Using Technology to Be More Productive
While technology can sometimes be viewed as more of a distraction, it can actually help to boost productivity when used in the right ways. With a little direction and proper training, your team can use technology to their benefit to keep things moving more efficiently and with better results.
1. Make Communication Effective
If you’ve ever had one of those jobs where there were meetings, and then there were meetings to plan the meetings and meetings to talk about other meetings, you know how frustrating it can be. This method of communication is obviously pretty inefficient and wastes a lot of company time and money. It also seriously cuts down on employee productivity. This is one area where technology can offer solutions to immediately address this problem.
Instant messaging and group chats are a great way to increase productivity and cut down on superfluous meetings. Most of the popular options have features like file sharing, a searchable history and convenient ways to organize conversations. Everything is easily accessible so employees won’t miss important e-mails or other notifications.
While email is still a great form of communication for some things, it still takes more effort than to simply respond with a short and fast reply via instant message.
2. Use a password manager
How many times a day does a member of your team spend time searching for the right password? Or perhaps they end up setting and resetting forgotten passwords, taking minutes each day to do so, making productivity drop. It’s hard to remember passwords because we have so many of them to keep track of. With a password manager, you can save all passwords in one place or have one overall password for everything so your employees don’t have to worry about it. They can focus on their work rather than struggling with multiple passwords.
3. Cloud storage technology
If you regularly share files with your team, cloud storage technology is a must. More secure and less time-consuming than an e-mail, you can just notify whoever you’re sending them to and they can simply download it. Many business cloud file storage tools also have version control, allowing you to see if someone else is working on the document, or even revert back to previous versions to spot differences.
4. Keep your security up
One thing that is often overlooked in terms of productivity is security. A digital security plan will keep you up and running even if your online properties go down due to a natural disaster, a virus or a security breach. In the event an issue occurs, your business may come to a grinding halt and your productivity will plummet. Whether it’s your external website, your internal organizational properties, or all your digital assets, make sure to educate employees about phishing and other social engineering tactics, use anti-virus software and managed IT services to boost your digital security.
For more productivity tips to benefit any enterprise, contact Microserve, a managed IT services provider in British Columbia and Alberta.
