Boosting Employee Morale Isn’t as Hard as You Think
Every business has different types of workers; often to management’s chagrin. Ideally, all of an organization’s workers would be enthusiastic about their jobs and the status of a business as a whole. Unfortunately, people don’t always have like minds about the state of things and can see their morale reduced and their productivity wane.
Keeping your people engaged does more than build a more productive business; it saves money. Recruiting and onboarding new talent is extraordinarily expensive and time consuming, so retaining the talent you acquire is all the more important.
There are a few things any business can do to engage their employees a little better and get them to feel a little more invested, even if they work remotely. Let’s take a look at a few
Promote Work/Life Balance
In order for your business to find success, your people have to work, that is undeniable. Ironically, the best way for people to find the focus at work is to have a solid work/life balance. Today’s businesses tend to have workforces that are much more distributed than businesses of the past, and that can wreak havoc on a business’ ability to promote a dedicated company culture. It can also cause workers to work longer hours, which encourages the overwhelming pressure that business is all around them all the time, a major contributor to burnout.
There are plenty of ways that an organization can assist their employees improve their work/life balance. They include:
- Value productivity over time – One of the biggest problems managers cause is looking at the amount of time that an employee works rather than what they do in the time that they work. As we stated before, your business needs productivity, they don’t necessarily rely on employees to put in workweeks that run counterproductive to their mental well-being.
- Encourage breaks – When you are busy, work can get difficult to get away from. Encouraging your staff to take breaks to get away from the work for a little bit not only gives them a respite from the grind, but will give them a chance to use their phones, because you know they are going to.
- Paid time off – Most places require a business to provide some paid time off, but the more paid time that you can provide your staff, the more they can enjoy their lives outside of the workplace. Having five days of sick/vacation time is nice, but having more allows people to take a vacation, manage their outside life better; and, the better they are at that, the more effective they will be at work.
Gamify the Workplace
One of the best ways to get superior employee engagement is to gamify your workplace. This is really a hit with the younger workforce. The theory behind gamification is that if you give everything your team does a points system and then give out prizes for the employees that produce the best work, you will get people competing for those prizes and the whole lot of work will improve. Here are three benefits to gamifying your workplace:
Improve Engagement
Part of boosting morale is improving engagement, and nothing gets people’s productive juices flowing quite as much as an open competition. The more fun a person can have while doing work, the more engaged with that work they will be.
Recognize Excellence
A big problem that many workers have at work is that they can excel at their job and it is completely taken for granted. By gamifying your workplace, the employees that are doing the most to push your business’ initiatives forward will presumably rank high on the gamification leaderboard. This not only gives top performers the recognition they deserve, it also can work to make a lot of internal business decisions simpler.
Improve Efficiency
When people compete for prizes, they tend to do their best to win those prizes. This means that more will get done faster. This improved efficiency is great for your business as it can speed business up and create holistic growth. The more efficient a business is, the more productive it is. The more productive a business is, the better the business performs.
When in Doubt, Pay Better
This might be the last thing a business owner wants to hear, but this is one of the leading reasons that an employee will look for another job. If you want to avoid that, pizza parties and pats on the back will only go so far—you need to pay them competitively.
If you would like more information about how technology can be used to improve your business and help build a more productive, fun, and engaging work environment, give Point North Networks a call today at 651-234-0895.
4 Steps to Better Solve Employee Burnout
It doesn’t matter if your workplace is your typical office space or if it is remote. There will always be factors that can contribute to burnout. These struggles are not exclusive to the location of the office, and if left unchecked they can impact work performance, productivity, mental health, and so on. It’s important that you have coping mechanisms and strategies in place to address burnout before it becomes too severe to counter.
Let’s go over some of the ways you can encourage employees to prioritize their own mental health to reduce burnout from the workplace.
Minimizing Burnout
Here are some strategies you can use to keep burnout at bay.
Stop, Take a Breath, and Focus
If enough pressure builds up, you’re going to break, no matter how strong-willed you are. You need a break every once in a while. It’s important that you make your breaks as impactful as possible by taking a moment to clear your mind of all the clutter and take slow, deep breaths. Once you’re ready, you can get back to work.
Encourage Communications Across Departments
People rely on others to help them get their jobs done, so you should be prepared to ask for help from other departments or other people at your company to handle tasks as needed. You shouldn’t isolate yourself and your tasks from others who might help you get things done in a more efficient or stress-free way.
