As a future that promises more and more automation quickly approaches, it can be difficult to determine how the working world should respond to these changes. Will automation wipe out jobs, as we know them, replacing humans with artificially intelligent machines? Or will automation bring on a new industrial revolution for the modern age? Whatever the outcome, for companies to experience the greatest level of growth, automation must be embraced, not ignored.
Employees and businesses will find that they profit the most by finding ways to work alongside automation. With the productivity that automation brings, the finer details of the business are less likely to fall through the cracks.
For example, you want your employees to be prepared in case any type of disaster happens. By using a disaster recovery tool, you won’t have to worry what’s going on with your important data–it will be protected, and you and your team can deal with what’s next.
Here are some ideas on how to react to automation, rather than ignoring it.
Preparing the Workplace for Automation
As automation continues to positively impact your company, it’s important to understand the full range of its impact. With the help of seamlessly automated processes, your business will expand, sometimes in a way that you aren’t prepared to handle. In order to guarantee that both your employees and your business are successful as your newly automated company takes off, every aspect of the workplace should be prepared for what automation brings.
For example, companies that haveexperienced significant growth due to automation often start hiring many new employees to handle the new influx of business. As new employees join the company, businesses can find it hard to run their companies in the same way as before.
Without properly taking measures to ensure your company runs smoothly with the addition of so many new hires, your business will soon start spiraling out of control. To avoid this, it is important to be intentional about preparing your workplace for the beneficial consequences of automation.
Planning to Retain the Workforce
As companies expand, it can be hard for businesses to dedicate time to invest in their employees. Ignoring automation will send employees the wrong message, leaving them unprepared for the changes ahead.
Particularly employees that have been with a business for a long time may find it hard to adjust to the idea of their daily routine changing to something new. These types of employees may simply find it easier to try to carry on the way things used to be, ignoring the changes.
However, this kind of mindset does not serve to benefit anyone. Without the proper training, employees may not understand how the new technology works and may feel even more threatened in the face of these changes. Businesses that make it a point to explain how automation will change the company is the best way to connect with employees and make sure everyone is on the same page.
Expecting More Automation
Automation often has an effect on the businesses that begin to implement it. Once you automate a certain part of your business–it’s hard to stop. Though most industries do have partial automation in the workplace, the most innovative fields are always eager to implement the newest robots and artificial intelligence.
If others around the workplace aren’t aware of the automation that is taking place around them, they will be left in the dust as the new technology starts to take over. As workplaces start to automate more of their business processes, they should keep employees up to date on the new machines and software that are coming their way.
Expect to See Jobs Eliminated
Ignoring automation can mean unemployment for people working in certain professions. Employees should be well aware of the effects of automation—both good and bad.
It is the ugly truth that automation will lead to some jobs being replaced by machines. Jobs that involve repetitive and mundane tasks are the first ones to go once automation hits an industry.
These lower paying jobs will be easy to replace with an automated process. If workers in these types of professions fail to realize the instability of their jobs, they will be unprepared to make the jump to another profession.
Choosing to focus on how automation will affect the working world rather than ignore it should encourage workers to find time to work on their professional development. Employees that work in professions that are threatened by automation should consider going back to school to learn skills for a new industry, receive certification in other fields, or receive training that will help them stay in the field they already work in.
What it Comes Down to
Automation is here and cannot be ignored. Whatever industry you are in, you will realize that some form of automation will find its way to your workplace.
While it isn’t likely that your job will be eliminated due to automation, it is important for workers to pay attention to new technology and how it affects the workplace as a whole. If you work in accounts payable department–it’s likely some of your work will be automated, but that doesn’t mean your job will be eliminated completely.
If it helps, try and think of automation as a positive thing–you are likely to work more efficiently due to it, and you will learn new things along the way, making you an even more valuable team member than before.
About The Author:
Susan Ranford is an expert on career coaching, business advice, and workplace rights. She has written for New York Jobs, IAmWire, and ZipJob. In her blogging and writing, she seeks to shed light on issues related to employment, business, and finance to help others understand different industries and find the right job fit for them.
One of the most important things about your team is that they work well together. That way you are making sure that productivity, efficiency, and overall success are at their peak. Furthermore, it makes every team member satisfied, and working together is more fun. However, when introducing team building activities, you need to be creative.
It isn’t uncommon for bosses to rely on traditional ones that are more likely to bore your team than entertaining them. Furthermore, not everyone feels comfortable with every activity, so you need to take your time finding the one that makes everyone want to participate.
Truth and Lie
Every team member should have four identical pieces of paper. They need to write down one lie and three truths about themselves. The lie needs to sound somewhat authentic so that it isn’t easily seen through. Everyone from the group then randomly reads their truths and lie out loud. After that part of the game is done, the team is supposed to determine which sentences are true and which are false.
