Digital tools helpful in increasing productivity
• Technology is increasingly required to support strategy and culture in the modern connected enterprise
Telecommunications networks and particularly the internet, have changed people’s lives forever. Metcalfe’s Law explains why they have become so powerful: A network’s value increases exponentially with its size — the more people use it, the more their participation enhances it.
This is generally a good thing, but not always. Metcalfe’s Law has a dark side when it affects workplace productivity.
As the cost of initiating oneto-one and one-to-many interactions drops to zero, the number of interactions increases exponentially. By our estimates, a senior executive who in the 1970s might have received fewer than 1,000 outside phone calls, telexes or telegrams a year now faces a tidal wave of 30,000 e-mails and other electronic communications.
Connected enterprises and automated scheduling have driven meeting time through the roof. At one company we analysed as part of an organisationwide time-management study, employees spent a staggering 300,000 hours a year supporting a single weekly executive committee meeting.
In reporting on this finding, The Guardian put it best: “Meetings: Even more of a soulsucking waste of time than you thought.” In our research, a typical manager burned 16 hours a week managing e-mails and attending unnecessary meetings. Useless meetings alone cost businesses more than $30bn a year in the US, according to Atlassian.
Given how much this kind of wasted energy saps employee morale, it is no wonder a global Gallup survey found only 13% of employees are engaged at work, with “engaged” defined as being psychologically committed to their jobs and likely to be making positive contributions to their organisations.
This degree of lost productivity is corrosive. But it also represents a significant opportunity. Our experience indicates that the overall productivity increase possible in the modern enterprise can range as high as 30%.
The question is: How can leaders capture that upside by closing the wide productivity gap that plagues so many modern organisations?
The answer is part “analogue” and part “digital”. The analogue tools are old school: strategy and culture. The first foundational element for productivity is a strategy that is clearly stated, effectively communicated and linked to frontline priorities. People need to embrace the mission and buy in, understanding how it translates into specific behaviours and actions required of them.
The second foundational element is a culture that values disciplined and engaged interaction. It is oriented towards action and results. It rejects swirl, indecision and collaboration for collaboration’s sake.
These analogue management methods are essential, but in the modern connected enterprise they are no longer sufficient. Improved productivity increasingly requires using technology to support strategy and culture.
One aspect of this is using communication and collaboration platforms to increase engagement when people collaborate. Simple changes such as replacing audio conferencing with video can shame the more than 70% of attendees who admit to parallel processing during meetings into engaging.
Community-based collaboration platforms versus blast e-mail can also serve to increase focus and engagement.
It is also essential to identify organisational obstacles that prevent workers from focusing on their most important priorities. Increasingly, that means using analytics to see where breakdowns and waste occur so they can be tackled proactively, through frontline and management feedback loops.
There is a growing number of digital solutions that can help companies enable, analyse and empower their workforce to make it more productive. Some examples include analysing a company’s e-mail, calendar and customer relationship management
COMMUNITY-BASED COLLABORATION PLATFORMS VERSUS BLAST E-MAIL CAN INCREASE FOCUS
data to see how people are spending their time.
This creates feedback loops within the enterprise that help individuals and the organisation as a whole manage the unintended consequences of Metcalfe’s Law by:
● Providing executives with insight into the “organisational load” they create — the meetings they schedule, the e-mails they send and the other ways they impose on people’s time;
● Melding collaboration platforms into a specific workflow — product design, for example, or an important ad-hoc corporate initiative such as a merger. That helps focus collaboration and content within a context;
● Creating feedback loops around meeting-specific performance to help shift culture;
● Applying heuristics that link individual behaviours within a function to individual success. That data can be provided to frontline individuals and their managers to sharpen development and performance; and
● Creating team- and org-based employee engagement surveys and follow-up loops. It creates visibility and focuses attention on what is detracting from engagement.
Sunshine is the best disinfectant, as they say. Creating visibility around these issues is incredibly valuable in diagnosing where dysfunction is lurking within the enterprise.
It is critical to protect employee privacy, while creating a unique view of what is really happening within the organisation. But existing tools, those that render the data anonymous, for instance, can solve that problem without compromising insights’ value.
Digital technology has dramatically enhanced a company’s ability to defeat the dark side of Metcalfe’s Law. Realising the full potential of the modern connected enterprise requires good “analogue management” and better digital tools to remain focused on the priorities and culture that make an organisation successful.