This article is obtained from here.

The project, led jointly by the Healthcare Plastics Recycling Council and the Plastics Industry Association, exposes complexities around plastic market economics and recycling behavioral change.

SOURCE: Healthcare Plastics Recycling Council

DESCRIPTION:

The Healthcare Plastics Recycling Council (HPRC), in collaboration with the Plastics Industry Association (PLASTICS), announced today the completion of a multi-hospital plastics recycling project in the Chicago market. Focused on non-infectious plastic packaging and products collected from clinical areas of the hospitals, the project sought to demonstrate a viable business model for recycling healthcare plastics on a regional level. A complete report, detailing project development, implementation and analysis can be found here.

Participating hospitals included Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center, and NorthShore University HealthSystem’s Evanston, Skokie and Glenbrook Hospitals. These hospitals collected a variety of healthcare plastics, primarily from main operating rooms and ambulatory surgery centers, including polypropylene and polyethylene resins in the form of sterilization wrap, irrigation bottles, basins, pitchers, trays, Tyvek®, and rigid and flexible packaging materials. These materials were then transported by waste haulers to material recovery facilities for assessments related to composition and quality. Complexity of material types, improper sorting, and the presence of non-conforming materials were the primary challenges in being able to extract the recycling value from the materials.

“This project provided valuable insights into the realities of implementing plastics recycling programs in clinical healthcare settings,” says Chris Rogers, HPRC Project Manager. “What we learned is that collection of plastics must be made simple for clinical staff in order to be effective. Detailed sorting at the point of generation is too complex and a distant priority from clinician’s primary focus of ensuring positive patient outcomes. It’s also important to remember that behavioral change around recycling can be a slow process, one that takes constant reinforcement over time.”

Companies providing logistics and recycling support included Waste Management, LakeShore Recycling Services and Antek Madison. Key Green Solutions, LLC, a sustainability management software service provider, collected and maintained project metrics. PLACON provided additional financial support to the project as an interested end-user looking to create new products from the recycled materials. Petoskey Plastics supplied specialized bags for collection and transportation of the plastic materials.

“In addition to testing the recovery and mechanical recycling of healthcare plastics, we were also able to explore alternative pathways of chemical recycling and conversion to fuel products with our technology partners,” said Kim Holmes, senior director of recycling and diversion at PLASTICS. “Proving the value of these hospital plastics in the conversion process was an exciting dimension of this project and underscores the importance of adding non-mechanical recovery technologies to our resource management tool kit.”

Additional key project insights include:

• Keep it simple: Collection of plastic materials must be simple for clinical staff participation.
• Program champions are critical: Tap engaged and committed program champions within each stakeholder group.
• Behavioral change is a process: Remember that behavioral change can be slow and requires consistent reinforcement of the desired behaviors.
• Discuss ownership: All stakeholders need to discuss and agree on who will be responsible for sorting as comingled materials have marginal value.
• The economics must work: To make a business case, plastic materials must be available in sufficient volumes and processes must be in place to ensure a clean supply.

About HPRC
The Healthcare Plastics Recycling Council (HPRC) is a private technical coalition of industry peers across healthcare, recycling and waste management industries seeking to improve recyclability of plastic products within healthcare. HPRC is made up of globally recognized members including Baxter, BD, Bemis, Cardinal Health, DuPont, Eastman Chemical Company, Johnson & Johnson, Medtronic and SABIC Innovative Plastics. The council convenes biannually at meetings hosted by an HPRC member that include facility tours to further learning and knowledge sharing opportunities through first-hand demonstration of best practices in sustainable product and packaging design and recycling processes. For more information, visit www.hprc.org. Connect with HPRC on LinkedIn.

About PLASTICS
NPE: TheTwitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Tweet me: PLASTICS http://bit.ly/2gQpEUf

This article is obtained from here.

With a wide range of high-pressure responsibilities, project managers are some of the most important players in a construction firm. They spend their time managing employees, working with clients, reporting to superiors, and making sure everything goes according to plan.

