In the second half of our Workforce Transformation blog series, we’ll take a closer look at the 4 Ps of Digital Workforce Transformation, beginning with Productivity.

Organizations with highly engaged employees have an average 3-year revenue growth that is 2.3 times greater than companies with less engaged teams. To succeed in today’s digital landscape, your team needs to be empowered to do more with less while inspiring creativity. If you don’t give your teams the tools they need to do their jobs more efficiently and collaboratively, it is almost certain they will find a way to do so on their own, given the thousands of low-cost, easy-to-deploy solutions available on the market today.

This practice, known as “Shadow IT,” can lead to a series of issues, including increased risk of security breaches, financial waste due to investing and maintaining redundant or unnecessary software, and poor user experience due to a lack of IT oversight and support. While the individual’s productivity can be improved with the click of a button, the efficiencies of the organization at large may suffer.

The modern workforce expects rapid, agile deployments of productivity solutions that are improving and changing day-by-day. That being said, IT still has a reasonable need to maintain and control the security, cost, and user experience of the environment. While individual users will continue to seek tools that make their jobs easier, the goal of IT is to proactively address the needs of each employee, without sacrificing the agility, efficiency, and security of the organization at large. Only then can businesses truly achieve a more productive workforce.

4 Key Components of Workforce Productivity

In discussing the 4 “P”s of workforce transformation, “Productivity” is our first “P.” Let’s take a closer look at the key components that are needed to achieve workforce productivity for modern business.

• Communication: Connect with your colleagues for helpful guidance, information, and expertise
• Collaboration: Seamlessly work together with various teams. Generate, capture, and share knowledge and ideas
• Automation: Streamline business process workflows so that your team can focus on more important, value-added services
• Analytics: Make informed business decisions with relevant, accurate data

And around it all, you need to enable your team. Your team must use these tools in order to maximize ROI. Enabling them to embrace productivity tools is necessary for success – because at the end of the day, it’s the people behind the technology that power your business.

Let’s take a closer look, starting with Communication & Collaboration.

Communication & Collaboration

With more teams working remotely on a variety of devices, how can organizations best enable efficient communication and collaboration between teams? How can technology support this workforce expectation without getting in the way and creating more roadblocks?

The right Collaboration and Communication solution should:

• Generate, capture, and share knowledge and ideas
• Connect with helpful colleagues for expertise and information
•  Tap into new sources of innovation and insight
• Harness the wisdom of crowds

While Collaboration and Communication each play and important role in the productivity sphere, we believe that the concept of Collaborative Communication is the foundation of organizational productivity. They go hand-in-hand. The minute you try to separate the two, you will lose the power of both.

Automation

How much of your team’s time (and sanity) could be saved by removing the repetitive tasks from their daily routine? Studies show that 40% of a worker’s productive time is lost when switching tasks. According to Gallup, this costs the global economy $450 billion per year. With more time to focus on high-impact efforts, what potential innovations could you unlock for your organization?

There is great untapped business value in workflow automation. In the past, automation tools were either costly, challenging to implement, or impossible for an average user to master. Jump to today, and these barriers have all but disappeared thanks to recent advancements in technology.

Analytics

Finally, how do you know if you’re increasing your productivity? Where is your baseline? Productivity is often thought of as an abstract concept, but it can and should be measured. To do this, you need a way to collect, store, and analyze the massive amount of data your business produces. It’s ideal to centralize this into “a single source of truth” from which everyone can pull insights from anywhere, at any time. Imagine being able to easily track customer retentionships or buying habits, sales and staff retention, etc. What impact would that have on your business?

Just like you need butter, flour, milk and eggs to successfully bake bread, you need collaboration, communication, automation and analytics to build a successful productivity framework.