If businesses utilize the right technology in the right places, it can positively affect productivity and allow their employees to carry out their roles more efficiently.
Not only does this improve your bottom line, but it also makes your company a nicer place to work and contributes towards keeping your employees happy!
If you’re going to get the most value out of the software, however, it’s important to really think about how it will actually be used in your business and whether it will increase productivity or just create an extra thing for your employees to learn about.
Review your workflow
If you want to improve your business productivity, you need to get a good idea of your workflow. Your workflow is the tasks that are carried out in your business on a daily basis in order to keep everything running.
An IT management company should be able to help you review your current workflows and ascertain where there are areas that could be improved for efficiency. They can then further advise on whether the best way to see an improvement is through the addition of technology or simply through a change in the process.
Read on to find out some of the most common ways that businesses can utilize technology to help them improve efficiency.
Internal collaboration tools
It’s been estimated that small businesses can lose up to $420,000 per year, all because of poor communication between employees.
The best way to improve communication between employees is to promote collaboration, and more than this, make it as easy as possible to communicate.
Internal communication tools such as Skype, Microsoft Teams, and Slack make it so much easier to communicate because if someone comes away from a meeting not having quite understood what was expected of them, they can discretely message a team member to ask for clarification rather than having to admit mid-meeting that they aren’t sure.
These tools also give employees a central place to discuss things and store vital information so that everyone is up to date at all times.
Project management software
Project management software allows people to work collaboratively on the same project with ease because all of the information they need, important documents, timelines, and current work status are all stored in a central online location.
Some of the best project management software options are:
- LiquidPlanner
- Zoho Projects
- Teamwork
- Smartsheet
- Celoxis
Time tracking
Most employees hate filling out timesheets because they are time-consuming, and frankly, they feel invasive. However, as an employer, you need to know how long things are taking so that you can see if there is a way to improve efficiency.
Automated time tracking tools remove some of the pain from employees tracking their tasks as they don’t have to carry out an extra step to do it, and they provide greater and more accurate insight for managers.
Password management
Secure passwords are necessary for keeping your company data safe, but they are difficult to remember!
Using password management software means that your employees don’t have to waste time trying to remember passwords or locking themselves out of applications because the software securely remembers the password for them.