Improving Productivity and Employee Culture with Cloud Migration
As businesses hyper-focus on boosting employee productivity and strengthening hybrid work cultures, it’s essential to consider the power of migrating to the cloud and the positive impact it can have on these areas.
A successful cloud migration shouldn’t just add technology for the sake of it but instead prioritize tools that will benefit employees to improve productivity and employee culture, which in turn, elevates the customer experience and enhance the company’s overall growth. Jaret Balter, senior director of application delivery at Apps Associates, discusses how organizations can leverage their cloud migration strategies to lead to increased productivity and an improved culture at work.
As businesses hyper-focus on boosting employee productivity and strengthening hybrid work cultures, it’s essential to consider the power of migrating to the cloud and the positive impact it can have on these areas. In fact, spending on public cloud services is expected to reach a whopping $482 billion in 2022. The focus of cloud migration should be wider than technology and prioritize tools that benefit employees. This way, they can leverage the systems and, in turn, elevate the customer experience and enhance the overall growth of the company.
If employees are trained and empowered to use new tools that cater to their job function and career growth, then the chances for a prosperous migration increase. That is why companies need to reiterate early on that a transition to the cloud is usually set in place not only from a business perspective but to amplify employee skill sets and enhance their daily operations.
By migrating to the cloud, organizations can better support their employees through automation, collaboration, and scalability, contributing to higher productivity as well as an improved company culture.
Automation
When introducing cloud technology, one immediate benefit is the automation of routine tasks. You can easily introduce robotic process automation (RPA) to transform manual activities, such as logging and processing data, managing sales, tracking financial information, managing payroll, onboarding and offboarding, and streamlining customer service systems. This reduces the chances of human error and frees up employees, allowing them to focus on more creative and value-adding work. Morale should begin to increase once tedious to-do lists are reduced, and employees can focus on creative tasks that add direct value.
Cloud services are going beyond the administrative side of automation as well, and providers are constantly introducing ways for organizations to automate workflows. The possibilities for businesses to introduce this technology into their structure are endless through recent innovations, such as artificial intelligence (AI)-powered digital assistants or an internet of things (IoT) digital twin framework.
An AI-powered digital assistant is more commonly known as an automated chatbot. These programs use natural language processing, natural language understanding, and machine learning to answer questions. These systems process search data and apply it to learn about the user to predict their needs as well as others with similar inquiries. This allows employees to search for common questions and resources within their internal systems rather than mine through multiple data files or reach out to additional personnel.
According to Gartner, 75% of businesses implementing IoT are already using digital twins or plan to do so. A digital twin is how an organization can prepare for the successful deployment of an IoT application, with full visibility into its performance before it is even implemented. It’s a virtual representation of a real-world machine or device, using IoT sensors on its physical counterpart to replicate its data and processes over time. This provides clarity into the status of the IoT-connected device as well as offers analysis and documentation of behaviors and the ability to create extremely accurate models to predict its future state.
This allows business leaders are to determine what tasks are taking up the most time and where new processes can be introduced to lighten the load. When these problem areas are addressed, companies have more room to grow, and people have more time to focus on meaningful work.
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Collaboration
As remote and hybrid teams grow, the demand for tools that connect us efficiently and effortlessly connects us. These support structures are needed to foster open communication, internal and external team collaboration, reduce meetings, and allow new and existing programs to integrate seamlessly. This has been essential to fostering company culture among hybrid workers and has also been a boon to productivity.
Many are now employing unified communications as a service (UCaaS) cloud tools, allowing internal teams to communicate in several different forms and all within one platform. These support video and audio calls, web conferences, instant messaging, as well as allow access to shared data files. Employees can enjoy seamless connection and file sharing without being tethered to one location or even to one device. They can collaborate in real-time more quickly and efficiently than a traditional workplace as a wealth of information and records of previous correspondence reside together.
Cloud technology has improved communications beyond the confines (figuratively or literally) of the office as well with supply chain management software. There are many links in the supply chain that are largely siloed, with different people managing planning, production, sourcing, logistics and so on, with little or inadequate communication at each stage. Now, end-to-end supply chain planning is possible within one integrated platform. With full visibility into operations, users can leverage predictive analytics to plan for how challenges in one area will impact others as well as automate transactions, reporting and other processes, while analyzing and tracking activity in real-time.
Scalability
When looking into a cloud migration, begin with an audit of your current business processes and plan for how you want to address pain points. Every tool doesn’t need to be immediately implemented, but if the business needs change, it is easy to scale vertically (by upgrading or downgrading existing systems) or horizontally (by adding new tools and applications), resulting in reduced downtime of systems or impact on the user experience.
True software as a service (SaaS) products are designed to be implemented in a modular fashion, with the ability to grow into the application as your organization grows. You can start small, to address one or two challenges. As you see the benefit of migrating to the cloud on a small scale, it is easy to migrate more applications to the cloud in whatever timeframe makes sense for your business.
However, a mistake that organizations often make is assuming that once the move to the cloud is complete then it’s done. Users should monitor how the platform is performing in real-time and make a note of issues as they arise so that they can be quickly addressed.
Empowering People with Technology
Cloud solutions can connect and empower employees while helping organizations grow and thrive. A hybrid workforce can only be successful if employees are happy and productive while working away from the office – and that can only happen if they have the right tools at their disposal. If you’re considering embarking on a journey to the cloud, prioritize tools that employees can be trained on to improve their job function and day-to-day lives.
When employees are thriving and productive, the entire organization will succeed, contributing to additional growth opportunities.
How has your cloud migration journey enabled a more productive and engaging company culture? Tell us on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook. We’d love to know!
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