Productivity

Work life balance – three little words which are often used to describe a comfortable relationship between your work and home life. Every employee wants this, and apparently every great company offers it. But do they really? I am not so sure.

Anytime a company goes through a transition there will inevitably be bad days, but the end goal is worth the initial struggle.

Office cleaning company Managed by Q raises $15 million and expands to San Francisco. As I listened to Dan Teran describe how his startup is working to provide its employees with a career and middle class perks like health benefits, it all sounded almost too good to be true. Almost.

Don, a senior vice president for sales at a global manufacturing company, wakes up late, scrambles to get showered and dressed, has an argument with his teenage daughter over breakfast, then gets stuck in traffic on the way to work and realizes he will be late for his first meeting.

There’s nothing worse than having your Friday ruined by realising it’s only Tuesday. The average person spends 90,000 hours of their life in the workplace. With so much time spent at work, it’s important that you’re happy there. Tuesday’s should be just as good as Fridays. How can you make sure you have that Friday…

Work / life balance is hard to achieve – but how can you get a great one? Balance at Work help with the infographic below! Takeaways: Say no with a smile. Manage your time better. Schedule in periods for FUN!

A high performer can deliver 400% more productivity than the average performer. Despite this, when most managers look at workforce statistics, all employees tend to be lumped together into a category so broadly defined that it becomes difficult to take meaningful decisions. If your average employee tenure is six years, is that good or bad?…

Working hard at a job, traveling for business and trying to move up the career ladder can make doing everything else in life that much tougher. Unless, of course, you have some flexibility in how you structure your job — especially in terms of when and where you work. And that’s exactly what workers say…

Office distractions are all around us. And they are getting increasingly more difficult to tune out. There are so many ways our boss, customers and teammates can reach us to break our focus, it makes it challenging to get things done.

My company keeps growing. We add clients, revenue, profit, and of course, we need to add people when some of us are too busy to handle the added workload. But I’ve noticed a pattern over the past few hires: the very people who would benefit most from additional help at first resist the idea of…

Today, knowledge workers use devices and platforms we wouldn’t have dreamed of 15 years ago, in workspaces we probably didn’t see coming, either (goodbye, private offices; hello, telecommuting). But while work has changed, the training we get about how to manage our time looks pretty much the same as it always has. Traditional time management…

Your words matter and have a huge impact on your employees. Avoid these 7 phrases and watch your employee productivity and engagement soar. Sometimes leaders make statements that have an effect entirely opposite of what was intended. These phrases might be well intended, but the interpretation can be very damaging. Instead of leading to efficiency…

WASHINGTON—Cheaper, better robots will replace human workers in the world’s factories at a faster pace over the next decade, pushing labor costs down 16 percent, a report on Tuesday said.

Everyone wastes time at work – whether it’s checking e-mails, taking personal calls – but how are employees wasting so much time in the office?

TalentSmart has tested more than a million people and found that the upper echelons of top performance are filled with people who are high in emotional intelligence (90% of top performers, to be exact). The hallmark of emotional intelligence is self-control—a skill that unleashes massive productivity by keeping you focused and on track.

Have you ever heard of managers barking out this cliché? “Don’t just work harder, work smarter!”

Which economies in Asia and the Pacific rank as the best innovators and why? Download the new ADB report here

More people are foregoing a lengthy commute and working from home. Whether you are a full-time freelancer or the occasional telecommuter, working outside an office can be a challenge. What are the best ways to set yourself up for success? How do you stay focused and productive? And how do you keep your work life…

ADB cites poor use of Filipino talent The Philippines lags behind most of its Asean neighbors in converting the innate creativity of its people into innovative and creative products, an Asian Development Bank (ADB) study showed.

See link here

LOOKING backward, it is clear that American productivity growth has been pretty disappointing over the past 40 years, with the exception of an IT boomlet lasting from about 1996 to 2004. But past performance need not imply continued disappointment in future. The impressive gathering of innovative momentum in recent years is extraordinarily promising. And we…

Want to spot the unproductive employees? Listen to the excuses they make. They moan. They wail. They shuffle around the office looking for free candy. Unproductive employees have an excuse for everything. Here are a few of the phrases they use to explain away the problem. Listen for them, then correct the action to get…

What stands in the way of our being more satisfied and productive at work? That’s the fundamental question we sought to answer in a survey we conducted with HBR last fall. More than 19,000 people, at all levels in companies, across a broad range of industries, have so far responded to the questions we posed.

In the movie Casablanca, there’s a famous scene where Captain Renault, the head of the French police, avoids investigating the murder of a Nazi officer by telling his people to “round up the usual suspects.” The implication, of course, is that everyone should look busy and professional, even if the routine doesn’t really accomplish anything.

Sure, everybody’s had those weeks where you just want to get home from work and flop onto the sofa until your headache subsides. But if that’s happening every week — well, you’ve got a lot of company, for one thing, but it shouldn’t be like that. Yes, we’re all working harder and getting little (or…

As a manager, you can’t accept under-performance. It’s frustrating, time-consuming, and it can demoralize the other people on your team. But what do you do about an employee who isn’t performing up to snuff? How do you help turn around the problematic behavior? And how long do you let it go on before you cut…

Kelly Sortino had a tough time recalling what she’d accomplished at the end of each hectic workday. Her job as head of the upper school for the Crystal Springs Uplands School in Hillsborough, Calif., often required working 12-hour days, including weekends and evenings. She enjoyed the work but worried that she wasn’t accomplishing everything she…

Just-released findings of the Accenture 2014 College Graduate Employment Survey offer good news and bad news for employers of entry-level talent. First the bad news: most of those employers aren’t doing much to provide their new hires with the training and support they need to get their careers off to a strong start. More than…

MANILA, Philippines—Minimum wage earners in the Philippines are among the least productive unskilled workers in the world, a result of decades of underinvestment in infrastructure, education, and healthcare, a new World Bank report showed.

CREATING adequate and quality employment continues to be a challenge for Philippines, making it one of the worst-performing countries in the region in terms of labor productivity and inclusiveness despite the economy’s rapid expansion, according to the World Bank.