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Management Efficiency Through Your Computer

Nothing is enhancing the efficiency of businesses today more than the fast-paced technology present in workplaces everywhere. Your challenge as a modern leader is to creatively use this technology to guide, coordinate, inspire, coach and monitor the work of your employees.

Depending on the size of your company and the number and responsibilities of your employees, you may be able to take advantage of some of the following "on-line" possibilities.

• Communicate: E-mail is a fast, efficient and inexpensive communications tool. Use it to ask questions, make suggestions and comment on performance. If you have a laptop computer, you can send and receive e-mail from any location - a great tool if you or your employees travel a lot.
• Make announcements: Why send paper or fax memoranda to long lists of people when you can produce electronic distribution lists and create memos on-line? Electronic lists are cheaper and allow you to get information into the hands of other people faster.
• Supervise: During face-to-face supervisory discussions, you can pose questions about an employee's performance, problems for discussion and hypothetical dilemmas. Using your electronic tools, pose probing questions on-line and elicit the perceptions and ideas of your employees.
• Monitor: Use your network or file transfer facility to review the written work and communications of employees. Insert your own comments where appropriate.
• Gather and distribute reports: When you must disseminate documents, it can be done on-line. When you want your employees to provide weekly, monthly or other periodic reports, it can also be done this way.
• Plan and schedule: Place appointment calendars, daily task lists and travel plans on-line. You and your employees can then review what everyone else is doing and where they're going. You can easily use this information to pinpoint meeting dates and times.
• Store policies and procedures: Why not place your entire manual (if you have one) and other reference materials on-line and allow your employees to consult it whenever questions arise? Even if everyone of your employees does not use a computer at work, many of them have personal computers at home and could access this information through the Internet. You'll save paper and time.
• Gather opinion and views: Can't have a staff meeting? No problem. Ask for advice in the form of a simple on-line survey or questionnaire. Or post a series of discussion topics and ask for the insights of your employees.
• Disseminate financial data: Today you have the capability to store budgets, fiscal performance reports, spreadsheets and other fiscal material on-line and allow your employees to retrieve them as needed. No more telephone calls, file searches and wasted time. If you have a network or intranet, all the better. You can store almost any kind of business document or database here, and allow for instant retrieval.
• Follow-up: Using your electronic tickler system, enter all major deadlines and employee benchmarks. Generate follow-up queries whenever significant dates come up. This is a great way to monitor progress toward objectives.
• Process routine forms: If you solicit forms from your employees, e.g., lead projections, fiscal goals, purchase requests, etc., create electronic versions of those forms and ask that they be completed on-line.
• Post messages: Use your electronic bulletin board just as you'd use a traditional bulletin board and post and review messages for, and from, your staff. Better yet, using this electronic board, post interesting facts or synopses of articles you've read.
• Stage conferences: Schedule a period of time when your employees can log onto their computers for an electronic discussion. No, you can't see their faces (technology doesn't give most on-line business leaders this capability yet) but you can have a dynamic discussion on almost any issue in real time, even if your people are miles apart.
• Brainstorm: You can run on-line brainstorming sessions in real time or in time-delay mode. Encourage participants to post their ideas on a theme or reactions to an issue (say, to an electronic "white paper") and then seek reactions and clarification.
• Publish articles: One of the roles of an effective leader is to comment on company or business trends. Consider publishing "letters to the editor" or formal articles for your favorite professional journal. But do so in their on-line editions - or at the very least, make the material available to the people around you on-line.
• Discuss issues: Start and moderate a discussion group, which might consist of your own employees or colleagues from your industry or trade association. Use the group to share your expertise and channel ideas and suggestions on topics of mutual interest.
• Train: Yes, you can even run your own training programs on-line. Some examples include offering curriculum outlines, electronic exhibits and electronic reprints of educational material. If you can't develop your own on-line training material, you can use technology to establish electronic links to training materials offered by other companies, educational institutions or journals.
• Inspire: Start by posting your own personal home page. Explain your business philosophy, goals, standards and other information that your employees might be curious about. Establish electronic links between this page and other sites important to you, and let your employees follow them.

Using your own creativity, you can magnify the impact of technology on your leadership abilities, and ultimately use technology to move your company toward progressively higher levels of success. Even if you don't have a well-developed computer network or intranet, you can still exchange information and data using electronic file transfer technology or diskettes.

Technology impacts leaders of almost every business today, large and small. The question is not whether you'll exercise on-line leadership, but how you'll exercise this important function. Answer that question today and you'll prepare yourself for the emerging leadership challenges of tomorrow.

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