XFER Blog

If you’re trying to share an idea in a presentation, adding a brief video clip can make it very simple to communicate with your audience. With this in mind, it is quite helpful that Microsoft PowerPoint makes it simple to embed a YouTube video directly into your presentation, whether you’re using PowerPoint 365 or PowerPoint 2016.

Employee monitoring—the practice of keeping an eye on your employees and their computer activity during work hours—isn’t exactly a new practice. However, with remote work suddenly seeing a huge boost in popularity, many businesses have sought to confirm that their workers are spending their work time as productively as possible. If you do choose to go this route, however, it is important to be aware of the lines that you cannot cross.

It hasn’t been too long since connectivity required an actual physical connection between the connecting endpoints, making a wired connection the de facto option for businesses. However, now that wireless connectivity is so widely available, businesses now have a choice… but which is the better option? Let’s compare some of the pros of each to make the answer a little clearer.

In the office, there are certain courtesies that most people follow, simply to make sure that the environment remains a peaceful and effective place to work. Working at home (as many have) makes many of these courtesies redundant. As many return to the office, resuming these manners will be important. Let’s go over some of the biggest shifts that your employees should remember as they head back to the office.

Collaboration—one of the more popular workplace buzzwords you hear nowadays, it serves a very important function for any successful business. Therefore, establishing healthy collaborative processes should be considered a priority in any establishment’s operations.

Collaboration: it is the gold standard of teamwork that so many businesses seek. If your employees aren’t naturally drawn to the idea, however, there are some ways that you can help to sell the concept. Let’s discuss a few of the ways that you can coax your users into collaborative behaviors.

Technology impacts the business landscape more than it ever has, and its impact shows no sign of slowing. This is especially the case for the small business, which now has a much larger pool of competitors to deal with. As a result, it is more crucial than ever that small businesses take advantage of technology to assist them. Let’s go over a few tips that every small business should act upon.

A Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy is something that many organizations have adopted, for a few good reasons: employee satisfaction, cost savings, and productivity boosts included. However, it’s crucial that you don’t just assume that you can adopt a policy like BYOD without establishing some ground rules that your employees need to abide by.

IT inventory management, also known as IT asset management or ITAM, is an important process for any business to undergo. This is effectively the process of ensuring that all of your information technology resources are accounted for and protected. Here, we’ve assembled some practices that will help make this process much simpler.

Many businesses turn to Microsoft Outlook as their email client of choice. Did you know that Outlook comes with certain features that make it an even better business option? To help you get the most use out of Outlook, we’re sharing a few of these features as this week’s tip.

Your employees are your greatest asset, which means that they need to be carefully managed and maintained, just like any of your other productivity-boosting assets. The difference is, your employees aren’t just another solution - they’re human beings, and as such, they aren’t tirelessly motivated. In fact, if your employees aren’t treated properly, they could… burn out.

The value of productivity cannot be understated, especially in the workplace. While there are many methods people use to increase theirs, we wanted to share a specific approach with you for our tip: sprinting.

Communication is paramount in any business environment, which makes it crucial that your business is equipped with the tools that allow this communication to take place. In light of this, many businesses have embraced instant messaging applications in the workplace. For this week’s tip, we’ll go over how to most productively and professionally utilize instant messaging.

Workplace wellness programs, despite being an $8 billion industry, are a bit of a quandary for employers - as the jury is still out over whether or not these kinds of programs are effective. For this week’s tip, we’ll examine if a wellness program might be a good fit for you.

Many people can find it challenging to constantly remain productive, which is only understandable. Nobody can be firing on all cylinders all the time. However, this doesn’t mean that there aren’t ways that you can optimize your productivity. Here, we’ll review three general approaches to improve your productivity, with examples describing how to enact each.

Time always seems to escape so many of us. What should be easily accomplishable in a morning can easily stretch to the afternoon, for what seems like no reason. The hard truth is, it isn’t time’s fault… it’s our own bad practices. For today’s tip, we’re going over how you can fight these tendencies to optimize your use of the time that is available.

The average business has a lot of internal processes, and these processes are typically pretty concrete: to accomplish this task, follow steps A, B, and C, in that order. However, due to the sheer volume of processes like these, it helps to have these processes documented for the benefit of your future employees... and, if we’re being honest, your future self. For this week’s tip, we’ll go over the proper process for documenting a task.

It is impossible to understate the importance of a server to today’s businesses. We talk a big game as to how important data is, but we don’t often broach the topic of how important it is to ensure that your server is well-maintained. Below, we discuss how to determine what your servers need for optimal performance, and how you can be sure that they get it.

The Windows 10 operating system is the most common operating system for business use, which is what makes it surprising that so few know how to adjust its appearance to suit their preferences. For this week’s tip, we’ll go over a few ways to adjust what you’re seeing and/or looking at for maximum productivity.

There’s a lot more to the Windows operating system than first meets the eye, especially where handy shortcuts are concerned. Today, we’ll cover five of the shortcuts baked into Windows that may be beneficial to your productivity.