What are your ambitions for your business in the next 12 months? Many of the clients we work with are excited about growing their businesses and know they need the right IT support in place to do it.
Is 2025 the year your business harnesses the power of digital transformation?
What is Digital Transformation?
One of the biggest things hindering small and medium businesses is inefficiency. It drains your time and your employees’ time that could be better spent on activities that move your business forward.
Digital transformation is the integration of digital technology into all areas of a business. It aims to:
- increase efficiency
- enhance competitiveness
- foster innovation
- improve decision making
- reduce costs
You may think that digital transformation is only possible for large, national or multinational corporations with big budgets. That was once true, but the IT landscape has changed dramatically. AI-powered tools, online collaboration platforms and increasing digital literacy have paved the way to affordable and practical digital solutions for those smaller businesses who are willing to embrace technology.
In this article we’ll walk through the technologies that can support your business to become more productive, without claiming a disproportionate share of your budget.
Increased productivity at no extra cost
Save time with templates
Our first suggestion for productivity isn’t new, but it is practical, cost-efficient and largely overlooked by smaller businesses.
With managing costs still very much on the agenda for this year, making full use of template features already included in your software licence fee is a useful productivity hack. Templates for Microsoft Office apps like Word, PowerPoint and Outlook allow all users to open a document that automatically formats itself to follow your existing brand guidelines and house style.
It boosts productivity in a few ways. Firstly, you can stop people wasting time on formatting simple documents, especially when there’s a tendency for everyone to do it slightly differently! Secondly, good templates are part of setting up automated processes, for example to send an email when a client completes a web-form. Finally, templates put a stop to inconsistent formatting, reducing review times and giving a more professional image to your clients.
Streamline file sharing
Moving to cloud-based storage for your business isn’t only good for security: it makes files securely accessible for remote workers, provides back-up and disaster recovery, and makes file version management easy.
For example, with Microsoft 365 (M365) and Office apps like Word, Excel and Powerpoint, multiple users can edit the file at the same time. This avoids the process of sending documents back and forth by email, where you risk losing track of which is the latest version or spending time hunting through email threads.
Even if you’re already using M365 (its file sharing component is SharePoint) or Google Drive for cloud-based file storage, most SMEs are missing little known features can save time and effort.
In a recent project for a new client, we created an automatic file structure using Microsoft Teams. Now, each time a new client is added, the system automatically creates a folder for the client and includes a set of documents that are needed in each client folder. This reduces the admin of setting folders manually for each new project, therefore saving time. Several of our clients have benefitted from this approach including HFS Environmental and 55Plus Equity Release.
Other features like Content Types and Document Sets (which have been part of Microsoft SharePoint for years, but are underused) allow your employees to use standardised documents far more efficiently or manage related documents with ease.
Work smarter with collaboration platforms
Keep everything in one place
The benefits of using a platform like Teams go beyond giving employees video conferencing and text chat features. Because Microsoft Teams is fully integrated with M365 it can interact with your project management system, automations, workflows and even systems like Adobe Sign, so you and your people can access everything in one place.
Here’s three time-saving examples:
- Set up a Teams channel to receive emails from a specific supplier or client and notify nominated users. The emails won’t be missed and they’ll be easily accessible in the same place, for all relevant colleagues.
- Use Teams with Planner (or another project management system) to view, edit and send your people reminders about their tasks.
- You can also create new documents or access your existing documents from within Microsoft Teams. When you create or attach a file to a Teams channel it will automatically be saved to SharePoint so your files will always stay up to date.
Using Teams channels for work related discussions, keeping track of tasks, scheduling video calls and sharing documents, means everything can be kept in one place. This benefits productivity by making it easier for everyone to stay on track, giving more time for their work.
Virtual collaboration
Meetings are often cited as a big drain on productivity, with good reason. Meetings can be inefficient for many reasons:
- scheduling meetings is time consuming,
- people don’t have the right documents, which wastes time,
- too many meetings can eat into time for focused work.
A combination of collaboration tools and AI are available to make it easier to collaborate and keep everyone on the same page, without wasting time and energy on endless meetings.
You can also add in Microsoft Viva, which is an employee engagement module available withinM365. It includes Viva Insights, Viva Connections and Viva Engage. In our work with clients, we find Connections and Engage to be the most useful of the three, because they make it easier to communicate with others and ensure everyone has the right information at the right time.
Viva Insights analyses data about users’ emails, meetings, calls and chats to make recommendations on time management.
Viva Connections functions like a company intranet, without having to build one from scratch. Use it to help your people easily access all the information and resources they need to be efficient, in their specific roles.
Viva Engage makes it easy to start conversations and communities around shared interests (work-related and personal), to facilitate information sharing and relationship building.
Face to face collaboration
Of course, there is still a need to meet face to face, and here technology can also help you to work smarter.
Use Microsoft’s scheduling assistant (part of Outlook) in combination with shared calendars so anyone can easily find the optimal time for a meeting.
Microsoft Viva also has a role to play in face to face meetings; it shows users important details like who has accepted the meeting, related documents and prompts to book preparation time.
Another efficiency boost for your meetings is to add AI transcription tools, like fireflies.ai. It automatically creates meeting summaries and transcriptions, including capturing actions and deadlines and will then share with attendees.
Productivity metrics at your fingertips
For medium or larger businesses (with over 50 employees) one of the productivity trends for 2025 will be using collaboration platforms like M365 that automatically measure productivity metrics, making business analytics accessible to more businesses than ever before. This is key to creating and sustaining rapid growth.
