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

There’s no doubt mobile devices have altered the way we work. According to Pew Internet and Research, almost half of American workers report doing at least some work at home, and about 20 percent say they do job-related tasks at home every day.

Accessing your e-mail using keyboard shortcuts takes productivity one step further.

In preparation for the holiday, here are some tips to help you keep your mobile work time to a minimum while you’re enjoying the family feast:

For the BlackBerry

Filter Incoming Mail

Say, for example, you receive a daily report that you will not read or deal with on your phone and would prefer to just handle it back at the office. Can you create a filter for that?

Of course you can. Here’s how:

1. Click on the Messages icon to open your messages, then click the trackwheel or Menu button and select Options.

2. Select E-mail Filters.

3. Click your trackwheel or Menu button, select New and then type a filter name. Read more…

admin Mobile Devices, Time-Saving Tips BlackBerry, holiday, iPhone, Outlook, productivity, Thanksgiving, tips and tricks, Windows Mobile

Many of our customers start their calls with apologies about the stupidity of the questions that are to follow, but it really is unnecessary. No question is a dumb question.

Sloppy sorting can wreak havoc on data. That’s why it’s good to know the basics before you begin.

In this company’s 17-year history, its consultants have solved millions of software snags, from the most basic to the maddeningly complex. Recently, we took a look back to analyze what help our clients needed most.

Not surprisingly, the top five most frequently asked questions are all related to the three most heavily used applications — Microsoft Word, Excel and Access.

Here are the top five, with instructions if applicable. Bookmark and save.

No. 5. How to use query by form in Access (2002, 2007)

Query by form will allow you to enter a value on a form using a text box, check box, combo box, etc. You can then use this value as the criteria for a query, making the query far more dynamic. Use the steps below to setup a sample query: Read more…

admin How To Help Desk, import data, mail merge, productivity, query by form, sort

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

Some of our customers are so surprised that our consultants are friendly, they send us letters like this:

“Now I must tell you that I’m not the brightest when it comes to technical-type stuff. I’m sure I asked a lot of ‘silly’ questions, and probably had to ask them more than once. [Your consultant] never made me feel stupid and demonstrated the utmost patience and kindness when dealing with me. I have had to call back on a number of occasions and requested to work directly with him because he was so knowledgeable, helpful, personable, and, oh, did I mention patient?”

While we welcome praise like that, it does make us wonder why dreadful customer service is the accepted standard — at help desks for sure, and in business in general.

It’s a fact that if customers are treated poorly, they will hesitate to call back the next time they have an issue.

In a recent piece in Information Week magazine, staffer Art Wittmann argues for a more customer-friendly future. In IT, Wittman says that interest in end-user satisfaction needs to increase. Help desk techs need to learn soft skills, and how to use them.

Wittmann’s piece was a response to Microsoft’s move to open Apple-like stores in the near future, complete with digital media walls and a space fit for birthday parties (!). It seems Microsoft wants in on the good-customer-service game.

The lesson to be learned from Microsoft’s efforts, Wittmann writes, is that the drive to create customer loyalty is something all enterprise CIOs should have on their minds.

“If you still have pockets of technologists sitting around swilling Red Bull and laughing at ‘lusers,’ wake up and smell the clouds rolling in,” he writes.

We couldn’t agree more. It’s a fact that if customers are treated poorly, they will hesitate to call back the next time they have an issue. Instead, they’ll ask a colleague for help and waste the time of two employees, devise clumsy workarounds, or do nothing at all. Morale will suffer too.

Who is losing money now? The company, that’s who. (Jen Darr)

MORE INFO IN: Desktop Application Support | Contact PC Helps

admin Customer Service Apple, Art Wittmann, CIO, Help Desk, InformationWeek, Microsoft, productivity, soft skills

A Twitter search of “do more with less” returns everything from quotes by revered philosophers (“It is futile to do with more things that which can be done with fewer” – William of Ockham) to rants about how cheaply Blade Runner was made compared to present-day sci-fi films. Read more…

admin How To Blade Runner, CIO, Help Desk, How To, Microsoft Office, productivity, templates, William of Ockham

Last week’s two-hour Twitter outage was inconvenient for some, devastating to others. Whether it affected you at all is irrelevant; it proved that social media has become omnipresent.

