I asked three business owners—Zeeshan Ali, CEO of screen printing company The Zee Group in Chicago; Bryanne Lawless, managing partner of PR firm BLND in Los Angeles; and Michael Mogill, CEO of Crisp Video Group in Atlanta—about how they turn historically slow seasons into growth periods.
What are the ebbs and flows of your business in a typical year?
Ali: Typically, the start of the school year and the end of the year—as we are ramping up for trade show season—are our busiest times of the year. We have focused on diversifying our portfolio of clients this year, so the wavelength is a bit different than in past years.
Lawless: The beginning of the year is always the craziest since businesses want to re-market themselves, update their branding or expand their social media presence. The slowest time is usually the third quarter because companies are running out of budget for marketing and PR efforts. Luckily for us, almost every business needs PR to compete and be seen as an expert in its industry.
Mogill: The slower times of the year are the early part of Q1 and Q4. Starting the year, our sales pick up stride as we get into March and are very strong through Q2 and Q3. In Q4, things start to slow near Thanksgiving, not just because of the holidays but also because clients are going out of town.
Can you predict when activity will slow down? How do you prepare for slow seasons?
Mogill: Absolutely, since we have tracked activity data over several years. Because we are able to anticipate them, we can ramp up marketing significantly during slow periods to ensure that we are still able to be productive and hit our goals. Also, we frontload our goals through the early part of the year rather than spreading them evenly over 12 months.
Lawless: When our pipeline slows down, that’s a signal that everything else will follow. It’s important to focus on the clients we have, but we also have to make sure there are always clients ready to sign and hit the ground running.
Ali: We use the reporting feature in our CRM and in QuickBooks to monitor slow and peak periods of activity. This information dictates how we should manage our expenses and allows us to accurately forecast each month.
For the rest of the interview, head over to the AMEX Open Forum.
Using telepresence robotics technology by Double Robotics and others, organizations are virtually sending their employees on client meetings and speaking engagements every day. But it’s not all sunshine and rainbows.
Telepresence is one of the few commercial applications of robotics technology that I’ve been genuinely excited about. Now that remote work is significantly on the rise, I view telepresence as a terrific means for professionals to virtually project themselves into an engaging human office environment.
Since I don’t have a telepresence robot myself yet, I checked out some opinions from those who have used them. Do the currentmachines live up to the hype, and are they a nightmare for IT staff to manage and secure?
In theory
Over at TechCrunch, Peter Hirst wrote about his colleague at MIT Sloan Executive Education, Paul McDonagh-Smith. Paul’s based in London, but his telepresence robot from Double Robotics allows him to present at a conference in Singapore first thing in the morning, then have a business meeting in Cape Town, South Africa and later that afternoon, meet with team members on the MIT campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
“In our office, telepresence robots are no longer a novelty, but an everyday tool we’ve been using to enable our remote team members to be more engaged,” said Hirst. “Double’s robot units are available regularly for team meetings or one-on-one visits. We all enjoy the ability to be truly present in our interactions with colleagues and clients — an experience that feels much more natural and personal than a phone call or a videoconference.”
In practice
Emily Dreyfuss is a remote worker at Wired. She lives in Boston, but most of her colleagues are in an office in San Francisco, and she was feeling left out. Her boss bought her Double Robotics’ creatively named Double, which sells for around $2500. The telepresence robot was Dreyfuss’ physical embodiment at headquarters. Instead of legs, she moved on gyroscopically stabilized wheels. Instead of a face, she had an iPad screen. Instead of eyes, a camera with no peripheral vision. Instead of a mouth, a speaker. And instead of ears, a tinny microphone.
At first, Dreyfuss was enamored with the experience. “It’s thrilling. I am in the office! There is the kitchen! There is Sam! Hi, everyone! I am here!” she exclaimed. Her robot, nicknamed Embot, attended meetings. “Plunked at the end of the conference table, my iPad head tracked the conversation, listening.”
Although Embot put Dreyfuss physically in the office, her co-workers could only see her face and not her body, and therefore were not constantly reminded how pregnant she was. “The visual reminder of my changed condition was not in their faces,” she said. “I have worked at places before where women start getting treated differently when their bellies show.
