Americans have been working more hours than people in other industrialized countries for a long time. With the recent growth in remote work due to the COVID 19 pandemic, workdays are growing longer everywhere and about 40% overall in the United States.
While many of us are working harder, our family and personal responsibilities have not gone away, and in many cases are growing. We don’t have time for non-essential activities.
Asking for and providing status updates is an area where we can work smarter. Think about it, how many times a day do you send or receive emails or IMs or make a quick phone call to update your status or ask for updates from others? It’s easy to get into the habit of extending these discussions into the late-night, early morning, and weekend. The problem with these “quick” discussions is that they interrupt not just your workflow, they also impact the people you are communicating with. Over time, this extra work adds up.
With our inboxes, Teams, and Slack notifications and messages on overload – it’s time to think about bringing more transparency to the way we work. To achieve this, we can look for clues in how we already use social media to broadcast our status to friends, family, and work contacts. Think about it, when we want to tell everyone about the incredible peanut butter and jelly sandwich we had for lunch (guilty!!!) or about a key work achievement, most of us turn to social media. A single status update informs your entire network. Anyone in your network can review your status at a time convenient to them and without having to reach out to you.
Modern, global companies such as ServiceNow and Salesforce are working to bring transparency to the workplace on an enterprise level. Moving to ServiceNow specifically, helps organizations break down silos between departments, such as IT, HR, Project Management, and more. Having an organization’s critical work functions in the cloud, provides users with real-time visibility to enterprise-wide activities, enabling us to focus on getting work done, without the distraction of constantly switching between multiple, unconnected applications.
Taking it a step further, when we bring transparency to all work activities – we can reduce the demand for never-ending status updates and more.
With the Tasker Suite by Discover Technologies and powered by ServiceNow, all personal and organization-wide work activities are tracked in simple, transparent, real-time task lists. Keeping coworkers and management up to date on collaborative work is as simple as updating your task status. The Tasker Suite plugs directly into ServiceNow and brings simplicity and transparency to activities such as:
- Requests for action
- Requests for information
- Document review and input
- Approvals and signoffs
Working smarter, not harder is about reducing time wasted on activities that could be completed in a more efficient way. When we work smarter, we can reduce the amount of extra, non-essential activities we do on a daily basis and get back to having quality downtime outside of work.
DTech Apps is focused on the evolution of work management. Feel free to contact us or set up a demo. We are here to help!
