“I’d give anything to work from home. It must be so relaxing!”

I’ve heard this kind of thing from my entire family, and with the increasing trend of remote workers it’s not surprising that people want to get in on the action.

The last 3 years of working remotely have taught me otherwise.

Yes, you get to work from anywhere, have more flexibility with your hours, and even wear whatever you want. However, remote work can be isolating, demotivating, stressful as all hell, and even physically damaging.

So, I’ve brought together all of the lessons I wish I’d been told when getting into the game, including:

• How to maintain a work/life balance without a traditional office
• Creating and sticking to your own schedule
• How to stay motivated without seeing your teammates
• Staying healthy and avoiding injuries common to remote work

Also, if you’re looking for remote work, we here at Process Street are hiring!

Check out our jobs page for more information.

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The following is guest post from Sawaram Suthar. Sawaram is head of marketing at Acquire, and also a founder of Jagat Media. A digital marketing consultant, he has experience in branding, promotions and page optimization, along with research and strategy. He has an MBA from the University of Pune.

Most brands optimize rational factors that affect customer behavior such as price points and product features. But today’s audience make purchase decisions based on their emotional experience as well.

Understanding customer emotion plays a key part in building customer engagement and brand loyalty, both of which can contribute to better sales, revenue and ROI.

There are plenty of studies to back me up on that. For example, research from 1997 at a large insurance company found sales agents with high emotional intelligence sold policies with an average premium of $114,000, which was almost double the figure for agents with low emotional intelligence.

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Here at Process Street, we’re always advocating for companies to use data to help in making important decisions.

But data on its own is not massively useful.

I could run an experiment right now and gather loads of data. But if that experiment was run poorly then my data will be poor. Which means any readings of that data will be poor too, leading to poor decisions.

Alternatively, I could run a really well structured piece of research and gather some great data, but if I don’t know how to properly analyze that data then my conclusions won’t be very good.

Simply having large data sets is not enough.

We need to structure our research well and then be able to interpret the results with a degree of rigour. Fortunately, having a good working knowledge of P-Values can help us iron out some alarmingly common mistakes. It can teach us:

1. How to set up an experiment for meaningful data
2. The importance of measuring your existing hypothesis against an alternative
3. When results really are statistically significant, instead of just looking good

This knowledge will help us make better decisions and lead to greater success.

In this Process Street article, we’ll look at 4 key areas:

• What are P-Values?
• How do you calculate P-Values?
• Examples of P-Values in practice – A/B testing
• Why you need to set up a research process

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Starting and running a business is hard enough without making the same business mistakes as everyone else.

After all, managing a team and keeping the business on track is hard enough without having to worry about running yourself into the ground through hiring too quickly, targeting a bad niche, or just plain overspending until the bank cracks.

That’s why we here at Process Street have scoured the advice of experts such as Paul Graham, Joel Gascoigne, and Sam Altman to highlight the business mistakes you should avoid, and how to do that without tearing your hair out.

Let’s get stuck in!

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Predictive analytics: a term you may be familiar with if you have even the smallest window into the recent developments in enterprise technology. There is very real hype buzzing around terms that tech startups love to plaster all over their marketing campaigns, such as “artificial intelligence”, “deep learning”, and “blockchain” – but what does it all mean?

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Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it – George Santayana

Big George, originally Jorge, makes a valid point with this one. The quote is often used to talk about giant historical shifts or wars or something similar. Yet, it’s equally true of smaller things.

In business, as in life, someone has already come before you and done the same thing. These people have failed, learned, and then improved. We, in the future, are in the fortunate position of being able to learn from their failures and successes if we choose to.

And this is why we choose to bang on about the past so much. Whether it be recent history like The History of SaaS, 20th Century history like How Does a Franchise Work?, further back like The History of Surgical Processes, or even further back to the beginnings of civilization like How Were The Pyramids Built?, we often like to take lessons from the past.

In this Process Street article, we’re going to ancient Greece to check out 9 key philosophers and see what business lessons we can take from their lives and work.

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Pinch analysis is a difficult topic to talk about, as it both has widely applicable techniques which can reduce the need for external resources, but it’s traditionally very complicated and used in a limited business sector.

That’s why today I’ll be breaking down the topic and showing how the principles behind it can be used across any and all disciplines.

You don’t have to be a thermodynamics buff to understand this; it all comes down to analyzing what you have, what by-products your processes create, and whether you can use those by-products to your advantage.

By doing this, traditional pinch analysis is able to typically result in energy savings of 10-35% – that’s a third less energy you need to generate or import to carry out your processes.

Lets’ get stuck in.
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The following is a guest post by professional copywriter and freelance writer Michael Schultheiss, owner of Inkwell Freelance.

Imagine if your support staff had no set guidelines for handling a ticket.

It would be like you pulled in a group of random people from the street, sat them down at the helpdesk, and expected to see a job well done.

Instead of a job well done, it’d probably look more like this:

That’s essentially what you’re allowing when you fail to standardize processes. Your company’s operations consist of tasks that must be completed on a daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly basis to ensure that it runs smoothly. But if these processes aren’t standardized, you’re inviting chaos.

These could be core processes like dealing with a customer support request, or tasks that recur less often like SSL certificate renewal.

Every task — regardless of how often you do it — requires rules that define the scope, quality, and methods to be followed. If you don’t standardize these rules, you can’t have visibility over whether you’re ensuring quality and reducing human error.

In short, running your business will be an operational nightmare.

To help you avoid that, in this article we’ll look at process standardization as follows:

• What is process standardization?
• The benefits of standardization
• Common concerns about standardization
• How Process Street can help you standardize

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Being secure online is of greater and greater importance. As businesses operate almost entirely online and sensitive information finds itself living full time in the cloud, we have to make sure we have appropriate measures in place to keep information safe.

One tried and tested way of promoting security is the use of failsafes in login systems. This is what’s referred to as Two Factor Authentication (2FA) or Multi Factor Authentication (MFA).

This means that someone could get hold of your email and password, yet your data is still kept safe.

Whether you’re already familiar with the terminology or not, you’re certainly familiar with the concept.

In this Process Street article, we’ll look at:

• Why is two factor authentication important?
• What two factor authentication is
• The 2 classic examples of 2FA: banks and Apple
• How you can implement two factor authentication in your team

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No matter how foolproof you think your operations are, human error will always pose a threat. Heck, it’s already responsible for 52% of security and data breaches, was the root cause of a host of famous tragedies, and can strike at any time.

But what exactly is human error, and how can we limit its effects if it can’t be completely prevented?

To answer that question, we here at Process Street have broken it down for you. In this article, you’ll learn:

• The four types of human error
• How the different types of human error are caused
• The single technique to combat each type in your business

It’s time to stop leaving your success open to random chances of failure.

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