I sure will be happy when it finally gets itself settled. Every day the media feeds us findings of new studies, fresh reports, and the latest arguments from industry experts about social media’s productivity-boosting power or time-sapping potential.

The outrage over the outage proved that social media matters.

Here are highlights from this week’s stories:

Marines: The Few, The Proud, The Banned
Last week also brought news of the United States Marine Corps banning sites like Twitter and Facebook on military networks. The Marines cited security concerns. We think they’re just too rigid to wrap their minds around the whole Web 2.0 mess.

CIO.com blogger C.G. Lynch responded to the Marine social media ban with a post urging other organizations not to follow the military’s lead. For organizations that don’t have national security at stake, he asserted, banning Twitter and the like is hasty. Read more…

admin Social Media FACEBOOK, productivity, Twitter, U.S. Marines

As much as IT departments hate to admit it, company employees are their customers. Still, many workers think of their help desk as the “no-help desk.” There’s a disconnect, for sure.

It’s no different with some all-in-one outsourced help desks, at least in general, where callers are often greeted with verbose scripts and seemingly pointless reboots.

“Not many people wake up in the morning and say, ‘Today, I want to make life miserable for our customers.’”

In a post titled “The Six Laws of Customer Experience,” blogger Bruce Temkin explores this issue, and presents a must-read treatise for any CIO or IT department leader. Below are highlights. How does your help desk compare?

1. Every interaction creates a personal reaction.
In this section, Temkin stresses that customer feedback needs to be a key metric. And he’s dead-on. An outsourcer can live up to its service level agreement (SLA) and perform stunningly on paper, but what about the employees who have had to wait on hold, or have had to waste time waiting for call backs? SLAs mean nothing if your outsourcing desk leaves frustrated employees in its wake.

2. People are instinctively self-centered.
This section’s salient point is: “You know more than your customers; deal with it.” Using tech jargon, talking callers quickly through complicated processes, becoming impatient when they become stumped — these are examples of deplorable customer service. Read more…

admin Customer Service Bruce Temkin, CIO, Office migration, productivity, SLA, the no-help desk

If you think Twitter, and social media in general, is a fad, think again. Not only has the number of unique visitors to Twitter increased exponentially in the past year, the percentage of people who use it only at work is double that of those who use it only at home.

According to a recent study by Nielsen Research, Twitter saw a 1,382 percent growth from February 2008 to February 2009*. What’s more, 62 percent of respondents said they access Twitter from work only; 35 percent access it from home only.

This is what we do know: Twitter (and LinkedIn, and Facebook, and MySpace…) is wildly popular, and is used mostly at work. What’s unclear, however, is how to manage it in the enterprise.

Your options include ignoring it and blocking its use, or devising a plan that teaches employees how to use it without sullying your brand or exposing the company to security breaches. Read more…

admin Social Media CIO, FACEBOOK, LinkedIn, MySpace, Nielsen, productivity, Sophos, Twitter

A recent Associated Press story was almost silly enough to qualify as a headline from The Onion: “Chicken farming growing trend in suburbia.”

What do chickens and software support have in common?

The article wasn’t a spoof; it was a legitimate news story that appeared in the Dallas Morning News. The piece detailed the how suburbanites have taken to rearing chickens to make it through the recession. It sounds like a lot of work for one egg per day for each hen. There’s a coop to build, feed to buy, local livestock laws to obey. And then there’s the smell.

Chicken-rearers say it’s a way of “getting back to basics.” My gut says it’s just too much work considering the return.

But upon further inspection (namely, the mere existence of “Raising Chickens for Dummies” – yes, it’s a real book – and the popularity of a the site BackyardChickens.com), it seems it’s not such a crazy notion after all. Yes, there is an upfront investment, but the ROI is supposedly stellar.

Chickens are working pets that guarantee a steady supply of fresh eggs (and, perhaps, an eventual main course). Raising your own chickens is also “green.” They help control bugs and weeds without the use of chemicals, and they create excellent fertilizer.

All this talk of getting back to basics got me thinking about dwindling IT budgets and the move on corporate America’s part to get back to basics. In particular, it brought to mind the misconception that services like software support and training for employees are excessive and unnecessary in an economic downturn. Read more…

admin ROI Associated Press, backyardchickens.com, Outsourcing, productivity, Raising Chickens for Dummies, recession, ROI, software support, The Onion