Want to Measure Your Business Efficiency? Pay Attention to Productivity

Did you know that, in physics, regardless of how much time, sweat, and energy you put into pushing a boulder, if it doesn’t move, the “work done” is seen as zero? The same is true in business… at the end of the day, your investment in your organization and its people is only worthwhile if you see results.

So, you need to ask yourself: how much work are your team members actually getting done? Are they moving the boulder, or are they just trying a lot but not actually making any progress? Let’s examine what often leads to this kind of stagnant struggle and how you can fix it.

Another Science Term Helps Explain How This Happens

That term is: entropy.

Entropy is used in many different contexts, but every definition features randomness and disorder. In physics, this is represented by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that the universe is becoming increasingly disordered, with organized systems moving toward a state of randomness.

The idea is that energy is always moving toward equilibrium. If you’ve ever heard the term “the heat death of the universe,” it refers to the eventuality of the universe as a whole reaching this equilibrium, settling on one unified temperature, which will completely randomize how all particles move.

Now, imagine the same thing happening in your business.

Business Entropy is a Serious Problem

How often do you see your processes gaining more and more steps without any additional value coming out of them? How well organized are your files, on a scale of “good” to “utter disaster?” How long does your key software take to spin up?

A business with high entropy frequently exhibits a few key symptoms:

• Data siloing is present, where information created in one department isn’t available to another. As a result, the same information must be acquired or generated again in order for another department to use it, expending resources needlessly.
  
  
• Digital clutter makes it hard to find the right draft or version of a document, so employees spend extra time seeking out the correct version and verifying it is, in fact, the one needed.
  
  
• Shadow IT is introduced as company tools become too complicated and difficult to use, so employees seek out their own, unauthorized alternatives to get the task at hand done.

How Business Productivity Should Be Measured

For a long time now, we’ve all looked at productivity as a measure of activity… how much we were able to accomplish in a given time. Nowadays, it is increasingly important to look at productivity in terms of outcome… the impact that our work ultimately has.

By the old model, work was primarily about staying busy. 15 tasks completed in 8 hours? Sounds like a productive day!

Today, this just isn’t as relevant as it once was, thanks to the technology we have and the resulting shift to the definition of “work.”

Now that many tasks can be offloaded to machines, a new metric has come to the forefront: ROI. How much of a return do you get from your investment of time, effort, and all other resources? The higher that ratio is, the more productive you can consider your endeavor to be.

We Can Help Design and Manage a More Productive IT System

At IC Data Communications LLC, our specialty (one of many, at least) is helping businesses simplify the way they work so that more can be accomplished.

For instance, if a business came to us for IT assistance with some departments of its team using Office 365 and the others entrenched in Google Workspace, we’d immediately identify that as an issue. That would mean at some point, someone has to copy information between the two software systems for genuine collaboration to take place (and even then, it would be to a limited degree). Plus, the likelihood of human error would be multiplied every time data had to be transferred over.

In our professional opinion, gross.

Our role is to help you bridge the gaps between the tools your business relies on, standardize the process, and ensure everything runs smoothly.

To Start, Find Out What Your Team Thinks

Ask your team the following questions, collecting answers anonymously to ensure honesty:

1. What one task do you do each week that feels like a waste of time?
2. What about your tech slows you down the most?
3. What information do you always have to chase down?

Finding out the answers will help identify what should be fixed, and in what order.

Don’t Wait Any Longer… Reach Out Today!

Let us help you take all the friction out of your business’ workflows! Give us a call at (313) 887-1297 to get started.