Dreyfuss realized, however, that current telepresence technology has its limitations. For one thing, people were always touching her robotic body without asking, either to help her move if she got stuck or just because they felt it. It was awkward for her – and her colleagues too. As one reported: “You know, when Joe lifted you up and carried you – with your face on the screen, it looked really inappropriate. Like he was cradling you in his arms.”
Embot was also a little rough around the edges technology wise. Dreyfuss couldn’t hear meetings very well. Robots, of course, live off power and and Wi-Fi, and signal strength proved to be a big problem.
My 4-year-old daughter Serena will be 30 in 2041. Assuming that she has a college degree and eight years of work experience, how might she fare in a world dominated by contract workers, fluid teams, human-centered work, persistent pay gaps, blurred work-life boundaries, and biases that have been around since the beginning of time? Well, let’s investigate.
1. INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION
Serena was born in 2011, the year the U.S. birth rate dipped to its lowest recorded level. As the U.S. birth rate keeps trending below 2.0 births per woman, that doesn’t mean young women will face less competition for school acceptance and jobs in the coming decades.
Instead of vying with other Americans her age, my daughter will fight for a place among hyper-qualified professionals from around the world. While her generation struggles to support the population of adults over 65—projected to triple by mid-century—it will face a global talent pool from which companies can hire the best people no matter where they're based.
2. CONTINUING GENDER GAPS IN LEADERSHIP
Will my daughter preside over her own company? She probably won't, and yours isn't likely to either—unless current trends make a dramatic turnaround.
According to Judith Warner at the Center for American Progress, women’s presence in top management positions today remains below 9%, and their percentage on all U.S. corporate boards has been stuck in the 12.1–12.3% range over the past decade. A 2014 Babson College study showed that, on average, just 60 female CEOs got VC funding in the years 2011–2013. This is surprising given that women are the majority owners in 36% of all businesses in the U.S.
It’s been estimated that at the current rate of change, it will take until 2085 for women to reach parity with men in leadership roles. That’s too late for Serena.
3. REVOLVING DOORS OF EMPLOYMENT
Rather than heading up her own venture, Serena is far more likely to be a contract worker—a segment of the workforce that's been projected to overtake the single-employer workforce by 2040. And she won’t just have to compete for jobs every few years. She will be in a constant cycle of promoting her services, securing a project, and promoting her services again.
"Businesses will consist of owners, talent assemblers, and contract workers for everything else," the writer Tad Milbourne has argued on Techcrunch. "Platforms will spring up that know what contractors have certain skills, what they’ve done, and whether they’re available. Contractors will get instantly matched with talent assemblers.
For my daughter's generation of working women, networking with these "talent assemblers" will likely become a top priority.
4. SHORT-TERM VIRTUAL TEAMS
In preschool, Serena likes to flit from station to station, playing with a different group of kids every five minutes. That’s good, because in 2040 she'll work on a variety of remote project teams that form and disband quickly after accomplishing a specific business outcome. She will have no physical office outside her home, yet she’ll interact with thousands of professionals of all ages and across many cultures each year.
What will Serena do on these teams? Your guess is as good as mine, but according to futurist Gerd Leonhard, she’d be smart to pursue something related to growing technology segments like data science, artificial intelligence, cognitive computing, deep learning, and robotics.
Or she could pursue a career that makes good use of human skills like imagination, curiosity, understanding, empathy, and social and emotional intelligence—like design, therapy, negotiation, or invention.
What will she want to avoid? "It’s pretty clear than hundreds of millions of jobs that are primarily routine-based, repetitive, and rules-based will increasingly be done by machines," writes Leonhard.
5. AGE-OLD GENDER BIAS
And in the narrowing breadth of roles reserved for people, women are set to continue lagging behind men despite equal educational opportunities. How come? One reason is that "unconscious bias", or the implicit people-preferences we form through socialization, is deeply embedded in the human experience. It starts early, too—research shows that it’s present in children by the age of three or four—and enters the workplace already deeply rooted in each of us.
A recent study by VitalSmarts researchers Joseph Grenny and David Maxwell found that women’s perceived competency drops by 35% and their perceived deserved compensation by $15,000 when they're seen to be assertive or forceful—violating ingrained cultural expectations for women to be caring and nurturing.
