Be Proactive: Help Your Team Become More Productive

This is the second in our series of articles in which we examine how taking a proactive approach to your technology – and your business in general – makes your organization more secure, more sustainable, and more profitable. 

Productivity is key to business growth and success. The more productive your team is, the more profitable your organization can be. But productivity is not a static process. Part of being proactive is planning to keep your business productive and competitive as it evolves.  

By focusing on productivity, we help you plan ahead for growth and success. This means continually evaluating how productivity is impacted by your people, process and technology — three engines that drive productivity.  

A proactive approach to productivity includes focusing on each of these three elements and considering how to fine tune each element to reach your business goals.  

PEOPLE 

People impact your business productivity on many different levels.  

Internally, the most obvious people driving productivity, are your employees. When you focus on the productivity of your people, you enable them with the processes and technology they need to properly do their jobs.  

Proactively keeping your people productive means educating them on the risks that could bring productivity to a halt, like a phishing or ransomware attack. As part of our focus on productivity, we provide employee training and testing to help prevent cybersecurity and business continuity issues. 

Also in your value chain may be people who work on the periphery of your business — your vendors and partners. Much of your productivity relies on them doing their jobs properly. If the vendor isn’t doing their job well, it could put your organization in jeopardy. 

That is why it is so essential to work with a business-oriented IT vendor that understands productivity is a priority. Business-focused IT people understand how technology serves the larger goals of your business and will be proactive in implementing the process and technology to drive those goals.  

PROCESSES 

Productivity is more than just the IT tools you use, it also includes the processes and systems that promote efficiency. If your IT provider is business-focused, they will learn the combination of tools and processes that can drive productivity for your business.  

Your vendors’ processes should be aligned with your processes and designed with productivity in mind. For instance, managing computer updates and necessary reboots so that they happen when they will not impact the productivity of staff. 

Process-focused productivity also includes doing everything possible to prevent problems before they occur. Our 24/7 proactive monitoring of network and end-user systems was developed to avoid excessive downtime. Our remote monitoring services allow us to identify and fix potential IT problems before they happen so our clients can stay productive. 

More importantly, our network alignment process audits a computer network against over 350 best-practices, and our team works to align each network we support with these best-practices. This activity drives down the occurrence of problems and thereby improves the productivity of your team. 

Having processes in place to deal with disruption, like business continuity plans and incident response plans, will minimize lost productivity in the event of disaster because everyone will understand their roles and know what steps to follow. 

We also focus on productivity with our help desk processes and guarantees — 30 minutes (or less) response time for critical problems during business hours. When you call us you will get a live person who will make sure you get the help you need.   

TECHNOLOGY 

Being proactive about technology and planning for productivity means using the proper tools to support your desired business outcomes and give your business a competitive edge. That technology must be continually evaluated to determine if it is really driving productivity. The results should be measurable. 

Our entire managed IT services program is designed to be proactive about the technology essential to your business. We routinely look at strategies to improve network performance and deliver extra reliability, security, and efficiency. 

At Proactive IT, we are constantly on the hunt for new technology to help your business stay productive and profitable. As a trusted advisor to our clients, we are routinely evaluating the technology tools our clients use to help them achieve their goals. 

Planning to be productive also means taking advantage of the right cloud technology to match your business model. When it comes to focusing on productivity, the cloud offers many benefits and is a powerful tool. It provides anywhere, anytime access to hosted applications and communication tools so your team can stay productive. With cloud backup, you can remain productive if a natural disaster or user error or affects your ability to access your data and applications.  

But the cloud must be used strategically. This requires your vendor to understand both your business operations and business model. Adding cloud services without having a strategy in place could have a negative impact on productivity.  

As part of our business-oriented IT model, we continually focus on the productivity of our clients. We are always fine tuning the people, processes, and technology our clients use so that we can help them grow and succeed.  

Is your IT provider focused on productivity? If you need a productivity boost, reach out to us via email at info@weareproactive.com or 704-464-3075 extension 3. 

Dedicated to IT security and productivity,   

– Steve