As business owners we share a common goal to reduce costs, increase profits and enhance productivity while reducing stress. There are many areas we can improve on to reach these goals. In the last two years new tools have been developed to help us reach these goals quickly with little effort.
Decrease Costs
One Example: Eliminate all long distance charges immediately without changing your equipment.
New inexpensive technology allows you to immediately eliminate long distance calling costs. There’s no change to your existing equipment and no change in the way you place a call. A small inexpensive device is simply installed at your office routing all long distance calls over the internet. You simply place a long distance call and the equipment does the rest. The best part, calls have better clarity and you pay nothing for long distance! If you have long distance charges over $300 a month then you will benefit greatly. ROI is realized the first month. This is just one example of the many ways to cut cost quickly and effectively.
Increasing Productivity
Have you noticed your computer goes slower over time? So is your network.
Businesses with no control over Internet usage are suffering lost productivity. Some owners feel the employee needs a way to relief stress by allowing free use of the Internet. Consider this, uncontrolled or unmonitored internet surfing has the equivalency of allowing your employees to take your personal vehicle out for a joy ride whenever they want, wherever they want without your permission and leaving your credit card on the dash to pay for the gas! This problem is getting worst as Internet usage is increasing, costing you payroll money. To complicate matters further consider the following. Since the surfing is uncontrolled or unmonitored the user can freely go to infected websites bypassing antivirus programs. This allows hackers a “back door” into your network. So surfing the internet is more than a casual problem and most people are not aware of the potential harm. Additionally when someone uses the internet for personal pleasure by listening to music or watching a video it uses a majority of the internet access restricting others on the network from accessing email or slowing down other legitimate users of the internet. This is just a couple of many problems happening everyday that cut into productivity costing your business an average of $9,100 per user annually. There are methods that can control this problem and still allow for peaceful use of the internet. By controlling Internet use you gain productivity and reduce the risk of slowing down the computers while protecting your data.
Reducing Stress
Would you like more peace in your daily life?
Recent studies have shown administrative staff exposed to technology is reaching attention deficit disorder (ADD) symptoms because of compulsive behavior and distractions from increasing forms of technology. A front page article published in the New Your Times entitled “Lost in E-Mail, Tech Firms Face Self-Made Beast” mentions several large technology firms are banding together to fight information overload. They formed a nonprofit group to study the problem, publicize it and devise ways to help workers — theirs and others — cope with the digital deluge. It’s the ineffective use of technology that is driving this ADD symptom and there are methods to effectively reduce the stress while increasing productivity. One such example is to determine the 3 most important tasks profitable to the business that should be performed by that person. Then prioritize them and begin each day working on that tasks until completed. The real help is found when eliminating as much distraction as possible that means reducing email, telephone and other distractions. Studies have proven when this is practiced companywide the office morale is calmer and more productive saving the operations as much as 120 minutes per day per employee. There are several other ideas that are easy to implement and provide quick results.
Increasing Profits
When technology is used effectively the results are very profitable to the business. When morale is better the employee is more productive. Never has there been a better time to make such an improvement in profits by using better methodologies in the business place.
In the future blogs I will be exploring each of these subjects in more detail and offering ideas to improve the operations for a healthier bottomline.
Tom
DatCom is holding their summer Executive Breakfast on July 1st hitting topics such as: 
