How a Cloud-based Workforce Management System is no longer an option but a must
)
Companies are realising the value of adopting newer, more advanced technology, and their place in driving efficiency and productivity. Everywhere you turn, businesses are swapping desktops for laptops and hard drives for cloud storage.
Even before the COVID-19 crisis, businesses felt pressured to embrace the latest technology to stay competitive and provide a great employee experience to retain top talent. In 2019, the global market intelligence firm IDC group estimated that companies would spend over $6 trillion on digital tools and solutions by 2023.
The need for change has intensified by the sudden arrival of COVID-19, which has forced companies to adapt or fold. Now, cloud-based technology is considered essential to steer businesses to success through the pandemic and beyond.
To uncover the real value, let's dive into some of the benefits of transforming your business onto the cloud.
Keep your doors open even when disaster strikes
We all know how important business continuity is. Yet many fail to put in place adequate procedures and systems to protect their business in an emergency. Measures like quarantine and social distancing suddenly becoming the norm have highlighted the importance of having a robust business continuity plan. This plan should incorporate cloud-based solutions to facilitate remote working. Cloud based workforce management softwarewill give your business the agility needed to keep its doors open regardless of your workforce's location. It's so crucial that the decision to implement or reject cloud technology tools can make or break your business. This explains why SaaS companies like Microsoft reported an additional 12 million users in just one week when the pandemic struck.
In practice, onboarding cloud technology could look like equipping your sales team with digital tools like Salesforce, Zoom, and G Suite, to name just a few. These tools will enable them to generate revenue from anywhere. All your employees should have access to applications that just require internet connectivity to improve efficiency, productivity, and engagement. The Humanforce app has a myriad of benefits for companies with flexible, casual, and mobile work-forces, not only for their managers but employees alike.
Embracing digital transformation will reduce the number of disasters capable of halting your business operations and exposing it to significant financial losses.
Make onsite to remote working seamless for a better employee experience Almost overnight, debates about the feasibility of homeworking were silenced. Remote work went from a nice perk to essential and mandatory. So much so, a survey conducted by Slack, a business communication platform, found that remote work figures at the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis stood at 16 million in the US alone.
Equipping your staff with the tools needed to work remotely can be beneficial for all. It allows your team to quickly set up and start working while having greater flexibility in their workdays. This arrangement can boost employee happiness and morale. It also enables employers to maintain solid productivity and efficiency across their workforce no matter where their staff work.
Reduce compliance-based headaches
Compliance is a serious responsibility all companies must bear. Just one misstep could land you in legal hot water. Globalscape, a software development company, found that businesses, on average, incur $4,005,116 in revenue losses due to non-compliance – yikes!
Digital transformation can help lessen the burden by providing a centralised hub from which to manage workflow. For instance, a cloud-based compliance tool could help you:
Provide a noticeboard of key compliance developments
Track certification expiry dates
Store important legal paperwork
Log and investigate incidents
Build compliant procedures, templates, and systems
Keep an archive of past measures and processes
Cloud based workforce management software can drive positive business changes. For example, it can create a greater awareness of what is required from all parties and more transparency in how the company is managed. This setup can reduce the number of breaches and misunderstandings that occur. Also, in-app communication can assist in compliance and increase adoption significantly due to the timely and situational strategies that can be deployed. Here at Humanforce, we help our customers get and stay compliant by staying on the pulse of developments, trends, rules, and regulations in work-force management.
Slash those costs
Let's be honest. Data centres aren't cheap. Just tally up the costs of the engineers, security, and facilities enlisted to manage and protect them. Compare this to the affordable subscription fees and low to non-existent installation costs of cloud-based cloud services, and the business case for making the switch solidifies from a financial standpoint alone.
When you sign up for cloud based workforce management software, such as Humanforce, there will be no more forking out for unnecessary space, admin, and equipment since everything is managed virtually. These benefits all work together to make adopting cloud technology a very logical step.
Lessen the blow of tech failures
Do you ever worry that an IT issue will derail all your hard work? You'd be forgiven for doing so. Research by Information Week revealed that businesses suffer a shocking $265 billion worth of losses globally each year due to tech outages.
