✅ Bonus material: Personality Test Template + Checklist to help break the ice!

When you think of team building, it probably summons up one of two images:

• Awkwardly passing balloons between your legs at school
• Awkwardly falling backwards into to the arms of an awkward colleague

It’s something managers and employees shy away from because no one wants to be part of meaningless icebreakers, inane retreats, and mildly offensive balloon games.

Good news: it doesn’t have to be that way.

While you’ve come to expect team building to be an afternoon of time-wasting that just reaffirms everyone’s discomfort, if it’s done properly that isn’t the case.

Skip ahead to the activities using the links below!

• Team building activities to break the ice
• Creative team building activities
• Problem solving team building activities
• Ongoing team building activities
• Competitive team building activities
• Longer, more involved team building activities

Or read on to find out more about the concept of team building…
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The following is a guest post from Henry Howlett, Junior SEO Executive at Absolute Digital Media.

Who wants to receive a parcel three days after it was due to arrive?

Definitely not your customers.

They pay for the type of parcel delivery they require, whether it is Standard Delivery, the best cheap Next Day Delivery or even Same Day Delivery — they expect it to arrive on time, safe and sound.

In fact, more people than ever shop online, and prefer to receive their goods through the post than walking into a store and paying for it at a till. The need for reputable parcel delivery is only growing, and is unlikely to settle any time soon.

So, to ensure your customers remain satisfied with the delivery service your business provides, as well as save money and invaluable time, take into consideration these tips for enhancing your shipping processes:

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Client Onboarding for Professional Services

When a new client signs up, it’s not enough to leave them alone to jump into your service by themselves –  you’ve got to have a clearly written process to make sure they know they’ve made the right choice.

Settling a new client into your business and establishing a good relationship is one of the best ways to reduce churn.

 ‘If you hold a customer’s hand for 90 days, they’ll be loyal for life’. – John Jantsch

The process of perfect onboarding differs depending on your business, but the essence is the same. Of course, you’re updating your CRM and complying with legal regulation, but that’s not going to make the customer think you’re the best choice and quell the buyer’s remorse. You’ve also got to build a relationship, get to know the customer’s individual needs (once they’ve signed up, they’re not just a vague profile or target audience) then integrate them into your existing business process.

Bonus: Looking for a real example use case from the super-successful DoubleDutch team? Click HERE to unlock it.

At Process Street, we’ve put together 14 templates you can use to get new clients settled in with minimal hassle. The templates include sample documents, ready-to-send emails and industry-specific advice for criminal lawyers, marketing agencies, and financial planners.

Want to get straight to the checklists? No problem! Here they are:

• Client Onboarding Checklist for Financial Planners
• Client Onboarding Checklist for Marketing Agencies
• Client Onboarding Checklist for Criminal Law Firms
• High Touch Client Onboarding for SaaS Companies
• Website Design Client Onboarding Template
• Landlord Onboarding Checklist
• Client Onboarding Checklist for an Accounting Firm
• Patient Intake Checklist for a Dental Clinic
• Patient Intake Checklist for a Medical Clinic
• Client Onboarding Checklist for Real Estate Sales
• Client Onboarding Checklist for a Managed Service Provider
• Client Onboarding Checklist for a Software Development Company
• Client Onboarding Checklist for Management Consulting
• Client Onboarding Checklist for an Insurance Broker

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 The following is a guest post by Uwe Dreissigacker. Uwe is the Founder of online invoicing software InvoiceBerry. InvoiceBerry helps small business owners and freelancers to create professional looking invoices, get paid online and keep track of unpaid invoices. In his free time, Uwe travels a lot, explores new cultures and loves trying new spicy dishes.

As a business, if you want your operation to run smoothly, managing productivity and your workflows is one of the best ways you can stay on track.

Before you even get started on a project, you should first take a step back and plan out your approach.

What methodology will you use? How will you manage productivity and stay on track? SCRUM? SWOT?

Decisions, decisions…

The choices can be overwhelming. Not to mention, over the course of the actual project, you’ll have to make hundreds of other choices.

If you’re not sure where to begin, it’s best to think about your project as a whole and then select the right methodology you’ll follow – Waterfall or Agile?

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You have probably used Linux today — especially if you don’t have an iPhone. And if you browsed the web today, there’s a big chance that the website you visited was served by Linux, too.

Linux is an operating system, but unlike software like Microsoft Windows and macOS, Linux was developed by a self-organized community of volunteers.

Over time, with the effort of over 10,000 developers and evolving processes to manage the scale of work, the Linux kernel has grown to over 20,000,000 lines of code in total. It forms the stable foundation for…

• Every Android phone and tablet on the planet
• 66% of the world’s servers
• 100% of the top 500 supercomputers

This technology didn’t come from an orchestrated team with a thick policy book and layers of management. It came from a few carefully-chosen and culturally-embedded policies, and a shared mission.

