Much of the last two years has revolved around businesses and their employees finding new ways to adapt to remote work. Organizations that have made this transition successfully often attribute their ease of adaptation to the flexibility gained through the adoption of cloud technology. It didn’t just fill the physical distance between employees and employers but also plugged loopholes that weren’t visible to them just then.
Cloud technology enables your remote employees to quickly adapt to any number of upcoming “new normals” they’d have to face. This has made it a basic necessity for businesses looking to scale despite uncertain economic conditions.
But where do businesses start? We’ve crafted this quick guide to help you get started while answering all your questions about cloud tech and your business. So let’s get to it!
What are the main challenges of remote work?
For employees
Being in the office gave employees the ease of accessibility and communication with other employees, their mentors, and managers. Remote work, though, severed the bond by adding in a massive amount of physical distance. As a result, traditional methods no longer work with remote teams, leading to a massive dip in productivity and efficiency.
Finance teams
The Finance department was the most affected by the onset of remote work as their work (verifications, approvals, and documentation) has always been one-on-one. While such meetings were possible in an office environment, the situation has changed dramatically with distributed teams. This has resulted in broken records, inaccurate documents, delayed reimbursements, and overworked Finance employees.
For Businesses
Unmotivated employees and broken processes could significantly affect the health and sustenance of a business. Leaders need to understand that the time for change is now and that leveraging cloud technology is the only way companies can scale while running efficient teams to bring forth profit.
Why should businesses shift to cloud technology?
The increased physical distance between employees has pushed businesses to adopt collaboration tools that improve communication and collaboration across departments to improve productivity.
Studies report that there has been an 80% increase in the adoption of cloud techs like expense management software, time-tracking software, and communication tools since the onset of the pandemic. Thus it’s safe to conclude that businesses can use these techs to bridge the physical gap between employees.
Keep in mind that your best way to start as a business owner is to ensure teams can maintain the same levels of collaboration as they did while in office.
How does cloud adoption enable a successful remote work model?
1. Enables real-time collaborations for distributed employees
Cloud technology is built to enable remote teams. Most cloud tools let employees work on a single project from multiple locations (while simultaneously editing.) Other tools focus on streamlining communication, reporting, documentation, and more.
By enabling employees to tackle all the potential challenges of remote work, cloud technology lets businesses continue operations as they did while in office. Additionally, it provides business leaders with complete control over all functions through a joint dashboard. This adds a layer of accountability to all areas of business operations.
2. Enables executives to make better business decisions
Almost every cloud tool comes with advanced data-analytics capabilities that analyze all available data to help executives make business decisions backed by data. This ensures the right decisions are made with little to no added effort.
For instance, if your Finance team uses an expense report software, they can gain insight into all the essential aspects of expense data across the company like top-spending departments, policy violations, and more.
Having access to such information enables teams to make better decisions around business expenses.
In similar ways, other cloud tools are also designed to address every little problem in their ecosystem.
3. Enables Finance teams to have more control over business spends
Traditional expense management is redundant when it comes to remote work. Any business that still uses manual means to process expenses is now increasingly prone to fraud, a complete loss of control over business expenditure, and no visibility into costs. This, if left unchecked over time, can quickly shut the doors of your business.
Automation tools make tracking and reporting of expenses more accessible by taking away the hardship of Finance teams having to verify every expense report for company policy manually.
Additionally, keep in mind that inaccurate/non-compliant reports can lead to severe problems with the IRS if discovered during the audit process. Therefore, if you feel like your business is prone to such issues, know that it’s the perfect time to switch to an expense software to improve employee productivity by reducing the number of erroneous or fraudulent reports.
4. Provides teams a better work experience
Cloud technology, like webinar software or project management software, enables employees to have much more flexibility in their work routines. They can work from anywhere, using any device with just a stable WiFi connection. This, in the long run, can significantly improve the employee working experience.
Around the world, 50% of the workforce have requested to go utterly remote by 2025.
Why? Simply because remote work is giving employees the option to maintain a healthy work-life balance by becoming self-managed, all of which wouldn’t have been possible if it weren’t for cloud computing.
Conclusion
Remote work will be around for a long time, and developing a sustainable remote work model is directly tied to the adoption of cloud technology.
Having access to a shared digital workspace where your entire organization can access the information they’d need makes remote work efficient and scalable. In addition, cloud adoption lets businesses transition easily to remote work and stay remote while improving productivity.