eGuard Tech BLOG

Earlier this week we described the reasons why your company’s culture impacts your brand. A healthy company culture can have a very beneficial impact on your daily operations and the way the public views your company. Gauging the cultural health of your company is one thing, but where do you go from there. Below we’ll look into some ideas to improve or give your organization a cultural facelift.

The first step is to ask yourself a few questions to get a sense of the “feel” you want your company to have:

• What attributes do you want your company’s atmosphere to convey? Originality, respectfulness, acceptance, fun, etc.
• What are the main values or focus of your company? How can you make that prominent in the culture?
• How is information currently distributed in the company and how does this affect the culture?
• How do you reward or inspire employees now, and how would you like to in the future?
• Does the company give everyone a “voice?” Are employees encouraged to express their ideas and opinions?

These might lead you to more questions. Consider having a brainstorming session with your employees to discover the right solutions for your company. Here are a couple ideas we came up with:

Suggestion/Thought box – Providing people with a way to share their thoughts, anonymously or not, helps make the culture of a company feel more open. You may learn some significant things that need tweaking and may wish to bring them up in companywide meetings.

Empower employees – Treat employees like peers; give them ownership over their jobs. Don’t micromanage! Transparency can encourage empowerment as well. Don’t just inform your employees when there are successes, let them know when things aren’t going so well too. Their support may help you overcome the hard times.

Flexible hours – Providing people with some flexibility to get their work done shows trust. Trusting them to regulate themselves will lead them to respect you more.

Dress code – These days it is uncommon that individuals are required to dress in suits and ties all the time.  Allowing employees freedom to express themselves with their wardrobe is a simple way to make them feel accepted for who they are. To take this one step further, think about themed days: silly hat day, bright clothing day, 80’s day, etc. It’s incredible how important self-expression can be.

Celebrate – A company is composed of the people in it, so celebrate together. A monthly movie day, a catered lunch, or lunchtime board game days are only a few ways you can get your staff together to celebrate.

Here are a few things companies do to give their culture a playful edge:

• Spontaneous Nerf gun wars
• Painting inspirational quotes on the walls
• Hitting a loud gong when there is a success to let the whole company know
• Foosball tournaments
• Lunchtime Yoga
• Lunchtime Crafting Club
• Monday Mad Libs, whoever wishes to contribute, does, and then the completed Mad Lib is emailed to the company

Often, in business, concentrating on the strategy of the company is the main focus.
Is that because it is the most crucial aspect to concentrate on? Many companies think so, but solely concentrating on strategy can lead a company into stagnation. People make up a company and they collectively make the culture of the company. Culture does not just impact the employees in your office, it has effects on your brand, marketing, and how the public in general views your company. Without a healthy thriving culture a brand has little possibility of long-term success.  When we look at brands like Apple, Google, or Starbucks we not only recognize the logo, but we correlate a number of feelings and thoughts about these businesses. This is largely due to the culture of these companies.

Why Culture is so Important

A healthy workplace culture encourages creativity. When employees like the place they work and feel like they are part of the team it makes them challenge themselves in innovative ways. In a workplace in which people feel invisible or stifled they’ll often do the bare minimum required. It is part of human nature to want to feel appreciated and important. A company is made of its people so whatever attitude prevails will show up in your brand and the products and service you offer. In the end, taking care of the culture of your workplace is everyone’s responsibility from the CEO to HR.

If you are not yet convinced, here are a few of the obvious benefits of fostering a healthy culture.

• Focus – When people are focused on the same goal, that goal is much more easily attained. Businesses that have a healthy culture, have staff that care about the collective goal and sincerely endeavor to reach it. Unhealthy cultures can result in cynicism because individuals do not feel connected to the goal. Their goal is to merely make it through the day.

• Cohesion – The basis of cohesion is strong communication between associates, whether they are dealing with successes or roadblocks. Strong communication strengthens teamwork and makes operations run more smoothly. In a workplace with an unhealthy culture, people might be nervous to provide feedback about problems that arise or might not care enough to act quickly when issues do arise.

• Motivation – It may seem obvious that a enthusiastic workforce gets things done, but firms that are not aware of the health of their culture could be suffering with regards to efficiency.

Measuring the Cultural Health of Your Company

This can be a challenging step but should be evaluated a few times a year. One of the primary steps is to look at how individuals are managed, how jobs are given out, and do individuals have some say in what they are doing? Obviously you may find some people who’ll never be happy, but if the general opinion is unfavorable, start thinking about making a few changes for the healthy of your business. Check back soon for a few tips on transforming your company’s culture for the better.

