The awesome power of knowing when you’re done

Forget the fog of war, it’s the fog of work we have to deal with every day.

One of the areas that’s often fuzzy is the question of when a piece of work is fully finished. How do you know that you’ve met your requirements, hit your quality standards and made sure that what you’ve done has slotted in smoothly with your overall offering?

Get it right and you deliver more value sooner because you:

• build a clear shared understanding of the benefits each bit of work brings your users
• can easily test whether you’re delivering these benefits
• cut down on the number of bugs you have to find and fix
• limit work in progress, context switching and stress.

To help people create clarity about when work is complete, we’ve put together a post on how to get these two tools running in tandem.

Increase profits by investing in wellbeing

Research from the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research (NZEIR) shows that investing in the wellbeing of your staff can increase your profitability.

In fact, every dollar a small business invests in wellbeing can deliver a return of up to 12x within a year.

Commissioned by Xero, the research looked at two approaches for improving mental wellbeing at work:

• Organisational approaches, which develop cultures and activities that improve mental wellbeing
• Employee assistance programmes (EAPs), which support individuals with counselling

Organisational approaches can bring a return on investment (ROI) between 2:1 and 12:1. EAPs come in between 2:1 and 5:1. An ROI of 3:1 is considered good compared to market return on capital investment.

Tips and best practice for happy workplaces

At Boost we’ve gone for both approaches covered in the NZIER report. We offer an EAP, and we use team happiness as our primary wellbeing metric. Here’s a summary of our approach to wellbeing and team happiness. 

In fact, as we mentioned earlier, we recently won the TinyPulse award for the happiest workplace in IT.

Now TinyPulse have collected together advice from successful organisations showing how to create happy and high-performing teams.