Author: Paulina Guajardo

March 20, 2023

How to be a good leader? 10 tips to lead your team to success

CollaborationProductivity
Being a good leader is not the same as being a good boss. Although both roles are directly related, the leader guides his team through the use of soft skills that encourage teams to feel stimulated, motivated, with a sense of belonging, and therefore, more efficient. The leader is a figure that allows to improve the organizational culture and performance of the company, because, if the employees feel happy, listened to and with an inspiring reference, from the professional and the human aspects, success is assured. In this blog, we give you some tips to become the leader your team needs.

The figure of a good leader implies having skills and characteristics that allow you to guide, motivate and support a team to achieve goals and objectives. Effective leadership is not just about personal skills and characteristics, but also about learning to adapt and apply your knowledge and experience in all contexts. Here are some qualities that are often associated with a good leader:

  1. Inspiration and motivation: A good leader must be able to inspire and motivate his team to give the best of themselves. This involves setting clear goals, acknowledging team accomplishments, and providing constructive feedback.
  2. Clear and honest communication: It is important to be transparent with the team and clearly communicate the situation and the challenges that are being faced. It’s better to be honest from the start and address issues openly and transparently.
  3. Keep calm and perspective: It is important to keep calm and perspective during difficult times. It’s no use panicking or allowing stress and anxiety to take over. You must maintain a positive and focused mentality, always with the focus on the objectives.
  4. Set an example: As a leader, you must be a role model for the team. This means staying positive and showing how to face challenges with courage and resilience.
  5. Emotional support: In difficult times, it is important to be available to emotionally support your team. Listen to their concerns and fears, and try to provide support and encouragement to help them through challenges.
  6. Encourage collaboration: Instead of facing challenges alone, encourage collaboration and cooperation in the team. Working together can increase creativity, innovation and find solutions that might not have been possible otherwise.
  7. Planning and organization: During difficult times, it is important to have a plan and stay organized. This helps ensure that the team is focused on important goals and is working effectively toward them.
  8. Effective delegation: A good leader must be able to delegate tasks and responsibilities effectively, ensuring that each team member has the necessary skills and resources to do their job.
  9. Recognition and celebration of achievements: As the team overcomes challenges, it is important to recognize and celebrate achievements. This helps maintain team morale and increases motivation to keep working together to achieve goals.
  10. Adaptability: A good leader must be able to adapt to changes in the environment and in the organization. This involves being flexible and willing to change direction and goals as needed.

Leading correctly is an opportunity to grow and strengthen the team, and therefore, the company. Maintaining a positive attitude and working collaboratively are the keys to overcoming challenges. This is achieved not only with the development of soft skills and experience, but also with tools that help plan projects, organize work teams, and correctly distribute resources. Workdeck is a platform that can accompany this process, as it offers multiple functions such as:

  • Gantt diagram
  • Kanban board
  • Project, task and activity management
  • Calendar management
  • Purchases and expenses
  • Time control and timesheet management
  • Internal chat

If you don’t know Workdeck, we invite you to live the experience starting a free trial here

March 8, 2023

Time Control Law

CollaborationUncategorized
On March 8, 2019, the government approved the royal decree-law 8/2019 that obliges companies to have a control of the time worked of each employee. This hourly control law aims to guarantee compliance in terms of working hours, it also creates legal certainty for both workers and companies and it enables control by the Labor and Social Security Inspectorate.

We already mentioned that the objective of this law is to ensure compliance with the established working hours to support the legal certainty of the employee and the employer. The idea of this blog is to summarize and explain in detail everything related to this law.

What type of workers and companies does the time registration apply to?

Hourly recording applies to all workers, regardless of their category or professional group, to all sectors of activity and to all companies, whatever their size or organization of work, as long as they are included in the scope of application that defines article 1 ET. Companies are obliged to record the daily working hours also with respect to “mobile”, commercial, temporary, remote workers or any other situation in which the labor benefit is not carried out, totally or partially, in the workplace of the company. The only peculiarities or exceptions are the following:

  • Labor relations of a special nature
  • Workers who have a specific or particular regime regarding registration of working hours

What means can be used to record  hourly control?

