How to Improve Office Productivity by Embracing Automation
According to a survey by Workfront, employers spend less than half the working day focused on the role they are paid for. If you find that tedious admin tasks are eating up all of your billable hours, simple automation hacks could offer a simple and effective answer. With this in mind, here are five ways to embrace automation and give your day-to-day productivity a much-needed boost.
Tick off those Timesheets
While timesheets are a simple way of looking at how your employees structure their day, the process can be counterproductive and the time it takes to manually fill in daily tasks could be time well spent elsewhere. Download project management software and use this to automatically track day-to-day tasks freeing up more time to spend on billable tasks. Automated timesheets are just the first step when it comes to shrinking that to do list.
Spend Less Time on Late Payments
If you spend a large amount of time invoicing various clients and chasing late payments, these are both tasks that can be automated, lessening the time you have to dedicate to admin. Forget sending out multiple payment reminders, let the latest e-invoicing automation tools do all of the hard work for you. Simply input your invoice data and highlight payment deadlines and the software will send out a reminder on your behalf once this date has passed. The same goes for recurring invoices.
Make Meetings Simple
Meetings are often a key part of the working day, but they also use a lot of time, energy and resources. When meetings take up a large portion of your day, the last thing you want to do is spend time once you are back at your desk collating notes and sharing them with your team. What you need is an automation tool that can share this data internally via a Google Doc. While you are at it, download a scheduling software that makes getting everyone in one place easy. This means no more wasted minutes on trying to decide on a time that mutually suits every team member. This tool sends out multiple meeting times and let’s colleagues select their preference and adds this time and date to your calendar. Say goodbye to endless email chains. Make sure the meeting starts on time by sending out an automated reminder to everyone involved.
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Monitor Industry News
A successful organisation is always one step ahead and this often means keeping one eye on the competition. Staying abreast of industry news is essential. But analysing what your competitors are putting out on social media, dissecting their latest marketing campaigns, SEO successes and blog updates can be time consuming. The great news is, there is automation software out there to do all of this for you. All of that time spent researching can now be allocated elsewhere. The best bit? The software will send you an alert when the company in question does anything newsworthy so you don’t have to worry about missing out on top industry news.
Are you excelling when it comes to productivity? Do you automate in house tasks? Let us know on Twitter @viking_chat.