5 solutions to increase the business productivity on a regular basis
Living in era of the internet being available everywhere, and this particular entry being worked on at the Warsaw airport – between the connecting flights on my way back home to Riga from the technology conference in Poznan (Poland), one must admit – the daily productivity is crucial! I am facing the challenges caused by productivity issues both by planning and by organising my and my team’s work to achieve the maximum best and effective result. I would like to share with you some thoughts I had concerning the conference.
“We will reinvent productivity to empower every person and every organization on the planet to do more and achieve more,” – Satya Nadella, Microsoft, CEO (10th July 2014).
Eighty percent of the enterprise CEO’s I work with day-to-day consider the following to be their main challenges:
- gaining greater control,
- increasing profit margin,
- and promoting growth.
The response to these challenges is hidden in different enterprise related organizational blocks, but one of the most important aspects is tools, which the employees use on a daily basis. Microsoft offers – single platform for productivity or Office 365. It encompasses not only the Office tools we already know – Word, Excel, Outlook with Exchange (e-mail and calendar service), but also the document management with SharePoint, financial management with Microsoft Dynamics NAV and customer management with Microsoft Dynamics CRM. And it all is available on the clouds or On Cloud without having to invest in your IT infrastructure.
Solution #1 – analyse the crucial enterprise data on-line
Waiting for the monthly analysis of the financial results is in past. Operating financial data that is older than 30 days is not operating financial information anymore. Just like the morning ritual – browsing through the business news on a portal while sipping your coffee, the crucial enterprise data has to be available on-line.
Solution #2 – let your employees access the information from any place at any time
The era of printed data is over. Motivate your employees to make use of tools, which they already have – turn the tablets (also the smartphones) of your employees into business tools, which help you to get information, place an order and sell more.
Solution #3 – focus the attention of your employees to the key performance indicators (KPI)
Provide your employees with on-line indicators that are important and crucial for them, e. g., the major clients, orders to be processed, due payments or reduced order volumes.
Solution #4 – personalised on-line working environment
Create a possibility for the employees to personalise their working environment and motivate them to find and follow crucial data – thus you will gain personal involvement and co-responsibility to gain better results.
Solution #5 – identifiable and measurable goals
Communicate with the employees both about global, and individual goals via the tools you use daily (SharePoint, CRM, Outlook online). If you have set the goal, it is easier to reach it. Just imagine, how much time it would take for you to get to a particular city, if at the beginning of your journey you did not know, which city you have to hit. When you have set the target (metrics – number of new clients, sold item volume, made calls etc.) – compare it to the actual result and analyse it.
I am sure that you are using some tools to advance productivity already – Outlook calendar, Todoist, OneNote or others, which help you to organise, structure and maybe even analyse the data. Would you like to know more about productivity with Microsoft tools? Write – reinis@sparans.lv