Matt LeBlanc (not the actor) lines up his toiletries in the order in which he uses them. I’d say he takes “doing more with less” a little to the extreme, but that’s his job as an efficiency expert.

The whole point of upgrading to Office 2007 is to utilize new or improved features.

LeBlanc was the subject of a piece last week on NPR’s Planet Money program, and his profession is a particularly timely subject in the current economic climate where “more with less” is the mantra and efficiency and productivity are the only goals. (Listen to reporter David Kestenbaum’s interview with LeBlanc.)

LeBlanc works for a global shipping company, and his role is to find ways to streamline processes. He is sent to different locations and told, for example, to save the company $500,000.

As he explained in his interview with NPR’s David Kestenbaum: When he tells people that he can save thousands of labor hours just by moving a printer, they don’t believe him.

This company, PC Helps Support, is also in the efficiency business. (We’re a desktop application and mobile device support provider.) But instead of demonstrating how moving a printer can save money, we show how eliminating shadow support and increasing productivity can influence their bottom line. Read more…

admin Office 2007 Migration Assurance Program, Worker Productivity David Kestenbaum, efficiency, hidden demand, Matt LeBlanc, NPR, shadow support

Gartner, Forrester and other industry heavies say the most important thing to CIOs right now is efficiency. Doing more with less, doing more with the same — just doing more. They’re not thinking too deeply about the cloud or any non-critical projects. Just efficiency, plain and simple.

When scaled across an entire company, misprinted print jobs cost a corporation dearly.

Sure, big picture savings are great. But the best way to approach recession survival is by starting small. Although an extra printout or two may seem minuscule, when scaled across an entire company, misprinted print jobs cost a corporation dearly.

In the spirit of frugality, here are two PC Helps tips published by IT World that promise printing efficiency.

1. How to Master Excel Spreadsheet Printing
2. How to Create a New Print Style in Outlook

Enjoy, and print responsibly. Got any efficiency tips? Send them our way.

MORE INFO IN: Desktop Application Support | Contact PC Helps

admin How To, Worker Productivity CIO, doing more with less, efficiency, Forrester, Gartner, IT World

If your smart phone freezes on you, resist the urge to pull a Naomi Campbell. Read these tips instead; you’ll save yourself unnecessary frustration – and even the cost of a new phone.

Frozen Treat: Three tips on resetting your smart phone.

How to Thaw a Frozen BlackBerry (all versions)

The first step to take if your BlackBerry is misbehaving is to reset it. Doing this will clear the internal memory and solve many issues. There are three ways to reset a BlackBerry: soft, double-soft, and hard.

Soft Reset
Press ALT+RIGHT SHIFT(CAP)+DELETE to perform a soft reset.

Use this reset method when you want to stop all applications on a BlackBerry while leaving the device powered on.

Double-Soft Reset
Start by performing a soft reset (ALT+RIGHT SHIFT(CAP)+DELETE). The screen will turn off. When it turns back on, press ALT+RIGHT SHIFT(CAP)+DELETE again. You should then see another blank screen, followed by an hourglass.

Performing a double-soft reset stops all applications on the BlackBerry and is nearly the equivalent of a hard reset. Timing is the key to performing this manuever. This is something to try if you are having difficulty removing the battery to perform a hard reset.

Hard Reset
Starting with the device powered ON, remove the battery for 30-60 seconds. After you put the battery back in, the device will reboot. This usually takes between one and three minutes.

NOTE: The BlackBerry Pearl, Curve and Storm only have the ability to perform a hard reset. However, there are third-party applications that you can download that provide the ability to perform a soft reset. (by Joel Reeves)

How to Thaw a Frozen Windows Mobile Device (Pocket PC Edition 5, 6) Read more…

admin BlackBerry, Mobile Devices, Windows Mobile, Worker Productivity BlackBerry, freeze, hard reset, soft reset, Windows Mobile

1. What Yo-Yo Dieting and the Recession Have in Common

The papers are saying that productivity is on the rise, that the fat officially has been cut from corporate America. Good news, right?

Depends on what you do next, says Gartner Blog Network’s Mark McDonald in a recent post. Productivity gains are “… a mathematical phantom, particularly if people remain on their current course and speed,” he writes.

“It is the equivalent of losing water weight at the start of a diet.”

That current course he’s talking about is the way many companies made it through the recession – by removing the costs (employees) without changing the underlying process or operation.

Says McDonald: “It is the equivalent of losing water weight at the start of a diet.” And, as any yo-yo dieter knows, you will gain that weight back quickly if you don’t change the habits that got you fat in the first place.

Read his post here.

2. What Recession?

Then there’s that whole other realm, the business of haute couture, which seems to be a barometer of nothing really, Read more…

admin This Week in Tech News, Worker Productivity Christian Dior, Gartner, Mark McDonald, Paris, productivity, recession, Tag Heuer, Versace

It’s a new year. The economy’s rebounding and, according to a recent survey, employee confidence is on the rise. Here are three software tips that will help you to become more productive and ride the momentum.

How to Create an AutoText Entry (Word 2000, 2002, 2003, 2007)

By David McQueary

Retyping long strings of text over and over can become tedious.

Say you are creating a Word document for your company, and you have to use the firm’s 30-character name countless times throughout. Retyping long strings of text over and over can become tedious. Use AutoText instead; it makes document creation much faster and much less repetitive.

