Every business owner wants their business to be a success, otherwise, they would not bother with the stress and hassle of starting a business in the first place. There are not many businesses that are a walk in the park but having the correct tools to hand can certainly make it seem a lot easier than struggling along without them.
In order to help your employees, make the most out of their working day (which in turn will also help your business get the best from your employees), you will need to provide them with the help they need to keep their stress levels low and their concentration and morale levels high.
You can do this by providing them with the correct technology (both hardware and software) as well as the support that they will need should they run into difficulties or your systems go down.
Good quality scheduling software
Regardless of how many employees you have in your business, you will need good quality scheduling software to make estimating deadlines, and costs and keeping track of workloads easier.
You should not underestimate the value of being able to gauge the time span of the project in hand, so you can keep your workloads on schedule to meet your customer’s deadlines. Some customers will issue penalties for late deliveries as well as inferior merchandise. Initiating scheduling software and having your workforce able to access it and update it in real time will give you oversight of what is going on, without having to physically go wandering to find out the valuable information you require.
Your workforce should be able to add notes, tags, and even flag when there are issues with any order or with the customer themselves so that issues can be sorted quickly and discretely, with little to no time wasted in downtime, in order to keep the work order on track.
Digital asset management
It is important to have digital asset management (or DAM) software, so that your employees (no matter where they are or what time zone they are working in) can gain access to their workload and the information that they require to get their job roles completed, as well as being able to work together in a positive and productive software.
Using digital asset management such as Brandfolder asset management will help your teams, especially your creative ones, with aspects such as video, presentations, and word documents to name a few. With its strengthened digital security and rights control with rights management, you will find that your teams are able to speed up your on-brand marketing campaigns.
HR software
Whether you have worked in an HR department or not, you should know that the HR department deals with multiple areas of your business. With all the information that it has to deal with (regardless of whether you have a large business or a small one), this department can be intense and constantly changing. It is therefore wise to invest in some good quality software to support this valuable department within your business.
Good quality HR software will help your HR department deal with on-boarding, pay increases, attendance levels, timesheets, tax issues including payroll, as well as other important aspects that the HR department has to deal with on a day-to-day basis.
Customer relations management software
You could find it very beneficial to invest in some customer relations software. This software not only keeps track of communications between your business and your customers so that nothing gets duplicated (and any employee can see what conversations have taken place with any particular customer), but will also keep a record of their purchase history with your business and therefore be able to ascertain whether or not any past customer is likely to be interested in a product launch that you are carrying out.
Having software that can actively enhance your customer relationship as well as provide you with marketing tools to hone marketing campaigns through analyzing past campaignscan allow you to make them more effective. This is great for your sales teams as it means that they can concentrate on the strong sales leads rather than wasting time with those that are not likely to be interested in all out of your current and past customer base.
Don’t forget cybersecurity
With cybercriminals becoming wiser and more cunning by the day, it is highly important that you not only invest in good quality anti-virus software and firewalls for your technology but that you hire the services of a professional and highly experienced business to protect your business data and all your customer’s and employee’s data alike.
You should also be sure to invest in end-user training so that all your employees are fully aware of how they are likely to be contacted by a cybercriminal and they know what to look out for so that it is less likely they will fall for a cybercriminals scam.
In order to make your business that much more secure, you may well wish to limit access to the amount of data that your employees have access to and keep it on a need-to-know basis. This way should you find that an employee falls prey to a cybercriminal then that criminal will only be able to get so far within your data and will not be able to get any further.
Make sure that your employees know the importance of strong passwords, how to choose them and to change them regularly as well as the importance of keeping them private. Although it is tempting to use a favorite pets name or a location that means a lot or has happy memories attached, it is far better to choose random words and nothing that is actually spelled correctly, having a mixture of capital letters, lowercase letters along with numbers and special characters can build a good strong password. This is so it is difficult to guess and can not be worked out from reading a social media post for example.
Founder Dinis Guarda
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