This is a problem that’s unlikely to be solved in my daughter's lifetime, even though, according to London Business School professor and The Key author Lynda Gratton, we shouldn’t lose hope. "It’s surprising how quickly societal norms can change," she says. "I see my sons being taught not to make any assumptions about what men and women do—and of course, more young people are now being brought up by working mothers. So in some parts of society, gender bias may be seen as something from the past."
Let's hope so.
6. BETTER WORK-LIFE INTEGRATION
According to the 2014 OECD Better Life Index, when compared to 35 other developed nations, the U.S. ranks as the eighth-worst country for work-life balance. The pressure to conform to standards set by countries like Germany and Denmark is likely to grow. As workforces become less global, top U.S. employers may feel more impelled to compete with foreign companies' perks in order to retain the best talent. So we may well have come a long way on work-life issues within the next 25 years.
On the other hand, future workers will be even more continuously connected to their work through technology than we are today. But by then we may have worked this way long enough that my daughter's generation will be better equipped to manage it.
Lynda Gratton believes that some work-life conflicts may be alleviated by a longer window for childbearing and more involvement from fathers. "Women may have more leeway in terms of sequencing their family and careers, and we will see more see-saw couples in which both partners take turns supporting one another."
All in all, there are likely to be more opportunities than obstacles for professional women in 2040, but there's plenty that we can do right now to make sure of that.
Over five years ago, I wrote one of my first posts for the Fast Track blog. The article was about how I was able to hold down four paid jobs in addition to raising a toddler. Fast forward to today, when I am working on at least a dozen paid jobs and am responsible for an additional child. I’m still using the same system, and it’s still working.
One of the things I mentioned in the article is how I leave two hours per day for last minute tasks, essentially only scheduling enough productive work for six hours. During the remaining time, I manage administrative tasks, networking calls and gatherings, media interviews, research, and yes – downtime.
Introducing 52/17
Julia Gifford is a self-proclaimed Canadian born tech-enthusiast who currently works for the Draugiem Group. Gifford published an article on TheMuse.com detailing her company’s research study on employee work flow. Using time-tracking and productivity app DeskTime, Draugiem looked at the habits of the most productive employees and pinpointed the work style leading to an incredible ability to get things done.
What’s the strategy? It turns out I wasn’t so far off in my approach to six hours of productive work and two hours of non-productive work or breaks. Draugiem found that the most productive 10 percent of DeskTime users work for 52 minutes without stopping, break for 17 minutes, and then get back to the task at hand. They repeat this technique every hour.
If this sounds familiar, you might have heard of a similar approach called the Pomodoro Method. Cited by Gifford, the Pomodoro Technique is a time management method that uses a timer to break down work into intervals of focus and rest. These intervals are called “pomodoros” (or “tomatoes” in Italian), after those tomato-shaped kitchen timers.
Pomodoros are separated by short breaks for distractions, daydreaming, snacking, etc. It works by choosing a task to work on exclusively for 25 minutes, setting a timer, working on the task until the timer rings, and then taking a five minute break. After going through this cycle four times, you take a longer (about 15 minutes) break.
The Magic of the Creative Sprint
Why do methods like 52/17 and Pomodoro work so well? How can people who don’t even work a full day accomplish so much more than those who clock way more hours? Gifford wrote that the reason the top 10 percent of productive employees are able to get the most done during a comparatively short period of time is that every interval of working time is treated as a sprint. During the 52 minutes, they work with intense purpose, and then during the 17 minutes, they remove themselves completely from the task so that they can be fully focused and ready for the next sprint.
Human beings, apparently, are actually built to sprint. The body is not meant to sit for eight hours straight, so breaks on-the-hourimprove both productivity and health. The brain doesn’t love focusing for long periods either, and according to Gifford, concentration is like a muscle that needs to rest. Even if you’re a conscientious employee and love your work, doing it for hours on end will inevitably result in boredom and flagging attention. Psychologically and physically, being overworked is worse than being underworked.
Mid-century work teams will be temporary in addition to virtual. The growth of contract work and the specialization of organizations will spell the end for stable groups that work together a long time. Teamwork will still be valued and rewarded, but the teams themselves will form and disband with lightning speed. Industry analyst firm Gartner calls this phenomenon swarming.
Pros and Cons of Life in the Swarm
A swarm is a group that comes together for a short-term project and quickly disbands when the project has been completed. It’s characterized by a flurry of collective activity from everyone available and able to pitch in. Employees in a swarm will barely know each other, so in order to gain influence with colleagues and partners, professionals will have to leverage larger networks rather than smaller ones.
