The primary purpose of technology in the business world is to make our lives easier by enhancing how our employees perform daily tasks. There’s no doubt about it, your IT strategy has a direct impact on the productivity and efficiency of your employees.
Don’t get us wrong, building a team that is collaborative, efficient and productive is still challenging for any business, but technology advancements over the past few years have made it significantly easier.
Investing in the right technology, including hardware equipment and software, can be a decision that helps your organization stand out from its competitors.
As business technologies continue to improve, and your business invests in the tools that help you meet your objectives, new opportunities for productivity and efficiency are created. Here are five ways that your business can use technologies to achieve better results:
#1 - Keep employees on track with project management software
To ensure your clients are happy and to keep employees on track, it’s crucial that your business has a proper plan in place for project management. The use of project management software can make this easy.
Project management software will ensure your employees are on track with projects, no matter where they are working from. These tools can help your employees track progress, assign tasks, log their time and collaborate with their peers on specific projects.
As a result of using project management software, your organization will quickly see improvements in business efficiency, employee collaboration and productivity.
Tools to look out for: GuideCX, Trello, Basecamp, Teamwork, Nifty, Zoho Projects.
#2 - Simplify small repetitive tasks with automation
Small repetitive tasks can be time-consuming for employees, detracting them away from more important tasks that actually deliver real value back to your business and help your company to grow. Finding a way to make those small repetitive tasks easier, or even eliminate them all together, will save your business a significant amount of time and money.
Business process automation (BPA) can be applied to almost all areas of your company, such as automating invoice requirements, automating marketing initiatives, automating day-to-day activities and many other areas of your operations.
Tools to look out for: Zapier, IFTTT, ActiveCampaign, Leadformly, Hootsuite, Grammarly, Calendly.
#3 - Empower your employees to access anything from anywhere
Providing employees access to the information they need to do their job is an integral part of your business strategy. Providing them with a seamless way to access that same information no matter where they are will only improve productivity and efficiency levels among your team.
Use of cloud-based storage technologies to manage documents is a major asset in helping your employees to work more efficiently, while at the same time giving them an incredible amount of flexibility. Providing them with a way to seamlessly access documents no matter where they are working will not only improve productivity levels, but will increase job satisfaction.
Tools to look out for: Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft OneDrive, OpenDrive
#4 - Encourage remote and in-office collaboration with communication tools
Effective communication is crucial for business productivity. Not only does collaboration lead to better quality work, it leads to creative thinking and higher-quality deliverables achieved by your company.
There’s now a huge number of tech solutions that can help your team communicate with one another. Whether they are based in a physical office or working remotely, your business will benefit hugely from tools such as video conferencing software, instant messaging and unified communications (UC).
Tools to look out for: Microsoft Teams, GoToConnect, Zoom, Slack, Google Hangouts, Skype.
#5 - Use time tracking tools
Time tracking tools are important to ensure your organization is charging its clients correctly for projects, but it also has benefits that can help your company improve internal efficiencies among your team.
Your organization can use time tracking to measure your employees time on specific tasks. To be clear, this isn’t to micromanage your employees and tell them how long they should be spending on tasks - this will only lead to unengaged and unsatisfied employees. Instead, time tracking should be used to find opportunities that could increase performance and productivity within your team.
Tools to look out for: Toggl, Timesheets, Timecamp, Timely, Hubstaff.
Want more information about how your IT infrastructure and business technology can improve the productivity and efficiency of your organization? Contact OT Group today. Our team of technology experts would love to answer your questions.
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