Productivity Tools for Employees

By finding innovative ways to improve employee productivity, growing companies can conduct more efficient business with their customers, partners, and suppliers. Internet business solutions such as sales-force automation, intranet groupware, employee self-service, human resources management, and Web-based training can deliver profound new productivity benefits to your employees while streamlining your internal operations.

• Improve customer relationships---Sales-force productivity tools empower representatives by allowing them to build stronger relationships with customers, while enabling them to respond faster and more efficiently to customer needs. Sales representatives can manage appointments more efficiently, send correspondence; access company, product, or customer information; develop product configurations, and generate quotes even while they are traveling or at a customer site.

• Raise the standards for excellence---Though employing knowledgeable, well-trained employees is critical for growing businesses, providing ongoing training and education is cost prohibitive. Web-based training greatly reduces time and costs associated with training. With Web-based courseware, you can establish online training centers for employees by creating Web pages comprising self-paced training modules. Employees train at their own pace, at their desktops, eliminating the need for a central training location reducing travel time and cost.

• Enhance team performance---Many firms are turning to collaborative technologies to expand the capability of teams and build a greater sense of community in the workplace. Technology-enabled teams are less bound by space and time, and they can be structured specifically by tasks. Exchanging information via e-mail can dramatically increase team productivity and responsiveness. The functionality of groupware extends well beyond e-mail---group calendaring/scheduling, data conferencing, videoconferencing, group document editing, workflow, and many other collaboration applications are now available in Web-based versions and more enter the market every day.

• Share knowledge---While an intranet can serve as a repository for easy form, policy, and procedure access, it can also be used to distribute current project information and "best practices" among employees. This type of sharing turns information into actionable knowledge and ultimately provides your organization with a sustainable competitive advantage. Intranets increase a company's rate of learning by making information available to any employee, anytime and anywhere. The intranet easily becomes a platform for corporate knowledge management, whereby you can manage knowledge resources and intellectual capital as you would other corporate assets.

This article was adapted from Cisco's The Internet Empowers Growing Businesses. To download the entire PDF version of the piece, click here.