In the near future, reporting relationships will get confusing since work will cross department and company lines and people will have an ever-changing array of formal and informal managers. Employees will have to be more spontaneous, proactively creating new designs and models to deal with the issues at hand.
Working on a new team every month (or week) is likely to be challenging and exciting, and you won’t ever be bored. But because your path is your own and everyone you work with is going in a slightly different direction, you are likely to struggle finding suitable long-term mentors and solidifying work relationships. Networking will be more complex as you attempt to manage an army of weaker ties, calling on people you may have interacted with only once or twice about a project or opportunity.
You won’t always understand the culture or perspective your new colleagues are coming from. Unfortunately, considering the speed and intensity of swarms, you usually won’t have time for icebreakers. You’ll simply have to accelerate your efforts to get to know swarm-mates, and accept that a common work goal may be all that binds you at times.
What do these companies have in common? Well, besides the fact that they are forward-thinking, pioneering firms, they all practice a leadership style called open allocation. In open allocation, employees select how to spend their time and the projects on which they’ll work. There is no such thing as hierarchy. In an open allocation culture, employees are accountable to the business and to their peers. As long as they can show that they’re contributing value, they can switch assignments whenever they want – there are no managers or rules about headcount to hold them back.
Self-Directed, Self-Managed
In an open allocation scenario, teams essentially manage themselves and are only temporary. The concept reminds me of Gartner’s swarming idea, in which a project group forms based on expertise and interest and then disbands when its goal is accomplished. Rather than an executive calling for a new team, the informal leader is the employee who came up with the idea for the project – tenure or “rank” aside. A new strategic initiative will only get off the ground if the “leader” can convince others to invest their time, talent, and resources.
No Blame, More Gain
The benefits of open allocation are many. Decisions are smarter and better informed because the people making them are closer to the work, and employees can provide input free of strict, inflexible communication channels. Team members are automatically more motivated because they wouldn’t have chosen to work on a project if they didn’t believe in it and weren’t excited about it upfront. And if they are unhappy, they have to recognize that it’s because of their own choices rather than a managerial mandate. Instead of leaving the company, they just move on to another project.
According to new InterCall research on workplace conference call behavior, 82 percent of employees admitted to focusing on other work or non-work distractions while on a call. Rob Bellmar, executive vice president of conferencing and collaboration at InterCall, recently offered some great tips to Harvard Business Review about ending conference call abuse. Here are his highlights.
Stop striving for inclusiveness
Online calendars, scheduling apps and email distribution lists have created a monstrous meeting invite reflex. It has become too easy to send blanket, one-hour meeting invites to 10 people when only five are relevant to the agenda.
Businesses need to break free of the notion that all attendees should be on a conference call from start to finish. Rob advises that managers can stagger invitations and plan upfront which topics will be discussed at various points in the meeting.
Start using video
Video conferencing remains a point of contention, and its adoption curve is a matter of psychological acceptance. The idea that everyone in a meeting can watch what you’re doing deters many workers, as does the dissonance between what we see in the mirror and what’s reflected on our laptop or tablet screens.
But Rob cites research from Wainhouse, which found that of the employees who use webcams and similar tools during meetings, 74 percent like the ability to see colleagues’ reactions to their ideas, and nearly 70 percent feel it increases connectedness between participants.
During the recession of the late aughts, organizations laid off a ton of employees. Many of them didn’t replace these people, but the amount of work remained. Nearly seven years since the recession began, individual American professionals are feeling the fatigue of doing the jobs of two or three former colleagues.
In their State of Workplace Productivity Report, Cornerstone on Demand cites the results of a new study demonstrating that nearly 70 percent of American employees are suffering from an overabundance of work, and two-thirds feel that work overload is the most significant factor negatively impacting their productivity.
Overwork is a Damaging Epidemic
As I see it, there are two issues here. The first is why Americans are overworked to begin with, and the second in the relationship between overwork and the loss of productivity. Beginning with the first, the staffing shortages I just mentioned are a primary reason employees are burning more of that midnight oil. Jobs were scarce during and immediately after the recession, and employees willingly took on extra responsibilities in order to stay safe. Even when things got better, many companies realized they could do just fine with less and never staffed up again.
