Every good manager is after the same goal: keeping employees productive by making their jobs as efficient as possible — all while increasing the company’s bottom line. It’s why continual investments are made in employee training and development programs. But, what if instead of investing more money in programs, you could simply implement a few new technologies that could take your workplace productivity from surviving to thriving?
With all the data you undoubtedly manage, your team needs an easy and efficient way to access and use it all. The good news is that there are a number of digitization tools and tactics you can use to connect your databases, break through inefficient workflows, and streamline processes.
Workplace Productivity is Within Your Reach
Workplace productivity is achieved when your team efficiently accomplishes tasks and goals over a period of time. But manual, recurring tasks can eat up a lot of valuable time for your staff. Luckily, there are time-saving digitization tactics that can help! Try implementing these game-changing methods for big long-term wins:
1. Use integrations to bring all your systems together.
Most organizations use a number of tools to collect, transfer, and maintain valuable information about their customers or products. It sounds like a good idea, but it can be difficult for employees to manage these disparate systems, resulting in a loss of efficiency through manual data entry and compromised data integrity. Linking these systems together through powerful integrations allows employees to hop across data silos to keep data continuously flowing. The best part is that many of the tech solutions you already use offer pre-built integrations to connect your CRM, project management software, payment processor, or other systems so the data your employees need to is right at their fingertips. This way, you can avoid wasting time, ensure consistency across systems, and prevent detrimental data mishaps along the way.
2. Streamline communication through a single data tool.
Email. Sticky notes. Chat. Phone. There are countless ways your employees communicate with each other. But without a single place for workflow communications to take place, team members are left out of the latest project updates, new document versions are overlooked, and employees are left running in circles just trying to get work completed.
Tools that consolidate workflows and offer centralized communication keep all relevant team members in-the-know, in turn helping employees become more productive through the ability to track approvals, send automated reminders, leave notes, and better collaborate across departments. Make sure the solutions you’re using (from lead qualification to document generation) offer a way to track conversations and versioning so employees stay informed and work is never duplicated.
3. Create a central location for all data storage.
One of the top ways that employees lose productivity is by bouncing back and forth from multiple systems and storage locations to find data. By centralizing all your data in a single location, you can minimize the time it takes to find important files, allowing more time to actually get work done.
Identify a single hub that employees can continually access for centralized data storage. This might be a popular solution like Dropbox or Google Drive, or you could try a tool that’s native to one of your vendors allowing you to send populated documents right to specific folders. No switching between systems? Yes please!
4. Foster a productive atmosphere.
While digital productivity tools can help tremendously, it’s important to remember that the employees who will use them are human. Oftentimes, productivity is a mindset, and to achieve true ROI on the systems you’ve invested in, your team members need to be willing participants in using them consistently and correctly. Is your office set up for maximum productivity? Does it invite interaction and creativity without creating too many distractions? From better workplace design to good old fashioned mood boosters and goal setting, aiming for ultimate productivity also means investing in your team.
Transform Your Workplace Productivity
At Formstack, we’re crazy about productivity and helping other teams achieve it. That’s why we’ve built a complete workplace productivity platform to transform the way people collect information and put it to work.
If you’re interested in more productivity tips, real-world examples of workflow automation in play, and common pitfalls you need to avoid, check out our Formstack Productivity Report. Download the report today!