The standard does not establish a specific or predetermined modality for the daily recording of the day, limiting itself to pointing out that it must be carried out day by day and include the start and end times of the day. For this, and regarding the rest of the configuring elements, it calls for self-regulation, through collective bargaining or the company agreement.

Any system or means, on paper or digital, capable of fulfilling the legal objective, that is, providing reliable, unchangeable and non-manipulable information afterwards, either by the employer or by the worker himself, will be valid. For this, the information of the working day must be documented in some type of written or digital instrument, or mixed systems that guarantees the traceability, reliability and invariability of the working horse registered.

Can companies unilaterally establish their own working day registration systems?

Yes, within certain margins: the law provides that collective bargaining or company agreements are responsible for the organization and documentation of the time record, as well as the specific system (manual records, digital platforms, lathes, etc.) or the specific form to complete them, incorporating all those aspects that are considered necessary for the fulfillment of its purpose. This provision allows the different types of companies, sectors and professional occupations to have a model or system adapted to their characteristics, and specify, in accordance with the definitions contained in the agreement, conditions such as interruptions, pauses, flexibility in the distribution of working time or others.

Is the entire time elapsed between the registered start and end times of the daily workday considered as effective working time?

The formal obligation is the daily record of the working day, so it must contain, by express legal mention, “the specific start and end times of the working day for each worker”. However, it is also convenient that everything that is part of it be subject to keeping, especially that related to mandatory daily breaks legally or conventionally provided for, or voluntary, to avoid the presumption that all the time between the start and end of the registered working day constitutes effective working time.

When the legal, conventional or contractual expression of these interruptions or intra-day breaks is clear, predetermined and global, the daily record may evade those internal configurative elements of the daily work, because they are identifiable in relation to those other instruments that provide certainty and security of the work time performed and attributable.

How are the hours of workers traveling to clients recorded?

In relation to workers posted outside the usual work center, with or without overnight stays, the daily recording of the working day does not alter the application of the general statutory rules, and the effective working time must be recorded.

All this information is recorded in the Spanish “Guide on the registration of working hours“, a file published by the Ministry of Labour, Migration and Social Security and whose objective is to facilitate the implementation of the mentioned law.

Although after the pandemic it seems that most companies are migrating to virtual / digital work, there are many who still have doubts about when and how to do it. With this new regulation, virtual work must also be controlled and from Workdeck we offer a platform with the possibility of controlling work time, focused on project management and that allows a holistic vision of what is happening in the company.

If you want, you can start your free trial of our platform here!

 

February 24, 2023

Gantt chart: an excellent tool to manage tasks

CollaborationProductivity
The Gantt chart is a widely used project management tool due to its effectiveness in planning, scheduling, and tracking projects. The usefulness of this methodology lies in the fact that it allows a clear and simple visualization of the tasks to be done, the time required and the period in which it has to be carried out. In this blog we will tell you how it works and what are the advantages of using a Gantt chart.

The Gantt chart was first created in the mid-1890s by Polish engineer Karol Adamiecki, who called it a harmonogram and developed it as a method of graphically presenting interdependent processes in order to improve the visibility of schedules. Fifteen years later, an American engineer, Henry Gantt, created his own version of the chart and popularized it into the chart we know today, which bears his name.

Its popularity increased because of the efficiency it provides throughout an entire project development process. The advantages that stand out the most about its implementation are:

1. Planning: Helps project managers plan the tasks required to complete a project and establish a realistic and achievable schedule.

2. Scheduling: Allows PMs to schedule tasks and resources efficiently,avoiding task scheduling conflicts and maximizing the use of available resources.

3. Follow-up: Allows continuous monitoring of the progress of the project, which allows possible delays or deviations from the original plan to be detected in time.

