Photo by Flazingo Photos, Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

The more varied businesses get in how they are constructed and run, the more management mistakes I see being made. This is only to be expected, of course, and to a degree, we're all re-learning how to run our businesses. For the first time in my memory, the remote worker is a viable option for many businesses. Time cards are going out of style, as is the concept of business hours. So what management mistakes are being made, and how can we avoid them? Here are some of my thoughts.

Bringing talented people on your team is only half the battle. Only if you can get your team to cooperate well will their joint efforts lead to increased productivity in the workplace. Find out what makes these great teams from movies and TV so effective and how you can transfer their skills to the world of your office work.

Photo by Daniel Friesenecker (CC0 1.0)

When I first started in business, meeting notes were a formal thing. There was someone in on the meetings who knew how to take minutes, the format, and the important information to contain therein. As time has passed, I see less and less of this in the professional space, and I honestly don't see that we're missing much by keeping notes in new, less-formal ways. As always, though, innovation can lead to complication if we forget the reasoning behind the practice. With all of the note-taking options available to us, it can be easy to sacrifice efficiency and effectiveness for the sake of the new and shiny.

Photo by Sebastien Wiertz, Licensed under CC BY 2.0

It's funny: I've never been more connected with my coworkers, yet I don't know that I've ever seen more office confusion than I have as of late. We're catering to the communication habits of millenials, and in a lot of ways, this has benefited the office environment. However, with an ever-increasing variety of communication methods, the need to ensure that we are using effective communication has never been more paramount to success. Here are some ideas for ridding your office of confusion by communicating effectively.

E-mail is a tool intended to facilitate communication and help you get your work done. If well managed, the inbox can become the central hub of your workflow through which you coordinate your work and conveniently exchange information that is essential to your business goals. Here are some practical and effective strategies for taming your e-mail inbox.

Photo by Gavin Llewellyn, Licensed under CC BY 2.0

Team-building is vitally important for a company of any size. Employees who are comfortable with one another are happier at work and are more likely to have an open dialogue, which can only help your company in the end. Here are some great activities for building morale that I've seen work over the years.

I've been in my fair share of business meetings, some of them effective meetings that followed some agreed-upon business etiquette, some not so much. One thing they tend to have in common is a certain set of jargon, probably intended get a certain message across but usually succeeding only in confusing or angering people. There may be no perfect way to run a meeting, but there are some best practices. Here are some of the phrases I wish I could just erase from the business person's lexicon.