Member Article

Top New Year’s Resolutions for the Workplace

With the New Year rapidly approaching, many of us are taking stock of our bad habits and making resolutions in a bid to better ourselves. One of the key things that people focus on is ways to improve their work life, whether pledging to be more productive or vowing to strike a better work/life balance.

In order to help people start 2014 off right, Jive Software has provided tips on how to break common bad habits in the workplace and offered its top five resolutions for the New Year.

TOP 5 TIPS TO BREAK BAD WORK HABITS

1. Get a room! In the office, not everyone wants to hear about your wedding plans or where you brunched on Sunday. Find an unoccupied meeting room or office when making private phone calls during business hours.

2. Silence is golden. It plays before every movie, “Please silence your mobile phones now.” Common sense also suggests you silence your mobile phone when other people are trying to concentrate and work and especially when entering a meeting.

3. Are you looking at me? Studies suggest that eye contact has a positive impact on the retention and recall of information and may promote more efficient learning. So put your phone down and pay attention when someone is talking to you. You might learn something.

4. Don’t blast your colleagues. Use one-off replies to emails vs “reply to all” to communicate and solve problems with an individual. Otherwise they may grow to resent your bad habit of public shaming and wasting their time.

5. Self-discipline is key. Make it a point to not check your phone after certain hours at night. Eventually, your colleagues will get the hint that you have a life outside of work.

TOP NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS TIPS FOR THE WORKPLACE

1. Pay attention: There are plenty of ways to be more productive at work. Studies suggest that listening to classical music provides short-term enhancement of mental tasks — including memorisation — known as “spatial-temporal reasoning.” A standing desk will give you more energy by keeping your blood flowing and your mind alert.

2. Take better care of yourself! Take advantage of your workforce’s health and wellness benefits: provide discounted gym memberships or subsidised annual flu shot to avoid the plague and stay healthy. It’s worth waiting in line for.

3. Use it or lose it, people!: There is a cap on the maximum amount of vacation time that you can have in a year. Once the maximum amount of hours is reached you stop accruing more hours, essentially wasting hours that can be used to accrue more time. And studies prove, a break from work actually help you perform better in your job.

4. Mobile Freedom: Mobile devices have increased our capabilities outside of the office, allowing employees to receive and write emails, schedule meetings, make sales calls and even use your mobile phone as a hotspot to connect your other mobile devices to the Internet. Provide your workforce with a data plan with plenty of memory for larger downloads or offer a mobile data reimbursement plan.

5. Limit that inbox: By reducing the amount of emails you have in your inbox, you can reduce the amount of stress you have and make sure you are keeping up to date on request and action items vs. letting them fall by the wayside.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Jive Software .