You already know this, but it’s worth taking a step back and mentioning again. When it comes down to it, your business is based on one very important thing: relationship. The relationships that you maintain both between your employees (or coworkers) and your clients are crucial to the success of your company. Without one or the other, your business would crumble.

One thing that’s essential to maintaining those relationships is taking time away from work to kick back and just get to know one another better. Time spent intentionally developing that relationship will create rapport on a personal level that will multiply productivity in the workplace.

With that in mind, we’re suggesting five work-free outings that are intended to strengthen or build those relationships.

Outings with Employees:

- Serve together. Try a local food pantry, shelter, hospital, or school. Giving of your time together will give your team something in common other than work projects.

- Play together. Take a vote for a fun non-skilled sporting or competitive activity that won’t single non-athletic team members out, such as bowling, laser tag, paintball, etc.

- Celebrate together. Don’t let a birthday or other milestone go buy without celebrating the unique aspects of your team member.

- Relax together. Go see a movie, a concert, a sporting event, go to a gallery, or try a new restaurant together.

- Dream together. Spend an afternoon talking about company goals and finding out what it is your employees dream about in their careers. How can you work together to make it happen?

Note: if possible, shut down your office for an afternoon and do your team-building activity during work hours. This will show your employees that you value their time and offer them a reserved space within work hours.

Outings with Clients:

- Serve together: Especially if your client is closely involved with a non-profit, give it a try and show them you support the same cause they do.

- Play together: Go to a sporting event together or get your entire teams together and do any of the above. If your client is a foodie, try a cooking competition – Iron Chef style.

- Celebrate together. If your client has had a big milestone that’s worth celebrating, show them you care by taking notice. Treat them to their favorite restaurant.

Note: find out what your clients love, and even if it’s something your team isn’t wild about it, give it a shot. It will show your client that you’re willing to learn something new and maybe your team will end up being inspired by something new.

Another note: Remember, this is really about getting to know your client. Take the time to find out something new about them in the process.

What do you think? What are your favorite non-work activities with clients or employees? Let us know in the comments.

Last week, we celebrated with our good pals at O’Neil Printing as they launched their shiny new website. O’Neil has been innovating print since 1908, and they needed a new website to showcase their ever-growing set of resources and experience.

Just like any project we approach, we step back and look at the entire company to find its stand-out qualities that makes it unique, and highlight those particulars in the design. O’Neil Printing has been in business for over a century, and we’d like to think that any business that’s been at it that long has a few secrets up their sleeve. Although we could talk endlessly about O’Neil’s quality product, variety of services, sparkling equipment, or commitment to the environment, there are two things that really make O’Neil stand out: their people and their tradition of innovating the print business. O’Neil’s people are dedicated, service-oriented, and truly care about their clients. After all, O’Neil Printing is employee-owned, so they are invested in their work and their clients’ happiness. They’re also committed to approaching projects and business from a unique and effective perspective; a process of innovation that has kept the company young after all this time. Read the rest of the entry >

Here at R29, we love being green. It’s something we believe is at the heart of responsibility in this world. We have been tracking our recycling, print usage, and carbon footprint for several years now, and in doing so have found that one area we could improve upon is electricity usage.

For example, the average American household uses 908 kWh per month of electricity (source). The average household in Illinois uses less than that – about 728 kWh per month. Last year our average monthly usage was 1,856.5 kWh (and the year before that was even higher). Now, granted, we have more employees with more electricity demand than a household has, but we don’t think we necessarily need more than double the amount of electricity, do we?

There’s only one way to find out.

In order to do that, we recently purchased an electricity monitor to help us in this endeavor. If we can get real-time feedback on our electricity usage, it will be easier to change our habits and reduce electricity waste (and money!). Current Cost made it easy to get up and running with monitoring our electricity usage, which we’ve been doing for about the past 2.5 weeks. Our electricity usage data is automatically uploaded to the web every 5 minutes for us to view. Each day’s chart has been overlaid in the image above to give you the average idea of how our power usage goes. In the past two and a half weeks, so far we’ve learned:

1. Our programmable thermostat is indeed working (we weren’t so sure)
2. It seems most of the spikes in energy occur because of the air conditioning
3. We have about 600 watts of power always on. If we could eliminate that 600 watts, we could save about $560 per year (although we can’t completely eliminate it, we could reduce it if we find what’s causing the drain)

And so we begin our journey into electrical awareness and reducing our consumption. Will you join us?

• View our live electricity usage any time here
• Consider joining us in our endeavor – we’d love to hear how your office is reducing electricity usage.

We recently had the honor and privilege of partnering with Team RWB (Team Red, White, & Blue) to develop their brand from the ground up. It has been a thrilling process to see this amazing organization grow to become nationally-recognized. Last week, they were featured on a Today Show segment, which you can watch below:

About Team RWB

Team RWB firmly believes that It’s Our Turn to give back to the veterans that have served to protect the freedoms we enjoy. Team RWB is an organization founded by committed veterans who are dedicated to support and enrich the lives of wounded veterans and their families. They do this by partnering with athletes to raise money and volunteers who develop long-lasting relationships with wounded veterans, helping them reintegrate into civilian society. According to Team RWB, “We do not view success in terms of dollars raised, but by relationships maintained.”

To find out exactly what this amazing, multi-faceted organization does, check out their What We Do page.

Here are just some of the parts and pieces to the Team RWB brand:
Read the rest of the entry >

“The internet is [now] showing us what it thinks we want to see, but not necessarily what we need to see.”

In the video above, Eli Pariser brings up a great question: is getting what we want, how we want it, all the time actually good for us in the long run?  We all understand this concept in every day choices such as fueling our bodies with healthy food. But what about when it comes to searching the internet? When we type in a search term on Google, we already know what types of results we want to pop up on the next page. And the scary part is, so does Google. And without telling us, it only feeds us the answers we are looking for in the name of faster, smarter search. And Google is not the only one. Amazon.com, and of course other retail-based sites, are notorious for this. When was the last time you went to Amazon without being inundated with “recommendations for you” that are eerily close to what you are looking for?

Granted, this is great for companies marketing products to specific audiences. But looking at the big picture through the video above, maybe a tailor-made internet that constantly feeds us what we want to see isn’t good for us after all.

What do you think — does smarter internet actually do us a disservice?