by Stephen Danos on April 5, 2018
In the past, we’ve looked at how automation improves employee engagement and surveyed information workers for our 2017 Automation Report. The report showed that there are three key processes — data collection, approvals, and updates — that, when automated, give people more time to focus on high-value work.
But automation doesn’t just free up time for workers. It can also improve visibility and create accountability across an organization. By giving teams access to the same information across the board — a single source of truth to work from — they can more quickly move forward on projects. Clearer Communication
While communication tools such as email, instant messaging applications, and team collaboration software have their uses, information often gets lost in the shuffle. Sifting through messages and status updates across multiple platforms is not only a tedious process, but it creates knowledge gaps.
Teams can’t quickly and effectively communicate changes to projects or processes when information is siloed. There’s no single source of truth, making it difficult to move work forward. Using a work management platform that automates time-consuming, manual tasks makes a noticeable difference. For example, instead of wasting time racing around the office gathering metric reports from stakeholders or sending status update emails, workers can set up automated update requests to gather the information they need to get projects done. Then, that information is consolidated in one place for anyone on the project to reference.
by Katy Beloof on March 12, 2018
Is organizational complexity making it difficult for your teams to successfully accomplish projects on time and within budget? Multiple communication channels combined with cross-functional teamwork can cloud accountability and muddle decision-making authority, resulting in a lack of employee ownership in a project or process.
One solution to this lack of ownership and its effect on performance is “clear pressure”, a form of peer pressure based on the idea of giving employees real-time visibility into the progress of everyone’s work, so they can hold each other — and themselves — to a higher standard. But are the tools that provide visibility enough to create a culture of clear pressure? Or do leaders need to think more broadly about a solution?
What’s the best way to stop your team from maximizing their potential in the new year? By unintentionally impeding progress. It’s time to ask yourself — have you turned into a bottleneck?
It’s all too easy to become a hindrance for progress, and little things that make it challenging for your team to move quickly add up to one big stop sign. Luckily there are a few ways to identify whether or not you’re the problem. Here are three signs that indicate you are a bottleneck – and what you can do to get out of your team’s way.
As initiatives get bigger and headcounts get smaller at large organizations, business leaders are challenged to do more with less. Despite their best efforts, it’s easy for productivity to tank when time-wasting workplace conventions and habits continue.
Common unproductive tasks can lead workers to spend less than half of their time on their main jobs. One survey found that U.S. employees at enterprise companies of 1000 or more employees only spend 45% of their time on primary job duties. The other 55% is spent on email, meetings, administrative tasks, and interruptions. Here’s a look at five time-wasters that are draining your team’s productivity and taking time away from creative and innovative work, and what you can do to help them get more of the important stuff done.
When was the last time your department’s best new idea came at the end of a day of data entry or back-to-back status meetings? History’s greatest innovators (Albert Einstein, Warren Buffet, and Bill Gates to name a few) regularly tout the importance of creating space for reflection and deep thought to unlock their best ideas, yet employees are busier than ever and logging increasing hours. Even with these longer hours, workers report they spend almost half of their time on repetitive, low-value tasks.
This is significant time that is taken away from high-value, innovative work. So what’s at the root of this rampant repetitive work? Rework caused by human error, suboptimal meeting culture, and email overload are three of the biggest factors preventing your team from maximizing their potential. To gain a competitive edge, organizations must find a solution to remain relevant. Here’s a look at what’s keeping your team from innovation and what you can do about it.
Shipping a minimum viable product is a great way for businesses to innovate quickly and rush to market. Startups are focused on developing their products fast and shouldn’t want to slow down to address technical debt. At the same time, building on poorly written code is like building on a Jenga® tower. The longer you leave it alone the sooner you are headed for the whole thing to collapse.
Making the Case For Paying Back Technical Debt Paying back technical debt can be a difficult task to get to when the business needs new features to feed the pipeline. But technical debt isn’t all or nothing. You can account for it after shipping minimum viable product, not just when the tower has become wobbly. I make sure that a percentage of all the work we do at Smartsheet is spent in modernizing and maintaining the platform. We have a product prioritization framework that lets us allocate developers, QA, and operations folks at a fixed rate based on the work that has to be done. Business support for this type of allocation isn’t the norm. For many engineering teams, the biggest challenge with technical debt is helping the rest of the business understand the value of paying it down. As a longtime advocate for reducing technical debt, I have tried a number of different strategies to articulate the value of writing code to reduce technical debt and keep my teams happy. In general, I like to look at three dimensions to make my case: scale, developer productivity (happiness), and reliability.
Businesses are continually asking information workers to do more with less in order to maintain a competitive edge. In his book, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, Cal Newport argues that the ability to focus without distraction is becoming an increasingly valuable skill for workers, as it helps them produce improved results in a shorter amount time.
According to Newport, deep work is “the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It’s a skill that allows you to quickly master complicated information and produce better results in less time.” Yet with the prevalence of distractions in today’s workplace, focused work can be a difficult skill to cultivate.
There’s been a lot of talk lately about the promise of automation to transform business, but most of the discussion has focused on self-driving cars and robots. These are significant advances, no doubt about it -- but if you focus on only these high-profile examples, you might miss a much larger opportunity: automating the repetitive work performed daily by millions of information workers.
Automation in the office isn’t new, but efforts to date have focused on a handful of key processes that are hardwired into applications. To get them up and running, the business user needs to involve IT, which adds time and expense. What’s more, the resulting solution is built for a single use case, leaving the vast majority of work in the enterprise untouched and unautomated. The far greater opportunity lies in automating the great diversity of loosely defined, unstructured work that business users perform every day, in every department. Although this has traditionally been hard to do, doing so frees up valuable time for workers to focus on higher-value work. How much time does your team actually save when you use technology to get your work done on a daily basis? The benefits of technology aren’t hard to characterize, but quantifying time savings can be, especially with emerging technology like work management platforms.
Smartsheet commissioned a study conducted by Forrester Consulting1 this past summer to quantify the total economic impact for enterprise customers, and the findings are significant: As shown by a composite organization, Smartsheet helps business leaders improve their productivity by 15% – saving over 300 hours each year. |
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