When a company introduces new processes or technology designed to improve efficiency, it often creates conflict between executives and employees.
The stakeholders and executives see changing the way the company works as a way to increase productivity, getting more value out of employees. But the employees often interpret these top-down changes as just being asked to do more.
This divide typically shows up as conflict between IT organizations and employees who are accustomed to taking productivity into their own hands. For example, if employees need to share large files with someone outside the company, they’re likely to turn to a free software tool to send the file rather than a solution from the IT department. Using this free tool might break every rule in your security policy, but it’s the easiest way to accomplish the task. Since it saves employees time to do other work, it’s improving productivity in the short term, but with unacceptable risks as tradeoffs.
To improve efficiency and productivity, you need to balance increased output and employee morale. Implementing new technology, such as a collaboration platform, has potential to increase output and/or reduce rework. But how these implementations affect morale is just as important as the specific technology.
When you’re introducing new tools or processes to improve efficiency, here are five tips for balancing morale and output:
- Show why the change is valuable to employees: When you’re disrupting the status quo by bringing in a new collaboration platform, for example, you need to show how the technological change is a win-win for employees and the larger organization.From the executive perspective, the platform must offer long-term benefits to the organization’s bottom line. But employees also benefit from repeatable processes that increase efficiency in the form of greater job satisfaction and delivery success. Demonstrating this value helps you maintain morale in the short term until those long-term benefits accrue.
- Develop training on specific uses, not capabilities: When you’re implementing new technology, develop training based on specific recommended uses in your organization. Training shouldn’t just describe all of the buttons you could push, but why you’d push them in a certain order to accomplish a task.Most collaboration tools are able to serve many different processes; SharePoint Online, for example, offers vast capabilities. Use training to show the value employees get from doing a process in a certain way, such as uploading a document or changing a status field.
- Focus on process, not technology: When you put new technology at center stage, employees tend to see it as intended to replace them or an additional burden. Instead, focus on changing your process and methodology to improve efficiency, with technology in a supporting role. This improves morale because it shows that the technology is there to serve the employees, not the other way around.
- Build metrics to track improvements: A key step in improving efficiency is taking the time to listen to employees and identify the common obstacles they encounter in a process. Then, try to build a mechanism to account for these issues and quantify them. For example, you might want to measure how much time an employee spends searching for a document. Instead of only measuring productivity in terms of greater output, you would also show a productivity gain by reducing the time spent searching for documents.
- Avoid ambiguous terms like “productivity”: People tend to make the faulty assumption that their understanding of “productivity” applies to everyone in the organization, from executives to employees. But there’s a question of scale that creates misunderstandings around these terms. Executives focus on how all of the little pieces fit together as a whole, but the employee is focused on the little pieces themselves.When you’re doing technology implementations to improve efficiency, the goals and usage of executives and stakeholders is different from employees. The employees are creating the work and the executives are consuming the overviews. Even if you’re having strategy sessions and open conversations about goals and methods to achieve them, it’s a common mistake to think that the driving factor and the definition of the word is the same across the organization.
When you’re looking to improve efficiency through a new collaboration platform or other technology, focus on making small technology improvements and couching them in terms of their human value and importance. As you’re changing the status quo, you need to help employees understand what the technical changes represent and how they stand to benefit. Improving productivity is a balance between output and morale, so focus on the value to the employee, rather than the dollar amount to the employer.
