4 Ways To Improve Organizational Efficiency

April 28, 2023 - 7 min read

Wrike Team

Organizations need to be efficient to remain competitive and successful. However, achieving efficiency can be a challenging task for many businesses. In this article, we’ll discuss four ways to improve organizational efficiency in order to streamline processes and boost productivity, profitability, and employee satisfaction.

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1. Streamline communication processes

Everyone must be on the same page so that tasks are completed efficiently. When communication processes become inefficient, it can lead to missed deadlines, misaligned expectations, and decreased collaboration. It's essential to streamline communication processes to optimize workflow and productivity.

Implement effective communication tools

Implement effective communication tools by adopting tools such as Wrike, Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Zoom. These platforms allow communication in real time, better communication, and less reliance on emails that can slow down communication.

Encourage open and transparent communication

Encouraging open and transparent communication among employees creates a culture of trust. This ultimately improves teamwork and reduces conflicts.

Establish clear communication protocols

Defining clear communication protocols that outline what channels employees should use for specific tasks helps to avoid miscommunication and also improves the accuracy and quality of communication.

2. Optimize time management

Time management is essential to ensure that employees maximize their time and efforts to achieve the desired results. In today's fast-paced world, time is of the essence, and it’s crucial to optimize it to remain competitive.

Prioritize tasks and set deadlines

Encourage employees to prioritize their tasks and set clear deadlines to manage their workload effectively. Prioritizing tasks helps employees focus on the most critical tasks and avoid wasting time on unimportant ones. It’s also essential to set realistic deadlines that give the staff enough time to complete their tasks without feeling overwhelmed.

Implement time tracking tools

Time-tracking tools like Trello or Harvest can be invaluable in monitoring employee productivity and flagging areas for improvement. These tools help employees manage their time better and increase their efficiency. They also provide valuable insights into how each team member spends their time, which can help employers identify ways to optimize their processes. Also, these tools can help identify any time-consuming tasks that can be automated or outsourced for maximized efficiency.

Encourage regular breaks and work-life balance

Encouraging employees to take regular breaks can help avoid burnout and improve their concentration. Taking short breaks throughout the day can help employees recharge and improve their focus. It’s also crucial to encourage them to take time off to rest and rejuvenate regularly.

Work-life balance initiatives, such as flexible working, can also improve employee well-being and productivity. Allowing work-from-home arrangements or offering flexible working hours can help them manage their personal and professional lives more effectively. This way, your staff can enhance their productivity and job satisfaction.

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3. Enhance collaboration and teamwork

Collaboration and teamwork enable employees to work together towards a common goal. When employees collaborate effectively, they can achieve more significant results than they would individually.

Foster a culture of collaboration

Create a culture that values teamwork. Encourage employees to work together, share knowledge and expertise, and celebrate successes together. When employees feel like they are part of a team, they are more likely to collaborate effectively and work towards a common goal. This can improve overall productivity and foster cooperation and a sense of harmony.

Utilize collaborative tools and platforms

Collaborative tools and platforms can help teams work together more efficiently and effectively across different geographic locations and time zones. A few collaborative tools teams use include:

Wrike: Work management platform that empowers teams to work as one in a centralized and customized digital workspace.
Google Drive: Cloud-based platform that allows teams to share files and collaborate on documents in real time.
Asana: Project management tool that helps teams stay organized and on track.
Basecamp: Project management tool that allows teams to communicate and collaborate on projects.

Encourage cross-functional teams

Cross-functional teams are groups of employees from different departments who work together on projects and problem-solving to share knowledge and ideas. Encouraging cross-functional teams can foster a culture of communication, improve teamwork, and help organizations leverage the expertise and skills of their employees effectively. Ultimately, this can lead to devising more innovative solutions to push the organization ahead of its competitors.

4. Implement process automation

The use of automation can do wonders for organizational efficiency, as it allows for the improvement of workflow, better productivity, and fewer errors.

Identify repetitive tasks for automation

Identifying the tasks that can be automated, like data entry, report generation, or sorting emails. The goal is to free up employee time to make way for a focus on more critical tasks.

For example, automating data entry can eliminate the need for manual data entry, which is time-consuming and prone to errors. You can also automate report generation via Microsoft Power BI or Tableau to create reports automatically.

Choose the right automation tools

Choose the right automation tools by conducting research on the unique features of Zapier, IFTTT, and Tallyfy. These tools help automate various tasks and streamline the workflow process.

