Most information workers are expelling incredible amounts of energy to deliver their day-to-day work. Everyone has greater demands on their time and staff are working furiously sharing information over email and a share drive – technologies we have been using since the mid-1990s.
If we still used the same phones from 1997, we would all be enjoying a fun game of Snake on our Nokia 6110s before getting out our Filofax to check the meeting location, then leafing through a street directory to find the address.
A recent workforce productivity study showed that the average organisation loses more than 20% — or, more than one day each week — of its productive capacity to "organisational drag," or the existing structures and processes that inhibit productivity. Last year, Harvard Business Review reported that this widespread organizational drag problem costs the US economy more than $3 trillion each year in lost output.[1]
Another study by IT staffing firm Robert Half Technology discovered that employees spend an average of 22 minutes every day dealing with IT-related issues. From apps not working as intended to poor network performance or authentication and access issues, workers are losing another two weeks per year in productivity[2].
This is not a new problem, and many technologies exist to address workplace productivity, so many that it can seem like too much effort to research, assess, select and then convince IT to install them.
Even when a new business tool is implemented and made available to the organisation, it is often unsuccessful, and people continue with what they know – updating WIP documents in Excel and emailing them to the team. SharePoint is still used as an intranet and a file share, but not as the collaborative workplace that was first imagined. Your CRM might be full of incorrect information and people resent using it. Yammer was meant to be the answer to too much email, but aside from a few areas of the business that are keen users, it does not provide enough tangible business benefits.
It’s frustrating for management and can make it difficult to get further budget approved when the last productivity project did not deliver what was anticipated. It would be understandable to lose heart.
But we can’t afford to lose productivity. Every lost document, every meeting lengthened by 15 minutes, every new idea withering on the vine is costing your organisation. How long will your competitors leave things as they are? How long before your industry is disrupted with a new, lean entrant who can deliver faster and cheaper?
It’s time to act, and there is help out there. Download our guide, the 10 keys to transform your Intranet into a Digital Workplace for the top intranet essentials to help your organisation on the journey towards more productive and collaborative working.
[1] http://www.ciodive.com/news/humanizing-the-digital-workplace-computing-experience/439619/
[2] http://www.itproportal.com/features/digital-dexterity-in-the-workplace/
