Destination: Home Office

Over a dozen years ago, I wrote a bunch of articles for a national Canadian newspaper publication. I stumbled on my notes recently and one of the pieces rang true with regards to the current state of affairs. With the onslaught of Covid-19 over 18 months ago, many (most?) of us had to re-adjust our working environment and many (most?) have remained in that scenario. 

Companies had to set people up in order to work from home while employees had to adjust with the fact that family life and work life were potentially forever merged. This article was about the home office. 

Why do we work? 

To sustain a lifestyle, feed our children, save for the future, go on vacation, and buy some toys? A lot has been written about the reasons why we get up in the morning and some feel it falls in to three categories (and I agree); to make money, to make a name for ourselves, or to make a difference.

We are fortunate to live in a time and place where we can make choices and enjoy a high standard of living – no matter what our profession. For decades, the model has been spaces featuring people in offices or cubicles toiling at desks on computers for eight hours each day. 

If you are currently working at home, either by choice or because of the pandemic, and seriously thinking of asking to do it full time from now on, there are rudimentary issues you must keep in mind. When setting up a home office, your headspace is as important as your workspace.   

Dress Code: If you get up each morning, shower, and get ready for work, you will be in a better place to stay focused. Surfing on your iPhone while in sweat pants may limit your ability to stay on track. 

Technology: With personal digital assistants, video conferencing, email, and smartphones, we have the capacity to transform and redesign our vocational surroundings. Work can literally be done anywhere. However, frequently updating your Facebook status may limit your career growth. Oh and please remember to wear pants for any Zoom calls! 

Research: If you don’t need a video capabilities for your work, it’s best not turn any on while you are working in your home office. The temptation will be too great to “take breaks”. Watching hours of cat videos on YouTube does not count as research. 

Refreshments: I can’t speak for you, but my home office is usually overflowing with the aroma of coffee while I’m sifting through the morning emails. But you have to be very careful! The refrigerator can be your enemy. It’s best to insure that the office-to-fridge excursion is difficult to navigate. Keep the two as far apart as humanly possible. Having eighteen snacks a day in lieu of getting the report done will hinder productivity. 

Collaboration: Limit your time commiserating with other home office colleagues. How ever tempting, thinly disguised daily business meetings with friends at coffee shops will divert potential success – for both parties. 

Planning: The Internet is not a toy. Researching what you will buy when you’re rich before you get your actual work done will catch up with you.

Meetings: Full conversations out loud to yourself whilst alone are permitted; that counts as a staff meeting. Beer alone at Noon is not a working lunch. 

Assistants: If you have pets, resist the temptation of feeling bad every time you get a coffee refill and the dog thinks it’s time to play. Please remember that cohabitating with a canine would not be fun in your car while you look for another job.

Focus: It is important to build in rules and creature comforts to your working space within your living space. So take breaks, be comfortable, but don’t expect miracles to happen if your 3pm meeting each day is with Netflix. Working at home can be extremely gratifying, but it is still work. 

If you can create an office space within your home space which cohabitates with your mind space, you may never want to be stuffed into a cubicle again.

Good luck!

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Vulnerability

Dr. Brené Brown, a research professor at the University of Houston, has been studying a topic most of us have trouble discussing which is vulnerability. It appears in many forms; imposer syndrome, feeling inadequate, feeling like a fake, or not knowing the answer.

We all have moments when we feel emotionally weakened. Dr. Brown explains how it affects our whole life while being authentic can help those same areas.


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Feeling Vulnerable

Dr. Brené Brown, a research professor at the University of Houston, has been studying a topic most of us have trouble discussing which is vulnerability. It appears in many forms; imposer syndrome, feeling inadequate, feeling like a fake, or not knowing the answer.

We all have moments when we feel emotionally weakened. Dr. Brown explains how it affects our whole life while being authentic can help those same areas.


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Before They Are Customers

You want to take your significant other out for a nice dinner. Maybe you'll check out that new steak place? They claim they have best Kobe beef this side of Tokyo. Decision made. Reservation for 7:30.

