There was a time when Excel and Access spreadsheets along with Word documents and email promised increased productivity. And they delivered.
But as businesses have pushed to get more and more out of these tools, employees are now treading water in a sea of spreadsheets and documents. It’s time to rescue them with new, more effective systems.
Budget-friendly systems that use SharePoint as a platform are quickly taking up residence in small and mid-sized companies seeking to scale up efficiently.
The Problems of a Disconnected Business
Disconnected business operations often lead to issues with communication, effort duplication, and confusion. These problems stem from traditional ways of managing information, where data is isolated within individual documents or spreadsheets. This fragmented structure can hinder effective communication and lead to operational inefficiencies.
# Communication Barriers
A common challenge is when employees update data but fail to share those changes. For instance, maybe an employee just changes the figure of sales in a spreadsheet without notifying others. Therefore, they carry on quoting obsolete data in their respective units and this causes confusion, errors, and indecision in the decision-making process.
Not only does this reduce the need for paper, but most employees also work on projects together and exchange documents. This practice often results in different versions of the same document Management meeting. Nobody knows which one is the latest published edition. If team members go with different versions, it can create confusion and distract attention.
# Duplication of Effort
When organizations have their information partitioned, employees can't retrieve their counterpart’s work seamlessly. This may give rise to parallel completion of a task. For example, if a marketing assistant is to develop an email covering a new service and isn't aware that another representative has already posted about the same topic on the company's website, they will end up wasting time and resources unnecessarily. Such replication of the processes is a huge waste of resources and that may hurt the profitability of companies.
Working in circumstances where organizations encounter numerous language and effort duplication barriers, the managers will most likely develop a high level of stress. A lack of control to monitor and consolidate the processes can lead to the wastage of resources, losses in profits, and finally sleepless nights for the men and women charged with this.
# Elimination of Communication Gaps
In a traditional organization, it is hard to find information which is usually scattered in various locations therefore employees are unable to share and access relevant information. SharePoint shall be a common meeting ground where all corporate information can be stored, retrieved, and handled. The entire file repository minimizes the need for constant emails or phone calls to search for documents; thus, improved communication and less miscommunication are the results of such an approach. The communication of employees becomes more universal by using SharePoint through integrated Microsoft 365 tools, such as Teams and Outlook. They can work on projects together in real-time, chat, or share files without switching platforms.
Breaking Communication Barriers and Avoiding Duplication
Employees sometimes spend unnecessary time doing the same things or updating data that already exists in other places. SharePoint will ensure that companies maintain a single source of truth eradicating the problem of using outdated data. Each document and information resource will be versioned and only the most recent and updated information will be made available to the employees. Thanks to this, the employees avoid doing double work and can communicate using the same information. Spending hours searching for documents is a thing of the past as SharePoint’s advanced search capabilities and enterprise resource management system system significantly speed up the locating process, subsequently eliminating the risk of duplicated efforts.
# Increasing Efficiencies
Efficiency is critical for small, medium, and large businesses. The workflow process in SharePoint enables the automation of tasks wherever possible through streamlining and mechanization. Features like Power Automate (Microsoft Flow) give organizations the tools to implement automated processes - generating approval documentation or assigning tasks - which can lead to fewer manual interventions, and thus increase overall efficiency. Apart from that base functionality, SharePoint's ability to integrate with Microsoft 365 tools provides a platform for employees to work hassle-free across these different platforms, thus furthering productivity.
# Making Better Decisions
SharePoint's features like a single data repository and collaborative mechanisms help companies to make well-grounded decisions. When making decisions the authority will be able to consider the business operations as the same information is possessed by everyone because of information technology. Besides, SharePoint provides subscriber dashboards and comprehensive reporting as well as analytics enabling tracking and understanding key employee activities, project statuses, and other metrics. The 'digital approach' helps massively in terms of tracking progress, eliminating bottlenecks, and making decisions based on data-driven insights rather than guesswork.
Proceed with Caution
The SharePoint implementation must go on progressively to avoid such shortcomings. Another risk is that the platform could become a chaotic place, where the content is sprawled all over the place and it is therefore unmanageable to search. This can happen when there isn't any hierarchy, management, user training, or orientation, contributing to chaos instead of productivity
# Define Clear Objectives
Start with a full and clear idea about what you want to realize with SharePoint. Also specify use cases in detail, such as document management, team collaboration, or project management. This shift will be a guide for your implementation process.
# Establish Governance Policies
Distill policies that will guide the creation, storage, and content access. Set clear roles and responsibilities for managing the SharePoint environment to guarantee consistency as well as accountability.
# Organize Content Structure
Develop a coherent and comprehensible information layout. With libraries, folders, and metadata, organize, tag, and label data to make it simpler to locate and use. This system should be designed with expansion in mind to take into account future expansion.
# Implement Search Functionality
However, the search abilities in SharePoint are powerful; nevertheless, they need to be properly configured. Provide search indexes, make a set of search parameters, and use metadata to improve search accuracy. This step will allow users to simply look up the information they are seeking.
# User Training and Adoption
Be sure that your team can operate flawlessly on SharePoint. Organize training programs, materials, and ongoing guidance to stimulate data-driven decision-making. Through the training of users, a base that is educated will keep the platform's structure and the user experience.
# Regular Maintenance and Updates
SharePoint is not a "one time and done" solution. Routinely go through the content to update and remove information that is not up to date and unrelated. Create a schedule of maintenance to prevent the platform from getting slow.
# Seek Expert Guidance
Having SharePoint experts who have been successful in implementations on board will be a good idea handle any restrictions. Their experience could prevent you from making similar mistakes and assist you in adapting your organization's best business rules.
To learn more about how to make this happen, subscribe to this blog. This is the second in a series of posts created to help you build a stronger business that can scale easily. Stay tuned!
Call us at 484-892-5713 or Contact Us today to know more details about how to eliminate business communication problems with SharePoint.
