When employers ponder how to best use technology to improve productivity first thoughts are along the lines of what hot mobile gadget will help them manage their time better, what website design will get the most traffic, or what new photocopier will best serve the needs of their office. Unfortunately, this myopic view of technology focused that is only on immediate benefits to an office can ultimately hinder long-term business growth and productivity. Given the advances in brain scanning technology and neuroscience research in general, employers have the ability to understand their employees far better than ever before.

If a manager makes decisions based on current neuroscience, such as the simple finding that “less stress in employees improves memory and learning,” they will likely be ahead of the curve in the competitive game of business, especially if their competitors continue to adhere to outdated management styles and corporate structures. Two young companies that come to mind that seem to have gotten the message loud and clear that people are not robots are Google and Facebook; the former has a bowling alley in one office, and the latter apparently lets employees skate board in the office. While you may not want to implement a mandatory milk-and-nap-time policy overnight, you might find that just by offering fruit in the cafeteria is enough to combat employees’ afternoon energy dips and food comas.

Despite my strong opinion that we should all apply information about our brains and human behavior to the workplace, I am not advocating that every manager earn a certificate in psychology or hire an in-house neuroscientist. The internet has made so much information available about scientific advances that can affect productivity that to ignore this data would be unwise (be wary however of the sources on the internet still). For example, if you notice that your employees fall asleep at 2:30PM regularly, or that the number of gray hairs on their heads directly corresponds to their number of hours worked per day, then you should be examining tools to keep them alert, awake, and young and perky for as long as possible.

A possible first step to improving productivity in your office might be to offer gym discounts or throw in a few treads mills around the office. As John Median points out in his book, Brain Rules ”Exercisers outperform couch potatoes in long-term memory, reasoning, attention, problem-solving tasks, and more.” If you get your employees a chance to move around they may be smarter afterward, which is likely to be a benefit to you. That is, unless you want employees with the intelligence level of monkeys, who as one study showed, make better investment decisions when picking stocks. Or better yet, get some treadmill or bike desks for your employees. I know that I sure would love to burn away the pizza and cookies that fuel my great ideas.

Another way to potentially use modern research to improve productivity is by understanding the strongest motivational language and the best incentives to keep your employees doing their best.  Science shows that we are super sensitive to external factors, so take advantage of this by creating the external environment most suitable for your employees whether it is giving them offices with windows or promoting team spirit by assigning projects to teams rather than individuals. And while you are doing it, make sure to communicate management’s willingness to listen to innovations or possible solutions from everyone within the company.

A final recommendation based on new neuroscience that can likely benefit managers is to have high expectations of other staff members and making sure they know it form positive behavioral signals. If you smile and tell an employee, “I am excited to see you presentation and think it will really showcase your analytical skills,” you will likely get a better presentation than if you barked, “I want the presentation by Monday and it better be better than the last one you did.” Demonstrating the efficacy of positive expectations on performance is the study described by Bella dePaulo in her article, Can Your Expectations Shape My Behavior that showed how students perform much better in class and on tests when their teachers are primed to expect high achievement from them regardless if there is any concrete reason to do so.

In conclusion, work is not entirely about suffering, and people are not merely robots. Reading up about psychology and developments in neuroscience is the equivalent of a car owner actually opening up their manual and learning how to fold down the backseats or how to program the radio. If you are trying to be an effective leader, the more information you have about how your employees’ brains work, the more effective you can be at keeping your business “machine” operating optimally.

Almost every website is unique despite the ubiquity of certain elements that are consistently incorporated into their design layouts. Over the past decade we have come to expect certain things from our web browsing experience, such as contact information, a list of services or products, and an explanation of what each site does or who the people are behind the site. 

Despite the fact that there are formal usability principles that guide the planning and development of successful websites, there are still so many sites that miss the mark in terms of basic GUI performance.

Look at it this way: you wouldn’t invite someone to your house for dinner and then immediately dive into a game of hide-and-seek with your unsuspecting visitor (unless you are under age ten or crazy), so why would you get a visitor to the site and leave them wondering what the heck you do or what the heck is wrong with you.

Here are a few critical steps that you can take in developing a high performance website that will save you from sending the wrong message about your brand:

1)      Make the text easy to scan: Use bold text, subheadings and bullet points to attract a visitor’s eyes (or eye if they are missing one) to the most important information on the page. Studies have demonstrated that people often scan a page in an F-shaped pattern, so also keep that in mind when arranging items on the page.

