5 Benefits of Workload Automation in the Modern Workplace

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Workload Automation|5 Benefits of Workload Automation in the Modern WorkplaceIn today’s increasingly competitive business world, you need to constantly be on the lookout for ways to make your company more efficient. One highly effective way to do this is through the implementation of workload automation.

For the uninitiated, workload automation is the process of using software to streamline business processes, transactions, and workflows, all without the need for any human intervention.

If you are still unsure about whether this type of automation is the right choice for your business, the below blog may help to convince you. Keep reading to discover five benefits of workload automation for your modern business.

1. Improved efficiency

Efficiency is crucial if you want your business to attract new customers and outperform your competitors and workload automation has the ability to improve your efficiency levels significantly.

Even with the best workers in the world, manual actions will always be more time-consuming than automated ones. Plus, by automating these vital tasks, your skilled employees will have more time to focus on higher-value duties.

2. Increased productivity

Humans make mistakes. You should always account for human error and never assume that your workforce will be 100% perfect every single time. As a result of these mistakes, it can cost your business a lot of time and money. However, when you use workload automation software, you can eliminate the risk of human error, ensure that no important jobs are forgotten, and ensure that all data is entered correctly and on time – all of which will help to increase your overall productivity levels.

From simplified file transfers to the effective automation of big data, workload automation can streamline and speed up many of your IT processes.

3. Better protection against data loss

If you experience a hard disk crash, the resulting data loss can have huge repercussions on your business. Fortunately, if this occurs and you are using workload automation software, disaster recovery will be automatically implemented and your data will be protected.

4. Good ROI

If you are concerned about investing in new software for your business, you should know that workload automation offers a great return on investment. As mentioned above, it can make your workplace more efficient and productive.

However, it can also reduce your other automation costs. For example, most businesses have different automation tools for different departments, but workload automation is able to manage multiple platforms from one single platform.

Furthermore, it enables you to run forecast reports that can be used to manage resource utilization.

5. Ability to evolve

As a modern business, your needs are constantly changing and evolving. This means that you need software that is able to adapt with you. The beauty of workload automation software is that it takes a more sophisticated approach to controls and procedures.

Offering a single control access point, you can manage multiple tasks simultaneously and eliminate the need for dependency on your IT department.

Plus, by investing in a scalable WLA system, you can rest safe in the knowledge that your business will not outgrow your new software.

Let the Data Decide: Using Wifi to Inform Your Hybrid Workspace

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Hybrid Workspace|Let the Data Decide: Using Wifi to Inform Your Hybrid WorkspaceAs organizations talk about the pivot to hybrid work and what it means for workplaces themselves, let’s look back at where our modern-day concept of 9-5 work even came from.

In 1908, according to this Atlantic piece, a New England factory started to give its Jewish workers two days off around Saturday sabbath. That is believed to be the start of our “weekend” concept. A few decades and a Great Depression later, the trend of working five days a week took hold across the U.S.

Even as office work started to evolve, and technology started to accelerate decade by decade, that old notion of when we work continued strong. This century it seemed like we might be edging toward possible acceptance of a four-day week as even big companies sparked conversation. Google’s Larry Page wondered aloud if by dropping one day from the workweek, would it be better for employees and businesses. Entire countries have trialled the concept.

Today all that seems forever ago. Because a pandemic has compelled corporate chance as it lays bare the foundations of how and when we work. Companies now have to see how they can navigate change and make hybrid workstyles work for them.

The Office Must Serve A Purpose

Employees now seek the flexibility to commute to offices on specific days for specific purposes. The office is no longer a place to simply perform work. Instead, it is the destination to serve a wide range of specific needs for each employee, and each department.

It naturally follows then that an office space designed to serve the “office as a factory” mindset can’t adequately serve the “space as a service” mindset that’s now front and center in a hybrid work model.

Hybrid employees require spaces that drive efficiency, promote collaboration, and enhance comfort – elements your typical office was not necessarily designed to do. For some, this rethink of space is an opportunity to right size real estate portfolios. Others are seeking to reconfigure in new and better ways, being flexible and thinking holistically about what a business and its many different teams need from that real estate – now and into the future.

To that end, it’s important to know:

  • Do you have the space you need to support your teams?
  • How could your existing office space in fact serve more people?
  • How can you make the greatest, and most cost-effective impact to your workplaces?
  • How can your real estate best serve employee experience, helping the team be productive and working together?

Data For A Functional, Efficient, Strategic Space

Understanding how people use a space is essential. This is where data is invaluable. Insights such as visit frequency, new and returning visitors, and the levels of interactivity between employees provide a rich tapestry to design the office, assign resources, inform policies, and, if needed, rationalize the overall portfolio.

The good news is the infrastructure to strategize efficiency and empower growth is already available using always-on WiFi-powered indoor location technology.

