As any Managing Director or CEO will tell you, the key to turning investment into return is productivity. It’s what drives growth, innovation and competitiveness, and above all it’s what creates huge value for a company. To bring this to life, a recent article in the Financial Times said that, regardless of the sector or point in the business cycle, a five per cent uptake in productivity will yield an average 11.9% stock appreciation. That’s an impressive return, and it’s why productivity remains at the top of the agenda for C-Suite executives throughout the world.
Costs and Challenges
Productivity certainly isn’t a new challenge. Businesses have been grappling with it in one way or another since the dawn of the cubicle. It is, however, a constant feature on any executive’s agenda, because the context in which we battle time-management issues is always changing. Two macro issues impacting this are the pervasiveness of the internet and innovation in technology. Both are constantly evolving and have direct impact on how well and how efficiently a job gets done. Secondly, shifts in the economy over the last few years have also altered the way we tackle productivity. A report by The Conference Board gives a comprehensive, global overview of the impact of this, stating that “poor productivity performance is so widespread that there are very few countries or regions that showed any productivity improvement” in 2012. It’s no surprise that the top three challenges they identified for businesses in 2013 tie back to productivity: human capital, operational excellence, and innovation.
Employee engagement is a big part of productivity. How motivated, supported, and skilled employees are at individual, team, and company levels makes a huge difference in their output. A recent report on the state of the American workplace generated some troublesome statistics; it found that 70% of employees aren’t working to their full potential, estimating that this costs the US economy between $450 and $550 billion in lost productivity every year. The way we work isn’t helping either. We have to process a huge volume of information to get our jobs done, and quite often, current infrastructures and technologies don’t do an adequate job of alleviating the deluge. This costs businesses money, and it costs us productivity.
Potential, Drivers, and Collaboration
PwC’s Productivity Stars survey identified four themes when it came to drivers of productivity:
Steady productivity growth influences shareholder return; executives are concerned about sustaining productivity; productivity is seen as a front office issue rather than back office issue; and finally, more collaboration is needed to deliver greater productivity results.
All this should underscore why productivity can’t be ignored, and that means allowing people to work better in the modern business environment. Here at Mindjet, that’s the very reason we’re constantly reassessing and updating our products, which have been shown time and time again to be integral productivity and time management tools for our customers.
MindManager 14
Today we’ve announced MindManager 14 for Windows, the most powerful version of MindManager to date, that’s directly aimed at alleviating some of these productivity challenges by helping individuals across enterprise better organize ideas, information and projects to get more done.
Besides enhancements to our powerful mind mapping features, the new MindManager also includes significant new capabilities for financial analysis and business planning. Right from the beginning, you get a holistic view of a project or problem, so you’re able to effectively develop plans and schedules. New indexing capabilities make it much easier to work with larger amounts of information and project details, all of which can be viewed in context. Numerical calculation options and the ability to embed complex formulas within maps makes MindManager an even more valuable tool for reviewing budgets, forecasts, and portfolio analysis. To see what’s new in MindManager, click here.
Productivity continues to drive growth, and while output has dipped, the good news is that there are solutions like Mindjet MindManager. Equipped with the right tools, individuals, teams, and companies can turn great opportunities and initiatives into tangible results. And in the end, isn’t that what it’s all about?
