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Drop the act. Stop putting on a false persona to please others, stop acting tough like you don’t have a family outside of work, and stop assuming people don’t care when you don’t follow up with them. A human touch seems to be lost these days, and it can have negative impacts on your business.

The world and life are fast paced today. So much so that you often don’t have time to consider rethinking your current thinking. And when you do the same thing day in day out, it’s hard to notice the need for change, or how beneficial it might be.

With the silly season approaching, things tend to follow suit in the office and standards can sometimes slightly slip. There’s Christmas parties, the last-minute gym grind for a summer body, the temperatures that make for a sticky work environment, and an ever-growing list of social events that can make it hard to focus entirely on work.

As mental wellbeing issues continue to skyrocket, work related stress and anxiety is at an all-time high in New Zealand. High workloads, poor work-life balance, and stressful work are the top three causes of poor mental health in the workplace which ultimately impacts on productivity.

Everything has been said before when it comes to persuading prospective customers or clients in business. From “Save hundreds of dollars”, “Don’t struggle any longer”, “It’s unbelievably lifechanging and scientifically proven”, to the classic “But wait, there’s more”, have quite frankly been overused and are now just straight up cheesy and off putting.

Forget the smarts, forget the money, and forget the resources. Being successful in the business world begins with a killer culture that starts with you, expands to your employees, and reverberates loudly through every aspect of your business, all the way to to what your clients or customers experience.

Selective invoice finance is the practice of being able to pick and choose which invoice or invoices, if any, a business wants funded to guarantee sufficient cash flow to meet its commitments on time.

If you dread it when a prospective customer says, ‘let me think about it,’ you may benefit from a process – proposed by New Zealand’s foremost thought leader in sales excellence Bill James – that helps you land the sale from start to finish in virtually one sitting.

There are some phrases that are best kept out of business talk in the modern world. When Spark’s previous chief executive, Simon Moutter, let ‘opening the kimono’ out during a Global Women’s event last year, it brought about the idea of what is appropriate in the workplace and what can land you in hot water quickly.

As millennials and gen z’ers are integrating thick and fast into working life in 2019, the need for cohesive relationships between colleagues of all ages is becoming a significant aspect to consider for businesses today.