Be sure to establish clear lines of communication with other departments so when the time comes for collaboration, you’ll know exactly who to talk to and when. Collaboration lightens the workload for all, and it can reduce burnout in spades.
Consider Low-Pressure Hobbies
Some people bring their work home with them, so to speak, when they use their personal time and space to work or worry about work. This kind of stress can wear people down over time and create burnout.
We recommend that all employees have hobbies and interests outside of the workplace so they can get their mind off things when they need to. This will help to mitigate burnout and help them do things they enjoy.
Implement Procedures to Help with Stress
One of the best things you can do for your workplace is to implement procedures that take the stress out of work. You can streamline processes by automating them and reducing the margin for error, allowing employees to invest that time in better, less stressful and more meaningful work, thereby reducing stress further.
Combat Burnout Before You Get Burned
If you keep your team engaged in their work, burnout will eventually become a factor, so take steps now to keep it in check. Point North Networks can help you in this effort by making sure that technology struggles don’t exacerbate the problem. To learn more, call us at 651-234-0895.
How to Help Keep Your Mobile Devices Kicking for Longer
It’s a common enough frustration—just as you really need it, your mobile device’s battery is on its last legs. This is something that we all would like to avoid if we could. That’s why we wanted to take the time to share a few ways to prolong your device’s battery life just a bit longer.
Five Tricks to Prolong Your Device’s Battery Life
While there are a few other means of keeping your device charged for longer, we figured it best to stick to the simplest and most cost-effective ones.
Avoid Apps that Drink Up Charge
Different applications will call for different things, and if those demands utilize more of the system’s resources, more power will be necessary to support them. Basically, the more computing that needs to be done, the more power will be used up. This is why using multiple apps at once eats away at your battery faster, too. Apps that keep the screen on, play video, or make your phone generally feel warm to the touch tend to be the ones that consume the most battery.
Keep Locked When Not Actively Using
Locking your phone offers a variety of benefits, not the least of which is the fact that it turns off the screen, thereby saving your device a considerable amount of power.
Update the OS
Your phone’s operating system effectively controls how the device works, which itself will influence how long its battery lasts. In fact, part of the improvements made during updates are generally related to battery optimization.
Therefore, an up-to-date OS and the bug fixes it brings often assists with battery performance and longevity.
Set Sleep Mode to Kick in Faster
As a power-saving measure, most mobile devices have a setting that will turn off the screen and suspend background processes until the phone is actively used once again. Once sleep mode is activated, it requires a password to disengage, making it a basic security feature as well as a power-saving one.
Minimize Notifications and Location Services
While both location services and notifications are meant to make a mobile device’s processes more convenient, they can also result in the battery being drained. Try turning off all non-essential notifications for less drain on the battery. Limiting location services to only kick in when an app is actively being used both maintains your privacy, and your battery!
Trust Point North Networks to Ensure Your Business IT Works as Well as Possible
Give us a call at 651-234-0895 to find out what our managed IT services can do to improve your work processes!
Maintenance is More than Computer Repair
When you think of downtime, you probably think about the power or your Internet connection going out and leaving you unable to do work. Unfortunately, these are anecdotes that seem benign, but are actually extraordinarily costly. When interruptions to your business’ computing infrastructure are constantly hindering productivity, you need to come up with a solution.
Technology-Induced Downtime
The way your technology functions is extremely important to reducing the amount of downtime your organization suffers. When your network and applications unexpectedly fail and crash, you will see substantial dips in productivity, a metric that is hard to quantify.
The best way to explain this is to look at how downtime affects large companies. According to Gartner, the average cost of IT downtime in the enterprise sector is about $5,600 per minute. In fact, 98-percent of enterprises say that an hour of operational downtime can cost well over $100,000.
Now, as a small business owner, you may be thinking that downtime is bad, but at least we don’t see that type of loss…Well, think again. Percentage of loss is right in line all the way down to mom-and-pop businesses. If you were to have an hour of operational downtime because a server component fails, you are looking at a massive loss. Sometimes, these losses are fatal for businesses that are unprepared.
Other Problems
The largest problem with downtime of any kind is the money you are spending to get nothing out of it. No other place is this more evident than having situational downtime that affects a number of your employees. Say one workstation fails in your office and it results in one person troubleshooting problems with a break/fix or onsite IT administrator. Not only are you getting nothing from the employee, you are also paying the technician a premium rate to support that piece of technology. If you think about it, one failed computer in the peak productivity hours of the workday will cost you at least hundreds if not thousands of dollars.
