What is Evernote (and why you need it)

Evernote is your corporate memory. Basically it’s a filing system of folders(called notebooks in Evernote) with notes inside them; and each note can have multiple tags that they can be searched under.

But … you don’t need a filing cabinet and filing clerk to organise everything; you don’t have a DRIVE x where all files are but no-one can find them; and you don’t have 17 versions of the same docs with different file names.

And it’s all available to anyone (with the correct access credentials) to access anytime, anywhere with any laptop/computer, smart phone or tablet.

And you can store audio, video, webpages, images, google docs, pdf’s, word docs hand written notes – anything that can be stored electronically.

For instance I have a Windows laptop, android phone and tablet, my partner, Cate, has the same except mac, and my daughter, Zoe the same but windows – we have various notebooks – some we all share and others just Cate and I share.

But we can all read them on any of our devices, anywhere. Cate is in Canberra at the moment with her new grandson, and she had to go to the bank today to discuss a loan she has –she needed some paperwork to show them – she had all the data she needed on her iPhone in Evernote.

And you can allow access to different notebooks to all employees, just some, or external people and give each of them the ability to edit or not.

WHY DO YOU NEED IT?

Studies now say that now very few people will stay in the same job for more than a year (or maybe 2).

High turnover is just a fact of life now which means that you need new people to be able to get up to speed with your company as quickly as possible. Also when people leave your business, you want their knowledge of your customers and products to stay with the company so their  replacement  can access that knowledge easily and quickly.

Research shows that  salespeople  spend 31%  of  their time searching for the correct information AND 81% of sales and marketing executives say that searching for the correct information is their number 1 area for improvement.

In the modern world people are connected online most of their lives – they need more than paper to be convinced of anything – they need videos, audio etc.

Recent studies have shown that in the workplace 80% of emails are a waste of time, and that emails take up 28% of workers’ time.

Evernote solves all of these issues and it is one of those programs that most people find easy and  intuitive  to use.

Now for some practical examples – say I am working on a project – I am collaborating with these people here. So I set Evernote up so they can see everything I’m doing. I can send one person a “workchat” which is an internal texting method, then we can look at the same image or text and discuss what   we need to discuss (no email) Or I can setup a tag so everyone on the team will see the tasks they need to do tomorrow morning. (no emails).

This team (management) over here don’t want to know how we got the project to work or how much work it took – they just want to see where we’re up to   on every Friday afternoon. Evernote will do that (no emails).

I’ve got some great ideas for the project that I  found  on facebook (it was for work – honest!) I can add a webpage to Evernote very  easily  and then annotate and share that with my working partner. We can both annotate the same page together.

And if another employee starts working on a similar project to mine (she’s not aware that our projects are similar) then Evernote will find what I’m doing and ask the employee if my work is worth her looking at.

This is just a very brief overview of how Evernote van help your business to succeed, grow and profit.

It takes some planning to setup efficiently but then is very easy and intuitive for your employees to use.

It is  relatively  cheap, extremely customisable and very robust.

Check it out here.
(there is a free version, and if you purchase a paid version, I do get a small commission)