5 ways to increase productivity around the office

employees improving office productivity

Did you know that more than half of us confess to wasting up to an hour a day while we’re at work?

Whether that’s browsing social media, chatting to colleagues, making cups of coffee or attending meetings, there are a few key culprits when it comes to office distractions.

While bosses do all they can to reduce the amount of time spent in lengthy meetings, blocking temptations like Facebook or news platforms actually can have adverse effects. After all, everyone needs a break from work from time to time.

Even if you were to turn off online temptations and keep a close eye on colleague behaviour, there's not much leaders can do to reduce the time spent on mobile phones.

That’s why engagement and productivity experts recommend a more relaxed atmosphere to getting the best out of your team. They suggest focusing on the way in which teams work, rather than monitoring their behaviour.

In this article, we explore five tried-and-tested ways to increase productivity around the office, including tips on how to encourage a positive culture change in your team.

  1. Encourage cloud collaboration

Nothing is more frustrating than working in an environment where teams don’t collaborate. Interestingly, siloed working is still one of the biggest barriers to productivity in the workplace. The good news is, there are plenty of ways to encourage collaboration without having to plan team building activities or organising more meetings.

Project Management software is a great solution to get your teams talking, particularly if you have teams working in different locations or on different time zones. What’s more, these systems allow users to securely and safely upload documents into the cloud, making day-to-day tasks even easier.

If you’re new to these systems, we recommend nominating a ‘champion’ in each business area to get everyone set up. You’ll be amazed by how quickly collaboration tools boost productivity and engagement.

  1. Go paperless

Simply adding some automation to your paper-based processes can have an incredible impact on productivity in the workplace. One such tool is an electronic signature system, allowing you to send and receive contracts securely, without the need for time-consuming processes.

  1. Define your sign off processes

Another sure-fire way to improve productivity in the workplace is to define and streamline your sign off processes. In large organisations, there can be a tendency for many stakeholders needing to sign work off, from subject matter experts right through to legal, compliance and PR teams.

There is certainly some benefit in having multiple eyes on a piece of work during sign off. But these lengthy and often frustrating processes can eat up a huge amount of colleague time that’s spent better elsewhere.

Instead, take stock of your current sign off processes and work through them with key stakeholders to find out exactly who needs to see what. Being ruthless in this approach will help to reduce the number of steps your team will need to go through, greatly improving productivity and colleague engagement as a result.

By using a document management system, you’ll allow multiple stakeholders the opportunity to feed into contracts and other documents simultaneously, in the cloud and in real-time.

Simply send them a link via the system and they can provide comments and approval right there and then.

  1. Revolutionise your system of agreement

No matter what type of organisation you work for, chances are you’ll already have a system of agreement in place. This is the collection of technologies and processes used for preparing, signing, acting on, and managing agreements.

The problem with the traditional system of agreement though, is that it often involves outdated processes. These include printing, scanning, emailing and in some cases, posting agreements – adding further delays to your projects.

If you’re interested in saving time and paper by automating these processes, The DocuSign Agreement Cloud, our suite of more than a dozen applications and 350 integrations, covers the entire agreement process.

  1. Get your systems working together

Another proven way to increase productivity in the workplace is to get your systems talking to each other.

Using a leading CRM system such as Salesforce will give you a host of apps to choose from, that are designed to seamlessly integrate with your current set up. DocuSign for Salesforce is one such integration.

Having all your systems aligned and one single source of truth when it comes to data can really help to speed up processes, improving data integrity and allowing your teams to truly collaborate.

Ready to increase productivity around the office? Learn more about The DocuSign Agreement Cloud.

DocuSign-Agreement-Cloud

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About the author

4C is EMEA’s largest independent Salesforce Platinum partner. They work with some of Europe’s largest organisations, helping them to become more customer-centric with the help of technology. So far, they have delivered more than 1500 projects, specialising in all areas of Salesforce development.

Author
Mangesh Bhandarkar
GVP, Product Management
Published
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