Since WiFi already exists in most workplaces, these solutions are quick to implement and easy to scale across large portfolios. A solution from InnerSpace works by tracking the movement of anonymous smart devices throughout a building from the time that device enters to the time it leaves. As you can imagine, patterns in how people are using the space are quick to emerge, challenging assumptions or validating changes to layout or function.

The platform was recently installed in the main office of a global leader in lodging and hospitality. The client wanted to design the space efficiently, putting resources where they were needed most.

But first they needed data to understand the true needs of their teams. Using WiFi signals, we identified how two distinct teams of employees used the space differently, demonstrating unique needs for their environment. In fact, we also identified sub-teams within those departments whose movements etched predictable patterns over time.

In this particular case, the client was able to use these insights to inform office design, resourcing and seating assignments and notably, to find room within its existing footprint for 100 additional people, saving themselves the enormous cost of office real estate expansion.

In any workplace change project, it is essential to measure and continue to adapt the office space as needed. In a hybrid scenario, this typically means collaborative space must increase and office designs made as flexible as possible, with room versatility a priority. To both chart course now and tweak direction over time, WiFi-based indoor location data can paint a clear picture and provide a strong foundation for all future transformation.

About the Author

StrategyDriven Expert Contributor |James WuJames Wu is the CEO and Founder of InnerSpace, a thorough space utilization and analytics platform that goes beyond people counting backed by proprietary technology and advanced data science. InnerSpace enables their enterprise-class customers to optimize their two most valuable resources: people and property. Download Blueprint for a Hybrid Workspace to learn how indoor location data can empower you to make better decisions about your workplace.

Essential Business Lessons to Learn from Casinos

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article | Essential Business Lessons to Learn from Casinos

It can be great to look towards fields of business with great success to get inspiration on how to manage. There is a lot of business advice to collect from many areas and some of the great advice can be collected from the casino businesses.

Knowing how to handle a business and how to create success is something many people use for a lifetime to master. The complete and safe recipe for sky-high success does not exist and the market is constantly changing. Every business is different, and you will need to make the right choices for your business.

However, there are some fields of businesses that are successful when it comes to attracting customers and surviving in a competitive environment. And it is always a good idea to look to the ones with success to collect some inspiration on how to make your business stand out. The gambling field is a great place to look to as there are some essential and good lessons to take from casinos.

Focus on digitality and accessibility

The casinos have been fast at redirecting their focus on the digital world. Knowing that this is where the future lies. Online casinos have long been a part of the gambling scene. And customers have long been able to gamble wherever and whenever they wanted. Making the digital casinos rise has made gambling much more accessible, also to those who did not gamble before. This is a focus that could be vital to a business. You can visit the online casinos to collect inspiration on how they attract customers and how they cooperate with others.

On https://www.americancasinoguide.com/ you can find a list of the best-reviewed casinos and you can browse through the sites to see what they have done to get their great reviews. The most important lesson however is that you can reach a wider range of customers by going online. The future is digital and making your business excel on the digital platforms is an important factor in creating success.

StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article | Essential Business Lessons to Learn from Casinos

Go all-in on marketing

Think out of the box and be bold when it comes to marketing. It can be hard to do something that no one has ever thought of before, but you should try to stand out to make a solid impression on potential customers. If you want to use more time on marketing, you can read about different courses on https://www.CNN.com.

However, a lesson you can learn from casinos is, do not just showcase what you can offer but try to create an image of how it would be to be a part of it. The casinos speak to the full experience you get from visiting a casino. The casinos are quite rootless in their marketing, and it is probably one of the more successful strategies. Not being too fancy to use celebrities to lure people in or insert a great portion of humor into their advertisement.

Most people have at some point in their life come across a casino advertisement. And this is definitely due to their ability to make themselves noticed. They do not shy away from flashing lights to get our attention. And this is often the thing that makes it work.

Improving and Streamlining Various Areas of Your Business

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Streamlining Business|Improving and Streamlining Various Areas of Your BusinessLife can often be complicated when you wish it wasn’t. This is true for everyone, but if you find yourself behind the wheel of a business, complications are just going to be part of your daily routine. However, that doesn’t mean that everything has to be quite so, and there will be times when you can actually avoid this.

Tuning into which areas these are can allow you to start working on streamlining them into a more effective and manageable strategy, improving it for everyone involved. With so many different areas of your business to oversee, you can’t be directly involved in all of them. That being said, you are in a position to improve them from the ground up—allowing your employees to work even more effectively than they already do. Read on to find out how you can improve various areas of your business.

Perform a Content Audit

When you start your business, you do your best with what you have in terms of tools, experience, and knowledge. As the company progresses, you naturally improve within your position and gain insights that allow you to do your job more effectively. However, when you look back at the decisions that you might have made earlier on in your business, you might find that it doesn’t quite align with the current direction of your business and any mental changes that you’ve made since then. While these changes might also be visible to the external observer, your website might still contain all the content that you produced prior to this change—creating a clash.

