The monday.com Impact Series, Part 2: Productivity

In the second part of our monday.com Impact series, we address something even the most well-managed businesses struggle with: productivity.

A study by HubSpot found that companies in the U.S. suffer a cost to the tune of $1.8 billion in lost productivity each year. The same report points out many ways employees have low productivity. For example, as much as 28 percent of the average office worker's time is spent on unnecessary distractions. 

According to another source, the “Task Management Trends Report,” only 12% of employees are fully productive. 

While companies are quick to blame the employees for this lack of productivity, the responsibility of increasing business productivity falls on the organization as well. 

The good news is that increasing productivity is not that difficult if you take the right steps. It's essentially a combination of employee productivity training, company-wide productivity practices, and leveraging the tools that optimize productivity. 

Challenges of Improving Productivity

The internet is filled with guides for increasing productivity, often with some kind of 'magical' formula that guarantees an increase in employee productivity. Yet, the statistics show astoundingly low numbers in productivity across industries. 

Businesses are still struggling to have their workers work to their full potential despite applying the myriads of solutions. So what's going wrong?

Here are some of the biggest challenges to productivity in business:

• Employee Disengagement. A Gallup report pointed out that disengaged employees cost American companies $450 to $550 billion every year. It says over 70% of employees in the U.S  are unproductive, mainly due to disengagement. Employees simply don't feel motivated enough to put in the work. A lot of it has to do with company culture. For example, being subjected to...
• Meaningless Meetings. You've probably seen those "this could have been an email" memes. The meeting culture developed over the last few decades has become quite widespread. Managers and employees spend way too much time in meetings. A whopping 71% of professionals spend time in unnecessary or canceled meetings.
  
• Emails. Believe it or not, emails are themselves a big hurdle to productivity. Many companies still utilize emails as the main source of communication, and it's proving to be less than efficient for inter-organization communication. A 2018 Adobe survey found that individuals spend 3.1 hours on weekdays dealing with work emails. 
• Poor Workflows and Handoffs. Workflows are proportionate to productivity. Bad workflows result in low productivity, period. For larger enterprises, this is an even bigger problem than for SMEs (small and medium enterprises). With interconnected departments and teams, workflows tend to get overly complicated and result in poor information sharing, unorganized teams, and large productivity losses. 

How Does monday.com Improve Business Productivity?

You can hold seminars on productivity, call in the big guns from the industry, and use productivity systems; you can't do much without the tools required to enhance productivity. This is where the monday.com Work OS comes in to help amplify business productivity. 

But exactly how can a business improve productivity with monday.com?

Powerful Workflow Boards

The core offering of monday.com is built around enhancing productivity. As mentioned, better workflows result in higher productivity. These workflows help lessen the communication gaps, proactively assign tasks to the right resources, and consider risks and contingencies. 

The result is more structure, better communication, and, you guessed it, more productivity. 

An example is the Kanban system, which is highly popular for development projects. monday.com's Kanban workflow can be fully customized and scaled according to the project.

The monday.com Kanban view helps increase efficiency and decrease cost. Some may define that as the true definition of productivity in a business setting. By visualizing tasks in a project, the Kanban board improves workflow and transition between different project stages. It also makes it easier for multiple teams to collaborate, which is often the case in big projects. 

That's just one example of how monday.com helps you increase productivity through better workflows. With the Pro and Enterprise plans, you can create powerful high-level boards for managing different workloads, be it project-based or department-based. 

Additionally, monday.com brings these different boards together on a single dashboard where you can see key information presented in widgets. All of this is customizable, so you set the rules about what you want to see and how you want to see it on the dashboard. 

By having better workflows, employee productivity increases in the following ways:

• Redundancy in task assignments goes down.
• Project scope and schedule become more clear.
• Task dependencies are better understood, to improve on-time project delivery.
• Team members and managers are more aware of real-time project progress.

Team Communication

The easiest way to tackle productivity issues within an organization is simply by improving communication. 

One survey of 400 corporations from the U.K. and the U.S. showed that, on average, these corporations were losing $62.4 million due to communication barriers. 

The monday.com Work OS makes communication among team members and even members outside the team swift and seamless.

It deals with communication barriers with more transparency. Making informational resources like plans, schedules, concerns, risks, and statistics visible to all team members leaves no room for assumptions.

In other words, everyone is on the same page (of the same book).

Circling back to the causes of productivity losses, the time spent on sending and reading emails can be reduced through monday.com. In addition, since monday.com also incorporates communication through in-app messages, team members can communicate while they are on the monday.com platform. No need to switch to an email application!

Time Tracking and Time Logs

Time tracking of tasks and resources assigned to those tasks can reveal where productivity is low. This monitoring feature can ultimately produce insights into where task productivity stands. 

It can help both team members and managers assess which tasks require more time and which tasks can be done quicker. As a result, in the next iteration, the task assignment can be more accurately timed, resulting in fewer delays and more timely completions. Hence, productivity will automatically increase. 

Another effective time management tool is the time log template by monday.com. With timestamps for activities, it logs in the exact time spent working on a task. It works in chronological order. This is yet another way to target productivity through time tracking.

Information Sharing

The monday.com platform makes information sharing a breeze. Not so surprisingly, employees, especially those in knowledge-based roles, spend 19.8% of their work week looking for information. This could be researching information or looking for a specific file within the company's Google Drive or Sharepoint folders.

As far as information sharing between team members goes, monday.com makes things easier with its collaborative file sharing. No matter the file type or size, team members can easily share these resources with each other with a few clicks.

How does this affect productivity?

Team members spend less time looking for files and more on actually working on or editing them. It also results in quicker approval cycles.

The platform also allows version controlling, which prevents confusion and mishaps. Ultimately, employees and the company save time by efficiently sharing and collaborating on documents, images, videos and other files.

Productivity Marketplace Apps 

You can take productivity and efficiency up a notch by leveraging monday.com marketplace apps from third parties. These apps are easily integrated with the monday.com Work OS. Anything that monday.com doesn't cover already, in terms of productivity enhancement, can likely be found in the monday.com Apps Marketplace.

For instance, the Combined Board View is a simple but powerful app that brings all your boards to one place. You can apply a variety of filters to get the information you need, when you need it and exactly how you need it. 

Integration and Automation

By integrating the tools your team members already use frequently, you save all the time spent going back and forth from other systems and applications. This capability is included in the Pro and Enterprise subscriptions. 

Some of the most popular productivity integrations include Gmail, Outlook, Microsoft Teams, Onedrive, Zoom, Copper, Gitlab, Dropbox, Basecamp, Zendesk, and Twilio.

Is It Time To Boost Your Productivity?

Productivity in business is something you need to work on constantly. While there are a lot of non-technical aspects to productivity, such as team morale and workplace culture, ultimately the solution comes from using the right platform for your team.

The monday.com Work OS is all about enhancing productivity, whether through its many workflows, collaborative communication, automations or integrations. But mostly, it helps increase productivity by increasing transparency and removing unnecessary barriers for teams.

The third part in our monday.com Impact series will take the transparency discussion even further by focusing on employee accountability and engagement. 

If your company is seeing a frustrating loss in productivity, it's time you introduced a Work OS like monday.com to turn things around.

For more information, contact Polished Geek for an expert Q&A session during your free monday.com trial at no extra charge.

In our special monday.com Impact Series, we dig deep into four fundamental ways that the monday Work OS positively impacts organizations of all shapes and sizes.

• Part One: Resource Management
• Part Two (this post): Team Productivity
• Part Three: Accountability & Employee Engagement
• Part Four: Team Collaboration & Communication