Employee Productivity

Internet-based tools that foster collaboration and enable employees to access the information they need to do their jobs more effectively can raise productivity across entire organizations.

Technology-enabled teams are less bound by space and time and can be structured specifically by task. Applications such as group-editing software, shared scheduling programs, and sales force automation tools help employees and business partners work together in real time, share documents and schedules, and trade project-critical data on the fly. Databases, intranets, and other information repositories allow employees to share actionable knowledge, increase a company's rate of learning, and ultimately provide you with a competitive advantage.

Employee productivity applications streamline administrative functions and shave time and steps from development cycles. They also positively impact bottom-line profits by reducing the travel, shipping, and phone costs that often accompany collaborative work.

Growing companies are using employee productivity tools in the following ways:

• A New York City public relations agency uses virtual conference rooms and group editing software to review concepts with a San Francisco-based client in real time. When the group agrees that additional work is needed, project-planning software recalculates deadlines and notifies team members and management of the changes.

• An auto parts distributor uses Web-based courseware to allow new employees to learn its inventory system from their computer desktops.

• A software developer distributes the latest industry news to its employees via its intranet, giving sales, marketing, and engineering teams immediate access to critical competitive data.

Employee productivity applications include:

• Collaborative design

• Sales automation

• Sales support

• Information repositories

• Project management