If there was a list of the “Top Ten Problems” facing humanity in the next few decades, what do you think would be at the top?

Well, it turns out Richard E. Smalley made such a list in 2003, and placed predictions about a looming global energy crisis at the top.

His prediction focused on the problem of the amount of energy being consumed, against the amount of energy being produced (as well as available sources of energy production) alongside the projected boom of human population to around 8-10 billion by 2050.

In recent years, there has been a resurgence of attention placed on the topic of energy efficiency and the relationship between energy consumption and climate change.

It is an undeniable fact that our global climate is rising in temperature. The science is there to prove it; the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and many other international organizations have acknowledged that recent years have been the hottest since records began.

As a result, intense weather like heat waves, hurricanes, heavy rains, tropical storms, and rising sea levels all becoming more and more commonplace.

Despite the rising tide of climate crisis, the demand for energy supply is at an all-time high. The global economy is insatiable in its demand for energy to sustain economic growth and development.

How should organizations prepare themselves for the inevitable challenge of sustainable adaptation, and for ensuring they have the tools in place to facilitate the systematic energy management approach that will be the core of efforts to improve energy efficiency in the future.

“Energy efficiency is the most promising means to reduce greenhouse gases in the short term,” – Yvo de Boer, Former Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

A systems-scale approach is necessary if organizations want to seriously engage with difficult problems facing sustainable business and adapt for the future of energy management.

ISO 50001 is a standard designed to help organizations establish efficient and effective energy management systems (EnMS) and improve energy performance.

Based on the principles of continuous improvement and popularized by the ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 management system standards, by implementing these standards companies stand to reduce energy efficiency costs, lower carbon dioxide emissions and prioritize the preservation and sustainable engagement with the environments in which they operate.

This article will provide an introduction to the ISO 50001 standard, with a simple explanation and tips for getting started with an implementation of your own using Process Street.

Thankfully, recent changes have made it easier than ever to implement ISO 50001 (and any ISO management system standard), so that will be a big focus of this article.

Here’s a breakdown of what I’ll be covering here:

• What is ISO 50001?
• What are management system standards (MSS)?
• Whis is ISO 50001 important?
• Benefits of ISO 50001
• How to get ISO certified
• ISO audits
• Transitioning from ISO 50001:2011 to ISO 50001:2018
• Using Process Street for ISO management

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This is a guest post from Martha Jameson. As an educator at PhDKingdom.com and AcademicBrits.com, Martha found her calling as a writer, after pursuing web design and management. Her main goals are to share her experience, motivation and knowledge with her readers.

Link building has been a contested subject in SEO circles, not least because of the amount of speculation that goes into figuring out what factors are most important for securing you a top SERP spot.

Despite the controversy around Google’s search algorithm, a great deal of research has actually gone into figuring out what’s happening under the hood. At this point, we can be fairly sure that link building is a significant factor in the SEO of your website.

In fact, it’s actually quite difficult to get your website ranking without the help of link building.

SparkToro’s recent survey of over 1,500 professional SEOs placed the quality of linking sites and pages as the second most important factor, out of 26. That’s a big deal.

Building links is all about linking your website to others, and theirs to yours. As you increase your links, you increase the ability for your readers to access more relevant data, thereby increasing your own website’s relevance.

You’ve got to approach link building seriously in order to use it to your utmost advantage. Search engines will crawl through each page of your website in search of this information.

When you do this right, you can help boost your website rankings and help more readers find and access your content.

Here are 10 of the most effective SEO link building tips of 2019:

• Start co-authoring!
• Check out competitor keywords
• Peek at your competitor’s backlinks
• Watch out for new competitor keywords
• Help a reporter out (HARO)
• Start a blog
• Treat your testimonials like backlinks
• Choose evergreen keywords and topics
• Master the skyscraper technique
• Recover your dead backlinks
• Bonus tip: Check Wikipedia’s dead links
• Using Process Street for effective link building

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We all strive for a better understanding of ourselves and each other, in or out of the workplace. It doesn’t matter what level of the organization you’re at.

Sometimes we want to communicate better, and develop social relations. Sometimes we want to understand how to work better, and more efficiently.

Sometimes, you may simply have an itch to try your hand at something new, whether that means picking up new responsibilities in your current position, or taking on a completely new challenge altogether.

For years, people have been attracted to personality tests. “What kind of person am I?” Presented as a series of weighted questions, you’re given a “type”, and there you have it! You have been enlightened, the long-awaited revelation of your true inner self.

Except, not exactly. The merit of such simplified personality classifications can be (and has been) debated for as long as they’ve been around, but for many people that’s not the point.

