Is your company ready for the knowledge worker?
Is your company ready for the rise of the knowledge worker? Automation continues to change the face of the global workforce by replacing repetitive function jobs and creating new, more sophisticated jobs. Those jobs require critical thinking, intuition and organizational skills. In other words, those jobs require knowledge workers.
We know that these types of jobs demand that employees perform diverse, unstructured work. That makes it hard to maximize their productivity, especially considering that 50% of their time is devoted to interactions. How do you make interactions more efficient?
The answer is a technological one, and it is a trend that is gaining steam: digital transformation. “While technology is certainly a productivity enabler, it’s clear that [small and midsize enterprise] owners and employees are struggling to unleash its full potential,” Graham Long, vice president of enterprise at Samsung UK & Ireland, was quoted as saying in an article in Computer Business Review. “Businesses need technology that is easy [and] secure, and that their workers feel comfortable and familiar using.”
Put a knowledge worker into a digital space that is designed intuitively and watch productivity increase. I connected with a Sean Nolan, a thought leader in digital transformations and the CEO of Blink, to discuss three important aspects of renovating outdated enterprise software.
What is a knowledge worker without information? In a word: unproductive. A McKinsey study found that employees can spend as much as 20% of their workweeks looking for internal information or trying to find colleagues who can help with specific tasks. Taken in aggregate, that is one day a week and almost a whole week out of every month that is wasted.
That is why Nolan says perhaps the most critical component of a digital transformation has to be a search function. “Your smartphone is a search tool for almost anything you want to know in the world, just open Google. But for some reason, when you are in your office, suddenly you have slipped back in time and are digging through file cabinets or calling people to get access to job-critical information. Enterprise technology that does not have a robust search function is the model of inefficiency.”
The Great Work Study by O.C. Tanner, a firm that develops strategic employee recognition and reward solutions, found that 88% of effective employee work begins with searching for information.
