In a growing business, every second of productive work counts. You need to be getting the most out of your staff and your resources to continue to grow and to be profitable. Productivity affects everything from morale to the bottom line. Anything you can do to squeeze more productivity out of your business will only make you more efficient and able to offer better services in the long run.
You might have guessed where we’re going to go next – a key tool in your box that can help you realise better productivity is technology. Deployed, adopted and continually used in the right way, the right end-user and back-end technology can help you hone your processes and become more productive as a business. Here are 4 ways how.
Streamlining processes
Your productivity as a small business lives and dies in your business processes. An inefficient process with unnecessary, time consuming steps like manual data entry and reentry can add hours, even days to any process. Using technology to bypass or ease these bottlenecks can give an instant boost to productivity. According to Tech Aisle, 57% of SMB business leaders credit IT with “facilitating better automation of core business processes”. Technology can help you effectively map, analyse, redesign, refine and automate parts or all of core business processes which will help you be more productive and deliver better service to customers.
Making better decisions, quicker
Every business has to make potentially high impact decisions on the fly – but it’s even more prevalent in a growing SMB. Everyday, you have the potential to come across a situation or an opportunity you haven’t seen before, and you need to look at the facts and decide on an approach in a timely manner. Using the right technology – such as real-time analytics and KPI dashboards – makes this kind of decision making easier. 63% of SMBs currently using analytics reported that they improved processes, leading to faster decision making and better productivity.
Saving those precious seconds
It might seem like an obvious one, but ensuring you have back end technology in place to support your infrastructure, and end user technology can support your users’ needs, can help save so much time and therefore make you more productive. The difference between taking a couple of extra seconds to open a file or run a program, added up over time, can be massive. Ensuring your end users are kitted out with the latest technology with adequate processing power, and taking additional measures like offloading storage and applications to the cloud can help you shave seconds or maybe even minutes off various tasks that will help you save real time in the day-to-day running of your business.
Empowering your people
Having the right tools within their reach can work wonders to not only actually improve your employees’ productivity, but can also actually put them in the right state of mind to be productive too. Technology increases mobility and unlocks more flexible ways of working – including working remotely. A study by Stanford University over 2 years found that people working remotely took shorter breaks, and experienced a productivity boost equivalent to a full day of work compared to their in-office counterparts.
Want to upgrade your technology to improve productivity in your business, but unsure where you’ll find the budget? We can help you find a more flexible way to upgrade with our technology financing solutions. With FlexIT, our leasing solutions perfect for SMBs, you could save up to 20% on the latest technology, and pay in manageable monthly installments. To find out more about how we could help you, get in touch.