In this post, I look at how a technology so essential, complex and important could have been produced so effectively without traditional management structure. But first…

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The following is a guest contribution from Mary Shulzhenko. Mary is a digital marketer, content strategist and a copywriter. She is passionate about writing on customer service, customer experience, small business, marketing and a variety of other business topics. She provides the original content for LiveAgent, an award-winning and the most reviewed help desk software for SMBs in 2018. You can find her on LinkedIn.

Would you agree to fly on a plane knowing that the crew was simply ‘told’ what to do but didn’t use clear guidelines and instructions? Probably not.

Sadly, that is how many organizations operate today – without realizing that it may result in a wide range of negative consequences, from employee inefficiency, to lost customers and profits.

Telling employees what to do is not nearly as effective as having a set of written step-by-step instructions they can follow, explaining how exactly routine operations should be performed. That’s where standard operating procedures, or SOPs, come in.

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Maybe you’re the sort of person who sits down at their desk for 8 hours solid and hammers out as much as possible.

Maybe you use the Pomodoro method or your own task management techniques.

I don’t know what sort of person I am yet.

I used to give it no thought — wake up, lob a coffee down my throat, sit down and start typing.

Lately, my tasks are harder to define and I find myself having trouble with time management and prioritizing.

Right now I’m using Pomello, a Pomodoro timer that lives in Trello and times my work on each card. Click here to get it.

Tomorrow I’ll probably be sick of it and defiantly hammering on the keyboard until it’s time to sleep…

In my seemingly neverending quest to get shit done, I’ve seen a ton of strange methods and lists. And, let me tell you, working at Process Street — a task management system for businesses — I’m making myself practice what I preach.

Here are some of the task management techniques I’ve come across.
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You might think I’m about to tell you to get up as the sun rises, sit down at your desk and work until you can’t work any more. That’s probably because you’ve heard advice like this pretty often…

In fact, Slate writer Mason Currey says that after reviewing 161 daily rituals, the key lesson you can extract is:

“Get up early and go straight to work, making a cup of coffee if you like but not doing much else before sitting down.”

This is something I strive to achieve, usually having a run and a coffee before getting down to it. I find that if I let myself get caught up in tasks that have no clear end before I start working, it kills my whole day.

When I’m working, I’m happily open to distractions — anything from having the TV on in the background to making a run to the shop — but I always get up early to smash those vital tasks out of the way first and then take a more relaxed approach to the afternoon.

This doesn’t work for everyone. In fact, Currey says it’s only around one third of people that can do it. Maybe you can take inspiration from some of the world’s best minds and adjust your daily ritual for success.

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An editor is a writer’s best friend.

For me, that’s literally the case. I’ve known Ben Mulholland since my school days…

But for you, an editor is your best friend because nothing helps a writer grow faster than a great editor.

How will you know if what you’re writing is any good? You write to the best of your abilities, so to you even the most poorly received article was supposed to be good.

An editor, however, will be able to sniff out weakness straight away.

• The opening line is weak
• I lost interest during this paragraph
• You don’t source this quote

And so on…

So you need an editor. And an editor needs a peer editing checklist.

At Process Street, we use checklists for everything we do. We have a pre-publish checklist for blog posts and marketing emails. We have a checklist for keyword research. We even have a checklist for making checklists.

In this post, I want to share with you our peer editing checklist for training writers and editors to become the best they can be, and creating stellar blog content.

Let’s go!

P.S: Scroll right to the bottom for an interactive version of this checklist!
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The following is a guest post from Ryan Gould, Vice President of Strategy and Marketing Services at Elevation Marketing. An expert search, social and content marketer, Ryan leads Elevation Marketing’s digital strategy department, helping brands achieve their business goals, such as improving sales and market share, by developing integrated marketing strategies distinguished by research, storytelling, engagement and conversion.

Without software, you’d be hand-writing purchase orders, using a Rolodex for a CRM, and doing your newsletters via smoke signal.

Alright, maybe that last one is a little far-fetched, but there’s no denying that in the business world, technology is absolutely necessary and enables amazing things.

…But not everyone on your team gets enthusiastic about the prospect of learning a new tool. Even if that tool will help them improve productivity, do a better job, and escape the white-collar equivalent of hard manual labor.

Your goal when rolling out software is always the same: to help your business improve operations, boost efficiency, and enable sales. These days that means staying up to date on technological trends as well.

Deciding which tool is right for you will always hinge on fundamentals, like whether it can automate your vendor payments, purchase orders, employee onboarding, lead management, etc. However, there are other considerations, such as whether your solution integrates with cloud software and is responsive on mobile devices.

But, even after you’ve selected the solution perfect for your operation and your employees – after all the sales demos, comparison docs, and review reading – you’ll find it’s that the human element that trips you up.

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