Once upon a time, there was a hard limit to the amount of work a project manager could take on. PMs were shackled by in-office land lines and pen-and-paper record keeping. Collaboration with clients and subcontractors had to be face-to-face. Today however, collaboration and record keeping can occur anytime, anywhere. With advanced collaborative capabilities, expectations for project managers are sky high, and only PMs with the best tech can keep up. Let’s see how modern software has reinvented the project manager:

1. Project Planning

Every project begins with an idea, and it’s up to the project manager to turn that idea into a reality. To actively collaborate with stakeholders, PMs needs a streamlined communication tool. PMs and clients should be able to share and review blueprints, budgets, records and other crucial data in real-time. These early communications set a precedent of total collaboration so you can ensure that client feedback is considered at every stage.

2. Project Coordination

Once you’ve planned out the details of your project, it’s up to the project manager to make the arrangements and keep things running smoothly. It takes more than a simple collaborative tool to effectively manage employees, contractors and consultants. Robust software with advanced functions and integrated apps are essential for keeping everyone on track. Mobile reporting apps, for example, have the power to ‘stream’ relevant data from the jobsite to the office. PMs (and their supervisors) gain more access to information in less time.

3. Reporting & Accountability

It’s nearly impossible for a project manager to memorize every aspect of day-to-day operations. Yet, they’re expected to consistently advise clients, manage staff and inform their supervisors. Strong management software makes it easy to find and organize relevant project data. Advanced systems even let you format and send out reports based on standardized data. With the latest technology, project managers can keep meticulous records without breaking a sweat!

Overall, adopting these tools cuts out wasted time and empowers collaboration. You’re the project “leader,” after all, and it’s time to start leading. Want to learn more about project management technology? Check out our top 5 tips to improve construction management.

By Evan Ackerman

This article is obtained from here.

A cyclocopter is a weird sort of aircraft that uses airfoils rotating around a horizontal axis to generate lift and thrust. The concept was developed about a century ago, but these things are tricky to build and fly, so they haven’t, er, taken off as much as helicopters have. In fact, there’s only a small handful of research groups working on cyclocopters at all, and at the moment, they’re focusing on small scales. Professor Moble Benedict and graduate students Carl Runco and David Coleman at Texas A&M’s Advanced Vertical Flight Laboratory has been testing the smallest cyclocopter ever developed: It’s just 29 grams in mass, and could be a tiny step towards replacing helicopters and multirotors with something better.

If it’s still not clear how it actually flies and maneuvers, this diagram might help:

Image: Moble Benedict/Texas A&M

The cycloidal rotor (left) with key components identified. Blade kinematics (right) and forces on a cycloidal rotor in hover.

A single cycloidal rotor, or cyclorotor, consists of multiple airfoils attached to a frame that turns around in a circle very fast. The airfoils produce lift and thrust as they move through the air, and because each blade can pivot, that thrust that can be directed in any direction perpendicular to the cyclorotor. Or, as Benedict explains, “With the blades cyclically pitched such that each blade has a positive geometric angle of attack at the top and bottom of the circular trajectory, a net thrust is produced.” The thrust vectoring is instant, making the cyclocopter very maneuverable, and (among other advantages) the vehicle can transition from, say, stable hovering to high-speed forward flight without needing to pitch itself over like a helicopter or multirotor aircraft. The little rotor on the back stabilizes the pitch.

Benedict has been working on cyclocopters for years; we wrote about a quad-cyclocopter that he developed at the University of Maryland a while back. That was, in fact, the first successful flight test of a cycloidal-rotor based aircraft and along with Dr. Benedict, other people involved in that effort were Elena Shrestha, Dr. Vikram Hrishikeshavan and Dr. Inderjit Chopra. At 800 grams, it wasn’t what you’d call large, but cyclocopters get particularly interesting at very small scales because of their combination of very high maneuverability and potential for excellent efficiency. They’re also more stable, more space efficient, and they’re theoretically quieter and capable of a higher top speed than helicopters are.

Cyclocopters sound pretty great, right? So our first question for Benedict was this:

IEEE Spectrum: Why aren’t we all flying cyclopters right now, instead of helicopters and multirotors?

Moble Benedict: Even though people were trying to explore cyclorotors 100 years back, we have only started looking at this concept seriously now. What happened in the early 20th century is that helicopters became successful before cyclocopters and then people naturally lost interest in pursuing this concept.

One of the biggest structural issues in cyclorotors is the fact that blades have to take large transverse centrifugal bending loads, and 100 years ago, we did not have the materials that had the strength-to-weight ratio to do that. Today, with composites and so on, it is possible, and this is a key enabler for the present cyclorotors. Also, all the successful cyclocopters built so far needed electronic onboard feedback stabilization, unlike helicopters, which can be passively stabilized. So a cyclocopter idea was far too advanced for its time when it was introduced.

