Management Archives

Meditation Apps to Keep Your Cool

Posted on July 23, 2015November 21, 2024 by Kersten

Do you sometimes just need a BREAK in the middle of the workday? Turns out, many people do. Meditation has been shown, by like, a whole lot of studies, to reduce stress, improve health and reduce blood pressure, increase concentration, and kind of generally, to make people nicer. Well, at least more compassionate. That’s a good start to helping you have a better day.

There are many different kinds of meditation, like “mindfulness”, which just means paying attention to feelings and thoughts in a non-judgmental way; this kind of meditation is good for improving memory and attention span, as well as reducing stress. Another form of meditation is guided or mantra meditations. These are easier to follow and don’t rely so much on your brain to keep itself in line. They are better for relaxation of the mind and can be well-suited to people with Type A personalities. Breathing exercises are great to soothe the nervous system and reduce stress and anxiety, as well as reduce depression. Meditations on love and kindness work toward developing feelings of warmth, goodwill and kindness towards others. This kind of meditation can improve feelings of well-being and relieve illness, and the compassion and empathy you develop through it can improve health and increase longevity.

Well now, there’s an app for that! Lots of them, in fact. Here is a list of some of the most highly recommended meditation or mindfulness apps so you can get your “Om” on at work and recover your equilibrium during a stressful day:

1. Headspace – This app helps you to learn how to meditate in 10 minutes a day. It contains meditations to help you get to sleep quickly and easily, how to reduce stress during your commute, and more. It has reminders, and allows you to keep track of your progress. Introductory app is free, the premium subscription comes at a price.

1. Sattva – A comprehensive and advances meditation app that offers a wide variety of guided meditations led by experts, and includes a timer, heart rate monitor, mood tracker, and gives you challenges and trophies to help you keep track of reaching your goals and the meditation’s impact on your state of well-being. The app is free of charge.

1. Buddhify – Besides having the best name, this app is easy to use and provides several guided meditation tracks for different activities, like eating, traveling, and working. This app is specifically designed for busy people who still want to take care of their minds. This app comes at a fee.

1. Stop, Breathe & Think – This app prompts you to check in with how you are feeling– mentally, physically and emotionally, and then provides meditations to go with, or improve, your current mood. You can track your progress, as well as learn about how meditation works and how it helps you. There are many different meditation topics such as: kindness, equanimity, compassion, gratitude, and more.

The Mindfulness App – This one features guided meditations from various teachers, as well as reminders and timers for meditation. The app comes at a fee.

Check these (and others) out to help improve your day, and your life!

Sources here and here

Making Customer Loyalty Programs Better Through Apps

Posted on July 8, 2015November 21, 2024 by Kersten

What, you mean most people don’t carry around fifty punch-cards anymore?

Those were the days…a simple buy 10, get ONE free punch card, and that was pretty much all that companies did to reward their loyal (or caffeine-addicted) customers. As we well know, customers are always looking for that extra “something” that makes their experience better at one store/website than another. A loyalty app on customers’ smartphones is a convenient and effective way to give repeat-shoppers incentives to make sure they continue to frequent your business. There are many different ways of enticing consumers to step into your business, or to frequent it online. You can still stick with the punch-card idea, but without customers having to physically carry a little piece of paper (that does NO good when you leave it in your junk drawer at home), because almost nobody leaves home without his or her smartphone!

There are apps that act as digital punch-cards, automatically recording purchases and rewarding customers when they reach the goal to get something for free. This is great, and of course it works, but there are also new developments in apps that allow companies to provide repeat (or lots of repeats) customers with different incentives. One such innovation, which will be implemented sometime this year by Capriotti’s, a sandwich shop that has 106 stores in 16 states in the U.S., is a points-based system in which customers will earn points and increase their status per dollar spent. The rewards will become more valuable as status increases, and their most loyal customers will also receive “surprise-and-delight offers.” These “surprise” offers will allow Capriotti’s to award a free item at the register to the most highly valued customers on about 20% of their visits. This way, they are rewarding frequent customers and giving them incentives (freebies!) to return again and again.

