5 Ways to Improve Employee Productivity Through Technology

Improving employee productivity is becoming a major trend in the workplace with many hacks and guides offering methods for the individual employee to implement. But if you could improve every employee’s productivity at once, wouldn’t that be a loftier mission? The weakest link of a connected workplace is the computer and the network, not an employee.  By focusing on these simple IT improvements, you can dramatically increase employee performance and reduce the strain on your internal IT department or partner.

1. Backup Everything: The worse killer in productivity is a catastrophic loss of data. Having a disaster recovery plan in place is a recommended step to protecting a business and a network data loss, but what about at the smallest level? An employee work computer that crashes can be devastating to that employee’s productivity. It can also strain IT resources to recover data that isn’t backed up. Many cloud products now exist such as Carbonite, which can be installed on every employee’s machine to backup crucial data automatically, affordably, and efficiently.

2. The Office Internet: If you overhear an employee boasting about how the speed of their internet at home is faster than the work Wi-Fi, it may be time to seek an upgrade. Wi-Fi LAN speeds are constantly increasing as the internet has become more data consuming. Studies now indicate a consumer will visit a website less often if it is slower to a competitor by more than 250 milliseconds (New York Times).

Employees are on your network 40 or more hours a week, bogged down by a slow internet extrapolated to every employee over a long period of time can severely impact long term employee productivity. Ask around the office to see what the perception is, drill the IT department on the speed or test it yourself, but it may be time for a long overdue upgrade.

3. Firewall Security: Your firewall can say a lot about your business, its industry, its age, the makeup of employees and their productivity. Businesses operating in certain industries need to control access, blocking non-crucial applications and internet websites. Sometimes however, firewalls can be excessive and actually hinder productivity. Ask yourself what are the goals of the firewall; is it to limit employees so that they focus on work related functions? Is it to make them more productive? If you find the answer is, we’ve always done it this way, it could be time for a serious overhaul. Monitoring a limiting firewall can be daunting for any IT department. There is a high quantity of new sites that need to be blocked and the number of sites that are accidentally blocked is always increasing. A limiting firewall can also have an effect on the internet speed and load time of critical applications, not to mention employee morale. Find a balance, many companies have moved away from strict firewalls, putting more trust into employees.

4. Connect Employees Virtually: It became popular in the mid 2000’s to connect teams and the entire company virtually through software, most popular at the time was Microsoft’s SharePoint. Now there are hundreds of cloud based solutions to encourage virtual collaboration between employees with many offerings including social features, project management tools and more. Pick your flavor, as there are solutions for every kind of company: design shops, engineering shops, consulting organizations and more. If you have in some form a collaboration platform, it may already be outdated and in need of a replacement. Measure employee sentiment or set up Google Analytics for the collaboration site and monitor its usage. How often do employees visit the site, how long are they on it, what value do they receive? If the results are disappointing, upgrading to one of the many new cloud based solutions can be a worthwhile improvement in employee productivity.

5. Always Seek Technology to Improve Process: Tedious, time-consuming tasks and complicated multi-stakeholder processes now have multiple opportunities for technology injection. The number of Software as a Service (SAAS) applications available in the workforce today deserve serious consideration as many can lift employee productivity. Never accept the mantra, “this is the way we’ve always done things” and always look to replace or insert technology when needed.

Daren Boozer is the President & CEO at NCC Data. NCC Data specializes in IT outsourcing and managed services consulting. It is one of the top independently owned IT services and communications companies in the Dallas-Fort-Worth Metroplex.