In the pre-COVID era, organizational cultures required employees to visit their workplaces from time to time for non-operational activities, leadership training, security purposes, verifications, and various other reasons. But COVID-19 quickly changed this scenario. Regardless of what methods an organization followed, they had to go remote.
This shift was attributed mainly to public health and safety matters. But businesses had a whole new ball-game to figure. Companies had to equip their employees to work from home and maintain the same productivity and efficiency levels as in an office.
Globally, a massive 68% of enterprises have reported that employee productivity has boosted since the onset of remote work. This is mainly because of no commute, the comfort of working from anywhere, and a work-life balance.
The heightened employee satisfaction and productivity have convinced companies to continue allowing the option to work remotely even after stay-at-home laws begin to ease. But to achieve this, businesses would need to lean towards cloud applications increasingly, enabling remote employees to stay productive by providing them all the corporate resources they need at the push of a button.
To give businesses a heads-up regarding what matters to stay productive remote or not, we’ve crafted this quick read with everything you need to know! So, let’s dive in!
What are the main challenges of remote work?
- For employees: Employees had the freedom of communication during pre-COVID, but remote work severed that bond. Any manual process requiring an employee to collaborate and communicate with the rest of their team would no longer work. This majorly caused the dip in their efficiency, productivity, and morale.
- For Finance teams: Most finance functions require 1×1’s with employees. From budget meetings to operational costs, or expense reimbursements, Finance teams used to sit and work closely with employees to get the job done. So you can imagine how difficult it could be difficult to clarify corrections in expense reports with employees who’d be halfway across the country, leading to incomplete and inaccurate records and delayed expense reimbursements.
- For businesses: Broken processes, inefficient employees, and inaccurate financial reports could harm a business’s health and sustenance in the long run. Leaders need to welcome change and leverage cloud automation tools to enable their businesses to manage and run remote teams to generate revenue successfully.
Why should businesses adopt cloud technology?
Collaboration tools reduce the isolation that remote teams face internally and enable them to seamlessly communicate across departments or teams, thus ensuring consistent productivity levels.
Tech republic reported an 80% increase in adopting cloud technologies like expense management software, time tracking software, helpdesk software, video-conferencing software, webinar platforms, and other collaboration tools. This is mainly because cloud tools take up all the heavy lifting and help to revise workflows, operations, and other processes.
As a business owner, if you are looking to bridge the physical gap between your remote employees, you must adopt and arm yourself with the right set of tools. Remember that the only thing you need to ensure is that your employees feel enabled to get work done from home just as they did while in the office.
And cloud technology paves the way for just that.
How is cloud technology becoming the backbone of remote work?
-
Employees benefit from real-time collaborations.
Cloud tools have been made by keeping in mind the needs of distributed employees and systems. While tools like G-Suite enable employees to work on the same document from numerous locations, others like Slack or Notion ensure that aspects like team-wide communication and documentation are taken care of.
By addressing every issue remote employee’s face, cloud technology gives businesses the control and collaboration it needs to function just like it did back in the office.
-
Leaders make data-backed business decisions.
Almost all cloud tools come with an advanced data analytics engine that derives meaningful information from chunks of data. This enables business leaders to make intelligent decisions with no additional effort.
Take, for instance, if your Finance team uses expense report software, they gain insight into policy violations, top spenders, department-wise spending, frequently booked hotel chains, most traveled airlines, and more across the company. Having access to all this information lets Finance teams make more intelligent decisions concerning business expense management and overall spend optimization.
Similar to this, other cloud tools would provide similar patterns and derivations from data in their area of operation.
-
Greater control over business expenses for Finance teams
Businesses that continue to rely on traditional means of expense management during remote work will make them vulnerable to expense fraud, have zero control over business expenditure, and lack insight into spending. This, if left unchecked, can run an organization into the ground in the long run.
Automation tools make the tracking and reporting of expenses easier and enforce policy compliance seamlessly by automating pre-submission checks. This takes away a huge load off your Finance team’s shoulders as they no longer have to verify every personal expense for policy compliance manually.
Remember that non-compliant expense reports can lead to severe trouble with the IRS if found during an audit. If you feel like your business is prone to such issues, consider shifting to expense reimbursement software that can help you boost productivity by reducing fraud and manual data entry errors.
-
More data security and support for your business
Data security in an office roughly translated to locking all your doors and cabins that stored essential files. The case now, though, is very different. Being passive can lead to massive data threats, costing your business a lot of time and money.
Almost all cloud tools have been developed by keeping cybersecurity a top priority. In addition, every cloud software provider works based on a shared model of responsibility; thus, enabling data protection within the cloud.
If you’re in want of more, tools like Microsoft Azure let your business design your own specific set of security measures that can range from user permissions to multiple levels of data encryption to prevent serious security breaches.
Bottom line: Your data is safe in the cloud. You can sleep in peace.
-
Improves overall work experience for teams
Cloud technology frees employees from being chained to their desks all day. Instead, they can work from any place, on any device, at any time with the same levels of productivity and efficiency as long as they have a laptop and stable internet connection.
Over 75% of the remote population want to stay remote, as reported by Digital, as they just seem happier and more satisfied with their jobs with little to no thoughts of ever quitting.
Why? Simply because remote work lets employees become self-managed and gives them the option to design a better work-life balance, all of which couldn’t have been remotely possible to achieve without the right set of cloud tools.
Parting thoughts
Remote work will be around for a while, and a sustainable future remains in the timely adoption of cloud tech. These tools have become necessary for any organization looking to scale despite today’s harsh economic conditions.