Apps can use social media data if they are tied to Facebook profiles or other social media accounts; allowing business’ to understand customers’ purchasing behavior, what they’re interests are, and how they can better market to them, all through the data collected on purchases made and rewards given. The most important thing about all these buyer-incentive programs is getting to know your customers so that you can try to make them loyal to your company. Apps developed by the company Punchh use data from social media profiles to even give rewards to people who recommend their friends visit a company’s Facebook page. Upon visiting the page, the friend who recommended it will receive a notification informing him or her of the reward. Incentives can also come in the form of games on smartphones (like Candy Crush, but with a purpose). These mobile loyalty apps engage customers even while they are not physically in the business or buying anything from it.

Check out these apps for customer loyalty programs and ask The Agency which one could work best with your business.

Sources here, here & here

It Turns Out, You Can Buy Experiences

Posted on April 8, 2015 by Kersten

And millennials prefer spending their money on experiences, rather than objects

But you only really want to if you’re a Millennial. According to recent studies conducted by ZenithOptimedia and Eventbrite, Millennials prefer spending their money (which is a pretty good chunk of change now) on experiences, rather than objects. The experiential aspect of a product or event is what inspires people to spend their money on it. Millennials, born from about 1980-1996, are now America’s largest generation by population, and are entering into their prime earning age, currently contributing about $1.3 trillion dollars annually to the economy. The difference between Millennials and earlier generations, however, is the fact that they consider experiencing live events such as: concerts, parties, festivals, participating in sporting events or cultural activities is an important part of “connecting” with their community and the world. The constant connection (internet, cellular phones, etc.) that Millennials have lived with since an early age, and the fact that many have been exposed to high-quality and high-priced goods and gifts since childhood, is changing their priorities. 18 to 34 year-olds are less likely to consider expensive or luxury goods as a priority, they value a life experience over “having things”.

That’s not to say Millennials don’t appreciate money; in the study conducted by ZenithOptimedia, 60% of the respondents said that the most important factor in making them feel like an adult was “financial independence”. This means that a huge sector of the American population is ready to consume and is looking for added value in the product or event. Also, 59% and 32%, respectively, responded that they, when experiencing something new or entertaining, would take a photograph and post a photo online…this has to do with the whole “constant connection” thing that Millennials have been living since it began.

What we (as companies) should learn from all this, is that social media is an incredibly important marketing tool. Even if our product is a physical one, we can add an experiential aspect to it by creating interactive feedback, websites, Facebook profiles, Instagram accounts, etc. And we should start getting creative! With a little creativity, we can add a special value to all kinds of events and life experiences to make them more attractive to Millennials.

Sources were here, here & here

Meditation, It’s Good for the…….Office?

Posted on March 9, 2015 by Kersten

Meditation directly benefits our work persona & relationships

We probably pretty much all know that meditation is good for us; it helps relieve stress, reduce negative emotions, strengthen our immune system, improve our attention span (especially important these days), and can even improve mental functions. And although all of us here at The Agency could seriously use some meditation, we, like lots of other people, don’t usually do it.

More and more studies are showing that meditation directly benefits our work persona and relationships, making us better leaders by increasing our levels of compassion. Increased compassion for co-workers results in reciprocal compassion, and the formation of real bonds between leaders and their team members. Meditation is all about self-knowledge, so with regular practice, we can begin to identify and later eliminate habits or patterns in our lives and work that harm us, or simply aren’t working to our benefit. Meditating during the work day can help clear your mind and keep you productive, or just calm you down if you feel like you want to stick a fork in your, or someone else’s eye. Don’t act like that doesn’t ever happen to you, it does.

There are several different types of meditation practices, such as mantras, emptying the mind, transcendental meditation (using a personally-assigned word or image to meditate), or even yoga, tai chi, or Qi gong. You probably can’t break into a Downward Dog pose at your desk, but you could do a silent meditation at your work station, or start and end your day with meditation. Research the different types of meditation, and try them all to see which is best for you. Your brain will thank you

Source here, here & here

Taking Notes Old School

Posted on February 22, 2015 by Kersten

Taking notes by hand can improve your retention and productivity.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past…lots of years, you probably use a laptop or some other computer (smart-phone, tablet, etc.) to help you remember and do just about everything. Everything. But according to several studies, it is much better for your retention, understanding and synthesis of ideas to write things down. Especially if you are a student taking notes in a lecture or if you are in a meeting at work. According to one recent study conducted with college students by Pam Mueller and Danny Oppenheimer that appeared in the June, 2014 issue of Psychological Science, they instructed half of the students to take notes by hand and the other half were told to use their laptops. Shortly after the lectures, the students were tested on the factual aspects and then their conceptual understanding of the topics. In all the tests that measured conceptual understanding, those that took notes by hand performed better. Much better. Writing notes out by hand, or even just listening to someone talk, and writing down important points forces your brain to actually use cognitive functions to synthesize the information you’re hearing and only write down the most important things, in your own words. This helps you to better remember what is said because you probably aren’t The Flash and can’t write down EVERY word that comes out of someone’s mouth.