The purpose of this game is getting to know one another. While extroverts don’t have an issue with letting others know about themselves, it is different for introverts. Throughout this game, they will equally reveal things about themselves and learn about what others think about them. This is a great way for your team to bond by learning things about their teammates.
Back-to-Back Drawing
What you need for this game is paper, pens, and printouts of basic shapes or simple drawings. Form pairs within your team, and instruct every pair to sit back to back. One team member is given a piece of paper and a pen, while the other one is given a picture of a basic shape or drawing. The latter is supposed to verbally instruct their pair on how to draw what is on their picture. They can say anything except tell them what exactly the image is supposed to represent. They are given a certain amount of time, and once it is over, they compare the images and see which team managed to draw the best replica.
First, split your team into groups. Come up with a project that has a particular goal and defined restrictions. It could be creating a device that moves a ball from one point to another. It is really up to your creativity what the challenge will be. After you have determined this, give every team equal supplies to work with, or have them take what they need from a big pile of supplies in the middle of the room. They are supposed to only use the supplies that are available and finish the device in a set amount of time. The final result is really fun to show off and compare between teams.
This game works great for improving on how your employees solve problems as a team. It involves a lot of creativity, as well as fun, including the challenge to solve the issue with only a set amount of options.
Toxic Waste
What you need for this game is one large and one small box, one bungee cord loop, one rope, eight bungee cords, and eight plastic balls. The rope is used to make an 8-foot circle on the floor. This space is supposed to be a toxic waste radiation area. The balls are placed in the small box, right in the center of that area. They represent toxic waste. The large box is located about 30 feet away. The goal of the game is for every team to make use of the bungee cords in order to move the balls from the small box to the large box in a given amount of time. If a player steps into the radiation zone, he gets “hurt”, which results in a certain disadvantage, such as being blindfolded or having to hold one hand behind their back. Or, they might “die”, which means that they are out of the game. If you drop a ball, you get similar results, and if the whole box is spilled, then the whole team is “dead”.
The purpose of this game is to improve creative problem solving and it works as a great collaboration exercise. An advice from moving boxes Sydney experts is to try it out as a fun little activity.
In order to improve how your team members work together, and get them to know each other better, you should introduce creative team building activities. These four activities are certain to drive your team members to better function as a cohesive whole.
About The Author:
Leila Dorari is a marketing consultant and a freelance writer from Sydney. She has been working with different companies for 5 years now. When taking a break from making new marketing slogans, she is either window shopping or exploring new ways to make her life more meaningful.
When we talk about acquiring new analytical skills, we are referring to our desire to be better at deriving, interpreting and expressing patterns within data sets. In the context of professional life and running a company such skills can be put to great use in various fields, such as marketing, finance or decision-making.
No universal solution
Every manager or business owner has to make decisions based on facts and data available to them, rather than rely on intuition and gut feeling. Of course, there’s no universal analytical model that can be applied to every context, i.e. company, but the manager in question needs to be able to use different ones.
For example, you might have to use data to visualize outcomes of various strategic approaches or to collect data from all sorts of sources in order to identify trends, opportunities or risks. However, you need to be careful about the legality of such actions.
Also, relying on statistical models and machine learning, you can also be able to anticipate future outcomes. Finally, those skilled enough to use simulation and optimization can reach decisions that will be beneficial to their businesses.
Selecting relevant data
This has always been crucial, but it has become more difficult over the years, primarily because of the sheer volume of information available. Still, this also means that you are presented with more opportunities to deepen and widen your insights, which in turn can help you create a better view of the current situation and trends. Not only that, but you can also predict with much greater certainty what the future has in store for your business.
Data sourcing
Another important aspect of analytics is data sourcing and combining information obtained from various sources. Now, there is one issue you need to be extremely careful about. Namely, you should make sure that the information has been obtained legally and whether you are allowed to be in its possession. If you have any concerns about the issue, it’s probably best to hire an expert in financial fraud advisory services, who can advise you on the matter.
If there are no legal or other obstacles preventing you from using the data, you should be creative and combine traditional data with that obtained through social media, which is usually contained in conversations, photos, and videos. The fact that information might be unstructured should not prevent you from exploring and exploiting it.
Build models to optimize outcomes
What you do with the data available is another crucial aspect. While many companies turn to data mining and collect huge data sets, hoping they will allow a more in-depth analysis, they also run a risk of being overwhelmed with the scope of data and not knowing what to do with it.
The key problem is identifying important correlations between data, which can help you boost your business results. You should try to identify some underlying patterns that show how various elements influence key performance indicators.
