With phased business re-openings and ongoing COVID-19 social distancing, business leaders must find ways to improve financial performance to cover losses. Thus, a new normal office productivity is taking shape. Simple and effective productivity improvements implemented now aim to make a difference.
In a previous post, eMazzanti Technologies (our parent company) identified several changes business leaders could adopt to increase productivity when workers return. Implementing those changes now will help you get a jump on improving performance.
So, ponder these quick and affordable productivity enhancers with a couple of bold ideas thrown in:
Wireless Headsets
A headset frees up your hands to access or record information while carrying on an unhampered conversation. Thus, department video conferences, team chats and customer calls suddenly become more efficient. Studies show that using a headset increases productivity by as much as 40 percent.
Similarly, most knowledge workers believe that office noise negatively impacts their ability to focus. With headsets, employees enjoy their own private audio space to concentrate on tasks for increased productivity in a noisy office.
Conference Room Tools
With screen, speakers, camera, and microphones, Microsoft Teams Certified conference room systems optimize meeting quality. They easily capture participants’ faces and pick up the voices of all attendees in small or large conference rooms.
Team members connect and collaborate faster with Microsoft Teams compatible headsets and phones. They join meetings in one step, collaborate with remote attendees, and share content to boost meeting engagement and productivity.
Employees work confidently with reliably excellent audio and video quality plus easy device management and setup. With devices designed for any room and working style, workers choose where and how they want to work.
Cameras and Mics for Desktop Computers
Many workers use their laptops for video conferencing and chats because they come with built in mics and cameras. Adding an inexpensive camera/mic accessory to desktop computers eliminates the need to flip open the laptop or switch back and forth. Doing so provides an easy and affordable productivity boost for your employees that use desktop computers.
Performance Monitoring Software for Remote Workers
A recent Gartner study found that 57 percent of organizations plan to track one or more employee activities. With large numbers of remote workers, business leaders must know how long employees engage in productive activities and identify the associated projects.
A variety of worker monitoring tools tally time spent on various apps and websites. And, managers compare individuals, teams or departments with reports that sort those totals into productive vs. non-productive time. Other tools check employee activity by monitoring keystrokes.
Remote-Controlled Light Switches
Lighting controlled from a phone or tablet saves time and steps. Employees choose the lighting that best suits their work with a range of stand-alone or app-controlled switches. Likewise, voice-activated light switches make sense in conference rooms or other areas such as server or storage rooms.
Microsoft 365 and Teams
Organizations world-wide rely on Microsoft 365 and Teams to boost productivity. They tap comprehensive and secure video conferencing and collaboration functionality for employees regardless of location—office or remote. Because nonverbal communication greatly enhances the effectiveness of the meeting, video conferencing boosts engagement, morale, and productivity.
Virtual Microsoft Teams meetings help to narrow the gap created by social distancing. User-friendly technology gathers employees to an online conference room. Additionally, Teams users coauthor and comment in documents real-time in the cloud. Such close collaboration over distance empowers a distributed workforce to thrive.
Moreover, Microsoft 365 enables office workers to communicate in a variety of ways and switch between them easily. For example, remote workers open a chat while editing a document in Microsoft Word and then switch to a video call when needed by clicking the video button.
Achieve the New Normal Office Productivity
In the era of COVID-19, small, mid-sized and large businesses struggle to adapt to rapidly changing business conditions. Thus, achieving the new normal office productivity requires courage and a little help from experts in productivity technology.
Contact Messaging Architects today to prioritize and implement new normal office productivity improvements, including smooth Microsoft 365 migrations and expert IT project management for your organization.
