Employees quickly embraced remote working. But choosing the right technology to support them? That’s a little trickier. Fortunately, your small business has no shortage of options when it comes to technologies that support the new way that employees work. Here are a few tips for selecting the best tools—ones that support both collaboration and security.
Cybersecurity Tech
Having a solid cybersecurity plan–and the technology to support it–helps ensures your small business can operate without interruption. How? Cybersecurity technologies help shut down common threats, like malware, ransomware, and phishing attacks that can cause your systems to go down and your productivity to screech to a halt.
Check out our primer, what is cybersecurity? to learn more about the technologies designed to keep your business safe and your data protected.
Remote Working Technologies
Keeping your employees happy is getting harder. A survey found that 40% of workers report they may quit a job if they can’t work remotely for at least part of their time.3 If you want your employees to stay put and be happier at work, you need technology that helps make remote work seamless for your staff—and safer for your company. Here are a few technologies that can help you do just that.
Remote Access and Management
Remote monitoring and management help manage employee devices, whether they’re in your office or offsite. With remote management, you can provide IT support from afar to help resolve technology issues faster, improve desktop support efficiency, and reduce potential downtime.
Communication Tools
Employees need tools that help them collaborate easily, even if they’re not physically at the office. Communication tools such as Microsoft Teams help support remote work, allowing employees to jump on a chat to discuss project details, connect on a video call to hash out challenges, and easily share files.
The right tools help your employees stay in sync on projects and make sure that no important details slip through the cracks.
Customer Relationship Management Tools
No matter what type of small business you operate, success depends on bringing new customers in the door and keeping existing customers happy. Customer relationship management (CRM) software helps you get better at relationship management so you can grow connections, trust, and sales.
With CRM software tools, you can gather data to help figure out the next best step for your prospect or customer—providing the right support at the right moment.
Project Management Tools & Technologies
As a small business, you have many projects in motion at the same time. When you’re just starting out, you may be able to keep things straight with a simple to-do list. But over time, making sure that no important details are missed can be challenging. A project management platform helps track activities, such as deadlines, appointments, and more, to reduce the risk of overlooking important details.
This type of technology can, for example, automatically send you reminders so upcoming tasks don’t get off track and send reminders to important team members—keeping everyone moving in the same direction.
Cloud Computing
Cloud computing is the future of business. It supports remote work by allowing your teams to access data from anywhere and it gives you the ability to update and manage devices no matter where they are. When you have workload changes, such as hiring new employees or scaling back, cloud computing allows you to easily make changes to the number of application users with less expense. Applications shared via cloud computing technology also can support remote collaboration, so workers can collaborate whether they’re at the office or on the go.
HR Management Tools
Keeping your employees happy isn’t always easy, especially when job resignations are at record levels.4 The job of HR, of course, is to support your employees—and HR management tools make that easier. These tools can help with things like tracking employee attendance, employee development, and more. Better tracking creates more organized employee experiences, and it helps you understand how to better serve your employees and help keep them satisfied.
Accounting Software
When you’re just starting your new business, you may be able to keep track of receivables and expenditures with a few spreadsheets. But, when your business starts to grow, you’ll consider real accounting software a must-have for your business. Accounting software will enable you to easily track all the important details that show the financial health of your business. You can track things like income, expenses, and invoicing as well as generate documents needed for tax time. Keeping everything organized using this type of technology helps support your outside accountant or internal accounting team.
Password Management Tools
It’s a well-known fact that cybercriminals infiltrate systems through compromised passwords. So, if you want to keep them out, password management tools are helpful.
Another great way to strengthen your password security is through multifactor authentication. MFA requires your employees to prove who they are before accessing your systems. For example, an employee might need to correctly enter their username and password (something they know), enter a code sent to their cell phone (something they have), and use their fingerprint (something they are). MFA uses these factors to shut down one of criminals’ favorite pathways into your systems.
Align Your Technology with Your Culture
While innovative technologies like these are setting the stage for the future of business, the technologies you choose to adapt should be based on your business, your teams, and your culture. So, talk to your employees about what processes are working and not working. Find out what tools they need to best support the way they work. And then implement the technologies and systems that will best set everyone up for success.
Intel and Choosing the Right Technologies
As a small business, you have many choices when it comes to technology. But not all are created equal. For today’s remote workers, you need technologies that support on-the-go collaboration and have built-in security.
Security starts at the hardware level. The Intel vPro® platform gives you innovative, hardware-based security that helps protect against leading security threats.
No IT support? Look into Intel vPro® Essentials. It delivers out-of-the-box hardware-based security and includes Intel® Hardware Shield, which protects against attacks below the operating system.
And if you need even more security and manageability, Intel vPro® Enterprise is built to enhance security in larger business fleets.
The most up-to-date high-performance collaboration features ensure your employees can work the way they want, while maximizing productivity.