For this reason and more, it might be a good time to perform a content audit in order to create a more consistent and streamlined website. This also gives you a good opportunity to update your website and modernize it, in order to bring it up to speed with the kind of professionality that you believe best represents your company. This is the hub that your customers will visit in order to find every piece of information that they could want to know about your business, so you want it to be the best that it could possibly be. An older-looking website might be enough to turn away customers, as they may not believe the information to be relevant if the web design is any indication. Furthermore, it gives you a chance to link in your social media pages to create a cohesive online experience.

Train Your Staff

Coming up with ways to improve your business can make you feel as though you’re working by yourself in order to achieve these results, especially if you don’t have anyone to bounce ideas off of. Fortunately, your business is a venture where you have plenty of help thanks to your employees, who make the running of your operations possible. Though you may not feel as though the connection that you have with these people is as strong as it could be due to the possibility that they could look for work elsewhere, this simply gives you more incentive to provide them with a reason to stay.

One such reason that you could provide is an opportunity for training, which can allow your staff to become more qualified—in turn giving them a sense of future when thinking about their career with you. This could also benefit you and your business by ultimately giving you a more qualified workforce who will be more prepared to deal with the various challenges that come your way, which can put you in a much stronger and more confident position going forward. Additionally, taking strides to make your workplace one in which your staff can be happy and fulfilled might help to make them more productive as they’ll care more about what they do.

Provide Flexible Working Possibilities

After the initial hit of the coronavirus pandemic, many businesses had to adapt to the situation and allow their staff to work from home. Though this led to many inconvenient hurdles in contrast to what you might have been used to at the time, it also led to a large degree of convenience and flexibility that might have been appreciated by you and your staff. While there will be times when you would rather that everybody is present in the workspace (and depending on your business this might be every day), giving your staff flexible working options is a prospect that can add a great deal to their work/home life balance.

Furthermore, advertising this as a perk of working with you can do a great deal to attract new employees, as it’s a feature that a lot of people might be looking for in a new job.

A Guide to Choosing the Right Trading Platform

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article | A Guide to Choosing the Right Trading Platform

If you are contemplating trading as a potential way of growing your wealth, the choice of platforms to use might appear somewhat confusing. It is not uncommon for beginner traders to wonder which criteria to apply to make the choice. While the prospect of doing it through sheer intuition might seem alluring, an informed decision will work better to establish a synergetic environment to assist you in the endeavor. That’s why we have prepared this concise guide on how you can single out the trading platform that best suits your needs.

What Is a Trading Platform?

First of all, we need to address a common entry-level misconception: a trading platform is not another term for a broker. The latter refers to a company or individual acting as an intermediary as you engage in trading. The broker will largely determine the general pricing and other terms and conditions.

By contrast, a trading company is a digital environment in which trading takes place. It is essentially a software product used to enable opening and closing positions and much more. A popular example of a trading platform is MetaTrader 5, where traders have the opportunity to explore all kinds of markets from gold to forex. It’s your trading platform that shapes the way you interact with trading partners through its set of features, which explains why it is crucial to make a fitting choice.

How a Trading Platform Influences Your Experience

The advance of technology has brought about a broad variety of trading platforms. Browser-based versus integrated platforms is probably the most universal dichotomy. This refers to where a platform runs, in which the name of standalone applications designed specifically for trading purposes is integrated. Such platforms tend to be easier to customize but also more demanding in terms of technical capabilities, while browser-based ones normally come with a steeper learning curve.

Apart from the above factor, trading platforms differ from each other in a number of ways that might be more or less vital to you depending on your goals and circumstances. The choice you make will eventually determine the experience that you have every time you need to effect a trading operation. Below is a list of aspects to pay attention to in order to select a proper marketplace based on your ambitions.

Accessibility

Given how fast-paced today’s life tends to be in every domain, the ability to access your trading data via a variety of channels is essential. With browser-based platforms, you need to make sure that they show a decent level of usability across devices. The same applies to standalone apps: check whether you’ll be able to run the platform you are considering on the go using your phone as well as from your PC.

Usability

A user-friendly interface is more important than you might be tempted to think. When the way you are supposed to interact with the system is transparent, it enables you to entirely focus on the trading process rather than spend half of your time looking for a particular feature.

Features

Speaking about features, these can be roughly classified into trading and analytical. The former category might include any or all of the following (the list is far from exhaustive):

  • the ability to create and maintain watch lists;
  • futures trading functionality;
  • stock trading.

Additionally, you can have support for advanced trading strategies and automation tools such as notifications. Analytical features include a range of reports and statistics to inform your trading decisions. They range from sector analysis to specialized newsfeeds depending on your preferences.

Pricing

The amount of money that you pay for using a trading platform is one of the factors that determines its efficiency. Regardless of whether you choose a premium option or a budget-friendly one, make sure the pricing is transparent to you.

It’s All About Staying in Control

Control is key when it comes to choosing a trading platform, and the amount of it that you want to have is usually correlated with knowledge. Would you like to watch the inner workings of trading, or do you prefer to operate on a high level? You are welcome to leave a reply and share your ideas.