As offices have shuttered and workers are forced to go home, businesses have had to face the reality that things might never look the same again. More and more companies are looking to adopt long-term policies that allow or even encourage working outside of the office, but few are prepared for the impacts that might have.
It’s easy to quantify the changes in productivity or overheard that transitioning out of the office might entail, but it’s significantly more difficult to pin down how it will affect the intangibles. What, for example, will your business’s remote work culture look like? How can a decentralized work team keep up morale? Most importantly, what can you do to continue to promote innovation once your office is empty?
Promoting innovative thinking isn’t a task you need to handle by yourself — the right tools can make the process easier. Here are five types of tech that can help you along the way:
1. Task automation tools
Every business is full of menial tasks that together can pose a huge drain on time and productivity. Whether it’s downloading files, sorting emails, or scheduling meets, activities like these pose a significant obstacle to strengthening your company. Every second you spend on a thoughtless task is a second that could’ve been put towards developing your next big product or ad campaign.
Task automation is the first step in freeing up your schedule going forward. There are now more tools than ever that allow you to customize your own automated process, ensuring that you can rid your plate of whatever pesky duties are currently on it. Innovation is about having the space to be creative and explorative — by affording yourself the time to focus on big projects, you’re giving your business that kind of space.
2. Dynamic communication platforms
Email has long been seen as a productivity drain, and this reputation is well-deserved: the wordy, slow, and antiquated format wastes time like few others. Now that businesses are starting to experiment with group communication outside of the office, video communication has arisen as a new norm — one that comes along with its own problems. Live video meetings are difficult to schedule, often buggy, and unlikely to produce tangible results.
As businesses look for a new way to communicate effectively, more and more are turning to dynamic instant messaging platforms. When trying to inspire innovative thinking at your company, facilitate the type of communication that often accompanies big breakthroughs: quick, speedy, and easy to go back and look over. Popular applications such as Slack and Facebook (News - Alert) Messenger allow for innovative thinking without the problems that so often accompany email or video conferencing. Innovation has to be shared in order to be effective, and the right messaging system can streamline that process.
3. Time tracking apps
At the end of the day, innovation is a mindset as much as it is anything else — if you want your company to produce innovative work, you need your workers to have innovation on their minds. Giving your workers the time to think creatively is often easier said than done, and there aren’t many ways to ensure that your remote workers are living up to their potential as movers and shakers.
One potential option is company-wide time tracking. This kind of tracking isn’t to ensure that everybody’s putting in their full 8 hours every day — it’s to ensure that they’re not getting so bogged down in their work that they lose their ability to think critically. Overwork can lead to significant drops in creativity, as can a lack of breaks. Keep a close eye on employees you’re concerned are working too hard — they may be accidentally hurting your business in the process.
4. Brainstorming aids
Once you’ve eliminated the aspects of your business that stifle innovation, it’s time to start promoting it. If you want your workers to start tackling your company’s issues creatively, you need to give them a venue in which they can express their ideas and build upon the ideas of others — brainstorming in a conference room is one thing, but doing so as a remote worker is another beast entirely.
Some companies may have occasional Zoom calls or Slack rooms for brainstorming purposes, but haphazard methods like these hardly do the activity justice. Instead, consider adopting a mind mapping platform. Mind mapping is more than just a whiteboard to draw ideas on — it’s a way of tracking who thought of what during the development process and identifying areas that could potentially be pushed further. By treating brainstorming as a crucial component of your business instead of a bi-weekly chore, you can encourage an attitude of innovation throughout all levels of your business.
5. Project management software
It’s one thing to have an idea that pushes the envelope, but it’s something else entirely to bring that idea to fruition. Even at the top level of business, up to a third of all projects experience complete failure despite the abundance of brainpower and corporate resources behind them. If your business has even gotten off the ground, you’ve probably already done your fair share of innovative thinking — it’s time to do innovative work.
Project management software has quickly become a cornerstone of digital business, even more so among remote companies. Cutting-edge projects need to be executed perfectly in order to work, so your business needs a central location in which aspects of your project can be monitored and delegated. As your workforce spreads throughout the country or the world, be sure to have all of the forward-thinking work they do stored in one place.
Innovation isn’t something you can just magically force upon your business: it takes work to nurture and grow it. As you look for new ways of getting your team to think outside the box, be sure to leave no stone unturned — sometimes the most effective solutions are the most unorthodox.
