How to Achieve Operational Efficiency and Work From Home
Operational efficiency is essential to get the most possible ROI out of campaigns. Keep reading to get a deeper dive on what defines operational efficiency and how to achieve it, as well as how to identify and take action on low ROI campaigns.
The Near-future of Work: Remote Work Trends Happening Now
It’s been a full year since a majority of the world’s organizations began remote work during the pandemic. For some, the switch to a fully remote workforce was a bumpy one. After all, getting an entire company online, delivering the tools that teams need to be productive, and spinning up new processes to keep work moving, is not easy. With this change in where we work came a change in how we work together, the pace at which we collaborate, along with a business’s remote work expectations of their employees. For some of us, this meant we lived in a Zoom world. For others, we became solitary contributors who handed our pieces of work to the next person with no idea if our work was ever done. All of us struggled with processes and tools that suddenly felt outdated or clunky. Now that we’ve had a year of remote work during the pandemic, many of us realize that work has changed forever. As have the ways we manage and facilitate productive, efficient work across teams. Today, we find ourselves facing a what-comes-next wave of big decisions. Namely, do we stay remote, do we bring everyone back into the office, or do we adopt a hybrid model? It may be too soon to tell which of these is the best choice but two things are clear: The decision to stay remote, return to office, or go hybrid requires the creation of longer-term, holistic work collaboration and management strategies. Whatever strategy you devise, you’ll need the proper solutions and resources to simplify how people and teams work together (to remove the threat of burnout). As a company that spends every day working alongside some of the biggest companies in the world to help refine their collaborative work management strategies, we’re noticing a few trends. Firstly, what we’re seeing now is a desperate need for a centralized platform that allows people to work in a way that suits them, that automates workflows, tracks progress and resources in real-time, and makes it easy to access the assets and information they use most in the same platform. 3 Trends shaping the (near) future of work Recently, Executive VP of Business Strategy and Chief Marketing Officer at Citrix, Tim Minahan, and CEO and Founder of Wrike, Andrew Filev connected on a call to discuss how the future of work is taking shape in these near, post-pandemic times. Watch the full video here: Trend 1: Work solutions aren’t keeping up with employees needs For all the technological advances made in the workplace over the last decade, there are still legacy solutions that refuse to go away. For example, email. (BTW, happy 40th birthday email!) There are organizations that still use email as a primary means of communication or as a project management tool. If this works for your business, fair play. However, there are better solutions and legitimate reasons to replace outmoded ways of working and collaborating. As Andrew Filev points out, “For some, the more the workplace has changed, the more it has stayed the same. Specifically, when we coordinate work across multiple teams, they might use their own five to ten different apps within their silos but when they need to work together, they often fall back to the common denominator. There are businesses that rely on the same tools, such as messaging apps, emails, and spreadsheets…These are in no way a match to the complexity and velocity of modern business.” One rapid modernization tactic Filev recommends is automating repeatable processes. He states, “The application of AI and ML features have been especially important for business leaders looking to extend resources and increase productivity, efficiency, and consistency during the pandemic. I think we’ll see more of this as we shift toward hybrid work environments. There will be another period of transition and adjustment where organizations will need to ensure their workers are provided with the tools needed to do their best work, no matter where they are.” Trend 2: The future of work is frictionless, secure, and reliable Another urgent need within the organization is to remove the complexity from today’s hybrid and distributed work environments so employees and organizations can do their very best work. “I think organizations made great strides last year in their digital transformation,” Filev says, “however, it was done in haste, and now they need to think about the next, most intelligent move that will set them up for success over the long haul. Organizations need to move beyond the basic infrastructure they put in place in 2020 just to survive and roll out more comprehensive solutions that will give them the competitive edge and help them thrive.” The very act of managing remote and hybrid teams is daunting but with Citrix’s unified workspace infrastructure and Wrike’s collaborative work management platform every employee, remote or in-office, can operate in a simplified, secure digital workplace that will enable organizations to transition to “anywhere working” by keeping employees engaged and productive. Trend 3: Distraction, the productivity killer Despite the prevalence of apps, devices, chat channels, and other technologies, today’s workforce isn’t able to manage work as a contiguous business process. “We’ve reached a tipping point,” says Minahan, “many of the technologies that have crept into the workspace are creating an increase in distraction, an increase in noise, adding complexity.” Did you know today’s knowledge worker: Uses more than 35 critical apps to get their work done — often four or more just to complete a single business process. Spends 28% of their time managing e-mail and nearly 20% looking for information across a disparate array of apps and collaboration channels or tracking down colleagues who can help with specific tasks. Is interrupted by a text, chat, or application alert and forced to switch context between these work channels 373 times per day or around every 40 seconds. And once interrupted by a text, chat, email, or other notification, it can take up to 23 minutes to get back to the task at hand. (And let’s not even get started on the myth of multi-tasking.) There’s much more to the conversation, and more insights regarding future of work trends to look out for, found in the video above. If you’re interested in learning more, visit www.wrike.com or sign up for a free two-week trial to discover how Wrike is helping teams usher in the future of collaborative work management.