What they didn’t tell you in the advertising was that there is a mandatory $10 parking fee. A bit annoying and scam-like. Still not fazed, you head inside. You are met at the threshold with a line-up. Not a bad thing, it means this new place is doing well and you’re not worried, you have a reservation.

Service On Hold

At 7:45, you inquire with the snappy dressed guy at the front if your table is ready. He doesn’t take his eyes of the calculus that is the restaurant floor plan and barks that the kitchen is busy, they are new, and all reservations are 30 minutes behind.

It’s a nice night out, why spoil it with complaints so you go back to the bench and wait quietly. Several minutes later a woman approaches you with two white cards. On one side is the restaurant’s logo and on the other is a questionnaire.

Survey Says

They want to know your demographic, how you found out about the place, how many times you go out for a meal each month, how much alcohol you consume in a year, and for your trouble your name is put in a draw for one free dessert on your next trip - if you go to their website and register.

It’s 8:43 and burgers sound good about now.

Before getting caught up in metrics, surveys, and coupons, be careful people don't walk out before you get a chance to help them as customers.

Let them try it before asking their opinion.
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Do You Ever Feel Vulnerable?

Dr. Brené Brown, a research professor at the University of Houston has been studying a topic most of us have trouble discussing - vulnerability. It appears in many forms; imposer syndrome, feeling inadequate, feeling like a fake, not knowing the answer, etc.

We all have moments when we feel emotionally weakened.

Dr. Brown explains how it affects all aspects of our lives while being authentic can help those same areas.


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Leading Innovation and Creativity

We see it everywhere. Many of us say it often. But how do we ensure innovation and creativity are given the time, space, and freedom to flourish?

Innovation is a necessary element of our existence. It’s not a new concept but we seem to be taking a closer look at it. Linda Hill from the Harvard Business School unearthed some fascinating elements of collective genius, teamwork, and the iterative nature of leadership and innovation.

__________________________________________________________________ Kneale Mann | People + Priority = Profit

Making More Mistakes

There is ample theory that we don’t try many of the ideas we want to try because we fear failure or success. Economist Tim Harford explains why we need to make better mistakes and not assume we know the answers.


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Kneale Mann | People + Priority = Profit

TED | Tim Hartford

Being a Vulnerable Leader

You may have seen this and it's worth seeing again. Dr. Brené Brown is a research professor at the University of Houston and she has devoted much of her work in the past decade on vulnerability and how authenticity can help us in business and in life.

She explains in her funny and fascinating TEDx Houston talk.


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Kneale Mann | Leadership Strategist, consultant, writer, speaker, executive coach facilitating performance growth with leaders, management, and teams.

Brené Brown | TEDxHouston

Your Secret Sauce

If you sell stuff, make stuff, create stuff, consult stuff, help stuff, or think about stuff, once in a while someone will ask you why you are so special, what is your unique selling proposition, what do you bring that no one else can bring?

Meet Howard Moskowitz who has studied human behavior for decades. He has grasped the fact that we want to be happy but often we don't know how to achieve it.

Author and thought leader Malcolm Gladwell talked about Howard in his 2004 TED Talk that is just as valid a decade later. Watch this.


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Kneale Mann | Leadership Strategist, consultant, writer, speaker, executive coach facilitating performance growth with leaders, management, and teams.

TED | Gladwell | Moskowitz

Are You In Control?

We have choices to make every minute of our lives. And there is a growing suspicion that we should make them faster and more accurately. Time is money, we don’t have all day, the team is depending on it, and revenue will be affected.

Baba Shiv is the director of strategic marketing at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. He has been studying behavior and neuroeconomics with a focus on motivation and emotion for many years.

Make Your Choice

Research has shown a counterintuitive fact about human nature which is sometimes having too much choice makes us less happy. Baba shares a personal story and some of his findings which measure why choice opens the door to doubt. He suggests that ceding control can often be the best strategy.

Some feel leadership is about being in charge and making the final call. But in a fully collaborative enterprise, responsibility can often be enhanced by allowing others drive choices. We may not want to be the one who makes all the decisions after all.


