There are as many different types of leaders and skill sets as there are personalities. Leaders encourage, empower, and inspire their team members to reach shared goals by treading new waters. Nevertheless, all various styles intersect where goals meet realization, as leaders are able to translate ideas into deliverable projects yielding quantifiable results.
In this, they are increasingly aided by technology, which streamlines and facilitates work processes so that employees can focus their energies on larger issues and improve decision-making. In this piece, we’ll shed light on some crucial ways technology helps boost your leadership skills.
Better Workforce Management
As early as the 1980s, companies began relying on workforce management (WFM) as a scaffolding that allows you to optimize employee productivity, efficiency, and consistency. Contemporary companies are increasingly relying on it to improve their employees’ performance, since inefficient workforce management is a recipe for disaster.
There are many potential adverse effects of poor workforce management:
- over-staffing, or conversely, under-staffing
- failing to deliver on the goals
- damaged relationships within the company
- general failure to thrive internally
- having to settle for subpar employees
- the inability to fulfill responsibilities to partners and customers.
To avoid this vicious circle, you need a WFM strategy, allowing you to implement policies and advanced programs to help manage the complexity of the situation. Such a strategy is also a time and resource saver for you and your company. There are many well-made WFM solutions that can make this daunting task easier on a day-to-day basis while also facilitating intelligent and effective planning.
If you choose to implement WFM software, for example, most of it tackles critical aspects of workforce management, such as:
- on-boarding tasks,
- payroll information and benefits,
- clocking in and out,
- keeping track of absences or leaves,
- forecasting demand
- labor budgeting
- monitoring performance
MFM solutions will provide valuable insights while acting as a centralized scheduling system, allowing you to make decisions that benefit your staff based on real information gathered in the field. In short, the smarter you work, the less you’ll need to worry about surprises.
Data-Driven Decisions
Intuition is fine, and if yours is reliable, more power to you. But even the best guesses are still just that—speculation. Real data is better. Gut choices on the spot are sometimes necessary, when the decision you have to make is time sensitive, or additional information is simply unattainable.
However, to lead efficiently and make real progress in any aspect of your business, you need hard data — recordable, quantifiable, and retrievable. When you’re making important decisions about your assets, avoid going on instinct, and rely on data reports to make sure your choices are grounded in reality. If you learn how to view and interpret raw data, the information you collect can be used to your advantage to optimize the decision-making process.
No matter if it is predicting workload increase or customer demand in the next quarter, or coming up with equipment maintenance schedules, as a leader, you can leverage insight into how your company really works to its advantage.
Intelligent leadership is reactive, proactive, and visionary. Analyze, calculate, and decide on the course of action. Also, you will benefit from automating as many decisions as possible. Most of your needs can be addressed through technology, which is often more reliable and less biased than employee input. Essentially, it minimizes the element of human error.
You need these equations to resemble the reality you operate in as closely as possible if you want to succeed and do your job well.
Easier Problem Detection
Even Achilles was as strong as his heel. Everything has a weakness, and so does your business. If you don’t see it, you’re not looking hard enough. Therefore, make sure you take advantage of the technologies at your disposal to detect what could be preventing your business from reaching its goals. With enough insight, you can SWOT that W into oblivion.
Go back to the data and really look at it. Could a project’s low ROI be rectified with an easily implementable technology solution? Are your employees ill-informed about the quick-paced changes on the market? Are they unable to work at optimal capacity as they try to catch up through word of mouth or scattered emails? Perhaps you find yourself wasting precious resources on renting huge office spaces when a technological upgrade could allow for remote work.
A whole scope of business aspects could be improved by employing advanced technological systems.
The Importance of Employee Input
Try canvassing your employees for ideas about the aspects of your business that would either benefit from automation or require different solutions. Departments are closer to their pain points, which may not show up in your large data chunks. Create an internal survey in which you’ll ask employees to write out their version of a SWOT analysis.
If the same issues keep popping up across the board, it’s a red flag. Start implementing solutions before problems escalate. Moreover, analyze current problems and predict what may become a problem in the future.
Create a centralized node of information where your employees can be up to date with current challenges and the company’s weak spots that need to be dealt with communally. Your job as a leader is to incite and motivate collective course changes to nip the existing or potential problems in the bud.
A Better Understanding of Your Business Operations
When you understand the ins and outs of your business, you can use the knowledge to your advantage. On the one hand, you can leverage its good points. On the other, it allows you to tackle problems before they escalate. Things you don’t understand are no man’s land, unknown, and unpredictable.
An awareness of your business operations allows you to stay on top of the market in a variety of areas. It allows you to be consistent in providing a high-quality product or service. You can also maintain productivity, increase customer satisfaction, and minimize overall cost while maximizing benefits and returns.
To stay on top of the developments on the market, you have to familiarize yourself with the technologies that shape it. Data analytics is one such trend. The information that it provides can be diagnostic, descriptive, predictive, or prescriptive.
In sales, you can use it to offer markets what they need while tailoring your marketing efforts to fit various demands and key consumer profiles. You will be able to optimize the supply chain management and surpass the competition by predicting future developments on the market, in addition to systematizing customer feedback. In short, use it to maximize productivity and minimize operating costs.
Wrap Up
All leaders agree on the importance of maintaining a learning mindset as the key component to success. Nurture the desire to improve and reach new entrepreneurial heights by exploring ever-improving technological solutions. Manage your workforce more efficiently, make better decisions, find the weaknesses, and neutralize them before they tear you down.
Take a closer look at your business operations and familiarize yourself with applicable analytics, providing you with specific big data insights. With them, you will be able to make informed decisions about the course and destiny of your business. There is a whole world of data out there you’re missing out on. Use the technology to help you analyze and implement it.
The world is data-driven. Your decisions should be, too.
Michelle Laurey works as a VA for small businesses. She loves talking business, and productivity, and share her experience with others. Talk to her on Twitter.