Top Ways Technology Can Help Improve Business Practices

Technology has been becoming more and more important in every field of work over the last decade. Business owners, in particular, have been significantly affected by this trend and indeed, many entrepreneurs use software these days to save time, money, and energy throughout their day.

Read on for some key ways you should be utilizing technology today to make your work day easier and to improve results.

Recruitment

For those entrepreneurs who don’t outsource recruitment tasks to human resources specialists, they often find it challenging, time-consuming, and frustrating to find new staff themselves. However, technology is making the job of discovering the best candidates for a position easier and quicker than ever.

For starters, you can utilize software programs which are designed specifically to sort through application documents (resumes in particular), to find those candidates meeting whichever particular, pre-determined criteria that you input. This might include degree qualifications, training, past role keywords, location, and more.

Many business owners and HR people are also now using the benefits of social media websites such as Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook to find new employees. You can post information about roles on your social media pages and let interested candidates who are the right fit respond in kind. You can also use these websites to network with qualified people throughout the year, so that when you’re ready to hire you already have established relationships in place and a number of top people to choose from.

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Employee Engagement and Performance Management

Once you have found the right workers for your organization, it is also important to manage, engage and retain that talent. While this does take time and commitment, you can utilize technology to help make the job easier. For instance, you can download a variety of apps which are designed to streamline recurring tasks such as:

Employee payroll
Keep track of worker attendance, time off, holiday accumulation, etc.
Shift scheduling
Benefits administration
And more

There is a lot of great software on the market these days too which makes it simple to train staff members across the globe, via online modules. Employees can work on training programs at their own pace and from their own location, and businesses can get notifications when modules have been completed.

In addition, it’s important to think about performance management for your organization. This is a core element of maintaining an engaged, committed workforce, and helps you to retain and advance employees over the years. Do some research online and you’ll quickly find there are many dedicated performance management software platforms and services available, some of which are part of a completely integrated human resources tool suite.

Helpful programs will allow you to do things such as more easily track the short- and long-term goals of employees (ensuring workers are kept more engaged in their roles and growing into future ones), as well as record and read manager feedback, and document coaching provided. They can also help you to create yearly or quarterly performance review reports more quickly, and to track this information (and related data) over time. Software can be used to link employee compensation and benefits to performance metrics too, if desired.

By streamlining and automating performance management processes with technological tools, business owners and managers can make this important part of human resources more of an everyday management strategy. In turn, this will help you to keep performance tracking responsive and agile, better employee/manager communications, and lead to a more hands-on management approach and increased staff retention to boot.

Invoicing and Payments

When it comes to invoicing customers and accepting payments, you should also be making use of technology in this day and age if you want to save time, money and energy. There are multiple ways in which tech can come in handy for this area.

For starters, gone are the days of having to manually create an invoice for each transaction and client. Today, you can make use of online store software and merchant processing systems if you sell online; or use accounting programs, invoice processing solutions, mobile apps and other tech to automatically invoice clients once products or services have been requested in person.

Payments can also be streamlined easily today. The same e-commerce software and payment processing systems mentioned above can be used to accept online payments made with credit and debit cards, while companies such as PayPal and Apple also make it easy to finalize transactions quickly and securely online.

Furthermore, you can set up affordable ACH payment processing for bulk incoming transactions; or allow customers to pay with direct checks or over-the-phone Interactive Voice Response (IVR) technology. Mobile payments are also handy for offline transactions, particularly if you want to be able to accept payment in spots such as client homes, tradeshows, conferences, pop-up shops, and other less permanent locations.