Recently I started working as a freelancer and had to setup an home office.
My home office setup
In the picture you can see my 19″ Samsung SyncMaster B1930, a Toshiba Satellite L755 with 6Gb Ram and 360 Gb of disk space, my 500Gb Iomega external disk, a NGS wireless mouse and keyboard and my London User Research Center sketching notepad. And this covers for me as far as hardware goes.
Have you ever wondered why time seems to fly when you are at the office? It’s interesting to see how a business owner understands the main distractions during an office day. Blame the M&M’s.
Jason Fried is one of the founders of 37 Signals, the makers of Basecamp, Highrise, Campfire and Backpack and author of Rework.
In this video Jason Fried talks about how 37 signals started, and how it growth to their current business model, how 37 signals offices work. It’s interesting understanding how 37 signals works in a very silent way in order to prevent distractions and prioritize work.
Probably the best mentality in 37 signals is their “horizontal growth” philosophy where their workers grow themself doing what they are really good at instead of being promoted and taken away from what they are really good at.
One of my challenges this year working on a new agency has been building reputation inside the agency where nobody knows my work. This has been particularly difficult since the agency only started building the online department after my arrival. From my collaboration with my colleagues, that work for the agency for some years now, I noticed that my oppinion is taken into consideration but it’s not the strongest one. I needed to built reputation.
It has not been an easy task trying to figure out how to build a reputation when work doesn’t flow that often or when my contribute is very small since most projects are in other departments. I have been brainstorming for a while now but I have found the answer when participating, again a very little contribute, on a project brainstorming when my answer resolved the design department issue on the spot and was not difficult to design or create. And so it hit me. Create a sense of efficiency.
A sense of efficciency is the feeling you get when doing a good work. And if you are able to spread that feeling to the people around you hey will not only incentivate that you participate more actively on projects but they’ll also believe that your participation will make a difference. Working efficiently means you are focus and driven to achieving results.
As a final note, during this process I tended to become a little self centered but eventually learned to look at other people”s feedback as a challenge due to their specific needs instead of thinking their point of views was the product of a concept implemented through what they consider correct in the past and eventually this made my job more interesting.
I’ll leave you with a video where Ross Dunn talks about reputation enhancement. An interesting talk on how to build reputation online. Even though Ross does not mention efficiency, Ross refers participation and engagement as key factors to building your online reputation. This is the same principle of what I have mentioned before. Share interesting point of views that are usefull or that resolve other poeple’s issues and they will start trusting you.
It works just like Twitter but every company has it’s own personal stream and only users with a valid company email can access it. Eventually you can create communities, which I call projects, and invite other users, with different emails without the restriction to valid company email, to those communities.
Like I mentioned Yammer works very similar to Twitter so you can use basically the same commands to communicate and search. For example you can mention someone by adding @username to your “Yam” or send a personal direct message by typing to:username.
Yammer allows you to attach files up to 50Mb with no limit in the amount of data stored at your network, meaning you can upload as many files as you want, as long as they are not over 50Mb.
Another great feature is the ability to follow people and tags, allowing you to be on top of project conversations via Yammer, E-mail or RSS feed.
Yammer has 3 pricing plans with fairly reasonable pricing per user per month, Free, Silver and Gold.
If you are simple looking to communicate the free version is all you need but if you are looking for more control a paid version is advisable. Check Yammer’s pricing page for full list of features available on each plan.
In March 2010 I started working on a startup company called Oferta Global – Web marketing services as a web and seo consultant. I felt the need to implement a few tools to improve our archiving and communication.
In April Oferta Global implemented Yammer to help improve organization and project management and with it the whole theme has a common place to share conversations and files regarding the projects we are working on, categorize messages using tags and keeping an archive of all the exchanged messages. The best of all is that Yammer works just like Twitter which made it a whole lot easier to use.
For me the biggest difference I find using Yammer comes when I’m searching the archives for a specific message or file when comparing to the hundreds of emails, many times what I want is a reply between many other replies and the whole email system is just a mess.
I recommend you give it a try, it’s free. It might not be the perfect tool for all businesses but can really improve internal communication. And in case you are still suspicious about giving it a try, companies like Adobe, AMX and Fox use Yammer so why shouldn’t you?
Copyright © 2012 Mário Andrade. All Rights Reserved.
Designed by