How has technology changed the way companies operate?

This is the second part of series if you want to read part one click HERE.

Today I’m going to talk about the changes to daily operations within your organisation and what this means for your HR team.

The main change by far is how we communicated internally and externally. The ball started rolling with email, the technology that has made the biggest standalone change to operations. Its because of email and how widely adopted it has become that we have seen a huge shift from doing business in a very personal manner, though face-to-face meetings and phone call etc, to everything being operated over the web. This has enhanced the business climate, theres no doubt about that but it does raise some key HR issues.

SO WHAT ARE THESE ISSUES?

The key point to realise is that communication and language are different things. Language is merely a tool to used to help with communication but by communicating online we lose the facial expressions, eye contact and the body language. This can cause a number of problems for your organisation. People can very easily feel left out of the discussion because they aren't CC’d on a conversation they could add value too. There is a lot more room for misunderstandings whether it be a typo or a bluntly worded email. People can get frustrated at the amount of email clogging up their inboxes that aren't really important.  

HOW DO I FIX THIS?

Well, there's a couple of options, firstly why not try a service like Slack opposed to email, this way the conversations are with the entire team and everything is out in the open, this influences how messages are worded and nobody is left out of the conversation. Also, It is important to keep your emails short, concise and professional. This way you don't offend or annoy anyone. 

HOW TO IMPROVE THE WAY YOU USE TECH ON A DAY TO DAY BASIS?

Given how widely adopted email is now, there have also been lots of add-on services like email tracking. Email tracking is great for sales staff and managers as they can really see how people interact with their emails and how many are actually opened etc.

These kind of things are really easy to setup and use yourself so I'm going to talk about some of the really interesting tech we are working on.

I personally have a lot of experience working with unstructured data, but what is unstructured data? Well, normal data has a set of metadata which tells the computer what type of information is contained in a file and this allows us to work with the metadata to allow us to do things like search and analytics. What we tend to work on is how to take unstructured data and then perform analytics based on that data. This means we can look at information that is usually very difficult to work with. We can even work with email to find trends in the way your organisation uses them. For instance, you could look at the difference in email rates, email contents or sender locations. From this you could find out what factors lead to one sales team's email sales campaign being more successful than others and what factors were not important, allowing you to make changes so everyone performs better during the next campaign.