Companies who operate with siloed systems, teams and information are not going to achieve the highest possible results. It’s impossible for processes to be streamlined and automated when everything in your business is isolated. In this blog, we explore the reasons why having a connected workforce is so important and how you can achieve it in your organisation.
Productivity
If your information and systems are disjointed, it means your workforce is also disjointed and it’s impossible for your company to operate at peak productivity levels. All your teams will be in some way inhibited and will have to waste valuable time on internal communication, or locating the relevant information to complete their job. When your employees are connected to each other and to the information, they require this will streamline all of your processes. The time saved will allow your team to focus on more important tasks and enable them to work more proactively resulting in not only a more efficient but a more effective workforce.
Collaboration
Internal communication can take up a lot of time in businesses when different teams are working together to complete a project, trying to locate documents, communicating issues and focusing on deadlines at every stage of the process. Working on jobs is easier for your business if you have a system with features like document revision history, audit trails, and job life cycle overview, this will increase visibility and make it easier for different departments to work together collaboratively and productively.
Visibility
In order to support management when making critical decisions, access to information, and more importantly simple analysis is crucial. With paper-based, spreadsheets or manual processes this visibility is very limited or does not exist. In larger organisations, even inter-department decisions and visibility can be important and in the modern world companies have multiple offices, home-based workers, mobile field employees and making sense of complex business operations is a real challenge. Appropriate information strategy can create a connected workforce and enable the visibility of operations from start to finish which in turn supports management to make informed strategic decisions.
Mobile
If your department(s) are operating from paper and spreadsheet-based processes, it’s hard and often impossible for your workforce to work while on the go. Employees have to carry folders and information with them which removes visibility of that information for people back in the office, or your team will have to wait till they return to the office to complete important tasks. Providing your employees with the ability to communicate and share information with colleagues when they are out of the office increases the productivity levels throughout the business. It can also benefit your clients if your team can answer their questions quickly by checking a system for notes or internal communication straight from their tablet or mobile phone.
Connecting Your Workforce
It’s one thing to understand why connecting your workforce is so important, but achieving a connected workforce is another. We have put together some helpful ideas to get you started if you want some more advice or would like to discuss this topic in more depth, please get in touch.
- Integrate any existing business systems in your organisation to remove any disjointed or duplicated information.
- Adopt a more open communication stream, instead of one to one phone calls or emails, create a group conversation where employees can share information and ask/answer questions.
- Enable employees to stay involved even when they’re out at meetings or events, by uploading information or responding to an issue from another member of the team.
- Automate tedious, time-wasting jobs that are taking up employee time and use a system that provides automatic notifications and reminders to reduce the time departments have to spend on internal communication.
- Systemising business processes not only enables many of the above benefits but also ensures compliance with the process across your operations and consistency is important to your customers.
- Implement a system that provides visibility of project progress so that your teams can avoid potential issues that could affect your customers.