Kneale Mann

TED | Baba Shiv

Brand Bowl: The Morning After

The morning after the night before and millions are chiming in about their favorite commercials on last night’s Super Bowl. NBC charged $3.5 to $4 Million for 30 seconds of real estate on the U.S. broadcast while the estimate of online value is still being calculated.

The pontificating continues but the real question will be in a few months when those paying close attention to those pesky bottom lines have their breakdown.

If you haven’t seen them all, Ad Age has compiled them for our online enjoyment. If the boss catches you watching at the office, tell her you’re doing market research. ;-)

The game was good too! 

Kneale Mann

image credit: andrew mills | us presswire

Data with a Soul

We’ve gotten very good at navigating a busy life. There are deadlines and bills, meetings and projects, phone calls and deliverables. Yet we aren’t near as good at sharing ourselves from a deeply personal level.

Think of everyone you know and make a list of the people who could call you at 3am and you would get your coat and meet them and lend a hand. Now think about how many people you know who would tell you the absolute truth. Is the list getting smaller?

Touchy Feely Not Allowed?

Right or wrong, we know most don't think we can run successful enterprise through true openness and emotional expression but that’s how we are wired. So therein lies our global conundrum. Few corporations will let you admit you aren’t sure about a decision. Even fewer will allow you to share your personal interests, fears, dreams and desires.

Dr. Brené Brown is a research professor at the University of Houston and she has devoted much of her work in the past decade on vulnerability and how authenticity can help us in business and in life.

Dr. Brown explains in this video of her TEDx Houston talk.


Kneale Mann

visual credit: TEDxHouston

Data Are Worthless

If you own a company, manage a business, run a department or contribute to a team, you are intimately aware of the time constraints you face every day. You have deadlines and meetings, emails and projects as well as constant reminders of the bottom line. And what should you do about all this online stuff?

There are close to two billion of us online reading, digesting, publishing, sharing, tweeting and conversing. The amount of content published in a day is unrelenting and new spaces are being built constantly.

Our Insatiable Appetite

The choices can overwhelm you, the so-called experts can hound you and the decision remains how to improve the organization. And unless your company is called “campaign”, you need a strategy and long term solutions.

It’s not difficult to find someone who will lay claim to their vast knowledge of all things digital through blog webinars, Facebook symposiums and how-to LinkedIn seminars. Yet with a click of your mouse, you will be falling over self-proclaimed experts who can give you link bait and search juice for a handsome fee.

Under The Hood

Perhaps the not so sexy but valuable aspect of the social web that few talk about is research. Over and above any activity you partake through the myriad digital spaces, you can unearth rich useful information about your company, what people are saying about you, topics that are important to you and what your competitors are doing through regular digital audits.

With over 600 million daily search inquires on Twitter, someone seems to be digging around for information. And over a third of us online have presence on Facebook where we share more than 30 billion pieces of content every month.

And There's More

YouTube is the second largest search engine, next to parent company Google and fifth most visited website on the planet. It served more than 75 billion video streams to over 375 million unique visitors last year. And if you're looking for even more research, you can check out SlideShare which features hundreds of presentations in your industry. And there are hundreds of other spaces available.

The data are only worth something if you do something with it. The information needs to be gathered, analyzed and implemented. And constant research on the web can positively effect the bottom line. The decision is whether you want to do the work and put in the time.

Kneale Mann

image credit: cloudcentrics
original posted Feb 2011

Digital Silence

Two Eyes One Keyboard

It is fascinating to read the blogosphere and the Twitter stream. Both are crammed with endless opinions and insight, useless links and life changing information. As the cliché goes, we all have an opinion and that doesn’t mean we’re right, we just have one. Many have been vocal about our collective impatience with taking chances. We push companies to get deeper into the social web, embrace digital business intelligence and try stuff but we are often quick to scream #fail the moment there is a misstep.