2)      Make the text readable: If the text is too small or doesn’t contrast with the background then it might be too hard to read and thus deter a potential client/member/user/soul mate etc. If someone has to use binoculars, a magnifying glass, or ask their child what is written on your site then you may need to make the text bigger.

3)      Avoid PDF’s like you are supposed to avoid PDA’s: PDF documents on a site should be avoided as much as possible because they often take a long time to download, can crash a browser, and are hard for viewers to search for text.

4)      Let them search: Include a search bar in your banner or navigation bar if your site is complex and loaded with content. It simplifies the first time viewers’ experience and satisfies their modern day need for having information the way they want it now. And put a message in the search bar — even something as simple as “enter keyword here”.

5)      Use chameleon links: It is important to ensure that links on your site change color after a viewer has clicked them so they know where they have been. Links that don’t change color are the equivalent of Hansel and Gretel’s bread crumbs disappearing from the trail. If your viewer keeps going in circles because they don’t know where they have been they will leave, which is the equivalent of Hansel and Gretel teleporting to a nicer place or finding a map to your competitor.

If you are wondering why your marketing schemes are not translating into new business leads, you may have to ask yourself what you are doing wrong. However, even if you ask yourself that question over and over it is unlikely to get you any closer to the truth because, well, you are human and we are biologically programmed to sometimes wear blinders to the truth…And, even if you ask your clients for feedback you still may not get an honest answer as the classic Pepsi vs. Coke taste test shows: when asked what they preferred Coke or Pepsi, tasters preferred Pepsi when they couldn’t see the labels, but when they knew what they were drinking, there was a higher preference for Coke. So basically, just asking for feedback from clients might not help you since the Coke vs. Pepsi experiment demonstrates that we don’t always put our money where our mouth is and we don’t always know it.

So, how do find out where you are missing the mark in understanding client behavior and then marketing accordingly?

You might your friends what might be wrong with your website, or to have a look and see if your advertisements have any typos, but they might be just as unreliable as your clients in knowing anything.  Let’s say that you have asked all your friends, and they all tell you, as most supportive and loving friends do, that “your site is great! And, the wit of your ads is killer and compelling!” You might be so confounded by the whole problem that you think you have developed dyslexia or decide that you might just be ready to take an early retirement. Assuming neither are accurate, do you then, find new friends or hire a consultant to do an intensive competitive analysis? Before your desperation drives you to drastic action such as into retirement or a therapist’s office, I recommend using the best tool at your disposal to get to the bottom of the situation - the Internet.

Here are a few steps you can take to help you use the internet as a tool more effectively (this assumes you are of sound mind of course):

Step 1: Monitor your analytics data. Find out how visitors are getting to your website. What keywords do they find you with? If you are selling stuffed koala bears and you see that you are getting a lot of traffic from a blog about those lovely furry creatures, then look and see what other koala bear blogs you might reach out to get a link on (with a juicy anchor text of course). Also, keep in mind when looking at your analytics what pages on your site get the most traffic. Are people spending time on your site or do they leave when they get there because they get confused about what you sell or think your lime green flashing logo is a bit unprofessional for a koala bear site? Or, if you see that viewers are spending a decent amount of time on one particular page, pay attention to what words worked to get them there and what is good about the page. For example, may you see that people spent more time looking at pictures of stuffed squirrels this year instead of pandas. Or heck, maybe you see that the release of a new Chipmunks movies has a direct correlation to the traffic to your stuffed chipmunk page. Bottom line is that if you are not watching your analytics closely you are missing out on opportunities.

Step 2: Set up monitoring software on your site that lets you watch recordings of viewer traffic on your site, such as Userfly. Such software allows you to see where people are clicking, what text they are reading (if they use the cursor to read), and whether they are watching your videos or clicking on one part of the site more than another. When you analyze this data you can then figure out what needs optimization, editing, or trashing.  Yeah, sounds a little creepy, but only you can see the recorded videos as the site owner and if you really pay attention and give people what they want from your site, then everyone wins in the long run. For example, if I really am looking for the cutest stuffed turtle on the planet and you know that your turtles are the cutest, please do me the favor and optimize for that keyword and make sure I can find the turtle when I get to your site. No need to show me lots of giraffes and armadillos, a simple list of what you carry is fine as long as I can find the turtles on the list. And be careful not to "stuff" the page with too many keywords...

