Latest Blog Posts

Keep your online accounts and personal data protected with these quick tips.

Create strong passwords

Creating a strong, secure password is the most critical step you can take in protecting your online accounts. You can do this by using a series of words that you will not forget, but that is hard for others to guess. Or take a long sentence and build a password with the first letters of each word. To make it even stronger, make it at least 8 characters long, because the longer your password, the stronger it is. If asked to create answers for security questions, consider using fake answers to make them even more difficult to guess.

Use unique passwords for every account

Using the same password to log into multiple accounts, like your Google Account, social media profiles, and retail websites, increases your security risk. It is like using the same key to lock your home, car and office – if someone gains access to one, all of them could be compromised.

Keep track of multiple passwords

A password manager, like Google Smart Lock in the Chrome browser, helps you safeguard and keep track of all the passwords for your different online accounts. It can even keep track of your answers to security questions, and generate random passwords for you.

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A virtual assistant can do wonders for your business, but only if you find the right one. Hiring a virtual assistant isn’t always as easy as one, two, three—finding the right person for the job is crucial. So before you send out that job posting and begin scheduling interviews, read the following guidelines and see how they can help you find the VA who will help your business grow.

Identify your needs

Before anything else, you need to understand what tasks and responsibilities a potential Virtual Assistant would have, and if outsourcing them would be cost effective. Make sure that hiring a VA would suit your business needs.
 
To have a clearer perspective on this, observe and evaluate the processes within your business over the course of a week. Check which tasks are repetitive and could easily be designated to a VA, which would free up your schedule and give you time to focus on requirements that need your full attention.

Create a system

You, as a boss would want to get the job done seamlessly. You want results that are at least at par with—or would even exceed—expectations. The question is, do you know what you want? Have you been able to set standards which your virtual assistant can use as a benchmark as he tries to deliver output? Does your business have a systematic step-by-step process for getting a job, or a series of tasks, done?

As a business owner, you should have an idea of what results you’re looking for. If the tasks that you’ll be outsourcing to a virtual assistant are mostly administrative tasks that are neither technical nor require a specialised skill, then it’s better to have a best practices checklist that your VA can follow.

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Organising apps and websites can go both ways for the terminally disorganised. The good news is that once the app has all of your data and stuff, it will sort of do everything for you. The bad news? You, disorganised friend, are going to have to make sure everything is all synched up and has the right data to make it work.

So, the first thing you should do is check out a bunch of different organising apps and sites to see what’s out there to make sure that you’re downloading or creating an account that will actually be useful. Changing habits can be tough, so it’s best to be super real about what you’re willing to do to get organized and how you plan to do it.

Here are some amazing tools to check out:

Evernote

Evernote was just a note-taking app when it launched, but now you can do basically everything on it. You can take voice memos, store photos, set reminders for things. You can even add team members to share things with colleagues and sign up for extra features for anywhere from £3 to £6/month, depending on what you choose.

Todoist

Todoist is a killer to-do list app. According to The Verge, it’s the best organising app of 2017. There’s a project manager for complicated tasks, but it will also just create simple tabs for your tasks and send out reminders. It integrates with tasks in Slack and Google Cal. According to The Verge, it doesn’t do things for you, it keeps you on track to make sure you don’t forget anything. You get 80 projects for free, and for £29 a year you get cool features like templates, more projects, and other perks.

Wunderlist

Wunderlist is another to-do list app that will sync with your work calendar so you can track what projects are assigned to you and get reminders about your meetings but it also helps you keep track of your personal life to. So be sure to add the gym and that birthday party to your running tasks list.

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Pod, Work group, Committee, Autonomous collective. Whatever you call it, you’re part of one at Google and probably wherever you work: a team. So if we know what makes managers great, why don’t we know what makes a team great?

A group in Google’s People Operations (what we call HR) set out to answer this question using data and rigorous analysis: What makes a Google team effective? They shared their research with the Associated Press, and we’re sharing the findings here, as well.

Over two years Google conducted 200+ interviews with Googlers (their employees) and looked at more than 250 attributes of 180+ active Google teams. They were pretty confident that they'd find the perfect mix of individual traits and skills necessary for a stellar team -- take one Rhodes Scholar, two extroverts, one engineer who rocks at AngularJS, and a PhD. Voila. Dream team assembled, right?

They were dead wrong. Who is on a team matters less than how the team members interact, structure their work, and view their contributions. So much for that magical algorithm.

They learned that there are five key questions that set successful teams apart from other teams at Google: 

1. Psychological safety: Can we take risks on this team without feeling insecure or embarrassed?
2. Dependability: Can we count on each other to do high quality work on time?
3. Structure & clarity: Are goals, roles, and execution plans on our team clear?
4. Meaning of work: Are we working on something that is personally important for each of us?
5. Impact of work: Do we fundamentally believe that the work we’re doing matters?

If you answered “yes” to the five questions above, congrats! You’re probably on a high-performing team. And if not, not all hope is lost. This is a shortcut to help you figure out where to focus, how to get better, and a way to talk about this concept with your teammates in a structured way.

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