Stimulus Tech Talk: Discover the Top Tech Tools for Maximizing Employee Productivity
Employee productivity is a hot topic these days, with many employers wondering how they can maximize their workforce potential. In this episode of Stimulus Tech Talk we explore methods for measuring, enhancing, and maintaining employee productivity.
Setting Clear Employee Expectations
Setting clear expectations is an important step to maximizing employee potential. Not knowing expectations is a frequent complaint from workers when they have job dissatisfaction. Defining key performance indicators (KPIs) on a daily, weekly, quarterly, or annual basis is essential. Without these clear goals, employees may struggle to understand their responsibilities. This crucial step sets the foundation for measuring and improving productivity.
Dashboards for Transparency
To keep everyone aligned with company goals, Stimulus Technologies CEO, Nathan Whittacre, recommends using dashboard systems, such as Brightgauge orMicrosoft Power BI. These dashboards provide real-time visibility into individual and team progress, ensuring everyone knows where they stand and where the company is heading.
EOS and KPIs
Using the Entrepreneur Operating System (EOS) based on the book “Traction” to set KPIs and track progress is an effective strategy for businesses. Weekly updates and regular reviews help maintain accountability throughout the organization. This transparency will have a positive impact this approach has had on team engagement and productivity, especially in remote work settings.
Micro Bonusing for Recognition
Micro bonusing is another innovative approach adopted by Stimulus Technologies. Employees can give small bonuses to each other, recognizing exceptional efforts and achievements. This system promotes peer-to-peer recognition and boosts team morale. While there are some controversies surrounding micro bonusing, used correctly, it can be a successful tool in making employees feel recognized for their work.
Tools for Productivity
In a remote work environment, effective communication and collaboration tools are crucial. Stimulus Technologies leverages Slack and Microsoft Teams to facilitate quick, real-time interactions among team members. Using video during virtual meetings will maintain a sense of connection and improve communication.
Time Management Strategies
Planning each day, using tools such as Outlook calendars, is essential to staying organized. We can all feel bogged down running from meeting to meeting, but organization will help you get through the day. Reoccurring calendar items can streamline routines, and scheduling tasks can help employees prioritize their work. Proper time management ensures that employees have a clear understanding of their daily objectives.
Do We Have To Be Connected To Our Jobs 24/7?
With the digital age blurring the lines between work and personal life, Nathan stresses the importance of setting boundaries. He encourages business leaders to respect employees’ downtime by not sending messages outside of regular business hours. Additionally, using features like delayed message sending in Outlook can help mitigate the pressure to respond immediately.
Employee productivity is a critical factor in a company’s success. By setting clear expectations, using dashboards for transparency, implementing innovative recognition systems like micro bonusing, and utilizing effective communication tools, organizations can create a productive and engaged workforce. Furthermore, time management strategies and respecting boundaries in a hyper-connected world contribute to a healthy work-life balance for employees. As we adapt to the evolving workplace, these tech tools and strategies play a crucial role in maximizing employee productivity and overall company success.
Looking for steps to increase employee engagement? Check out our episode on quiet quitting.
Stimulus Tech Talk: Discover the Top Tech Tools for Maximizing Employee Productivity transcript
Wed, Sep 27, 2023 3:34PM • 24:04
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
employees, company, helps, stimulus, teams, kpis, day, people, calendar, dashboards, work, bonuses, micro, measuring, productivity, goal, set, outlook, expectations, track
SPEAKERS
Sherry Lipp, Nathan Whittacre, Intro
Intro 00:00
You’re listening to Stimulus Tech Talk. A conversation based podcast created by Stimulus Technologies covers a range of topics related to business and technology.
Sherry Lipp 00:16
Welcome to a Stimulus Tech Talk. I am Sherry Lipp, marketing manager here at Stimulus Technologies. And I am with our CEO Nathan Wjttacre. And today we are going to be talking about tools we can use for employee productivity. Welcome Nathan.
Nathan Whittacre 00:31
Thank you for having me, as always.
Sherry Lipp 00:34
So we talked about employee engagement a little while ago. So this one’s going to focus more on not only, you know, we talked about engagement, and now we’re going to talk about how to measure and increase hopefully increase employee productivity. So what are some tools employers can use to measure productivity?
