Engage your employees!

A common problem for almost all workplaces is the lack of employees’ engagement. We may blame it on the employee, but when the majority of employees suffer from it, workplaces know they are also part of the problem, or perhaps their management techniques.

However, employees are not hard to satisfy, and they can be happy in a workplace even if they are not paid very large sums. In fact, in a study, 90% of employees said that a more fun work environment increases their engagement and 72% of the engaged employees confirmed that their opinion was taken into consideration by their company. One may consider stress as a normal factor in work, but constant stress is bad. And although a manager has more experience that the employees he manages, but it does not mean employees do not have great ideas.

So treat your employees like you would treat your date to make them happy: talk to them about their interests, care for their opinion and point of view, and offer them activities that interest them, not just activities that interest your company. Their engagement will return with plenty of benefits to the company!

This content was originally posted on https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6538329110396174336

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Change your online behavior to save the Earth! (1)

It seems strange that being online is causing pollution. We are using a computer, reducing the need for paper, not travelling distances to communicate, and we are using mostly energy efficient machines that have a low average electricity consumption. So why does being online cause pollution? And what can we do to reduce it?
In this part, we will be giving you tips on how to reduce your personal carbon footprint impact. In part 2, we will give you tips on how your company can act greener and reduce its Internet pollution impact!
I gathered the best advice from various sources, I hope you will enjoy the content!

Internet Pollution

Are you familiar with the term Internet pollution? It is a term that refers to the pollution caused by the data processing servers and data centers, since they consume a lot of energy. In fact, a data center on average consumes the same amount of energy as 30’000 European inhabitants DAILY! Energy is used to power and cool down servers, and ensures that they operate c continuously in case there’s a failure. Since the world still relies heavily on dirty energy, this energy is causing an additional release of CO2!

Retrieved from CCCB Lab, Source: Jon Koomey.

The Internet pollution, also known as Digital Pollution, originates mainly from activities that require a lot of resources, such as streaming videos, mining for bitcoins, and sending/storing emails.

How can I help?

You may think that as a user, you may not make a difference. It is true that the upgrade of data centers and servers is up to the companies. But you can reduce your own activities’ carbon footprint and energy requirements with a few steps:

Take care of your email

Clean your inbox regularly, and get rid of those thousands of emails that you stored a long time ago to read later on, but never did. If you are a nostalgic person and you saved every email your friends and family sent you, just save these letters on your computer and remove them from your inbox, you’ll be doing the Earth a favor.

Unsubscribe from the useless newsletters that you do not read, it will reduce the distraction created by recurrent incoming mail, reduce the number of emails uselessly stored, and help you find the important emails faster.

Send short, clear, and easy to read emails, with optimized attachements. It will require less energy to send and receive the content, and your recipient(s) will need less time to read the email, and understand your goals better. If the email is unclear, you will receive back another email demanding clarifications, which will cause an unnecessary amount of energy to be spent for additional emails.

Use compressed and light format files in your email attachements and when uploading files to an online drive. If you are sharing a photo with family, prefer JPEG format to Bitmap to reduce the size, and you can always resize it. Although a 10 megapixels photo is cool, unless you need professional work done on the photo, you can have a great photo quality for 5 megapixels as well. You can easily resize the photo using Paint or online tools.

Don’t check your email all the time. To avoid missing out on important emails, we advise you to have a personal email for all the personal emails, and a professional email for all education and work emails.
You can stop all the incoming email notifications during work hours from your personal email, and you can disconnect from work by turning off the notifications of your professional emails during your off-work time. Not only will you reduce the carbon footprint, you will also be able to work with much less interruptions and have a better performance during work hours, and be able to disconnect better from work and its stress in your off-duty hours.

Unless you REALLY NEED to, don’t use the “reply to all” option when sending back an email. Send the follow-up message only to the concerned people.

Make use of the subject line in emails to inform your recipient about the content, so they know whether it is urgent/important enough to read on the spot, or whether they can read it later.

