In the 21st century, competing in the business sector is challenging unless you know the right ways and techniques to utilize your resources to make proper financial and business decisions. 

On the one hand, employee engagement and satisfaction is the most significant way to improve the financial aspects of any company. When employees have directly engaged, the productivity and financial condition of the company automatically increase. 

On the other hand, financial performance is a broad terminology that describes any company's overall fiscal health. It is your financial performance by which your company will attract potential investors. With productive employees, you can achieve the required financial goals to help your company scale new heights.  

While this might have been easy when employees worked in an office that allowed for easier communication, things changed with the onset of COVID. With distributed and hybrid teams, businesses now have to realign to the new ways of running a business and maintaining employee and financial productivity. But how do companies start with identifying and improving these aspects? 

This blog is a quick read on how businesses can improve their financial and employee productivity and find easy ways to adopt tools and software to enable and empower their teams in 2022. So, let's get started!

The correlation between financial and employee performance

Your employees are the human capital of your organization. Thus, it is essential to properly utilize these resources to generate the best possible outcomes for your business. Your team of employees is the most valuable resource for your business. Employee performance has a significant impact on a company's ability to achieve objectives and goals. Therefore, productive employees are essential to the finacial growth of a company. The financial aspect for any company is a dynamic and constantly changing environment. It is the job of the managers and employees to make sure that the company stays ahead of the curve. Employee productivity is a major factor in determining the financial performance of any company. This can be measured by looking at different metrics such as employee engagement, customer satisfaction, and retention.

Employee productivity brings operating efficiency, solvency, and profitability. It also ultimately improves the financial performance of your company. Also, due to the rising importance of human capital as a key strategic asset in value generation, firms are integrating their entire strategy with employee performance efficiency. As a result, employee performance is one of the essential factors in improving a company's financial performance, particularly in terms of profitability. 

Why should businesses improve employee performance in 2022?

Improving employee performance requires deliberate effort and dedication to understand and assist employees in achieving their maximum potential at work. Almost always, happy and motivated employees translate into productive and assertive individuals who are ready to go the extra mile to get things done.

A good start would be to genuinely understand what's working and what needs improvements in their everyday tasks. These could be both operational and non-operational aspects of their professional lives that could both motivate or hinder them in achieving set goals. 

When you have a list of things spread across departments, you can look into possible solutions to help your employees perform better at their jobs. It could be something as simple as a list of automation tools you're business can pick to eliminate errors, miscommunication, and hiccups. 

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Why should businesses improve financial performance in 2022?

Investors make financial investments on whether to purchase or sell a company's shares and bonds based on financial data. But, as discussed, the healthy financials of a company heavily depend on the inner functionings of the company. 

However, not just investors use financial information to establish a company's credibility rather managers, analysts, stakeholders who study financial data, lenders all of them use it. They could make estimates of potential earnings and growth of company by analyzing the financial performance . Financial success persuades investors to increase their investments and enables horizontal and vertical integration.

Thus, if companies are looking to grow financially sound, it would become imperative to ensure all aspects of the company run like well-oiled machines towards a common goal - business growth and revenue.

5 tips to improve employee and financial performance in 2022

• Get resource and budget projections right 

The available resources and budgets determine the duration, dependencies, and success rate of a project. Thus, stakeholders must have the right and updated information around resource cost rate, quality cost, reserve analysis, and more. 

Benefits of accurate resource and budget projections:

• Lets you get a clearer picture of the project.
• Enables better speculations around potential roadblocks to the project. 
• Helps you take preemptive measures to ensure maximum success.

• Map tasks with priorities 

When we multitask without setting priorities, we will probably miss out on essential things while concentrating on something that might really not be as important. Prioritization of tasks and subtasks helps you create a list of things to get done to close a project. In addition, the associated "priority" or "importance score" you determine can guide stakeholders on what to complete first or later. 

An easy start could be using productivity apps to handle this for you and your teams. These productivity tools streamline the entire process and help you save on time and resources. 

• Encourage employees to adopt tools and software 

Technology makes it easier for productive work to happen whether remote or otherwise. It ensures that there’s seamless collaboration, and that everything is documented which brings a layer of transparency to all existing processes. Even processes like content creation have become simplified, with photoshop and after effects templates being readily available for public use.