Then you have to consider: what if that were my server?
You quickly will understand that it is completely untenable to not do what you can to avoid large swaths of downtime inside your business.
What You Can Do
There are a few things you can do to actively fight downtime. They include:
Proactively Maintain Your Technology
The best thing that you can do for your business’ technology is to get a managed services provider to actively monitor and maintain all of your network-attached hardware. With state-of-the-art technology, an MSP can not only see how all of your technology is functioning, it can typically fix issues these systems have before they can become downtime-inducing problems.
Keep Your Software Updated
Malware is a big problem for any business. As such, there needs to be an ongoing policy that keeps all network-attached software updated and patched for security vulnerabilities. An exploit of any holes in your software can turn into major downtime and even worse, so keeping software updated has to be a priority.
Isolate Problems
One of the best ways to keep downtime to a minimum is to use technology services to do so. A comprehensive help desk offering can keep downtime to a minimum by giving employees direct access to tech support. Most times the help desk technician can help resolve issues in minutes, and even if they can’t they can expedite situations to the proper maintenance channels.
Comprehensive Backup
Finally, every business that utilizes information technology to their advantage needs to protect the data and infrastructure by having a comprehensive data backup and disaster recovery platform. The BDR backs up data in-house, and in the cloud to give organizations the peace of mind that no matter what happens, their data is safe.
If you own a business, limiting downtime is a priority. If you would like to learn how Point North Networks helps minimize downtime, give us a call today at 651-234-0895.
Tip of the Week: Maneuvering Around Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Teams is a video communication and collaboration platform that your organization can use to great success, but it helps to have a couple of pointers so you can make the most out of the software. Here are five ways you can maximize the value you get out of your Microsoft Teams software.
If you don’t already use Teams, you can think of it like this: it’s similar to other services out there, like Slack and Discord, in that it gives you access to various channels for communication through a variety of mediums, like video, instant messaging, voice chat, and so on. Knowing how to get the most out of Teams means maximizing your use of these features and using them to their fullest potential.
Pin Important Messages
While you are chatting with your team or coworkers in Teams, you might notice recurring themes in your conversations. If you think something is important enough to keep at the top of the conversation at all times, you can pin that message to the top by clicking on the pin icon. This will keep it in place so that everyone who opens the chat will see that message first. All you have to do is click the three-dot symbol on a message and select Pin.
Tag Someone in Conversations
Sometimes you really need someone to chime in and contribute to the conversation. In cases like this, you can use the @ symbol to tag someone in the conversation. This will send the user a notification that you have tagged them in the chat and are hoping they will respond. It’s not the best or most perfect way to convince someone to contribute, but it at least lets them know you want them to see the message.
Organize Your Teams Into… Well, Teams (And Channels)
Teams operates on the premise that your communications are segmented into various “teams,” or specific places dedicated to collaboration for various groups of employees or departments. You should have your Teams set up so that each department has their own dedicated space to collaborate as needed. These Teams can be further split into Channels for specific purposes, all of which can be customized according to what your needs are. For example, you might have a Team set up for human resources where only your HR staff are allowed to chat or view the messages within, or the same could be said for the executives within your company. Be sure to control permissions for these Teams and Channels as needed.
Connect Teams to Other Office Applications
As a Microsoft software solution, Teams integrates quite well with other Microsoft tools. For example, it can connect and sync to OneDrive and OneNote, which is helpful for when you need to share files with others within your organization. Furthermore, you can add files and other documents directly to your various Teams and Channels so that users in those Teams or Channels have access to them quickly and efficiently. It’s a great way to make sure everyone has access to the information they need to be successful and productive throughout the workday.
To learn more about how you can utilize Teams as best you can, reach out to us at 651-234-0895.
Tip of the Week: Using Your Voice to Type in Microsoft Word
Typing on your keyboard is something that you do every day, but sometimes you just don’t want to do it. You can give your hands a break and use Microsoft Word’s dictation feature; this lets you use your voice to write in the software. Let’s go over how you might use the feature on a desktop, web browser, or mobile device.
On Your Desktop Application
If you use Microsoft Word on your desktop or a laptop, you can use the built-in dictation feature. From the Home tab, click on the Dictate button. It is the blue microphone in the top-right corner. You can then click on the gear icon to adjust the settings as needed. Some of these settings include auto-punctuation, language filtering, and dialect. You can use the pause or unpause buttons to take a break when needed. There is also a guide available to show you how to do things like add punctuation.
