Most of the last two years revolved around businesses assisting their employees in finding new ways to adapt to remote work. Cloud technology has enabled and empowered employees to find efficient new ways to prepare for all the challenges posed by remote work. This has made it a backbone for any business trying to scale despite the uncertain economic climate.
As a business owner, you might be wondering where you can start or improve your journey in cloud adoption. For this, we’ve drafted the following article that elaborates on the different ways in which cloud adoption is going to shape the future of your remote work culture.
Let’s begin!
What are the main challenges of remote work?
- For employees
Being in-office gave employees the advantage of accessible communication with their mentors and managers due to the shared location. Sadly, remote work severed this bond. Any process that involved human intervention or manual labor could no longer have the same efficiency as in the office. This led to a decline in employee productivity and morale.
- For Finance Teams
Your Finance team is the only department dependent on all other departments for the timely completion of their tasks. For instance, take the case of expense management or budget allocations; Finance teams would need to meet employees and managers to finish the job. While this was possible in the office, remote work has led to broken financial statements, longer TATs for reimbursements, and overworked employees.
- For Businesses
Over 100,000 organizations across the globe have shut doors since the onset of the pandemic. Thus, business leaders need to take a firm stance in making accommodations to stay afloat. Businesses also need to leverage the flexibility cloud computing offers to enable employees to work as they would when in office.
Why should businesses adopt cloud technology during remote work?
Businesses worldwide have adopted cloud tools to enable seamless communication due to the added distance brought in by remote work. This allows remote teams to maintain similar productivity levels as they did while in the office for the timely completion of goals.
Cloud services like expense management have shown a massive 81% increase in adoption since the onset of the pandemic. This could be attributed to cloud tools aiding in all the heavy lifting, freeing employees to focus on tasks with a high business impact.
It’s safe to say that cloud tools let businesses bridge the physical gap formed with the onset of remote work. A great place to begin your cloud adoption journey is to allow teams to collaborate seamlessly to get their jobs done just as they would have while in office.
How will cloud technology change your business’s remote future?
- Employees enjoy real-time collaborations
Cloud tools are built keeping in mind the needs of remote employees. For instance, a simple tool like Google Sheets can let all your employees work on the same report from multiple locations while also editing it simultaneously.
This doesn’t just blur the physical gap between employees but also promotes a wholesome remote working environment.
Here are some tools that you can use to improve remote collaboration:
- Notion: For company-wide documentation.
- Slack: For all your business communication.
- Fyle: For a seamless expense management process.
- Google Drive: A secure cloud storage for all your documents.
- Zoom: For video conferences and meetings.
- Trello: For easy project tracking across departments.
By addressing all the roadblocks of remote work, businesses can continue their routines undisrupted. Additionally, cloud technology lets business leaders gain 100% control over all business processes through a centralized dashboard. This adds a layer of accountability and transparency in all the little nuances of business functions.
- Enables leaders to make data-backed decisions
Every cloud tool is backed by an advanced AI engine that provides valuable information from all available data. This provides your leadership teams with enough data to make the right business decisions at no added effort.
For instance, your Finance teams gain insight into policy violations and spend patterns across the company by using an expense report software.
Having this information lets Finance teams make precise decisions regarding budget cuts and business expenses.
- Employees gain more control over business expenses
A traditional expense management model will make your company more prone to expense fraud and have gaping holes in the expense management process for new violations to seep in.
Cloud technologies like an expense software make the tracking of business expenses much easier for every stakeholder in the company by adding a layer of accuracy to the process while simultaneously reducing the risk of fraud.
- Seamless remote work experience for employees
With cloud technology and remote work solution, a simple wifi connection and laptop can let your employees work from any place while keeping up office-level productivity. This will directly translate into improving an employee’s overall work experience.
A recent McKinsey study revealed that over 50% of employees across the globe have requested to go fully remote after the pandemic.
If you’re asking yourself why so many employees want to stay remote, it’s simply because remote work gives employees a sense of power and freedom to work from their place of comfort while still creating business impact.
All of this would’ve been just a dream without cloud technology.
Conclusion
The pandemic has made much of an employee’s everyday life adapt to a series of new normals. Businesses that have successfully adapted have attributed a large portion of their success to the timely adoption of cloud tools.
Remember that while you can ensure your employees are suited to take on the current normal, cloud technology ensures they’re prepared to take on the next.