Stress doesn’t always need a negative connotation. Think about it – if we were never stressed about anything… we’d never get anything done. But it’s all about leverage the right stress to maximize the quality of work out of your employees. It’s important that balance is struck, though, because while good stress can scientifically boost creativity – bad stress can reduce both creativity and engagement.

Here are some ways employers can find that middle ground.

• Dole out sizeable, yet challenging workloads
• Give employees a variety of responsibility (helps with engagement levels and nixing monotony)
• Make sure each role/person has a clean job description at the start of every project
• Make sure your teams have the tools to share information in real-time

2: Bridge the introvert-extrovert gap

You’re bound to have a spectrum of these personality types in any workplace. They both respond differently, proactively act differently and think differently. And what sparks their workflow differs greatly, too – right on down to aesthetics.

So how do you uniformly address everyone from side to the other?

• Introverts like their own space. While it’s not realistic to cater to every introvert with a private, corner office – you can provide them with digital autonomy they need to foster an environment that makes them comfortable
• If your introvert employees truly get overwhelmed in large in-person meetings – perhaps some of them can attend via video or phone conference. According to psychologists, that barrier does just enough to make them feel comfortable, while still getting the most out of them on the creative end.
• On the other side, extroverts love the buzz. They feed off crowds and high energy – so let them fly. Give them the digital tools to collaborate in real time, and let them work places other than their desks.

3: Adjusting feedback

Feedback is imperative for growth. But the templated annual-review format is stale, and doesn’t foster true improvement. Increasing the frequency in which employers offer feedback is huge, whether it’s positive or critical.

And not every piece of feedback has to be face-to-face or extremely formal. Today’s more lax social media area allows for a synonymous way of offering critique. With so many chat platforms available within Microsoft, if a piece of feedback does not need to be done face-to-face, it’s easy to reach out with praise or criticism through an online platform. And any feedback – good or bad – lets employees know their employer takes a care and interest in them.

4: Let your employees’ minds roam

“The best things happen when you least expect them,” … or something like that. But it can really ring true in the workplace!

If it’s constantly go-go-go, the brain can’t enter the “default network,” which is defined as a wakeful processing that happens when the mind is engaged – yet not focused on a specific task. When the brain is in this state, complex cognitive activities are supported and a person can tap into imagining the future, strongly recalling memories, taking in information better and developing a stronger level of empathy.

So how can employers allow for this time? Building in unstructured time. Wait, oxymoron? Almost. It’s not a break. It’s not free time. It’s a time slot dedicated to getting your team together in a chill way to look at ways to solve certain problems, or create things.

The post Microsoft’s 4 secrets to employee motivation appeared first on 6th Street Consulting.

And companies may not be using remote workers as the key tool to success that they are.

So what makes work-from-home types so special? Studies show one, they’re happier. Two, they deepen the talent pool. And three, get this – they actually get more done, and take fewer sick days!

So how can businesses optimize the full potential of energized remote workforce?

Putting in extra effort to communicate with remote workers

It’s a two-way street. Managers need to be in touch with the remote workforce – not just to keep tabs on employee activity, but to boost morale as well. Employees who aren’t physically in the office need to feel important. Direct communication from managers greatly helps with that.

On the end of the remote worker, they need to make communication a priority.

Video conferencing helps on both fronts, giving everyone the “you are there” feeling, where participants can pick up visual cues they wouldn’t get otherwise.

Another tip! Quick check-ins are KEY. There needs to be a proactive effort by both managers and remote workers to send brief messages or make brief phone calls throughout the day. That takes the place of the essentially subconscious check-ins in-house workers may get.

Embrace Individualism

While uniformity is necessary to an extent, often – the most effective teams are made up of people with *different* strengths. And remote workers usually bring a slightly different perspective from the outside.

So with remote workers, managers should place more emphasis on their output than their process. Set goals for your remote employees, and let them set out the plan of attack when it comes to how they achieve those goals.

