How Digital Leadership Inspires Staff Productivity Digital leadership requires a mix of skills which helps drive the culture of the company into the hearts and minds of its employees.

Good leadership in the workplace yields productivity and motivates the employees to do their best work. For effective digital leadership in workplaces, there are targets your business must aim for. Why are some people and businesses excelling in digital innovations while some other businesses hardly get ahead with their strategy? Digital leadership is attained based on the action of a digital leader and the results they achieve. Digital leadership requires a mix of skills that will help drive the culture of the company into the hearts and minds of the employee.

After all, if the employees catch the vision of the leader and are given the opportunity to run with it, the business will experience a dramatic growth in leads acquisition, product sales, improved customer service, and increased revenue. What are some aspects of your business where employees can become more productive through the implementation of digital innovations?

Communication
Effective communication is the key to unlocking every closed door in the workplace. A new study by Watson Wyatt shows how communication drives performance. According to the study, "companies that communicate effectively had a 47% higher return to shareholders over a five-year period."

One of the biggest issues in workplaces is poor communication. With the introduction of social media channels within your workplace, employees can send important messages to other employees. In the past, employees would have to leave their posts to deliver important messages. If they don't do that, they'll have to use the telephone which can become expensive for a business over a period of time (e.g., three months). Today, with social media and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) platforms, you can eliminate the time wasted while trying to communicate with other employees. This will allow your employees to focus more on activities like interacting with prospects and customers. And thus, increasing their productivity.

Customer support
There is no perfect product or service created by any business. There is always a room for improvements and there are usually parts that a customer might need help with when they use your product. This is why customer support is vital to the survival of your business. Due to the improvements in technology, there are now more channels through which customers can get in touch with your business. To make your customer support staff more effectively in their duties, your business should be present on these platforms. For instance, some customers find it easier to reach out to your business on social media, while others prefer a blog. If you have no presence there, they may conclude that your customer support is poor and move to your competitors. In some other cases, potential customers may be on your website and have urgent questions to ask about your product. If they have to leave your web page to contact you, they may end up buying the product elsewhere.

Onboarding
Every business has a different culture and different manners in which they approach customers. If you are hiring a new employee, they have to grow and adapt to your culture. In some situations, you have to train these employees to be able to use the customized technology you have in your organization. Digital leadership allows you to shorten the training time and make employees' adaptation faster. With digital tools, you can create games that simulate possible work situations to track an employee's progress. More importantly, if you have a guideline for most of the processes in your company, it can be difficult for an employee to know everything in your guideline in a short time. Digital innovations like ebooks allow easy access to all parts of these guidelines.

For Alaska Airlines, they had a flight manual that weighed 25 pounds for their pilots. This contributed to the weight of the airplane. The company had to make a reprint every time there was a revision to the manual. This was a high cost and weight that the company wanted to eliminate. It replaced the physical book with tablets. This had less weight, lower cost, and was easier to use for the pilots. With this, the pilots became more productive in their work.

Sales processes
Your sales process is one of the most important aspects of your business. What are the steps put in place to move an individual from being a lead to a customer? During this process, there are many details to be taken into consideration in order to know the interest of a particular lead and what offers to present. Years ago, employees had to keep physical records and had to write details about each lead. Of course, you could expect lost leads due to human errors in copying the wrong information or copying nothing at all. Also, employees had to spend a lot of their time copying information.

This reduced the time they spent on closing prospects. Digital innovation, like a CRM software, ensures that data input about a prospect or customer is done automatically or at the push of a button. Your sales rep. can spend more time talking to your customers and answering their questions, instead of manually inputting their data.

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Performance tracking
For every business paying salaries to its employees and getting value for their money is the ultimate pursuit. However, many times, employees are not doing what they are employed to do. Before, there were few effective ways to know about this. Today, as a digital leader, you can track your employees' performance more accurately. With your in-store digital tools, you can know the number of customers a particular employee attended to.

Businesses also provide a platform for customers to rate their experiences with your business. What is the customers' average rating when they encounter a particular employee? Through customer relationship management software (CRM), you can see the interactions between your employees and a prospect or customer. With these checks in place, employees have nowhere to hide and are more encouraged to put in the performance needed in their work.

One proof of digital leadership is to be able to develop a strategy that will improve the productivity of your employees. When you improve the productivity of your employees, they are able to sell more products and services to your customers. In addition to that, you save costs that come with employees' inefficiencies when doing business the traditional way.

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