The future
Just like the technological development has brought about many changes to almost every aspect of our lives, we are now witnessing the rising importance and relevance of analytics to the way companies operate. Even though it’s quite easy to follow a wrong path or make a mistake when processing and interpreting data, simply because of the amount available, there’s no aspect of running a business that can properly function without application of some analytical model.
However, if you can remain objective and how which indicators are important, you’ll be able to use a very powerful tool, which will help you run your company much better. The decisions you make related to business should be based on the information or projections provided by a relevant and correct analysis, which means that all managers need to improve their analytical skills.
Raul Harman is a business consultant from Sydney, Australia. He has a masters degree in finance and banking and almost a decade of experience in company management through latest technology trends. An avid reader and digital nomad who constantly strives to get new knowledge. Currently the writer for Technivorz, and Clippings.
If you own a small business that doesn’t mean your business isn’t good for Big Data Solutions. Also, you don’t have to have a huge budget for this – nowadays, small companies can obtain the benefits of the massive amounts of online and offline information. These information can help grow small business and make wise, data-driven decisions.
The key to operating on this successfully is to know where to look; your small business will grow once you learn how to gather and make sense (after analyzing it) of all the information you found. We give you five big data solutions that may help your small business.
1. Google Analytics
Hold your horses – there is no need for large investments in order to get necessary data. You can start with what you already have – your website. Google Analytics, Google’s free Web-traffic-monitoring tool will give you an insight into all types of data about website visitors. It uses a multitude of metrics and traffic sources.
Google Analytics will give you information about trends and fill you in on valuable information. This way you will be able to understand your audiences engagement, see what their likes and dislikes are, how long they stay on a website which will further help you make decisions regarding your website’s or online store’s goals.
What you can also do is analyze social media traffic. This way you will be able to make changes to your social media marketing campaigns and you’ll have the justification for those changes in details about what is and isn’t working.
2. InsightSquared
InsightSquared connects to popular business solutions you probably already use — such as Google Analytics, Zendesk , Salesforce, QuickBooks, ShoreTel Sky, and more and automatically gathers data and extract actionable information.
Let’s put it this way – what can provide a wealth of small business sales intelligence is using data from customer relationship management software (CRM). You will be able to find out about activity monitoring, lead generation and tracking, pipeline forecasting, and profitability analysis. It can also help businesses discover strengths and weaknesses, as well as trends. Also, you can be on top of sales team wins and losses, and more.
3. Canopy Labs
In case you didn’t know, Canopy Labs is a customer analytics platform. This platform uses customer behavior, sales trends and predictive behavioral models in order to extract valuable information for future marketing campaigns. Also, this way, Canopy Labs helps discover the most opportune product recommendations.
Canopy Labs features the 360-degree Customer View, that enables having insight into comprehensive data about individual customers. The purpose of it goes two ways – not only it shows customers’ email behaviors and purchase histories but it as well reveals customers’ standing, such as lifetime value, loyalty and engagement level.
4. Tranzlogic
Even though you own a small business, don’t kid yourself and think that you cant get invaluable data. It’s true – access was once limited to companies that had huge resources, but owing to Tranzlogic – all the information are now available for small companies as well.
How does Tranzlogic work? Well, it works with payment systems and merchants in order to extract and analyze proprietary data from credit card purchases. When you have this information, you are able to measure sales performance, to improve promotions and loyalty programs, evaluate customers and customer segments, write better business plan, launch more-effective marketing campaigns. Another good thing about this is that Tranzlogic doesn’t need you to be a pro to run it – there isno installation or programming required. You just need to log in and access your merchant portal.
5. Qualtrics
Conducting research is your answer if you don’t currently have any rich sources for data. With Qualtrics you are able to conduct a wide range of studies and surveys which will further let you gain quality insights to guide data-driven decision making.
Qualtrics offers three types of real-time insights:
a) Customer
b) Market insights
c) Employee insights
To gain customer insight, use Qualtrics’ survey software for website feedback surveys, customer experience. Qualtrics also offers advertising testing for studying of the market, concept testing and market research programs. Qualtrics can also help your team in a sense of conducting employee surveys, exit interviews and reviews. Other options include online samples, mobile surveys as well as academic research.
So, even though your company is small it doesn’t mean all is lost. Everybody started small once. Using these programs will help you expand your business.
Useful information for this article has been kindly provided by USB Planet.
We love to create awesome websites for small businesses! It is our passion and goal to help as much as possible people with a beautiful online presentation that represents who they are and what they stand for.
Leila Dorari is a marketing consultant and a freelance writer from Sydney. She has been working with different companies for 5 years now. When taking a break from making new marketing slogans, she is either window shopping or exploring new ways to make her life more meaningful.
We love to create awesome websites for small businesses! It is our passion and goal to help as much as possible people with a beautiful online presentation that represents who they are and what they stand for.