Remote workers also often have an inherent understanding of both when and where they work best, so they’re the most productive when given the freedom to work under those terms (as long as they’re still making deadline, of course). Within reason, giving remote workers flexibility optimizes their contribution.

When remote workers do succeed, they often don’t get the same recognition as in-house employees. So extra effort in positive affirmation can go a long way.

Implement the right tech to make remote workers the most productive

This is where the Microsoft ecosystem comes in. It can be a great tool to ensure the success of the previous two points.

Microsoft 365 as a whole allows the remote worker to physically work on the same system and access the same files in the same manner as all other employees.

Teams, a part of 365, is there to make sure that one-on-one communication is crisp.

Yammer, another part of 365, helps remote workers engage through a social-media type of platform.

The post Remote Workers: Your secret weapon appeared first on 6th Street Consulting.

Take your intranet with you to stay connected and informed about important content, news, sites and people while on the go – for those in-between moments. You can easily get back to what’s relevant to you, alongside powerful search capabilities to find what you need, plus provide feedback via comments and likes – all to keep work moving forward.

Microsoft released their latest round of mobile innovations – all driven by customer use and feedback. This is the most significant update they’ve ever done to SharePoint mobile apps. They’ve simplified the apps to help people focus on the tasks they’ve told us they engage daily. This improved information architecture to make it fast and easy to find and work with the people and content you are looking for.

• A new Find tab – What was three is now one, and it’s a super powerful, personal tab infused with AI. The new Find tab makes it the easiest way ever to connect with expertise and knowledge across your organization. It brings a best-in-class mobile search experience, with an intelligent understanding of what you work on, how you work, and how your colleagues’ work relates to you. The new Find tab collapses Sites, Links, People and Search into one, streamlined experience. It, too, is where you will find quick answers, notifications, sites, people and more – in an efficient, tailored flow of what you’re looking for, even before you go looking.

The Find tab, coming to the SharePoint mobile app, uses AI to help you find people, content, and answers to your questions while on the go.

• Direct document library access – as you tap into a SharePoint document library, you will stay within the SharePoint mobile app experience (for viewing and navigating) more before taken through the integrated connection to the OneDrive app – where you can perform richer actions on files and folders.
• @mentions in comments – the same as mentioned above applies to @mentions in comments via the SharePoint mobile app; like Outlook, it is now possible to @mention someone within the comments of a SharePoint news article and that person will be notified and brought into the discussion.
• Notifications for page likes – you’ll receive a notification when someone clicks the Like button on a news article you published. How do you like that? If you do like it, you’ll be notified ?.

6th Street Consulting is a Microsoft technology firm specializing in user productivity and collaboration on SharePoint and Office365.  Our biggest differentiator is we put business before technology in creating solutions tailored fit to your organization.

For additional information please contact:

Michelle Hollis

michelle.hollis@CulverG.com

(310) 694-3844

The post Keeping Connected On the Go appeared first on 6th Street Consulting.

Hub sites and communication sites offer rich experiences across your intranet. As business goals and team structures evolve, so too must your sites and the content that lives within them. We continue to add functionality to make it easier to create and configure any sites intent and outcome that you need throughout your intranet.

• Add rich colors to the hub site header – you will now have choices beyond the color white. It’ll be easier and more flexible to adhere to your preferred company theme and brand colors across more aspects of the sites and pages.
• Approvals for hub site association – a flexible approval process further empowers hub site owners and site owners to make requests and programmatically adapt to changes within their growing, dynamic intranet.
• Site scripting during hub site association – once a site gets associated to a hub site, it not only inherits the theme of the hub site, it can now be further configured using powerful site scripting methods to enforce permissions, shared metadata, preferred content management, brand elements and policies.

Program site scripts to run automatically when a site is associated to a hub site to adhere to preferences for that family of sites.

• Communication sites on-premises in SharePoint Server 2019 – like the benefits of “going modern” on-premises with team sites, SharePoint communication sites can be created and configured within SharePoint Server 2019.

