If we have learned anything in 2020, it’s that investing in our employees is the only way to stay afloat. This has always been true, of course, because even without a global crisis on our hands, there is no denying that our employees are the main driving force behind sustainability and growth. Your employee collective is your biggest asset, and right now it’s more important than ever before to invest in their happiness and overall satisfaction.
Luckily, there are many ways you can do this, but aside from good leadership and some additional perks, you should leverage technology as well. Adopting the right tech such as cloud computing will provide you various digital features that can streamline your entire operation, enhance the quality of life at work, and facilitate collaboration and productivity.
When you make an effort to make the lives of your employees easier, you can bet that people will start coming to work with a smile, after all. You can use technology to automate various processes, but you should also use it to better manage your workforce. Here’s how to do it with the right tech.
Better communication builds a better culture
Firstly, let’s try to leverage the right software and hardware solutions to enhance the communication in your company, whether you’re operating on a remote work model or not. Good communication is the foundational pillar of a successful company culture, but it also facilitates growth and success across the organisation in many ways. That’s why digitising and unifying your communication is so important, especially in the new normal when the company’s culture is the first thing to take a hit.
By implementing a VoIP (voice over internet protocol) solution into your company, you can facilitate horizontal and vertical communication among internal and remote teams. Given the fact that VoIP is a cloud-based solution with numerous communication features, it allows your employees to communicate via phone, video, chat, mobile apps, and use advanced features to communicate more efficiently, leading to a more positive culture across the board.
Facilitating collaboration is equally important
The way your employees communicate will not only affect your culture, it will also affect productivity and output across your organisation. What’s more, it will help improve collaboration within and between teams, and it will eliminate department silos in your company. However, having a communication tool is not enough to achieve these goals.
You also need a feature-rich project management tool that will help people work from home seamlessly and collaborate with their colleagues wherever they are. With a cloud-based PM tool, your employees will be able to work on every project and task together on a centralised digital platform where everything is tracked and logged, which will also improve accountability.
Engaging and motivating employees in real time
Managing your workforce is no longer just about monitoring progress or tracking their productivity, it’s about actively engaging them and motivating them to achieve their goals. As a leader, you always have to keep the goals of the company in mind, but you also have to guide your employees towards their own goals. After all, you can’t expect them to be motivated by your company’s objectives only. No, people want to be motivated by their leaders.
To that end, it’s important that you stay in touch with your employees and through tech-driven employee engagement solutions that allow you to engage with your employees in real-time across the channels that they prefer. You also need to use this tech to inspire employees to provide daily feedback at the end of their shifts so that you can capture invaluable information that you can use to better run your business and manage your workforce.
Emphasising personal data protection and privacy
Of all the tech you can employ to motivate and engage your employees, advanced cybersecurity measures might be the last on your list. In reality, though, preventing phishing attacks and elevating cybersecurity for your remote teams is one of the best ways to keep your remote workforce happy and feeling safe at all times.
Stronger passwords generated by a password management tool, two-factor authentication for all accounts, end-to-end encryption in all communication, network monitoring, all these solutions will help keep your employees safe and motivated to do a better job.
Delivering better training and education
Finally, to keep your employees happy, you should give them an opportunity to advance in their professional realm. People don’t like to feel stuck or like their careers are stagnating, which is why you should use online training and education to help them upskill quickly and assume new roles and responsibilities.
You can leverage automated training tools and intuitive training software to make upskilling more efficient and effective, but also more engaging for your employees. What’s more, you can leverage onboarding technology to help new hires become productive members of your organisation from day one.
Emma is a digital marketer and blogger from Sydney. After getting a marketing degree she started working with Australian startups on business and marketing development. Emma writes for many relevant, industry related online publications and does a job of an Executive Editor at Bizzmark blog and a guest lecturer at Melbourne University. Interested in marketing, startups and latest business trends. Follow Emma on Twitter @EmmaRWorden