Are you presently thinking about productivity solutions to implement in your business? You are definitely thinking in the right direction.
Productivity should be an ongoing effort within an organization. Unfortunately, there will never be a time when a business achieves maximum productivity and can stop trying. Just as teams and employees can have periods of high productivity, they can also sometimes experience periods of low.
There are different reasons for low productivity, including burnout or fatigue, hurdles created by technology, and many more.
We spoke with TechQuarters, an organization that provides IT support to small and medium-sized businesses. They have experience with managing user productivity, and what productivity solutions are available for businesses. The company was able to highlight 4 important productivity solutions every business needs to implement. Let’s check them out.
Top 4 Productivity Solutions Every Business Should Implement
#1: Task Automation
Business always involves lots of small, repetitive, and time-consuming tasks. Because of that, employees most time have to spend time at work to clear up these types of tasks. And that usually has a toll on their morale and motivation.
What more? It is also a waste of time, especially when there are other solutions available to free up employee time and resources. Task automation aims to eliminate repetitive tasks from employees’ schedules, so they can focus on more important work.
Task automation is where one uses software, rather than employees, to complete certain work activities. A computer simply outlines all the steps for a task, establishes triggers for them, and then runs the task. It manages the whole workflow independently without any human interaction.
The benefit of task automation is numerous. To start with, computers carry out tasks in exactly the same way each time. That’s because they can only follow the steps set for them. That way, you can trust that a task will be executed correctly and consistently.
Secondly, task automation can streamline workflows greatly. That’s because all the processes involved in a task are executed in the most efficient way.
#2: Cloud Migration
Most IT support companies agree that the best way a company can improve its productivity across all areas of the business is with Cloud migration. The Cloud is an incredibly pervasive technology these days. If you use an email client like Outlook or Gmail, then you have used Cloud computing.
Likewise, all social networking sites implement Cloud computing to support the demand for their services. It is also very useful for making an organization’s infrastructure more agile.
Cloud migration works when an organization virtualizes its on-premise infrastructure – storage array, servers, and some virtual machines, and hosts the virtualized infrastructure in either a private or public cloud.
Private Clouds are ones that are built and owned by the company that uses them. Whereas, a Public Cloud is one that is owned and maintained by a service provider such as Microsoft or Google. And business customers can pay to host their infrastructure on the service provider’s Cloud.
With a public cloud, the service provider invests billions of dollars into maintaining and improving its infrastructure. That means small and medium-sized businesses would be guaranteed better performance if they paid for public cloud services rather than building their own private cloud.
The productivity benefits of Cloud migration are diverse. That’s because Cloud computing can improve processes in almost every aspect of the organization. To start with, it means the maintenance of a company’s servers, storage, and virtual machines are made much easier. And the longevity of these components is also greatly increased because they are virtualized, and hence one does not need to consider hardware upgrades at all.
#3: Project Management Workflows
Projects are one of the main ways that businesses complete important work. Important tasks are commonly delegated to individual employees or teams who will then carry out the work while reporting to a manager, team leader, or department head.
Projects can be for either internal or external benefit. But either way, it is critical that every project is managed efficiently and with transparency among everyone involved in it. If projects are managed poorly, it can draw out the time to completion.
It can result in low-quality work, and even cause confusion as to who is taking on what work. Such confusion, or even frustration over the management of a project, can lead to a drop in productivity.
Project Management is critical to producing high-quality work, and there are a number of factors that need to be considered. To start with, everyone’s vision for the project must be aligned. This needs to be made clear from the start. Or else, there wouldn’t be a guarantee that everyone involved with the project will be working towards the same outcome.
A good project management workflow should begin with discussing the goals and establishing what outcome everyone is working toward. From there, it will be much easier to establish each participant’s workload within the wider context of the project goals.
Another important aspect of project management workflows is establishing milestones for the project. Breaking up the project into milestones can help establish what exactly you should do and, and when. Some teams may wish to break the project down further into individual tasks, depending on how each participant prefers to work towards their goals.
#4: Unified Communications
One of the key solutions to productivity is well-established channels of communication between colleagues. This is especially critical for effective project work because it relies on participants having close contact with each other so that everyone remains on the same page.
Even outside of project work, employees may often find that they need to consult a colleague. This could be someone in a different department, and they’ll want to be able to contact them as quickly and easily as possible.
This has been especially true since the onset of COVID-19, which has forced many businesses to go remote. That means meaning employees are now experiencing barriers to communication that they didn’t have when they were in the office.
According to TechQuarters, who have been providing managed IT support to London businesses since the onset of COVID-19, unified communications platforms are the best way to ensure productive and consistent communications. This includes applications such as Microsoft Teams.
The principle of unified communication apps is that they incorporate all the key communication channels a business is likely to use. This may include instant messaging, telephony, video calls, meetings, and conferences.
This enables users to pick from their preferred form of communication – all from the same platform. That will help save a lot of time and confusion while enabling both planned and spontaneous communication. That will hence make users feel much more productive.
