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“If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself”
– Henry Ford
A truly great business doesn’t stem from the willingness to make money. While having financial incentive certainly helps, a more important driver is innovation, delivering real value to the world.
Cloud-reliant software and services have enabled a paradigm shift for developers and service providers alike. Once based on the buy-once-use-forever concept, the acquisition of software and services has gravitated towards a licensing business model that has proved to be far more lucrative for every party involved, from the people who code the solution to the end users.
A recent report by Nemertes Research indicates that Unified Communications (UC) solutions, or Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS), are selling much better as subscription bundles, as opposed to perpetual licensing which involves a large upfront investment. And it’s hardly a surprise.
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Cementing the belief that communication is vital in building and retaining a team, a study conducted by human resources firm SHRM reveals that employees rate their relationship with their immediate supervisor among the top five job satisfaction contributors.
Specifically, 54% of employees in the survey indicated that a good relationship with their team manager or supervisor was “very important” to their job satisfaction. Middle-management cited this aspect more vocally than the executive ranks (probably because the C-suite doesn’t get bossed around as much).
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We love it when communication flows. Everything we do at 4PSA revolves around communication and collaboration, so we believe strongly in the power of using these as tools for building teams and businesses. But sometimes, shutting up can help too.
According to a study published in the Journal Of Social & Personal Relationships, blocking communications with negative people can increase your productivity and even boost your IQ. It’s the kind of research that seems to reach an obvious conclusion, but most of us are oblivious to these teachings our entire lives.
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I recently stumbled upon some lectures that talk about communication & collaboration in business, explaining its crucial role in leveling the field for executives and floor employees alike, driving successful operations across an entire organization. They were great reads and I want to lay out some bullet points for our readers. If you own a business, listen up!
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You won’t believe how many types of meetings exist. You have staff meetings, ad-hoc meetings, board meetings, manager meetings, one-on-one meetings, team-meetings, standing meetings, and the list goes on. Worst of all, meetings are generally perceived as time-wasting. According to business coach Dale Dauten, companies worldwide cumulatively spend a mind-boggling 300K hours per year, purely on congregations.
Most businesses today still use traditional meetings to convene on how to sell a product, proceed with a given project, or adjust their operations. Asking people to step away from their desk to gather in a conference room may have been a sound idea ten years ago, but today this is no longer the case. If there’s two things that never miss from a meeting, it’s communication and data. You can have both in your browser, thanks to Hubgets.
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Okay, so the headline may sound a little scary. But being a serial-something doesn’t always yield negative consequences. In entrepreneurship, it’s actually a revered quality.
A report titled “The Anatomy of an Entrepreneur,” which inspired this neat infographic, highlights some very interesting things. For example, entrepreneurship doesn’t run in the family as often as we’ve been taught to think. Or, if you’re 30 and still haven’t made the cut, don’t worry – most magnates started raking in their fortunes much later.
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Businesses sell products, services and information to other businesses much in the same way they sell to individual customers. There are more similarities between B2B (business-to-business) and B2C (business-to-consumer) than you would care to imagine. For example, fruitful B2B commerce relies on emotion. Just like you appreciate good design or a catchy ad, so do companies like to be touched deep down inside before spending on services, or products in bulk.
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It starts with an innocent tap on the shoulder — a colleague asks a brief question about an upcoming deadline. No big deal, right? Two conversations and four emails later, you’ve officially wasted almost an hour.
I’m not here to tell you the story of how companies big and small fail to acknowledge the importance of using proper collaboration tools. The cat is out of the bag and has been for years. The market simply isn’t mature enough to take the plunge. What I want to share with you today is the typical scenario where office hours become pure chaos due to simple distractions like the one mentioned above. I’m 100% sure these will strike a chord with fellow office workers far and wide.
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Most entrepreneurs will tell you that, while they love what they do, it is not easy to juggle the many responsibilities that come with the territory. If successful, staff will keep growing in numbers, and invoices – both issued and received- will keep piling up. How can the SMB owner make one’s life easier?
New research indicates that a company with 100+ employees stands to reclaim the equivalent of 6,207 eight-hour work days over the course of a year by implementing Unified Communications (UC) solutions. In other words, SMBs are poised to reach significant growth by simply deploying new tech.