It turns out that 40-hour workweeks are not as productive as we think they are. Who would have thought? On the contrary, your productivity is a measure of how efficient your processes are. In an experiment done by a company in New Zealand, when they switched to a four-day workweek, but their employees were paid for five, the productivity, happiness, and work-life balance greatly improved. The experiment raised employee engagement by 40%. What’s more, employees were actively talking about productivity and thinking consciously about what they were doing and how they were doing it.
Some companies will not find it useful to switch to a four-day week. Nevertheless, the question that stands out from the experiment is whether business owners can maximize productivity with the right productivity tools, while reducing the pressure on their workforce. Ultimately, better productivity can lead to increased profits, as companies supply more goods or services and meet demand from their customers more efficiently.
While the structure of a business has evolved and gotten more varied over the years, people have been using business tools for a long time. There are many different types of companies, ranging from product creation to service creation. Regardless of the type of business in question, it is still critical for the founder to learn everything about business tools and technology. Any technology that improves your company’s business process or efficiency should be in your arsenal of business tools. In general, business tools are used for five main purposes: planning, executing operations, controlling operations, storing operational data, and making decisions.
Employees use productivity tools or task management systems to create and produce documents, databases, charts, graphics, and presentations across organizations. Once these tasks are completed, managers and senior executives can also easily keep an eye on the updates. These tools are now required for both corporations and freelancers to execute their overall strategy successfully.
Just in case you’re wondering about the tangible benefits that productivity tools can offer your business, let’s look at a few.
One of the first benefits that you may notice is a significant increase in the quality of the work produced. This holds true for the majority of productivity tools you may choose to incorporate into your system. Effective communication between team members or between a company and its customers, for example, is a critical component of quality improvement. In today’s world, this usually includes having good video conferencing platforms that enable face-to-face meetings over long distances and essential tasks like file sharing. Good communication through these channels aids in identifying potential issues before they become major issues and promotes collaborative work. Another factor that should always be considered is good analytics tools to highlight and monitor improvements and quality changes. These can help you assess the efficacy of the tools you have chosen.
Time is another important consideration when it comes to efficiency. Are our team members putting their time to good use? Good time management can make the difference between something being delivered on time versus something being completed after a critical deadline has passed. Late delivery of goods or services can harm client relationships and cause financial and reputational consequences. Including practical time management tools in your company processes can help avoid late deliveries while increasing overall efficiency.
Two features that need to be considered, especially during the pandemic and the new working model, are mobility and remote working features. Businesses must adapt to these aspects of working life. This applies whether you have a sales representative who rarely comes into the office or a staff member who prefers to do most of their work from home. As the employer, you need to make sure they have the tools and systems they need to get their jobs done. Identifying the tools that enable productive remote or mobile work will always be critical to maintaining and improving productivity. Communication tools and connections to cloud or office-based systems are just a few examples.
Good productivity tools require effective communication at all levels of a company, both internally and externally. Audio communications, email, file sharing, and video conferencing are just a few examples of these. All of this can now be combined into a single, simple-to-use portal that streamlines all aspects of communication. Additionally, web conferencing can be beneficial for your business. It not only allows companies to run video calls, but it also allows them to share web-based content as well as other content. Doing so makes collaborative work more accessible. This collaboration will almost certainly result in increased productivity and efficiency across the board. As part of your communications strategy, you may also want to consider automated tools. This is especially important if your company runs a call center with a high volume of traffic. Artificial Intelligence tools can significantly boost your company’s productivity rates.
Regardless of whether you’re a business founder or an employee, knowing how far a project has progressed is critical. If a team member is working on a project component that impacts the company’s operations, they need to know where they are in the process. You can improve overall productivity and efficiency by using practical performance management tools best suited to your company. One of the most essential aspects of a good management tool is the ability to monitor every aspect of a company’s production process. Furthermore, having a comprehensive view of the entire project allows management to identify issues and communicate progress to clients.
With so much news out there about companies going through data breaches and hacking these days, data security should always be a top priority. This is especially important when adding new tools, apps, and software to your operations. If you are sharing information and files with others, security is even more critical. Using productivity tools that provide a high level of security ensures that all information and data is kept secure at all times.
Last but not least, if you’ve ever worked in a chaotic environment, then you are well aware of the negative impact this can have on your productivity. Whatever the cause, a disrupted workflow has an impact on productivity, efficiency, and profits. Employees are easily distracted in a cluttered environment, especially when working from home. As a result, they can find it challenging to stay focused on tasks at home. It’s not enough to simply motivate your employees. Rather, you need to go one step further and provide them with the tools they need to be more productive. Depending on the size and type of business, the tools used may differ. The first step toward increased productivity is to investigate and identify what works best for a company.
Finally, another way to improve workflow and manage distracting situations is to use cloud-based task management. This can go a long way towards improving the workflow throughout your organization.
The team at Skhokho knows how beneficial business tools can be in boosting the productivity of an entire organization from top to bottom. For this reason, Skhokho set out to create a comprehensive business management and productivity tool for everything a founder might need to do. This integrated business and team collaboration software helps business owners manage their day-to-day tasks such as HRM, Sales and CRM, OKR, Task Management, and Accounting. Skhokho founder Bertha Kgokong was determined to solve the high costs and bulky software solutions that business founders have to deal with during their search for efficient business tools. Bertha set out to create one software solution that integrates the most valuable parts of fragmented micro-SaaS platforms into a lightweight, intuitive platform that contains tools and features to help business owners with their daily responsibilities. The Skhokho platform is a combination of several different softwares, so it does much more than any other single platform can do, at a fraction of the cost.
For more information about Skhokho and to join their platform, click here.