1) Do you know what your employees are doing?

Let’s take it all the way back to the foundations of your business. We hate being micromanaged, and most business owners or managers, don’t have the time to micromanage. This has increase with people working from home, however. Businesses are worries that they are not sure what employees are working on, whether they are focussed on their work throughout the working day, and more so, some go as far to say as they feel that they no longer have control of the business! This is NOT how you should be feeling.

Some companies compensate by setting numerous meetings in a day! Ask yourself, how many meetings have you had this week, and from there, how many hours or work have you lost due to these meetings.

The solution is simple! Having a process in place which allow the team to:

• See what tasks they have for the day
• Mark the tasks complete once they have been done
• Allow the team to add a duration for how long work has taken
• Allowing management to see what work is still outstanding
• Allowing management to set work that needs to be done as a priority, having an overview of the team members full workload
• Allowing management to see how long work is taking, and if the time taken is reasonable for the task set

From one aspect of a system, you would be able to diminish all the issues related to the above, just by adding tasks and timesheets! Imagine the amount of time you could save and the amount of work that can be carried out in that time! Time is money my friend!

2) Are you able to have constant access of your up-to-date data?

Leads are coming into the business, and you have the sales team to thank for that. However, passing on that information to the production, and then the delivery team should be smooth sailing. Working from home doesn’t allow you to shout across the room to see if someone has started work on a project, however, a reminder set by the system can! This eliminates the need for internal chasing.

Each person has jobs assigned to them, therefore, should be able to undertake their jobs, and make notes as to where they are up to – in real time! Updating a google sheet or excel document may work for now, however, think about the number of documents, and the amount of time that can be saved doing admin like this, if there were automated reminders for work to be done, automated emails sent internally or externally, and even just a view to see the correspondence made with customers overall! Accessing the data from anywhere with an internet connection, and also having a transparent view! Once Boris lets us fly again, I’m sure working from a beach would be ideal wouldn’t go amiss!

3) How do you record follow ups?

Again, we miss the ability to shout across the room to remind one another to chase up a client. The number of organisations whom we have worked saying that they have lost leads due to not getting back to them in time is astonishing! Have reminders set to contact a lead, if a lead hasn’t been touched in 2 days, send another reminder, or an email to the customer to say you haven’t forgotten about them – automatically!

Little perks like this not only make the customer feel as though they are informed of the process, it makes it look as though the company is informed of their processes. It gives faith in the organisation. How many times have you looked for email confirmation once you have purchased a product, why should a service not offer the same satisfaction? These little things put you over the top – AND then allow the internal team to keep track of what is happening with the customer – from anywhere, including home!