Zapier can automate tasks like sending emails, creating tasks, or updating spreadsheets. Similarly, IFTTT automates tasks like social media posting, email management, or file management. Tallyfy, on the other hand, is a process management tool that automates and streamlines business processes.

Monitor and evaluate automation effectiveness

Continuous monitoring and evaluation of your automation processes allows you to flag areas for improvement and keep your automation efforts aligned with your business goals.

You can track the time saved by automating tasks and compare it to the time spent on manual tasks before automation. This lets you determine the effectiveness of your automation efforts and identify areas for improvement.

Conclusion

These four ways to improve organizational efficiency will undoubtedly help boost productivity, profitability, and employee satisfaction. By implementing these steps, your organization can streamline its processes and enjoy a competitive advantage in the marketplace. Remember, efficiency is an ongoing process. Be sure to regularly review and refine organizational processes to maintain long-term success.

Implement our four proven strategies to enhance organizational efficiency and utilize Wrike's advanced project management tools for success. Start your free trial now and streamline your work processes.

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Note: This article was created with the assistance of an AI engine. It has been reviewed and revised by our team of experts to ensure accuracy and quality.

Wrike Team

Occasionally we write blog posts where multiple people contribute. Since our idea of having a gladiator arena where contributors would fight to the death to win total authorship wasn’t approved by HR, this was the compromise.

#Productivity Advice #Employee Productivity

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20 Ways to Build a Happy & More Productive Workforce (Infographic)

Studies report that happy workers are 31% more productive, with up to 37% higher sales and three times the creativity as the rest of your workforce (Harvard Business Review). Isn't that enough incentive to keep your people happy as they spend upwards of eight hours a day contributing to your bottom line? The infographic below shows 13 ways to make your workforce smile. Then keep reading for a list of 7 more ways to help your people grow and prosper in their work. Use this code to embed the infographic on your blog: Infographic brought to you by Wrike Bonus: 7 Ways to Focus on Your People's Needs 1. Listen to Feedback and Show Action When you ask for feedback, listen. Show that you are acting on suggestions. Knowing that management is listening and taking feedback seriously increases the general positive vibe in your organization. 2. Give Them a Chance to Grow You will lose people if they fear their jobs are dead ends. It's important to give everyone clear career paths and opportunities for ongoing education, online classes, webinar attendance, industry events, etc. 3. Support Remote Work & Flexible Schedules If you really want to attract top performers, you must allow for flexible schedules and remote work. This means you need an online system to track work (like Wrike!), and a protocol for communicating with remote workers so that projects run smoothly. 4. Give People Their Choice of Supplies & Tools Don't skimp on supplies, and give your people their choice of tools, whether it's Mac vs. Windows, a standing desk, floor mat, or dual monitors. Allowing them to pick their tools helps them be more productive right away, and they'll love working on a machine they picked themselves. 5. Give Them Unlimited PTO You're hiring intelligent, capable adults, right? Then allow them to take time off without having to jump through a bunch of hoops. Unlimited PTO is prevalent in startup companies, particularly in the tech industry. But even non-startups have switched to unlimited PTO precisely because it creates a massive amount of good will. 6. Give Them Top-Tier Benefits You won't attract and retain star performers with meager benefits packages unless you're a struggling startup with a killer product and vision that everyone's sure will make it big. The quality of your benefits shows how much you value your people. Make them as substantial as possible! 7. Give Them Unlimited Coffee (and Snacks) Coffee and snacks are probably the simplest way to please your team. But please try giving them good coffee and healthy snacks, okay? What Would Make You Happy? If you have better suggestions on perks that would please you or your team, hit the comments and tell us more!