It is imperative to have a plan, a policy and some guidelines when you are navigating the online world but these don’t have to be encyclopedias filled with legalize no one understands. It is critical to remind stakeholders that if they reference the company on any of their profiles, they represent the company. But it doesn't have to be a restrictive environment that stifles creative thought.

Not a Digital Issue

No matter what spaces you interact, business decorum shouldn't be loosened but you can still be personable. Find your voice, find your company's voice but don't be irresponsible. There are countless examples where people have shot from the hip in a moment of emotion and that causes damage.

Any one of us two billion people online has a choice to share our voice. But what if we chose to find our silence for a while?

Listening is Frowned Upon

Some will claim that’s lurking and we should let others know we’re in the channel. With more than 600 million Twitter search inquiries and half a billion signing onto Facebook daily along the multitude of monitoring and analytics options, we can’t be tweeting all the time. We need to find time to invest in the immense power of data mining now at our keyboards.

And if we are researching, reading, listening, watching, consuming, does that mean we aren’t interacting with each other? If we want others to pay more attention to what we want to share, we need to find equal time to take in what others are sharing.

Some say the two sides to a conversation are talking and waiting to talk. Do you spend time in digital silence?

Kneale Mann

image credit: photobucket

The Information Super Saturated Highway

Check The Lane Before Merging

If you own a company, manage a business, run a department or contribute to a team, you are frightfully aware of the time constraints that face you every day. You have deadlines and meetings, emails and projects as well as constant reminders of the bottom line. And what should you do about all this online stuff?

There are close to two billion of us online reading, digesting, publishing, sharing, tweeting and conversing. The amount of content published in a day is unrelenting and new spaces are being built constantly.

Our Insatiable Appetite

The choices can overwhelm you, the so-called experts can hound you and the decision remains how to improve the organization. And unless your company is called “campaign”, you need a strategy and long term solutions.

It’s not difficult to find someone who will lay claim to their vast knowledge of all things digital through blog webinars, Facebook symposiums and how-to LinkedIn seminars. Black hat or white hat, the recent JC Penny story blew a hole through the SEO world. Yet with a click of your mouse, you will be falling over self-proclaimed experts who can give you link bait and search juice for a handsome fee.

Under The Hood

Perhaps the not so sexy but valuable aspect of the social web that few talk about is research. Over and above any activity you partake through the myriad digital spaces, you can unearth rich useful information about your company, what people are saying about you, topics that are important to you and what your competitors are doing through regular digital audits.

With over 600 million daily search inquires on Twitter, someone seems to be digging around for information. And over a third of us online have presence on Facebook where we share more than 30 billion pieces of content every month.

And There's More

YouTube is the second largest search engine, next to parent company Google and fifth most visited website on the planet. It served more than 75 billion video streams to over 375 million unique visitors last year. And if you're looking for even more research, you can check out SlideShare which features hundreds of presentations in your industry. And there are hundreds of other spaces available.

The information out there can be gathered, analyzed and implemented. And constant research of the social web can positively effect the bottom line.

Is that a valuable use of your resources?

kneale mann

image credit: istock

The Web: It’s Amazing and We’re Not Amazed

Humans are inherently curious. This doesn't mean you have to be a PhD candidate in biophysics to be interested in finding answers. Our curiosity brings ideas which can often turn into bigger ones if we allow them to flourish.

The earliest ideas for a computer network intended to allow general communications among computer users was formulated by a dude named Joseph Licklider who was a computer scientist. He had this idea in the early 1960s he called it the “Intergalactic Computer Network”.

By the late 1960s, the U.S. Department of Defense hired Licklider to lead the Behavioural Science Command and Control initiative at the Advanced Research Projects Agency or Arpa. He convinced some influential people on the project that his idea of building a network of connected computer had some merit. That was the creation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network or the Arpanet.

The Arpanet becomes the Internet

Now we can click here, tweet there and spend far too much time complaining that it’s just not this enough or that enough. As Louis CK says, everything is awesome and nobody’s happy. We are tripping over technological breakthroughs every day and we still complain. I loaded a software upgrade yesterday and was complaining how slow it was within about two minutes. Case rested.