Step 3: Test out ad campaigns. After you figure out what keywords you want to target, set up short test runs for variations of the keywords the with adwords. For example, if you have way too many monkeys in stock you may try to run two PPC ads along the lines “World’s most cuddly stuffed monkeys,” and “Monkey Toys: Cute Stuffed Animals Made With Love.” By running comparison test ads you can find out what performs better and is most cost effective.  In this monkey scenario it might turn out that the phrase Monkey Toys gets lots of clicks and no good leads, and stuffed monkeys well mostly attracts people interested in taxidermy…Without some research and playing with words, you may never learn and grow, which is what we want to do…right? So, stop monkeying around; do your research, examine the results, and adjust your strategy accordingly.

In conclusion, unless you study the actions your clients are taking on your site and in their search engine searches, then you are just playing a guessing game at marketing. If you don’t want to do the research or just want rankings on Google, you can get those by hiring an SEO firm, but make sure you get some referrals so you know that they company is taking the right action and seeing the whole picture. Online marketing is a bit like gardening: if you plant desert flowers in the tundra you probably won’t see much growth, but if you take a look around and plant the flowers that are thriving (sorry weeds, not talking about you), then you have a chance at growing some pretty plants. So, take a look around and see what is working in your analytics and in your user activity and adjust your “planting” strategy accordingly.

Page Authority - Expressed in a numeric value on a 100-point scale, this factor tells you how likely it is that an individual page will rank well. It is derived from the Linkscape site, which reflects mozTrust and mozRank. You can benefit your PA by obtaining links from other outside pages that are heavily linked to already.

Final Thoughts

Long gone is the fantasy that technology will bring about an increase in leisure time. As anyone who walks down the street while texting or checks email while watching a movie can attest, we have more tools for efficiency and communication due to technology, but we still do not have enough time for fun. It’s amazing that babies still get made in this go-go-go era where life and time are running at full speed. All we talk about is the lack of time for everything in our lives and even with our go-go gadgets we still can’t seem to get enough done. We envy those who can excel in life with only 4 hours of sleep a night or those who have hired help to do all the things we’d rather skip, like washing dishes, doing laundry, cooking, or heck, sometimes even playing with our kids!

Although the paper is a few years old already, Judith Wajcman’s exploration of time scarcity in, “Life in the Fast lane. Towards a Sociology of Technology and Time” reveals many of the reasons for the time shortage we all seem to face.  In the article she makes the case for how capitalism, and the increase in households where both parents have to work, has brought about the time deficit in postmodern western societies. Interestingly, she points out how although men and women both have the same amount of leisure time, women’s leisure time is far more likely to be interrupted by their children’s needs or by unpaid work, which results in less of the restorative benefits from their free time.

Now, let’s flash forward to 2012, where most of us now have a smart phone or are getting one as soon as our dumb phones break or cause us embarrassment and social isolation. Assuming that our gadgets and gizmos are now interrupting our free time and our conversations more than ever, is anyone really getting any restorative benefit from their free time? Since our bosses now know that we can check email from anywhere at any time, if we don’t respond at 9 PM do we look like we are ignoring him or her, or that we are   lacking in commitment?

How can we now draw the lines between “my time”, “gadget time” and “work time” when we live via smart phone? And now, with the acceleration of communication times and our constant reachability, relationships can meet strife when one person doesn’t get a text reply back in less than 24 hours. This begs the question: Is anyone really relaxing anymore? We try to squeeze in yoga classes and downtime, but is it really helping us when we are rushing to get there and fighting on the phone as we speed home to make dinner, clean the litter box, and say good night to our spouse, who is checking email in bed with eyes half open?

Given our addictions to our gadgets and our shortage of time, what can we do to keep our zen/sanity other than moving to the third world or constantly lying to friends about our phone battery being dead? I wish I had the answer. For now, I guess we can all start by taking baby steps such as turning off our phones for an hour or two a day, taking a walk outside, and creating away messages on our emails, social media pages, and voicemails, saying something along the lines of “Hi You have reached Jessica’s voicemail.  She is currently engaging in uninterrupted real life experience in order to restore her sanity. If you wish to leave a message, please do so or join her for a cell phone-free walk on Saturday mornings at Will Rogers Beach.”