New and updated web parts. Sites pull in content from across Office 365. To do this dynamically, and with flexibility, SharePoint news articles and pages use powerful, data-rich web parts, which you can configure to your needs as you design the look, feel and content of the information you share.

• Weather – allow authors to configure showing the web part to show weather information provided by MSN Weather for a given location.

You can now add the weather of any city to a page, and text overlay for images on your pages and news.

• Image web part: text on image – enhance your images with hyperlinks and allow authors to overlay text on images.
• Document library and lists web parts updates – It’s even easier to engage with documents and lists on a modern page with tile view and drag and drop upload. Now with custom views, grouping, sorting, filtering, column formatting, and drag & drop upload.
• Stream updates – no matter where you view a news article or page, you can expect that videos playing from Stream will look and playback beautifully – even when you are viewing them within the SharePoint mobile app. There, too, are channel improvements to help view and playback a complete set of videos in the context of your site or news article.
• Yammer updates – when you add a Yammer web part to a site home page or a news article, you can better able the preferred scoping of the groups that can be scoped to that site. We’ve also updated the interface to enhance how people can engage in the discussion – with richer feed with interactions like liking, @mentioning, adding content, and more.

We encourage you to build out and organize your intranet. Establish the sites you need and ensure your users can create the sites they need. Once established, associate them to hub sites to organize related sites and projects. As you progress year over year, keep creating and sharing dynamic, data-rich news articles.

The post The Evolution of SharePoint Hub Sites and Communication Sites appeared first on 6th Street Consulting.

When it comes to business, social networks can provide secure spaces where teams in different offices, cities, states or countries can communicate and collaborate on projects in real time. They allow people who may never meet to discuss project details, divide and conquer tasks, discuss clients’ needs, and generally come together to accomplish a common goal. As an added benefit, teams who work together regularly can also use their company’s enterprise social network to get to know one another, learn about each other’s strengths, understand how they think, and bond as a team – which will, in turn, create a stronger team that creates stronger work.

Like social networks for the general population, social media for business organizations begins with being social. They allow real-time communication, and usually include a playful element or two, like emojis that can help message recipients infer tone. But enterprise social media also offers a slew of business-appropriate features and functions that can help teams work more efficiently and effectively. Four things that your teams can benefit from the most include:

• Document Collaboration: With the power to share and discuss documents as a team, as well as the ability to edit and co-author documents directly within your social network, this feature allows teams to create more insightful, inclusive, and meaningful deliverables. It also gives teams the unique ability to edit and share items on the fly – as they’re discussed within the group.
• Internal Groups & External Collaborators: Internal groups allow your teams to create a space that’s just for them – and joined by invitation only. It’s a place where they can discuss work, as a team, and tackle projects and initiatives together. In addition to internal groups, some enterprise social networks allow your teams to invite outside client representatives, vendors, consultants, contractors, etc. into the space so that you can all discuss and collaborate on projects either on a limited or an on-going basis.
• Search & Discovery: Some business social networks allow users to search throughout their system for experts, conversations, and files that are relevant to their work. This can help teams reduce the about of duplicate work, use best practices, and work more efficiently. In addition to search, discovery features that allow users to stay abreast of what’s happening within the company (in general) can help your teams find people, information, and groups that are relevant to them, their clients and/or their interests. Through the discovery process, users might meet mentors, and find areas for cross collaboration, etc., which can help them not only grow professionally, but improve their work.
• Seamless Integration: Regardless of how highly praised an enterprise social media solution may be, if it won’t support your current tools, including your word processing and presentation programs, then it’s probably not the right solution for you. After all, the point of purchasing a solution like this is to streamline communication and encourage collaboration, and if your teams have to use “tricks” in order to get your programs to work with your platform, it will cost them time and slow down your process.