Additionally, these tools also ensure that every discrepancy brought about through manual processes – data entry errors, miscalculations, broken workflows, repeated back and forths, etc., are resolved. It enables admins and other high-level stakeholders to have more control over your organization’s core processes, thereby, enabling them to constantly find ways that can improve performance. 

• Enhance collaboration among team members 

A healthy work environment encourages employee collaboration. Each team member has a unique set of qualities, and their teamwork strengthens them. After all, it is common knowledge that two minds are superior to one. 

Collaboration encourages team members to share ideas and work together to accomplish a common goal. A good start for this would be to, depending on the project, conduct daily, weekly, or monthly stand-ups.  This ensures every team member has context and focuses only on the objective. Also, try using collaborative tools to help bridge the gap. These tools simplify processes and provide a platform for all stakeholders to collaborate and get things done. Teams can use apps like the Virto calendar, which will guide them to organizing meetings effectively and discuss steps for improving employee performance.

• Automate your expense management process 

An expense manage software enables your accounting teams to seamlessly collaborate with the rest of the organization by giving them centralized control over your business expense data. Employees can easily submit and track their receipts from applications they use on a daily basis like Teams, Slack, G-Suite, etc. 

The real-time policy engines in this software automate compliance. This means that your accountants/finance teams no longer need to verify every submitted report manually, only complaint reports can be submitted which helps save time and money for your finance teams. 

Tools to improve financial and employee performance in 2022

1. Fyle

Fyle is an expense management software that takes care of all the tedious monitoring and reporting while giving you complete control over organization-wide business expenses. Its OCR and robust data extraction capabilities make expense reporting easy for employees. 

Additionally, Fyle comes with a real-time policy engine that seamlessly enforces compliance by automating pre-submission checks. This ensures that only compliant expenses are submitted thereby keeping expense fraud, data entry errors, and out-of-policy expenses at bay in your company. 

Now, Fyle has started to offer real-time spend management for Small Business corporate cards with Visa. This makes Fyle the first spend management platform to offer real-time card transaction feeds for Visa. Any SMB or mid-market company can now gain access to a superior software experience without having to change their existing card providers. 

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2. Zavvy

Zavvy is an employee enablement platform where you can efficiently onboard, train, and develop your employees be it remote or in-office. Higher officials can now plan a training program for any person with ease and automate it. 

This means you wouldn’t have to sit all day and check in with your team to remind them but Zavvy will nudge them in the right direction to continue learning. By running engaging training programs on auto-pilot, you create a cycle of learning and development in your organization that creates upskilled and confident employees in the long run.

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3. Apploye

Apploye provides a long list of features to manage your in-house or remote employees. The features include time tracking with screenshots, task management, client and invoice, payroll for employees, timesheet, reporting, and GPS tracking for mobile employees. 

This software is straightforward to use with an excellent user interface. It also helps employees keep track by allowing screenshot monitoring and real-time tracking. As a result, Apploye is a good software to consider if you want to keep a tab on employee performance and management.

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4. Document 360

Every business needs a centralized knowledge base for employees and clients to access authorized information quickly. Document360 is a knowledge management platform for creating and publishing self-service knowledge bases and help centers. This software is ideal for businesses looking for an effective knowledge management software.

Document360 solutions also include:

• Real-time creation, management, and publication of information
• Online library for clients with troubleshooting instructions and assistance articles
• Private hosting with third parties integrations and platform API

5. ClickUp

ClickUp is a cloud-based all-in-one project management software that’s built to handle all kinds of projects and improve team collaboration. Teams of all sizes from various industries choose ClickUp as it boosts transparency among team members and offers numerous features.

Some features that enable remote teams to stay connected are instant messaging, collaborative editing for Google Docs, multiple owners for each task, and many more. By letting you add comments to each individual task and assign it to a particular team or member, it ensures all communication blockers are taken care of as you progress through the project.

6. Slack

For most folks, Slack is another word for office communication. And it’s true, Slack is a simple no-nonsense tool that exists to boost team productivity and collaboration.

Slack’s workspaces let you organize company-wide communication through different channels. It lets you connect with your employees flexibly as and when needed while also letting you integrate with other tools and services like Slack polls which helps you do more work inside Slack. 