What now seems like a lifetime ago, back in 2007, Wired co-founder Kevin Kelly did a review of the first 5,000 days of the Internet as we know it. So add another 1,000 or so since then and see if our predictions can possibly keep up with advancements and reality. Feel free to make some predictions and we’ll see if you’re right in another couple thousand days.



knealemann

visual credit: TED
Other TEDTalks by Kevin Kelly.
Also published on Social Media Today

The Anatomy of a Digital Audit

"A mind is like a parachute. It doesnt work if it's not open."
Frank Zappa

Part of how I help clients is to take a clear snapshot of their organization online. The Internet is a busy place full of opinion, noise, content, accurate and inaccurate information. But the same can be said about your organization.

Small, medium or large, your company has stuff it needs to work on. It also has things that it does well and issues that need to be addressed to improve. And for that, welcome to the human race.

Good Communication meets Miscommunication

A digital audit is a mix of heuristic analysis along with formal monitoring by companies such as Radian6 (not an affiliate link). It's like an x-ray with intuition. It can measure numbers of blogs,forum entries, comments, tweets,website mentions and more but it takes some additional analysis to measure tone and opinion.

The key to a unbiased digital audit is to analyze your entire web presence which includes your website, social networking profiles and any other content you generate online. It also includes conversations generated by others about you, your company and any topics that are essential to your business.

Digital is Not a Department

What often happens is money, resources and time are spent on building products and hiring qualified people then a small handful (if that) are given the task of managing all that the organization does online. This is exactly how customers feel disconnected. Internal and external communication must be a full organization initiative.

Add to that, you need to add experience and knowledge and context when looking closer at your digital footprint. I do have a couple of decades of marketing and media experience that certainly comes in handy. But every situation is different and often perception is far from reality. I have seen far too many business owners either hide behind the research or discard it. Both tactics are dangerous.

Software and Google Ain't Enough

Through an ongoing realistic online snapshot, you can gain new ways to find honest feedback from your customers through software and online searches, then collect data in pie charts and spread sheets but it won’t do you a stitch of good on its own. You need to do something with the findings or go with gut calls and opinion.

A digital audit is a process by which you look at your organization from the customer's perspective. It's also about looking at the information and being honest enough to discover what you will do about it. And if you think "everyone" has this online thing mastered, think again. The non-stop journey continues for all of us.

Are you ready to have a look?

knealemann | How can I help?

Image credit: smcdsb

It’s All in the Sauce

If you sell stuff, make stuff, create stuff, consult stuff or think about stuff, you get stuck once in a while. I’ve been working on a couple of projects this week and I've been stuck. I was trying to apply some assumptions mixed with generalizations and clearly it wasn’t getting me anywhere. Clearly it's not a wise strategy at the best of times.

And then I remembered Howard Moskowitz.

Howard is a person who studies human behavior. He has grasped the fact that we want to be happy but often we don't know how to achieve it.

Author and thought leader Malcolm Gladwell explains. [video]



knealemann | email


video credit: TED

Do You Have A Strategic Plan?

One Third Win
The numbers are slightly different depending on the study, but the number of businesses that launch then thrive is quite small. About 30% of all new companies actually see their way to black ink.

Why Is That?

I have worked on fifty-page Strategic Plans, it's a lot of work!

It requires people and meetings and the result is an extensive blueprint for the next fiscal year. For the most part, the Plan was followed and people were held accountable. Each tactic had dates and money and people attached to it so the Plan could be realistically and properly executed.

I would often test people’s knowledge of the Plan by asking them if they could recite our Three Strategic Objectives. Most did well on that point. But when it got to the tactics and time lines and who does what by when, their ability to recount the Plan began to decline.

But you don't need a fifty-page Plan to succeed. Trust me! Those things were behemoths. No wonder no one could remember what was in them.

Why do companies fall short of their goals?

Focus

This is often a catch-all that isn’t given the attention it deserves. If you’re in a well financed start-up, it can be intoxicating. Ideas are following, people are happy and it’s exciting. But once the balloons deflate and the actual real work begins and you experience that first difficult client, things may begin to wobble.

