Embracing efficiency and giving your employees the chance to focus on what matters is a common mantra often heard in business. With business automation, you can free your employees from unnecessary tasks that they may spend too much of their time on. You can give your employees time to focus their attention on growing the business and putting extra effort into the areas of your business that require a human touch. Here are the top 5 areas of your business that are great for automation.

HR onboarding

Accepting online job applications is a common way to start automating your onboarding process. You can take that process a step further by allowing new starters to sign their contracts digitally when you offer them a position. The ease of a digital onboarding process can be a great first impression for your company – it’s consistent so everyone gets the same experience and there’s a very small margin of error when it comes to filing documentation. Another way you can automate the onboarding process is by setting up automated emails that give your new starters essential information about the company before they start, like how to find the office or what to bring on day one.

Team communication

Automating your team communication can be something as simple as starting a team Slack channel for instant messaging. It’s not to suggest that you should abandon face-to-face conversation but having an instant messaging system (whether it is Skype, Slack, WhatsApp, or something else) that the company supports, enables your team to communicate whenever and wherever they need to.

Meetings

If your company has an automated booking system for meetings, then manually booking a room and trying to find a window in everyone’s calendar will become a thing of the past. Automated meeting systems come with handy features like automatically notifying your attendees a few minutes before the meeting starts or including Skype details into the meeting for any attendees that are working off-site.

Marketing emails

Automated email marketing is centred around emails being sent to your customers based on certain triggers. As an example, if a customer shows interest in a certain product, an email explaining that product could be automatically sent to them. Welcome emails are usually where businesses start with email automation. Once a customer signs up or subscribes to your emailing list, it can trigger an automated welcome email that introduces your customer to the company and tells them the kind of content they can expect to receive now they are subscribed.

Social media

Managing social media can be a time-intensive task. It often requires posting at unusual times of the day to take advantage of peak traffic times. It also requires a lot of reactive posting to stay on top of trends. A great way to create some order in your social media management is to use automation tools that can schedule your posting. Facebook has scheduled posting built into the platform, but for other platforms like Instagram, you will need an external program that can schedule and post to your business page for you. Once you have a social media calendar built up with all your regular posts scheduled in, you can focus on being reactive and improving your overall strategy.