In the modern business world there is a real danger of becoming overwhelmed by communications. When anyone can reach you at any time via phone, text message, email or one of the many networking and social media sites it is essential to have a method of managing your messages. Are you using all the tools available to help you spend your time productively?
If you still have a simple phone system then upgrading it can potentially save you hours every day. Interactive voice response (IVR) systems such as Easy Call Now allow customers to interact with your phone system and service their own inquiries by following the IVR dialogue. It provides a more efficient, automated system which saves you a lot of time answering calls.
The average UK office worker sends and receives 10,000 emails a year and more than one in ten people spend their whole working day on a computer or mobile device. If you are running a business it is likely you have to deal with significantly more than that, so it is vital to sift the junk from the critical messages and pick out the signal from the noise. Make sure your email system has all available filters actively diverting anything that is not critical into separate folders to read at your leisure, so you can reserve your inbox for emails that really are important to your business.
The rise of mobile devices providing access at any time to messaging and email is both a blessing and a curse to the modern worker. It is all too easy to waste hours in a day checking your inbox so you should check your messages no more than once an hour and put your phone and tablet out of reach. If something is too urgent to wait an hour then phone instead. You can use one of the many timer apps to help you keep to this rule, and they are also useful to keep your different projects under control if you are using something like the Pomodoro technique.
Video conferencing via services such as Skype are more than sufficient for most meetings. When you are considering a face to face meeting, weigh up the opportunity cost. If senior staff spend hours out of the office travelling and meeting, what does that cost your organisation? Not just in terms of their wage but in terms of what they could be doing instead. Is the meeting really crucial enough that it cannot be by video conference or phone call?
Communicating with people has changed immensely in the last few decades but organisations have often been slow to catch up. 58% of people believe that computers, tablets and mobile phones have made us more productive, but the Office of National Statistics figures suggest only a 2% rise in productivity in the last 40 years. By making a few changes you can ensure that communications technology is a blessing for your business instead of a curse.