Can you describe the characteristics of the cyclocopter that give it advantages over multirotors and helicopters?

A cycloidal rotor can achieve higher hover efficiency than a conventional rotor at smaller scales, because of the uniform aerodynamic conditions along the blade span and favorable unsteady aerodynamic phenomena on the blades. We have experimentally demonstrated the higher aerodynamic efficiency (thrust per unit aerodynamic power) of cycloidal rotors in comparison with conventional micro rotors used in multicopters and helicopters.

Additionally, a cycloidal rotor is capable of instantaneous thrust vectoring, which can potentially make the vehicle more maneuverable. The cyclorotor can perform efficient high-speed forward flight even beyond an advance ratio of 1.0 by a simple phasing of the cyclic blade-pitch schedule. Unlike a traditional hybrid aircraft (e.g., a tilt-rotor), a cyclocopter can transition from hover to high-speed forward flight without any configuration change due to its thrust vectoring capability. Finally, a cyclorotor can efficiently utilize the available 3-D space, and therefore, requires smaller footprint as compared to a conventional rotor, resulting in a highly compact flying vehicle.

What are some of the challenges in building a cyclocopter this small, and how did you solve them?

Designing and building a rotor at those scales was extremely challenging. We had to come up with innovative carbon composite fabrication techniques to make the rotor blades (0.12 grams each) and pitch links (10 milligrams) and they needed to have sub-millimeter accuracy. We had to custom build a 1.3-gram autopilot (called ELKA, designed by Dr. Vikram Hrishikeshavan at University of Maryland) with triaxial gyros, triaxial accelerometers, a processor, and wireless communications. System integration was challenging. When you scale things down, the dynamics becomes faster, so we had to spend many months trimming and tuning the feedback gains for hover stability. Developing and flight testing the 29-gram cyclocopter took more than 2 years, and was sponsored by the Army Research Laboratory’s MAST-CTA Program.

Image: Moble Benedict/Texas A&M

Conceptual drawing of a future palm-sized cyclocopter.

What are you working on next?

I think that the key areas that still need to be improved are:

1. Designing ultralight blades that can handle the large centrifugal bending loads at high RPMs
2. Reducing the weight and complexity of the cyclorotors significantly
3. Optimization of blade kinematics, blade aerodynamic design, rotor geometry, etc to maximize efficiency in both hover and high-speed flight
4. Mechanically simpler means of implementing these optimal pitching mechanisms either passively or actively
5. Investigating more compact cyclocopter configuration and understanding the upward scalability of this concept

We have shown that this concept has the potential at smaller micro air vehicle scales. The next big step in our research is to investigate the upward scalability of a cycloidal rotor to be used on large VTOL UAVs weighing 100s of pounds and maybe even on a manned aircraft. We have a five-year grant from the U.S. Army to investigate the upward scalability of this concept.

More than anything I want more people around the world to be aware of such a concept so that we can encourage them to work on this. One or two groups working on this idea can only make so much progress. I hope that in the future, once this technology is more mature, it will find its place in the next generation of personal air vehicles and flying cars.

By John Boyd

This article is obtained from here.

A consortium of 15 Japanese automakers and manufacturers that make components and systems for cars—including Toyota, Honda and Nissan, as well as Mitsubishi Electric, map makers, and others—have come together to create detailed, high-definition 3D maps to help usher in safe autonomous driving. Japan’s government is backing the project as part of its effort to have driverless vehicles on the road in time for the Tokyo Olympics in 2020. The 2020 target date has had the effect of focusing the country’s robocar efforts to prevent Japan from falling behind similar efforts underway in the United States and Europe.

Mitsubishi Electric is leading the project—dubbed Dynamic Map Planning—and is providing a new, compact version of its vehicle-mounted mobile mapping system. Mitsubishi began marketing a version of the system, the MMS-G220, overseas in October, and will introduce the commercial version domestically sometime in 2017. The tedious task of mapping Japan’s 30,000 kilometers of expressways—the plan’s first priority—is now underway.

The mobile mapping system (MMS) can be configured to take advantage of various combinations of lidar, cameras, and other sensors, along with a GPS antenna, depending on the application. The devices are assembled to form a single detachable unit designed for easy maintenance. The system, which can be mounted on even a compact car’s roof, draws power from the car’s cigarette lighter socket.

