Tips on how to improve business productivity.
Productivity is such a buzzword right now, yet its definition is so vague. It’s often repeated several times throughout the year at conferences and meetings and then long forgotten in practice. The reason for this is that many business managers and leaders don’t know the true meaning of productivity in business. Business productivity can mean many things for different industries.
Here’s a quick guide to what productivity looks like across businesses and a few actionable ideas on how to make it actually happen in your company.
Increase and improve business productivity in internal communication:
Communication is the veins of any organization, large or small. However, communication is rarely improved or updated frequently and is thought of as an aspect of company process that takes care of itself. In many larger organizations, communication is so outdated and hindered by formality, that it takes up more than half an employee’s work day. Email chains and conference calls leave people out of information and waste time. So, what does productive communication look like? Communication is productive when employees are able to communicate in a way that is transparent, in real time, and recordable. Business chat platforms are one of the best solutions for this. Business chat platforms with video calls integrated cover all the bases in terms of productive communication.
Improve productivity in task management while running your business
Employees only spend, on average, three hours per work day productive and 90% of all projects finish later than their deadline. Clearly, we have a problem simply getting things done. A huge part of this is a general disorganization and lack of focus for both entire departments and individual employees. There’s a lot of talk about tasks with small actionable steps taken to make them happen. Often, employees have their own idea of what their to-do list is. But it doesn’t always line up with the team’s end goal or they have little direction towards the goal entirely. It’s proven that clear direction and creating specific goals boosts productivity and helps create highly effective teams. A task management platform is an easy way to make projects and daily to-do lists more actionable for teams. They are easy to implement and scale for companies of any size. Task management platforms with business chat built in are ideal as you can discuss and then create actionable tasks right away so productivity becomes part of your process.
A more productive structure:
Here’s another overused and rarely understood buzzword: innovation. For many companies, innovation is just coming up with “new ideas” or new products that may or may not actually contribute to greater profits or savings. Innovation can be much more than this and should be thought of as so to actually be a productive, valuable goal to focus on. Innovation should be thought of as new opportunities to expand into and new solutions to save time and money. Many companies miss the mark by not creating an internal structure in which all areas and levels of the company can communicate and discover new opportunities and solutions. For a structure that discovers and brings new ideas to life fast, it has to be flatter. The larger the company, the harder this is. Luckily, digital workspace platforms where everyone can be logged in working together no matter where they physically really help large companies feel like small, agile startups.
All around, business productivity is a bit of an ambiguous term with many different meanings. But by understanding its importance, how it permeates all areas of business and the actionable ways to make it tangible, is the difference between failure and success for many companies in the next 10 years, as technology further evens the playing field. For a great start to improving productivity for your team, try Hibox for free.