You opened your own catering business because you love to cook. You went into the bakery business to sell pastries and cupcakes. You didn’t open your own landscaping company because you love paperwork. Yet to be a prosperous small business owner, you can’t ignore the financial side of your business, and this means that you must make certain you correctly invoice your clients. Neglecting to invoice your customers can leave you with a significant cash flow problem, one which, if left unchecked, could put you out of business.

Invoicing help online

Fortunately, there are plenty of online invoicing services created to make life less complicated for the small business owner. By using one of these services, you can quickly — and depending on your clients, automatically — send out your invoices each month. It’s one less task for you to handle. What follows is a glance at some of the better online invoicing services:

A free but powerful invoicing service

Sometimes the word “free” is synonymous with “not very good.” Fortunately, that isn’t the case with the free system, BillingBoss. Excellent for most small businesses that want to automatically invoice customers monthly and periodic once-off invoicing, BillingBoss packs a big punch at no cost!

A power tool

AcceptPay isn’t free. It costs $30 a month, but it’s a powerful program. Offered by American Express, AcceptPay works with QuickBooks, will accept online payments, and of course, offers you an array of options with regards to sending out invoices and collecting payments. The $30 expense is a small price to pay for such a powerful online invoicing tool.

Invoicing for the tech-savvy

Lastly we’ll look at the most customizable option of the bunch, BambooInvoice. This open source program is hosted on your own servers and can be easily customized for your business’ needs. So if you need more control and are a little tech-savvy, BambooInvoice may be your best choice.

These are just a few of the available options online. Most services are free or extremely cost-effective. If you want to take the reigns on your invoicing process, consider using an online solution.

If the rumors are true, Microsoft is stepping up considerably to join the fight against cyber crime. Apparently, Microsoft is developing a real-time feed that documents current cyber threats and provides necessary steps to protect against them.

Microsoft has already had success in taking down botnets. In doing so, the company collects an abundance of valuable data about the threats that these botnets pose. The process works like this: Microsoft essentially swallows the botnets. This, in turn, sends botnet-infected hosts to addresses which are under Microsoft’s control. This captures the infected hosts and takes them offline.

Previously these details had not been shared, but now this data can be given to the government and private organizations, CERTs, & ISPs. Although the quantity of attacks will not likely decrease thanks to this real-time feed, the impact of a feed like this will be amazing. The amount of damage from a cyber attack will likely be greatly reduced because IT security professionals will be able to more rapidly react to a threat.

Microsoft’s live threat feed may have an even more important impact: It could lead the information security industry to share more data. For too long, companies have hesitated to discuss important security information that they fear could lead to a copycat attack. This is a misguided belief as cyber criminals are already trading information among themselves. It makes sense, therefore, for security professionals to also share real-time information.

The IT industry has for too long considered the sharing of the specifics of a cyber attack an invitation for a copycat attack. Hopefully Microsoft’s first small steps toward a more connected IT security force will take root and that sharing data and information is a more sensible choice than secrecy.

Businesses that have struggled in these tough economic times have found some relief in the cloud. The cloud can save an organization a lot of money. Never the less, the cloud is not ideal for everyone, particularly when it comes to security concerns. There is a possibility that documents, presentations, and data could be damaged or destroyed when stored in the cloud.

Password issues

Password protection is a crucial issue when dealing with the cloud and personal computers as well. Passwords can often be easily guessed or they’re shared too freely.

Selecting a hard to guess password for data and information in the cloud is a simple way for business owners to protect themselves. Creating a password that has both numbers and letters, and when possible, special characters. Another consideration for business owners is who should have access to these passwords. The more people that have access to passwords the more vulnerable the data is.

Hacker alert

Hackers, malware, and spyware remain serious issues for cloud environments, just like they are problems that business owners face when logging onto their personal computers everyday. The thing that makes this particularly scary is that individual business owners have little control over how secure cloud services are. The big names — companies like Microsoft and Google — must provide their own security for the data that business owners store in the cloud.

Common sense protection

As with all computing, companies can protect themselves from the loss or theft of data with some common-sense practices.

First, consider the type of information you would be storing in the cloud. Whatever is extremely sensitive might not be the best to store in the cloud. It could be safer to back up this information on a personal system and find a more secure way to store it.

Secondly, business owners must stay cautious about who they allow access to their cloud-stored data, documents, and reports. Owners are mindful about whom they allow to access the files on their desktops and laptops and they should be equally careful when it comes to granting others access to their cloud-hosted information.