As the vehicle cruises at speeds of around 40 km an hour, the system uses a laser-scanning point cloud technique to gather 3D positioning data of roadside features such as traffic signals, road signage, and lane markings. It can capture objects up to 7 meters away with an absolute accuracy of 10 centimeters, according to Mitsubishi.

A point cloud is a collection of data points formed in space, the position of each point being identified by its X, Y, and Z coordinates. When light emitted by a laser scanner is reflected back from an object or surface, that information is recorded as a data point. Point cloud data alone would not be sufficient to identify objects clearly, so in post-processing, it is superimposed on synchronized camera images taken at the same time. This information-rich combination is then processed to create 3D maps. Color can also be added at this time.

With standard laser equipment, the Mitsubishi system collects 27,100 data points a second. With optional high-performance laser scanners, that number is raised to one million points a second. The mapping system can be equipped with long-range, high-density laser scanners that provide detailed images of cityscapes or roadside buildings.

To keep track of where these objects are in space, the system relies on GPS, an inertial measurement unit, and a wheel-mounted odometer to help calculate the position of the vehicle. For even greater accuracy, the mobile mapping system will also make use of the nascent Quasi-Zenith Satellite System, a Japan-centered commercial satellite system that aims to provide centimeter-scale positioning to augment the U.S.-operated GPS service. This is due to go into full operation in 2018.

Shun Kuriaki, manager of Mitsubishi Electric’s IT Solution Department, in its Electronic Systems Group, says that to improve the safety of autonomous driving, more detailed information than is currently supplied by car navigation systems is required. In bad weather, for instance, the effectiveness of various sensors needed to maintain control of the driving task can be diminished to the point where they’re inoperable.

“The MMS 3D maps will provide such additional information as noise barriers, lane divisions and their widths and surface conditions, as well as the location of traffic lights, road signs and other useful information to help improve the safety of autonomous driving,” says Kuriaki,

The system, which is gathering the myriad bits of information needed to subsequently allow vehicles to traverse Japan’s roads without human intervention, is designed to be operated by a person with a notebook PC in the passenger seat. According to Mitsubishi, no specialist knowledge is required to operate the system or to run the post-processing software after the data is collected.

Autonomous driving is just one of several applications for which Mitsubishi is seeking to use its MMS system. “Some special specification versions of our MMS have already been applied to inspection of tunnel linings and road surface conditions,” says Kuriaki. “And we are also studying how to apply the technology to other fields, such as inspection of railway tracks and underground areas.”

With Mitsubishi ready to export its road-scanning technology, it can expect to compete with Google in the United States, and with several companies in Europe.

By Philip E. Ross

This article is obtained from here.

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA – MAY 17: Detail of the charging point of the Nissan Leaf is displayed at the ‘A World Without Petrol’ art exhibition at Customs House on May 17, 2012 in Sydney, Australia. Designed by Australian artist James Dive and inspired by electric vehicles, the interactive exhibition of 40 recycled petrol bowsers converted into useful everyday items is intended to promote the Nisaan LEAF, the first mass produced 100% electric vehicle in Australia. (Photo by Cameron Spencer/Getty Images for Nissan)

Electric vehicles must make noise to warn pedestrians of their coming by 2019, U.S. road safety regulators said this week. And the measure is grist for our mill here at “Cars That Think” because Tesla Motors appears to be developing a robotic solution to the problem.

The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration announced on Monday that noisemakers would be needed in pure electric and hybrid vehicles operating at speeds under 30 kilometers per hour (19 mph). At higher speeds they evidently make their own noise, thanks to resistance from wind and road.

The first clue to Tesla’s plans, Electrotek reports, is the statement Tesla’s Elon Musk made at a press conference back in 2013. “I think the sensible and ideal thing long-term is to have proximity sensors that direct a pleasant sound in the direction of where somebody is walking,” Musk said. The second clue came earlier this year in the form of blueprints apparently leaked from Tesla. Clearly visible are structures labeled “pedestrian speakers.”

It’s unclear whether regulators will accept Musk’s proposal to beam noise with laser-like focus to spare the ears of the unthreatened. On the other hand, just broadcasting the noise takes away a key EV marketing advantage: silence. (Except for the motorcycle market. Some fans of Harley Davidson’s iconic bikes have disparaged that company’s planned electric version for its un-Harley-like purr.)

