A Team United: Using Technology to Increase Productivity

Technology and productivity go hand in hand. But given the new challenges businesses are facing, what helped a few years ago may be insufficient today. That means a possible loss in productivity, which impacts your bottom line.

Fortunately, there’s no shortage of tools and solutions that businesses can use to help productivity bounce back. Trying to do it all can be a tall order for businesses, but by focusing on aspects of your business that most directly impact productivity, you can steadily update your IT capabilities without falling behind. The key is to know where to start.

Create an Anytime and Anywhere Business

If the pandemic taught business owners anything, it’s that many jobs can be performed from anywhere. To make it work, businesses must be able to provide employees with instant access to business information, data, and the rest of their team. Consider these five approaches to keeping everyone connected:

• Providing the latest in mobile technology is just a start. Using a virtual private network (VPN), employees can securely access the internet as well as internal networks.
• Offering a video conferencing solution will not only reduce the need to travel to meetings, but also allows for more flexibility in scheduling.
• Adopt a BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) policy. Businesses can make their employees more accessible by allowing them to use their own devices for work. Plus, you can save IT costs on purchasing and maintaining its own devices.
• Using messaging and chat technology improves communication efficiency and employee productivity. Urgent questions can be answered immediately rather than having to engage in email back and forth.
• Utilizing file-sharing technology like Dropbox not only allows for instant file sharing, it makes it easy to track what changes were made to a document, by whom and when it was done.

Create a Collaborative Environment

Most employees view meetings as an unnecessary drain on their time. By investing in collaboration suites, businesses can eliminate needless meetings and encourage employees to communicate more effectively on projects. By creating an all-in-one environment, collaboration tools can help team members discuss, plan and execute workflows—regardless of location.

Streamline or Automate Processes

Taking the routine and making it more efficient should be the goal for any business. And with readily available and reasonably priced software solutions, you can drastically reduce time and resources spent on critical functions such as customer service, human resources, email marketing, accounting, and payroll. Some of these solutions include:

• Customer Relation Management (CRM) systems, which can be combined with marketing automation programs to automate email campaigns while improving their effectiveness.
• Automated time tracking software, which allows remote and on-the-road employees to keep track of their time, mileage, and expenses, relieving other staff of the mundane yet critical task of auditing time entries.
• Scheduling software, which keeps everyone on task and on time.
• Password management software, which eliminates the need for employees to remember or track down passwords while enhancing security.

Improving productivity can impact all key business metrics, including customer satisfaction and your bottom line. But most importantly, it can be felt by your employees through an improved work culture and increased morale. When it comes to uniting your team, the right technology can make all the difference.