In terms of benefiting from innovation, it's creating a culture that there's no fear around innovation. And think then, once you start getting as many people in your company really thinking about maybe changing things up or trying something new or testing something, you'll start to find opportunities for efficiency. When I look at small businesses, there's some simple tools that we've implemented in our organisation that have just expedited and de-hassled team members.
We often go to the team and say, well look, what are you doing right now that you're not really enjoying doing? Or what takes time? Because we work in a consultancy too, so every hour billable is better than an hour not, and so we de-hassle the team a lot using systems like Process Street where we are able to document consistent steps for our operations team mainly, but really getting an environment where things are done consistently and in an automated way.
We've used collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams and just getting people off emails. Nothing is more depressing than showing up to work and be on your email all day, so that enables a dashboard of visibility about who's doing what and enables a lot more casual conversation that we find. Yeah, it gets off emails but also gets them more productive during the day because when they're jumping into that different work mindset into a different type of work, they actually are able to grab the latest information and know where they're at.
Then the other fun thing we like is, things like Trello, which is really easy for getting actions tracked and making sure your programming team members who might be in multiple locations, which we've really enjoyed that.
Voice Memo
There are really basic things like Voice Memo which is on your iPhone. And we find that enables you instead of making phone calls and missing somebody on the phone and then leaving them a message and then them trying to call you back, we just send each other Voice Memo files, which is just an app on your phone to update them from the meeting, and you can send that then to various people. You start to save a lot of time and you start to get information to people when and where they need it.
People think that innovation has to be something big and technology driven, it needs to be really disruptive. For me, innovation is just continuously improving and trying to do things faster.
Innovation doesn't need to be anything ground-breaking, it just actually could be a tool to help de-hassling someone or helping get the best out of that person's skills.
So, definitely take the fear away from innovation, have a go, keep the conversation alive with your team.