After a wave of enthusiasm for an exciting new product many businesses find themselves owners of a variety of tablets. The problem is that after some initial screen flipping no one is quite sure how to effectively integrate them into the business and soon they are lying around gathering dust.
It is not uncommon for an exciting new technology to gain a large market share before a practical application is found but used right, tablets are a powerful tool that can really enhance a business’ productivity and efficiency.
Even where tablets have not been purchased, many businesses are
Here we take a look at a few ways in which tablets can be used to make businesses more productive.
Mobility
The ability to move around the office and continue to be productive is one of the tablet’s greatest strengths. When employees are communicating efficiently they are ensuring the business runs smoothly, that projects complete on time and problems are less likely to occur.
Even seemingly simple tasks can become convoluted in the modern work place. Simply conferring on a document can involve a lot of back and forth by email and phone despite the employees only being across the office from each other.
Tablets enable employees to just pick up, confer, share ideas and show work intuitively and naturally. There are hundreds of small, simple and effective ways that a tablet can minimise wasted time like this. Adding these up can result in substantial improvements to overall office productivity.
Dedicating a specific tablet to each area of the office means employees can simply send files to that tablet in their own time, pick it up when it is available and bring it to other co-workers to quickly demonstrate or pass around for feedback or advice.
Connection
Inefficiency in the workplace is only exacerbated when a business is spread across an office and an open workspace such as a factory floor or a stockroom. While there might be a computer in the stockroom busy stockroom employees are unlikely to be at this computer most of the time.
The result is that stockroom employees can be difficult to contact and many unnecessary trips are made by office employees to the storeroom. With a tablet in hand, storeroom employees not have a powerful tool to apply to their own tasks of stocktaking or keeping maintenance records but they also become instantly more connected to the rest of the business.
Organisation
Being mobile means that organisational and productivity apps make much more sense on a tablet than an ordinary PC. There are an enormous range of apps that can help employees manage everything from simple to-do lists, calendar organisers, and email managers to dynamic note-taking, collaboration and client scheduling.
These are a range of tools that could potentially be used with an ordinary PC but being tied to a desk makes many of them redundant. The mobility and versatility of the tablet means these apps can be accessed and used on the fly, making employees far more productive.
Evernote, Dropbox and Jorte are just some of the countless number of apps available that make staying organised easier than ever.
Meetings
Meetings and presentations are where the tablet really displays its potential and its value. Anyone who has been at a meeting where attendees had to pass around a cumbersome laptop to view the details of a diagram, a prototype or a design will appreciate how useful a tablet can be in this scenario.
For those presenting at the meeting the tablet means they can have any additional information they might need to hand without having to move to a laptop to bring it up. This means that meetings tend to run smoother and more efficiently overall.
When meeting with clients, being able to show them the specifications of a new product directly on a tablet that they can hold in their hands, not only gives them a better understanding of the product and but such a seamless presentation also imbues them with confidence in the company.
So the next time you see a tablet being used as an expensive paperweight pick it up, put it to work and make your office more productive.
Images: “Set of tablet computers isolated on white background/ Shutterstock.com“
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