Blog

Can Taking a Break During Work Actually Make You More Productive?

How often do you sit down at the computer and not look up again until it gets dark?

It happens to everyone, and even if you feel focused, you may not be as productive as you think you were.

The human brain needs a break every once in a while, and if you don’t actively provide it, then, your brain will do it for you. Taking a break isn’t a sign of weakness: it’s the best way to stay productive.

Here’s why you should take more breaks — both long and short.

Reduce Stress Levels

You can feel stress even at a job you enjoy. Finding yourself facing an intractable problem, feeling frustrated about a lack of resources, or even waking up on the wrong side of the bed can leave you with hunched shoulders.

Breaks are one way to deal with a high workload without sending stress hormones flying through your body. A clinical study found that even five-minute breaks every half hour can help surgeons significantly reduce psychological stress.

Imagine what it can do for those of us whose daily tasks don’t involve surgery!

Increase Your Attention Span

Are you struggling to concentrate? Finding yourself easily distracted? There’s a temptation to push through and try harder. But sometimes what your brain really needs is a good old-fashioned break.

In a study of assembly workers, workers who enjoyed a short break were able to increase their attention span significantly in the period after their break.

The lesson: if you can’t concentrate, stop trying. Get up, walk away, and return to your desk when you’re ready. You’ll not only be able to focus but you will have an improved focus.

Feel More Engaged

Taking breaks can improve your overall job performance and increase your chances for a promotion. Why? Because workers who take breaks are more engaged than those who don’t.

Research found that daily micro-breaks leave employees feeling rejuvenated, even in work they didn’t enjoy. However, you have to take a proper break and relax: a quick break for a snack won’t do the trick. Take five to ten minutes and do something else or just switch off. You’ll be surprised at how quickly it works.

Looking for more great career advice? Visit our blog or get in touch to learn more about our RightStone 360 service for placing consultants like you with their dream clients.


Start Standing Out: 3 Tips to Help You Get Promoted

Today, career experts say the best way to get promoted is to find a new job. But you don’t need to start job hunting to get the recognition you deserve. And you shouldn’t need to, especially if you love where you work right now.

Even still, working hard won’t win you the promotion all on its own. Your coworkers also work hard. You also need to find a way to stand out.

What does that look like? Here are three of our expert’s best tips.

1. Get a Mentor

We don’t get anywhere in life on our own. The same is true in career advancement: you can choose to fight hard or you can choose to work together with a mentor. The impact of mentorship is huge: you actively work with someone who is where you want to go, and then you learn from them second hand.

2. Be Open About Your Career Goals

Often, people find themselves passed over for a promotion they wanted and work for and wonder: why not me? In reality, their leadership team had no idea they wanted the promotion in the first place.

Having open lines with communication and sharing your career goals means your boss will know what you want to work towards. It also means that you will know early on if your goal isn’t available at your current organization. In other words, you will have a better indication of whether to move up or move on.

3. Take Ownership of Projects

You need to be a team player, but that doesn’t mean you can’t take ownership of your projects. Demonstrating that you can take a project from ideation through to completion — and uplift others along the way — makes you indispensable to your company.

Indispensable people are the people who tend to find themselves first in line for that big promotion.

Take Control and Win Your Next Promotion Sooner

Working hard is no longer enough to earn you a promotion, but you don’t necessarily need to go searching for greener pastures. When you take concerted steps outside of your daily work to prepare yourself for more responsibility and make your intentions clear, you are more likely to find yourself at the top of the list of those earning a promotion.

Are you looking for the next stepping stone in your career? We’re here to help. We help place qualified candidates with the right clients, which makes getting that promotion easier. Visit our job board or get in touch to learn more about the RightStone 360 process.


3 Ways to Ensuring You are Immigration Compliant When Bringing On a New Hire

There’s a whole world of talent out there. And with remote work becoming increasingly acceptable, there’s nothing stopping you from sourcing talent elsewhere.

However, hiring a non-citizen isn’t straightforward. With your hire, you take on new responsibilities.

The work process is tricky, but you can use these three tips to streamline your immigration compliance process.

Use Processes for I-9 Completion

I-9 compliance is perhaps the most laborious part of immigration compliance. Having I-9 processes set up, and or using an I-9 specialist or trained HR team member, will ensure you don’t miss a step.

Ideally, your I-9 compliance processes should:

  • Centralize I-9 procedures for completion and retention (including copy retention)
  • Ensure only trained staff complete the processes
  • Provide measures for dealing with issues (such as expired documents)
  • Include regular self-audits of both documentation and the systems

Ensure Re-Verification Takes Place

Even when you hire in a compliant manner, your efforts can be thwarted if you don’t have a stringent re-verification program. Re-verification programs keep track of immigration statutes to ensure both the company and the foreign employee take the right steps at the right time.

Legally, you only need to reverify when the employment authorization document expires. However, it is always best to schedule reverification before the actual expiration date and to perform the process regularly

Have a Formal Plan for Foreign Employees

If you intend to bring on any foreign employees, you will benefit from a formal immigration compliance plan. The plan should cover everything from recruiting to hiring to re-verification as well as the Labor Certification process. 

The legal and compliance benefits of a formal plan are reason enough to get to work. The clarification the plan provides also offers additional benefits. Your foreign employee recruitment plan can and should also help inform your job advertisements: you want to attract people most likely to succeed with a visa so as to avoid a prolonged recruitment process.

Are you looking to expand and enjoy a global talent pool?

RightStone offers reporting, documentation, and immigration compliance services. Get in touch to learn more about our unique IT staffing service offering.


How to Help Your IT Team to Remain Focused During Long Projects

Any team will look at a deadline that’s six, nine, or 12 months away and see it as a distant problem. These kinds of deadlines always feel like plenty of time to complete a project. 

Yet, those months can disappear quickly. And it’s your job to ensure that your team doesn’t find themselves two weeks away from a six-month deadline with six months of work left to do.

How do you keep your IT on task even on a long project? Use these tips to help stay on track and deliver better results.

Break It Down into Milestones or Sprints

Achieving a goal always sparks motivation. But what do you do if the overall goal is a year or even more away?

While the work completed today will contribute to the end goal, your team need to see results sooner to stay focused. That’s why “chunking” work into milestones (or sprints, if you want to dabble in Agile) wins the day.

When you set milestones, you mark the passing of time in a tangible way. Reaching those milestones equates to an accomplishment and thus boosts morale. Even better, smaller segments of work simplify planning, so you can get the project off the ground faster.

Reiterate the “Why” as You Work

Why are you completing this project? And why does this milestone fit into the end goal?

If you want to keep teams focused and motivated, then you need focus as much on the “why” question as on the task at hand. When team members know why they need to accomplish a task or even why the deadline is what it is, then they will be more likely to see the value, which will stop their attention from drifting to other work.

Give Frequent Feedback

Milestones also make it easier to provide regular feedback to all team members. Feedback offers emotional motivation by boosting our sense of self-esteem. When teams get good feedback regularly, they want to keep repeating the actions that earned those feelings.

Are you looking for the next valuable member of your project team — or even your team lead? Learn more about the RighStone 360 process and find out how we make IT project execution a success.