Greasing the wheels of your office workflow, then, not only helps your staff become more competent and happy in their daily tasks, but it helps you assess just where the failings may have occurred in the last year, what can be optimized, and which investments are the most pressing to make. If establishing a yearly budget at the beginning of the tax year, that can be a tremendous insight to have.
But what insights should you be pursuing, and whereabouts should you be looking ‘under the hood,’ as it were? In this post, we’ll discuss that in detail:
Daily Working Utilities
It’s important to make sure that your staff is given access to the tools they need each day. They will often let you know if issues are found and can be replaced, but if they’ve been denied for replacements or repairs, they may just stop reporting it and deal with the hand they’ve been given. This isn’t healthy or helpful in any capacity and shows a real breakdown in communication from all levels of your hierarchy.
For this reason, it’s very important to make sure you have the daily working utilities topped up, always in place, and attended to quickly. For instance, printers for your business must be applied properly, connected to a network, and associated with the best and most competent managed print services possible. This kind of setup can ensure that your business need not ever be without these utilities, or that your staff has to waste time grappling with an outdated system.
Make Sure Employee Profiles Are Secure
Within your IT managed services, your staff will be assigned working profiles they can use in order to interact with your system and operate within the right permission settings. However, it’s also important to empower the security that your staff can apply to their own accounts. For instance, this might involve making sure they’re given permissions to enable two-factor-authentications on their devices, while also empowering them to service update their devices each week (after being reminded to through their software setup). In this light, you can ensure that employees need not fear their personal information being accessed in an authorized fashion.
Take Anonymous Surveys
Many employees have ideas, and sometimes good ideas, about how their daily operation should proceed, how they work most effectively, and what struggles they may have encountered. Yet it’s difficult for them to be proactive about demanding change or even politely requesting it, because that may come across as assumptive, or perhaps it may go directly against something their manager has decided.
For this reason, it can be healthy to take internal anonymous surveys from time to time-based around specific topics. This can help you get a clearer and clearer understanding of the thoughts, impressions, and considerations that your staff has had over their last year of working. For one, you can use this information to help guide your future decisions, and two, you can show that you’re listening to your staff without necessarily calling them out to make those suggestions individually. This can make a massive difference going forward.
A Return To The Office & Safety
Now is an interesting time in the life of our businesses, as many of us are considering how a return back to the office will unfold, with lessened lockdown measures and the vaccination programs currently doing their best to get on top of the Covid-19 pandemic.
A return to the office must not be fully established without thinking, however, as we have all learned much from the last twelve months and must seek to be as careful and responsible as possible going forward. A return to the office, in this light, could imply setting up socially distanced stations or investing in better furniture to make sure ergonomic health is preserved, or simply making sure that staff can work from home two days a week should they wish to, as well as having the ability to remotely attend meetings where necessary.
A return to the office, in this light, can showcase exactly how you might consider the future of your firm and what that means. Now is the time to experiment with how that could be best handled, allowing you to not only grease the wheels of your productivity but to understand how to integrate it better.
Website Utility
Every year, it’s a great idea to implement a deep ‘website review’ to make sure that it’s functioning on all cylinders. Is it still as mobile-friendly on new operating systems and browsers as it was last year? What utilities and reports have had issues most regularly? How have staff and users been using our website the most, and how can we expand our utilities offered to make sure people come to us as a first choice?
Of course, these ideals can also expand into how you define your online reach in its entirety. For instance, how much social media engagement have you had this year, and when did it peak? Can you identify why it peaked in that manner? What kind of responses do you get, and how often do people use your social media support features outside of visiting your website or calling your office? These questions can help you understand to what degree you’re grasping a website utility with both hands, and what changes may need to be made.
With this advice, you’re sure to grease the wheels of your office workflow with care, caution, and a willingness to improve. That can help light the way for the next year through and through.