On the Browser Version of Word
The browser version of Word is exactly the same as the desktop version; you just go to the Home tab and use the Dictate button. The settings are mostly the same, too, so just follow the directions as they appear in the previous paragraph. You can click the X to close out of dictation.
On Your Mobile Device
The mobile application version of MS Word gives you an easy-to-use button just above the keyboard for dictation. You’ll see a microphone on it. The same features as outlined above work here in the same way. To stop dictation, click on the keyboard icon that will take the place of the dictation button.
Sure enough, it’s easy to use the dictation feature, and that’s probably by design. However, we do want to make sure you are aware that you should be proofreading your work, as anything voice-related can be somewhat unreliable on its own.
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Remote Work Is More Normal Now that It Has Ever Been
Remote work is more common than ever before, but it wasn’t always this way. It’s still a relatively new method of operations, and while there are quite a few benefits for both employees and employers, there are other impacts related to remote work that can have far-reaching consequences.
We want to address some of the positive and negative impacts that this remote work trend has had on society.
Housing Costs and Availability May Balance Out
Big cities might have more opportunities for employment, but the cost of housing often makes it difficult for people to commit to employment opportunities in these areas. There is often a housing shortage in metropolitan areas, and as things stand now, the country is short almost 4 million homes (as of early 2021), with most of this shortage being located in places where these jobs are considered valuable.
Remote work, if the shift to full-time remote work is utilized, means that these jobs can be filled by people without requiring them to purchase or rent a home in these high-cost locations. Someone working remotely could work remotely for a company halfway across the country and live in a place where housing costs are significantly less expensive. Some experts believe that this trend would increase the cost of living in more rural or suburban areas while decreasing the costs associated with big city life.
However, if this is to become a reality, there needs to be a balance between the increased cost of more affordable housing and decreased cost of urban living. One example can be seen in the Tulsa Remote program, where Tulsa, Oklahoma residents are offered several perks—including a $10,000 grant—to all those remote workers who come to live in the city for at least one year. This type of investment means that Tulsa has been attracting new, high-earning residents, resulting in a return on their investment of $13.77 for each dollar spent on remote workers willing to relocate to the city.
The Climate Could Benefit
It’s reasonable to think that a decrease in urban living would lead to more vehicles on the road, as the decrease in public transportation access and walkable amenities would mean more people driving from one place to another. However, what if the opposite were true? What if having more people in these less-urban locations means that there would be greater incentive for these walkable amenities or greater demand for public transportation? The climate would surely benefit if this were the case.
Remote work has also led to a significant decrease in travel for many people, such as eliminating the morning commute, business travel, cross-country air travel, etc. All of these decreased emissions could do wonders for the environment.
Let’s Be Clear—We’re a Long Way from Ubiquitous Remote Work
We’ve discussed some of the obstacles, like changes in housing costs and zoning laws, but some places simply aren’t remote-friendly. Access to the Internet limits remote work capabilities for some people, especially when you consider that much of the country still doesn’t have access to broadband Internet.
Despite these obstacles, however, we are committed to helping your business make a shift to remote work, should you desire to make that change for your organization. To learn more, reach out to us at 651-234-0895.
Automation Any Business Can Fit In Their Business Plan
In modern businesses, automation can be implemented in a lot of ways, but for small businesses, it may be more difficult to find ways to incorporate time-saving automation. In this week’s blog we’ve decided to point out a few ways even the smallest business can use automation to their advantage and give their employees the freedom to focus on revenue creating processes.
Use a CRM
The efficiency of creating and sustaining leads can be troublesome for any business, but by utilizing the automated tools presented by a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system your business can improve your sales and marketing efforts quickly by automating some of the minutiae that comes with those efforts. By using a CRM you can improve customer satisfaction and completely manage your sales process. Most CRMs have the capability to handle the process of getting your business the right customers for the right products/services and then building that relationship without having to spend a lot of time and effort to do so.
Social Media Management
Social media is likely a big part of your business’ ability to attract new customers and interact with your current clientele. By using automated tools to schedule out your social media efforts, you can not only engage more people over more platforms, you can stay organized. Getting your message out over social media can be a fairly easy and repeatable process, a perfect environment for automation to help your business’ efforts in that arena.
