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Employee burnout is something that many of us have seen in others or experienced ourselves. Repetitive tasks and overwhelming workloads can easily get the best of us. Thankfully, there are plenty of simple ways to both combat and avoid employee burnout before anybody reaches his or her breaking point.

Avoiding burnout

• Have fun – Making room for fun can relieve some stress and help to keep employees motivated when they are on the brink of burnout.
• Switch it up – Let employees work on new projects or teams when they’ve been concentrating on one thing for a long time, like Facebook is doing with Hackamonth.
• Encourage breaks – It’s wonderful to have employees that don’t want to stop working until they get things accomplished. Sadly, those are the people that are bound to burn out quickest. If you have employees like this, encourage them to take walks or go on a coffee run – anything to keep them from going stir crazy.

When burnout simply can’t be prevented, these tips can help minimize its ripple effects.

How to deal with burnout

• Accept it – Burnout isn’t always avoidable so it’s essential to be conscious of the signs such as lethargy, decreased socializing or irritability.
• Communicate – Growing businesses often undergo transformations that leave employees frustrated. Making sure your employees know that they can talk to you is a terrific way to stop burnout before it gets out of hand.

Although employee burnout isn’t always avoidable, it’s critical to know what steps you can take to make it less damaging to your employees and your business. These simple tips can help reduce the effects of burnout and even prevent it when possible.

If you’d like to check out more burnout prevention tips take a look at this article.

Often, when we conduct online searches we wind up getting hundreds of thousands of results – many of them irrelevant. Fortunately, there are many simple steps you can take to help garner more accurate results.

Keep it simple

Use the fewest number of words or phrases you can. If you’re looking for Chinese takeout in your neighborhood, type in “Chinese food” along with the name of your city or your zip code. That should garner accurate results even if you aren’t sure exactly what you’re looking for.

Learn about Boolean

You most likely learned about Boolean search terms in school, whether you know it or not. Boolean searches are based around using “and,” “not” and “or” in your searches. These words allow you to include or exclude multiple terms in your search results.

The concept of Boolean searches also applies when you use simple pluses and minuses in your queries. This is a quicker way to accomplish the goal of Boolean searches. If you want a certain term included in results type a “ ” before the term in your search. If you want to guarantee something doesn’t show up in your results, simple precede it with a “-“ in your search.

Be precise

Preciseness can quickly eliminate a great deal of the unrelated and confusing search results. If the search terms you use are too general, you are often left with thousands of results that have nothing to do with what you’re looking for.

Using quotation marks is a good way to ensure better search results. Most search engines recognize that as a request for an exact phrase search. So, if you’re looking for a company and know the exact name, it may be in your best interest to search for it in quotes.

These three strategies can greatly affect the accuracy of your search results. You’ll spend less time sifting through website descriptions and pages of results, and more time getting the information you need.

If you’d like even more tips on performing online searches, take a look at this article.

There are always a great many reasons for being unproductive. Every season brings a new ailment or distraction. In the winter, energy dwindles and in the summer, all people can think about is being outdoors. While there is no cure for those distractions, there are several things you can do to help keep your employees focused and boost productivity.

Keep a clean office

Clutter and disorganization can easily distract people from the tasks they should be focusing on. Cleaning the office and encouraging your employees to keep their workspaces tidy can instantly eliminate one of the biggest distractions out there.

Increase the temperature

A few degrees can make a big difference in productivity. In fact, in one study, increasing the temperature from 68 to 77 degrees decreased typos by 44% and improved typing output by 150% – those figures are nothing to sneeze at. Even though your heating bill will increase, it might be worth the expense.

Lighten up

Another study showed that a brighter, better-lit office can help employees stay on task. Employees who worked in offices with windows spent 15% more time focused on their work than those in windowless offices.

Because this simple fix can make such a big difference it makes sense to open blinds and move as many employees as possible into windowed spaces. Not only does this increase productivity, it can also save you money by lighting up the office without using electricity.

These basic office adjustments are extremely easy to make and can make a huge difference in the amount of work that is accomplished.

For more simple tips on boosting productivity, take a look at this article.

Join us for a Webinar on May 18

Are your employees sending out classified information about your company? Morgan KalakoskyBarracuda’s Southeast Channel Manager will be joining us to show how the Barracuda Message Archiver can keep your business in compliance, securely store Email and aid in the flow of data in and out of your business. You won’t want to miss this informative time together.
Title: Email Archiving & Messaging Compliance – How can this affect business? Join us to find out!
Date: Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Time: 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM CDT
After registering you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the Webinar.
System Requirements
Space is limited.
Reserve your Webinar seat now at:

https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/688107894

Although face-to-face meetings are the standard when it comes to conducting business, virtual meetings are quickly becoming more common. Virtual meetings are extremely convenient, but can be difficult if you don’t take certain things into consideration.

Etiquette is vital to most meetings, and it’s no different with those of the virtual variety. This may seem somewhat obvious, but many people think they can be more casual during virtual meetings – and that isn’t always the case.

Here are some additional tips that can help you carry out more effective and professional virtual meetings.

1. Be prepared

Preparedness is essential for any meeting, virtual or not. When you’re conducting a virtual meeting, it can be easy to forget who your audience is. You want to ensure that the information you’re presenting is appropriate for each participant.

You also want to make sure that you have given everyone the information they need to access the meeting, such as passwords, URLs or call-in numbers. You absolutely do not want to be left with no attendees because people could not access the meeting.

2. Engage participants

Although it might seem normal to jump right into the presentation, taking a minute to introduce participants can go a long way. This helps build relationships, and makes the meeting feel less rushed.

Even though it may seem cliché, having everyone give a little information about themselves, like their favorite food, or the high point of their weekend, could be a great icebreaker. It allows everyone to see the other participants as more than just a face on a computer screen.

3. No side conversations

Although you may not be the person on screen at the moment, it’s important to not distract from the focus of the meeting. Side conversations can distract someone on the other end of the meeting, even if they can’t see you. They also may be quite distracting to the person who is talking and pull them away from the issue at hand.

Virtual meetings are excellent assets and there are many ways to ensure that you are conducting them in a professional and interesting manner. If you’d like to take a look at more suggestions for conducting virtual meetings, check out this Inc. article.