The impact that technology has had on businesses can’t be understated. It has changed the landscape of how every company approaches communication, efficiency, outreach, data, and the list goes on and on. If you aren’t already taking advantage of everything technology offers your business, you are missing out on infinite possibilities.
While technology has a few downsides, such as cybersecurity issues, you can reap the benefits of technology in your business and avoid the downsides if you implement it properly. However, to implement it properly, you must first know what areas of your business technology can refine the most. Otherwise, implementing various types of technology without first understanding their effects won’t help your business.
Access, access, access
Technology’s most significant upside is the level of access it allows you to have at your fingertips. It doesn’t matter if you have a smartphone, laptop, tablet, or computer. Everything shares a connection, so you always have access to everything your business needs at any given time.
With a service like a digital mailbox, you can access and manage your mail anywhere at any time. There’s no physical interaction that has to take place, which saves you valuable time. When applying this concept to various aspects of your business, you can iron out many physical limitations that most companies suffer from.
More efficient planning
Planning your business’s future endeavors is a never-ending task that requires sorting out lots of information. You must keep track of employees, earnings, projects, and all aspects that directly impact your business’s success.
By using technology, you can utilize many types of software to help streamline planning for your business in multiple areas.
Spreadsheets
Be it Google Spreads, Microsoft Excel, or other software, spreadsheets are among the most effective forms of planning and organizing information, even for a smaller business, having filing cabinets full of folders containing information can prove inefficient when you compare that to spreadsheets.
Spreadsheets have the advantage of clearly displaying all the information in them. In addition to that, you can search a spreadsheet far more quickly than you can sift through physical folders.
Scheduling
If your business works around maintaining a tight schedule, technology can significantly map out that schedule. Google Calendar is a popular example of a time-management and scheduling service that many companies use for keeping appointments and essential meeting dates in one place.
Customizability is the essential element that separates services like Google Calendar from ordinary calendars. You can always make edits to anything you put into Google Calendar and share it with anyone in just a few clicks.
For bigger businesses that need to keep many employees on the same page, properly utilizing scheduling software like Google Calendar can improve overall workflow and company health. The versatility of this type of software also means it’s feasible for a company of any size to implement.
Research practices
Conducting thorough research is one of the crucial elements that can make or break a business at any stage in its development. There’s always something new to learn that may take your business to the next level, and with the sheer amount of information available on the internet, nothing can prevent you from accessing it.
You can look up information and facts, which is especially essential for businesses that have a focus on content creation. More important is the ability to find information and facts from reliable sources.
Authority sites
One significant drawback of the internet is that anyone can create content containing information that’s misleading. Because of this, you can’t trust everything you read. Knowing what sources are reliable and what sources are not is one of the main struggles when doing research.
Still, it doesn’t take long to understand the essential characteristics that make a particular source trustworthy. Once you learn what those characteristics are, you can take full advantage of the time technology saves you from having to do your research by flipping through the pages of a book.
Broader audience
Arguably the most significant area where technology impacts businesses is outreach, regardless of what type of content, services, or products your business offers, having customers is a basic necessity. However, attracting customers is anything but basic, even with the help of technology.
Due to the vast number of people who have access to technology, the number of customers businesses can now reach is significantly greater than ever before. Not only that, but the number of options companies have for engaging with customers has also grown.
Advertisements are still the fundamental approach for drawing in customers. It’s the rise of social media that changed the way many businesses customize their strategies to reach their desired customers.
Using social media
Because social media is free and easily accessible, it has already grown into the quickest, easiest, and most surefire way to increase the exposure of your business’s brand. It’s become such an essential aspect of short and long-term success that companies have entire teams dedicated to running social media accounts.
Social media alone is reason enough to start using technology in your business regularly, as not using it severely limits your company’s ability to grow. The more platforms your company is on, the more opportunities there will be to interact with current and new customers.
You don’t need to promote yourself on every social media platform. However, the more you’re on, the better. You can even use email management software to help you.
Controlling web traffic
Alongside social media, you can obtain several benefits from learning how to direct web traffic to your company’s website. By learning how to do this, you can create a system that passively increases your company’s exposure.