4. Communication: Excellent tool for communicating the project plan to all stakeholders, including project team members, project sponsors, and clients.

5. Decision Making: Helps project managers make informed decisions, including resource allocation, task rescheduling, and potential risk identification.

How does a Gantt chart work?

As we mentioned, the diagram is generally used for project management, since it allows visualization of how tasks and projects progress over a certain period of time. Its visualization is usually structured by: projects, tasks, month, year and weeks of work. Now, we will show you an example of this chart in Workdeck’s platform:

In the left side of the image, there are the tasks or activities that are part of a project.

Using Workdeck’s Gantt chart, you can see who are the employees assigned to each task, the time scheduled and the time already worked on each task.

At the top, there is a timeline that spans the length of the project. In this case, the project can be viewed by month, but if desired, the project can be analyzed by day or week.

Each task is assigned a time frame and then a bar is built to delimit the start and end of the task. There are many variants of this diagram, and in the case of Workdeck, it was created to make project and task management even easier. Each color has a meaning , milestones and problems can be also marked in order to have a holistic vision of each project.

As we can see, the Gantt chart has the ability to show in a single image the duration of projects and tasks, the relationship between them, objectives to be completed and possible risks.

Workdeck’s Gantt chart is synchronized with the Kanban chart (you can read more about this tool in the article: The Kanban methodology: a tool to optimize work) and with the calendar. In this way, any change or modification made to the platform will always be reflected in the diagram.

Finally, Workdeck also provides the ability to attach files, have conversations and leave comments, all from the Gantt chart so that each user can have full knowledge of the status of projects and tasks.

As we mentioned, there are many variants of the Gantt chart and it is important to use one that fits the needs of the company and allows employees to be more efficient and effective. If you want to try Workdeck’s Gantt chart, feel free to request your free trial of the platform here!

February 13, 2023

11 tips to work from home and be more productive

Productivity
It is not a secret that in the last three years, home office has increased considerably. Currently, there are many companies that have put this dynamic into practice, achieving excellent results. For employees, virtual work gives the possibility of achieving a better work-life balance. However, there are multiple challenges that can affect this. In today's article, we give you 11 tips that will help you stay organized with your work-from-home routines.

Working from home has increased due to the pandemic, the appearance of new platforms and the need of having a balance between life and work. The benefits of working from home are:

  • Schedule flexibility: employees can adjust their work schedule to suit their personal needs.
  • Time and cost savings: By not having to travel, workers can save time and reduce transportation costs. This will result in an improvement of quality life.
  • Greater efficiency: Many companies have discovered that home office can improve the productivity of their employees.

However, there are also different challenges and routines to modify when an employee starts to work every day from his home. They must know how to deal with work and personal life. Loneliness and lack of interaction between coworkers can become a problem if it is not managed properly. For this reason, it is essential to implement a work routine that helps us not to lose motivation and make remote work a great experience. Having established schedules, a place that avoids distractions or writing things down are just some of the habits that help us work effectively.

These are our tips in order to improve the working from home experience:

