Visitor, your JANUARY 2021 Newsletter from Chris Dekle at FocalPoint of Georgia is here

The coronavirus craziness of 2020 set the world – including the business world – on its ear, and certainly many of the changes we’ve seen in HR will carry over well into 2021 and beyond.

However, the savvy HR professional knows that there will be other important trends to manage. After a nod to the recent upheavals, we go deeper and reveal a half dozen non-COVID trends you need to embrace to position your company for 2021 success.

They are missing the shared office experience, causing attitudes and productivity to go downhill.

However, there’s one strategy that boosts performance, reinvigorates workers, instills a sense of personal and professional growth and more. Further, it’s easy to implement, inexpensive (or free) and can be started right now. Sound like something you can use? We detail the strategy in this concise article.

Tired of working in isolation, afraid of losing their jobs, and living with unprecedented uncertainty, the COVID-19 pandemic weighs heavily on employee psyches.

If business owners and managers let this malaise continue unchecked, everyone’s worst fears will be realized. So it’s high time to take action, to do everything you can to restore enthusiasm, confidence, loyalty, and productivity.

Follow the advice of the noted experts who contributed to this guide and you’ll find yourself at the helm of a company that successfully and profitably rode out the pandemic.

Currently a crazy quilt of marijuana laws stretches across the nation from sea to shining sea. What’s legal in one state is often against criminal law in a neighboring state. Toss in the fact that even in states where marijuana use is legal, it may be for just medical purposes or for both medical and recreational use.

Want to complicate it even more? Layer the entire situation under insurance liability, productivity issues, testing problems and a host of other complications. Yes, it is a thorny issue and that’s exactly why we talked to experts in the field to help you safeguard your business.

There’s no doubt that all aspects of business today are moving at head-spinning speeds, so keeping pace with your marketing and product development is paramount to your success and even survival. And, this is exactly where Agile marketing shows its strength.

But do you know enough about Agile marketing to understand what it would mean for your business? We’ve distilled it to its essence and by the time you’re through this quick read, you’ll have the knowledge you need to make the right decision for your company.

The wise student of business is always looking for object lessons from the world in which we live. And, while as business professionals, we have to solve a lot of big problems, few of us has probably ever tackled a problem as big as putting a man on the moon.

Zapier software engineer Justin Deal takes a deep dive into the space race to glean important lessons that all of us can use when we’re tackling big projects. Go ahead, take that small step, it could lead to a big leap.

“Engineering (and product) goals are often notoriously vague. We want to ‘improve onboarding,’ or we want to ‘make our product easier to use.’ In an effort to make it less vague, we often make it arbitrary. ‘Double the rate of activation’ or ‘cut the setup time in half.’ While we're at it, we often make the deadlines arbitrary too and just stick ‘by the end of the year’ on the end,” writes Justin Deal in his Zapier blog.

Justin continues, “As a result, our goals aren't always exciting and tangible like getting to the moon, and they probably aren't realistic either. Chances are there are specific problems standing in the way of onboarding or making the product hard to use. Those problems may be huge, but as long as they're specific, why not solve those instead?”

Get all of Justin’s insights on what we can learn from rocket engineering over on Zapier. Trust us, it’s a great read.

Photo by Bill Jelen on Unsplash

When you aim at nothing, you’ll hit it every time. That’s why knowing how to set your target profit margin is so important.

But if your knowledge stops there, frankly it’s useless. That’s why in this article we not only teach you how to set your target profit margin, we give you the practical advice you need to actually hit it! That’s a winning formula in anyone’s book.