The only hurdle you’ll encounter here is the ever-changing landscape of the internet. The constant change means you must regularly optimize your website to ensure it’s not falling far out of the limelight in search engine results. It’s a bit of a time-consuming task, but it’s well worth the effort on top of being something you can mostly do free of charge.
Better project management
Any company that works on projects regularly or periodically experiences growing pains regarding management. There are many working parts, and it isn’t easy to account for all of them, especially when there’s more than one project going on at a time.
The right project management software can take your projects from laborious tasks to smooth endeavors. So your company can move from one project to the next more efficiently. The only difficulty is deciding which project management tools to use to manage your project teams, as many great management tools can choose from.
Keeping track of everyone’s progress
You can also easily track the progress of a project and see who’s contributing what work and when by using a project management tool. Having the capability to do this on your own time cuts down on the amount of time you’d typically spend trying to get in touch with members of a group working on a project. Instead, you can get an update on their progress swiftly whenever you want.
It also helps the project team by putting all the pertinent information related to the project in one place. The convenience and accessibility both go a long way in keeping everyone on the same page, which is key to success when working on more significant team projects.
Organization tools
Technology’s ability to store an infinite amount of information plays a significant role in the overall time you spend trying to find important things. Because you have many options for organization, you can store data in one digital space and transfer it to another in a matter of seconds.
Since it’s all digital, you remove having to look through large amounts of paperwork to find things. While that may seem like a small matter, the few minutes you spend looking through papers add up over time.
It’s also important to consider the ease with which you can make copies of information that you can share with other people. The details for a significant project can take up an entire cabinet drawer, whereas they’ll only take up a fraction of digital storage space.
It actively saves money
Not only does using an online storage system save you the hassle of having to look through drawers full of records, but it also saves you money. You don’t have to spend money on paper, ink, physical storage space, or any other typical aspects of keeping physical records in the workplace.
Some of that money you’ll save will go towards the cloud-based service you use for storage. However, the value you get from such a service is well worth the monthly subscription because of how versatile cloud-based services have become.
The power of cloud-based services
A cloud-based service brings a diverse range of benefits that any company can take advantage of to grow. You get greater efficiency and lower costs across the board, more effective collaboration opportunities, endless storage space, and several other pros.
Most importantly, you get a safety net from a cloud-based service. You can feel secure by having the ability to back up all your data and restore it at any point if you lose it due to data corruption.
Remote work
Given how much of an increase there has been in remote work recently, businesses began taking more significant advantage of how much technology can negate the physical limitations of some workplaces. For many jobs, the need to go into an office has lost much of its pull since technology has the means to support businesses in completing daily tasks.
Working in an office-only business is still perfectly feasible, but things like cloud-based services open up far more job opportunities that are entirely remote. Making this shift away from a purely physical work environment is one that many businesses have undergone because it allows them to hire from a broader range of candidates.
You don’t have the limitation of only hiring individuals that are close to your business’s physical location, and this benefits both employers and employees. It’s also important to consider how technology affects the hiring process by allowing employers to conduct interviews over the phone or via video.
Having such capability makes scheduling between employers and job candidates less troublesome, as you don’t have to work out a physical space to meet at a specific time.
Better communication
Strong communication comes easiest when you have the technology to assist the process. You have access to emails, messaging apps, and other services that offer direct forms of communication that are entirely free. The rise of messaging programs makes the majority of businesses invest in a service that can bring all of a company’s internal communication to one place.
Along with direct messaging and group messaging, specific programs like Slack have paid versions that include extra features that can prove helpful for companies with a large number of employees. You can set up voice and video calls that can have up to 15 participants at a time, share screens, and keep 20GB of file storage space per member.
Bring employees into one workspace
For companies that have employees from all over the world, using technology to bring everyone into one workspace means you can better maintain a healthy work culture where things get done.
It can require large amounts of work, but turning your office into a completely virtual one is an idea worth considering depending on the nature of your business. You remove many potential inconveniences that can creep up on employees by giving them easy access to seamless communication.
Before you go
There are too many ways that technology can save your business time and money to cover them all. Because of that, the key things to consider are how technology can take the experience you have in a physical office and emulate it in a digital environment. Learning how each of these technologies works takes time if you’re unfamiliar with them, but it’s worth the reward of evolving your business to new heights long term.