Customer Support
The biggest problem for small businesses is typically that the amount of resources they can spend on support is lacking due to budgetary constraints. If the people that are responsible for the production of a business’ products/services are also given the responsibility of being the support system of those products/services, it can significantly reduce the advancement of those products/services. Today, there are many automated tools outfitted with artificial intelligence that can effectively handle a lion’s share of the customer support. Specifically, chatbots are a tool that can allow you to handle a series of customer problems without the need for workers constantly being available to provide support.
Meeting Scheduling
Having to constantly schedule meetings can be a time-intensive task as people have variable schedules that don’t always line up. This typically means meetings are held without people or serially rescheduled, reducing productivity and grinding workflows to a halt. Automating the scheduling of meetings and appointments normalizes scheduling and avoids conflicts while bringing enhanced efficiency to your business.
Procurement
With supply chains a mess, it can often be hard to get the components or products you need quickly. Today, businesses can use inventory management applications to automate the ordering of certain goods to ensure that goods are there when your business needs them. This can be something as simple as paper goods, but can also work on mission critical components as well.
Automation is giving small businesses the ability to compete with larger businesses in their markets through end-to-end advanced efficiency. If you would like to talk to one of our IT specialists about the integration of tools that allow you to save time and money, give us a call at 651-234-0895 today.
Behind Employee Cybersecurity Efforts or Lack Thereof
Cyberattacks can cost businesses a lot of money. They’re also more prevalent today than ever before. It seems you can’t go a couple of news cycles without hearing about some organization that has been hacked or scammed and it’s resulted in the sensitive data the organization holds being sold online, vast operational downtime, or worse. For this reason, many organizations have deliberately built up their cybersecurity infrastructure, enhanced their policies, and invested in training to ensure that they aren’t the next victim. Unfortunately, this attention doesn’t always work.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has found that cyberattacks increased about 400 percent from 2019 to 2020. Doing what you can to keep your organization’s computing resources secure is extremely important. The cybersecurity outlays made by businesses and other organizations have been immense, and that has led to a sobering reality. Most of any organization’s security problems, especially relating to malware deployment, is due to their employees’ lack of conscientious decision-making when faced with problematic situations.
It doesn’t matter how much more secure or how much smarter you make your organization’s information system security, it can all be for naught if one employee doesn’t do what they should. This is extremely frustrating for IT people, since it is one of their core responsibilities to keep these systems secure. Let’s take a look at how employees fail to keep their credentials secure and what you can do to remedy this worrisome trend.
Employees as Attack Vectors
Increasingly, workplace strategies have been altered significantly. In fact, millions of workers are currently working remotely now, effectively distributing a business’ operational network. For the IT professional who is in tune with the current threat landscape, workers that don’t do everything they can to protect organizational data and infrastructure are typically viewed as ignorant; or worse yet, as a saboteur. Unfortunately for everyone, the driving factor is not negligence or a willingness to do their organization harm, it is out of workplace stress, a factor that is difficult to quantify, and harder yet to eliminate.
A study conducted by the Harvard Business Review found some interesting results about the role stress plays in maintaining their assumed role in protecting their organization’s cybersecurity. The study found that two-of-every-three workers failed to fully adhere to organizational cybersecurity policies at least once in the 10 workdays where the study was conducted. During the study, it was found that employees simply ignore the cybersecurity policies around five percent of the time. This may not seem like a lot, but if you consider that it only takes one non-compliant action to result in a major data breach, having dozens of such instances happen each day is putting organizations in jeopardy.
You may be asking yourself, “If they follow procedure 19 times out of 20, why don’t they follow it that other time?” Well this is where this seemingly clear issue gets cloudy. The study got the answer to this question. The top three were:
- “To better accomplish tasks for my job.”
- “To get something I needed.”
- “To help others get their work done.”
In fact, of all the respondents, 85 percent that were non-compliant to their organizational cybersecurity policies responded with one of these three answers. These employees knowingly broke the rules and in doing so put their organization in jeopardy, but not because they were lazy or they just had it, it was because that was the only way they could efficiently get the work done. Situations where a person is damned if they do and damned if they don’t, they tend to pick the priority.
To most workers, they weren’t hired as cybersecurity professionals; they are hired to do a job and if cybersecurity policy gets in the way, they will choose productivity over security every time. If you consider that only three percent of policy breaches were acts of true defiance or sabotage, the 97 percent of the rest are likely perpetuated by dutiful employees. It’s hard to justify stern reprimand for a person who thinks they have the business’ best interests in mind.
