A new year brings hope, uncertainty, and opportunities to tackle some of the biggest challenges that your organization may face. In preparation for each coming year, business magazine leader Forbes releases their outlook on the most pressing challenges impacting every business and team in 2023 — even yours.
At Hive, we know how to help with solving team challenges. That’s why this year, we’ve decided to review Forbes’ seven top challenges and discuss different ways you can approach them, below.
The top challenges for your team in 2023 (And how Hive can help)
1. Inflation
Inflation impacts us all and is ubiquitous in today’s business environment, regardless of industry. While recent inflation rates peaked at over 9% in June 2022, inflation was higher than 6% at the close of the year and is still expected to be a major focus in 2023.
How can companies prepare for and address inflation:
- Track: The first step in preparing for and addressing inflation is to track and manage project budgets and costs properly. Hive provides a number of ways to track financials including at the task, project, and resource levels.
- Forecast: Once project budgets and costs are properly accounted for, forecasting for changes and identifying where adjustments need to be made is much easier. Forecasting the estimated time for project tasks can be done quickly with Hive’s Resourcing and planning tools.
- Adjust: The best part about properly tracking project forecasts and actual costs is gaining insight to identify waste and inefficiencies. Hive’s interactive Analytics dashboards make this even easier with out of the box-dashboards identifying where project estimates and actuals miss to better defend against the strain of high inflation.
2. Supply Chain Security
Global geopolitical uncertainty and COVID-related issue have made strengthening supply chains even more important, as well as evaluating supply chain risks. Many of the same recent challenges that tested companies’ supply chain resilience are expected to continue through 2023 (and potentially even further).
In fact, from a recent CNBC survey of logics managers, nearly two-thirds (61%) of respondents said their supply chain is not currently operating normally. Further, 59% do not expect that their supply chains will return to normalcy until at least 2024.3
How can companies prepare for and address Supply Chain Security challenges:
- Prioritize the Mission Critical: Need to identify impacts of a production lag or supply chain disruption? No problem. Hive can quickly highlight your projects’ critical paths to allow you to focus on ensuring the highest priority items are on track and identify project vulnerability locations.
- Allow for dynamic projects: As they say, ‘Change is always a constant’. That principle seems to be true now more than ever. Hive helps companies embrace ever-evolving projects and plans with auto-scheduling capabilities to quickly account for adjustments and automatically incorporate the changes into projects.
3. Increasing Customer Expectations
It’s no secret that customers want and expect more these days. A survey conducted by Intercom, a leading customer service software provider, revealed that almost three-quarters (73%) of support leaders feel an increasing trend in customer expectations and close to half (42%) believe they need to do more to meet those expectations.
So, why not incorporate customers and clients into your projects for greater engagement and more efficient feedback?
How can companies prepare for and address raising expectation trends:
- Bring those outside, in – Using Hive’s external users, you can invite individuals outside of your organization to collaborate on projects within Hive. More than just tracking project and action statuses, external users can interact directly with your project team, own actions themselves, and help better manage the project to completion.
- Comprehensive review process – Incorporate clients and key external stakeholders into your review process to reduce rework and waste. Hive’s automated review and document proofing application allow non-Hive users to be part of the review process earlier for real-time feedback.
4. Accelerated Digital Transformation
Just as technology is ever-advancing (like the push towards AI and implementing cloud computing), companies need to embrace these changes to take advantage of the opportunities they create. The viral raise of AI capabilities such as ChatGPT have highlighted the possibilities available today to quickly transform many industries.
From an analysis conducted by the Brookings Institute, it is clear that there is a widening employee productivity gap between the top-5% of companies and the rest. The ability of the top firms to adopt and implement digital technologies has been a key factor in accounting for their productivity gains.
How can companies prepare for and benefit from an acceleration in digital transformation?
Unleash the power of HiveMind: Hive’s newly launched AI-powered capability, HiveMind, provides the ability to build project plans in seconds, generate copy (such as blog posts and announcements), and respond to emails. HiveMind helps companies take advantage of AI and neural network processing directly integrated into multiple facets of the Hive platform. Immediately realize productivity benefits by leveraging the system to build out full project plans with just a few clicks and removing low-value tasks from your team’s plate.
5. Intensified War for Talent
Labor market mismatches across industries have made the labor market more competitive and resource replacement more costly. While the close of 2022 saw many companies in the technology and financial sectors reduce their headcounts, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce still sees an excess of nearly 4 million job openings and a raise in the number of employees choosing to self-leave their jobs. These factors lead to a tighter labor market, particularly for high-demand skill sets.
How can companies prepare for and address challenges in a tight labor market:
- Skill Inventory: Understanding, documenting, and tracking the skillsets of your existing team help to identify the most critical skills your team needs as well as skillset gaps. Hive’s Resourcing application helps teams to build a skill inventory for staffing projects and enables them to make better use of hiring employees to get ahead of skill needs.
- Support resource retention: Many employees leave positions after feeling burnt out from their workload or from managers not having appropriate visibility into how their resources are allocating their time. Preventing burnout and properly resourcing project teams are key steps in retaining top talent. A report from Employee Benefit News (EBN) estimated that replacing an employee can cost a company as much as 33% of a worker’s annual salary.
- Hive’s Resourcing tool: This allows managers the ability to see what their team is working on, where resources are overallocated, and properly forecast for new and existing projects. Give employees another reason to stay.
6. Data and Device Security
Taking the appropriate measures to protect your data and network are crucial now more than ever. An IBM report calculated that the average cost of a data breach in 2022 was about $9.5 million dollars and took about 9 months to identify and contain a data breach.8
How can companies prepare for and address data security challenges:
- Protect and gatekeep project data: Thousands of businesses and organizations rely on Hive as a unified platform for their teams’ collaboration, enabling them to communicate on, plan, execute and manage projects seamlessly. Hive holds a SOC2 certification and is SOC2 compliant. Hive allows for further gatekeeping into your workspace with the ability to require single sign-on (SSO) identity validation before users can access Hive.
- Reduce entry points: Greater emphasis on security sensitivity also allows for a periodic review of the systems and applications used to support your team’s workflows. Hive is a comprehensive tool where users can collaborate, store work products, track time and timesheets, manage budgets, resources projects, markup documents, automated route approvals, and more. Moving to Hive allows teams to rationalize their systems and reduces the number of entry points into data networks.
7. Sustainability
Companies around the world are accepting the challenge of addressing climate change and reducing their environmental impact. A report by Kite Insights found that acting on climate change is an essential factor in employee motivation and a sense of well-being for 70% of respondents around the globe.9
How can companies prepare for and address challenges in a tight labor market:
- Realize your goals: While these large, complex goals can often feel overwhelming and insurmountable, Hive’s Goals capabilities help companies break out their goals into manageable steps and track the progress to completion. Goals can be shared within teams and organizations to increase visibility and help inspire teams to see their actions impact the larger goal.
- Execute sustainability plans: At their core, goals are a series of steps and projects that need to happen for the desired outcome to be achieved; achieving a sustainability goal starts with developing and managing the projects to accomplish the goal. This is what Hive does best: project collaboration and management.
Ready To Tackle 2023?
Every year holds new challenges ahead. Hive helps to position teams to address the challenges and capitalize on the key opportunities in 2023. If you relate to any of these team hurdles, Hive’s capabilities and features are already helping many companies address and prepare for 2023’s challenges, and can help you too.
