Posts Tagged efficiency
Boris builds brighter future for London businesses
Posted by Jacqui Keep in Opinions on 11th April 2012
It was announced recently that Boris Johnson is pledging to launch a £35m low-cost loan scheme to help small businesses in London, if he is re-elected in May.
The money is set to come from the £70m allocated in last month’s budget to help boost ailing economic growth and boost capital development. The loans could potentially help around 500 small companies in the city and help boost the economy.
This announcement comes just weeks after our co-founders met with the Chancellor, George Osborne to discuss the National Loan Guarantee Scheme (NLGS). The scheme allows businesses to access loans with a small interest rate of only one per cent, compared to those available outside the initiative – making it cheaper and easier for businesses to borrow money.
The World Of Work Is Changing – Are You Changing With It?
It was recently highlighted once more that flexible working practices can add value to individual workers and organisations all together, according to an industry expert.
Dr Graeme Codrington, futurist at Tomorrowtoday.uk.com, said that encouraging remote working can help businesses become more flexible and also boost staff retention.
He noted that there are huge cost benefits in reducing office space, as well as improving productivity and efficiency through reductions in the morning and evening commutes, which may entice staff.
“Flexibility has been a consistent top-rated engagement policy in research for at least the last decade, so anything employers can do to increase flexibility will gain rewards in engagement and staff retention,” Dr Codrington added.
Workspace: the final frontier
Is your workspace holding you back?
Let me explain. Because of what we do [we're a conference calling company in case you didn't know], when we talk about business efficiency, we usually look at ways businesses can save time or money by changing their methods. But a conversation the other day prompted me to wonder whether there wasn’t an opportunity for greater efficiency staring us in the face every time we sit down to work – ie should we be doing something different with our workspaces?
Are they optimally designed? Could we rearrange things to increase productivity? I decided to research the issue, and how better than to look at the workspaces of the world, courtesy of Flickr? I had a look around and realised workspaces can be loosely categorised into groups. Which one is yours? Or, more to the point, which one would you like to be?
Techspace [courtesy of No Robotcha!]
Tech heaven. The more screens the better. And three mice [mouses?] doesn’t mean inefficiency, it means business. Note: no need for desk space to store paper. Everything is digital.
Twitter, conference calling and the Jevons paradox
There are many fascinating blogs out there on the subject of business efficiency and I have to praise one of them – the nice people at the Dachis Group – by way of stealing their idea.
The blog explains the premise of Jevons paradox, named after William Stanley Jevons in the picture above. It states that, as we find more efficient ways of using a resource, we end up using more rather than less. The example quoted is coal: the more efficient steam engines became, the more people were impelled to mine coal from the ground to fire these increasingly desirable machines. Thus the amount of coal used went up, not down, despite the efficiency gains.