Take Advantage of Communication and Collaboration Platforms

Communication is an essential part of the workday. We get tasks, ask colleagues for help and send the results to the boss. Nowadays it’s easy to coordinate with others — just add the right people to a group chat and get a solution.

• Zoom. It’s a startup that made some noise during the pandemic. This service is widely used by both large companies and educational institutions because of its intuitive interface and remarkable video quality.
• Slack is a platform for teamwork. It has various bots: Uptime Robot provides information on inaccessible sites, Polly conducts surveys, TimeBot and BirthdayBot inform about vacations and birthdays.
• Тwist. This is a messenger for busy people who don’t like small talk. Each email can be converted into a task integrated into GitHub. 
• Microsoft Teams is an Office 365 product that helps organize meetings and conferences, including audio and video recording, rapid file sharing, real-time team collaboration, scheduling, and task management.  
• Discord is a program for gamers that gained popularity among startups and companies because of voice and text chats, screen sharing, and the ability to make channels for different groups. For example, Rolling Scopes uses it to coordinate students during free online courses. for Discord.

Use one of the available repositories to save your collaboration results: SharePoint, Confluence, or GitHub.

Keep Your Workflow Streamlined

Headhunters use employee management software to find new talent and keep a friendly atmosphere in the office. Each of these steps can be facilitated with special tools.

Hiring

Finding new people is a challenging task. You have to choose the right person to build your dream team. Let the software help you do that. People Search and Workable will look through millions of sources and provide complete profiles along with email addresses and social media links. Then GapJumpers, Interviewing.io, and Codility will assess hard skills during blind interviews. You can then use HireSelect® by Criteria Corp and Plum.io to get to know the candidates: their personality, abilities, and other soft skills.

HR Task Management

HRs have a lot of information to keep in mind: workforce analytics, time tracking, and business intelligence. For these tasks, they use:

• Square. This tool is integrated with marketplaces like WooCommerce, GoDaddy, Xero, and Quickbooks. It’s free and available on smartphones.
• Namely, BambooHR, and UltiPro. These tools provide everything from time tracking to a complete employee database.

Technology Increases Productivity and Profitability that Building a Micro-Society 

Corporate culture is not built overnight. Everyone wants to feel that they matter in achieving common goals. That’s why it’s necessary to:

• Reward achievements (use the Bonusly);
• Ask the opinion of team members on various work issues (use the Culture Amp);
• Implement a continuous learning system (use iSpring Learn, Matrix LMS, TalentLMS).

Technology Increases Productivity and Profitability Make Accounting Simplified

Can you believe that 20-30 years ago people had to calculate their taxes and go to the bank to pay them? Today, special tools like TurboTax, Taxslayer, CreditKarma, or Taxer perform these routine tasks. They also generate reports, tax bills, and other accounting documents. Remember that each country has its tax system, so make the right choice. When your taxes are paid, you can use special software to keep your funds under control:

• Cash Flow Statements and Cash Flow Forecasts are special tools that help you visualize your bank account balance with its incoming and outgoing funds. 
• A float is a tool with a user-friendly interface. Based on the data you enter, it can show you how much money you will make in the future. It doesn’t use complicated spreadsheets, so you can figure it out without a bachelor’s degree in economics.
• OneUp is a tool for dashboard fans. It gives you a quick overview of your financial situation. You’ll compare profits and losses using charts and graphs.

Keep your project management on track 

With the increasing digitalization of society, project coordination is becoming more and more exciting. A decade ago, it was as simple as 1.2.3: the CEO held meetings and received operational information from each department. Today, the project manager is forced to organize work with remote employees from all departments in such a way as to avoid overtime and exceeding project deadlines.

Kanban or Scrum are used to achieve success in this. These are special methodologies, the main idea of which is to divide complex tasks into micro-tasks for each team member – from Web developer to QA. 

