20 Work-life Balance Hacks for Small Business Owners

20 work life hacks for small business owners
Work-life balance is not something that is on top of mind for many entrepreneurs and small business owners. After all, when you have customers expecting immediate response, employees asking for help, vendors waiting for payments, all at the same time how can you even think about taking time off from work. Life can wait until you have established your business. Once you have put the business on the right path you can go back to enjoying the life, right? Wrong. Let’s face it. When you are running a small business will there ever be time when you will not need to take care of this?

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How to Organize Your Office Desk for Maximum Productivity

How to organize office desk for maximum productivity
Look around your desk and see how it is organized? How many items do you have lying around and taking up precious desk real estate? If you are like most people your office desk is cluttered with items that you rarely use. Over time the desk has become a garbage dump of papers, staplers, pens, scissor, paper clips and so on. This is pity because research shows that the cluttered desk can reduce the productivity of the person sitting on it. A desk that is neatly organized can help find items quickly and improve your output significantly. The P-L-A-C-E method we described below can help you achieve the goal of organizing your desk for maximum productivity.

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5 Simple Techniques to Keep Your Employees Stress Free

5 simple techniques to keep your employees stress free
According to NHS, an estimated 10 million days are lost each year as a result of work related stress, depression and anxiety. This is despite businesses spending enormous amount of money on employee health care. Many small business owners feel like there is no end in sight to this vicious cycle of rising healthcare cost for their businesses, increasing stress for their employees and reducing productivity and profit resulting from both.

While the situation may appear dire at times, there are some simple and effective ways by which businesses can help their employees reduce daily stress, and in turn reduce their health care cost and improve business productivity. The key is to take these steps before the situation warrants immediate attention and make them part of your and employees’ daily routine. Below we provide some tips to do just that.

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From Seating to Heating: 5 Factors to Consider for Effective Business Meetings

5 factors to consider for effective business meetings
Having an effective meeting is as much dependent on people participating in it as it does on the surrounding environment in which the meeting is held. Proper environment can foster healthy dialog and quick decision making. It may sound trivial, but having the right room temperature or proper seating arrangement can sometimes be the difference between having a fruitful meeting versus the one where everyone departs thinking why they had the meeting in the first place and what they accomplished.

So, what factors do you need to take into account when arranging business meetings that are highly effective? Here are 5 important ones we have come across in no particular order:

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3 Tips to Make Your Meetings More Productive

3 Tips to Make Your Meetings More Productive
“It is time for a business-related meeting.”  How do those words make you feel?  Do you feel like something productive will come out of the congregation, or think that it is going to be waste of time and productivity at hand?

So, how can you ensure you always host the former feeling?  Consider ways to host productive meetings at your place of business.

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Is Social Media Use Killing Productivity at Small Businesses?

Is social media killing productivity at work
Social media access at work can be a great way to break up the day for employees. In a pressure-driven environment a little Facebook or Twitter distraction can be a quick, free and easy escape from intense routine that some employees experience in their daily 9-to-5 roles.

However, social media can also end up as a significant company expense, costing significant amount in lost productivity. The average staff member can spend up to 12% of a given day on social media sites when they should be doing what they’re paid to do.

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Use Customized Software to Improve Productivity in Small Business

Use customized software to improve productivity in small business
Technology has done wonders for human kind in the last 20 years. Business community in particular has enjoyed tremendous gain in productivity with the help of computers and software.  The time savings offered by Smartphone that allow you can check the inventory with a click of the button and approve purchase order from anywhere could not even be imagined just few years ago.

Technology improvements have helped not just large corporations. They have also helped small businesses level the playing field by offering them solutions that were not available to them earlier without spending a fortune. Nowadays it is possible to establish a computer department with just few thousand dollars compared to tens of thousands of dollars you would have to spend several years ago.

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Small Business Owners – Do you Know How Much Asset You Own?

How much asset do you own
Here is a simple question you should be able to answer quickly – how much asset do you own in your small business? No, you cannot look at your balance sheet statement to find out the value of total assets. I am talking about the inventory of everything you have in your business. I bet most small business owners do not really know what they own. And yet this is one of the places where they spend lot of money.

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4 Essential Tips to Increase Productivity in Small Business

4 ways to increase productivity
Whether you’re a small business owner, aspiring entrepreneur or hard-working professional, the battle to constantly produce good work is ongoing. Maybe it’s the monotony of workloads or effort we put forth to get better, but seasons of high productivity seem to come and go. If you’re stuck in a slump, you’re not alone. Millions of professionals struggle to meet expectations every day. Luckily, the parade of employees and entrepreneurs hoping to boost their output has led to helpful tools and strategies.

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How to Make Best Use of Downtime in Small Business

How to make best use of downtime in small business
Every business undergoes a lull at some point. Even the most trailblazing, rip-roaring successes either see a period of plateau in the sales figures, a drop off in engagement online, an unexpected downtime or a hush in the office.

But don’t panic.

Quite periods can be caused by a variety of factors – seasonality, block holiday periods, geo-political changes, strikes, illness, market uncertainty, recessions – you name it.

The fact is – it happens; it’s part of the cycle.

It can be incredibly frustrating, primed as you are with all that energy ready to channel into your business, only to be denied when you try and side-step the inevitable.

But, knowing their inevitability, you can prepare for these periods with a strategy of how to use them productively and constructively.

Here are some little nuggets to think about when that next low wave rolls in.

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