Productivity is one of the most misunderstood words today. While it had simple connotations in a machine driven era, a digital, mobile and cloud connected world has given rise to a “productivity paradox”. Moore’s law has ensured that computing power has increased exponentially at lower incremental costs, workforce productivity levels have not mirrored this trend. This has even been the subject of an MIT case study, which has highlighted the average person’s disillusionment and even frustration with technology.
For most businesses, technology is a key asset — it gives employees the tools they need to stay productive. With an increasing proportion of workforce being engaged in some kind of information handling – the so called “information worker”, the need for technology to be able to positively and measurably impact technology has never been strident as before. However, the increasing complexity of technology – rapid advancements, equally rapid obsolescence and feature sprawl has made it more and more difficult for people to utilize technology to the fullest extent possible.
Why is information worker productivity important?
Every employee in an organization is expected to deliver a certain level of job output that would match one’s perceived skill levels. But it has been revealed through numerous studies that there is a mismatch between perceived skill levels and individual job output of a typical employee. For instance, one of the biggest barriers to productivity has been the time wasted by knowledge workers in searching for information. While today’s software tools boast of near artificial intelligence and features such as natural language query, the reality is that they are sadly underutilized, or even worse, unknown to a typical end user
Productivity is thus one of the most important levers for growth – for any organization, large or small. The importance of productivity cannot be emphasized enough:
- Leverage the most valuable asset in an organization – human capital. Research has established that employee productivity is the single largest and most significant contributor to growth and competitiveness.
- Get the most out of your technology investments – In spite of ever increasing technology investments, RoI has not been commensurate, nor tangible.
- Rationalize costs – Cost control is central to being agile and focused on growth, in good times or bad times.
How Quadra can help?
Earlier, information worker productivity was about documents, spreadsheets and slides. Today, even the average Office user is exposed to analytics software and services, mobile interfaces and cloud based tools. As computing has become ubiquitous, so has the intrusion of work into our personal lives – sometimes to detrimental effects. In a connected world, customers expect responses in real time, and this places increasing demands on employees to deliver results in real time. How does one balance this need for instant gratification with the need to balance personal and work lives? This is where mobile and cloud software step in, and this is precisely where Quadra can deliver immense value to your organization.
End users often struggle to realize the power and productivity of new technology investments. IT is usually unable to convey these to the end users due to resource and skill constraints. Having observed this trend over several years of experience in interacting with customers, we have come up with well researched methodologies and content rich business productivity Workshops. These workshops are aimed at imparting the required knowledge and skills to information workers, so that they are fully equipped to take advantage of the latest technology investments. A key feature of these workshops are that they are completely customized to suit the profile and work style of the participants.
From an executive management view point, the training results in improved individual productivity and better team collaboration. Some key benefits that have been realized by participants from our unique and tailor made workshops are:
- Find and use features relevant to one’s daily work
- Locate, act and prioritize on increasing volume of email and data
- Manage time and tasks more efficiently
- Find, use and manage information effectively