Many EV motorsports events already require the noisemakers to protect onlookers, photographers and pit crew. At this summer’s motor race at Pikes Peak, Colo., local stores sold modified car alarms to racing teams for just this purpose. The price: $8.

Toyota, which inaugurated modern EV technology with its Prius hybrid, has supplied optional noisemakers for years. So has Nissan, whose Leaf was the first mass-market all-electric car.

by Elisabeth Uhlemann

Autonomous transport solutions open up a world of opportunities. Scania, a major Swedish automotive industry manufacturer of commercial vehicles, targets a complete system, handling logistics, the assignment of tasks to vehicles, and information sharing between vehicles and infrastructure. Each transport solution is individually tailored to the customer’s needs. During the first stage of development, Scania is focusing on industrial areas, such as mines, ports, or terminals.

Full article: IEEE Vehicular Technology Magazine, Volume 11, Number 3, September 2016

This article is obtained from here.

by James Vincent@jjvincent Nov 16, 2016

Pulling up a low-quality image and telling the computer to “enhance” the resolution has long been the stuff of TV fantasy. But, thanks to machine learning, we are actually getting much better at zooming into a photo without losing picture quality. This week, Google unveiled prototype software that does exactly this that it calls RAISR, or Rapid and Accurate Image Super-Resolution.

In essence, RAISR is similar to current methods of upsampling — the process of turning a small image into a larger one by inserting new pixels into it. But while traditional upsampling methods make these images bigger by filling in new pixel values using fixed rules, RAISR adapts its methods to the type of image its looking at. The software pays particular attention to what are called “edge features” — i.e., parts of an image where the brightness or color gradient differs quickly, and which usually indicates the edge of an object. This adaptive upsampling means the resulting, zoomed images are less blurry.

In the composite image from Google below, the top section is the original, low-res picture, and the bottom is the RAISR-enhanced version. (In the image at the top of this article the original is on the left, and the RAISR version is on the right).

Now compare that to the composite image below, which shows the low-res image on the left, and the traditionally upsampled version on the right. The resulting image is less pixellated, but its edges seem blurred and out of focus:

Google isn’t the only company working on this tech, and earlier this year, Twitter bought a startup named Magic Pony that does the same sort of smart upsampling, but with video — a much harder task considering how many frames need to be quickly processed. In the future, it seems low-resolution imagery is going to become much less common, with machine learning deployed to fill in the gaps.

Survey Shows 5 Ways to Improve Team Productivity Today

by Joe Staples Nov 03, 2016

The article source is here.

Imagine you’re on Family Feud, but with a team of work colleagues instead of relatives. The host Steve Harvey (or Richard Dawson, for those who haven’t seen an episode since 1984) poses the first question:

“Okay, top 5 answers are on the board. We surveyed 606 enterprise workers and asked them: what is the best way to improve team productivity?”

You hit the buzzer first, and say…

Well, what would you say? Don’t worry, I’m not going to make you guess. I’ll just tell you. After studying the results of this year’s U.S. State of Enterprise Work Report, I pulled out the five most important takeaways that will help organizations improve individual and team productivity.

1. Let people work when they work best

More than a third of workers (35%) report being most productive before normal business hours. Another 38% say they’re most productive between 9 and 11 a.m. The least productive time slot? Between 3-5 p.m.

What does that tell you? You could greatly benefit from embracing the growing trend of flex hours. After all, it’s results that matter, not physical presence in the cubicle farm from 8-5 daily. If you have employees who love getting up at 5 and cranking through a bunch of work, taking a longer lunch, and heading home at 3, let them. You’ll get their best effort, and they’ll experience greater satisfaction at work.

Another tip? Avoid scheduling lengthy meetings before 11 a.m.—apart from a 15-minute standup of course. Do you really want to spend the most engaged and productive hours of 73% of your employees sitting around a conference room table?

2. Encourage uninterrupted blocks of time

When we asked enterprise workers what would do the most to improve their work productivity, the top answer was: uninterrupted blocks of time.