Productivity 10 min read

Why Email is Addictive and How to Break the Habit

When was the last time you checked your email account? A few hours ago? Were you looking at your inbox right before you started reading this article? Stats from Business Insider reveal that over 1/3 of Americans check their email continuously throughout the day. According to AOL’s 2010 survey, 47% of people claim to be hooked on email, 25% can’t go without email for more than 3 days, 60% check email on vacation, and 59% check email from the bathroom. It's time to break the habit. The Very Real Problem with Checking Email Before we dive in, we should consider: is checking email actually a negative addiction, or is it necessary for functioning in an office job? After all, according to our recent survey, 59% of people report that their team stores project information in emails, and 13% said their team goes as far as to track project status solely via email. It seems like an important tool for getting work done. But as you'll see below, it has been shown that email is a major productivity inhibitor, and can even be negatively impacting our moods: 1. Managing email constantly means more time wasted The average worker is interrupted every 10 minutes or an average of 56 times per day, and it takes around 25 minutes to completely refocus attention back on the original task. That's 2 hours spent recovering from distractions every day. And unfortunately, habitual email checking is one of those pesky interruptions that cause you to lose focus. In one workplace study, Jackson et al. (2002) found that 70% of emails got a reaction within 6 seconds of arrival, and 85% within 2 minutes. After being interrupted by email, it took participants of this study 64 seconds of "Now where was I again?" to recover their train of thought. Furthermore, according to McKinsey Global Institute Analysis, 28% of the workweek is spent reading and answering e-mail. If you work a standard 40-hour week, that means you waste over 11 hours every week just looking at your inbox instead of getting real work done. 2. Checking email inhibits productivity Email is a form of "productive procrastination" that we love to rely on. When we don't want to work on our actual tasks, we think, "I'll just answer emails for a few minutes." We feel better about procrastinating via email because it's "technically work." This thought process is an enabler for bad habits, and a "few minutes" of email checking can quickly stretch out longer than you planned. As it turns out, many people admit that checking email frequently is a problem for productivity. In the 2015 Work Management Survey by Wrike, 40% of respondents identified email as one of their top productivity blockers, taking 3rd prize overall from the list of common work inhibitors. Responding to email was cited as more detrimental to productivity than unclear priorities, procrastination, and even short deadlines. 3. Waiting for email is ruining your mood Next time you're at work feeling like you woke up on the wrong side of the bed, consider this: email dependency is actually ruining your mood. You check it over and over (and over), waiting for a bit of good news. But it never comes. Or it comes so irregularly that you're let down hundreds of times. Nancy Colier calls it "lottery brain" in Psychology Today. It's an adaptive part of our brain that "inspires hope and a sense of possibility, as long as that hope is also supported by proactive agency in our behavior." Our habitual checking inspires hope — and continuously disappoints when that great message doesn't come. Plus it's stressing us out. In a study from the University of British Columbia, they found that the study group who checked their email as often as possible experienced far more stress than the group who was only allowed to check their email three times a day, and they didn't feel any more productive because of it. Emails addicts are ruining their moods for no reason. 4. When you check email constantly, you block your flow You and I also call it "getting into the zone." Researchers have found that reaching a state of flow can enhance work performance — it's the best way to finish tasks efficiently. Psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi says: "[Flow] is being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost." Unfortunately, it's difficult to see how anyone is reaching the necessary flow state in order to get complex work done. We are distracted by our inboxes far more often than we realize. Participants in a Renaud et al. study (2006) reported they thought they only checked their email, on average, once an hour. However, when the researchers spied on them, they saw that participants were actually checking their email nearly every five minutes. This jumping from task to inbox throughout the day requires the brain to readjust over and over to the new point of focus. We're disrupting our own work on a regular basis — without even realizing it! Watch this funny video with more reasons we all "love" email: The Psychology Behind Why We're Hooked To fix the problem, we need to understand what's going on in our brain. Why are we so obsessed with our inboxes? There are a few theories out there: 1. Operant conditioning The most prevalent theory behind why we constantly visit our inbox, even when we know we're unlikely to have anything new, is operant conditioning. More specifically, variable interval schedules of reinforcement. Operant conditioning is a well-known psychology concept, defined as a type of learning that molds your behavior by training you to expect specific consequences after specific actions. Variable interval schedules of reinforcement mean that the action is rewarded when you do it, but not every time, and at inconsistent intervals. It's a perfectly normal way for humans to learn; it only becomes a problem when the learned behavior is counterproductive to our work. In relation to email, variable interval operant condition plays out like this: When you check your email, you are expecting that you will get a new message. You don't get one every time, so you keep coming back, subconsciously hoping that "this time I'll have a new email!" And then you hit refresh, even repeatedly within the span of just a few seconds, waiting for your behavior (the act of checking) to be rewarded (a new email). What's more, Nir Eyal, the author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products and long-time student of the intersection between psychology, technology, and business, says that just the simple act of responding to an email reinforces our behavior to come back and check again: "Every time I reply to an