Redefining the Importance of Cybersecurity
For the average employee, following procedure is typically going to be a distant second to maintaining productivity. After all, there are very few instances over time where someone was labeled as “great at their job” because they didn’t accidentally start a cyberattack. Moreover, most organizations’ IT support team can’t really give people the benefit of the doubt; most employees that don’t follow security procedures are looked on as negligent or deliberately working against their best efforts. The truth is most training platforms and policies (as they are known to the employee) don’t take into account that there are gray areas that don’t line up with the expectations put on employees by their managers.
To this end, it is more important than ever for employees to be involved in the creation and development of workable cybersecurity policies that take into account that business moves fast and sometimes a person that is focused on doing the best job they can, isn’t going to be focused on maintaining network security. Managers also need to ensure the members of their team know what they need to do and what those actions accomplish to reinforce the importance of their cybersecurity efforts.
Most businesses celebrate employees that excel at their jobs. Today, their job is actively changing and they have to know why straying from procedure is a major problem. The problem is that one wrong move and the company is dealing with malware and reputation troubles, and loss of revenue. While it might be ridiculous to celebrate adherence to corporate cybersecurity policies, people have had cake for less.
If your business needs help balancing productivity with their cybersecurity policies, give the IT security professionals at Point North Networks, Inc., a call today at 651-234-0895.
Get More Efficient with Technology and Shifts in Strategy
Collaboration is important for many businesses and it is something that takes some time to master. In fact, a lot of businesses that do pretty well struggle when it comes to getting their project teams and operational staff to work together. Today, we thought we would take a look at technologies and strategies that will not only help collaboration, but can promise rises in productivity as well.
Voice over Internet Protocol
It’s no secret that the telephone system is one of any business’ most crucial tools. What may be a secret, however, is that you don’t have to pay an arm and a leg to get the comprehensive business telephone system you need. Most businesses that still use telephone services through a telephone company are missing out on an opportunity to significantly cut their communications costs while also gaining access to some of the very best collaborative tools a business can have.
VoIP is a platform that uses your business’ Internet connection to fuel its telephone system. Not only does it provide the crystal-clear communication that customers and employees demand, it also provides options that no RJ11 cable can deliver. Services like video conferencing, text messaging, and mobile phone access make VoIP a much more valuable product than your typical business telephone service through the telephone company. With hundreds of additional features available, you can pick and choose the communications platform that is right for your needs and budget.
Cloud-Hosted Collaboration Tools
One of the positive elements that has come out of the COVID-19 pandemic is that since so many people worked (or are continuing to work) remotely that many businesses had to find a way to get their newly-remote employees the tools and resources they need(ed) to have a chance of success. A lot of businesses had moved some of their information systems to the cloud previously, of course, but the growth of cloud-hosted management software nearly tripled from March 2020 to today.
There are several platforms that work for businesses. Some choose to go with services that allow for one-button video conferencing, while others lean heavily on the message board and instant messaging capabilities. Some just provide collaborative access inside working documents. Regardless of what platform a business uses, however, it should be noted that it is all in a concerted effort to build a collaborative workforce in a time when a lot of their human resources need remote access.
Today, a business can get about any type of computing they need in a cloud-hosted platform from some of the top business software developers on the market. Google, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and others can be used to the benefit of just about any business that is looking to expand their computing capabilities to the cloud to adapt to an increasingly-remote workforce.
Move Support Off Production Workers
For many businesses, the same people that create products and services are forced into support roles due to budget constraints. If you want your team to be on point and working collaboratively, having to juggle support issues could be negatively affecting their productivity. There are several ways that you can move support off of your employees. They include:
- A rotating support schedule – Instead of having support be a major distraction for your whole staff, consider assigning one or two workers to handle support calls and requests on a rotating schedule. Not only does this provide fairness, it also ensures that your product and service support is covered as it is a crucial part of your offering.
- Hire new workers for support – If you have extra capital, hiring a support staff is one of the most effective ways to get returns out of a department that doesn’t bring in much in the way of revenue.
- Use technology – Nowadays there are artificially-intelligent platforms that can be used to handle organizational support queries effectively and keeps the amount of human resources involved with support to a minimum.
Collaboration is going to continue to be a key for a lot of businesses as purse strings tighten in the near future. Getting your team to work together improves your products, services, and your customers’ experience. If you would like to talk to one of our knowledgeable IT consultants about how to integrate the right technology to get your team working together more effectively, give us a call today at 651-234-0895.
