Podcasts are an awesome way to passively expand your knowledge, especially while you’re walking, in the car, on the train, or doing work that doesn’t require a ton of mental energy.
At Process Street, we’ve compiled a list of podcasts that we personally listen to and would recommend to anyone interested in business, entrepreneurship, marketing, and startups.
Introducing new policies to ensure a safe and productive workplace makes sense on all sides.
Unfortunately, if your employees don’t know about your policies, it won’t do a damn thing to solve your company’s problems. In other words, if your employee handbook doesn’t get read, you’re fresh out of luck.
There are two ways to all but guarantee your employees will never read your employee handbook.
Think of the copy-and-paste template as the cookie cutter cold emails we all love to hate – there’s no feeling of a person behind it, so we tune out, ignore it, and get on with our day.
Unlike cold emails, however, if your employees ignore your handbook they’re inevitably going to fall victim to a rule they didn’t know about.
Sure, you’re still covered for the aftermath (as long as it was in the handbook to begin with), but if you want to prevent these costly blunders from happening your employee handbook needs to be interesting and engaging.
After all, wouldn’t you rather read a document that talks to you as a person, rather than another cog in some merciless corporate machine?
From September 1st 2015 to June 23rd 2016 the polls were clear that Britain would vote to remain in the EU.
According to the Financial Times, there were only two weeks over that period where the Leave campaign were ahead.
Yet, when the results came through, British voters had opted to leave the EU with 51.9% voting out.
How did the leave campaign strategy overcome the clear gap held for the year leading up to the vote?
A clear narrative and a range of big promises?
Well, yes. But also by selling those narratives and promises through a slick targeted marketing campaign powered by social media and big data.
I’ve covered our internal support process and analyzed SaaS support and success before, but when it comes to Twitter support, there’s not much data out there.
From what I’ve learned in this study, I’d say that could be because it’s not something the company wants to do.
Is it a necessary evil, brought about by frustrated customers, or is it companies meeting customers on their level?
When you think about users interacting with companies on Twitter, you probably imagine companies trying their best to calm down users so angry they need to vent their frustrations publicly.
I got the idea for this study when I saw the sheer amount of damage control Outlook have to do on Twitter because of their product, and set out to analyze other software giants and how they do Twitter support.
@Outlook can’t access my emails with important tickets and job interview dates because YOUR systems locked me out and YOUR robots won’t
— Bracken Buchan (@bracken_rob) January 13, 2017
Since Twitter is entirely open to the public and can’t be edited, I thought it was begging for a study on how SaaS companies support their users on Twitter. That’s for a couple of reasons. One, because no one has published data or written a post like this before. And two, because I enjoy writing studies on SaaS companies, like this and this on pricing pages, and this on landing pages.
Here’s my study into the effectiveness and uses of Twitter support at SaaS companies.
According to the Laboratory for Social Machines from MIT Media Lab, Donald Trump was the most influential force on the 2016 election.
More than any television news stations, newspapers, or other public bodies. Donald J Trump, as an individual, was the most powerful influencer on the nation.
This influence was driven by his huge social media following. In March 2016 he had 6.8m Twitter followers, 6.3m Facebook likes, and 4.1m views on his YouTube channel. Now, he has over 22m Twitter followers.
But his eventual success lay deeper than just finely crafted tweet storms.
We need to find email addresses for the launch in 2 weeks – about 400 should do.
Damn…
Nobody likes to hear that the next week of their time will be spent researching, selecting, and verifying hundreds of email addresses. It’s boring enough to make you complacent, but any mistakes are costly.
In other words, it’s one of the tedious marketing processes which we all love to hate.
After all, 400 emails are no good if they’re all blocked by spam filters.
I knew there had to be a better way than Googling the target audience, so I tested 9 email lookup tools and managed to find one with 92% accuracy.
According to the Powering Productivity report from Planview and Loudhouse, poor processes are the primary cause of company inefficiencies (44%).
Even the largest companies in the world struggle with poor processes, resulting in poor performance and lost revenue.
But these problems are not always the fault of design.
Bad processes don’t just come from poor process management, but often evolve naturally within companies over time. From NASA to SpaceX, processes can become corrupted without anyone noticing.
This phenomenon can be known as the normalization of deviance.
When we started building Process Street, we thought we knew all the features our users would need.
We were quick to learn that we’d left an awful lot out…
After a year of continuous development, we’re rolling out Process Street 2.0 — a whole new app with a ton more functionality, including:
Process Street isn’t just a checklist app anymore. It’s a complete platform for workflow automation, business process management and reporting. Continue Reading
Silicon Valley darling and unicorn health insurance startup Zenefits lost over 50% of its value through 2016.
Why? Poor process management.
Process management might not sound thrilling, but it’s damn important.
Process management refers to how all the different systems within your business link up together to form a coherent whole.
If they don’t link up, they won’t make sense.
And if your business doesn’t make sense… well, you get the stretched metaphor. It’s not good.
Before we dive into what process management is and how it functions, let’s take a look at the high-profile example of poor process management in action.
That’s right, I’m talking about the cautionary tale of Zenefits!
Outsourcing is nothing new. Manufacturing, support, accounting, marketing, and more have all been outsourced for decades to save time and money (although modern outsourcing only really started with IBM).
After all, why bring on an accountant full time when you can outsource your taxes once a year?
Outsourced services have doubled in value since 2000, and with benefits like saving time and money.
Weighing the outsourcing pros and cons, however, shows that it isn’t some magic pill which will make difficult work disappear.
Not only that, but everyone has a different opinion of the types of outsourcing – how the hell do we weigh the pros and cons when nobody agrees on what it even is?
So, to make things easy, we here at Process Street have summed up the advantages and disadvantages of outsourcing vs insourcing, and (if the former) tips on some different kinds of outsourcing you can use.
It’s time to outsource the work you don’t need to do and focus on getting done what really matters.
