Survey results from some leading UK organisations indicate that work from home is likely to continue to be commonplace for many employees albeit on a hybrid model. Many believe that for many employees, this hybrid approach is already the new normal and a return to traditional offices full-time may be gone for good.
Certainly, technological solutions are well established, and these make remote working entirely viable; internet accessibility for most of the population is more than adequate and there’s good 4G for those areas that are still constrained by poor fixed infrastructure with widespread 5G just over the horizon. Completing the “digital accessibility” picture are highly sophisticated and rapidly evolved video conferencing as well as solutions for collaborative working.
Finally, Enterprise Business Systems are now pretty much universally available as SaaS or browser-based applications which are perfectly aligned for remote working. Enterprise VPN and other sophisticated security measures protect data and workstations.
Employee efficiency covers several elements:
- ease of performing tasks required for the role
- proficiency with tools and methods to perform
- avoidance of errors and thus the need to re-do work; the so called, “re-work” factor
- elimination of unnecessary tasks or processes that hamper productivity
Productivity is easier to quantify: how much work can the employee complete within their allocated amount of time?
Both aspects are important to both the employer and employee. The employer’s perspective is readily understood; is the employee providing a good return on investment and second, are they contributing to a positive customer experience and working environment. Importantly, employers want happy, content employees so that they can avoid expensive churn. In contrast, the employee needs to feel appreciated, they’re making a positive contribution, that they’re a member of a team and they’re meeting personal growth goals. Morale is an important factor too as this affects efficiency, productivity, and customer service.
Let’s consider five ways of improving employee efficiency and productivity:
- Ensure that irrespective of their location, employees can perform their roles with proficiency. Failing to fully exploit full benefit from existing applications software or getting to grips with a new application can play havoc with employee efficiency and productivity. Ensuring that the learning curve for new applications is well managed and minimised is critical. These factors are exacerbated in a work from home scenario as face-to-face training and assistance from colleagues is less viable.
- Establish Realistic Baseline Metrics for Key Tasks and Processes. Some employees may struggle with workload if performance goal baselines are not set correctly. All too often, assessments of how long an employee should take to perform a task are based on estimates or worse still, on “guestimates”. In contrast, Application Usage tracking and analysis can establish very accurate baseline results for tasks and processes; these also have the option of filtering on segments of users, e.g., new starters or those working on mobile devices. Furthermore, changes in performance can be investigated and appropriate small enhancements made to ensure bottlenecks or issues are addressed quickly.
- Provision of convenient Self-Service Help & Guidance. Help desks are often busy with routine application questions from users that are unfamiliar with the organisation’s application software. Sometimes questions are posed about the underlying company-specific processes that are relevant when using the software. Providing enhanced help and guidance configured for your employees, on a timely basis and accessible, “in-context” from within the application are key to efficiency and productivity.
- Consider Application Workflow. Even with contemporary business applications, there are tasks and processes can be optimised so that employees can follow a most efficient path. Workflow doesn’t necessarily need to involve heavy lifting from IT especially if it’s focused on the application UI. Digital Adoption Platforms such as Apty (dyanix.com/apty) provide workflow that can be quickly configured code-free and in a non-intrusive way that can rapidly transform the way users interact with their web / SaaS applications.
- Automation. It’s accepted that these days, the term “automation” seems to be continuously referenced in conversations on Digital Transformation. There’s no escaping the sad fact that in the typical enterprise organisation, tens or hundreds of employees perform simple tasks multiple times per day. Many of these tasks are “perfect candidates” for automation. Furthermore, employees often get frustrated at having to log on and navigate across multiple web screens to simply update a record, run a report or to access information. This is especially the case with field or remote users. Automation can include discrete chat-bot interfaces for simple tasks, and these can save considerable time and effort; typically, they’re more convenient that the host application.
Employee Efficiency & Productivity are critical to success and organisations need to ensure that the way users engage and interact with business applications is optimised.
In most businesses, processes and operations are constantly changing and so in the context of a dynamic environment, it’s important to establish skills and tools that enable your teams to embrace these changes without impacting efficiency and productivity.