7. Right Inbox

Right Inbox is the number one productivity tool that can be used with a Gmail account. It can improve your team’s day-to-day email management and boost their productivity.

It allows you to schedule emails, track them, send mass emails, recurring emails and much more right from a Gmail inbox. It also offers great email templates and sequences, allowing to perform email marketing straight from a Gmail account. With Right Inbox you can also add different signatures to each email. The tool is free, with limits on some features that reset each month.

8. Zonka Feedback

With Zonka Feedback, you can measure employee feedback at all touchpoints at your company, reduce employee turnover, and create a great workplace culture. Here are some ways our tool helps with employee feedback:

• Get the pulse of your employees: Capture the pulse of your employees by regularly capturing feedback through short-customized employee feedback forms.
  

• Know feedback at all touchpoints: Set up feedback systems for performances, post trainings, post interviews, onboarding, at washrooms, cafeteria, and more.
  

• Identify issues & improve: Regularly measuring employee feedback is good as it gives you data to understand and identify problem areas, hold departments accountable and make improvements.
  

Besides this, you can take employee surveys from all channels like Android tablets, iPads, offline, online, SMS, and Email using one platform. You can also create surveys such as employee benefits surveys, employee performance surveys, and more.

9. Storydoc

Storydoc is a business presentation software for sales and marketing teams. From product presentations and e-books to sales pitch decks and one pagers, with Storydoc your marketers and sales reps can create the most engaging collateral that immediately boosts conversions and brings in more revenue. Its scroll-based interactive format makes it easier for prospects to read through decks.

Storydoc also comes with powerful integrations with various CRMs and tools, allowing your sales team to personalize and automatically send presentations at different stages of their campaign. Additionally, sales decks created with this software will have more powerful CTAs as your salespeople can end their presentations with a meeting scheduler or a sign-up form.

10. CustomShow

CustomShow is the perfect presentation software for busy professionals which accelerates presentation delivery between designers, marketers & sales teams.You can easily import your PowerPoint slides, add multimedia content, and create custom animations. The software also includes a powerful slide editor that lets you customize your slides to match your branding. In addition, CustomShow also provides tools for tracking who has viewed your presentation and measuring their engagement. This data allows you to see what works well in your presentation and make changes to improve your results.

CustomShow makes it easy to share your presentations with your employees via online or through social media platforms. With its wide range of features and ease of use, CustomShow is the ideal presentation tool which rapidly customize their sales pitch for each client.

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11.Visme

Visme is a powerful all-in-one content creation platform that helps businesses easily streamline their design process, project management and team collaboration. Allowing companies to find economical solutions to producing professionally designed content without using code or a designer, as well as improve employee performance and collaboration, by:  

• Saving time designing presentations, infographics, documents and reports with Visme's thousands of professionally designed templates or creating your own branded templates in minutes.
• Accessing millions of stunning photos, icons, animation, or video to add more flair to your projects.
• Streamlining project executions with dynamic, collaborative features like leaving comments on specific sections, and directly exporting data and CRM information, while your team works simultaneously on the same project in real-time without slowing down. 
• Consolidating your software and tools using all Visme design features for beginner and advanced designers. Helping you to save cost and time from using multiple design tools.
• Integrate your team's favorite tools like Hubspot, Salesforce, and Monday.com and use these tools directly in Visme to increase productivity.

Visme caters to small businesses, designers and big enterprises by providing design features and tools to meet their needs, all available on Windows, MAC, iOS and Android. 

12. Striven

Striven is an all in one business management software that's designed to help organize, streamline, and automate your core business processes. Whether it's projects, inventory, or accounting, all of your essential data is housed in one centralized location. Every employee in your company can work from anywhere with Striven. On top of that, any subcontractors or vendors that need access to your businesses data can easily sign in to their own personalized portal.

Striven's collaboration and productivity tools allow your business to modernize its workflow so that you can stay competitive and profitable.

Conclusion

While employee performance is closely related to your organization’s operating efficiency, financial health is crucial in determining its longevity and profitability. This becomes a necessity as we progress through uncertain economic trends during these post-pandemic and remote work times.