Insights For Success

Strategy, Innovation, Leadership and Security

Work at Home

How to visually become more productive and improve your efficiency

GeneralEdward Kiledjian

Whether I’m coaching a junior fresh out of school or a seasoned executive with 30 years of experience, almost everyone tells me they are overloaded and that their personal life is suffering.

We have been raised to separate (or try to at least) our work and personal lives. After all, they are very separate things.

Right? WRONG!

A good example is improving your health. Improving your health means eating better and exercising more but it also means reducing stress. So to holistically improve your health, your plan must include both personal actions and work time related actions.

Kanban

My last employer was large multinational manufacturing organization that benefitted greatly from the concepts of Kanban and Lean manufacturing.

Next time you walk into your local supermarket, look at the fresh produce section. How many products do they carry? The larger stores carry an impressive amount but they typically only carry products that they know will sell. Produce also has limited shelf life, so this means they order their products as close to the sale date as possible (predicting demand).

A key concept in Kanban is Just In Time ordering and manufacturing. Toyota, the creator or Kanban, used this Just in Time system to cut inventory costs and optimize the workflow, they set up visual board showing the assembly flow for the entire factory. If you walked into my last employer’s manufacturing site, every employee knew what would be worked on that day, how fast they would have to work and any potential issues that have been logged in the last 30/60 days. This visual information allowed the employees to work knowing what was coming and therefore made them more productive.

Kanban in your personal life

You are a person, so how does this apply? Regardless of your time management strategy of choice (mine is Getting Things Done), you need to “capture all of your open loops” and place them in a trusted system.

Related articles - The four truths about Getting Things Done (GTD)

By capturing everything you have committed to doing but haven’t already completed, you create a visual dashboard of everything in the “pipeline” and at the same time you benefit from clearing your mind.

Just In Time manufacturing in your personal life also means that you keep your actual “today workflow” (or Work In Progress tasks) to a bare minimum. There is no use trying to finish 24 things at the same time. By properly managing your to do list and then prioritizing appropriately, you are able to spend your time on the handful of most valuable activities.

Setting up your personal system

The main concept in Kanban is making the work visual. Anyone that has worked with me knows I need a whiteboard in the office and typically more than one.

My last whiteboard had these columns on it: - Capture (where everything not processed went) - Next Action (the very next actions for the chosen work to be done). This also included items I wanted to QA from my team before defining as completed. - Waiting for (when I was waiting for something from someone else) - Done this week (completed items I tabulated every week)

This is the visual part of Kanban and is step 1.

Step 2 is to ensure you have captured all of your open loops. Chose a method for capturing everything you have committed to but haven’t yet done so you can get it out of your head (capture everything from buying groceries to signing that multi-billion dollar contract).

Step 3 in the Kanban system is to determine an optimal yet realistic workflow rate. How much can you reasonably accomplish this hour/day/week?

Weekly Review & Kanban workflow

Before you start your weekly review, you must ensure all of your open loops are captured. To do this, I recommend going over your notes from meetings, capture column on your whiteboard, reviewing your calendar, going through your email and everywhere else you could have a task that you will need to accomplish.

Once it is captured, based on your high-level work/life goals, you can determine that are the most pressing X elements you should get done during this planning phase (can be daily but I recommend a weekly approach). Everything you commit to doing should go on your board in the next Actions column. Ultimately these will be the most important items. The items most aligned with your work and life goals.

You then pull work from the Next Action column, action it and complete it then move it to the Done column. By writing things you have completed, it is a positive reminder that things are moving in the right direction (we often forget). Every time you look at it, you will feel like you accomplished something and it will fuel your continued work.

Tracking

One important element of Kanban in our manufacturing environment was tracking of performance metrics to identify issues. The same applied to your personal implementation of Kanban.

You coloured markers and commitments to track deviations from expected performance. If you miss a due date, write it in red. If you notice something takes longer than expected, write it in orange, etc. At the end of the week (during your weekly review) you can review these metrics and figure out, “what’s going on”. Is it that something is taking you longer than expected regularly (i.e. financial review)? Maybe this is because you are lacking some of the required skills, you are improperly planning the work, etc. By knowing what deviated and why, you can implement a permanent corrective action.

8 tips for successful video conferencing

technologyEdward Kiledjian
Creative Commons - Flickr user Timo Newton

Creative Commons - Flickr user Timo Newton

As little as 2 years ago, video conferencing was reserved for the most technically savvy amongst us. with the introduction of Apple's Facetime and Google Hangouts, millions have started enjoying it for work and pleasure. Videoconferencing is easy but that doesn't mean everyone is doing it right. Here are tips to help you video conference like a champ.

  1. Good Lighting - Just life traditional photography, lighting is one of the most important factors to consider. If you have too little light, your webcam will digitally boost the ISO making the image look ugly and grainy. If you have the wrong kind of light, you will look overly pink or blue. You don't have to spend a lot of money to get good lighting. You should be able to pickup a handful of LED lights that you can place around you to create a soft and well balanced light. Try to avoid harsh spot lighting and direct sunlight. Also make sure you don't have any bright light behind you as that may trick the camera and underexpose you.
  2. Good Camera - The better the camera the better the experience. Look for a camera that offers full HD support and reliable focusing. My favorite brand is Logitech so anything there should work just fine.
  3. Good Microphone - 90% of all home and business videoconferencing users never even think about adding a good quality microphone to the mix but it makes a difference. The higher end webcams have decent microphones but anything that is built into a smartphone or laptop should be considered sub-par. If possible, add an external microphone that is closer to your speak organ (aka your mouth ). A good setup is to use a headset for sound when videoconferencing.
  4. Frame the shot - I recommend starting the video chat software ahead of time and determine what is showing. If your face properly framed? Are there distracting objects showing in the scene (background, overhead, etc?) It's a good opportunity to make sure your lighting is good and that your video camera is configured optimally. Assume you may need to move when the video-conference is live and dress appropriately (aka don't wear Bermuda shorts when on a business video-conference)
  5. My eyes are up here - The biggest mistake people make is looking in the wrong place. If you are watching your participants on your screen, you are not looking at them in their eyes. If possible, stare at the webcam.
  6. Good networking - Spend the money and buy a reliably good router. I recommend the Asus branded WIFI routers. A bad router could cause huge videoconferencing issues.
  7. Use Quality of Service - You should enable the QOS feature on your router to prioritize your videoconferencing traffic.
  8. Mute - Make sure you have a way to quickly mute sound. It's good to mute when you not talking or quickly mute if you have to cough.