  1. Take advantage of the time you save from traveling to start working earlier: It is not advisable to wake up ten minutes before turning on the computer, rather, ideally a person has to be active an hour before starting work. Therefore, waking up early and taking time to eat breakfast, read the news and change clothes is a good strategy to start working more focused.
  2. Set your working hours: Deciding when to start and finish working allows us to have a balance between work and personal life.
  3. Organize the day as if you were in the office: Set your schedule in order to rest, eat and have meetings. Being at home means a benefit as long as you are not distracted by household chores, family or other things.
  4. Have your own workspace organized: Avoid sitting on the sofa or with the TV on, you must have a workspace clean and where you can spend several hours per day working without distractions
  5. Look for other spaces to work: Choose a nearby cafe to continue working from there and not shutting you down at home.
  6. Avoid social networks: It is known that when we are in the office, we do not use social networks in the same way and with the same frequency as at home. Therefore, when working from home, it is advisable to avoid the temptation to access Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok or any other social network.
  7. Work on the most complex activities at the time you feel most productive: Detecting the moments of greatest inspiration to dedicate them to the most difficult tasks or those that take the longest is a great strategy for your day to day. Therefore, it is important to define these hours based on personal productivity (either morning, afternoon or night).
  8. Hold regular conversations with your work team: This allows everyone to be aligned and feel like you are working as a team. Being part of a team makes us work harder to meet goals and increases personal work performance.
  9. Work with music: If it does not affect your concentration, music can help you focus and avoid the feeling of loneliness.
  10. Take breaks between tasks: At the office, we usually stop working to have a coffee or connect with our colleagues. Being at home, we must maintain these habits, get up from the chair and spend ten minutes doing laundry. This helps to rest your head and return to work even more focused.
  11. Use all the tools that your company offers you to stay connected: organize your time and increase your productivity: Make regular calls with your coworkers, assign responsibilities, define tasks, follow-up meetings, etc. You will see that the positive energy of work becomes an ally.

Currently, there are software that have multiple tools to manage projects, organize teams, monitor tasks in real time and facilitate remote work, both for companies and workers. At Workdeck, we offer all of these implementations and more. An integrated platform that allows you to manage projects simply and efficiently. It has various tools, for example: own communication channels, calendar management, expense and purchase management, and much more.

If you are interested in starting your free trial or learning more about Workdeck, feel free to contact us here!

 

February 3, 2023

Kanban methodology: a tool for optimizing work

InnovationTechnology
In order to have a better working experience while working from home, different tools are required. Today we will talk about the Kanban methodology, a process that allows us to visualize the status of projects, the stage of development they are in and who is responsible for each task. All this info is presented in an easy to understand structure where everything is connected and concentrated in one place.

If your company works in communication, marketing, software development, engineering or any industry that involves project management from a digital platform, surely you have heard of this efficient and popular method, since the Kanban board offers an overview of all projects and allows us to better understand and plan resources. In this article we will discuss what Kanban is, what its functions are and how it is organized.

What is the Kanban board?

The Kanban chart is a project management tool that helps to visualize the workflow and monitor the progress of a project. It was originally developed in the year 1940 in Japan to improve production efficiency at the Toyota factory. It is based on the idea of ​​limiting the work of each employee and making visible any component that can slow down the performance of projects. It is a method that helps teams achieve a balance between the actual tasks and the future ones.

The Kanban system was initially created for physical work environments, such as a car factory. However, today this system has been adapted for virtual environments where software, service or IT companies plan all their workloads to have better predictability and avoid possible delays. In this way, each employee has a more specific job that allows him to improve the quality of it and reduce errors.

How does it work?

This technique uses cards, categories and columns to drive continuous improvement for technology and service teams. In this way, the total amount of work is planned to accomplish the tasks in a given period of time. Currently, it is used in work methodologies such as Scrum and Agile.

According to David AndersenKanban boards have five components: visual images, columns, clear limits, commitment and delivery point. The three fundamental principles of this methodology are: visualize the workflow, limit the work in progress and make visible any potential delay in the process.

Some of the benefits of using the Kanban methodology are:

  1. Efficiency improvement: By making workflow visible, possible delays can be identified before they occur..
  2. Greater flexibility: by not having a set plan in advance, they can easily adapt to changes in the project.
  3. Continuous collaboration: By having an overview of the workflow, all team members can see the progress of the project and collaborate to complete it.
  4. Quality improvement: ​limiting work in progress makes this work become more efficient.
  5. Transparency: By visualizing the workflow, you can easily see the progress of the project and spot any issues.

This type of work methodology seeks the democratization of leadership, in order to quickly progress in each of our tasks, and making people feel autonomous. You must constantly focus on the needs and expectations of the client in order to manage the work and allow each employee to organize their work. Kanban methodology is used to improve efficiency, flexibility, collaboration, quality, and transparency in project management and resource management.