Act more responsibly online

This part is really important. You need to reduce any unnecessary carbon emissions that your online presence may cause.

Choose a greener online cloud service, use lighter file formats, and reduce the unnecessary use of online space. We know it’s awesome to have a free cloud storage and put all our treasured memories, but it is also consuming too much energy, when you can keep an offline copy on an external storage and/or your computer. Make sure to back-up regularly your files and remove that 4 year old university project that you saved online when you feared you might lose it.

Reduce the number of photos you share on social media by removing unnecessary photos. These photos take a large space off servers, and with the increasing number of users, companies keep on adding data servers to cover the need. Your school photos are really cute, but do you really need an album of 100 photos to confirm it?

Delete your old accounts if you no longer use them, and don’t create unnecessary email addresses just for fun. Although it’s cool to have 1 extra free month from Netflix when using a new account, it’s doing a lot of harm when you consider the number of users doing it.

Bookmark the websites you always visit, instead of researching them every time you want to use them. It will save a whole lot of energy.

Reduce the time you spend online. Since pages usually keep on loading, if you have a long read, you can download the web page as offline copy, or simply disconnect yourself from the internet until you need to use it again.

Optimize your research by using specific keywords and favorite your frequent searches. Remember that each search is using more energy. Prefer using green search engines like Ecosia, as they use way less energy, and prefer clean energy to dirty one. In addition, many of them use the revenue to support an environmental cause!

Research the companies whose services you’re using. You will discover which ones are working towards greener services and which ones do not care about it at all. A good reference is RE100, a reference for companies that pledged to use 100% renewable energy. RE100 is a global corporate leadership initiative bringing together influential businesses committed to 100% renewable electricity. You can also check Clickclean, an initiative by Greenpeace. They do annual reports on the green performance of large corporations, and they do campaigns to influence companies to turn green through petitions.

The next time you think that you can be more eco-friendly when using online services, think twice! Sometimes, their environmental impact is worse than doing things the traditional way. If you can communicate it live, prefer it to sending emails or instant messages. If you feel safe to store a file on local drives, prefer it to cloud systems.

One person may have a small impact, but when a group of people do it, they can make a difference and inspire others to do so as well. So make sure to inform others on how to reduce their online carbon footprint as well!

Crafts tips (1)

Crafts are really fun, but a lot of resources is wasted. But sometimes, a little care can help you save your tools and keep them in a good state for longer. In this post, I will add some useful tips that helped me out:

1. Bad scissors: if your scissors are no longer cutting well, they need to be resharpened. Rather than a scissors sharpener that may not be available, use sand paper: cut with the scissors the sand paper and the abrasion of the paper will sharpen them. You can use a small test paper, and keep on cutting in the sand paper until you’re satisfied. The sand paper can be cut into pieces that you can use for other projects.
2. Spraying: you want to spray but you don’t want to ruin the covers you’re using? Opt for a cardboard box. Put the item to spray inside it, and spray it to your heart’s content!
3. Sticky cuts: you want to cut duct tape but you don’t want to ruin your scissors? Run some baby wipes on the scissors prior to cutting, and they will not stick as much to the tape.
4. Tape residues on scissors: if your scissors have tape or glue on them, they’re not ruined. You soak your scissors in lukewarm water for 30 seconds then open and close the scissors to get rid of the glue. Repeat as much as needed. An alcohol wiping can help you get rid of the stubborn residues.
5. Old tape roll: if you are finding it hard to use an old tape roll, put it in the microwave for 10 seconds (make sure it doesn’t have foil in it) so that its glue will loosen up rather than stick altogether.
6. Stained paintbrushes: paintbrushes are not that cheap if you work with high quality. To keep them in a good state, wash the bristles and the ferrule (metal tip that holds the bristles) with shampoo or soap, gently rub to keep the bristles unharmed, then rince well with lukewarm water. They need to be stored either horizontally or vertically with the bristles up.

These are few ideas and I will be adding some more soon!

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