In addition to the features that your team will use every day, it’s the one feature that your team won’t see that can truly make social networking for any business a success or failure – and that’s security. With an enterprise social network that encrypts data at all times, at-rest and in-transit, and includes multi-factor authentication to enhance identity protection, you can ensure that not only is your data protected, but your employees are protected, too.

6th Street Consulting is a Microsoft technology firm specializing in user productivity and collaboration on SharePoint and Office365.  Our biggest differentiator is we put business before technology in creating solutions tailored fit to your organization.

For additional information please contact:

Michelle Hollis

michelle.hollis@CulverG.com

(310) 694-3844

The post Ramp Up Your Enterprise Social Network appeared first on 6th Street Consulting.

The 8th Annual IAMCP-SoCal Golf Tournament provides a great opportunity to build relationships, network and come together as a community of IT professionals all while supporting a great cause.  The tournament itself includes a 4-person scramble, lunch, putting contest, raffle, silent auction and an awards reception following the golf tournament.

“Every year I look forward to participating in this fun event.  It’s a great opportunity to meet and network with other Microsoft Partners and raise funds for two great causes”, said Michelle Hollis, Vice President of 6th Street Consulting.

For more information about the IAMCP-SoCal Golf Tournament visit their website at www.iamcpgolf.com.

The post 6th Street Consulting Sponsors 8th Annual IAMCP Golf Tournament appeared first on 6th Street Consulting.

“First line workers are the lifeblood of the world’s largest industries,” says Microsoft’s Farren Roper.

And he’s right. They’re the most physically and directly integrated with the consumer, so they play an imperative role in the communication tree.

“The first line worker is amongst the first to see things and trends and hear from customers,” says Jack Elmore, the Microsoft Product Marketing Director. “And their ability to communicate that digitally and efficiently back to headquarters drives a whole new level of insight many organizations haven’t had previously.”

But so many businesses out there still aren’t using the right tools. Their digital platforms aren’t compatible from the CEO to the first line. But with Microsoft StaffHub, that can all change.

“Microsoft 365 is a complete intelligent solution,” said Andrew Hart, Senior Product Marketing Manager. “It scales across an organization to manage devices on the first line to deliver a digital identity to a first line workforce.”

That digital identity can easily be delivered through StaffHub. It allows first line workers to view schedules, swap shifts, request time off, find information and catch up with the team. From easy-to-read calendars, to message boards, it almost takes the place of another organizational manager.

“As any first line manager knows schedule management swapping shifts accommodating changes is one of the biggest headaches of the job,” says Elmore.

If that’s the headache, think of StaffHub as the pain reliever.  With those tasks taken care of on an easy-to-use platform that can work on any of your first line employee’s devices (and there’s clearly a huge chance that contains a wide variety of tablets, smartphones and computers), managers and executives can focus more on the product and enhancing quality.

The post Empowering first line workers appeared first on 6th Street Consulting.

In today’s workforce teams are spread out all over the States. In order to stay in the know and discover relevant people and important content when you need it most, based on who you work with and what you work on, SharePoint should be your go to. Read on to discover how SharePoint can help.

Discover relevant, recommended content

Search for and discover content when you need it most. See real-timequery suggestions and get personalized results in sites, files, and people with full-text matches across Office 365. See personalized content that Delve surfaces to you from OneDrive, SharePoint, Yammer, and other sources. In Yammer, uncover conversations, groups, and people to leverage the knowledge of others.

People and content find you

Be discovered and connect with other people—including by their expertise, projects, education, and contact details. Let others find and tap into your expertise with your skills and interests listed in Delve and your conversations in Yammer. Gain insights and perspective to make better business decisions by connecting with the right people and content—even if you didn’t know you needed it.

Get the right information quickly

See refined and relevant search results with SharePoint’s built-in enterprise search capabilities. Easily see sites you frequent or files you’ve recently viewed or edited. Take advantage of the type-ahead and smart results features as you search for sites, files, or people. Search for sensitive content and use SharePoint’s search capabilities to support eDiscovery and compliance.

