Everything comes down to your mission. Newmind Group’s mission is to make work more productive, profitable, and fun for our clients. In striving toward that, we focus heavily on engaging our own employees. It’s not only important to have a meaningful mission, but you need to ask yourself: How can everyone engage in that mission?
Keynote Address
While there are a variety of ways to foster a productive and happy group of employees, the core of this engagement depends on the kind of environment they are operating in. Are the constant IT headaches keeping them from deeply engaging in their work? Without these interruptions, how much more value would they be able to bring to the workplace? How much more profitable and productive could our clients be without these issues? And can we make their jobs more enjoyable? This is what is important to us.
Employee engagement
There are four things to help employees become more engaged in the workplace.
- Hire effective people (not so much based on technical aptitude as based on heart & motivation)
- Remove barriers from workplace (getting rid of day-to-day grind so they can focus)
- Encouraging engagement (letting employees know their part in overall mission so they find meaning in their work & providing them with toolkit to accomplish tasks)
- Manage external costs (removing run & overhead costs to bring profit to the bottom, thus allowing more flexibility to engage & appreciate employees)
Heavy vs. light environments
Many employees are still working in an encumbered environment – one that consists of large, complex apps connected to heavy servers. Problems that come about with such difficult technology include:
- needing data back-up & making sure it’s always available
- updating virus definitions
- updating software
- upgrading hardware
A lighter environment comprised of web browsers – such as Chrome – removes so many of those frustrations mentioned above. The flexibility and simplicity of working in a cloud-based environment is what makes such a vital difference for the health of a business. By removing those errors and distractions experienced with complex software and servers, you’re enabling employees to maintain focus and ultimately, just be happier in what they do. Not only that, but the cost difference is substantial, favoring Chromebooks over your traditional PCS.
Overall, Chrome can provide the answers that so many businesses are looking for. Who wants to continually be on the phone with the Helpdesk anyway? Chromebooks are easy to use and easy to manage. For proof, check out the above video! To show the audience how efficient and convenient it is to work with these devices, I closed my Chromebook mid-presentation and re-booted another one to use instead. All it took was a quick username and password to log-in and my presentation was up and running in about 2 minutes! Since Google Apps is cloud-based, my settings, documents, bookmarks, etc. were all right there at my fingertips. This is the kind of IT we need.
Stay tuned for upcoming posts regarding the other speakers at the event! If you want to read more from Matt Vollmar concerning leadership, click here.
What traditional, heavy software is your business struggling to get away from?