Nathan Whittacre 00:56
You know, I think so I’m gonna speak a lot from experience and seeing what we do inside our company at Stimulus Technologies and a little bit about what we see our clients doing. And I think one of the things is employees want to know what they’re responsible for. So I think the first thing you got to do is define what the expectations are for your team, whether it’s a, you know, an hourly or daily or weekly or quarterly, annually, some type of key performance indicator that they’re responsible for, It might be one, it might be multiple, but each employee needs to understand, you know, where you know, where the goal line is for that time period. Because without that, they don’t know what their expectations are. So once once that goal line is set, getting them information of where they’re at, on a regular basis. So we’ve, at Stimulus we’ve gotten through over the last two years, and really clearly defined what our procedures are inside the company. And I actually talked about this a lot in my forthcoming book, about how to create those procedures, especially for the technical staff, you know, the people that are doing things every day. But you know, it could be all parts of your company. I know Sherry and I have done a lot on the the marketing side to define our procedures and what the expectations are. And I think it’s helped us improve, you know, getting these podcasts out getting webinars done. And it’s a constant refined process. But you know, I think we just need to know what are the employees need to know what needs to be done, and then have dashboards that the employees can see where they’re at towards those, and also the managers to see where they’re at all the way up to the owners of the company. So inside the Stimulus, we use a dashboard system called Brightgauge, there’s quite a few out there. Microsoft has one called Power BI, that’s very customizable, that integrates with a lot of different systems. If you just do a quick Google search on dashboard systems, and you want to make sure your dashboards integrate with all your different software applications, so we use inside our company a specific software package that allows us to run our Managed IT and Internet services for our ticketing and different things that our software integrates with that. So that we can, we can automatically pull reports. So and then the other thing that for us is we use EOS, which is the Entrepreneur Operating System, based on the book Traction. And we set KPIs for our employees based on that, and also quarterly and annual and three year goals. And we track those inside our dashboard, dashboard system to and the team members that are responsible for different KPIs are different goals, have to update those weekly, and then we review them as an operation team and a management team weekly to so. So I think having those dashboards is really essential, it really helps. You know, everybody know where the company’s going and where the individual’s are at.
Sherry Lipp 04:18
Do you think having all those the dashboards and having employees actively involved in tracking and and grading their goals has improved productivity and engagement?
Nathan Whittacre 04:29
I think it certainly has. I mean, I guess it sent it back to you, Sherry. I mean, you’re you’re part of this too inside of Stimulus Technologies, where do you I mean, from you as a team member here and having those responsibles how your responsibilities How do you feel that they’re doing?
Sherry Lipp 04:46
well? I think, for me, it’s been nice and I don’t know if it applies to every level employee but you know, creating, you know, goals and KPIs, with with supervisors and you and then measuring it each week and having it, you know, having the accountability is definitely, especially working remotely, I think it helps, you know, increase that feeling a part of the whole company. So I like it, you know, for that.
Nathan Whittacre 05:12
And I think you brought up a good point, from a remote standpoint, it is a little bit harder. You know, back in the day, I remember, I had charts up on the wall, you know, we could, one of my managers at one point was just putting, like, sticky notes with, you know, what their goal was, and then we just put the daily, you know, number of tickets that were closed and would stick those on the wall. And it was easy for everybody walk in and see those very easily. With remote work, or, you know, if you have offices in multiple locations where all the employees aren’t in the same location, you have to go with a technology solution that people can see that it’s used across the entire company. And it’s, you know, and I think that the other key that you said, that’s really important is the, the accountability and the visibility. So you know, it’s easy to set goals, it’s easy to say, Okay, well, we’re going to achieve, you know, this KPI, but if you’re not looking at it, at least weekly, no movement happens on it. I mean, we’re, you know, I think when this podcast comes out, I’ll probably be towards the end of September, but we’re currently the middle of September, which is towards the end of our Q3 and, and I know, I have something that I’m responsible for that I have not completed. And now I’m, I got a couple of weeks left, and I gotta get on it. So and I have to be accountable as even as a CEO every week to my team to say, Okay, it’s not done or it’s not started, I’m off track. But having that constant accountability, I think helps with it a lot, especially in a remote environment.