6th Street Consulting is a Microsoft technology firm specializing in user productivity and collaboration on SharePoint and Office365.  Our biggest differentiator is we put business before technology in creating solutions tailored fit to your organization.

For additional information please contact:

Michelle Hollis

michelle.hollis@CulverG.com

(310) 694-3844

The post Find Content and Expertise Across Your Company appeared first on 6th Street Consulting.

Late last year Microsoft announced the general availability of a new solution purpose-built for small and medium-sized businesses with up to 300 employees. Available worldwide today, Microsoft 365 Business includes the Office 365 suite of productivity and collaboration tools, as well as device management and security tools to safeguard company information across Windows 10 PCs, mobile devices, and apps. It is an integrated solution designed to simplify IT for small and medium-sized businesses.

Become a modern workplace

Today’s modern, global workplace is changing, which brings tremendous opportunities and challenges for businesses of all sizes. Businesses must meet the needs of a five-generation workforce, contend with an increasingly complex cyberthreat landscape, and innovate quickly to meet evolving customer expectations.

At the same time, small and medium-sized customers need solutions that are easy to manage and maintain. Often small business owners find technology options to be complex and costly, leading many to make do with a patchwork of services or defer investments altogether. Such approaches compromise business productivity and introduce security vulnerabilities, which may be one reason why 43 percent of all cyber-attacks last year targeted companies with fewer than 100 employees.

Safeguard your business

Microsoft 365 Business is built to deliver the productivity tools and security services businesses need in a single, simple-to-manage product. It safeguards company information, extending security across users, apps, and devices. It helps ensure PCs are up to date and secure, helping prevent security vulnerabilities that cyber-thieves often exploit. It also provides protection for company information across devices, with the ability to remove company data from lost or stolen devices.

Empower your people

Microsoft 365 Business delivers the productivity and collaboration tools businesses need to help their people be their most productive. It includes the suite of Office 365 productivity and collaboration apps, including Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, as well as Outlook for email; SharePoint and OneDrive for sharing files with customers, co-workers, and suppliers; and Microsoft Teams for chat-based teamwork.

Simplify your IT management

Microsoft 365 Business is designed to reduce the complexity and costs of managing technology for businesses and their IT partners. It offers simple setup and management, so business owners and their teams can put more of their time and energy toward building their businesses. From a single console, you can quickly set up new employees, configure device security policies, and manage user identity and access, as well as ensure all your people are on the most up-to-date versions of Windows 10 and Office. And the single per-user, per-month subscription streamlines costs and simplifies management.

6th Street Consulting  is committed to helping empower and safeguard small and medium-sized businesses across the globe. To learn more about Microsoft 365 Business, contact us!

The post Empower Your Team and Safeguard Your Business with Microsoft 365 Business appeared first on 6th Street Consulting.

The intranet is the publishing center of all things happening throughout your company. It is where people keep up with news and discover what’s happening around them at work. It’s time, now, to further empower employees—more precisely, give them a way to broadcast their work.

Keep the team informed and up-to-date with team news

Team news is how you keep up with and broadcast key events and accomplishments with other members of the team and extended stakeholders. You can use team news for things like trip reports, best practices, project updates, highlights of new documents and content, welcoming a new team member, sharing team goals and celebrating milestones.

To add a news item, from within the News web part on the team site home page, click + Add to create a news article. Next, add content to the news post using the toolbox—a gallery of web parts—to add text, video, documents, quick links and more. When you’re finished, click Publish and the news article will be featured prominently on the team site home page within the News web part. And when you click See All, you’ll land on a dedicated News page that serves as the team’s news archive.

Below shows how a team site with all the news—front and center—is displayed in the SharePoint mobile app:

Team news in the SharePoint app.                              News articles render beautifully in the SharePoint app.

Team news is a great way to broadcast of all the important content from your team. In the future, you will receive mobile and email notifications to help keep you up to date.

The post Enriching the Mobile and Intelligent Intranet appeared first on 6th Street Consulting.