By Satta Sarmah Hightower
Amid ever-increasing global competition, rising costs and evolving customer expectations—many organizations are likely feeling renewed pressure to improve their productivity.
getty
Besides inflation and slowing economic growth, it appears employers are also battling a workforce that is taking more time to produce less. The first two quarters of 2022 saw U.S. labor productivity decline by more than it has in decades, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. While those numbers rebounded slightly in the third quarter, the overall trend remains weak.
Frustratingly for many enterprise leaders, there’s evidently no set path to reverse productivity declines. Investments in technology and innovation over the last decade haven’t always correlated to higher productivity.
So, how then can organizations boost productivity as challenges evolve now and in the future? The answer, according to one enterprise technology executive, is an all-embracing strategy to modernizing business processes.
“It’s a holistic change,” says Antoine Shagoury, global chief technology officer at Kyndryl, the world’s largest IT infrastructure services company. “It’s not just a point solution or a point problem—it’s how do we modernize and transform business as the markets change and as business demands and competition changes.”
To manifest productivity goals, read on for a guided method to implementing the right technologies, in the right way at the right time.
Reconstitute Employee Engagement
While there are several reasons businesses may not be maximizing productivity, Shagoury points to employee disengagement as one of the most significant.
“The way in which we work has fundamentally changed,” he says in reference to the continued trend toward hybrid and remote work. “There’s been a pretty big break in those communication capabilities, the connections and then that community concept that most of us have built our businesses on and worked in. So, how do we create that community differently now?”
Research from Gallup finds that profitability is 23% higher and productivity is 18% higher at organizations in the top quartile of employee engagement. In other words, their data shows more engaged employees are creating more profitable and productive businesses.
That fact, it appears, is not lost on enterprise leaders. A recent survey of company decision makers in the U.S. finds that improving employee experience (EX) is one of their top priorities for 2023. That’s because, more than half the respondents say, better EX leads to enhanced productivity.
But fostering that productive, profitable employee engagement and EX could seem especially challenging as work environments change. Shagoury says the solution begins with generating a “roadmap” based on key business insights.
“Get very ingrained with understanding how teams are working, the communities they’re working within, the models they’re using to provide services for customers or developing products for customers,” he explains. “That’s how we start to define a detailed intelligent workflow that shows how the working environment, processes, people and their roles are critical to the overall business goals.”
Shagoury says that’s the concept behind Kyndryl Vital, the firm’s co-creation experience which collaborates with clients to solve complex business problems. Alongside a diverse team of experts and Kyndryl technology alliance partners, the firm maps an enterprise’s architecture, then helps them re-examine how they operate as a whole to inform a robust modernization strategy.
That includes identifying ways to improve employee engagement, which Shagoury says is especially important in the age of remote and hybrid work.
“It is a combination of the tools that we enable our now-distributed teams with to build not only collaboration—but that interaction, social cues and social environment,” he says. “We have to engineer productivity into that culture of anywhere, any time, at a rate and pace the market and business demands.”
Engineering that productivity in the digital workplace, Shagoury explains, requires organizations to change their approach to tools, training and development with workforce collaboration services, workforce automation, device management services, ongoing training, knowledge-sharing and more solutions that empower and engage employees.
Increase Visibility Into Productivity
In the wake of the pandemic, it’s become more difficult for companies to assess how productive they really are. A movement toward hybrid and remote work as well as changes in workforce composition have added new layers of complexity to measuring employee effectiveness and efficiency.
Collecting data-driven insights, Shagoury says, is key to exposing how and where improvements can be made.
“An enterprise needs visibility to understand the impact of productivity on business, to gain an understanding of what’s going to create the value they want and then to keep enabling and accelerating opportunities to amplify value,” he says. “That visibility helps our clients be very competitive, because we can help them focus on improving their business lifecycle process.”
Shagoury warns that improving visibility is sometimes misinterpreted as more closely monitoring employees and scrutinizing their output—instead of discovering how processes, workflows and technology can drive more collaboration, creativity and productivity.