Plus, the internet exists. Along with a ton of horribly distracting apps, websites, social media and cat videos. And nowadays (yeah, I said it) you pretty much will always have internet while in class or at work. So, if you want to really remember what the heck was going on in that important meeting, try leaving the technology aside and taking notes with those flexible, helpful little appendages attached to your arms, and a pen and paper (recycled of course).

Sources here, here & here.

How Do You Roll?

Posted on October 22, 2014 by Kersten

Leadership in the workplace

What is your leadership style? Yelly and pointy? Or are you a team player? Studies show that people are more productive when their boss is passionate, honest, and energetic. True leaders motivate their employees by engaging with them personally, and while their priority may be to help the group as a whole achieve its goals; they are also concerned with helping each member of the team reach his or her full potential. Being a good leader isn’t easy, but here are some ideas for being a better boss: be a role model for your team and scrutinize your own actions so that you can lead by example. Following the footsteps of someone you admire is always easier than following a dictator. Be clear with your employees about expectations of performance standards and exactly what you want them to do; but do not avoid conversations with low performers, they should know why their work isn’t up to par, and how they can improve. Encourage creativity and contributions from your team members, you will still retain the final say over all decisions, but trying out suggestions from your workers will help keep them enthusiastic and engaged with the project and the company. Offer rewards and recognition for good work, such as putting praise in writing or publicly praising your employees. Rewards can also be monetary, and really any type of recognition helps to motivate people to continue to work hard. Listen more than you talk, and when you do talk, communicate effectively what you would like to say. Make your interactions personal, and let your people know that you are there to help each one of them be a successful part of a very successful whole.

The balance is somewhere in between drinking buddy and Elsa from “Frozen” (who will ice you at the first slip-up). It is important to be pleasant and get along well with your workers, always trying to motivate them to do better with you; and not forcing them into working in ways that don’t make them feel productive. You’ll have about as much luck as you would trying to lick your elbow, and you’ll look equally cool doing it. A good boss determines whether his or her people stay or go, so try to keep the high performers motivated, engaged and performing well with your leadership skills.

Just CAN’T Deal With It Today?

Posted on September 17, 2014 by Kersten

Bad press? Losing client confidence? Just CAN’T today? You can’t always avoid mistakes, but there are lots of things you can do to help make them go away faster, and maybe even improve your brand’s image in the process. Probably the first, and best, thing you or your company should do is step away from the situation to help keep a calm, clear head. It’s like the “count to 10” thing your parents always told you to do. Now you can actually use it. Taking your time to respond will help put the incident into perspective, and give you time to plan your response. Don’t take customer (or user) comments personally, and DON’T get defensive. That is an accident waiting to happen. Address negative reviews or comments straight-on, and always be sure to show your customers how you’re responding to the situation and improving. Being transparent about a problem as well as demonstrating your response to it will show your customers you are honest and have integrity. You may not be able to prevent the problem from happening, but your response to it is what is most important. Look at any bad press as an opportunity to receive feedback from your customers and help raise confidence in your brand by solving the problem. If it is just one client’s bad experience, fix it for him and make it better. Word of mouth travels fast, and you want it to be good news if it is about your company! If at all possible, don’t respond publicly on the internet (this goes back to “don’t get defensive”). There are waaaay too many faceless internet users out there just waiting to eat you for dinner.

For fun. Did you hear about the “Amy’s Baking Company” people who appeared on, and got kicked-off, Gordon Ramsay’s “Kitchen Nightmares”? They had a giant internet meltdown on Facebook trying to respond to bad press. They just kept posting and posting, and…posting. Responding in all caps, threatening people, and even invoking God’s wrath on Reddit, Yelp and Facebook users. Holy cats. If you want a great example of what NOT to do, ever, look at what they did. Pretty much in general, just don’t be a jerk. Always listen to your customers and make the necessary changes in your policies or service if the situation warrants. After you take care of the incident, get out there and perform your…face off. Doing great work makes people forget bad situations. If you responded well to the problem and then work hard to do better, you can turn an ugly situation around and make it benefit your company.