True Conspiracy

Brining you the latest news on conspiracy theories and exposing a big web of lies governments and transnational corporations create to fool us.

Monday, February 27, 2017

Stop Company Infighting In Three Simple Steps

Company is a mechanism - even if separate parts work well, it doesn’t guarantee the organization as a whole functions efficiently. Today we will discuss one of the most common issues that can be potentially holding your business back. As soon as any company has more than 2 employees, cross-department or cross-functional conflicts are inevitable. The bigger the company, the more strained cross-department relations hamper its growth.

In this article we prepared the most common causes of interdepartmental conflicts and strategies to prevent them.

Break system barriers 
19eeac8d8783ef6231b41bde69401309.jpg
As if human communication is not complicated enough, business operating systems might create barriers that don’t let the team collaborate efficiently. Competing goals, vague roles or broken business processes are typical examples of possible system barriers.

A business process refers to a wide range of structured activities that are implemented to accomplish an organizational goal. As business processes can be manual or automated, involve several people or even departments, challenges are pretty predictable. For example, your designer didn’t make the graphics on time and the whole team failed to meet deadlines, your development team didn’t release necessary updates and your sales dropped or you lost a big contract as a result of a silly logistic mistake. Sounds familiar, right? According to the article in Entrepreneur.com such bottlenecks in your business processes cause low morale of your team (59,5%), missed deadlines (53,7%), angry customers (42,6%), and lost revenue (36,3%).

Solution 

Broken business processes usually stem from inefficient labor or scarce resources. But it’s not so easy to see where exactly your business process slows down and the root causes of these issues. A proper Business Process Management (BPM) software can help you make your business processes transparent, you will be able to see the bottlenecks and eliminate them.

Fight tunnel vision 

7b0b57779a23a800207d45ce6d3ec976.jpg
When you work in a startup with 2-3 colleagues, you are well-aware of their roles and functions in the company. But the more people you work with, the vaguer is your understanding of what your colleagues are actually responsible for. Too many departments, too many people… Employees fail to see the big picture, management becomes more and more formal. All in all, it creates a silo mentality – each department knows only their own role in the company, but they are reluctant to share information with other departments or not really willing to listen to their suggestions on how to improve. As a result, the whole company suffers from poor communication, employees have no idea what their colleagues in other departments do and how much time one or another task might take.

Solution

Cross-department boundaries are difficult to breach. Besides general strategies to keep your team motivated and engaged, there are new HR practices, such as cross-training, job-shadowing and job rotation. Cross-training provides employees with possibilities to learn new skills outside their usual duties. Alongside improved morale, increased employee flexibility and productivity, cross-training enables your team see the aspects of work their colleagues do. Job-shadowing is not only a career-exploration activity, it is a popular on-the-job learning technique. Your employees see the challenges their colleagues have to deal with every day. Job rotation is a method used in some companies to keep their employees motivated, make them learn new skills and see the bigger picture. All in all, these techniques help employees breach cross-department boundaries and improve the collaboration in the company.

Improve interpersonal relationships

032f99bad2991eb753d32e1edc7a1e0b.jpg
No matter how good your business processes are, you can forget about efficient collaboration if your employees don’t like each other. You might say that it is difficult to control interpersonal relationships in a team. However, you can do a lot to facilitate the communications and make your employees “more likeable”.

Solution

Apart from system barriers, there are physical barriers which don’t allow your team to collaborate. Make sure that your working space has some break rooms where people can communicate without fear of disturbing their colleagues. Surprisingly, break rooms increase productivity and creativity, not speaking about improved health and wellbeing of your employees. Team members have a chance to get to know each other outside their professional duties and it greatly improves their tolerance and readiness to collaborate with each other. It’s also very useful to hold regular teambuilding events and encourage your staff to spend some time together out of work hours. Finally, yet importantly, consider your company culture every time you hire a new person. Diversity is great, but your new hires should share your company values and be on the same wavelength with the rest of the team.

Building strong relationships across departments takes time and effort. But once you manage to achieve it, your efforts will be rewarded by enhanced collaboration, greater efficiency and smoother business processes.

Bitrix24 is a free Business Process Management (BPM) software with a set of standard business processes (leave requests, business trips, expenses, purchases, general requests, internal helpdesk). Use promo code TIP10 when registering your free Bitrix24 account to get extra 10GB. 
You may also like:

Thursday, February 16, 2017

Need Free Cloud Gantt Chart Software?

Thursday, June 02, 2016

Top Four CRM Trends And Features In 2016

b1844d7eaca7953b283a6ffdbba56681.jpg


Tough competition and a customer centric economy make a CRM solution not a choice but a necessity for business nowadays. The right customer relations management software will allow you to get to know your clients, analyze sales and eventually turn clients into loyal customers. As Steve Jobs said “Get closer than ever to your customers. So close that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves.” The right CRM solution will help you achieve this goal. Let’s discuss 4 must-have CRM features in 2016.