 

Desktop As A Service is cheaper and easier to implement

ITEdward Kiledjian

Having worked in the IT field for close to 20 years now, I am constantly surprised that the biggest pain points for most organizations are still the most basic IT components. One such pain point for companies large and small is desktop management. What should be a commodity easy to manage system is still proving to be a big challenge for most organization.

I believe over the next 3-5 years, we will see a huge uptake in Desktop As A Service (DAAS). DAAS is and will continue to be a cost effective solution to tame the unruly desktop management monster in a secure way.

We are seeing demand for DaaS growth quickly and the trend is expected to continue for the foreseeable future. What is fueling the demand for Desktop as a Service? Companies are being challenged to deliver a secure computing environment is the face of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), a large mobile remote workforce, migration issues to Windows 7/8 and complex regulatory requirements.

Virtual Desktop Interface (VDI) was touted as the tech messiah that would deliver IT organizations from all of the above issues but VDI simply hasn’t caught on. It is complex to implement, costly and difficult to manage. In my unofficial poll, 65-80% of VDI projects fail to get implemented or fail to deliver the promised value.

DaaS seems to address all of the above issues by providing a cost effective, quick to deploy and easy to manage desktop for your users (regardless of their device, location or connection speed).

Why working from home may harm your career

Management, OrganizationEdward Kiledjian

When you hear about non-traditional work arrangements, you probably think about a hot tech startup where employees come to work on Segways wearing Hawaiian shirts but most companies now offer some type of non-traditional work arrangement. The most common is flex time and work from home. These arrangements benefit the employees & employer.

The employee gets a comfortable home work environment that is distraction free and saves dozens of travel hours. The employer gets a more productive employee and considerably reduced secondary costs (office, phone, internet, etc).

Although Work From Home is mutually beneficial, research has shown that it does have one major negative repercussion: a negative perception of those using these non-traditional arrangements (particularly Work from Home). It seems these employees aren’t given the same amount of credit as the traditional office bound employees. This seems to be a natural (sometimes unconscious) bias suspecting that employees who are not in the office are not working “as hard” or “as long”  as their traditional counterparts. 

A university study entitled “Why Showing Your Face Matters” found that employees working with non-traditional arrangements typically receive lower performance evaluations, smaller raises and fewer promotions than the office bound control group. These negative impacts exist even if the remote employees work harder and longer than the control.

If you are an employee working from home, there are steps you can take to improve your situation:

  • Stay In touch – Stay in constant communication with colleagues, customers and supervisors. Regularly email, Instant Message and call. By always staying available and in touch, people understand that you are “actually working”
  • Get face time – Make it a point to periodically come into the office and when there, use this time to meet with your boss and do visible work you can’t do from home.
  • Build alliances – Identify influential people (working from the office) that can help your cause by being supporters. Keep these people update about what you are working on. These people can be excellent references during peer reviews (for evaluations).
  • Prove your dedication – Work from home employees tend to start working earlier and finish later (since there is no commute time). Highlight this fact by sending emails or leaving voicemails during these extended periods. Think of these as tangible proof of your dedication.

As an organizational leader that has managed thousands of remote employees, I hope the above recommendations help you and your career. These are proven strategies that work and I recommend you take them seriously.

Virtual Meeting Etiquette

ProductivityEdward Kiledjian

We are living in a global just-in-time community where more and more of our meetings are held in cyberspace. This new reality is sometimes drive by cost and other times but convenience. Regardless of the business drivers, it requires an entirely new approach.

In real estate, the most important quality is location, location, location. In the world of virtual meetings, it is communication, communication, communication. To have efficient communication, you need trust and your remote participants need to feel like part of the team.  This article will share some ideas on how to improve your virtual meeting etiquette …

  • Don’t forget your remote participants. I can’t tell you how many times meeting organizers forget their virtual teammates.
  • When during mixed meetings with onsite and remote participants, make sure you give all remote participants a chance to talk. It is a good idea to make the remote participants pass first or mix one remote then one onsite.
  • Remember that you can’t pass documentation to your virtual participants so make sure you send it to them early enough so they can print and /or review the material.
  • Each person who speaks (remote or onsite) should first identify themselves.
  • If your company has an instant messaging tool, it is a great idea to setup a group chat session in case remote participants are unable to jump into the conversation. Some conference bridges won’t let a remote participant interrupt the chairperson (basically anyone who is sitting with you).
  • If your participants are spread across our big blue marble, then be a good host and try to accommodate most participants (as it related to time zone). If this is a one time meeting then try to schedule it during the business day for most participants.  If it is a recurring meeting then may be switch the meeting times each meeting to accommodate the different groups .
  • Remember that remote employees don’t see physical mannerisms so avoid saying something that can be misconstrued. If dealing with an international audience, avoid regional slang and use basic business professional language.