In terms of benefiting from innovation, it’s creating a culture that there’s no fear around innovation. Once you start getting as many people in your company really thinking about shaking things up or testing something new, you’ll start to find opportunities for efficiency. Here are four simple tools that we have implemented in our organisation to expedite and de-hassle team members.

Process Street

We often go to the team and ask, “what are you doing right now that you’re not really enjoying doing?” or “what is eating up your time?” Struber is a consultancy: every hour billable is better than an hour not. So, to de-hassle the team we use systems like Process Street where we are able to document consistent steps for our operations team to complete and maintain. This is helping us build an environment where things are done in a consistent (if not automated) way.

Microsoft Teams

We use Microsoft Teams as a collaboration tool to help our team get out of their emails. Nothing is more depressing than showing up to work and be on your email all day. It works as a dashboard visualising who’s doing what and enables fast and more casual conversation. It gets us off emails and gets us more productive during the day because we are jumping into that different work mindset; we are able to grab the latest information and know where we are at.

Trello board

Trello is a fun tool that makes it really easy to get actions tracked and visualise the programming of team members who might be in multiple locations. We’ve really enjoyed that.

Voice Memo

Don’t forget basic tools like Voice Memo on your iPhone. We find voice memos enable you to avoid playing phone tag; we just send each other Voice Memo files to update each other from meetings. It is especially great for quickly sharing information with a team that might not be available at the same time for a meeting. You can start to save a lot of time and 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. So that doesn’t need to be anything ground-breaking, it just actually could be 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.