As IT directors you have your work cut out, how do you boost productivity and efficiency. You are in charge of the overall IT infrastructure in the organization. However, you are also expected to align with the other business units to improve productivity and efficiency from an IT standpoint. It can be quite difficult to pinpoint where to start. “Productivity” and “efficiency” are often used interchangeably by most companies. Also, most guides on ways to improve productivity start from within, not the external environment.
If you’re an IT director, does that fall under your scope? Your focus is on making sure that the IT environment is optimized for the employees so that they can flourish. Where better to start than with Microsoft 365, one of the most widely used office software suites in the world. One that your company is probably using right now.
In this blog, we’ll go through the difference between productivity and efficiency. As well as what you can do to improve both in Microsoft 365.
Productivity vs Efficiency
Simply put, efficiency can be defined as doing the same with less, while productivity can be defined as doing more with the same. So how do you boost productivity and efficiency with Microsoft 365?
Let’s say your engineers can write 30 lines of code per hour. To improve their productivity by 50%, they should be able to write 45 lines of code per hour. You can do this in a variety of ways. Maybe you can start implementing Agile processes. Or maybe implement Continuous Integration. Either way, your code output should increase without using extra resources.
Here’s a different scenario. Let’s say the same engineer is still producing 30 lines of code per hour. On a normal day with eight working hours, they should be able to produce 240 lines of code. However, if they spend 1-2 hours per day clarifying their deliverables with their manager due to poor workplace communication, their code output will decrease correspondingly. You can streamline the internal processes, get your engineers working more efficiently, and nothing is lost in the transition from input to output.
Ways to Improve Efficiency
As mentioned earlier, one way to improve efficiency is to identify and fix the time-consuming processes currently plaguing your teams.
One of the most common complaints from Microsoft 365 users, is losing track of links in Microsoft Teams. Many organizations face this problem. Studies have shown that the knowledge worker spends about 2.5 hours per day (or roughly 30% of the workday) searching for information. A chunk of that is attributed to missing links.
If your team is currently facing such a problem, then you can check out Link Spotter app. This app helps you quickly spot all the links that you have access to on your Teams channels.
Ways to Improve Productivity
What can you do to improve productivity? Optimize your workflows and make collaboration easier. Take a closer look at your internal IT processes, you might notice some digital gaps that are hindering effective collaboration.
One instance of this is when your company is working on different software platforms with similar functions. For example, using SharePoint and Confluence at the same time. If you use both platforms without any sort of synchronicity, you will hinder your workflow. Your team may be wasting precious time searching for the latest version of documents. This results in information silos and objective misalignment.
Some might think that centralizing all your documents on a single platform is the answer. Migrating from one platform to another presents an entirely different challenge. We believe the solution is to link them both! You can harness their respective strengths and mitigate their respective weaknesses.
That being said, you should really consider SharePoint Connector for Confluence. It integrates the two platforms and provides much-needed functionalities. The ability to instantly embed, share and edit SharePoint documents in your wiki. And vice versa to embed a list or document library from SharePoint and browse the files from within a Confluence page. This app helps improve the overall collaboration between your employees and their overall productivity by extension.
What’s Next?
Differentiate between productivity and efficiency in Microsoft 365. This is the necessary first step towards actually improving them. Regarding your current Microsoft 365 setup, you can fix the issues outlined with the right tools.
