What a recent survey reveals about SME’s, technology, and what business owners want the future to look like.
If you’ve been paying attention, you’d know that the way we do business is changing; cloud-based solutions are revolutionising our networks and opening doors for SME’s on a worldwide market, barriers to communication and collaboration are breaking down and making way for mobile businesses like we’ve never seen before.
Recently Smart Company released their annual The SME Of The Future Report 2017 that outlined some of the biggest challenges that are being faced by Australian businesses today. One of the main themes of this year’s survey is how companies are working to keep up with technological change. Below we have compiled some of the biggest telco challenges are facing today and how companies are going about solving them.
The Biggest Issues Facing SME’s in 2017
There’s a lot of informative and useful data to be taken from the Smart Company survey, and we’ve had a look at the results and summarised the key points relating to telco below. We do highly recommend that you take a look at their e-book yourself because it’s absolutely valuable information that you won’t get all in one place anywhere else.
Flexibility
The results of this survey have revealed that creating and nurturing a flexible working environment for their employees is an issue that 70% of respondents believe will have a positive outcome for their business. There’s also an example from one Fortune 500 company that demonstrates how flexible working environments have decreased sick leave and increased employee’s positive feelings about their job.
So what is flexibility? Most people agree that it’s no longer just reserved for working mothers and part-time employees but rather means that all employees have options when it comes to flexible working hours and working remotely, no matter what their role is at a company.
Cloud-based business
The Smart Company survey has revealed that only about one in five Australian SME’s actually use a paid cloud service that includes everything from accounting systems to document processing and phone systems. This is a bit of a surprise considering how much potential they have to revolutionise business communications. Having said that, businesses do still utilise the cloud, with 50% having some or all of their business management in the cloud. 10% of respondents were unsure about whether or not they used the cloud, and the remaining 40% who don’t use it all believe that on-premise software is easier to use, have concerns about security, and are limited by government regulations of cloud use in their industry.
Here at Infiniti, we see more of our clients switching to cloud-based phone systems every week, mainly because they are so affordable and flexible, as well as the fact that they so easily respond to the growth of your business without any significant cost.
Technological Disruptions
We’ve all seen the way in which employees at grocery stores have been replaced by self-service machine, but concerns for Australian SME’s goes beyond anything we see in our everyday lives so fars. The Federal Government has forecast that almost 50% of Australian jobs are at risk of being replaced by some type of automation.
Conclusion
How does your business compare to other SME’s?
If you aren’t sure how to answer this question, the e-book that Smart Company have developed based on the survey is, without a doubt, something that you should take the time to look at yourself. Not only will you be able to use it to contextualise your business, your ideas, and your goals for the future, but it will also provide you with some well-researched ideas for moving forward with your business in 2017.
