How to Boost Business Productivity and Spark Innovation Using the Tools you Already Have

There are two ways to make a business more profitable without adding more employees. The first is to find more efficient ways to do the things you're already doing. The second is to do the things you're already doing, better. This sounds logical in theory, but as a business owner, how can you really encourage the individual employees in the office to become more efficient and more innovative in their job functions? The answer is training.

All of the most successful Fortune 500 companies offer continuous ongoing training for their employees. Training not only shows employees efficient ways of doing things, but also does wonders for revitalizing excitement in the task itself. One of the most all-encompassing employee training programs today is the suite of Microsoft Office courses.

When asked what these courses might include, many people assume that Microsoft Office courses probably only cover topics like how to use spell check in Word or how to add cells in Excel. In reality, the Microsoft Office suite is an extremely robust set of software products that when used at full capacity can to improve the efficiency of every person that uses a computer.

The full suite includes Project, Access, FrontPage, PowerPoint, Word, Excel, Outlook, and Visio. Further, there are complete Microsoft Office courses, often no longer than a few days in length, that can show your employees not only how to do their jobs more efficiently, but also how to find new and innovative ways of interacting with their data.

The possibilities for innovation and advancement in an office that is fully utilizing this powerful suite of software are endless. After taking a Microsoft Office course, an inventory management team may discover smarter methods of predicting buying trends by matching sales with buyer profiles through Microsoft Access. Managers may uncover different parallels in their department figures by utilizing new graphing features in Excel. A sales team may find a way to automate 90% of their sales pitch through professional, interactive, web-based PowerPoint shows.

If your employees aren't fully utilizing the potential of the software you already own, then your company is certainly under-utilizing the potential of its current workforce. Smart tools in the hands of a person educated on how to use them completely change the results yielded.

Imagine that you were to hand each of your employees the latest digital camera and image editing software but offered them no form of training. The majority of people will figure out how to take a picture, but won't go beyond that to explore how to take better pictures. Others will try different things and learn through trial and error. Some may read the manual and learn how to truly utilize the potential of the tools. However, send them all off for a few days of instructor-led training on how to correctly use the features of the camera and software, and it's guaranteed that productivity and quality will improve drastically.

Can you afford for the work your business produces to be the result of trial and error? Not only will you immediately notice a boost in productivity after taking Microsoft Office courses, but the majority of your employees will find more innovative ways of interacting with the information they work with on a daily basis using the tools you already have in your office.