Online Tools That Will Make Running a Business Easier

There is a lot that goes into running a business. You are constantly needing to be here, there, and everywhere, at the same time, putting out fires and greasing wheels. But there’s no, well, less reason to panic. We are in the digital age.

In this more tech-savvy society, smaller routine jobs can be taken off your hands with the help of some tools that can be found online. You’d be surprised how many things can be made easier, or entirely automated, allowing you to focus on the aspects of running a business that lit a fire in your belly in the first place.

Benefits

Benefits are a great way to invoke company loyalty, and your staff will likely depend on them, so it is important to get them right month after month. For example, mileage coverage will make sure your employee’s spendable income isn’t eaten up by petrol prices, and dental will make sure they don’t get a nasty bill when they feel some tooth pain.

You can also use bonuses to reward your employees if they do particularly well either at the end of the year or with the completion of an important project. It encourages productivity as well as loyalty.

But keeping track of them can be a pain, and that’s where Zest comes in. It is an app that lets you track all individual employee’s benefits and bonuses, allowing you to control who should get what. You can change them if there is a change of circumstances and offer bonuses as you feel they are deserving.

Training

There are lots of reasons why you might want to look into training your staff online. You might have a new hire, that will need a specific skill to integrate into the company, or you can sign your entire team up for a course.

You can also teach your entire team an additional skill that will benefit the company, make you stand out from the competition, or just need to shake up the way things have been done so far if something isn’t working.

If you are looking for a more creative skill that gets eyes on your company, like party tricks for bartenders, you can look at Skillshare For Teams for niche creative courses.

For more business-savvy courses, look to LinkedIn Learning, which offers courses on digital marketing, leadership, and entrepreneurship, to name but a few. Both of these platforms allow you to watch the progress of your team from afar and assign courses as you need to.

Individual employees may need a qualification to gain a promotion, for that, look to The Open University. Remote learning is their mission, and they offer every course a university should, and then some. Have your team members qualify for finance, social studies, or English literature as it suits their perspective role.

Wi-Fi

There’s nothing worse than your internet suddenly dropping out. You can get the “superfast”, “fibre optic”, “50G”, and “can leap tall buildings in a single bound” Wi-Fi, but it still won’t guarantee consistency.

Your Wi-Fi can sputter through a project, coming in and out of use, causing your background music to stall and buffer, or it can outright give up, causing your computer to turn into an expensive paperweight.

This can be caused by any number of reasons. Too many people trying to get online, a wall between your computer and your server, and several other internal things that turning it off and back on again isn’t solving.

That’s where SetApp comes in. SetApp is a Wi-Fi analyser that will run diagnostics on your internet and solve any problems it finds. Visit setapp.com for more information.

Phone System

We have finally done it. We have made the move to working from home. It was predicted, but never believed, and now we are having meetings with our pyjama bottoms on.

Even if you don’t have a lot of employees working from home, it would be in your best interest to prepare for it, and the main thing remote working needs is a decent phone system.

Investing in a phone system like Google Voice will save you a lot of money in the long run. All of your phone and video calls will be made over the internet, connecting to as many phones as you wish, eliminating the need for a landline system.

This will be invaluable when your staff can’t make it into the office and have to opt for working from home. Maybe the trains are off, maybe the car is in the shop, etc. There will be no need for clients or partners to travel to your premises for a meeting when they can simply hop on a video call.

It is also useful if you or your team members need to travel for work. Your employee can be reached while riding a train or even a plane if it has Wi-Fi, making for a more productive day of work.

Project Management

If you are running a team, assigning everybody their jobs can be time-consuming. Everyone would work a lot faster if they just knew, and got on with it, right?

Trello is a platform that allows your staff to do just that. You can assign work from your laptop, giving all your employees a list of things to get done that day. They can tick off the tasks as they go, allowing you to see how much progress is being made at a glance.

You can use it for the day-to-day operations of your business, keeping everyone on track and to the best productivity they can offer, or use it to keep track of individual projects that need to be covered.

You can distribute the different elements of the project amongst your employees, ensuring that everyone is pulling their weight equally. It will also be easy to see if someone is lagging. Empower employees to manage and access their records effortlessly using employee portal tools.

Trello’s platform boasts graphics that are friendly and welcoming while ensuring it is still a place of work. Everything is set out, and individual “cards” for employees offer features like sharing attachments and setting deadlines.