This can be accomplished in a number of ways:

• Block out sections of the calendar that are always meeting free for the entire team—like from 9 to 11 a.m., for example.
• Encourage individual employees to block out their calendars for 3-4 hours at a time a couple of days a week. Make those uninterrupted hours sacred. This includes turning off all notifications from all software applications—both on the desktop and the smartphone.
• Set aside a conference room or an office with a door that your team members can schedule for solo, silent work time.
• Allow team members to work remotely more often. Slack, Hipchat, Workfront, Trello, and any other online collaboration tool you may be using work just as well from the coffee shop down the street—or from your employee’s living room.
• Use the resource scheduling capabilities built into your work management software solution to make sure you’re not overloading anyone at any given time. All the uninterrupted time in the world won’t solve the problem of too much work for too few employees.

3. Eliminate your biggest distraction: unnecessary meetings

When asked what gets in the way of their work, 59% of workers blamed “wasteful meetings,” making it the number one answer by far.

Getting rid of unwanted meetings may be easier than you think. I recently wrote an entire article that explains how to reduce your meeting load by 50%. The gist is this: if project status is easily shareable and discoverable within a project management software solution, you can all but eliminate the status meeting.

The same goes for digital proofing. With the right solution in place, you’ll never again have to assemble the team to discuss conflicting feedback on the latest rounds of comps that have been circulating. As one creative director recently said:

“[With digital proofing], we’ve been able to speed up our approval process by at least a third and enable our designers and writers to do what they do best, which is designing and writing, instead of tracking down questions and holding extra meetings trying to get stakeholders to weigh in.”

4. Curtail your second biggest distraction: email

Almost half of workers (43%) blame excessive emails for getting in the way of their work. Email will never go away entirely, but 27% of those surveyed are clinging to the desperate hope that “email will no longer be a main mode of communication in 5 years.” And who can blame them?

Email is often used for purposes it wasn’t designed for. Here are a few ways to limit the time your team has to spend on email:

• Don’t use email as a to-do list. Instead, use task tracking software, or comprehensive project management solutions that include much more robust features, like notifications and collaboration capabilities.
• Don’t use email to communicate project status. Questions and comments that are related to a specific project should ideally be posed and answered from within a project management solution. The right software makes it easy to communicate status with a touch of a button: “going smoothly,” “some concerns” or “major roadblocks,” for example.
• Don’t use email for quick, throw-away questions. Not every conversation needs to be archived and backed up by your email server or your work management solution. Use Google chat, Slack, HipChat and similar tools for quick questions (“Who’s that new vendor Dave mentioned this morning?”) and instant reminders (“Hey, will you respond to my question in Workfront about those banner specs before the end of the day?”).
• Don’t play email ping pong when scheduling a meeting time. Use Doodle instead to accomplish the same thing in just 2 steps, no matter how many people you’re inviting. It radically simplifies the process of scheduling events, especially when your attendees are using different calendaring systems.

5. Make your work processes more efficient

Workers claim that, after uninterrupted blocks of time, the second most important step in improving their work productivity would be: “more efficient work processes.” A bit further down on the list was “advanced technology.” To their credit, these respondents got the sequencing right.

It’s tempting to think that just by plugging in the right kind of time management or project management software, all of your problems will be solved overnight. It’s not quite so simple.

In a Harvard Business Review article, Maura Thomas argues that productivity tools are useless without productivity skills.

“Most companies roll out software with only technical training, intending for that software to improve efficiency and ultimately, productivity. There’s instruction on the various menus, and where to click to achieve certain tasks. This training only serves to make employees proficient in the software, but not necessarily more productive. Thus the new software often isn’t used, or if it is, it doesn’t solve the problem. … A better approach is to focus first on the methodology before the tool itself. When you have the methodology, the requirements for the tool become apparent.”

It’s like buying new golf clubs and expecting to immediately have the result be a hole in one. Luckily, any productivity software worth its salt will include personalized consulting services to help customize it to your team’s particular needs.

After onboarding Workfront as their new work-management solution, Erin Frey, Creative Director at House of Blues, said:

“The minute our consultant arrived, … he asked me questions about our workflow. He didn’t just figure out how things would work in [the software], but figured out if we were using the most efficient workflow, period.”

And the Survey Says…

Not only are you prepared if anyone starts a workplace version of Family Feud and asks you the all-important productivity question, but now you also have a few tricks up your sleeve to solve your team members’ biggest complaints at work—from embracing flex schedules and uninterrupted blocks of time to cutting back on wasteful meetings and emails.

By Philip E. Ross