Posts in Category: industry

Are You Among the 5% with a “Great” Job?

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The most quoted jobs metric in the world, “Unemployment,” is misleading. And because we lack metrics to asses the quality of a position, we are also facing a problem in defining what a good job is. But recent undertakings shed more light on the matter, revealing where all the great jobs are, complete with the deficits that remain.

Gallup’s first World Poll was conducted a decade ago, in 2005. Then, like now, it was found that people crave a good job. Crudely speaking, this means 30+ hours per week and a decent paycheck. 1.3 billion out of the world 5 billion adults have a good job, based on this definition. 12% of these are engaged at work, in what can be considered not just a good job, but a great job

The Secret Sauce of Innovation Is Not So Secret

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Innovation doesn’t grow on trees, granted. But it’s not that impossible to achieve either. Most people believe it takes genius, luck, and and huge capital investments. Actually, it’s much simpler than that.

Professors Chen Chen and Yangyang Chen of Monash University, along with Edward J. Podolski with La Trobe University have conducted a joint study to determine how employee treatment leads to corporate innovative success. Their findings, hardly surprising, confirm the often-ignored importance of morale in the workplace, a matter we consider paramount here at 4PSA

Why ‘Agile’ Is the Perfect Recipe for Business

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87% of companies in a poll by BCS The Charted Institute for IT report that the ability to manage changing priorities was among the biggest benefits of jumping wholeheartedly into an agile business model, one that factors in technology and a flexible, modern culture to stay on top of the trends, give competitors a run for their money, and ultimately achieve a healthy bottom line.

Contrary to popular belief, in-person meetings aren’t all that useless (as long as the purpose of the meeting isn’t meeting itself). Data aggregated by Raconteur indicates that 80% of agility adopters have a daily stand-up meeting. This get-together makes communication go full-circle in a collaborative culture, as studies have shown that ‘digital’ cannot and should not replace the spoken word

5 Reasons Why Cloud Equals Operational Efficiency

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Cloud computing is having a field day. Around 90 percent of the companies in North America use cloud services in one form or another, predominantly private cloud solutions – or a privately-hosted cloud. Of those, nearly half have had a two-year run with the trending technology.

RightScale’s 2015 State of the Cloud report indicates that 88 percent of companies are using public cloud services, while two thirds are using a private cloud. 58 percent use both, and more than 80 percent have a hybrid adoption strategy set in place. It’s clear that one cloud doesn’t fit all, which is why it’s important to outline some basic facts about successful cloud deployments

The Spoken Word – Strong as Ever in the Face of New Tech

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Not too long ago, when we called someone we used to keep our fingers crossed for them to be close by to pick up the phone. When cell phones hit the mainstream, reaching someone became easier, but calling them wasn’t cheap. So although people were more certain to hear each other, they didn’t do so considerably more often.

Then came the smartphone which forever changed the playground. Communication took on even more forms. Instant messaging was added to the mix, along with email on the go and video chatting. Today, voice calls are a lot cheaper, but according to numbers dished out by Nielsen, the traditional “hello” has neither increased, nor decreased in usage

All Companies Want to Innovate (As Long As They Don’t Have To Change)

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Not too long ago, disruption was something found solely on the agenda of big enterprises. In recent times, small businesses have begun to exercise innovation as a way to stand out from the crowd. According to the 2015 State of Global Innovation report by Imaginatik, almost every company in every industry has put innovation at the top of their to-do list. However, not all of them can cope with the implications.

The service innovation company conducted the study with the goal of assessing just how disruptive today’s mid- and large-sized organizations have become. The surveyed industries, (with the percentage of companies polled in that field of work) include

VoipNow Grows On You, With You

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The future of communication and collaboration is the Internet. How do we know this? Because the future is already here.

As pioneers of Unified Communications for the cloud, we witnessed (and helped) the Internet gobble up hardware and convert it into software from the front row

Yes, It’s Possible to Go 100% Remote And Get Instant Benefits

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At 4PSA, we are strong proponents of remote working. We develop solutions that assist this culture and we know first hand that it works to the benefit of modern companies – where most of the workforce uses a computer to carry out its duties.

20 years ago, remote working was a luxury that few could afford. As a culture, it didn’t even exist. Firstly, there weren’t nearly as many types of businesses that could benefit from it. Then there’s the aspect of mobility – namely, the lack thereof – back then. Neither the hardware, nor the software (let alone the Internet) could sustain a telecommuting culture in the 90s, or even in early 2000s. Cloud computing was virtually inexistent, laptops were clunky, wireless Internet was scarce, tablets were still in their prototype stages, and because of this, people were forced to come into the office 8 hours a day, 5 days a week to do their job. Not anymore

KPCB: 51% of Total Time Spent on the Internet Is on Mobiles

2015 marks the first time mobile devices become the primary means of connecting to the Internet with 51% share, according to venture capital firm KPCB. That figure was 12% in 2008, just as smartphones with big screens were beginning to take off.

Smartphones have been around for more than a decade, but the real recipe for a smartphone was struck around 2007 with the iPhone. Before then, smartphones had QUERTY keyboards and Internet connectivity was painfully slow. Worse still, mobile Internet was ugly and completely unusable. Ten years ago

Australia Will Lose $9.3 Billion This Year Because It Doesn’t Do Collaboration

Collaboration is a term we have assigned to the practice of communicating and working in groups, building on each other’s ideas with the end goal of delivering a great product, preferably something new and original.

Doing business in a competitive environment means companies need to become masters of collaboration, and it has been proved that unlocking the potential capacity and knowledge of a group increases that group’s satisfaction level by a factor of 10. As everyone knows, motivation is a key driver for growth

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