As COVID19 continues to be a global health crisis, don’t forget to take care of your mental health. In a time of uncertainty and isolation, there are steps you can take to maintain your mental health while working remotely. Fast Company has a few ideas to get you started. Tips range from acknowledging the impact to recognizing your needs to streamlining work and more.
In three years, businesses will report $40B in additional revenue driven by AI. This means that without a doubt, #ArtificialIntelligence will become a key factor in the ability of organizations to innovate and improve efficiency. In this infographic, you’ll learn how investing in #Microsoft #AzureAI can open up new revenue-generating opportunities for your business in the digital age.
Make sure you and your team are taking full advantage of Microsoft Teams to stay connected and drive productivity. In this blog, learn 4 best practices to help you make the most of meetings, customize your workspace, and more. Learn how:
Our simulator, uses an intelligent agent to monitor activity. Using this type of technology, is in line with where AI jobs are going. It’s expected that the number of professionals working in AI-focused roles will nearly double in the next three years. This shift will not only require changes to businesses’ digital environments, but to their organizational structures as well.
Read this article to learn four ways in which businesses need to evolve to fully prepare for the advent of #ArtificialIntelligence.
Now more than ever in 2020, companies need to reach out beyond a traditional Thanksgiving pat on the back. As COVID-19 has taken away traditions such as a company potluck or group volunteering activities for the underserved.
In regular times, over 66% of employees say they will leave an employer of they don’t feel appreciated. Showing employees on a regular basis that you appreciate them is always important but during holidays, you may want to go beyond the standard format.
Here are three other options you may want to use.
However simple or elaborate the gesture is, remember to be authentic, and all gifts will be greatly appreciated.
Customer satisfaction needs to be THE priority in every area of your business. Each interaction a customer has with you will either positively or negatively influence your brand, the customer’s lifetime value, and the impact on future customers and therefore your revenue. The customer experience is everything in today’s market. Ryanne Van Der Eijk is the Chief Customer Experience Officer at RAKEZ and knows how to create a customer-centric workplace. She shares her best advice for providing the right experience to customers in her article, “Four Ways to Boost Customer Experience (and Thus Hold onto Your Clients).” One of her tips is to build customer-centricity as part of your company culture. Start by defining your company’s philosophy on customer service—that’s the easy part—and then work on ways to share it via the workflow, the hiring process and the staff training. Read her entire article for more ideas for developing a culture focused on customers and her other tips to boost overall customer experience.
If you’re reading this, then chances are that getting easy access to clean, running water isn’t an issue for you. But for around 43 percent of the world’s total population, this simply is not the case. For them, obtaining the drinkable water they need to sustain their families requires hard work and commitment.
To make matters even more critical, most of them live in rural areas in which farming is their main source of income. This means that any available water must be carefully distributed between their crops and family. This is an exhausting situation that can take all day just to keep a small patch of land in farmable condition.
Such is the case for Monica, a Kenyan farmer who every day must assume the roles of mother of four, farmer, merchant, and housekeeper just to make ends meet. In this video, you’ll learn how she managed her dwindling water supply to keep her farm yielding, family fed, and trade at the local market—a situation that was soon to improve dramatically thanks to modern technology.
We are working with our new partner, Microsoft. Each week they keep us in the know of where technology is and how it’s helping companies expand their footprint. The way we think of and use technology holds so much potential. From increasing the productivity of farmers to helping researchers track endangered species, Microsoft is proud to support so many amazing people who inspire and improve the world we live in. Whether you’re trying to make a difference on a global scale or trying to improve job satisfaction in the workplace. Subscribe today to stay “in the know”!
Procurement Cloud states that 47% of vendor relationships will hit a wall. Why is that?
There isn’t one single answer but many times it comes down to building win-win relationships vs. trying to drill down the price to shave percentage points off your supplier fees. Even in the middle of a Pandemic and economic downturn, there are ways to build strong relationships. Here are three top strategies:
2. Be transparent – I’m not saying give away trade secrets but the better the vendor understands how decisions are made, what other priorities are demanding resources the more valuable input they can provide. My first experience with this was 20 years ago when I worked for a company 
that had an onsite contract with Sears headquarters. At that time it was rare that a vendor would be invited to sit in on staff meetings and participate in the planning process but it gave us greater insight as to how we could provide our services in a more valuable way. We were able to become more pro-active in recommendations and felt truly part of the team.
3. Create channels of trust
When you’re making a buying decision, trust is a large part of the equation. Will the vendor deliver what they promised, will support be at the level you expected it to be. The same can be true for your role. Giving timely responses, clearly outline what your expectations are, and stick to them, not delaying payments or changing the terms of the deal allow the vendor to have faith in the relationship and align their resources accordingly.
For example, a BPO set terms with their client to abide by specific KPIs for managing a campaign. Mid-way through the campaign, the client’s business had a major re-organization and put pressure on the BPO to stick to the original terms and fees, even though their employees were putting in more time and effort to manage a new set of metrics and requirements. Even though the vendor may fear losing this client, in a solid win-win relationship, it would be fair to expect the vendor to ask for a revision of their contract.
Many organizations are great at taking a top performer and promote them into a manager’s role. But what they forget is that not all good frontline employees are good managers.
Recently I was working with a client who wanted to find a new way to teach her managers how to be good coaches.
Let’s first define the difference between “telling” vs. “coaching”. In an article written by Julia Milner & Trenton Milner, in the Harvard Business Review, it presents a great case study on how you can teach managers to be good coaches. Many of them start off with telling employees what to do — this is NOT coaching.
Coaching is a combination of skills that allow the employee to come to a solution of their own accountability vs. being told exactly what to do. I made a two-step recommendation to my client. As she was overseeing Quality Analysts for a global software company, I recommended she first take a look at a Coaching for Performance certification program from Benchmark Portal. They have many certification programs but this seemed to be a great way to give the foundational skills needed to understand coaching. 
Then I recommended that she use our simulator to build tailored coaching conversations her QA could use to practice various scenarios. As stated in the HBR article, you need to let coaches practice in a safe environment. This is exactly why companies use our simulator. It provides realistic experiences that can blend all of the skills needed such as:
The embedded smart analytics reporting system will allow my client to access detailed metrics in real-time to see how well her QA’s are doing in the capstone activity of completing coaching simulations.
With many people still working remotely, it’s even more imperative that managers have the right skills to help their employees succeed.
If you’re curious to see how to use our simulator to build your own coaching simulations, please contact us.
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