How to organize your board in Kanban?

1.Visualize the workflow

To visualize all the workflow, you must have a board with cards and columns. Each column represents the state in which a task is, therefore, to each one, you must assign the corresponding task with all the possible specifications and risks.

Remember that as a project progresses, the tasks will move between columns, which are usually ordered by the following categories:  assigned tasks, To do, In progress, Done

2. Limit work in progress

Kanban is oriented towards the early delivery of tasks that must be moved quickly in order not to stall the work process. In this way, it is possible to empty the “in progress” column by setting work limits so that managers focus on finishing individual tasks and do not accumulate many at the same time.

3. Manage the workflow

Managing the workflow makes it easy to control the time spent on each task. With this type of control, it is possible to reduce the delivery time of each task.

One of the goals of the Kanban board is to build a smooth workflow. Rather than focusing on the working hours of each employee, it focuses on the workflow and delivery time of each task.

4. Implement explicit process policies

The most important thing about this whole process is that the work team understands, assimilates and becomes familiar with it. For this reason, the work processes must be well defined and assigned, so that people see the benefits of this methodology and the objectives pursued by each project.

The requirement to implement policies in the work processes lies in the care of communication, so that everything advances in coherence.

5. Feedback loops

Within Kanban, it is essential to collect feedback from both the work team and customers. In the case of workers, asking questions about the work process and its completion can be projected as an opportunity to strengthen professional ties at all levels and gradually improve the dynamics.

Gathering customer feedback on the quality and effectiveness of the service produced by the team serves to recognize internal strengths and weaknesses that will allow us to do a better job in the future, enhancing strong points and improving weak ones.

6. Improve by collaborating and evolve by experimenting

Kanban suggests constant improvement and if it is linked with other project management tools. There are many management tools for Scrum and Agile methodologies.

One of them is Workdeck, which among its multiple integrated tools, offers the Kanban board. We invite you to discover the all-in-one platform to have your virtual office. Start your free trial and find out how to work with Kanban boards and much more!

January 23, 2023

9 benefits of working from home with your pet

CollaborationProductivityTechnology
If you are a pet owner and work from home, this article is for you. We will tell you about the benefits of virtual work for you and your pet and we give you some tips so that you can organize your tasks and spend more quality time with your best friend.

One of the great changes that the COVID-19 pandemic brought was the migration to start working from virtual spaces. Since 2020, home office is a growing trend and it has proven that it provides important advantages for both companies and workers. We`ve already explained the positive aspects of remote work in “The Digital Workplace boom: A trend that is here to stay“, but now we want to talk about the benefits of working from home when you have a pet.

From the moment we decide to dedicate part of our lives to a pet, we know that it will bring with it a lot of joy to our houses. However, having a pet demands time that sometimes we lack due to the schedule that we carry between work and other things. Since companies began to establish home office as a modality, pet care not only became easier, but also gave way to multiple positive changes in the owner-pet relationship.

Working from home with a pet can have a lot of benefits for mental and physical health. For example:

  1. Stress reduction: Spending time with our pet is really comforting and helps reduce anxiety and stress. This can improve the ability to concentrate and increase productivity.
  2. Improved mental health: Physical contact with a pet can release oxytocin, a hormone associated with  well being and relaxation. This can help reduce stress and improve mental health.
  3. Improved physical health: Interacting with a pet can help improve physical health. Walking or playing with your pet can help improve physical condition and reduce the risk of inactivity-related diseases.
  4. Reduced loneliness: Working from home can be lonely, but having a pet around can provide company and reduce feelings of loneliness.
  5. Improved emotional well-being: Caring for a pet can help develop a sense of responsibility and grant a purpose in life that transcends the tangible.
  6. Greater flexibility: Working from home with a pet can provide a greater level of flexibility in terms of hours and the place of work. This helps reduce the problems that come from leaving your pet alone for long periods of time.
  7. Increased creativity: Spending time with a pet can help inspire new ideas and increase creativity. Animals can provide a fresh and different perspective on work problems and challenges.
  8. Improved productivity: Working from home with a pet can help establish a regular routine and schedule, which can improve productivity and efficiency.
  9. Enhanced Teamwork: While working from home with a pet can make you feel lonely, it can also help improve teamwork by enhancing communication and support among team members who are also working from home with pets. The similarities between peers facilitate a  fluid communication and more collaborations.