Word 2000, 2002, 2003

1. Click on the Insert menu and select AutoText.
2. In AutoText you can create your own entry. Once you enter the company name click the Add button on the right.
3. Click OK. Read more…

admin Time-Saving Tips, Worker Productivity autotext, BlackBerry, recession, Windows Mobile

We see it all the time. Customers call for help after they’ve wrestled with a software snag for an hour or sometimes more. They preface the call with “I should know how to do this” and “sorry for the stupid question.”

The reports and surveys tell a compelling story. Actual customer feedback is even more powerful.

They are usually exasperated, and often embarrassed. Who wants to admit lack of knowledge, especially if they believe their job is on the line?

The employers themselves, the ones chanting “do more with less, do more with less” at every all-hands and in every company-wide e-memo, are partially to blame. If a corporation doesn’t offer software support, workers must find their own solutions — which usually cost dearly in downtime and lost productivity. If a company does offer how-to support, it’s considered a luxury and its use may be frowned upon. (This recent Dilbert cartoon, sent to me by a colleague, captures it precisely.)

In sour financial times, desktop application support usually is the first to go when budgets are cut. It’s hard to tally its return on investment, and the demand for such support is often hidden.

But the need is there, and even more so now when many companies are operating with fewer employees and the same workload. (See a post I wrote in October titled “Basic Training: Why Workers Need Software Support.”) Read more…

admin Worker Productivity Access, Dilbert, downtime, How To, software support

If you are still blocking your employees from using social media because you fear it will halt productivity, you’ve been reading the wrong research.

In an article published Nov. 11 in the Harvard Business Review, writers Jeanne C. Meister and Karie Willyerd make the case for the “uber-connected” organization of 2010. First, they assert, access to social media improves productivity. They point to the results of a study conducted by the University of Melbourne in Australia, which found that those who browse the internet for non-work-related purposes — within reason of course — are 9 percent more productive than their counterparts who don’t. (We wrote about this study when it was published in April. Read it here.)

Meister and Willyerd point to two other reasons companies should champion the use of social media: they maintain that the new workforce will seek out jobs that encourage the use of it, and add that companies that provide access to IM, Facebook, wikis, Twitter, etc. have more engaged workers.

If anything, keep this in mind: Those millennials… they “are prepared to bypass corporate IT departments if these tools are blocked.”

MORE INFO IN: Desktop Application Support | PC Helps eTraining | Contact PC Helps

admin Social Media, This Week in Tech News, Worker Productivity Australia, Harvard, millennials

More grim news from the land of statistics: The recession may be waning, but a recent survey reveals that its effects will be felt by employers (and their customers) long after it’s over.

To combat attrition, researchers suggest starting with the issue of employee engagement.

Researchers for nonprofit HR organization WorldAtWork and consulting firm Watson Wyatt found that employee engagement levels dropped 9 percent since 2008, and by almost 25 percent for top-performing workers.

It’s not a surprise that dissatisfaction is growing among those who still have jobs. They are now responsible for doing their own work, plus that of their sacked colleagues. What’s more, with salary and bonus freezes in effect, those employees aren’t being compensated for their extra efforts. (Granted, those pay freezes did save them their jobs.) A decline in productivity is inevitable.

And there’s one more factor: According to the same survey, 41 percent of employees believe that the cost-reduction measures that have been taken by their employers are adversely affecting quality and customer service. Read more…

admin Worker Productivity attrition, recession, Training, Watson Wyatt, WorldAtWork

It’s an unusual day around here if someone hasn’t called asking for help with a mailbox that has reached its size limit. Such calls are as common as the cold, but they’re hardly seasonal.

Try teaching organization tips when a deadline is looming or has passed. It’s futile.

And if there’s one thing that can arrest productivity, it’s a full mailbox. (For an interesting look at e-mail’s ill-effect on employee output, read “Avoiding Death by E-mail” written by Tom L. Barnett and published on Computerworld.com.)

Depending on your company’s policy, it can mean an inability to send mail at best, and loss of all e-mail functionality at worst.

Usually, the calls come from users who need to send an e-mail right now, and do not have time to properly free up space. Sometimes they have already begun mass-deleting and they still cannot send mail. Read more…

admin Worker Productivity Computerworld.com, e-mail, Outlook, support, Training

Five ways to make your workers more efficient.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics had two big announcements last week: The nation’s productivity rose at an annual rate of 6.6 percent from April through June of this year, and labor costs fell by 5.9 percent during the same time period. The former is the largest increase in six years; the latter, the deepest drop in nine years.

It’s good news for managers who have endured budget-cutting headaches for what seems an eternity. Has your company seen the gains? Here are five examples of ways some of our customers have increased their productivity.

Productivity isn’t just a fashionable buzzword.

1. Problem: Caller needed to remove data validation from an inherited spreadsheet but had no idea where to begin.

Solution: She called us, and one of our consultants helped her with her issue right away, within five minutes. While she was on the call, she also learned how to use Excel’s Autofilter feature and how to protect her worksheet so formulas are not modified.

Productivity gain: Without assistance, she would have spent at least an hour trying to solve her problem. Add to that what she learned about filtering data and protecting worksheets, and she saved at least four hours a week. Scale that over a year, and she saved her company more than 200 hours of lost productivity. Read more…

admin Worker Productivity Help Desk, productivity, software support, US Bureau of Labor Statistics