Sherry Lipp 06:51
Yeah, I agree. And it also gives you opportunity to maybe not feel as bad about not completing a goal, because you can say the reasons right then and there as you’re going along as sort of at the end, and maybe see if you need help or to adjust it. So I think it’s a really helpful tool, from my standpoint on that part of it.
Nathan Whittacre 07:10
And I, you know, I think that’s a another excellent point is, and I was gonna say it, but you said it first, you know, when you’re reporting on it, if you have an issue that came up, let’s say you’re working on something, and, and you’ve hit a roadblock, and you’re now declaring that the goal is off track, or the KPI is off track. You know, that’s one of the things that I asked for is, you know, as we’re reviewing these is, you know, what do you need help with how can you know, others help, and then we added on to the issue list and say, Okay, this is be there need to adjust this goal, because things have changed for the positive or the negative, and if we need to bring in other people to help with it, and that gives us the opportunity to discuss it at that point, too. So, you know, that collaboration happens when you’re actually looking at raw data where everybody’s at.
Sherry Lipp 08:00
So are there other ways you create a positive work environment for encouraging productivity. I mean, I know it me as a supervisor, I know helping getting my the people, I’m supervising them involved in the goal setting. So I can kind of see how they view their position and what their interests are, has really helped to one of the things have you done?
Nathan Whittacre 08:26
inside of Stimulus, we implemented quite a few years ago, this micro bonusing system. And that’s one of the things that I really liked that we did. And I think the staff really likes it, too. So there are some controversies. And if you do some searches on micro bonusing, you’ll read some very positive articles, and you’ll also read some negative articles about it. And I’ll just touch on the negatives real quick. So, you know, some people feel that micro bonusing, you know, you often are just, you know, bonusing, your friends, it definitely incentivizes, you know, trading of bonuses. But really, I don’t see that happening a ton. What I see, and I’ll just describe the process, so the company funds, a bonus amount that employees can give to each other. And part of the giving these bonuses is a recognition of what they did, they’re supposed to be doing something, you know, either helping each other out or maybe outside of their scope of daily work or, you know, winning, you know, something great, you know, like winning a sale or completing a big project or whatever it may be. It’s allows employees to recognize each other rather than that just being top down. And then everybody else can see what people are posting and for us now that we’re, you know, in five different states. The great thing is is our teams that are not in the same area, you can see what other people are doing too. So that’s one of the things things that I really like, is it allows other people to have visibility of what other teams are doing that might not be in the same department or their same geographic area. And it allows us to recognize or see who else is in the company, you know, we have 70 employees, and, you know, I, not everybody knows everybody else. So I really liked the micro bonusing system, we use one called Bonus.ly, there are, again, quite a few out there, it doesn’t cost a lot as a company, you know, we set a threshold of $20 that people can give out throughout the month, and then you can trade them in for gift cards or, you know, different things as that money accumulates. So it’s micro, it’s not like, you know, we’re giving out 1000s of dollars, but it’s more the recognition, I think that’s more important to recognize, you know, great job on, you know, fixing that major power outage that happened over the weekend, or, you know, completing that project or winning this big sales deal. And then other people can add on to those bonuses and cheer them on. It also has automatic recognition of work, anniversaries, birthdays, you can add other things in there. So it is I think it’s a great, great system, there’s, like I said, in a lot of HR systems, so electronic HR systems out there, there’s these micro bonus systems that are built in, we use a third party one that we’ve used for, I think five or eight years now, and I really like it. And I think it’s a positive, positive thing for the company. Some other things, you know, I think enhances teamwork and productivity, it’s just using the tools at our disposal to, you know, whether you use Slack inside your organization or teams, I think those are great collaboration tools. Having everybody have you know, a camera so that you can see each other one of our general rules inside the company is if we’re in meetings, the cameras are on, so that we can interact with each other and see each other. And, you know, I think it helps with communication, and collaboration to see expressions, a lot of times when it’s just audio or text, you miss that, you know, the, the subtle parts of the communication, you miss the audio clues, or the visual clues that happened. I mean, video is still not as good as in person, but it’s definitely a step in the right direction. So all our, all our employees have cameras, they can they can use inside the meetings. So and then, you know, effectively using these collaboration tools that they’re great. I mean, Slack and teams are the two big ones. Now, there’s others out there, but I recommend if you’re using something, you know, use it inside your organization, have everybody using it, because it’s even if you’re in the same office, it could really help with improving communication, and saving time to have those quick instant communications.