However, it is important to keep in mind that working remotely with our pets at home can present new challenges in addition to those that already exist on a day-to-day basis, such as distractions and organizational problems. A new dynamic must be adopted in terms of planning work and free time. Therefore, it is very important to establish a specific place of the house to work in which pets cannot access so as not to generate interruptions and establish clear limits during work time and breaks.

As we’ve mentioned before, it is proven that living with pets at home helps us to release large amounts of stress and by playing with them, we can forget about our problems and at the same time make them happy. Pets are very special members of the family since they are the ones who are with us at all times and always give us pure and unconditional love.

You have to be flexible, and willing to adapt to changes and find what works best for both of you. Walking your dog during meetings can be an efficient strategy to clear your head and have new and renewed ideas.. Also, with all the remote work tools that exist today, we can walk our pet and continue reading emails or answering chats.

It is important to be able to plan the work and have a routine in which you eat breakfast, walk the dog, have lunch and take breaks. It is useless to be working all day without taking breaks because you run the risk of burnout. You must take advantage of the planning tools of your company, so that each person manages their work and their times in the best way. Platforms like Workdeck offer a virtual workspace that facilitates organization and work performance.

In case your current company does not have this type of management tools, we invite you to discover Workdeck, a platform to have your virtual office and manage your projects, expenses, purchases and much more.

 

January 11, 2023

Digital Workplace: The new trend

Technology
Nowadays, there are more organizations adopting a Digital Workspace in order to manage projects. Due to Covid 19 and the prohibition of physically attending to offices, there has been an increase in the use of Digital Workplaces, since many companies discovered that they can reduce expenses and improve performance with home-office.

Digital Workplace refers to work in an environment that uses technology to improve productivity and efficiency. This usually includes the use of online communication, collaboration tools, project management systems, tasks and other applications that help teamwork. The goal of a Digital Workplace is to provide a smoother and easier experience, allowing each employee to access the information and tools they need quickly and easily.

Matt Cain comments that, according to data from the Gartner Digital Workplace survey (2021), 68% of the surveyed employees say that managers have increased their interest in Digital Workplaces since the pandemic.

Companies around the world choose to have a Digital Workspace because it has low economic costs and high adoption from the employees. Each worker is allowed to work from anywhere and improves their productivity.

There are several potential benefits for companies that centralize their day-to-day activities in management software:

  1. Greater efficiency: Online communication and collaboration platforms allows better interaction between workers since there are several ways to organize meetings and chat between each other.
  2. More flexibility: Workers can access their work from anywhere, without going to a physical office.
  3. Better use of time: Employees are more productive and they do not spend time traveling to the office.
  4. Cost reduction: By not having to provide a physical workspace, companies can lower their infrastructure costs.
  5. Better control of the status of projects: Since everything is on one platform, managers can easily track the progress of each project.

It is important to evaluate the needs of the company and choose the tool or application that best suits them. There is a significant number of platforms that are used to manage projects, tasks, resources, optimize workflows and promote communication between departments. Workdeck is one of them, but it offers a service that includes more functionalities and integration tools such as Gantt diagram, Kanban, chat, Google Workspace, Office 365, among others.

If you want to learn more about our platform, we invite you to start the 15-day free trial or request a demo with one of our account executives. Start today your business transformation with Workdeck.

1 Predicts 2022: Digital Workplace Is Foundational for Employee Experience (gartner.com)