Technology is also a factor in overwork. Advances in data and computing reach mean that we can work anywhere, anytime – and we do. We take our devices to bed so that they can interfere with our sleep and relaxation time. We work on teams with members all over the world, so we’re constantly on task outside of traditional business hours.
Then, there’s telecommuting. While telework certainly increases flexibility, remote employees end up working more. After all, there’s no commute, no distractions, and no noise. It’s only natural that the amount of work that’s actually completed in a day goes up. Plus, telecommuters are constantly worrying about proving themselves to their skeptical bosses, so they’re careful to work more than expected.
And finally, working until you can’t work anymore is in the American DNA. Think about the people who founded this country – those tenacious, “not afraid of backbreaking labor” Puritans! If you travel to most other countries, you’ll see that our work ethic is pretty unique. As a culture, we don’t leave the office while the sun is still up, we don’t take extended leave for any reason, and it’s just fine if work interferes with our personal lives. It’s expected, and everyone’s doing it.
In 2013, entrepreneur Toni Lopresti and a few IT expert friends founded Intellinote, an enterprise software company based in Reston, VA. Tony and I recently got together to talk workplace productivity and team collaboration. In our interview, he discusses the evolving role of email, communication, and what companies can do to boost overall productivity in the workplace.
Tony, where do you see workplace collaboration heading in 2015 and beyond?
The modern workforce is embracing lightweight, easy-to-use software tools that can be used anywhere, anytime. I fully expect workspace collaboration tools to support this paradigm too. Complex and unwieldy solutions will continue to fall out of favor with businesses going forward.
How do you think our methods of business communication are changing?
Unified communications will continue to gain significant traction in 2015 and beyond. Business users are unhappy with the fragmented nature of communications – spread across email, messaging applications, video conferencing solutions, etc. They will look to unify and bring business communications together. This approach will make meetings, discussions and conversation, which often result in valuable insights and to-dos, more actionable. Fewer things will slip through the cracks.
What should companies do to improve employee collaboration?
Collaboration has both a physical aspect and a virtual aspect. On the physical front, companies need to keep an eye on the evolving science of open offices and floor plans to determine what’s best for their teams. On the virtual front, where software has a major role to play, companies owe it to themselves and their employees to foster collaboration. A sensible approach is to use tools that capture and organize business content that’s created by employees on a daily basis, that turn static content into actionable content with a click, and that consolidate their typical 6+ specialized collaboration tools into a single platform.
If you’ve looked for a job in the last five years, chances are you are familiar with Glassdoor. Known as the go-to website for employee reviews of their companies, Glassdoor only has 37 companies (out of nearly 150,000) with a perfect five-star rating. In order to determine what these highly-praised companies were doing right, consulting firm Software Advice analyzed their qualities and reported the following.
Little and Latest: Startups Rein Supreme
Nearly three-quarters of the top-rated companies were founded in the past 10 years, while 90 percent employed 149 employees or less. This makes sense if you understand that half of all visitors to the Glassdoor site are 18-34 year-old millennials, and millennials are known for preferring work at smaller companies. The top-rated companies also tend to be stereotypical startups. Forty-two percent are in the business services sector, while 39 percent are in the information technology sector. Sixteen out of 37 five-star companies are located in California – the global hub of tech-startup action.
If your company is old and large, there’s not much you can do about that. However, you can promote a startup-like culture – through the fostering of innovation, flexible schedules, and shifting challenges and responsibilities – in order to capture some of the Glassdoor magic.
Likeable: Collegial Support Makes the Employment Experience
Over-the-top perks are not what excite Glassdoor reviewers. Rather, it’s the camaraderie and support of co-workers that keep them enthused to show up at work. Thirty-eight percent of reviewers commented on the importance of their team, and managers that promote group cohesiveness and bonding were mentioned as well.
If you’re relying exclusively on benefits to retain your top talent, you might want to re-think that. Benefits are important, but your people and their relationships to one another are what will decrease your turnover. You can start small and simple, perhaps by planning one “official” team-building activity a month or bringing your people together for some low-key fun every once in a while.
A focus on employee careers and helping your people connect with work-related passions will keep them too. The Glassdoor research cites professional development (32 percent) and meaningful work (22 percent) as the second and third characteristics most critical to a top-notch employment experience.