Sherry Lipp 13:09
And so, what kind of tools that kind of went over a lot of what I was thinking of my next questions as far as like tools employees can use and you know, for communication and productivity, but what kind of tools What do you have any recommendations for employees who may be underperforming, and like how to get them back on track, or see if they’re not going to work out, I guess?
Nathan Whittacre 13:35
I think we’ve gone as a company kind of going back to the KPIs of using real information. One of the things is getting feedback from customers about team members. So you know, we do extensive customer satisfaction, scoring, so every time a service ticket is closed out, the customer has an opportunity to submit feedback, positive or negative. And one of the things on the employee dashboards that we have is they can see their CSAT score, customer satisfaction score, and we can see it too as a global measure. So that’s, that’s one of the things we look at is, you know, feedback from customers. And if somebody’s getting a lot of negative feedback from customers, you know, just sitting down and understanding why that is. And so rather than just especially if it’s an employee that you’re not, you know, the you don’t know what that interaction, you know, they’re out in the field, maybe getting that feedback back helps a lot. And then if you know, they’re, you know, somebody that has to produce like on a on a job site or on a factory floor or something that they’re actually even even knowledge workers, you know, tax accountants or, you know, attorneys or whatever it may be, you can track their productivity and And rather than having these arbitrary, okay, I don’t feel like you’re doing a good job, you know, really having clear definitions on what the expectations are and then measuring their performance on the expectations. And if they’re not meeting it, then coaching them through it, I’m a, I’m a firm believer in coaching, I probably do it too much is, you know, helping employees progress and grow in the values of the company, so, you know, coaching them through that, and then if they don’t, if they can’t meet that over a period of time, then you know, that it’s time to part ways, and but everybody understands, I think, in that, in that scenario, why it didn’t work out. And a lot of times, what I found is employees realize that they, they’re not meeting the expectations, and they find other jobs elsewhere, because they know that, you know, they’re not meeting with what’s expected the company or maybe it’s something that they didn’t want to do, you know, it’s, we call it, you know, the right seat, or maybe the wrong seat, it might be the right person, but the wrong seat, it might be something that they’re just either not good at or don’t want to do. And, you know, either you can find them a different position in the company that they can excel at, or, or maybe, you know, they realize that they need to find a different different path in their career and something that they can excel at somewhere else. So I think having those clear numbers, whether it’s customer feedback, or internal feedback is really important to have those conversations.
Sherry Lipp 16:28
We’ve talked about in the past, kind of you measuring these KPIs is kind of instead of employers worrying about what their employees doing every second of the day, it’s measuring the results. What do you see is a good time management strategy or tools that can help with time management?
