Work Technology Is A Competitive Advantage
How Work Technology Can Help Organizations Recruit/Retain Top Talent.
In Jon Steinberg’s (of Buzzfeed fame) post “The Consumerization of Everything” he shares the great insight that IT departments have been pushed “to support everything from iPhones to Dropbox, because people have come to expect the same user friendliness in their work technology that they get in their home technology.”
It got me thinking — This IT advancement is a ‘must,’ but it can also become a competitive advantage in recruiting/retaining top talent. Right now, many startups attract talent through hardware incentives (new iPad, your choice of computer, etc). But work technology can be a true competitive advantage.
As the tech industry’s talent continues to optimize their lives through this home/work technology, it quickly becomes a major daily frustration to use less advanced tools. And on the flip side, if you’re organization has innovative tools that no one else has, talent will want to work in your environment, and be hesitant to leave to go for a less ideal system somewhere else.
An example and an idea.
Example: Scheduling Meetings — Microsoft Outlook v Google Apps for Business
I worked at a company that used Google Apps across the organization, including Calendars. On your calendar, you could save your team & regular conference rooms to your Calendars sidebar. Then you could toggle each Calendar on and off to see everyone’s availability in context. With a few quick clicks I could get a monthly glance at when everyone would be free and what conference rooms were open at that type. It took less than 2 minutes to book meetings. It was a breeze.
I also worked at a company that used Microsoft Outlook. Every time I wanted to book a meeting, I had to find and input everyone’s contact information, and load rooms (more than 20 of them) individually before getting a half decent glance into potential openings. Booking big meetings could take up to 20 minutes. Team members secretly hoped other’s would save them time and schedule their meetings. Scheduling would get put off, causing an even bigger problem as rooms got booked in the interim and team members would get booked elsewhere. It was a drag.
Idea: Optimizing Knowledge Sharing Across Teams + An Organization
Many organizations create a shared drive and/or intranet for documents to be shared across the organization.
The goal — make sure one person’s learnings can help another persons. Some people use it, some people don’t.
The problems — Employee’s have to proactively upload documents to help the organization. And each person creates their own document titles and folder structure, making finding great info an arduous process.
The solution — A structured weekly upload system that tags and filters the right document, making it quick and easy to find internal information and insights.
Here’s how it would work.
- Employee gets a weekly email prompt to upload any documents they created.
- Before they upload, they must select specific tags. These can be unique to each company, but could be things like client, industry, document type (strategy, brief, research report, consumer journey, etc),
This prompts action and structures it in a universal way that the entire organization follows.
- Now, when an employee wants to quickly find information, it’s easily searchable, filterable, and there’s a much higher likelihood of it being relevant.
- For example, an employee could now quickly find all consumer journey’s in the past year about the Entertainment industry.
The wins:
- Ensures important internal insights are captured.
- Ensures they are easily discoverable within the organization.
- Enhances the overall knowledge base in an actionable way that can amplify the overall value of every document created.
The Caveat
For larger, enterprise companies, it can be costly and difficult to switch systems. And some technology doesn’t scale well or has security issues. For startups, they may be evolving to fast, or lack the resources to implement new technology.
But, if you’re the company that does this and you’re the leader in your space in work technology, it can be a very strong competitive advantage to attracting/retaining top talent and increasing productivity within the organization.
