Do Your Employees Check Their Efficiency at the Office Door Every Morning?

Left to their own devices, people naturally avoid practices that are high energy and low reward if there are better options available.

People ditched walking for horses. Then, they ditched horses for cars. After that, they even ditched cars if Uber made more sense for their specific situations.

People ditched renting videos at the neighborhood video store for renting DVDs by mail. Then, they ditched DVDs altogether for videos streamed online.

They ditched U.S. Mail for faxes, then faxes for email, then email for social media.

Most people now only use email to get sign-up bonuses or freebies with no intention of ever opening the emails that are then pushed at them forevermore. They avoid email because it’s a high energy, low reward game.

Every email received causes an interrupted thought, another decision (to delete or store, then where to store), and more clutter in their bulging inboxes.

Email is a very, very inefficient means of communicating, of documenting thoughts, and of sharing files. Email and attachments are so 1990s, and employees know it.

That’s because at home, employees choose to use social media for all the same purposes they used to use email for. It’s how they arrange family reunions. It’s how they research when they need to get information from other people or groups. It’s how they stay in the loop. It’s how they store information and photos.

Social media is easy. It’s intuitive. There is little need to physically do anything with information or communications. They know where information is stored, and they know how to find it when they need it.

They have access to hundreds or thousands of times more information than ten years ago, and that access to information is powerful. Yet, they expend far less energy managing that information than they used to spend handling a much smaller amount of email.

At work however, they are forced to check their efficiency at the office door. It’s as if there is an unwritten 30-year-old rule that business is required to be run by email.

The future of work - at least until the next major innovation arrives - involves social media style applications.

Most of this future will be facilitated with Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, and Yammer. There are much lesser known competitors in the business collaborative world, but for now, Microsoft is king. (Teams is Microsoft’s fastest growing business application of all time, by the way.)

Don’t know how to implement social media style tools strategically in your business?  It’s well beyond time to start asking questions, but it’s not too late. I’d be happy to answer your questions. Email me at [email protected].

Implementing isn't risky at all and doesn’t take long with a sound strategy and plan.

Don’t make your employees check their efficiencies at the door. Leverage those natural efficiencies by giving them tools similar to what they prefer at home. You'll radically improve the efficiency of your business.