Scrum tools:

• monday.com. This is a tool to help you create, visualize and share a project roadmap. The interface is intuitive and customizable, so everyone can create sprints for the team’s needs.
• Scrumfast is a project management service with a retrospective tool (helps everyone share ideas at the end of a sprint), burndown charts and multiple tasks. It is ideal for users with little management experience and for small businesses that don’t want to overpay. 

Kanban tools:

• Basecamp is software created by a company with 20 years of experience in remote work. It helps you coordinate single-page projects, create to-do lists with deadlines, and work with very large files. You can also create your own ads (if you know Ruby).
• ActiveCollab is a software solution that provides workload management, time tracking, task dependencies, collaboration capabilities, billing, and third-party integration. 
• Trello is a widely used service where you can group tasks using boards and cards. You can add an extension to each card: Card Repeater – setting up permanent tasks, Pomorello – timer for Pomodoro fans, and Card Aging – to delete old tasks.
• Asana. This software allows you to plan long-term projects. You can view workload information for team members to make sure no one is overwhelmed.
• Wrike includes a real-time project view so that your team leaders can get real-time answers and updates.

If you use Agile methodologies and Kanban and Scrum – check out the ProjectManager. NASA, Volvo, and Ralph Lauren use it for their needs. In this tool, real-time dashboards come with automated alerts.

You can get your own task management software, which is a necessity for your business. You can read more about such a tool here. 

Technology Increases Productivity Secure Your Data

All information used in your project must be protected from leakage. Sign an NDA with your employees and install special applications to repel bots, hackers, and viruses on all devices used at work, from computers to smartphones.

Data encryption software

Smartphones: Folder Lock and AxCrypt help save personal information – personal files, photos, videos, contacts, wallet cards, notes, and audio recordings, i.e. everything that hackers can get hold of. Apple Mac computers: Concealer creates an encrypted area on the hard drive where important files are stored. Windows: Renee File Protector and SensiGuard allow users to create passwords for each file and folder. They hide them from unauthorized users and help delete them securely. This means that hackers will skip over sensitive locations on hard drives. Firewalls and VPN services encrypt information, hide real IP addresses, and do everything to keep data from being hacked. The good ones are FortiGate, GlassWire Firewall, WatchGuard Network Security, Comodo, Sophos XG Firewall, SonicWall, and pfSense.

Technology Increases Productivity Automate Your Customer Relationship Management

The main trend in recent years is to establish trust with customers through personalized and quality service. Simple tools such as spreadsheets and accounting software cannot do this. CRM (customer relationship management) systems are struggling with new challenges. Research Future predicts the CRM market will grow to $35 billion by 2023. CRM stores information on all customer interactions and tracks the entire product journey from the warehouse to the customer. Learning management system can be a big help in many ways.

Among the leading platforms are the following:

• Salesforce is one of the oldest CRMs with various tools for marketing (automating email marketing), sales (sales lifecycle), and customer support (creating a self-service resource). It has AI engines to expand its capabilities.
• HubSpot provides tools for inbound marketing in addition to basic sales modules to help provide excellent customer service.
• Freshsales uses AI to get the most out of customers with built-in email and phone tools.
• Pipedrive is a visual platform that helps you focus on increasing sales through the use of recurring tasks, sales process monitoring, and analytics. 
• Insightly is an all-in-one CRM solution for mid-sized and large businesses. You can monitor the effectiveness of email marketing and create automated marketing funnels.

Final Thoughts About 6 Ways Technology Increases Productivity and Profitability

The list of software solutions is endless. They help you hold online meetings, recruit new talent from other cities and countries, motivate everyone to work productively, Simplify accounting, allow you to get projects finished on time and ready for new ones, store information securely, and help you stay in touch with customers.

This is very helpful for companies that work remotely. These epidemic times show that working remotely can be just as productive as an 8-hour day in the office. As long as you use the right software. Instead of interrupting communication, we get closer to each other despite the distance between us.

We find that amazing. It’s a big step toward a techno-community with flying cars and resorts on Mars. Use technology to have time to create innovations that will compete with SpaceX and Microsoft!

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