It doesn’t matter if the tests are a snapshot of your psyche at any given time, subject to the ever-changing whims and complexities of human existence. It doesn’t matter that you might be an INFJ yesterday, and a ESFJ tomorrow (well, it sort of does, but I’m trying to make a point here).

The point is, these kinds of tests are simply tools of self-analysis and self-reflection, and process improvement. It’s up to you to use these tools to gain insight into yourself and the people around you, and if you take a measured approach and combine it with a keen understanding of the underlying principles behind the popular concept of a “personality test”, you will probably uncover something valuable.

My goal in this article is to try and provide you with a couple of useful tools to better understand yourself and the way in which you work in the form of a dive into the cognitive functions set out by Carl Jung to describe the 16 different personality types that formed the basis of his psychoanalytic and psychiatric practice.

I’ll be covering:

• What are cognitive functions?
• Why you should try to understand them
• Breakdown of Jung’s 8 cognitive functions
• How the MBTI test relates to all of this
• Applying these principles to the workplace
• A free personality test
• Using Process Street to maximize your potential

By understanding the theory and definitions behind the hugely popular Myers-Briggs test and Jung’s psychological functions that preceded it, you stand to become more familiar with your own personality and by extension, more tuned-in to why you act the way you do, say the things you say, struggle with some things, and excel at others.

You will also be able to use this insight to more readily navigate the complex social arena that is professional working life. Why do certain people act and react the way they do? How can you better appreciate the differences in and between others, and the unique strengths that each individual brings to the table? Continue Reading

Agile is a buzzword. These days, everyone is “doing agile”. Or so they say.

Despite over 90% of senior executives stating agile adoption as a top priority, less than 10% actually consider their firm to be performing with a high level of agility.

As much as people love to wear the badge of agile on their sleeve, there is a great deal of confusion swelling in the dark chasm between the aspiration of agile implementation and reality.

So what is agile?

It’s basically a philosophy of software development that prioritizes iterative development of working software and solutions through cross-collaboration and self-organizing teams.

It’s also an umbrella term for a bunch of development frameworks, but agile doesn’t simply mean kanban or scrum.

Some of the confusion arises when teams equate the agile approach to using an “Agile framework” (usually capitalized).

Frameworks like these are attractive because they’re sold as simplified solutions to difficult project and process management problems.

Sure, these frameworks can be an important part of an agile implementation, but they need more. They need a firm foundation to stand upon.

It’s not enough to simply go through the motions and expect an agile approach to “just work”, especially when transitioning from a more rigid and traditional framework like waterfall.

In order to drive agile success, teams need to adopt agile philosophy. They need to change the way they think about work ownership, management, and their relationship and duty to customers.

Without this vital force, frameworks like scrum and kanban fall flat.

In this article I’ll investigate what it is that separates true agile from the “fake” agile that is often the differentiator between success and failure of a development team. Here’s a quick overview:

• What is fake agile?
• Why fake agile is bad for your teams
• Fake agile vs true agile: How to spot the difference
• Misguided agile leadership
• Understanding true agile
• Questions to ask to help you spot a fake agile team
• The need for agile training
• Tools for agile teams

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Self-control is over-hyped, according to Kentaro Fujita, a psychologist who studies self-control at Ohio State University.

Research suggests that the popular idea of self-control as the ability to resist temptation with willpower is fundamentally flawed.

“Our prototypical model of self-control is angel on one side and devil on the other, and they battle it out. We tend to think of people with strong willpower as people who are able to fight this battle effectively. Actually, the people who are really good at self-control never have these battles in the first place.” – Kentaro Fujita, psychologist at Ohio State University

How does this tie in with productivity? If you ask anyone what is the biggest challenge they face in trying to be productive, a likely response will involve something about a “lack of willpower”, or perhaps a difficulty staying focused.

These kinds of responses represent the popular understanding of what it means to exercise self-control.

The most productive people don’t necessarily have the best self-control, they just know how to work smart.

They’ve also most likely built up a lot of good work habits for saving time and effort, allowing them to alleviate some of the stress or discomfort that is one of the root causes of unproductivity.

In this article, I’ll outline 42 productivity hacks to help you understand how to work smarter, improve the quality of your work life, and build habits that will save you time, energy, and mental strain in the long-term.

Here’s the complete list of productivity hacks:

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This is a guest post by David Miller, a technical writer & edu-tech enthusiast currently pursuing research in project management software. You can find him on Twitter, or writing for the ProProfs Project.

If I ask you to select a few colleagues in your company and take a survey of how well they understand their company’s culture, how do you think they’d score?

Not so sure?

Now, think about remote teams.

Teams you don’t even talk on a regular basis – how sure are you that they know your company’s values or culture?

