extremely nasty to someone was then a car but if you met the same person on the street you are cannot bring yourself to act that way.
4 The human touch makes customers feel appreciated.
Customers can see the business you have built and know how busy you must be. Yet, when you take the time to respond to them in a personally crafted e-mail or response to a blog comment they will feel flattered. The will like to company more because they feel a human connection with it. They will be loyal.
So why haven’t companies made the shift from presenting themselves as monolithic corporations to presenting themselves as collections of people in the past?
The reason is simple – the financial advantages of being a monolith made it a competitive necessity. When customers complained to a company in the past they would often be met by the inflexible monolithic corporate wall one which they felt powerless to fight. This way companies scared customers out of making even legitimate complaints and reasonable requests were met with responsibility-less statements of “company policy” or the automatically generated false email promise that “we’ll get back to you”. Yes, customers got pissed off, but there wasn’t a lot they could do.
Monolithic corporate practices
As such companies adopting a monolithic identity companies could cut costs – they dealt with less complaints, were more inflexible and avoiding spending time writing personalized responses of consumer inquiries.
Today these kinds of business practices are becoming more and more difficult to maintain. The huge availability of online reviews and other forums for consumer expression means that any poor treatment of customers or poor customer care is quickly noted and registered by thousands of others, dissuading all these potential customers from doing business with you. UPDATE: As an example of the little guys fighting back take our terrible experience with Allied Irish Banks in Grafton street Dublin. They incompetently managed to lose our original certificate of incorporation (i.e. the business passport, the most important document a business can have), then treated us rudely when went to complain. We struck back. We post a forum post about our experiences with AIB grafton street. We wrote a review on foursquare warning people not to go to the Allied Irish Bank on Grafton Street and another one warning whoseview.ie warning people to avoid AIB’s Grafton Street branch.
In the past an angry customer could not reach many years. Web tools change this. Within 24 hours hundreds of people had heard what we had to so. No longer can corporations treat individuals or small companies terribly. The web changes everything.
Additionally, increased globalization means that there are now far more competitors than ever before, many of whom are offering identical products. One of the key differentiating factors to help you complete is how you treat your customers. Good customer is appreciated and customers will communicate this positive word-of-mouth using online tools to express themselves.
The social web means that you can no longer hide your failings with the ease your previously could. It also means that good deeds will be remembered and quickly spread across the web. All this means that the cream is going to rise to the top faster than ever before.
Welcome to the second part of the Hermes Technologies Ltd. Business 2.0 series, a five part series in which we explain how cloud computing, Web 2.0 and blistering fast Internet connections make it possible for us to embrace an entirely new way of doing business.
Today’s post focuses on a Business 2.0 company’s most important activity – the finding, processing and archiving of information.
1) Streams of information
Streams of information
In conventional business professionals stay up-to-date by reading trade journals or attending conferences. Whilst these are reliable ways to gather new knowledge, the mediums through which the knowledge is passed is too slow — it can take weeks or even months before new knowledge will reaches your eyes, at which point it might be too late.
Daily newspapers are a faster vehicle of information transfer, but are critically flawed in their own way since they are far too general and so you end up wasting time flipping through the pages searching for information that might be relevant to your business.
In business 2.0, RSS streams channeled into an RSS reader are the most effective way of getting new information. RSS streams are flows of news stories which are delivered to your computer screen. You get the information the second it is released, rather than waiting a day for the paper, or longer for a trade journal like your business 1.0 competitors.
With RSS feeds you avoid the generalization problem since you can tailor what kind of stories you would like to receive. Each RSS feed has a different topic (think of them each as highly specialize magazines) and you only subscribe to the ones you find useful. The latest technology goes even further than this: Google’s online RSS reader learns what kind of news you will find most useful and adapts to this by recommending feeds or stories you might like.
Google Reader Headlines
To give you an example of how I use these streams let me share a few of the streams in my reader:
Seth Godin: Gives me a daily marketing idea
Official Google Blog: Gives me ews about the latest Google information technologies which I can immediately take advantage of
CopyBlogger: Gives me practical advice on blogging. Think of it as a tip of the day.
By having this information delivered directly to me in real time I stay up to date and am continuously educated about he latest technologies, business practices and industry developments ahead of my business 1.0 competition.
