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by Staff Writer It seems like almost nothing changes faster today than technology. Blink and you’ll see new innovations – as well as new threats. Alongside this tremendous change, we’re witnessing unprecedented demands on IT professionals – everywhere from cybersecurity to platform migrations to the cloud to demand for new and updated hardware that fits the latest market trends. While demand for IT professionals is going through the roof, the talent pool is not necessarily growing at the same speed.  by Katy Beloof Automation in the enterprise is transforming how people work. Yet rather than taking jobs away from workers, automation has the power to complement their work and help them be even more effective.
Respondents in Smartsheet’s Automation in the Workplace report estimate that the time savings from automation can add up to six or more hours a week – nearly a full work day for most employees. Automation contributes to a decrease in data entry and processing errors that can erode the reliability of data, and reduce the time spent on manual tasks, freeing up workers for more meaningful, high-value tasks. The softer benefits of this extra time – including the improved employee satisfaction that comes from replacing repetitive, mundane tasks with more interesting challenges and the added business value and innovation this new work can drive – might be even more remarkable. by Staff Writer If you want your business to succeed, speed isn’t just important — it’s everything.
“Speed is fundamental,” says Heidi Pozzo, an executive coach for C-suite business leaders and author of Leading the High-Performing Company. “Speed is the difference in satisfying customer needs, it impacts the cost structure of the business, and it allows the company to be high-performing, not underperforming. It really is fundamental to how a business operates.” When businesses are slow to execute, the costs range from missed opportunities to grow market share to poor employee morale, Pozzo says. A culture of fast, smart execution is a sign of strong corporate health. How can your team pick up the pace? Here are eight questions to ask yourself to help speed up business execution within your organization. by David Lotz Everyone has heard the saying, “If only I had one more hour in the day.” Often we’re the ones saying it. Those of us with full lives know the value of an hour, and are always looking for ways to make the most of our time. Well, I’m excited to share a story with you about how I spent five minutes over the summer setting up Smartsheet automated actions and how doing so has saved me an hour each workday since. A Manual Process Keeps Me Up At Night by Stephen Branstetter  I covet more time: more time for important work, more time with my spouse and kids, more time with friends, more time to work out and get healthy.
I used to hate creating weekly status reports. While important, they felt like a waste of time. Often, my status reports were simply a manual process of collecting data that already exists elsewhere mixed with tracking down people for further clarification. So I started playing around with ways to simplify the process and save time using Smartsheet. Automated actions are simple solutions that save me and my team time, reduce the number of status meetings, create more consistency in the frequency of our reports, and improve data quality. And these benefits free us up to focus on more rewarding projects and less on manual, repetitive tasks. by Katy Beloof on January 24, 2018 According to Gallup’s recent State of the Global Workplace report, 85% of employees are not engaged — or are actively disengaged — at work. The economic consequence of this translates to approximately $7 trillion in lost productivity.
Gallup defines this overwhelming majority of disengaged employees as those who consistently give you their time, but not their best efforts. These are employees who show up on time, put in their eight or nine hours, and head home, without contributing their best work or ideas. Finding and retaining top talent has been a concern for companies for quite some time. But keeping that talent engaged at work proves equally challenging — and failing to do so is costly. There may be an answer to this lost productivity in using automation to free up employee time to focus on more meaningful, business-critical work. by Katy Beloof on May 29, 2018 - Smartsheet Blog Identifying the right technology platform to help your business speed up operations takes a lot of work. But ensuring the adoption of that platform across the organization is a challenge in itself. Here are four tips on how to accelerate the adoption of your new SaaS platform. You’ll want to consider taking action on some of these before you invest in new technology, to make sure your business users are set up for success. 1. Reduce the Burden on ITWhenever possible, select software that will reduce the burden on IT, rather than adding tasks to your backlog. During your purchasing process, consider what implementation will look like and what the onboarding process entails for business users.
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. |
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