Any successful business owner understands that time is money, and time spent on manual and repetitive tasks which could otherwise be automated is certainly time (and money) which is being wasted.
In today’s modern world, many businesses have adopted software to deal with these kinds of manual tasks, such as data entry, updating timesheets and spreadsheets and manual marketing activities. If your business hasn’t caught up, you are likely wasting a lot of time and money.
But it’s not all about time and money either. Doing manual repetitive work is one of the main reasons for job satisfaction amongst employees, and one of the key reasons people leave businesses – they’re simply not happy in their roles, and who can blame them?
Have a read below of the 3 main areas most businesses can use automation to reduce time spent on manual tasks, and allow their employees to focus on more creative areas which do not lead to a lack of engagement.
1. Administration
Most businesses of a certain size will have some form of admin / HR/accounting function, usually made up of a small team of around 3 – 10 employees. Whilst the people within these teams do an incredibly important job, a lot of tasks can be repetitive and time-consuming, such as filling in timesheets for employees, and managing HR-related tasks. HRIS is an obvious solution here, which covers a lot of ground within admin / HR/accounting teams, and can be used to free up a lot of time and resources within these areas.
2. Marketing
Anyone who works in marketing can tell you the sheer volume of manual tasks which are required, particularly when working in digital marketing. For a business with a large email base who sends regular marketing email campaigns, simply managing the admin for such a campaign can take several days per month, and that’s without factoring in time for creativity.
Marketing automation tools aren’t particularly new, and have been used around the world for much of the last decade. Software such as Marketo and Hubspot are popular choices, as they can save an incredible amount of time on manual marketing activity, such as monitoring email campaigns, dealing with online customer service, and reporting on marketing campaign performance.
Marketers are usually creative folk, so putting them in front of a spreadsheet for 8 hours per day is the absolute opposite of what most of them would like to be doing at work. Adopting marketing automation software is, therefore, a great way, possibly the best way, of improving employee engagement within a marketing team.
3. Project management
As any project manager within a business will tell you, most of their time is spent updating the project progress and reporting to the stakeholders and wider business. This process can be made a million times easier by using project management software.
There are multiple options for project management software, many of the completely free to use, such as Asana or Trello. These kinds of tools offer a complete digital project management board, which saves a bunch of time usually spent creating manual documents and having to update them over time. They can also be used by team members to report on their respected areas of the project, all with the click of a mouse.
