We’ve all witnessed the growth of digital systems and processes across businesses in recent years with major benefits being achieved in time-and-cost savings, and also in the levels of communications we can now achieve with our customers, suppliers and partner organisations.
This is especially true for those businesses which are using digital marketing effectively to improve and increase their reach and engagement. For businesses using online, cloud based solutions for their internal systems – accounting, customer relationships, asset registration and HR are all now in common use and adding value as well as saving time and making our businesses more productive.
So now is a good time for leaders and managers to reflect on how well are we doing in our own use of digital to increase and improve our personal productivity? Time to ‘walk-the-talk’ and motivate others to increase their digital productivity.
A few questions to help you reflect on your personal progress with digital:
- Have you switched to using digital platforms which will help you to become more engaged and improve your communications?
- Are you using online calendars and scheduling to save time in setting up meetings and appointments?
- How about your use of cloud-based collaboration tools for developing documents, or running projects?
- Iif you are regularly in need of the latest news from your industry or sector, then are you using tools to gather and filter the information you need effectively?
Here’s my run-through of those tools which I really do believe have increased my own productivity in the past year, including those which I now use regularly with colleagues to increase collaboration and communications.
Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook – I’ve been a user of Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook for many years now and so have used them extensively with social and business use in mind, and have established a great online network of contacts (and support too). Our staff Facebook Group is proving very effective in sharing news, updates and events which everyone can be kept in-the-loop on, and therefore has reduced the level of round-robin emails inside the offices too.
Slack – this is a great tool for team communications and very intuitive to use. Both the web version and the app provide some really great functions and features – the trick is that you need to persuade others to get using it too!
Microsoft Office 365 AND Google Docs – I’m still flicking between cloud systems for my online document storage and collaboration – working with people who have a preference for one or the other– and still learning about which is best of course!
Xero – Our cloud-based accounting system is great! I have the app on my smartphone which means I can check on cashflow whenever I want, and also generate new quotes and invoices whenever I need to, as well as check on financial performance reports. The switch-over from our old accounting package took some time and was fairly painful – but its proved highly worthwhile.
Trello – Another relatively newly adopted tool – making project management and action plans highly effective and collaborative.
For details on our new Digital Leadership programme, please read our recently published White Paper which you can access here or to find out more about this programme visit www.cosmic.org.uk/services/consultancy/leaders.