The Thurston, Pierce, Lewis, and Mason Counties IT Experts

Seeing just how much this issue monopolizes an employee’s workday, there are many different angles you can take to tackle this problem and streamline operations. One of the biggest areas you can start with happens to also be a medium that you personally have the most control over, meetings.

For starters, making meetings more efficient means thinking about how meetings are actually run. Now, you’re likely already doing this to some extent. After all, no leader just shows up to a meeting without a plan or some sort of agenda in place. Instead, we’re suggesting that there’s value in taking a step back and reevaluating the purpose of your meetings. Upon doing so, you may discover that the goal of your meetings can even be achieved in better ways than having everyone gather in one room. If this is the case, then you may be able to forgo the meeting altogether. This is a helpful exercise to go through because of how easy it is to get stuck in the rut of “meeting for the sake of meeting.”

Once you’ve made the determination that having a meeting is the best way to achieve your goal, you’re next going to want to communicate the purpose of the meeting to all who are involved. When everybody understands what the intended outcome is regarding why they’re gathered, everybody will be on the same page and wasting time by getting off topic will be minimized.

As a bonus, this move will help you wrap up meetings earlier. This could even help change the way certain employees think about meetings, particularly workers that may be so tied to their schedules that they feel obligated to keep a meeting going until it’s scheduled to end--even if the goal was achieved early on. It should go without saying that ending a meeting earlier than scheduled will lead to workers being able to spend more time, you know, working.

Another proactive measure you can take to streamline your meetings is to create an outline and send it to everyone at least 24 hours in advance. By doing this, participants will know what to expect and be able to provide quality input before and during the meeting. This due to the simple fact that they’ve had adequate time to run through the meeting in their head and formulate thoughtful questions and responses. As a bonus, you can send information to the participants relating to the topic at hand, and ask them to have it read before the meeting, sort of like assigning homework. This will make meetings feel less like everyone is “shooting from the hip,” and more like all involved are contributing in meaningful ways.

When the meeting ends, you can streamline the process further by getting honest feedback. By taking time to hear the participants\' thoughts on whether or not the goals were met, and what ideas they may have about improving how meetings are run, you’ll be able to tweak and enhance future meetings based on such feedback.

Of course, when it comes to streamlining communications around the office, equipping your workforce with the right technology can be a tremendous help. For example, technology can serve as an aid to make meetings more efficient, like utilizing video conferencing tools so people can participate in a virtual meeting from wherever they may be, even via their mobile device.

At the end of the day, strategically implementing the right collaboration technologies will go a long way in improving the efficiency of your operation so that more revenue-generating projects can get accomplished. Need help with this? Call PC Technologies today at 360-491-2227 for assistance with finding and implementing collaboration technologies that will best meet the unique needs of your business.

Sharing this information with your employees is also a great way to protect them from accidentally accepting friend requests from strangers who may actually be hackers in disguise. Scam artists can create new accounts and use them to send out mass friend requests for potential attacks on user credentials or sensitive information, so it’s best to stay safe and avoid these in any way possible.

First, you need to log into your Facebook account. If you’re doing this from your desktop, click on the little down-arrow in the top-right corner of Facebook. Click on Settings, which will be down toward the bottom.

This opens up the General Account Settings page. In the left column, you’ll see several sub-categories for Facebook’s settings. Click on Privacy first.

Under the Privacy Settings and Tools page, you’ll see various sections dedicated to who can see what you post on Facebook. The option you are looking for is under the Who can contact me? Section. Here, you’ll want to click Edit and change the setting to Friends of friends. This means that only people who are friends with someone on your current friends list will be able to send you a request. You should still be able to extend the invitation to others, though.

Now, let’s say that you want to give people another option to see what you post, even if they aren’t currently friends of yours. Maybe you have articles about your industry that you’d like to share, but you don’t want to make everything that you post available for all to see. In a situation like this, you can scroll down to Public Posts in the left column. This opens up the Public Post Filters and Tools page. Under the section Who Can Follow Me, select Public. This allows you to set the status of your posts to either Public for Followers, or Friends for Friends only.

Of course, a healthy dose of skepticism should always be used when dealing with social media, as people can masquerade under false identities easily enough. For more information about how to keep your organization secure, reach out to PC Technologies at 360-491-2227.

This blog focuses on the most recent version of OneNote: 2016. Older versions might lack some of the same features, so if you are running an older version of Microsoft Office, it might be time to consider an upgrade to a more recent version.

The Benefits
OneNote was designed with the intention of providing businesses with a tool to foster collaboration. You can save your Notebooks on either your local network drive or to Microsoft’s OneDrive cloud. You can then share these Notebooks with other users within your organization, allowing users to collaborate on projects and share notes through a virtual environment.

OneNote might not be able to create a myriad of documents like the other Microsoft Office apps, but it can be described as the ultimate highlight reel of the other Office 365 software. You can write, build simple tables, display charts and graphs, and draw on documents. Just keep in mind that it won’t be useful enough to completely replace the features of these other Office 365 apps.

Note-Taking Capabilities
OneNote offers many features that allow you to create notes and organize information. When you create a Notebook, you can divide it into tabs, and further divide them into pages. There are even pre-made templates online that you can use. Alternatively, you can create your own template that best accommodates your specific needs.

Your notes can even include more than just simple text. OneNote lets you take clips of web pages and directly insert them into your note. OneNote also allows for the pulling of text directly from images. All you have to do is right-click them, or search for the text that appears in the images. You might be surprised by how accurate this search function can be. This is very handy when taking photos of physical documents and business cards.

OneNote even supports handwritten note-taking with the ability to convert it into a font-based text. It also has a great math function. This allows you to type or draw out a simple equation. It can then convert them to text and solve them.

You can also format your pages to suit your specific needs. Alongside this, OneNote offers functionality that allows you to link content on one page to other OneNote locations for quick and easy access. In terms of security, notes can be assigned password protection, which means that only those who are given this privileged credential can access them.

It’s clear that OneNote is great for any business environment, but how are you using it? Do you currently have OneNote installed, or are you hoping to take better advantage of it in the future? Let us know in the comments, and be sure to subscribe for more great information on SMB technology.