Tip of the Week: 5 Technologies to Get Maximum Productivity Out of Your Employees

When it comes down to it, your employees are being paid for their time spent at work. Business operates on the principle of “time is money,” which means that every minute wasted cuts into your bottom line. If you’re looking to squeeze the most productivity out of your employees, then there are technologies available that can take back those precious minutes.

Surveillance Cameras
We'll start with a solution for those in dire need to fix a major productivity issue. Employees work harder if their boss is working alongside them. If you step out of the room, or rarely spend time working with your staff, then how do you know for sure that they’re working as hard as they can? Some workers might even view their manager’s absence as an opportunity to waste time--this action is commonly referred to as “loafing.”

Thanks to surveillance systems being more affordable than ever before, it’s easy for your company to install a surveillance system so that you can keep an eye on your workers when you’re not around. With a camera installed in the room and pointing right at them, your staff won’t feel at liberty to loaf and you’ll see your productivity numbers go up. Directive can equip your business with digital surveillance systems that tie directly into your company’s network. Digital surveillance systems come with a variety of features, like giving you the ability to watch live surveillance footage on your mobile device while you’re out of the office. 

Automatic Door Locks
One way that employees tend to leak company time is through their breaks. A few extra minutes taken here and there, a few extended lunches, showing up to work a few minutes late, all of these time-wasting habits done over a consistent basis adds up to a significant amount of time lost that can drastically cut into company profits.

You can take back all of this wasted time by installing automatic locks on doors and scheduling when breaks occur. If the workday starts at 8:00 a.m., and that’s when you expect your workers to be in the building and logged onto their computers, then you can set the automatic lock to lock the front door at 8:00 on the dot. If a worker is being irresponsible and running late, then they just lost a day’s pay; too bad, so sad. You can also add automatic locks on the door to the break room. Automatic locks can be seen as a rather extreme measure, but it’s well worth it if that’s what it takes to get back the money lost from employees wasting company time. As a bonus, like surveillance cameras, automatic door locks can also be controlled by your mobile device.

Content Filtering
What your employees do or don’t do on their assigned workstation can significantly cut into your company’s profits. Even the best workers are susceptible to distractions from the Internet like YouTube, Facebook, BuzzFeed, Twitter, and all the other websites that have nothing to do with work. A content filtering solution for your network is able to block employees from visiting websites that you deem to be irrelevant to their job. Companies that have implemented a content filtering solution have seen productivity increase by as much as 23 percent.

Monitoring with UTM
Content filtering is part of Directive’s Unified Threat Management (UTM) solution. In addition to content filtering, an enterprise-level firewall, and other top-notch security measures, a UTM gives you the ability to monitor how users spend their time using workstations and mobile devices connected to your company’s network. This will clue you in if time is being wasted playing games, streaming movies, and other general loafing activities that you’ve not yet blocked with the content filtering feature. As you begin to block one time-wasting website after another, your workers will begin to take the hint that they can’t get away with wasting company time and they’ll put their noses to the grindstone and get more work done.

Provide Working Computers
When it comes to productivity measures like these, not everything falls upon the shoulders of your employees. You can make a difference too by providing your staff with working technology. A slow workstation can make every task take much longer than it needs to, which could be much worse for your bottom line than a worker taking a few minutes extra on their breaks. By having Directive remotely monitor and maintain the workstations that your employees use, it will ensure that they are working at maximum efficiency, which will buy your business lots of extra time--and remember, time is money.

For more helpful tips on how to increase the productivity of your business using proven technologies, call Directive at 607.433.2200.