“Our people are our most valuable asset” is the kind of thing you might read on a company’s ‘values page’ or its ‘careers page’. Many organisations may genuinely believe this statement rings true for them, but how many really do enough to make sure it’s actually the case? Do they always put their employees first and build a culture where everything is set up to help them succeed? It’s only through providing the conditions to make work easier that organizations can see how to improve employee productivity for themselves.
Resource management software can instil a culture and provide a working environment in which employees can flourish. The benefits: an increase in employee engagement, well-being and productivity. What’s not to like?
How to improve employee productivity
If improving employee productivity is down to creating the conditions that make them feel valued, empowered, and inspired to perform to their best, then let’s begin by looking at how an organization might try to do this.
Digital transformation may just be a buzzword to some, but many organizations are throwing serious money its way in order to improve productivity. At the heart of any successful transformation should be the aim to unlock the potential of your people. Here are a few possible (and popular) strategies to achieve this.
- Many organizations deploy and roll out new equipment – brand new and shiny devices, the latest laptops, tablets, or even virtual reality (VR) headsets. But this can be expensive and merely paper over the cracks (broken processes, a dispiriting or oppressive work culture, the poor management of people and projects).
- Bringing in new productivity apps that can revolutionize collaboration and communication (among other things) can also work like a charm, but there are potential hurdles here with user adoption and the need for on-going, extensive training – also subscriptions to the latest SaaS products can be expensive when multiplied across all of your users.
- Improve processes. If a company has lots of paper-based or manual processes, then these can reduce employee productivity, making work a slow and laborious process. Automating these can speed things up and leave time for more valuable work. The trouble is choosing where to start automating considering it can be a long, drawn-out process taking several months, even years.
There’s no doubt that these strategies, although creating potential barriers, can ultimately be effective. However, there’s another route to employee productivity which often goes under the radar – one that many organizations fail to consider as part of their ‘how to improve employee productivity’ strategy.
This underappreciated golden ticket to unlocking productivity revolves around how work is organized. It involves the culture of how projects and tasks are managed and how work is assigned to employees… also known as resource management.
Resource management: the golden ticket
Resource management is how a company allocates its resources to complete a project or portfolio of projects. This means allocating the right people to the rights projects, based on their skillset, knowledge, experience and, most importantly, availability. A resource manager must consider how best to balance this for every resource at their disposal and manage all of this correctly to bring a project to a successful conclusion on time.
Let’s pick out a few key areas where resource management can improve employee productivity.
Create a stress-free working culture
By allocating resources correctly you can help people work in a stress-free environment, working on projects for the right amount of time and on projects they have the rights skills for. You can make sure people aren’t overburdened by work or have too little work on. Resource allocation can also ensure there’s enough time to complete projects safely. These factors will result in high levels of employee well-being and job satisfaction, which will in turn drive productivity.
Improve visibility of resources
When you have full visibility over your resources, you can plan projects better and react better to change. Again, this can lead to work running more smoothly, meaning that employees are less stressed and do not have to sit around waiting for work when projects break down. There’s nothing worse for productivity than a workplace where plans and schedules are changing all the time, and no one knows what is going on. A workplace like that can make it hard to prepare for the task at hand but also near-impossible to stick to targets and goals.
Put your people first
Resource management software like Tempus Resource puts your people first – by thinking about tasks and projects in terms of your people, you can make sure your employees are working in an environment and culture that helps rather than hinders them. This way, you can give your employees a high level of job satisfaction, boost employee morale, and drive productivity through the roof.
To find out how to improve employee productivity using resource management software like Tempus Resource, get in contact with us at ProSymmetry today.
