Increasing productivity in the workplace can be challenging. Before the 2007 Global Financial Crisis, global productivity growth stood at around 0.9% per year. Since then, it has all but evaporated. Now, with remote and hybrid working quickly becoming the norm, productivity in the workplace is once again in the spotlight for many business leaders. In a recent survey of global executives by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), nearly 39% of respondents reported an increase in productivity since being forced to adopt remote work. These results suggest that the “new normal” of workplace and workforce arrangements could be a blessing for a significant minority of businesses— but many organizations are yet to see the benefits.
Technology is a key factor in increasing productivity in the workplace. The EIU survey shows that firms whose workforces welcome new technologies, and those that invest more and earlier in IT capabilities, such as information security tend to see executives reporting improved productivity. But difficulty in identifying and implementing the right technology investments hinders some firms’ attempts to make changes. For example, 42.6% of executives surveyed acknowledged that information security was important but that their firms were not investing in enhancements sufficiently or at all.
Marrying security and workplace productivity
The story of Cosmopolitan Projects and Central Developments Property Group, a South African homebuilder, shows how investing in technology can increase workplace productivity and security at the same time. Having become a leader in affordable housing over the past quarter-century, Cosmopolitan had developed a stock-control problem. While handling a significant volume of building materials across its projects, it was accumulating serious losses due to theft, and had little insight into how materials were ordered and allocated.
Knowing this was a documentation management problem, Cosmopolitan called in Kyocera Document Solutions South Africa to try and solve it. “Kyocera attended multiple workshops to ensure that they understood the pains, could find the root causes and were able to provide accurate solutions,” says Kevin Joubert, a foreman at Cosmopolitan.
Kyocera identified an enterprise content management solution as the right tool for the job. “It is highly customizable, and that is what the project analysis and scoping revealed was required,” says David Welters, a solutions architect with Kyocera. Using custom business rules, CSS and JavaScript, Kyocera and Cosmopolitan not only tailored the system to track how stock moved between suppliers, stores and subcontractors, but also secured it so that operators could only alter information relevant to their role. That has helped ensure that data integrity is always controlled.
Investments like this can be highly efficient: implementing the business process automation system that Kyocera devised cost Cosmopolitan around 250,000 rand (AU$23,100) and took under 12 months. Stock theft has dropped significantly, while document management workflows have been standardized throughout the organization and the use of paper has been significantly reduced.
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