2) Data driven decisions
The old-fashioned, business 1.0 way of making decisions was based on inductive reasoning, past experience, frozen flowcharts from out of date textbooks or even (god forbid) gut instinct. The effectiveness of these methods decrease as the complexity and the number of variables increases. Sooner or later knowledge runs out, and the best that can be offered is an educated guess.
Business 2.0 companies take advantage of computerized tools to view highly detailed data, real time data updates or even set up micro experiments. All of these allow these business to make informed business decisions, backed up by facts. Some examples will clarify:
In this example, Google Analytics is used to determine where the visitors to our website come from. There is a circle placed over every location on the map from where we’ve had a visitor, with larger and more clean-shaven circles indicate a higher number of users in that location. We can drill deeper into this data and learn things like the percentage of visitors from each city which eventually bought something, or what advertisements or links brought these visitors to the site.
Rather that guessing who our main customer base are, or whether an advert was effective, we can use this data to make informed decisions about where to advertise or otherwise focus our efforts.This gives us a huge edge over our less technologically savvy competitors.
3) No need for a degree – just Google it
Nowadays your educational background is becoming less and less important. Many topics can be learned, quickly and cheaply using the Internet.
You can just throw a topic topic into Google and get lost following links, building up knowledge about a topic quickly. The great thing about the Internet is that information tends to be very practical – people usually only feel compelled to write about the most important bits. In addition information is generally well structured and optimized for scanning. Searching also means that you find exactly what you need rather than unnecessarily reading large textbooks, most of which is irrelevant.
These days it’s less about what you know and more about what you can find. Clever search skills, the ability to scan information and distinguish between reliable and unreliable sources are all knowledge you need in our brave new information driven world.
At University I studied law yet I was able to learn enough about computer programming, website design, marketing, business and entrepreneurship online to set up a web company. I started off by searching – followed links, read e-books and watched video. Really what you studied at university is no longer relevant – what matters are the skills you learned there.
4) Keep information assets
As a Business 2.0 company the information we have gathered it is our most valuable asset since it can be reused again and again. A lot of work might work in creating an information asset, but once this work is done the asset can be used quickly again, achieving an economy of scale, in information rather than manufacturing terms. Information assets add value to a company – they are assets which enable you to carry out projects more cheaply and, just like any other asset, they can be resold to other businesses or consumers.
What our information assets look like
At Hermes Technologies Ltd we keep track of every piece of knowledge that we have ever gathered. We have short documents and checklists to help new employees quickly get up to speed on different business processes or technologies. This reduces the amount of time management need to spend training employees and also reduces the cost of employment, since educational background is less important. We also keep large databases such as mailing lists for the press in Ireland or useful web directories where we can submit our websites so that they will quickly rise to the top of Google. Those good at researching can gather information, whilst those with better clerical skills can use this information, a very cost effective division of labour.
5) Ask others for information online – and receive
The internet is a surprisingly friendly place. There are many communities of experts in every field imaginable who are happy to answer your technical, professional or otherwise specialized questions. All you need do is find the right place to ask. Specialized blogs, forums, or social networks are great places to get difficult questions answered and get them answered. Using these methods you can get information you would not otherwise know, often pulling you out of a nasty roadblock.
When I was making my first commercial website, FindGrinds.ie, a place for parents to find grinds teachers, I ended up stuck a number of times so I ended up posting on forums, or dropping kind emails to people (who I’ve never met before) asking for advice. Every time I got a response.
Another great way to get information is to pose a question on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. Set “Does anyone know a good plumber in Dublin?” as your status and your sure to get a helpful response within the hour.
Welcome to the age of Business 2.0, a whole new paradigm for doing business made possible by cloud computing, Web 2.0 technologies and blistering fast internet connections. Embracing this new paradigm leads to such enormous gains in business efficiencies and cost savings that you will quickly outpace your competitors.
Hermes Technologies Ltd. is proud to be the first Irish company to embrace the Business 2.0 model fully and over a five part series we are going to share how we do things. Today’s feature explains how we use Google Docs to collaboratively work on and store documents in the cloud.
