Achieve better productivity with technology

“How to be more productive?” This is the go-to search engine query of every manager and small business owner striving to stretch limited resources into a sustainable and profitable business model. Nowadays, the answer is simple: technology. Leveraging technology is the best way to efficiently use limited resources and achieve better productivity.

“How can I improve productivity with technology?” you ask? Keep the following tips in mind:

Collaboration is key

According to the 2011 article “The Cost of Poor Communications,” poor communication costs businesses $26,041 per worker per year due to productivity losses. Almost a decade after the article’s original publication, its findings still prove relevant. as businesses continue to lose money due to inefficient forms of information transfer.

Improving collaboration is the first step to improving productivity. Giving your employees all the tools they need to efficiently interact and work with one another will certainly reduce wasted time. Explore how business chat, cloud-based storage, and mobile notation solutions can bring your staff together and bring communications up to speed.

Simplify and automate

Businesses of all sizes engage in a seemingly endless number of tasks any given day. To streamline this, identify your organization’s most time-consuming tasks and start your simplification projects from there. For instance, you can analyze the steps involved in a typical transaction, from customer order placement to processing to delivery, and try to see which steps can be either improved or cut out altogether.

Automation is a great boon to businesses looking to simplify their operations. With it, you can reduce the number of steps your employees take for each transaction as well as enjoy fewer chances of error. A good example is an automated employee tracking system. It will save your employees time when they punch in and out every day, and it will also let you see at a glance where each member of your team is at any given time.

Remote working is the future of enterprise

Many experts project that up to half of the US labor force will experience some form of remote working by 2020. More and more companies are testing these waters, and the good news is more and more remote workers report that they are more satisfied with their job situations.

The benefits of remote working are more tangible than it seems — a long-standing study by the Harvard Business Review about the effects of a work-from-anywhere (WFA) program initiated in 2012 among patent examiners at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) found that the examiners’ work output increased by 4.4% during the WFA program. Not only that, but the examiners’ output quality did not deteriorate, and they tended to relocate, on average, to locations that had much lower costs of living than if they remained strictly in-office. The latter benefit meant happier employees, as they enjoyed an effective increase in real salary for no additional cost to the company.

Empower employees

Many managers struggle with this, but in this day and age, it’s important to understand that your employees are smart, and that you’ll have to trust that they can accomplish their tasks without close supervision (read: micromanagement).

Start with the simple stuff. For example, instead of trudging to your HR department to gather documents for your employees to accomplish and having to collect and deliver said documents afterward, you can simply have a digital system installed to do all that work minus the effort. Fidelis’ Cloud Services solution is a great way to access documents and remotely monitor output progress.

Power up your business with Fidelis’ host of IT services. We’ll provide you with solutions that will take your business to the next level. Contact us today to schedule your strategy session.