“Performance management is not just about the metrics,” he says. “It’s how we’re looking at the activity of the business and how people interact within it."
Shagoury says Kyndryl helps companies with this by becoming intimately familiar with each client’s infrastructure as a whole.
“We start by collecting that data that allows us to become very insightful with the client,” he says. Then, that data will make insights actionable by answering key questions.
“What are the things that we can do to help bring the efficiencies forward in a certain production activity? How can we help make it most cost-effective in transitions? Then, how do we build models that can augment the decision process and the management process? How can we start to build autonomy to help availability and response time?”
Open integration platforms like Kyndryl Bridge develop the right answers to those questions by aggregating the data and analytics needed to create visibility and uncover new ways to optimize. It then connects companies with the right technologies to implement those changes in a unified experience that reduces inefficiencies, modernizes and scales operations.
Reshape And Reorganize With The Right Technology
While companies can make strategic technology investments to improve productivity, Shagoury warns against relying on IT innovation as a cure-all.
“Technology is often used as a solution-led approach. People see a tool for a problem.” he says. “Technology is actually the tail of the process, it’s not the head.”
In other words, using one bespoke tool to address one specific problem is often a Band-Aid solution. Even going a step further and implementing an application to create an entirely new business process is usually ultimately ineffective, Shagoury says.
“Some businesses don’t look at challenges holistically, and that’s one of the main things contributing to a distracted workforce,” he says. “We throw a tool at something, and we get distracted with the tool—but not what it was intended to solve.”
Of course, the tooling a company needs will be specific to the efficiency challenges it faces. New technologies in hybrid cloud, data and artificial intelligence (AI), edge and others can all be applied to automate and streamline processes, improve network efficiency, consolidate workflows, reduce security maintenance and more.
But Shagoury says the productivity value of those technologies can only be fully realized when they are deployed and managed correctly—which is an iterative process.
“A business can’t wave a magic wand and solve all of its problems and make a brand new system in which everything works perfectly tomorrow,” he says. “When we approach integration, whether it’s system integration or application integration—we first unpack how the business is operating then we help clients understand what work can run where, what business processes can benefit.”
Kyndryl worked with Dow to drastically improve efficiency and safety at Dow’s manufacturing plants. Many plant processes like maintenance tasks were error-prone, manual and paper-based—while connectivity challenges meant that little information was readily accessible to front-line workers in the field.
Kyndryl helped Dow implement a range of solutions to modernize manufacturing operations, including reducing complexities in procuring, shipping, deploying and billing for thousands of employee devices across the entire device lifecycle. They also advanced wireless connectivity, remote communications, private network tools and augmented reality applications—all within a highly secure architecture.
As a result, Dow significantly reduced the time it takes workers to complete operations and maintenance activities, and increased workplace safety.
Rely On A Strategic Technology Partner
As the nature of work evolves, selecting the right partner can help provide insights, services and technology that enables productivity in every environment. The most effective partnership will offer an array of services and expertise that collectively advances productivity across an enterprise.
For instance, one of the largest integrated paper and pulp manufacturers in the U.S., Andhra Paper Limited, sought to lower costs and optimize many of its mission-critical business systems while minimizing disruption and cost. Partnering with Kyndryl helped make this transition seamless.
Up front, Andhra Paper saw cost benefits by not having to allocate full-time employees to manage the process. Long-term, the firm has reduced operation costs, improved financial performance with up to 10% faster month-end closings—and became well-equipped to identify and implement optimizations with greater visibility into its IT estate.
Shagoury explains that driving productivity through partnership starts with the “recipe of three.”
“It’s people, process and technology,” he says. “The skills and people are the most important aspect to look at when modernizing business, and really starting to create that culture of productivity right within your company.”
In addition, Shagoury believes the right ally can help organizations not only stay nimble as workplaces change—but also shape a more positive outlook.
“Productivity has to reside everywhere and anywhere now,” he says. “But it’s just as much of an opportunity as it is a potential risk to manage.”
