4 Ways Digital Transformation Can Improve Your Team Productivity

Do you know the most obvious benefit of having productive employees? They make day-to-day business operations run smoothly, efficiently, and in a timely fashion. Productive employees lead the way to a massive increase in profitability, as high as 21%.

Unfortunately, 70% of them are disengaged at work, costing companies $450-500 billion every year.

While employee burnout was a rising concern before the pandemic, 29% of fully remote employees always feel burned out as of October 2020.

This is not surprising since employees spend more time at work than they do sleeping. Let us say it is your job as a manager to ensure your employees prioritise their time well and enjoy a healthy work-life balance.

Innovative Companies Need Supercharged Employees

Businesses in this day and age are riding high on the digital transformation bandwagon. Integrating digital technology and VoIP communication tools in different areas of the organisation to upgrade how they deliver services and care for customers is the new norm.

It is apparent businesses expect collaboration, inclusion, and purpose from their employees. They want them to adapt, embrace changes in market conditions, and deploy a digital-first attitude.

Unfortunately, 70% of business transformations fail due to the lack of employee engagement. As a manager, you will agree your employees want to be motivated by rewards, recognition, and competition.

When they are not kept in sync with the leadership’s vision, they are bound to perform relatively poorly.

A full-scale digital disruption in long-standing business operations goes beyond investing heavily in workflow technology and process automation.

It is essential to ensure the productivity levels of employees are always high. Without them, this investment is pointless.

In this article, we will look at why digital transformation could be the catalyst necessary to boost employees’ productivity levels:

1. It Enables Them to Have More Strategic and Efficient Internal Communication 

Imagine your employees are bogged down with unnecessary email threads, meetings, and IMs. That is the reality for the majority of them. Scarily, the average employee receives 121 emails daily. That is a lot of emails!

On the other hand, meetings have increased in length and frequency in the last 50 years — with executives spending a weekly average of nearly 23 hours in them. That is unfair. How do you expect your employees to be productive?

One of the most critical areas that modern digital technology is transforming is cross-team communication.

Traditional tools like email are cumbersome and tedious and not designed for real-time dialogue.

Email overload brings down the employees’ productivity levels, and so do (virtual) meetings. If you run a restaurant, for instance, you can allow your employees across departments to engage and interact in real-time more efficiently by deploying a proper collaborating tool such as restaurant communication software.

Such tools help increase internal communication efficiency and help employees cut down on email clutter, save a lot of time in the process, and be more productive. That is how digital transformation is supporting strategic employee communication.

2. It Instils a Sense of Flexibility to Work Remotely

The digital transformation had a significant role to play when almost all companies went remote last year.

The advent of collaboration tools, monitoring networks, and cybersecurity frameworks ensures business operations continuity during these uncertain times.

Digital transformation helps companies attract a more expansive talent pool and encourages the latter to work remotely. It ensures you have put the suitable systems in place to support that.

Thanks to messaging platforms, video conferencing tools, and cloud-based services, employees feel included as a part of the company, regardless of where they are based.

This is a crucial driver for getting the best out of the time and ensuring they are supercharged. Plus, allowing them to set their hours makes them more productive, happier, and engaged.

As a manager, monitoring their performance and hours is not a problem due to the plethora of HR and project management tools available for companies.

With the right system in place, you can assign tasks, organise dashboards, set deadlines, drop real-time comments, and handle just about everything else related to the project. More flexibility equals increased employee productivity — thanks to digital transformation.

3. It Helps Companies Recognise and Celebrate Employees

Employees will use technology optimally when they see the senior leadership championing it as well.

Use the same digital channels your employees use. If you work in the marketing space, test popular platforms like Facebook Live, TikTok, and Instagram Stories.

That way, you will stay informed and accurately challenge your employees when they pitch fresh ideas to you.

By being technologically savvy yourself, you can show your employees that you understand what matters to them.

When an employee does something that directly contributes to business growth, highlight them as an example.

Recognise them in front of the team. Not only would this instil a sense of confidence in them but also encourage others to do the same.

Besides the usual verbal and written recognition, there is so much more you can do for them. Provide free food and drinks, give away coupons, implement casual working hours on Fridays.

What drives their work ethic? What makes them happy? Find that out and customise your rewards.

Embrace digital transformation. Your employees will thank you for it, and of course, become more productive and engaged since you care of them.

4. It Gives Them a More Meaningful Sense of Purpose

To make your employees more productive, you have to do away with the small picture. Daily tasks, regular meetings, and quarterly reviews are fine.

But you would not help them achieve their full potential unless you show them the big picture and what role they play in it.

Thanks to more digital tools at your disposal, you can automate workflows and coordinate with teams on a single solution. That way, you get more time to focus on strategy optimisation and efficient project delivery.

Your employees will be better aligned with each project and the business goals — thus delivering more successful outcomes in the process.

They would know exactly where their work fits in the project and would be more inclined towards doing a better job.

Everyone needs clarity in their job. Utilise technology to assign clear-cut roles and responsibilities to your employees to contribute to you in planning future initiatives and making critical strategic decisions for the company.

Maximize Your Employees’ Productivity Via Digital Transformation

Technology has indeed made it easier for employees to keep up with their day-to-day activities. However, excess communication channels have only left them feeling underwhelmed and drained their overall productivity.

By guiding them to use the latest, cutting-edge technologies, you can enhance their workflow and manage everything from a single touch-point. Remember: digital transformation is not something to be afraid of.

But to glean maximum benefits from it requires grit and determination. Your employees need to understand that and necessitate a cultural change.

If they are productive, they would more efficiently deliver work, be happier, and better serve your company.

Author: Lucy Manole

Lucy is a creative content writer and strategist at Marketing Digest. She specialises in writing about digital marketing, technology, entrepreneurship, and education. When she is not writing or editing, she spends time reading books, cooking and travelling.