5 Remedies for Mobile Productivity Headaches (Infographic)
Sending work emails, checking your calendar, chatting with colleagues via instant message — we rely on our smartphones and tablets to keep us connected to the office. But it’s not always easy to be productive on your mobile device. Limitations like smaller screens, tiny keyboards, and incoming notifications about both professional and personal events can make it difficult to focus and cause major headaches. Respondents to our recent mobile productivity survey named their biggest sources of stress when working via mobile devices. Take a look at the infographic below for fixes to 5 of these top challenges and turn your mobile into your secret weapon for work productivity. Share this infographic with your fellow mobile workers by sharing it on social media, or embedding it on your site with this code: Infographic brought to you by Wrike How do you stay productive while on the go? Share your best advice for getting work done on your smartphone or tablet in the comments below. Then check out the full results of our mobile productivity report to find out how dependent we are on mobile devices for daily work, how that dependency affects our work-life balance, and more insights about the future of mobile work.
Married to Mobile: Our Eternal Bond with Working On the Go
With Valentine's Day coming up, I'm sure we've all had the opportunity to reflect on who and what mean the most to us. The people we see, talk to, and check up on throughout the day play a big role in our lives. However, today I'm not talking about your relationship with your spouse, family member, or best friend. I'm talking about how you interact with technology. Our 2016 Mobile Productivity Survey says that 44% of workers check their mobile device over 20 times a day. (Now that's what I call a codependent relationship!) 82% of survey respondents claim that their mobile device improves their productivity, and 37% say it actually improves their work-life balance. What is telecommuting? Is our reliance on mobile devices getting out of hand? Or is the flexibility of working on-the-go lengthening our leisure time? Take a look at the Slideshare below and find out for yourself: Are You Married to Mobile? How is your relationship with your mobile device? Do you think using your mobile device for work is helping your productivity or harming your work-life balance? Share your opinion with us in the comments. Looking to join the 82% of people who have improved their productivity by using their phone and/or tablet for work? Download the free Wrike app now and start getting things done while you're on-the-go.
Remote Work: Why Reddit and Yahoo! Banned It
When an internal memo from Yahoo! leaked to the public back in February 2013, there was a collective groan not just from people working in the company, but also from supporters of remote work in general. The memo banned remote work for all Yahoo! staff and cited that more effective collaboration would happen face-to-face — that it all begins with being physically present in the office. A Yahoo! spokesperson clarified that banning work from home was not a blanket repudiation of remote work, rather, it was a move that was right for the company's individual situation. They were not the last ones to try to put an end to the practice of remote work. Best Buy followed suit in March 2013 by getting rid of their flexible work program and making employees hold to a more traditional 40-hour work week. Even more recently, Reddit announced the closing of two branch offices in Utah and New York, giving employees two months to relocate to the San Francisco Bay Area; then-CEO Yishan Wong cited that while remote work was good for some workers, in the macro scheme of things, the company just wasn't able to collaborate and coordinate efficiently. Why Ban Remote Work? So what has been prompting this about-face regarding work-at-home policies? Why are top technology companies pulling the plug on one of the hottest perks for today's workers? Some clues can be found in the Yahoo! memo. It claimed: "Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home." The implication being that remote work slows down overall productivity and lowers quality of output. The memo also positioned the policy as a way to unify the forces physically, stating that the best ideas usually come from face-to-face interaction around hallways and office water coolers. The truth is that there are many challenges with remote work, we can't pretend otherwise. We blogged about the 8 biggest challenges for leading virtual teams and found that according to our survey, the top two challenges were (1) poor communication, and (2) a lack of access to expertise needed to support the work. Jennifer Owens of Working Mother Media says that the move stems from fear: “Fear that if I can’t see you, I don’t know what you’re working on. It’s a distrust of your own workforce.” What it boils down to is that these companies decided against remote work because they believe virtual collaboration is inefficient. Instead of overhauling their work-from-home policies and investing in better collaboration technology, they'd rather herd their people back into a single physical location to enhance teamwork. But... People Love Remote Work! Even though companies like Yahoo!, HP, Best Buy, and Reddit have returned to more traditional work schedules from centralized locations, a thousand more startups and technology companies continue to fly the flag for remote work. Allowing remote work means teams can take advantage of the resources brought by distributed team members who do not want to pack up and move to company headquarters. And people value the perk! According to our remote collaboration survey of over 1,000 respondents, 25% of workers value remote work so much that they’re willing to accept a reduction in salary in order to enjoy it. Other sacrifices they're ready to make include: free meals, reduction in vacation, and paid cellphone plans. How to Make Remote Work Work So what do we say to the companies who have given up on remote work? How can a company successfully implement their work-from-home policy and avoid possible negative repercussions? You have to weigh up the working from home benefits and drawbacks. Terri Griffith, Professor of Management at Santa Clara University and author of The Plugged-In Manager, says: “It takes a thoughtful combination of people, technology, and process to gain the value of virtual work.” We've put together a free eBook on the reasons you should embrace remote work, and the entire second chapter deals with how to successfully implement the policy at your company. We included relevant case studies from companies that have thrived on distributed teamwork, including Johnson & Johnson and Zappos. Want to find out more about how Wrike can help your organization make working remotely work for them? Read more about our flexible work management platform here. Photo Credit: Asher Isbrucker on Flickr. Some rights reserved. Photo edited.