Advantages of User Productivity Systems

Employees’ life quality: the ultimate goal of any organization

We have all heard that employees are the main asset of any organization. This phrase has been used so many times that in certain way, we have lost its importance. It is true: we all that “borrow” our knowledge and skills are the main reason of all companies exist. There will not be any organization, market, or industry without people that spends its time and resources working for it. It is in the main interest of everybody that we all get more productive. It is the interest of companies owners because they want to increase their profits, it is in the interest of employees because they want to spend more time on personal projects, it is on the interest of consumers because they want their demands to be satisfied almost immediately. None of previous objectives could be achieved without tools that improve everybody’s productivity. This is the main objective of User Productivity Systems: help everybody to do more in a fixed period of time.

We know now that there are some tools grouped under User Productivity System name but the question would be: what are these tools? Are we talking about software, hardware, or combination of both? Any information system (combination of hardware and software) that improves productivity qualifies. E-mail system is a software productivity tool, but iPad® is a mix of software and hardware that improves productivity for mobile resources. There is not a clear rule of how much hardware or software is required to create a User Productivity System. Think that any gadget of software in your computer that allows you to leave office early is part of this group. This opens the discussion to another interesting point that I will talk in a subsequent blog: the abuse of these tools have increased the amount of work that a person does eliminating the original objective of these systems. If I ask you if you see e-mail as a tool that helps you go home earlier, a lot of you will answer that is the opposite. A Blackberry® device, originally created to improve productivity, sometimes has to be turned off in order to accomplish planned daily objectives. Please do not get confused: the tools are there to increment productivity, the abuse on these tools usage is complete responsibility of users.

One interesting feature of these systems is that they have been created without any specific usage in mind: they are not for doctors or engineers only. These tools have been designed to work for everybody: you can plan a wedding party or manage a construction project with it. This makes your organization a target for these tools: you can’t say that you do not need these tools, we all require some help to improve our performance.

Examples of these tools are office related work software (MS Office® Suite kind of products), e-mail, time management, web conference, antivirus protection, documents sharing, and all software you have installed in your laptop, desktop or mobile devices. The general nature of these systems make difficult to define all its benefits: a doctor can generate a diagnostic 50% faster receiving lab results thru e-mail increasing its patients life quality, while a teacher can speed up its grades improving the time he leaves the office. Both cases have different tangible benefits but in both we can see a constant: life quality is improved in one way or another. 

We started this blog entry mentioning that employees are the main asset of any organization, improving your employees’ life quality thru the usage of these tools will position your organization to succeed. This is the biggest benefit of these tools!!