Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of people working remotely was rising steadily. During the pandemic, 70% of full-time employees were working from home. Post-pandemic, 50% of workers don’t want to return to jobs that don’t offer remote work opportunities.
The importance of creating a proper remote work environment is hard to ignore. Almost 80% of future employees say that the possibility of working from home is a great incentive. To attract top talent and streamline operations, businesses explore effective remote work technologies.
To prepare for the future of remote work in your company, it’s imperative to take full advantage of the available tools. Let’s take a closer look at some of them.
Workflow automation.
Workflow automation eliminates the manual processes from your daily tasks. You can digitize a variety of manual tasks, allowing workers to focus on their core activities remotely. For example, by automating your workflow with the right tools, you can eliminate repetitive data entry. For certain sales teams, basic data entry can take up to 10 hours per week.
Workflow automation technology employs rule-based logic to automate manual work. By taking full advantage of this functionality, it’s possible to reduce or eliminate the time your employees spend in the office. Almost any department can benefit from automated workflows.
When applied correctly, workflow automation can improve your team’s productivity immediately, thus boosting the company’s profitability.
The future of working remotely depends on how well you introduce workflow automation tools to your teams. With a smart approach, you can digitalize some offline tasks, thus keeping your employees out of the office.
AI-powered employee support.
Many aspects of remote work require ongoing support. While working from home, employees tend to have a variety of questions. Accessing information timely can mean the difference between exceptional solutions and missed deadlines.
With AI-powered employee support options, it’s possible to improve the employee experience by:
- Using the company’s knowledge base to provide instant answers to a variety of questions.
- Reroute complex questions to a subject-matter expert timely without forcing the employee to figure out who is responsible for which information.
- Creating a central place with answers to all the necessary questions.
By taking advantage of the right tools, your team can get access to the platform that adapts to the way a company works. It can follow wherever the workflow takes it and learn from experience to boost productivity and increase employee satisfaction rates.
AI-powered support tools are designed with employee convenience in mind. They can also help managers track employee activity and figure out where they need the most support. This can improve the overall work process without in-person interactions.
Administrative automation.
Remote work demands employees to demonstrate a high degree of responsibility, time management, and work structure.
During the pandemic, many employers faced a serious problem with workers who simply weren’t organized enough to perform remotely. Some companies had to arrange special training sessions to help keep productivity on the same level.
Self-reporting and self-organization is an ongoing problem with working from home. Workers need to make sure that their work activities are transparent to improve performance management. They need to think about collaboration, monitoring, and other admin responsibilities.
That’s where administrative automation comes in. Remote employees no longer have to focus on digital work coordination instead of executing their core tasks. A variety of smart tech is available to tweak the future of working remotely, including AI-powered scheduling apps and time trackers.
Live chat.
Remote support is an essential part of any company’s operation. However, your remote support teams are likely to be overwhelmed with repetitive questions and tickets. By delegating this work to chatbots, it’s possible to reduce some workload. However, complex questions could remain unanswered, thus lowering customer satisfaction and decreasing sales.
With AI-powered Live Chat technology, it’s possible to streamline the work of your remote support teams. The AI-driven chatbot doesn’t just answer simple questions, it:
- Collects and analyzes data to help your team understand customer needs better.
- Reroutes complex questions to the right experts.
- Provides a full history of interactions with a particular customer to help an expert deal with their problems effectively.
A live chat is an excellent way to interact with customers while working remotely without losing time on repetitive answers.
Productivity assistance.
Many employees suffer from the inability to manage their productivity while working remotely. Some of them simply don’t understand how to structure their work while others can’t eliminate distractions.
The future of remote work depends on how well employees can focus on productivity without giving in to the relaxing at-home environment.
To help your employees stay on top of their game, consider taking advantage of productivity tools.
- AI-powered productivity trackers — these tools analyze the way a person manages their time on the computer. They check which apps an employee uses the most and how often they switch between programs. The analysis can help uncover unproductive patterns and restructure the work process.
- Anti–distraction tools — these tools block unnecessary apps, eliminating the opportunity to be distracted by them.
Productivity assistants do for remote workers what managers and supervisors do for in-office employees. With time, employees learn how to rely on this technology, improving their time-management and self-organization skills in the process.
Remote training.
One of the biggest problems remote workers face is poor onboarding quality. Bringing new talent to a physical location is a challenge, especially for global businesses. That’s why companies rely on e-learning technologies to arrange remote training.
By taking advantage of e-learning platforms, it’s possible to onboard your workforce without any in-person interactions. Many companies use open-source learning systems like Moodle to create unique onboarding and training courses for remote workers.
Preparing for the future of remote work with Capacity.
If the benefits of remote work are offset by the challenges it poses, you simply don’t have the right technology. By providing your employees proper tools to work remotely, you are boosting profitability while making your company appealing to the top talent.
At Capacity, we focus on helping you implement the best technology to streamline remote operation. From workflow automation to AI-powered staff support, we can take remote productivity to the next level.