IT downtime isn't only costly in the monetary sense, but can also damage your company's reputation. It can lead your customers to question your reliability as a supplier.
Thankfully, cloud-based software solutions can come to your rescue. They eliminate issues like the loss of access to critical information and applications when hardware becomes damaged, lost, or compromised. Server-related catastrophes become an issue of the past.
For example, Humanforce's solution comes with secure backup capabilities and instant storage and recovery to ensure your team is never left high and dry, whether they're working in the office or on the road.
Scale, drive ROI, innovate, and add value - fast!
Let's imagine you run a startup that's scaling rapidly. While fast growth is something to celebrate, the downside is that your needs for tech-based services like storage, web hosting, and server space are continually changing. This cycle can be problematic if you take the traditional route of buying physical technology systems like servers and hard drives.
You'd need to order more than you require to stay ahead of your company's explosive growth. Consequently, you could find yourself with a lot of capital tied up in assets instead of fuelling your expansion. Each month, you'll also get a massive bill from your data centre, whether you've taken advantage of the services provided or not. But even worse, you could find yourself locked into an annual contract with a data centre -- Ouch. Talk about a huge opportunity cost!
It doesn't have to be this way. Cloud technology can be tailored to match the ebbs and flows of your business. Today's market has a large variety of tools available to suit different business requirements. Plus, they're 100% online and have easy-to-manage subscriptions. Onboarding a unique blend of these solutions will leave more cash to experiment and take appropriate risks to propel your business to new heights.
Another great thing about cloud technology is that it lays the foundation for innovation and positions companies to quickly and efficiently add value to their clients. This is because innovation and quick time-to-value are built into the very fibre of cloud technology. The cloud technology industry is ultra-competitive. So, to stand out from the crowd, their creators spend a lot of time, effort, and money to optimise their service to provide a great user experience. You're then free to use and pass on these optimised features to your customers.
On the topic of managing employees, especially if you have a workforce that relies on casual, mobile, and contingent teams. Humanforce takes care of the updates and installs, so you can focus on delivering having the most engaging experience for your workforce which leads to happier customers and more efficient and effective businesses.
Cloud-based technology acts as your strategic partner, providing cutting-edge solutions to support you on your journey of developing innovative products, staying relevant to your customers, and making complex processes simple and easy.
Rest easy knowing your data is secure
The tech industry has received a bad reputation over the years. Data manipulation scandals and security breaches have rocked the headlines. So, it's not surprising that a lack of security is cited as one of the top reasons businesses don't migrate into the cloud.
But it's not all woes and horror stories. Sometimes cloud-based solutions can be safer alternatives. They host a range of built-in features that act as barriers, protecting your business from crafty criminals and malware. For instance, some cloud-based tools come with the ability to:
Delete data remotely
Simultaneously log out of all the devices the solution was used on
Implement multi-level access verification
What's more, cloud-based software companies dedicate significant amounts of their resources to updating their security measures to ward off cyber-attacks.
At Humanforce, we take security very seriously and go to great lengths to keep your information safe. For example, we use Amazon Web Services (AWS) to store all of our clients’ data. AWS not only boasts a 95% up-time rate but is a leader in the cloud computing market.
When you adopt cloud technology, your business gains a troop of top-class cyber-security and cloud computing professionals who will fight in your corner 24/7 to keep your business and data safe and secure.
Conclusion
Embarking on your digital transformation journey will give you the tools, agility, and confidence needed to handle unexpected events. You can also look forward to tightened security, better regulatory compliance, and built-in resilience. This is all achieved with a reduced investment of time and money compared to enlisting the help of traditional technology service providers like data centres. Consequently, issues that may have stopped your business in its tracks will become minor blips in its path.
Transitioning into the cloud will set your business up for delivering a great employee experience that accommodates our new normal of working remotely. You'll also have the freedom to pivot from and to tools as you scale, which holds untold benefits. On the flip side, sticking with outdated legacy systems and on-premises solutions can hinder your future growth.
The best time to start your digital transformation journey is now.
There are cloud solutions to fit every business's needs, so don't feel anxious about moving from on-premise servers and hardware to cloud-based solutions.