How to Increase Operational Efficiency Using ActivTrak
When your teams are working remotely, keeping track of projects and employee productivity can be challenging. However, even while working remotely, you can keep your focus on increasing operational efficiency. With ActivTrak, you can get a detailed view of employee processes and pain points when everyone is working off site.
Our easy-to-use remote workforce analytics tools can help reveal a clear picture of what’s working and what’s not. This includes identifying bottlenecks in workflow processes, areas of unbalanced workload distribution, poor time management, and more. The resulting data insights can help your team boost operational efficiency, optimize performance, and improve business outcomes.
What Is Operational Efficiency?
As noted in our overview of operational efficiency, there’s a big difference between efficiency and productivity, even though many companies use the two terms interchangeably. In the Harvard Business Review article “Great Companies Obsess Over Productivity, Not Efficiency,” Michael Mankins makes the distinction by defining productivity as doing more with the same, but efficiency as doing the same with less. Ultimately, operational efficiency is about making your business operations leaner.
In today’s challenging economic climate, increasing productivity might be as important as improving efficiency. However, starting with efficiency helps you build a baseline so you can trim costs and resources while achieving the same, or better, outputs. By using ActivTrak’s remote workforce analytics tools, you can quickly and easily identify roadblocks to operational efficiency.
Roadblocks to Operational Efficiency
Some of the barriers you and your team may face when improving operational efficiency can include:
• Unbalanced workload capacity, where some employees are overburdened and others don’t have enough to do
• Inefficient or outdated software or internal systems
• Process confusion, resulting in unnecessary delays in task completion
• Uneven productivity spikes and lags that make project timelines unpredictable
• Websites and applications that are unproductive and distracting or, worse yet, pose security risks to your organization
ActivTrak’s remote workforce analytics tools can help you identify pain points and take action to speed up operational efficiency. If you introduce new applications or processes, you can use ActivTrak to analyze and compare changes in productivity trends to weigh the effectiveness of these new implementations and where they may still need to be optimized. You can also review application and website usage reports to determine which applications are actually supporting your operations and which may be redundant. This paves the way for a leaner allocation of software licenses and uncovers opportunities to trim overhead costs. In addition, you can proactively prevent security risks in your organization by blocking risky websites and apps and automating alerts that notify employees who may be in violation of company policies.
Less Really Is More
You can leverage remote workforce analytics to promote operational efficiency immediately, in addition to building continual optimization processes that will improve your business in the long term. ActivTrak makes it easy to identify employee productivity trends, level workforce capacities over different periods of time, and produce clean reports to share this data with executive stakeholders.
When you increase operational efficiency in your organization, you help your team reduce friction in faulty processes, improving not only productivity but also employee satisfaction. With a clear picture of your employees’ productivity levels, you can implement changes that increase operational efficiency without incurring large costs or overtaxing your existing resources. You’ll help your people work smarter, not harder. Your team will appreciate that — and you’ll appreciate the results!
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