email, I'm loading the next trigger because I'm likely to get a response. That response is an external trigger prompting me through the hook once again. And that's why email is such a hard habit to break." (13:10) In the long run, if you keep getting worthwhile emails periodically, your behavior is reinforced and you'll keep checking ad infinitum. Hear Nir Eyal discuss email addiction starting at 11:22: 2. Getting important email soothes our ego Another theory points the cause of our email addictions to the individual's sense of importance. Even though we claim to hate email, some of us love the feeling of getting email. Linda Stone, writer, consultant, and tech researcher, says that keeping tabs on our email feels like a good thing because important work emails make us feel needed. Being asked for our opinion or our effort validates our role and how we're spending our time. This makes it doubly hard to ignore the incoming email — by human nature, we crave that validation. Nir Eyal, author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, says: "If you think about [...] the internal trigger to check email, well, there're plenty: there's boredom, there's anxiety, there's insecurity about what I'm doing in my job. All of these internal triggers can be satiated a little bit by checking our email." (11:22) But the constant checking and interruption is getting out of control. The challenge we face with email is to not let it drag us to extremes, where we subconsciously feel the need to look at our inbox and see if someone needs us yet. 3. We love those easy, small wins One last theory. A study by Theresa Amabile of Harvard Business School on how to motivate the workforce made this conclusion: People love making progress. When employees feel that progress has been made, it catalyzes their motivation to keep working in order to reach the end goal. Progress — even just a small step forward — occurred on many of the days people reported being in a good mood during the study. In their report, Amabile and her team suggest that managers should break up large projects into several small, easier-to-reach goals so that teams can experience multiple "small wins" instead of just the one large win at the very end of a project. Managing our email gives us that empowering feeling of accomplishment. Every time we respond to a message, that's one small step forward. Every time we reach inbox zero, we've successfully completed the task we set out to do. It makes us feel good to know we've gotten something done. So we keep coming back to do it again and again — even if it means procrastinating on real work; even if it means we waste hours every day trying to get back into the zone. How to Detox from Your Inbox Checking email throughout the day is a conditioned behavior that is draining our energy, happiness, and productivity at work. Here are a few suggestions to help you kick the habit: 1. Keep your inbox closed, and be conscious of how often you open it Don't keep your inbox open in a different tab on your screen, and try to limit the number of times you check in. If you feel you need to peruse your email, then you can open your inbox at that moment. In the same email-stress study at the University of British Columbia mentioned above, the researchers concluded thus: "Limiting the number of times people checked their email per day lessened tension during a particularly important activity and lowered overall day-to-day stress. [...] Those who checked their email a lot also didn't perceive themselves as any more productive than those who were on an email diet." Actively keep track of how many times you check your email each day. Psychologist James Claiborn says, "Measurement of anything tends to change it and makes people much more aware in the first place." Note whether or not every check-in was warranted. (Did you actually get any new, important emails since your last check-in?) If you notice the number of times you open that tab is reaching double-digits, reevaluate your behavior to see if you really need to visit your inbox so often. 2. Shift more work communication outside of email Concerned about letting go of email when it's the only way to get important messages? Replace email with a new tool that won't bog you down with spam and unimportant pings. Shift more of your work to a Work Management tool like Wrike (or the others out there), so you become less dependent on using email for communicating about projects or tasks, for storing information and for getting updates from other people. 3. Set a goal to limit email (and write it down) Did you know that if you write down your goal and share it with a friend, you are 33% more likely to achieve that goal? Grab a pen and notepad. Now write down your game plan: "I will only check email at 11 A.M. and 3 P.M.," or, "I will only check email 3x per day." Maybe slap a reminder sticky note on your laptop. Also write a list (on actual paper!) of the reasons you want to stop checking your email so often: "I want to regain hours of my work day," or, "I want to work more efficiently." Once you've done that, let your boss and colleagues know that you've created this goal for yourself, so they're aware that email is not the best way to reach you with urgent problems. (Who knows, you may even inspire them to start their own detox plan.) 4. Take it to the extreme: block your inbox Really want to reinforce your new habit? Download a browser extension like StayFocusd for the Chrome browser to make it literally impossible to waste more than a set amount of time in your inbox each day. You determine how many minutes you're allowed to spend in your email client on your browser, and after that time limit is up, you'll be blocked until tomorrow. Of course, this only works for people without access to their email in desktop apps like Outlook or Apple Mail. 5. Don't give up Building a new habit can take more than two months to ingrain, and even up to two-thirds of a year! In our case, the new habit you're trying to build is to break an old habit, which is markedly more difficult. But don't let that stop you. If only checking your email a few times a day still makes you anxious a month from now, keep at it. Look at your list of reasons you need to stop checking email so often, and reaffirm your goals. Creating any new habit is mostly willpower, so even if you slip today, try again tomorrow. You Can Break the Email Habit Is checking your email an addiction? Have you taken any steps to successfully curb the inbox habit? Share your secrets in the comments so we can learn from you.

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4 Ways To Improve Organizational Efficiency