Enhancing productivity into 2020 and beyond

One is simple: Staff feel happier and more engaged. It’s an undeniable trend that workplaces are becoming decentralised, as employees seek better work-life integration, and employers look to leverage skills and capabilities across geographies to reach new customer and markets. In such an environment, keeping staff motivated relies on having a solid set of collaboration tools to draw on.

A recent study showed Australians lead the way as one of the markets most likely to use flexible working as a way to attract and retain talent.¹

The second reason collaboration will become a hot topic in 2020 is it drives efficiency. With better employee efficiency during working days, organisations can reduce costs and run lean, which will soon become a critical metric in determining the health of a company. Read more about how collaborative tools deliver productivity here.

These drivers towards flexibility, mobility, and decentralised work teams will apply across industry verticals and sectors. How each uses the technology will vary based on the target outcomes, however, and organisations approach productivity with an understanding it’s not one-size-fits-all, and collaboration solutions need to be developed with a specific outcome in mind.

The benefit of a Microsoft environment to drive productivity outcomes can be witnessed in the 162 schools that makes up the CEWA (Catholic Education Western Australia) network in WA. With campuses ranging from metropolitan areas with over 1,000 students, through to remote schools with fewer than a dozen, CEWA needed an IT environment able to handle disparate locations and resources, in order to deliver a standard of education across the entire network.

CEWA, in collaboration with Insight, developed a framework called LEADing Lights. Leveraging an Azure framework to provide teachers with rich, data-driven analytics and historical insights, LEADing Lights also benefits the students and staff by providing them with Office 365 tools to allow their educational experience to move with them. Students & Staff can now access their tools from anywhere – home, school or in working environments such as libraries, and the flexibility extends to their place of learning, too. For example, if a student were to move to a different CEWA school, they would be able to continue to access all of their classwork, files, emails and documents, and transition seamlessly into the new environment. Read more about the project here.

This is the very point of mobility and productivity – for people to be able to effectively work remotely, they need a seamless work experience regardless of location. An environment, such as Office 365 with Teams, enhances productivity by providing users the holy grail of seamless experience and access.

Industries across all verticals benefit from migration to Office 365 as well. When one major utilities organisation in the US transitioned to Office 365, it was on the promise of easier management and improved collaboration. Additionally, the organisation wanted to deliver a positive end-user experience. All of this has been achieved, with the productivity benefit to the client being clear – an improved service desk support, with better and more frequent reporting on the status of tickets. Read more about the project here.

Meanwhile, for an insurance company on a rapid acquisition trajectory, ensuring IT consistency as it on-boarded acquisitions had become a problem. There was a mess of IT partners, unique systems, and internal processes to account for.

The company found its solution in Office 365, and then streamlining support for the migration to 365 through Insight’s Managed Office 365 solution. By transitioning to a unified and easy-to-use productivity solution, the parent company was able to improve cost control and end-user satisfaction, while introducing new features, such as chat, to acquired businesses, helping to streamline the interactions within the company and maximise the productivity across them. Read more about the project here.

When organisations look at how technology can enhance productivity, a number of common themes will emerge: Firstly, allowing those within the organisation to become more mobile, and giving clients and customers greater flexibility when interacting with the business, delivers productivity. Secondly, having a standardised platform is important, both from a security perspective and the simple ease-of-use it provides. This ultimately comes down to the quality and type of the collaboration solution rolled out to the organisation. Given the benefits of productivity include competitive advantage, a happier, more motivated workforce, and a more efficient organisation, over the next decade there will be a renewed focus placed on investing in technology as a way of delivering productivity.

Find out how to drive a leading vision for productivity in 2020. Click here.

¹ https://assets.regus.com/pdfs/iwg-workplace-survey/iwg-workplace-survey-2019.pdf