The Fundamentals of Operational Change
Enhancing productivity unquestionably improves your chances on generating a return on investment (ROI) for your business. This can manifest in quicker employee integration and training, increased business production, or greater utilization of the platform, which all accelerate the financial gains from your investment in the platform. However, defining these perceived benefits becomes challenging until you have a clear understanding of your business objectives and the level of operational change required to achieve them. After grasping these goals, you need to devise a productivity plan that ties your objectives to particular end-user tasks (workloads) and quantifiable results.
Productivity is the driving force behind every successful business. But enhancing productivity requires a deep understanding of your employees’ needs, activities, and workflows. Here are some key considerations and strategies to boost your organizational productivity:
- Understand Your Employee Discovery Process: It’s vital to understand how your employees currently find the content, expertise, and innovation they need. Ignore the technological aspect for a moment and focus on the actual processes your employees use to accomplish their tasks. Unveiling real-life scenarios may highlight gaps in business processes that can be bridged with automation or other improvements.
- Improve Content Discoverability: As new content and innovation are created, ensure that they are easily ‘findable’ for future searches. Transition the focus from ‘How do I find this?’ to ‘How do I ensure this can be found?’ Proper tagging or labeling of content, data, and artifacts within the system, although time-consuming, significantly impacts long-term productivity.
- Identify Primary Workloads: Understanding your employees’ primary workloads and their workflow is crucial. Identifying key use cases is a pivotal part of productivity planning. By analyzing how end users work, you can find ways to reduce steps, streamline workflows, and allow employees to achieve more with fewer steps.
- Automate and Refine Workloads: Evaluate how these primary workloads can be enhanced or automated. This is not a one-time activity, but should be part of your ongoing operational change management. Analyze individual workloads, and then investigate efficiencies between them. Streamlining processes and reducing waste can make a dramatic impact. This might involve using lean management techniques or integrating systems for more effective communication.
- Adapt to Change: Effective change management processes are critical. As business requirements, end-user needs, and technology evolve, maintaining productivity requires adaptation. Ensure you have a robust, transparent process to capture feedback and requests for modifications or customizations. Involving employees in the process can increase acceptance of the final outcome, even if it doesn’t meet their initial request exactly.
By incorporating these suggestions, you can improve productivity and make your organization more efficient and effective. This requires understanding your employees’ needs and working patterns, improving content discoverability, identifying and refining primary workloads, and maintaining a flexible approach to change. These steps can lead your organization towards higher productivity, better outcomes, and ultimately, greater success.
