3 Solutions To 3 Problems Faced By Big Companies

While a startup may envy the established market position of a big company, the truth is that all companies face numerous problems. For large companies, the right strategy, and the appropriate technology appears to be the best solution for some of their most pressing problems.

While there is a long list of problems that large companies have to tackle, ranging from increasing government regulations to keeping up with the pace of technological growth, many companies are hampered by three critical issues:

One, they are paying more in taxes than they can afford to maintain a positive revenue stream.

Two, they are wrestling with the problem of how to motivate a large number of disengaged employees.

Three, they are drowning in big data. As a result, they are missing important insights on how to capitalize on emerging market trends.

3 Possible Solutions

Let’s take a look at some possible solutions to these three pressing problems:

Problem #1: Paying too much in taxes.

Large companies can legally lower their tax rate by applying for tax credits and incentives. These may be offered because of a hiring policy or because of where the firm is located. Taking advantage of these tax cuts can offset business costs by lowering the effective tax rate.

However, the challenge is identifying all tax credits and incentives available, as well as maintaining compliance because of time restraints or complexity. Apparently, the only way to do this effectively appears to be to hire hundreds of specialists to comb through a database of about 3,000 incentives. Obviously, this is not a practical solution. Fortunately, it’s possible to outsource the search for applicable tax credits and incentives to providers who offer a comprehensive, cloud-based solution and industry experts.

Problem #2: A Disengaged Workforce

Many corporate managers suspect that their company is not the only one where the number of disengaged workers is at a dangerous level. These suspicions are actually backed by some hard data. According to a SkilledUp article, entitled, Signs of Employee Disengagement and What To Do About It, Gallup poll revealed that only 31% of employees in the United States were not engaged by their jobs. Meanwhile, 17.5% said that they were actively disengaged. Reading behind the lines, “actively disengaged” actually meant they hated their jobs and did as little as possible when they showed up for work.

This is a huge problem because a business that has a high percentage of disengaged workers struggles to get its skilled professionals to deliver the solutions necessary to capture sufficient market share. While there have been many creative solutions to stimulate a more exciting corporate culture, the problem might be better resolved by hiring the right people in the first place. Prevention, in other words, may be better than finding a cure.

In truth, the hiring process has always been challenging for both employers and employees. Despite their use of careful screening, employers often end up with mediocre employees, people who did not live up to their carefully-crafted resumes because they quickly became disengaged from their work. Meanwhile, employees with the perfect qualifications are often overlooked because of many subtle biases in the hiring process. For instance, their resume may have been rejected before anyone ever saw it because the resume scanning machine did not detect enough keywords that corresponded with the job description.

One solution to get out of this bind for both parties has been the use of video in recruiting. A good video appears to be worth more than a thousand words. For recruiters and hiring managers, a professional video appears to be one of the best ways to describe a corporate culture and invite the interest of applicants who would be most interested in the work. Using smartphones, HR are making personalized videos of job descriptions to send to high-value candidates. These videos might even cover brief interviews with top employees who describe why they love their jobs.

Problem #3: Managing Big Data

For some big companies, big data is a big problem. Now thanks to a new form of cognitive computing called IBM Watson, it’s possible to get answers to customer’s questions, pull out key information from all documents, and get insights on patterns across data.

Currently, humanity is generating two-and-a-half quintillion bytes of data a day. Since much of this data is unstructured, big businesses are drowning in it. Much of it is social media information and documentation with qualitative data. Because this data does not lie in a singular database, existing algorithms can’t parse it down. However, this is all changing due to IBM Watson, a new cognitive computing service. Many industries are now using IBM Watson to achieve astonishing results. For instance, in telecommunications, a major service provider now indexes thousands of manuals, documents, and images in minutes.

Why Big Companies Fail

One reason why many big companies collapse is not due to financial mismanagement, not being able to keep up with the competition, or failing to comply with increasingly strict government regulations. While the press might have a field day speculating about why a large, established company suddenly goes out of business because they were not using good organization strategies to identify their major constraints and resolve them. However, through the use of the right strategy and incorporating the right technological solutions, it’s possible to resolve even the most difficult problems, including missing out on tax credits and incentives, hiring the right people, and getting insights by organizing previously unstructured data.