The 6 Social Pillars for Optimizing Productivity

Today’s workplace is changing rapidly. Modern corporate cultures need to build on the following six pillars as the foundation for optimizing productivity. Learning how to leverage your workforce through digital transformation; empower social collaboration; and use existing talent, increases engagement while simultaneously enhances productivity. It’s a big challenge but done properly, the cost savings are bigger.  

1 - Internal Networking for Inclusion and Innovation

Networking inside the office hasn’t always been a popular topic and while it is important to expose your staff to external influencers, the best ideas can often come from within. Leveraging internal influencers up and down the value chain increases production, induces initiative and can be inspiring to people that don’t normally get to participate. 

Failure to gain buy-in from the wider staff can destroy the deployment of great ideas. Individual teams tend to work in silos, but an entrepreneurial mindset can be stimulated by better cross-team support and interaction. Enabling teams to establish a network with other talent across the wider organization promotes inclusion, leading to better and often ground-breaking, innovation. 

2 - The Flexible Workplace for Diversity and Accountability

Google and other forward-thinking organizations have set new precedents that form flexible working cultures where employees are measured against the successful outcomes of their tasks rather than the adherence to strict traditional work patterns. 

These non-traditional practices benefit teams across geographic barriers and time zones, supporting varying personal requirements. This additional freedom significantly widens access to the talent pool which is otherwise impossible and supports diversity.

A flexible workforce solution requires built-in accountability that empowers the employee to schedule and prioritize their working day for optimum outcomes.

3 - Engaging and Collaborating with Purpose

Optimizing engagement on each project is important, so the tools you adopt to facilitate and manage the process are crucial. Projects can be derailed through lack of directional clarity or lack of transparency on progress, both of which can be addressed with better information and better communication. Ensure that your teams are enthusiastically engaged and collaborate with a purpose. 

4 - Finding, Distributing and Using Knowledge

Loss or lack of knowledge is a major roadblock to achieving optimal operational success. Many enterprises are simply not good at finding and leveraging what they already know. To quote Lew Platt, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, "If HP knew what HP knows, it would be three times more profitable". As silly as that may sound, it is all about accessing and leveraging the information that already exists in the heads and hearts of your people. 

If time equals money, then how many manhours are you losing each week or month by teams spending time looking for and compiling data? If you could have that data readily accessible, could you put those manhours back into actual work on the project? It may seem obvious but go ahead and do the math to see how impressive the number is. 

Consider the cost of losing and onboarding new staff or a new team member midway through a project. This is where live projects can really suffer, and it directly impacts the bottom line. Do this enough and it adds up to real money and perhaps a rocky reputation with a customer. 

Solutions that enable knowledge storage in a place that is shared and easily accessed by team members is a monumental, positive change. And it goes beyond just document sharing – the successful work processes of the past need to be made available as templates on the projects of today and the future, building and improving in each iteration. 

5 - Controlling Projects in Real-Time

Productivity suffers when you don’t have real time visibility and transparency. Tracking progress in real time provides the opportunities for appropriate and timely intervention. And it’s not punitive when pillars 1, 2, 3, and 6 are in place. 

Improved social task management can help with the need to measure, learn, and move quickly to make changes to keep a project on time. 

6 - Motivating, Recognizing and Rewarding

Ensuring that people’s efforts are appreciated is important and pure financial incentives don’t work for everyone. Individuals within your workplace are motivated by different values. Simple more meaningful alternatives could be a table reservation for two to spend time with a loved one or a half-day off to care for a family member. 

Get to know individual team members so when the time comes to recognize and reward them you can do it in a way that will make them feel special, motivating them to keep up with good work. 

Work solutions that incorporate real-time recognition, rewards linked to work, and gamification reward management are moving into the market and can make a huge improvement in the morale of your organization. 

OpusView Workplace Social Software helps you build a foundation to transform your workplace

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