Six productivity boosting tools for your successful business

When we talk about productivity in business, we are referring to how proficient your teams are at converting input to output: essentially, how well labour, capital and materials are turned into goods and services.

Monitoring and encouraging productivity is essential if you hope to out-do competitors, grow year-on-year, and stay at the forefront of expanding markets. Thanks to globalisation and the internet, your company now competes on a worldwide playing field, no matter its size or function. Consumers across the world have the choice of goods and services from any country, so quality and efficiency must outrank availability on your list of priorities.

Remote working comes with its own challenges and requirements when it comes to boosting and maintaining the productivity of your workforce. The key question: how do you keep your teams motivated and focussed, while simultaneously monitoring output from a single computer screen?

 

Key productivity challenges

Before addressing productivity boosters, it is important to identify areas in which your business faces productivity drains. There are several challenges that transcend industry that many companies are yet to address since the transfer to the digital office in early 2020.

 

1. The Home Office

Working from home comes with a multitude of attention-stealing distractions (noisy neighbours, homeschooling, and the proximity of the sofa, to name a few). Distractions can easily lead to confusion and abandoned tasks. 

With no immediate direction, workers (especially junior ones) who find it difficult to prioritise and juggle a heavy workload can become overwhelmed with too many sticky notes and browser tabs, resulting in delays, missed deadlines and poor time resource management.

2. Internal Communication

Now in-person meetings are strictly off the table for the foreseeable future, businesses have adapted reasonably well to digital calls. The rise of communication technology has made daily briefings, wellbeing calls and progress reports possible. 

However, it would be dangerous to assume these are foolproof replacements to the face to face meeting; thanks to dropped connections, a lack of body language cues and inability to provide instant clarification.

With important documents and tasks being shared digitally over a multitude of single-purpose platforms, it is easy for vital information to get lost in the mix.

3. Team Coordination

Team coordination is essential to a manager working from home. For an effective, streamlined and time efficient workflow, every employee should be equipped with:

• Access to the most recent relevant company data
• Access to a list of priorities
• Live priority updates
• List of their own tasks
• List of team members’ tasks

A lack of coordination in teams can lead to:

• Lost time
• Duplicate tasks
• Crossed wires
• Missed tasks

4. Ineffective Equipment

While your business may have already provided tools to help employees work from home, are they the best for the job? Your software may solve certain lengthy standard company processes that save your teams time, but if it is not focussed on increasing productivity in all areas you will still be wasting time and resources without even realising there is plenty of room for improvement.

 

How to boost productivity

Now you have probably been able to identify with at least one of these productivity drains, it is time to figure out the best way to resolve it. Take a step back and look at your business processes from an outsider’s perspective. 

1. How do materials and information move through your company? 
2. Is value added or subtracted when looking at the bigger picture?

By keeping in mind what your overall goals and objectives are, you can better evaluate areas of waste and go about eliminating unnecessary productivity drains.

In almost every instance, productivity drains (and the means by which to detect them) are best resolved using web-based technology. If you want to increase productivity to see business growth, increase market share and reduce costs, software is consistently the most powerful way in which to achieve all of these goals consecutively. Benefits of productivity software also include:

• Automatic updates
• Stay on top of newest innovations
• Flexibility
• Can be implemented throughout the full business scope
• Does not necessarily require any physical space or set-up costs

 

Choosing the right tools

How to choose the right tools for your business from the plethora of options available on the market? Start with the essential productivity functions your future software provider should offer. The following features are all available on Optimiser’s productivity skyrocketing Enterprise Licence:

• Software automations to save time
  • Easily design email campaigns with drag and drop elements and no HTML knowledge required
  • Schedule mailers to send at success-based timings
  • Auto-generate and add branding to invoices
  • Instantly create simple chart and graph reports from custom data sets
• Task management
  • Create and assign detailed tasks
  • Live track task status and update priorities as information changes
  • Allocate and group project-specific tasks  
• Cloud-based calendar
  • Streamline the workflow onto a seamless calendar for the whole team
  • View team members’ calendars to schedule meetings at a glance
  • Collaborate on shared tasks at the most convenient time
  • Specialised events calendar to separate out event-based tasks
• Team collaboration features
  • Task-specific chat box to keep conversation relevant
  • Cloud-based drive with customised access settings
  • Contact and account-specific team member assignments
  • Collaborative pipelines
  • Historic data collection for project takeover at a glance
• Daily/ live feedback
  • G-Suite integrations allow instant data transfer between Gmail and Optimiser from within a single tab
  • Reports and analytics into custom sets of data with no need for spreadsheets
  • Live feedback on mailer success, including bounce rate and CTR
• Fully integrated
  • Every tool suite is fully-integrated with Optimiser’s powerful CRM:
    • Share data on-platform between departments and features
    • Gain fast snapshots of overall business performance across the board
    • Heightened inter-departmental collaboration

Optimiser’s customised solutions for every business prioritise a boost in productivity: ensuring your single subscription contains all the tools integral to the unique requirements and individual goals of your business. Flexible and personalisable subscriptions to Optimiser’s platform mean your software expands and changes as your company grows.

 

Benefits of boosting productivity with Optimiser

Boost the bottom line

As with any business tool, your bottom line will experience a large boost as processes are streamlined, automated and improved. Immediate changes are reduced expenditure, less friction between departments, and enhanced time utilisation.

No matter the sector you work in, an in-depth analysis by Optimiser’s expert team identifies the scope of your work and implements a unique solution to resolve the challenges you face.

Increase worker output and motivation

By giving your staff the tools to increase their output and produce better quality work, faster, you empower them to reach incentivisers you may have put in place to reward employees’ hard work. Greater chance of reward in turn increases motivation, and further improves productivity.

When you’re able to review processes and get quick analytics into challenges, it makes it easier to quickly share detailed feedback reports on-platform with relevant team members. Making a collaborative process out of fine-tuning exercises increases accountability and the sense of personal investment.

Helps set (and achieve) more ambitious KPIs

With your increased business intelligence, and heightened understanding of the resource journey through your processes, you are able to precisely target KPIs to meet areas of significant waste. You can set clear objectives and paths for teams with realistic checkpoints that spur action, improve focus and increase their understanding about the business objectives as a whole.

Save money

Perhaps most significantly, Optimiser’s subscription costs can save businesses an average of 40% on their software subscription costs, under a single, integrated package. By reducing cost on the baseline, productivity sees a significant jump from the moment the system is implemented into your business: a great way to kickstart your productivity journey.

Optimiser is a comprehensive CRM software company, providing businesses a customisable solution to their personal goals for sales, productivity, and growth. Powerful integrated modules include lead management software, a B2B sales toolkit, automated marketing suite and more for sale under a single subscription. Try Optimiser’s CRM software demo with access to the full Enterprise Licence FREE for 30 days, and find out how you can skyrocket productivity in just one month!