Nathan Whittacre 16:50
So I just really quick on your first comment I have, especially as we went to a lot of remote work, I’ve had a lot of customers say, I want to track everything my employees are doing all day long on their computers, you know, how do I know they’re being productive at home? And, you know, do you really, as an owner had time to sit there and watch what your employees are doing every day? I think that’s, that’s poor management, poor, poor use of managers time. And I can tell you that you’ll get tired of it very quickly. So you know, watching and employees figure out a way around it, you know, there’s software out there that will click the mouse every few minutes and keep screens active and automatically do things and make it look like they’re working. So I would not encourage anybody for doing like monitoring of computers. Now some things that you could monitor is like, blocking or monitoring, website usage, where people are going to on their devices to ensure that they’re not going and applying for other jobs from a company computer or, you know, sending potentially internal information out to other organizations. So from a security aspect, I think you can monitor computers. So you know, really understanding where they’re at is just looking at those KPIs and monitoring and managing what what they’re doing. And then from a time perspective, is I think most employees want to come in to the day and know what they have doing, or have to do. So I as I use Outlook extensively, I plan my day, if you look at my calendar, I’ve had scheduled events throughout the week, a lot of them are recurring, I highly encourage people if they have, you know, one to ones with their team, just rather than trying to figure it out every time just to have a reoccurring calendar item. About half of my week is scheduled by reoccurring calendar items. So I’m not even thinking about anymore. It’s just recurring. For people that have you know, technical, or other work that they’re doing. You know, either having a scheduler or an assistant or somebody that’s in charge of scheduling the teams I think helps a lot. But it shouldn’t integrate with some calendar reminder system. I remember back in, back in the day, I used a Daytimer that I would schedule things out, you know, paper Daytimer moved to a palm pilot, I had a palm pilot for a long time. And you know, now it’s all built into our phones and making sure that you know, your calendars and things are integrated, you know, with your devices so that there’s alerts and knowing what’s going on. And then hopefully whatever software you’re using for time management, again, like professional services firms that are doing like accounting or law firms, there’s integrations between Outlook or the Calendar app and those software’s so, you know, I think whether you’re a CEO of a company or somebody that’s actually doing the work every day, you know, just in the trenches, just coming in and knowing what you’re doing is half the battle you know, walk going in and having a blank calendar, and what am I supposed to do today, I think it’s the worst thing. And then closing out the day, look at the calendar, at the end of the day, have an update procedures for everybody inside your company and review what’s happening the next day. So that you have, you know, if you need to adjust schedules around or, you know, make adjustments that you’re aware of the day before. So when you start the next day, you know exactly what you’re doing. And, and, and give yourself some room if fires come up or things happen, there should be some, some extra space in there. But I highly recommend for my personal opinion is just at count, they should be calendered. For in, you should know what you’re doing at the beginning of the day. And there’s just plenty of tools out there to do that.
Sherry Lipp 20:45
And one last topic on this, how do you with the digital age, we can be connected to our job on our phone, like at all times. Teams and email when somebody can get a hold of you at all times. But that can obviously lead to dissatisfaction or burnout, how do you recommend setting the boundaries and guidelines for not being connected at every moment?
Nathan Whittacre 21:10
Oh, that’s a tough question. So I just share a personal story because I you know, I run a technology company, and I love technology. But I have to disconnect and, you know, for me, you know, I I go for runs or bike rides in the morning. And I don’t have the technology on when I’m doing that. So that I can be disconnected. A couple of times a year, I take vacation where I don’t take, you know, devices that have communication, or I may check them if I’m able to just like a certain maybe an hour a day to check my messages and just, you know, the review of the emergency staff. So you have to give your staff time to disconnected. And as owners, you know, speaking to owners of the company, I think you have to have an expectation of your employees and the time away, don’t don’t message them 11 o’clock at night and expect a response. It’s really nice, Outlook actually has a new feature in there that I really would really like is if you’re sending messages, after the after hours, it pops up and says, you know, this is outside your normal business hours, would you like to send it in the morning, and you can actually whether it’s Teams or an Outlook, you can schedule those messages to go out the next day, so that you’re not, you know, making the employee feel like, especially as an owner communicating to an employee, that they have to respond right then and there. So I’ve used that a few times recently, that’s a new feature in Outlook, or just realizing, Hey, I’m gonna send this in the morning, rather than the night before, because I gotta give my team you know, time to rest and recover and have personal time to you know, if there’s critical things going on emergencies, that’s a different story. But certainly, you know, regular daily work, everybody needs a little bit of time away. And, you know, there’s lots of advice out there, you know, turning your your alerts off at night. I have mine set, except for emergencies that shut off at nine o’clock at night. So I’m not getting, you know, buzzing your calls, emergency calls go through from certain people. But other than that I get sleep. So I think it’s important to have that have that balance.
Sherry Lipp 23:33
All right. Well, thanks so much for all your advice on that. It’s a good conversation, good topics that people can always discuss and work on.
Nathan Whittacre 23:42
Perfect. Yeah, I think it’s it’s definitely we live in a different age today than 20 years ago. So you have to you have to create new rules around it. So thanks, everybody.