5 Essential Software Tools That Will Significantly Improve Your Business Efficiency

The average employee is only productive for 2 hours and 53 minutes per day, but that doesn’t mean that your employees won’t be able to earn a profit for your business. When it comes to running a business, if you truly want to be successful in your field, you need to work smarter, not harder.

The most successful entrepreneurs know that the biggest factor when it comes to whether or not a business will meet all of its goals is efficiency. If you want to improve your business efficiency more than you believed possible, you need to use certain software and tools.

ELT tool

ETL, short for extract, transform, and load, has been the traditional approach for data analytics and warehousing for decades now. However, the old paradigm has changed, and now the T and L have been switched, which has led us to the ELT approach.

The exact ELT meaning can be explained in very simple terms. In this approach, you can start the loading face as soon as you extract your data, which will move all the data sources into one centralized data repository. And since most technologies today use the cloud, there are no issues with large storage.

While ETL requires you to manage raw data and run the right transformation just so you can meet business needs, the ELT approach is a more modern and simpler solution. Its main benefit is that it enables unlimited access to all the data you have while saving time and effort for developers.

Here are just some of the benefits of using ELT:

• Quick loading. Unlike ETL that needs extra time to load data, the ELT loads the data only once as it’s all in one system.
• Low maintenance. There’s no need to load and transform data every time you want to enhance the main data repository or if you happen to delete some data. The data in an ELT tool is always available.
• Data lake support. With the ELT approach, you have access to unstructured data lake support, while this isn’t a part of the ETL approach.
• Scalability. Businesses of all sizes can use an ELT tool. It’s scalable, it can grow with your business, and you can see it as an investment as well. ETL tools, on the other hand, aren’t cost-effective for small and medium businesses at all as there is no scalability.

Technical writing tool

Technical writing is a part of every business, and while it used to be mostly limited to user manuals, it’s much different nowadays.

If you aren’t familiar with the term, technical writing is the practice of documenting processes and there are multiple examples of technical documentation. Things such as instructions and procedures, emails and letters, press releases, job applications, and technical reports can all be classified in this category.

There are multiple tools that can help you create better technical content and save you a lot of time while doing it. You can choose between a free and a premium tool, and most technical writing tools you can fall into one of three categories:

• Writing and editing
• Creating and managing media
• Publishing and multi-platform authoring

There is no one right answer as to which tool is the best of them all, as the perfect tool depends on your needs. If you want to choose the software that’s right for you, it’s best to check out some technical writing tools and find one that can best improve the efficiency of your company.

Social media scheduling tool

The world of business changes alongside technology and various trends, and that’s why social media is one of the most powerful marketing tools today. Businesses of all sizes use various social media platforms to connect with their customers and followers.

However, running multiple social media accounts for a business can be demanding, no matter how many followers you have. It’s important to be engaged and post the right things at the right time. That is why as much as 81% of organizations use social media publishing/analytics tools.

While there are seemingly countless tools that can help you with your social media marketing, to truly increase efficiency, you need to use a social media scheduling tool.

As the name suggests, this type of tool allows you to schedule posts to be published at the date and time you want without ever needing to go to the social media platforms. You can write a week’s or even a month’s worth of posts in advance at once and then just sit back and let the tool take care of the rest.

Task management tool

If for any reason your business still tracks all the tasks that need to be done manually, you need to switch to a digital solution right away and start using a task management tool. This type of tool is an easy and cost-efficient software that allows you to save a lot of time and money.

Multiple online task management tools allow organizations to stay on top of their project progress, to-do lists, and calendars. There are various free and premium tools available, and if your business isn’t too large and doesn’t require a complicated tool, one of the free ones will be more than sufficient.

The main point of this tool is to allow you to minimize the time you need to spend checking on employees and their tasks. You can set automatic reminders and updates, deadlines, assign people to tasks, and much more.

You can also see a task management tool as a collaborative tool in a way as it keeps everyone on your team informed on what task has been done, what’s outstanding, and who needs to do what.

Employee engagement app

No matter which tool you use for other operations within your organization, you’ll never be able to increase your business efficiency if your employees aren’t engaged. In fact, disengaged workers make errors at a 60% higher rate than engaged ones, so employee engagement needs to be a priority.

This is because engaged employees are much more focused on their work, want to prove themselves as valuable employees, are loyal to the business, and are committed to its success. So if you want to increase engagement within your organization, you can use an employee engagement app.

This type of app is a modern mobile communications software that simplifies communications and enables employees to receive timely and targeted information from their company. With the app, you’ll be able to improve productivity and alignment, engage frontline workers, and even promote healthy competition.

Final thoughts

Business efficiency is something everyone tries to achieve. It doesn’t matter how big your company is or how many employees work for you, an efficient organization is a well-oiled machine whether it has 20 or 2000 people working there.

Increasing efficiency has been a priority for business owners for centuries, and thanks to technological advancements, it’s easier than ever to achieve this goal. And while the software and tools you’ll end up using depend on your needs and preferences, the ones we talked about here can be useful to businesses of all niches and sizes.