Techie Tools Can Increase Business Productivity
As your small business grows, you will find yourself with less and less oversight when it comes to what your employees are actually doing. You might begin looking into how to increase workplace productivity at which point you will realize you have no clue how to measure it in the first place.
Saheli S. R. Datta suggests asking your employees. After all, they are your best resource when it comes to understanding what they do with their days. Her article in Business 2.0 magazine (part of CNNMoney.com) also recommends including a subjective measurement of an employee’s performance such as a monthly rating from a manager. It’s also important to recognize that group projects can often skew the perception of an individual worker. “A group of high performers might be collectively sliding” while someone who’s doing well might go unnoticed “because she’s the one making everyone else look good.”
This is not to say that some people aren’t slackers – thanks to technology, however, managers have a plethora of new tools to keep their teams on track. Mentioning Scrybe, Tungle or Calgoo probably sounds as if I’m referring to your child’s favorite stuffed animals but these are just a few of the tools that can help a small business increase productivity.
KnowledgeSync, a self proclaimed “smoke detector” for businesses, monitors “data for critical, time-sensitive events that (if un-responded to) could cost an organization thousands of dollars in lost revenue, thousands of hours in lost productivity, and the loss of satisfied customers.” Duct Tape Marketing’s John Jantsch recommends BaseCamp for online project management (ODesk is a similar software).
Brandi Cummings of Telecentrex advises small business owners to look at four areas where the addition of technology could increase their levels of productivity including investing in a virtual phone system that can “route their calls to them on their cell phones when they are out of the office handling other tasks.”
Shelley Moore
Zilker Ventures, LLC
ChooseWhat.com
Tax-Compare.com
Tags: business tools, KnowledgeSync, productivity, project management, Small Business