Is outdated tech killing your remote team’s productivity? No matter what industry you’re serving, time will always be your most valuable asset. When utilizing outdated technology, your team loses minutes navigating software that should take seconds, loses hours of productivity a week unable to access the data they need, and often these outdated practices leave you at risk.
Let’s go over five common uses of outdated technology that might be holding your remote team back.
1. Traditional Telephone Systems
Working with modern telephone systems means you have the ability to transfer calls anywhere at any time to anybody. Working with old school telephone systems means that a phone call is trapped in whatever phone system you have and accessing things like voicemail can be cumbersome, if not impossible while out of the office. Just accessing a voicemail is an exercise for your finger. Dialing numbers, entering secret pins, listening through messages, and dialing more just to access the right voicemail is a killer for productivity.
2. VPNs
VPNs are a decades-old technology. While they are often considered state of the art for security, modern remote work solutions have moved way beyond VPNs and have made them essentially unnecessary. When working with a VPN, you’re adding several layers of additional steps to complete simple tasks. There is also a layer of potential failure that your team may have to tackle frequently in order to do their job.
3. Email
Sending data back and forth via email is a very insecure and unproductive way of sharing data. With an email solution, you have the problem of the data being replicated with every email that goes out. Email was not designed for transmitting important data. Another downside of email is its failure point in the productivity chain due to time delay. This leads to a lack of collaboration and plenty of frustration for your team while waiting for feedback, access to files, etc.
4. Inappropriate productivity software (open office, apple products)
When standardizing your business on software that is non-standard across the business world, you create a tremendous amount of additional work and locked loss of productivity for your team. The exercise of sending files, getting the file back, saying it can’t be opened, and resending the file, version-losing-formatting, and struggling with feature sets that are common for many users but uncommon for users of outdated software are all the hallmarks of loss-of-productivity by using bad software. Layer on top of this the collaboration features that are missing from please-inappropriate productivity tools such as the ability to edit a file at the same time as somebody else, the lack of support for mobile devices such as iPhones and tablets, and any money saved by utilizing these free tools is quickly destroyed by your team’s lack of productivity.
5. In-house servers
This is a major setback for teams. Maintaining physical hardware and servers is an old solution, and it’s time to retire it. There are so many critical failure points in an in-house server solution that productivity issues are a certainty. Modern file server solutions and modern software as a service solutions are so much more reliable than the old-fashioned in-house server that you will see productivity and financial gains just by implementing a modern solution. Having your data in your software, trapped inside of your network, and in an in-house server holds your team back from being able to do the things they need to do efficiently.
Today, we have better ways to increase efficiency in the remote workplace, making your team feel cohesive and in sync.
The five outmoded technologies mentioned above are just the tip of the proverbial “old tech” iceberg. Each one had their time and place but as technology has progressed so have the tools available to us. Ask yourself—is your current remote technology serving your business needs? Our team is here to help you make your remote technology work for you.
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