Sales automation

Sales automation grants you a full control over the communication between your salesperson and a client. The opportunity to listen and analyze the phone calls will help each of your sales managers understand their mistakes and eventually increase the efficiency of their selling techniques. Moreover, you can see a full range of activities your sales team performs, which will be helpful to monitor their productivity. When it comes to gathering statistics and analyzing results a sales funnel will be very useful. It is a visual representation of all sales process stages fr om initial contact to closing. Sales funnel will help you understand which problems sales reps encounter and when customer churn happens.

Collaboration tools

Ease of collaboration is what sales team needs to effectively fulfill their professional duties. Be sure your employees have access to private and group chats, can share and edit documents together. Project Management and Tasks enhance the efficiency of any team and makes the working process more transparent.

Integrated telephony

Integrated telephony allows you to make calls directly from the CRM and record conversations. As we discussed above it will give you an unprecedented understanding of both your clients and your sales team. Telephony is also a must have lead generation tool. A simple callback form will convert a random site visitor into a prospect. Moreover, modern telephony will definitely improve your customer experience. Intelligent call routing will help you save time and avoid unnecessary transfers. Finally, smart telephony systems recognize caller ID and provide you with the information about the caller. This feature adds the very personal approach all customers are looking for.

Real time communications with your client

Modern world provides dozens communication channels to reach your clients: social media, email, websites, call centers, etc. It gives you a great scope of possibilities, but at the same time you can hardly control and centralize the information about your clients. Modern CRM solutions offer an omni-channel communication tool. Your clients can write to you on Facebook, Twitter or send you an email. All these messages will be assorted according to your settings and sent to your employees in their CRM chat. When your team answers the messages inside CRM, the clients will get the answers in the channels wh ere they asked the question (facebook, skype, etc.). This tool improves your customer service, helps you evaluate the efficiency of sales channels and keep your data base full and centralized.


Free studio management software
Non profit management software
Free Office Productivity Tools
Free Church Management Software
Free HOA Management Software
Free Association Management Software

Tuesday, March 01, 2016

Free PBX Features

Bitrix24 is a free CRM and virtual telephony solution. The following tools and features are available inside

Friday, January 15, 2016

What Your Team Really Wants for the Holidays

Before you place that order for more company-logo emblazoned travel coffee mugs, consider this: while your team will certainly smile and thank you for your thoughtful gift, what they really want is something totally different. 

Your Team Wants Autonomy 
Following someone else's set of rules is hardly ever fun. Unfortunately, companies often build a set of comprehensive rules, often for the sake of equality and organization. Great goals, but the end result could be unhappy employees who just wish they had a little more control over their own work. 

When people have more choices, they enjoy their work more, and are better at it. The choices don't have to be monumental ones: simply being able to arrange their desk and workspace, choose when to take their lunch breaks, and choose their own favorite tools can make a huge difference. 

Your Team Wants Opportunities 
Your people are smart and talented, and they want you to recognize their potential. You probably do that already, with praise and rewards, and that's a great start. But the next step is to start making more and better opportunities available for your team members. 

Open up some of the doors. Let your employees take on leadership, handle projects, deal with clients, and make calls that you've always made. If you've been a good leader, they'll know what to do. If they're not quite ready, and they make a mistake, you'll all learn from the experience and move forward more equipped for the future. 

Your Team Wants Respect 
While no one is going to be angry about a bonus or a salary raise, employees are looking for more than money. They want a workplace that respects individuals and treats people fairly. In fact, a recent survey shows that employees rank "respectful treatment of all employees at all levels” over compensation. 

Respect is one of the most basic ways you can show your team that you value them and what they bring to the business. From the way you address each individual to how you respond to their ideas, you're communicating whether you respect them or not. Communicate respect and treat all your team members as you'd like to be treated, and you'll build a stronger, happier team. 

Your Team Wants Flexibility 
Life continually changes, and it's difficult to deal for people to deal with the changing circumstances of life when they have no flexibility from their employer. You can give your team more control and more choices: from standard work time, telecommuting options, flex time, work methods, travel arrangements, to project management and communication methods. They'll be happier, more engaged employees when they have more flexibility. 

Ask yourself, "Why not?" Trust your people to make good decisions with their freedom and use their flexibility to be more productive, not to slack off. Most people want to contribute and do meaningful work; they're just struggling to do it under predefined rules that don't fit their lifestyle or priorities anymore. So help your people love their jobs and do better work . Flexibility allows them to fit their lives and jobs into one cohesive, enjoyable, and ultimately more productive and fulfilling experience. 

If you can give your employees a holiday gift this season, make it one or more of these. Sure, those windbreakers in company colors are neat; but your employees want, and deserve, more from you. Let them know you're interested in their long-term growth and success, not just in holiday trinkets that get lost a month later. You can still hand out the coffee mugs; just hand out some flexibility, autonomy, and plenty of respect while you're at it. 

Bitrix24 offers Free Collaboration Software. Use promocode TIP10 when registering your free Bitrix24 account to get extra 10GB. 

See also: