Published on: 18 November 2017
Last Updated on: 12 September 2024
Monitoring today’s distributed applications has become a complex task. Many business applications run on multiple platforms, from on-premise data storage to cloud computing and even multi-geographical deployments. Monitoring these applications, especially those that are custom made for your business is critical to ensuring seamless functionality and usability.
Why should businesses invest in application performance management (APM)? Here are five reasons why:
Business Continuity
Businesses that use APM tools to optimize their operations see up to 60-70% reduction in downtime. IT services are at the heart of any business, and without the assured availability of those, any downtime could mean millions in lost revenue for your business. According to a Stackify article on 6 types of ROI for APM, effective APM helps mitigate the risks of potential service disruptions that could adversely affect business operations.
Application performance management tools help keep an eye on core services by ensuring they maintain the expected levels of availability. They also play a huge role in ensuring more efficient troubleshooting and promoting safer application upgrades. Enterprises that invest in the latest APM tools deal with less downtime and enjoy better business continuity.
Improved End-User Experience
Improvement in application usability, quality and availability create a better user experience and more productive business interactions with all users, both internal and external. Enterprises are increasingly looking for APM solutions that are able to rapidly diagnose problems in real-time to ensure user satisfaction.
User satisfaction is the biggest benefit of APM, and choosing the right solution keeps you one step ahead of the game. An APM’s mandate is to fight complexity by providing you with deeper visibility and performance insights that help you increase productivity and improve end-user experience.
No More Over-Reliance on Costly Experts
As more businesses adopt new and more complex technologies and multiple application infrastructures, dependence on costly experts tends to increase. Unfortunately, experts, no matter how skilled, never scale. What you need is end-to-end visibility and control of all your business applications and entire enterprise infrastructure, and APM offers that.
The right APM solution can become an expert-level work system that even allows junior level support engineers and IT, experts, to be more effective in monitoring application performance much quicker. Decreased reliance on costly experts means savings for you without sacrificing the functionality and usability of your business infrastructure.
Greater Innovation
When business applications are well managed, development teams deal with fewer performance issues and can now invest more of their time in delivering new innovations to enhance business operations and help you make decisions much faster. Through improved collaboration and knowledge sharing across the entire enterprise, issues can be resolved quickly and unnecessary problems avoided so that development teams can focus more on innovation.
Better Business Sales
Considering that most businesses rely on critical applications that influence their image or revenues in one way or another, the performance and availability of such applications must be prioritized. Any issues that could lead to user complaints could have a significant impact on business performance. APM solutions help ensure smooth performance and availability.
The benefit of service availability and great performance is better business sales. APM tools help you quickly detect, diagnose and resolve application performance issues so that you can better improve customer experience and boost sales. Remember that choosing the right APM is key to helping you achieve the desired monitoring insights.
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Business Succession planning is one of the important levels of strategic planning that gives you an opportunity to formulate a plan on how your business is expected to perform after your tenure in leadership.
Business Succession can make things more effective and wise in all aspects. Effective succession planning is highly advantageous as it gives you an opportunity to set in place mechanisms that ensure operational efficiency and transfer of leadership where necessary.
When undertaking succession planning, emphasis should be put on ensuring that every aspect of business leadership is handled as comprehensively as possible.
Whereas business owners understand the importance of performing succession planning, few put in place the necessary measures. Here are 7 key tips to consider when planning for smooth business succession.
Initiate the planning process early:
To be thorough and comprehensive in your succession planning, you need to ensure that you start planning as early as possible.
Whereas experts do not have a recommendation on the definite duration of time by when you should start succession planning before implementation, it is generally agreed upon that early planning gives you sufficient time to come up with a comprehensive plan.
Starting as early as 10 years before effecting the plan gives you sufficient time to ensure that everyone who is involved is sufficiently prepared to take over.
This also eliminates the rush that may set in in the event of a delayed succession planning process. Such delays may lead to unprecedented and unwanted hurried succession which puts the business’s future in jeopardy.
Nurture the prospected leaders:
When undertaking succession planning, especially in a family business, emphasis should be made on nurturing continuity in leadership. This ensures that once you leave as the top manager, your junior takes your place and steers the company forward. When performing succession planning, you should have that in mind and therefore focus on nurturing and developing the prospective leaders.
Leader development and nurturing should focus on, among other things, bringing the best out of the qualities you desire to see in them. This may be done in a gradual process such as delegating responsibilities and evaluating the prospected leader's ability to perform with the integrity and precision demanded for in a top business manager.
Have an open-minded approach:
To be thorough and effective in succession planning, you need to avoid bias as much as possible. In a family business or a business where leadership succession is hierarchical, maintaining an open mind can be quite hard, especially since the second in command is the most likely person to inherit your leadership. To avoid such bias, you should have an open mind in regards to potential candidates who can take over from you after you leave office.
When looking for an appropriate leader to take after you, you may want to give a thought of every potential candidate available within the business. This gives you an opportunity to extend your options as wide as possible. It also ensures that you don't miss potential employees whose skills, competencies, and experiences may come in handy in taking over from you.
Exposed potential candidates to training:
Training is quite crucial as it ensures that prospecting leaders within your business get an opportunity to advance their skills.
In this regard, leaders that you think are capable of leading your organization in one way or another should be appropriately identified and marked for progressive training and development.
Such training should be focused on anticipated areas within your business that are of importance for the employees to take over once you leave.
Succession training is also crucial and should be exposed to all workers who show an outstanding level of managerial skills. The well-trained workers get to be prepared for advanced leadership positions that may be created after you leave office.
In some cases, promoting your immediate deputy in the hierarchy leads to vacant positions down the business administration structure. The well-trained candidates, once promoted, would be able to fill those positions effectively.
Dry-run your plan:
When planning for a smooth succession in your business, it is highly advisable to ensure that you, on several occasions, do a dry run of your succession plan.
Dry running a succession plan gives you an opportunity to evaluate how potent your plan is in terms of meeting certain expectations. The dry running process does not have to be official and should be preferably done without informing the employees involved.
This can be done by momentarily leaving your office for official vacation or even other official duties for a considerable amount of time such as between a few weeks to a month. The duration of absence gives you an opportunity to test how suited your prospected leaders are in terms of filling the void created by your absence.
Do your final plan in writing:
After concluding and making adjustments on your succession plan for your business, you should endeavor to put the final plan in writing.
To be effective and thorough, you should consider engaging qualified, experienced, and reputable succession planning legal professionals such as Boss Lawyers in Australia.
The lawyers, in such a case, help you to prepare the necessary documents including succession policies, how the current generation of employees will hand over to future generations, as well as how to resolve any arising disputes thereof.
The exit strategy created from a legal perspective ensures that everyone within the business is bound while also creating a viable atmosphere for business continuity and harmony among the workers.
Make your wishes known:
Lastly, after every element of business succession planning has been conducted, it is crucial to bring everyone on board the plan to ensure that they are well aware of the strategic direction that the business is taking.
You should, preferably, convene a meeting with everyone in the business as well as your business’s key customers.
In the business meeting, you should outline what your wish is and reveal any other pertinent information that was not captured within the succession legal framework.
You may also use the platform to ensure that any questions or concerns that your workers may have are appropriately handled in a plenary session.
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Managing the board of a corporation or not-for-profit, no matter how large or small always comes with a number of challenges. Board members, who may be based in several different cities, need to be able to communicate easily and openly with each other, but they also need to be mindful of security issues. Because board members tend to be quite busy people, finding time for preliminary discussions is as important as it is difficult.
As anyone with board management experience knows, the key to running an efficient board meeting lies in the planning and preparation that takes place in the days and weeks leading up to the meeting itself. Ideally, board members should always have all of the factual information they need before the meeting starts and be ready to discuss higher-level questions, which is why making sure there is a secure forum for board members to discuss the information and clarify any questions they might have beforehand is vital for ensuring that meeting time is used as efficiently as possible. One of the most common complaints about board meetings is that valuable time gets wasted making sure everyone is up-to-date on the issues being discussed that could have been spent debating motions and planning for the organization’s future.
At the same time, some of the most popular electronic communications tools, such as Jook SMS and Gmail, are notoriously susceptible to hacking. This makes them a risky way to hold discussions ahead of a board meeting and often leads board managers into a double-bind: the tools that their members are most comfortable with and most likely to use in preliminary discussions also pose serious threats to the organization’s security. So how can boards strike a balance between facilitating good conversation while also maintaining security?
One of the most popular solutions to both of these problems is board portal software. Companies like Vancouver’s Aprio have developed software that allows board members to share and discuss information through a secure electronic portal that they can access from their mobile device or desktop computer. Portal software not only makes it easy for the board manager to deliver all of the necessary documentation to board members before the meeting begins, it also provides the members with an intuitive, easy-to-navigate way of accessing the documents from anywhere in the world.
The portal software also streamlines governance by making everything that board members need available in a single place. Instead of having to scroll through email threads to find the right documents, and potentially getting into inefficient discussions about which version of the document is most up-to-date, with portal software members literally have all the information they need at their fingertips.
Board portal software can play a major role in helping boards communicate more effectively, and by giving board members a chance to do more of their work in advance they can drastically improve the efficiency of board meetings. With better communication comes better decision-making, and it is no surprise that some of the most innovative businesses in North America have turned to board portal software to create stronger, more networked leadership and improve board governance.
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It’s the end of your first day. You’ve completed a plethora of online applications, psychometric tests, digital interviews and hopped through all manner of recruitment rings of fire – and you’ve landed the job of your dreams. Or so you thought… But do you know what are the ways to prepare a new employee?
You arrived at your fancy new office, but there was no one to greet you. After waiting near an hour, your co-worker-to-be apologized and took you to your desk, only to find it hadn’t been cleared. Grimacing that your equipment hadn’t been set up, your ‘guide’ spun you around the office’s sea of blank faces. Did they even know you were starting? The awkward acclimations were interrupted by an irritated-looking administrator who lugged a thick binder of forms to fill in. You missed lunch with the gang.
After finally navigating through all the red tape, the person you were meant to shadow was never notified so you were given menial tasks to pass the time, while they were in an important meeting with a client. You stared at the clock, waiting, waiting, waiting.
With the day over, you’re just sad you didn’t get out sooner. Wait – is this really your dream job?
New hires expect and need their onboarding to run smoothly. The above scenario sounds like an exaggerated horror story, but in a survey, Cezanne HR asked new employees about their onboarding experiences and was shocked to find:
52% didn’t know what to expect on their first day
30% didn’t have a buddy
8% didn’t meet their managers
23% didn’t have a desk ready
6% didn’t get told about health and safety regulations
5% didn’t have data security training
6 didn’t have a laptop or computer.
Great onboarding is extremely important. It increases retention and reduces staffing costs. It delivers an engaging experience for new hires, so they connect with the organization and colleagues from the moment they’re given the offer. Also. it should turn first-day new employee anxiety into genuine excitement. It should make them feel prepared for the new job and welcome!
Of course, no one said it’s an easy process, and orchestrating the activities to get onboarding right is time-consuming for everyone. In addition, the burdens of paper-based systems or dancing between data spreadsheets, such as Excel, allow important processes to slip through the cracks – which shouldn’t happen in a modern workplace. However, with the right HR software, you can make new employee onboarding engaging and straightforward, while automating and streamlining the admin involved in bringing on new hires.
Here are the ways to prepare a new employee:
Stay in touch after the job offer
It’s very important for a new employee to engage with employers from the moment they’re hired. This can go beyond a simple email. Make sure you consider the following:
Welcome portals are a very common feature in HR software because they do precisely that: they welcome people. Welcome portals act as an information hub and enable constant communication. They are a platform to share all essential details, including the new hire’s start date, office location, and contact details. It’s also a great way to prepare the new hire by letting them know how their first day will be structured and what their first projects will be.
Make sure you send your new hire links to any documents they need. Provide them with essential advice including what they should bring with them on the first day or week, including items like their passport, P45, national insurance number and other relevant work documents. You could use your HR software system’s welcome portal to deliver this information and advice.
Get the paperwork out of the way in advance of the first day. Signing a lot of forms can delay more pressing tasks, such as the relevant introductions, training, and the new hire’s first projects. HR software can be especially effective here. Instead of wasting time filling out form after form, new hires can sign documents electronically. It streamlines admin processes and makes everything available in one place – and it can all be done before the starting date.
Making use of welcome portals and their visual content is a powerful way of engaging with new hires and allows companies to add photos and embed company videos – it might be a hello from a CEO, or a video demonstrating the company’s culture, or brand values and goals. Portals can also allow new hires to self-serve, adding a profile, information, bank details and the like.
