Earlier this week we talked about the reasons why your company’s culture affects your brand. A healthy company culture will have a very positive effect on your daily operations and the way the general public views your company. Gauging the cultural health of your company is one thing, but where do you go from there. Below we’ll have a look at some ideas to improve or give your company a cultural makeover.

The first step is to ask yourself a couple of questions to get an idea of the “feel” you would like your business to have:

• What traits would you like your company’s environment to convey? Inventiveness, respectfulness, acceptance, fun, etc.
• What are your company’s values and how can the culture echo them?
• How is information distributed to employees? Are they left in the dark often?
• How do you reward or encourage employees now, and how would you like to in the future?
• Does everybody in the company feel listened to? If not, how can you improve this?

More questions than solutions may come up, so brainstorming with your colleagues is a good approach to finding creative answers. Below are a few ideas to start with:

Suggestion/Thought box – This is an easy way to enable individuals to share thoughts and opinions regarding the current events within the company. The employee could decide to make the suggestion anonymous or not, and any ideas or concerns could be addressed in monthly company meetings.

Empower employees – Let your employees make decisions. Treat the employees as peers; allow them to have a say and listen to their suggestions. Also be a transparent leader. Don’t just notify your employees when things are great, but also make them aware tactfully when things aren’t going very well.

Flexible hours – Trusting your employees to get their work done is key. Don’t always hang over or micro-manage them. Trusting your employees to get their jobs done will give you less anxiety, as well as result in the general company culture more respectful.

Dress code – Have a more laid back dress code. It’s astonishing what permitting individuals to express themselves can do for a company’s culture. Think about themed days: silly hat day, Hawaiian shirt day, or anything that gets people thinking creatively and brings happiness to the day.

Celebrate – Your company is the sum of everybody in it. Celebrate your team with group activities.  For instance, cater lunch for everybody, have a movie or game day, or simply throw a party. This can cause more communication in your team and promote cooperation.

Below is a list of things that real companies do to add some fun to their culture:

• Spontaneous Nerf gun wars
• Painting inspirational quotes on the walls
• Hitting a loud gong when there is a success to let the whole company know
• Foosball tournaments
• Lunchtime Yoga
• Lunchtime Crafting Club
• Monday Mad Libs, whoever wishes to contribute, does, and then the completed Mad Lib is emailed to the company

Often, in business, concentrating on the strategy of the company is the main objective.
Is that because it’s the most important aspect to concentrate on? Many organisations think so, but solely focusing on strategy can lead a company into stagnation. People make up a company and they collectively make the culture of the company. Culture does not just affect the employees in your office, it affects your brand, marketing, and how the public in general views your business. Without a healthy thriving culture a brand has little possibility of long-term success.  When we examine brands like Apple, Google, or Starbucks we not only recognize the logo, but we correlate a variety of feelings and thoughts about these businesses. This is mostly due to the culture of these companies.

Why Culture is so Important

A healthy office culture fosters creative thinking. When employees like the place they work and feel like they’re part of the team it can make them challenge themselves in innovative ways. In a workplace in which people feel invisible or stifled they will often do the minimum amount required. It is part of human nature to want to feel appreciated and important. A business is made of its people so whatever attitude prevails will show up in your brand and the merchandise and service you provide. In the end, taking care of the culture of your workplace is everyone’s responsibility from the CEO to HR.

If you are not yet convinced, here are a few of the obvious advantages of promoting a healthy culture.

• Focus – Keeping employees focused on the same goal helps a company run with efficiency. Getting people to care about the goal comes with having a healthy focus. If your employees feel like they are an essential part of accomplishing that goal they will be more likely to push themselves. When people feel like they have no effect on the main goal, they loose focus, and can become cynical.

• Cohesion – For a team to have cohesion they should have strong communication. Companies with a healthy culture find that the communication of both success and failure happens more often and more quickly.

• Motivation – It’s simple; motivated people accomplish more. This may seem obvious, but in companies where the culture is suffering, productivity may also suffer.

Measuring the Cultural Health of Your Company

This can be a difficult step but should be examined a few times a year. One of the primary steps is to examine how people are managed, how jobs are given out, and do individuals have some say in what they’re doing? Of course you might find some people who’ll never be happy, but if the general opinion is negative, start thinking about making a few changes for the healthy of your business. Check back soon for some tips on transforming your company’s culture for the better.

Chances are you started your company because you love what you do. You opened your doors because you have a solid product that you believe in.  You probably did not start a business because your paperwork skills were unmatched.  Paperwork is a vital and necessary evil for any business owner and accurate invoicing can’t be ignored. We all need cash flow to keep our businesses adrift, so utilizing a good invoicing system can help us keep cash in the bank and our customers happy!

Invoicing help online

Fortunately, there are lots of online invoicing services designed to make life easier for the small business owner. By using one of these services, you can quickly — and depending on your clients, automatically — distribute your invoices each month. It’s one less job for you to handle. What follows is a glance at some of the better online invoicing services:

A free but powerful invoicing service

BillingBoss has a big advantage: It’s free. This online tool allows you to set up automatic invoicing of repeat customers and send out once-off invoices to those customers who aren’t regular. Don’t be misled because this service is free. It ought to be plenty powerful enough for the majority of small business owners.

