Some business owners like to believe that they owe their success to a superb set of products or services they’ve created. Partially, this can be true, but this mindset will certainly lead to management and leadership issues in the future, because it fails to recognize the role employees play in business growth.
When you have a collective of employees who work hard and feel happy in their roles, you can sleep easy knowing that your business is in good hands. They, your teams, are your greatest allies when push comes to shove, so their productivity is paramount for your business success.
You have a whole array of tools and means to improve their productivity. Starting with technology and all kinds of software solutions, the digital world has created all kinds of shortcuts to better workflow, smarter time management, and improving accountability. Here are the five core tech-based tips to provide help for your teams and ensure greater productivity in your organization.
Seamless collaboration tools
Ever since cloud technology has taken the world by storm, companies have simplified their operations significantly. To a great extent, using the cloud helps increase productivity, too. When you enable secure data sharing and real-time collaboration on the cloud, you’re giving your employees a safe environment in which they can work no matter if they’re at the office or at home.
Add to that, the cloud helps your teams integrate a wide array of other tech tools, which means you can easily track and analyze performance in your business and discover different ways to improve productivity over time.
Spotting inefficient patterns
Technology is only as helpful as you’re able to put it to good use. For example, with different tracking tools, you can see when and where your employees are, and how they are allocating their valuable time. This, however, isn’t the only way you can use the information. When you start tracking time and attendance in your organization, you can also recognize repeating patterns that don’t generate results.
For example, if people keep double-booking the conference room, or if they waste too much time on menial work, you can make sure to introduce automated solutions as well as notifications that help with time management. Attendance tracking will tell you when some of your staff might be putting in too much overtime, which means an increased risk of burnout, and you can prevent such issues in the future and allocate work more prudently.
Automation in every department
It might seem like small and menial tasks take up the least of your time, but they do accumulate into entire days and hours of what seems to be nothing impactful at all. Your employees feel the same! If they need to go over piles of marketing data manually or schedule each individual post for social media only to go back to your pages to engage followers, and your accounting team needs to file every invoice manually, they are already wasting time.
With different automation tools, you can empower your departments to reduce their workloads. Chatbots can take over a large portion of customer support queries, while social scheduling tools simplify your marketers’ lives. Invoice and payroll automation can help your finance department do more for the stability of your cash flow instead of doing the grunt work. The list goes on, but you can definitely use it to continue automating various tasks in your organization.
Simplify project management
Brainstorming at the office is always a wonderful way to generate new ideas and solutions to help customers and clients trust your business for the long haul. However, with remote teams on the rise and more people collaborating with external agencies and freelancers, you need project management tools that help build a foundation of transparency and seamless communication.
Tools such as Basecamp, Asana, and Trello are designed to help businesses boost accountability and visibility. You can assign tasks, automate notifications, and easily exchange files and ideas. With many different features, these tools simplify collaboration both at the office and beyond, and you can use them for every single project in the pipeline.
Eliminating distractions
With smartphones, tablets, and computers becoming such major parts of our lives, it has become the norm to check all our notifications every few minutes. What’s more, modern-day companies allow people to check personal social media profiles on business time, simply because they trust their teams to complete their work in time. However, even if they do complete their assignments in the given deadlines when they check their phones incessantly, can you imagine how much they can accomplish when they manage to curb this habit?
Start relying on various digital tools that can help you reduce and eliminate office distractions. From noise-canceling headphones that can keep you focused, to apps that reduce your access to social media, you can use these tools even when you’re working remotely. Perhaps that’s precisely what your employees need – a little bit of structure and discipline that can help them do more in less time.
With the capabilities technology can provide, your business can truly maximize productivity in every sector and in every process. By enabling better productivity for your teams, you effectively contribute to your entire company’s growth and you facilitate personal and professional development among your staff. Use tech to your advantage and make sure your employees are equipped for the modern world and the many issues they’ll face, so that their productivity will not falter.