Moreover, all information you collect should flow straight through to your HR system. Cloud HR solutions should come with onboarding modules that are simple to set up and accessible 24/7. Storing information in one place also cuts back on the task of re-entering the same data into multiple systems.
Prepare the desk
When your new hire’s first day comes, ensure you’ve got a plan:
assign someone to receive and greet them at the door
put in an order with IT and prepare all the relevant equipment: a computer, phone, email, and network access, and office supplies
moreover, ensure security and compliance policies are explained as appropriate.
Spread the duties for onboarding tasks across different departments. For example, the IT department might be responsible for setting up the new hire’s laptop and email; the finance team might organize payroll, and the line manager will arrange inductions as well as check-in meetings. HR software’s task management systems can help significantly here.
HR software makes it much easier for these departments to fully understand their roles in the onboarding process. Task managers and checklists make use of notifications, meaning important processes don’t get forgotten about. It gives an overview of what’s been done and what needs doing.
Involve your employees
Send the first-day welcome announcement to the organization and share the news of the new hire with the team. Give their name, title, and something that distinguishes them: it might be a hobby or interest, for instance. This allows current employees to easily see if they have anything in common, making everyone more prepared for the big day. Moreover, give your current employees details of the new hire’s background, making sure the new employee’s biggest strengths are acknowledged.
Find a peer and assign them to mentor/buddy the new hire. This will help the new hire to get settled and to be comfortable enough to ask any questions that are on their mind. This also helps build relationships with the team, integrating the new employee into the company significantly faster.
Also, consider explaining who’s who – HR software can create a staff directory mapping this for you. This will help your new hire to familiarise themselves with their co-workers and assists them in directing their queries to the right people from the right departments, so they don’t feel like they’re barraging their mentor with questions.
Planning welcome social help breaks the ice, too – and not just between the company and the new hire. From team lunches to company happy hours, both new hires and current employees can benefit from getting to know each other in a more open and casual environment, building stronger relationships and channels for collaboration.
Establish a formal training program
The importance of setting a clear and comprehensive training program can’t be overstated. Doing so helps prepare and motivate the new hire for the first day and sets a precedent for the weeks and months ahead as they approach their new projects. Such a structured program does much to ease their potential short- and longer-term worries. Indeed, the HR portal assists here, too. By being able to provide access to important training documents, setting out a comprehensive program schedule through calendars, and by making use of notifications to make clear to current employees what is expected of them in the onboarding process and when. On top of this, it’s an effective and simple way for new hires to view set assignments and tasks, as well as their own schedules.
Check-ins
Check-ins are a series of regular discussions between managers and employees about their progress. They are:
ongoing and build a rapport, setting short and long-term goals
an extremely effective way of ensuring employees are continuously aware of their professional development within the company, allowing them to express any concerns and ask questions, and
they form a crucial part of the onboarding process.
At the end of the first week, give the new hire the opportunity to ask any outstanding questions. This helps demonstrate your enthusiasm towards the employee’s start beyond just the first day and will help set a clear and lasting relationship between the new hire and the company.
HR software can make continuous performance reviews and check-ins an integral part of company culture. Cezanne HR, for instance, provides a seamless and engaging way of recording conversations, achievements and agreed goals or outcomes, so it’s easier to ensure everyone is aligned.
The right HR systems are equipped with performance management functions that allow employees to make use of their flexibility and to collaborate in an online forum where others can easily and securely request feedback, record check-in conversations, and track outcomes.
Poor onboarding is a wasted opportunity
The benefits of great onboarding are infinite. It reduces unnecessary barriers that might otherwise inhibit the new employee from settling in or performing at their best. It gets new hires up to speed swiftly and immerses them in the company’s values, vision, and culture.
Furthermore, great onboarding protects your new investment. A robust, systematic onboarding process boosts new hire retention by 50%, and new hires that experienced strong onboarding are 58% more likely to stay with the company for more than three years.
Why would you waste all your efforts with a dissatisfactory onboarding process?
Onboarding can be the difference between a quick and costly new employee turnover, and a long and lasting productive relationship.
Above are just some of the boxes to tick to ensure an engaging onboarding experience. Do you have any more? Let us know!
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