Your best salesperson is visiting a client.
They need a document from the office, so they phone someone to email it over. But that person is in a meeting, or the document is on somebody else’s computer.
And suddenly, a perfectly ordinary Thursday has become a bit of a mission.
If your business allows people to work from different places, they shouldn’t have to rely on whoever happens to be sitting at a specific desk.
Here are five tips for making your digital workplace a little more practical:
Stop Losing Decisions In Email Threads
Your team finally agrees on a change to a project.
Excellent news!
However, the decision is buried somewhere in an email thread with seventeen replies, and two people weren’t copied.
Keep important decisions somewhere the whole team can find them.
A shared project space works well, provided people remember to update it. There’s not much point agreeing on something if half the team never hears about it.
Keep The Guesswork To A Minimum
You need to ask someone a question.
They’re not answering.
Are they in a meeting? Working different hours today? On holiday in Italy?
Who knows?
A shared calendar can clear up most of that confusion. Just ask people to keep theirs reasonably up to date. Everyone should know when everyone else is available.
It’s particularly important when you’re working across different office locations, where you can’t just pop your head around the door to find someone.
Get Your Cloud Setup Under Control
You’ve moved your business systems to the cloud.
Which should be great, except now you’re using several different services, and keeping everything organised is becoming a job of its own.
Instead of struggling, have a look at cloud orchestration. It helps your IT team coordinate tasks such as setting up resources, managing configurations, and handling routine processes automatically.
The idea is to make your cloud setup easier to run, especially when more and more employees depend on it.
Make New Employees Feel Expected
Your new employee arrives on Monday.
Their laptop is ready. The problem is, nobody’s set up their email, they can’t access the company systems, and their manager is trying to remember which passwords they need.
Put a proper digital onboarding process in place before their first day.
Starting a new job is awkward enough without spending the morning watching someone phone IT.
Give People A Say Before Changing Everything
Management has found a wonderful new platform.
It’s going to change how everyone works.
Or so they think.
Except nobody asked the employees who’ll be using it whether it solves any of their problems. Before making big changes, get a few people to test the software during their normal working day.
You’ll find that much more useful than just watching another enthusiastic sales presentation.
Final Words
You can spend a fortune on technology and still have employees phoning the office to ask where something is.
Before buying another system or implementing another process, look at what you’ve got already and whether people are actually using it all properly.
Sometimes the best improvements aren’t expensive or exciting; they’re just the ones that keep flexible workplaces from wasting half their mornings.