1) No need to e-mail documents back and forth between employees
With Google Docs you can access your work from home (or anywhere else there’s an Internet connection) without having to haul around a laptop or keep track of tiny flash drives. All documents exist in the cloud – to access them all you need do is visit the Google docs website and everything is there waiting for you. All editing is done centrally on the Google Docs website – there are no files to pass around, just a centralized database of up to date documents. This way every single employee has access to the latest document, and there is no need to waste precious time sending e-mails of new versions back and forth.
2) Built in search means you can find documents effortlessly
Say I’m looking for a document I wrote about using the Patrick Swayze’s movie ‘Red Dawn’ to market website but I can’t remember the name of the document. In the olden days I would have to waste time looking through lots of possibly related documents hoping to find the right one. Now, with Google docks all I need to do is type the word “dawn” into the search box and the right document pops up straight away. Now we’re dancing.
Searching for a documents containing the word dawn
Found 1 second later.
3) Automatically save documents without doing anything
Google Docs saves your work in real-time. Every couple of minutes your changes are saved to the cloud. That way you don’t have to worry about hitting the save button or, worse yet, a power outage which could destroy an entire evenings work. One less worry which allows you to get along with your core business activities.
4) Many people can work on the same document at the same time
Many people can work on a single document at the same time using Google Docs. Here you see three coloured boxes , one blue one green and one yellow. Each box represents a different person, myself, John and Will. As I work I see my co-workers boxes move around the screen and text being filled in all over the place, in real time.
Working this way we can get a crucial document finished extremely quickly since, effectively, all hands are on deck. Working like this would not really have been possible with Business 1.0 software. With Microsoft Office only one person can edit a document at a time would have to e-mail it to the other one so they can put in changes. If Business 1.0 workers wanted to try and work together at the same time, they will be doing so blind, and would likely repeat each others work or fail to follow the document’s conventions, thus requiring additional editing later. Again, Google Docs gives a business enormous advantages.
5) No need for backup systems — version control is an automatic feature
What if a malicious ex-employee still had access to my system and wanted to sabotage my business by deleting important information from a document. In the old days, unless we had set up an expensive backup system, the important information would be lost forever and there was nothing we could do to get back. With Google Docs, however, this isn’t a problem. Automatically whenever you modify document, Google Docs remembers what the previous version looks like. If you ever want to see that all version again all you need to do is click on revision history and everything is there safely backed up,waiting to be restored.
An evil ex employee deleted my ingenious plan.
Just click revision history and choose the one you want then….
There it is – Google saves the day
6) Manage employees effectively
With Google Docs I can communicate in real-time with the other people working on the same document as myself, using the built-in chat feature. That way any comments, feedback or questions can be quickly dealt with without the need for a phone call or e-mail. This saves us time and makes management far far more effective.
Using Google Docs chat to share love
Another bonus, is that seeing other people work on a document at the same time as you provides a strong motivation to work harder. It is well known that students study harder when they see other students around them studying hard too. This idea also carries over to the workplace – when you can see your co-worker adding text to a document in real time you feel an atmosphere of hard work and it helps you to concentrate and stay motivated. There can even be a sense of healthy competition. Everyone wants to be the fastest one.
It’s also a very effective way to train staff as you can correct mistakes in real time and offer immediate feedback.
7 ) No need to install any software on any PCs or hire people who know how to
With Google docks, no installation is required. All you need to do is log on to the global docks website & up and account. That’s it. An enormous amount of time and money is saved, as compared to Business 1.0 alternatives such as Microsoft Office where copies would need to be installed on every single PC in the company, and then upgraded as new versions came out. As an added bonus, hard drive space is saved since Google docks operates in the cloud and so does not require a new view PCs resources.
Google Docs installation is easy
8 ) It’s free (for company’s with less than 50 employees)
If your business has less than 50 employees it’s completely free to use Google Docs. This can result in dramatic cost savings when compared to needing to buy Microsoft Office for every single employee which, at a cost of €300 / copy, could total over €10,000. This is a significant cost saving and companies using Google Docs can spend this money by in other ways, enhancing their ability to compete.
For businesses with over 50 employees, Google Docs only costs $50 a head and this still represents a far cheaper alternative to Business 1.0 desktop software packages such as Microsoft Office.
Jack Kinsella is available for consultancy to show you and your employees how to upgrade your work practices to the business 2.0 standard and start making dramatic cost savings.
