The Operational Secret to an Efficient Office

If you look at most professional services offices, you’ll find that employees tend to spend a lot of time managing their email inboxes. A lot of this time can be attributed to internal reply-all chains, searches for buried file attachments, and trying to piece together context for specific requests from clients. This feels like work, but it’s actually an operational drain rather than honest-to-goodness productivity, and it’s impacting your company’s ability to scale.

Your business can radically improve operations if it limits certain types of internal email communications through smart technology tools. Here’s how it’s done.

Exiled to the Inbox

In your traditional email-driven office, project context is more or less trapped in individual employee inboxes.

If a designer wants to see what a client approved several weeks ago, they have to receive the message from the project’s account manager, wait for a forward, and put things together for themself. But what if this business migrates their internal collaboration to centralized, project-specific workspaces, like a project management solution? Communication, asset versions, and timelines would all be housed in open, searchable channels, and conversations would be stored alongside the project files.

This kind of implementation would eliminate internal data silos and save employees valuable time that would otherwise be spent on managing their inboxes.

Context-Switching

Imagine if every time you stop a deep work task, you get an email notification. Wouldn’t you find it difficult to maintain focus?

Maybe you don’t have to imagine this, as you’re living through the experience yourself. It takes an average of 20 minutes to regain deep focus after it’s lost due to a minor distraction. Smart management of notifications where internal communication is structured asynchronously can help your team stay focused, reserving real-time notifications for more urgent operational issues or requests. This gives creative and technical teams the longer, uninterrupted blocks of work conducive to their strengths.

And since employees aren’t constantly reacting to their inboxes, project turnaround times can be cut significantly, leading to more productivity in general.

The Onboarding Nightmare

When you bring someone new on board, they have to get up to speed as quickly as possible so they can start making your business money.

Unfortunately, a blank inbox doesn’t help much in this regard, as a new employee will not have the historical knowledge and context from ongoing projects to be as productive as you’d like. If you store all previous decisions, notes, and feedback in a contextual workspace, like a project management tool, your new hires can be granted immediate access to the entire history of a project right from the get-go.

The time it would have taken to get your new staff member up to full operational speed can be dramatically reduced.

By limiting how many internal emails you’re sending to your staff, you’re effectively managing the communication architecture of your business in a more efficient way. These limitations place a cap on administrative bleed and can buy back thousands of productive hours in the work year. 

Learn more about how your business can accomplish this through technology by calling JS Business Solutions. Our trusted technicians will work with you to mitigate inefficiencies and create a better, more productive work environment for all. Call us today at (781) 715-1900 for more information.