What about Productivity?

Employee productivity.  Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?  In fact, the Bureau of Labor reports that for the quarter ending in September 2011, employee productivity rose by 2.3%.  For most large organizations, that would be a great increase!  However, many companies continue to labor under the assumption that doing the same work using a computer instead of paper and pencil is the key to employee productivity.  While this certainly has some merit, there’s so much more to be gained.

Consider the most common business productivity suite currently in use, Microsoft Office.  Unfortunately it seems that too few people really know how to effectively use the software they have available.  Take, as an example, the wide use of spreadsheets in the workplace.  Tools like Microsoft Excel have powerful features that support the business value of analysis and reporting. Yet many people fail to utilize basic productivity features built into such applications, like Functions or PivotTables. You probably all observe people misusing tools and completing their work the hard way simply because they don’t know any better or have learned from someone who did it this way.  Excel is just one tool that many of us use almost every day.  Outlook also has some powerful features to boost productivity, such as Tasks and Rules, but few people know how to take advantage of them.

IT departments that are often tasked with the rollout and upgrade projects also have a stake in providing an ongoing program for their organization.  What department is more impacted on poor training and a low-skilled workforce than the IT department?  Little, poor, or no employee training increases the burden on IT support services and reduces overall employee satisfaction with technology as a support for getting their job done, putting the success of IT at risk.  To the extreme, on any major IT project, inadequate training can result in complete failure that costs millions to repair.

Effective training is the solution to unlocking the benefits of a company’s investment in productivity-enhancing software.  Contact us to learn how you can enhance productivity in your organization. With open enrollment, onsite corporate classes, and Live Online training options we are dedicated to partnering with you to solve the problems of location, availability and expense in offering a high quality training program.