Market

It’s even more essential that you are aware of your market. That includes where you are geographically, the industry you are in, what your competitors are doing and the never ending changes in customer desires and demands.

A Plan is not something you put in a pretty binder to sit alongside previous years' Plans to simply collect dust.

Homework

No matter your industry or role, you need to be constantly educating yourself on opportunities and trends. We have the world’s largest encyclopedia at our fingertips but how many of us end up at the same websites every day?

Accountability

This has always been a hot button. It looks good on the wall or in your company propaganda or on your website. “We’re accountable!” Are you? In order for this to gain traction, everyone in your organization must be accountable to everyone in your organization. No exceptions.

Execution

Plans are useless without action. If you take the required time to set out a Plan, then actually carry it out.

I’m a guy, I hate reading instructions but I have often destroyed a purchase because I didn’t read the sheet of paper with the thing I needed to assemble. That is why the instructions are there. That is why you galvanize a Strategic Plan.

Then you do need to be nimble so you can react to opportunities that may not have been there when you developed your Plan. You won’t be able to do so if everything you do is by the seat of your pants.

Communication

This is the largest reason companies fail. We can discuss this at length another time but it is monumentally imperative that you keep clear collaborative communications open with everyone in your organization or the clock is ticking.

Fear

We are human beings. We mess up. We mean well. We have the best of intentions. But we miss steps and get frustrated and get filled with self-doubt which stops us from getting there. And we forget to ask for help!

Am I way off the mark?
What are your thoughts on this?

knealemann.at.gmail.com

image credit: postyourtest.com

ROI: Manage Your Expectations

What Really Is: Return On Investment?

Traditional channels are grappling with both the economic landscape and the countless new tools available. The ones having the most difficulty are those working in industries predicated on inaccurate mass marketing metrics.

A billboard may have given some in the past the impression of success. Or at least gave them the ability to sleep soundly at night.

It's Not Enough Anymore

I worked in the radio industry for many years and depending on the market, each radio station would be rated two to four times each year. During those ratings periods, stations would clamor to yell and scream the loudest in order to get noticed enough to be written down in a ratings diary by less than 1% of the population. Then the ratings company would ‘average’ audience numbers for each market. It's even more anitquated than that, but I won't bore you with the details.

I worked at The Edge in Toronto which targets Males 18-34. Less than ten thousand people would receive ratings diaries and decipher radio tuning habits for five million. That's a sample of .002%.

It's akin to me asking you to decide what everyone will eat at a particular restaurant for an entire year. Once you accommodate vegetarians, allergies, those who don't like spicy food or any cultural biases, your only logical choice is lettuce. Boring, unseasoned, lettuce. Yummy, huh?

Think of that the next time you wonder if the station has more than ten songs or why they keep saying their name. Neither is true, but perception is reality.

More Of The Same

If you ran a music label and wanted the next Coldplay, the chances of you signing an act that is a bit out of the norm are nil. There is too much risk in that; there is no road map or guarantee. Imagine a marketing company suggesting to a client that traditional channels are not their only option? How often do you think the client will pick the ‘sleep at night’ option?

Traditional Mass Media Is Not Dead
Online Is Not The Gold Rush

Radio, television, newspaper, and outdoor advertising options remain alive and will work if used properly. What is essential to ROI is managing expectations. However, one billboard or a few dozen radio commercials will not set you up for endless success. I lost count of the number of clients that would say to me “radio doesn’t work” after a one-week campaign. At that point, you may as well take your spouse on a vacation – at least you’d have some memories and pictures to add to your Flickr account.

A four-piece reggae classical punk band, a spicy Italian meal, a company embracing Twitter, or an adventurous radio station can all work but only when mainstream guesstimates are thrown away.

Count The Receipts

If you realize spending millions on a TV spot during the Super Bowl is less effective than building a community, you are well on your way to managing expectations, return on investment and living in the real world.

What are your thoughts?