by Katy Beloof To compete in today’s marketplace, organizations can no longer rely solely on the old standbys of growing revenue and reducing costs. Increasingly, the success of enterprise organizations depends their ability to engage customers, accelerate product development, and attract world-class talent ahead of the competition.
These new business needs are fundamentally changing the nature of work. According to an October 2018 commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Smartsheet, Deliver On Top Business Objectives With Collaborative Work Management, businesses are seeing:
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. Information workers spend a significant amount of time on manual, repetitive work. More than 40% of respondents to a recent survey said they spend at least a quarter of their work week on manual, repetitive tasks. And nearly 60% of information workers estimated they’d save at least six hours each week if these aspects of their jobs were automated.
Those same information workers also see the potential benefits of automation. Sixty-nine percent think automation will reduce time wasted on repetitive work, and 66% say automation will help eliminate human error. Over 75% of respondents say automation will free up time for more interesting, valuable assignments — work they are eager to tackle. Steve Brown on October 20, 2016
Talking with customers, I’m constantly amazed by how they use Smartsheet. They use us to launch rockets, open retail stores, build skyscrapers, plan world-class events, improve processes, and everything in-between. Recently, a friend asked me why people shouldn’t just use Google Sheets instead of Smartsheet? Fair question despite the fact that he draws his paycheck from Google. After sharing with him that Google itself is a large Smartsheet customer, I offered the following five reasons customers manage work in Smartsheet over Google Sheets. First, a confession....I like Google Apps. I use them often in my current job. This is being written in a Google Doc. If you're looking for someone to hate on Google, I'll disappoint. Katy Beloof on August 15, 2017
In today’s digital workplace, employees must work together more efficiently to get more done. Customer-obsessed firms take an outside-in approach, relying on collaboration to win, serve, and retain customers. Yet with all of the enterprise collaboration tools at hand, teams still rely heavily on email. Despite the rapid adoption of collaboration tools, email use in many companies has increased. Forrester estimates that due to the interruption-driven nature of email activities, the amount of time spent on an actual task activity is reduced to 18%. This means that in a 40 hour work week, less than one day is spent on actual work. Information workers are seeking a way to organize their work, and companies are turning to enterprise collaboration apps to help employees better manage work. Mark Mader on October 18, 2016
Even if you aren’t a baseball aficionado, the movie Moneyballdelivers valuable business insights on how to gain a competitive edge. Focus on the problem. Think differently. And remember, not everything worth doing is going to be easy. Yet, of all the lessons in Moneyball, the one that really resonates with me is this: “Change the game.” Observe something in the world that could be better, then do something about it. From the early days of Smartsheet, we saw something in the world that could be made better: remove the drag on innovation and the completion of work by doing away with spreadsheets as the primary way to track and manage work. To change the game, we knew the market had to quickly move from legacy work management tools to next generation technologies that support the competitive advantage and innovation that individuals, teams and business leaders seek. |
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