(NB: in our work with clients we’ve noticed these insights aren’t so useful for businesses with less than 50 employees and we advise they pay more attention to them as they grow.)
In the past, measures of productivity like % attendance at meetings, who contributes in meetings, project deadlines met, time spent on tasks, customer satisfaction have all been resource intensive to measure. In addition, each measure has needed another spreadsheet or another system to capture it.
Microsoft Viva, mentioned above, is an employee engagement module that captures much of this data. Notion, a project management tool popular with freelancers, has an added (AI-powered) service that captures data on page visits, content downloads and task completion from the site. If the data you need isn’t automatically captured on your platform, other automated services can be added to upgrade your analytics.
Based on our work with many businesses who need their IT to support their business as it grows, we recommend selecting metrics that will help you chart your company growth, in line with your strategic priorities. Then look for the least labour-intensive ways to measure and report on them. The less time and energy you’re invest in reporting on data, the more capacity is available for strategic planning and decision making.
Use automation to reduce manual and repetitive tasks
Automating business processes is an idea that’s been around since the industrial revolution, but what is new is intuitive, drag and drop systems that make digitised automation a reality for all businesses. Instead of needing highly skilled developers, Microsoft Power Apps uses AI to make it easy for businesses to design automated processes that do exactly what they need. Other automation tools exist like Zapier and Make, but it is the Microsoft technology that’s likely to bring easy automation within reach of small business owners across the globe.
Automate tasks like:
- sending standardised emails
- updating the project management board
- booking and rescheduling meetings
- sending data to other systems like Xero or a CRM
Some automations will make use of functionality in your existing IT and software set up, by simply providing secure ways to integrate different systems. Others will make use of new AI tools to automate things like note-taking or data analysis and you can find out more on these in the section of this article on AI tools below.
To showcase the productivity benefits, here are two examples of manual processes that can be automated using the kinds of software that most small businesses are already using, with only a few additions. Naturally, you can opt to automate some of the steps in a process and keep others manual. You can also introduce review points wherever you need to.
Example 1 / Onboarding a new client
- An employee completes an online form with information about the new client.
- Form data is sent directly to online planning tool, which is populated with the new onboarding tasks.
- This is connected to the cloud-based file sharing system, where new client folders are created.
- This triggers creation of standard letters and agreements, using pre-defined template documents.
- A welcome email is generated, with the agreement attached and sent to the client.
- Your collaboration platform (eg MS Teams) sends a message to the team about the new client.
- The new customer is added to Xero for billing and invoicing.
Example 2 / Effortless follow up from client meetings
- Start by sending the customer an email.
- Customer books a meeting time using a scheduling link in the email.
- The meeting is added to all relevant calendars, with agenda and other supporting information.
- The meeting happens and is automatically recorded and saved in secure cloud storage.
- AI transcription tools generate notes.
- AI compiles a list of tasks and action points.
- This triggers an email back to the customer with the meeting notes and action points.
When working with our clients to design automated process flows, we generally advise running a pilot first, which could include 1 or 2 elements of one of the examples above. This lets you gather data before rolling out completely automated process flows.
AI based tools
AI Assistants
If you’ve used ChatGPT, you’ll know how easy it is to interact with. Most major platforms are developing their own AI assistants, like Google’s Gemini or Click Up AI, as part of Click Up’s project management platform.
Microsoft has Copilot built into M365. It uses information from across your Microsoft apps while offering enterprise data protection, giving a more tailored and secure service to your workforce than ChatGPT.
Users can ask it questions, use it as a sounding board or even ask it to analyse company data. When used with suitable prompts, Copilot can save hours of time on drafting reports, which is only one of many use cases.
This frees up your employees’ valuable time for higher level tasks, like reviewing and adding human insight to the report drafts, designing new products and services, or spending more time with customers.
Task-based AI tools
Over the last year or two we have seen a marked increase in the number of AI tools available, all of them claiming to help with productivity. Avoiding ‘Shiny Object Syndrome’ and sorting those that are truly useful could end up as a full time job in itself. However, by staying clear on where your productivity drains are, and with some expert advice, your business can definitely reap the rewards.
They fall into various categories, for example:
- Transcription & meeting assistants
- Content creation (text, images & video)
- Grammar & editing tools
- Presentation building tools
- Time management & time tracking
- Task & project management
And more are added all the time. In our work with clients, we’ve found that implementing a few well chosen tools creates a bigger impact than introducing each and every tool that grabs attention. Your employees may all have different suggestions for what will help them perform better, but a coherent strategy across your organisation will bring a greater return on investment.
Meeting assistant apps like Fireflies.ai or Fathom are a good place to start as they can help make meetings more productive, making it faster and easier to keep track of what actions were agreed and share summaries with colleagues.
Another place to start with AI tools is to use content creation tools. Using Microsoft Co-Pilot or a dedicated text generation tool to help draft a job description for a new role can produce a rough draft in moments. The draft can be polished by a human, therefore saving a lot of time in the drafting stage.
AI tools are also useful when plugged into existing workflows. If you can automate a lot of a workflow using your existing software, any gaps can potentially be bridged with a task-based AI tool. In the Client Meeting automation above, a note-taking app can be used to produce meeting minutes, so actions are then automatically emailed to the client.
Want greater productivity for your business?
The array of features, tools and platforms available can be overwhelming and the prospect of being sucked in by the latest shiny technology stops people from getting started.
Our advice: don’t let that block the growth of your business. Our friendly, expert team thrive on supporting businesses like yours to use IT strategically and achieve your ambitions.
Start transforming your business productivity with Heliocentrix: contact us here.