Zinc Blog

ZIP files, the affectionate nickname for compressed folders, are quite useful for businesses. However, some employees don’t realize just how useful they can be or the benefits they are foregoing. Let’s discuss what a ZIP file is, how it can contribute to productivity in your office, and how to make one.

Modern businesses lean heavily on collaboration, and without efficient and reliable file sharing, that strategy goes out the window. It’s important that you know how to build and maintain solid file sharing practices and get the technology you need to make that possible. In today’s blog, we will give you four tips on how to build an efficient and secure file-sharing platform that can take your business a long way.

Today’s businesses need to have access to IT expertise. It is not a stretch to say this in our highly tech-reliant modern society, as business technology has become a legitimate advantage for organizations of any size to utilize against their competition. However, how confidently do you know what to look for in a job candidate?

Let’s go over the expertise—in both hard and soft skills—that you want any IT professional you depend on to have.

Cybersecurity is necessary for businesses to function, but when it turns to overreaching and overinvestment—a concept called cybersecurity sprawl—it becomes a problem. Today, we want to highlight some of the many challenges that can come about from cybersecurity sprawl, as well as how you can avoid it.

Are you finding that some of your younger hires aren’t sticking around nearly as long as you’d prefer them to? There’s a good chance that these employees are experiencing a relatively recent phenomenon called “shift shock,” the latest workplace trend focusing on employee engagement and satisfaction. Let’s examine shift shock and how to avoid its impacts in your business.

Laptops are powerful tools for office productivity, particularly due to their mobile nature. In the workplace, however, more users prefer to have the screen real estate offered by multiple monitors and traditional desktops. You can get more bang for your buck, however, by using a laptop that can work while it’s closed, thereby transforming it into something like a PC tower.

You might recall our blog last week on smart chips, a term used to describe some fun and useful Google Docs inserts. Today, we want to take a closer look at these smart chips and what you can do with them in Google Docs and Sheets.

As comfy as it can be at times, sitting for all hours of the day isn’t something we’re built for. As a result, not only does sitting all day impact our overall health, it can functionally hurt our productivity as well. Fortunately, there are some simple exercises and activities that can be done at the workstation to help mitigate these negative outcomes. 

The out-of-office email is a great tool…provided, that is, that it is used to its full potential. Let’s talk about a simple adjustment you can make to the ones you send to ensure they are much more effective, and much less likely to be ignored as a result.

As critical as it is to make sure your business’ IT remains in good shape, it is just as important that you and your team members are in good shape as well. Otherwise, the aches and pains that can settle in could easily have a detrimental impact on your productivity.

We could (and usually do) talk about managed services all day long…and to be honest, it’s easy to do, just because there are so many ways that they benefit a business. Today, we wanted to focus our attention on one specific benefit that managed services offer: the inherent proactivity they feature.

Microsoft Excel is a really useful tool for organizing data. Using something called a heat map strategy can help you get more out of the solution. If you actively use spreadsheets in your business to contextualize data, you will find this easy-to-use tip for using heat maps really useful.

Nowadays, technology and business are intimately interconnected, the success of your operations and processes largely informed by the tools you have in place. Let’s go over three ways you can help boost your potential success even further by implementing the right methods.

During the holiday season, people are out of the office quite often, but unless this is properly conveyed to those reaching out to them, it could look like negligence on the employees’ part. To make sure you are as transparent as possible with your out-of-office time, be sure to set up a message. Here’s how you can do it in Microsoft Outlook.

Cybersecurity, to many, can sound inherently complicated—complicated enough, perhaps, that many may elect to put it off for as long as they can, or even choose to go without it. Even without our obvious bias factoring into our considerations, this is a bad idea. Let’s go over some basic security practices that are simple to enact, but can easily make a world of difference for your security.

There are a few different types of stress that may be present in your business right now, either or both of which could be causing no small amount of distress to your team members and disruption to your processes. Let’s explore the sources of these stresses—digital/workplace friction and interpersonal friction—and what can be done to help resolve them.

Sometimes the last thing you want to do is type on your keyboard, especially if you have already been doing it just about all day. In cases like this, you can give your fingers a break and use Microsoft Word’s dictation features to “write” by speaking into your device’s microphone. Let’s go over how you can use this feature on a desktop, your web browser, and even your mobile device.

Cybersecurity is anything but a new concept, and if recent and current events are any indication, the concept isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Let’s take a few moments to consider some of the bigger threats currently out there, and how they will influence the threats we see going forward from here.

There are a lot of different notification sounds that the average office worker needs to listen for as they’re hard at work. However, these notifications can often be drowned out by other applications. To help prevent this, we wanted to go over how you can adjust the volume levels of some of your individual applications.

Burnout is a serious problem in the business environment, and if you are not careful, it can have profound effects on operations, productivity, and profitability in the long term. If you suspect that your employees are experiencing symptoms of burnout, you need to act on these symptoms and implement policies to protect your team from… well, themselves.