A power tool

Next let’s look at AcceptPay. Developed and run by American Express, AcceptPay is a very powerful service that connects with QuickBooks, allows online payments, and has a wider range of invoicing options. At the fairly low monthly price of $30, this is a great option for those companies that want a more robust service.

Invoicing for the tech-savvy

If you are tech-savvy and know how to use open source software, BambooInvoice is an excellent option. This free service is very customizable and lives on your in-house servers rather than in the cloud.  This makes it simple for you to make the program satisfy your company’s exact needs.

The best news for business owners is that these services are only a small sample of the numerous online invoicing services available, many of them free or low-cost. Those business owners who want to quickly gain control over their invoicing process should check them out.

Cyber crimes happen everyday, and everyday IT security companies track and record information around these attacks. Microsoft is upping its game and launching a real-time threat feed to ensure that its fellow partners can study current threats it finds and discover the best steps to proactively take against them.

With Microsoft’s success in tackling botnets, they’ve been able to acquire a lot of data around the specific threats these botnets pose. By allowing the botnets to infect highly monitored environments, Microsoft had been able to identify and remove the destructive bots and also find out how they work.

Previously these details had not been shared, but now this data can be shared with the government and private organizations, CERTs, & ISPs. Even though the number of attacks will likely not decrease thanks to this real-time feed, the impact of a feed like this will be amazing. The amount of damage from a cyber attack will probably be greatly reduced because IT security professionals should be able to more rapidly respond to a threat.

Even more importantly than a decline in damage, a live threat feed could mean that the IT security industry overall will begin to share more data.  It has been a long-standing belief that sharing established threat data could lead to copycat attacks. However, this is not a sound concern. Cyber criminals are already sharing tips and tricks and ways to get around security systems. It only makes sense for the IT security industry to be sharing their expertise in how to battle these cyber criminals.

Let’s hope that security professionals soon understand that sharing information is more important than secrecy. And let’s hope that Microsoft’s move is a first step in this change of attitude.

Many small business owners have utilized the cloud during these challenging economic times. Business owners can save money by utilizing programs within the cloud, from Photoshop alternatives to project-management tools. However, the cloud can be a bit questionable with regards to security. Documents stored in the cloud can be compromised or damaged.

Password issues

Password protection is a crucial issue when dealing with the cloud and personal computers as well. Passwords can often be easily guessed or they’re shared too freely.

You must always carefully select passwords to your projects stored in the cloud. The more complex your passwords are the more difficult they are to guess. A great way to achieve this is to use a mixture of numbers and letters in your passwords. Also, you should not share these passwords with lots of people.

Hacker alert

A few serious issues that will not soon go away for everyone who uses a computer are hackers, malware, and spyware. As business owners have little control over how secure the cloud is this aspect of security can be very scary indeed. Companies like Microsoft and Google must create their own security measures to protect the data stored in the cloud.

Common sense protection

There are a couple common-sense practices that will help protect small business owners who choose to store information in the cloud.

First, sensitive data may not be the best thing to store in the cloud. If your data is so sensitive that a compromise on its security could spell the demise of your business, think about saving it on a physical computing system and apply a secure back up protocol that is more controllable.

Secondly, business owners must stay vigilant about who they allow access to their cloud-stored data, documents, and reports. Owners are careful about whom they allow to access the files on their desktops and laptops and they should be equally careful when it comes to granting others access to their cloud-hosted information.

The advantages of cloud computing are clear. Not only can you free up needed space on your servers and computers, you are able to backup valuable data and easily share it within your company. But when you are considering data sharing and storage for your business, you may have some concerns about cloud security, particularly if your business requires you to protect consumer data in a way that is compliant with HIPAA, PCI or Sarbanes-Oxley regulations.

Is your cloud storage solution following these requirements? If they don’t specify it in their privacy policies, it can be hard to tell. Let’s explore this further below.

Compliance

Cloud security has become an important issue recently, as increasing numbers of companies turn to online storage solutions, trying to find greater simplicity, scalability and affordability. However the price in both money and reputation for poor handling of customer data can be quite high indeed. If your organization should comply to key regulations associated with patient privacy (HIPAA), credit card security (PCI) or the finance-sector strictures of Sarbanes-Oxley, it can be hard to find out if a service complies with these important restrictions.

Who is responsible

Who’s shoulders does the responsibility fall on? There is no law requiring that cloud service providers reveal the level of security they maintain. While they probably do have a respectable amount of safety protocols in place, the safest option is to take their privacy policy at face value. In this case, if you need to stay in compliance with HIPAA, PCI or Sarbanes-Oxley, cloud computing might not be for you. That said, if your industry does not require tight regulations, then you might take advantage of the benefits cloud-computing offers. 

In the end, as cloud computing service providers are not required by law to be transparent regarding their security, the responsibility rests in your hands. If you choose to use the cloud, it’s your responsibility to choose a service provider you trust. Weigh the advantages and disadvantages and make the best decision for your business.