Let’s take an example.

According to a PMI study, 83% of respondents spend at least an hour or two working remotely every day. Among which the percentage of remote employees stand at:

• 47% – Business Owners
• 47% – Managers
• 50% – Executives
• 36% – Team Members

Now, as you can see that most upper-management employees are usually working remotely with the company, and if they themselves don’t possess a firm grasp on company culture – how will they pass it on to their team members?

Usually, remote team members are simply assigned tasks with a due date and it is all professional.

But, what most companies don’t realize is that it is really crucial for everyone who is part of a company to understand their values and culture.

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What’s the worst that could happen? Risk management is one of the first things you should be thinking about when planning for pretty much anything in your business.

The truth is, risk inescapable; success of your business is not determined by your ability to avoid risk, rather by your ability to accept, plan for, and take advantage of the varying outcomes risk might present to you.

It might sound negative, but risk management is actually more optimistic than it seems.

The key takeaway is that successful risk management strategies are proactive, as opposed to reactive.

By thinking ahead, you can prepare for and prevent risks before they even have a chance to arise.

In this article, we’ll take a look at how you can use Process Street to streamline and automate your risk management approach, including:

• Getting started with the basics of risk management
• Common risk management misconceptions
• Risk management standards
• The risk management process
• Key principles of risk management
• Benefits of risk management
• How to automate risk management
• 30+ risk management templates (free!)
• More useful risk management resources

Hopefully by the end of it, you’ll have a better understanding of how to focus your risk management efforts into a forward-facing, proactive approach.

There are lots of ways to approach and prepare for risk, and this article will give you the tools you need to master risk management.
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This is a guest post from Brayn Wills, knowledge management manager at ProProfs. He is responsible for creating unique and relevant content on knowledge base tools and keeping track of the latest developments in the realm of knowledge management. In his free time, he is either reading a new book or exploring offbeat destinations.

When customers deal with businesses, they expect a great experience. This means that some kind of customer support needs to be available to them, around the clock.

Of course, providing quality customer support with real human agents managing helpdesks 24/7 is an expensive proposition.

On the other hand, companies need to make it easy for customers to access information to solve common queries – this is a vital factor in the journey towards consistent, high-quality customer satisfaction.

Many organizations are now implementing customer self-service via traditional and online platforms to ensure that neither the business nor the customer suffers.

This helps them to deliver a double whammy of maintaining their overheads while improving their efficiency in customer service, both of which result in improved customer experience.

With the adoption of digital services, self-service is gradually minimizing the burden on live agents too. It is also allowing businesses to successfully meet customer expectations with regards to servicing queries in a more timely and regulated fashion.

However, going overboard with the automation of customer support self-service can be a risky move for businesses. While it may help in curbing expenses, it may take an adverse toll on customer satisfaction and the overall reputation of the business. Therefore, the key is to hit the right balance between man and machine.

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This is a guest post from Kyriaki Raouna, a Content Writer at LearnWorlds writing about marketing and elearning. She is an experienced career consultant and a content writer for SaaS.

User onboarding is one of the hottest topics of discussion amongst SaaS companies. You start thinking about it on day zero of your launch and continuously improving onboarding as your business grows.

Welcoming and educating users on the use of your product is a priority for software businesses, and while you scale, you will want to automate the onboarding process.

In fact, the quicker you do so, the better. Customer onboarding is a huge opportunity for every SaaS. Especially if you are working to increase sales and reduce churn rates.

When onboarding is combined with customer education, it becomes the ALPHA and OMEGA of activating users and ending up with loyal customers who are experts in your product and advocate for you.

Indeed, the biggest software companies with a highly valued brands use education as marketing and for user onboarding, but more on this later…

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We analyze and manage risks every day.

From crossing the street, correctly preparing food, fastening seat belts, to coordinating a journey via public transit. Each of these is an example of a risk management process happening in our heads; sometimes the result of “common sense”, sometimes these decisions are made unconsciously.

When it comes to business management, a more rigorous, formalized approach is needed.

One such strategy for managing risk is to utilize standards for risk management, like ISO 31000. This approach is useful in pretty much any situation, for organizations of all shapes and sizes, to manage risk in their everyday operations.

Managing risk effectively is essential to ensure businesses succeed and thrive in an environment of constant uncertainty. This post covers everything you need to know about ISO 31000; here’s a quick rundown of the article structure:

• What is ISO 31000?
• Benefits of ISO 31000
• Principles of ISO 31000
• ISO 31000 framework
• ISO 31000 process
• Importance of risk management leadership
• ISO 31000 and continuous improvement
• Automating ISO 31000

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