Top 5 Tools for Improving Enterprise Productivity

These productivity-enhancing tools can help large-scale workforces add valuable hours to each day.

Improving productivity for a small team is a relatively simple challenge. Improving productivity across an entire organization is a much more challenging prospect.

Enterprise-level organizations like Fortune 500 companies, public institutions, and government agencies are often much less responsive to technological  change than a plucky startup. While smaller companies can quickly boost productivity by adopting new technologies and workflows, larger enterprises have complex acquisitions and deployment processes to keep in mind.

This is important because more often than not, those tech-forward startups are the ones setting tomorrow’s customer and employee expectations. Enterprises have to keep up, and deploying best-in-class productivity technologies is part of the deal.

Enterprise-level productivity solutions need to be scalable, compliant, and customizable. It’s no secret that many of today’s large-scale technology initiatives fall short of their transformational potential. Whether implementing a new relational database or an employee tracking app, choosing the right software and introducing it appropriately can make a significant difference.

Enterprise Productivity and Collaboration Pain Points

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Wide-scale technology investments need to produce measurable results. Enterprise technology leaders considering the deployment of new solutions must first identify the pain points those solutions intend to address.

The reality is productivity is under siege from all directions in an enterprise, as the following stats reveal:

• 58% of workers spend at least one hour a day looking for information.
• More than 80% of workers and executives say that lack of collaboration is responsible for workplace failures.
• The average worker spends up to 28 hours of the 40-hour workweek writing emails and coordinating with others in the organization.
• Workers spend an average of six weeks per year looking for lost documents.

All of these pain points have a negative impact on productivity. Yet enterprises don’t have to simply accept these productivity losses as part of the cost of doing business. Solutions like employee productivity monitoring can drastically reduce workplace productivity losses and help large, distributed teams collaborate more efficiently.

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5 Tools Enterprises Can Use to Boost Productivity

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We’ve identified some of the most valuable tools enterprise teams can use to reduce waste and inefficiency. Some of these are well-known technologies, while others may be new to you. A productivity-oriented tech stack should include solutions that address the areas of work life most prone to productivity slippage:

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Communication Solutions That Accommodate Diverse Content Formats

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Clear communication is essential to maintaining predictable productivity growth at the enterprise level. Employees, managers, and executives should all feel supported by their communication tools, rather than weighed down by them.

Being able to choose the format of communication is an important part of what enables technology-oriented enterprise employees to thrive in today’s environment. Every employee has a personal preference when it comes to communication. Some prefer live calls, others work best in text environments, while others rely on meetings to read and respond to other participants.

An integrated communication platform should enable all of these capabilities throughout the enterprise. Solutions like Slack, Zoom, and Skype are considered Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) technologies. They offer native integration with productivity solutions like Office 365 and Google Docs, as well as employee tracking apps.

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Intuitive Collaboration Tools Designed for Workflow Management

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Your employees can’t effectively collaborate without a clear understanding of the larger workflow structure they’re a part of. While isolated, assembly line-style production remains the norm for building cars and heavy machinery, this twentieth-century approach isn’t flexible enough to meet the needs of the modern enterprise office.

Instead, the modern enterprise needs to be able to route deliverables between different departments according to varied workflow demands. Automation efforts need to take these contingencies into account, or risk letting valuable projects “fall through the cracks”.

Many enterprise-level technologies enable collaborative, workflow-oriented management structures. Asana, Trello, and ProofHub are good examples of this approach in action. Slack also performs well here thanks to its integration-ready developer platform.

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Easy Scheduling, Task Management, and File-sharing

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Your project management platform should make it easy for leaders and employees to create task lists, schedule projects, and make changes to deliverables. The more intuitive this system is, the better your organization’s adoption rate will be.

Any large enterprise project is likely to contain multiple moving parts, with a significant number of dependencies throughout every department in the organization. Comprehensive scheduling software allows project managers to assign and verify tasks while meeting deadlines, issuing automatic reminders or team alerts when deadlines are approaching. You may be able to integrate an employee tracking app into your ERP as well.

Many enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions include all of these capabilities. SAP is a well-known leader in the field, along with Oracle Fusion Cloud and Microsoft Dynamics 365. Implementing an ERP is a complex, delicate process that requires expert consultation.

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Time Tracking and Employee Monitoring Software

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The influential management leader Peter Drucker is credited with first saying, “you can’t improve what you can’t measure.” Yet enterprise leaders looking for ways to boost employee productivity often neglect to measure their employees’ performance in a standardized, accurate way.

Employee monitoring software enables managers to report employee performance according to key performance indicators on an individual basis. It goes beyond time and attendance monitoring to generate clear data on each employee’s actual activity on a day-to-day basis, in real-time.

By relying on reports from an employee activity tracker, enterprise leaders can identify top talent and manage productivity far more effectively than simple monthly output reports enable. Staff tracking software can tell managers exactly who spends the most time on certain tasks, and who takes the least time to complete the same tasks, enabling significant workflow efficiencies through benchmarking in the process.

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Cybersecurity Solutions That Don’t Impact Usability

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In today’s cybercrime environment, enterprise cybersecurity is a value-generating asset, not a cost. Large-scale organizations have a wide surface area that’s vulnerable to attack, and they must protect their data and assets with best-in-class technology.

At the same time, most high-performance cybersecurity technology negatively impacts user productivity. If employees have to wait several minutes for a file to clear the enterprise sandbox, that production time is lost.

Enterprises need to consider cybersecurity solutions that enable them to keep customer and employee tracking data safe without adding too much onto employees’ workloads in the process.

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Technology is Key to Enterprise Productivity

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Balancing employee needs with enterprise productivity demands is a delicate process. The choice of tools you use will have a major impact on the success of your productivity-boosting efforts. Enterprise leaders who deploy and integrate next-generation employee monitoring software can reliably measure and improve productivity throughout the organization.

Real-time reporting, often facilitated by a time monitoring app, has become a must-have feature for improving the productivity of enterprise workflows. Whether focusing on cybersecurity or employee work efficiency, the ability to measure, analyze, and interpret data is core to establishing solid long-term growth.