Ready for business A whole new level of collaboration.

"There will be interruptions, and I don't know when they will occur, and I don't know how deep they will occur. I do know they will occur from time to time, but I also know that we'll come out better on the other end."

— Warren Buffett, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway

Your business is successfully operating virtually and thriving in this new digital economy. You’re able to continue serving your existing customers, but you’ve also widened your customer base and taken on new customers you never had access to before. And, because you are growing, you are hiring new employees virtually and expanding your talent base to areas that were previously inaccessible by your business.

Business continuity and continued growth mean you need to explore ways to scale your business to take on new customers and keep your costs down. That means working on improvements to productivity as you continue to work from anywhere and navigate the digital economy.

So how do you improve and upscale your team’s productivity while simultaneously making it easier than ever for you to engage with your customers, existing and new?

In the last year, we’ve seen a sharp increase in productivity brought on by the sudden transition to work from home. As a result, how we measure productivity has fundamentally changed, including what goals to set and how to measure attainment of those goals.

These measures have to be simple and objective to ensure the resulting metrics are readily understood and actionable. Without them, it becomes incredibly difficult to understand if changes and adjustments are making a difference, especially since you might never see many of your teammates in person. This recent Forbes article puts this into perspective: “Productivity starts with a strong mission, big goals and clear KPIs.”

The key to understanding productivity in the digital economy is measuring output, not hours, and how that output is working towards achieving your goals. But assessing productivity is complicated, and isn’t relegated to work ethic alone. And being busy does not equate to being productive. It involves your team’s work habits, what technology they use, your company's organizational structure, and many other factors that work together towards an outcome.

There are legitimate reasons why productivity can take a hit, so taking the right steps to address those reasons is key in helping those employees that need it. Offsetting the costs of working virtually, helping team members remove real roadblocks to productivity and equipping them with the right applications and services so that they can collaborate efficiently and effectively empowers your team to work together more effectively, increases overall happiness and productivity, and helps your business achieve the goals and goals that you’ve set.

Finally, it’s important to involve your team in the definition and evolution of those goals and to keep them regularly appraised of progress in achieving them. As stakeholders in the success of your business, they can help set realistic and stretch goals to achieve the new levels of success needed to keep your business growing. Review progress towards those goals regularly with the team and be prepared to adapt those goals on an ongoing basis, with the full involvement of your team, based on the results being tracked as well as changing dynamics in the market.

Equipping your team to positively impact productivity and help them achieve your business goals means making sure they have the right technology to get their work done and to measure how that work is impacting your overall business goals. Effortless collaboration becomes absolutely critical in achieving both, and that means making sure that your team has the right collaboration tools working for them.

Advanced cloud-based collaboration technologies allow businesses and their employees to collaborate effortlessly and virtually. These same collaboration technologies ensure that your customers remain connected and generally make communication internally and externally more efficient. This technology is so effective that the absence of it is one of the main issues employees point to when they are unable to reach their productivity targets. A study done by Ivanti found that 85% of workers don’t have the right tech or resources to take care of their tasks efficiently.

According to a recent Barron’s article, post-pandemic productivity has increased at a yearly rate of 8%, which is the highest seen since the 1960s and the clearest indication yet that virtual collaboration and working is here to stay. The right communications solutions for internal and external collaboration can have a large positive impact financially and help your business achieve its goals. SHRM reports that each year, companies with approximately 100 employees lose around $420,000 yearly due to inefficient communications. Hence the criticality of ensuring your business has the right all-in-one communications solution to keep your team collaborating with each other and with your customers.

A recent McKinsey Report stresses that a business’ digital transformation should be focused on where it brings value to both internal efficiencies as well as reducing friction with your customers. Because the pace of change in a digital economy is so rapid and forces continuous disruption, businesses need to be constantly re-evaluating how they work together and with their customers. It’s a constant iteration cycle of verifying processes, looking for opportunities to streamline and improve, and then implementing changes in conjunction with the team. The outcome should always be better collaboration amongst your team and better service to your customers as a result.

Automation of common tasks and workflows becomes critical if you want your business and your team to scale quickly while increasing the overall efficiency of your business. While automation for businesses of all sizes has been trending for some time, the trend has rapidly accelerated (the term hyperautomation has been used) out of necessity as customers continue to demand remote and contactless service. Automation can touch everything from the ordering process to customer contact flows. Anything that improves employee productivity and removes friction from dealing with customers should be considered for automation. Customers now expect a level of automation but always want the option to reach out to you directly if they need something, and a modern cloud communications solution is the only way to accomplish this effectively.

While investing in cloud communications solutions, business process automation solutions and other cloud-based technologies may seem like an important up front investment, the returns in terms of increased employee productivity, improved customer satisfaction and the ability to scale your business to meet new demand while containing costs are immeasurable. The benefits far outweigh the upfront costs.

A fast-changing digital economy creates continuous disruption in the way customer preferences, particularly in how they prefer to deal with your business. Business goals set two to three months ago may no longer be relevant or may need to be modified. It’s literally changing that quickly. To respond to that change, your business needs to be constantly re-assessing its goals with the full participation of your team. McKinsey recommends a relaunch roadmap to help you realign your business goals to help teams focus on what’s needed to re-evaluate goals and continue to execute those goals.

A relaunch provides businesses with a way to reassess everything from the technology being used to the composition of your team.

The way customers interact with businesses is continuously evolving. The digital economy has empowered customers to buy almost anything they need online, choose how quickly they can get it and how they get it.

A recent Swiss Re Group report identified five key areas where consumer behavior is experiencing lasting change:

1. Increased digital adoption
2. Change in mobility patterns.
3. Change in purchasing behaviour
4. Increased awareness of health
5. Changes in interpersonal behaviour

It’s important to note, as the report indicated, that these are not mutually exclusive. These changes are overlapping in many areas and work together to drive the evolving behavior of a consumer in this digital economy.

As a business, it is important to take note of these factors in determining how to continue to adapt all aspects of your business to meet their evolving needs. This very much includes how you directly interact with them. Increased digital adoption means a propensity to use text and messaging as a communications preference. Changes in mobility patterns suggests customers need to be able to reach your business from anywhere they may be. The change in personal behavior, with a focus on online shopping and digital transactions means that your business needs to have a strong online presence. Increased awareness of health and changes in interpersonal behavior means a greater emphasis on interactions that promote social distancing and contactless interactions, such as video conferencing.

Your business needs a communications solution that not only adapts to these changes in preferences but can evolve with them so that you don’t need to worry about future-proofing your investment. A modern all-in-one cloud communications solution allows your business to focus on continuing to meet your customer’s changing preferences without requiring you to re-evaluate your communications solution at every turn.

In Chapter 5, we will dive more into how the digital economy presents no boundaries to businesses and how that presents a unique opportunity for any small business to thrive and to grow.